Melena on some morning or other, probably not the one in question. All days begin the same, at the bank of the river, wherever their camp might be pitched alongside it. At this point in the undertaking the missionaries don’t bother going inland. The waterway provides an abundance of fish and also of marsh people drifting by, so it’s a practical place for her husband to net converts to the faith.
Also, the river affords an escape route in case of a native resistance. Not that it has been needed. Melena and Frex have found that the Quadlings, a peaceable lot, raise their weapons only against predators like jaguars, marsh jackals, that sort. If Quadling locals don’t like you, they mostly try to shout you off their settlement. The worst punishment is a brief if humiliating incarceration in bamboo cages. Nonetheless, ever prudent, the Munchkinlander mission keeps canoes at the ready, should Quadling hospitality evaporate.
Canoes for emergency evacuation, and a few devices of defense, including the shield of faith—an actual shield, made of pale worked bronze. A gift of several bishops relieved not to have felt a personal calling to establish themselves in such a hardship post. The shield is a spiritual artifact whose ornamental breast dazzles. It’s said to be functional: it could provide cover for a mother and two small children, if they crouched close.
This length of black silk water might be the main river, called Waterslip. But perhaps not. Hereabouts, Quadling Country is threaded with several dozen channels, slight or substantial, all running into and out of Waterslip, braiding and dividing too frequently to be charted. Even the locals don’t bother naming the courses, relying on instinct for orientation.
Melena isn’t certain what her husband thinks about her return from Colwen Grounds last year, hauling the sad new infant and dragging along Nanny to care for it. Colwen Grounds, Melena’s childhood home, theater of birth and death the same day. Good riddance to sweet rubbish. Melena is silent about it while her husband broods. But Melena has never been strong at imagining the viewpoints of other people. She can’t bear to anticipate any viewpoint her healthy first child might take eventually, while her second child won’t live long enough for the question to arise. So Melena, ill-trained at introspection, finds confounding the chain of events that has led her to this exile, this Frog Holiday, this evacuation from everything she’s known before.
She has left home twice. The first, eloping with Frex to the harsh outback of Wend Hardings, Munchkinland, where Elphie was born. Sheep-shit country. Then, having returned to her family’s demesne for the birth of her second daughter, she managed to slip away again. It would be the final retreat, though that hasn’t been proven yet—Melena is still alive.
They don’t give her much credit, her relatives. In a way Melena can’t blame them. So she has a strolling eye—where’s the crime in that? Everyone’s got a pretty little flaw hidden behind the party smile and the better shoes. Hers is only loneliness, she decides, taking longer than necessary to wash herself in attractive poses of public dishabille. A need to be seen. By men. So what?
Yes, she has a husband. How her family disapproved of such a fervent man with so few prospects! An Eminence of Munchkinland, her grandfather, always intended a better match for Melena than some itinerant preacher.
Frexspar the Godly: A tall man, especially compared to old-stock Munchkinland farmers, those barrelly folk whose chins rarely grow four feet above the soil. In contrast, Frex is a ladder, an apple rake. Melena had clung to him more out of the thrill of scandalizing her parents and grandfather than out of love. She realized this sometime during their first mission as a married couple, when Frex was assigned to Wend Hardings in the rubbly outback of Munchkinland.
Anyway, she approves of her own loyalty. Which is loyalty as she defines it, a bespoke virtue cut to her needs. She isn’t beyond taking a man now and then when he piques her curiosity. She is always any community’s most attractive attractive nuisance.
But Wend Hardings toughened her up, even before the green creature came along. And since then, Melena has stuck the course, oh, they can say that much for strut-about Melena Thropp. Other women might have fled back to their ancestral homes. Or disappeared in the night, leaving behind the tainted baby to be looked after by someone else. By the father, if he is up to it. (Frex is decidedly not.) No, Melena had bit her lower lip and done calculations of a moral sort, and decided that while she couldn’t bring herself to cozen the poisoned infant with cuddles and coos, she could, in fact, stick to her post. The wife of a missionary.
The first few years with Baby Elphaba were a trial. The bleating of sheep the primary lullaby. Nanny was hard persuaded to keep around; she’d visit but then she’d flee. Having been threatened that any stray comment she might let drop back at Colwen Grounds about Elphie’s condition would be cause for abrupt dismissal without references, she complied. Nanny had kept her word, even if she’d been inconstant in her tenure that first couple of years. Elphie was more or less a secret back home, at least as to the particulars of her complexion.
There will be other things Melena remembers about this day on the banks of an unnamed stretch of a sly, grease-green river in some outback beyond Qhoyre, the provincial capital. But she’s struck a pose, so let’s relish her a silent moment longer. The lift of her left arm, a sponge tracing water from her elbow to the side of her exposed breast. The poise of that woman, the satin butter of her skin. A perfect beauty, a perfect target.
Maybe she’s totally vain and that’s the sum of it. Or maybe this is only how she’s seen and how she seems. Whose memories are these anyway? Perhaps just the river’s.