Ovvels is rich in open spaces. But Lei tells her tenants that the town council forbids the co-opting of any commons for personal financial gain other than the licensed hawking of edible produce or homemade handiwork. And the few formal municipal venues are restricted to military training—parade marches and the like.
Frex argues with Lei that religious excitation isn’t essentially a commercial enterprise, but the goodwidow raises her palm. It’s scored with designs in henna, Elphie sees, and the pattern on Lei’s palm is, of all things, a smaller palm. Effectively she is holding up a double wall of resistance to argument. “Not for me to grant an exception,” says the landlady. “For that you’ll have to go talk to the chief of the council.”
Which person, it turns out, is the father or uncle of the Pari’isi kid who was snorting at Elphie’s particular glamour. No thanks, is Elphie’s take on the matter. Let’s go back to the marshways and eat bugs again.
But the holiday is approaching, that festival called Se’enth. The local alternative to Lurlinemas. Ovvels boys from the fields of vegetable pearls show up in noisy clots, home for the festival. The city—it calls itself a city, so why not—is becoming more urgent. A bit more rice tipsicle being consumed, and during the daytime no less. It makes a nice change, an uptick in jollity.
Frex relies on Lei to bring home the intelligence. Oh, she’s happy to oblige, even if she hasn’t quite cottoned on to Frex’s strategies. She mentions that because one of the lodges used for the education of the girls of Ovvels is vacant over the holiday, the locals sometimes steal into its playing field to mount an impromptu morning festival event. A Se’enth picnic of sorts, on the day before observance. Frex comes up with a scheme. On the day of the big gambol, he tells Elphie she isn’t to go to the clothier’s for work.
“It’s the last day of trade for the season. He needs me,” she protests, but Frex will brook no resistance.
“He’s using you. He got along without you before you showed up, and he’s taking advantage. I just hope not too much advantage. No, you’re coming with me. I need your help today.”
“To do what?”
“All in good time. First you’d better find something less gruesome to wear.”
“Where shall I find it?”
“Look in that trunk of your mother’s old things.”
“We’ve given quite a few of them away to Unger already.”
“If there’s something left, trot it out and try it on. Nothing too bosomy, mind—you haven’t got the goods for that kind of thing.”
“I’m thirteen.” Elphie’s tone neither contradicts nor supports her father’s observation.
She and Nanny root around among the few remaining items that haven’t yet been surrendered to Unger. There’s a dull red skirt with a feathery motif stitched upon it in black cord. If you roll it under at the waistband, it doesn’t drag on the ground too much. Though it gives Elphie an ungainly rope of fabric about her middle. She hides it with a fringed shawl of pink roses painted upon a brick-pink surround. “I look like a carnival attraction,” she complains to Nanny, who is busy sorting her out.
“You take after your mother,” says Nanny grimly, through a clenched mouth of pins.
“I want to go, too, wherever you’re going,” says Nessa. “Is there anything in that chest for me?”
“Nothing would suit you, you’re already too beautiful to gussy up,” says Nanny. “Anyway, I’ve been informed that we’re staying behind, Shell and you and me. They’ll tell us about it when they get home.”
“Quick,” says Frex, “let’s get going before Lei returns with the marketing and insists on being our chaperone.”
“Can’t we go by Unger’s so I can at least tell him I’m called away today? He’ll be cross otherwise. Last-minute custom-work!”
“I’ve asked Nanny to make your apologies. Will you keep up?”
They set out, taking a series of suspended walkways strung from tree to tree. Heads poke out to follow them as they pass. Elphie is a sight, she supposes, even discounting the ignominy of her skin color. “I feel like a walking tree trunk,” she complains. “This column of broadcloth. It’s so stiff and unnatural. How did our mother stand it?”
“She often went without,” says Frex shortly, then clarifies. “I mean to say that there was little call for formal wear during our time as missionaries.”
At the edge of the student lodge, a few musicians are amusing themselves with bizarre stringed instruments shaped like crossbows. This is augmented by a percussion of tambours, bells, and a bleating of reeds. The good people of Ovvels are arriving with flagons and posies, and baskets of food for a midday meal. There’s an air of harsh merriment. Small circles of dancers began to revolve. Nothing orchestrated, everything impromptu.
Frex scopes out the venue and tells Elphie they will mount the steps on the side veranda of the lodge. Around the corner. This vantage point doesn’t face the main gathering directly, but perches at an angle to it. Beyond the floorboards stretches a grassy verge broad enough for a crowd to gather. Frex then says to Elphie, “You’re going to sing when I tell you to.”
“You’re mad.” She smiles at him out of panic. “I can’t possibly.”
“You’ll do as you’re told. We’ve reached the end of our resources. We’ll have to throw ourselves on the mercy of the public for their charity if we don’t begin to make good. The Unnamed God expects no less than our utmost. Start with the hymn we used to sing in the canoes. ‘Tender Us Tenderness.’ I know you know it.”
“But that’s in Ozish; these people speak Qua’ati.”
“Trust me and follow my lead, or you’ll be sorry, my girl.”
When, around the corner, the meadow music breaks off for a moment, and a bit of noisy chatter erupts in the interval, Frex nods at her. Elphie does as she is told. “Louder,” he says. “You’re summoning people.” She flings out an arm at the empty sports meadow before the veranda, daring him to notice nobody there. “Louder.”
Then as the anthem climbs the bridge to the second chorus, which unfolds on a higher platform of melody, her voice flutes through somehow. It has found its altitude; it unspools from her throat more naturally. Her mother’s stiff dress holds her in place and stops her from fleeing even while a few residents of Ovvels round the corner of the lodge to see what human creature is making this sort of sweet thunder out of her own mouth.
When she has finished, Frex delivers an invocation to the deity, failing to mention which specific deity he has in mind. He quickly rolls his hand for Elphie to plunge into something else. The first thing that comes to mind, to throat, is a sort of nonsense catalog of animals that Nanny croaked in the nursery tent for years, to Elphie and to Nessa and again much later to Shell.
It doesn’t matter that the lyric is anything but devotional. The syllables make pleasant nonsense in the air. The melody is jauntily off-the-beat. More people approach. And then Frex has them where he wants them. He begins to stake a claim in Ovvels at last, with Elphie as a spiritual lure, a reward. That it has happened over the festival of Se’enth is deemed not just fitting but almost prophetic.