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

by Gregory Maguire

  “No.” She looked so fierce that he didn’t even tease her about it again.

  “Why should I keep myself so safe?” he asked her, but he was almost asking himself. What is there in my life worth preserving? With a good wife back there in the mountains, serviceable as an old spoon, dry in the heart from having been scared of marriage since she was six? With three children so shy of their father, the Prince of the Arjikis, that they will hardly come near him? With a careworn clan moving here, moving there, going through the same disputes, herding the same herds, praying the same prayers, as they have done for five hundred years? And me, with a shallow and undirected mind, no artfulness in word or habit, no especial kindness toward the world? What is there that makes my life worth preserving?

  “I love you,” said Elphaba.

  “So that’s that then, and that’s it,” he answered her, and himself. “And I love you. So I promise to be careful.”

  Careful of us both, he thought.

  h h h

  So he stalked her again. Love makes hunters of us all. She had swathed herself in long dark skirts, like some sort of a religious woman, and tucked up her hair inside a tall wide-brimmed hat with a crown like a cone. There was a dark scarf, purple and gold, wound around her neck, and pulled over her mouth, though she would need more than a scarf to mask that lovely prow of a nose. She wore elegant, tight-fitting gloves, a nicer type of accessory than she usually went in for, though he feared it was to allow for nimbler control of her hands. Her feet were lost in big, steel-toed boots like the kind worn by miners in the Glikkus.

  If you didn’t know she was green, it would be hard to tell—in this dark afternoon, in this raking skittle of snow.

  She didn’t look behind her; perhaps she didn’t care if she was being followed. Her circuit took her around some of the major squares of the city. She ducked in for a minute to the chapel of Saint Glinda next to the mauntery, the one where he had first seen her. Perhaps she was getting last-minute instructions, but she didn’t try to give him (or anyone else) the slip. She emerged in a minute or two.

  Or perhaps—perish the thought—she was actually praying for guidance and strength?

  She crossed the Law Courts Bridge, she wandered along the Ozma Embankment and cut diagonally through the abandoned rose gardens of the Royal Mall. The snow pestered her; she kept twining her cape the more tightly around; the silhouette of her thin, dark-stockinged legs in those huge comical boots showed up against the snowy blankness of the Oz Deer Park (now of course bereft of Deer and deer). She marched, head tucked down, past the cenotaphs and obelisks and memorial tablets to the Magnificent Dead of this escapade or that. The decades—Fiyero thought, in love with her or at least so frightened for her that he could mistake it for love—the decades looked on and didn’t notice her passing. They stared from their fixed mounts across at each other and didn’t see revolution striding between them, on her way to destiny.

  But the Wizard must not be her aim. She must have told the truth in saying that she was too untried, and too obvious, to be selected as the Wizard’s assassin. She must be involved in a diversionary tactic, or in taking out a possible successor or high-level ally. For tonight the Wizard would be opening the antiroyalist, revisionist Exhibit of Struggle and Virtue at the People’s Academy of Art and Mechanics near the Palace. Yet at the top of the Shiz Road Elphaba struck out sideways, away from the Palace district, cutting through the small, fashionable district of Goldhaven. The homes of the filthy rich were guarded by mercenaries, and she clopped past them on the pavements, past the stableboys out sweeping the snow off the pavement with their brooms. She did not look up or down or back over her shoulder. Fiyero guessed he was the more ostentatious figure, striding in his opera cape in the snow a hundred paces behind.

  At the edge of Goldhaven was perched a small bluestone jewel of a theatre, the Lady’s Mystique. In the shallow but elegant square before it, white lights and gold and green spangles hung in profusion, looped from streetlight to streetlight. Some holiday oratorio or other was scheduled—he could only read sold out on the board in front—and the doors weren’t yet opened. The crowd was gathering, some vendors sold hot chocolate in tall ceramic glasses, and a crowd of self-approving youngsters amused themselves and bothered some elderly people by singing a parody of an old unionist hymn of the season. The snow came down on all, on the lights, the theatre, the crowds; it landed in the hot chocolate, it was churned to mush and ice on the bricks.

  Bravely, foolishly—without decision or choice, it felt like—Fiyero climbed the steps of a nearby private library, to keep an eye on Elphaba, who lost herself in the crowd. Was there to be a murder in the theatre? Was there to be arson, the innocent sybarites roasted like chestnuts? Was it a single mark, an appointed victim, or was it mayhem and disaster, the more, the worse, the better?

  He didn’t know if he was there to prevent what she was about to do, or to save whomever he could from the catastrophe, or to tend anyone hurt accidentally, or even maybe just to witness it, so he could know more about her. And love her or not love her, but know which of the two it was.

  She was circulating through the crowd, as if trying to locate someone. He believed, incredibly, that she didn’t know he was there—was she so intent on finding the right victim, and he didn’t fill the bill? Could she not feel her lover in the same open-air square with her as the wind moved the curtains of snow?

  A phalanx of Gale Forcers appeared from an alley between the theatre and a school next door. They took up their places before the bank of glass doors in front. Elphaba mounted the steps of an ancient wool market, a kind of stone gazebo. Fiyero saw that she had something under her cloak. Explosives? Some magic implement?

  Did she have colleagues in the square? Were they lining themselves up one with another? The crowd kept getting thicker, as the hour for the oratorio drew near. Inside the glass doors, house management was busy lining up stanchions and stringing velvet ropes to promote a genteel entry into the hall. Nobody pushed and shoved into a public space like the very rich, Fiyero knew.

  A carriage came around the corner of a building on the far side of the square. It couldn’t come right up to the doors of the theatre, as the crowds were too dense, but it proceeded as far as it was able. Sensing the presence of someone with authority, the crowd drew a little still. Could this be the elusive Wizard, on an unannounced visit? A coachman in a teck-fur headpiece flung the door open, and reached his hand in to assist the passenger in alighting.

  Fiyero held his breath; Elphaba stiffened into petrified wood. This was the target.

  Out into the snowy street, in a tidal wave of black silk and silver spangles, swept a huge woman; she was magisterial and august, she was Madame Morrible, no other; even Fiyero recognized her, having met her only once.

  He saw that Elphaba knew that this was the one she must kill; she had known this; in an instant all was dead clear. If she was caught and captured and tried, her motivation couldn’t be more wonderful—she was merely a mad student from Madame Morrible’s own Crage Hall, she carried a grudge, she never forgot. It was too perfect.

  But could Madame Morrible be involved in intrigue with the Wizard? Or was this just a diversion, to take the mind of the authorities away from some more urgent target?

  Elphaba’s cape twitched; her hand went up and down inside it, as if priming something. Madame Morrible was growling a greeting to the crowd, which, while not necessarily knowing who she was, appreciated the spectacle if not the bulk of her arrival.

  The Head of Crage Hall walked four steps toward the theatre, on the arm of a tiktok minion, and Elphaba leaned a little forward from under the wool market. Her chin was now sharply jutting out from the scarf, her nose aiming forward; she looked as if she could snip Madame Morrible into shreds, just using the serrated blades of her natural features. Her hands continued to figure out things beneath the cape.

  But then were thrown open the front doors of the building Madame Morrible was walking past—not the t
heatre, but the adjacent school, Madame Teastane’s Female Seminary. Out the doors swarmed a cluster, a little upper-class mob of schoolgirls. What were they doing in school on a Lurlinemas Eve? Fiyero caught Elphaba looking wildly surprised. The girls were six or seven, small creamy lumps of uncurdled femininity, spooned into furry muffs and tucked into furry scarves and tipped into boots with furry edges. They were laughing and singing, raucous and rough as the elite adults they would become, and in their midst was a pantomime player, someone being the Fairy Preenella. It was a man, as the convention had it, a man done up in silly clownlike makeup, and mock bouncing bosom, and a wig and extravagant skirts, and a straw hat, and a huge basket with trinkets and treasures spilling out. “Oh la, socie-tee,” he fluted at Madame Morrible, “even Fairy Preenella can have a present for the Lucky Pedestrian.”

  For a moment Fiyero thought the man in drag was going to pull out a knife and kill Madame Morrible right in front of the children. But no, espionage was organized but not that organized—this was a real accident, a disruption. They hadn’t figured on there being a school occasion this evening, nor on a screaming flock of schoolgirls greedily tugging at an actor in skirts and falsetto.

  Fiyero turned back to look at Elphaba. Her face struggled with disbelief. The children were in the way of whatever she was supposed to do. They were a small unruly mob, chasing around the Head, teasing Preenella, leaping up at him/her, grabbing for presents. The children were the accidental context—noisy, innocent daughters of tycoons, despots, and butcher generals.

  He could see Elphaba working, he could see her hands fighting with each other, to do it anyway, to keep from doing it—whatever it was.

  Madame Morrible pushed on, like a huge float in a Remembrance Day parade, and the doors of the theatre opened for her. She passed grandly into safety. Outside, the children danced and sang in the snow, the crowd surged this way and that. Elphaba crumpled and sank back against a pillar, shivering with self-loathing so violently that Fiyero could see it from fifty yards away. He began to push toward her, devil come what may, but by the time he reached the steps she had, for the first and only time, managed to lose him.

  The audience filed into the theatre. The children shrieked their song in the street, awash with greed and joy. The carriage that had brought Madame Morrible around was able to draw up in front of the theatre and start its long wait for her to come out again. Fiyero paused, unsure, in case there was a backup plan, in case Elphaba had something else up her sleeve, in case the theatre exploded.

  Then he began to worry that, in the few minutes of losing sight of her, Elphaba had been rounded up by the Gale Force. Could they have whisked her out of sight that fast? What should he do if she became one of the disappeared?

  At a clip, he headed back across town. Mercifully he found a waiting cab, and he had the cab drive him directly to the street of warehouses adjacent to the military garrison in the city’s ninth district.

  In a state of profound agitation he arrived back at Elphaba’s little eyrie atop the corn exchange. As he climbed the stairs, his bowels turned suddenly to water, and it was only with effort he managed to make it to the chamber pot. His insides slopped noisily, wetly out, and he held his perspiring face in his hands. The cat was perched atop the wardrobe, glaring down at him. Voided, washed down, and at least loosely done up again, he tried to coax Malky with a bowl of milk. She would have none of it.

  He found a couple of dried crackers, and ate them miserably, and then pulled on the chain to open the skylight, to help air the room. A couple of plops of snow fell in and sat there not melting, it was that cold in the damn place. He went to build up a fire, pulled open the iron door of the stove.

  The fire caught, then flared, and the shadows detached themselves and moved as shadows will, but these shadows moved fast, across the room, at him before he could register what they were. Except that there were three, or four, or five, and they were wearing black clothes, and black char on their faces, and their heads were wrapped in colored scarves like the ones he had bought for Elphaba, for Sarima. On the shoulder of one he saw the glint of a gilded epaulet: a senior member of the Gale Force. There was a club and it beat down on him, like the kick of a horse, like the falling limb of a tree hit by lightning. There must be pain, but he was too surprised to notice. That must be his blood, squirting a ruby stain on the white cat, making it flinch. He saw its eyes open, twin golden green moons, befitting of the season, and the cat then scarpered through the open skylight and was lost in the snowy night.

  The youngest maunt was obliged to answer the convent door if the bell sounded during mealtime. In fact she was clearing away the remains of pumpkin soup and rye brisks, the other maunts already wafting, in a cerebral mood, toward their cloister chapel upstairs. She hesitated before deciding to answer the bell—in another three minutes she too would have been losing herself in devotions, and the bell would have gone unheeded. She had rather get the dishes to soak, frankly. But the seasonal cheer bullied her into charity.

  She opened the huge door to find a figure crouched like a monkey in the dark corner of the stone porch. Beyond, snow was wrinkling the facade of the adjacent Church of Saint Glinda, making it look like a reflection in water, only right way up. The streets were empty and a noise of choirs came filtering out of the candle-lit church.

  “What is it?” said the novice, remembering then to add, “Good Lurlinemas, my friend.”

  She decided, once she saw the blood on the odd green wrists, and the darting look in the eyes, that holiday decency required her to drag the creature inside. But she could hear her sister maunts assembling in their private chapel, and the mother maunt beginning to sing a prelude in her silvery contralto. This was the novice’s first big liturgical event as a member of this community, and she didn’t want to miss a moment of it.

  “Come with me, dolly,” she said, and the creature—a young woman a year or two older than she was—managed to straighten up enough to walk, or hobble, like a cripple, like a person so malnourished that their extensors cannot flex and their limbs look as if they are about to snap.

  The novice stopped in a washroom to rinse the blood off the wrists, and to make certain that it was indeed splattered mess from the beheading of some hen for a holiday supper, and not a sad attempt at suicide. But the stranger recoiled from the sight of water, and looked so deranged and unhappy that the novice stopped. She used a dry towel instead.

  The maunts were beginning antiphonal chants upstairs! How maddening! The novice took the path of least resistance. She dragged the forlorn thing down toward the winter salon, where the old retired biddies lived out their lives in a haze of amnesia and the discreetly placed clumps of marginium plants, whose sweet miasma helped mask the odors of the old and incontinent. The crones lived in a time of their own, they couldn’t be carted upstairs to the sacred chapel anyway.

  “Look, I’ll sit you down here,” she said to the woman. “I don’t know if you need sanctuary or food or a bath or forgiveness, whatever. But you can stop here, warm and dry and safe and quiet. I’ll come back to you after midnight. It’s the feast day, you see. It’s the vigil service. Watch and wait, and hope.”

  She pushed the hunted, haunted woman into a soft chair, and found a blanket. Most of the crones were snoring away, their heads nodding on their breastbones, dribbling softly onto bibs ornamented with green and gold berries and leaves. A few were telling their beads. The courtyard, open in summer, was now welled in with glass panels for the winter, so it looked like a square fish tank in an aquarium; snow falling in it always made them peaceful.

  “Look, you can see the snow, white as the grace of the Unnamed God,” said the novice, remembering her pastoral requirements. “Think on that, and rest, and sleep. Here’s a pillow. Here’s a stool for your feet. Upstairs we’ll be singing and praising the Unnamed God. I’ll pray for you.”

  “Don’t—” said the green ghostly guest, then slumped her head against the pillow.

  “It’s my pleasu
re to,” said the novice, a bit aggressively, and fled, just in time to catch the processional hymn.

  For a while the winter salon was still. It was like a fishbowl into which a new acquisition has been dropped. The snow moved as if done by a machine, gently and mesmerizingly, with a soft churr. The blossoms of the marginium plants closed a bit in the strengthening cold of the room. Oil lamps issued their funereal crepe ribbons into the air. On the other side of the garden—hardly visible through the snow and the two windows—a decrepit maunt, with a more precise grasp of the calendar than her sisters, began to hum a saucy old pagan hymn to Lurline.

  Up to the shivering figure of the newcomer came one of the elders, inching forward in a wheeled chair. She leaned forward and sniffed. From a cloak of plaid blanket, blue and ivory, she pawed her old hands along the armrests. She reached out and touched Elphaba’s hand.

  “Well, the poor dolly is sick, the poor dolly is tired,” said the ancient thing. Her hands felt, as the novice’s had done, for open wounds on the wrists. Nothing. “Though intact, the poor dolly is in pain,” she said, as if approving. A dome of near-balding scalp came into view under the hood of the blanket. “The poor dolly is faint, the poor dolly is faltering,” she went on. She rocked a bit and pressed Elphaba’s hands between her own, as if to warm them, but it was doubtful that her anemic and incompetent old circulatory system could heat a stranger when it could scarcely heat herself. Still she kept on. “The poor poppet is failure itself,” she murmured. “Happy holidays to one and all. Come my dear, lay your breast on old Mother’s bosom. Old Mother Maunt will set things right.” She couldn’t quite pull Elphaba out of her position of dreamless, sleepless grief. She could only keep Elphaba’s hands tightly clutched within her own, as a sepal sockets the furls of young petal. “Come, my precious and all will be well. Rest in the bosom of mad Mother Yackle. Mother Yackle will see you home.”