At the final gorge, where the Conference of the Birds had departed for its circuit around western Oz, Liir said a quick and perfunctory good-bye to Lord Shem, Prince Ottokos, and turned home with a heavy heart.
The accomplishments of the last six months had been irrelevant, he decided, for all but Nastoya. Was that the only accomplishment that mattered?—that somehow you not bungle your own death? Everything else that had happened in his short adult life had been frothy and meaningless, ultimately. Passionate, yes—yes, that, indeed. Passionately felt, but without shapeliness or worthy outcome.
The dragons were dead: some people were still walking about, ignorant of how their tired lives might otherwise have ended up with a scraping. That much was good. Stack that up against the cursed lives of those Quadlings who daily had to remember their own dead, lost at the burning of the bridge at Bengda. The bit of thatch falling, a letter in the air, flaming and drowning.
And doubtless there were still disconsolate prisoners in Southstairs, and misguided soldiers in barracks, and those abject poor who had survived the cleaning out of Dirt Boulevard. And that kid named Tip, whose granny had probably sold him already for a better brand of cow, a broom, a new pot for the hearth.
To be sure, the airborne Conference of the Birds—a great show, if nothing else. But what did it mean? Where did it get anyone? For all Liir knew, that juvenile spectacle would give the Emperor better leverage to draft additional soldiers, to tax for newer weapons, to dictate for more control over the crown city of Oz. A flying witch made out of birds! In another generation that would have been called pleasure faithism: as if spectacle itself could convince one of anything.
Yet the world was a spectacle, its own old argument for itself. Endlessly expounded with every new articulation of leaf and limb, laugh and lamb, loaf and loam. Surely there was something in the world lovely enough to counter the dread of being alone, a solitary figure untroubled by ambition, unfettered by talent, uncertain of a damn thing?
The great force of evil? Shell, Emperor Quake-in-your-Boots, naming himself the Spear of the Unnamed God? Or the next despot, or the one after that?
The colossal might of wickedness, he thought: how we love to locate it massively elsewhere. But so much of it comes down to what each one of us does between breakfast and bedtime.
Remembering Princess Nastoya, he thought: Sever us from our disguises. Then he flinched, almost in disgust: was that a prayer?
How he wished the Elephant Princess had been able to deliver whatever message that Sister Apothecaire had advertised she had for him. Another slim hope dashed, so many slim hopes waiting to rise in its wake.
A message about Nor, and the word on the street. Could Princess Nastoya, with her massive ears, actually have learned Nor’s whereabouts? Surely she’d have found a way to tell him?
Nor, lovely Nor, wherever she was. He didn’t know where, he might never know, except she was in his memory—like everyone else. There, and drawn on the piece of paper secreted into the inner pocket of the Witch’s cape. He saw it in his mind’s eye, clear as day, the drawing, the coffee-colored wash suggesting the gleaming highlights of preadolescent, perfect skin, the letters written in Nor’s peculiar, crabbed printing.
It was as if the burning letter had spelled something, suddenly, just before it was quenched in black water. The thought came like a spasm, and he harvested it before it disappeared. He unpacked the Princess Nastoya’s promised gift.
The word on the street. Elphaba Lives!
Nor’s handwriting.
WHEN HE GOT BACK to the farm a little after dusk, perhaps a week later, he knew at once that it was deserted. One knows those things about an old farmstead. Iskinaary was gone, and the donkey, and the hens had scattered. For a minute he wondered if Trism had come back for Candle, and now—angry at Liir for his quizzical ways, or herself taken with handsome Trism—she’d changed her mind, and cast her lot with him.
Or perhaps Trism’s warning had been accurate, and Commander Cherrystone and his band had found Apple Press Farm at last. Found a way to avenge the slaughter of the dragons.
It mattered, and would matter more tomorrow. For now, he was alone, as before. As usual. It was a condition he’d need to get used to, or to tolerate never getting used to—not exactly the same thing, more’s the pity.
He walked through the house. Her domingon was gone, which suggested deliberation, but the dishes were unwiped, still crusty with porridge, which suggested haste. Had she taken the broom? No, there it was, put up on the mantelpiece out of harm’s way.
He built up a small fire in the kitchen to take the edge off the chill. There was precious little with which to make a meal. As he stood trying to think, though, he heard a barracking in the boggy land some way south of the farm. Thrashing through underbrush, he found the goat hidden in thickets, tied to a tree, sorely in need of milking, and cross as blazes.
He led it back to the barn, and milked it in the shadows of the broken press, glad he had learned one skill at least.
Then, in the dark corner of the stair hall where they left the trash for tipping into the dump beyond the orchard, he nearly tripped over the Witch’s cape. He picked it up to shake it out and hang it on a hook, and the lump of dead matter rolled off the hem into the corner.
Oh, oh oh oh. So this was it. The baby had come, come early, he guessed; he didn’t know all that much about the calendar as it pertained to babies. It must have come too soon, and it had been dead on arrival, or it had died at once. And Candle had been alone, poor thing—alone but for that vainglorious Goose. How misguided that Liir should have felt the need to honor the corpse of Nastoya and leave Candle to face a possible childbirth or a stillbirth alone, with only a silly Goose to hiss for help.
He had hauled the dead carcass of an Elephant across the mountains on a cart; he had tried to hear the testimonies of people who had had their faces scraped. He had murdered dragons and people. He could bear to touch the small corpse of a human child.
So he picked it up. He held it at a distance. Tears started, though why? He hadn’t believed this was his child, and there was no new reason to believe it now. It was just another child, just another inevitable fatality, the next crude accident of the world, and not the last.
He maneuvered its cold form closer. Cold, though not icy; this death had to have just happened. Had the scraped faces sung the fetus to a death, as they’d sung Princess Nastoya?
Maybe the child had been born dead this very morning, as he was making his approach. And a rosy morning it had been, the sun strengthening, and the inane involuntary return of a green blush to the skin of the world. He had even sung a bit of his own. Not his usual way!—he’d yodeled some nonsense syllables, thinking: Maybe it will be all right. Maybe Candle. Maybe Trism. Maybe something will work.
The form was cold. Was it a normal infant size, or smaller? He didn’t know human infants. He nestled it against his neck, and thought he felt its mouth move.
Gingerly he stepped from the stair hall into the kitchen. Was it warming up? Or was it just his own heat he felt, reflecting back at him?
In the feeble light of the new fire, he moved it again, shifted it to rest along his forearm. It was a pretty corpse, and now he could see it had been a girl. Its umbilical cord was an unholy mess. Maybe Iskinaary had helped to sever it. It didn’t bear thinking about.
The corpse twitched and cried, and stretched a little. He wrapped it from stem to stern, forehead to toes, making sure its dab of a nose had access to air. Then he carried it closer to the fire, in case corpses liked to be a little warm before they were fed milk.
Elphaba had kept a basket rocking at her feet, once: a basket was just the thing. Was there an old onion basket somewhere in the keeping-room belowstairs? He’d find a basket.
He found a basket.
He fed her by dripping goat’s milk through a cheesecloth into her pursing mouth. She took the false sucket well enough. She had Candle’s Quadling face, already: those beautiful rhombo
ids that made such splendid cheekbones.
Of course Candle would flee, if she’d given birth to a child and thought it had died. Imagine the panic. Of course she would. Maybe she’d go back to the mauntery, as the Superior Maunt had suspected she would. At least for a time: to recover herself. What an ordeal she’d had. The lonely pregnancy, the lonely delivery, and then—whatever it was that had happened with Trism. And all of Liir’s absences. Of course she would flee.
She might come back. She might.
He sat with the infant most of the night. For a while he spread out the cape and even managed to sleep a little—he kept her in the basket, though, so he wouldn’t roll over onto her by accident and crush her.
In the first black wash of dawn, he woke up comforted with a different thought. Candle could see the present. Perhaps she’d known he was almost home. What if she had fled—what if a guard of Commander Cherrystone’s battalion had indeed found the farm, and she’d led them away, diverted their attention? Drawn them off scent? The mother bird pretends to have a broken wing, to lead predators away from her nestlings in the grass. Candle had as much instinct as a mother bird.
So she knew that Liir would be back in time to rescue the girl, give it a burial if needed, feed it if not. She’d hid the goat for him to find.
She wasn’t leading danger away from him, but from the baby. She could take care of herself; they didn’t want her, after all. But she was relying on Liir to save her baby, whether he believed it was his or not.
Imagining that, anyway, helped him open his eyes.
There was heavy rain in the morning. The light was greyish and mossy with the low clouds. He had to concede that the baby wasn’t a corpse, really. She was alive. Maybe she’d been born stone cold. But she was alive now.
Still smeared with her birth blood, and the watery beginning of her little feces. He took her to the doorway and held her up in the warm rain. She cleaned up green.
A LITTLE PATIENCE, and we shall see the reign of
witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people,
recovering their true spirit, restore their government
to its true principles.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1798
From Wicked
THEY CONDUCTED THEIR LOVE AFFAIR in the room above the abandoned corn echange 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.
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 fraglity 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.
MY MOTHER was a westerne woman
And learned in gramarye
—K. Estmere, 1470,
collected in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 1765
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THANKS ARE DUE to the team at ReganBooks, starting with Judith Regan and including Cassie Jones, Paul Olsewski, and Jennifer Suitor.
Thank you to David Groff, Betty Levin, Andy Newman, and William Reiss for commenting on early drafts of Son of a Witch.
Thank you to Haven Kimmel and to Eve Ensler, for encouraging words sent at precisely the right moment.
Thank you to Harriet Barlow, Ben Strader, and the company of Blue Mountain Center, New York.
Thank you, again, to Andy Newman, for defending the ramparts as usual, and to Lori Shelly, for able assistance at every wicked little thing.
A Lion Among Men
Volume Three in the Wicked Years
Gregory Maguire
Illustrations by Douglas Smith
Map
Dedication
FOR MAURICE SENDAK
King of all wild things
Epigraph
The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves as well. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen accidents, meetings and material assistance that no one could have dreamed would come their way. Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.
—Goethe, by attribution
A statement about luck is a statement about the mind, not about the world…. We find what seems to have been the lucky break or the big mistake, and so we thank our lucky stars that we took the road less traveled or curse the fates that sent that little wavelet that flipped us on our backs. With hindsight, we seem to see that everything preceding the pivotal point was leading up to it, tending toward it, and that everything following it grew from it.
To any observer outside the lucky one himself, however, luck is simply chance. Chance is neutral.
—Eric Kraft, “I Consider My Luck,” from Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Significant Families of Oz
A Brief Outline of the Throne Ministers of Oz
Deposition of an Oracle
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
The Nursery in the Forest
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
No Good Old Days to Speak Of
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
A Coward for His Country
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
A Question of Influence
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
The Past Approaches
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
The Shroud of the Cowardly Lion
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Acknowledgments
Credits
SIGNIFICANT FAMILIES OF OZ
The House of Ozma
The Thropps of Munchkinland
The Uplands of Gillikin
The Tigelaars, Arjiki chieftains of the Vinkus
A BRIEF OUTLINE OF THE THRONE MINISTERS OF OZ
Augmented with notes about selected incidents of interest to students of modern history
THE OZMA YEARS
The matrilineal House of Ozma established.
The Ozma line descends from a Gillikinese clan. It originally claimed legitimacy through a purported divine relationship with Lurlina, fabled creatrix of Oz. Depending on the claim, his
tory records between forty to fifty Ozmas and their regents.
The last Ozma, Ozma Tippetarius, is born of Ozma the Bilious.
Ozma the Bilious expires through an accident involving rat poisoning in the risotto. Her consort, Pastorius, becomes Ozma Regent during the minority of Ozma Tippetarius.
Pastorius rules over central Oz.
He renames the hamlet known as Nubbly Meadows, near the ancient burial ground of Open Tombs, as the Emerald City (EC). Declares the EC as the capital of united Oz.
The Great Drought begins.
By air balloon, Oscar Zoroaster Diggs arrives in the Emerald City.
Diggs successfully mounts a palace coup d’état. Pastorius is murdered, and the infant Ozma Tippetarius disappears. She is presumed slain, perhaps in Southstairs Prison (built over the Open Tombs), though an evergreen rumor claims she lies enchanted in a cave, to return only in Oz’s darkest hour. Diggs becomes known as the Wizard of Oz.
The Wicked Years Complete Collection Page 95
