Elphie starts to chart change in herself. Not manually: she’s no budding diarist, and anyway there’s hardly any paper. Furthermore, her thoughts don’t come in sentences and paragraphs, but rather in gusts of noticing and guessing and forgetting. Whenever there is arresting novelty—let’s say the day in which the eternity of jungle gives way to a small city—she will remember it.
And so one remarkable midmorning, she and her family make their riverside approach to the upland municipality of Ovvels, in the heart of Quadling Country. The southernmost city in all of Oz.
While sometimes they’ve broken camp and traveled cross-country on foot, more often they’ve taken to the water. An experience that locks Elphie in lip-clenched silence as she sits in the middlest middle of the vessel, and the boat boys try not to flick her with drops of water from their oars or poles. When the family group leaves the punt, Elphie ebbs back into herself, noting a cool flush of relief.
Their scrappy luggage shared out among hired handlers at the docks, the family straggles up from the quay. Above them rises a substantial town, maybe even a city, indistinct in clammy weather. A fog loiters in the dirt streets and among the groves and stilt-legged buildings. The missionary party can smell corn flatbread. Fish and shallots on the skillet. A hint of the local cuisine. Breakfast never seemed so urgent a need.
The sounds of industry and of small children. Goats on the tether, goats on the loose with bells around their necks. Some unknown musical instrument far off, zither-like, playing in an exotic modality.
Relative to the mountains where Elphaba will end her known days, this outcropping is hardly even a hillock. Still, there’s more altitude here than she’s experienced so far. While not large, the city lolls across rises and dips. A good many of the buildings are nestled in the trees themselves, or on posts.
Shell is about five years old at this point. Nessa, eleven. Elphie, therefore, thirteen. She is on the lip of the metamorphosis that she can nearly but not quite sense. Ah, adolescence, save us all. She tries to take everything in.
It is a more temperate world, for one thing. Ovvels, pitched on this stray bit of outcrop, is spared the swampy character of so much of Quadling Country. “They’re still froggy folk, even if they’re tree frogs now,” mumbles Nanny, looking forward to being able to take off her stockings and air out her toes.
Compared to the capital city, Qhoyre, where they spent a year when Elphie was ten, and which she can still sort of picture these two or three years later—but imagination is a memory cheat—Ovvels proves more humble and more beautiful. It is tossed together haphazardly, a metastasis of a single architectural vernacular. Ovvels has never been prettied up or Oz-ified. Nothing like Qhoyre, which in trying to strut about like a younger sibling of the great Emerald City has squared itself off with columns and porticos and ceremonial carvings. (Becoming moss-covered in months and tumbled ruins within decades.) No, the humbler Ovvels is a city built entirely of square-hewn logs, assembled at right angles as much as possible, for the anchoring strength of the joins. Rooflines leaf out into gambrels and dormers. Cooking chimneys built of stone or of tin pipe. Countless gabled windows peer in all directions, allowing a hundred widows to snoop from their attics to see who is passing.
Frex points out that this part of Quadling Country, because higher and less damp, is home to colonies of marsh pine. When felled the trunks remain strict; they don’t go spongey like their lowland cousins. An inexhaustible supply of square-cut logs, impervious to the rains, needing little by way of tarring or treatment.
So the city of Ovvels resembles an arithmetically precise beaver’s dam, one constructed with a plumb line and a builder’s square. Look, the buildings aren’t just raw brown, but subtle shades of mauve, cherry, pale cedar, and chocolate. Ovvels seems coherent, even serene. No one in this family bothers with the word charming, but they might.
They are here to continue and maybe to complete the expiation that Frex began years earlier. Previously he’d considered it Melena’s task as well as his own, for hadn’t she been the first one to take in Turtle Heart and put that Quadling whistle-blower at such risk? But the minister accepts that as widower, he’s the responsible party now. He doesn’t know how much time he has left. He doesn’t want to bequeath his three children a heritage of unserviceable moral debt.
“So we are here,” he tells them, whether they are listening or not, “to make amends. Pay attention.”
Shell is tossing stones at the tree rats, trying to knock them off their boughs. Elphie grabs his right arm and says, “I’ll break your wrist if you keep this up, you little monster.” To her father, she snaps, “I am paying attention.”
“So am I,” says Nessa, batting her eyelashes. At eleven, she’s learned the power of eyelash punctuation. “Look at the creatures carved into the ends of the roof beams and the porch supports. Oh my, Elphie, there’s you—a pouting little monkey.”
“Ha,” says Elphie, who has only mentioned her dream of seeing a polter-Monkey once or twice, but the notion is glued to her for all time. “And there’s you, a snake.”
“Why a snake?” asks Nessa. She slips her tongue out between her lips, quickly. Wittily.
“Because a snake is a venomous creature. And, like you, has no arms.”
“Don’t make personal remarks,” says Nanny with leaden promptness. “There was a snake in Lurline’s magic garden, no doubt, and it did the job snakes do, so mind your tongue, Elphie.” Elphie is minding her tongue, slithering it back at Nessa, mimicking, collaborating, besting, all at once. Elphie almost regrets that her baby viper teeth are long gone. A daggermouth would have made the joke stronger.
They are a smaller contingent now. Boozy has left, and so has Ti’imit. Brother Frex can’t afford to hire replacements. What with pressure being put on the bishoprics of Munchkinland by the Emerald City tax authorities, the parishes can no longer underwrite the expenses of a missionary diving ever deeper into Muck Nation. They’ve tried to recall Frex, but he’s gone rogue. He’s chosen to forge on, to drill ever more southerly. Atonement is a bitch. You do what you have to do, and he’s not done yet.
Elphie has struggled to manage the family cooking. She isn’t a whiz at the cooking pot, but Nanny refuses to do anything other than direct the operation. “I was hired to raise children, not to feed them,” she says. “I’d intended to see the new baby into his training trousers and then go back and take my retirement in Munchkinland. But Melena slipped the gate and got to her retirement first, so now I’m yoked to this family till you children are of age or until I’m dead. But cooking is not in my sheaf of talents. If you prefer to eat, fire the Nanny and hire a cook.”
“This is good enough,” Frex growls at such an outburst. Warm undercooked rice, nearly nutty, flavored with herbs and sand. “Delicious. Thank you, Elphie. The Unnamed God provides.”
“The Unnamed God should choose from a better menu of options,” Nanny says, sniffing. “In the privacy of my tent I beseech the ancient goddess Lurline to show up with a nice pork roast and cracklings, and an apricot pudding with treacle sauce, but she seems to be otherwise engaged and has not answered my prayers. This only deepens my faith and I pray harder. I’ll break her yet, just watch me.”
“We’ll find someplace to live, someplace maybe with a floor,” says Frex. “I have some money put aside from camp meetings. Depending on cost, we might establish ourselves for a couple of weeks quietly, scope out the situation before I start stirring up faith-spending among the potentially devout of Ovvels.”
They wander along a sloping track. Pine needles make the going slippery. Nessa now walks on her own two feet, though more confidently if someone follows with a balancing hand. Steps and ladders are still torturous, but the muscles supporting her spine have shown up for the job. Frex is her most frequent buttress, because Elphie can become distracted and turn suddenly, toppling Nessa onto her knees or face or side.
They amble, on the lookout for an opportunity. If the locals are curious, they are too polite to show interest in the odd party—this gaunt, bearded prelate; a stout tufted armchair of a bonneted woman; a green child approaching adolescence; a younger girl with perfect skin and no elbows or wrists or fingers; and a five-year-old boy kicking stones and looking bored. The Quadlings of Ovvels, proud of being worldly, are accustomed to visitors from the north.
While there’s not much physical difference between the natives of Ovvels and their ruddy cousins in the marshy outback, the Ovvels attitude is keener somehow. Their gaze is more confident. Elphie sees this most sharply in the face of a woman perched on a tree-hoisted balcony of sorts, who answers their question about lodgings without any attitude. “I’m a widow who has rooms to let,” she admits, calling down her chins as she regards the group of five foreigners. “I don’t take single men, for reasons of propriety, but a family group, why not.”
“I am not married to Miss Spunge,” says Frex, up front about it.
“No one need know the details. You’re married as far as I’m concerned.”
“Well, I never,” says Nanny, wondering if ever.
“We’ll need three rooms,” insists Frex. “A larger one for the children, one for me, a third for the domestic. The big room can also be for prayer and lessons and family life.”
“I am Leili Leila’ani,” replied the landlady, “but call me Lei. My husband is dead and my grown boys are off harvesting vegetable pearls in the north. Good sons, they send back a portion of their salaries but not nearly enough. So I can’t be choosy. For my reputation in this neighborhood, you’re married, do you understand. I can’t have it otherwise. How you disport yourselves among three rooms is your own affair. Come, look, and make me an offer.” She watches as Frex and Elphie together maneuver Nessa up the stairs. “I can see she won’t be the one sent running to the market for caper jelly or fresh manatee milk.”
“I can be a comfort to you around the house,” proposes Nessa, smiling like a saint.
“We’ll see about that,” replies Lei. “This way, please.”
The rooms are small but airy, fitted out with louvered shutters that slant bars of sunlight on the floorboards. Scantly furnished. The family comes supplied with sleeping rolls and a purpose-built wicker chair with high box sides so Nessa can sit without falling over. It’ll do. No wardrobes, but their meager supply of clothes still fits into Melena’s trousseau trunks from Colwen Grounds—with enough room left over to store their mother’s outmoded fancy-party gowns, too. A hint of lost luxury.
Nanny’s room has a shelf perfect for arranging a framed icon of Lurline, a faded rotogravure torn out of a holy magazine Nanny once pilfered from the back of a chapel.
Elphie, Nessa, and Sheltergod can doss down in the bigger room. Only one mosquito net to cover all three of them. “If Elphie makes beans for supper, I’m going to die in here,” says Shell.
Frex’s room, narrow and stale, is served by one window too high to reach without a stool. He likes discomfort, so he is pleased at the prospects. He bargains a reduced rent. Lei Leila’ani looks smug, though, as if she’s scored a win here. She offers to whip them up a welcome breakfast.