The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  “Amplify.”

  “I went underground,” she said softly, “and I am still underground. You’re the first one to crack my anonymity since I said good-bye to Glinda five years ago. So you now know why I can’t say any more, or why you can’t see me again. For all I know you will turn me in to the Gale Force.”

  “Hah! Those martinets! You think very little of me if you think I—”

  “How do I know, how could I know?” She twisted her fingers together, a puzzle of green sticks. “They march in those boots all over the poor and the weak. They terrify households at three in the morning and drag away dissenters—and break up printing presses with their axes—and hold mock trials for treason at midnight and executions at dawn. They rake over every quarter of this beautiful, false city. They harvest a crop of victims on a monthly basis. It’s government by terror. They could be massing on the street right now. Never having yet followed me, they may have followed you.”

  “You’re not as hard to follow as you think,” he told her. “You’re good but not that good. I could teach you a few things.”

  “I bet you could,” she said, “but you won’t, for we won’t meet again. It’s too dangerous, for you as well as for me. That’s what I mean when I say I loved you all too much to keep in touch. Do you think the Gale Force is above torturing friends and family to get at sensitive information? You’ve got a wife and children, and I’m merely an old college friend you ran into once. Clever you to have followed me. Never again, do you hear? I will move if I find you’re trailing me. I can pick up right now, and be away in thirty seconds. It’s my training.”

  “Don’t do this to me,” he said.

  “We’re old friends,” she said, “but we’re not even especially good friends. Don’t turn this into a sentimental rendezvous. It’s nice to see you but I don’t ever want to see you again. Take care of yourself and beware high connections with bastards, because when the revolution comes there won’t be mercy for toadying ass-lickers.”

  “At what—twenty three years old?—you’re playing the Lady Rebel?” he said. “It’s not becoming.”

  “It’s unbecoming,” she agreed. “A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un. Though I point out you are the same age as I, and prancing about as a prince. But have you eaten enough? We have to say good-bye now.”

  “We don’t,” he said, firmly. He wanted to take her hands in his—he didn’t remember that he’d ever touched her before. He corrected himself—he knew he never had.

  It was almost as if she could read his mind. “You know who you are,” she said, “but you don’t know who I am. You can’t—I mean you can’t and you can’t—it’s not allowed, for one, and you’re not capable for the other. Godspeed, if they use that phrase in the Vinkus—if it’s not a curse. Godspeed, Fiyero.”

  She handed him his opera cape, and held out her hand to shake his. He grabbed her hand, and looked up into her face, which just for a second had fallen open. What he saw there made him chill and hot flash, in dizzying simultaneity, with the shape and scale of its need.

  “What do you hear of Boq?” she asked, the next time they met.

  “You just won’t answer me anything about yourself, will you?” he said. He was lounging with his feet up on her table. “Why did you finally agree to let me come back if you keep yourself locked up like a prisoner?”

  “I rather liked Boq, that’s all.” She grinned. “I let you come back so I could pump you for news of him, and of the others.”

  He told her what he knew. Boq had married Miss Milla, of all surprising turns. She had been dragged out to Nest Hardings, and she hated it. She kept trying suicide. “His letters sent at Lurlinemas every year are hysterical; they annotate her failed attempts at killing herself like a sort of annual family report.”

  “It makes me wonder, in the same circumstances, what my mother must have gone through,” said Elphaba. “The privileged childhood in the big home of the ascendancy, then the rude shock of a hard life out there in nowhere-land. In Mama’s case, from Colwen Grounds to Rush Margins, then the Quadling lowlands. It’s actually a penance of the most severe sort.”

  “Like mother like daughter,” said Fiyero. “Haven’t you left a certain amount of privilege yourself, to live here like a snail? Hidden and private?”

  “I remember the first time I saw you,” she said, shaking drops of vinegar over the roots and vegetables she was preparing for a supper. “It was in that lecture hall of what’s-his-name—Doctor . . .”

  “Doctor Nikidik,” said Fiyero. He blushed.

  “You had those beautiful markings on your face—I’d never seen such before. Did you plan that entrance, to win your way into our hearts?”

  “On my honor, could I have done anything else, I would have. I was both mortified and terrified. Do you know, I thought those enchanted antlers were going to kill me? And it was prancing Crope and flibberty Tibbett who saved me.”

  “Crope and Tibbett! Tibbett and Crope! I’d forgotten all about them. How are they?”

  “Tibbett was never the same after that escapade at the Philosophy Club. Crope, I think, entered an arts auction house, and still flits around with the theatrical set. I see him from time to time at occasions. We don’t speak.”

  “My, you’re disapproving!” She laughed. “Of course being as prurient as the next creature I always wondered what the Philosophy Club had turned out to be like. You know, in another life I’d like to see them all again. And Glinda, dear Glinda. And even nasty Avaric. What of him?”

  “Avaric I do speak to. He’s most of the year installed in the Margreavate, but he has a house in Shiz. And when in the Emerald City we stay at the same club.”

  “Is he still a smug boor?”

  “My, you’re disapproving now.”

  “I suppose I am.” They ate their dinner. Fiyero waited for her to ask more about his family. But it was their respective families they were keeping from each other, apparently: his Vinkus wife and children, her circle of agitators and insurrectionists.

  The next time he came, he thought, he must wear a shirt open at the neck, so she could see that the pattern of blue diamonds on his face continued unbroken down his chest . . . Since she seemed to like that.

  “Surely you don’t spend the entire autumn season in the Emerald City?” she asked one evening when the cold was drawing in.

  “I’ve send word to Sarima that business is keeping me here indefinitely. She doesn’t care. How could she care? Plucked out of a filthy caravansary and married as a small child to an Arjiki prince? Her family wasn’t stupid. She’s got food, servants, and the solid stone walls of Kiamo Ko for defense against the other tribes. She’s going a little fat after her third child. She doesn’t really notice whether I’m home or not—well, she has five sisters, and they all moved in. I married a harem.”

  “No!” Elphaba sounded intrigued and a little embarrassed at the idea.

  “You’re right, no, not really. Sarima has proposed once or twice that her younger sisters could and would happily occupy my energies at nighttime. Once you pass over the Great Kells, the taboo against such an exercise isn’t as strong as it seems to be in the rest of Oz, so stop looking so shocked.”

  “I can’t help it. Did you do it?”

  “Did I ‘do it’?” He was teasing her.

  “Did you sleep with your sisters-in-law?”

  “No,” he said. “Not out of lofty moral standards, or a lack of interest, either. It’s just that Sarima is a shrewd wife, and everything in marriage is a campaign. I would have been in her thrall even more than I am.”

  “Such a bad thing?”

  “You’re not married, you don’t know: Yes, a bad thing.”

  “I am married,” she said, “just not to a man.”

  He raised his eyebrows. She put her hands to her face. He’d never seen her look like that—her words had shocked herself. She had to turn her head away for an instant, clear her throat, b
low her nose. “Oh damn, tears, they burn like fire,” she cried, suddenly in a fury, and ran for an old blanket to dab her eyes before the salty wetness could run down her cheeks.

  She stood bent over like an old woman, one arm on the counter, the blanket falling from her face to the floor. “Elphie, Elphie,” he said, horrified, and lurched after her, and put his arms around her. The blanket hung between them, chin to ankles, but seemed about to burst into flame itself, or roses, or a fountain of champagne and incense. Odd how the richest images bloomed in the mind when the body itself was most alert . . .

  “No,” she cried, “no, no, I’m not a harem, I’m not a woman, I’m not a person, no.” But her arms wheeled of their own accord, like windmill sails, like those magicked antlers, not to kill him, but to pin him with love, to mount him against the wall.

  Malky, with a rare display of discretion, climbed to the windowsill and looked away from them.

  They conducted their love affair in the room above the abandoned corn exchange as the autumn weather came lop-leggedly in from the east: now a warm day, now a sunny one, now four days of cold winds and thin rain.

  There were long days in a row when they couldn’t meet. “I have business, I have work, trust me or I shall disappear on you,” she said. “I shall write to Glinda and ask her to share the spell on how to go up in a puff of smoke. I am teasing, but I mean it, Fiyero.”

  Fiyero + Fae he wrote, in the flour that spilled when she rolled out a piecrust. Fae, she had whispered, as if even to keep it from the cat, was her code name. No one in the cell could know one another’s real names.

  She would not let him see her naked in the light, but since he also was not allowed to visit during the day this was hardly a problem. She waited for him on the appointed evenings, sitting naked under the blanket, reading essays on political theory or moral philosophy. “I don’t know that I understand them, I read them as poetry,” she once admitted. “I like the sound of the words, but I don’t ever really expect my slow, slanted impression of the world to change by what I read.”

  “Is it changing by how you live?” he asked, turning down the light and slipping out of his clothes.

  “You think all this is new to me,” she said, sighing. “You think I am such a virgin.”

  “You didn’t bleed the first time,” he observed. “So what’s to think about?”

  “I know what you think,” she said. “But how experienced are you, Lord Sir Fiyero, Arjiki Prince of Kiamo Ko, Mightiest Stalker of the Thousand Year Grasslands, Chiefest Chieftain in the Great Kells?”

  “I am putty in your hands,” he said, truthfully. “I married a child bride and to preserve my power I haven’t been unfaithful. Until now. You are not like her,” he said. “You don’t feel like her, it doesn’t feel the same. You’re more secret.”

  “I don’t exist,” she said, “so you’re still not being unfaithful, either.”

  “Let’s not be unfaithful right now then,” he said, “I can’t wait,” running his hands along her ribs, down the tight plane of her stomach. She always brought his hands to her thin, expressive breasts; she would not be touched below the waist by hands. They moved together, blue diamonds on a green field.

  He didn’t have enough to do during the days. Being the chieftain of the Arjiki people, he knew it was in their political interest to be tied ineluctably to the commercial hub of the Emerald City. Yet Arjiki business concerns only required Fiyero to show his face at social engagements, in board meetings and financial parlors. The rest of the time he wandered about, seeking frescoes of Saint Glinda and other saints. Elphaba-Fabala-Elphie-Fae would never tell him what she had been doing in the chapel of Saint Glinda attached to the mauntery in Saint Glinda’s Square.

  One day he looked up Avaric and they had lunch. Avaric suggested a girlie show afterward, and Fiyero begged off. Avaric was opinionated, cynical, corrupt, and as good-looking as ever. There wasn’t much gossip to bring back to Elphaba.

  The wind tore the leaves from the trees. The Gale Force continued to frog-march Animals and collaborators out of town. Interest rates in the Gillikin banks went soaring up—good for investors, bad for those who had adjustable rate loans. Foreclosures on a lot of valuable city-centre properties. Too early, businesses began stringing the green and gold lights of Lurlinemas, trying to woo cautious and depressed citizens into the shops.

  More than anything else he wanted to walk the streets of the Emerald City with Elphaba—there was no more beautiful place to be in love, especially at dusk as the shop lights went on, golden against the blue-purple evening sky. He had never been in love before, he now saw. It humbled him. It scared him. He couldn’t bear it when their forced absence went four or five days.

  “Kisses to Irji, Manek, and Nor,” he wrote on the bottom of his weekly letter to Sarima, who couldn’t write back because, among other things, she had never learned either alphabet. Somehow her silence seemed a tacit approval of this vow-shattering interlude. He didn’t write kisses to her, too. He hoped the chocolates would do.

  He rolled over, tugging the blanket with him; she tugged it back. The air in the room was so cold it seemed clammy. Malky endured their thrashing legs in order to stay near them, to receive warmth, and to give whatever passes for affection in cats.

  “My darling Fae,” said Fiyero. “You probably know this, and I’m not about to become a co-conspirator at whatever it is you’re working for—reducing library fines or revoking the need for cat collars or whatever. But I do keep my ears open. The Quadlings are under the thumb of the marching militia again. At least that’s what they’re saying in the lounge of the club, over newspapers and pipes. Apparently an army division has gone down into Quadling Country as far as Qhoyre, on some sort of a slash-and-burn mission. Your father, your brother, and Nessarose—are they still there?”

  Elphaba didn’t answer for a while. She seemed to be working out not only what she wanted to say, but perhaps even what she could remember. Her expression was of puzzlement, even testiness. She said, “We lived in Qhoyre for a time, when I was about ten. It’s a funny little low town, built on boggy ground. Half the streets are canals. The roofs are low, the windows are grilled or louvred to provide privacy and ventilation, the air is steamy and the flora excessive—huge roundels of palmy leaf, almost like shallow quilted pillows, making a sound as they beat against each other in the wind—tirrr tirrr, tirrr tirrr.”

  “I don’t know that there’s much of Qhoyre left,” said Fiyero carefully. “If the gossip I picked up is accurate.”

  “No, Papa isn’t there now, thank—thank whoever, whatever, thank nothing,” continued Elphaba. “Unless things have changed. The good people of Qhoyre weren’t very responsive to missionary efforts. They’d invite Papa and me in, serve us little damp cakelets and lukewarm red mint tea. We’d all sit on low, mildewing cushions, scaring geckos and spiders into the deeper shadows. Papa would drone on about the generous nature of the Unnamed God, doing his basic xenophiliac slant. He pointed to me as proof. I would grin with horrible sweetness and sing a hymn—the only music Papa approved of. I was miserably shy and ashamed of my color, but Papa had convinced me of the value of this work. Invariably the gentle citizens of Qhoyre would capitulate out of hospitality. They’d allow themselves to be led in prayers to the Unnamed God, but you couldn’t say their hearts were in it. I think I sensed a great deal more—more dishearteningly than Papa did—how ineffectual we really were.”

  “So where are they now? Papa, Nessarose, and the boy—your brother, what’s his name?”

  “Shell, that’s his name. Well, Papa felt his work was farther south in Quadling Country, in the real outback. We had a series of small cramped homes around Ovvels–the Hovels in Ovvels, we called them—that dreary, beastly countryside, full of a bloody beauty.”

  At his questioning expression she continued. “I mean, fifteen, twenty years ago, Fiyero, the Emerald City speculators discovered the ruby deposits there. First under the Ozma Regent, then after the coup, unde
r the Wizard: same ugly business practices. Though under the Ozma Regent the exploitation did not require murder and brutality. Using elephants, the engineers hauled in gravel, they dammed up springs, they perfected a complicated system of strip mining under three feet of brackish groundwater. Papa thought this disarray in their little moist society was a situation ready-made for mission work. And he was right. The Quadlings struggled against the Wizard with ill-argued proclamations, they resorted to totems, but their only military weapons were slingshots. So they rallied around my father. He converted them, they went into the struggle with the zeal of the newly chastised. They were dispossessed and disappeared. All with the benefit of unionist grace.”

  “My, you’re bitter.”

  “I was a tool. My dear father used me—and Nessarose less so, because of her trouble moving about—he used me as an object lesson. Looking as I did, even singing as I can—they trusted him partly as a response to the freakiness of me. If the Unnamed God could love me, how much more responsible it’d be to the unadulterated them.”

  “So, my dear, you don’t care where he is, or what happens to him now?”

  “How can you say that?” She sat up, steaming. “I love the mad old tunnel-visioned bastard. He really believed in what he preached. He even thought that a Quadling corpse found floating faceup in a brackwater pond—provided it had a tattoo of conversion on it somewhere—was better off than a survivor. He felt he’d written a single ticket to the Other Land assembly of the Unnamed God. I think he considered it work well done.”

  “And you don’t?” Fiyero had a fairly anemic spiritual life; he felt unqualified to voice an opinion about her father’s vocation.

  “Maybe it was work well done,” she said sadly. “How do I know? But not for me. Settlement by settlement we reaped converts. Settlement by settlement the civil engineering corps came in, to detonate the village life. There was no outcry throughout Oz proper. Nobody was listening. Who cared about the Quadlings?”

  “But what brought him there in the first place?”