“He and Mama had had a friend, a Quadling, who died in my family home—a Quadling itinerant, a glassblower.” Elphaba frowned and closed her eyes, and would say no more. Fiyero kissed her fingernails. He kissed the V between her thumb and forefinger, he sucked on it as if it were a lemon rind. She slipped backward to allow him greater purchase.
A while later he said, “But Elphie-Fabala-Fae—are you really not worried about your father and Nessarose, and little himmy-who?”
“My father chases hopeless causes. It gives his failure at life some legitimacy. For a while he proclaimed himself a prophet of the return of the last, lost tadpole of the Ozma line. That’s over now. And my brother Shell—he is probably fifteen by now. Look Fiyero, how can I be worried about them and be worried about the campaign of the season too? I can’t course around Oz—on that broomstick there, like a storybook witch!—I’ve chosen to go underground so that I can’t worry. Besides, I know what will happen to Nessarose at least. Sooner or later.”
“What?”
“When my great-grandfather finally pops off, she’ll be the next Eminent Thropp.”
“You’re in line, I thought. Aren’t you older?”
“I’m gone, dearie, I’m magicked away in a puff of smoke. Forget it. And you know, that’ll be good for Nessarose. She’ll be a sort of local queen out there in Nest Hardings.”
“She apparently did a course in sorcery, did you know? In Shiz?”
“No, I didn’t. Well, bully for her. If she ever comes down off that plinth—the one that has words written on it along the edges in gold, reading most superior in moral rectitude—if she ever allows herself to be the bitch she really is, she’ll be the Bitch of the East. Nanny and the devoted staff at Colwen Grounds will prop her up.”
“I thought you were fond of her!”
“Don’t you know affection when you see it?” scoffed Elphaba. “I love Nessie. She’s a pain in the neck, she’s intolerably righteous, she’s a nasty piece of work. I’m devoted to her.”
“She’ll be the Eminent Thropp.”
“Better she than I,” said Elphaba dryly. “For one thing, she has great taste in shoes.”
One evening through the skylight the full moon fell heavily on Elphaba sleeping. Fiyero had awakened and gone to take a leak into the chamber pot. Malky was stalking mice on the stairs. Coming back, Fiyero looked at the form of his lover, more pearly than green tonight. He had brought her a traditional Vinkus fringed silk scarf—roses on a black background—and he had tied it around her waist, and from then on it was a costume for lovemaking. Tonight in sleeping she had nudged it up, and he admired the curve of her flank, the tender fragility of her knee, the bony ankle. There was a smell of perfume still in the air, and the resiny, animal smell, and the smell of the mystical sea, and the sweet cloaking smell of hair all riled up by sex. He sat by the side of the bed and looked at her. Her pubic hair grew, almost more purple than black, in small spangled curls, a different pattern than Sarima’s. There was an odd shadow near the groin—for a sleepy moment he wondered if some of his blue diamonds had, in the heat of sex, been steamed onto her own skin—or was it a scar?
But she woke up just then, and in the moonlight covered herself with a blanket. She smiled at him drowsily and called him “Yero, my hero,” and that melted his heart.
She could get so angry, though!
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the pork roll you’re devouring, in such perfect mindless affluence, is cut from a Pig,” she snapped at him once.
“Just because you’ve already eaten, you don’t need to ruin my appetite,” he protested mildly. Free-living Animals were not much in evidence in his home territory, and the few sentient creatures he’d known at Shiz had, except at the Philosophy Club that night, made little impression. The plight of the Animals had not much touched him.
“This is why you shouldn’t fall in love, it blinds you. Love is wicked distraction.”
“Now you have put me off my lunch.” He fed the rest of the pork roll to Malky. “What in the world do you know about wickedness? You’re a bit player in this network of renegades, aren’t you? You’re a novice.”
“I know this: The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness,” she said.
“And of women?”
“Women are weaker, but their weakness is full of cunning and an equally rigid moral certainty. Since their arena is smaller, their capacity for real damage is less alarming. Though being more intimate they are the more treacherous.”
“And my capacity for evil?” said Fiyero, feeling implicated and uncomfortable. “And yours?”
“Fiyero’s capacity for evil is in believing too strenuously in a capacity for good.”
“And yours?”
“Mine is in thinking in epigrams.”
“You let yourself off lightly,” he said, suddenly a little annoyed. “Is that what you’re engaged by your secret network to do? Generate witty epigrams?”
“Oh, there’s big doings afoot,” she said, uncharacteristically. “I won’t be at the center of it, but I’ll be on the fringes helping out, believe me.”
“What are you talking about? A coup?”
“Never you mind, and you’ll stay blameless. Just as you want to be.” This was nastiness on her part.
“An assassination? And so what if you do kill some General Butcher? What does that make you? A saint? A saint of the revolution? Or a martyr if you’re killed in the campaign?”
She wouldn’t answer. She shook her narrow head in irritation, then flung the rosy shawl across the room as if it infuriated her.
“What if some innocent bystander is killed as you aim for General Pig Butcher?”
“I don’t know or care much about martyrs,” she said. “All that smacks of a higher plan, a cosmology—something I don’t believe in. If we can’t comprehend the plan at hand, how could a higher plan make any more sense? But were I to believe in martyrdom, I suppose I’d say you can only be a martyr if you know what you are dying for, and choose it.”
“Ah, so then there are innocent victims in this trade. Those who don’t choose to die but are in the line of fire.”
“There are . . . there will be . . . accidents, I guess.”
“Can there be grief, regret, in your exalted circle? Is there any such thing as a mistake? Is there a concept of tragedy?”
“Fiyero, you disaffected fool, the tragedy is all around us. Worrying about anything smaller is a distraction. Any casualty of the struggle is their fault, not ours. We don’t embrace violence but we don’t deny its existence—how can we deny it when its effects are all around us? That kind of denial is a sin, if anything is—”
“Ah—now I’ve heard the word I never expected to hear you say.”
“Denial? Sin?”
“No. We.”
“I don’t know why—”
“The lone dissenter at Crage Hall turns institutional? A company gal? A team player? Our former Miss Queen of Solitaire?”
“You misunderstand. There is a campaign but no agents, there is a game but no players. I have no colleagues. I have no self. I never did, in fact, but that’s beside the point. I am just a muscular twitch in the larger organism.”
“Hah! You the most individual, the most separate, the most real . . .”
“Like everyone else you refer to my looks. And you make fun of them.”
“I adore your looks and I acknowledge them. Fae!”
They parted that day without speaking, and he spent the evening at the betting parlor, losing money.
The next time he saw her, he brought three green candles and three gold candles and decorated her flat for Lurlinemas. “I don’t believe in religious feast days,” she said, but relented to admit, “they are pretty, though.”
“You have no soul,” he teased her.
“You’re right,” she answered soberly. “I didn’t think it showed.”
“You’re only playing word games now.”
“No,
” she said, “what proof have I of a soul?”
“How can you have a conscience if you don’t have a soul?” he asked despite himself—he wanted to keep things light, to get back onto a better footing after their last episode of moral wrestling and estrangement.
“How can a bird feed its young if it has no consciousness of before and after? A conscience, Yero my hero, is only consciousness in another dimension, the dimension of time. What you call conscience I prefer to call instinct. Birds feed their young without understanding why, without weeping about how all that is born must die, sob sob. I do my work with a similar motivation: the movement in the gut toward food, fairness, and safety. I am a pack animal wheeling with the herd, that’s all. I’m a forgettable leaf on a tree.”
“Since your work is terrorism, that’s the most extreme argument for crime I’ve ever heard. You’re eschewing all personal responsibility. It’s as bad as those who sacrifice their personal will into the gloomy morasses of the unknowable will of some unnameable god. If you suppress the idea of personhood then you suppress the notion of individual culpability.”
“What is worse, Fiyero? Suppressing the idea of personhood or suppressing, through torture and incarceration and starvation, real living persons? Look: Would you worry about saving one precious sentimental portrait in a museum of fine arts when the city around you is on fire and real people are burning to death? Keep some proportion in all this!”
“But even some innocent bystander—say an annoying society dame—is a real person, not a portrait. Your metaphor is distracting and belittling, it’s a blind excuse for crime.”
“A society dame has chosen to parade herself as a living portrait. She must be treated as such. It’s her due. That denial of it, that’s your evil, to go back to the other day. I say you save the innocent bystander if you can, even if she’s a society dame, or he’s a captain of industry thriving mightily on all these repressive moves—but not, not, not at the expense of other, realer people. And if you can’t save them, you can’t. Everything costs.”
“I don’t believe in this concept of ‘real’ or ‘realer’ people.”
“You don’t?” She smiled, not nicely. “When I do disappear again, dearie, I’ll surely be less real than I am now.” She made to simulate sex against him; he turned his head, surprised at the vigor of his aversion.
Later that night, when they had made up, she suffered a racking paroxysm and painful sweats. She would not let him touch her. “You should go away, I’m not worthy of you,” she moaned, and some time later, when she was calmer, she murmured before sleeping again, “I love you so much, Fiyero, you just don’t understand: Being born with a talent or an inclination for goodness is the aberration.”
She was right. He didn’t understand. He wiped her brow with a dry towel and kept close to her. There was frost on the skylight, and they slept beneath their winter coats to keep warm.
One brisk afternoon he sent off a propitiatory package of bright wooden toys for the children and a jeweled torque for Sarima. The pack train was going around the Great Kells via the northern route. It wouldn’t deliver Lurlinemas presents to Kiamo Ko until well into the spring, but he could pretend to have sent them earlier. If the snows held off, he would be home by then, restless and chafing in the tall narrow rooms of the mountain stronghold, but maybe he would get the credit for thoughtfulness. And perhaps deserved, why not? To be sure, Sarima would be in her winter doldrums (as distinct from her spring moods, her summer ennui, and her congenital autumn condition). A torque eventually would cheer her up, at least a little.
He stopped for a coffee in a café in a neighborhood just enough off the beaten track to be both bohemian and pricey. The management apologized: The winter garden, usually heated with braziers and brazen with expensive forced flowers, had been the site of an explosion the night before. “The neighborhood is troubled; who’d have thought it?” said the manager, touching Fiyero on the elbow. “Our Glorious Wizard was to have eradicated civil unrest: wasn’t that the whole point of curfews and containment laws?”
Fiyero was not inclined to comment, and the manager took his silence for agreement. “I’ve moved a few tables into my private parlor up the stairs, if you don’t mind roughing it amidst my family memorabilia,” he said, leading the way. “Finding good Munchkinlander help to repair the damage is getting harder, too. The Munchkinlander tiktok touch, there’s nothing like it. But a lot of our friends in the service sector have gone back to their eastern farms. Scared of violence against them—well, so many of them are so small, don’t you think they seem to provoke it?—they’re all cowards.” He interrupted himself to say, “I can tell you have no Munchkinlander relatives or I wouldn’t comment this way.”
“My wife is from Nest Hardings,” said Fiyero, lying unconvincingly, but the point was made.
“I recommend the cherry chocolate frappe today, fresh and delicious,” said the manager, retreating into repentant formality, and pulling out a chair at a table near high old windows. Fiyero sat and looked out. One fretted shutter had warped and couldn’t fold back against the outer wall as designed, but there was still enough of a view. Rooflines, ornamental chimney pots, the odd high window box stuffed with dark winter pansies, and pigeons swooping and scissoring like lords of the sky.
The manager was of that peculiar stock; after so many generations in the Emerald City, it seemed a separate ethnic strand. The paintings of his family showed the bright gimlet hazel eyes, and refined receding hairlines on men and women alike (and plucked into the scalps of children, too, in the fashion of the Emerald City upwardly yearning middle class). At the sight of simpering boys in pink satin with frizzy-headed lapdogs, and girlettes in womanish dark rouge and plunging necklines (revealing their innocent lack of breasts), Fiyero felt the sudden longing, again, for his own cold and distant children. Though bruised by their particular family life—and who wasn’t?—in his memory Irji, Manek, and Nor managed more integrity than these hothouse scions of a family on the make.
But that was cruel, and he was responding to artistic convention, not to the actual children. He turned his gaze out the window when the order came, to avoid hideous art, to avoid the other people in the salon.
Having coffee in the winter garden below usually provided a view of vine-covered brick walls, shrubs, and the occasional marble statue of some improbably beautiful and vulnerably naked stripling. However, from a flight up, one could see over the wall, into an interior mews area. One part was a stables, another a neighborhood toilet, apparently; and just within the range of his vision was the wall broken by the explosion. Some sort of twisted, thorny wire netting had been erected across the opening, which led into a schoolyard.
As he watched, one of the doors of the adjacent school was pushed open, and a small crowd emerged, shaking and stretching into the sunlight. There seemed to be—Fiyero peered—a couple of elderly Quadling women and some adolescent male Quadlings, straplings with early mustaches making a bluish-colored shadow against their fine rose-rust skin. Five, six, seven Quadlings—and a couple of stout men who might have been part Gillikinese, it was hard to tell—and a family of bears. No—Bears. Smallish Red Bears, a mother and father and a toddler.
The little Bear went unerringly to some balls and hoops under the stairs. The Quadlings made a circle and began to sing and dance. The old ones, with arthritic steps, joined their hands with the teenagers and moved in a widdershins pattern, in and out, as if making a clock face that reversed the clockwise movement of time. The stocky Gillikinese men shared a cigarette and gazed out the wiry barrier across the break in the wall. The Red Bears were more dispirited. The male sat on the wooden edge of a sandlot, rubbing his eyes and combing the fur below his chin. The female moved back and forth, kicking at the ball just often enough to keep the cub occupied, then stroking the bowed head of her mate.
Fiyero sipped his drink and inched forward. If there were, what, twelve prisoners, and only a wire fence between them and freedom, why didn’t they rus
h it? Why were they separated into their racial and species groups?
After ten minutes the doors opened again and a Gale Forcer came out, trim and—yes, Fiyero had to admit it at last—terrifying. Terrifying in the brick red uniform with the green boots, and the emerald cross that quartered the breast of the shirt, one vertical strap from groin to high starched collar, the other strap from armpit to armpit across the pectorals. He was only a youth whose curly hair was so blond as to look nearly white in the winter sun. He stood with legs apart on the step of the school’s verandah.
Though Fiyero couldn’t hear a thing through the closed window, the soldier apparently gave a command. The Bears stiffened and the cub began to wail and clutch the ball to itself. The Gillikinese men came and stood quiescently ready. The Quadlings ignored the order and kept on with their dance. They swung their hips, and they held their arms at shoulder height, moving their hands in a semaphoric message, though what it meant Fiyero could only guess. He had never seen a Quadling before.
The Gale Forcer raised his voice. He had a truncheon in a thong loop at his waist. The cub hid behind the father, and the mother could be seen to growl.
Work together, Fiyero found himself thinking, hardly aware he could have such a thought. Work as a team—there are twelve of you and only one of him. Is it your differences from one another that keep you docile? Or are there relatives inside who will be tortured if you make a break for freedom?
It was all speculation; Fiyero couldn’t tell the dynamics of the situation, but he was riveted. He realized his hand was open, palm up against the glass of the window. Below, because the Bears had not stood to join the lineup, the soldier raised his cudgel and it came down on the skull of
the cub. Fiyero’s body jerked, he spilled his drink and the cup broke, porcelain shards on the buttery herringbone-laid oak flooring.
The manager appeared from behind a green baize door and tutted, and twitched the drapes closed, but not before Fiyero had seen one last thing. Recoiling as if he had never hunted and killed in the Thousand Year Grasslands, he averted his eyes and they wheeled upward, where he glimpsed the pale blond coins of faces—two or three dozen schoolchildren in the upper windows of the school, staring down with fascination and open mouths at the scene in their playing field.
The Wicked Years Complete Collection Page 24
