Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Wicked Years, #1)

by Gregory Maguire

I had wondered if she talked about the death of the Goat.” Glinda said, “Oh the Goat? Well I could hardly tell—”

“I suspected that, in her deranged condition, she might return to that critical moment. The dying often try to make sense, at the last possible moment, of the puzzles of their lives. Useless effort, of course. No doubt Ama Clutch was puzzled by what she came across, the Goat’s body, the blood. And Grommetik.”

“That terrible morning I was up early—at my spiritual meditations—and I noticed the light in Doctor Dillamond’s lab. So I sent Grommetik over with a cheering pot of tea for the old Goat. Grommetik found the Animal slumped over a broken lens; he’d apparently stumbled and severed his own jugular vein. Such a sad accident, born of academic zeal (not to say hubris) and a pitiful lack of common sense. Rest, we all need rest, the brightest of us need our rest. Grommetik in its confusion felt for a pulse—none to be found—and I surmise that is just when Ama Clutch arrived. To see dear Grommetik splashed with the spurts of a strong circulatory pulse. Ama Clutch arrived out of nowhere and none of her business, I might add, but let’s not malign the dead, shall we?”

Glinda said waveringly, “Madame Morrible, you should know that Ama Clutch had never suffered such a disease as I described to you. I invented it. But I didn’t assign it. I didn’t commit it to her, or her to it.” Elphaba looked at Madame Morrible steadily,

“You live in a little womb here, a tight little nest, girl with girl. Oh I know you have your silly boys on the edge, forgettable things. Good for one thing only and not even reliable at that. But I digress. I must say that you know little or nothing of the state of the nation today. You have no sense of the pitch of unrest to which things have mounted. Setting communities on edge, ethnic groups against one another, bankers against farmers and factories against shopkeepers. Oz is a seething volcano threatening to erupt and burn us in its own poisonous pus.

But things are not always as they seem. And it has been clear for some time that the Wizard’s bag of tricks would not do forever. There are bound to be popular uprisings—the stupid, senseless kind, in which strong dumb people enjoy getting killed for the sake of political changes that’ll be rolled back within the decade. Adds such meaning to meaningless lives, don’t you think? One can’t imagine any other reason for it. At any rate, the Wizard needs some agents. He requires a few generals. In the long run. Some people with managing skills. Some people with gumption. “In a word, women.

There is more in each one of you than meets the eye. Miss Nessarose, being the newest, you are the most hidden to me, but once you outgrow that fetching habit of faith you will display a ferocious authority. Your bodily disorder is of no significance here. Miss Elphaba, you are an isolate, and even in my binding spell you sit there stewing in scorn of every word I say. This is evidence of great internal power and force of will, something I deeply respect even when marshaled against me. You have shown no sign of interest in sorcery and I don’t claim you have any natural aptitude. But your splendid lone-wolf spit and spirit can be harnessed, oh yes it can, and you needn’t live a life of unfulfilled rage. And Miss Glinda: You have surprised yourself with the talents at sorcery you possess. I knew you would. I had hoped your inclinations might rub off on Miss Elphaba, but that they haven’t is only firmer proof of Miss Elphaba’s iron character.

“Now to be specific. I want you to consider your futures. I would like to name you, to baptize you as it were, as a trio of Adepts. In the long run I would like to assign you behind-the-scenes ministerial duties in different parts of the country. I am empowered to do this, remember, by those whose boot straps I am not worthy to lick.” But she looked smug, as if she thought herself quite worthy enough, indeed, of attention from these mysterious forces. “Let us say you will be secret partners of the highest level of government. You will be anonymous ambassadors of peace, helping to restrain the unruly element among our less civilized populations. Nothing is decided yet, of course, and you do have a say in the matter—a say to me, and not to each other nor anyone else, as the spell goes—but I would like you to think about it. I need—eventually—to place an Adept in Gillikin somewhere. Miss Glinda, with your middle-range social position and your transparent ambitions, you can slime your way into ballrooms of margreaves and still be at home in the pigsties. Oh, don’t squirm so, your good blood is only on one side and it’s not a terribly refined strain anyway. The Adept of Gillikin, Miss Glinda? Does it appeal?”

“Miss Elphaba,” said Madame Morrible, “full of the teenage scorn of inherited position, you are nonetheless the Thropp Third Descending, and your great-grandfather, the Eminent Thropp, is in his dotage. One day you will inherit what is left of Colwen Grounds, that pretentious pile in Nest Hardings, and you could manage to be the Adept of Munchkinland. Your unfortunate skin condition notwithstanding—indeed, perhaps because of it—you have developed a feistiness and an iconoclasm that is just faintly appealing when it doesn’t nauseate. It will come in service. Believe me.

Miss Nessarose,” she went on, “having grown up in Quadling Country, you will want to return there with Nanny. The social situation in Quadling Country is such a mess, what with the decimation of the squelchy froglet population, but it may come back, in small measure, and there should be someone to oversee the ruby mines. We need someone to look after things in the South. Once you recover from your religious mania, it’ll be a perfect setting. You don’t expect a life of high society anyway, not without arms. After all, how can one dance without arms? “As for the Vinkus, we don’t imagin...

Now girls, bound as you are to an oath of silence, I bid you to go away and think on what I have said. Please don’t even try to discuss it together as it’ll just give you a headache and cramps. You won’t be able to manage it. Sometime in the next semester I will call each of you in here and you can give me your answer. And if you should choose not to help your country in its hour of need . . .” She clasped her hands in a parody of despair. “Well, you are not the only fish in the sea, are you?”

“We’re going to the Emerald City.”

“Tonight,” hissed Elphaba. “You little idiot, we have no time to waste on sex!”

“It’s over the garden wall,” said Elphaba, “and we’re going to see the Wizard, come what may and hell to pay.”

ostlers

Men who care for horses at an inn

Off the boulevard on which they rode branched alleys, where shelves of tin and cardboard served as roofs for the flood of indigents. Many of them were children, though some were the diminutive Munchkinlanders, and some were dwarves, and some were Gillikinese bowed with hunger and strain. The carriage moved slowly, and faces stood out. A Glikkun youth with no teeth and no feet or calves, on his stumpy knees in a box, begging. A Quadling—“Look, a Quadling!” said Elphaba, grabbing Glinda’s wrist. Glinda caught a glimpse of a ruddy brown woman in a shawl, lifting a small apple to the child in a sling around her neck. Three Gillikinese girls dressed like women for hire. More children in a pack, running and squealing like piglets, pressing up against a merchant, to pick his pockets. Rag merchants with pushcarts. Kiosk keepers whose goods lay locked beneath safety grilles. And a sort of civil army, if you could call it that, strolling in foursomes on every second or third street, brandishing clubs, angular with swords.

Five days later they had made it past the gatekeeper, the receptionists, and the social secretary. They had sat for hours awaiting a three-minute interview with the Commander-General of Audiences. Elphaba, a hard, twisted look on her face, had managed to eject the words “Madame Morrible” from between her clamping lips. “Tomorrow at eleven,” said the Commander-General. “You will have four minutes between the Ambassador to Ix and the Matron of the Ladies’ Home Guard Social Nourishment Brigade. Dress code is formal.” He handed them a card of regulations that, being unequipped with courtly dress, they were obliged to ignore.

putative

Generally reputed or thought to be

martinets!

Strict disciplinarians in the military forces

plinth—

Heavy base supporting a statue

if she ever allows herself to be the bitch she really is, she’ll be the Bitch of the East. Nanny and the devoted staff at Colwen Grounds will prop her up.”

“What in the world do you know about wickedness? You’re a bit player in this network of renegades, aren’t you? You’re a novice.” “I know this: The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness,” she said.

martyr

Person killed because of their beliefs

“I love you so much, Fiyero, you just don’t understand: Being born with a talent or an inclination for goodness is the aberration.”

torque

Neck ornament with twisted metal

scions

Descendant of a prestegious or notable family

quiescently

In a state of inactivity or dormancy

semaphoric

System of sending messages by holding arms or flags in varied positions representing letters

“The disruption in your winter garden,” said Fiyero. “That was someone trying to break down your wall into that yard, and get them out alive.” “Don’t even suggest it,” shot the manager in a low voice. “There are more ears in this room than yours and mine. How do I know who was up to what, or why? I’m a private citizen and I mind my own business.”

Was it an accident I saw that, Fiyero wondered, looking at the manager with new eyes. Or is it just that the world unwraps itself to you, again and again, as soon as you are ready to see it anew?

harridan,

Strict, bossy, belligerant old woman

“Even after all this time, you could be an agent for the Palace,” she said later. “I’m not,” he said. “I’m good.”

I can sign a hundred greeting cards for the holiday season at one go. But it’s a very minor talent, I tell you. Sorcery is vastly overrated in the popular press. Otherwise, why wouldn’t the Wizard just magick the hell out of his adversaries? No, I’m content to try to be a good partner for my Chuffrey.

Who would’ve imagined it, Fiyero—you’re a prince, and Nessarose just about installed as the next Eminent Thropp, and Avaric, of course, the Margreave of Tenmeadows, and humble little me-eee married to Sir Chuffrey, holder of the most useless title and the biggest stock portfolio in the Pertha Hills?” Glinda almost stopped for breath, but lunged on kindly, “And Crope, of course, dear Crope. Crope, tell Fiyero all about yourself, he’s dying to know, I can see it.”

When we were young we thought the world revolved around Shiz. You know there’s real theatre here now, the Wizard has made this a much more cosmopolitan city, don’t you think?”

“Nessarose says if her sister ever does turn up she’ll spit in her face,” Glinda remarked, “so we must all pray that Nessarose never loses her faith, for that would mean the evaporation of such tolerance and kindness. I think she would kill Elphaba. Nessa was abandoned, rejected, left to look after her crazy father, her grandfather-thingy, that brother, that nurse, that house, the staff—and you can’t even say single-handedly, as she doesn’t have any hands!”

He didn’t see Glinda again. He didn’t call at the Florinthwaite Club. He didn’t stroll past the Thropp family house in Lower Mennipin Street (though he was sorely tempted). He didn’t stop a scalper to try to get one of the tickets to Sillipede’s triumphant fourth annual comeback tour. He found himself in the Chapel of Saint Glinda in Saint Glinda Square, from which he could sometimes hear the cloistered maunts next door chanting and susurrating like a swarm of bees. When the two weeks had passed at last, and the city was worked up to a froth over Lurlinemas, he went to see Elphaba, half-expecting she would have vanished. But there she was, stern and loving and in the midst of making a vegetable pie for him.

He didn’t tell her about Glinda. How could he? Elphaba had worked so hard to keep them all at bay, and now she was engaged in the major campaign of her life, the thing she had been working toward for five years.

But even after seeing the Bear cub struck down, he had to keep an even, cautious relationship with the Power on the throne—for the sake of his tribe.

Also, Fiyero didn’t want to make Elphie’s life harder than it was. And his selfish need to be comfortable with her surmounted his need to gossip. So he didn’t tell her Nessarose and Nanny were in town either, or had been. (For all he knew, he rationalized silently, they had already moved on.)

“Why should I keep myself so safe?” he asked her, but he was almost asking himself. What is there in my life worth preserving? With a good wife back there in the mountains, serviceable as an old spoon, dry in the heart from having been scared of marriage since she was six? With three children so shy of their father, the Prince of the Arjikis, that they will hardly come near him? With a careworn clan moving here, moving there, going through the same disputes, herding the same herds, praying the same prayers, as they have done for five hundred years? And me, with a shallow and undirected mind, no artfulness in word or habit, no especial kindness toward the world? What is there that makes my life worth preserving?

“I love you,” said Elphaba. “So that’s that then, and that’s it,” he answered her, and himself. “And I love you. So I promise to be careful.” Careful of us both, he thought.

cenotaphs

Tomblike monument to someone buried elsewhere

ostentatious

Designed to impress or attract notice

sybarites

A person who is self indulgent in their need for sensuous luxury

Nobody pushed and shoved into a public space like the very rich, Fiyero knew.

Fiyero held his breath; Elphaba stiffened into petrified wood. This was the target.

Out into the snowy street, in a tidal wave of black silk and silver spangles, swept a huge woman; she was magisterial and august, she was Madame Morrible, no other; even Fiyero recognized her, having met her only once.

But could Madame Morrible be involved in intrigue with the Wizard? Or was this just a diversion, to take the mind of the authorities away from some more urgent target?

The Head of Crage Hall walked four steps toward the theatre, on the arm of a tiktok minion, and Elphaba leaned a little forward from under the wool market. Her chin was now sharply jutting out from the scarf, her nose aiming forward; she looked as if she could snip Madame Morrible into shreds, just using the serrated blades of her natural features. Her hands continued to figure out things beneath the cape.