Gregory Maguire_Wicked Years_02

A NOVEL

MAP

L. FRANK BAUM’S
second Oz novel,
The Marvelous Land of Oz
(1904), was dedicated to the actors David C. Montgomery and Fred A. Stone, who performed the roles of the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow in the first theatrical version of
The Wizard of Oz.

In that spirit,
Son of a Witch
is dedicated to the cast and creative team of the musical
Wicked,
which opened on Broadway in October 2003—the night before Halloween.

To Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz, foremost and first, for their vision; to Wayne Cilento, Susan Hilferty, Eugene Lee, Joe Mantello, Stephen Oremus, Kenneth Posner, and Marc Platt and his associates, for bringing visions to life; and, among all the capable cast, most especially to Kristin Chenoweth (
Galinda/Glinda
), Joel Grey (
The Wizard
), and Idina Menzel (
Elphaba
), for bringing life to visions.

I
HAVE NO FEAR
that the poetry of democratic peoples will be found timid or that it will stick too close to the earth.
I am much more afraid that it…may finish up by describing an entirely fictitious country.

—Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America,
1835, 1840

A
LL COWS
were like all other cows,
all tigers like all other tigers—what on earth has happened to human beings?

—Harry Mulisch,
Siegfried,
2001

1

S
O THE TALK OF RANDOM BRUTALITY
wasn’t just talk. At noontime they discovered the bodies of three young women, out on some mission of conversion that appeared to have gone awry. The novice maunts had been strangled by their ropes of holy beads, and their faces removed.

Her nerve being shaken at last, Oatsie Manglehand now caved in to the demands of her paying customers. She told the team drivers they’d pause only long enough to dig some shallow graves while the horses slaked their thirst. Then the caravan would press on across the scrubby flats known, for the failed farmsteads abandoned here and there, as the Disappointments.

Moving by night, at least they wouldn’t make a sitting target, though they might as easily wander into trouble as sidestep it. Still, Oatsie’s party was antsy. Hunker down all night and wait for horse hoofs, spears? Too hard on everyone. Oatsie consoled herself: If the caravan kept moving, she could sit forward with her eyes peeled, out of range of the carping, the second-guessing, the worrying.

With the benefit of height, therefore, Oatsie spotted the gully before anyone else did. The cloudburst at sunset had fed a small trackside rivulet that flowed around a flank of skin, water-lacquered in the new moonlight. An island, she feared, of human flesh.

I ought to turn aside before the others notice, she thought; how much more can they take? There is nothing I can do for that human soul. The digging of another trench would require an hour, minimum. An additional few moments for prayers. The project would only further agitate these clients as they obsess about their own precious mortality.

Upon the knee of the horizon balanced the head of a jackal moon, so-called because, once every generation or so, a smear of celestial flotsam converged behind the crescent moon of early autumn. The impact was creepy, a look of a brow and a snout. As the moon rounded out over a period of weeks, the starveling would turn into a successful hunter, its cheeks bulging.

Always a fearsome sight, the jackal moon tonight spooked Oatsie Manglehand further.
Don’t stop for this next casualty. Get through the Disappointments, deliver these paying customers to the gates of the Emerald City
. But she resisted giving in to superstition. Be scared of the real jackals, she reminded herself, not frets and nocturnal portents.

In any case, the light of the constellation alleviated some of the color blindness that sets in at night. The body was pale, almost luminous. Oatsie might divert the Grasstrail Train and give the corpse a wide berth before anyone else noticed it, but the slope of the person’s shoulders, the unnatural twist of legs—the jackal moon made her read the figure too well, as too clearly human, for her to be able to turn aside.

“Nubb,” she barked to her second, “rein in. We’ll pull into flank formation up that rise. There’s another fatality, there in the runoff.”

Cries of alarm as the news passed back, and another mutter of mutiny: Why should they stop?—were they to bear witness to every fresh atrocity? Oatsie didn’t listen. She yanked the reins of her team of horses, to halt them, and she lowered herself gingerly. She stumped, her hand on her sore hip, until she stood a few feet over the body.

Face down and genitals hidden, he appeared to have been a young man. A few scraps of fabric were still knotted about his waist, and a boot some yards distant, but he was otherwise naked, and no sign of his clothes.

Curious: no evidence of the assassins. Neither had there been about the bodies of the maunts, but that was on rockier ground, in a drier hour. Oatsie couldn’t see any sign of scuffle here, and in the mud of the gulch one might have expected…something. The body wasn’t bloody, nor decayed yet; the murder was recent. Perhaps this evening, perhaps only an hour ago.

“Nubb, let’s heave him up and see if they’ve taken his face,” she said.

“No blood,” said Nubb.

“Blood may have run off in that cloudburst. Steel yourself, now.”

They got on either side of the body and bit their lips. She looked at Nubb, meaning: It’s only the next thing, it’s not the last thing. Let’s get through this, fellow.

She jerked her head in the direction of the hoist. One, two, heave.

They got him up. His head had fallen into a natural scoop in the stone, a few inches higher than where the rain had pooled. His face was intact, more or less; that is to say, it was still there, though shattered.

“How did he get here?” said Nubb. “And why didn’t they scrape him?”

Oatsie just shook her head. She settled on her haunches. Her travelers had come forward and were congregating on the rise behind her; she could hear them rustling. She suspected that they had gathered stones, and were ready to kill her if she insisted on a burial.

The jackal moon rose a few notches higher, as if trying to see into the gulley. The prurience of the heavens!

“We’re not going to dig another grave.” That from her noisiest client, a wealthy trader from the northern Vinkus. “Not his, Oatsie Manglehand, and not yours, either. We’re not doing it. We leave him unburied and alone, or we leave him unburied with your corpse for company.”

“We don’t need to do either,” said Oatsie. She sighed. “Poor, poor soul, whoever he is. He needs no grave. He isn’t dead yet.”

2

I
N TIME,
when the travelers had rejoined their cronies and relatives in the Emerald City—in salons, in public houses, in taverns of exchange—they heard more chatter about the hostilities they had managed to sidestep. Rumor flourished. Forty, sixty, a hundred deaths resulting from the skirmishes between the Scrow and the Yunamata. Barbarians, the lot of them: They deserved to kill off each other. But not us.

Rumor could be wrong, of course, but it couldn’t be uninteresting. Two hundred dead. Twice that. Mass graves, and they would be found
any day
.

But the luxury of safety came later. First, the Grasstrail Train still had to resume its snail’s progress through the Disappointments. Geographical variety—the hills, mountains, dales and forests that made the rest of Oz so memorable, such a heartland—was in short supply here. Just flats, shales, more flats, grey as pulped newspapers.

The prospect was dispiriting, and the notion of having to carry an invalid with them didn’t improve matters. Oatsie Manglehand’s clients had paid good hard cash for her service. Some originating from as far away as Ugabu, and others having joined the group along the eastern foothills of the Great Kells, they considered their own safe travel should be Oatsie’s sole concern.

Oatsie reminded them that they didn’t have a vote. She’d never represented that her clients would travel unencumbered by waifs and strays. Indeed, by terms of their contracts, she was free of liability should any of the travelers be murdered on the trail by a fellow passenger, a stowaway, a hitchhiker, a native. Oatsie had promised to lead the caravan as safely as she could, relying on her knowledge of the terrain and its populations. That was it. Period. To that end, she’d chosen a new route intended to avoid the current hot spots of intertribal conflict, and so far so good. Right?

The invalid was loaded aboard.

Despite her bravado, Oatsie was indeed sensitive to her clients’ fears, and in a way she was glad to have the unconscious young man with them. It distracted the travelers, while he remained oblivious of their resentment.

She bedded him in the third carriage back, requisitioning from her clients the warmest of winter robes. She mounded him into a cocoon. There he languished, day and night, not so much fevered as feverless—an equally worrying condition. After a day of trying, Nubb was able to spoon a few tips of brandy between the lad’s lips, and Oatsie fancied she saw his muscles relax in a new way.

She couldn’t be certain of this. She was no doctor.

Of one thing she was sure, though. With his arrival, the mood of the Grasstrail Train changed. Why? Perhaps this: If the poor creature had been beaten to within an inch of his life, and lived, there might be hope for all of them. Think about it:
His face hadn’t been scraped
. People relaxed. The nasal buzz of prayers around the supper campfire gave way to a quieter mood. Song returned, in time.

We’ll make it. We deserve to. The privilege of life has been accorded us, see? We’ve been saved. Must be for a reason. Spines straightened, eyes grew bright and moist in a rapture of gratitude at the plan of the Unnamed God.

Another week and they had rounded the landmark rocks that marked their U-turn north, and they left behind them in the Disappointments the greatest threat of ambush.

In this month of Summersend, the wind flicked the strands of oakhair in the forest that grew between the lakes. Squirrels spilled nuts on the skarkskin roofs of the wagons. The air was more watery, too, though both lakes were out of sight beyond the miles of woods on either side.

As the oakhair forest thinned and they reached the Shale Shallows, the shady surround and homely walls of an old settlement solidified in the middle of walnut-colored fields. The first stone building they’d seen in six weeks. Despite its steep, aggrieved gables and pinched outbuildings, despite its battlement defenses, nothing—not even the Emerald City—could seem more welcome a sight just then.

“The Cloister of Saint Glinda,” they buzzed. “How holy it appears.”

The maunts who lived within were divided into ranks. Some took vows of silence and lived cloistered. Others took vows of indulgence. They indulged in teaching, tending the sick, and operating a hostelry for those traveling between the southern Kells and the Emerald City. So the broad carved doors were swung open when the Grasstrail Train pulled up. The welcoming committee, a band of three middle-aged maunts with well-starched collars and bad teeth, stood at attention.

They greeted Oatsie with frosty politeness. They were suspicious of any unmarried woman who had found a way to live single, apart from female community. Still, they offered her the traditional wipe of the face with sweet rosefern. A fourth maunt, sequestered behind a screen, played a welcoming anthem, poorly. Harp strings snapped, and the sound of a most unmauntish oath issued forth.

The travelers didn’t care. They were almost in heaven. To anticipate beds!—and a warm meal!—and wine!—and a captive audience, ready to thrill at the story of their journey!

In this last item, though, the maunts gave bad value for money. At once their attention was riveted by the invalid. They carried him into the loggia and hurried to collect a stretcher so he could be hauled upstairs to the infirmary.

The maunts were beginning to shift the fellow to private quarters when the Superior Maunt wafted by, fresh from her morning devotions. She greeted Oatsie Manglehand with the least of nods, and glanced upon the broken lad for a moment. Then she waved her hands: Remove him.

She said to Oatsie, “We know him. We know this one.”

“You do?” said Oatsie.

“If my memory hasn’t begun to fail me,” the Superior Maunt continued, “you should know him, as well. You took him from us some years ago. Fifteen was it, twenty? At my age I don’t apprehend the passage of time as I ought.”

“He’d have been a child twenty years ago, an infant,” said Oatsie. “I never took an infant from a mauntery.”

“Perhaps not an infant. But you took him just the same. He traveled with a disagreeable novice who served for several years in the hospice. You were conveying them to the castle stronghold of the Arjikis. Kiamo Ko.”

“He was with Elphaba?”

“Now you remember, I see you do.”

“The Wicked Witch of the West…”

“As some called her.” The Superior Maunt sniffed. “Not I. Her name here was Sister Saint Aelphaba, but I seldom called her anything. She was more or less under a vow of silence—her own. She needed no addressing.”

“You recognize him from youth to now?” said Oatsie. “You’ve seen him since?”

“No. But I do not forget a face.”

Oatsie raised her eyebrows.

“I have seen so few faces,” explained the Superior Maunt. “We will not talk now. I must have Sister Doctor here to look the boy over.”

“What
was
his name?”

The Superior Maunt vanished without answering.

By nightfall, as Oatsie’s clients finished their nightcaps, the next generation of rumors was launched. The man-child was the Emperor’s confessor. He was a brigand trafficking in the sex trade. He spoke in the voice of a Loon. Except for a single rib, the man-child had broken every bone in his body.

Many of the rumors were contradictory, which in the aggregate made them all more amusing.

3

I
T WAS A HARD TIME.
It had been a hard time, in Oz, for some time (for all time, said world-weary students). The Superior Maunt, too tired for colloquy, removed herself to her chambers and settled in a rocker. Amid trappings more severe than what her younger colleagues could tolerate, she rocked a little and thought, as coherently as she could. (It was a habit of hers, to forestall the onset of vagueness, that she review a strand of history from time to time.)

The Witch—so-called—had lived at the cloistered mauntery a decade and a half ago. One couldn’t forget
that
—to the Superior Maunt’s knowledge, no one else in Oz had ever been born with skin as green as new lilac leaves. But Elphaba had kept herself to herself, accepting without complaint such assignments as were meted out. She’d lived there for, what, five, six, seven years? And then, the Superior Maunt had hired Oatsie Manglehand to escort the close-lipped novice back into the civilian world. The small boy had tagged along, neither warmly included nor shooed away.

What had his name been, and where had he come from? An urchin left behind by one of the gypsy bands that scavenged for petty mushrooms among the roots of oakhair trees? The Superior Maunt couldn’t remember the lad’s provenance. Someone younger would know.

Elphaba had gone. Off to Kiamo Ko, there to stew in her own private penance. The Superior Maunt occasionally listened to testimonies of sin confessed by her sisters, but during her tenure as a maunt, Elphaba had never petitioned for an audience. Of this the Superior Maunt was quite sure. Though the nature of Elphaba’s sins had been of great interest to the under-entertained sorority, Elphaba had never obliged.