The Quadling vigilantes lose interest in penning the missionary group. They begin to thrash the undergrowth with their spears, searching for the other child. Melena, dazed now beyond rationality, rushes forward. She drops to her knees in the marshgrass. She lifts the fallen Quadling bearer off the ground; so newly dead—this has been mere moments, all this—he is still limp and warm. His head falls back; he looks merely drunk; for a moment Melena has this rush of instinct to kiss him, as if in an old children’s tale, and wake him up. But there is the odor of wound, attracting flies already feeding on the blood. She lays him back down, her eyes streaming for him. And this crying washes out her mind, somewhat, and she remembers herself.
Nanny has grabbed Elphie’s hand and hauled her away from the edge of the water, not that there’s any danger the child will splash in on purpose. Nanny’s act is more a proof of her professional competence than anything else.
Boozy has gone back to packing up her kitchen, as if this has been an interesting diversion but lunch will still have to be served en route. Severin and Snapper dart away into the verges of the encampment. Melena realizes that they’re looking to grab the baby first, to protect it. But rounding the corner of the tent, Melena finally sees that the hammock is empty and the baby is gone. While the invaders are dissolving into the greenery, some thrashing about, some recovering their canoes and making a noisy departure. The chieftain among them.
“Stop them, they’ve taken her!” bellows Melena, lunging toward the riverbank.
It’s just now that Frex, finally, reappears, wading along the curve of the river from upstream, his clothes sodden, his hair streaming. He is followed by three water buffalo, two with curly horns and one with lateral lances, straight out on either side. They aren’t following him as the perqu’unti followed Elphaba, but driving him.
“What the hell is going on here,” he lashes out, as if everything were everyone else’s fault but his. He stumbles ashore, his wet slippers in his hands.
“They’ve taken Nessa, they’re going to kill her, stop the canoe—”
There’s no stopping canoes that are launched thirty feet out from shore already, especially when you’re cornered by water buffalo with lowered heads and fierce opinions. Though Frex flails with his hands as if dispersing mosquitoes, the heavy beasts only grunt. They aren’t budging. They crowd Frex away from the water’s edge and stand guard. Nearly falling over the corpse of the Quadling boy hidden in the marshgrass, Frex tumbles to his knees and his face contorts, and he mutters a prayer and throws up.
With Elphie in her armpit, Nanny hoists upon her own shoulders a sack of Nanny supplies—ointments, charms, a pack of cards, a romantic novel, strings and thread and Elphie’s long-ignored dolly.
Severin and Snapper circle back to camp, calling that Nessa is nowhere. They’ve swung the empty hammock aside and kicked the grasses below, looking for her in the underbrush. She can’t crawl away, they all know this already!—but they haven’t seen anyone bundling her into a departing canoe, either.
When Frex can speak again, he berates them all for not defending themselves better, for failing to protect the poor murdered Quadling bearer. “Where is the shield of Holy Faith, loaned me by the unionist bishop in Old Pastoria?” he demands to know. “Why didn’t you get the gun and turn it on them?”
“Guns aren’t for shooting, they’re for brandishing,” snaps Nanny, “and in any case for you to brandish, not Nanny. Where were you when trouble ran aground here?”
The story doesn’t come out in its entirety right away, but they’ll learn eventually that Frex had gone to a private spot downstream for his morning rinse and cleanse. In a moment of naked vulnerability he’d been startled by the water buffalo stalking the verge, who formed a ring and stood around him in the water, with their horns nearly touching. He’d been as penned waterside as his family and his entourage had been on the shore. When he tried to bully his way out of the ambush, the creature with the sharpest horns turned its head sidewise, as if ready to impale him. He’d never known water buffalo to be anything but docile, let alone to work in tandem hostility like this. They held him for half an hour while the morning gnats fed on his ears and his bum and his privates. The indignities suffered by men persuaded into missionary work! Surely these mammoth sentries had been corralled by the Quadling attackers. Hexed into service. Though at a certain moment the beasts slackened their guard, allowing him to scramble for his clothes. Then they bullied him back into the shallows as they ushered him to camp.
And they stand here still as he tries to grasp what has happened. He counts the party—everyone is present but the poor blighted Nessarose and the dead bearer, whose name they now remember is something like Sicapari. Scapari?
“We’ll follow them and get her back,” he promises, though he knows he may be lying. It is what needs to be said. Maybe this is Nessarose’s path in life, after all. He isn’t a prophet, just an agent of mystery in his faith, and this is mystery at its finest: the future of a child.
“They don’t have the baby,” insists Severin. “We’d have known it; she’d have been screaming.” He continues blandly, “But in any case, we can’t all follow them; they’d have to do us all in. I’ll steal to their village tonight and sneak around, finding out if somehow they spirited her off without our noticing. And what they intend with her. The rest of you should head upstream. Boozy, collapse your tent; we have to hurry. Snapper, the canoes—have they been sunk, or stolen?” The canoes having been tied up in a cattail-choked inlet upstream, the marauders may not have noticed them. Snapper goes to check.
It’s the dark-toothed Snapper who finds the baby’s corpse. He doesn’t lift it from its resting place, but comes back first to tell the family. They leave their baggage where it is and follow Snapper along the verge of the riverway. The water buffalo trudge behind, swaying like mourners at a state funeral. They might as well have thuribles swinging from their horns, such pomp and gravitas.
Here they all come, humans and creatures, through the tall scratchy marshgrass, sandstone and pale lilac, flecked through with butterflies and dragonflies. The sun having conquered the mist at last, the truth of the world is ready to stare them in the face.
They are all splashing except Nanny and Elphie, who keep to the drier patches. Elphie is reluctant and dragging her heels, contrary as usual. But she is still a child and Nanny is dragging her along. Nanny is not going to miss the saddest moment in the life of a family. Eventually Nanny may have to report this whole tragedy to the Eminent Thropp and Lady Partra. Such a frightful catastrophe, the death of Melena’s second daughter; Nanny will need to witness the evidence. Anyway, it wasn’t Nanny’s fault. Will she be sacked for this? She can get a post with the Beckenhams over toward Center Munch if necessary. They’re always popping out babies, that lot. Though Beckenham society is not as high as that of the Thropps, and a position in a Beckenham household would be seen as a comedown. Nanny straightens her shoulders and prepares for, well, whatever.
But the baby, there it is—it isn’t even dead. How bizarre! Melena splashes forward and swoops upon it, lifting it from the burnished cradle to which it has been secreted. The pacifier plugging her mouth has delayed the inevitable wailing. Nessa now coos and shoots bright eyes about her, and tries without success to kick her little feet in their bunting.
Who dropped her in the shield and set it to float among the cattails? It must have been a tender-hearted Quadling who couldn’t bear to see his fellow ambushers do it harm. But how had he gotten the shield? Was the assault upon the camp so overwhelming that nobody among them had noticed the shield being taken from where it had been laid in the sun that morning, the polish upon it to dry? Back before anyone knew this would become Encounter Day?
Then someone remembers having heard it fall on the ground, resoundingly, and that Elphie had been trying to see if she could lift it, if she could roll it like a hoop.
“Nonsense,” says Frex. “She couldn’t have foreseen the danger to Nessarose, and set her adrift to hide her from her abductors. Elphie can hardly put her arms through her own sleeves yet.” They look at Elphie, who glares back at them, unrepentant, imperturbable.
“Who else,” says Melena, “and does it matter now? We’re safe. We’re whole. We have Nessa. We can go.”
They return to camp with the baby in their arms, the bronze shield across Snapper’s back. Nanny follows last, her hand stolidly clamped in Elphie’s whether Elphie wants it or not.
The water buffalo must have spooked the war party, for those still left are rushing away. The massive bovines nudge the body of the fallen Quadling boy into the river, allowing it to float to its rest. As if following instructions, the creatures then wade out to where the perqu’unti has drifted and they slowly nose its remains back to the shore. Elphie picks up Boozy’s ladle where it dropped. She pokes the perqu’unti’s snout with it, helping to snag the creature and pull it forward.
“She wants to take it with her,” says Snapper.
“She doesn’t want a doll any more than she wants a baby sister,” says Nanny, who gets Elphie better than her parents do. “No, she prefers the corpse of a crocodrilos. I worry about that one. I really do.”
“We’ll leave it for creatures to clean, and if the bones are here when we come back this way,” says Frex to his brave and selfless daughter, “we’ll collect them for you.” Nothing of the sort will ever happen of course, he thinks, but a little lying to calm a fractious child is acceptable, and anyway, it’s how children learn what lying is all about.
The morning rolls toward noon, and the encampment has been abandoned. The water buffalo stray off and are never seen again. The Quadling boy, looking baggy and relaxed, drifts downstream, soon out of sight. The canoes are snug enough, and the local guides and bearers, turning upstream, ply their paddles with nearly noiseless precision. As the temperature rises, sweat rolls down Melena’s aired bosom. Frex’s brow furrows at yet another failed attempt to establish a more permanent mission. Nessa babbles in relief at being rescued from her exile. Elphie glowers.
Someone in the party knows what has happened here, but there are many questions. Who, if indeed anyone did, had spoken to the water buffalo and given them their standing orders? Why did Elphie return to camp, return from wherever she’d gone missing, with a crocodrilos trailing her? The intensity of Elphie’s interest in the creature, its sacrificial slaughter having righted some imbalance and saved herself and her family—could she have arranged this somehow? She is only four, after all.
It makes for ridiculous conjecture. Maybe only Elphie considers the sum and minus of the exchange, unintended but no less accurate: a life for a life. How could she see that, a crocodrilos’s life for her own, or that of her sister? When she hardly can say her own name yet? A perqu’unti’s heart is not a turtle heart. But still.
Of course she can’t put any of this into words. Of course she can’t think like this. No one is even sure if she can think at all. And no child at the age of four is capable of working out a moral equation about wrong and right. Right? Right?