“She didn’t,” said Elphaba.
“Do you even know the meaning of the word
pawn?” shrieked the Wizard.
“Do you know what resistance means?” Elphaba shot back.
But the Wizard only laughed instead of killing them on the spot. “What does she want of you?”
Glinda spoke up; it was about time. “A decent education. For all her bombastic ways she’s a capable administrator. It can’t be easy.” Elphaba was staring at her with a queer, slanted look.
“Has she brought you in—?”
Glinda didn’t quite understand. “We’re only sophisters. We have only begun to specialize. I in sorcery, Elphaba in life sciences.”
“I see.” The Wizard seemed to consider. “And after you graduate next year?”
“I suppose I’ll go back to Frottica and get married.”
“And you?”
Elphaba didn’t answer.
The Wizard turned itself around, broke off its femurs, and pounded the seat of the throne as if it were a kettledrum. “Really, this is getting ridiculous, it’s all pleasure faith showbiz,” said Elphaba. She took a step or two forward. “Excuse me, Your Highness? Before our time is up?”
The Wizard turned back. Its skull was on fire, a fire not quenched by the thickening curtain of rain. “I shall say one last thing,” the Wizard ventured, in a voice like a groan, a voice of one in pain. “I shall quote from the Oziad, the hero tale of ancient Oz.”
The girls waited.
The Wizard of Oz recited:
“Then hobbling like a glacier, old Kumbricia
Rubs the naked sky till it rains with blood.
She tears the skin off the sun and eats it hot.
She tucks the sickle moon in her patient purse.
She bears it out, a full-grown changeling stone.
Shard by shard she rearranges the world.
It looks the same, she says, but it is not.
It looks as they expect, but it is not.
“Beware whom you serve,” said the Wizard of Oz. Then he was gone, and the gutters in the floor gurgled, and the candles went instantly out. There was nothing for them to do but retrace their steps.
At the carriage, Glinda had settled in and made a little nest for them in the desirable forward-facing seat, guarding Elphaba’s place against three other passengers. “My sister,” she lied, “I am saving this seat for my sister.” And how I have changed, she thought, in a year and some. From despising the colored girl to claiming we are blood! So university life does change you in ways you cannot guess. I may be the only person in all the Pertha Hills ever to meet our Wizard. Not on my own steam, not of my initiative—still, I was there. I did it. And we’re not dead.
But we didn’t accomplish much.
Then, there was Elphie, at last, barreling along the paving stones with her elbows jutting and her thin bony torso swathed against the elements, as usual, in a cape. She came up through the crowd, batting at more refined passengers to get past, and Glinda shoved open the door. “Thank heavens, I thought you’d be late,” she said. “The driver is eager to leave. Did you get a lunch for us?”
Elphaba tossed in her lap a couple of oranges, a hunk of unrepentant cheese, and a loaf of bread that filled the compartment with pungent staleness. “This’ll have to do you till your stop this evening,” she said.
“Me, me?” said Glinda. “What do you mean, me? Have you got something better to eat for yourself?”
