The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  In the back of the room, creeping with pretend invisibility so that she might observe, Madame Morrible shook her head and clucked. Once or twice she could not stop herself from interfering. “No dab hand in the sorcerer’s parlor I,” she would protest, “yet surely Miss Greyling you’ve omitted the steps to bind and convince? I’m merely asking. Let me try. You know I take a special pleasure in our training of sorceresses.” Inevitably Miss Greyling sat on what was left of a previous demonstration, or dropped her purse, collapsing into a heap of shame and mortification. The girls giggled, and didn’t feel that they were learning much.

  Or were they? The benefit of Miss Greyling’s clumsiness was that they were not afraid to try for themselves. And she didn’t stint at enthusiasm if a student managed to accomplish the day’s task. The first time Glinda was able to mask a spool of thread with a spell of invisibility, even for a few seconds, Miss Greyling clapped her hands and jumped up and down and broke a heel off her shoe. It was gratifying, and encouraging.

  “Not that I have any objection,” said Elphaba one day, when she and Glinda and Nessarose (and, inevitably, Nanny) sat under a pearlfruit tree by the Suicide Canal. “But I have to wonder. How does the university get away with teaching sorcery when its original charter was so strictly unionist?”

  “Well, there isn’t anything inherently either religious or nonreligious about sorcery,” said Glinda. “Is there? There isn’t anything inherently pleasure faithist about it either.”

  “Spells, changings, apparitions? It’s all entertainment,” said Elphaba. “It’s theatre.”

  “Well, it can look like theatre, and in the hands of Miss Greyling it often looks like bad theatre,” admitted Glinda. “But the gist of it isn’t concerned with application. It’s a practical skill, like—like reading and writing. It’s not that you can, it’s what you read or write. Or, if you’ll excuse the play on words, what you spell.”

  “Father disapproved mightily,” Nessarose said, in the dulcet tones of the unflappably faithful. “Father always said that magic was the sleight of hand of the devil. He said pleasure faith was no more than an exercise to distract the masses from the true object of their devotion.”

  “That’s a unionist talking,” said Glinda, not taking offense. “A sensible opinion, if what you’re up against is charlatans or street performers. But sorcery doesn’t have to be that. What about the common witches up in the Glikkus? They say that they magick the cows they’ve imported from Munchkinland so they don’t go mooing over the edge of some precipice. Who could ever afford to put a fence on every ledge there? The magic is a local skill, a contribution to community well-being. It doesn’t have to supplant religion.”

  “It may not have to,” said Nessarose, “but if it tends to, then have we a duty to be wary of it?”

  “Oh, wary, well, I’m wary of the water I drink, it might be poisoned,” said Glinda. “That doesn’t mean I stop drinking water.”

  “Well, I don’t even think it’s so big an issue,” said Elphaba. “I think sorcery is trivial. It’s concerned with itself mostly, it doesn’t lead outward.”

  Glinda concentrated very hard and tried to make Elphaba’s leftover sandwich elevate outward over the canal. She only succeeded in exploding the thing in a small combustion of mayonnaise and shredded carrot and chopped olives. Nessarose lost her balance laughing, and Nanny had to prop her up again. Elphaba was covered in bits of food, which she picked off herself and ate, to the disgust and laughter of everyone else. “It’s all effects, Glinda,” she said. “There’s nothing ontologically interesting about magic. Not that I believe in unionism either,” she protested. “I’m an atheist and an aspiritualist.”

  “You say that to shock and scandalize,” said Nessarose primly. “Glinda, don’t listen to a word of her. She always does this, usually to make Father irate.”

  “Father’s not around,” Elphaba reminded her sister.

  “I stand in for him and I am offended,” said Nessarose. “It’s all very well to turn your nose up at unionism when you have been given a nose by the Unnamed God. It’s quite funny, isn’t it, Glinda? Childish.” She looked spitting angry.

  “Father’s not around,” said Elphaba again, in a tone that verged on the apologetic. “You needn’t rush to public defense of his obsessions.”

  “What you term his obsessions are my articles of faith,” she said with a chilly clarity.

  “Well you’re not a bad sorceress, for a beginner,” said Elphaba, turning to Glinda. “That was a pretty good mess you made of my lunch.”

  “Thank you,” Glinda said. “I didn’t mean to pelt you with it. But I am getting better, aren’t I? And out in public.”

  “A shocking display,” Nessarose said. “That’s exactly what Father would have deplored about sorcery. The allure is all in the surface.”

  “I agree, it still tastes like olives,” Elphaba said, finding a clump of black olive in her sleeve and holding it out on the tip of her finger to her sister’s mouth. “Taste, Nessa?”

  But Nessarose turned her face away and lost herself in silent prayer.

  3

  A few days later Boq managed to catch Elphaba’s eye at the break of their life sciences class, and they met up in an alcove off the main corridor. “What do you think of this new Doctor Nikidik?” he asked.

  “I find it hard to listen,” she said, “but that’s because I still want to hear Doctor Dillamond and I can’t believe he’s gone.” On her face was a look of gray submission to impossible reality.

  “Well that’s one of the things I’m curious about,” he said. “You told me all about Doctor Dillamond’s breakthrough. Do you know if his lab has been cleared out yet? Maybe there’s something there worth finding. You took the notes for him, couldn’t they be the basis of some proposal, or at least some further study?”

  She looked at him with a wiry, strong expression. “Do you think I’m not way ahead of you?” she asked. “Of course I went tramping through there the day his body was found. Before anyone could lace up the door with padlocks and binding spells. Boq, do you take me for a fool?”

  “No, I don’t take you for a fool, so tell me what you found,” he said.

  “His findings are well hidden away,” she said, “and though there are colossal holes in my training, I am studying it on my own.”

  “You mean you’re not going to show me?” He was shocked.

  “It was never your particular interest,” she said. “Besides, until there’s something to prove, what’s the point? I don’t think Doctor Dillamond was there yet.”

  “I am a Munchkinlander,” he answered proudly. “Look, Elphie, you’ve more or less convinced me what the Wizard is up to. The confining of Animals back onto farms—to give the dissatisfied Munchkinlander farmers the impression he’s doing something for them—and also to provide forced labor for the sinking of useless new wells. It’s vile. But this affects Wend Hardings and the towns that sent me here. I have a right to know what you know. Maybe we can figure it out together, work to make a change.”

  “You have too much to lose,” she said. “I’m going to take this on myself.”

  “Take what on?”

  She only shook her head. “The less you know the better, and I mean for your sake. Whoever killed Doctor Dillamond doesn’t want his findings made public. What kind of a friend would I be to you if I put you at risk too?”

  “What kind of friend would I be to you if I didn’t insist?” he retorted.

  But she wouldn’t tell him. When he sat next to her during the rest of the class and passed her little notes, she ignored them all. Later he thought that they might have developed a genuine impasse in their friendship had the odd attack on the newcomer not occurred during that very session.

  Doctor Nikidik had been lecturing on the Life Force. Entwining around each wrist the two separate tendrils of his long straggly beard, he spoke in falling tones so that only the first half of each sentence made it to the back of the room. Hardly a single
student was following. When Doctor Nikidik took a small bottle from his vest pocket and mumbled something about “Extract of Biological Intention,” only the students in the front row sat up and opened their eyes. For Boq and Elphaba, and everyone else, the patter ran—“A little sauce for the soup mumble mumble, as if creation were an unconcluded mumble mumble mumble, notwithstanding the obligations of all sentient mumble mumble mumble, and so as a little exercise to make those nodding off in the back of the mumble mumble mumble, behold a little mundane miracle, courtesy of mumble mumble mumble.”

  A frisson of excitement had woken everyone up. The Doctor uncorked the smoky bottle and made a jerky movement. They could all see a small puff of dust, like an effervescence of talcum powder, jostle itself in a swimming plume in the air above the neck of the bottle. The Doctor rowed his hands a couple of times, to start the air currents eddying upward. Keeping some rare sort of spatial coherence, the plume began to migrate upward and over. The ooohs that the students were inclined to make were all postponed. Doctor Nikidik held a finger out to them to shush them, and they could tell why. A vast intake of breath would change the pattern of air currents and divert the floating musk of powder. But the students began to smile, despite themselves. Above the stage, amid the standard ceremonial stags’ horns and brass trumpets on braid, hung four oil portraits of the founding fathers of Ozma Towers. In their ancient garb and serious expressions they looked down on today’s students. If this “biological intention” were to be applied to one of the founding fathers, what would he say, seeing men and women students together in the great hall? What would he have to say about anything? It was a grand moment of anticipation.

  But when a door to the side of the stage opened, the mechanics of the air currents were disturbed. A student looked in, puzzled. A new student, oddly dressed in suede leggings and a white cotton shirt, with a pattern of blue diamonds tattooed on the dark skin of his face and hands. No one had seen him before, or anyone like him. Boq clutched Elphaba’s hand tightly and whispered, “Look! A Winkie!”

  And so it seemed, a student from the Vinkus, in strange ceremonial garb, coming late for class, opening the wrong door, confused and apologetic, but the door had shut behind him and locked from this side, and there were no nearby seats available in the front rows. So he dropped where he was and sat with his back against the door, hoping, no doubt, to look inconspicuous.

  “Drat and damn, the thing’s been shabbed off course,” said Doctor Nikidik. “You fool, why don’t you come to class on time?”

  The shining mist, about the size of a bouquet of flowers, had veered upward in a draft, and it bypassed the ranks of long-dead dignitaries waiting an unexpected chance to speak again. Instead it cloaked one of the racks of antlers, seeming for a few moments to hang itself on the twisting prongs. “Well, I can scarcely hope to hear a word of wisdom from them, and I refuse to waste any more of this precious commodity on classroom demonstrations,” said Doctor Nikidik. “The research is still incomplete and I had thought that mumble mumble mumble. Let you discover for yourselves if mumble mumble mumble. I should hardly wish to prejudice your mumble.”

  The antlers suddenly took a convulsive twist on the wall, and wrenched themselves out of the oaken paneling. They tumbled and clattered to the floor, to the shrieking and laughing of the students, especially because for a minute Doctor Nikidik didn’t know what the uproar was about. He turned around in time to see the antlers right themselves and wait, quivering, twitching, on the dais, like a fighting cock all nastied up and ready to go into the ring.

  “Oh well, don’t look at me,” said Doctor Nikidik, collecting his books, “I didn’t ask for anything from you. Blame that one if you must.” And he casually pointed at the Vinkus student, who was cowering so wide-eyed that the more cynical of the older students began to suspect this was all a setup.

  The antlers stood on their points and skittered, crablike, across the stage. As the students rose in a common scream, the antlers scrabbled up the body of the Vinkus boy and pinned him against the locked door. One wing of the rack caught him by the neck, shackling him in its V yoke, and the other reared back in the air to stab him in the face.

  Doctor Nikidik tried to move fast, and fell to his arthritic knees, but before he could right himself two boys were up on the stage, out of the front row, grabbing the antlers and wrestling them to the ground. The Vinkus boy shrieked in a foreign tongue. “That’s Crope and Tibbett!” said Boq, jouncing Elphaba in the shoulder, “look!” The sorcery students were all jumping on their seats and trying to lob spells at the murderous antlers, and Crope and Tibbett found their grips and lost them and found them again, until at last they succeeded in breaking off one driving tine, then another, and the pieces, still twitching, fell to the stage floor without further momentum.

  “Oh the poor guy,” said Boq, for the Vinkus student had slumped down and was volubly weeping behind his blue-diamonded hands. “I never saw a student from the Vinkus before. What an awful welcome to Shiz.”

  The attack on the Vinkus student provoked gossip and speculation. In sorcery the next day Glinda asked Miss Greyling to explain something. “How could Doctor Nikidik’s Extract of Biological Intention or whatever it was, how could it fall under the heading of life sciences when it behaved like a master spell? What really is the difference between science and sorcery?”

  “Ah,” said Miss Greyling, choosing this moment to apply herself to the care of her hair. “Science, my dears, is the systematic dissection of nature, to reduce it to working parts that more or less obey universal laws. Sorcery moves in the opposite direction. It doesn’t rend, it repairs. It is synthesis rather than analysis. It builds anew rather than revealing the old. In the hands of someone truly skilled”—at this she jabbed herself with a hair pin and yelped—“it is Art. One might in fact call it the Superior, or the Finest, Art. It bypasses the Fine Arts of painting and drama and recitation. It doesn’t pose or represent the world. It becomes. A very noble calling.” She began to weep softly with the force of her own rhetoric. “Can there be a higher desire than to change the world? Not to draw Utopian blueprints, but really to order change? To revise the misshapen, reshape the mistaken, to justify the margins of this ragged error of a universe? Through sorcery to survive?”

  At teatime, still awed and amused, Glinda reported Miss Greyling’s little heartfelt speech to the two Thropp sisters. Nessarose said, “Only the Unnamed God creates, Glinda. If Miss Greyling confuses sorcery with creation she is in grave danger of corrupting your morals.”

  “Well,” said Glinda, thinking of Ama Clutch on the bed of mental pain Glinda had once imagined for her, “my morals aren’t in the greatest shape to start out with, Nessa.”

  “Then if sorcery is to be helpful at all, it must be in reconstructing your character,” said Nessarose firmly. “If you apply yourself in that direction, I suspect it will be all right in the end. Use your talent at sorcery, don’t be used by it.”

  Glinda suspected that Nessarose might develop a knack for being witheringly superior. She winced in advance, even while taking Nessarose’s suggestion to heart.

  But Elphaba said, “Glinda, that was a good question. I wish Miss Greyling had answered it. That little nightmare with the antlers looked more like magic than science to me, too. The poor Vinkus fellow! Suppose we ask Doctor Nikidik next week?”

  “Who ever would have the courage to do that?” cried Glinda. “Miss Greyling is at least ridiculous. Doctor Nikidik, with that lovable bumbling mumbling incoherent way he has—he’s so distinguished.”

  At the life sciences lecture the following week, all eyes were on the new Vinkus boy. He arrived early and settled himself in the balcony, about as far from the lectern as he could get. Boq had the suspicion of nomads all settled farmers possessed. But Boq had to admit that the expression in the new boy’s eyes was intelligent. Avaric, sliding into the seat next to Boq, said, “He’s a prince, they say. A prince without a purse or a throne. A pauper noble. In his particular
tribe, I mean. He stays at Ozma Towers and his name is Fiyero. He’s a real Winkie, full-blood. Wonder what he makes of civilization?”

  “If that was civilization, last week, he must long for his own barbaric kind,” said Elphaba from the seat on the other side of Boq.

  “What’s he wearing such silly paint for?” said Avaric. “He only draws attention to himself. And that skin. I wouldn’t want to have skin the color of shit.”

  “What a thing to say,” said Elphaba. “If you ask me, that’s a shitty opinion.”

  “Oh please,” said Boq. “Let’s just shut up.”

  “I forgot, Elphie, skin is your issue too,” said Avaric.

  “Leave me out of this,” she said. “We just had lunch, and you give me dyspepsia, Avaric. You and the beans we had at lunch.”

  “I’m changing my seat,” warned Boq, but Doctor Nikidik came in just then, and the class rose to its feet in routine respect, then settled back noisily, chummily, chattering.

  For a few minutes Elphaba waved her hand to get the Doctor’s attention, but she was sitting too far back and he was burbling on about something else. She finally leaned over to Boq and said, “At the recess I’ll change my seat and go forward so he can see me.” Then the class watched as Doctor Nikidik finished his inaudible preamble and beckoned a student to open the same door at the side of the stage that Fiyero had stumbled through the previous week.

  In came a boy from Three Queens rolling a table like a tea tray. On it, crouched as if to make itself as small as possible, was a lion cub. Even from the balcony they could sense the terror of the beast. Its tail, a little whip the color of mashed peanuts, lashed back and forth, and its shoulders hunched. It had no mane to speak of yet, it was too tiny. But the tawny head twisted this way and that, as if counting the threats. It opened its mouth in a little terrified yawp, the infant form of an adult roar. All over the room hearts melted and people said “Awwwwww.”