“Yackle person? What do you mean?” asked Elphaba, starting. “And who the hell was Nessarose’s father if it wasn’t Papa?”
“Oh la,” said Nanny, “pour me another cup of tea and I’ll tell you all. You’re old enough now, and Melena’s long dead.” She meandered through a story about the Quadling glassblower named Turtle Heart, and Melena’s uncertainty whether Nessarose was his child or Frex’s, and the visit to Yackle, about whom she could remember nothing else but the name, the pills, and the prophecy, can’t pull teeth from a hen so stop trying. She didn’t mention (and she never had) how depressed Melena became when Elphaba was born. There was no point.
Elphie listened to all this, impatient and annoyed. On the one hand she wanted to throw it out the window: The past was immaterial. On the other, things fell into a slightly different order now. And that Yackle! Was the name just a coincidence? She was tempted to show Nanny the picture of Yakal Snarling in the Grimmerie, but resisted. No sense alarming the old woman, or giving her the nighttime frights.
So the two women poured each other tea and restrained themselves from painful observations about the past. But Elphaba began to fret about Nessarose. Perhaps Nessie didn’t want the position of Eminence, and was just as incarcerated there as her older sister was here. Perhaps Elphaba owed her the chance of liberty. Yet how much really could you owe other people? Was it endless?
3
Nor was beside herself. In a short time her whole life had changed, so utterly. The world was more magic than ever, but it seemed lodged inside her now, not outside. Her body was waiting to flame, to blossom, and no one seemed to care or to notice.
Liir had become a water boy for the expeditionary soldiers. Irji spent his time composing long devotional libretti in honor of Lurlina. In a state of uncertainty over the men in residence, the sisters remained confined to their chambers by their own inclination, yet quivering with readiness should things change. Nothing could change, as convention dictated, unless Sarima married again, and then they would be free to court. Their domestic campaigns to throw Commander Cherrystone and Sarima together, however, met with no success. They redoubled their efforts. Three even approached Auntie Witch for a love potion from that magic encyclopedia. “Hah,” said Elphaba, “that’ll be the day,” and that was that about that.
Nor, bereft of companionship, took to hanging around the men’s dormitory, trying to pitch in with chores that Liir wasn’t asked to do, that men didn’t much care about. She hung out their cloaks in the sun. She polished their buttons. She brought them flowers from the hills. She prepared a tray of summer fruits and cheeses that seemed to please them, especially when she served them herself. One young, dark, balding soldier with a captivating smile liked her to pop the orange segments right in his lips, and he sucked the juice from her fingers, to the mingled enjoyment and envy of the others. “Sit on my lap,” he said, “and let me feed you.” He offered her a strawberry, but she wouldn’t sit on his lap—and she loved refusing.
One day she decided to treat them to a full-scale chamber cleaning. They were out doing an inventory of the vineyards on the lower slopes and would be gone all day. Nor arrayed herself with rags, yoked herself with buckets, and since Auntie Witch was deep in conversation with Nanny about, it seemed, Sarima, Nor swiped the Witch’s broom, for its thicker brush and longer handle. She headed to the barracks.
She couldn’t read much, so she ignored the letters and maps that spilled from the leathern satchels left carelessly slung over the back of a chair. She tidied the trunks, and swept, and in the effort raised a lot of dust, and felt warm.
She took off her blouse, and slung one of the men’s rough capes over her sun-browned shoulders. It gave off such a heady aroma of maleness, even after its airing, that she nearly swooned. She lay down on someone’s pallet with the cape just slightly falling open, so that she could imagine falling asleep and having the men return and see the beautiful line of flat skin that ran between her fresh new breasts. She considered pretending to fall asleep. But she knew she wouldn’t do this. She sat up, dissatisfied with the possibilities, and reached out to grab the nearest thing—it happened to be the broom—so she could whack something in frustration.
The broom was out of reach, but it lunged a little toward her. It came across the floor of its own accord. She saw it. The broom was magic.
She touched it, almost fearfully, as if she guessed it had intentions. It felt no different from an ordinary broom. It merely moved, as if guided by the hand of an invisible spirit. “What tree are you whittled from, what field are you mown from?” she asked it, almost tenderly, but she expected no answer and she got none. The broom quivered, and elevated itself a little off the floor, as if waiting.
The cape had a hood on it, and she drew this up over her face. Then she hiked her summer skirt to her knees, and threw one leg over the broom, to ride it as a child rides a hobby horse.
The thing rose, tentatively, so she could keep her balance by trailing her toes on the floor, correcting, correcting—the center of gravity was high, and the span was so narrow. The top of the handle tilted farther up, and she slid down the shaft until she was caught against the brush top, as if it were a saddle of sorts. She held on tightly; her legs, especially in the upper thigh, felt as if they were swelling, the better to clench the handle between them. The large window at the end of the room hung open, for air and light, and the broom moved a couple of feet across the floor, until it had reached the sill.
Then the broom rose a few feet, and carried her out the window. Nor’s stomach pitched, and her heels beat against the underside of the brush. Mercifully she had emerged not in the castle courtyard, where she would likely be seen, but on the other side, where the land did not fall away quite so far and fast. Nor wailed softly in the strangeness and ecstasy of the adventure. The cape flared out, exposing her chest, and how could she ever have imagined she wanted to be seen without a blouse? “Oh oh,” she cried, but whether to the broom or to some guardian spirit, she did not know. She shuddered with exposure and shock, and the broom rose higher and higher, until it had come to a level with the uppermost window, which was in the Witch’s tower.
The Witch and her nanny were watching, open-mouthed, with cups of tea halfway to their lips.
“You come down from there at once,” ordered the Witch. Nor didn’t know if it was she who was being addressed, or the broom. She had no reins to tug, no words of magic to wield. However the broom, apparently chastened, turned back, descended, and made a somewhat clumsy landing on the floor of the men’s barracks. Nor flung herself off, weeping and shivering, and reclothed herself properly. She didn’t want to touch the broom again, but when she picked it up the life had gone out of it, and she carried it up to the Witch’s apartments expecting a severe reprimand.
“What were you doing with my broom?” barked the Witch.
“I was cleaning the soldiers’ quarters,” g
abbled Nor. “It’s such a mess, their papers all over, their clothes, their maps . . .”
“Keep your hands off my things, you,” said the Witch. “What kinds of papers?”
“Plans, maps, letters, I don’t know,” said Nor, regaining her spunk, “go look for yourself. I didn’t pay attention.”
The Witch took the broom and appeared to consider hitting Nor with it. “Don’t be a fool, Nor. Stay away from those men,” she said coldly. “Stay away from them!” She raised the broom like a truncheon. “They’ll hurt you as soon as spit at you. Stay away from them, I say. And stay away from me!”
Elphaba remembered that the broom was given her by Mother Yackle. The young woman had seen the old maunt as crippled, senile, a bother, but now Elphaba looked back and wondered if there was more to her than met the eye. Was that broom magicked by Mother Yackle, with a vestige of some Kumbricial instinct? Or did Nor have a power developing in her, and did she bring it out in the senseless broom? Nor apparently was a fervid believer in magic; maybe the broom was waiting to be believed in. Would it fly for Elphaba, too?
One night when everyone else had retired, Elphaba brought the broom out to the courtyard. She felt a little foolish, crouching down on the broom like a child on a hobbyhorse. “Come on, fly, you fool thing,” she muttered. The broom twitched back and forth in a naughty way, enough to raise welts in her inner thighs. “I’m not a blushing schoolgirl, stop that nonsense,” said Elphaba. The broom rose a foot and a half and then dumped Elphie on her rear end.
“I’ll set you afire and that’ll be the end of you,” said Elphaba. “I’m too old for this sort of indignity.”
It took five or six nights of trying before she managed even to hover six feet off the ground. She had been useless in sorcery. Was she doomed to be useless at everything? It was a pleasure, finally, to scare the barn owls and bats senseless. And it was good to be abroad. When she had more confidence, she wobbled far down the valley to the remains of the Ozma Regent’s attempt at a dam; she rested and hoped that she wouldn’t have to walk back. She didn’t. The broom was resistant to her intention, but she could always threaten it with fire.
She felt like a night angel.
In midsummer, an Arjiki trader came along with pots and spoons and spools of thread, and he carried with him some letters left at an outpost farther north. Among them was a note from Frex—apparently Nanny had told him of her intentions to hunt Elphaba down, and he wrote to the mauntery, which had forwarded the letter on to Kiamo Ko in the Vinkus. Frex wrote that Nessarose had orchestrated a revolt, and that Munchkinland—or most of it anyway—had seceded from Oz, and set itself up as an independent state.
