The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  “Didn’t you see a doctor? Anyone propose it might have been a stroke?” He wasn’t being tender, just comprehensive. “Probably your mental gears just slipped. It happens to the feeble.”

  “Those who don’t know the concept of medicine don’t think to consult physicians.”

  He tried a more soothing voice. It came out snide. “A little therapy, or a stiff drink, and maybe the memory of your past life would return.”

  “Maybe,” she replied. “But I don’t believe in past lives.”

  “Any twinges about your lost childhood? Snatches of déjà vu, that sort of thing? Did you ever pick up something silly and common like, oh, bootlaces or, or…butter rolls…and stare at them in case they jogged your mind about your past?”

  “I didn’t imagine the past, yet, so I didn’t miss it. It was as if I was freshly minted as a senior. Some are born blind, some cranky, some superior. Some”—and she waggled a finger at him—“are born green. I was born old. Old I came into the world, and older still will I leave it, if I can ever figure out how.”

  He wrote in his notebook: Claims to have amnesia about her youth. Dotty? Honest? Clever? Canny strategy to avoid her legal liabilities?

  “We’re here to do some discovery about your relationship with the Thropps,” he said. “Can we continue?”

  “I thought you said it was Madame Morrible’s connections you were tracking down.”

  “Madame Morrible. The Thropp sisters. There is some overlap, as you bloody well know. Now just start where you can, and I’ll cut you off if you ramble.”

  “I don’t think I like you,” she said, “but since this is nearly a posthumous tea party to which I’ve been invited, maybe it doesn’t matter if I like you or not.”

  “You came from your coffin to talk to me,” he reminded her. “You must have had something to tell me now, right? Got some beef you’re eager to turn into hash. I’m your willing audience. I’m all ears, I am.”

  She cocked her head sharply. She wasn’t befuddled in the slightest. She just didn’t like him. It showed loud and clear. Not that he cared. He was only doing his job. “Get on with it, before those army boots start tramping back this way,” he said.

  Was she ready to talk? She thought it over. Would she inadvertently give something away before she had finished vetting the Lion for a possible ally? So far he didn’t look promising. Sitting before her, waxing his mane with spittle, twirling it into points. She could hear the motion, her ears were that keen. He was behaving like a pantomime villain training his mustachios.

  Maybe he was only a ruse, a warm-up. Maybe she’d emerged from her clammy bier for the one who would follow this oily character.

  Oracle though she was, she couldn’t see in front of her own nose.

  • 2 •

  BRRR TAPPED his pencil. Patience wasn’t his strong suit. Still, he was trying to listen to her with the severity of attention she had paid to him.

  WITH A plain demeanor, I could sidle by unnoticed. I had no charm to speak of. The older woman talking to herself in some gutter isn’t an uncommon sight, and passersby rarely bother to interrupt her.

  I found it useful staying a bit unwashed. No one wants to look too closely at someone wrapped in strong body odors. That made it easier to sidle along in the background, to watch slit-eyed and sideways at the goings-on of a crowd. To size up a mark. To pick up what I could about this mystery of my existence.

  So I stumped about Shiz. I kept my eyes down and my ears open and, for the time being, my big mouth shut.

  These were the days before the Wizard arrived—yes, get your pen, I’m going to be as specific as I can, though the patterns of politics always eluded me. But now I know enough to realize that I emerged from my first sleep into the halcyon last days of the line of Ozma. Though halcyon is never so sweet as memory makes it.

  Vain Pastorius was squatting upon the throne as the Ozma Regent. He ruled in the Emerald City in the stead of his infant daughter, the Ozma Tippetarius. He was a piece of work. Dim, bullnose-chinned Pastorius. What is this in human time? Fifty, fifty-five years ago? Being born without any childhood to speak of—my “olden days” have a different meaning than yours!—I never could master time. It seems a long while ago, anyway. Pastorius, that old fool. Both sybaritic and syphilitic. Cocooned in silk, drunk on compliments warbled by his ass-licking courtiers. Those were days of expensive balls in the court proper, and of bawdy carnivals of patriotic sentiment outside the palace walls. To distract the urban poor from the deprivations of the Great Drought, about which no one could do a thing.

  THOSE DAYS,” she asserted. “You wouldn’t remember. You weren’t whelped yet.”

  “Tell me. I’m all ears.” He listened like a doe just noticing a leopard on a limb.

  “You want the three historic segments of my earthly life? I’ve lived through a good deal of these modern times, if you can call it living. I’d arrived, preaged and preshrunk, a crone at birth, just at the end of the Ozma regency, before Pastorius was deposed by the Wizard and the infant Ozma was secreted away, probably murdered.

  “Then came the Wizardic reign. Nearly four decades of the Great Head, as power consolidated in the Emerald City. Animals were disenfranchised of their rights; and the green shrike of a witch, Elphaba Thropp, flew the skies in agitation. Her sister, Nessarose, presided over the breakaway state of Munchkinland.

  “Following the Wizard’s abdication of the Throne, the brief and blameless twin interregnums—first of Lady Glinda, that bottle blonde, and then of the so-called Scarecrow, who came to power and left it again faster than a pile of autumn kindling responds to a winter torch.

  “The torch of piety, that is, as wielded by Shell, the Apostle Emperor. Younger brother of Elphaba and Nessarose. He swore he was divinely positioned by the Unnamed God. For all I know he is his, he is his—” She nearly gagged at the thought, and rotated her hand in the air, a forward roll. “He is history.”

  Brrr didn’t want to lead her on, to give her anything to work with, if she was indeed an oracle. Let her show facility with those unholy talents. Yet he was curious, too; he couldn’t help saying, “The Emperor Shell is still on the Throne in the Emerald City. No opposition to his royal prerogatives allowed.”

  “But of course. Who can gainsay a prince personally chosen by the Unnamed God?”

  He nodded: go on.

  I HEARD ABOUT current events, naturally. Shiz is a university town from way back, and undergraduates reading history do blather so.

  I minded my own business on the pavement—well, begging a little, picking pockets, too, for I saw that was how common folk fed themselves. I figured out that inventing little prophecies—doling out appealing lies—brought in some cash.

  I bought my bread and beer from the small change I could earn by pretending to be a seer. I was persuasive enough, a competent liar, and I looked the part, so I developed a clientele. I wore a shawl, like Yackle Snarling. I had fun worrying my hair into a nest of scowls. When I had put a small purse aside I took a room above a tonsorial parlor and I invested in a line of herbal comforts. Limited-liability curses, bogus love charms and the like. I traded only in minor hexes, for I wanted no trouble with the constabulary.

  It was fun for a while. I examined tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. I studied the crow’s feet on either side of a spinster’s face and I made up some nonsense about strangers and romance. I never could figure out why romance is so desirable, having felt nothing of the sort myself. Maybe because I was desiccated in that department. With no eggs to hatch, I had no reason to kiss and canoodle, and no appetite for it, either. But those with an experience of canoodling seem reluctant to leave the possibility behind, even when their romantic prospects are limited due to the insults of aging. Onset of severe personal ugliness.

  Then I got in a spot of trouble. A local brouhaha, nothing you need worry yourself about. I made a bad investment prediction and a couple of Shiz financiers who were trembling on the edge of ruin fell into it. When the
ir goons came after me with a vengeance, I developed a sudden yen to see the other sights of Oz. So I considered lighting out for the Emerald City, which, while still being built, was already the biggest conurbation in Oz. Finding me there would take some doing, and I hoped they wouldn’t manage it. Still, you have found me. A goon on whose payroll?

  BRRR THOUGHT: Is she just making this up because of my own admission of being morally obtuse as a cub? Trying to soften me up by saying, see, we’re equally untethered to conventions of right and wrong?

  A court reporter’s first job, though, is to report what is said. Let someone else authenticate it. Someone with more to lose. Hah—as if there were such a creature.

  “Very interesting,” he said, and made some notes. Then he regarded them dubiously. He had invented a shorthand all his own to compensate for his inability to hold a pen in the human style—wrong muscle groups for that. But sometimes he couldn’t read his own scrawl. He hoped he wouldn’t come a cropper when it was time to dictate to his transcriber back in the Emerald City court stenographers’ bullpen. She’d slap his face, and her colleagues would snort and titter. The flatheads.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” he said. “I had asked about when and how you first came in touch with the Thropp family. When you became aware of them. And I’m trying to find out why your name was scribbled in the notes left in the archives of a clandestine Wizardic operative named Madame Morrible.”

  “One has to start somewhere,” she replied. “Because I developed a reputation for clairvoyance in the demimonde of Oz, I attracted the attention of a family retainer of the Thropp contingent. It all goes back to that.”

  “Still, can we get to the point? I haven’t been tracking the progress of the military units around here, but if the skirmishes around us heat up, the Emerald City Messiars or the Munchkinlanders may need to fall back to regroup. I wouldn’t be surprised if this House is commandeered for a garrison by nightfall. I plan to be finished up and on my way before that happens. I have no interest in hobnobbing with soldiers. Not my type.”

  “Don’t bully me,” she snapped.

  He straightened up. This was one of the nicest things that had been said to him since his release from custody. “The Thropp family,” he insisted.

  “You next,” she said. “This is a bargain, remember? What happened when you debuted in property society? Civilization and its malcontents?”

  The Lion’s voice was testy. “You are under order of the Emerald City Court of Magistrates to comply with my request for information. I don’t have to answer your nosy questions. I’m done auditioning for you. I’ve said all I have to say.”

  “You didn’t tell me if you ever found the soldier’s father. As you promised. Do you keep your promises? I’m merely asking.”

  “You think you can shame me? You’ll have to work harder than that.”

  “Shame you? Hardly. I have no capacity for that,” she said. “No capacity and no interest. I’m not involved in shame. Morals are learned in childhood, and I didn’t have any such holiday called childhood. I’m merely curious.”

  • 3 •

  THEY SAT in silence, both of them unwilling to yield, and after a while a maunt came in. She carried a plate piled with rye brisks smeared with a paste made of ground tadmuck and onions. Neither Yackle nor Brrr thanked her—neither was willing to be the first to show the weakness inherent in courtesy.

  While the maunt fussed about with napkins and condiments, Brrr listened to the world.

  The Mauntery of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows sat only a little distance from a forest of oakhair trees. Brrr knew that the higher branches of the mature oakhair tree developed long tendrils. In early autumn, the tendrils produced dense little acorns that swung until, finally, they were heavy enough to snap off and drop to the ground for seeding. Before they fell, though, the weight they exerted pulled their long threadlike stems tighter and tighter. When the wind arose from the south, if it ran close enough to the earth, it could produce a sound as of thrummed harp strings. A kind of foresty moan. Lurlina, or whatever damn goddess was responsible for the development of flora in Oz, hadn’t bothered to tune the oakhair’s reproductive system. The sound was less like an orchestra agreeing on a common pitch and more like a bevy of banshees considering what creature to feast upon for their supper.

  The sostenuto lingered. The transparent cat began to vibrate slightly, as if in sympathy, like the ringing of a wineglass struck with the blade of a knife. The noise an ornamental paperweight might make if it could purr.

  The maunt left, closing the door soundlessly behind her, no doubt vexed that she’d been able to overhear nothing of the interview. The wind pulled longer, half-strangled moans out of the forest, until, to drown out the noise if nothing else, Brrr caved at last, and spoke first.

  “I hate that sound.”

  “What sound is that?” asked Yackle, pawing on the floor for a biscuit she had dropped.

  “The oakhair chorus. Can’t you hear it? I thought the blind developed keener hearing as compensation.”

  “I can’t hear it. I have other compensations,” she said. “Like a sense of taste. I don’t suppose that helpmeet supplied us with any gin? I found this little snack offensive.”

  “Only water, I’m afraid. I could do with some ale.”

  “You say,” said Yackle, “that your emergence into Traum was your first experience outside of the Forest. Are you sure of that?”

  “No,” he replied. “It’s even been suggested to me that I could have wandered out when I was too young to perceive it. So what? That’s as good as if it hadn’t happened, right?”

  “Perhaps,” she answered. “Or not.”

  “You might well have had a childhood yourself,” he said. “Suppose you lived eighty years of some life choked with drama and feeling, and then you had a stroke or some other illness. When you came around, in that basement in Shiz, you were like a child again. The slate wiped clean. It’s been known to happen to the elderly, Animals as well as people.”

  “No, no,” she replied. “Even those whose memories are corrupted by illness still have their pasts pocketed somewhere. But I have nothing to remember—no childhood to flee from. Don’t you understand? I think that’s why I can see the future—to the extent that I can. I suppose it’s your principle of compensation. I can’t remember the past, so I can remember the future.”

  “All right, then. Prove it to me. Remember for me what is going to happen to me when I get back to the Emerald City with the information they want. Which you’re about to give me.”

  He was playing with fire, but what was there left to lose? Not dignity—he couldn’t lose face with this harridan, who couldn’t see his face to begin with—or could see it all too clearly. One or the other.

  “You don’t really want to know.”

  “Or are you the scam artist that most oracles are? Look, I gave you my shame, which you asked for. Tell me about the Thropps, then. The Thropps.” He tapped his pencil on the notepad. “Or are you losing memory capacity so fast? The bucket leaking while we sit here? Your past draining away?”

  “If I only had a past. I have no past.”

  He grinned at her, wondering if she could intuit an expression. “And if I don’t get what I’m looking for, I have no future. So begging your pardon, can we hurry it up?”

  • 4 •

  HE WATCHED as she descended into what memories she had. The poor old macaroon. What possible good could come of her in the end? Of any of us, he amended.

  Did her memories sting and surprise, as that sudden recollection of a cage had done, coming over him in Traum at the height of the troll massacre? And returning to him now. Always a cage, no?

  I REMEMBER MORE than you think.

  I can’t always tell what it means, though. Every oracle is a scam artist, even those with talent.

  My departure from Shiz. Under cover of night I packed up what little I owned and I spent my last coin on a midnight carriage to the Em
erald City.

  The journey—it means nothing to your investigation. But I do remember sucking on the edge of my lace shawl, to savor a taste of potato stew I had trailed the garment through. I was at wit’s end. I was spooked by the challenge of the Emerald City, but I desired it, too. I hoped I could glean something from some other old crone at a bingo parlor or a chapel testimonial. Maybe I could hear that someone else had been born old. Then I might learn why I was so blighted.

  I can feel you sneering in sympathy. You think effeminate beasts are the only ones who don’t know their places?

  So I came to the Emerald City to find my fortune, a toddler in the body of an octogenarian. I was astounded at the capital city’s noise and breadth and stink and lights and attitude.

  The Emerald City, so called, wasn’t hugely emerald yet. It was more like a work in progress. Its name was a developer’s advertisement looking for investors. The green jewels being dug up in the Glikkus mines adorned only the Palace. The urban squalor around the Throne house looked like a heap of pigsties. Nonetheless, the Emerald City was beginning to practice the art of self-squawk.

  Eventually, I saved up enough of my little pilferings and filchments to launch a new practice. I’d learned my lesson, though. No more financial advice. And I wouldn’t take on a client unless she—it is nearly always a she who cares about the future, isn’t it?—unless she promised not to call in the authorities if my reading provoked some catastrophe or other. In such an event, I declared, I’d consider myself released from our contract and I’d have to lower a chastening spell upon her.

  I hadn’t any such talent at spells, mind you—I was never a witch of any stripe—but my talent for lying proved useful. Clients always acceded to my conditions. They were so greedy to know things.