Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
“But where did you get that green bottle?” said the Witch into Nanny’s good ear. “Look at it, Nanny dear, and try to remember.”
“I suspect I bought it at a jumble sale,” she said. “I could stretch a penny, believe me.”
You could stretch the truth even further, thought the Witch. She suppressed a desire to smash the green glass. How deeply bound by cords of family anger we all are, thought the Witch. None of us breaks free.
12
One afternoon a few weeks later, Liir came back from a ramble all hot and bothered. The Witch hated to hear that he had been hobnobbing again with the Wizard’s soldiers down in Red Windmill.
“They had news, a dispatch from the Emerald City,” he said. “A delegation of strangers got in to see the Wizard. And just a girl! Dorothy, they said, a girl from the Other Land. And some friends. The Wizard hasn’t allowed an audience with his subjects in years—he works through ministers, they say. A lot of soldiers think he died long ago, and it’s a Palace plot to safeguard the peace. But Dorothy and her friends got in, and they saw him, and told everyone what it was like!”
“Well well,” said the Witch. “Imagine that. All of Oz, Loyal and Otherwise, is yapping about this Dorothy. What did the fools say next?”
“The dispatch soldier said that the guests asked the Wizard to grant them some wishes. The Scarecrow asked for a brain, Nick Chopper the Tin Woodman asked for a heart, and the Cowardly Lion asked for courage.”
“And I suppose Dorothy asked for a shoe horn?”
“Dorothy asked to be sent home.”
“I hope she gets her wish. And?”
But Liir got coy.
“Oh come on, I’m too old to be put off my supper by gossip,” she snapped.
Liir looked flushed with guilty pleasure. “The soldiers said that the Wizard had rejected the odd requests.”
“And you’re so very surprised?”
“The Wizard told Dorothy that he would grant them their wishes—when they had—when they had—”
“You haven’t stuttered in years. Don’t start again, or I’ll beat you.”
“Dorothy and his friends have to come here and kill you,” he finished. “The soldiers said it’s because you murdered an old lady in Shiz, a famous old lady, and you’re an assassin. Also you’re crazy, they said.”
“I’m a more likely murderer than those incompetent vagabonds could be,” she said. “He was just trying to get rid of them. Probably he’s instructed his own Gale Forcers to slit the girl’s throat as soon as she’s safely out of the limelight.” And no doubt the Wizard had confiscated the shoes. It galled her. But how flattered she felt that the news of her attack had gotten out. By now she was sure she had killed Madame Morrible. It only made sense that she had.
But Liir shook his head. “The funny thing,” he said, “is that Dorothy is called Dorothy Gale. The soldiers at Red Windmill said the Gale Forcers wouldn’t touch her, they’re too superstitious.”
“What do these soldiers know of intrigue, stationed here out at the edge of the moon?”
Liir shrugged. “Aren’t you impressed that the Wizard of Oz even knows who you are? Are you a murderer?”
“Oh Liir, you’ll understand when you’re older. Or anyway not understanding will become second nature, and it won’t matter. I wouldn’t harm you, if that’s what you mean. But you sound so surprised that I should be known in the Emerald City. Just because you disobey me and treat me like refuse, do you think the whole world does?” Yet she was pleased. “But you know, Liir, if there’s even the slightest chance that there’s any truth to these rumors, you had better stay away from Red Windmill for a while. They might kidnap you and hold you for ransom until I give myself up to this schoolgirl and her needy companions.”
“I want to meet Dorothy,” he said.
“You’re not that age already, please preserve us,” she said. “I always intended to pickle you before you got to puberty.”
“Well, I’m not getting kidnapped, so don’t worry,” he said. “Besides, I want to be here when they get here.”
“Worry is the last thing I’d do if you got kidnapped,” she answered. “It’d be your own damn fault, and a great relief to me to have one less mouth to feed.”
“Oh well, then who’d carry the firewood up all those stairs every winter?”
“I’ll hire that Nick Chopper fellow. His axe looks pretty sharp to me.”
“You’ve seen him?” Liir’s mouth dropped open. “No, you haven’t!”
“I have, as a matter of fact,” she said. “Who says I don’t travel in the best circles?”
“What’s she like?” he said, his face eager and bright. “You must have seen Dorothy too. What’s she like, Auntie Witch?”
“Don’t you Auntie me, you know that makes me sick.”
He pestered without stopping until finally she had to screech at him. “She’s a beautiful little dolt who believes everything everybody says to her! And if she gets here and you tell her you love her, she’ll probably believe you! Now get out of here, I have work to do!”
He lingered at the door, and said, “The Lion wants courage, the Tin Man a heart, and the Scarecrow brains. Dorothy wants to go home. What do you want?”
“A little peace and quiet.”
“No, really.”
She couldn’t say forgiveness, not to Liir. She started to say “a soldier,” to make fun of his mooning affections over the guys in uniform. But realizing even as she said it that he would be hurt, she caught herself halfway, and in the end what came out of her mouth surprised them both. She said, “A soul—”
He blinked at her.
“And you?” she said in a quieter voice. “What do you want Liir, if the Wizard could give you anything?”
“A father,” he answered.
13
She wondered, briefly, if she was going insane. That night she sat up in a chair and thought about what she had said.
A person who doesn’t believe in the Unnamed God, or anything else, can’t believe in a soul.
If you could take the skewers of religion, those that riddle your frame, make you aware every time you move—if you could withdraw the scimitars of religion from your mental and moral systems—could you even stand? Or do you need religion as, say, the hippos in the Grasslands need the poisonous little parasites within them, to help them digest fiber and pulp? The history of peoples who have shucked off religion isn’t an especially persuasive argument for living without it. Is religion itself—that tired and ironic phrase—the necessary evil?
The idea of religion worked for Nessarose, it worked for Frex. There may be no real city in the clouds, but dreaming of it can enliven the spirit.
Perhaps in our age’s generous attempt at unionism, allowing all devotional urges life and breath under the canopy of the Unnamed God, perhaps we have sealed our own doom. Perhaps it’s time to name the Unnamed God, even feebly and in our own wicked image, that we may at least survive under the illusion of an authority that could care for us.
For whittle away from the Unnamed God anything approximating character, and what have you got? A big hollow wind. And wind may have gale force but it may not have moral force; and a voice in a whirlwind is a carnival barker’s trick.
More appealing—she now saw, for once—the old-timers’ notions of paganism. Lurlina in her fairy chariot, hovering just out of sight in the clouds, ready to swoop down some millennium or other and remember who we are. The Unnamed God, by virtue of its anonymity, can’t ever be suspected of a surprise visit.
And would we recognize the Unnamed God if it knocked on our doors?
14
Sometimes she napped, against her will, her chin sagging on her chest, sometimes driving right down to the tabletop, jarring her teeth and rattling her jaw, and startling herself awake.
She had taken to standing at the window, looking down in the valley. It would be weeks before Dorothy and her band arrived, if indeed they hadn’t already been murdered
One night Liir came back from a visit to the barracks. He was teary and inarticulate, and she tried not to care about it, but was too curious to let it go. Finally he told her. One of the soldiers had proposed to his fellows that when Dorothy and friends arrive, the friends be killed and Dorothy be tied up for a little amusement among the lonely, randy men.
“Oh, men will have their fantasies,” said the Witch, but she was troubled.
What had made Liir cry was that his friends had reported the soldier’s remarks to their superior. The soldier had been stripped and castrated, and nailed to the windmill. His body rotated in circles as the vultures came and tried to peck at his entrails. He still wasn’t even dead.
“It isn’t hard to find evil in this world,” said the Witch. “Evil is always more easily imagined than good, somehow.” But she was struck at the vehemence of the Commander’s response against one of his own. So Dorothy might well be alive still, and was apparently under orders of protection from the highest military offices in the land.
Liir held Chistery in his lap and sobbed onto his scalp. Chistery said, “Well, we’ll wail while woe’ll wheel,” and he cried along with Liir.
“Aren’t they the sweet pair,” observed Nanny. “Wouldn’t that make the sweetest painting?”
Under cover of darkness the Witch slipped away on her broom, and saw to it that the suffering soldier died at once.
She thought one afternoon, inexplicably, of the baby lion cub taken from its mother, and pressed into service in Doctor Nikidik’s lab back in Shiz. She remembered how it had cowered, she remembered the fuss she had made about it. Or was she only glorifying herself in hindsight?
If it was the same Lion, grown up timid and unnatural, it should have no bone to pick with her. She had saved it when it was young. Hadn’t she?
They confused her, this band of Yellow Brick Road Irregulars. The Tin Woodman was hollow, a tiktok cipher, or an eviscerated human under a spell. The Lion was a perversion of its own natural instincts. She could deal with tiktok clockworks, she could handle Animals. But it was the Scarecrow she feared. Was it a spell? Was it a mask? Was there merely some clever dancer inside? All three of them were emasculated in some way or other, deluded under the spell of the girl’s innocence.
She could give the Lion a history, and think of him as that abused cub in a Shiz science hall. She suspected that Nick Chopper was the victim of her own sister’s spite and magic, casualty of the enchanted axe. But she had no way to place the Scarecrow.
She began to think that behind that painted cornmeal sack of a face, there was a face she would know, a face she had been waiting for.
She lit a candle and said the words aloud, as if she really could do spells. The words blew aside the taper of grayish smoke that rose from the fatty tallow. If they had any other effect in the world than that, she didn’t know it yet. “Fiyero didn’t die,” she said. “He was imprisoned, and he has escaped. He is coming home to Kiamo Ko, he is coming home to me, and he is disguised as a scarecrow because he doesn’t yet know what he will find.”
It would take brains to think up such a plan.
She took an old tunic of Fiyero’s. She called elderly Killyjoy and bade him sniff it well, and sent him down into the valley every day, so that if the travelers showed up, Killyjoy would be able to find them, and lead them home rejoicing.
And though she tried not to sleep, on occasion she could not help it; her dreams brought Fiyero closer and closer to home.
15
There was a day, in the first gusts of autumn, that the banners and standards of the camp below were shifted and bugles blew tinnily up the slopes to the castle. By this the Witch guessed that the troupe had arrived in Red Windmill, and were being given a royal welcome. “They’ve come so far, they won’t wait now,” she said. “Go, Killyjoy, go find them and show them the quickest way here.”
She loosed the senior dog, and so strong were his exhortations that the entire pack of his kin went racing along with him, howling with joy and frantic to do their duty.
“Nanny,” cried the Witch, “put on a clean petticoat and change your apron, we’ll have company by nightfall!”
But the dogs didn’t come back, all afternoon and into the gloaming, and the Witch could see why. With a telescopic eye in a cylindrical casing—invented by the Witch along the lines of Doctor Dillamond’s discovery about opposing lenses—she followed a shock of carnage. Dorothy and the Lion trembled with the Scarecrow beyond while the Tin Woodman struck the heads of her beasts one after the other with his axe. Killyjoy and his wolfy relations lay scattered like dead soldiers on a field of retreat.
The Witch danced with rage, and summoned Liir. “Your dog is dead, look what they did!” she cried. “Look and make sure that I didn’t only imagine it!”
“Well, I didn’t like that dog very much anymore,” said Liir. “He had a good long life, anyway.” He concurred, tremblingly, but then trained the glass on the slope again.
“You fool, that Dorothy is not for messing with!” she cried, slapping the instrument out of his hand.
“You’re awfully on edge for someone about to have company,” he said sullenly.
“They are supposed to be coming to kill me, if you remember,” she said, although she had forgotten that, as she had forgotten her desire for the shoes until she saw them again in the glass. The Wizard had not demanded them of Dorothy! Why not? What fresh campaign of intrigue was this?
She wheeled about her room, whipping pages of the Grimmerie back and forth. She recited a spell, did it wrong, did it again, and then turned and tried to apply it to the crows. Though the original three crows had long since fallen stiffly from the top of the door frame, there were plenty of others in residence still, rather inbred and silly, but suggestible in a stupid, moblike way.
“Go,” she said. “Look with your eyes more closely than I can, pull the mask off the Scarecrow so we can know who he is. Get them for me. Peck out the eyes of Dorothy and the Lion. And three of you, go on ahead to the old Princess Nastoya, out there in the Thousand Year Grasslands, for the time is coming when we will be reunited, all of us. With the help of the Grimmerie, the Wizard may topple at last!”
“I never know what you’re talking about anymore,” said Liir. “You can’t blind them!”
“Oh, watch me,” snarled the Witch. The crows blew away in a black cloud and dropped like buckshot through the sky, down the jagged precipices, until they came to the travelers.
“A pretty sunset, is there?” said Nanny, coming up to the Witch’s room in one of her rare forays, Chistery as always providing service.
“She’s sent the crows out to blind the guests coming for dinner!”
“What?”
“She’s BLINDING THE GUESTS COMING FOR DINNER!”
“Well, that’s one way to avoid having to dust, I suppose.”
“Will you lunatics hush up?” The Witch was twitching as if with a nervous disorder; her elbows flapped, as if she were a crow herself. She gave out a long howl when she found them in the glass.
“What, what, let me see,” said Liir, grabbing the thing. He explained to Nanny, because the Witch was almost beyond speech by now. “Well, I guess the Scarecrow knows how to scare crows, all right.”
“Why, what’s he done?”
“They’re not coming back, that’s all I’ll say,” said Liir, glancing at the Witch.
“It still could be him,” she said at last, breathing heavily. “You might get your wish yet, Liir.”
“My wish?” He didn’t remember asking for a father, and she didn’t bother to remind him. Nothing had yet suggested to her that the Scare-crow wasn’t a man in disguise. She would not need forgiveness if Fiyero had not died!
The light was failing, and the odd band of friends was making good time up the hill. They had come without an escort of soldiers, perhaps because the soldiers really believed that Kiamo Ko was run by a Wicked Witch.
“Come on, bees,” said the Witch, “work with me now. All together on this one, honeys. We need a little sting, we need a little zip, we want a little nasty, can you give us a little jab? No, not us, listen when I talk to you, you simpletons! The girl on the hill below. She’s after your Queen Bee! And when you’re through with your job, I’ll go down and collect those shoes.”
“What’s that old hag blathering about now?” said Nanny to Liir.
The bees were alert to the pitch in the Witch’s voice, and they rose to swarm out the window.
“You watch, I can’t look,” said the Witch.
“The moon is just like a pretty peach rising over the mountains,” said Nanny with the telescope to her old cataracted eye. “Why don’t we put in some peach trees instead of all those infernal apples in the back?”
“The bees, Nanny. Liir, take that from her and tell me what happens.”
Liir gave a blow-by-blow recounting. “They’re swooping down, they look like a genie or something, all flying in a big clump with a straggly tail. The travelers see them coming. Yes! Yes! The Scarecrow is taking straw out of his chest and leggings, and covering the Lion and Dorothy, and there’s a little dog, too. So the bees can’t get through the straw, and the Scarecrow is all in pieces on the ground.”
It couldn’t be. The Witch grabbed the eyepiece. “Liir, you are a filthy liar,” she shouted. Her heart roared like a wind.
But it was true. There was nothing but straw and air inside the Scarecrow’s clothes. No hidden lover returning, no last hope of salvation.
And the bees, having none left to attack but the Tin Woodman, flung themselves against him, and dropped in black heaps on the ground, like charred shadows, their stingers blunted on his fenders.