III

It was noon when the caravan pulled up to the edge of the Scrow camp. A committee of Scrow had ridden to their domestic margin, where the sand-colored tents petered out into untrampled grass—men and women alike sat on horseback, about seven or eight of them, in blue ribbons and ivory bangles. Also, obviously senior, was a huge slab of an old woman carried in a palanquin of some sort, its frame all hung round with tambours and clinking amulets and gauzy veils. She let the rafiqi and the tribal paladins trade compliments or insults. After a while she grunted a direction and her curtains were withdrawn so she could see. She had an overhung lip, so large that it doubled back on itself like an upside-down spout on a pitcher. Her eyes were ringed with kohl. On her shoulders sat two dyspeptic-looking crows. Their feet were shackled in gold links and attached to loops in her ornamental collar, into which the old woman had dribbled traces of the fruit she had been eating as she waited. Her shoulders were speckled with crow droppings.

“The Princess Nastoya,” said the rafiqi at last.

She was the filthiest, least-educated princess anyone had ever seen, yet she had some dignity; even the most ardent democrat among the travelers genuflected. She laughed raucously. Then she bade her bearers lug her away to someplace less tedious.

The Scrow camp was arranged in concentric circles, with the Princess’s tent in the middle, prettied up with extensions of faded striped baldaquins on all sides. It was a little airy palace in silks and cotton muslin. Her advisors and concubine-husbands seemed to live in the nearest circle (and a scrawny lot the husbands were, thought Elphie, but perhaps they were chosen for timidity and scrawniness, to make her seem ever the larger). Beyond the Princess’s settlement ranged four hundred tents, which meant maybe a thousand people altogether. A thousand humans, with their poached-salmon skin, their moistly protruding eyes (but sensitive, in lowered gazes, to avoid being met), their handsome generous noses, and big buttocks, and wide rolling hips, men and women alike.

Most of the caravan travelers stayed glued to the doors of their wagons, imagining crime just beyond the nearest tent. But Elphie found it impossible to keep still, with all this newness beckoning. When Elphie walked, there were gasps, and the adults shyly retreated out of her path. But only ten minutes had passed before there were sixty children in a noisy crowd, following behind, running ahead, like a cloud of midges.

The rafiqi advised caution, advised return to the camp; but childhood in the Quadling badlands had made Elphaba not only bold, but curious. There were more ways to live than the ones given by one’s superiors.

After the evening meal, a delegation of erect old Scrow dignitaries approached the Grasstrail Train and entered into a lengthy palaver with the rafiqi. In the end, the rafiqi translated the message: a small band was invited—requested—(ordered?)—to the Scrow shrine. It would take an hour by camel. For her sin of skin color, presumably, or possibly for having had the nerve to take a solitary stroll through the Scrow tent city, Elphie was told to join Oatsie, the rafiqi, Igo for his venerable age, and one of the financial adventurers—named Pinchweed, or maybe that was just a nasty nickname.

By the light of sallowwood torches, the camels, in glittering caparisons, lurched and lumbered on a worn track. It was like going up and down a staircase at the same time. Elphie sat above the grass, a vantage point over the great flickering surface. Although the ocean was only an idea sprung out of mythology, she could almost see where it came from—there were small grasshawks launching themselves like fish leaping out of the spume, nipping at the fireflies, pocketing them, then falling back in a dry splash. Bats passed, making a guttering, sputtering sound that ended in an extinguishing swoop. The plain itself seemed to bring forth night color: now a heliotrope, now a bronzy green, now a dun color skeined through with red and silver. The moon rose, an opalescent goddess tipping light from her harsh maternal scimitar. Nothing more need have happened; it seemed enough to Elphaba to find herself capable of such a weird ecstatic response to soft color and safe space. But no, on—on.

Eventually Elphie noticed a plantation of trees, carefully tended in this devastating openness. First a stand of scrub spruce, contorted by the winds into gnarled figures of split bark and hissing needles—and the pagan odor of sap. Beyond, a rise of higher hedges, then, yet higher trees. It was the circular pattern of the Scrow encampment again. The party passed into it in silence, as through a maze, along curving corridors of whispering brush, moving from outer to inner circles lit by oil lamps hammered to carven posts.

Within, at the center, was the Princess Nastoya girded in a native costume of leather and grass made all the more effective by a length of striped purple and white toweling she must have bargained from some traveler or other. She stood, distracted and breathing heavily, leaning on stout walking sticks; around her, sarsen stones like gapped teeth resembled a stone cage through which she could hardly pass, given her bulk.

The guests joined the hosts in eating, drinking, and smoking on a pipe with a bowl carved like a crow’s head. Crows ranged all around on the tops of the sarsens, twenty, thirty, forty? Elphie’s head spun, the moon rose, the plain at night, invisible from the secret garden of the green maze, wheeled about like a child’s top. She could almost hear the spinning. The Scrow elders chanted in a drone.

When the drone died out, the Princess Nastoya raised her head.

The huge wattles of old flesh beneath her small chin wobbled. Her toweling fell to the ground. She was naked and old and strong; what had seemed like boredom was revealed as patience, memory, control. She shook the very hair off her head and it uncoiled down her back and disappeared. Her feet moved massively, as if seeking the best purchase, like columns, like pillars of stone. She dropped her arms forward and her back was a dome; still her head was up, her eyes the brighter, her nose working mightily; she was an Elephant.

An Elephant goddess, Elphie thought, her mind recoiling in terror and delight, but the Princess Nastoya said, “No.” She spoke through the rafiqi still; he had obviously seen this before, though with the alcohol he stuttered and had to search for words.

One by one she asked the intentions of the travelers.

“Money and commerce,” said Pinchweed, shocked into honesty: money and commerce and pillage and plunder at whatever cost.

“A place to die where I can rest, and my spirit go abroad,” ventured Igo.

“Safety and movement, out of harm’s way,” said Oatsie spunkily, by which it was clear she meant: out of men’s way.

The rafiqi indicated that Elphie’s own answer was still needed.

In the presence of such an Animal, Elphie could not stay aloof. So she spoke it as best as she could. “To retire from the world after making sure of the safety of the survivors of my lover. To face his widow, Sarima, in guilt and responsibility, and then to remove myself from the darkening world.”

The Elephant told the others, except the rafiqi, to leave.

The Elephant raised her trunk and sniffed the wind. Her rheumy old eyes blinked slowly and her ears moved back and forth, raking the air for nuance. She pissed hugely in a steaming flow, with dignity and nonchalance, eyes firmly latched on Elphaba.

Through the rafiqi, the Elephant then said, “Daughter of the dragon, I too am under a spell. I know how it may be broken—but I choose to live as a changeling. An Elephant is a hunted thing in these times. The Scrow approve of me. They have worshipped elephants from the time before language, the time before history began. They know I am not a goddess. They know I am a beast who chooses magical incarceration as a human over the dangerous liberty of my own powerful form.

“When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis,” she said, “those who are the most themselves are the victims.”

Elphie could only look, she could not speak.

“But the choice to save yourself can itself be deadly,” said the Princess Nastoya.

Elphie nodded, looked away, looked back.

“I will give you three crows as your familiars,” said the Princess. “You are in hiding as a witch now. That is your guise.” She spoke a word to the crows, and three mangy, evil-looking things came and waited nearby.

“A witch?” Elphaba said. What her father would think! “Hiding from what?”

“We have the same enemy,” replied the Princess. “We are both at risk. If you need help send the crows. If I am still alive, as an old matriarch monarch, or as a free Elephant, I’ll come to your aid.”

“Why?” asked Elphie.

“Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face,” she answered.

The Princess said more. It had been years—more than a decade—since Elphie had been able to talk to an Animal. Who, Elphie asked the Princess, had enchanted her? But the Princess Nastoya wouldn’t say—in part as self-protection, for the death of the enchanter could sometimes mean the revocation of binding spells, and her curse was her safety.

“But is life worth living in the wrong form?” said Elphie.

“The interior doesn’t change,” she answered, “except by self-involvement. Of which be not afraid, and also beware.”

“I have no interior,” said Elphaba.

“Something told those bees to kill the cook,” said the Princess Nastoya, with a glitter in her eye. Elphaba felt herself go pale.

“I didn’t!” she said. “No, it couldn’t have been me! And how did you know?”

“You did, on some level. You are a strong woman. And I can hear bees, you know. My ears are keen.”

“I would like to stay here with you,” said Elphaba. “Life has been very hard. If you can hear me when I cannot hear myself—something the Superior Maunt could never do—you could help me do no harm in this world. That’s all I want—to do no harm.”

“By your own admission, you have a job to do,” said the Princess. She curled her trunk around Elphaba’s face, feeling its contours and truths. “Go and do it.”

“May I return to you?” asked Elphie.

But the Princess wouldn’t answer. She was tiring—she was an old old thing even for an Elephant. Her trunk went back and forth like a pendulum on a clock. Then the great nose-hand came forward and set itself with wonderful weight and precision on Elphaba’s shoulders, and curled a bit around her neck. “Listen to me, sister,” she said. “Remember this: Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny.”

Elphaba could not answer, so shocked was she at the touch. She backed away when dismissed, her mind all but out of her.

Then the return on camels across the shuddering colors of night grass: hypnotic, vague, and distressing.

Yet there was blessing in this night. Elphaba had forgotten blessing, too—like so much else.