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

by Gregory Maguire

  “I got her some tablets in the Emerald City, from some gypsy woman,” said Nanny. “I explained to the beastly creature what had happened—I mean that you’d been born an unfortunate color, and those teeth—thank Lurline your second set were more human!—and the gypsy woman made some silly prophecy about two sisters being instrumental in the history of Oz. She gave me some powerful pills. I’ve always wondered if the pills were the cause of Nessarose’s affliction. I wouldn’t mess with gypsy potions anymore, believe me. Not with what we know these days.” She smiled, having long ago forgiven herself of any culpability in the whole affair.

  “Nessarose’s affliction,” mused Elphaba. “Our mother took some gypsy remedy, and bore a second daughter without arms. It was either green or armless. Mama didn’t have very good luck at girls, did she.”

  “Shell, however, is a sight for sore eyes,” said Nanny rosily. “Then, who is to say it was all your mother’s fault? First there was the confusion about who was really Nessarose’s father, and then the pills from that old Yackle person, and your father’s moodiness—”

  “Yackle person? What do you mean?” asked Elphaba, starting. “And who the hell was Nessarose’s father if it wasn’t Papa?”

  “Oh la,” said Nanny, “pour me another cup of tea and I’ll tell you all. You’re old enough now, and Melena’s long dead.” She meandered through a story about the Quadling glassblower named Turtle Heart, and Melena’s uncertainty whether Nessarose was his child or Frex’s, and the visit to Yackle, about whom she could remember nothing else but the name, the pills, and the prophecy, can’t pull teeth from a hen so stop trying. She didn’t mention (and she never had) how depressed Melena became when Elphaba was born. There was no point.

  Elphie listened to all this, impatient and annoyed. On the one hand she wanted to throw it out the window: The past was immaterial. On the other, things fell into a slightly different order now. And that Yackle! Was the name just a coincidence? She was tempted to show Nanny the picture of Yakal Snarling in the Grimmerie, but resisted. No sense alarming the old woman, or giving her the nighttime frights.

  So the two women poured each other tea and restrained themselves from painful observations about the past. But Elphaba began to fret about Nessarose. Perhaps Nessie didn’t want the position of Eminence, and was just as incarcerated there as her older sister was here. Perhaps Elphaba owed her the chance of liberty. Yet how much really could you owe other people? Was it endless?

  3

  Nor was beside herself. In a short time her whole life had changed, so utterly. The world was more magic than ever, but it seemed lodged inside her now, not outside. Her body was waiting to flame, to blossom, and no one seemed to care or to notice.

  Liir had become a water boy for the expeditionary soldiers. Irji spent his time composing long devotional libretti in honor of Lurlina. In a state of uncertainty over the men in residence, the sisters remained confined to their chambers by their own inclination, yet quivering with readiness should things change. Nothing could change, as convention dictated, unless Sarima married again, and then they would be free to court. Their domestic campaigns to throw Commander Cherrystone and Sarima together, however, met with no success. They redoubled their efforts. Three even approached Auntie Witch for a love potion from that magic encyclopedia. “Hah,” said Elphaba, “that’ll be the day,” and that was that about that.

  Nor, bereft of companionship, took to hanging around the men’s dormitory, trying to pitch in with chores that Liir wasn’t asked to do, that men didn’t much care about. She hung out their cloaks in the sun. She polished their buttons. She brought them flowers from the hills. She prepared a tray of summer fruits and cheeses that seemed to please them, especially when she served them herself. One young, dark, balding soldier with a captivating smile liked her to pop the orange segments right in his lips, and he sucked the juice from her fingers, to the mingled enjoyment and envy of the others. “Sit on my lap,” he said, “and let me feed you.” He offered her a strawberry, but she wouldn’t sit on his lap—and she loved refusing.

  One day she decided to treat them to a full-scale chamber cleaning. They were out doing an inventory of the vineyards on the lower slopes and would be gone all day. Nor arrayed herself with rags, yoked herself with buckets, and since Auntie Witch was deep in conversation with Nanny about, it seemed, Sarima, Nor swiped the Witch’s broom, for its thicker brush and longer handle. She headed to the barracks.

  She couldn’t read much, so she ignored the letters and maps that spilled from the leathern satchels left carelessly slung over the back of a chair. She tidied the trunks, and swept, and in the effort raised a lot of dust, and felt warm.

  She took off her blouse, and slung one of the men’s rough capes over her sun-browned shoulders. It gave off such a heady aroma of maleness, even after its airing, that she nearly swooned. She lay down on someone’s pallet with the cape just slightly falling open, so that she could imagine falling asleep and having the men return and see the beautiful line of flat skin that ran between her fresh new breasts. She considered pretending to fall asleep. But she knew she wouldn’t do this. She sat up, dissatisfied with the possibilities, and reached out to grab the nearest thing—it happened to be the broom—so she could whack something in frustration.

  The broom was out of reach, but it lunged a little toward her. It came across the floor of its own accord. She saw it. The broom was magic.

  She touched it, almost fearfully, as if she guessed it had intentions. It felt no different from an ordinary broom. It merely moved, as if guided by the hand of an invisible spirit. “What tree are you whittled from, what field are you mown from?” she asked it, almost tenderly, but she expected no answer and she got none. The broom quivered, and elevated itself a little off the floor, as if waiting.

  The cape had a hood on it, and she drew this up over her face. Then she hiked her summer skirt to her knees, and threw one leg over the broom, to ride it as a child rides a hobby horse.

  The thing rose, tentatively, so she could keep her balance by trailing her toes on the floor, correcting, correcting—the center of gravity was high, and the span was so narrow. The top of the handle tilted farther up, and she slid down the shaft until she was caught against the brush top, as if it were a saddle of sorts. She held on tightly; her legs, especially in the upper thigh, felt as if they were swelling, the better to clench the handle between them. The large window at the end of the room hung open, for air and light, and the broom moved a couple of feet across the floor, until it had reached the sill.

  Then the broom rose a few feet, and carried her out the window. Nor’s stomach pitched, and her heels beat against the underside of the brush. Mercifully she had emerged not in the castle courtyard, where she would likely be seen, but on the other side, where the land did not fall away quite so far and fast. Nor wailed softly in the strangeness and ecstasy of the adventure. The cape flared out, exposing her chest, and how could she ever have imagined she wanted to be seen without a blouse? “Oh oh,” she cried, but whether to the broom or to some guardian spirit, she did not know. She shuddered with exposure and shock, and the broom rose higher and higher, until it had come to a level with the uppermost window, which was in the Witch’s tower.

  The Witch and her nanny were watching, open-mouthed, with cups of tea halfway to their lips.

  “You come down from there at once,” ordered the Witch. Nor didn’t know if it was she who was being addressed, or the broom. She had no reins to tug, no words of magic to wield. However the broom, apparently chastened, turned back, descended, and made a somewhat clumsy landing on the floor of the men’s barracks. Nor flung herself off, weeping and shivering, and reclothed herself properly. She didn’t want to touch the broom again, but when she picked it up the life had gone out of it, and she carried it up to the Witch’s apartments expecting a severe reprimand.

  “What were you doing with my broom?” barked the Witch.

  “I was cleaning the soldiers’ quarters,” g
abbled Nor. “It’s such a mess, their papers all over, their clothes, their maps . . .”

  “Keep your hands off my things, you,” said the Witch. “What kinds of papers?”

  “Plans, maps, letters, I don’t know,” said Nor, regaining her spunk, “go look for yourself. I didn’t pay attention.”

  The Witch took the broom and appeared to consider hitting Nor with it. “Don’t be a fool, Nor. Stay away from those men,” she said coldly. “Stay away from them!” She raised the broom like a truncheon. “They’ll hurt you as soon as spit at you. Stay away from them, I say. And stay away from me!”

  Elphaba remembered that the broom was given her by Mother Yackle. The young woman had seen the old maunt as crippled, senile, a bother, but now Elphaba looked back and wondered if there was more to her than met the eye. Was that broom magicked by Mother Yackle, with a vestige of some Kumbricial instinct? Or did Nor have a power developing in her, and did she bring it out in the senseless broom? Nor apparently was a fervid believer in magic; maybe the broom was waiting to be believed in. Would it fly for Elphaba, too?

  One night when everyone else had retired, Elphaba brought the broom out to the courtyard. She felt a little foolish, crouching down on the broom like a child on a hobbyhorse. “Come on, fly, you fool thing,” she muttered. The broom twitched back and forth in a naughty way, enough to raise welts in her inner thighs. “I’m not a blushing schoolgirl, stop that nonsense,” said Elphaba. The broom rose a foot and a half and then dumped Elphie on her rear end.

  “I’ll set you afire and that’ll be the end of you,” said Elphaba. “I’m too old for this sort of indignity.”

  It took five or six nights of trying before she managed even to hover six feet off the ground. She had been useless in sorcery. Was she doomed to be useless at everything? It was a pleasure, finally, to scare the barn owls and bats senseless. And it was good to be abroad. When she had more confidence, she wobbled far down the valley to the remains of the Ozma Regent’s attempt at a dam; she rested and hoped that she wouldn’t have to walk back. She didn’t. The broom was resistant to her intention, but she could always threaten it with fire.

  She felt like a night angel.

  In midsummer, an Arjiki trader came along with pots and spoons and spools of thread, and he carried with him some letters left at an outpost farther north. Among them was a note from Frex—apparently Nanny had told him of her intentions to hunt Elphaba down, and he wrote to the mauntery, which had forwarded the letter on to Kiamo Ko in the Vinkus. Frex wrote that Nessarose had orchestrated a revolt, and that Munchkinland—or most of it anyway—had seceded from Oz, and set itself up as an independent state.

  Nessarose as the Eminent Thropp had become the political head of state. Frex apparently thought this was Elphaba’s birthright, and that she should come to Colwen Grounds and challenge her sister for it. “It may be she isn’t the right woman for the job,” he wrote, though Elphaba found his apprehension surprising. Wasn’t Nessarose the warmly spiritual daughter that Elphie could never be?

  Elphaba had no thirst for leadership, and did not want to challenge Nessarose in any way. But now that the broom seemed able to carry her for long distances, she wondered if she could fly by night to Colwen Grounds, and spend a few days seeing Papa, Nessie, and Shell once again. It had been a dozen years since she left Nessie in Shiz, drunk and sobbing following the death of Ama Clutch.

  For Munchkinland to be free of the Wizard’s iron grip!—that alone would be worth the trip. It made Elphie grin a bit at herself, to feel her old contempt for the Wizard flare up. Perhaps this was what healing meant, after all.

  To be safe, one afternoon Elphaba went through the soldiers’ empty barracks. She pawed through their papers. All the documents related to issues of mapping and geological survey. Nothing else. There seemed to be no hidden agenda of threat to the Arjikis or the other Vinkus tribes.

  The earlier she went, the sooner she would return. And it would be better if no one know. So she told everyone she was taking a period of isolation in her tower, and she wanted neither food nor visitors for some days. When midnight struck, she set out for Colwen Grounds, now the home of her powerful sister.

  4

  She slept by daylight in the shadows of barns, the overhang of eaves, the lee of chimneys. She traveled by night. In the gloom, Oz spread out below—she hovered above it at about eighty feet, near as she could reckon—and the countryside made its geographical transformations with the ease of a vaudeville backdrop on rollers. The hardest passage was down the steep flanks of the Great Kells. Once free of the mountains, however, she saw Oz level out into the rich alluvial plain of the Gillikin River.

  She flew along the waterway, above trading vessels and islands, until it fed at last into Restwater, Oz’s largest lake. She kept to its southern edge, and took a whole night to traverse it, as it endlessly lapped in black oily silk waves, into sedge and swamp. She had trouble finding the mouth of the Munchkin River, which drained into Restwater from the eastern direction. Once she did, though, it was easy to locate the Yellow Brick Road. The farmland beyond grew even more lush. The effects of the drought, so drastic in her childhood, had been eradicated, and dairy farms and small villages seemed to prosper, happy as a child’s toy town set, cunning and cozy in the wrinkled, nappy land of arable soil and accommodating climate.

  The farther east she went, however, the more torn up the highway became. Crowbars had pried out bricks, trees had been felled and brush walls erected. It looked as if a few of the smaller bridges had been dynamited. A safeguard against retaliation by the Wizard’s army?

  Seven days after leaving her chambers at Kiamo Ko, Elphaba flew into the hamlet of Colwen Grounds, and slept under a green bay tree. When she awoke, she asked a merchant for the great house, and he tremblingly pointed her the way, as if she were a demon. So a green skin still gives Munchkinlanders the creeps, she observed, and walked the last couple of miles, and arrived at the front gates of Colwen Grounds a little after breakfast.

  She had heard her mother speak of Colwen Grounds, wistfully and angrily, as they had slopped in waterproof boots through six inches of Quadling Country water. Elphie’s years in the smug antiquity of Shiz, and the pomp of the Emerald City, ought to have prepared her for an imposing mansion. But she was startled, even shocked, at the grandeur of Colwen Grounds.

  The gate was gilded, the forecourt swept clean of every scrap of grass and dung, and a bank of topiary saints in terra-cotta pots lined the balcony above the massive front door. Dignitaries with ribbons denoting new rank and prestige in the Free State of Munchkinland, she guessed, stood in small groups to one side. Coffee cups in hand, the officials had apparently just finished an early morning privy council meeting. Inside the gate, swordsmen stepped neatly up and barred her way. She began to protest—instantly branded a menace and a loon, she could see—and she was about to be ejected when a figure wandered into view from around the corner of a folly, and called for them to stop.

  “Fabala!” he said.

  “Yes, Papa, I’m here,” she answered, with a child’s politeness.

  She turned. The dignitaries paused in their discussions, and then resumed, as if realizing that overhearing this reunion would be the height of rudeness. The guards withdrew their barrier when Frex approached. His hair was thin and long and caught up by a rawhide implement, as it always had been. His beard was the color of cream and reached his waist when he took his hands away from it.

  “This is the sister of the Eminence of the East,” said Frex, staring at Elphaba, “and my oldest daughter. Let her pass through, dear men, now and every time she approaches.” He reached and caught her hand, and turned his head as a bird might to see her through one capable eye. The other eye, she realized, was dead.

  “Come, we will greet each other in private, away from this attention,” said Frex. “My word, Fabala, you have become your mother in these long years!” He linked his arm into hers, and they went into the building through a side door and foun
d a small salon done up in saffron silks and plum velvet cushions. The door closed behind them. Frex lowered himself cautiously to the sofa and patted the upholstery next to him. She sat down, wary, tired, astonished at the wealth of her own feeling for him. She was full of need. But, she reminded herself, you’re a grown woman.

  “I knew you would come if I wrote,” he said. “Fabala, I always knew that.” He wrapped her in his arms, stiffly. “I may cry for a minute.” When he was through, he asked her where she had gone, and what she had done, and why she had never come back.

  “I was not sure there was a back to come to,” she answered, realizing the truth of it as she spoke. “When you finished converting a town, Papa, you moved on to new fields. Your home was in the pasture of souls; mine never was. Besides, I had my own work to do.” She added, a moment later, in a low voice, “Or I thought I did.”

  She mentioned her years in the Emerald City, but did not say why.

  “And was Nanny right? Were you a maunt? I didn’t raise you for such submission,” he said. “I’m surprised. Such conformity and obedience—”

  “I was no more a maunt than I ever was a unionist,” she chided him gently, “but I lived with the maunts. They did good work, whatever the error or inspiration of their beliefs. It was a time of recuperation from a difficult passage. And then, last year, I went to the Vinkus, and I guess I’ve made my home there, although for how long I cannot say.”

  “And what do you do?” he said. “Are you married?”

  “I’m a witch,” she answered. He recoiled, peered through the working eye to see if she spoke in jest.

  “Tell me about Nessie before I see her, and Shell,” she said. “Your letter sounded as if you thought she needed help. I’ll do what I can in the short while I can be here.”