The Wicked Years Complete Collection Page 3

  He wouldn’t move, so he was bundled unceremoniously from his perch. The dwarf gave a poetic welcome. “All our lives are activity without meaning; we burrow ratlike into life and we squirm ratlike through it and ratlike we are flung into our graves at the end. Now and then, why shouldn’t we hear a voice of prophecy, or see a miracle play? Beneath the apparent sham and indignity of our ratlike lives, a humble pattern and meaning still applies! Come nearer, my good people, and watch what a little extra knowledge augurs for your lives! The Time Dragon sees before and beyond and within the truth of your sorry span of years here! Look at what it shows you!”

  The crowd pushed forward. The moon had risen, its light like the eye of an angry, vengeful god. “Give over, let me go,” Frex called; it was worse than he had thought. He had never been manhandled by his own congregation.

  The clock unfolded a story about a publicly pious man, with lamb’s wool beard and dark curly locks, who preached simplicity, poverty, and generosity while keeping a hidden coffer of gold and emeralds—in the double-hinged bosom of a weak-chinned daughter of blue blood society. The scoundrel was run through with a long iron stake in a most indelicate way and served up to his hungry flock as Roast Flank of Minister.

  “This panders to your basest instincts!” Frex yelled, his arms folded and his face magenta with fury.

  But now that darkness was almost total, someone came up from behind him to silence him. An arm encircled his neck. He twisted to see which damned parishioner took such liberties, but all the faces were cloaked by hoods. He was kneed in the groin and doubled over, his face in the dirt. A foot kicked him square between the buttocks and his bowels released. The rest of the crowd, however, was not watching. They were howling with mirth at some other entertainment put on by the Clock Dragon. A sympathetic woman in a widow’s shawl grabbed his arm and led him away—he was too fouled, too much in pain to straighten up and see who it was. “I’ll put you down in the root cellar, I will, under a burlap,” crooned the goodwife, “for they’ll be after you tonight with pitchforks, the way that thing is behaving itself! They’ll look for you in your lodge, but they won’t look in my keeping room.”

  “Melena,” he croaked, “they’ll find her—”

  “She’ll be seen to,” said his neighbor. “We women can manage that much, I guess!”

  In the minister’s lodge, Melena struggled with consciousness as a pair of midwives went in and out of focus before her. One was a fishwife, the other a palsied crone; they took turns feeling her forehead, peering between her legs, and stealing glances at the few beautiful trinkets and treasures Melena had managed to bring here from Colwen Grounds.

  “You chew that paste of pinlobble leaves, duckie, you do that. You’ll be unconscious before you know it,” said the fishwife. “You’ll relax, out will pop the little sweetheart, and all will be well in the morning. Thought you would smell of rosewater and fairy dew, but you stink like the rest of us. Chew on, my duckie, chew on.”

  At the sound of a knock, the crone looked up guiltily from the chest she was kneeling before and rummaging through. She let the lid close with a bang and affected a position of prayer, eyes closed. “Enter,” she called.

  A maiden with tender skin and high color came in. “Oh, I hoped someone would be here,” she said. “How is she?”

  “Nearly out and so is the babe,” answered the fishwife. “An hour more, I reckon.”

  “Well, I’m told to warn you. The men are drunk and on the prowl. They’ve been riled up by that dragon of the magic clock, you know, and are looking for Frex to kill him. The clock said to. They’ll likely stagger out here. We’d better get the wife safely away—can she be moved?”

  No, I cannot be moved, thought Melena, and if the peasants find Frex tell them to kill him good and hard for me, for I never knew a pain so extraordinary that it made me see the blood behind my own eyes. Kill him for doing this to me. At this thought, she smiled in a moment of relief and passed out.

  “Let’s leave her here and run for it!” said the maiden. “The clock said to kill her too, and the little dragon she’s going to give birth to. I don’t want to get caught.”

  “We’ve got our own reputations to uphold,” said the fishwife. “We can’t abandon the fancy ladything in mid-delivery. I don’t care what any clock says.”

  The crone, her head back in the chest, said, “Anyone for some real lace from Gillikin?”

  “There’s a hay cart in the lower field, but let’s do it now,” said the fishwife. “Come, help me fetch it. You, old mother hag, get your face out of the linens and come dampen this pretty pink brow. Right-o, now we go.”

  A few minutes later the crone, the wife, and the maiden were trundling the hay cart along a rarely used track through the spindles and bracken of the autumn woods. The wind had picked up. It whistled over the treeless foreheads of the Cloth Hills. Melena, sprawled in blankets, heaved and moaned in unconscious pain.

  They heard a drunken mob pass, with pitchforks and torches, and the women stood silent and terrified, listening to the slurred curses. Then they pressed on with greater urgency until they came upon a foggy copse—the edge of the graveyard for unconsecrated corpses. Within it they saw the blurred outlines of the clock. It had been left here for safekeeping by the dwarf—no fool he; he could guess this particular corner of the world was the last place jumpy villagers would seek tonight. “The dwarf and his boykins were drinking in the tavern too,” said the maiden breathlessly. “There’s no one here to stop us!”

  The crone said, “So you’ve been peering in the tavern windows at the men, you slut?” She pushed open the door in the back of the clock.

  She found a crawl space. Pendulums hung ominously in the gloom. Huge toothed wheels looked primed to slice any trespasser into sausage rounds. “Come on, drag her in,” said the crone.

  The night of torches and fog gave way, at dawn, to broad bluffs of thundercloud, dancing skeletons of lightning. Glimpses of blue sky appeared briefly, though sometimes it rained so hard that it seemed more like mud drops falling than water. The midwives, crawling on hands and knees out of the back of the clock-wagon, had their little discharge at last. They protected the infant from the dripping gutter. “Look, a rainbow,” said the senior, bobbing her head. A sickly scarf of colored light hung in the sky.

  What they saw, rubbing the caul and blood off the skin—was it just a trick of the light? After all, following the storm the grass did seem to throb with its own color, the roses zinged and hovered with crazy glory on their stems. But even with these effects of light and atmosphere, the midwives couldn’t deny what they saw. Beneath the spit of the mother’s fluids the infant glistened a scandalous shade of pale emerald.

  There was no wail, no bark of newborn outrage. The child opened its mouth, breathed, and then kept its own counsel. “Whine, you fiend,” said the crone, “it’s your first job.” The baby shirked its obligations.

  “Another willful boy,” said the fishwife, sighing. “Shall we kill it?”

  “Don’t be so nasty to it,” said the crone, “it’s a girl.”

  “Hah,” said the bleary-eyed maiden, “look again, there’s the weather vane.”

  For a minute they were in disagreement, even with the child naked before them. Only after a second and third rub was it clear that the child was indeed feminine. Perhaps in labor some bit of organic effluvia had become caught and quickly dried in the cloven place. Once toweled, she was observed to be prettily formed, with a long elegant head, forearms nicely turned out, clever pinching little buttocks, cunning fingers with scratchy little nails.

  And an undeniable green cast to the skin. There was a salmon blush in the cheeks and belly, a beige effect around the clenched eyelids, a tawny stripe on the scalp showing the pattern of eventual hair. But the primary effect was vegetable.

  “Look what we get for our troubles,” said the maiden. “A little green pat of butter. Why don’t we kill it? You know what people will say.”

  “I think it�
��s rotten,” said the fishwife, and checked for the root of a tail, counted fingers and toes. “It smells like dung.”

  “That is dung you’re smelling, you idiot. You’re squatting in a cow pattypie.”

  “It’s sick, it’s feeble, that’s why the color. Lose it in the puddle, drown the thing. She’ll never know. She’ll be out for hours in her ladylike faints.”

  They giggled. They cradled the infant in the crook of their arms, passing it around to test it for weight and balance. To kill it was the kindest course of action. The question was how.

  Then the child yawned, and the fishwife absentmindedly gave it a finger to nurse on, and the child bit the finger off at the second knuckle. It almost choked on the gush of blood. The digit dropped out of its mouth into the mud like a bobbin. The women catapulted into action. The fishwife lunged to strangle the girl, and the crone and the maiden flared up in defense. The finger was dug out of the mire and shoved in an apron pocket, possibly to sew back onto the hand that had lost it. “It’s a cock, she just realized she didn’t have one,” screeched the maiden, and fell on the ground laughing. “Oh, beware the stupid boy first tries to please himself with her! She’ll snip his young sprout off for a souvenir!”

  The midwives crawled back into the clock and dropped the thing at its mother’s breast, afraid to consider mercy murder for fear of what else the baby might bite. “Maybe she’ll chop the tit next, that’ll bring Her Drowsy Frailness around quick enough,” the crone chuckled. “Though what a child, that sips blood even before its first suck of mother’s milk!” They left a pipkin of water nearby, and under cover of the next squall they went squelching away, to find their sons and husbands and brothers, and berate and beat them if they were available, or bury them if not.

  In the shadows, the infant stared overhead at the oiled and regular teeth of time’s clock.

  Maladies and Remedies

  For days Melena couldn’t bear to look at the thing. She held it, as a mother must. She waited for the groundwater of maternal affection to rise and overwhelm her. She did not weep. She chewed pinlobble leaves, to float away from the disaster.

  It was a she. It was a her. Melena practiced conversions in her thinking when she was alone. The twitching, unhappy bundle was not male; it was not neutered; it was a female. It slept, looking like a heap of cabbage leaves washed and left to drain on the table.

  In a panic, Melena wrote to Colwen Grounds to drag Nanny from her retirement. Frex went ahead in a carriage to collect Nanny from the way station at Stonespar End. On the trip back, Nanny asked Frex what was wrong.

  “What is wrong.” He sighed, and was lost in thought. Nanny realized she had chosen her words poorly; now Frex was distracted. He began to mumble in a general way about the nature of evil. A vacuum set up by the inexplicable absence of the Unnamed God, and into which spiritual poison must rush. A vortex.

  “I mean what is the state of the child!” retorted Nanny explosively. “It’s not the universe but a single child I need to hear about, if I’m going to be any help! Why does Melena call for me instead of for her mother? Why is there no letter for her grandfather? He’s the Eminent Thropp, for goodness sakes! Melena can’t have forgotten her duties so thoroughly, or is life out there in the country worse than we thought?”

  “It’s worse than we thought,” said Frex grimly. “The baby—you had better be prepared, Nanny, so you don’t scream—the baby is damaged.”

  “Damaged?” Nanny’s grip on her valise tightened and she looked out over the red-leafed pearlfruit trees by the side of the road. “Frex, tell me everything.”

  “It’s a girl,” said Frex.

  “Damage indeed,” said Nanny mockingly, but Frex as usual missed the dig. “Well, at least the family title’s preserved for another generation. Has she got all her limbs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any more than she needs?”

  “No.”

  “Is she sucking?”

  “We can’t let it. It has extraordinary teeth, Nanny. It has shark’s teeth, or something like.”

  “Well she won’t be the first child to grow on a bottle or a rag instead of a tit, don’t worry about that.”

  “It’s the wrong color,” said Frex.

  “What color is the wrong color?”

  For a few moments Frex could only shake his head. Nanny did not like him and she would not like him, but she softened. “Frex, it can’t be that bad. There’s always a way out. Tell Nanny.”

  “It’s green,” he finally said. “Nanny, it’s green as moss.”

  “She’s green, you mean. It’s a she, for heaven’s sake.”

  “It’s not for heaven’s sake.” Frex began to weep. “Heaven is not improved by it, Nanny; and heaven does not approve. What are we to do!”

  “Hush.” Nanny detested weeping men. “It can’t be as bad as all that. There isn’t a sniff of low blood in Melena’s veins. Whatever blight the child has will respond to Nanny’s treatment. Trust Nanny.”

  “I trusted in the Unnamed God,” sobbed Frex.

  “We don’t always work at cross purposes, God and Nanny,” said Nanny. She knew this was blasphemous, but she couldn’t resist a gibe as long as Frex’s resistance was down. “But don’t worry, I won’t breathe a word to Melena’s family. We’ll sort this all out in a flash, and no one need know. The baby has a name?”

  “Elphaba,” he said.

  “After Saint Aelphaba of the Waterfall?”

  “Yes.”

  “A fine old name. You’ll use the common nickname Fabala, I suppose.”

  “Who even knows if she’ll live long enough to grow into a nickname.” Frex sounded as if he hoped this would be the case.

  “Interesting country, are we in Wend Hardings yet?” Nanny asked, to change the subject. But Frex had folded up inside, barely bothering to guide the horses onto the correct track. The country was filthy, depressed, peasant-ridden; Nanny began to wish she had not set out in her best traveling gown. Roadside robbers might expect to find gold on such a refined-looking older woman, and they would be right, for Nanny sported a golden garter stolen years ago from Her Ladyship’s boudoir. What a humiliation, if the garter should turn up these years later on Nanny’s well-turned if aging thigh! But Nanny’s fears were unfounded, for the carriage arrived, without incident, in the yard of the minister’s cottage.

  “Let me see the baby first,” said Nanny. “It will be easier and fairer on Melena if I know what we’re dealing with.” And this wasn’t hard to arrange, as Melena was out cold thanks to pinlobble leaves, while the baby in a basket on the table wailed softly.

  Nanny drew up a chair so she wouldn’t hurt herself if she fainted dead away. “Frex, put the basket on the floor where I can look into it.” Frex obliged, and then went to return the horses and carriage to Bfee, who rarely needed them for mayoral duties but loaned them out to earn a little political capital.

  The infant was wrapped in linens, Nanny saw, and the baby’s mouth and ears were strapped with a sling. The nose looked like a knob of bad mushroom, poking up for air, and the eyes were open.

  Nanny leaned closer. The child couldn’t be, what, three weeks old? Yet as Nanny moved from side to side, looking at the profile of the forehead from this angle and that, so as to judge the shape of the mind, the girl’s eyes tracked her back and forth. They were brown and rich, the color of overturned earth, flecked with mica. There was a network of fragile red lines at each soft angle where the eyelids met, as if the girl had been bursting the blood threads from the exertion of watching and understanding.

  And the skin, oh yes, the skin was green as sin. Not an ugly color, Nanny thought. Just not a human color.

  She reached out and let her finger drift across the baby’s cheek. The infant flinched, and her backbone arched, and the wrapping, which was tucked securely around the child from neck to toe, split open like a husk. Nanny gritted her teeth and was determined not to be cowed. The baby had exposed herself, sternum to groin, and the skin on
her chest was the same remarkable color. “Have you even touched this child yet, you two?” murmured Nanny. She put her hand palm down on the child’s heaving chest, her fingers covering the almost invisible baby nipples, then slid her hand down so she could check the apparatus below. The child was wet and soiled but felt made according to standard design. The skin was the same miracle of pliant smoothness that Melena had possessed as an infant.

  “Come to Nanny, you horrid little thing you.” Nanny leaned to pick the baby up, mess and all.

  The baby swiveled to avoid the touch. Her head beat itself against the rush bottom of the basket.

  “You’ve been dancing in the womb, I see,” said Nanny, “I wonder to whose music? Such well-developed muscles! No, you’re not getting away from me. Come here, you little demon. Nanny doesn’t care. Nanny likes you.” She was lying through her teeth, but unlike Frex she believed some lies were sanctioned by heaven.

  And she got her hands on Elphaba, and settled her on her lap. There Nanny waited, crooning and every now and then looking away, out the window, to recover herself and keep from vomiting. She rubbed the baby’s belly to calm the girl down, but there was no calming her down, not yet anyway.

  Melena propped herself up on her elbows in the late afternoon when Nanny brought a tray with tea and bread. “I have made myself at home,” said Nanny, “and I’ve made friends with your tiny darling. Now come to your senses, sweetheart, and let me give you a kiss.”

  “Oh, Nanny!” Melena allowed herself to be coddled. “Thank you for coming. Have you seen the little monster?”

  “She’s adorable,” said Nanny.

  “Don’t lie and don’t be soft,” said Melena. “If you’re going to help you must be honest.”

  “If I’m going to help, you must be honest,” said Nanny. “We need not go into it now, but I will have to know everything, my sweet. So we can decide what’s to be done.” They sipped their tea, and because Elphaba had fallen asleep at last, it seemed for a few moments like the old days at Colwen Grounds, when Melena would come home from afternoon walks with lithesome young gentry on the make, and boast of their masculine beauty to a Nanny who pretended she had not noticed.