The Wicked Years Complete Collection
Page 124
“You came and found me, true, but maybe my use to you was only as bait. To draw the Grimmerie to Yackle so she could take her leave. And where are you going anyway? Are you converted to Elphaba’s old cause, to see her rise like that before us?”
“Elphaba’s dead and gone,” said the dwarf equably enough. “We stay neutral, we keep our nosey noses clean, we take no sides, and we watch our backs. So linger here and stew about it as long as you like. Send us a postcard from whichever military prison you end up in. Whee-up, gee-up, knees-up, boys.”
Brrr was stuck with the conundrum. His job was done. He had been ordered to find out what had happened to the Grimmerie, and he had done far more than that: He had located the very book itself. Why let it escape? He might as well go with them, keep them in range. When the time was right he could choose to turn them over to the Emperor’s army. Once he felt ready to make that decision. The proper number of the dwarf’s slurs and indignities having mounted up to legitimize it.
Think of the glories that might accrue to Sir Brrr if he arrived back at the Emerald City with the Clock of the Time Dragon, and the Grimmerie safely interred within.
Think of the possibilities if he did not. He could fall in with the company of the Clock now, and perhaps—if they escaped to the West, along the banks of foul Kellswater—he could trip the brakes on the dreadful apparatus and drown the tiktok dragon and its bullying prophecies in the deadening water. Then no one could ever again use the Grimmerie to learn how to attack another soul.
“Make up your mind, and on your own head,” said the dwarf as the Clock of the Time Dragon began its slow creaky exodus into its future.
Ilianora turned to him and held out her hand. “Don’t be bashful. You would make a good companion for the company of the Clock. You know as much as anyone does, now, about where it came from and why we tend it.”
“I don’t know why you tend it,” said Brrr, but he flipped his notepad closed and pocketed it. “That’s beyond my brief to care about, Ilianora, so don’t spend your breath. Let’s get out of here.”
They passed under the portcullis. The broad stretch of the Shale Shallows lay to the west and south, wheat fields to the northwest. On the horizon they could see emerald green pennants of the advancing army, though from this distance the wind masked the sound of their snapping. Had the EC battalions paused to reconnoiter? Load their cannons? Was some general busily braying a rallying oration?
“Why did that otherworldly magician bring forth Yackle to oversee Elphaba?” Brrr asked Ilianora. “If his goal was merely to hide the Grimmerie, he didn’t need to use it to meddle in the affairs of this world. Look at the harm it’s done.”
“All my thoughts about history are sifted through my own warped fate. I have no conclusions,” she replied. “I can’t imagine why Elphaba deserved an angel to hover on her sidelines, even a paper angel, when the rest of us have to deal on our own with what prison and torture befalls us.”
“Prison and torture?”
“I’ll tell you one day. But not while you’re on the payroll of the Emerald City, no thank you. Not when the EC has supervised the extermination of my kin.”
“They’re not all dead,” said the Lion. “Liir may not be dead. And he went looking for you, all the way into Southstairs, I’m told.”
“There is that,” she said.
“We could leave the dwarf to his misadventures,” said the Lion. “We could try to find Liir.” So was he signing on to Yackle’s hopes? Was he being seduced by her wily trust in him? Or perhaps he was remembering Dorothy’s long-ago request of him, that he remain a companion to Liir. “I’m not looking for much,” he continued, shrugging. “Not for romance, believe me. You and I are well matched in our hesitations. But romance isn’t the only thing that draws two individuals together.”
They walked more quickly, almost trotting, to catch up to the Clock of the Time Dragon, but still they hung back far enough to speak privately for another moment or two. The steep walls of the Cloister of Saint Glinda fell behind them, a stone cloak they were escaping. As the armies drew within earshot of each other, the doors of this holy keep would be opened to all.
“I don’t want your company while you are in the employ of the Emerald City,” she said at last. “Not when they were behind the stationing of your Cat as a spy. Not when they were behind the deaths of my father and my mother and all my siblings. Everyone.”
“Everyone but Liir,” he said again, trying to convince her of something. “Liir waits for you somewhere. We can find him.”
“Have you other work you must finish?”
There were so many campaigns he had left midway, out of shame and confusion. One couldn’t fix much in one’s messy past, of course. Perhaps none of it at all. He couldn’t stitch up history so that Muhlama returned to him. He couldn’t go back and pull the trap off Jemmsy’s leg. He couldn’t apologize to Dorothy for his failing to warn her against the wickedness of the Wizard of Oz.
“It’s hard to know what to do,” he admitted. “I look at that great book of magic, and all the mechanisms set up to guard it from eyes that would steal its secrets. So much fate seems wound up around it, including whole lives—yours, Yackle’s, maybe Elphaba’s, maybe mine. With so much written in magic, how can we hope to become agents culpable for our own lives?”
Ilianora laughed. It was the first time she had laughed in years, guessed Brrr, for even she looked surprised to hear the sound coming out of her mouth.
“You and I think alike,” she said. “How improbable. But I don’t put much faith in a magic book. For everything that is revealed, more is concealed. What good is that Grimmerie going to do us? A magic book can ingest a troublesome old crone: so what? An army can’t disappear into a book of magic.”
“Fair enough,” he admitted. “Can it bring a single dead soldier back to life?”
Ilianora was busy unlatching a satchel slung over her shoulder. She reached inside and withdrew a small notebook. “Look,” she said, opening it up, fanning its blank pages in his direction. “This is a book, too, and precious little is written in it. It’s just as accurate as the Grimmerie, and maybe more so. Don’t be chagrined by its blankness. Be liberated instead. Go on, it’s yours. I have never written a word in it worth saving, so what I give you isn’t magic or the benefit of my thinking, but my belief in the blankness of our futures. Charms only go so far. Here, take it. Whether you write your own story in it or not, that’s your affair.”
He took it from her, mostly because she seemed eager to release it to him.
“A blank book for a court reporter to take depositions in?” Was he teasing her, just a little? He was.
“Take your own deposition,” she said.
He looked sideways at her. Her veil came down farther over her forehead, hiding even the tendrils of hair that had been blowing across her forehead, but her chin was up. Her eyes were dry and true.
“You go on ahead, then,” said the Lion. “We’ll find a future uncharted by any tiktok charm. We’ll make our luck as we go along. When I get back.”
“Why?” asked Ilianora. “What are you doing now? Where are you going?”
He wasn’t sure even what his answer would be; he waited to hear the words from his own mouth.
“The cottage there.” They were passing a small stone hut with a roof of oakhair thatch. A kitchen fire was still burning in the chimney, and beyond, in the light, a field of wheat rustled like gold on water. “One of the maunts mentioned that an elderly couple lives there, and their sons have gone off to war. The rain will come soon, and the wind, and an army will trample this field by tomorrow. I have learned enough about prophecy to say that for sure: Its future is drenched in blood. Let me harvest wheat before the catastrophe. I’ve done some agricultural work in my time. I can bring in that crop for them. Better they should have something to sell to the mill when the battle is history and their sons are dead. Better that wheat should go for bread. No? No?”
“Go, then,” sai
d Ilianora. “If you must. Someone might as well chase the schoolchildren away from the lightning-wreathed hill.” She didn’t look at him, but drew her veil tighter, and covered her mouth with it. Was she covering a smile—did she believe he was lying, out to betray the company of the Clock?—or did she think him a hero, for having so far-fetched a notion of charity?
Brrr bounded forward and pulled from the back of the Clock of the Time Dragon the shroud that Yackle had left behind. She wouldn’t need it now. He dressed himself in it. Not a white flag of surrender but an advertisement of his neutrality. A plea to let him pass.
“Go,” she repeated. “Bread for the aged and the desolate. It’s as good a job as tending the book. Maybe a better one.”
“We’ll look for Liir,” he said. “When I come back.”
“We’ll look for Liir.” She was trying the idea on for size: the idea that someone might be left to her, after all her losses. Her color was high, making her own veils look like the glazed white paper in which Shiz merchants wrapped freshly cut flowers. Which made her a kind of bouquet. “You and I together? You’ll catch up to me?”
“I’ll catch up to you.”
“Is that a promise?” But she wouldn’t have heard an answer even if he had given one. The dwarf was braying out that the boys should push, push, put their backs into it. The dragon’s sallowwood limbs were creaking and its leather wings fell to flapping in the commotion, like a bellows swung about in a circle. A mile or two off, the music of war went tintinnabulary. Clarion horns of the hunt sounding, thunder of horse hoofs on stony ground, shatter of artillery, the clamorous ringing of swords.
Louder than any of that: men roaring like beasts.
The Lion turned into the wind, on the run once more. Neither an envoy of the EC, just now, nor a foot soldier of the underground opposition. Not even a neutral protector of oracular justice and magic hopes. He was a free agent, a rogue Lion, just as he’d started out in the Forest. A rogue Lion with the beginning of an education.
He headed for the sag-roofed, slipshod cottage. He had so little time. He would frighten the old couple there with an offer of help. It was neither the least nor the best he could ever do. It was simply an action that didn’t follow obviously from all his earlier campaigns. It was an exercise in refusing to barter. It was an exercise in refusing to play dead. And that was the only way he could imagine how to vex history.
A plodder, he watched his feet on the ground. Had he turned to look up, to review the map of Oz in the clouds, he’d have seen the first stain of battle smoke rising against the white. Lightning was waiting in the heavens, of course. Sooner or later, the lightning comes to us all. In the meantime, for a moment, the clouds had rearranged themselves, and he might have said that they looked like a flying creature, a shadow angel, all light and impermanence. But the clouds suggested this only to themselves, while he kept his head down, bent to his task.
Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart Could have recovered greenness?
—George Herbert, “The Collar”
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank a coterie of early readers for giving such useful comments. Mistakes that remain are mine. The readers include David Groff, Betty Levin, Andy Newman, and William Reiss of John Hawkins and Associates; and at William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, Cassie Jones and Johnathan Wilber.
Douglas Smith’s devotion to the exercise of illustrating the Wicked Years is an inspiration to me to continue writing the books just to see what he’ll come up with.
FOUR YEARS AGO, to prepare for writing Son of a Witch, I reread Wicked for the first time in quite a while. I was startled to see something I’d never noticed before: a little plot device I had worked up to explain the mysterious presence in Elphaba’s life of the dwarf (in A Lion Among Men called Mr. Boss). I saw that his employment and employer bore similarity to aspects of Susan Cooper’s novel for children called The Dark Is Rising, which I’d read some fifteen years before writing Wicked. While I have had fun in the Wicked Years slipping sidelong references to books by L. Frank Baum and other inspiring fantasists, and to the famous MGM film of 1939, I didn’t intend my homages to descend into appropriation.
At once I wrote to Susan Cooper—a long-standing friend and colleague—and I apologized for the accidental theft. She answered with her usual clarity and courtesy, citing a remark by J. R. R. Tolkien (who had once been her teacher at Oxford) that reminds us of the differences, in ancient storytelling, between invention, diffusion, and inheritance: “Speaking of the history of stories and especially of fairy-stories we may say that the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty.” Had she been possessed by a litigious mood, she might have gone on to quote: “There are many things in the Cauldron, but the Cooks do not dip in the ladle quite blindly. Their selection is important.”
Credits
Illustrations by Douglas Smith
Map by Douglas Smith after the original by Gregory Maguire
Jacket and case illustrations by Douglas Smith
Dedication
for Cassie Jones
Epigraph
[He] … had a magical view of the work of words, that “it is hard to conceive of a nobler magic” than the prospect of a salvation which is not just for us.
—Michael Wood, in The London Review of Books, on Frank Kermode’s appraisal of I. A. Richards from Bury Place Papers
We believe the explanation we hear last. It’s one of the ways in which narrative influences our perception of truth. We crave finality, an end to interpretation, not seeing that this too, the tying up of all loose ends in the last chapter, is only a storytelling ruse. The device runs contrary to experience, wouldn’t you say? Time never simplifies—it unravels and complicates. Guilty parties show up everywhere. The plot does nothing but thicken.
—Michelle de Kretser, The Hamilton Case
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
The Wicked Years: A Note to Readers
Charting the Wicked Years Chronologically
Maps: The City of Shiz, Gillikin; The Emerald City
Significant Families of Oz
A Brief Outline of the Throne Ministers of Oz
Prologue: Out of Oz
I. To Call Winter upon Water
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
II. The Patchwork Conscience of Oz
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
III. The Chancel of the Ladyfish
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
IV. The Judgment of Dorothy
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
V. At St. Prowd’s
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
1
1
12
13
14
15
16
17
VI. God’s Great-Niece
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
VII. To Call the Lost Forward
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
VIII. Somewhere
1
2
3
Acknowledgments
Coda
Credits
THE WICKED YEARS
A Note to Readers
Our story so far:
Wicked begins with the birth of a green-skinned child, Elphaba Thropp—later known as the Wicked Witch of the West—and portrays her unlikely college friendship with Galinda Upland and her romance with Fiyero Tigelaar. The arriviste Wizard of Oz consolidates his power in the Emerald City and throughout Oz. Under the governance of the Wicked Witch of the East, Nessarose Thropp, Munchkinland secedes from Loyal Oz. The novel closes with the Matter of Dorothy, when Elphaba is thirty-eight and her son, Liir Thropp, is fourteen.
Son of a Witch tells the story of Liir’s life, revealed in flashbacks, while Elphaba’s brother Shell strengthens his position in the Emerald City, particularly against Munchkinland. Orphaned at fourteen, without guidance or patronage, Liir stumbles into the military, leads a raid against Quadlings, and goes AWOL, eventually heading a protest against his uncle Shell, now the Emperor of Oz. Son of a Witch concludes with the arrival of a child—a green-skinned daughter—born to Liir and Candle, a Quadling. Liir is about twenty-four.
A Lion Among Men refers to the Cowardly Lion, known as Brrr. His story is told alternately with that of the ancient oracle, Yackle. Brrr muses on his part in the Matter of Dorothy, his rise and fall in society, and his plea-bargaining with Emerald City magistrates to avoid a prison sentence. Hunting for the mysterious oracle Yackle, he locates the lost Grimmerie in the bargain. At novel’s end, a skirmish between rabble-rousing Munchkinlanders and the Emerald City military threatens to ignite into full-scale civil war. Caught in the crosshairs, Brrr escapes with the troupe that accompanies the Clock of the Time Dragon.