Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

by Gregory Maguire

  He lingered in the shadow of a pillar. In about forty minutes, a cloaked figure entered the chapel and moved, hobbling with a cane, directly to the oratory Elphie occupied. He was too far away to hear if words were exchanged, or anything else. (Perhaps the newcomer was merely another disciple of Saint Glinda, and wanted solitude to pray.) The figure didn’t linger; it left again as quickly as its stiff joints would allow.

  Fiyero dropped an offering in the poor box—a note, so to avoid the clink of coin. In a quarter of the city so infested with the urban poor, his situation of comparative wealth required the penitential gift, though his motivation was characterized more by guilt than charity. Then he slipped out through the side door, into an overgrown cloister garden. Some ancient women in wheeled chairs were chortling at the far end and didn’t notice him. He wondered if Elphaba belonged to this community of monastic nuns—maunts, they were called. He now remembered that they were females living in that most paradoxical of institutions: a community of hermits. Apparently, however, their vows of silence were revoked in the decay of old age. He decided that Elphaba couldn’t have changed that much in five years. So he let himself out the servants’ entrance, into an alleyway.

  Three minutes passed, and Elphaba emerged from the same servants’ entrance, as he had suspected she would. She was intent on avoiding him! Why, why? The last he had seen of her—he remembered it well!—was the day of Ama Clutch’s funeral, and the drunken party at the pub. She had fled to the Emerald City on some obscure mission, never to return, while he had been dragged off to the eye-opening joys and terrors of the Philosophy Club. Rumor held that the great-grandfather, the Eminent Thropp, had engaged agents to look for her in Shiz, in the Emerald City. From Elphaba herself there was never a postcard, never a message, never a clue. Nessarose had been inconsolable at first, and then grew to resent her sister’s putting her through this pain of separation. Nessa had lost herself deeper in religion, to the point where her friends had begun to avoid her.

  Tomorrow Fiyero would make his apologies for missing the opera and standing up his business colleague. Tonight he would not lose Elphaba. As she hurried through the streets, checking over her shoulder more than once, he thought: If you were trying to lose someone, if you did think someone was on your trail, this is the time of day to do it—not because of shadows, but because of light. Elphaba kept turning corners into the summer sun that, setting, was bowling blinding shafts of light along side streets, through arcades, over the walls of gardens.

  But he had had many years of practice at stalking animals under similar conditions—nowhere in Oz was the sun as much an adversary as in the Thousand Year Grasslands. He knew to squint his eyes and follow the persistence of motion, and forget about identifying by shape. He also knew how to duck sideways without tipping over or losing his balance, how to crouch suddenly, how to look for other clues that the prey had begun to move again—the startled birds, the change in sound, the disrupted wind. She could not lose him, and she could not know he was on her trail.

  So he wound halfway across the city, from the elegant city centre to the low-rent warehouse district, in whose shadowy doorways the destitute made their malodorous homes. Within spitting distance of an army barracks, Elphaba stopped before a boarded-up corn exchange, ferreted a key from some inner pocket, and opened the door.

  He called from a short distance, in an ordinary voice—“Fabala!” Even in the act of turning she caught herself and tried to rearrange her expression. But it was too late. She had shown that she recognized him, and she realized it. His foot was blocking the way before she could slam the heavy door shut.

  “Are you in trouble?” he asked.

  “Leave me alone,” she said, “please. Please.”

  “You’re in trouble, let me in.”

  “You’re trouble. Stay out.” Pure Elphaba. His last doubts fled. He cracked the door open with his shoulder.

  “You’re making me into a monster,” he said, grunting with the effort—she was strong. “I’m not going to rob you or rape you. I just—won’t—be ignored like that. Why?”

  She gave up then, and he fell stupidly against the unplastered brick wall of the stairwell, like a pratfalling twit in a vaudeville hour. “I remembered you as full of delicacy and grace,” she said. “Did you catch something by accident, or did you study awkwardness?”

  “Come on,” he said, “you force someone to behave like a clumping boor, you give them no choice. Don’t be so surprised. I can still manage grace. I can do delicacy. Half a minute.”

  “Shiz got to you,” she said, eyebrows up, but mockingly; she wasn’t really surprised. “Listen to those graduate school affectations. Where’s the native boy reeking that appealing naiveté like a well-chosen musk?”

  “You’re looking well too,” he said, a bit hurt. “Do you live in this stairwell or are we going someplace even a little bit homey?”

  She cursed and mounted the stairs; they were covered with mouse turds and scraps of packing straw. A soupy evening light seeped in the grimy gray glass windows. At a bend in the stairs a white cat was waiting, haughty and disaffected like all its kin. “Malky, Malky, miaow miaow,” said Elphaba as she passed it, and it deigned to follow her up to the pointy arched doorway at the top of the stairs.

  “Your familiar?” said Fiyero.

  “Oh, that’s rich,” said Elphaba. “Well, I’d as soon be thought a witch as anything else. Why not. Here Malky, some milk.”

  The room was large and seemed only casually arranged for dwelling. Originally a storeroom, it had barricaded double doors that could be swung outward, to receive or dispense sacks of grain hauled up by a winch from the street. The only natural light fell in through a couple of cracked panes of glass in a skylight open four or five inches. Pigeon feathers and white-and-bloody flux on the floor below. Eight or ten crates in a circle, as if for sitting. A bedroll. Clothes folded on a trunk. Some odd feathers, bits of bones, strung teeth, and a wizened dodo claw, brown and twisted like beef jerky: These were hung on nails pounded into the wall, and arranged for art or for a spell. A sallowwood table—a nice piece of furniture, that!—whose three arching legs tapered down into elegantly carved doe’s hooves. A few tin plates, red with white speckles, some food wrapped in cloth and cord. A pile of books at the bedside. A cat toy tied to a string. Most effectively, and gruesomely, the skull of an elephant hung on a rafter, and a bouquet of dried creamy pink roses emerged from the central hole in the hull of its cranium—like the exploding brains of a dying animal, he couldn’t help thinking, remembering Elphaba’s youthful concerns. Or maybe an homage to the putative magical talents of elephants?

  Below it hung a crude glass oval, scratched and chipped, used as a looking glass, perhaps, though its reflective qualities appeared unreliable.

  “So this is home,” said Fiyero as Elphaba brought out some food for the cat and ignored Fiyero some more.

  “Ask me no questions and I’ll spell you no lies,” she said.

  “May I sit down?”

  “That’s a question”—but she was grinning—“oh, well then, sit for ten minutes and tell me about yourself. How did you of all people turn into a sophisticate?”

  “Appearances are deceiving,” he said. “I can afford the garb and affect the language, but I’m still an Arjiki tribal boy underneath.”

  “What is your life like?”

  “Is there something to drink? Not alcohol—I’m just thirsty.”

  “I don’t have running water. I don’t use it. There’s some questionable milk—at least Malky will still drink it—or perhaps there’s a bottle of ale up there on the shelf—help yourself.”

  She took a little ale in a pipkin, left the rest for him.

  He told her the barest outline of things. His wife, Sarima, the childhood bride grown up and grown fecund—their three children. The old Office of Public Works waterworks headquarters at Kiamo Ko, which by ambush and occupation his father had converted to a chieftain’s seat and a tribal stronghold back i
n the time of the Ozma Regent. The dizzying schizoid life of moving every year from the Thousand Year Grasslands in the spring and summer, where the clan hunted and feasted, to a more settled autumn and winter at Kiamo Ko. “An Arjiki prince has business interests here in the Emerald City?” said Elphaba. “If it were banking you’d be in Shiz. The business of this city is military, my old friend. What are you up to?”

  “You’ve heard enough from me,” he said. “I can play coy and deceptive too, even if it’s all pretend and no dark secrets to speak of.” He guessed the quiet business of trade agreements would not impress his old friend; he was embarrassed his affairs weren’t more audacious or thrilling. “But I’ve gone on. What of you, Elphie?”

  She wouldn’t say anything for a few minutes. She unrolled some dried sausage and some graying bread, and found a couple of oranges and a lemon, and put them unceremoniously on the table. In the mothy atmosphere she looked more like a shadow than a person; her green skin seemed oddly soft, like spring leaves at their tenderest, and beaten, like copper. He had an unprecedented urge to grab her wrist and make her stop moving about—if not to make her talk, at least to keep her still, so he could look at her.

  “Eat this stuff,” she said at last. “I’m not hungry. You eat it, go on.”

  “Tell me something,” he begged. “You left us at Shiz—you disappeared like the morning fog. Why, where to, and what then?”

  “How poetic you are,” she said. “I’ve a notion that poetry is the highest form of self-deception.”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  But she was agitated. Her fingers twitched; she called for the cat, and then irritated it and sent it flying off her lap. Finally she said, “Oh well, this much then. But you’re never to come here again. I don’t want to have to find a new place, this is too good for me. Do you promise?”

  “I will agree to consider promising, that’s all. How can I promise any more than that? I don’t know a thing yet.”

  She said, hurriedly, “Well, I was fed up with Shiz. The death of Doctor Dillamond vexed me, and everybody grieved and nobody cared. Not really. It wasn’t the right place for me anyway, all those silly girls. Although I liked Glinda well enough. How is she anyway?”

  “I’m not in touch. I keep expecting to run into her at some Palace reception or other. I hear through the grapevine that she married a Paltos baronet.”

  Elphaba looked annoyed and her back stiffened. “Only a baronet? Not a baron or a viscount at least? What a disappointment. Her early promise was never to pan out, then.” Meant as a joke, her remark was stiff and unfunny. “Is she a mother?”

  “I don’t know. I’m asking the questions now, remember?”

  “Yes, but Palace receptions?” she said. “Are you in cahoots with Our Glorious Wizard?”

  “I hear he’s mostly gone reclusive. I’ve never met him,” Fiyero said. “He shows up at the opera and listens behind a portable screen. At his own formal dinners he dines apart, in an adjoining chamber behind a carved marble grill. I’ve seen a profile of a stately man walking along a promenade. If that’s even the Wizard, that’s all I’ve met of him. But you, you: you. Why did you cut us all off?”

  “I loved you too much to keep in touch.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Don’t ask me,” she said, thrashing a bit, her arms like oars rowing in the blue summer evening lightlessness.

  “Yes, I am asking. Have you lived here ever since? For five years? Do you study? Do you work?” He rubbed his bare forearms as he tried to guess about her: What would she be up to? “Are you associated with the Animal Relief League, or one of those defiant little humanitarian organizations?”

  “I never use the words humanist or humanitarian, as it seems to me that to be human is to be capable of the most heinous crimes in nature.”

  “You’re evading again.”

  “That’s my job,” she said. “There, that’s a clue for you, dear Fiyero.”

  “Amplify.”

  “I went underground,” she said softly, “and I am still underground. You’re the first one to crack my anonymity since I said good-bye to Glinda five years ago. So you now know why I can’t say any more, or why you can’t see me again. For all I know you will turn me in to the Gale Force.”

  “Hah! Those martinets! You think very little of me if you think I—”

  “How do I know, how could I know?” She twisted her fingers together, a puzzle of green sticks. “They march in those boots all over the poor and the weak. They terrify households at three in the morning and drag away dissenters—and break up printing presses with their axes—and hold mock trials for treason at midnight and executions at dawn. They rake over every quarter of this beautiful, false city. They harvest a crop of victims on a monthly basis. It’s government by terror. They could be massing on the street right now. Never having yet followed me, they may have followed you.”

  “You’re not as hard to follow as you think,” he told her. “You’re good but not that good. I could teach you a few things.”

  “I bet you could,” she said, “but you won’t, for we won’t meet again. It’s too dangerous, for you as well as for me. That’s what I mean when I say I loved you all too much to keep in touch. Do you think the Gale Force is above torturing friends and family to get at sensitive information? You’ve got a wife and children, and I’m merely an old college friend you ran into once. Clever you to have followed me. Never again, do you hear? I will move if I find you’re trailing me. I can pick up right now, and be away in thirty seconds. It’s my training.”

  “Don’t do this to me,” he said.

  “We’re old friends,” she said, “but we’re not even especially good friends. Don’t turn this into a sentimental rendezvous. It’s nice to see you but I don’t ever want to see you again. Take care of yourself and beware high connections with bastards, because when the revolution comes there won’t be mercy for toadying ass-lickers.”

  “At what—twenty three years old?—you’re playing the Lady Rebel?” he said. “It’s not becoming.”

  “It’s unbecoming,” she agreed. “A perfect word for my new life. Unbecoming. I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un. Though I point out you are the same age as I, and prancing about as a prince. But have you eaten enough? We have to say good-bye now.”

  “We don’t,” he said, firmly. He wanted to take her hands in his—he didn’t remember that he’d ever touched her before. He corrected himself—he knew he never had.

  It was almost as if she could read his mind. “You know who you are,” she said, “but you don’t know who I am. You can’t—I mean you can’t and you can’t—it’s not allowed, for one, and you’re not capable for the other. Godspeed, if they use that phrase in the Vinkus—if it’s not a curse. Godspeed, Fiyero.”

  She handed him his opera cape, and held out her hand to shake his. He grabbed her hand, and looked up into her face, which just for a second had fallen open. What he saw there made him chill and hot flash, in dizzying simultaneity, with the shape and scale of its need.

  “What do you hear of Boq?” she asked, the next time they met.

  “You just won’t answer me anything about yourself, will you?” he said. He was lounging with his feet up on her table. “Why did you finally agree to let me come back if you keep yourself locked up like a prisoner?”

  “I rather liked Boq, that’s all.” She grinned. “I let you come back so I could pump you for news of him, and of the others.”

  He told her what he knew. Boq had married Miss Milla, of all surprising turns. She had been dragged out to Nest Hardings, and she hated it. She kept trying suicide. “His letters sent at Lurlinemas every year are hysterical; they annotate her failed attempts at killing herself like a sort of annual family report.”

  “It makes me wonder, in the same circumstances, what my mother must have gone through,” said Elphaba. “The privileged childhood in the big home of the ascendancy, then the rude shock of a hard life
out there in nowhere-land. In Mama’s case, from Colwen Grounds to Rush Margins, then the Quadling lowlands. It’s actually a penance of the most severe sort.”

  “Like mother like daughter,” said Fiyero. “Haven’t you left a certain amount of privilege yourself, to live here like a snail? Hidden and private?”

  “I remember the first time I saw you,” she said, shaking drops of vinegar over the roots and vegetables she was preparing for a supper. “It was in that lecture hall of what’s-his-name—Doctor . . .”

  “Doctor Nikidik,” said Fiyero. He blushed.

  “You had those beautiful markings on your face—I’d never seen such before. Did you plan that entrance, to win your way into our hearts?”

  “On my honor, could I have done anything else, I would have. I was both mortified and terrified. Do you know, I thought those enchanted antlers were going to kill me? And it was prancing Crope and flibberty Tibbett who saved me.”

  “Crope and Tibbett! Tibbett and Crope! I’d forgotten all about them. How are they?”

  “Tibbett was never the same after that escapade at the Philosophy Club. Crope, I think, entered an arts auction house, and still flits around with the theatrical set. I see him from time to time at occasions. We don’t speak.”

  “My, you’re disapproving!” She laughed. “Of course being as prurient as the next creature I always wondered what the Philosophy Club had turned out to be like. You know, in another life I’d like to see them all again. And Glinda, dear Glinda. And even nasty Avaric. What of him?”

  “Avaric I do speak to. He’s most of the year installed in the Margreavate, but he has a house in Shiz. And when in the Emerald City we stay at the same club.”