Death of Manek

Manek, the middle child of Fiyero and Sarima, is a boy of casual cruelty and sharp intelligence, the most assertive of the three Arjiki children at Kiamo Ko. Where his older brother Irji is soft and prone to tears, Manek is a "little bantam," quick to dominate and to test the limits of others. He is the first among the children to treat the newly arrived Liir—the fat, awkward boy who accompanies the green-skinned guest called Auntie—as a target for sustained torment. Manek's bullying is not impulsive but calculated, a campaign of psychological and physical abuse that he orchestrates with a leader's instinct for isolating his victim.

The Bullying and the Fishwell Incident

Manek's cruelty reaches its peak in a game of hide-and-seek. He leads Liir down to the basement of Kiamo Ko, where a stone fishwell opens into a shaft of black water. Promising a clever hiding place, Manek coaxes Liir into the bucket and lowers him into the well, then slides the heavy wooden cover fully shut, leaving Liir trapped in the dark above the water. When Liir is not found for hours, the household discovers him only after the snow monkey Chistery's whining alerts them. The boy is pulled from the well, bloated and seemingly drowned. Elphaba, in a desperate act, breathes her own breath into his lungs and revives him. Manek, watching the rescue, shows no remorse; his only comment is a flat, theatrical "I cannot believe it, this is so terrible." The incident exposes the depth of his malice and the household's failure to govern him.

The Icicle and the Death

In the aftermath of Liir's near-drowning, Sarima lectures Elphaba on the nature of anger, distinguishing between the hot anger needed by boys for survival and the cold, simmering anger required by women. Elphaba, sitting alone the following morning, watches the strengthening sun beat down on the icicles hanging from the eaves. She thinks about the weapons needed to fight such abuse. As she trains her gaze on a single icicle, it breaks from the eaves and drives whistling downward. It catches Manek in the skull as he goes out to find some new way of beleaguering Liir. The death is instantaneous and precise, an act of nature that feels, to everyone, like an act of will.

Consequences and Aftermath

Manek's death devastates the household. Sarima, behind her gestures of ecstatic acceptance of life, becomes more aloof, taking her meals alone in the Solar. The sisters, who had invested their hopes in Manek as the future restorer of Kiamo Ko's fortunes, are left with a sense of theft and loss. Irji, freed from his brother's shadow, retreats into religious devotion, while Nor, the youngest, becomes increasingly isolated and reckless. The family's unspoken feeling is that Liir's life has been saved at the expense of Manek's, a suspicion that deepens the rift between Elphaba and Sarima. For Elphaba, the event confirms her own dangerous, unconscious power—a power she cannot fully control or understand, and which she will later recognize as the mark of a witch.