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

by Gregory Maguire

  “Is he still a smug boor?”

  “My, you’re disapproving now.”

  “I suppose I am.” They ate their dinner. Fiyero waited for her to ask more about his family. But it was their respective families they were keeping from each other, apparently: his Vinkus wife and children, her circle of agitators and insurrectionists.

  The next time he came, he thought, he must wear a shirt open at the neck, so she could see that the pattern of blue diamonds on his face continued unbroken down his chest . . . Since she seemed to like that.

  “Surely you don’t spend the entire autumn season in the Emerald City?” she asked one evening when the cold was drawing in.

  “I’ve send word to Sarima that business is keeping me here indefinitely. She doesn’t care. How could she care? Plucked out of a filthy caravansary and married as a small child to an Arjiki prince? Her family wasn’t stupid. She’s got food, servants, and the solid stone walls of Kiamo Ko for defense against the other tribes. She’s going a little fat after her third child. She doesn’t really notice whether I’m home or not—well, she has five sisters, and they all moved in. I married a harem.”

  “No!” Elphaba sounded intrigued and a little embarrassed at the idea.

  “You’re right, no, not really. Sarima has proposed once or twice that her younger sisters could and would happily occupy my energies at nighttime. Once you pass over the Great Kells, the taboo against such an exercise isn’t as strong as it seems to be in the rest of Oz, so stop looking so shocked.”

  “I can’t help it. Did you do it?”

  “Did I ‘do it’?” He was teasing her.

  “Did you sleep with your sisters-in-law?”

  “No,” he said. “Not out of lofty moral standards, or a lack of interest, either. It’s just that Sarima is a shrewd wife, and everything in marriage is a campaign. I would have been in her thrall even more than I am.”

  “Such a bad thing?”

  “You’re not married, you don’t know: Yes, a bad thing.”

  “I am married,” she said, “just not to a man.”

  He raised his eyebrows. She put her hands to her face. He’d never seen her look like that—her words had shocked herself. She had to turn her head away for an instant, clear her throat, blow her nose. “Oh damn, tears, they burn like fire,” she cried, suddenly in a fury, and ran for an old blanket to dab her eyes before the salty wetness could run down her cheeks.

  She stood bent over like an old woman, one arm on the counter, the blanket falling from her face to the floor. “Elphie, Elphie,” he said, horrified, and lurched after her, and put his arms around her. The blanket hung between them, chin to ankles, but seemed about to burst into flame itself, or roses, or a fountain of champagne and incense. Odd how the richest images bloomed in the mind when the body itself was most alert . . .

  “No,” she cried, “no, no, I’m not a harem, I’m not a woman, I’m not a person, no.” But her arms wheeled of their own accord, like windmill sails, like those magicked antlers, not to kill him, but to pin him with love, to mount him against the wall.

  Malky, with a rare display of discretion, climbed to the windowsill and looked away from them.

  They conducted their love affair in the room above the abandoned corn exchange as the autumn weather came lop-leggedly in from the east: now a warm day, now a sunny one, now four days of cold winds and thin rain.

  There were long days in a row when they couldn’t meet. “I have business, I have work, trust me or I shall disappear on you,” she said. “I shall write to Glinda and ask her to share the spell on how to go up in a puff of smoke. I am teasing, but I mean it, Fiyero.”

  Fiyero + Fae he wrote, in the flour that spilled when she rolled out a piecrust. Fae, she had whispered, as if even to keep it from the cat, was her code name. No one in the cell could know one another’s real names.

  She would not let him see her naked in the light, but since he also was not allowed to visit during the day this was hardly a problem. She waited for him on the appointed evenings, sitting naked under the blanket, reading essays on political theory or moral philosophy. “I don’t know that I understand them, I read them as poetry,” she once admitted. “I like the sound of the words, but I don’t ever really expect my slow, slanted impression of the world to change by what I read.”

  “Is it changing by how you live?” he asked, turning down the light and slipping out of his clothes.

  “You think all this is new to me,” she said, sighing. “You think I am such a virgin.”

  “You didn’t bleed the first time,” he observed. “So what’s to think about?”

  “I know what you think,” she said. “But how experienced are you, Lord Sir Fiyero, Arjiki Prince of Kiamo Ko, Mightiest Stalker of the Thousand Year Grasslands, Chiefest Chieftain in the Great Kells?”

  “I am putty in your hands,” he said, truthfully. “I married a child bride and to preserve my power I haven’t been unfaithful. Until now. You are not like her,” he said. “You don’t feel like her, it doesn’t feel the same. You’re more secret.”

  “I don’t exist,” she said, “so you’re still not being unfaithful, either.”

  “Let’s not be unfaithful right now then,” he said, “I can’t wait,” running his hands along her ribs, down the tight plane of her stomach. She always brought his hands to her thin, expressive breasts; she would not be touched below the waist by hands. They moved together, blue diamonds on a green field.

  He didn’t have enough to do during the days. Being the chieftain of the Arjiki people, he knew it was in their political interest to be tied ineluctably to the commercial hub of the Emerald City. Yet Arjiki business concerns only required Fiyero to show his face at social engagements, in board meetings and financial parlors. The rest of the time he wandered about, seeking frescoes of Saint Glinda and other saints. Elphaba-Fabala-Elphie-Fae would never tell him what she had been doing in the chapel of Saint Glinda attached to the mauntery in Saint Glinda’s Square.

  One day he looked up Avaric and they had lunch. Avaric suggested a girlie show afterward, and Fiyero begged off. Avaric was opinionated, cynical, corrupt, and as good-looking as ever. There wasn’t much gossip to bring back to Elphaba.

  The wind tore the leaves from the trees. The Gale Force continued to frog-march Animals and collaborators out of town. Interest rates in the Gillikin banks went soaring up—good for investors, bad for those who had adjustable rate loans. Foreclosures on a lot of valuable city-centre properties. Too early, businesses began stringing the green and gold lights of Lurlinemas, trying to woo cautious and depressed citizens into the shops.

  More than anything else he wanted to walk the streets of the Emerald City with Elphaba—there was no more beautiful place to be in love, especially at dusk as the shop lights went on, golden against the blue-purple evening sky. He had never been in love before, he now saw. It humbled him. It scared him. He couldn’t bear it when their forced absence went four or five days.

  “Kisses to Irji, Manek, and Nor,” he wrote on the bottom of his weekly letter to Sarima, who couldn’t write back because, among other things, she had never learned either alphabet. Somehow her silence seemed a tacit approval of this vow-shattering interlude. He didn’t write kisses to her, too. He hoped the chocolates would do.

  He rolled over, tugging the blanket with him; she tugged it back. The air in the room was so cold it seemed clammy. Malky endured their thrashing legs in order to stay near them, to receive warmth, and to give whatever passes for affection in cats.

  “My darling Fae,” said Fiyero. “You probably know this, and I’m not about to become a co-conspirator at whatever it is you’re working for—reducing library fines or revoking the need for cat collars or whatever. But I do keep my ears open. The Quadlings are under the thumb of the marching militia again. At least that’s what they’re saying in the lounge of the club, over newspapers and pipes. Apparently an army division has gone down into Quadling Country as far as Qhoyre, on som
e sort of a slash-and-burn mission. Your father, your brother, and Nessarose—are they still there?”

  Elphaba didn’t answer for a while. She seemed to be working out not only what she wanted to say, but perhaps even what she could remember. Her expression was of puzzlement, even testiness. She said, “We lived in Qhoyre for a time, when I was about ten. It’s a funny little low town, built on boggy ground. Half the streets are canals. The roofs are low, the windows are grilled or louvred to provide privacy and ventilation, the air is steamy and the flora excessive—huge roundels of palmy leaf, almost like shallow quilted pillows, making a sound as they beat against each other in the wind—tirrr tirrr, tirrr tirrr.”

  “I don’t know that there’s much of Qhoyre left,” said Fiyero carefully. “If the gossip I picked up is accurate.”

  “No, Papa isn’t there now, thank—thank whoever, whatever, thank nothing,” continued Elphaba. “Unless things have changed. The good people of Qhoyre weren’t very responsive to missionary efforts. They’d invite Papa and me in, serve us little damp cakelets and lukewarm red mint tea. We’d all sit on low, mildewing cushions, scaring geckos and spiders into the deeper shadows. Papa would drone on about the generous nature of the Unnamed God, doing his basic xenophiliac slant. He pointed to me as proof. I would grin with horrible sweetness and sing a hymn—the only music Papa approved of. I was miserably shy and ashamed of my color, but Papa had convinced me of the value of this work. Invariably the gentle citizens of Qhoyre would capitulate out of hospitality. They’d allow themselves to be led in prayers to the Unnamed God, but you couldn’t say their hearts were in it. I think I sensed a great deal more—more dishearteningly than Papa did—how ineffectual we really were.”

  “So where are they now? Papa, Nessarose, and the boy—your brother, what’s his name?”

  “Shell, that’s his name. Well, Papa felt his work was farther south in Quadling Country, in the real outback. We had a series of small cramped homes around Ovvels–the Hovels in Ovvels, we called them—that dreary, beastly countryside, full of a bloody beauty.”

  At his questioning expression she continued. “I mean, fifteen, twenty years ago, Fiyero, the Emerald City speculators discovered the ruby deposits there. First under the Ozma Regent, then after the coup, under the Wizard: same ugly business practices. Though under the Ozma Regent the exploitation did not require murder and brutality. Using elephants, the engineers hauled in gravel, they dammed up springs, they perfected a complicated system of strip mining under three feet of brackish groundwater. Papa thought this disarray in their little moist society was a situation ready-made for mission work. And he was right. The Quadlings struggled against the Wizard with ill-argued proclamations, they resorted to totems, but their only military weapons were slingshots. So they rallied around my father. He converted them, they went into the struggle with the zeal of the newly chastised. They were dispossessed and disappeared. All with the benefit of unionist grace.”

  “My, you’re bitter.”

  “I was a tool. My dear father used me—and Nessarose less so, because of her trouble moving about—he used me as an object lesson. Looking as I did, even singing as I can—they trusted him partly as a response to the freakiness of me. If the Unnamed God could love me, how much more responsible it’d be to the unadulterated them.”

  “So, my dear, you don’t care where he is, or what happens to him now?”

  “How can you say that?” She sat up, steaming. “I love the mad old tunnel-visioned bastard. He really believed in what he preached. He even thought that a Quadling corpse found floating faceup in a brackwater pond—provided it had a tattoo of conversion on it somewhere—was better off than a survivor. He felt he’d written a single ticket to the Other Land assembly of the Unnamed God. I think he considered it work well done.”

  “And you don’t?” Fiyero had a fairly anemic spiritual life; he felt unqualified to voice an opinion about her father’s vocation.

  “Maybe it was work well done,” she said sadly. “How do I know? But not for me. Settlement by settlement we reaped converts. Settlement by settlement the civil engineering corps came in, to detonate the village life. There was no outcry throughout Oz proper. Nobody was listening. Who cared about the Quadlings?”

  “But what brought him there in the first place?”

  “He and Mama had had a friend, a Quadling, who died in my family home—a Quadling itinerant, a glassblower.” Elphaba frowned and closed her eyes, and would say no more. Fiyero kissed her fingernails. He kissed the V between her thumb and forefinger, he sucked on it as if it were a lemon rind. She slipped backward to allow him greater purchase.

  A while later he said, “But Elphie-Fabala-Fae—are you really not worried about your father and Nessarose, and little himmy-who?”

  “My father chases hopeless causes. It gives his failure at life some legitimacy. For a while he proclaimed himself a prophet of the return of the last, lost tadpole of the Ozma line. That’s over now. And my brother Shell—he is probably fifteen by now. Look Fiyero, how can I be worried about them and be worried about the campaign of the season too? I can’t course around Oz—on that broomstick there, like a storybook witch!—I’ve chosen to go underground so that I can’t worry. Besides, I know what will happen to Nessarose at least. Sooner or later.”

  “What?”

  “When my great-grandfather finally pops off, she’ll be the next Eminent Thropp.”

  “You’re in line, I thought. Aren’t you older?”

  “I’m gone, dearie, I’m magicked away in a puff of smoke. Forget it. And you know, that’ll be good for Nessarose. She’ll be a sort of local queen out there in Nest Hardings.”

  “She apparently did a course in sorcery, did you know? In Shiz?”

  “No, I didn’t. Well, bully for her. If she ever comes down off that plinth—the one that has words written on it along the edges in gold, reading most superior in moral rectitude—if she ever allows herself to be the bitch she really is, she’ll be the Bitch of the East. Nanny and the devoted staff at Colwen Grounds will prop her up.”

  “I thought you were fond of her!”

  “Don’t you know affection when you see it?” scoffed Elphaba. “I love Nessie. She’s a pain in the neck, she’s intolerably righteous, she’s a nasty piece of work. I’m devoted to her.”

  “She’ll be the Eminent Thropp.”

  “Better she than I,” said Elphaba dryly. “For one thing, she has great taste in shoes.”

  One evening through the skylight the full moon fell heavily on Elphaba sleeping. Fiyero had awakened and gone to take a leak into the chamber pot. Malky was stalking mice on the stairs. Coming back, Fiyero looked at the form of his lover, more pearly than green tonight. He had brought her a traditional Vinkus fringed silk scarf—roses on a black background—and he had tied it around her waist, and from then on it was a costume for lovemaking. Tonight in sleeping she had nudged it up, and he admired the curve of her flank, the tender fragility of her knee, the bony ankle. There was a smell of perfume still in the air, and the resiny, animal smell, and the smell of the mystical sea, and the sweet cloaking smell of hair all riled up by sex. He sat by the side of the bed and looked at her. Her pubic hair grew, almost more purple than black, in small spangled curls, a different pattern than Sarima’s. There was an odd shadow near the groin—for a sleepy moment he wondered if some of his blue diamonds had, in the heat of sex, been steamed onto her own skin—or was it a scar?

  But she woke up just then, and in the moonlight covered herself with a blanket. She smiled at him drowsily and called him “Yero, my hero,” and that melted his heart.

  She could get so angry, though!

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if the pork roll you’re devouring, in such perfect mindless affluence, is cut from a Pig,” she snapped at him once.

  “Just because you’ve already eaten, you don’t need to ruin my appe-tite,” he protested mildly. Free-living Animals were not much in evidence in his home territory, and the few sen
tient creatures he’d known at Shiz had, except at the Philosophy Club that night, made little impression. The plight of the Animals had not much touched him.

  “This is why you shouldn’t fall in love, it blinds you. Love is wicked distraction.”

  “Now you have put me off my lunch.” He fed the rest of the pork roll to Malky. “What in the world do you know about wickedness? You’re a bit player in this network of renegades, aren’t you? You’re a novice.”

  “I know this: The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness,” she said.

  “And of women?”

  “Women are weaker, but their weakness is full of cunning and an equally rigid moral certainty. Since their arena is smaller, their capacity for real damage is less alarming. Though being more intimate they are the more treacherous.”

  “And my capacity for evil?” said Fiyero, feeling implicated and uncomfortable. “And yours?”

  “Fiyero’s capacity for evil is in believing too strenuously in a capacity for good.”

  “And yours?”

  “Mine is in thinking in epigrams.”

  “You let yourself off lightly,” he said, suddenly a little annoyed. “Is that what you’re engaged by your secret network to do? Generate witty epigrams?”

  “Oh, there’s big doings afoot,” she said, uncharacteristically. “I won’t be at the center of it, but I’ll be on the fringes helping out, believe me.”

  “What are you talking about? A coup?”

  “Never you mind, and you’ll stay blameless. Just as you want to be.” This was nastiness on her part.

  “An assassination? And so what if you do kill some General Butcher? What does that make you? A saint? A saint of the revolution? Or a martyr if you’re killed in the campaign?”

  She wouldn’t answer. She shook her narrow head in irritation, then flung the rosy shawl across the room as if it infuriated her.

  “What if some innocent bystander is killed as you aim for General Pig Butcher?”