And as I peered at them, and as I struggled to see the ways that they could lie to me as well as to themselves, I found out new things about them. And about myself.
Without a childhood, you see, I had to lightfinger an education from someone.
Don’t glare so. I can hear you glaring. Yes, the Thropps. I’m getting there.
In my third year at work in the EC—old Pastorius was still in power, parading his baby Ozma up and down the Ozma Embankment—I had a visit one cold autumn afternoon from a middle-aged domestic. Her name, she said, was Cattery Spunge, but she was known around the estate as Nanny. Well-upholstered in the rump and cushiony of bosom—professional attributes as a governess, I guess.
She liked saying estate, she adored saying she was known. She wore her affectations of gentility like so many foxfur castoffs of her lady employer.
It came out soon enough that this Cattery Spunge had served as overseer to several generations of a prominent family. The clan was headed by the Eminence of Munchkinland known at home as Peerless Thropp or, when in government circles, the Eminent Thropp.
Yes, we’ve reached the Thropp family at last.
Cattery Spunge brought with her a small pot of common ferns. She pushed it across the table toward me as I was clearing away lunch. Scraps of congealed tar-root and mash, I’m afraid. Proof of my humble station. “I don’t barter,” I said at the sight of the fern. “I take cash only.”
“It’s not a present,” said Cattery Spunge. “Nor a bribe. Nanny wouldn’t stoop to bribery.”
I left it where it was. Green things tended to wither in my company. Milk sours, children cry, cats develop hairballs. I’d have made one hell of a mother, believe me.
“Go on,” I said to her, refusing to touch the plant.
She fussed at the clasp of a garish carpetbag, making sure I saw the handsome obsidian rings on her chafed hands.
Not too old for romance, I guessed, though beyond child-bearing years. Not twitchy enough to be in legal trouble. Too stout to be vexed by a wasting illness. “An eminence named Peerless Thropp,” I said, to get a hold of anything. “I’m not quite sure about eminences. I have never been to Munchkinland.”
“An eminence is the senior member of the local governing family. Munchkinland has maybe a dozen or so established families, don’t you know, and the Thropps are the most prominent. The Eminent Thropp is superior in station to all other Munchkinlander gentry. I believe the term Eminence is specific to Munchkinland, though I can’t be certain. I have never traveled much. Happy at home, you see.” She grimaced. “Quite happy indeed.”
So we were getting somewhere. “Peerless Thropp is still alive—?”
“Yes. A widower. So he’s the Eminent Thropp. More or less the governor of Munchkinland. One daughter, Lady Partra, who married and bore two daughters of her own, Sophelia Thropp and Melena Thropp. I helped raise them both. The former went mad, in the most respectable way, and is housed offstage. The latter, Melena, I did with what I could. High spirits, that one.”
A decayed gentlewoman of loose morals, I inferred. “Go on.”
“Melena could have had anyone, but she suffered chronically from spite. To vex her family was her chiefest aim. She refused an alliance with another eminence’s son, as Lady Partra had proposed. Instead, Melena eloped with a minister of the unionist faith. The husband is far beneath her. Frexspar, his name. As if it matters. As if he matters. Stationed in the hardscrabble outback of Wend Hardings.”
Yes, I remember this all. As if it were yesterday. But you must consider that my mind wasn’t stuffed with eighty years of my own memories. There was little to displace.
The Nanny enjoyed reciting genealogies. “Melena is the Thropp Second Descending, you see—she will become Eminence when her grandfather and her mother are both dead. The honor passes through the female line, just as with the Ozmas. This is assuming, of course, that her mad Aunt Sophelia doesn’t rap out a claim to the title and the family seat, et cetera. Few think she’s capable,” observed Nanny, “but in any instance she has no issue, so sooner or later the title will revert to Melena Thropp.”
All this palaver. “Why have you come, Miss Spunge?”
“Call me Nanny.”
I resisted the invitation. She continued. “My sweet Melena, the Thropp Second Descending, is still young and fertile. I want some salve, some charm, some hedge to ensure that any second child would be born—without blemish.”
“The first child?” I said.
“Elphaba,” said Nanny.
A chill ran through me. I who hadn’t known chills before. I didn’t ordinarily deal in medical charms. “A serious blemish, I’m guessing, or you wouldn’t be here.”
She nodded. A tear fell, and I knew it to be genuine.
I continued. “They put the unhappy infant out of its misery, I assume.”
“Hardly. As if they could. That child has a will stronger than springtime.”
“Her infirmity, then? You must be blunt if I am to be of help.”
Nanny pushed the potted fern closer. “Green. Skin as rich as that. I brought this so you could see. The child is a year old now, poor dreadful thing. I don’t ask you for a corrective for her condition—only for a prophylactic to save Melena Thropp, her mother, against a repeat disaster. To benefit a second child, not Elphaba. Elphaba is condemned to sorrow.”
“Elphaba is condemned to nothing,” I found myself saying. “Nothing is written for her, which means everything is possible.”
I looked at the fern, which did not wither back at me.
“That’s a fancy opinion,” said the family retainer, but I could see she was a bit shaken. “Nanny expected something more in the line of an herbal remedy. Not a prophecy.”
“This is not a restaurant. You take what’s on offer,” I said, but I was surprised at my vehemence, too.
“As long as you’re feeling prophetic, why not push it a little bit further?” she asked. “I mean, a Nanny’s job is to prepare for all eventualities, so it would be useful to know what to look out for. Plagues, boyfriends, the rotten tread in the tower stairs, that sort of thing.”
I was torn at the audacious request. Who was I? A scioness of nothing—without an evident mother, I wasn’t even a bastard. Having anything to do with a prominent family seemed risky from the start. Still, I was intrigued. I wasn’t given to vaulty sorts of sentiments, but the report of a green girl had captured my attention. I felt a little bit of a one-off myself—perhaps there was a kinship effect.
“I will need to have something to hold,” I said, playing for time while my mind raced.
Nanny put her hands in her satchel. At first I thought she meant merely to remove them from the tabletop so I wouldn’t get any ideas. Then I saw she was fussing about. “I suspected as much,” she said. “I came prepared. This isn’t my first visit to an oracle, you know.”
“Why didn’t you go back to the oracle you’d seen before?”
“She died, alas, when a marble bust of Pastorius fell off its pillar and brained her.” The Nanny got to the punch line first. “Yes, yes, if she didn’t see it coming, one questions her professional skills. So she probably deserved to die.”
I snorted to be polite, yet not so loudly as to impugn my colleague, may she rest in peace. Whatever that might be like.
“Still,” said the Nanny, continuing to rummage about, “who of us really can see our own deaths coming?”
I didn’t know back then that this would be a problem of mine decades hence: that I couldn’t find my own death. “Have you got anything in there?” I asked.
The Nanny withdrew some prettily carved beads, ivory or the like, and a golden garter worked with repoussé trim. “The beads were made by Melena’s husband, the minister,” she said. “They’re inscribed with symbols of the Unnamed God, I’m told. To me they look like denomination emblems from foreign monetary systems, but what do I know. Like I said, I haven’t traveled much.”
I took the beads. They felt cool and
aloof in my hands, and spoke nothing to me. If I’d hoped for a jolt of spiritual connection, I was disappointed. “Let’s see the garter,” I said. “And this belongs to your Ladyship?”
“Did. Does. That is…” And here the Nanny began to blush, remembering I was supposed to be a truth-teller. “I came away with it in my belongings, somehow, last time I visited,” she admitted. Meaning she stole it. I nodded without disapproval; I wasn’t above theft myself, though it was the edible thing rather than the beautiful that I usually lifted.
I felt it, to little benefit. The woman who wore such a decorated legging expected her legs to be explored by admirers. That was all, and I’d already figured out as much. I handed it back. “Is there nothing else?”
“Oh, you are good,” said the client. “Here you go.” Next she fished out a small bottle made of green glass with a cork stopper in it. It stood so-high, about, and a paper label was affixed to the front. Yes, I remember what it said; give me a moment. It read MIRACLE ELIXIR.
“You have miracle elixirs, so what are you coming to me for?” I asked.
“I need all the help I can get,” she replied.
I picked at the label with my finger and some of it came off. A scrap of paper at the end of the word, showing part of the ornately inscribed X and IR—XIR, it looked like, or—LIR. I examined the dried glue on the back, as if it might be a pale word in a secret language. It was a glob of dried glue, no more, no less.
Still, the client wanted theatrics, and I think I was more alert than I’d ever been. I found a porcelain mortar and I burned the scrap of paper, and looked to see if I could read words forming in the arabesques of smoke. I couldn’t. I mashed up herbs and crystals and added some oil of gomba, and heated the whole mess in an alembic. I counted backward by seventeens. All the usual party tricks.
Then I popped off the cork and took a swig of the miracle potion.
I’m not a poet, and despite my profession I’m not particularly good at description. The taste burned and stank, and I felt the liquor in my eyes stew. Waves rose and fell in half formation, like apathetic ghosts, like anemic fogs. I could almost see—I reached, mentally—I could almost read what it meant. But it was shapeless as most dreams really are; we put onto our dreams the shapes we think with during the day, depriving our dreams of the message they are trying to deliver. Such it was with me. There was so much life, it was so vivid: but I could only think of it with the experience of life I had already had. And despite my evident age, that wasn’t much experience at all. It was like a five-year-old, upon learning the alphabet, being presented with a copy of the annotated Great Morphologies of the ancient tutorix Gorpha vin Tesserine. A child might be able to count the numbers marking off the footnotes, but not much more than that.
Nonetheless, I put my hands flat on the table and felt the surface of the wood grain, and tried to release my mind. The wood meant “usefulness in death” to me; the wood meant “you may be dead and you may still serve.” I had never tried to read the lifelines of a piece of timber before.
“Are you quite all right?” asked the Nanny, beginning to gather up her things, including the bottle. Apparently I looked as if I were about to expire, or explode.
“You have to leave the way you came,” I said to her.
“I only saw the one staircase,” she asserted.
“That’s not what I meant,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure what I did mean, or if it had anything to do with her at all. “History waits to be written, and this family has a part to play in it.”
• 5 •
HAH,” SAID the Lion. “You have to leave the way you come in? So what did you mean by that? You have to go out of the world the way you came into it? Imbecilic and diapered?”
Yackle didn’t speak. He pressed his point. “Did you decipher your own gibberish? You’ve been trying to die as a human, but if you never were born as a human, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Ha-ha.”
She was silent for a long time. Her hands moved as if she were picking up the green glass bottle in her mind, all over again. When she spoke, her voice had an opacity to it.
“So you did have something to give me after all,” she said. “You come in all rough edges and smarmy clothes, and it seems you have something to say.”
He shrugged. He didn’t know what she meant.
“That’s why I’ve been down in the crypt for a year without having the plea sure of a visit from a gentleman caller named Master Death. My first prophecy, and I read it wrong. ‘You have to leave the way you came.’ That was for me. Not for that Cattery Spunge.”
“Don’t look at me,” he said. His paws went up and flat like the palms of a human hand, protesting. Like a Bear cub playing dead. “I’m not certified.”
She was shaken. She left the chairback and meandered to the window. She stood there for a long time. Then, as if trying to change the subject, she said, “Someone’s got a cook fire down there. One of the houses to our west.”
“You can see now? Or are you ‘seeing’ it?”
“I’m smelling it, you blasted bog-wart. The wind is pressing up from the west, and I remember a few stone cottages out that way. If we’re in as much of a skirmish moment as you say, I’d have thought the residents of the small farms that supply the mauntery would be huddling in our great hall for protection. That’s the origin of this establishment in the first place, after all—a keep.”
“Apparently whoever lives out yonder isn’t scared, though.”
“Not scared of war? Hmmm.”
“Or maybe more scared of starvation. It’s harvest season, and the troops have been tromping their bloody jackboots all across the country. Flattening whatever modest crop of autumn wheat the locals can manage to eke out of this unforgiving soil.” He walked to the window and stood next to her. “I’m right. Their house stands amid three small fields of grain ready for harvest. If they leave that harvest too long, the armies will trample the fields for a camp, or bloody it with an encounter.”
“Still, if the farmers become the next casualties of war, they’re not going to be able to enjoy their wheat rolls. So why stay and guard their useless harvest? They should get out of the way while they can.”
“Maybe they’ve had enough of life. Maybe they’ve had their share.”
“Who has had enough of life?” she said.
“You did,” he answered. “You laid yourself down to die.”
“I laid myself down to go,” she corrected him, but then she began to cry. He assumed she didn’t really know what she meant. It must be no fun being an oracle for everyone else and being clueless about yourself.
Before they could return to their chairs to continue, a bell rang in the mauntery. The glass cat slept on. “It is time for prayers before dinner,” said Yackle. “Shall we take a break now?”
“You’re going to pray?” he asked.
“I remember the old ways of this place. I’m going to find a cleaver and trim these pesky nails, for one thing. Then I’m going to sit in a chapel among people who pray,” she replied. “You may have a writ from the Emerald City, but I suspect it doesn’t require me to reveal the metes and bounds of my religious doubt.”
He shrugged again. “Will you join me?” she said, aggressively.
“We have hardly started,” he said. “You’ve told me about meeting the Nanny, and how you came to learn about the Thropps. That’s just scratching the surface. Tell me something more about that Elphaba—the Wicked Witch—before you go. For all I know you’ll be assumed bodily into the Afterlife at the end of prayers tonight.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” she replied and headed for the door.
Then she turned. “The Nanny had come for advice about her employer, about that Melena Thropp—the mother of Elphaba and, eventually, the mother of Nessarose and our current benighted Emperor of Oz, Shell, too. I supplied her with something, some pinlobble leaves cut with milkflower or something. I don’t even remember. Useful, though hardly magical. I never met Melena
or her husband the minister. I never met Nessarose or Shell. And that Elphaba—that green girl!—well, we know what happened to her. I was on hand for bits and pieces of that, too.”
“Go on,” he said.
“I’m out of here,” she said, scraping her hand in the air, hunting for the doorknob. “But don’t you see what I’m saying? I had had my first genuine vision, even if it was induced. Something about possibility. All that misty apprehension, those swirls of image trying to form into something intelligible…in all that, I perceived force and hope alike. And I saw that I would be a real oracle, whatever kind of oracle I could manage to be. My calling wasn’t just a joke.”
“Elphaba’s tools of the trade,” he urged her. “The broom. The crystal ball. And wasn’t there a book, some book of magic?”
She wasn’t taking the bait. “The elixir had awakened in me the potential to read for meaning. I would read for meaning. It’s as simple as that. You see, I had been waiting for something to focus my attention. I needed to find something in order to sense a meaning to my life, in this earthly prison of Oz. Maybe I was like the orphan duckling who has to find a friendly dog or a hen or something that might serve as a surrogate mother.”
“Take it from me,” said Brrr, “not everyone who is devoid of a mother seeks out a surrogate.”
“Tell it to the judge,” she replied and left the room.
Like many a blind person, her spatial memory seemed keen. She creaked and tottered away toward the chapel. He listened to the hem of her winding sheet whispering along the floorboards.
It would be fun to hear the scream of some young novice who hadn’t yet heard the news that Yackle had risen from the nearly dead. All he could hear, though, was the arpeggios of melody in the oakhair trees.
NOT MANY MILES to the south, on the banks of the Vinkus River, a stand of young deciduous trees grew fairly close together. A forest fire some eight or ten years earlier had leveled the foliage, so what had sprung up in the ashes was of first growth, and all roughly the same height. Had Brrr possessed a spyglass, and had he thought to train his eyes in that direction, he might have caught a glimpse of a strange and troubled head swimming above the tips of the adolescent trees. It had ears like a dragon, and eyes like a dragon, but its tread was continuous, more like a serpent dragging its huge tail than like a quadruped galumphing along. But Brrr had no such spyglass.
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