Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West Read online

  She looked at him with a wiry, strong expression. “Do you think I’m not way ahead of you?” she asked. “Of course I went tramping through there the day his body was found. Before anyone could lace up the door with padlocks and binding spells. Boq, do you take me for a fool?”

  “No, I don’t take you for a fool, so tell me what you found,” he said.

  “His findings are well hidden away,” she said, “and though there are colossal holes in my training, I am studying it on my own.”

  “You mean you’re not going to show me?” He was shocked.

  “It was never your particular interest,” she said. “Besides, until there’s something to prove, what’s the point? I don’t think Doctor Dillamond was there yet.”

  “I am a Munchkinlander,” he answered proudly. “Look, Elphie, you’ve more or less convinced me what the Wizard is up to. The confining of Animals back onto farms—to give the dissatisfied Munchkinlander farmers the impression he’s doing something for them—and also to provide forced labor for the sinking of useless new wells. It’s vile. But this affects Wend Hardings and the towns that sent me here. I have a right to know what you know. Maybe we can figure it out together, work to make a change.”

  “You have too much to lose,” she said. “I’m going to take this on myself.”

  “Take what on?”

  She only shook her head. “The less you know the better, and I mean for your sake. Whoever killed Doctor Dillamond doesn’t want his findings made public. What kind of a friend would I be to you if I put you at risk too?”

  “What kind of friend would I be to you if I didn’t insist?” he retorted.

  But she wouldn’t tell him. When he sat next to her during the rest of the class and passed her little notes, she ignored them all. Later he thought that they might have developed a genuine impasse in their friendship had the odd attack on the newcomer not occurred during that very session.

  Doctor Nikidik had been lecturing on the Life Force. Entwining around each wrist the two separate tendrils of his long straggly beard, he spoke in falling tones so that only the first half of each sentence made it to the back of the room. Hardly a single student was following. When Doctor Nikidik took a small bottle from his vest pocket and mumbled something about “Extract of Biological Intention,” only the students in the front row sat up and opened their eyes. For Boq and Elphaba, and everyone else, the patter ran—“A little sauce for the soup mumble mumble, as if creation were an unconcluded mumble mumble mumble, notwithstanding the obligations of all sentient mumble mumble mumble, and so as a little exercise to make those nodding off in the back of the mumble mumble mumble, behold a little mundane miracle, courtesy of mumble mumble mumble.”

  A frisson of excitement had woken everyone up. The Doctor uncorked the smoky bottle and made a jerky movement. They could all see a small puff of dust, like an effervescence of talcum powder, jostle itself in a swimming plume in the air above the neck of the bottle. The Doctor rowed his hands a couple of times, to start the air currents eddying upward. Keeping some rare sort of spatial coherence, the plume began to migrate upward and over. The ooohs that the students were inclined to make were all postponed. Doctor Nikidik held a finger out to them to shush them, and they could tell why. A vast intake of breath would change the pattern of air currents and divert the floating musk of powder. But the students began to smile, despite themselves. Above the stage, amid the standard ceremonial stags’ horns and brass trumpets on braid, hung four oil portraits of the founding fathers of Ozma Towers. In their ancient garb and serious expressions they looked down on today’s students. If this “biological intention” were to be applied to one of the founding fathers, what would he say, seeing men and women students together in the great hall? What would he have to say about anything? It was a grand moment of anticipation.

  But when a door to the side of the stage opened, the mechanics of the air currents were disturbed. A student looked in, puzzled. A new student, oddly dressed in suede leggings and a white cotton shirt, with a pattern of blue diamonds tattooed on the dark skin of his face and hands. No one had seen him before, or anyone like him. Boq clutched Elphaba’s hand tightly and whispered, “Look! A Winkie!”

  And so it seemed, a student from the Vinkus, in strange ceremonial garb, coming late for class, opening the wrong door, confused and apologetic, but the door had shut behind him and locked from this side, and there were no nearby seats available in the front rows. So he dropped where he was and sat with his back against the door, hoping, no doubt, to look inconspicuous.

  “Drat and damn, the thing’s been shabbed off course,” said Doctor Nikidik. “You fool, why don’t you come to class on time?”

  The shining mist, about the size of a bouquet of flowers, had veered upward in a draft, and it bypassed the ranks of long-dead dignitaries waiting an unexpected chance to speak again. Instead it cloaked one of the racks of antlers, seeming for a few moments to hang itself on the twisting prongs. “Well, I can scarcely hope to hear a word of wisdom from them, and I refuse to waste any more of this precious commodity on classroom demonstrations,” said Doctor Nikidik. “The research is still incomplete and I had thought that mumble mumble mumble. Let you discover for yourselves if mumble mumble mumble. I should hardly wish to prejudice your mumble.”

  The antlers suddenly took a convulsive twist on the wall, and wrenched themselves out of the oaken paneling. They tumbled and clattered to the floor, to the shrieking and laughing of the students, especially because for a minute Doctor Nikidik didn’t know what the uproar was about. He turned around in time to see the antlers right themselves and wait, quivering, twitching, on the dais, like a fighting cock all nastied up and ready to go into the ring.

  “Oh well, don’t look at me,” said Doctor Nikidik, collecting his books, “I didn’t ask for anything from you. Blame that one if you must.” And he casually pointed at the Vinkus student, who was cowering so wide-eyed that the more cynical of the older students began to suspect this was all a setup.

  The antlers stood on their points and skittered, crablike, across the stage. As the students rose in a common scream, the antlers scrabbled up the body of the Vinkus boy and pinned him against the locked door. One wing of the rack caught him by the neck, shackling him in its V yoke, and the other reared back in the air to stab him in the face.

  Doctor Nikidik tried to move fast, and fell to his arthritic knees, but before he could right himself two boys were up on the stage, out of the front row, grabbing the antlers and wrestling them to the ground. The Vinkus boy shrieked in a foreign tongue. “That’s Crope and Tibbett!” said Boq, jouncing Elphaba in the shoulder, “look!” The sorcery students were all jumping on their seats and trying to lob spells at the murderous antlers, and Crope and Tibbett found their grips and lost them and found them again, until at last they succeeded in breaking off one driving tine, then another, and the pieces, still twitching, fell to the stage floor without further momentum.

  “Oh the poor guy,” said Boq, for the Vinkus student had slumped down and was volubly weeping behind his blue-diamonded hands. “I never saw a student from the Vinkus before. What an awful welcome to Shiz.”

  The attack on the Vinkus student provoked gossip and speculation. In sorcery the next day Glinda asked Miss Greyling to explain something. “How could Doctor Nikidik’s Extract of Biological Intention or whatever it was, how could it fall under the heading of life sciences when it behaved like a master spell? What really is the difference between science and sorcery?”

  “Ah,” said Miss Greyling, choosing this moment to apply herself to the care of her hair. “Science, my dears, is the systematic dissection of nature, to reduce it to working parts that more or less obey universal laws. Sorcery moves in the opposite direction. It doesn’t rend, it repairs. It is synthesis rather than analysis. It builds anew rather than revealing the old. In the hands of someone truly skilled”—at this she jabbed herself with a hair pin and yelped—“it is Art. One might in fact call it the
Superior, or the Finest, Art. It bypasses the Fine Arts of painting and drama and recitation. It doesn’t pose or represent the world. It becomes. A very noble calling.” She began to weep softly with the force of her own rhetoric. “Can there be a higher desire than to change the world? Not to draw Utopian blueprints, but really to order change? To revise the misshapen, reshape the mistaken, to justify the margins of this ragged error of a universe? Through sorcery to survive?”

  At teatime, still awed and amused, Glinda reported Miss Greyling’s little heartfelt speech to the two Thropp sisters. Nessarose said, “Only the Unnamed God creates, Glinda. If Miss Greyling confuses sorcery with creation she is in grave danger of corrupting your morals.”

  “Well,” said Glinda, thinking of Ama Clutch on the bed of mental pain Glinda had once imagined for her, “my morals aren’t in the greatest shape to start out with, Nessa.”

  “Then if sorcery is to be helpful at all, it must be in reconstructing your character,” said Nessarose firmly. “If you apply yourself in that direction, I suspect it will be all right in the end. Use your talent at sorcery, don’t be used by it.”

  Glinda suspected that Nessarose might develop a knack for being witheringly superior. She winced in advance, even while taking Nessarose’s suggestion to heart.

  But Elphaba said, “Glinda, that was a good question. I wish Miss Greyling had answered it. That little nightmare with the antlers looked more like magic than science to me, too. The poor Vinkus fellow! Suppose we ask Doctor Nikidik next week?”

  “Who ever would have the courage to do that?” cried Glinda. “Miss Greyling is at least ridiculous. Doctor Nikidik, with that lovable bumbling mumbling incoherent way he has—he’s so distinguished.”

  At the life sciences lecture the following week, all eyes were on the new Vinkus boy. He arrived early and settled himself in the balcony, about as far from the lectern as he could get. Boq had the suspicion of nomads all settled farmers possessed. But Boq had to admit that the expression in the new boy’s eyes was intelligent. Avaric, sliding into the seat next to Boq, said, “He’s a prince, they say. A prince without a purse or a throne. A pauper noble. In his particular tribe, I mean. He stays at Ozma Towers and his name is Fiyero. He’s a real Winkie, full-blood. Wonder what he makes of civilization?”

  “If that was civilization, last week, he must long for his own barbaric kind,” said Elphaba from the seat on the other side of Boq.

  “What’s he wearing such silly paint for?” said Avaric. “He only draws attention to himself. And that skin. I wouldn’t want to have skin the color of shit.”

  “What a thing to say,” said Elphaba. “If you ask me, that’s a shitty opinion.”

  “Oh please,” said Boq. “Let’s just shut up.”

  “I forgot, Elphie, skin is your issue too,” said Avaric.

  “Leave me out of this,” she said. “We just had lunch, and you give me dyspepsia, Avaric. You and the beans we had at lunch.”

  “I’m changing my seat,” warned Boq, but Doctor Nikidik came in just then, and the class rose to its feet in routine respect, then settled back noisily, chummily, chattering.

  For a few minutes Elphaba waved her hand to get the Doctor’s attention, but she was sitting too far back and he was burbling on about something else. She finally leaned over to Boq and said, “At the recess I’ll change my seat and go forward so he can see me.” Then the class watched as Doctor Nikidik finished his inaudible preamble and beckoned a student to open the same door at the side of the stage that Fiyero had stumbled through the previous week.

  In came a boy from Three Queens rolling a table like a tea tray. On it, crouched as if to make itself as small as possible, was a lion cub. Even from the balcony they could sense the terror of the beast. Its tail, a little whip the color of mashed peanuts, lashed back and forth, and its shoulders hunched. It had no mane to speak of yet, it was too tiny. But the tawny head twisted this way and that, as if counting the threats. It opened its mouth in a little terrified yawp, the infant form of an adult roar. All over the room hearts melted and people said “Awwwwww.”

  “Hardly more than a kitten,” said Doctor Nikidik. “I had thought to call it Prrr, but it shivers more often than it purrs, so I call it Brrr instead.”

  The creature looked at Doctor Nikidik, and removed itself to the far edge of the trolley.

  “Now the question of the morning is this,” said Doctor Nikidik. “Picking up from the somewhat skewed interests of Doctor Dillamond, who mumble mumble. Who can tell me if this is an Animal or an animal?”

  Elphaba didn’t wait to be called on. She stood up in the balcony and launched her answer out in a clear, strong voice. “Doctor Nikidik, the question you asked was who can tell if this is an Animal or an animal. It seems to me the answer is that its mother can. Where is its mother?”

  A buzz of amusement. “Caught in the swamp of syntactical semantics, I see,” said the Doctor merrily. He spoke louder, as if having only now realized that there was a balcony in the hall. “Well done, Miss. Let me rephrase the question. Will someone here venture a hypothesis as to the nature of this specimen? And give a reason for such an assessment? We see before us a beast at a tender age, long before any such beast could command language if language were part of its makeup. Before language—assuming language—is this still an Animal?”

  “I repeat my question, Doctor,” sang out Elphaba. “This is a very young cub. Where is its mother? Why is it taken from its mother at such an early age? How even can it feed?”

  “Those are impertinent questions to the academic issue at hand,” said the Doctor. “Still, the youthful heart bleeds easily. The mother, shall we say, died in a sadly timed explosion. Let us presume for the sake of argument that there was no way of telling whether the mother was a Lioness or a lioness. After all, as you may have heard, some Animals are going back to the wild to escape the implications of the current laws.”

  Elphaba sat down, nonplused. “It doesn’t seem right to me,” she said to Boq and Avaric. “For the sake of a science lesson to drag a cub in here without its mother. Look how terrified it is. It is shivering. And it can’t be cold.”

  Other students began to venture opinions, but the Doctor shot them down one by one. The point being, apparently, that without language or contextual clues, at its infant stages a beast was not clearly Animal or animal.

  “This has a political implication,” said Elphaba loudly. “I thought this was life sciences, not current events.”

  Boq and Avaric shushed her. She was getting a terrible reputation as a loudmouth.

  The Doctor dragged the episode out long after everyone had digested the point. But finally he turned and said, “Now do you think that if we could cauterize that part of the brain that develops language, we could eliminate the notion of pain and thus its existence? Early tests on this little tom lion show interesting results.” He had picked up a small hammer with a rubber head, and a syringe. The beast drew itself up and hissed, and then backed up and fell on the floor, and streaked toward the door, which had closed and locked from this side as it had the previous week.

  But it wasn’t only Elphaba who was on her feet yelling. Half a dozen students were shouting at the Doctor. “Pain? Eliminate pain? Look at the thing, it’s terrified! It already gets pain! Don’t do that, what are you, crazy?”

  The Doctor paused, visibly tightening his grip on the mallet. “I will not preside over such shocking refusal to learn!” he said, affronted. “You are leaping to harebrained conclusions based on sentiment and no observation. Bring the beast here. Bring it back. Young lady, I insist. I shall be quite cross.”

  But two girls from Briscoe Hall disobeyed and ran out of the room carrying the clawing lion club in an apron between them. The room collapsed in an uproar and Doctor Nikidik stalked off the stage. Elphaba turned to Boq and said, “Well, I guess I don’t get to ask Glinda’s good question about the difference between science and sorcery, do I? We were definitely headed down a different path
today.” But her voice was shaking.

  “You felt for that beast, didn’t you?” Boq was touched. “Elphie, you’re trembling. I don’t mean this in an insulting way, but you’ve nearly gone white with passion. Come on, let’s sneak out and get a tea at the café at Railway Square, for old times’ sake.”

  4

  Perhaps every accidental cluster of people has a short period of grace, in between the initial shyness and prejudice on the one hand and eventual repugnance and betrayal on the other. For Boq it seemed that his summer obsession with the-then-Galinda made sense if only to usher in this following, more mature comfort with a circle of friends who had begun to feel inevitably and permanently connected.

  The boys still weren’t allowed access to Crage Hall, nor the girls to the boys’ schools, but the city centre area of Shiz became an extension of the parlors and lecture halls in which they were allowed to mingle. On a midweek afternoon, on a weekend morning, they would meet by the canal with a bottle of wine, or in a café or student watering hole, or they would walk about and discuss the fine points of Shiz architecture, or they would laugh about the excesses of their teachers. Boq and Avaric, Elphaba and Nessarose (with Nanny), Glinda, and sometimes Pfannee and Shenshen and Milla, and sometimes Crope and Tibbett. And Crope brought Fiyero along and introduced him, which frosted Tibbett for a week or so until the evening that Fiyero said, in his shy formal way, “Of course—I have been married for some time. We marry young in the Vinkus.” The others were agog at the notion, and felt juvenile.

  To be sure, Elphaba and Avaric needled each other mercilessly. Nessarose tried everyone’s patience with her religious rantings. Crope’s and Tibbett’s stream of saucy remarks got them dumped in the canal more than once. But Boq was relieved to find that his crush on Glinda was lifting somewhat. She sat on the edge of the picnic blanket with a look of self-reliance, and she diverted conversation away from herself. He had loved the girl who had loved the glamour in herself, and that girl seemed to have disappeared. But he was happy to have Glinda as a friend. Well, in a nutshell: he had loved Galinda and this now was Glinda. Someone he could no longer quite figure out. Case closed.