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

by Gregory Maguire

  “Nor, it’s Auntie Witch. I’ve come to bargain for your release, at last,” said the Witch, improvising.

  But the Wizard motioned the unseen attendants to usher Nor out of sight. “I’m afraid that is not possible,” he said. “She is my protection from you, you see.”

  “The others?” said the Witch. “I must know.”

  “Everything is undocumented,” said the Wizard, “but I believe Sarima and her sisters are all dead.”

  The Witch’s breath caught in her chest. The last hopes of forgiveness gone! . . . but the Wizard was continuing. “Perhaps some underling who had no authority in the matter had an appetite for a bloodbath. It’s so hard to get reliable help in the armed forces.”

  “Irji?” said the Witch, gripping her elbows.

  “Now he had to die,” said the Wizard apologetically. “He was the next in line to be Prince, wasn’t he?”

  “Tell me it was not brutal,” said the Witch. “Oh, tell me so!”

  “The Paraffin Necklace,” admitted the Wizard. “Well, it was a public affair. A statement needed to be made. There now, against my better judgment, I have told you what you wanted to know. Now it is your turn. Where can I find the book that this page is from?” The Wizard took the paper out of his pocket and pressed it out onto his lap. His hands were trembling. He looked at the page. “A spell for the Administration of Dragons,” he said, wonderingly.

  “Is that what it is?” she said, surprised. “I could not be sure.”

  “Of course. You must have a hard time making this out,” he said. “You see, it does not come from this world. It comes from my world.”

  He was mad, obsessed with other worlds. Like her father.

  “You are not telling the truth,” said the Witch, hoping she was right.

  “Oh, what care I for the truth,” he said, “but I am truthful, as it happens.”

  “Why would you want that?” said the Witch, trying to buy some time, trying to figure out how she could barter for Nor’s life. “I don’t even know what it is. I don’t believe you do either.”

  “I do,” he said. “This is an ancient manuscript of magic, generated in a world far away from this one. It was long thought to be merely legendary, or else destroyed in the dark onslaughts of the northern invaders. It had been removed from our world for safety by a wizard more capable than I. It is why I came to Oz in the first place,” he continued, almost talking to himself, as old men are prone to do. “Madame Blavatsky located it in a crystal ball, and I made the appropriate sacrifices and—arrangements—to travel here forty years ago. I was a young man, full of ardor and failure. I had not intended to rule a country here, but just to find this document and return it to its own world, and to study its secrets there.”

  “What kind of sacrifices?” she said. “You do not stint from murder here.”

  “Murder is a word used by the sanctimonious,” he said. “It is an expedient expression with which they condemn any courageous action beyond their ken. What I did, what I do, cannot be murder. For, coming from another world, I cannot be held accountable to the silly conventions of a naive civilization. I am beyond that lisping childish recital of wrongs and rights.” His eyes did not burn as he spoke; they were sunk behind veils of cold blue detachment.

  “If I give the Grimmerie to you, will you go?” she said. “Give me Nor and take your brand of evil and leave us alone at last?”

  “I am too old to travel now,” he said, “and why should I give up what I have worked for all these years?”

  “Because I will use this book and destroy you with it if you don’t,” she said.

  “You cannot read it,” he said. “You are of Oz and you cannot do such a thing.”

  “I can read more of it than you suspect,” she said. “I do not know what it all means. I have seen pages about unleashing the hidden energies of matter. I have seen pages about tampering with the orderly flow of time. I have seen disquisitions about weapons too vile to use, about how to poison water, about how to breed a more docile population. There are diagrams of weapons of torture. Though the drawings and the words seem misty to my eyes, I can continue to learn. I am not too old.”

  “Those are ideas of great interest to our times,” he said, though he seemed surprised that she had taken in as much as she had.

  “Not to me,” she said. “You have done enough already. If I give it to you, will you surrender Nor to me?”

  “You should not trust my promise,” he said, sighing. “Really, my child.” But he continued to stare at the page she had handed over to him. “One might learn how to subjugate a dragon to one’s own purposes,” he mused, and flipped the page over to read what was on the back.

  “Please,” she said. “I think I have never begged for anything before in my life. But I beg of you. It is not right that you should be here. Assuming for a moment you can sometimes tell the truth—go back to that other world, go anywhere, just leave the throne. Leave us alone. Take the book with you, do with it what you will. Let me accomplish at least this in my life.”

  “In exchange for my telling you about the kith and kin of your beloved Fiyero, you are to tell me where this book is,” he reminded her.

  “Well, I won’t,” she answered. “I have revised my offer. Give me Nor, and I will get you the Grimmerie. The book is already hidden so deeply that you will never find it. You have not the skill.” She hoped she was being persuasive.

  He stood and pocketed the page. “I shall not have you executed,” he said. “At least, not at this audience. I will have that book, for here or for there. You cannot bind me to a promise, I am beyond being bound by words. I will think of what you have said. But meanwhile, I will keep my young slave-girl at my side. For she is my defense against your anger.”

  “Give her to me!” said the Witch. “Now, now, now: Act like a man, not like a mountebank! Give her to me and I will send you that book!”

  “It is for others to bargain,” said the Wizard. Rather than sounding offended, he seemed merely depressed, as if he were talking to himself instead of to her. “I do not bargain. But I do think. I will wait and see how the reunification with Munchkinland goes, and if you do not interfere, I may be kindly disposed to think about what you have said. But I do not bargain.”

  The Witch breathed in deeply. “I have met you before, you know,” she said. “You once granted me an interview in the Throne Room, when I was a schoolgirl from Shiz.”

  “Is that so?” he said. “Oh, of course—you must have been one of the darling girls of Madame Morrible. That wonderful aid and helpmeet. In her dotage now, but in her heyday, what she taught me about breaking the spirits of willful young girls! No doubt, like the rest, you were taken with her?”

  “She tried to recruit me to serve some master. Was it you?”

  “Who can say. We were always hatching some plot or other. She was good fun. She would never be as crude as that”—he pointed to the open door through which crouching Nor could still be seen, humming to herself—“she could manage girl students with much greater finesse!” He was about to leave the room, but he turned back at the door. “You know, now I remember. It was she who warned me about you. She told me you had betrayed her, you had rejected her offers. She was the one who advised me to have you watched. It is because of her that we found out about your little romance with the diamond-skinned prince.”

  “No!”

  “So you met me before. I had forgotten. In what form did I appear?”

  She had to clutch herself to keep from vomiting. “You were a skeleton with lighted bones, dancing in a storm.”

  “Oh, yes. That was clever, that was. Were you impressed?”

  “Sir,” she said, “I think you are a very bad wizard.”

  “And you,” he answered, stung, “are only a caricature of a witch.”

  “Wait,” she called as he headed away through the panel, “wait, please. How will I receive your answer?”

  “I will send a messenger to you before the year is
out,” he said. The panel slammed tightly behind him.

  She fell to her knees, her forehead dropping almost to the floor. At her sides her fists clenched. She had no intention of surrendering the Grimmerie to such a monster, ever. If need be she would die to keep it out of his hands. But could she arrange a deception so that he would surrender Nor to her first?

  She left a few days later, first making sure that her father was not to be turned out of his room in Colwen Grounds. He did not want to join her in the Vinkus; he was too old to make the journey. Besides, he thought that Shell would come back sooner or later looking for him. The Witch knew that Frex wouldn’t live long, grieving so for Nessarose. She tried to put away her anger at him when she said good-bye for what she suspected was the last time.

  As she strode through the forecourt of Colwen Grounds, she crossed paths once again with Glinda. But both women averted their eyes and hurried their feet along their opposing ways. For the Witch, the sky was a huge boulder pressing down on her. For Glinda it was much the same. But Glinda wheeled about, and cried out, “Oh Elphie!”

  The Witch did not turn. They never saw each other again.

  5

  She knew that she couldn’t afford the time to mount a full-scale chase against this Dorothy. Glinda ought to be hiring accomplices to track those shoes down; it was the least she could do, with her money and her connections. Still, the Witch stopped here and there along the Yellow Brick Road, and asked those taking an afternoon tipple at a roadside public house if they had seen a foreign girl in blue and white checks, walking with a small dog. There was some animated discussion as the patrons of the pub struggled to decide whether the green Witch intended the child harm—apparently the child had that rare skill of enchanting strangers—but when they had satisfied themselves that no harm was likely, they responded. Dorothy had come through a few days ago, and it was said that she had spent the night with someone a mile or two down the road, before continuing on. “The well-kept house with the yellow domed roof,” they said, “and the minaret-chimney. You can’t miss it.”

  The Witch found it, and she found Boq on a bench in the yard, dandling a baby on his knee.

  “You!” he said. “I know why you’re here! Milla, look, who’s here, come quickly! It’s Miss Elphaba, from Crage Hall! In the flesh!”

  Milla came, a couple of naked children clutching her apron strings. Flushed from laundry, she lifted her straggling hair out of her eyes and said, “Oh my, and we forgot to dress in our finery today. Look who’s come to laugh at us in our rustic state.”

  “Isn’t she something!” said Boq fondly.

  Milla had kept her figure, though there were four or five offspring in evidence, and no doubt more out of sight. Boq had gone barrel-chested, and his fine spiky hair had grown prematurely silver, giving him a dignity he had never had as an undergraduate. “We heard about your sister’s death, Elphie,” he said, “and we sent our condolences to your father. We didn’t know where you were. We heard you had come here following Nessie’s ascension to governor of Munchkinland, but we didn’t know where you went back to when you left. It’s good to see you again.”

  The sourness that she had felt over Glinda’s betrayal was ameliorated by Boq’s common courtesy and direct speech. She had always liked him, for his passion and for his sense. “You are a sight, you are,” she said.

  “Rikla, get up off that stool and let our guest have a seat,” said Milla to one of the children. “And Yellowgage, run to Uncle’s and borrow some rice and onions and yogurt. Hurry now, so I can start a meal.”

  “I won’t be staying, Milla, I’m in a hurry,” said the Witch. “Yellowgage, don’t bother. I’d love to spend some time, and catch up on all your news, but I’m trying to locate this girl stranger, who passed by here, someone said, and stayed a night or two.”

  Boq shoved his hands in his pockets. “Well, she did that, Elphie. What do you want with her?”

  “I want my sister’s shoes. They belong to me.”

  Boq seemed as surprised as Glinda had. “You weren’t ever into fancy trappings like society shoes,” he said.

  “Yes, well, perhaps I’m about to make my belated debut in Emerald City society at last, and have a coming-out ball.” But she was being tart with Boq, and didn’t want that. “It’s a personal matter, Boq; I want the shoes. My father made them and they’re mine now, and Glinda gave them to this girl without my permission. And woe betide Munchkinland if they fall into the Wizard’s hands. What is she like, this Dorothy?”

  “We adored her,” he said. “Plain and straightforward as mustard seed. She shouldn’t have any problems, although it’s a long walk for a child, from here to the Emerald City. But all who see her are bound to help her, I’d say. We sat up till the moon rose, chatting about her home, and Oz, and what she might expect on the road. She hasn’t traveled widely before this.”

  “How charming,” said the Witch. “How novel for her.”

  “Are you brewing one of your campaigns?” said Milla suddenly, cannily. “You know, Elphie, when you didn’t come back from the Emerald City with Glinda that time, everyone said you’d gone mad, and had become an assassin.”

  “People always did like to talk, didn’t they? That’s why I call myself a witch now: the Wicked Witch of the West, if you want the full glory of it. As long as people are going to call you a lunatic anyway, why not get the benefit of it? It liberates you from convention.”

  “You’re not wicked,” said Boq.

  “How do you know? It’s been so long,” said the Witch, but she smiled at him.

  Boq returned the smile, warmly. “Glinda used her glitter beads, and you used your exotic looks and background, but weren’t you just doing the same thing, trying to maximize what you had in order to get what you wanted? People who claim that they’re evil are usually no worse than the rest of us.” He sighed. “It’s people who claim that they’re good, or anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”

  “Like Nessarose,” said Milla meanly, but she was telling the truth, too, and they all nodded.

  The Witch took one of Boq’s children on her knee and clucked at it absentmindedly. She liked children no more than she ever had, but years of dealing with monkeys had given her an insight into the infant mentality she had never grasped before. The baby cooed and wet itself with pleasure. The Witch handed it back quickly before the wet could soak through her skirt.

  “Regardless of the shoes,” said the Witch, “do you think a child like that should be sent unarmed straight into the jaws of the Wizard? Has she been told what a monster he is?”

  Boq looked uncomfortable. “Well, Elphie, I don’t like speaking ill of the Wizard. I’m afraid there are too many pitchers with big ears in this community, and you never know who is on what side. Between you and me, I hope Nessa’s death will result in some sort of a sensible government, but if we are overrun with an invading army in two months I wouldn’t want it bruited about that I’d been bad-mouthing the invaders. And there are rumors of reunification.”

  “Oh, don’t tell me you’re hoping for that,” she said, “not you too.”

  “I’m not hoping for anything, except for peace and quiet,” he said. “I have enough trouble getting crops out of these rocky fields. That’s what I was in Shiz to learn, do you remember?—agriculture. I’ve put the best of my efforts into our small holdings, and we only manage to eke out a living.”

  But he looked rather proud about it, and so did Milla.

  “And I guess you have a couple of Cows in your barn,” said the Witch.

  “Oh, you’re testy. Of course we don’t. Do you think I could forget what we worked for—you and Crope and Tibbett and I? It was the high point of a very quiet life.”

  “You didn’t have to have a quiet life, Boq,” said the Witch.

  “Don’t be superior. I didn’t say I was sorry for it, neither the excitement of a righteous campaign nor the relief of a family and a farm. Did we ever do any good back then?”<
br />
  “If nothing else,” said the Witch, “we helped Doctor Dillamond. He was very much alone in his work, you know. And the philosophical basis for the resistance grew out of his pioneering hypotheses. His findings outlived him; they still do.” She did not mention her own experiments with the winged monkeys. Her practical applications were directly derived from Doctor Dillamond’s theories.

  “We had no idea we were at the end of a golden age,” Boq said, sighing. “When’s the last time you saw an Animal in the professions?”

  “Ah, don’t get me started,” the Witch said. She couldn’t stay seated.

  “Do you remember, you hoarded those notes of Dillamond’s. You never really let me know what they were all about. Did you make any use of them?”

  “I learned enough from his research to keep questioning,” said the Witch, but she felt bombastic, and wanted to stop talking. It made her feel too sad, too desperate. Milla saw this, and with a brusque charity declared, “Those times are over and gone, and good riddance to them, too. We were hopelessly high-spirited. Now we’re the thick-waisted generation, dragging along our children behind us and carrying our parents on our backs. And we’re in charge, while the figures who used to command our respect are wasting away.”

  “The Wizard doesn’t,” said the Witch.

  “Well, Madame Morrible does,” said Milla. “Or so Shenshen told me in her last letter.”

  “Oh?” said the Witch.

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Boq. “Though from her bed of pain Madame Morrible continues to advise our Emperor Wizard on policy matters about education. I’m surprised that Glinda didn’t send Dorothy to Shiz to study with Madame Morrible. Instead she directed her to the Emerald City.”

  The Witch could not picture Dorothy, but for a moment she saw the stooped figure of Nor. She saw a crowd of girls like Nor, in chains and yokes, drifting around Madame Morrible the way those schoolgirls had, all those years ago.