Elphie will never remember if she and Nessa went down to the edge of the lagoon the next day, or perhaps a week or two later. Either way, it’s early on in their stay in Ovvels, to be sure. One of those moments that stick, though not in sequence, exactly.
Frex and Nanny are on the prowl for a venue to hold an impromptu faith convocation. Told to stay home, the children light out. Lei Leila’ani can’t stop them (“You’re not our mother!”). They go wandering through Ovvels on their own. Elphie wants to inspect the wide lagoon that she spotted from the porch of the cloth merchant.
Whichever day it is, and it doesn’t matter, they find themselves descending the slopes on the north side of Ovvels. A great brightness of water curves beyond the honeycombed city. A lagoon, a slab of blue sky that fell earthward and turned to water, wider than any breadth of river they’ve ever encountered.
To the left of the vast blue, rice terraces climb the slopes of the near hills. These hundreds of irregularly shaped pools, held back by low ramparts of stone and mud, make a start at lake-edge and step up nearly to the peak of the slope. Were you a salmon who knows how to leap the falls, in a series of five or six dozen lunges you might spring from the shore almost to the top of the mount. The terraces taper and bulge as the contours of the hill allow. In full sun they wink hundreds of metallic eyes. No inch of slope goes uncultivated. Some smaller paddies hold as few as three dozen rice plants. Some are broad enough to harbor thousands of stalks.
The hydraulics of this arrangement forever remain a mystery to Elphie. In time, she will wonder if the mountain range called the Quadling Kells drains through an underground riparian system and somehow emerges at the crest of the terraced hilltop. The splash at the top of a fountain. A faucet that won’t turn off. In fact, the vast dampness of the Marsh Nation may result from serving as a slip-pool for the mountains of Oz. As Munchkinland is Oz’s breadbasket, Quadling Country perhaps is its footbath.
In the lagoon, locally known only as “the lake,” half the distance between Ovvels and the rice terraces on the shore is taken up by floating gardens: open-top oval or rectangular boxes made of rot-resistant wood. A few are filled with soil for ground plants, but most are pools for the raising of fish, water lettuce, and other wet produce.
Though privately harvested—vegetables, fruits, and all kinds of rare flowers—the floating gardens of Ovvels are open to the public for strolling. Every allotment abuts another. The pairs of cedar timbers yoked together make a path wide enough for any wobbly granddad to navigate—except when they curve at the occasional spandrel, where care must be taken. At the juncture of ovals and rectangles, choices abound. A watery labyrinth.
“It’s like a colony of lily pads, the way they crowd and don’t overlap,” says Nessarose. “That close.”
The kids see creatures feasting in the outer gardens—water impalas and herons and, over there, a murder of crows. Trained swamp dogs with unerring footing race around the perimeters to scare predators away. The dogs sometimes plunge in the earthen gardens with recklessness, but they avoid the basins of water. In time Elphie will find out why, but on her first visit with her siblings, she merely watches and looks.
It is high noon, an hour when most of the water gardeners of Ovvels have gone home for the midday meal, or are quaffing a beer in a back room of a shop. Eventually even the dogs slope off. So the floating allotments are empty of humans but for the Thropp children. The relative quiet means it’s a good time for animal foragers, to be sure. A pair of deer, a doe and a fawn, freeze into statues and watch the children as they maneuver along the braided wooden paths. A couple of mangy creatures, too far away to be identified, are moseying about on all fours, splashing and eating at the same time. They might be pigs? Elphie keeps an eye on them. She supposes lunchtime for humans at home means a safer hour for scavengers.
Not putting a high value on being cautious, the Thropp children might as well explore while there is no one around to shoo them away. And off they go, balancing and squealing, Shell racing ahead, Elphaba guiding and steadying her sister with a hand in the small of her back. “Good practice, this,” says Elphie. “One day you’re going to have to walk on your own, you know.”
“One day you’re going to have to stop bossing me around.”
“I’m being useful. Somebody has to be useful in this family.”
“And I’m what? Useless?”
“I wouldn’t say that. Ornamental, maybe. Anyway, everything isn’t about you, or haven’t I let you know that yet?”
“Don’t push so fast. I have to find the right footing or I’ll make a fall.”
Does Elphie pull her hand back too quickly, does she stutter its support to remind Nessa that she’s not Nessa’s staff, she’s her sister? Unanswerable. Upon her slender porcelain ankles, Nessa teeters.
What follows is easiest told as Elphie remembers it later, though she’ll question the sequencing of her understanding. Had she ever really encountered a talking Animal before? Had the subject even come up, except in a fable of some distant world that only Nanny ever mentions? Elphie can never say. She’s had dreams, she remembers: an impossible item called a polter-Monkey. She thought she’d made that up.
What Elphie is sure of, what she can see nearly to her last day, is the sight of Nessarose in front of her, unbalanced, tilting. Maybe the lake has unsettled itself. Maybe a crocodrilos has humped its spine right under where they are walking, just to disturb their lives. Nessa pitches leftward, and then slides sideways into a penned segment of lake. A pool with only a few ropy tendrils and rondels of vegetation. Nessa can’t flail; she has no arms with which to flail. The water is several feet deep at least.
Even if he hadn’t run ahead, Shell couldn’t jump in. He can’t swim, and he is still small. The depth of the water, they can’t guess it. But he pivots at his Nessa’s offended little shriek, and he begins throw himself about, threatening to jettison himself into the drink and double the tragedy.
Tragedy it will be, because Elphie can’t plunge into deep water any more than she could run face-first into a bonfire. Her body won’t move itself. Paralysis. Nanny and the jungle physicians with their charms and potions have all been wrong: Elphie has no more outlived her skin’s sensitivity to water than she’s outgrown her green skin. She screams. Nessa sinks below the surface of the water, face up, eyes on Elphie, conveying something something something. Her mouth closes though, to keep from filling up with water.
The sound of children hollering over the lagoon of private water gardens, such a common occurrence. No one comes running. All nearby families will have their own brats home already, sitting cross-legged upon a lunch cloth, everyone safe and accounted for, and you eat that swamp beet because it’s good for you. In any case, this is the worst possible hour to call for help—it’s the hour that help takes its midday break.
But before Elphie can decide whether or not to hold on to Shell’s ankles and drop him into the water so he might fishpole his sister to the surface, somehow, a commotion occurs nearby. That hump-shouldered pair of foraging creatures out there is galloping toward them.
A whiplash of furry muscle. Tearing along the walkways, arriving in a pulse of animal intention. And then plunging into the water on both sides of the drowning girl, hoisting her head and shoulders above the water. A commotion of splash and thrash. Elphie recoils from thrown coins of water; she can’t help herself.
Shell catches on his sister’s ears and pulls from above. The creatures push and roll the rest of Nessa up the edge of the sill until she is lying flat upon the teak margin.
Is it instinct or learned behavior? These animals know something about water rescue. The bulkier one thumps upon Nessa’s upper chest and the smaller leans upon her stomach. Nessa gives up the water she’s taken in and begins to heave and gasp for air. While her eyes remain closed, she sneezes a few times. Her eyelids twitch and her eyes run, lagoon water draining. Or maybe tears.
“She’s not what you’d call a natural swimmer,” observes the smaller of the rescuers, not a pig but a sort of dwarf bear. Her fur has segmented into points, as if combed with a fork.
But: no: so: these are Bears, not bears. Elphie’s first waking experience of talking Animals. Arriving in time to save her from accidentally murdering her sister. Figures more solid than the dream-figments of a polter-Monkey. Something marvelously both rash and undeniable, witnessed by her brother and sister.
Elphie flushes with a rage that threatens to overwhelm her panic over Nessarose. She’s been lied to by—by everyone. Her father primarily. He hadn’t bothered to tell her about Animals.
She’s been blind to half the world. She’s been kept in a prison of her own ignorance.
Now, she’s just thunderstruck. The Dwarf Bears speak in a patois part Qua’ati, part Ozish: these creatures seem to be better traveled than most Quadlings.
Shell backs away a few feet. Talking Animals lived in stories, not in the wild. His fingers look itchy for a stone he can use as a missile, even though these interlopers have come in the cause of rescue.
“She’ll be all right,” says the larger Bear. It—he?—is a bit squinty. He rubs the epaulets of his shoulders, squeezing water out of the charred-toast fur. Then he shakes like a wet dog. Elphie flinches and ducks.
The first experience of hearing a creature speaking can come as a kind of welcome assault. Akin to listening to water and trying to hear melody in it, or eavesdropping on a pair of squawking parrots and imagining what they might be on about. You have to try. A certain effort of translation is required, due to accent deafness, if nothing else. But in Elphie the need to figure it out overrides her skepticism and ignorance. Some of us face the mirage and find it true.
The smaller one snorts a brave curse or a nasty word.
These bears—Bears!—are the ones with language; Elphie is stuck with sputtering silence. But not for long. “They didn’t tell us you could talk,” she manages, not certain how to address an Animal. “It sort of never came up, exactly.”
“In this part of this country, we Ski’ioti live with our own kind and we don’t mix,” says the smaller one. She repeats herself so Elphie can move along the syllables and pick out meaning. The Dwarf Bear—a Ski’ioti!—then speaks even more slowly. “What’s. Wrong. With. Her. Arms?”
“Nothing,” replies Elphie. “She doesn’t have any. On the plus side, she never worries about hitting her funny bone. On the minus side, she doesn’t have much of a sense of humor to begin with.”
“So she’s a lot like a fish. But she can’t swim.”
“Well, it was only her first try.” Elphie’s breeziness startles herself. It derives from a combination of panic and joy. She’s going slightly out of her mind, that must be it. “Shell, you better run find Papa or Nanny, or someone.” Though Nessa’s dorsal muscles are now stronger, she still doesn’t easily get up from a prone position without some help. Elphie doesn’t want to touch her sister till she’s dried off. But the Bears are already putting their shoulders into it. Nessa’s head lolls as her torso lifts upright, but not in a dead way. Elphie grimaces. “Oh, come on, Nessa, don’t milk this for drama.”
“Wh—wh—where am I?” moans Nessa, then sticks her tongue out at her sister.
“Shut up.” Elphie pivots to the Dwarf Bears. “Why would you help us? Who are you? Why can you talk? Is this some hex put on you, are you really human cousins imprisoned by a witch into some animal shape? What is a Ski’ioti?”
“You ask such nosy questions, Elphie,” remarks Nessa, back from the dead with a vengeance. In a Nanny manner: “It’s hardly polite.”
The Bears don’t seem to mind. They introduce themselves as Lollo-lollo and Neri-neri. Lollo-lollo, with one fixed and one unstable eye, is the bigger creature. Neri-neri proves the more loquacious one. She says, “We’re not supposed to feed here, of course, so rescuing your sister puts us in harm’s way. You Quadlings are so grabby.”
“We’re not Quadlings.”
The Bears look at each other and then slide a glance toward Nessa. Elphie tries to ignore the implication. “Why would you help us if the Quadlings are so interfering?”
Neri-neri replies, “You might want to see to your friend’s care before we discuss public policy.”
“Friend? Um. I don’t have any friends. She’s, um, my sister.”
“Ah, if you’re sisters, why aren’t you both—more like sisters?”
“Answer my question. Why did you help us? Why would you?”
“So you’re the bossy one? All right, we’re not allowed to be here. We’re illegal. Someone will already have spotted us out on the edge of the floating allotments. If your armless thingy-person-sister drowned while we were around, we’d be blamed, somehow. Reason enough to go after us. That’s how it works, and that’s enough of that. We should scamper.”
Elphie isn’t sure they’re telling the whole truth. Hanging around longer only gave them more chance to be implicated, should a tragedy have occurred. But the social question is more pressing. “I don’t get it. Why can’t you feed here?”
“The Quadling humans consider it their property. And outside the floating gardens can be too dangerous. Lagoon hippos, you know. The occasional rogue crocodrilos.”
“Perqu’unti,” intones Elphie, not knowing where the word has emerged from. But that’s how language works.
“They plant the outside rim of this raft of allotments with trailing brindlevine,” says the smaller Bear. “It gives off a stinging poison to most water creatures. Keeps them from breasting the ramparts and making a meal of the harvest. But birds can approach by air. And we can arrive by the shore if we feel lucky. So can those impalas there, see. If we’re in the neighborhood, I admit that we’re tempted by the convenience.”
“And by the fun of the risk,” says the larger Dwarf Bear.
“Does that cover the matter for you?” continues Neri-neri. “We’re done here, leaving before there’s trouble.”
“You should get me home, I’m in need of tending,” says Nessa to her sister.
“Will you bolt up for a moment? When are we going to meet a talking Animal again?” But Elphie realizes that Nessa is looking decidedly queasy—perhaps not from her terrifying bath but, maybe, from the experience of talking to Animals at all.
“Your sister is right, she needs dry clothes,” says Lollo-lollo languidly, as if he doesn’t much care if Nessa gets them or not as long as she hasn’t drowned.
Elphie snaps, “They’ll dry in this sun in thirty-eight seconds if she’d stop yapping.”
“We can talk some other time,” says Neri-neri. “Few Quadlings choose to pass the time of day with us. We spook them. And they spook us. But you seem different. Maybe you’re deranged? Anyway, we won’t loiter near Ovvels for too long—we’re migratory feeders, and we have our little routines. You can find us—” Neri-neri surveys the tidy little city and its outlying reaches. “Over there, do you see, the cedars crowning that brow to the left?”
“Neri-neri,” says her companion, “you’re off your feed. That’s insane. Too risky. No way—”
She continues calmly. “We’ll hide out there for a day or two and wait to see if you show up. We’ll be able to see if you’re making your way without hunters and trappers and guns. If you try to be sly about that, we’ll disappear. But we’ll wait, and hope. And why? I can see it in your face, why would we want to talk to you? We have our own curiosities, as it happens. You seem a breed apart. We’re rarely interested in human chatter—but if you’re willing?”
“What could you be curious about that I could explain to you?”
“Well, why you’re green, for one thing. That’s a talking point right there.”
“Yuh-huh,” says Elphie. The deal is sealed. Nessa is brought to her feet. Shell is waiting some feet away, creeped out by the entire sequence of events, shaking with the sort of excitement and terror a five-year-old lives for.