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“Damn,” she said aloud, in the cold bedchamber.
She traced it out some more—just the highlights. How she had moved about Oz, in thrall to the idea of the two Thropp sisters. She’d begun to feel anointed, if that was the word—or condemned—to the task of living on the sidelines. To the extent that she had developed genuine powers of prophecy, she had tried to read what was happening, what might happen, and to place herself in Elphaba’s way, where she could do some good.
She got a great deal wrong, of course. Infallible she was not. There she’d been at a grotty den of sexual escapades, collecting cash at the window, having read the signs that Elphaba would come by that night. She thought she could protect Elphaba from some dreadful experience. The Philosophy Club! She could remember that. The dwarf at the door, a rotten little bounder: That was where their paths had crossed for the first time. He had been dogging Elphaba’s steps, too, it seemed, though she had not been able to determine why.
He was as wrong as she was, that night. Elphaba had proved elusive, often swifter than Yackle’s powers of prediction could track. True, Elphaba’s college chums had shown up: Avaric, Boq, Fiyero. A few others. But not Elphaba or Glinda. Instead, those two best friends had ducked away that night, and gotten out from under Yackle’s distant and watchful eye—it worked back then, the eye, both eyes—and they had hightailed it to the Emerald City for their famous interview with the wonderful Wizard of Oz.
And Yackle had taken years to pick up the trail again. Elphaba had gone underground, a kind of freedom fighter with questionable ethics. She had been damned slippery—who would have thought a green-skinned girl could make herself so invisible? It had taken the best of Yackle’s talents to track her down again. But find her she did, after several years, and this time her reading had been more accurate. She could see that Elphaba would turn to the mauntery (though not why, not that she would arrive with the blood of Fiyero on her wrists); and Yackle had presented herself at the door of the establishment earlier, to be there, to be ready when Elphaba arrived: and so she had been.
Yackle had kept her own counsel, nodding in her blankets like a gaga grandmother, but she’d watched. She’d slipped a hand to Elphaba, a set of gnarled fingers in the green palm, as if she were looking for help up some stairs: She had tried to squeeze strength and courage through that wordless communiqué. Who is to say it didn’t help somewhat?
Had Yackle known what she was doing when she gave Elphaba the broom?
She could no longer remember.
Then, when the time was right, Sister Elphie had left for the West, to the mountaintop seat of the Tigelaars, the ruling Arjiki family. For all her life an upstart, the grit in the eye that makes it water, Elphaba had hoped to become a hermit. Hoped for forgiveness from Fiyero’s widow, hoped for solace from the mountain loneliness.
But the dwarf had come back into the picture, and had delivered to Elphaba an old looking glass she had had in childhood. Elphaba had reheated the glass and modeled it into a globe—turning a mirror into an eye—and who knows what she had been able to see in its depths. The girl was talented.
Talented enough to sidestep everything except, in the end, her own death.
Though perhaps, like Yackle, death was what she had wanted the most.
Yackle groaned. The notion of being Aunt Sophelia, loopy Aunt Sophelia: curse that the idea had roosted in her! Now she’d have to disprove it to her own satisfaction. Still, it made some mad kind of sense: Why else had she spent these weird extended decades of old age stepping around the skirts of someone else’s life? She had never known where the compulsion had come from. Perhaps something as simple as blood.
The house ticked, neither in sympathy nor in accusation.
When you can’t die, she thought, everything sounds like a clock ticking.
Yackle couldn’t see the dawn, but she could hear in the brush of movement, the wind against roofing tiles, and in the swell of birdsong that light was rising. She was tired without exhaustion, or exh
austed without weariness—it was hard to put into words.
Still, she asked herself: If I am not mad Aunt Sophelia Thropp, and never was, then who put me here? Who had enough influence to knock me into a somewhat human figure in a world of more fully human creatures as well as Animal figures—and bystanding dwarves? And prophetic clocks?
If I were appointed to generate change in Elphaba’s life, who had generated the change in mine? The legendary source of evil amongst us, that old she-demon, the Kumbric Witch? Or the grand, dim, fusty, decayed deity, goddess of creation, Lurlina Herself? Or the Unnamed God, more sober because more secretive? (And did unnamed mean un-nameable or “once named but name revoked”? All these years among unionist maunts and she had never asked a single theological question. What was that proof of, besides obduracy?)
Who gave Lurlina or any other deity her power?
The very children, maybe, who were now hearing the story of Elphaba only as the cautionary fable of the Wicked Witch of the West—her rise and fall—and believing it? Cutting their schoolyard morals to conform to the cheap lessons of a propagandized biography?
She couldn’t know. Her head hurt to try to imagine. The closest she came to sleep these days was a kind of slipping sideways into a vision, and this is what she saw: The circularity of influence was like a trail of dominoes falling in four dimensions. Each time one slapped another and fell to the ground, from a different vantage point it appeared knocked upright, ready to be slapped and fall again.
Everything was not merely relative, it was—how to put it?—relevant. Representational. Revealing. Referential and reverential both.
No, she wasn’t losing language. She was choking on it.
• 3 •
A MILE OR two on, no more than that, and the underbrush was pestered with the movement of small creatures. The company could read the escape routes of the beasts of the forest floor. “The EC division that was approaching from the north beach of Kellswater is headed this way,” decided the sergeant-at-hand. “Lads, look sharp; they’ve stolen a march on us. We want to cross their path before they get here to cross ours. If we’re not careful we’ll rub noses with them.”
“We’ll blow them to kingdom come!” cried one of the boys, excitable but dull. His pals didn’t bother to remind him they traveled without firearms. Their only defense was the dread that the oracle could inspire in the gullible. Though they had no idea how gullible the soldiers of an invading battalion could be, or if they would stop long enough to discover gullibility in themselves.
“Heave now, heave,” called the dwarf, but even he tried to keep his voice down.
The birds of the oakhair forest, who had settled for the night, revived their twitter. Ilianora thought again of the birds in the hall, on the night she had first scribbled a fanciful tale as a stay against discovery. Sing your hearts out, she thought: Let us know from which direction the danger is strongest.
But alone of the company, she walked without much fear. She cared for her companions, in a modest way, and hoped they would survive. Certainly she didn’t want them to suffer. But she had a prerogative of calm, in that she alone had no obligation to the oracle or to the future they all muscled in favor of or against. Indeed, she often wondered if she were dead, or dying from the inside out, and that was the root of her calm, the reason she could surrender her character.
