“He doesn’t even have a bed?” Sarima coldly asked Elphie.
“Well, don’t ask me, this is your house,” said Elphie.
And Liir stirred somewhat, and said, “The fish talked to me. I talked to the fish. The goldfish talked to me. She said she was. . . .”
“Hush, little one,” said Nanny, “time for that later.” She glared around at the women and children in the kitchen. “Well, it shouldn’t take Nanny to have to find him a proper bed, but if there’s none other for him he can come up to my room, and I’ll sleep on the floor!”
“Of course not, the very idea,” began Sarima, bustling ahead.
“Barbarians, the lot of you!” snapped Nanny.
For which no one in Kiamo Ko ever forgave her.
Sarima lectured Auntie Guest severely for what had happened to Liir. Elphaba tried to say that it was not her doing, it was not her fault. “It was some boys’ trick, some game, some dare,” she said. Their accusations spent, they fell to talking about the differences between boys and girls.
Sarima told Auntie Guest what she knew of the boys’ initiation rite in the tribe. “They are taken out in the grasslands, and left with nothing but a loincloth and a musical instrument. They are required to call forth spirits and animals out of the night, to converse with them, to learn from them, to soothe them if they need soothing, to fight them if they need fighting. The child who dies at night clearly lacks the discretion to decide if its company needs fighting, or soothing. So it is correct that he should die young and not burden the tribe with his foolishness.”
“What do the boys say of spirits who approach them?” asked Auntie Guest.
“Boys say very little, especially about the spirit world,” she answered. “Nonetheless, you pick up what you pick up. And I think some of the spirits are very patient, very wearing, very obdurate. The lore supposes there should be conflict, hostility, battle, but I wonder, in contact with spirits, if what the boy needs is a good helping of cold anger.”
“Cold anger?”
“Oh yes, don’t you know that distinction? Tribal mothers always tell their children that there are two kinds of anger: hot and cold. Boys and girls experience both, but as they grow up the angers separate according to the sex. Boys need hot anger to survive. They need the inclination to fight, the drive to sink the knife into the flesh, the energy and initiative of fury. It’s a requirement of hunting, of defense, of pride. Maybe of sex, too.”
“Yes, I know,” said Elphaba, remembering.
Sarima blushed and looked unhappy, and continued. “And girls need cold anger. They need the cold simmer, the ceaseless grudge, the talent to avoid forgiveness, the sidestepping of compromise. They need to know when they say something that they will never back down, ever, ever. It’s the compensation for a more limited scope in the world. Cross a man and you struggle, one of you wins, you adjust and go on—or you lie there dead. Cross a woman and the universe is changed, once again, for cold anger requires an eternal vigilance in all matters of slight and offense.” She glared at Elphaba, pinning her with unspoken accusations about Fiyero, about Liir.
Elphaba thought about this. She thought about hot anger and cold anger, and if it divided by the sexes, and which she felt, if either, if ever. She thought about her mother dying young, and her father with his obsessions. She thought about the anger that Doctor Dillamond had had—an anger that drove him to study and research. She thought about the anger that Madame Morrible could barely disguise, as she tried to seduce the college girls into the secret service of government.
She sat and thought about it the following morning as she watched the strengthening sun beat down on the mounds of snow on the sloping tiled roofs below. She watched the sun bleed ice water out of the icicle. Warm and cold working together to make an icicle. Warm and cold anger working together to make a fury, a fury worthy enough to use as a weapon against the old things that still needed fighting.
In a fashion—without any way to confirm it, of course—she had always felt as capable of hot anger as any man. But to be successful, one would need access to both sorts . . .
Liir survived, but Manek did not. The icicle that Elphaba trained her gaze on, thinking on the weapons one needed to fight such abuse—it broke like a lance from the eaves, and drove whistling downward, and caught him in the skull as he went out to find some new way of beleaguering Liir.
Uprisings
I
They’re calling you a witch, do you know that?” said Nanny. “Now why ever is that?”
“Silliness and stupidity,” said Elphaba. “When I arrived I was distanced from my name, after my years at the mauntery, where I was called Sister Saint Aelphaba. Elphaba seemed like the name of someone long ago. I told them to
call me Auntie. Though I never felt like anyone’s Auntie, nor would I know what it felt like. I never had any aunts or uncles.”
“Hmmm,” said Nanny, “I don’t think you’re much of a witch. Your mother would be scandalized, bless her soul. Your father too.”
They were walking in the apple orchard. A cloud of blossoms thickened the air with scent. The Witch’s bees were having a field day, humming throatily. Killyjoy sat wagging his tail in the shadow of Manek’s tombstone, placed near the wall. The crows had relay races overhead, scaring away all other birds except the eagles. Irji and Nor and Liir, at Nanny’s insistence, had been taken into the schoolroom of the village. Kiamo Ko was blissfully quiet until midday.
Nanny was seventy-eight. She walked with a cane. She hadn’t given up on her little efforts toward beauty, though now they seemed to coarsen rather than dignify her. Her powder was on too thick, her lip rouge smeared and off center, and the flimsy lace shawl was useless in the updraft from the valley. For her part, Nanny thought that Elphaba was looking poorly, as if she were going moldy from the inside out. Pale. A disintegration of sorts. Elphaba didn’t seem to care for her beautiful hair at all, keeping it knotted up out of sight underneath that ridiculous hat. And the black gown needed a good washing and airing.
They stopped at a lopsided wall, and leaned against it. The sisters were gathering flowers a few fields away, and Sarima ballooned along. In her dark mourning gown she resembled a huge dangerous cocoon broken loose from its mooring. It was good to hear her laugh again, even if falsely; light had that strange, ameliorative effect on everybody, even Elphaba.
Nanny had told Elphie about her family. The Eminent Thropp had died at last. In Elphaba’s absence and presumed death, the mantle of Eminence had fallen to Nessarose. So the younger sister was now ensconced in Colwen Grounds, issuing dogmatic statements about faith and blame. Frex was there with her too, his career of ministry almost at an end. As he gave up the effort his mind was returning to balance. Shell? He came and went. Rumors abounded that he was an agitator for Munchkinland’s secession from Oz. He had grown up handsome and fine, in Nanny’s biased opinion: straight of limb, clear of skin, direct of speech, bold of heart. He was now in his early twenties.
“And what does Nessarose think of secession?” Elphie had asked. “Her opinion about it will be important if she’s the Eminent Thropp now.”
