The Wicked Years Complete Collection Page 4

  In fact, as the weeks went on, Nanny noticed quite a few disturbing things about the baby.

  For one thing, Nanny tried to remove the baby’s bandages, but Elphaba seemed intent on biting her own hands off, and the teeth inside that pretty, thin-lipped mouth were indeed monstrous. She would bite a hole through the basket if she were left unfettered. She went after her own shoulder and scraped it raw. She looked as if she were strangling.

  “Can’t a barber be had to pull the teeth out?” Nanny asked. “At least until the baby learns some self-control?”

  “You’re out of your mind,” Melena said. “It will be all over the valley that the little marrow is green. We’ll keep the jaw strapped up until we solve the skin problem.”

  “However in the world did her skin come green?” Nanny wondered, stupidly, for Melena blanched and Frex reddened, and the baby held her breath as if trying to turn blue to please them all. Nanny had to slap her to make her breathe again.

  Nanny interviewed Frex out in the yard. After the double blow of the birth and his public embarrassment, he was not yet up to professional engagements and sat whittling praying beads out of oak, scoring and inscribing them with emblems of the Namelessness of God. Nanny set Elphaba down inside—she had an unreasonable fear of being overheard by this infant, and, worse, of being understood—and Nanny sat scooping out a pumpkin for supper.

  “I don’t suppose, Frex, that you have green in your family background,” she began, knowing full well that Melena’s powerful grandfather would have confirmed such a predisposition before agreeing to let his granddaughter marry a unionist minister—of all the chances she had!

  “Our family isn’t about money or about earthly power,” said Frex, taking no offense for once. “But I’m descended in a direct line from six ministers before me, father to son. We’re as well regarded in spiritual circles as Melena’s family is in parlors and at the court of Ozma. And no, there is no green, anywhere. I never heard of such a thing before in any family.”

  Nanny nodded and said, “Well all right, I was only asking. I know you’re gooder than goblin martyrs.”

  “But,” Frex said humbly, “Nanny, I think I caused this thing to happen. My tongue slipped on the day of the birthday—I announced that the devil was coming. I meant the Clock of the Time Dragon. But suppose those words unlocked room for the devil?. . . ”

  “The child is no devil!” snapped Nanny. She’s no angel either, she thought, but kept it to herself.

  “On the other hand,” Frex continued, sounding more secure, “she may have been cursed by Melena, accidentally, who took my remark the wrong way and wept about it. Maybe Melena opened up inside herself a window through which an unattached sprite entered and colored the child.”

  “On the very day she is to be born?” said Nanny. “That’s a capable sprite. Is your goodness so exalted you attract the truly high-powered among the Spirits of Aberration?”

  Frex shrugged. A few weeks earlier he would have nodded, but his confidence was shattered with his abject failure in Rush Margins. He did not dare suggest what he feared: The child’s abnormality was a punishment for his failure to protect his flock from the pleasure faith.

  “Well . . .” Nanny asked practically, “if through a curse the goods were damaged, then through what might the ill be overturned?”

  “An exorcism,” said Frex.

  “Are you empowered?”

  “If I’m successful at changing her, we’ll know that I’m empowered,” said Frex. But now that he had a goal, his spirits brightened. He would spend some days in fasting, rehearsing prayers, and collecting supplies for the arcane ritual.

  When he was off in the woods, and Elphaba napping, Nanny perched on the side of Melena’s hard marriage mattress.

  “Frex wonders if his prediction that the devil was coming caused a window in you to open, letting an imp pass through to spoil the baby,” said Nanny. She was crocheting an edge of lace, clumsily; she had never excelled at piecework, but she liked handling the polished ivory crochet hook. “I wonder if you opened another window?”

  Melena, groggy from pinlobble leaves as usual, arched an eyebrow in confusion.

  “Did you sleep with someone other than Frex?” Nanny asked.

  “Don’t be mad!” said Melena.

  “I know you, honey,” said Nanny. “I’m not saying you’re not a good wife. But when you had the boys buzzing around you in your parents’ orchard you changed your perfumed undergarments more than once a day. You were lusty and sneaky and good at it. I’m not looking down at you. But don’t pretend to me that your appetites weren’t healthy.”

  Melena buried her face in the pillow. “Oh for those days!” she wailed. “It’s not that I don’t love Frex! But I hate being better than the local peasant idiots!”

  “Well, now this green child brings you down to their level, you ought to be pleased,” said Nanny meanly.

  “Nanny, I love Frex. But he leaves me alone so often! I would kill for some tinker to pass by and sell me more than a tin coffeepot! I would pay well for someone less godly and more imaginative!”

  “That’s a question for the future,” said Nanny sensibly. “I’m asking you about the past. The recent past. Since your marriage.”

  But Melena’s face was vague and blurry. She nodded, she shrugged, she rocked her head.

  “The obvious theory is an elf,” said Nanny.

  “I wouldn’t have sex with an elf!” Melena shrieked.

  “No more would I,” said Nanny, “but the green does give one pause. Are there elves in the neighborhood?”

  “There’s a gaggle of them, tree elves, up over the hill someplace, but if possible they are more moronic than the fair citizens of Rush Margins. Really, Nanny, I’ve never even seen one, or only from a distance. The idea is repulsive. Elves giggle at everything, do you know that? One of them falls out of an oak and smashes his skull like a rotten turnip, and they gather and giggle and then forget about him. It’s insulting of you even to bring it up.”

  “Get used to it, if we don’t find a way out of this quagmire.”

  “Well, the answer is no.”

  “Then someone else. Someone handsome enough on the outside, but carrying a germ that maybe you caught.”

  Melena looked shocked. She hadn’t thought of her own health since Elphaba was born. Could she be at risk?

  “The truth,” said Nanny. “We must know.”

  “The truth,” said Melena distantly. “Well, it is unknowable.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “I don’t know the answer to your question.” And Melena explained. Yes, the cottage was off the beaten track, and of course she never passed more than the curtest greetings with local farmers and fishermen and thickheads. But more travelers took to the hills and woods than you would credit. Often she had sat, listless and lonely, while Frex was off preaching, and she had found comfort in giving passersby a simple meal and a buoyant conversation.

  “And more?”

  But on those boring days, Melena muttered, she had taken to chewing pinlobble leaves. When she would awake, because the sun was setting or Frex was there frowning or grinning at her, she remembered little.

  “You mean you indulged in adultery and you don’t even have the benefit of a good saucy memory about it?” Nanny was scandalized.

  “I don’t know that I did!” said Melena. “I wouldn’t choose to, I mean not if I was thinking clearly. But I remember once when a tinker with a funny accent gave me a draft of some heady brew from a green glass bottle. And I had rare expansive dreams, Nanny, of the Other World—cities of glass and smoke—noise and color—I tried to remember.”

  “So you could well have been raped by elves. Won’t your grandfather be pleased to learn how Frex is taking care of you.”

  “Stop!” cried Melena.

  “Well, I don’t know what’s to be done!” Nanny lost her temper at last. “Everyone’s being irresponsible! If you can’t remember whether your marriag
e vows have been broken or not, there’s not much good in acting like an offended saint.”

  “We can always drown the baby and start over.”

  “Just try drowning that thing,” muttered Nanny. “I pity the poor lake asked to take her in.”

  Later, Nanny went through Melena’s small collection of medicines—herbs, drops, roots, brandies, leaves. She was wondering, without much hope, if she could invent something that might cause the girl’s skin to blanch. In the back of the chest Nanny found the green glass bottle spoken of by Melena. The light was bad and her eyes weren’t strong, but she could make out the words MIRACLE ELIXIR on a piece of paper pasted to the front.

  Though she had a native skill in healing, Nanny was unable to come up with a skin-changing potion. Bathing the child in cow’s milk didn’t make the skin white, either. But the child would not allow herself to be lowered into a pail of lake water; she twisted like a cat in panic. Nanny kept on with the cow’s milk. It left a horrid sour stink if she did not rub it off thoroughly with a cloth.

  Frex organized an exorcism. It involved candles and hymns. Nanny watched from a distance. The man was beady-eyed, perspiring with effort even though the mornings were colder and colder. Elphaba slept in her binding cloth in the middle of the carpet, oblivious to the sacrament.

  Nothing happened. Frex fell, exhausted and spent, and cradled his green daughter within the crook of his arm, as if finally embracing the proof of some undisclosed sin. Melena’s face hardened.

  There was only one thing left to try. Nanny gathered the courage to bring it up on the day she was to leave back for Colwen Grounds.

  “We see that peasant treatments don’t work,” said Nanny, “and spiritual intercession has failed. Do you have the courage to think about sorcery? Is there someone local who could magick the green venom out of the child?”

  Frex was up and lashing out at Nanny, swinging his fists. Nanny fell backward off her stool, and Melena bobbed about her, shrieking. “How dare you!” cried Frex. “In this household! Isn’t this green girl insult enough? Sorcery is the refuge of the amoral; when it isn’t out-and-out charlatanism, it is dangerously evil! Contracts with the demons!”

  Nanny said, “Oooh, preserve me! You fine, fine man, don’t you know enough to fight fire with fire?”

  “Nanny, enough,” said Melena.

  “Hitting a feeble old woman,” said Nanny, hurt. “Who only tries to help.”

  The next morning Nanny packed her valise. There was nothing more that she could do, and she wasn’t willing to live the rest of her life with a fanatical hermit and a ruined baby, even for the sake of Melena.

  Frex drove Nanny back to the inn at Stonespar End, for the coach-and-four to take her home. Nanny knew Melena might still think about killing the child, but somehow she doubted it. Nanny held her valise to her ample bosom, fearing bandits again. Inside her valise was hidden her gold garter (she could always claim it had been planted there without her knowledge, whereas it would have been hard to claim it had been planted on her leg in the same circumstances). She also had squirreled away the ivory crochet hook, three of Frex’s prayer beads because she liked the carvings, and the pretty green glass bottle left behind by some itinerant salesman selling, apparently, dreams and passion and somnolence.

  She didn’t know what she thought. Was Elphaba devil’s spawn? Was she half-elf? Was she punishment for her father’s failure as a preacher, or for her mother’s sloppy morals and bad memory? Or was she merely a physical ailment, a blight like a misshapen apple or a five-legged calf? Nanny knew her worldview was foggy and chaotic, pestered by demons, faith, and folk science. It didn’t escape her attention, however, that both Melena and Frex had believed uncompromisingly that they would have a boy. Frex was the seventh son of a seventh son, and to add to that powerful equation he was descended from six ministers in a row. Whatever child of either (or any) sex could dare follow in so auspicious a line?

  Perhaps, thought Nanny, little green Elphaba chose her own sex, and her own color, and to hell with her parents.

  The Quadling Glassblower

  For one short, wet month, early in the next year, the drought lifted. Spring tipped in like green well water, frothing at the hedges, bubbling at the roadside, splashing from the cottage roof in garlands of ivy and stringflower. Melena went about the yard in a state of mild undress, so that she could feel the sun on her pale skin and the deep warmth she had missed all winter. Strapped in her chair in the doorway, Elphaba, now a year and a half old, hit her breakfast minnow with the bowl of her spoon. “Oh, eat the thing, don’t mash it,” said Melena, but mildly. Since the child’s chin-sling had been removed, mother and daughter had begun to pay some attention to each other. To her surprise, Melena sometimes found Elphaba endearing, the way a baby should be.

  This view was the only thing she had seen since leaving the elegant mansion of her family, the only thing she would ever gaze upon again—the windswept surface of Illswater, the distant dark stone cottages and chimneys of Rush Margins on the other side, the hills lying in a torpor beyond. She would go mad; the world was nothing but water and want. If a frolic of elves scampered through the yard she would leap on them for company, for sex, for murder.

  “You father is a fraud,” she said to Elphaba. “Off finding himself all winter, leaving me with only you for company. Eat that breakfast, for you’ll get no more if you throw it on the ground.”

  Elphaba picked up the fish and threw it on the ground.

  “Your father is a charlatan,” continued Melena. “He used to be very good in bed for a religious man, and this is how I know his secret. Holy men are supposed to be above earthly pleasures, but your father enjoyed his midnight wrestling. Once upon a time! We must never tell him we know he’s a humbug, it would break his heart. We don’t want to break his heart, do we?” And then Melena burst into a high peal of laughter.

  Elphaba’s face was unsmiling, unchanging. She pointed to the fish.

  “Breakfast. Breakfast in the dirt. Breakfast for the bugs,” Melena said. She dropped the collar of her spring robe a little lower and the pink yoke of her bare shoulders gyrated. “Shall we go walk by the edge of the lake today and maybe you’ll drown?”

  But Elphaba would never drown, never, because she would not go near the lake.

  “Maybe we’ll go out in a boat and tip over!” Melena shrieked.

  Elphaba cocked her head to one side as if listening for some part of her mother not intoxicated with leaves and wine.

  The sun swept out from behind a cloud. Elphaba scowled. Melena’s robe dropped lower. Her breasts worked their way out from between the dirty ruffles of the collar.

  Look at me, thought Melena, showing my breasts to the child I couldn’t give milk to for fear of amputation. I who was the rose of Nest Hardings, I who was the beauty of my generation! And now I am reduced to company I don’t even want, my own squirming thorny little girl. She is more grasshopper than girl, with those angular little thighs, those arching eyebrows, those poking fingers. She’s about the business of learning like any child, but she takes no delight in the world: She pushes and breaks and nibbles on things without any pleasure. As if she has a mission to taste and measure all the disappointments of life. In which Rush Margins is amply supplied. Mercy from the Unnamed God, she’s a creep, she is. She is.

  “Or we might take a walk in the woods today and pick the last of the winter berries.” Melena was full of guilt at her lack of motherly feeling. “We can put them in a pie. Can we put them in a pie? Shall we, honey?”

  Elphaba didn’t speak yet, but she nodded, and began to wiggle to get down. Melena started a clapping game Elphaba took no notice of. The child grunted and pointed to the ground, and arched her long elegant legs to illustrate her desire. Then she gestured to the gate leading from the kitchen garden and the hen yard.

  There was a man at the uprights of the gate, leaning, shy and hungry-looking, with skin the color of roses at twilight: a dusky, shadowy red. He had a couple of le
athern satchels on his shoulders and back, and a walking staff, and a dangerously handsome, hollow-looking face. Melena screeched and caught herself, directed her voice to a lower register. It had been so long since she had spoken to anyone but a whining toddler. “Good glory, you startled us!” she cried. “Are you searching for some breakfast?” She had lost the social touch. For instance, her breasts should not be staring at him so. Yet she did not clasp her gown.

  “Please to forgive a sudden appearance by a strange foreigner at Lady’s gate,” said the man.

  “Forgiven, of course,” she said impatiently. “Come in where I can see you—come in, come in!”

  Elphaba had seen so few other people in her life that she hid one eye behind her spoon, and peeked with the other eye.

  The man approached. His movements showed the clumsiness of exhaustion. He was large of ankle and thick of foot, slender about the waist and shoulders, and thick again in the neck—as if he had been made on a lathe, and worked too briefly at the extremities. His hands, letting down the satchels, seemed like beasts with minds of their own. They were outsized and splendid.

  “Traveler not to know where he is,” said the man. “Two nights to cross the hills from Downhill Cornings. To look for the inn at Three Dead Trees. To rest.”

  “You’re lost, you’ve veered,” said Melena, deciding not to be perplexed at his scrambled words. “No matter. Let me fix you a meal and you can tell me your story.” Her hands were at her hair, which once used to be thought precious as spun brass. At least it was clean.

  The man was sleek and fit. When he removed his cap his hair fell out in greasy hanks, sunset red. He washed at the pump, stripping off his shirt, and Melena noticed it was nice to see a waist on a man again (Frex, bless him, had run to plumpness in the year-and-some since Elphaba’s birth). Were all Quadlings this delicious dusty rose color? The man’s name, Melena learned, was Turtle Heart, and he was a glassblower from Ovvels, in little-known Quadling Country.