A baby sister hanging in a tree. A mouth of forgotten razor teeth. An ambush sniffed in the air of a swamp morning. A father preparing for a meeting with the indigenous heathen of these parts. A distracted mother, put-upon and aggrieved, forgetting why she’s fled her cushy family environs for this career of mildewy motherhood in Quadling Country. A nanny whose only asset is her indispensability. The world beyond the blanket. Green dripping from green, shrieking birds, silent snakes. The billion enterprises of the bug nation. A cry in the mist, a curious silence. The day is launched upon its inevitabilities.
“I don’t believe they even heard that,” mutters Nanny, shrugging at Frex and Melena, praying and preening. She tries to draw the green child closer, but Elphie can’t abide the cloying touch.
But is her father even present at this moment? Or has he already left for his meeting with the elders of the tribe? Has her mother—what? Not gone with him, surely; she isn’t interested in missionary work. Maybe Nanny has taken Melena aside. Maybe it isn’t even the same day. One morning stands out and makes all the others recede. Catch a glint of sun on a single stone in the riverbed, and that’s all you can see, not the other stones nesting against it.
Beneath a tree lies a kind of broad flat dish, two-thirds the height of Elphie. Hammered yellow of some sort, light and strong. A platter with beveled edges to catch the gravy. Not so hard to lift. A sort of suctioning sound as it comes away from the grass. Heave and drop, heave and drop, to make the world go clop clop clop.
She gives it a push to see if it will roll, and it does, heading downhill. It revolves in tightening circles and makes a metallic echo when it clangs to the ground. Someone hollers at her.
But few pay attention to her. Father—Frex, Frexspar, originally Frexispar Togue; Guv’nor Pastor, Papa—Father seldom looks up from his devotions—Elphie will have few memories of him even speaking to her until after the death of her mother. So it probably isn’t Father. Maybe at this moment he isn’t even around. Nor has Melena Thropp clucked a warning. Melena is a hen who doesn’t mother her chicks.
Elphie alone. Elphie in the wilderness.
Most likely it’s Nanny, whose voice caws and grates like a dawn scissorjay. Background noise.
Or—wait, there are occasionally a few others in the entourage, now and then. A local guide named Severin, probably hardly more than a teenager but good with navigation. He has a companion who takes the second paddle when Father needs to be ferried to a camp meeting at some other marsh-landing. The friend chews some kind of beetle that turns his teeth charcoal. Elphie tucks her own smile inside her lips so as not to provoke a return grin from that boy.
Then, also, there is Boozy. Not her real name—that’s just how her name in Qua’ati sounds upon Munchkinlander ears. Boozy, an itinerant cook. She travels with the party when she wants, disappears for days on end when she’s had enough. Elphie will never know if Boozy is twenty years younger than Nanny, or maybe older; the child doesn’t know about years yet. Or about growing up.
But a presence, our Boozy; yes indeed. She’s made an impression. Decades later, Ephie might have drawn her likeness, had she any talent for trailing ink off the nib of a quill. Boozy’s forehead is tall and her glossy hair is yanked back along her scalp, clamped under a band of marshberry cord. The cook’s top lip frills, one side of it going wryly up and down. As if she once made the soup way too hot and wrinkled herself permanently. Elphie’s memory of Boozy at this stage is warmer than most. Maybe Elphie’s command of Qua’ati—the tongue of the Quadlings—is weaker than her grasp of Boozy-speak. A kind of pidgin-Boozy.
People come and go in this party. In a list of dramatis personae in a theater program they’d be identified only as “the fisherman,” “the seer,” “the spice lady,” “the chieftain,” “the sewing circle.” No one would have a proper name. Walk-on parts mostly. But Boozy is a fixture, and so are Severin and his ash-smiled companion—yes, his name is Snapper, that’s it—and Nanny. And of course Elphie and her parents, Frex and Melena. No one else of significance, unless you pick up on the thin pleated cry of a baby annoyance. Elphie often forgets about that one, hanging in a tree. They call her Nessarose. A pretty name for a pretty sorry scrap of child.