Son of a Witch

by Gregory Maguire

  Liir picked up Candle’s hands again. He wanted more from her, he willed it so. She let him thumb her palms for a moment, then she pulled her own hands away.

  “So Trism got here unharmed?” he said.

  “The dragon master? He did,” she said, her face turned away again.

  “Where is he?”

  “He couldn’t stay.”

  Cautious. Gentle step, here. “Why not? Candle?”

  She began to lift a huge urn of water from the table in the yard; he took it from her.

  “Candle. What happened? Was he all right?” Suddenly Liir had no trust: not in his own apprehensions of Trism, nor of Trism…nor even of Candle. Trism, after all, had once wanted to kill him. “Did he treat you poorly?”

  “This water needs taking out to the Princess,” she answered. “She’s being laved round the clock. I’ve been preparing it with essence of vinegar, as that priestly prince instructed me to do.”

  “What happened? What passed between you and Trism? Candle!”

  “Liir. What could pass between us? He didn’t speak Qua’ati. And I could understand what he chose to tell me, but not answer him—I don’t speak that bossy a tongue. I have a small voice, a half-voice. As you know.”

  In succession, Liir thought a half dozen crises. She knows I loved him. That I love him. That he loves me? That he loves her?

  That she loves him?

  What was this verb love anyway, that could work in any direction?

  Did he hurt her?

  “Candle. I beg of you.”

  “Don’t beg,” intoned Iskinaary, standing on one foot. “Remember General Kynot. Don’t beg. Never beg.”

  “We’ll talk later,” she said. “Now, if you’d take that water to your guest? And then you’d better do what you came here to do.”

  “I came here to be here! With you.”

  “And this band of ragamuffins who preceded you? They are, what? The relatives?”

  Tears pricked his eyes. “Don’t be preposterous, and don’t be mean! I’ve been away, Candle. Doing what you asked. Getting something done. Anything. Learning where I wanted to be.”

  “I have my bad moments,” she admitted, wiping her own face. “It hasn’t been easy. Let’s not talk. Go straight to work, and help that old sow if you can.”

  “She’s an Elephant.”

  “Whatever the beast she is.”

  “Candle!”

  “I didn’t mean it like that. Liir, you startled me. Carrying this child is hard work. I haven’t been myself.”

  He could see that.

  “Did Trism leave parcels for me?”

  “Two packets in the press, hanging on strings from the ceiling, to keep the mice from them. The mice are very interested. Are you going to haul this water to the invalid, or shall I? I have other work to do now. Washing. The old woman runs through a dozen towels a day.”

  She picked up a basket of wet laundry and wobbled outside to an old apple tree, where she began to sling the clothes on drooping branches to dry. She’s hurting, he thought: even I, dull as I am, can see that. But from what? My long absence? My affection for Trism? Or is the child inside her making her sick, draining her blood, eating her liver from within, kicking her pelvis sore with its ready heels?

  3

  HE WASN’T UP TO DEALING with Princess Nastoya yet, and the Scrow seemed to have settled in nicely. Hell, she’d been dying for a decade, she could die some more for another ten minutes before he finally had his reunion with her.

  Stung by Candle’s reticence, he wandered into the barn to retrieve the parcels. If Trism had gotten them here safely, then he must have managed to elude Commander Cherrystone. Glinda’s glamour had worked once again, and riding at her side as her factotum, Trism had played the shadowy manservant, a known quantity. He’d been smuggled out of the mauntery safely.

  But what had happened here? Had he followed Liir’s directions and found Candle in residence, beautiful and reticent and large with child? Had Trism resented the notion of a Candle? Had he been stung by the fact that Liir had never mentioned her pregnancy? Had he assumed Liir was the father?

  Had Trism been cruel to her?

  Liir took down the parcels, struck by the thought that the workings of the human heart could be as various and imperturbable as the workings of human communities. He didn’t know enough of love in all its forms to compare, to choose, to sacrifice, to regret. Held in Trism’s soldier arms, he’d been strengthened; held in Candle’s loving regard, he’d been strengthened, too. Now the only thing holding him was Elphaba’s cape. Was her mantle of penitential solitude to be his, too?

  He wiped his eyes and opened the parcels. In the slanting light through the barn door, he wheeled out the hoops of face. Now that he knew what they were, they seemed less grotesque—no less terrible than a drawing or a dream of someone. A flat disc not unlike a mirror. They’d had lives, these people, as puzzling as his. No one would ever know what those lives were like, though.

  “Well,” said Iskinaary, who’d followed him in, “as I live and breathe. Is this what they mean by a human shield?”

  “They’re the faces of the dead.”

  “You’re in here studying them, when you have a dying woman out there in a tent, waiting for your attention?” Iskinaary was incensed.

  Liir looked at them, shaking his head. From the distance he heard the first few notes of a melody. Candle had taken down the domingon again. Whom was she calling with it? The baby within her? Come out, come out? Or Liir himself, stuck in his indecision, his confusion?

  “I’m quite an expert at music, as I have perfect pitch. Unusual in a Goose,” said Iskinaary. “She’s got a way with that instrument. She could play the eggs right out of a mama Goose.”

  “I heard her encourage the yard animals to sing,” said Liir. “I mean really sing, not just bray and cackle.”

  “Singing lightens the load,” said Iskinaary, who looked about ready to deliver an aria himself. He cleared his throat. But Liir suddenly snatched up the hoops from the ground and turned on his heel.

  “If she can be persuaded,” he said, “maybe she can help the load lighten. She’s so weighed down herself—but she’s a kind person. What a good idea!”

  “Thank you,” said Iskinaary, his feathers ruffled. Denied an audience, he hummed to himself in a desultory fashion, but shortly thereafter he followed Liir to find out what his good idea had been.

  LIIR INTRODUCED HIMSELF to the man called Lord Ottokos.

  “We’ve met before,” said Shem Ottokos, “though since then, you’ve grown up and I’ve grown old.”

  Liir explained what he hoped Candle might do. If she would.

  Shem Ottokos seemed to find nothing peculiar in the proposal. “Your wife is very kind, even in her heavy condition, and your husband seemed equally kind.”

  “She is not my wife, and I have no husband,” said Liir. “Indeed, I have no talent except the idea for this. And I do not know if it will work.”

  “I will tell the Princess Nastoya that you have arrived,” said Ottokos. “She is in grave distress, and it is hard for her to talk anymore. But I believe she is still able to hear and understand. I must believe this: it is my job.”

  Liir took the scraped and treated faces of the dragons’ victims into the orchard, faintly budding already, though the ground was still wet with old snow. He hooked the thirteen hoops upon notches of apple tree branch, as near to body height as he could guess each one had required when attached to a living body. The damp sheets and toweling fluttered like liquidy limbs beneath.

  4

  SHE PUT ASIDE her domingon when he approached and asked her for her help. “Don’t do it for me,” said Liir. “Do it for her.”

  “I’m already doing laundry for her,” said Candle. “I have no more strength.”

  “You know people and you know kindness. Your music sang me back to life. You have that skill. It’s called knowing the present. You could make the barnyard sing. I only ask that you k
now the present of Princess Nastoya, and play her constituent parts to their own places.”

  “You think like a witch. I am not a witch, Liir.”

  “I am not a witch and I am not thinking like one. I am trying to learn from history. I am trying to figure out what happened in the past, and work to use that knowledge again. You played in my past, and brought me my life. Perhaps you can play her death to her.”

  “I don’t feel well.” She rubbed her eyes with her forefingers. “Frankly, I haven’t been sleeping. I don’t know that this pregnancy is going as it should, but there’s no one to ask.”

  “You don’t feel as badly as Princess Nastoya does.”

  “Liir!”

  He caught her at the elbow. “Tell me what happened!” he said roughly. “Tell me what happened with Trism!”

  “Leave me be, Liir,” she said, crying, but when he gripped her arm harder, she said, “He told me to come away with him. He said whoever had followed the two of you so far would not give up that easily. He said the mauntery would be burned, and its members tortured until they disclosed the whereabouts of this satellite operation. Oh, don’t look at me like that. Of course the maunts know about this place! Why else would Mother Yackle have sent us here? Or the donkey know the way? Think, Liir!”

  “He told you to leave with him?”

  “He said I should go with him, for protection: that it is what you would want me to do.”

  Liir was stunned. “Why didn’t you do it, then?”

  “I trusted you,” she said, a little abrasively, “how do I know whether to trust another soldier? He could have been abducting me to kill me and my child. He could have been lying. He could have been doing it to hurt you. Though now I see he meant more to you than I reckoned.”

  What he heard mostly was her possessive pronoun: my child. Not ours.

  “And he didn’t stay,” said Liir, in a voice nearly as small as hers.

  “No, he didn’t,” she answered. “Generally, people don’t. They come, they go. He left. The Scrow came. For all I know your Commander Cherrystone will be here in time for tea, and Mother Yackle for the washing up.”

  5

  THE SCROW RETINUE carried the Princess into the orchard and set her down on a blanket. She was grey; her legs had swollen like bolsters, her scalp was nearly bald. She’d lost her eyebrows and her eyelashes, which gave her sightless eyes a horrible eggy look. Her chin bristled with enough hair to wipe farm boots clean.

  Liir could hardly put this collaboration of bones and muscles and foul odors together with his childhood memories of meeting Nastoya the day or two after Elphaba had died. He didn’t try. The Princess was beyond language, groaning and leaning into a screw of physical pain that seemed to implicate the entire orchard. He could never apologize for having abandoned his promise to her for so long. Neither could she speak whatever message she’d had for him. It was too late now.

  Lord Ottokos retained his composure. He spoke to her about every shift of limb and placement of pillow. Unsuccessfully he tried to dribble some water into her mouth, but even at this late moment he was afraid he might drown her before she could be divided from her disguise. She would have to go to her death, if this worked, thirsty.

  She was prostrate on the ground, her head rolled back, giving her chin some prominence for perhaps the first time in a decade.

  “We’re ready,” said Ottokos. He stood with a gnarled old staff, a bit of sourwood into which iron thorns had been pounded. It looked like a mace of some sort, a scepter, and Lord Ottokos was ready to assume the leadership of the tribe.

  Liir nodded at Candle, who had come equipped with an old milking stool. She sat down clumsily. Her legs went wide, but there wasn’t enough lap on which to hold her instrument. She had to balance it on an overturned washtub. Still, she looked at Princess Nastoya with a complicated expression, and presently she began to play.

  The others in the company had not been invited, but they lined the edge of the orchard, knuckles locked, a Scrow position of reverence. The Goose stood near Liir, a foot or two back, both deferential and significant. It wasn’t clear if he was Liir’s familiar, or if Liir was his interpreter.

  Candle began by dissecting chords and distending them into arpeggios. She chose the lighter modalities at first, but quickly shifted into more subtle variations. The Princess was uncomfortable on the ground, and her blankets were already getting soaked in the snow.

  “To grow a death,” murmured Liir, holding Candle’s shoulders, “you must plant a life.”

  She shook him off. He began to walk the perimeter of the orchard, trying to see from different angles. Was there something more he could do? He should be doing? Candle was hard at work, and no doubt Princess Nastoya was doing her own, but was more help needed, in this mission of nothing but mercy?

  One stretch of the orchard. Another.

  “Liir,” whispered Candle as he neared her. “I am very uncomfortable here. It is not like six months ago. I can’t keep this up for long.”

  She rotated the instrument a quarter turn and splayed her fingers, cocking them laterally, and she flat-struck the alto quarter, trying a sprigged quadrille, a dance of spring.

  The third side of the orchard. Iskinaary wandered over as if at an evening reception honoring the recent work of a well-regarded painter. “You might try concentrating on the past,” he said.

  “I don’t know her past,” said Liir. “I don’t know a thing about it, except that she knew Elphaba.”

  “I don’t mean her past,” said Iskinaary. “She knows her own past well enough, somewhere in there. I mean the others. Even in death, we are a society, after all.”

  Liir turned and looked at the Scrow, standing a distance away, but then he saw what Iskinaary meant. It wasn’t anything the living could do—it was the human dead who were best equipped to call the human disguise off Nastoya. They could beckon it forward, if Candle could play the scraped faces to sing.

  But the playing was her talent, and the singing was theirs—it was his job to listen. To witness their histories, and cherish them in memory, his only talent. He had looked into the Witch’s crystal ball, after all, and had seen her past, even if it had nothing to do with him. He had stumbled upon his own reveries without benefit of any gazing globe. Maybe his only job was to listen. That much he could do.

  6

  I WAS THE FOURTH OF FIVE CHILDREN, and I loved the way sun warmed stone. Just before lunch, on the flagstones of the terrace, I used to dance barefoot with my mother for she loved it too.

  I was happy enough in my marriage, and happier still when I was widowed, though happiness seems incidental to a good life.

  I never wanted to take the cane my father gave me, and I picked it up and broke his nose with it, and he laughed so hard he fell into the well.

  I made things with colored threads, little birds and such.

  I always wanted to go to university at Shiz, as some of my friends would do, but boys like me weren’t allowed.

  I believed in the Unnamed God and accepted the mission set me because God would take care of everything: the Emperor said so.

  I once took off all my clothes and rolled in a field of ferns, and had an experience I never told anyone about.

  I was at the ceremony in Center Munch when the cyclone dropped the house on Nessarose, and I saw it with my own eyes, but I lost my ribbon on the way home.

  I loved how milk tastes, and the way hills go blue with cloud markings, and my baby sister, her hair black as a beetle brush.

  I loved it when I was alive.

  I loved it when I was alive, too.

  Forget us, forget us all, it makes no difference now, but don’t forget that we loved it when we were alive.

  LIIR HEARD SOMETHING from each hoop. Every face sang as Candle provided accompaniment. The bud-notched trees shook with the force of their voices, though there were no tongues, and little enough left of lips, and no wind to pass through the aperture and turn their mouths into flutes.

/>   Reminded of human life, the corporeal part of Princess Nastoya melted into the snow. All that was left of her human disguise shook off—a spin of charcoal smoke, smudged in the air like incense. It stood, finding its feet, before it dispersed, and the voices fell silent.

  There was nothing left on the blanket but a massive She-Elephant. The Scrow all closed their eyes and began to weep. Her eyes opened and her head rolled back. Her eyes met Liir’s for an instant. Her neck snapped.

  No Place Like It

  AFTER AN HOUR, Lord Ottokos indicated that a surgeon should come forward with a saw. The small bowl-stomached woman went to work at the Elephant’s right tusk and removed it in just a few minutes. Then she sawed an inch of disc off the wider end. The tusk being hollow at the wide end, the disc formed a ring with an aperture several fingers wide. The surgeon fitted this on the point of the other end of the tusk, and handed the relic to Ottokos.

  He bowed and accepted it. In turn he fastened it to the staff he had prepared. When finished, the staff was a six-foot stake crowned by an arched prong of Elephant tusk, an ivory smile without a face around it.

  “I will lead under the influence of Nastoya,” he said in a quiet voice, and this calmed the Scrow from their weeping.

  What influence is that, thought Liir; a shard of bone, a makeshift totem?

  That, and memory. Maybe all the influence needed.

  THE SCROW HAD lived so long under the leadership of Princess Nastoya that they hardly knew what to do when she was gone. With effort, everyone tugging at once, they managed to get her body onto the cart that had brought Candle and Liir to Apple Press Farm. Then they began the long trudge back to their tribal homeland. They would burn her on a pyre when they arrived, and the scraped faces besides, and not a moment too soon. Nastoya had never smelled very fine while alive, and now she was a health hazard as well.

  Lord Ottokos insisted Liir should accompany them through Kumbricia’s Pass in case the Scrow delegation met up with the Yunamata, and trouble flared. “It’s the last thing you can do for Princess Nastoya, finishing the task she asked of you back when the Witch first died,” he said. “See her bones to safety, anyway.”