The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  “I’d settle for a spoonful of real cream,” said Nanny. “How pinching that old sow is. No respect for the dead.”

  But Glinda found that the binding spell was deeper, cut closer than she had even understood. It wasn’t merely that they couldn’t talk about it. Already she had begun—to lose the words about it, to falter in her thinking, to fail to commit the interview to memory. There was the proposal. It was a proposal, wasn’t it? Of some questionable proposition in (was it) the civil service? Doing some—some ballroom dancing, which didn’t make sense. Some laughing, a glass of champagne, a handsome man taking off his cummerbund and pressing his starched cuffs against her neck, nibbling the teardrop-shaped rubies at her ears . . . Talk softly but carry a bit stick. Or was it not a proposal but a prophecy? A little friendly encouragement about the future? And she had been alone, the others hadn’t been listening. Madame Morrible had spoken directly to her. A lovely testimony to Glinda’s . . . potential. The chance to rise. Walk softly but marry a big prick. A man draping his evening tie on a bedstead and rolling his diamond studs, nudging them with his nose, down the declivity of her superior neck . . . It was a dream, Madame Morrible couldn’t have said that! She must be dazed with grief. Poor Ama Clutch. It had only been a quiet word of condolence from the dear and self-effacing Head, who found it hard to speak in public. But a man’s tongue between her legs, a spoonful of saffron cream . . .

  Nessarose said, “Catch her, I can’t, I’m—” and she sagged against Nanny’s bosom, and Glinda swooned at the same moment. Elphaba thrust out strong arms and scooped Glinda in mid-collapse. Glinda didn’t really lose consciousness, but the uncomfortable physical nearness of hawk-faced Elphaba after that undesired act of desire made her want to shiver with revulsion and to purr at the same time. “Steady on, girl, not here,” said Elphaba, “resist, come on!” Resist was just what Glinda didn’t want to do. But after all, in the shadow of an apple cart, on the edge of the market where merchants were selling the last fish of the day, cheap, well, this was hardly the place. “Tough, tough skin,” said Elphaba, appearing to pull words from the back of her throat. “Come on, Glinda—you’ve got better brains—come on! I love you too much, snap out of it, you idiot!”

  “Well, really,” she said as Elphaba dumped her on a heap of moldy packing straw. “No need to be so romantic about it!” But she felt better, as if a wave of illness had just passed.

  “You girls, I tell you, the faints, it comes from those tight shoes,” said Nanny, huffing and loosening Nessarose’s glamorous footwear. “Sensible folk wear leather or wood.” She massaged Nessarose’s insteps for a minute, and Nessarose moaned and arched her back, but began in a few moments to breathe more normally.

  “Welcome back to Oz,” said Nanny after a while. “What goodies were you all snacking on, in there with the Head?”

  “Come on, they’re waiting,” said Elphaba. “No sense dawdling. Anyway, I’m afraid it might rain.”

  At the Peach and Kidneys, the rest of the gang had commandeered a table in an alcove several steps above the main floor. They were well into their cups by that point in the afternoon, and it was clear tears had been shed. Avaric sat slouched against the brick wall of the student den, one arm slung around Fiyero and his legs stretched out in Shenshen’s lap. Boq and Crope were arguing about something, anything, and Tibbett was singing an interminable song to Pfannee, who looked as if she wanted to drive a dart into the thick of his thigh. “Ahh, the ladies,” slurred Avaric, and made as if to rise.

  They sang, and chattered, and ordered sandwiches, and Avaric plunked down an embarrassment of coins to demand a salver of saffron cream, in Ama Clutch’s memory. Money did wonders and the cream was found in the larder, which gave Glinda an uneasy feeling, though she didn’t know why. They spooned the airy mounds into one another’s mouths, sculpted with it, mixed it in their champagne, threw it in small gobbets at one another until the manager came over and told them to get the hell out. They complied, grumbling. They didn’t know it was the last time they would all be together, or they might have lingered.

  A brisk rain had come and gone, but the streets were still noisy with runoff, and the lamplight glistened and danced in the silvery black curvetts of water caught among the cobbles. Imagining the possible brigand in the shadows, or the hungry wanderer lurking nearby, they stood close together. “I’ve got an idea,” said Avaric, putting one foot this way and the other that, as if he were as flexible as a man of straw. “Who’s man enough for the Philosophy Club tonight?”

  “Oh, no you don’t,” said Nanny, who hadn’t had that much to drink.

  “I want to go,” whined Nessarose, swaying more than usual.

  “You don’t even know what it is,” said Boq, giggling and hiccuping.

  “I don’t care, I don’t want to leave tonight,” Nessarose said. “We only have one another and I don’t want to be left out, and I don’t want to go home!”

  “Hush Nessa, hush hush, my pretty,” said Elphaba. “That’s not the place for you, or me either. Come on, we’re going home. Glinda, come on.”

  “I have no Ama now,” said wide-eyed Glinda, stabbing a finger toward Elphaba. “I am my own agent. I want to go to the Philosophy Club and see if it’s true.”

  “The rest can do what they want but we’re going home,” said Elphaba.

  Glinda veered over toward Elphaba, who was homing in on a very uncertain-looking Boq. “Now Boq, you don’t want to go to that disgusting place, do you?” Elphaba was saying. “Come on, don’t let the boys make you do something you don’t want.”

  “You don’t know me,” he said, appearing to address the hitching post. “Elphie, how do you know what I want? Unless I find out? Hmmm?”

  “Come with us,” said Fiyero to Elphaba. “Please, if we ask you politely?”

  “I want to go too,” whined Glinda.

  “Oh, come, Glinny-dinny,” said Boq, “maybe they’ll pick us. For old times’ sake, as never was.”

  The others had awakened a slumbering cab driver and hired his services. “Boq, Glinda, Elphie, come on,” Avaric called from the window. “Where’s your nerve?”

  “Boq, think about this,” Elphaba urged.

  “I always think, I never feel, I never live,” he moaned. “Can’t I live once in a while? Just once? Just because I’m short I’m not an infant, Elphie!”

  “Not till now,” said Elphaba. Rather smarmy tonight, thought Glinda, and wrenched herself away to climb into the cab. But Elphaba grabbed her by the elbow and pivoted her around. “You can’t,” she whispered. “We’re going to the Emerald City.”

  “I’m going to the Philosophy Club with my friends—”

  “Tonight,” hissed Elphaba. “You little idiot, we have no time to waste on sex!”

  Nanny had led Nessarose away already, and the cabbie clucked his reins and the equipage lumbered away. Glinda stumbled and said, “What did you think you were just about to say? To say?”

  “I already said it and I’m not saying it again,” said Elphaba. “My dear, you and I are going back to Crage Hall tonight only to pack a valise. Then we’re away.”

  “But the gates’ll be locked—”

  “It’s over the garden wall,” said Elphaba, “and we’re going to see the Wizard, come what may and hell to pay.”

  7

  Boq could not believe he was heading to the Philosophy Club at last. He hoped he wouldn’t vomit at a crucial moment. He hoped he would remember the whole thing tomorrow, or at least some kernel of it, despite the headache forming vengefully in the hollows at his temples.

  The place was discreet, though it was the best known dive in Shiz. It hid behind a facade of paneled-up windows. A couple of Apes roamed the street in front, bouncing troublemakers ahead of time. Avaric counted the party carefully as they fell from the cab. “Shenshen, Crope, me, Boq, Tibbett, Fiyero, and Pfannee. Seven. Boy how’d we all fit in the cab, could hardly fit us I’d think.” He paid the cabbie and tipped him, in some obscure homage still
to Ama Clutch, and then pushed to the front of the silent knot of companions. “Come on, we’re the right age and the right drunk,” he said, and to the shadowed face at the window, “Seven. Seven of us, good sir.”

  The face came forward to the glass and leered at him. “The name is Yackle, and I’m not a sir nor am I good. What kind are you up to tonight, Master Fellow?” Speaking through the pane was a crone, with random teeth and a shiny white-pink wig slipping westwards off her pearly scalp.

  “Kind?” said Avaric, then more bravely, “Any kind.”

  “I mean the tickets, sweetbread. Strutting and strumming on the sprung floor, or strumpeting in the old wine cellars?”

  “The works,” said Avaric.

  “You understand house rules? The locked doors, the if-you-pay-you-play policy?”

  “Give us seven, and hurry up about it. We’re not fools.”

  “You never are fools,” said the beastly woman. “Well, here you are then, and come what may. Or who may.” She affected a stance of virtue, like a painting of a unionist virgin saint. “Enter and be saved.”

  The door swung open, and they went down a flight of uneven brick steps. At the bottom of the flight was a dwarf in a purple burnoose. He looked at their tickets, and said, “Where are you soft things from? Out of town?”

  “We’re all at the university,” said Avaric.

  “A motley crew. Well, you’ve seven-of-diamond tickets. See here, the seven red diamonds printed here, and here.” He said, “Have a drink on the house, watch the girlie show, and dance a little if you want. Every hour or so I close this street door and open the next.” He pointed to a huge oak door, barred with two monstrous timbers in iron hasps. “You all go in together or you don’t go in at all. That’s the rule of the house.”

  There was a chanteuse singing a send-up of “What Is Oz Without Ozma,” and teasing herself with a parrot-colored feather boa. A small band of elves—real elves!—tootled and rattled out a tinny accompaniment. Boq had never seen an elf, even though he knew there was a colony of them not far from Rush Margins. “How weird,” he said, inching forward. They looked like hairless monkeys, naked but for little red caps, and without any appreciable sex characteristics. They were as green as sin. Boq turned to say, Look, Elphie, it’s like you had a passel of babies, but he didn’t see her and remembered then that she hadn’t come. Nor had Glinda, apparently. Damn.

  They danced. The crowd was the most mixed Boq had seen in some time. There were Animals, humans, dwarfs, elves, and several tiktok things of incomplete or experimental gender. A squadron of well-built blond boys circulated with tumblers of rotgut squash wine, which the friends drank because it was free.

  “I don’t know if I want to go any more daring than this,” said Pfannee to Boq at one point. “I mean, look, that hussy of a Baboon is almost out of her dress. Perhaps we should call it a night.”

  “Do you think?” said Boq. “I mean, I’m game, but if you’re feeling uneasy.” Oh hurrah, a way out. He was feeling uneasy himself. “Well let’s get Avaric. He’s over there nosing up to Shenshen.”

  But before they could make their way across the crowded dance floor, the elves began to let out a banshee screech, and the singer thrust out her hip and said, “That’s the mating call, dollies! Ladies and gentle-friends! We’re doing, and I do mean doing”—she glanced at a note in her hand—“five black clubs, three black clubs, six red hearts, seven red diamonds, and—on their honeymoon, isn’t it sweet”—she simulated gagging—“two black spades. Up to the mouth of everlasting bliss, fraidies and gentlehens.”

  “Avaric, no,” said Boq.

  But the crone from the front, who called herself Yackle, came knocking through the hall—having apparently locked up the front door for the time being—and she remembered the holders of the designated cards, and brought them forward with a smile. “All rides, all riders, on the ready,” she said, “here we be, at the shank end of the evening! Lighten up, lads, it’s not a funeral, it’s an entertainment!” It had been a funeral, Boq remembered, trying to invoke the warm, self-effacing spirit of Ama Clutch. But the time to back out, if such a time existed, had passed.

  They were swept through the oak doors and along a slightly sloping passage whose walls were padded in red and blue velvet. A merry tune was playing farther on, a dancing ragged melody. A smell of roasting timm leaves—sweet and softening, you could almost feel them turning up their purplish edges. Yackle led the way, and the twenty-three revelers processed, in a confused state of apprehension, elation, and randiness. The dwarf followed behind. Boq took stock, as best his stumbling mind could manage. An erect Tiger in hip boots and a cape. A couple of bankers and their evening consorts, all wearing black masques: as a protection against blackmail or as an aphrodisiac? A party of merchants from Ev and Fliaan, in town on business. A couple of women rather long in the tooth, bedecked in costume jewelry. The honeymoon couple were Glikkuns. Boq hoped that his crowd wasn’t gawping as much as the Glikkuns were. As he glanced around, only Avaric and Shenshen looked eager—and Fiyero, possibly because he hadn’t yet grasped what this was all about. The others looked more than a little squeamish.

  They entered a small dark theatre-in-the-round, with the space for the public divided into six stalls. Above, the ceiling was lost in a stony blackness. Tapers fluttered, and a hollow music issued through fissures in the wall, increasing an unearthly air of dislocation and otherness. The stalls circled and faced the central stage, which was enshrouded in black drapes. The stalls were separated from one another by vertical strips of latticed wood and slats of mirror. All the parties were being mixed up, all friends and partners separated. Was there incense in the air too? It seemed to make Boq’s mind split in half, like a husk, and allow a tenderer, complacent mind to emerge. The softer, more bruisable aspect, the private intention, the surrendering self.

  He felt he was knowing less and less, and it was more and more beautiful to do so. Why had he been alarmed? He was sitting on a stool, and around him in the stall sat, almost preternaturally near, a man in a black masque, an Asp he hadn’t noticed before, the Tiger whose breath ran hot and meaty on his neck, a beautiful schoolgirl, or was that the bride on her honeymoon? Did the whole stall then tilt forward, like a gently swung bucket? Anyway, they leaned together toward the central dais, an altar of veils and sacrifices. Boq loosened his collar and then his belt, felt the gingery appetite between heart and stomach and the resulting stiffening apparatus below that. The music of pipes and whistles was slowing, or was it that as he watched and waited and breathed so, so slowly, that the secret area inside himself uncloaked itself, where nothing mattered?

  The dwarf, in a darker hood now, appeared on the stage. He could see from his vantage point into all the stalls but the revelers in separate stalls couldn’t see one another. The dwarf leaned and reached a hand here, there, welcoming, beckoning. He encouraged from one stall the figure of a woman, from another a man (was it Tibbett?), and from the stall where Boq sat he gestured to the Tiger. Boq felt only faintly sorry not to be chosen himself as he watched the dwarf pass a smoking vial beneath the nostrils of the three acolytes, and help them to remove their clothes. There were shackles, and a tray of scented oils and emollients, and a chest whose contents were still in shadow. The dwarf bound black blindfolds around the heads of the scholars.

  The Tiger was pacing on all fours and growling softly, tossing his head back and forth in distress or excitement. Tibbett—for it was he, though nearly out of consciousness—was made to lie on his back on the floor of the stage. The Tiger strode over him and stood still while the dwarf and his assistants lifted Tibbett and tied his wrists together, around the Tiger’s chest, and his ankles around the Tiger’s pelvis, so Tibbett hung beneath the Tiger’s belly, like a trussed pig, his face lost in the Tiger’s chest hair.

  The woman was set on a sloping stool, almost like a huge tilting bowl, and the dwarf tucked something aromatic and runny up in the shadowy regions. Then the dwarf pointed to Tibbett, w
ho was beginning to twist and moan into the Tiger’s chest. “Let X be the Unknown God,” said the dwarf, poking Tibbett in the ribs. The dwarf then slapped the Tiger on his flank with a riding crop, and the Tiger strained forward, positioning his head between the woman’s legs. “Let Y be the Dragon of Time in its cave,” said the dwarf, hitting the Tiger again.

  As he laced the woman into the half-shell, stroking her nipples with a glowing salve, he handed her a riding crop with which she could lash at the Tiger’s flanks and face. “And let Z be the Kumbric Witch, and let us see if she exists tonight . . .” The crowd drew nearer, almost participants themselves, and the musky sense of adventure made them tear at their own buttons and nibble their own lips, leaning in, in, in.

  “Such are the variables in our equation,” said the dwarf as the room darkened even further. “So now, let the true, clandestine study of knowledge begin.”

  8

  The industrialists of Shiz, from an early stage wary of the growing power of the Wizard, had elected not to lay down the rail line from Shiz to the Emerald City as originally planned. Therefore, it was a good three days’ journey from Shiz to the Emerald City—and this was in the best of weather, for the wealthy who could pay for a constant change of horses. For Glinda and Elphaba it took more than a week. A bleak, cold-scoured week, as the winds of autumn ripped the leaves off trees with a dry screech and a rattle of brittle, protesting limbs.

  They rested, like other third-class travelers, in the back rooms above inn kitchens. In a single lumpy bed, they huddled together for warmth and encouragement and, Glinda told herself, protection. The ostlers cooed and shrieked in the stableyard below, the kitchen maids came and went noisily, at odd hours. Glinda would start as if from a frightful dream, and nestle in nearer to Elphaba, who seemed at night never to sleep. Daytimes, the long hours spent in poorly sprung carriages, Elphaba would nod off against Glinda’s shoulder. The land outside grew less succulent and varied. Trees were crabbed, as if conserving their strength.