A Lion Among Men (37 page)

Louder than any of that: men roaring like beasts.

The Lion turned into the wind, on the run once more. Neither an envoy of the EC, just now, nor a foot soldier of the underground opposition. Not even a neutral protector of oracular justice and magic hopes. He was a free agent, a rogue Lion, just as he’d started out in the Forest. A rogue Lion with the beginning of an education.

He headed for the sag-roofed, slipshod cottage. He had so little time. He would frighten the old couple there with an offer of help. It was neither the least nor the best he could ever do. It was simply an action that didn’t follow obviously from all his earlier campaigns. It was an exercise in refusing to barter. It was an exercise in refusing to play dead. And that was the only way he could imagine how to vex history.

A plodder, he watched his feet on the ground. Had he turned to look up, to review the map of Oz in the clouds, he’d have seen the first stain of battle smoke rising against the white. Lightning was waiting in the heavens, of course. Sooner or later, the lightning comes to us all. In the meantime, for a moment, the clouds had rearranged themselves, and he might have said that they looked like a flying creature, a shadow angel, all light and impermanence. But the clouds suggested this only to themselves, while he kept his head down, bent to his task.

W ho would have thought my shrivel’d heart Could have recovered greenness?

-George Herbert, “The Collar”

I’d like to thank a coterie of early readers for giving such useful comments. Mistakes that remain are mine. The readers include David Groff, Betty Levin, Andy Newman, and William Reiss of John Hawkins and Associates; and at William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, Cassie Jones and Johnathan Wilber.

Douglas Smith’s devotion to the exercise of illustrating the Wicked Years is an inspiration to me to continue writing the books just to see what he’ll come up with.

FOUR
YEARS
AGO
, to prepare for writing Son of a Witch, I reread Wicked for the first time in quite a while. I was startled to see something I’d never noticed before: a little plot device I had worked up to explain the mysterious presence in Elphaba’s life of the dwarf (in A Lion Among Men called Mr. Boss). I saw that his employment and employer bore similarity to aspects of Susan Cooper’s novel for children called The Dark Is Rising, which I’d read some fifteen years before writing Wicked. While I have had fun in the Wicked Years slipping sidelong references to books by L. Frank Baum and other inspiring fantasists, and to the famous
MGM
film of 1939, I didn’t intend my homages to descend into appropriation.

At once I wrote to Susan Cooper-a long-standing friend and colleague-and I apologized for the accidental theft. She answered with her usual clarity and courtesy, citing a remark by J. R. R. Tolkien (who had once been her teacher at Oxford) that reminds us of the differences, in ancient storytelling, between invention, diffusion, and inheritance: “Speaking of the history of stories and especially of fairy-stories we may say that the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty.” Had she been possessed by a litigious mood, she might have gone on to quote: “There are many things in the Cauldron, but the Cooks do not dip in the ladle quite blindly. Their selection is important.”

GREGORY
MAGUIRE
is the bestselling author of Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, Lost, Mirror Mirror, and the Wicked Years series, which includes Wicked, Son of a Witch, and A Lion Among Men. Wicked, now a beloved classic, is the basis for the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical of the same name. Maguire has lectured on art, literature, and culture both at home and abroad. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.

www.gregorymaguire.com

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