Wicked - The Life and Times of theWicked Witch of the West Wicked - The Life and Times ofthe Wicked Witch of the WestWicked - The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the WestBy Gregory MaguirePrologueOn the Yellow Brick RoadA mile above Oz, the Witch balanced on the wind’s forwardedge, as if she were a green fleck of the land itself, flung up and sentwheeling away by the turbulent air. ‘White and purple summerthunderheads mounded around her. Below, the Yellow Brick Roadlooped back on itself, like a relaxed noose. Though winter storms andthe crowbars of agitators had torn up the road, still it led, relentlessly,to the Emerald City. The Witch could see the companions trudgingalong, maneuvering around the buckled sections, skirting trenches,skipping when the way was clear. They seemed oblivious of theirfate. But it was not up to the Witch to enlighten them.She used the broom as a sort of balustrade, stepping down fromthe sky like one of her flying monkeys. She finished up on thetopmost bough of a black wiliow tree. Beneath, hidden by the fronds,her prey had paused to take their rest. The Witch tucked her broomunder her arm. Crablike and quiet, she scuttled down a little at a time,until she was a mere twenty feet above them. Wind moved thedangling tendrils of the tree. The Witch stared and listened.There were four of them. She could see a huge Cat of some sort-a Lion, was it?-and a shiny woodman. The Tin Woodman was pickingflits out of the Lion’s mane, and the Lion was muttering andsquirming from the aggravation. An animated Scarecrow lollednearby, blowing dandelion heads into the wind. The girl was out ofsight behind shifting curtains of the willow.“Of course, to hear them tell it, it is the surviving sister who isthe crazy one,” said the Lion. “What a Witch. Psychologicallywarped; possessed by demons. Insane. Not a pretty picture.”“She was castrated at birth,” replied the Tin Woodman calmly.“She was born hermaphroditic, or maybe entirely male.” “Oh you, you see castration everywhere you look,” said theLion.“I’m only repeating what folks say,” said the Tin Woodman.“Everyone is entitled to an opinion,” said the Lion airily. “Shewas deprived of a mother’s love, is how I’ve heard it. She was anabused child. She was addicted to medicine for her skin condition.”“She has been unlucky in love,” said the Tin Woodman, “like therest of us.” The Tin Woodman paused and placed his hand on thecenter of his chest, as if in grief.“She’s a woman who prefers the company of other women,” saidthe Scarecrow, sitting up.“She’s the spurned lover of a married man.”“She is a married man.”The Witch was so stunned that she nearly lost her grip on thebranch. The last thing she ever cared for was gossip. Yet she had beenout of touch for so long that she was astonished at the vigorousopinions of these random nobodies.“She’s a despot. A dangerous tyrant,” said the Lion withconviction.The Tin Woodman pulled harder than was necessary on a lock ofmane. “Everything’s dangerous to you, you craven thing. I hear she’sa champion of home rule for the so-called Winkles.”“Whoever she is, she must surely be grieving the death of hersister,” said the child, in a somber voice too rich, too sincere for oneso young. The Witch’s skin crawled.“Don’t go feeling sympathetic now. I certainly can’t.” The TinWoodman sniffed, a bit cynically.“But Dorothy’s right,” said the Scarecrow. “No one is exemptfrom grief.”The Witch was deeply irked by their patronizing speculations.She moved around the trunk of the tree, stretching to catch a glimpseof the child. The wind was picking up, and the Scarecrow shivered.While the Tin Woodman continued fussing over the Lion’s tresses, heleaned against the Lion, who held him tenderly. “Storm on thehorizon,” said the Scarecrow.Miles off, thunder echoed. “There-is-a-Witch on the horizon,”said the Tin Woodman, tickling the Lion. The Lion got spooked and rolled on top of the Scarecrow, whimpering, and the Tin Woodmancollapsed on top of them both.“Good friends, should we be wary of that storm?” said the girl.The rising winds moved the curtain of greenery at last, and theWitch caught sight of the girl. She was sitting with her feet tuckedunderneath her and her arms wrapped around her knees. She was nota dainty thing but a good-size farm girl, dressed in blue-and-whitechecks and a pinafore. In her lap, a vile little dog cowered andwhined.“The storm makes you skittish. It’s natural after what you’vebeen through,” said the Tin Woodman. “Relax.”The Witch’s fingers dug into the bark of the tree. She still couldnot see the girl’s face, just her strong forearms and the crown of herhead where her dark hair was pulled back into pigtails. Was she to betaken seriously, or was she merely a blow-away dandelion seed,caught on the wrong side of the wind? If she could see the girl’s face,the Witch felt she might know.But as the Witch craned outward from the trunk, the girl at thesame time twisted her face, turning away. “That storm is comingcloser, and in a hurry.” The feeling in her voice rose as the wind rose.She had a throaty vehemence, like someone arguing through thethreat of impending tears. “I know storms, I know how they comeupon you!”“We’re safer here,” said the Tin Woodman.“Certainly we are not,” answered the girl, “because this tree isthe highest point around, and if lightning is to strike, it will strikehere.” She clutched her dog. “Didn’t we see a shed farther up theroad? Come, come; Scarecrow, if there’s lightning, you’ll burn thefastest! Come on!”She was up and running in an ungainly way, and her companionsfollowed in a mounting panic. As the first hard drops of rain fell, theWitch caught sight, not of the girl’s face, but of the shoes. Her sister’sshoes. They sparkled even in the darkening afternoon. They sparkledlike yellow diamonds, and embers of blood, and thorny stars.If she had seen the shoes first, the Witch would never have beenable to listen to the girl or her friends. But the girl’s legs had beentucked beneath her skirt. Now the Witch was reminded of her need. The shoes should be hers!-hadn’t she endured enough, hadn’t sheearned them? The Witch would fall on the girl from the sky, andwrestle those shoes off her impertinent feet, if only she could.But the storm from which the companions raced, farther andfaster along the Yellow Brick Road, troubled the Witch more than itdid the girlwho had gone through rain and the Scarecrow whom lightningcould burn. The Witch could not venture out in such a vicious,insinuating wetness. Instead, she had to tuck herself between someexposed roots of the black willow tree, where no water couldendanger her, and wait for the storm to pass.She would emerge. She always had before. The punishingpolitical climate of Oz had beat her down, dried her up, tossed heraway-like a seedling she had drifted, apparently too desiccated everto take root. But surely the curse was on the land of Oz, not on her.Though Oz had given her a twisted life, hadn’t it also made hercapable?No matter that the companions had hurried away. The Witchcould wait. They would meet again. Wicked - The Life and Times ofthe Wicked Witch of the West Book 1 - MunchkinlandersFrom the crumpled bed the wife said, “I think today’s the day. Lookhow I’ve gone.”“Today? That would be like you, perverse and inconvenient,” saidher husband, teasing her, standing at the doorway and looking outward,over the lake, the fields, the forested slopes beyond. He could just makeout the chimneys of Rush Margins, breakfast fires smoking. “The worstpossible moment for my ministry. Naturally.”The wife yawned. “There’s not a lot of choice involved. From whatI hear. Your body gets this big and it takes over-if you can’taccommodate it, sweetheart, you just get out of its way. It’s on a track ofits own and nothing stops it now.” She pushed herself up, trying to seeover the rise of her belly. “I feel like a hostage to myself. Or to thebaby.”“Exert some self-control.” He came to her side and helped her situp. “Think of it as a spiritual exercise. Custody of the senses. Bodily aswell as ethical continence.”“Self-control?” She laughed, inching toward the edge of the bed. “Ihave no self left. I’m only a host for the parasite. Where’s my selfanyway? Where’d I leave that tired old thing?”“Think of me.” His tone had changed; he meant this.“Frex”-she headed him off-“when the volcano’s ready there’s nopriest in the world can pray it quiet.”“What will my fellow ministers think?”“They’ll get together and say, ‘Brother Frexspar, did you allow yourwife to deliver your first child when you had a community problem tosolve? How inconsiderate of you; it shows a lack of authority. You’refired from the position.” She was ribbing him now, for there was no oneto firehim. The nearest bishop was too distant to pay attention to theparticulars of a unionist cleric in the hinterland.“It’s just such terrible timing.”“I do think you bear half the blame for the timing,” she said. “Imean, after all, Frex.”“That’s how the thinking goes, but I wonder.” “You wonder?” She laughed, her head going far back. The linefrom her ear to the hollow below her throat reminded Frex of an elegantsilver ladle. Even in morning disarray, with a belly like a scow, she wasmajestically good-looking. Her hair had the bright lacquered look of wetfallen oak leaves in sunlight. He blamed her for being born to privilegeand admired her efforts to overcome it-and all the while he loved her,too.“You mean you wonder if you’re the father”-she grabbed thebedstead; Frex took hold of her other arm and hauled her half-upright-“or do you question the fatherliness of men in general?” Shestood, mammoth, an ambulatory island. Moving out the door at a slug’space, she laughed at such an idea. He could hear her laughing from theouthouse even as he began to dress for the day’s battle.Frex combed his beard and oiled his scalp. He fastened a clasp ofbone and rawhide at the nape of his neck, to keep the hair out of his face,because his expressions today had to be readable from a distance: Therecould be no fuzziness to his meaning. He applied some coal dust todarken his eyebrows, a smear of red wax on his flat cheeks. He shadedhis lips. A handsome priest attracted more penitents than a homely one.In the kitchen yard Melena floated gently, not with the normalgravity of pregnancy but as if inflated, a huge balloon trailing its stringsthrough the dirt. She carried a skillet in one hand and a few eggs and thewhiskery tips of autumn chives in the other. She sang to herself, but onlyin short phrases. Frex wasn’t meant to hear her.His sober gown buttoned tight to the collar, his sandals strapped onover leggings, Frex took from its hiding place-beneath a chest ofdrawers-the report sent to him from his fellow minister over in thevillage of Three Dead Trees. He hid the brown pages within his sash. Hehad been keeping them from his wife, afraid that she would want tocome along-to see the fun, if it was amusing, or to suffer the thrill of it ifit was terrifying.As Frex breathed deeply, readying his lungs for a day of oratory,Melena dangled a wooden spoon in the skillet and stirred the eggs. Thetinkle of cowbells sounded across the lake. She did not listen; or shelistened but to something else, to something inside her. It was soundwithout melody-like dream music, remembered for its effect but not forits harmonic distresses and recoveries. She imagined it was the child inside her, humming for happiness. She knew he would be a singingchild.Melena heard Frex inside, beginning to extemporize, warming up,calling forth the rolling phrases of his argument, convincing himselfagain of his righteousness.How did that proverb go, the one that Nanny singsonged to her,years ago, in the nursery?Born in the morning,Woe without warning;Afternoon childWoeful and wild;Born in the evening,Woe ends in grieving.Night baby borningSame as the morning.But she remembered this as a joke, fondly. Woe is the natural end oflife, yet we go on having babies.No, said Nanny, an echo in Melena’s mind (and editorializing asusual): No, no, you pretty little pampered hussy. We don’t go on havingbabies, that’s quite apparent. We only have babies when we’re youngenough not to know how grim life turns out. Once we really get the fullmeasure of it-we’re slow learners, we women-we dry up in disgust andsensibly halt production.But men don’t dry up, Melena objected; they can father to thedeath.Ah, we’re slow learners, Nanny countered. But they can’t learn atall.“Breakfast,” said Melena, spooning eggs onto a wooden plate. Herson would not be as dull as most men. She would raise him up to defythe onward progress of woe.“It is a time of crisis for our society,” recited Frex. For a man whocondemned worldly pleasures he ate with elegance. She loved to watchthe arabesque of fingers and two forks. She suspected that beneath hisrighteous asceticism he possessed a hidden longing for the easy life.“Every day is a great crisis for our society.” She was being flip,answering him in the terms men use. Dear thick thing, he didn’t hear theirony in her voice. “We stand at a crossroads. Idolatry looms. Traditional values injeopardy. Truth under siege and virtue abandoned.”He wasn’t talking to her so much as practicing his tirade against thecoming spectacle of violence and magic. There was a side to Frex thatverged on despair; unlike most men, he was able to channel it to benefithis life’s work. With some difficulty she set herself down on a bench.Whole choruses were singing wordlessly inside her head! Was thiscommon for every labor and delivery? She would have liked to ask thenosy local women who would come around this afternoon, growlingshyly at her condition. But she didn’t dare. She couldn’t jettison herpretty accent, which they found affected-but she could avoid soundingignorant about these basic matters.Frex noticed her silence. “You’re not angry I’m leaving youtoday?”“Angry?” She raised her eyebrows, as if she had never encounteredthe concept before.“History crawls along on the peg legs of small individual lives,”said Frex, “and at the same time larger eternal forces converge. Youcan’t attend to both arenas at once.”“Our child may not have a small life.”“Now isn’t the time to argue. Do you want to distract me from holywork today? We’re facing the presence of real evil in Rush Margins. Icouldn’t live with myself if I ignored it.” He meant this, and for suchintensity she had fallen in love with him; but she hated him for it too, ofcourse.“Threats come-they’ll come again.” Her last word on the subject.“Your son will only be born once, and if this watery upheaval inside isany indication, I think it’s today.”“There will be other children.”She turned away so he could not see the rage in her face.But she couldn’t sustain the fury at him. Perhaps this was her moralfailing. (She wasn’t much given to worrying about moral failings as arule; having a minister as a husband seemed to stir enough religiousthought for one couple.) She lapsed sullenly into silence. Frex nibbled athis meal.“It’s the devil,” said Frex, sighing. “The devil is coming.”“Don’t say a thing like that on a day our child is expected!” “I mean the temptation in Rush Margins! And you know what Imean, Melena!”“Words are words, and what’s said is said!” she answered. “I don’trequire all your attention, Frex, but I do need some of it!” She droppedthe skillet with a crash on the bench that stood against the cottage wall.“Well, and likewise,” he said. “What do you think I’m up againsttoday? How can I convince my flock to turn away from the razzle-dazzlespectacle of idolatry? I will probably come back tonight having lost to asmarter attraction. You might achieve a child today. I look forward tofailure.” Still, as he said this he looked proud; to fail in the cause of ahigh moral concern was satisfying to him. How could it compare withthe flesh, blood, mess, and noise of having a baby?He stood at last to leave. A wind came up over the lake now,smudging the topmost reaches of the columns of kitchen smoke. Theylooked, thought Melena, like funnels of water swirling down drains innarrowing, focusing spirals.“Be well, my love,” said Frex, although he had his stern publicexpression on, from forehead to toes.“Yes.” Melena sighed. The child punched her, deep down, and shehad to hurry to the outhouse again. “Be holy, and I’ll be thinking of you-my backbone, my breastplate. And also try not to be killed.”“The will of the Unnamed God,” said Frex.“My will too,” she said, blasphemously.“Apply your will to that which deserves it,” he answered. Now hewas the minister and she the sinner, an arrangement she did notparticularly enjoy.“Good-bye,” she said, and chose the stink and relief of the outhouseover standing to wave him out of sight as he strode along the road toRush Margins.Frex was more concerned for Melena than she knew. He stopped atthe first fisherman’s hut he saw and spoke with the man at the half-door.Could a woman or two spend the day and if needed the night withMelena? It would be a kindness. Frex nodded with a wince of gratitude,acknowledging without words that Melena was not a great favorite inthese parts.Then, before continuing around the end of Illswater and over toRush Margins, he stopped at a fallen tree and drew two letters from his sash.The writer was a distant cousin of Frex’s, also a minister. Weeksearlier the cousin had spent rime and valuable ink on a description ofwhat was being called the Clock of the Time Dragon. Frex preparedhimself for the day’s holy campaign by rereading about the idol clock.I write in haste, Brother Frexspar, to catch my impressions beforethey fade.The Clock of the Time Dragon is mounted on a wagon and standsas high as a giraffe. It is nothing more than a tottering, freestandingtheatre, punched on all four sides with alcoves andproscenium arches. On the flat roof is a clockwork dragon, aninvention of green painted leather, silvery claws, ruby jeweled eyes. Itsskin is made of hundreds of overlapping discs of copper, bronze, andiron. Beneath the flexible folds of its scales is an armature controlled byclockwork. The Time Dragon circles on its pedestal, flexes its narrowleathery wings (they make a sound like a bellows), and belches outsulfurous balls of flaming orange stink.Below, featured in the dozens of doorways, windows, and porches,are puppets, marionettes, figurines. Creatures of folk tale. Caricatures ofpeasants and royalty alike. Animals and fairies and saints-our unionistsaints, Brother Frexspar, stolen out from underneath us! I get enraged.The figures move on sprockets. They wheel in and out of doorways.They bend at the waist, they dance and dawdle and daily with each other.Who had engendered this Time Dragon, this fake oracle, thispropaganda tool for wickedness that challenged the power of unionismand of the Unnamed God? The clock’s handlers were a dwarf and somenarrow-waisted minions who seemed to have only enough brain capacityamong them to pass a hat. Who else was benefiting besides the dwarfand his beauty boys?The cousin’s second letter had warned that the clock was making itsway next to Rush Margins. It had told a more specific story.The entertainment began with a thrum of strings and a rattle ofbones. The crowd pushed close, oohing. Within the lighted window of astage, we saw a marriage bed, with a puppet wife and husband. Thehusband was asleep and the wife sighed. She made a motion with hercarved hands to suggest that her husband was disappointingly small. The audience shrieked with laughter. The puppet wife went to sleep herself.‘When she was snoring, the puppet husband sneaked Out of bed.At this point, up above, the Dragon turned on its base, and pointedits talons into the crowd, indicating_without a doubt- a humble welldigger named Grine, who has been a faithful if inattentive husband. Thenthe dragon reared back and stretched two fingers in a come-hithergesture, isolating a widow named Letta and her snaggle-toothed maidendaughter. The crowd hushed and fell away from Crine, Letta, and theblushing maid, as if they had suddenly been inflicted with running sores.The Dragon rested again but draped a wing over another archway,which lit up to reveal the puppet husband, wandering out in the night.Along came a puppet widow, with sprigged hairand high color, dragging along a protesting, flinty-toothed daughter.The kissed the puppet husband, and pulled off his leather trousers. Hewas equipped with two full sets of male goods, one in the front andanother hanging off the base of his spine. The widow positioned herdaughter on the abbreviated prong in the front, and herself tookadvantage of the morning arrangement in the rear. The three puppetsbucked and rocked, emitting squeals of glee. When the puppet widowand her daughter were through, they dismounted and kissed theadulterous puppet husband. Then they kneed him, simultaneously, foreand aft. He swung on springs and hinges, trying to hold all his woundedparts.The audience roared. Crine, the actual well digger, sweated drops asbig as grapes. Letta pretended to guffaw, but her daughter had alreadydisappeared from shame. Before the evening was out, Crine was setupon by his agitated neighbors and investigated for the grotesqueanomaly. Letta was shunned. Her daughter seems to have vanishedentirely. We suspect the worst.At least Grine wasn t killed. Yet who can say how our souls havebeen stamped by witnessing such a cruel drama? All souls are hostagesto their human envelopes, but souls must decay and suffer at muchindignity, don’ t you agree?Sometimes it seemed to Frex that every itinerant witch andtoothless gibbering seer in Oz who could perform even the mosttransparent of spells had seized on the outback district of Wend Hardingsto scratch out a trade. He knew that folks from Rush Margins were humble. Their lives were hard and their hopes few. As the droughtdragged on, their traditional unionist faith was eroding. Frex was awarethat the Clock of the Time Dragon combined the appeals of ingenuityand magic-and he would have to call on his deepest reserves of religiousconviction to overcome it. If his congregation should prove vulnerable tothe so-called pleasure faith, succumbing to spectacle and violence-well,what next?He would prevail. He was their minister. He had pulled their teethand buried their babies and blessed their kitchen pots for years now. Hehad abased himself in their names. He had wandered with an unkemptbeard and a begging bowl from hamlet to hamlet, leaving poorMelena alone in the minister’s lodge for weeks at a time. He hadsacrificed for them. They couldn’t be swayed by this Time Dragoncreature. They owed him.He moved on, shoulders squared, jaw set, stomach in a sour uproar.The sky was brown with flying sand and grit. The wind rushed high overthe bills with the sound of a tremulous wail, as if pushing through somefissure of rock, on a ridge beyond any Frex could see.It was nearly evening by the time Frex had worked up the courageto enter the ramshackle hamlet of Rush Margins. He was in a deepsweat. He hit his heels to the ground and pumped his clenched fists, andcalled out in a hoarse, carrying tone. “Hist, oh ye of small confidence!Gather while ye may, for temptation is abroad, to try ye sorely!” Thewords were archaic, even ridiculous, but they worked. Here came thesullen fishermen, dragging their empty nets up from the dock. Herecame the subsistence farmers, whose hardscrabble plots had borne littleduring this dry year. Before he had even begun, they all looked guilty assin.They followed him to the rickety steps of the canoe repair house.Frex knew that everyone expected this evil clock to arrive at any instant;gossip was as contagious as the plague. He yelled at them for theirthirsty anticipation. “Ye are dull as toddlers reaching their hands to touchthe pretty embers! Ye are as if spawn of dragon womb, ready to suck onteats of fire!” These were time-worn scriptural imprecations and they fella little flat tonight; he was tired and not at his best.“Brother Frexspar,” said Bree, the mayor of Rush Margins, “couldyou perhaps tone down your harangue until we get a chance to see what