Before prospecting for a possible congregation, Frex and Elphie venture into the marketplace. Frex wants to see if they can find out if anyone here ever knew their Quadling martyr, dead now ten or eleven years. “We may never be able to tidy up our condolences with an actual family member,” he says, “but in this crowded city we’re more likely to run into someone who’s heard of Turtle Heart than in most other places in the lowlands. We can only try.”
“I don’t really get the point,” says Elphie, who has become contrary. “You didn’t murder him. You didn’t send him to the Eminent Thropp’s house to be murdered, either. You might as well atone for the fact that village cats kill village rats every day of their lives. It has nothing to do with you. Taking all this responsibility for how the world just works—isn’t that a kind of hubris?”
“I haven’t yet taught you what hubris is,” he snaps at her.
“I’m nearly a teenager, I know already. I’m smart for my age. Besides, you talk about hubris. All the time. You think I never listen to your sermons? I try not to but I forget, so sometimes what you say seeps in.”
“Listen, Elphie. Pay attention. These city Quadlings seem nonchalant, but they have their guard up with me, unlike the more innocent river clans. They may be more comfortable with you. You’re just a kid. Even with your ripe complexion, you’re less threatening. I need your help. You can be the spy.” But they’re passing establishments into which it isn’t smart to send a girl on the threshold of adolescence. A smithy, a kind of tavern, an apothecary with a sweaty proprietor who seems toked up and over-jolly. On the edge of a more residential quarter they come upon a set of wide wooden steps, rusticated in an artificial way, that leads to a lookout porch and a treehouse-shop of some sort. Between branches hangs a strung line of wares, showing off color and design. “Look, a lady’s shop. That’s safe enough. March up there and nose around. It looks like an emporium for dressmaking material. Finger some goods, and pretend you’re interested. Don’t buy an inch of it, of course. But shop women love to gab, I remember that from Qhoyre. See if you can get the mistress around to the subject of Turtle Heart, and if she’s ever heard of him.”
“Turtle Heart probably had his own name in Qua’ati.”
“He probably did, but Turtle Heart is all we know. Maybe someone can translate from the Ozish.”
She does as she is told, glad to be let off her leash even for ten minutes. Shell and Nessa are home with Nanny. Nanny is probably brainwashing the two younger kids with antique legends of soft Lurlina while their father and Elphie are out trawling for absolution. They won’t linger; Shell will be twitching to explore this place, and as Nessa can’t be left on her own for long, Nanny will have her hands full keeping Shell distracted.
Elphie hangs back on the broad elevated veranda, hoping the doyenne of the fabric shop will come out. Instead, a frail man appears, his lozenge belly snug under panels of brocaded garment. He gestures her with a finger. Elphie follows him through a doorway strung with long lines of buttons and beads and dried beans, lintel to threshold. Her eyes adjust in the gloom—a rich gloom. A broad salon with chairs and tea things arranged socially. For clients. Wow. At the far side of the room sweeps a broad varnished counter where, presumably, bolts of fabric are unfolded. The goods are rolled up around bamboo poles, and they stand more or less upright. Some powdery incense that smells of caramelizing tomatoes coils from a copper bowl on the counter. A small lizard waits next to it, untroubled by Elphie’s approach.
The man—maybe the missing shop-lady’s husband—comes forward with an uncertain step. He is weak of chin and high of forehead, with thinning hair. His is a sly and whetted expression, though perhaps that’s usual among shop stewards. Elphie has only ever been in a few shops, back in Qhoyre, apron-tagging, and she’s never yet ventured into a store on her own. As a pretend customer no less. This is risk, this is adventure. She is about to pass out with nerves.
The gentleman speaks to her in a courtly Ozish. She answers in serviceable Qua’ati. His flinch is a kind of gesture of respect, she guesses, though she’s slow at understanding cues given by eyebrow and upper lip. Every person is so different, and so is every moment. Like a clock—she’s seen one once—with an hour hand, a second hand, a hand to mark the day, and a pedestal that turns to follow the sun. Who can do all that addition at once? Sort out what people mean, not just what they say? Well, she is trying. People are organic puzzles every minute hour day and year.
He advances upon her, resting his forearms on the countertop and crossing his wrists, and tilting his head, a manticore just before pouncing. Docile and dangerous. He probably wonders if she is one of a tribe of hitherto unknown green-skinned foreigners just passing through. She’s intrigued.
“So the young miss is perhaps looking for some rural token? A souvenir of her holiday visiting the hovels in Ovvels?” he says in Qua’ati. “You’ll be on your way soon, no doubt.”
Nothing to lose here, and it helps that Elphie is free of tact and guile. “Did you ever know a man named Turtle Heart?”
He repeats the name in Ozish and then translates it into Qua’ati. “Turtle Heart. Chelo’ona,” he says turning the words over and over in his mouth. “Perhaps. You are buying some fabric?” He splays a hand toward his wares.
“Do people tromp around in such giddy clothes? I haven’t noticed. All these jungle flowers and sunset gleam.”
“And you won’t. This isn’t fabric for wearing.”
Elphie tries, and fails, to raise an eyebrow to indicate Oh no? She succeeds only in looking as if a bug has flown in her ear.
“In the homes of those who care,” he says, “and who can afford it,” he admits, “these lots of fabric are cut into strips and displayed upon moveable screens. Or tacked behind dark varnished rods of mahogany, paneling a plain whitewashed room with patterns of color. We live simply in Ovvels. It’s a place of mud and rice and fish, and we are generally modest in our street garb. Smart of you to pick up on that. Even kinder to mention it.” (Is he being waspish? She can’t work him out.) “But behind the shutters of home we cherish brass, which winks when polished, and we are devoted to fine fabric, which consoles differently in different angles of light. It is our aesthetic, and a refined one. But I am a merchant, not a cultural anthropologist, so if you haven’t come to buy—”
“I’m a poor girl from a poor family. Obviously.” Elphie splays a green hand along her formless burlap shift. “We don’t have a home of our own to pretty up with stripes of gaudy color. I am looking for Chelo’ona, was that how you said it? Turtle Heart.”
“Perhaps I’ve heard of such a person,” says the vendor, “or of one or two others. Or maybe they’re the same person from different circumstances. But I can’t help you. I have a business to run and I’m not the neighborhood gossip. And I’m woefully behind on my orders. Good afternoon.”
Elphie isn’t good at this and she’s run out of gambits already. She doesn’t want to return to her father having achieved so little. As she tries to come up with a different approach, a sharp crack rings out in the room. The iguana creature disappears more quickly than Elphie’s eyes can follow. The merchant whips his head. One of the windows at the side of the room has been broken by a bird crashing into it, or—she sees it before he does—a dense, water-smoothed stone. She bends down. “Let me see it then,” says the merchant.
“You have glass windows,” says Elphie. “They’re so clean I didn’t notice. I haven’t seen many glass windows before.”
“Show me that weapon, you wicked thing.”
“I am no such thing. I didn’t do this.” But she brings out the stone for his inspection if not for his touch. A purplish stone, no markings on it.
“He was a glass-maker,” she says. “Turtle Heart. I just remembered, they used to say that. He could blow glass. He made a mirror of a sort that we still have in Mama’s trunk. Maybe his polter-self threw this stone to get your attention.”
“What mischief are you playing at, girl? Do you have an accomplice waiting outside? If you’re trying to distract me, you’ve come up the wrong steps. I don’t keep cash on the premises.” The man is calm and irate at the same time, a combination Elphie hadn’t known was possible.
“I’m not a robber or a robber’s sidekick. Look, I think maybe I could pay you for finding Turtle Heart’s kin, if you can.”
The merchant rummages about for a broom. “Don’t move, there’s glass all around you. You’re looking for his kin and not him?”
“He’s dead, didn’t I tell you already? We’ve come to express our condolences.”
“We. Who is we?”
Elphie says, “My family. My father and me. And my sister, my brother, my nanny. Look, if you’re so interested in cloth, we have some beautiful old skirts and cloaks from Munchkinland. In a trunk. I could bring you something as a trade. If you can find us the route to Turtle Heart’s people. Chelo’ona.”
The merchant purses his lips, as if having bitten into a sour rind. “There are some around here who would look askance at foreigners hunting for a Quadling native or his family. I’d restrict your enquiries to those who aren’t so parochial—I mean, I’m fine with it, I’ve traveled and met other types. But we’re a close community here, and my fellow citizens don’t all have the largesse I do.” His comment mostly champions his own urbanity, Elphie thinks. Yet she takes his caution at face value and decides she will murmur it to her father.
Another customer comes through the door then, scowling at the broken glass on the floor. With an uplift of his hands the vendor herds Elphie back onto the veranda cantilevered over the pebbly lane below. He doesn’t accept her offer but he doesn’t reject it either. She turns about with a small sense of accomplishment. Below, her father, waiting for a report.
She doesn’t wave at him, not yet. She turns to look at Ovvels from this viewpoint. Almost her first experience of a horizon. In this case, not just rooftops and tree limbs, but the distant rice terraces of Ovvels. The lagoon with its floating gardens. How cunningly put together, all the different parts of a world, the near and far, the mammoth and the particular.
The merchant has followed her out through the rattling beads. He catches sight of Frex loitering below and gesturing to his green-skinned daughter. “You’ve sent in a girl to distract me while you break my window to steal my wares?” he yells. He has become the testiest Quadling Elphie can remember running into during her short life—louder and more fierce than those warriors from the mist, which she can barely conjure up any more. The proprietor shakes his fist at Frex.
“He’s a minister, he wouldn’t break your windows,” says Elphie, wondering if a lie is only a lie if you’re sure it’s a lie. Maybe Frex did throw that stone.