The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  And then the sandy scrubland was domesticated by farm life. Overgrazed fields were dotted with cows, their withers shriveled and papery, their lowing desperate. An emptiness settled in the farmyards. Once Glinda saw a farm woman standing on her doorstep, hands sunk deep in apron pockets, face lined with grief and rage at the useless sky. The woman watched the carriage pass, and her face showed a yearning to be on it, to be dead, to be anywhere else other than on this carcass of a property.

  The farms gave way to deserted mills and abandoned granges. Then, abrupt and decisive, the Emerald City rose before them. A city of insistence, of blanket declaration. It made no sense, clotting up the horizon, sprouting like a mirage on the characterless plains of central Oz. Glinda hated it from the moment she saw it. Brash upstart of a city. She supposed it was her Gillikinese superiority asserting itself. She was glad of it.

  The carriage passed through one of the northern gates, and the scramble of life aroused itself again, but in an urban key, less restrained and self-forgiving than that of Shiz. The Emerald City was not amused by itself, nor did it consider amusement a proper attitude for a city. Its high self-regard sprang up in public spaces, ceremonial squares, parks and facades and reflecting pools. “How juvenile, how devoid of irony,” murmured Glinda. “The pomp, the pretension!”

  But Elphaba, who had passed through the Emerald City only once before, on her way up to Shiz, had no interest in architecture. She had her eyes glued on the people. “No Animals,” she said, “not so you can see, anyway. Maybe they have all gone underground.”

  “Underground?” said Glinda, thinking of legendary menaces like the Nome King and his subterranean colony, or dwarves in their mines in Glikkus, or the Time Dragon of the old myths, dreaming the world of Oz from his airless tomb.

  “In hiding,” said Elphaba. “Look, the poor—I mean are they the poor? The hungry of Oz? From the failed farms? Or is it just the—the surplus? The expendable human selvage? Look at them, Glinda, this is a real question. The Quadlings, having nothing, looked—more—than these—”

  Off the boulevard on which they rode branched alleys, where shelves of tin and cardboard served as roofs for the flood of indigents. Many of them were children, though some were the diminutive Munchkinlanders, and some were dwarves, and some were Gillikinese bowed with hunger and strain. The carriage moved slowly, and faces stood out. A Glikkun youth with no teeth and no feet or calves, on his stumpy knees in a box, begging. A Quadling—“Look, a Quadling!” said Elphaba, grabbing Glinda’s wrist. Glinda caught a glimpse of a ruddy brown woman in a shawl, lifting a small apple to the child in a sling around her neck. Three Gillikinese girls dressed like women for hire. More children in a pack, running and squealing like piglets, pressing up against a merchant, to pick his pockets. Rag merchants with pushcarts. Kiosk keepers whose goods lay locked beneath safety grilles. And a sort of civil army, if you could call it that, strolling in foursomes on every second or third street, brandishing clubs, angular with swords.

  They paid the carriage master and walked with their parcels of clothes toward the Palace. It rose, in stepped-back fashion, a growth of domes and minarets, high flared buttresses in green marble, blue agate screens in the recessed windows. Central and most prominent, the broad, gentle-browed canopies of the pagoda lifted over the Throne Room, covered with hammered scales of virgin gold, brilliant in the late afternoon gloom.

  Five days later they had made it past the gatekeeper, the receptionists, and the social secretary. They had sat for hours awaiting a three-minute interview with the Commander-General of Audiences. Elphaba, a hard, twisted look on her face, had managed to eject the words “Madame Morrible” from between her clamping lips. “Tomorrow at eleven,” said the Commander-General. “You will have four minutes between the Ambassador to Ix and the Matron of the Ladies’ Home Guard Social Nourishment Brigade. Dress code is formal.” He handed them a card of regulations that, being unequipped with courtly dress, they were obliged to ignore.

  At three the following afternoon (everything running late), the Ambassador to Ix left the Throne Room looking agitated and splenetic. Glinda fluffed the bedraggled feathers in her traveling hat for the eightieth time, and sighed, “Now you’re the one who says what should be said.” Elphaba nodded. To Glinda she looked tired, terrified, but strong, as if her form were knit with iron and whiskey instead of bones and blood. The Commander-General of Audiences appeared in the doorway of the waiting salon.

  “You have four minutes,” he said. “Do not approach until you are bade to do so. Do not speak until you are addressed. Do not venture a remark unless it is to answer a comment or question. You may refer to the Wizard as ‘Your Highness.’”

  “That sounds pretty regal to me. I thought that royalty had been—” But here Glinda elbowed Elphaba to make her shut up. Really, Elphaba had no common sense sometimes. They hadn’t come so far just to be turned away because of adolescent radicalism.

  The Commander-General took no notice. As they approached a set of tall double doors, carved with sigils and other occult hieroglyphs, the Commander-General mentioned, “The Wizard is not in a good humor today due to the reports of a riot in the Ugabu district in the north of Winkie Country. I should be prepared for what I find, were I you.” Two stoical doormen opened the doors then, and they passed through.

  But the throne did not lie before them. Instead, the antechamber led left, and through an archway there was another, but on a shifting axis to the right, and another beyond that, and another. It was like looking through a reflection of a corridor in mirrors set opposite each other; it veered inward. Or, thought Glinda, like processing through the narrowing, deviating chambers of a nautilus. They made a circuit through eight or ten salons, each slightly smaller than the other, each steeped in a curdled light that fell from leaded panes above. At last the antechambers concluded at an archway into a cavernous circular hall, higher than it was wide, and dark as a chapel. Antique wrought-iron stands held ziggurats of molded beeswax burning with a multitude of wicks, and the air was close and slightly floury. The Wizard was absent, though they saw the throne on a circular dais, inset emeralds gleaming dully in the candlelight.

  “He stepped out to use the toilet,” said Elphaba. “Well, we’ll wait.”

  They stood at the archway, not daring to venture farther without invitation.

  “If we only have four minutes, I hope this doesn’t count,” said Glinda. “I mean, it took us two minutes just to get from there to here.”

  “At this point—” said Elphaba, and then, “Shhhhh.”

  Glinda shhhhhhed. She didn’t think she heard anything, then she wasn’t sure. There was no change that she could identify in the gloom, but Elphaba looked like a pointer on alert. Her chin was out, her nose high and nostrils flared, her dark eyes squinting and widening.

  “What,” said Glinda, “what?”

  “The sound of—”

  Glinda heard no sounds, unless it was the hot air lifting from the flames into the chilly shadows between dark rafters. Or was it the rustle of silk robes? Was the Wizard approaching? She looked this way and that. No—there was a rustle, a sort of hiss, as of bacon rashers in a skillet. The candle flames suddenly all genuflected, obeisant to a sour wind that beat from the area of the throne.

  Then the dais was pelted with thick drops of rain, and a shudder of homegrown thunder blatted out, more dropped kitchen kettles than timpani. On the throne was a skeleton of dancing lights; at first Glinda thought lightning, but then she realized it was luminescent bones hitched together to suggest something vaguely human, or at least mammalian. The rib cage flexed open like two fretted hands, and a voice spoke in the storm, not from the skull but from the dark eye of the storm where the heart of the lightning creature should be, in the tabernacle of the rib cage.

  “I am Oz, the Great and Terrible,” it said, and shook the room with its related weather. “Who are you?”

  Glinda glanced at Elphaba. “Go on, Elphie,” she said, nudging her. But Elp
haba looked terrified. Well, of course, the rain. She had that thing about rainstorms.

  “Whooo arrrre youuuu?” bellowed the thing, the Wizard of Oz, whatever.

  “Elphie,” hissed Glinda. Then, “Oh, you useless thing, all talk and no—I’m Glinda from Frottica, if you please, Your Highness, descended matrilineally from the Arduennas of the Upland, and this if you please is Elphaba, the Thropp Third Descending from Nest Hardings. If you please.”

  “And if I don’t please?” said the Wizard.

  “Oh really, how like a child,” said Glinda under her breath. “Elphie, come on, I can’t say why we’re here!”

  But the banal comment of the Wizard’s seemed to snap Elphaba out of her terror. Staying where she was at the edge of the room, gripping Glinda’s hand for support, Elphaba said, “We’re students of Madame Morrible at Crage Hall in Shiz, Your Highness, and we’re in possession of some vital information.”

  “We are?” said Glinda. “Thanks for telling me.”

  The small rain seemed to let up a bit, though the room stayed dark as an eclipse. “Madame Morrible, that paragon of paradoxes,” said the Wizard. “Vital information of her, I wonder?”

  “No,” said Elphaba. “That is, it is not for us to interpret what we hear. Gossip is unreliable. But—”

  “Gossip is instructive,” said the Wizard. “It tells which way the wind is blowing.” The wind then blew in the direction of the girls, and Elphaba danced back to avoid being spattered. “Go ahead, girls, gossip.”

  “No,” said Elphaba. “We’re here on more important business.”

  “Elphie!” said Glinda. “Do you want to get us thrown in prison?”

  “Who are you to decide what is important business?” roared the Wizard.

  “I keep my eyes open,” said Elphaba. “You didn’t call us here to ask for our gossip; we came with our own agenda.”

  “How do you know I didn’t call you here?”

  Well, they didn’t know, especially after whatever it was had happened to them at tea with Madame Morrible. “Scale down, Elphie,” whispered Glinda, “you’re making him mad.”

  “So what?” Elphaba said. “I’m mad.” She spoke up again. “I have news of the murder of a great scientist and a great thinker, Your Highness. I have news of important discoveries that he was making, and their suppression. I have every interest in the pursuit of justice and I know you do too, so that the amazing revelations of Doctor Dillamond will help you to reverse your recent judgments on the rights of Animals—”

  “Doctor Dillamond?” said the Wizard. “Is that all this is about?”

  “It is about an entire population of Animals systematically deprived of their—”

  “I know of Doctor Dillamond and I know of his work,” said the glowing bones of the Wizard, snorting. “Derivative, unauthenticated, specious garbage. What you’d expect of an academic Animal. Predicated on shaky political notions. Empiricism, quackery, tomfoolery. Cant, rant, and rhetoric. Were you taken in perhaps by his enthusiasm? His Animal passion?” The skeleton danced a jig, or perhaps it was a twitch of disgust. “I know of his interests and his findings. I know little of what you call his murder and I care less.”

  “I am not a slave to emotions,” Elphaba said sternly. She was pulling papers from her sleeve, where she had apparently rolled them up around her arm. “This is not propaganda, Your Highness. This is a well-argued Theory of Consciousness Inclination, is what he calls it. And you will be amazed to learn of his discoveries! No right-thinking ruler can afford to ignore the implica—”

  “That you presume me to be right-thinking is touching,” said the Wizard. “You may drop the things where you stand. Unless you prefer to approach?” The lightning-marionette grinned and stretched out its arms. “My pet?”

  Elphaba dropped the papers. “Good, my Lord,” she said in a piercing, pretentious voice, “I shall take you to be right-thinking, for did I not, I should be obliged to join an army against you.”

  “Oh hell, Elphie,” said Glinda, then more loudly, “she doesn’t speak for the both of us, Your Highness, I’m an independent person here.”

  “Please,” said Elphaba, at once hard and soft, proud and pleading. Glinda realized she had never before witnessed Elphaba wanting anything. “Please, sir. The hardship on the Animals is more than can be borne. It isn’t just the murder of Doctor Dillamond. It’s this forced repatriation, this—this chattelizing of free Beasts. You must get out and see the sorrow. There is talk of—there is worry that the next step will be slaughter and cannibalism. This isn’t merely youthful outrage. Please, sir. This is not untrammeled emotion. What’s happening is immoral—”

  “I do not listen when anyone uses the word immoral,” said the Wizard. “In the young it is ridiculous, in the old it is sententious and reactionary and an early warning sign of apoplexy. In the middle-aged, who love and fear the idea of moral life the most, it is hypocritical.”

  “If not immoral, then what word can I use to imply wrong?” said Elphaba.

  “Try mysterious and then relax a little. The thing is, my green girlie, it is not for a girl, or a student, or a citizen to assess what is wrong. This is the job of leaders, and why we exist.”

  “But then nothing would keep me from assassinating you, did I not know what wrong was.”

  “I don’t believe in assassination, I don’t even know what it means,” Glinda called. “Yoo hoo. I’m going to take my leave now while I’m still alive.”

  “Wait,” said the Wizard. “I have something to ask you.”

  They stood still. They stood for minutes. The skeleton fingered its ribs, played them like the brittle strings of a harp. Music like stones turning over in a streambed. The skeleton collected its lighted teeth from its jaws and juggled them. Then it tossed them at the seat of the throne, where they exploded in candy-colored flashes. The rain was running down a drain in the floor, Glinda noticed.

  “Madame Morrible,” said the Wizard. “Agent provocateur and gossip, crony and companion, teacher and minister. Tell me why she sent you here.”

  “She didn’t,” said Elphaba.

  “Do you even know the meaning of the word pawn?” shrieked the Wizard.

  “Do you know what resistance means?” Elphaba shot back.

  But the Wizard only laughed instead of killing them on the spot. “What does she want of you?”

  Glinda spoke up; it was about time. “A decent education. For all her bombastic ways she’s a capable administrator. It can’t be easy.” Elphaba was staring at her with a queer, slanted look.

  “Has she brought you in—?”

  Glinda didn’t quite understand. “We’re only sophisters. We have only begun to specialize. I in sorcery, Elphaba in life sciences.”

  “I see.” The Wizard seemed to consider. “And after you graduate next year?”

  “I suppose I’ll go back to Frottica and get married.”

  “And you?”

  Elphaba didn’t answer.

  The Wizard turned itself around, broke off its femurs, and pounded the seat of the throne as if it were a kettledrum. “Really, this is getting ridiculous, it’s all pleasure faith showbiz,” said Elphaba. She took a step or two forward. “Excuse me, Your Highness? Before our time is up?”

  The Wizard turned back. Its skull was on fire, a fire not quenched by the thickening curtain of rain. “I shall say one last thing,” the Wizard ventured, in a voice like a groan, a voice of one in pain. “I shall quote from the Oziad, the hero tale of ancient Oz.”

  The girls waited.

  The Wizard of Oz recited:

  “Then hobbling like a glacier, old Kumbricia

  Rubs the naked sky till it rains with blood.

  She tears the skin off the sun and eats it hot.

  She tucks the sickle moon in her patient purse.

  She bears it out, a full-grown changeling stone.

  Shard by shard she rearranges the world.

  It looks the same, she says, but it is not.

>   It looks as they expect, but it is not.

  “Beware whom you serve,” said the Wizard of Oz. Then he was gone, and the gutters in the floor gurgled, and the candles went instantly out. There was nothing for them to do but retrace their steps.

  At the carriage, Glinda had settled in and made a little nest for them in the desirable forward-facing seat, guarding Elphaba’s place against three other passengers. “My sister,” she lied, “I am saving this seat for my sister.” And how I have changed, she thought, in a year and some. From despising the colored girl to claiming we are blood! So university life does change you in ways you cannot guess. I may be the only person in all the Pertha Hills ever to meet our Wizard. Not on my own steam, not of my initiative—still, I was there. I did it. And we’re not dead.

  But we didn’t accomplish much.

  Then, there was Elphie, at last, barreling along the paving stones with her elbows jutting and her thin bony torso swathed against the elements, as usual, in a cape. She came up through the crowd, batting at more refined passengers to get past, and Glinda shoved open the door. “Thank heavens, I thought you’d be late,” she said. “The driver is eager to leave. Did you get a lunch for us?”

  Elphaba tossed in her lap a couple of oranges, a hunk of unrepentant cheese, and a loaf of bread that filled the compartment with pungent staleness. “This’ll have to do you till your stop this evening,” she said.

  “Me, me?” said Glinda. “What do you mean, me? Have you got something better to eat for yourself?”

  “Something worse, I expect,” said Elphaba, “but needs to be done. I’ve come to say good-bye. I’m not going back with you to Crage Hall. I’ll find a place to study on my own. I’ll not be part of—Madame Morrible’s—school—again—”

  “No, no,” cried Glinda, “I can’t let you! Nanny will eat me alive! Nessarose will die! Madame Morrible will—Elphie, no. No!”

  “Tell them I kidnapped you and made you come here, they’ll believe that of me,” said Elphaba. She stood on the mounting tread. A fat Glikkun female dwarf, having caught the gist of the drama, shifted to the more comfortable seat next to Glinda. “They needn’t look for me, Glinda, for I’m not going to be findable. I’m going down.”