The Wicked Years Complete Collection

by Gregory Maguire

  7.

  At a café, in the shade of aromatic fruit trees unruffled in the breezeless evening, they discussed the day’s proceedings with Mister Mikko, who had been persuaded to leave the Reading Room behind and dare the public agora.

  “I still wonder what this trial is intended to achieve,” said Little Daffy. “It’s one thing to build up a villain to help concentrate a sense of national purpose and struggle. But I should think the divine Emperor of Oz and his chief commanding officer, General Cherrystone, already qualify as enemies of the Free State of Munchkinland. Finding out whether Dorothy is now sixteen or sixty-one doesn’t seem worth the public fuss. What good does it do anyone to persecute this poor girl?”

  “The Free State of Munchkinland can’t get at Shell, more’s the pity, and their engagement with Cherrystone seems at a permanent standstill,” observed Mister Mikko. “This exercise against Dorothy is meant to siphon off national frustration. Give the Munchkinlanders a sense of achievement.”

  Brrr said, “So this isn’t going to be a fair trial? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Of course it isn’t. The very premise of the accusations is bizarre. Conflating the deaths of both sisters! Though Elphaba Thropp was born in Munchkinland, she maintained no political association with her sister Nessarose, and Elphaba ignored the opportunity to seize power once her sister was dead. And a Munchkinlander court prosecuting anyone for the murder of the Wicked Witch of the West? Absurd. The west is deep in Loyal Oz. The premise is prejudicial and proves that what’s wanted here isn’t a trial but a conviction.”

  “I’m with you,” said Mr. Boss. “Nothing cheers folks up like a public beheading.”

  “I’m no student of history,” said Little Daffy, “but I don’t like the way this has all lined up. Mombey and General Jinjuria, two strong defenders of Munchkinland, concentrating the attention of the country upon a legal assault of another female? The real enemies of Munchkinland are the man in the Emerald City and his chief officer at Restwater.”

  “Total bitch gripe,” agreed Mr. Boss. “You’ve never seen that before? And you lived with maunts for several decades? What were you, blind?”

  “She has a point,” said Mister Mikko, who after all had taught history back in his day. “Shell in his emerald towers, and Cherrystone holed up in Haugaard’s Keep … two powerful men in Oz, after the forty-year history of the Wizard’s oppression that beleaguered my parents’ generation, and their parents’, too. It’s been sixty years since Pastorius was deposed, and so maybe sixty-five, is it, since the last Ozma died? A lot of rule by men in a land with a long tradition of matriarchy.”

  Little Daffy said, “That’s it exactly. If Munchkinlanders needed to take against someone to prove their strength, you’d think they’d nominate someone who stood in for the Emperor of Oz a little more keenly. This Dorothy seems a pale substitute.”

  “She’s what turned up,” said Mr. Boss. “You’re not going to rear back and change her gender for the sake of a more satisfying trial.”

  “But Little Daffy has a point,” insisted Mister Mikko. “Since Ozma the Bilious died leaving her husband the Ozma Regent and the baby, Ozma Tippetarius, there’s been only one female minister of Loyal Oz as we know: Lady Glinda. And she ruled well but all too briefly.”

  Brrr said, “But what’s the point of the prosecution of Dorothy?”

  Mister Mikko responded with a tone of gentle irony. “The fight to retake Restwater won’t be won in the court of public opinion.”

  “Then what is really going on here?” asked Brrr. “It seems important to figure out, if only to find a way to defend the hapless Dorothy.”

  They sat, confounded, fiddling with the silverware until the dwarf said, “I often thought the displays of the Clock of the Time Dragon were intended to divert the attention of the public from the Clock’s real mission: to serve as the secret vault that housed the Grimmerie. I wonder if this trial isn’t so much a public relations exercise as a diversion. Is something going on elsewhere on the war front that La Mombey doesn’t want us to be noticing? The Clock might have given us a clue. Damn its rotted soul.”

  On their way back to the dubious comforts of A Stable Home, they passed a beer garden. Over their pints, little lager louts were singing something clangorous. The words were slurred.

  Ding dong, the bitch will swing

  Like a clapper on a string

  Back and forth until the bitch is dead!

  “What has gotten into my countrymen?” said Little Daffy.

  “Don’t dawdle and gawk, you’ll only draw attention,” said Brrr, his old irritable-bowel thing threatening to flare up. “Eyes front, move along.”

  “It’s just that the melody is so jolly,” said Little Daffy. “True, we used to hold singing festivals, but the texts weren’t so rabid.”

  “Climate of the times,” said Mr. Boss. They hurried past.

  When the court convened in the morning, the room was full to capacity. Lord Nipp instructed the Chimps to wave large rush fans. The casement windows were cranked open to their fullest, and more spectators gathered outside. There, the sight lines being poor and the sun hot, a pretty penny was to be made passing among the crowd selling cups of lemon barley. Mister Mikko, who was waiting outside, would later report that the atmosphere seemed a cross between a state funeral and a harvest festival, morbid and giddy at once.

  Since yesterday Dorothy had been allowed a change of clothes, but the selection offered her hadn’t been the kindest. She seemed to be wearing a dirndl of some sort, cut for someone with the proportions of a Baboon. The sleeves were so long they could have been tied together in a bow. She looked like a child in her father’s nightshirt.

  Dame Fegg dove into questioning at a gallop today, returning to the subject of Dorothy’s prior arrival in Oz. “You say that Glinda Chuffrey gave you Nessarose’s enchanted shoes and advised you to tiptoe out of town?” asked Dame Fegg. “She has a great deal to answer for herself, that Glinda. Those shoes should have belonged to the treasure-house of Munchkinland.”

  “I can’t speak to Glinda’s motives,” said the defendant. “She simply told me that the Wizard of Oz could help me, and that the Yellow Brick Road would lead me to him. For all I knew she was in the tourist business and wanted me to see the sights.”

  “She gave you no armed guard, no escort, no inkling that Munchkinland was devolved from Loyal Oz?”

  “I don’t think so. But it seems such a long time ago, and of course everything was so new. And I did love those shoes. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention.”

  “Maybe, Miss Dorothy, you have never paid enough attention.”

  The crowd chortled quietly at this line, as if it were the end of a scene of some parlor farce on a stage at Shiz. But Brrr thought Dame Fegg had made a mistake. Hitherto she had not addressed Dorothy as “Miss.” Having started now, she wouldn’t be able to retreat, and that accorded the girl a little more dignity than she seemed to deserve, given her ridiculous getup.

  “Dame Fegg,” piped up Dorothy, “if you were suddenly, magically carried off to my home of Kansas, how long do you think it would take you to pick up on our ways?”

  “That calls for speculation,” said Dame Fegg.

  “You’re not asking the questions, Miss Dorothy,” said Lord Nipp. Aha, thought Brrr, there it is: she has graduated to Miss Dorothy. In her zanily earnest way, she’s commanding the respect of her enemies despite themselves. Brrr would never call it charisma but oh, Dorothy had charm of a sort, for sure.

  Dame Fegg proceeded to grill the girl about the Yellow Brick Road Irregulars, as in popular lore they had become known. Having spent his life timid enough over every living thing, and a few gloomy stationary things as well, Brrr had his concerns about being tarred by association with Dorothy. But he was a Lion, after all. A Lion among Munchkins. And thanks to good dental hygiene he had all of his natural teeth. So he straightened up and tossed his head to make of his mane a more impressive quiff, to make himself
look stouthearted, even if it was all public relations.

  “And the Scarecrow was so dear and so helpful,” said Dorothy, “and then the Tin Woodman such a sweetheart. And the Lion, when he showed up, a total mess.” She smiled at him as if she weren’t out to ruin his reputation, that is if he had had a reputation he cared about. “If I ever get you back to San Francisco with me, I think you would all fit in there just fine.”

  “At what point did you let them in on your secret background as a regicidal maniac?” asked Dame Fegg.

  “I object. Leading the witness,” said Temper Bailey, who most of the time looked as if he were napping on his perch.

  “They called her a witch, that Nessarose,” explained Dorothy. “It took me a while to cotton on to the fact that she was governor as well.”

  “In your single-minded campaign to deprive both Munchkinland and Loyal Oz of its entire bank of leaders, you collected a mob of collaborators,” pushed Dame Fegg.

  “May I speak?” said Brrr, and stood. He was roughly ten times the girth and weight of either Lord Nipp or Dame Fegg, so they couldn’t object, though Dame Fegg focused her pious squinty bloodshot eyes on him with contempt. “Dorothy didn’t entice me with plans of sedition or the overthrow of any government. Truth to tell, I was rather at loose ends at that stage in my life. I wanted to put behind me the shame of some poor choices and some dead-end experiences—”

  “Please, spare us the melodrama,” said Lord Nipp. “We’re a court of law, not a guidance counsellorship.”

  “We went to the Emerald City, Your Lordship, to see if we could find a way to help Dorothy return home,” said Brrr. “As I heard it told, no one in Munchkinland had had any bright ideas about that.”

  “That’s true enough,” said Dorothy. “But at least no one put me under arrest, that time.”

  “And then the Wizard of Oz, so called, enlisted you in the assassination of Nessarose’s sister,” said Dame Fegg.

  “Well now, that much I can’t deny,” said Dorothy. “The Wizard said the Wicked Witch of the West was tremendously evil and needed to be stopped. I was young and didn’t think to ask ‘stopped from what?’ He said she deserved to die. He wouldn’t entertain my request for help until I’d killed her.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.” Dame Fegg was steely with purpose.

  “I had no choice but to head to the west,” said Dorothy. “But I had no intention of doing the Wizard’s dirty work for him. Doesn’t that count for something? It was either leave town or take on a job as a chambermaid in one of the seedier neighborhoods of the EC.”

  “Nonsense,” said Fegg. “There’s always choice.”

  “No, I’m not explaining it correctly. I mean, for myself, I had no choice. For it had dawned on me how dreadful the accidental squashery of Nessarose Thropp had been. I wanted to apologize to the closest survivor for my inadvertent part in her sister’s demise. That’s why I went west. That, and for no other reason.”

  “You expect us to believe that?” Fegg looked offended. “The Wizard, by your own admission, asks you to kill the Wicked Witch of the West, and you carry out his plans with cunning and immediacy, and then you claim you had no culpability in the matter? It’s preposterous.” She gave a sneer that could have won her an acting award.

  “Hey now, wait,” said Dorothy. “The coincidence of the Wizard’s aims and my experiences at Kiamo Ko, the Witch’s castle, is no proof of my guilt.”

  Coincidence again, thought Brrr. Not proof, but not helpful, either.

  Temper Bailey spoke up again. “Let’s hear more from the Lion. He was on that mission too, was he not?”

  Nipp turned a cold eye on Brrr and nodded.

  The Lion thought: If this does end poorly, what happens to Dorothy—? To me?

  He said, “I wasn’t present at Dorothy’s commission from the Wizard. I can’t confirm what he said to her. I do concur that the Wizard asked me to kill the Witch too, and about their private meetings with the Wizard, both the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman reported the same. We proceeded to the west not to fulfill the Wizard’s request but to lend succor to our companion on the road, who we all could see was young and innocent if not a few sequins short of a diadem, if you know what I mean.”

  Dorothy pulled a face at that.

  “And what can you tell us about the murder of Elphaba Thropp?” asked Temper Bailey.

  “I can tell you precious little about her death; I don’t answer to its being called a murder,” said the Lion. “I was locked in a kitchen larder with the Witch’s son, Liir, and by the time we’d escaped the room and dashed up the tower stairs to the parapet of the castle, Dorothy was already descending the stairs, weeping her eyes out.”

  “I cried so hard,” said Dorothy, “I looked like I’d thrown that bucket of water over myself.”

  “And so the question is,” said Brrr, “what happened up there? Did Dorothy kill the Witch? Either on purpose or by accident? All any of us know about the matter is that the Witch is done with. She’s gone. But was she killed?”

  The room fell silent. Dame Fegg turned to Dorothy and so did Temper Bailey. Several hundred Munchkinlanders paused in their knitting or their munching of small round breakfast pastries. The Chimpanzees held their fans still.

  “I shall remind you that you are under oath to answer honestly,” murmured Lord Nipp, almost as if afraid to break the spell of the question.

  Dorothy put her face in her hands, a sloppy gesture given the length of her sleeves. When she lifted her teary cheeks, her upper lip was creamy with mucus; it looked as if she had applied a depilatory unguent. “I believe in taking responsibility for what happens,” she admitted. “I believed it six years ago, and that’s why I went to Kiamo Ko, to confess my part in the death of Nessarose Thropp. And I confess my part in the death of Elphaba Thropp too, to the extent I can be sure that it happened. But when I threw a bucket of water at the Witch, to save her from burning to death in her black skirts, what happened was a huge plume of smoke and a sizzle, as of fatback on a griddle, and the Witch collapsed amid the drapes of her skirts and the billows of smoke. The acrid stench and the burning in my eyes made me turn away, and I vomited in terror and surprise, and when I looked back—well, she was gone.”

  “Killed,” said Fegg.

  “Gone,” said Dorothy.

  “Is that the same thing?”

  “Who can say?”

  “Very good question,” said Temper Bailey. “Who can say? Were there witnesses?”

  “Only Toto, and he used to be the strong silent type,” said Dorothy.

  “Oh, now, let’s not start that sniffling again,” scoffed Fegg.

  “The Witch’s old Nanny finally made it up the stairs, and she swept me away while she cleaned up,” said Dorothy. “I never went up there again, and I never examined the scene of the death. I was a witness at her disappearance—and, sure, maybe it was a death. But wouldn’t there have been a corpse?”

  “Of course there was a corpse,” snorted Dame Fegg. “You’ve proven yourself to be an unreliable witness any number of times. In your glee and relief you just didn’t check, or you’re pretending not to have checked.”

  The room seemed to rock a little; maybe it was the heat, or maybe that Dorothy carried personal earthquakes with her to deploy at will. Brrr sat up straight. Temper Bailey emitted a series of small who-who-whos, but whether that was a stutter or an admission in Owlish that he was not wise enough for this particular job was hard to say.

  “Before you kill again,” said Dame Fegg, “I will see you put to death.”

  Lord Nipp had to pound his gavel repeatedly. When silence returned at last, he called a halt in the proceedings for two days. He made the suggestion that Animals should be invited to hear the final assessments and the judgment of Dorothy, and Munchkinlander farmers should roundly encourage their lodgers and farmhands to show some civic spirit and witness the conclusion of the trial. After all, a cow had been killed in the Glikkus. There was such a thing as solid
arity.

  8.

  Why the adjournment? From the point of view of the prosecution, it seemed to Brrr a clumsy move. The hiatus might allow that rumor—that Elphaba was somehow still alive—to gain weight and sway public opinion in Dorothy’s favor. Mister Mikko agreed and concluded that Nipp must have a sound reason for delaying. Might they be trying to dig up a witness, somewhere, someone who could confirm Elphaba’s death by revealing anything about the disposition of her corpse?

  “Preposterous,” said Brrr. Who could it be? Back on that dreadful day, neither he nor Liir had been allowed up the stairs to the parapet where Elphaba had died. The only human souls who might give testimony about the scene of that tragedy were Dorothy herself and the Witch’s old Nanny, who had gone up after Dorothy had come down but who had refused Liir access. Brrr had assumed it was out of kindness; Liir had, after all, been a mere fourteen years old. And a young fourteen at that.

  Could Elphaba’s old Nanny have been capable of a deceit of any magnitude? Concealing the Witch?… Brrr thought not. Even then Nanny had been stunningly unmoored from reality. Were she still alive, she’d be over a hundred years old now. At any rate, Kiamo Ko was a thousand-some miles away any route you took. They wouldn’t be putting Nanny or her ghost on the witness stand.

  Then, he wondered, what about Chistery? The chief of the flying monkeys? As far as Brrr knew, Chistery was an anomaly in Oz. He’d begun life as an animal incapable of language, and yet he had managed to learn it, thanks to Elphaba’s ministrations and maybe to her magic. Brrr had no idea how old Chistery would be now, nor how long snow monkeys generally lived. He asked Mister Mikko his opinion, but the Ape bared his false dentures at Brrr and refused to get into a discussion about it. “I don’t even know my own expected life span,” he snapped; “how could I possibly be conversant on the life span of an invented line like a flying monkey?”