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

by Gregory Maguire

  “I can’t bring him back,” said Elphaba, “I can’t! I have no aptitude for sorcery! I never did! That was all a foolish campaign of Madame Morrible’s, which I rejected!” The six sisters looked at her askance.

  Irji escorted Nanny to the kitchen, Nor brought the broom, Manek brought the Grimmerie, and the sisters and Sarima brought the body of Liir, dripping and bloated, and laid him on the butcher’s block. “Oh, now who’s this one,” mused Nanny, but got to work pumping the legs and the arms, and set Sarima to pressing in at the abdomen.

  Elphaba flipped through the Grimmerie, she screwed up her face and hit herself on the temple with her fists, and wailed, “But I have no personal experience with a soul—how can I find his if I don’t know what one looks like?”

  “He’s even fatter than usual,” said Irji.

  “If you prick his eyes out with a magic straw from the magic broom, his soul will come back,” said Manek.

  “I wonder why he went in the fishwell?” said Nor. “I never would.”

  “Holy Lurlina, mercy on us, mercy!” said Sarima, weeping, and the sisters began to mumble the service of the dead, honoring the Unnamed God for the life departed.

  “Nanny can’t do everything,” snapped Nanny, “Elphaba, be some help! You’re just like your mother in a crisis! Put your mouth on his and push air into his lungs! Go on!”

  Elphaba wiped the wet off Liir’s pasty face with the edge of her sleeve. The face stayed where it was pushed. She grimaced, and nearly vomited, and spit something into a bucket, and then she sank her mouth down on the child’s, and breathed out, pushing into the sour passage her own sour breath. Her fingers tensed at the sides of the butcher’s block, gouging splinters, as if in an ecstasy of sexual tension. Chistery breathed along with her, breath for breath.

  “He smells like fish,” Nor said under her breath.

  “If that’s what you look like when you drown, I’d rather burn to death,” said Irji.

  “I’m just not going to die,” Manek said, “and nobody can make me.”

  The body of Liir began to choke. They thought at first it was an involuntary reaction, air from Elphaba’s mouth pocketing and blurting out again, and then there was a small stream of yellowish yuck. Then Liir’s eyelids moved, and his hand twitched of its own accord.

  “Oh mercy,” Sarima murmured. “It’s a miracle. Thank you Lurlina! Bless you!”

  “We’re not out of the woods yet,” said Nanny. “He may still die of exposure. Quick now, off with his clothes.”

  The children watched the silly indignity of grown-up women tearing stupid Liir’s trousers and tunic off. They rubbed him all over with lard. This gave the children a case of the giggles, and made Irji feel very funny in his trousers, for the first time in his life. Then they wrapped Liir in a woolen blanket, which made quite a mess, and prepared to put him to bed.

  “Where does he sleep?” said Sarima.

  They all looked at one another. The sisters looked at Elphaba, and Elphaba looked at the children.

  “Oh, sometimes on the floor in our room, sometimes on the floor in Nor’s,” said Manek.

  “He wants to sleep in my bed too but I push him out,” said Nor. “He’s too fat, there’d be no room for me and my dollies.”

  “He doesn’t even have a bed?” Sarima coldly asked Elphie.

  “Well, don’t ask me, this is your house,” said Elphie.

  And Liir stirred somewhat, and said, “The fish talked to me. I talked to the fish. The goldfish talked to me. She said she was. . . .”

  “Hush, little one,” said Nanny, “time for that later.” She glared around at the women and children in the kitchen. “Well, it shouldn’t take Nanny to have to find him a proper bed, but if there’s none other for him he can come up to my room, and I’ll sleep on the floor!”

  “Of course not, the very idea,” began Sarima, bustling ahead.

  “Barbarians, the lot of you!” snapped Nanny.

  For which no one in Kiamo Ko ever forgave her.

  Sarima lectured Auntie Guest severely for what had happened to Liir. Elphaba tried to say that it was not her doing, it was not her fault. “It was some boys’ trick, some game, some dare,” she said. Their accusations spent, they fell to talking about the differences between boys and girls.

  Sarima told Auntie Guest what she knew of the boys’ initiation rite in the tribe. “They are taken out in the grasslands, and left with nothing but a loincloth and a musical instrument. They are required to call forth spirits and animals out of the night, to converse with them, to learn from them, to soothe them if they need soothing, to fight them if they need fighting. The child who dies at night clearly lacks the discretion to decide if its company needs fighting, or soothing. So it is correct that he should die young and not burden the tribe with his foolishness.”

  “What do the boys say of spirits who approach them?” asked Auntie Guest.

  “Boys say very little, especially about the spirit world,” she answered. “Nonetheless, you pick up what you pick up. And I think some of the spirits are very patient, very wearing, very obdurate. The lore supposes there should be conflict, hostility, battle, but I wonder, in contact with spirits, if what the boy needs is a good helping of cold anger.”

  “Cold anger?”

  “Oh yes, don’t you know that distinction? Tribal mothers always tell their children that there are two kinds of anger: hot and cold. Boys and girls experience both, but as they grow up the angers separate according to the sex. Boys need hot anger to survive. They need the inclination to fight, the drive to sink the knife into the flesh, the energy and initiative of fury. It’s a requirement of hunting, of defense, of pride. Maybe of sex, too.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Elphaba, remembering.

  Sarima blushed and looked unhappy, and continued. “And girls need cold anger. They need the cold simmer, the ceaseless grudge, the talent to avoid forgiveness, the sidestepping of compromise. They need to know when they say something that they will never back down, ever, ever. It’s the compensation for a more limited scope in the world. Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on—or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the universe is changed, once again, for cold anger requires an eternal vigilance in all matters of slight and offense.” She glared at Elphaba, pinning her with unspoken accusations about Fiyero, about Liir.

  Elphaba thought about this. She thought about hot anger and cold anger, and if it divided by the sexes, and which she felt, if either, if ever. She thought about her mother dying young, and her father with his obsessions. She thought about the anger that Doctor Dillamond had had—an anger that drove him to study and research. She thought about the anger that Madame Morrible could barely disguise, as she tried to seduce the college girls into the secret service of government.

  She sat and thought about it the following morning as she watched the strengthening sun beat down on the mounds of snow on the sloping tiled roofs below. She watched the sun bleed ice water out of the icicle. Warm and cold working together to make an icicle. Warm and cold anger working together to make a fury, a fury worthy enough to use as a weapon against the old things that still needed fighting.

  In a fashion—without any way to confirm it, of course—she had always felt as capable of hot anger as any man. But to be successful, one would need access to both sorts . . .

  Liir survived, but Manek did not. The icicle that Elphaba trained her gaze on, thinking on the weapons one needed to fight such abuse—it broke like a lance from the eaves, and drove whistling downward, and caught him in the skull as he went out to find some new way of beleaguering Liir.

  Uprisings

  I

  They’re calling you a witch, do you know that?” said Nanny. “Now why ever is that?”

  “Silliness and stupidity,” said Elphaba. “When I arrived I was distanced from my name, after my years at the mauntery, where I was called Sister Saint Aelphaba. Elphaba seemed like the name of someone long ago. I told them to
call me Auntie. Though I never felt like anyone’s Auntie, nor would I know what it felt like. I never had any aunts or uncles.”

  “Hmmm,” said Nanny, “I don’t think you’re much of a witch. Your mother would be scandalized, bless her soul. Your father too.”

  They were walking in the apple orchard. A cloud of blossoms thickened the air with scent. The Witch’s bees were having a field day, humming throatily. Killyjoy sat wagging his tail in the shadow of Manek’s tombstone, placed near the wall. The crows had relay races overhead, scaring away all other birds except the eagles. Irji and Nor and Liir, at Nanny’s insistence, had been taken into the schoolroom of the village. Kiamo Ko was blissfully quiet until midday.

  Nanny was seventy-eight. She walked with a cane. She hadn’t given up on her little efforts toward beauty, though now they seemed to coarsen rather than dignify her. Her powder was on too thick, her lip rouge smeared and off center, and the flimsy lace shawl was useless in the updraft from the valley. For her part, Nanny thought that Elphaba was looking poorly, as if she were going moldy from the inside out. Pale. A disintegration of sorts. Elphaba didn’t seem to care for her beautiful hair at all, keeping it knotted up out of sight underneath that ridiculous hat. And the black gown needed a good washing and airing.

  They stopped at a lopsided wall, and leaned against it. The sisters were gathering flowers a few fields away, and Sarima ballooned along. In her dark mourning gown she resembled a huge dangerous cocoon broken loose from its mooring. It was good to hear her laugh again, even if falsely; light had that strange, ameliorative effect on everybody, even Elphaba.

  Nanny had told Elphie about her family. The Eminent Thropp had died at last. In Elphaba’s absence and presumed death, the mantle of Eminence had fallen to Nessarose. So the younger sister was now ensconced in Colwen Grounds, issuing dogmatic statements about faith and blame. Frex was there with her too, his career of ministry almost at an end. As he gave up the effort his mind was returning to balance. Shell? He came and went. Rumors abounded that he was an agitator for Munchkinland’s secession from Oz. He had grown up handsome and fine, in Nanny’s biased opinion: straight of limb, clear of skin, direct of speech, bold of heart. He was now in his early twenties.

  “And what does Nessarose think of secession?” Elphie had asked. “Her opinion about it will be important if she’s the Eminent Thropp now.”

  Nanny reported that Nessarose had grown to be far cleverer than anyone anticipated. She kept her cards close to her chest and issued vague statements about the revolutionary cause, statements that could be read several ways, depending on the audience. Nanny assumed Nessarose intended to set up some sort of theocracy, incorporating into the governing laws of Munchkinland her own restrictive interpretation of unionism. “Your sainted father Frex himself doesn’t know if this would be a good or bad thing, and keeps silent on the matter. He’s not much for politics, he prefers the mystical realm.” There was, Nanny observed, even some local support for Nessarose’s plans. But since Nessarose governed her remarks well, the Wizard’s armed forces garrisoned in the area could find no excuse to arrest her. “She’s adept at this,” Nanny admitted. “Shiz taught her well. She stands on her own two feet now.”

  The word adept sent chills down Elphie’s spine. Was Nessarose even now responding to some sort of spell that Madame Morrible had placed on her, those foggy years ago in the parlor at Crage Hall? Was she in fact a pawn, an Adept of the Wizard, or of Madame Morrible? Did she know why she did what she did? For that matter, was Elphaba herself merely a playing piece of a higher, evil power?

  The recollection of Madame Morrible’s proposals for their careers—hers, and Nessarose’s, and Glinda’s—had come back to Elphie with a shock following the recovery of Liir from his saturation and near drowning last winter. When he finally came around enough to answer questions about how he had come to be in the fishwell, he could only say “The fish talked to me, she told me to come down.” Elphie knew in her heart that it was Manek, horrible evil Manek, who had tortured the boy unmercifully and openly all winter. She didn’t care that Manek died, even if Manek was the precious son of Fiyero. Any torturer was fair game for javelin icicles. But she had to pause, gulping, at what Liir had said next. He said, “The fish told me she was magic. She said that Fiyero was my father, and that Irji and Manek and Nor are my brothers and my sister.”

  “Goldfish don’t talk, sweetheart!” Sarima said. “You’re imagining things. You were down there too long and your brain got waterlogged.”

  Elphaba had yearned toward Liir, a strange, unhappy compulsion. Who was this boy who lived in her life? Oh, she knew more or less where he came from, but who he was—it seemed to make a difference, for the first time in her life. She had reached out and put her hand on his shoulder. He had twitched it off; he was not used to such a gesture. And she had felt rebuffed.

  “Want to see my pet mouse, Liir?” said Nor, who had been warm to the boy during his convalescence. Liir always chose the company of his peers over questioning by the grown-ups, and it was impossible to pry further information out of him about his ordeal. He didn’t seem much changed, except that with Manek dead, Liir charged around Kiamo Ko with greater zest and liberty.

  And Sarima had looked at Elphaba, and Elphaba thought the hour of her liberation was at hand at last. “How silly of the boy, he’s delusional,” Sarima had said at last. “The idea of Fiyero being his father. Fiyero didn’t have an ounce of fat on his body, and look at the boy.”

  Under the terms of her welcome, Elphaba could not prod Sarima to change her mind, but she stared at her hostess, willing her to accept the facts. But she wouldn’t. “And whoever might the mother be?” said Sarima blandly, touching the hem of her skirt softly. “It’s preposterous beyond words.”

  For the first time, Elphie wished that Liir had at least an undertone of green in his skin.

  Sarima had swept away, to weep in her chapel for her husband, for her second son.

  And the terms of Elphie’s imprisonment—as an unwilling traitor, as an exiled maunt, as a hapless mother, as a failed insurrectionist, as a Witch in disguise—remained unchanged.

  Though the idea of a Goldfish or a Carp in the fishwell telling such things to Liir—was there any possibility in that? Or had Madame Morrible the ability to change her shape, to live in cold darkness, to slip in and observe what Elphie was up to? Liir had no imagination to speak of, he couldn’t have come up with that by himself. Could he?

  When she went to look in the fishwell, many times at all hours of the day or night, the old carp—or Carp—stayed out of sight.

  “I’m glad to hear Nessarose is on her two feet,” said Elphaba at last, coming back to the orchard from her musings. Nanny was gnawing at a piece of sugar candy.

  “I mean that literally, you know,” said Nanny through her spittle. “She doesn’t need to be propped up anymore. Not figuratively or literally. She can stand on her own, stand and sit.”

  “Without benefit of arms? I don’t believe it,” said the Witch.

  “You’ll have to. Do you remember that pair of shoes that Frex had decorated for her?”

  Of course Elphaba remembered! The beautiful shoes! Her father’s sign of devotion to his second daughter, his desire to accentuate her beauty and draw attention away from her deformity.

  “Well, old Glinda of the Arduennas, remember her? Married to Sir Chuffrey, and gone a bit to seed, in my humble opinion. She came to Colwen Grounds a couple of years ago. She and Nessarose had a wild old time, remembering college days. And she put those very same shoes through something of an enchantment. Don’t ask me. Magic was never my cup of tea. The shoes allowed Nessarose to sit and stand and walk without support. She is never without them. She claims they give her moral virtue too, but then she has buckets more of that than she needs. You’d be surprised how superstitious Munchkinlanders have become these days.” Nanny sighed. “That’s why I was free to look you up, dearie. The magic shoes made me redundant. Nanny is out of a job.” />
  “You’re too old to work, you sit and enjoy the sun,” said Elphaba. “You can stay here as long as you like.”

  “You talk as if this is your house,” said Nanny. “As if you have the right to issue such invitations.”

  “Until I’m allowed to leave, this is my house,” said Elphie. “I can’t help it.”

  Nanny shaded her eyes and looked out over the mountains, which in the midday light looked like polished horn. “It’s too rich, to think of you being a Witch, after a fashion anyway, and your sister trying out as resident Saint. Who would have thought, back in those muddy years in the Quadling badlands? I don’t think you’re a Witch, whatever you say. But one thing I do want to know. Is Liir your son?”

  Elphaba shivered, though her heart, deep inside its pocket of cold, roiled in hot energy. “It is not a question I can answer,” she said sadly.

  “You needn’t keep anything from me, dearie. Remember, Nanny was nursemaid to your mother too, and a more outgoing, sensual woman I have yet to meet. Convention didn’t bind her, not in youth nor in married life.”

  “I don’t think I want to hear about this,” said Elphie.

  “Then let’s talk about Liir. What in blazes can you mean, you can’t answer a simple question like that? Either you conceived him and bore him, or you didn’t. As far as I know in this world there are no other stories.”

  “What I mean,” said Elphaba “and the only remark about it I will ever make is this. When I first went to the mauntery, under the kind offices of Mother Yackle, I was in no state to know what was happening to me, and I spent about a year in a deathly sleep. It’s just possible I brought a child to term and delivered it. I was another full year recovering. When I was first assigned duties, I worked with the sick and the dying, and also with abandoned children. I had no more congress with Liir than with any other of several dozen brats. When I left the mauntery to come here, it was under the condition that I would take Liir with me. I didn’t question the instruction—one doesn’t question the instructions of superiors. I have no motherly warmth toward the boy”—she gulped, in case this was no longer true—“and I don’t feel as if I’ve ever gone through the experience of bearing a child. I don’t quite believe myself capable, in fact, although I’m willing to concede that this may be simply ignorance and blindness. But that’s all there is to say about it. I’ll say no more, and no more will you.”