Dedication

  For Idina Menzel and for Cynthia Erivo

  and for all the Elphabas, past and to come

  Epigraph

  Pursue the authentic—decide first

  what is authentic,

  then go after it with all your heart.

  Your heart, that place

  you don’t even think of cleaning out.

  That closet stuffed with savage mementos.

  —Louise Erdrich, from “Advice to Myself”

  Map

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  Part One: Encounter Day 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  Passim

  Part Two: The Hex 16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Passim

  Part Three: The Vegetable Pearl 27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  Passim

  Part Four: The Fledgling 44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  About the Author

  Also by Gregory Maguire

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  Encounter Day

  1

  War in the air, and yet the air is soft. Rotting jasmine and ripe skunk cabbage. Frogs in the sawgrass marsh. The basso profundo statement of a water buffalo, out of sight somewhere upstream. From farther off, a pock-pockity-pock. Not rain, but human hands skittering across drumheads of alligator hide. It sounds random unless you know the grammar. Just a pockity-pockity, while dawn drifts in like an afterthought.

  Some of the family take this in. Most do not. The father sunk in his devotions, eyes closed, fingers moving over prayer beads. The mother at her daily rinse, naked to the waist, while a mist stands stationary above the sliding water. Mist speckled with midges that glint and vanish.

  The older child is lollygagging on a blanket set squarely in the mud. She’s no baby, she can poke about when she wants. She can run when she remembers about running. At the age of three and spare change, maybe four. Certainly old enough. Though often she just sits, sucking her thumb and looking about her. She does this whenever her parents are distracted, which means frequently. She looks as if she is supervising the world, though like any child she is merely curious.

  Some children are more alert than others. This girl is one of them. Elphie, the Nanny calls her. Elphie, get down from there. Elphie, mind your tongue. Elphie, get your finger out of—Elphie.

  A green child in a green green world. Maybe green is as invisible to her as concepts of time, gravity, justice. She’s only a child on a blanket. Through the haze the sun bleeds, a wound leaking through gauze. She hears the dip of paddles from some unseen canoe down the river. Two bugs meet on the satin edging of her cotton playground but as they’re of different congregations they pass by without acknowledgment. One is the color of new-split bamboo and the other wetly black.

  The mother, the father, the child, and Nanny. Also the team of bearers and guides.

  Something has caused this day to lift out of the morass of everyness. The girl hears a cry across the water, a human cry, as of someone startled. The sound of a human being set upon by some unimaginable aspect of the morning.

  Her father concentrates his grip on his beads and screws his eyes more tightly closed. Her mother shifts a shawl to cover one of her breasts, but only one; even on a dangerous morning something might be seducible. Nanny comes to squat upon the far edge of Elphie’s blanket. She finds Elphie’s hand and holds it without remark. This as much for her own comfort as for the child’s, Elphie being the kind of person who doesn’t elicit the consoling gesture.

  War is in the air. She has caught the hint, though she can’t yet know what war is. She takes her thumb out of her mouth and dries it along the smooth, smudged blanket. Nanny says, “Oh, I think that was a morning dove, don’t you?” A lie about what peace sounds like. If there is such a thing. Elphie glances at Nanny but keeps her own counsel. Well, that’s a bit rich; Elphie has no counsel to keep at the time. She will come to know Nanny as something of a failure.

  The black bug has gotten interested in a loose pink thread on the blanket. Elphie watches it. “Oooh, the nasty,” says Nanny, and flicks it away. “This place. And its bugs. Melena, dress yourself. Even the backlands abhor a harlot.”

  Elphie won’t remember any of this actual talking. She is slow to speak herself, according to family legend. But with what other tool does she have to consider the start of everything? Words, words alone, and the lustrous peril of the wicked world.

  2

  About those teeth. Some still whisper that Elphie was born with snake dentures. If so, maybe that’s why her mother has dragged Nanny along on this mission to Quadling Country: to wet-nurse the new baby the way she did Elphie. Somebody has to. Though the younger child’s gums are soft and pink and normal, and the baby teeth poking through are little gems of standard design.

  Melena has always valued her assets, especially now that her portfolio is limited to what’s left of her personal allure. A few better gowns and a fine embonpoint, which signals social capital in some circles—for instance, those of Colwen Grounds, her childhood home in Munchkinland. And, yes, all right, point taken: Melena has sidestepped the oversight of her family these four years and counting. But that formative influence, apparently, she hasn’t quite escaped. Attitude, poise. The confidence of her breeding. Now, a fine bosom is nearly all she has left, or so she concludes when the sour cloud shadows her.

  Elphie has no memory of harboring daggered pincers within her mean little smile. Her second-growth teeth have come in unnaturally early, and more conventionally shaped. She won’t remember having pulled out her own milk teeth when they got loose. (Perhaps no one else risked putting a hand inside Elphie’s mouth.)

  Nanny always says, “Don’t kiss the baby, Elphie. You might scare it.” There is that. The baby in its swaddles, the baby in its sling hung from the bough of a moss palmetto. Going on two years old, but slow to grow. Small and immobile, like a much younger child. A lump of sweet silence beneath the mosquito netting. “Jaguars don’t care for the smell of moss palm fruit, so she’s safe there. The monkeys can’t undo knots to get her out of her nest. Don’t worry about her.”

  Worry doesn’t enter into it. Maybe dimly remembering her sharp milk teeth, Elphie has thought of chewing the strings so as to make the bothersome creature more accessible to thieving monkeys. After all, they take everything else that isn’t tied down or caged.

  3

  A baby sister hanging in a tree. A mouth of forgotten razor teeth. An ambush sniffed in the air of a swamp morning. A father preparing for a meeting with the indigenous heathen of these parts. A distracted mother, put-upon and aggrieved, forgetting why she’s fled her cushy family environs for this career of mildewy motherhood in Quadling Country. A nanny whose only asset is her indispensability. The world beyond the blanket. Green dripping from green, shrieking birds, silent snakes. The billion enterprises of the bug nation. A cry in the mist, a curious silence. The day is launched upon its inevitabilities.

  “I don’t believe they even heard that,” mutters Nanny, shrugging at Frex and Melena, praying and preening. She tries to draw the green child closer, but Elphie can’t abide the cloying touch.

  But is her father even present at this moment? Or has he already left for his meeting with the elders of the tribe? Has her mother—what? Not gone with him, surely; she isn’t interested in missionary work. Maybe Nanny has taken Melena aside. Maybe it isn’t even the same day. One morning stands out and makes all the others recede. Catch a glint of sun on a single stone in the riverbed, and that’s all you can see, not the other stones nesting against it.

  Beneath a tree lies a kind of broad flat dish, two-thirds the height of Elphie. Hammered yellow of some sort, light and strong. A platter with beveled edges to catch the gravy. Not so hard to lift. A sort of suctioning sound as it comes away from the grass. Heave and drop, heave and drop, to make the world go clop clop clop.

  She gives it a push to see if it will roll, and it does, heading downhill. It revolves in tightening circles and makes a metallic echo when it clangs to the ground. Someone hollers at her.

  But few pay attention to her. Father—Frex, Frexspar, originally Frexispar Togue; Guv’nor Pastor, Papa—Father seldom looks up from his devotions—Elphie will have few memories of him even speaking to her until after the death of her mother. So it probably isn’t Father. Maybe at this moment he isn’t even around. Nor has Melena Thropp clucked a warning. Melena is a hen who doesn’t mother her chicks.
  Elphie alone. Elphie in the wilderness.

  Most likely it’s Nanny, whose voice caws and grates like a dawn scissorjay. Background noise.

  Or—wait, there are occasionally a few others in the entourage, now and then. A local guide named Severin, probably hardly more than a teenager but good with navigation. He has a companion who takes the second paddle when Father needs to be ferried to a camp meeting at some other marsh-landing. The friend chews some kind of beetle that turns his teeth charcoal. Elphie tucks her own smile inside her lips so as not to provoke a return grin from that boy.

  Then, also, there is Boozy. Not her real name—that’s just how her name in Qua’ati sounds upon Munchkinlander ears. Boozy, an itinerant cook. She travels with the party when she wants, disappears for days on end when she’s had enough. Elphie will never know if Boozy is twenty years younger than Nanny, or maybe older; the child doesn’t know about years yet. Or about growing up.

  But a presence, our Boozy; yes indeed. She’s made an impression. Decades later, Ephie might have drawn her likeness, had she any talent for trailing ink off the nib of a quill. Boozy’s forehead is tall and her glossy hair is yanked back along her scalp, clamped under a band of marshberry cord. The cook’s top lip frills, one side of it going wryly up and down. As if she once made the soup way too hot and wrinkled herself permanently. Elphie’s memory of Boozy at this stage is warmer than most. Maybe Elphie’s command of Qua’ati—the tongue of the Quadlings—is weaker than her grasp of Boozy-speak. A kind of pidgin-Boozy.

  People come and go in this party. In a list of dramatis personae in a theater program they’d be identified only as “the fisherman,” “the seer,” “the spice lady,” “the chieftain,” “the sewing circle.” No one would have a proper name. Walk-on parts mostly. But Boozy is a fixture, and so are Severin and his ash-smiled companion—yes, his name is Snapper, that’s it—and Nanny. And of course Elphie and her parents, Frex and Melena. No one else of significance, unless you pick up on the thin pleated cry of a baby annoyance. Elphie often forgets about that one, hanging in a tree. They call her Nessarose. A pretty name for a pretty sorry scrap of child.

  4

  Melena on some morning or other, probably not the one in question. All days begin the same, at the bank of the river, wherever their camp might be pitched alongside it. At this point in the undertaking the missionaries don’t bother going inland. The waterway provides an abundance of fish and also of marsh people drifting by, so it’s a practical place for her husband to net converts to the faith.

  Also, the river affords an escape route in case of a native resistance. Not that it has been needed. Melena and Frex have found that the Quadlings, a peaceable lot, raise their weapons only against predators like jaguars, marsh jackals, that sort. If Quadling locals don’t like you, they mostly try to shout you off their settlement. The worst punishment is a brief if humiliating incarceration in bamboo cages. Nonetheless, ever prudent, the Munchkinlander mission keeps canoes at the ready, should Quadling hospitality evaporate.

  Canoes for emergency evacuation, and a few devices of defense, including the shield of faith—an actual shield, made of pale worked bronze. A gift of several bishops relieved not to have felt a personal calling to establish themselves in such a hardship post. The shield is a spiritual artifact whose ornamental breast dazzles. It’s said to be functional: it could provide cover for a mother and two small children, if they crouched close.

  This length of black silk water might be the main river, called Waterslip. But perhaps not. Hereabouts, Quadling Country is threaded with several dozen channels, slight or substantial, all running into and out of Waterslip, braiding and dividing too frequently to be charted. Even the locals don’t bother naming the courses, relying on instinct for orientation.

  Melena isn’t certain what her husband thinks about her return from Colwen Grounds last year, hauling the sad new infant and dragging along Nanny to care for it. Colwen Grounds, Melena’s childhood home, theater of birth and death the same day. Good riddance to sweet rubbish. Melena is silent about it while her husband broods. But Melena has never been strong at imagining the viewpoints of other people. She can’t bear to anticipate any viewpoint her healthy first child might take eventually, while her second child won’t live long enough for the question to arise. So Melena, ill-trained at introspection, finds confounding the chain of events that has led her to this exile, this Frog Holiday, this evacuation from everything she’s known before.

  She has left home twice. The first, eloping with Frex to the harsh outback of Wend Hardings, Munchkinland, where Elphie was born. Sheep-shit country. Then, having returned to her family’s demesne for the birth of her second daughter, she managed to slip away again. It would be the final retreat, though that hasn’t been proven yet—Melena is still alive.

  They don’t give her much credit, her relatives. In a way Melena can’t blame them. So she has a strolling eye—where’s the crime in that? Everyone’s got a pretty little flaw hidden behind the party smile and the better shoes. Hers is only loneliness, she decides, taking longer than necessary to wash herself in attractive poses of public dishabille. A need to be seen. By men. So what?

  Yes, she has a husband. How her family disapproved of such a fervent man with so few prospects! An Eminence of Munchkinland, her grandfather, always intended a better match for Melena than some itinerant preacher.

  Frexspar the Godly: A tall man, especially compared to old-stock Munchkinland farmers, those barrelly folk whose chins rarely grow four feet above the soil. In contrast, Frex is a ladder, an apple rake. Melena had clung to him more out of the thrill of scandalizing her parents and grandfather than out of love. She realized this sometime during their first mission as a married couple, when Frex was assigned to Wend Hardings in the rubbly outback of Munchkinland.

  Anyway, she approves of her own loyalty. Which is loyalty as she defines it, a bespoke virtue cut to her needs. She isn’t beyond taking a man now and then when he piques her curiosity. She is always any community’s most attractive attractive nuisance.

  But Wend Hardings toughened her up, even before the green creature came along. And since then, Melena has stuck the course, oh, they can say that much for strut-about Melena Thropp. Other women might have fled back to their ancestral homes. Or disappeared in the night, leaving behind the tainted baby to be looked after by someone else. By the father, if he is up to it. (Frex is decidedly not.) No, Melena had bit her lower lip and done calculations of a moral sort, and decided that while she couldn’t bring herself to cozen the poisoned infant with cuddles and coos, she could, in fact, stick to her post. The wife of a missionary.

  The first few years with Baby Elphaba were a trial. The bleating of sheep the primary lullaby. Nanny was hard persuaded to keep around; she’d visit but then she’d flee. Having been threatened that any stray comment she might let drop back at Colwen Grounds about Elphie’s condition would be cause for abrupt dismissal without references, she complied. Nanny had kept her word, even if she’d been inconstant in her tenure that first couple of years. Elphie was more or less a secret back home, at least as to the particulars of her complexion.

  There will be other things Melena remembers about this day on the banks of an unnamed stretch of a sly, grease-green river in some outback beyond Qhoyre, the provincial capital. But she’s struck a pose, so let’s relish her a silent moment longer. The lift of her left arm, a sponge tracing water from her elbow to the side of her exposed breast. The poise of that woman, the satin butter of her skin. A perfect beauty, a perfect target.

  Maybe she’s totally vain and that’s the sum of it. Or maybe this is only how she’s seen and how she seems. Whose memories are these anyway? Perhaps just the river’s.

  5

  Someone has brought Nanny a something. A dish of threads to repair a bonnet. A bowl of breakfast soup, hot and oily and snaily. Someone has brought Nanny a something. And put it on a campstool of some sort.

 

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