The chief, this uncertain fellow, is undone by the execution of the creature, however monstrous it looked. He has a tenderness of heart belied by his killer musculature and expression. Sent, reluctantly, to slaughter a Munchkinlander missionary, he now finds he cannot. He had decided to abduct a child instead.
But the chief hasn’t figured on the perqu’unti, a beast who features in some of the foundation myths of the Quadling nation. There’s no love lost between perqu’untii and other natives sharing its habitat. A perqu’unti can rip the leg and buttocks off a wading citizen before the human can clear its throat. And the ugliness of this particular specimen, following along behind the frightful young girl! Why? Obeisance, appetite, sheer menace? Nothing is certain. It can’t reveal its intentions now, either; already the chief’s men are readying to knock back the spinal growths and slit the skin to get at the meat.
—Save the first portion for the mother of nations. (The chief, authoritative, referring to the clan matriarch.)
—What is he saying, why does he talk nonsense, they do it to annoy. (Nanny.)
—Shut up, and we may be clear of danger now. (Severin, sensibly.)
—I’ll thank you to keep a civil tongue in your head, young man.
—Keep talking and you won’t have any tongue in your own head.
Nanny purses her lips, and that is that.
The chief regards the green child once more. In light of this transaction—the perqu’unti’s life for a Quadling glassblower’s life, as it were—he might backtrack on his decision to take a child. Compromise toward mercy. If so, would he lose stature in the eyes of his companions? By tomorrow’s campaign someone else will be in charge, and he’ll be a part of the squad. Who will even remember what he’s said or not said?
If he abducts this child, in any case, what to do with it won’t be his decision. Maybe some consensus will elect to rename the child Turtle Heart and raise it as a replacement for the murdered prophet. Or decide to take its life as compensation. Or maybe his people will return the child ten years later, with a souvenir pair of sandals fashioned from crocodrilos leather, a crown of water lilies on her brow. And a foreign tongue in her mouth and mind, a virus it will be impossible to shake.
Or maybe he’ll be stuck with her. If he is forced to harbor her at home, his own boys and his sweet baby dumpling might begin to glow green, through contagion. Or a fatal affliction could bring down this lurid girl before she is ten, and his own children in the same frame of time.
The risk isn’t to be tolerated.
He doesn’t look at the child. He has the peculiar sensation that she might perceive his not kidnapping her as a slight. This child is already no stranger to rejection. He says:
—Leave the carcass. Let the birds and bugs and fish have it. An offering to the riverworld. Let the bones float away. Leave the thing, leave it. We are off. Spread out; find the other child if you can. In any case, we’re not having this one. It is time to go.
The men back off, disguising their sense of relief. They don’t want to touch the carcass. They abandon it where it is, a few feet into the water, rotating in the current until its head has swung around like the needle of a compass, hunting true north.
Nanny comes to her senses at last and opens her arms to Elphaba. The child pays no attention, but trains her eyes upon the crocodrilos. The eye that had caught Elphaba’s is turned back to her now, staring blindly from the flood out of which it has first crawled. Elphie would wade in to touch its foreleg, its snout. But then: water: she can’t.