The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  The matriarch alone responds to these words; maybe she is the only one who actually remembers Turtle Heart. She has a look of someone caught venturing out from beneath a rock. Well, in a people whose moral code is so lax, so little is wrong. For her this encounter is a mysterious, complicated transaction.

  She says something like, We don’t shrive, we don’t shrive, and not for Turtle Heart, no, and she strikes Papa on the face with a reed, cutting him with thin stripes. I was only a witness, I was not really alive then, but I saw: This was when Papa began to lose his way, it dates from this whipping.

  I see him shocked: It doesn’t occur in his conception of moral life that some sins are unforgivable. He blanches, onion white behind the blood-pearled perforations of her attack. Maybe she has every right to do what she’s done, but in Papa’s life she’s become old Kumbricia.

  I see her, willful, proud: Her moral system doesn’t allow for forgiveness, and she is just as incarcerated as he, but she doesn’t know it. She grins, all gums and menace, and rests the reed on her collarbone, where its fletching tip falls like a necklace around her own neck.

  He points to me, and says—not to me, but to them all—Isn’t this punishment enough?

  Elphaba the girl does not know how to see her father as a broken man. All she knows is that he passes his brokenness on to her. Daily his habits of loathing and self-loathing cripple her. Daily she loves him back because she knows no other way.

  I see myself there: the girl witness, wide-eyed as Dorothy. Staring at a world too horrible to comprehend, believing—by dint of ignorance and innocence—that beneath this unbreakable contract of guilt and blame there is always an older contract that may bind and release in a more salutary way. A more ancient precedent of ransom, that we may not always be tormented by our shame. Neither Dorothy nor young Elphaba can speak of this, but the belief of it is in both our faces . . .

  The Witch had taken the green glass bottle, whose label still read MIRACLE ELI-, and placed it on her bedside table. She took a spoonful of the ancient elixir before sleeping, hoping for miracles, seeking some version of the fabulous alibi Dorothy was unwinding, that she had come from a country somehow other—not the real states across the desert, but a whole separate geophysical existence. Even metaphysical. The Wizard made such a claim for himself, and if the dwarf was right, the Witch had this ancestry too. At night she tried to train herself to look on the periphery of her dreams, to note the details. It was a little like trying to see around the edges of a mirror, but, she found, more rewarding.

  But what did she get? Everything flickered, like a guttering candle but more harshly, more stridently. People moved in short, jerky motions. They were colorless, they were vapid, they were drugged, they were manic. Buildings were high and cruel. Winds were strong. The Wizard stepped in and out of these pictures, a very humble-looking man in this context. In one window, in a shop from which the Wizard was emerging rather dejectedly, she thought, she caught some words once, and willed herself with tremendous effort to wake up so she could write them down. But they didn’t make any sense to her. NO IRISH NEED APPLY.

  Then one night she had a nightmare. Again the Wizard began it. He walked over some hills of sand, with tall gray grasses blowing in a fierce gale—a thousand thousand grasses like the scratchy sedge with which the old Quadling matriarch had struck Frex—and the Wizard stopped along a broad flat stretch. He stepped out of his clothes, and looked at a timepiece in his hands, as if memorizing an historic instant. Then he walked forward, naked and broken. When the Witch realized what he was approaching, she tried to back out of the dream with a howl, but could not manage to disengage herself. This was the mythical ocean, and the Wizard walked into water up to his knees, his thighs, his waist; he paused and shivered, and slopped water over the rest of himself as a kind of penance. Then he kept walking, and disappeared entirely into the sea, as Saint Aelphaba of the Waterfall had disappeared behind her watery veil. The sea rocked like an earthquake, vomiting against the sandy shore, pounding in a kettledrum commotion. There was no Other Side to it. It threw the Wizard back, again and again, though again and again he forged in, more and more exhausted. The stoicism, the determination: no wonder he had managed to overcome a nation. The dream ended with him washed back on shore one last time, weeping with frustration.

  She woke, gagging, terrified beyond telling, salt in her nostrils. Thereafter she avoided the miracle elixir. Instead, she concocted a potion derived both from Nanny’s recipe book and the Grimmerie’s marginalia, on how to keep awake. If she fell asleep again, she would be prey to that vision of earthly destruction, and she would rather die.

  Nanny didn’t have very much to say about nightmares. “Your mother had them too,” she remarked at last. “She used to say she saw the unknown city of anger in her dreams. She was so enraged over how you turned out, you know—I mean physically, dear, don’t look like that at me: a green girl isn’t easy for any mother to explain away—that she gulped down those pills like candy when Nessarose was expected. If Nessarose were still around to take up a grudge, she could blame you, in a way, for what happened to her.”

  “But where did you get that green bottle?” said the Witch into Nanny’s good ear. “Look at it, Nanny dear, and try to remember.”

  “I suspect I bought it at a jumble sale,” she said. “I could stretch a penny, believe me.”

  You could stretch the truth even further, thought the Witch. She suppressed a desire to smash the green glass. How deeply bound by cords of family anger we all are, thought the Witch. None of us breaks free.

  12

  One afternoon a few weeks later, Liir came back from a ramble all hot and bothered. The Witch hated to hear that he had been hobnobbing again with the Wizard’s soldiers down in Red Windmill.

  “They had news, a dispatch from the Emerald City,” he said. “A delegation of strangers got in to see the Wizard. And just a girl! Dorothy, they said, a girl from the Other Land. And some friends. The Wizard hasn’t allowed an audience with his subjects in years—he works through ministers, they say. A lot of soldiers think he died long ago, and it’s a Palace plot to safeguard the peace. But Dorothy and her friends got in, and they saw him, and told everyone what it was like!”

  “Well well,” said the Witch. “Imagine that. All of Oz, Loyal and Otherwise, is yapping about this Dorothy. What did the fools say next?”

  “The dispatch soldier said that the guests asked the Wizard to grant them some wishes. The Scarecrow asked for a brain, Nick Chopper the Tin Woodman asked for a heart, and the Cowardly Lion asked for courage.”

  “And I suppose Dorothy asked for a shoe horn?”

  “Dorothy asked to be sent home.”

  “I hope she gets her wish. And?”

  But Liir got coy.

  “Oh come on, I’m too old to be put off my supper by gossip,” she snapped.

  Liir looked flushed with guilty pleasure. “The soldiers said that the Wizard had rejected the odd requests.”

  “And you’re so very surprised?”

  “The Wizard told Dorothy that he would grant them their wishes—when they had—when they had—”

  “You haven’t stuttered in years. Don’t start again, or I’ll beat you.”

  “Dorothy and his friends have to come here and kill you,” he finished. “The soldiers said it’s because you murdered an old lady in Shiz, a famous old lady, and you’re an assassin. Also you’re crazy, they said.”

  “I’m a more likely murderer than those incompetent vagabonds could be,” she said. “He was just trying to get rid of them. Probably he’s instructed his own Gale Forcers to slit the girl’s throat as soon as she’s safely out of the limelight.” And no doubt the Wizard had confiscated the shoes. It galled her. But how flattered she felt that the news of her attack had gotten out. By now she was sure she had killed Madame Morrible. It only made sense that she had.

  But Liir shook his head. “The funny thing,” he said, “is that Dorothy is called Dorothy Gale.
The soldiers at Red Windmill said the Gale Forcers wouldn’t touch her, they’re too superstitious.”

  “What do these soldiers know of intrigue, stationed here out at the edge of the moon?”

  Liir shrugged. “Aren’t you impressed that the Wizard of Oz even knows who you are? Are you a murderer?”

  “Oh Liir, you’ll understand when you’re older. Or anyway not understanding will become second nature, and it won’t matter. I wouldn’t harm you, if that’s what you mean. But you sound so surprised that I should be known in the Emerald City. Just because you disobey me and treat me like refuse, do you think the whole world does?” Yet she was pleased. “But you know, Liir, if there’s even the slightest chance that there’s any truth to these rumors, you had better stay away from Red Windmill for a while. They might kidnap you and hold you for ransom until I give myself up to this schoolgirl and her needy companions.”

  “I want to meet Dorothy,” he said.

  “You’re not that age already, please preserve us,” she said. “I always intended to pickle you before you got to puberty.”

  “Well, I’m not getting kidnapped, so don’t worry,” he said. “Besides, I want to be here when they get here.”

  “Worry is the last thing I’d do if you got kidnapped,” she answered. “It’d be your own damn fault, and a great relief to me to have one less mouth to feed.”

  “Oh well, then who’d carry the firewood up all those stairs every winter?”

  “I’ll hire that Nick Chopper fellow. His axe looks pretty sharp to me.”

  “You’ve seen him?” Liir’s mouth dropped open. “No, you haven’t!”

  “I have, as a matter of fact,” she said. “Who says I don’t travel in the best circles?”

  “What’s she like?” he said, his face eager and bright. “You must have seen Dorothy too. What’s she like, Auntie Witch?”

  “Don’t you Auntie me, you know that makes me sick.”

  He pestered without stopping until finally she had to screech at him. “She’s a beautiful little dolt who believes everything everybody says to her! And if she gets here and you tell her you love her, she’ll probably believe you! Now get out of here, I have work to do!”

  He lingered at the door, and said, “The Lion wants courage, the Tin Man a heart, and the Scarecrow brains. Dorothy wants to go home. What do you want?”

  “A little peace and quiet.”

  “No, really.”

  She couldn’t say forgiveness, not to Liir. She started to say “a soldier,” to make fun of his mooning affections over the guys in uniform. But realizing even as she said it that he would be hurt, she caught herself halfway, and in the end what came out of her mouth surprised them both. She said, “A soul—”

  He blinked at her.

  “And you?” she said in a quieter voice. “What do you want Liir, if the Wizard could give you anything?”

  “A father,” he answered.

  13

  She wondered, briefly, if she was going insane. That night she sat up in a chair and thought about what she had said.

  A person who doesn’t believe in the Unnamed God, or anything else, can’t believe in a soul.

  If you could take the skewers of religion, those that riddle your frame, make you aware every time you move—if you could withdraw the scimitars of religion from your mental and moral systems—could you even stand? Or do you need religion as, say, the hippos in the Grasslands need the poisonous little parasites within them, to help them digest fiber and pulp? The history of peoples who have shucked off religion isn’t an especially persuasive argument for living without it. Is religion itself—that tired and ironic phrase—the necessary evil?

  The idea of religion worked for Nessarose, it worked for Frex. There may be no real city in the clouds, but dreaming of it can enliven the spirit.

  Perhaps in our age’s generous attempt at unionism, allowing all devotional urges life and breath under the canopy of the Unnamed God, perhaps we have sealed our own doom. Perhaps it’s time to name the Unnamed God, even feebly and in our own wicked image, that we may at least survive under the illusion of an authority that could care for us.

  For whittle away from the Unnamed God anything approximating character, and what have you got? A big hollow wind. And wind may have gale force but it may not have moral force; and a voice in a whirlwind is a carnival barker’s trick.

  More appealing—she now saw, for once—the old-timers’ notions of paganism. Lurlina in her fairy chariot, hovering just out of sight in the clouds, ready to swoop down some millennium or other and remember who we are. The Unnamed God, by virtue of its anonymity, can’t ever be suspected of a surprise visit.

  And would we recognize the Unnamed God if it knocked on our doors?

  14

  Sometimes she napped, against her will, her chin sagging on her chest, sometimes driving right down to the tabletop, jarring her teeth and rattling her jaw, and startling herself awake.

  She had taken to standing at the window, looking down in the valley. It would be weeks before Dorothy and her band arrived, if indeed they hadn’t already been murdered and their corpses burned, just as Sarima’s must have been.

  One night Liir came back from a visit to the barracks. He was teary and inarticulate, and she tried not to care about it, but was too curious to let it go. Finally he told her. One of the soldiers had proposed to his fellows that when Dorothy and friends arrive, the friends be killed and Dorothy be tied up for a little amusement among the lonely, randy men.

  “Oh, men will have their fantasies,” said the Witch, but she was troubled.

  What had made Liir cry was that his friends had reported the soldier’s remarks to their superior. The soldier had been stripped and castrated, and nailed to the windmill. His body rotated in circles as the vultures came and tried to peck at his entrails. He still wasn’t even dead.

  “It isn’t hard to find evil in this world,” said the Witch. “Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.” But she was struck at the vehemence of the Commander’s response against one of his own. So Dorothy might well be alive still, and was apparently under orders of protection from the highest military offices in the land.

  Liir held Chistery in his lap and sobbed onto his scalp. Chistery said, “Well, we’ll wail while woe’ll wheel,” and he cried along with Liir.

  “Aren’t they the sweet pair,” observed Nanny. “Wouldn’t that make the sweetest painting?”

  Under cover of darkness the Witch slipped away on her broom, and saw to it that the suffering soldier died at once.

  She thought one afternoon, inexplicably, of the baby lion cub taken from its mother, and pressed into service in Doctor Nikidik’s lab back in Shiz. She remembered how it had cowered, she remembered the fuss she had made about it. Or was she only glorifying herself in hindsight?

  If it was the same Lion, grown up timid and unnatural, it should have no bone to pick with her. She had saved it when it was young. Hadn’t she?

  They confused her, this band of Yellow Brick Road Irregulars. The Tin Woodman was hollow, a tiktok cipher, or an eviscerated human under a spell. The Lion was a perversion of its own natural instincts. She could deal with tiktok clockworks, she could handle Animals. But it was the Scarecrow she feared. Was it a spell? Was it a mask? Was there merely some clever dancer inside? All three of them were emasculated in some way or other, deluded under the spell of the girl’s innocence.

  She could give the Lion a history, and think of him as that abused cub in a Shiz science hall. She suspected that Nick Chopper was the victim of her own sister’s spite and magic, casualty of the enchanted axe. But she had no way to place the Scarecrow.

  She began to think that behind that painted cornmeal sack of a face, there was a face she would know, a face she had been waiting for.

  She lit a candle and said the words aloud, as if she really could do spells. The words blew aside the taper of grayish smoke that rose from the fatty tallow. If they had any other ef
fect in the world than that, she didn’t know it yet. “Fiyero didn’t die,” she said. “He was imprisoned, and he has escaped. He is coming home to Kiamo Ko, he is coming home to me, and he is disguised as a scarecrow because he doesn’t yet know what he will find.”

  It would take brains to think up such a plan.

  She took an old tunic of Fiyero’s. She called elderly Killyjoy and bade him sniff it well, and sent him down into the valley every day, so that if the travelers showed up, Killyjoy would be able to find them, and lead them home rejoicing.

  And though she tried not to sleep, on occasion she could not help it; her dreams brought Fiyero closer and closer to home.

  15

  There was a day, in the first gusts of autumn, that the banners and standards of the camp below were shifted and bugles blew tinnily up the slopes to the castle. By this the Witch guessed that the troupe had arrived in Red Windmill, and were being given a royal welcome. “They’ve come so far, they won’t wait now,” she said. “Go, Killyjoy, go find them and show them the quickest way here.”

  She loosed the senior dog, and so strong were his exhortations that the entire pack of his kin went racing along with him, howling with joy and frantic to do their duty.

  “Nanny,” cried the Witch, “put on a clean petticoat and change your apron, we’ll have company by nightfall!”

  But the dogs didn’t come back, all afternoon and into the gloaming, and the Witch could see why. With a telescopic eye in a cylindrical casing—invented by the Witch along the lines of Doctor Dillamond’s discovery about opposing lenses—she followed a shock of carnage. Dorothy and the Lion trembled with the Scarecrow beyond while the Tin Woodman struck the heads of her beasts one after the other with his axe. Killyjoy and his wolfy relations lay scattered like dead soldiers on a field of retreat.