Uprisings
I
They’re calling you a witch, do you know that?” said Nanny. “Now why ever is that?”
“Silliness and stupidity,” said Elphaba. “When I arrived I was distanced from my name, after my years at the mauntery, where I was called Sister Saint Aelphaba. Elphaba seemed like the name of someone long ago. I told them to call me Auntie. Though I never felt like anyone’s Auntie, nor would I know what it felt like. I never had any aunts or uncles.”
“Hmmm,” said Nanny, “I don’t think you’re much of a witch. Your mother would be scandalized, bless her soul. Your father too.”
They were walking in the apple orchard. A cloud of blossoms thickened the air with scent. The Witch’s bees were having a field day, humming throatily. Killyjoy sat wagging his tail in the shadow of Manek’s tombstone, placed near the wall. The crows had relay races overhead, scaring away all other birds except the eagles. Irji and Nor and Liir, at Nanny’s insistence, had been taken into the schoolroom of the village. Kiamo Ko was blissfully quiet until midday.
Nanny was seventy-eight. She walked with a cane. She hadn’t given up on her little efforts toward beauty, though now they seemed to coarsen rather than dignify her. Her powder was on too thick, her lip rouge smeared and off center, and the flimsy lace shawl was useless in the updraft from the valley. For her part, Nanny thought that Elphaba was looking poorly, as if she were going moldy from the inside out. Pale. A disintegration of sorts. Elphaba didn’t seem to care for her beautiful hair at all, keeping it knotted up out of sight underneath that ridiculous hat. And the black gown needed a good washing and airing.
They stopped at a lopsided wall, and leaned against it. The sisters were gathering flowers a few fields away, and Sarima ballooned along. In her dark mourning gown she resembled a huge dangerous cocoon broken loose from its mooring. It was good to hear her laugh again, even if falsely; light had that strange, ameliorative effect on everybody, even Elphaba.
Nanny had told Elphie about her family. The Eminent Thropp had died at last. In Elphaba’s absence and presumed death, the mantle of Eminence had fallen to Nessarose. So the younger sister was now ensconced in Colwen Grounds, issuing dogmatic statements about faith and blame. Frex was there with her too, his career of ministry almost at an end. As he gave up the effort his mind was returning to balance. Shell? He came and went. Rumors abounded that he was an agitator for Munchkinland’s secession from Oz. He had grown up handsome and fine, in Nanny’s biased opinion: straight of limb, clear of skin, direct of speech, bold of heart. He was now in his early twenties.
“And what does Nessarose think of secession?” Elphie had asked. “Her opinion about it will be important if she’s the Eminent Thropp now.”
Nanny reported that Nessarose had grown to be far cleverer than anyone anticipated. She kept her cards close to her chest and issued vague statements about the revolutionary cause, statements that could be read several ways, depending on the audience. Nanny assumed Nessarose intended to set up some sort of theocracy, incorporating into the governing laws of Munchkinland her own restrictive interpretation of unionism. “Your sainted father Frex himself doesn’t know if this would be a good or bad thing, and keeps silent on the matter. He’s not much for politics, he prefers the mystical realm.” There was, Nanny observed, even some local support for Nessarose’s plans. But since Nessarose governed her remarks well, the Wizard’s armed forces garrisoned in the area could find no excuse to arrest her. “She’s adept at this,” Nanny admitted. “Shiz taught her well. She stands on her own two feet now.”
The word adept sent chills down Elphie’s spine. Was Nessarose even now responding to some sort of spell that Madame Morrible had placed on her, those foggy years ago in the parlor at Crage Hall? Was she in fact a pawn, an Adept of the Wizard, or of Madame Morrible? Did she know why she did what she did? For that matter, was Elphaba herself merely a playing piece of a higher, evil power?
The recollection of Madame Morrible’s proposals for their careers—hers, and Nessarose’s, and Glinda’s—had come back to Elphie with a shock following the recovery of Liir from his saturation and near drowning last winter. When he finally came around enough to answer questions about how he had come to be in the fishwell, he could only say “The fish talked to me, she told me to come down.” Elphie knew in her heart that it was Manek, horrible evil Manek, who had tortured the boy unmercifully and openly all winter. She didn’t care that Manek died, even if Manek was the precious son of Fiyero. Any torturer was fair game for javelin icicles. But she had to pause, gulping, at what Liir had said next. He said, “The fish told me she was magic. She said that Fiyero was my father, and that Irji and Manek and Nor are my brothers and my sister.”
“Goldfish don’t talk, sweetheart!” Sarima said. “You’re imagining things. You were down there too long and your brain got waterlogged.”
Elphaba had yearned toward Liir, a strange, unhappy compulsion. Who was this boy who lived in her life? Oh, she knew more or less where he came from, but who he was—it seemed to make a difference, for the first time in her life. She had reached out and put her hand on his shoulder. He had twitched it off; he was not used to such a gesture. And she had felt rebuffed.
“Want to see my pet mouse, Liir?” said Nor, who had been warm to the boy during his convalescence. Liir always chose the company of his peers over questioning by the grown-ups, and it was impossible to pry further information out of him about his ordeal. He didn’t seem much changed, except that with Manek dead, Liir charged around Kiamo Ko with greater zest and liberty.
And Sarima had looked at Elphaba, and Elphaba thought the hour of her liberation was at hand at last. “How silly of the boy, he’s delusional,” Sarima had said at last. “The idea of Fiyero being his father. Fiyero didn’t have an ounce of fat on his body, and look at the boy.”
Under the terms of her welcome, Elphaba could not prod Sarima to change her mind, but she stared at her hostess, willing her to accept the facts. But she wouldn’t. “And whoever might the mother be?” said Sarima blandly, touching the hem of her skirt softly. “It’s preposterous beyond words.”
For the first time, Elphie wished that Liir had at least an undertone of green in his skin.
Sarima had swept away, to weep in her chapel for her husband, for her second son.
And the terms of Elphie’s imprisonment—as an unwilling traitor, as an exiled maunt, as a hapless mother, as a failed insurrectionist, as a Witch in disguise—remained unchanged.
Though the idea of a Goldfish or a Carp in the fishwell telling such things to Liir—was there any possibility in that? Or had Madame Morrible the ability to change her shape, to live in cold darkness, to slip in and observe what Elphie was up to? Liir had no imagination to speak of, he couldn’t have come up with that by himself. Could he?
When she went to look in the fishwell, many times at all hours of the day or night, the old carp—or Carp—stayed out of sight.
“I’m glad to hear Nessarose is on her two feet,” said Elphaba at last, coming back to the orchard from her musings. Nanny was gnawing at a piece of sugar candy.
“I mean that literally, you know,” said Nanny through her spittle. “She doesn’t need to be propped up anymore. Not figuratively or literally. She can stand on her own, stand and sit.”
“Without benefit of arms? I don’t believe it,” said the Witch.
“You’ll have to. Do you remember that pair of shoes that Frex had decorated for her?”
Of course Elphaba remembered! The beautiful shoes! Her father’s sign of devotion to his second daughter, his desire to accentuate her beauty and draw attention away from her deformity.
“Well, old Glinda of the Arduennas, remember her? Married to Sir Chuffrey, and gone a bit to seed, in my humble opinion. She came to Colwen Grounds a couple of years ago. She and Nessarose had a wild old time, remembering college days. And she put those very same shoes through something of an enchantment. Don’t ask me. Magic was never my cup of tea. The shoes allowed Nessarose to sit and stand and walk without support. She is never without them. She claims they give her moral virtue too, but then she has buckets more of that than she needs. You’d be surprised how superstitious Munchkinlanders have become these days.” Nanny sighed. “That’s why I was free to look you up, dearie. The magic shoes made me redundant. Nanny is out of a job.”
“You’re too old to work, you sit and enjoy the sun,” said Elphaba. “You can stay here as long as you like.”
“You talk as if this is your house,” said Nanny. “As if you have the right to issue such invitations.”
“Until I’m allowed to leave, this is my house,” said Elphie. “I can’t help it.”
Nanny shaded her eyes and looked out over the mountains, which in the midday light looked like polished horn. “It’s too rich, to think of you being a Witch, after a fashion anyway, and your sister trying out as resident Saint. Who would have thought, back in those muddy years in the Quadling badlands? I don’t think you’re a Witch, whatever you say. But one thing I do want to know. Is Liir your son?”
Elphaba shivered, though her heart, deep inside its pocket of cold, roiled in hot energy. “It is not a question I can answer,” she said sadly.
“You needn’t keep anything from me, dearie. Remember, Nanny was nursemaid to your mother too, and a more outgoing, sensual woman I have yet to meet. Convention didn’t bind her, not in youth nor in married life.”
“I don’t think I want to hear about this,” said Elphie.
“Then let’s talk about Liir. What in blazes can you mean, you can’t answer a simple question like that? Either you conceived him and bore him, or you didn’t. As far as I know in this world there are no other stories.”
“What I mean,” said Elphaba “and the only remark about it I will ever make is this. When I first went to the mauntery, under the kind offices of Mother Yackle, I was in no state to know what was happening to me, and I spent about a year in a deathly sleep. It’s just possible I brought a child to term and delivered it. I was another full year recovering. When I was first assigned duties, I worked with the sick and the dying, and also with abandoned children. I had no more congress with Liir than with any other of several dozen brats. When I left the mauntery to come here, it was under the condition that I would take Liir with me. I didn’t question the instruction—one doesn’t question the instructions of superiors. I have no motherly warmth toward the boy”—she gulped, in case this was no longer true—“and I don’t feel as if I’ve ever gone through the experience of bearing a child. I don’t quite believe myself capable, in fact, although I’m willing to concede that this may be simply ignorance and blindness. But that’s all there is to say about it. I’ll say no more, and no more will you.”
“Have you an obligation to be motherly to him then, despite the mystery?”
“The only other obligations I’m under are the ones I assign to myself. And that, Nanny, is that.”
“You are too tart, this situation makes you unhappy. But if you think I came here to raise yet another generation of Thropps, forget it. Nanny is in her senility now, remember, and happily so.”
But Elphaba couldn’t help noting that in the weeks that followed, Nanny began to attend to Liir’s needs more lovingly than she did the needs of Nor and Irji. Elphaba registered it with shame, for she also saw how willingly Liir responded to Nanny’s attention.
In telling tales of Shell’s derring-do—her racy old heart pitter-pattering almost visibly beneath her breastbone—Nanny revealed details of the Wizard’s campaigns. It made Elphaba furious, for she had kept hoping to lose interest in the ways of evil men.
Nanny buzzed on about the Wizard’s having mounted a new kind of youth camp, the Emperor’s Garden—a pretty, euphemistic name. All Munchkinlander children from four to ten were required to attend, in month-long summer residencies. The children were sworn to secrecy—a great game for them, no doubt. Nanny told a long-winded tale, more suited to toothless cronies in a fireside inglenook than to a dinner table with upright and repressed Arjiki spinsters, of how Shell, dear stranger brother Shell, disguised himself as a potato man doing deliveries. And got in the gates. Oh la, the many amusing adventures of a rake! The Camp General’s nubile daughter in deshabille, Shell’s inventive alibis, his dalliances, his narrow escapes! Almost being discovered at his liaisons—by children! What a lark! Nanny remained a mouthy old peasant at heart despite her airs. Elphaba thought: She hardly comprehends she is talking about indoctrination, betrayal, forced conscription of children into low-level warfare. With Elphie’s newfound awareness of Liir hovering at the edges of her life, bumbling gently through her days, she found these tales of indoctrinated children horrifying and repugnant.
She went to the Grimmerie and hauled open its massive cover—leather ornamented with golden hasps and pins, and tooled with silver leaf—and pored through the tome to find what makes people thirst for such authority and muscle. Is it the sheer nature of the beast within, the human animal inside the Human Being?
She looked for a recipe for the overthrow of a regime. She found much on power, and damage, but little on strategy.
The Grimmerie described poisoning the lips of goblets, charming the steps of a staircase to buckle, agitating a monarch’s favorite lapdog to make a fatal bite in an unwelcome direction. It suggested the nocturnal insertion, through any convenient orifice, of a fiendish invention, a thread like a piano wire, part tapeworm and part burning fuse, for a particularly painful demise. All of this seemed carnival sleight of hand to Elphaba. What was more interesting, in her reading, was a small drawing she saw next to a section marked Evil Particulars. The drawing—done, if you would believe gullible Sarima, in some world other than theirs—was a clever sketch of a broad-faced woman-fiend. Written in an angular, bronchiating script with elegant tapering serifs, all around the illustration, were the words YAKAL SNARLING. Elphaba looked again. She saw a creature part woman, part grassland jackal, its jaws open, its hand-paw lifted to rip the heart out of a spiderweb. And the creature reminded her of old Mother Yackle from the mauntery.
Conspiracy theories, as Sarima had said, seemed to bedevil her thinking. She turned the page.
Nothing in the Grimmerie on how to depose a tyrant—nothing useful. Armies of holy angels were not answerable to her. Nothing there that described why men and women could turn out so horrible. Or so wonderful—if that ever happened anymore.
2
In truth, the family was devastated over Manek’s death. There was an unspoken feeling, that somehow Liir’s life had been saved at the expense of Manek’s. The sisters suffered from that most dreadful of losses: the theft of the adult Manek from their lives. Their sad lot had been bearable all these years because Manek was going to be the man Fiyero had been, and maybe more. They realized in retrospect that they had expected Manek to restore the fallen fortunes of Kiamo Ko.
Feckless Irji had no more sense of destiny than a prairie dog. And Nor was a girl, more flighty and distractible than usual. So Sarima, behind her gestures of ecstatic acceptance of life (its joys, its sorrows, its mysteries, as she was fond of elaborating), became more aloof. Never close to her sisters, she began to take her meals alone in the Solar.
Irji and Nor, who had enjoyed a sort of allegiance from time to time against the headstrong malice of Manek, had less to bind them together now. Irji began to moon about in the old unionist chapel, teaching himself to read better by scrutinizing moldy hymnals and breviaries. Nor didn’t like the chapel—she thought the ghost of Manek lingered there, as that was the last place she had seen his body in the unwrapped shroud—so she tried to ingratiate herself with Auntie Witch—but to no avail. “You are out to make mischief with Chistery,” snapped Elphie, “and I’ve work to do. Go bother someone else.” She aimed a kick at Nor, who, whimpering and screaming as if it had hit home, left in a funk.
Nor took to wandering—now that the summer was coming in—down the high valley, the one with the stream at its bottom—and up the other side, where the sheep were nibbling on the best grass they would get all year. In previous years she would either have been with her brothers, or she would have been forbidden to go climbing alone. This year no one was paying enough attention to her to forbid it. She wouldn’t have minded being forbidden, she wouldn’t have minded the strap even. She was lonely.
One day she wandered particularly far down the valley, luxuriating in the strength and endurance of her strong legs. She was only ten, but a strapping, mature ten. She had hiked her green skirt up into her belt, and because the sun was high and strong, she had shucked off her blouse and tied it like a bandanna around her head. She hardly had a swelling here or there on her chest with which to startle any sheep, and anyway she expected to be able to spot a shepherd from miles away.
How in the world did I come to be here, of all places in Oz, she asked herself, freshly treading upon the terrain of reflection. Here I am, a girl on a mountain, nothing but wind and sheep and grass like an emerald brushfire, green and golden as Lurlinemas decorations, silky in the updraft, coarse in the downdraft. Just me and the sun and the wind. And that group of soldiers coming out from behind the rock.
She slid down onto her back in the grass, fixed up her blouse, and raised herself to her elbows, hiding.
They were not soldiers such as she had seen before. They were not Arjiki men in their ceremonial brasses and helmets, with their spears and shields. These were men in brown uniforms and caps, with muskets or something slung over their shoulders. They were wearing a kind of boot rather high and inappropriate for hill walking, and when one of them had stopped and was fiddling with a nail or a stone in his boot, his arm disappeared inside it right up to his elbow.
There was a green stripe down the front of their uniforms, and a bar across it, and Nor felt cold with an unfamiliar sense of anticipation. At the same time she wanted to be seen. What would Manek have done? she asked herself. Irji would run, Liir would puzzle and dither, but Manek? Manek would have marched right up to them and found out what was going on.
And so would she. She checked once again to make sure her buttons were done up, and then she strode down the slope toward them. By the time she had got all their attention, and the man with the boot off had slipped it back on, she was beginning to rethink the wisdom of the plan. But it was too late to run away now.
“Hail,” she said in a formal way, using the language of the east, not her own Arjiki vernacular. “Hail, and halt. I am the Princess Daughter of the Arjikis, and this is my valley you are marching your big black boots along.”
It was broad noon when she delivered them into the castle keep of Kiamo Ko. The sisters were in their summer laundry yard, beating carpets themselves because they didn’t trust the local scrubwives to treat them respectfully enough. The sound of boots on cobbles brought the sisters running through an archway, all flushed and dusty, hair wrapped in cotton scarves. Elphaba heard the noise, too, and threw her window open and stared. “Not an inch farther until I come down,” she called, “or I’ll turn you all to rodents. Nor, come away from them. All of you, come away.”
“I shall fetch the Dowager Princess,” said Two, “if it please you gentlemen.”
But by the time Sarima arrived, drowsy from a nap, Elphaba had descended, her broom over her shoulder, her eyebrows up to her scalp. “You have no invitation here,” said Elphie, looking more like a Witch than ever in her mauntish skirts, “so just how welcome would you like to be made? Who is in charge here? You? Who’s the senior one leads this mission? You?”
“If you please, Madame,” said someone, a strapping Gillikinese man of about thirty. “I am the Commander—the name is Cherrystone—and I’m under the Emperor’s orders to requisition a house large enough to shelter our party while we are in this district of the Kells. We are doing a survey of the passes to the Thousand Year Grasslands.” He produced a sweat-stained document from inside his shirt.
“I found them, Auntie Witch,” said Nor proudly.
“Go away. Go inside,” said Elphaba to the girl. “You men aren’t welcome here and the girl has no right to invite you. Turn around and march yourself out over that drawbridge at once.” Nor’s face fell.
“This is not a request, it is an order,” said Commander Cherrystone in an apologetic tone.
“This isn’t a suggestion, it’s a warning,” said Elphaba. “Go, or suffer the consequences.”
Sarima by now had taken in enough to step forward, her sisters buzzing in a thrill around her. “Auntie Guest,” she said, “you forget the code of the mountains, the same code by which you came to lodge here, and your old Nanny after you. We do not turn visitors away. Please, sirs, excuse our excitable friend. And excuse us. It has been some time since we saw soldiers in uniform.”
The sisters were primping away as best they could at such short notice.
“I won’t have it, Sarima,” Elphaba said, “you’ve never been out of here, you don’t know who these men are or what they will do! I won’t have it, do you hear?”
“It’s the high spirits, the determination, it makes her so much fun to have around,” said Sarima a trifle meanly, as in general she really did enjoy Elphaba’s company. But she did not like having her authority usurped. “Gentlemen, this way. I’ll show you where you can wash up.”
Irji wasn’t sure what to make of military men, and wouldn’t go very near. Whether he was afraid of being conscripted or enchanted he couldn’t say. He dragged a sleeping roll down into the chapel and slept there, now that it was warm enough. It was Nanny’s opinion he was going weird. “Believe me, after a life looking after your dear mother’s devout husband, Frex, and your sister after that, I know a religious lunatic when I see one,” she said to Elphaba. “That boy ought to be taking some lessons from these men in manliness, whatever else is going on here.”
On the other hand, Liir was in heaven. He followed Commander Cherrystone around unless he was turned back, and he fetched water for the men and polished their boots, in a surfeit of ill-concealed romance. The tramping they did, reconnoitering about the local valleys, mapping the places to ford the river, pinpointing spots for beacons, gave Liir more exercise and fresh air than he had ever had before. His spine, which had threatened to become curved like the arc of a mountain harp, seemed to straighten out. The soldiers were indifferent to him, but they were not manifestly unkind, and Liir took this as approval and fondness.
The sisters regained some sense when they stopped to consider what class of men would go into the army. But it wasn’t easy.
Sarima alone seemed unperturbed by the disturbance to their routine. She cast about among the villagers and called in favors to help her feed the host of soldiers, and in mixed resentment and fear her neighbors came up with milk, eggs, cheese, and vegetables. There was stouch or garmot from the fishwell almost every evening. And the summer game, of course—quail, hill pfenix, baby roc—which the men proved a dab hand at bringing in themselves. Nanny suspected that the reconnaissance team was helping Sarima over her grief, bringing her back to the family table at least.
But Elphaba was furious at them all. She and the Commander had words every day. Elphie forbade him to allow Liir to tag along—and she forbade Liir himself—to absolutely no effect. Her first true motherly feelings were of incompetence and of being blithely ignored as inconsequential. She could not understand how the human race had ever managed to develop past a single generation. She continually wanted to strangle Liir, as a means of saving him from smooth-talking father figures.
As Elphie tried harder to ferret out the nature of his mission, with every sidestepping pleasantry Commander Cherrystone grew more icy and polite. The one thing Elphaba had never been able to manage was a parlor manner, and this soldier—of all people—was a master at it. It made her feel as she had felt among the society girls at Crage Hall. “Pay those soldiers no mind, they’ll go away eventually,” said Nanny, who was at the time of her life when everything was either the final fatal crisis or a dismissible matter indeed.
“Sarima says that she has rarely seen any of the Wizard’s forces in the Vinkus. This was always arid, lifeless, of little interest to the farmers and merchants of northern and eastern Oz. The tribes have lived here for decades, centuries I suppose, with nothing but the occasional cartographer passing through and beating a quick retreat. Don’t you think this suggests some sort of campaign in these parts? What else can it suggest?”
“Look at how long it has taken these young men to recuperate from their overland trek,” said Nanny. “This is surely just a reconnaissance mission, as they say. They’ll get their information and then leave. Besides, everyone is always telling me, the whole damn place is swamped in snow or mud for two thirds of the year. You’re a worrier, you always were. The way you gripped the Quadlings we used to proselytize, as if they were your own private dolls! How you went on when they were relocated or whatever! It used to trouble your mother no end, believe me.”
“It’s been well documented that the Quadlings were being exterminated, and we were witnesses,” said Elphaba strictly. “You too, Nanny.”
“I look after my young, I can’t look after the world,” said Nanny, quaffing a cup of tea and scratching Killyjoy’s nose. “I look after Liir, which is more than you do.”
Elphaba didn’t think it worth her while to lambaste the old biddy. She flipped through the Grimmerie again, trying to find some small spell of binding with which she could close the castle gates against the men. She wished she had at least sat in on Miss Greyling’s class in magic at school.
“Of course your mother was worried about you, she always was,” said Nanny. “You were such an odd little thing. And the trials that poor woman had! You remind me of her now, only you’re more rigid than she was. She could really let her hair down. Do you know, she was so upset with having you be a girl—she was so convinced you’d be a boy—she sent me to the Emerald City to find an elixir to ensure . . .” But Nanny stopped, muddled. “Or was that elixir to prevent her next child from being born green? Yes, that was it.”
“Why did she want me to be a boy?” said Elphaba. “I would have obliged her if I’d had a say in the matter. Not to be simplistic, but it always made me feel horrible, to know how I’d disappointed her so early on. Not to mention the looks.”
“Oh, don’t credit her with nasty motives,” said Nanny. She eased her shoes off and rubbed the backs of her feet with her cane. “Melena had hated her life at Colwen Grounds, you know. That’s why she contrived to fall in love with Frex and get out of there. Her grandfather the Eminent Thropp had made it all too clear that she would inherit the title. The Munchkinlander title descends through the female line unless there are no daughters. The family seat, and all its attendant responsibilities, would go from him, to Lady Partra, to Melena, and then to the first daughter Melena had. She was hoping to have only sons, to keep them out of that place.”
“She always talked about it so lovingly!” said Elphaba, astounded.
“Oh, everything is gorgeous once it’s gone. But for a young person, trained up in all that wealth and responsibility—well, she hated it. She revolted by having sex early and often, with anyone who would oblige, and she as good as ran off with Frex, who was the first suitor she had who loved her for herself and not her position and inheritance. She thought a daughter of hers would find it equally deadly, so she wanted sons.”
“But that makes no sense. If she had sons and no daughters, then her oldest son would inherit. If I’d been a boy without sisters, I’d still have been stuck in the same mess.”
“Not necessarily,” said Nanny. “Your mother had one older sister, who was born with a permanent case of overwrought nerves, maybe also lacking in the brains department. She was housed off-grounds. But she was old enough to breed, and healthy enough, and was just as likely to bear a daughter. If she had borne a daughter first, her daughter would have inherited the title of Eminence, and the estate and fortunes with it.”
“So I have a mad aunt,” said the Witch. “Maybe madness runs in the family. Where is she now?”
“Died of the flu when you were still a small child, and left no issue. So Melena’s hopes were dashed. But that was her thinking, back in those brash, brave days of youthful blunder.”
Elphaba had few memories of her mother, and they were warm, sometimes searing. “But what’s this about her taking medicine to prevent Nessarose from being born green?”
“I got her some tablets in the Emerald City, from some gypsy woman,” said Nanny. “I explained to the beastly creature what had happened—I mean that you’d been born an unfortunate color, and those teeth—thank Lurline your second set were more human!—and the gypsy woman made some silly prophecy about two sisters being instrumental in the history of Oz. She gave me some powerful pills. I’ve always wondered if the pills were the cause of Nessarose’s affliction. I wouldn’t mess with gypsy potions anymore, believe me. Not with what we know these days.” She smiled, having long ago forgiven herself of any culpability in the whole affair.
“Nessarose’s affliction,” mused Elphaba. “Our mother took some gypsy remedy, and bore a second daughter without arms. It was either green or armless. Mama didn’t have very good luck at girls, did she.”
“Shell, however, is a sight for sore eyes,” said Nanny rosily. “Then, who is to say it was all your mother’s fault? First there was the confusion about who was really Nessarose’s father, and then the pills from that old Yackle person, and your father’s moodiness—”
“Yackle person? What do you mean?” asked Elphaba, starting. “And who the hell was Nessarose’s father if it wasn’t Papa?”
“Oh la,” said Nanny, “pour me another cup of tea and I’ll tell you all. You’re old enough now, and Melena’s long dead.” She meandered through a story about the Quadling glassblower named Turtle Heart, and Melena’s uncertainty whether Nessarose was his child or Frex’s, and the visit to Yackle, about whom she could remember nothing else but the name, the pills, and the prophecy, can’t pull teeth from a hen so stop trying. She didn’t mention (and she never had) how depressed Melena became when Elphaba was born. There was no point.
Elphie listened to all this, impatient and annoyed. On the one hand she wanted to throw it out the window: The past was immaterial. On the other, things fell into a slightly different order now. And that Yackle! Was the name just a coincidence? She was tempted to show Nanny the picture of Yakal Snarling in the Grimmerie, but resisted. No sense alarming the old woman, or giving her the nighttime frights.
So the two women poured each other tea and restrained themselves from painful observations about the past. But Elphaba began to fret about Nessarose. Perhaps Nessie didn’t want the position of Eminence, and was just as incarcerated there as her older sister was here. Perhaps Elphaba owed her the chance of liberty. Yet how much really could you owe other people? Was it endless?
3
Nor was beside herself. In a short time her whole life had changed, so utterly. The world was more magic than ever, but it seemed lodged inside her now, not outside. Her body was waiting to flame, to blossom, and no one seemed to care or to notice.
Liir had become a water boy for the expeditionary soldiers. Irji spent his time composing long devotional libretti in honor of Lurlina. In a state of uncertainty over the men in residence, the sisters remained confined to their chambers by their own inclination, yet quivering with readiness should things change. Nothing could change, as convention dictated, unless Sarima married again, and then they would be free to court. Their domestic campaigns to throw Commander Cherrystone and Sarima together, however, met with no success. They redoubled their efforts. Three even approached Auntie Witch for a love potion from that magic encyclopedia. “Hah,” said Elphaba, “that’ll be the day,” and that was that about that.
Nor, bereft of companionship, took to hanging around the men’s dormitory, trying to pitch in with chores that Liir wasn’t asked to do, that men didn’t much care about. She hung out their cloaks in the sun. She polished their buttons. She brought them flowers from the hills. She prepared a tray of summer fruits and cheeses that seemed to please them, especially when she served them herself. One young, dark, balding soldier with a captivating smile liked her to pop the orange segments right in his lips, and he sucked the juice from her fingers, to the mingled enjoyment and envy of the others. “Sit on my lap,” he said, “and let me feed you.” He offered her a strawberry, but she wouldn’t sit on his lap—and she loved refusing.
One day she decided to treat them to a full-scale chamber cleaning. They were out doing an inventory of the vineyards on the lower slopes and would be gone all day. Nor arrayed herself with rags, yoked herself with buckets, and since Auntie Witch was deep in conversation with Nanny about, it seemed, Sarima, Nor swiped the Witch’s broom, for its thicker brush and longer handle. She headed to the barracks.
She couldn’t read much, so she ignored the letters and maps that spilled from the leathern satchels left carelessly slung over the back of a chair. She tidied the trunks, and swept, and in the effort raised a lot of dust, and felt warm.
She took off her blouse, and slung one of the men’s rough capes over her sun-browned shoulders. It gave off such a heady aroma of maleness, even after its airing, that she nearly swooned. She lay down on someone’s pallet with the cape just slightly falling open, so that she could imagine falling asleep and having the men return and see the beautiful line of flat skin that ran between her fresh new breasts. She considered pretending to fall asleep. But she knew she wouldn’t do this. She sat up, dissatisfied with the possibilities, and reached out to grab the nearest thing—it happened to be the broom—so she could whack something in frustration.
The broom was out of reach, but it lunged a little toward her. It came across the floor of its own accord. She saw it. The broom was magic.
She touched it, almost fearfully, as if she guessed it had intentions. It felt no different from an ordinary broom. It merely moved, as if guided by the hand of an invisible spirit. “What tree are you whittled from, what field are you mown from?” she asked it, almost tenderly, but she expected no answer and she got none. The broom quivered, and elevated itself a little off the floor, as if waiting.
The cape had a hood on it, and she drew this up over her face. Then she hiked her summer skirt to her knees, and threw one leg over the broom, to ride it as a child rides a hobby horse.
The thing rose, tentatively, so she could keep her balance by trailing her toes on the floor, correcting, correcting—the center of gravity was high, and the span was so narrow. The top of the handle tilted farther up, and she slid down the shaft until she was caught against the brush top, as if it were a saddle of sorts. She held on tightly; her legs, especially in the upper thigh, felt as if they were swelling, the better to clench the handle between them. The large window at the end of the room hung open, for air and light, and the broom moved a couple of feet across the floor, until it had reached the sill.
Then the broom rose a few feet, and carried her out the window. Nor’s stomach pitched, and her heels beat against the underside of the brush. Mercifully she had emerged not in the castle courtyard, where she would likely be seen, but on the other side, where the land did not fall away quite so far and fast. Nor wailed softly in the strangeness and ecstasy of the adventure. The cape flared out, exposing her chest, and how could she ever have imagined she wanted to be seen without a blouse? “Oh oh,” she cried, but whether to the broom or to some guardian spirit, she did not know. She shuddered with exposure and shock, and the broom rose higher and higher, until it had come to a level with the uppermost window, which was in the Witch’s tower.
The Witch and her nanny were watching, open-mouthed, with cups of tea halfway to their lips.
“You come down from there at once,” ordered the Witch. Nor didn’t know if it was she who was being addressed, or the broom. She had no reins to tug, no words of magic to wield. However the broom, apparently chastened, turned back, descended, and made a somewhat clumsy landing on the floor of the men’s barracks. Nor flung herself off, weeping and shivering, and reclothed herself properly. She didn’t want to touch the broom again, but when she picked it up the life had gone out of it, and she carried it up to the Witch’s apartments expecting a severe reprimand.
“What were you doing with my broom?” barked the Witch.
“I was cleaning the soldiers’ quarters,” gabbled Nor. “It’s such a mess, their papers all over, their clothes, their maps . . .”
“Keep your hands off my things, you,” said the Witch. “What kinds of papers?”
“Plans, maps, letters, I don’t know,” said Nor, regaining her spunk, “go look for yourself. I didn’t pay attention.”
The Witch took the broom and appeared to consider hitting Nor with it. “Don’t be a fool, Nor. Stay away from those men,” she said coldly. “Stay away from them!” She raised the broom like a truncheon. “They’ll hurt you as soon as spit at you. Stay away from them, I say. And stay away from me!”
Elphaba remembered that the broom was given her by Mother Yackle. The young woman had seen the old maunt as crippled, senile, a bother, but now Elphaba looked back and wondered if there was more to her than met the eye. Was that broom magicked by Mother Yackle, with a vestige of some Kumbricial instinct? Or did Nor have a power developing in her, and did she bring it out in the senseless broom? Nor apparently was a fervid believer in magic; maybe the broom was waiting to be believed in. Would it fly for Elphaba, too?
One night when everyone else had retired, Elphaba brought the broom out to the courtyard. She felt a little foolish, crouching down on the broom like a child on a hobbyhorse. “Come on, fly, you fool thing,” she muttered. The broom twitched back and forth in a naughty way, enough to raise welts in her inner thighs. “I’m not a blushing schoolgirl, stop that nonsense,” said Elphaba. The broom rose a foot and a half and then dumped Elphie on her rear end.
“I’ll set you afire and that’ll be the end of you,” said Elphaba. “I’m too old for this sort of indignity.”
It took five or six nights of trying before she managed even to hover six feet off the ground. She had been useless in sorcery. Was she doomed to be useless at everything? It was a pleasure, finally, to scare the barn owls and bats senseless. And it was good to be abroad. When she had more confidence, she wobbled far down the valley to the remains of the Ozma Regent’s attempt at a dam; she rested and hoped that she wouldn’t have to walk back. She didn’t. The broom was resistant to her intention, but she could always threaten it with fire.
She felt like a night angel.
In midsummer, an Arjiki trader came along with pots and spoons and spools of thread, and he carried with him some letters left at an outpost farther north. Among them was a note from Frex—apparently Nanny had told him of her intentions to hunt Elphaba down, and he wrote to the mauntery, which had forwarded the letter on to Kiamo Ko in the Vinkus. Frex wrote that Nessarose had orchestrated a revolt, and that Munchkinland—or most of it anyway—had seceded from Oz, and set itself up as an independent state.
Nessarose as the Eminent Thropp had become the political head of state. Frex apparently thought this was Elphaba’s birthright, and that she should come to Colwen Grounds and challenge her sister for it. “It may be she isn’t the right woman for the job,” he wrote, though Elphaba found his apprehension surprising. Wasn’t Nessarose the warmly spiritual daughter that Elphie could never be?
Elphaba had no thirst for leadership, and did not want to challenge Nessarose in any way. But now that the broom seemed able to carry her for long distances, she wondered if she could fly by night to Colwen Grounds, and spend a few days seeing Papa, Nessie, and Shell once again. It had been a dozen years since she left Nessie in Shiz, drunk and sobbing following the death of Ama Clutch.
For Munchkinland to be free of the Wizard’s iron grip!—that alone would be worth the trip. It made Elphie grin a bit at herself, to feel her old contempt for the Wizard flare up. Perhaps this was what healing meant, after all.
To be safe, one afternoon Elphaba went through the soldiers’ empty barracks. She pawed through their papers. All the documents related to issues of mapping and geological survey. Nothing else. There seemed to be no hidden agenda of threat to the Arjikis or the other Vinkus tribes.
The earlier she went, the sooner she would return. And it would be better if no one know. So she told everyone she was taking a period of isolation in her tower, and she wanted neither food nor visitors for some days. When midnight struck, she set out for Colwen Grounds, now the home of her powerful sister.
4
She slept by daylight in the shadows of barns, the overhang of eaves, the lee of chimneys. She traveled by night. In the gloom, Oz spread out below—she hovered above it at about eighty feet, near as she could reckon—and the countryside made its geographical transformations with the ease of a vaudeville backdrop on rollers. The hardest passage was down the steep flanks of the Great Kells. Once free of the mountains, however, she saw Oz level out into the rich alluvial plain of the Gillikin River.
She flew along the waterway, above trading vessels and islands, until it fed at last into Restwater, Oz’s largest lake. She kept to its southern edge, and took a whole night to traverse it, as it endlessly lapped in black oily silk waves, into sedge and swamp. She had trouble finding the mouth of the Munchkin River, which drained into Restwater from the eastern direction. Once she did, though, it was easy to locate the Yellow Brick Road. The farmland beyond grew even more lush. The effects of the drought, so drastic in her childhood, had been eradicated, and dairy farms and small villages seemed to prosper, happy as a child’s toy town set, cunning and cozy in the wrinkled, nappy land of arable soil and accommodating climate.
The farther east she went, however, the more torn up the highway became. Crowbars had pried out bricks, trees had been felled and brush walls erected. It looked as if a few of the smaller bridges had been dynamited. A safeguard against retaliation by the Wizard’s army?
Seven days after leaving her chambers at Kiamo Ko, Elphaba flew into the hamlet of Colwen Grounds, and slept under a green bay tree. When she awoke, she asked a merchant for the great house, and he tremblingly pointed her the way, as if she were a demon. So a green skin still gives Munchkinlanders the creeps, she observed, and walked the last couple of miles, and arrived at the front gates of Colwen Grounds a little after breakfast.
She had heard her mother speak of Colwen Grounds, wistfully and angrily, as they had slopped in waterproof boots through six inches of Quadling Country water. Elphie’s years in the smug antiquity of Shiz, and the pomp of the Emerald City, ought to have prepared her for an imposing mansion. But she was startled, even shocked, at the grandeur of Colwen Grounds.
The gate was gilded, the forecourt swept clean of every scrap of grass and dung, and a bank of topiary saints in terra-cotta pots lined the balcony above the massive front door. Dignitaries with ribbons denoting new rank and prestige in the Free State of Munchkinland, she guessed, stood in small groups to one side. Coffee cups in hand, the officials had apparently just finished an early morning privy council meeting. Inside the gate, swordsmen stepped neatly up and barred her way. She began to protest—instantly branded a menace and a loon, she could see—and she was about to be ejected when a figure wandered into view from around the corner of a folly, and called for them to stop.
“Fabala!” he said.
“Yes, Papa, I’m here,” she answered, with a child’s politeness.
She turned. The dignitaries paused in their discussions, and then resumed, as if realizing that overhearing this reunion would be the height of rudeness. The guards withdrew their barrier when Frex approached. His hair was thin and long and caught up by a rawhide implement, as it always had been. His beard was the color of cream and reached his waist when he took his hands away from it.
“This is the sister of the Eminence of the East,” said Frex, staring at Elphaba, “and my oldest daughter. Let her pass through, dear men, now and every time she approaches.” He reached and caught her hand, and turned his head as a bird might to see her through one capable eye. The other eye, she realized, was dead.
“Come, we will greet each other in private, away from this attention,” said Frex. “My word, Fabala, you have become your mother in these long years!” He linked his arm into hers, and they went into the building through a side door and found a small salon done up in saffron silks and plum velvet cushions. The door closed behind them. Frex lowered himself cautiously to the sofa and patted the upholstery next to him. She sat down, wary, tired, astonished at the wealth of her own feeling for him. She was full of need. But, she reminded herself, you’re a grown woman.
“I knew you would come if I wrote,” he said. “Fabala, I always knew that.” He wrapped her in his arms, stiffly. “I may cry for a minute.” When he was through, he asked her where she had gone, and what she had done, and why she had never come back.
“I was not sure there was a back to come to,” she answered, realizing the truth of it as she spoke. “When you finished converting a town, Papa, you moved on to new fields. Your home was in the pasture of souls; mine never was. Besides, I had my own work to do.” She added, a moment later, in a low voice, “Or I thought I did.”
She mentioned her years in the Emerald City, but did not say why.
“And was Nanny right? Were you a maunt? I didn’t raise you for such submission,” he said. “I’m surprised. Such conformity and obedience—”
“I was no more a maunt than I ever was a unionist,” she chided him gently, “but I lived with the maunts. They did good work, whatever the error or inspiration of their beliefs. It was a time of recuperation from a difficult passage. And then, last year, I went to the Vinkus, and I guess I’ve made my home there, although for how long I cannot say.”
“And what do you do?” he said. “Are you married?”
“I’m a witch,” she answered. He recoiled, peered through the working eye to see if she spoke in jest.
“Tell me about Nessie before I see her, and Shell,” she said. “Your letter sounded as if you thought she needed help. I’ll do what I can in the short while I can be here.”
He told her about her sister’s rise to Eminence, and the secession in the late spring. “Yes, yes, I know of it but not why,” she said, prodding. So he described the burning of a grange where opposition meetings had been gathering, the reported rape of a couple of Munchkinlander maidens following a cotillion of the Wizard’s army garrisoned near Dragon Cupboard. He mentioned the Massacre at Far Applerue and the heavy taxation on farm crops. “The last straw,” he said, “as far as Nessie was concerned, anyway, was the callow despoiling by the Wizard’s soldiers of simple country meetinghouses.”
“Unlikely last straw,” said Elphaba. “Isn’t the back room of a colliery as holy a place to pray as a meetinghouse? I mean, according to teaching?”
“Well, teaching,” said Frex. He shrugged; such distinctions were beyond him now. “Nessie was incensed, and communicated her outrage, and before she knew it the spark had been thrown out and the tinder caught. Within a week of her firing off a furious letter to the Emperor Wizard himself—a dangerous and seditious act—the revolutionary fever had coalesced around her. It happened right here in the forecourt of Colwen Grounds. It was magnificent, and you’d have guessed Nessie was groomed for treason. She addressed the senior men among the farming communities both near and far, and kept her religious agenda in check, sensibly, I think. So her appeal for their support was overwhelmingly answered. There was a unanimous approval for secession.”
Papa’s gone pragmatic in his old age, Elphaba observed with some surprise.
“But how did you slip through the border patrols?” he asked. “Things being what they are—hotting up, as they say.”
“I just flew right through, a little black bird at nighttime,” she answered, smiling at him, and touching his hand. It was glazed and mottled pink, like a lake lobster on the boil. “But what I don’t know, Papa, is why you called me here. What do you expect me to do?”
“I had thought you might join your sister in her seat of authority,” he said, with the simple-minded hope of one whose family has been too long apart. “I know who you are, Fabala. I doubt you have much changed over the years. I know your cunning and your conviction. I also know that Nessie is at the mercy of her religious voices, and she could slip and undo the terrible good she is helping to create right now by being a focal figure for resistance. If that happens, it will not go well for her.”
So I am to be a whipping girl, thought Elphaba, I am to be a first line of defense. Her pleasure evaporated.
“And it will not go well for them, the eager supporters,” Frex said, waving a hand to indicate most of Munchkinland. His face sagged—his smile was an effort too, she thought coolly—and his shoulders fell. “They have had more than a generation of gentle dictatorship from our Glorious Wizard scoundrel—oh, even I forget, we’re now in the Free State of Munchkinland—these farmers surely underestimate the size of the eventual retaliation. In fact, Shell has found from reliable sources that the stockpiles of grain in the Emerald City are massive, and we can be left for some time without needing to be overrun. Short of routing some divisions of soldiers across the border, and jailing some drunken hooligans, this has been a most genteel disengagement so far. We are deluded into believing we are safe. I mean Nessie is deluded too, I think. You, I have always felt, had a clearer mind about you. You can help her prepare, you can provide the balance and the support.”
“I always did that, Papa,” she said. “In childhood and at college. Now I am told she can stand up for herself.”
“You’ve heard of my precious shoes,” he said. “I bought them from a decrepit crone, and then I retooled them for Nessa with my own hands, using skills in glass and metal that I had once learned from Turtle Heart. I made them to give her a sense of beauty, but I didn’t expect them to be enchanted by someone else. I am not sorry they are. But Nessa now thinks she needs no one, to help her stand or help her govern. She listens less than ever. In some ways I think those shoes are dangerous.”
“I wish you had made them for me, Papa,” she said in a quiet voice.
“You didn’t need them. You had your voice, your intensity, even your cruelty as your armor.”
“My cruelty!” She reared back.
“Oh, you were a fiendish little thing,” said Frex, “but so what, children grow into and out of themselves. You were a terror when you first were around other children. You only calmed down when we began to travel and you got to hold the baby. It was Nessarose who tamed you, you know. You have her to thank; she was holy and blessed even from the day she was born. Even as an infant, she soothed your wildness with her obvious need. You don’t remember that, I suppose.”
Elphie wasn’t able to remember, she wasn’t able to think about all that. Even the idea of being cruel was slipping from her. Instead, she was trying to feel fondness toward her father, despite the exhaustion of being commandeered to be a second lieutenant once again, in service of dear needy Nessarose. She concentrated on her father’s concern for the citizens of Munchkinland. Ever a pastoral sensibility, his. Though rejecting his theology, she adored him for his commitment.
“I must hear more about Turtle Heart one day,” she said in a light voice, “but now, I suppose I should go greet my sister. And I will think about what you say, Papa. I can’t imagine being part of a governmental troika, with you and Nessarose—or a committee, should Shell be involved too. But I’ll suspend judgment for a while. And Shell, Papa, how is he?”
“Behind enemy lines, so they say,” Frex answered as she got up to leave. “He is a foolhardy boy and will be among the first casualties, once this really gets going. He resembles you in some ways.”
“He’s gone green?” she asked, amused.
“He’s stubborn as sin stains,” he answered.
Nessarose was secluded in an upstairs parlor, conducting her morning meditation. Frex saw that Elphaba was given license to wander about the house and demesne. After all, in another configuration of events, Elphaba could have been (or could yet become) the Eminent Thropp, the Eminence of the East, the nominated head of the Free State of Munchkinland. Frex watched his green daughter amble down marble corridors, dragging her broom like a charwoman, gazing at the ormolu, the damask, the fresh flowers, the servants in livery, the portraits. He felt, as always, a twinge of pain deep in his breast, for the hidden and unknowable things that he had done wrong in raising her. But he was glad that she was here at last.
Elphaba found her way into a private chapel at the end of a hall of polished mahogany. It was baroque rather than ancient, and it was in the midst of being redecorated. Nessarose must have ordered the frescoes to be whitewashed; perhaps the succulent images would distract people from their meditative tasks. Elphie sat on a bench on the side, amidst buckets of limestone wash and paintbrushes and ladders. She did not pretend to pray, though she felt very uneasy about this whole thing. She trained her gaze, to focus her mind, on a huge section still boasting its images. It featured several rotund angels levitating with the aid of sizable wings. Their garments had been cut to accommodate the anatomical irregularity, she saw. They were rather full-bodied dames, but the wings weren’t bulging with straining arteries nor snapping at the tip. The artist had considered the optimal length and breadth of wing required to hoist ample ladies aloft. The formula looked to be about three times wing length to the length of arm, corrected perhaps to account for the portliness. If you could sweep your way to the Other Land on wings, what about on a broom? she wondered. And realized she must be very tired; usually she’d cut off senseless speculation about unionist nonsense like an afterlife, a Beyond, an Other Land.
I should remember my lessons from that life sciences course, she thought. All the devastating borders of knowledge Doctor Dillamond was about to cross. I almost understood some of it. I could stitch wings onto Chistery. He could join me in flight. What a lark.
She rose and went to find her sister.
Nessarose was less surprised to see Elphaba than Elphie would have guessed. Perhaps, Elphie considered, it was because Nessa had become used to being the center of attention. Then again, she had always been the center of attention. “Darling Elphie,” she said, looking up from a pair of identical books some attendant had laid out, next to each other, so she could read four pages without calling for someone to turn the page. “Give us a kiss.”
“Oh there, then,” Elphie said, obliging. “How are you, Nessie? You look fine.”
Nessarose stood, in her beautiful shoes, and smiled brilliantly. “The grace of the Unnamed God gives me strength, as ever,” she said.
But Elphaba could not be annoyed. “You have risen, and I don’t just mean to your feet,” she said. “History has chosen you for a role, and you’ve accepted it. I’m proud of you.”
“You needn’t be proud,” said Nessarose. “But thank you, dear. I thought you’d probably come. Did Father drag you here to take care of me?”
“No one dragged me here, but Papa did write.”
“So all those years in solitude, and political turmoil brings you out at last. Where were you?”
“Here and there.”
“You know we thought you’d died,” said Nessarose. “Drape that shawl around my shoulders and fix it with a pin, will you, so I needn’t call a maid? I mean that awful, awful time when you left me alone in Shiz. I am still furious with you about it, I just remembered.” She curled her lip, prettily; Elphaba was glad to see she possessed at least a residual sense of humor.
“We were all young then, and perhaps I was wrong,” said Elphie. “It didn’t do you any lasting harm, anyway. At least not so I can see.”
“I had to put up with Madame Morrible all by myself, for two more years. Glinda was a help for a while, then she graduated and went on. Nanny was my salvation, but she was old even then. She’s gone on to you lately, hasn’t she? Well, back then I felt horribly alone. Only my faith saw me through.”
“Well, faith will do that,” said Elphie, “if you’ve got it.”
“You speak as one still living in the shadowland of doubt.”
“In fact I think we have more important things to discuss than the state of my soul or lack thereof. You have a revolution on your hands—sorry, I guess I’ve gotten out of the habit!—and you’re the resident commander general. Congratulations.”
“Oh, tiresome events of the distracting world, yes yes,” said Nessarose. “Look, it’s just beautiful out there in the gardens. Let’s go walk for a bit and get some air. You look green about the gills—”
“All right, I deserved that—”
“—and there’s plenty of time to go into diplomatic matters. I have a meeting in a little while, but there’s time for a stroll. You should get to know this place. Let me show it to you.”
5
Elphaba could only get Nessarose’s attention for small snatches of time. However dismissive of the demands of leadership, Nessarose was clearheaded about her schedule, and spent hours preparing for meetings.
And at first the discussion was frivolous—family memories, school days. Elphie was impatient to get around to the meat of the matter here. But Nessarose wouldn’t be rushed. Sometimes she let Elphie sit in when she held audiences with citizens. Elphie wasn’t entirely pleased with what she saw.
One afternoon an old woman from some hamlet in the Corn Basket came in. She made obeisance in a most disgusting and obsequious manner, and Nessarose seemed to shine back at her with glory. The woman complained that she had a maid who, having fallen in love with a woodcutter, wanted to leave her service to get married. But the old woman had already given three sons to the new local militia for defense, and she and the maid were all the labor available to bring in the crops. If the maid ran off with her woodcutter, the crops would spoil and she would be ruined. “And all for the sake of liberty,” she concluded bitterly.
“Well, what do you want me to do about it?” said the Eminence of the East.
“I can give you two Sheep and a Cow,” said the woman.
“I have livestock—” said Nessarose, but Elphaba interrupted and said, “Did you say Sheep? A Cow? You mean Animals?”
“My very own Animals,” the woman replied proudly.
“How do you come to own Animals?” Elphaba asked, her teeth clenched. “Are Animals no more than chattel now in Munchkinland?”
“Elphie, please,” said Nessarose quietly.
“What will you take to release them?” demanded Elphie, in a passion.
“I already said. Do something about this woodcutter.”
“What do you have in mind?” interrupted Nessarose, displeased that her sister was usurping her role as arbiter of justice.
“I brought you his axe. I thought you might bewitch it and cause it to kill him.”
“Fie,” said Elphaba, but Nessarose said, “Oh well, that wouldn’t be very nice.”
“Very nice?” Elphie said. “No indeed it wouldn’t be very nice, Nessie.”
“Well, you’re the legal answer around here,” said the old woman stoutly. “What do you suggest?”
“I might bewitch his axe and let it slip,” said Nessarose thoughtfully, “just enough perhaps to cut off his arm. I know from experience that a person without an arm isn’t as desirable to the opposite sex as one fully armed.”
“Fair enough,” said the woman, “but if it doesn’t work I’ll come back and you’ll do more, for the same price. Sheep and a Cow don’t come cheap around here, you know.”
“Nessarose, you’re not a witch, no, I don’t believe it,” said Elphie. “You don’t do spells, of all things!”
“The righteous person can work miracles in the honor of the Unnamed God,” said Nessarose calmly. “Show me that axe, if you’ve brought it.”
The old woman held forward a woodcutter’s axe, and Nessarose knelt down near it, as if she were praying. It was an odd, even a frightening thing, to see that narrow armless body able to lean forward, unaided and off balance, and then, when the spell was through, able to right itself. Those are some shoes, thought Elphie soberly, bitterly. Glinda has got some power in her, for all her social dazzle, or maybe the power comes from the love of our father for his Nessie. Or some combination. And if Nessarose isn’t pulling the wool over this old biddy’s eyes, she’s become a sorceress too, by whatever name she chooses to call it.
“You are a witch,” said Elphaba again; she couldn’t help it. This perhaps was a mistake, as the old woman was just thanking Nessarose for her efforts. “I’ll bring the Animals by the barn out back,” she said. “They’re tethered in town.”
“Animals! Tethered!” exclaimed Elphie, seething.
“Thank you, Miss Eminence,” said the old woman. “The Eminence of the East. Or should I call you the Witch of the East?” She grinned toothily, having gotten her way, and went out the door carrying the enchanted axe over her shoulder the way a strapping young lumberjack would do.
They weren’t to be alone again for a while. Elphaba went prowling around the stable and sheds until she found an attendant who could point her toward the two Sheep and the Cow. They were in a pen with clean straw, each one facing a different corner, chewing in abstraction.
“You’re the new Animals, brought here by that old vengeful fiend,” said Elphaba. The Cow looked over as if unaccustomed to being addressed. The Sheep made no sign of having understood.
“What’s your beef?” said the Cow, in a dark humor.
“I’ve been living in the Vinkus,” said Elphie. “There aren’t many Animals there. At one time I was an agitator in the Animal Rights grassroots sweep—I don’t really know how things stand for Munchkinlander Animals now. What can you tell me?”
“I can tell you to mind your own business,” said the Cow.
“And the Sheep?”
“These Sheep can tell you nothing, they’ve gone dumb.”
“Are they—sheep? Does that happen?”
“They talk about humans becoming vegetables—or nuts—or even fruits,” said the Cow, “but they don’t mean it literally. Sheep don’t become sheep, they become mute Sheep. They don’t really need to be discussed here as if they’re not listening, by the way.”
“Of course. My apologies,” she said to the Sheep, one of whom blinked balefully. To the Cow she added, “I’d rather call you by your name.”
“I’ve given up using my name in public,” said the Cow. “It’s not afforded me any individual rights to have an individual name. I reserve it for my private use.”
“I understand that,” said Elphaba. “I feel the same. I’m just the Witch now.”
“Her Eminence herself?” A gummy rope of spittle dropped from the Cow’s jaw. “I’m flattered. I didn’t know you called yourself Witch, I thought that was just a nasty backfield nickname. The Witch of the East.”
“Well no. I’m her sister. I suppose I’m the Witch of the West, if you will.” She grinned. “In fact I didn’t know she was so disliked.”
The Cow had blundered. “Surely I meant no disregard to your family,” she said. “I should just keep my mouth closed and concentrate on my cud. The thing is, I’m in shock—to be sold in exchange for a witch’s spell! There’s nothing wrong with that woodcutter—oh I’ve got ears, I have, though they forget—and the thought of a warmhearted simpleton like Nick Chopper coming to harm through a witch’s spell—and I part of the barter cost—well, it’s hard to imagine how much lower one could sink in life.”
“I’ve come to free you,” Elphie said.
“By whose authority?” The Cow snorted suspiciously.
“I told you, I’m the sister of the Eminent Thropp—the Eminence of the East.” She amended herself: “The Witch of the East. It’s my prerogative here.”
“And free to go where? To do what?” said the Cow. “We’d get from here to Lower Muckslop and be roped in again. Subjected to slavery under the Wizard, and catechisms under the Eminent Thropp! We don’t exactly blend in with those creepy little Munchkinlander humans.”
“You’re gone a bit dour,” said Elphaba.
“Haven’t you ever heard of a mad Cow?” she answered. “Sweetheart, my udder is sore from their daily yanking. I am tapped for milk morning and night. I won’t even go into what it’s like to be mounted by a—well, just never mind. But worst, my children have been fattened on milk and slaughtered for veal. I could hear their cries from the abattoir, they didn’t even bother to move me out of hearing range!” Here she turned her head to the wall, and the Sheep came up on either side of her, pressing like a living pair of warm bookends against her lower sides and underbelly.
Elphaba said, “I can’t be sorrier or more ashamed. Look, I was working with Doctor Dillamond—have you heard of him?—in Shiz, years ago. I went to the Wizard himself to protest what was happening . . .”
“Oh, the Wizard doesn’t show himself to the likes of us,” said the Cow, after she had regained her composure. “I don’t feel like talking anymore. Everybody’s on your side until they want something from you. The Eminent Nessarose has probably brought us in order to impress us into some religious ceremonial procession. My silken flanks tarted up with garlands or the like. And we all know what happens next.”
“Now you must be wrong in that,” said the Witch. “I do object. Nessarose is a strict unionist. They don’t go in for—blood sacrifice—”
“Times change,” said the Cow. “And she’s got a population of ill-educated, nervous subjects to pacify. What, pray tell, works better than ritual slaughter?”
“But however could it come to this?” said the Witch. “Assuming you’re telling the truth? This is farming country. You ought to be well established here.”
“Animals in pens have lots of time to develop theories,” said the Cow. “I’ve heard more than one clever creature draw a connection between the rise of tiktokism and the erosion of traditional Animal labor. We weren’t beasts of burden, but we were good reliable laborers. If we were made redundant in the workforce, it was only a matter of time before we’d be socially redundant too. Anyway, that’s one theory. My own feeling is that there is real evil abroad in the land. The Wizard sets the standard for it, and the society follows suit like a bunch of sheep. Forgive the slanderous reference,” she said, nodding to her companions in the pen. “It was a slip.”
Elphaba threw open the gate of the pen. “Come on, you’re free,” she said. “What you make of it is your own affair. If you turn it down, it’s on your own heads.”
“It’s on our own heads if we walk out, too. Do you think a Witch who would charm an axe to dismember a human being would pause over a couple of Sheep and an annoying old Cow?”
“But this might be your only chance!” Elphaba cried.
The Cow moved out, and the Sheep followed. “We’ll be back,” she said. “This is an exercise in your education, not ours. Mark my words, my rump’ll be served up rare on your finest Dixxi House porcelain dinner plates before the year is out.” She mooed a last remark—“I hope you choke”—and, tail swishing the flies, she meandered away.
6
An ambassador from the Glikkus, darling,” Nessarose said, when Elphaba demanded a meeting. “Really, I can’t turn her away. She’s come to discuss mutual defense pacts in the event that the Glikkus secedes next. She thinks there are agents trailing her family, and she needs to leave on her return journey tonight. But we’ll dine together, just like old times? You, me, and my server?”
Elphaba had no choice but to while away another afternoon. She located Frex and persuaded him to go for a stroll out beyond the ornamental ponds and pristine lawns, where the woods came up to the back edge of Colwen Grounds. He walked so stiffly, so slowly, it was torture; she was a strider. But she kept herself in check.
“How do you find your sister?” he asked her. “After all these years? Much changed?”
“She was always confident, in her way,” Elphie said reservedly.
“I never thought so, and I don’t now,” Frex said. “But I think it was a good act, and it’s gotten better.”
“What really did you ask me to come here for, Papa?” Elphaba said. “I haven’t much time, you know. You must be frank.”
“You would make a smarter Eminence than
Nessie,” he said.
“And it’s your birthright. Yes, I know the strict rules of title
inheritance weren’t important to your mother. I just think that the
people of Munch-kinland would do better with you at the helm. Nessa
is—too devout, if such a thing exists. Too devout to be a central
figure in public life, anyway.”
“This may be the only respect in which I take after my mother,” Elphaba said, “but an inherited position is of no interest to me, and it carries no weight at all that I’m the rightful Eminence. I’ve long ago abdicated my position in the family in that respect. Nessarose has every right to abdicate hers, and then Shell can be located to stand in. Or better yet, the foolish custom can be abolished, and let the Munchkinlanders govern themselves to death.”
“Nobody ever suggested a leader isn’t just as much a scapegoat as a lowly peon,” said Frex. “Anyway, it’s possible. But I’m talking about leadership, not about rank and privilege. I’m talking about the nature of the times we live in, and the job that needs to be done. Fabala, you were always the more capable sibling. Shell is a madcap cutup, currently playing secret agent, and Nessie is a bruised little girl—”
“Oh please,” she said in disgust. “Isn’t it time to get over that?”
“She hasn’t,” he said, hurt. “Do you see her wrapped in some lover’s arms? Do you see her bearing her own children, engaging in life in a way that makes sense? She hides behind her devotion the way a terrorist hides behind his ideals—” He saw her flinch at this, and paused.
“I have known terrorists capable of love,” she said evenly, “and I have known good maunts, unmarried and childless, doing charity for stricken people.”
“Have you known Nessa to have an adult bond with anyone other than the Unnamed God?”
“You’re one to talk,” she said. “You had your wife and your children, but they came lower on the order of priorities than Quadlings waiting to be converted.”
“I did what had to be done,” he said rigidly. “I won’t be lectured by my daughter.”
“Well, I won’t be lectured by you about my everlasting duties to Nessie. I gave her my childhood, I got her going at Shiz. She’s made her life the way she wants it, and she still has choice and free will even now. And so do her subjects, who can depose her and cut off her head if her prayers get in their way.”
“She is a rather powerful woman,” Frex said sadly. Elphie glanced sideways at him, and for the first time she saw him as feckless—the kind of old man that Irji, if he survived, would grow to be. Constantly pawing at the edge of events, reacting instead of acting, mourning the past and praying for the future instead of stirring up the present.
“How did she get so powerful?” she asked, trying to be kind. “She had two good parents.”
He didn’t answer this.
They walked on and came out of the woods along the edge of a cornfield. A couple of farmhands were repairing a fence and erecting a scarecrow. “Afternoon, Brother Frexspar,” they said, doffing their caps. They looked a little askance at Elphaba. When she and her father had continued out of earshot, she said, “They were wearing a little talisman or something on their tunics, did you see it? It looked like a small straw dolly or something.”
“Oh yes, the straw man.” He sighed. “Another pagan custom that had almost gone underground, and then was revived during the Great Drought. Ignorant field-workers wear a straw man as a charm against the pests of crops: drought, crows, insects, rot. Once upon a time there was a tradition of human sacrifice about it.” He paused to catch his breath and wipe his face. “Our family friend, Turtle Heart, the Quadling—he was butchered right here in Colwen Grounds, on the day that Nessarose was born. An itinerant dwarf and a huge tiktok entertaining clock were making the circuit that year, and providing a conduit for the ugliest of human inclinations. We arrived here just in time for Turtle Heart to be nabbed. I’ve never forgiven myself for not seeing what was about to happen—but your mother was in her labor, and we’d been run out of town. I wasn’t thinking clearly enough all the way around things.”
Elphaba had heard all this before—even so. “You were in love with him,” she said, to make it easier.
“We both were, we shared him,” said Frex. “Your mother and I did. It was a lifetime ago and I don’t know why anymore; I don’t think I knew why then. I haven’t loved anyone else since your mother died, except of course my children.”
“What a brutal history of sacrifices,” she said. “I was just talking to a Cow who expects to be a blood victim. Is that possible?”
“The more civilized we become, the more horrendous our entertainments,” said Frex.
“And it’ll never change, or will it? I remember the etymology of the word Oz, at least as proposed at a lecture by our Head, Madame Morrible. She said that academics were inclined to locate the root of the term in the Gillikinese cognate oos, which carries freights of meaning about growth, development, power, generation. Even ooze, with its distant companion noun virus, is thought to belong to the same general family. The older I get, the more accurate this derivation seems to be.”
“And yet the poet of the Oziad calls it ‘Land of green abandon, land in endless leaf.’”
“Poets are just as responsible for empire building as any other professional hacks.”
“Sometimes I would give anything to get away from here, but I dread the thought of a trip across the deadly sands.”
“That’s only a legend,” said Elphie. “Papa, you taught me that the sands are no more deadly than these fields. That reminds me of the other theory, that Oz is related to the word oasis. What the nomadic peoples of the north thought of Gillikin, time beyond thinking, when Oz was first discovered and settled. Now look, Papa, you needn’t go so far. The Vinkus is nearly another country. Why don’t you come back with me?”
“I would love to, honey,” he said. “But how could I leave Nessarose? I never could.”
“Even if she’s Turtle Heart’s daughter and not yours?” she said, stingingly because stung.
“Especially if that,” he answered.
And Elphaba saw that by not knowing for sure if Nesssarose had been fathered by himself or by Turtle Heart, Frex had decided in some subrational way that she was the daughter of them both. Nessarose was the proof of their brief union—theirs, and, obviously, Melena’s as well. It didn’t matter how crippled Nessarose was; she would always be more than Elphaba, always. She would always mean more.
Elphaba and Nessarose sat in Nessa’s bedchamber. A handmaid served some soup made of cow’s stomach. Elphie, not normally squeamish, couldn’t eat it. The maid neatly spooned tiny portions into Nessie’s mouth.
“I’m not going to beat around the bush,” Nessarose said. “I would like you to join me here as a sister-at-arms, to lead my circle of advisors and to manage in my absence if I should travel.”
“I have no love of Munchkinland, from what I’ve seen so far,” said Elphaba. “The people are cruel and impressed by charades, the pomp of this place is oppressive, and I do believe you’re sitting on a powder keg.”
“All the more reason you should stay and help me,” said Nessarose. “Weren’t we raised up to expect a life of service?”
“Your shoes have made you strong,” said Elphie. “I didn’t know shoes could do that. I don’t think you need me. Don’t lose those shoes, though.” She thought: Your shoes give you an unnatural balance. You look like a serpent standing on its tail.
“Surely you remember them from before?”
“Yes, but I hear Glinda amplified them with a magic spell, or something.”
“Oh, that Glinda! What a card.” Nessie swallowed and smiled. “Well, you can have the shoes, my dear—over my dead body. I’ll rewrite my will and leave them to you. Though what they would do for you, I can hardly imagine. They didn’t grow me new arms. Perhaps enchanted shoes won’t change the color of your skin but will make you enticing enough so that it won’t matter.”
“I’m already too old to be that enticing.”
“Why you’re still in the prime of life, and so am I!” said Nessarose, laughing. “Tell me you’ve got some romancing man in a Vinkus yurt or tent or teepee or whatever it is they call home there. Come on.”
“I have been wondering something, ever since I saw you do that spell this morning,” Elphie said. “The spell over the axe.”
“Oh right. Small potatoes, that one.”
“Do you by any chance remember that time in Shiz, when Madame Morrible said she was putting us under a spell? And that we couldn’t talk to each other about it?”
“Go on. Sounds familiar. She was so creepy, wasn’t she? A master of tyranny.”
“She said she had chosen us—me, you, and Glinda—to be Adepts. To be agents of someone quite high up. To be sorceresses and, I don’t know, secret accomplices. She promised we’d be highly placed and effectual. She made us think we couldn’t ever discuss it with one another.”
“Oh yes, that. I do remember. What a witch she was.”
“Well, do you think there’s any truth to that? Do you think she had the power to bind us into silence? To make us powerful sorceresses?”
“She had the power to scare us out of our wits, but we were young and very stupid, as I remember.”
“I had the feeling at the time that she was in collusion with the Wizard, and that she ordered her tiktok thing—Grommetik, the name’s just come back to me, isn’t memory odd like that—to kill Doctor Dillamond.”
“You saw fiends with knives behind every chair, you always did,” Nessarose said. “I don’t think that Madame Morrible had any real power. She was a manipulative woman, but her power was very limited, and in our naiveté we saw her as a villain. She was merely full of self-importance.”
“I wonder. I tried to say something about it afterward. Didn’t we all faint?”
“We were innocent and horribly suggestible, Elphie.”
“And Glinda’s gone on to marry money, as Madame Morrible said. Is Sir Chuffrey still alive?”
“If you can call it that, yes. And Glinda is a sorceress, there’s no questioning that. But Madame Morrible was merely predicting things to us; she saw our talents, as an educator could be expected to do, and she advised us on how to make the most of them. What’s so surprising about that?”
“She tried to seduce us into a secret service for an unknown master. I’m not inventing this, Nessie.”
“She knew how to get to you, obviously, by appealing to your sense of conspiracy. I don’t remember such alluring nonsense.”
Elphaba fell silent. Perhaps Nessie was right. And yet here they were, a dozen years later: two Witches, in a manner of speaking. And Glinda a sorceress for the public good. It was enough to make Elphie go back to Kiamo Ko and burn that Grimmerie, and burn the broom too, for that matter.
“She always reminded Glinda of a carp,” said Nessarose. “Can you really be scared of a fish, after all these years?”
“I saw in a book once a drawing of a lake monster, or a sea monster if you believe in oceans,” said Elphie. “I may not be sure if monsters exist, but I’d rather live my life in doubt than be persuaded by a real experience of one.”
“You said much the same thing about the Unnamed God once,” said Nessarose quietly.
“Oh, now please don’t start on that.”
“A soul is too valuable to ignore, Elphie.”
“Well, isn’t it good I don’t have one then, so there’s no muss, no fuss.”
“You have a soul. Everyone does.”
“How about the Cow you bartered for today, and the Sheep?”
“I’m not talking about lower orders.”
“That sort of talk offends me, Nessie. I freed those Animals today, you know.”
Nessarose shrugged. “You have some rights in Colwen Grounds. I’m not going to walk around prohibiting your little pet missions.”
“They said some pretty horrible things about how Animals are being treated here. I thought it was the Emerald City and Gillikin only; I somehow guessed Munchkinland, being more rural, would have more common sense.”
“You know,” said Nessie, indicating that the maid should wipe her mouth with a napkin, “once at a prayer service I met a soldier. He had lost a limb in a campaign against some restless Quadlings. He said every morning he slapped the stump where his arm used to be. He got the blood ringing, and after a few minutes there was a tingling sensation, and he developed a kind of phantom limb. Not all at once, and not in physical form: What he regained was a sense of what it had felt like. It would grow to the elbow, and then his memory, his bodily memory, of limbs in three-dimensional space, would extend, eventually, all the way down to his fingers. Once his phantom limb was in place, mentally, that is, he could face the day as a crippled man. Furthermore, he had better physical balance.”
Elphaba, feeling more and more like a real Witch, looked at her sister, waiting for the punch.
“I tried it for a while. For months in fact. I had Nanny massage my little knobs there. After much hard work on poor Nanny’s part, I began to develop just the beginning of a sense of what it would be like to have arms. It never went very far, until Glinda dazzled up these shoes. Now—I don’t know why, maybe they’re too tight and my circulation is complaining—after an hour on my feet, I have phantom arms. First time in my life. I can’t quite get the feel of fingers.”
“Phantom limbs,” said Elphie. “Well, I’m pleased for you.”
“You know, if you slapped yourself around, spiritually speaking,” said Nessarose, “you might develop a phantom soul, or something that felt like one. It’s a good internal guide, a soul. I suspect you might even recognize that it’s not a phantom at all—it’s a real one.”
“That’ll do, Nessie,” said Elphaba. “I don’t care to discuss my spiritual trials with you.”
“Why don’t you stay here with me, join my staff, and we can have you baptized,” said Nessarose warmly.
“Water is profoundly painful to me, as you well know, and I won’t discuss it again. I can’t pledge allegiance to anything Unnamed. It’s a sham.”
“You’re condemning yourself to a life of sadness,” Nessarose said.
“Well, that I’m already familiar with, so at least there’s nothing to jump out and surprise me.” Elphie threw down her napkin. “I can’t stay here, Nessie. I can’t help you out. I have responsibilities of my own back in the Vinkus, which you have shown precious little interest in finding out about. Oh, all right, I know, a revolution has occurred and you’re a new prime minister or something, you surely have a right to be distracted if anyone does. Either accept the burden of leadership or turn it down, but either way make sure it’s your choice in the matter, and not an accident of history, a martyrdom by default. I worry about you, but I can’t stay and be your dogsbody.”
“I’ve just been clumsy and outspoken. Don’t expect me to remember how to be sisterly in such a short while—”
“You’ve had Shell to practice on all these years,” Elphaba said sternly.
“Just like that, you’re getting up and going?” Nessarose stood too, in that sinuous, unsettling way she had. “After twelve years of separation, we have three, four days of reunion and that’s that?”
“Keep yourself well,” Elphie said, and kissed her sister on both cheeks. “I know you’ll be a good Eminence for as long as you want to be.”
“I shall pray for your soul,” promised Nessarose.
“I shall wait for your shoes,” Elphie answered.
On her way out, Elphie thought about going to say good-bye to her father, and then decided against it. She had said to him everything that she could bring herself to say. They had ganged up on her, in the claustrophobic, loving way of families, and she wanted no more of it.
7
Taking the northern route over the Madeleines, she realized she would pass Lake Chorge. She decided to pause there, about halfway home, interested to note that she was actually glad to be heading back. She paced the edge of the lake, looking for Caprice-in-the-Pines, but she could not pick it out of the many resort villas that had sprung up since that visit in her youth.
But it wasn’t the visible terrain she was really seeing. It was the world at large. The character it seemed to have, how it seemed to refer to itself. How could Nessarose believe in the Unnamed God? Behind every aspect of the world is another aspect of the world. In a sense, wasn’t that what Doctor Dillamond had been on about? He had imagined another true foundation of the world, defensible by proofs and experiments; he had figured out how to locate it. But she was not a visionary. Behind the blue and white marbleized paper of the lake, beyond the watered silk of the sky, Elphaba couldn’t see any deeper in.
Not about the raw material of life: the muscle structure of angels’ wings, the capillary action involved in focusing a gimlet gaze. Nor about the gooey subjects of the empyrean: not about good, if the Unnamed God was good. Not about evil, either.
For who was in thrall to whom, really? And could it ever be known? Each agent working in collusion and antagonism—like the cold and the sun alike creating a deadly spear of ice . . . Was the Wizard a charlatan, a fraud, a despot of merely human power and failure? Did he control the Adepts—Nessarose and Glinda, and an unnamed third, for it surely wasn’t Elphie—or was it only put to him by Madame Morrible that he did, to assuage his obvious ego, his appetite for the semblance of power?
And Madame Morrible? And Yackle? Was there any connection? Were they the same person, were they harsh divinities, avatars of a power of darkness, were they poisonous flitches struck from the evil body of the Kumbric Witch? Or were they—singly, or together—old Kumbricia herself, or such as could be presumed to have survived from the heroic age of mythology into these crabbed, cramped, modern days? Did they govern the Wizard, jerk him about like a marionette?
Who is in thrall to whom?
And while you wait to learn, the deadly icicle, formed by all opposing forces, falls and drives its cold nail into penetrable flesh.
She left the pine-needled shores of Lake Chorge in a state of high frustration and energy. Having no confidence to decide about matters of political or theological hierarchy, she felt driven to dig up those old notes she had collected from Doctor Dillamond’s study the day after he was murdered. Something concrete under her fingertips. A magnifying lens, a surgical knife, a sterilized probe. Perhaps now she was old enough to understand what he had been getting at. He had been a unionist essentialist; she was a novice atheist. But she still might profit from his work, after all this time.
The winds were with her as far as the lower slopes of the Great Kells. Thereafter she had a harder time, both finding her way and keeping her seat. A number of times she had to dismount and walk. Fortunately it wasn’t very cold, and she came upon small clusters of nomads in the protected vales, who kept her heading in the right direction. Still, she was two weeks returning, even with the help of a broom.
Late in the afternoon, with the sun still hot and high compared to its winter habits, she toiled her way up the last slopes, Kiamo Ko raising its narrow dark profile above her. She felt like a child looking up at the top hat of a very tall gentleman. Eager to avoid ceremony and fuss, she skirted the village. Without the broom this approach would be nearly impossible; as it was, even the broom seemed to be feeling the effort. She came to a halt in the orchard, made her way to the back door, and found it open, which meant the sisters were out flower picking or some such nonsense.
The place was quiet. She grabbed a browning apple from the sideboard and trudged up the steps of her tower without running into anyone. When she passed Nanny’s room, she rattled the doorknob and said, “Nanny?”
“Oh,” came a little shriek, “you startled me!”
“May I come in?”
“Just a minute.” There was the sound of furniture being dragged away from the door. “Well, this is a fine mess, Miss Elphaba! Going off and leaving us to be murdered in our beds, or just as likely!”
“What are you talking about? Let me in.”
“And not saying a word. You had us frantic with worry—” The last piece scraped across the floor, and Nanny flung open the door. “You hideous ungrateful woman!” She fell heavily into her arms and burst into tears.
“Please, I’ve had enough drama to last me the rest of my life,” said Elphaba. “What are you going on about?”
Nanny took some while to calm down. She rummaged through her bag for some smelling salts, pulling out enough little bottles and satchels to set up her own apothecary business. There were blue glass vials, clear pillboxes, snakeskin envelopes of powders and pills, and a beautiful green glass bottle that had an old torn label on it, MIRACLE ELI-.
She administered calming agents to herself, and when she could breathe again, she said, “Well, you know—my dear—you saw I suppose, that everyone has disappeared?”
Elphaba scowled in confusion. And rising, sudden fear.
Nanny took a deep breath. “Now don’t be angry at Nanny. It’s not Nanny’s fault. Those soldiers suddenly decided that their exercises were finished. I don’t know how, maybe Nor told them you were gone? She told us; she’d been sneaking around looking for your broom, and she said you weren’t here. So maybe she mentioned it to them. You know how nice they were to her, how they adored her. The soldiers came to the front door and said that they needed to escort the entire family, Sarima and her sisters and Nor and Irji, back to their base camp, wherever it is. They didn’t require me, they said, which was very insulting indeed, and I let them know as much. Sarima asked why, and that nice Commander Cherrystone said that it was for their own protection. In case a fighting battalion comes through, he said, it won’t do to have any members of the ruling family still here, or there might be a bloody incident.”
“Coming through, a battalion? When?” Elphie hit the windowsill with her open palm.
“I’m trying to tell you. No time soon, he said; this is just advance planning. They became insistent. Those soldiers scattered the peasants in the village—I don’t think there was any killing, it all seemed quite humane, except for the chains—and only I was left behind, being too old to march down a mountain, and no relation besides. Also, they left Liir, since he was no threat and I think they’d become fond of him. But a few days later Liir disappeared, too. I’m sure he was desperately lonely for them, and he must have followed them to their camp.”
“And nobody protested?” shrieked Elphie.
“Don’t yell at me. Of course they protested. Well, Sarima fell in a heap, fainting dead away, and Irji and Nor looked after her. But the sisters, that mealy-mouthed lot, they barricaded the dining room and set fire to the chapel wing, trying to draw attention, and Three slammed a sharpening stone on the hand of Commander Cherrystone and broke every bone in his wrist, I bet. Five and Six rang the bell, but the shepherds are too far away, and it all happened too fast. Two wrote messages and tried to tie them to the feet of your crows, but they wouldn’t be liberated, they just kept roosting on the windowsills again, useless old things. Four had a great idea about boiling oil, but they couldn’t get the flame high enough. Oh, it was a merry chase here for a day or two, but of course the soldiers won. Men always win.”
Nanny continued petulantly, “And we all thought they’d ambushed you earlier, to get you out of the way. You’re the only effective one here, everyone knows that. They all think you’re a Witch. The townspeople told me that if you come back you’re to be in touch with the hamlet of Red Windmill down below the dam, you know the one. They seem to think you can rescue their royal family, such as they are. I told them it was misplaced trust, that you wouldn’t be interested, but I promised to give you the message, so there it is.”
Elphaba strode back and forth. She pulled her hair from its customary knot and shook it out, as if trying to shake away what she was hearing. “And Chistery?” she said at last.
“Cowering behind the piano in the music room, no doubt.”
“Well, this is a fine kettle of fish.”
She strode, she sat, she stroked her chin, she kicked Nanny’s chamber pot and broke it. “What have I got,” she mumbled. “There’s the broom. There’s the bees. There’s the monkey. There’s Killyjoy—did they hurt Killyjoy? There’s Killyjoy. There’s the crows. There’s Nanny. There’s the villagers, if they’re unharmed. There’s the questionable Grimmerie. It’s not a lot.”
“No, it’s not,” said Nanny, sighing. “Doom, doom, I say.”
“We can get them back,” said Elphie. “We will.”
“Count Nanny in,” said Nanny, “though I never did like those sisters, I’ll tell you.”
Elphie clenched her fists and tried to keep from striking herself. “Liir gone too,” she said. “I came here to make my apologies to Sarima, and I lost Liir in the bargain. Am I good for nothing in this life?”
Kiamo Ko was deathly still, except for old Nanny’s labored breathing as she took a catnap in her rocking chair. Killyjoy thumped his tail on the floor, happy to see his mistress. The sky was broad and hopeless beyond the windows. Elphaba was tired herself, but she couldn’t sleep. For, from time to time, she imagined she could hear the sound of water lapping against the sides of the fishwell, as if the legendary underground lake were rising to drown them all.