Meeting with Princess Nastoya

The Meeting with Princess Nastoya is a pivotal event in which Elphaba, traveling with the Grasstrail Train through the Vinkus, is brought before the Scrow chieftain and discovers that the Princess is actually an Elephant living under a self-imposed enchantment. The encounter provides Elphaba with a profound philosophical exchange about identity, power, and the nature of evil, and it grants her three crows as familiars, marking her formal acceptance of the role of a witch.

The Journey to the Scrow Camp

The Grasstrail Train, led by Oatsie Manglehand, had been traveling through the Vinkus for some time. The rafiqi, a thin, balding man with battle scars, pointed out on the horizon several mounding coils of smoke, which Oatsie identified as evening fires for a large encampment of the Scrow. It was autumn hunting season, though nothing had been seen of any game larger than a hare or a grass fox. The travelers feared the Scrow more than they had the Yunamata, and the rafiqi did not say much to allay their fears. Elphie felt in herself a jolt of pleasurable expectation over the thought of approaching the Scrow, having forgotten what pleasurable expectation was. As night fell, the skies throbbed with turquoise, even at midnight, and starlight and comet tails burned the tips of endless grass below into a hammered silver, like thousands of tapers in a chapel just blown out but still glowing. Elphie thought that if one could drown in the grass, it might be the best way to die.

The Encounter with the Princess

It was noon when the caravan pulled up to the edge of the Scrow camp. A committee of Scrow had ridden to their domestic margin, men and women alike on horseback, in blue ribbons and ivory bangles. Also obviously senior was a huge slab of an old woman carried in a palanquin, its frame hung round with tambours and clinking amulets and gauzy veils. She had an overhung lip so large that it doubled back on itself like an upside-down spout on a pitcher, and her eyes were ringed with kohl. On her shoulders sat two dyspeptic-looking crows, their feet shackled in gold links and attached to loops in her ornamental collar, into which the old woman had dribbled traces of the fruit she had been eating. Her shoulders were speckled with crow droppings. The rafiqi announced her as the Princess Nastoya. She was the filthiest, least-educated princess anyone had ever seen, yet she had some dignity; even the most ardent democrat among the travelers genuflected. She laughed raucously and bade her bearers lug her away to someplace less tedious.

The Night Journey to the Shrine

After the evening meal, a delegation of erect old Scrow dignitaries approached the Grasstrail Train and entered into a lengthy palaver with the rafiqi. In the end, a small band was invited to the Scrow shrine, an hour away by camel. For her sin of skin color, or possibly for having had the nerve to take a solitary stroll through the Scrow tent city, Elphie was told to join Oatsie, the rafiqi, Igo for his venerable age, and a financial adventurer named Pinchweed. By the light of sallowwood torches, the camels lurched and lumbered on a worn track. Elphie sat above the grass, a vantage point over the great flickering surface. The plain itself seemed to bring forth night color: now a heliotrope, now a bronzy green, now a dun color skeined through with red and silver. The moon rose, an opalescent goddess tipping light from her harsh maternal scimitar. Nothing more need have happened; it seemed enough to Elphaba to find herself capable of such a weird ecstatic response to soft color and safe space. Eventually, she noticed a plantation of trees, carefully tended in this devastating openness, first a stand of scrub spruce, then a rise of higher hedges, then yet higher trees. It was the circular pattern of the Scrow encampment again, and the party passed into it in silence, as through a maze, along curving corridors of whispering brush, moving from outer to inner circles lit by oil lamps hammered to carven posts.

The Revelation of the Elephant

Within, at the center, was the Princess Nastoya, girded in a native costume of leather and grass made all the more effective by a length of striped purple and white toweling she must have bargained from some traveler. She stood, distracted and breathing heavily, leaning on stout walking sticks; around her, sarsen stones like gapped teeth resembled a stone cage through which she could hardly pass, given her bulk. The guests joined the hosts in eating, drinking, and smoking on a pipe with a bowl carved like a crow's head. Crows ranged all around on the tops of the sarsens. Elphie's head spun, the moon rose, and the plain at night wheeled about like a child's top. When the drone died out, the Princess Nastoya raised her head. The huge wattles of old flesh beneath her small chin wobbled. Her toweling fell to the ground. She was naked and old and strong; what had seemed like boredom was revealed as patience, memory, control. She shook the very hair off her head and it uncoiled down her back and disappeared. Her feet moved massively, as if seeking the best purchase, like columns, like pillars of stone. She dropped her arms forward and her back was a dome; still her head was up, her eyes the brighter, her nose working mightily; she was an Elephant. Elphie thought she was an Elephant goddess, her mind recoiling in terror and delight, but the Princess Nastoya said, "No." She spoke through the rafiqi, who had obviously seen this before, though with the alcohol he stuttered and had to search for words.

The Exchange of Truths

One by one, the Princess asked the intentions of the travelers. Pinchweed, shocked into honesty, spoke of money and commerce and pillage and plunder at whatever cost. Igo ventured a place to die where he could rest and his spirit go abroad. Oatsie spunkily said safety and movement, out of harm's way, by which it was clear she meant out of men's way. The rafiqi indicated that Elphie's own answer was still needed. In the presence of such an Animal, Elphie could not stay aloof. She spoke it as best she could: to retire from the world after making sure of the safety of the survivors of her lover, to face his widow, Sarima, in guilt and responsibility, and then to remove herself from the darkening world. The Elephant told the others, except the rafiqi, to leave. The Elephant raised her trunk and sniffed the wind. Her rheumy old eyes blinked slowly and her ears moved back and forth, raking the air for nuance. She pissed hugely in a steaming flow, with dignity and nonchalance, eyes firmly latched on Elphaba. Through the rafiqi, the Elephant then said, "Daughter of the dragon, I too am under a spell. I know how it may be broken—but I choose to live as a changeling. An Elephant is a hunted thing in these times. The Scrow approve of me. They have worshipped elephants from the time before language, the time before history began. They know I am not a goddess. They know I am a beast who chooses magical incarceration as a human over the dangerous liberty of my own powerful form." She added, "When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis, those who are the most themselves are the victims." Elphie could only look, she could not speak. "But the choice to save yourself can itself be deadly," said the Princess Nastoya.

The Gift of the Crows and the Final Wisdom

The Princess Nastoya then said she would give Elphie three crows as her familiars, telling her, "You are in hiding as a witch now. That is your guise." She spoke a word to the crows, and three mangy, evil-looking things came and waited nearby. When Elphaba asked why the Princess would help her, the Princess replied, "Because no retreat from the world can mask what is in your face." The Princess also revealed that she had heard the bees kill the cook, implying Elphaba had done it on some level, and said, "You are a strong woman. And I can hear bees, you know. My ears are keen." Elphaba asked to stay with the Princess, saying, "Life has been very hard. If you can hear me when I cannot hear myself—something the Superior Maunt could never do—you could help me do no harm in this world. That's all I want—to do no harm." But the Princess, curling her trunk around Elphaba's face, feeling its contours and truths, told her, "Go and do it." When Elphaba asked if she could return, the Princess would not answer. She was tiring, an old old thing even for an Elephant. Her trunk went back and forth like a pendulum on a clock. Then the great nose-hand came forward and set itself with wonderful weight and precision on Elphaba's shoulders, and curled a bit around her neck. "Listen to me, sister," she said. "Remember this: Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny." Elphaba could not answer, so shocked was she at the touch. She backed away when dismissed, her mind all but out of her. The return on camels across the shuddering colors of night grass was hypnotic, vague, and distressing, yet there was blessing in this night. Elphaba had forgotten blessing, too—like so much else.