The chief makes a wag of his left hand. It means: Those of you on the perimeter, scatter, comb the foliage. Beat out any lurkers.
Half the men fan out, their daggers now sheathed. The others come closer. With a tch’ing sound of his tongue the chief instructs them to keep the mission party corralled. He moves a few feet toward Elphie. Just close enough to suggest to his men he isn’t frightened by her.
Elphie—neither Melena nor Nanny can guess what is in the child’s head, if there’s anything in her head, or if she’s just a sponge living through this unforeseeable hour. Elphie knows nothing of unionism or animism, hegemony or marginality, sexual tension or spiritual need. She’s a creature of wild reed and murky riverside, although she avoids immersion. (She won’t even wade in the shallows.) Whatever she might perceive, she doesn’t speak it—that skill is a few years out. Her language is slow in coming for a child her age.
But she’s full of all the things there are no words for, the great inchoate passions that are reduced, as we grow up, to the smaller things language allows us to say.
—This is one of theirs. (A question. The chief.)
—You won’t touch her. (Severin, and bravely; he could die for this. But:)
—I will not touch her. We do not want this one.
A moment ticks as the sun levers itself another degree above the mist. The chief scratches an itch on his hip and continues.
—We do not want this one.
—What is he saying? (Melena.)
—There are two, we are told there are two, where is the other one?
When Severin doesn’t answer, the chief makes another click of his tongue. Two men draw dirks. Snapper flinches; he’s the most dispensable one in the encircled pack, if it comes to that. He knows it.
“Where is Nessarose?” mutters Severin to his companions.
Melena swivels her head. From where they’re huddled, the bassinet is out of sight, around the edge of a tent. “Nanny? Where is she?”
“In her hammock as always, I hadn’t gotten to her yet. She was safer there,” gabbles Nanny, “while you were purpling the air with your panic and we were pulling up stakes.”
Melena starts to scream, a single ascending syllable. The Quadling marauders aren’t amused but they keep their footing.
Elphie comes a little nearer. Her mother hasn’t made a sound like this before and she’s curious about it. An organic sound. Maybe it reminds the child of the wind over the fells of Wend Hardings, that desolation of shattered stone and stunted gnarly trees. Even though it’s already two years ago since they left.
But the chief isn’t going to touch Elphie. Fear of the child, respect for its unblinking integrity. Who knows. Maybe for its splendid aberrance. What child doesn’t run to its mother’s knees when an attack is underway? But Elphie stands there watching, listening, the least overwhelmed of the human beings there.
Nanny finally says, “Come to Nanny, child, there’s a good Elphie,” if a scrap insincerely. She isn’t sure she wants Elphie nearer just now. But she’s said it, and credit to her for that much.
Elphie, not for the first time in her life, behaves as if she doesn’t hear Nanny’s instruction. If this isn’t quite disobedience, it’s mighty near.
The chief is now being stared down by a four-year-old, which won’t do his standing in the community any good. He begins to wonder if his reluctant warriors may need to kill him in order to save his honor. So he moves closer. His attitude isn’t quite revulsion. He’s just curious. Once he saw a marsh goat born with two tails, another time, a feral pig arrived in a clearing with another feral pig standing on its back. Such idiocies need to be slaughtered in order that their peculiarity not infect the world.
He won’t murder her, but perhaps he’ll let her loose in the wild, so the wild can do the job. The wild doesn’t like competition, he’s noticed.
The chief makes a few muttered remarks. Elphie, for her part, stands her ground. She’s intrigued. As if she is making her first study of otherness. She likes the poise of the chief. Unlike Melena and Frex, who avoid their older child, and Nanny, who coddles her into submission, this chief is paying Elphie the greatest compliment she’s ever received: keen attention from a human being.
She hears the noise behind her before the others do. It isn’t the soft calls or softer footfalls of the warriors hunting for Nessarose. It isn’t more drums on the water. The noise is a kind of dry sweeping. A smoothness with an under-rattle of grit.
Then the others catch it, and then the chief sees it. Elphie doesn’t turn around to look at what is behind her. So no one knows what she perceives at this moment.
Melena’s screams pause in the middle of her endless vowel — — —. Nanny uses an outmoded countrywoman’s curse that has gone so far out of fashion it’s not worth repeating. (Crude from snout to stirrups, you can be sure.) Boozy drops her ladle. Snapper exhales for what feels like the first time in an hour and he nearly passes out from the relief. And Severin audaciously reaches to grab the chief’s forearm. He simulates the throwing of a lance. There’s your prey.
The vile creature is low to the ground, familiar and deformed at once. The Quadling term is perqu’unti, or some variant thereof. Better known as a crocodrilos, or of the crocodrilos family. Crocodile in some vernaculars. But this a defective specimen. A thicket of protuberances thrusts up from its spine, unlike anything ever seen upon a crocodrilos. Biological bravado. Editorial objection to the world, even before its nictitating eyelids can lift and its poxite eyeballs focus. Its horny hide is mud green and mud brown, blistered and battle-scarred.
The chief is agog. His associates grip their spears more tightly. The kind of creature that could capably eat through several Quadling canoes for supper. A mortal threat, and the worst one of its sort ever spotted.
The animal has paused, too. About ten feet behind the child. As if in Elphie’s thrall, awaiting her word. It mutters, a glottal purr, the grinding of broken glass. And it smells, it reeks of dried swamp caught in its plates.
Not quite the puppy that follows a child home and begs to be adopted. This creature looks as if expecting a command to kill.
And yet Elphie shows no sign of realizing that the crocodrilos loiters behind her.
The beast snorts. Elphie has to have heard it. But maybe she takes it for the sound of the universe groaning. Isn’t that the fatuous remark—what does she know of the universe at all, let alone of how it might express its opinions? Still, Elphie is a vigilant child. Maybe delayed in her development when it comes to speech, but attentive as a dog cocking its head to listen to something no human ear can pick up. So why doesn’t she turn? Maybe the child is distracted by the mystery of her baby sister. Who knows.
The chief gives the sign. The men surrounding the missionary party fall back. They move beyond Elphie to encircle the deformed perqu’unti.
The old creature stares straight ahead. It has seen combat before breakfast more than once. The beast can move faster than they realize. But usually a display of might is all it takes. Its dorsal hedge becomes engorged, clacking as its thorns pitch and sway. The spears thrown by the Quadlings penetrate the thicket of appendages, but perqu’unti skin is tough as armor. The spearheads bounce off, while the spear-shafts get stuck. The chief barks at his band to stop wasting their weapons.
This old waterlogged hedgehog has been following Elphie placidly enough. It isn’t snapping its jaws, nor does it advance when the child pauses. It has paused, too. Maybe it has its own take on the matter. So it smells bad and looks fierce. So it is a bizarre instance of its own kind. Does that justify judging it a mortal threat?
But perhaps the moment has been too keyed up for anything other than attack. Mob panic working out again.
A dumpy Quadling warrior, least physically fit of the lot, hurries past the missionary group to the cookfire, which Boozy hasn’t yet extinguished. He lights the dry end of his canoe paddle. In no great hurry, he levels the torch into the beast’s spineywork defense, locking the flame centrally, where the paddle can’t be knocked off.
Only now does Elphie really clock on to what is going on. She whirls about and takes in the measure of the attack. She sees the lizardy creature. She shrieks, a little girl scream the world has known since before there were stars and sand. Perhaps not out of fright for her own safety, but as a message of warning.
Elphie’s cry catches the creature’s attention. It cocks its supple neck and opens its sedge-fringed mouth in outrage or surprise. Then the perqu’unti pivots with unnerving speed. A couple of Quadling mercenaries leap out of its way as it slithers toward the sandy verge in order to extinguish its burn in the river.
It doesn’t make it in time. Its oily skin, even when wet, proves highly flammable. The crocodrilos contorts, the bottom half of a wheel, its thorny spokes meeting as if at a fiery hub. The flexing exposes its sensitive undercarriage, and two spears take advantage. Heart bleeds, spinal brush burns. Throat protests, a rent in the fabric of the morning. Its forelegs tremble, it reaches for the lip of the water only inches away.
The crocodrilos with the burden of a burning bush on its back. Just inches from the water that might have quenched the flames and preserved its share of moments. It has its ways, its slow-flickering mind, its woes. Whatever it perceives won’t change what happens next. Still. Give it credit for noticing.