Gregory Maguire_Wicked Years_02

by Son of a Witch

  He gripped the broom in his hand, and tightened the Witch’s cape around him—he’d worn it several weeks now, glad to have carted it all these seasons, as it was helpful against the chill. Mercy, mercy, he thought, I’m home from the wars, whatever that means. He climbed the steep steps to the gatehouse and went in to the primary courtyard.

  At first he saw no change at all; but he was looking through the eyes of memory, and those eyes were blurred with tears. She might have come back here, he thought at last. Have I been hoping this all along, step by step—is this hope what has kept me from dying? If Nor really had survived her abduction, she might have made her way back here as I have. She might even now be slapping a meat pasty into a hot oven and turning at the sound of my foot on the cobbles.

  Then he wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands. The place had gone from rack to ruin, and some of the hard edges of its utilitarian design had become softened by neglect. The cobbles were covered in dried leaves, and a dozen or more saplings like party guests stood here and there, human size or even a little taller, twitching their thin limbs in excitement at a new arrival. A shutter banged overhead. Ivy clawed up the side of the chapel. Several windows were broken and more young trees leaned out.

  It was silent but not still; everything rustled almost without sound. He could have heard a baby cry in its sleep down in a cradle in Red Windmill, had some baby needed to cry just then.

  He turned about slowly, his arms open, pivoting on one heel. Allowed a torrent of emotion to batter him from within.

  When he finished his revolution, the monkeys were there under the trees, on the outside steps, peering out through the yellowing foliage in the windows. They had come from nowhere while his eyes were misted. Some of them trembled and held their wingtips; a couple shat themselves. This breed had never taken to personal hygiene with any conviction.

  “Liir?” said the nearest one. He had to walk with his knuckles on the ground; had the years of living with heavy wings curved his spine? Or was it merely age?

  “Chistery,” said Liir, cautiously; he wasn’t sure. But Chistery’s face had broken into a grin at being recognized.

  He came up and took Liir’s hand and kissed it with gummy affection.

  “Don’t do that, don’t,” said Liir. He and Chistery then walked hand in hand through the warped door into the ominous, plain, high-ceilinged staircase hall, just as they had done fifteen, eighteen years ago, when for the first time they’d arrived together at the castle with Elphaba Thropp.

  IT DIDN’T TAKE HIM LONG to figure out that Nor wasn’t there. The sudden lurch of thought about her, though, crackled almost aurally through his apprehensions of Kiamo Ko. It was as if he could just about hear her childish squeals and pattering feet.

  Still, he couldn’t indulge in moodiness even if he wanted. For one thing, the skanky stench of monkey ordure cut through the complicated memories of childhood. He had to watch where he stepped. Public health hazard.

  He was hardly surprised to find Nanny still alive. She’d be in her ninetieth year now, or more? Surely. Her olfactory senses had long fled her, so she seemed unbothered by the fumes, and her own bedding and day gown were in a less-than-pristine condition. Sitting bolt upright in bed with a bonnet on her head and a beaded purse clutched between her hands, she greeted him without much surprise, as if he’d only been down in the kitchen this past decade, getting himself a cup of milk.

  “It’s hizzie, it’s whosie, yourself in all your glory, if you can call it that,” she said, and offered her cheek, which had sunk dramatically into a hollow of greying crinkles.

  “Hello, Nanny. I’ve come to visit you,” said Liir.

  “Some does and some doesn’t.”

  “It’s Liir.”

  “Of course it is, dear. Of course.” She sat up a little straighter and looked at him. Then she picked up an ear trumpet from her bedside table and shook it. A ham sandwich fell out, the worse for wear. She regarded it with disapproval and took a healthy bite. She put the trumpet back against her head. “Who is the whosie?”

  “Liir,” he said, “do you remember? The boy with Elphaba?”

  “Now that’s one as never visits. Up in her tower. Too much studying and you’ll chase the boys away, I always said. But she had a mind of her own. Are you going up there? Tell her to show some respect to her elders and bitters.”

  “Do you remember me?”

  “I thought you might be Grim Death, but it’s only the haircut.”

  “Liir, it is. Liir.”

  “Yes, and whatever happened to the boy? He was a funny noodley one. It took him forever to get trained, as I recall. Still, he’d fit right in now.” She rolled her eyes at Chistery, who stood fondly by with his hands folded. “He never writes, you know. That’s all right, though, as I can’t read anymore.”

  Liir sat down on a stool and held Nanny’s hand for a while. “Chistery, is there anything like sherry around?” he asked suddenly.

  “Whatever hasn’t evaporated in its bottles. We don’t touch the fumey stuff,” said Chistery. That’s a bit righteous, thought Liir, and realized, too, that Chistery’s language had improved hugely. Now that everyone had stopped trying to teach him.

  Chistery returned in time with a dusty bottle. It was ancient cooking brandy, and a B grade at that, but Nanny’s palate had clearly deteriorated like some of her other talents, and she sipped it happily, goofily.

  After a nap that lasted only a few moments, she was awake, and more alert. Her eyes looked as they once had: less swift to track, perhaps, but no less canny.

  “You’re the boy, grown up some,” she said. “Not enough, I see, but there’s time.”

  “Liir,” he reminded her. He wanted to work fast while she was attending. “Nanny. Do you remember when we came here? Elphaba and I?”

  She screwed up her face and settled on an answer almost at once. “I do not, Liir. Because I came later. You were already here when I got here.”

  Of course. He had forgotten this. “Elphaba was your charge, wasn’t she? You were her nanny. She told you everything.”

  “She hadn’t much to tell,” said Nanny. “For an interesting life, you wanted to listen to her mother. Melena. Saucy little thing, got around the parish, if you know what I mean. A trial to her husband, Frex. Now he was a good man, and like most good men, a crashing bore about it. The hours he spent trying to convert me to unionism! As if the Unnamed God wanted to take an interest in Nanny! Preposterous.”

  He didn’t want to talk about religion. “I want to ask you something directly. If you know the answer, you can tell me. I’m grown up now. Was Elphaba my mother?”

  “She didn’t know,” said Nanny. Her mouth took the shape of an O—O!—as if startled all over again by the ridiculous conceit. “She suffered some terrible blow, and lapsed into a dreamless sleep for months on end. Or so she said. When she came to, and was suitably convalesced, she stayed on to work for some maunts. Then she left them to come here, and they gave her you to take along. That’s all she ever knew. She supposed she could have given birth to you in a coma. It is possible. These things do happen.” She rolled her eyes.

  “Why didn’t she ask about me—and her?”

  “I suppose she thought the answer didn’t matter. There you were, one way or the other. It hardly signified.”

  “It matters to me.”

  “She was a good woman, our Elphie, but she wasn’t a saint,” said Nanny, both tartly and protectively. “Leave her her failings. Not everyone is cut out to be a warm motherly type.”

  “If she thought I might be her child, wouldn’t she have mentioned the possible father?”

  “She never did what another person might. You remember that. Now, I did know that fellow named Fiyero, once upon a time, and you don’t look much like him, if that’s your game. Frankly, you could more easily pass for a child of Nessarose. Elphaba’s sister, the Wicked Witch of the East as they called her behind her back. If you were Elphie’s there’d be the green skin, wo
uldn’t there? It’s a puzzle. Is there any more of that juice?”

  He poured a small sip more. “Did you raise Nessarose, too? And their baby brother? Shell?”

  “Their father, Frex, thought I was too pagan to be over involved with Nessarose. Me with my devotions to dear Lurline, our fairy mother. Frex wanted a godly child, and it was clear, with her alarming hue, that Elphaba wasn’t it. Nessarose was born a martyr—that unfortunate disability! Revolting, really—and she lived and died as a martyr. If she had even a second or two to understand that a house was about to come and sit on her head, I’m sure she died happy.”

  “I never met her.”

  “In the Afterlife, my boy, count on it. She’ll be waiting there to improve you some more.”

  “And Shell? I’ve met Shell once or twice.”

  “Oh, that lad! The high jinks of that one! He was in and out of trouble like tomorrow’s stitches in yesterday’s britches. He led poor Frex a merry chase! Shell was hopeless at school, a good-joke johnnycake, in trouble with the masters and in the skirts of the misses. And he grew to have a smart mouth for wine, they say. He used to lie to his father so well that you’d’ve sworn he was born for the stage. Of course in his line of work, later on, all that came very much in handy.”

  “What work was that? Medicine?”

  “Never heard it called that. I think the term is espionage. Snooping, settling scores out of the public eye, selling information, and if the tales have any truth to them, sexing up the ladies from Illswater to Ugabu.”

  That made some sense, then, of Shell’s activities in Southstairs. He was ferreting out information from political prisoners and getting laid in the bargain.

  “I know she’s dead,” said Nanny flatly, looking out the window. “Dead and gone. At least once a day I remember that much. You could be her son. Why don’t you just decide you are?”

  “I had nothing from Elphaba but misery,” he replied. “It was a happy sort of misery, since children know no better. But she left me nothing—nothing but a broom and a cape. She left me no clues. I have no talents. I haven’t her capacity for outrage. I haven’t her capacity for magic. I haven’t her concentration.”

  “You’re young yet, these things take time. I myself couldn’t cast off until I was well into my sixties, but then I could do it so enthusiastically I once fell right out of my chair.”

  “I think you know if you’re different,” he ventured. “I think you know if you’re gifted. How could you not?”

  “You know if you feel set apart,” said Nanny, “but who doesn’t feel that? Maybe we’re all gifted. We just don’t know it.”

  “Does no good to have a useless gift.”

  “Have you tried? Have you even tried to read from her book of spells? From what I remember, Elphaba had to learn. She did go to school, you know. She was a scholarship girl at Shiz.”

  “Chistery’s learned to talk well,” he said, after a while.

  “My point exactly,” she said, draining her glass. “He had to try for years, and it suddenly clicked.”

  He walked around the room. The windows were shuttered against the early autumn gale—how well he remembered the way it blew up the valleys, sometimes forcing the snow back up into the clouds that had dropped it. “You have a good life?”

  “I have had a good life,” she corrected him. “Chistery comes from time to time, and the filthy peasants bring their filthy food, which I’m expected to eat as my part in community relations. I do as I’m bade.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Not in a dog’s age. Not since that Dorothy. And you and the others. Did Dorothy ever stop whimpering so? She’ll grow up to require the convent, mark my words. Or a husband with a good strong backhand. Her fanny wants spanking badly.”

  “Dorothy came back?”

  “She did?” Nanny’s clarity was ebbing.

  “If I go up to Elphaba’s room,” said Liir carefully, “and if I find something of hers, may I take it?”

  “What, you’re looking for precisely what?”

  “A book, maybe.”

  “Not that big thick thing she was always poring through?”

  “Yes.”

  “Much good it would do you even if she would let it out of her sight. She could hardly ever get those recipes to work. I remember once she was trying to work a spell on a pigeon she’d caught. She was trying to teach it to be a homing pigeon. She let it loose from her window. It zipped away from her as fast as it could, but when she called ‘Come back now,’ the thing turned and dived like a suicidal lover, and impaled itself on the weather vane.” The old woman sighed. “Actually it was kind of funny.”

  “I’ll leave you for a while, Nanny, and I’ll come back. I promise.”

  “I never cared for pigeons except in pies. Poor little Nor, though, was heartbroken.”

  “Nor,” said Liir cautiously.

  “The little girl who used to live here. You remember. With the others.” But Nanny grew vague now and she could be made to say no more about Fiyero’s three children.

  “What if I find that book?” asked Liir. “If no one has taken it away, may I have it?”

  “You’ll have to ask Elphaba.”

  “If she’s not there to ask?”

  “Where would she be?” said Nanny. “Where would she be? Where is she? Elphie!” she suddenly bellowed. “Why don’t you come when I call you? After all I did for you all my life, and your slut of a mother before you! Elphie!”

  Chistery came flying from the corner of the room where he had been folding a basket of laundry. He made shooing hands to Liir, who backed out of the room, shaken.

  LIIR SPENT THE FIRST few weeks helping put Kiamo Ko to rights. He reminded the monkeys about sanitation, first and foremost. Under his help, the monkeys set to work closing up windows that had blown open, and repairing the roof when the wind didn’t imperil them. Liir began to weed the forecourt of its convocation of trees, sad as he did so, for even in their autumnal twiggery they provided some semblance of company. But then he decided to prune and thin rather than remove the trees entirely. Under its ivy and moss and tiny domesticated forest, the place might as well succumb to green. It seemed a suitable memorial for Elphaba Thropp.

  He couldn’t bring himself to go up to her tower rooms, though. He was afraid he might throw himself from the highest window if the grief took him unawares, like a demon lover.

  He visited Nanny and made her conditions comfortable and more sanitary. In a sideboard in the dining room he found a magnifying glass and some dusty old novels written decades ago. The Curse of the Admirable Frock was one; A Lady among Heathen, another. “Trash,” decided Nanny at once and set to reading them with gusto. It turned out she had not forgotten the skill; it was merely her eyes giving her trouble, and the lens helped.

  He watched the autumn go golden, then spare. He took care not to get too friendly with Chistery and the others. Isolation was one thing, but forming an unseemly attachment to a Flying Monkey might be quite another. The monkeys kept to their quarters—the old stables, the hayloft and granary—and he slept in the room that Nor had used as a little girl. The days darkened earlier, and when he went to bed in the gloom, he hardly knew if he was twelve or twenty-ish.

  A few days after the autumn rains began, a Swan was driven into the forecourt, and huddled for four days under a set of steps. He brought her milk and meal, and helped her wash her bloody breast, for she’d been attacked. She couldn’t give a name to the predator; she didn’t know what it might be called. She lived long enough to say that she had summoned a Conference of Birds to convene in Kumbricia’s Pass, but she’d gotten blown off course in some nasty weather.

  “What’s the Conference about?” asked Liir.

  She wasn’t accustomed to talking to a human, and resisted saying more. As her death drew nearer, though, she relented. “The rising threat. Can’t you see it? Being creatures of the wing, we have largely escaped the harshness that has befallen the creatures of the soil, but
now we are paying for our isolation and pride.”

  Before she died she said more to Chistery, perhaps feeling that as a winged creature he was more deserving of her confidences. Despite a blinding rain, they buried her beautiful downy carcass deep in the orchard. Out of respect Chistery and Liir didn’t rake her plumage for feathers to improve the household bedding, though Liir guessed that they both considered it.

  SHE HAD BEEN A PRINCESS among the Swans, said Chistery. Her last wish was that, as a Flying Monkey, he should take her place at the Conference and deliver her opening remarks to those assembled.

  Chistery said them carefully, trying to remember.

  “She said that the danger imperiling members of the Yunamata and the Arjiki clans, the Scrow and Ugabusezi, and the other tribes of the Vinkus, is related to what threatens Munchkinlanders in their fields and Scalp dwellers in their caves—it is a related sorrow, or the same trouble under different names. Trouble, sorrow, danger, peril: the Animals suffer no less than the Quadlings; the Birds are merely the latest, and neither the least nor the last—but only the Birds see everything, and they are coming together to share their information, to tell what they see, and to sound an alarm.”

  “I can’t make out what you mean, Chistery.”

  He moaned. “I’m trying to say what that Swan Princess said. Don’t ask me what it means! My head! She said, ‘It isn’t a matter of each generation taking care of its own, each species protecting its own young, each tribe its own kind. It is not a matter of that.’” Chistery’s head looked as if it were going to explode. These were not matters he was used to discussing. “The parvenu Emperor is the First Spear of God—that’s what he calls himself. He aims it against the whole world; no discrimination left. We have no choice but to resist.’”

  “Are you going to go to the Conference? Where is it?”

  “The eastern mouth of Kumbricia’s Pass. No, I’m not going.” Chistery spat. “I’m not a Bird, and I’m hardly a Monkey—more a monkey, really. Besides, my wings wouldn’t manage that distance anymore. I need a nice perch and a hot cup of cocoa before sleep, and a good private scratch in the morning, or I can’t answer for myself. It isn’t pretty.”