Samani is nearly a glass village, rigged up for convenience, not elegance. A shabby workshop and a display of wares. Lei murmurs, “It’s all so beautiful,” but Elphie is clueless about all that.
Though she tries to imagine what it might be like to be seen through great flat panes of color. Would she look less green if spied through a green-tinted window?
She and Lei pause among five or six open-air buildings roofed with rattan. Around the work yard stand U-shaped cedar frames where large sheets of glass can be slotted in upright. For cleaning, for inspection, for selection. Here and there, workers with callused fingers pick through scrap piles of broken glass, clinkingly, looking for bits they might use.
Half the stock is clear, if bubbled, rippled, glaucous, and watery. Of the rest, an encyclopedia of color options. Greens and golds, on this side. The token shades of Lurlinemas festivities, according to Nanny. And over here, purplish blacks and bruising blues. Now the yellows: acid, citron, bad teeth, flax, lion-skin. Curious, not many reds. Since so much of Quadling Country stews on its bed of buried corundum, perhaps the local market for crimson glass is intentionally suppressed. Who wants to further advertise the presence of rubies?
Elphie is afraid she’ll have to do the talking. This clan of tradespeople speaks a dialect of Qua’ati Elphie has some trouble following. But Lei Leila’ani surprises Elphie by shaking off her retiring manner. She throws her shoulders back, her no-nonsense capacities called into service. She identifies the yard chief by instinct and the keen reading of cues. Over here, Glass-master. I require your attention.
He’s a shrunken, sclerotic, bleached-out man of a complexion Elphie has never seen, and which she will learn is called albino. A skin like milk thinned with water, and red-rimmed eyes of silvery ice. His reedy hair is pulled back in a knot of scarf. He walks with a permanent hunch, his hands gripped behind his back. Elphie wonders if he maintains that posture for balance, since his chin hovers below the level of his gullet. The others call him Ta’abi, though this may be an honorific, like boss.
Lei starts to explain about Unger’s order, but Ta’abi cuts her off. He paces about Elphie and studies the girl with a scientific skepticism. He mutters. Elphie guesses it might amount to something like: “You get all the original color, and I get none. Which of us is more unlucky.” Maybe that was unlikely. Elphie has no riposte at the ready. She merely brings out the oval panel of brown muslin to whose curving dimensions the new glass needs to be cut.
Seeing this, Ta’abi seems to remember the original job—he supplied the glass when Unger first opened his emporium—and the glass merchant tries to talk Lei into a line of pricier product. But Lei isn’t authorized to bargain. She holds her ground. Ta’abi complains about being overwhelmed with back orders. He says he has all he can do to fulfill existing contracts. Lei holds firm. For the House of Unger, Ta’abi should see if he can push himself.
He rubs his protuberant eyes and seems to be reluctant to clinch the deal. Tea is brought out—tea, or some sort of foaming cold drink that looks like whipped algae. Ta’abi is curious about Elphie; she senses it with reserve and caution. But her being on display seems part of the process. She doesn’t really trust Lei to ask the question about Turtle Heart, but her own grasp of the dialect is too weak to bring up the subject herself.
As if to prove how difficult it is to shape a single large oval of glass, Ta’abi takes them around the yard. With gestures and pidgin muttering he walks them through the creation of crown glass. A sweaty laborer, naked to the waist, blows a large bubble through a pipe. When it reaches the correct size, something called a pontil rod is attached on the opposite end, and the blowpipe is snapped off. The bubble is spun and reheated several times, and in the process flattens out. For a large piece, Ta’abi tells them, several glassblowers work in tandem to maneuver a larger pontil, keeping it level, thrusting the cooling material back into a massive oven. Lei make suitably awed noises in her throat. Elphie keeps her own mouth shut. Water may be Elphie’s chief enemy, but fire is no friend, either.
“Lei, ask about Turtle Heart,” mumbles Elphie.
“Let’s get the contract inked first,” replies the landlady.
Once Ta’abi and Lei sign a paper of agreement, the glass-master relaxes a little. He points out various bits of glass exotica to his clients. The colored glass tortured into the shapes of pitchers or totems or who knows what, it all seems vain and foolish. Elphie’s attention is arrested, though, by an oddment on a stone plinth parked to one side in a glut of creeper. “Ask him what that is,” she says. “It looks like a glass soap bubble.”
Ta’abi whisks a sharp look at Elphie before he answers. How accurate is Lei’s translation, Elphie wonders. “He says,” the landlady states, “this item is a gazing globe. Everything in the world is reflected in it because it has no edges and no corners. There can be no secrets kept from it. No one can sneak up to it undetected. It’s considered useful for sorcery for that reason—”
“Oh, is that all,” says Elphie, and shrugs.
“No, listen.” Lei sounds put-upon, but continues. “He insists I tell you that some can see within its depths what others can’t. For some, that is, it’s a reflecting ball. For others, a window. I’m not sure I’m getting this right.”
“Like, for seeing the future?”
“I wouldn’t be able to ask a thing like that.” But actually Lei likes the idea. “Can I see if I shall ever be married again?” she asks Ta’abi, using enough common words that Elphie can decipher her message.
He doesn’t bother to answer her but turns to Elphie and bids her come look. Reluctantly she leans forward. He mumbles syllables that Lei portentously translates: Can you see into it, and what do you see?
It’s like looking into one of Boozy’s rank broths, long ago, concoctions that manage to be both transparent and opaque. Water and oil, probably, not emulsified. Boozy had been an indifferent chef. Elphie hasn’t thought about her in years.
She doesn’t want to touch the glass globe, but neither does she want to turn away. She sees her own face contorted by the curve. She looks monstrous—but then, so do the landlady and the glassblower behind her, parentheses wavering around her prominent nose. She’s never cared to study her own face in any reflection but she can’t avoid it now. It looms, stupid and unrestrainedly verdant.
If she could, she’d pick up the glass ball and shatter it, but she has no funds of her own to pay for such damage. So she closes her eyes, shakes her head as if to clear sour reality from her thoughts. When she opens her eyes again, the glass has taken on a different aspect. A deeper viscosity, an atmosphere more of cloud than of mirror.
Somewhere below the reflective surface, an impression is sorting itself out. “Well, this has been a treat. Still, I think—” begins Lei, but Elphie holds up her hand and slices it sideways, to silence her. The apparition is trying to organize itself. A kind of infused, bleached color is registering shapes, rounding them.
Sometimes you look in a campfire and you can almost see a face, a dancing flame with a grin or a leer. It ducks and hides and pops up again. The same can happen in the formation of clouds. Once Elphie saw two white horses galloping in front of a grey mountain range, up there in the sky. That was an accident of wit, light as played by clouds, but this globe is a trick of a different order.
There they are, unmistakable, a hunched-over monkey-type figure leading some woman by the hand. The monkey—the word polter-Monkey comes floating up in Elphie’s mind—dissolves in curvetted fragments as her mother’s face seems to bob forward, expanding into the dimensions of the glass universe. Unrecoverable earlier today, Melena’s face seems complacent, somehow more than a drawing or a marble bust. It has the shimmery feel of activity about it.
Say something, thinks Elphie. Call for me. Look for me. I can tell you we’re all right.
Then the word they had so rarely used at home: Mama. I’m here.
The figment of Melena keeps its own counsel. Is it really her, is it a sleight of malevolence somehow? Is it only a memory floating up, arriving tardily because summoned, using this shaped glass as a conduit? The vision nears and enlarges in slow time, with an arrested quality. Movement decelerated beyond the rules of reality. Elphie has never had the chance to study her mother’s face this closely, her mother may never have given her such access. Melena’s face is neither beautiful nor harsh, her expression neither tortured nor beatific. It’s merely human. Human, abstracted, aloof, unreachable. The forehead turns, the chin pivots, Melena’s nose anchors forward, and her eyes focus, looking at something at last. But not at Elphie.
“What did you see?” Lei asks, at the glassblower’s insistence.
“Not much.” Elphie turns to the man. “Does this thing tell the future? What does it cost? I want it.”
Lei does the translation, which takes quite a few exchanges, and seems to spin off into arguments and concessions. Finally she replies, on behalf of Ta’abi, “Maybe he can tell the future. Because he says you will have one of these one day—he can see it in your greedy eyes. But not this one. Go away, he says, and don’t come back. And so we shall. And we can, because I’ve asked him for the details about the family of that old Turtle Heart. The young glassblower served an apprenticeship right here, long ago. Ta’abi says he’s going to write down whatever he remembers on the back of the order form so we can bring it back to your father. Stop looking so ill, Elphie. You’re nearly pink. What in a normal person would look like perfect health in you looks bilious. Are you quite all right?”
The albino glassblower and the green girl glance at each other. He is making small motions with his white wormy fingers, hexes to cast away from himself any danger this green girl has introduced into his yard. Yet he smiles thinly at her, no hard feelings. She nearly smiles back, but can’t; she’s not sure about hard feelings yet.
As Lei and Elphie turn away from Samani and climb the sandy escarpment, Elphie pivots to look once again. This Ta’abi has directed himself back to his work, and has shucked off his overshirt so he can help rotate one of the larger pieces. Upon the paper-white skin of his back, diagonally across his spine, she sees that he has a blood-browned scar. An industrial accident; a whip wound, maybe; a mark of disaster but also of survival. There he is, made more himself by life. She takes more comfort from this clinical observation than she does from any memory provoked by the crystal gazing ball.
Or so she tells herself.
Yet how vibrant, that simulacrum of her mother, her scarce-remembered mother. It had presence. Even if only a trick of glass. Summoned not by Elphie but by the muttered encouragements of a peasant artisan. Now, as Lei and Elphie crest the hill with the cedar grove, and look down upon Ovvels, she feels that the little city below is more inert than the shady tricks of a gazing globe were. And the hilltop itself—she can sense, like a drop in temperature, the absence of Dwarf Bears. The appearance, however artificial, of her disappeared mother highlights this further disappearance.
There’s no reason to wait. “Someone said you’ve been talking around the town about the Dwarf Bears at the lagoon, who seem to have vanished,” says Elphie. “If it’s even true that you did, I don’t know why you would do that.”
Lei is unruffled. Perhaps she doesn’t pick up the note of accusation in Elphie’s question. “Your brother said they pushed Nessarose into the water. I had to let it be known so other parents could protect their own precious children.”
“What’s with this ‘other parents’? We’re not your precious children. You had no right. And you believe Shell? He’s a punky little troublemaker. Why would you even bother to get involved?”
“Don’t play the fool. You know it can’t hurt for me to prove to your father that I, who raised three boys, can take care of girls, even two humbled and hobbled creatures. It is my duty to him.”
“As his landlady? You’d set town vigilantes against harmless Ski’ioti to prove a point to your tenant?”
Lei looks levelly at Elphie though the sides of her eyes. “You’re not as smart as you think. You don’t know anything about Animals. Neither what they are capable of or what they aren’t capable of. And you can’t pin what may have happened to those Dwarf Bears on me. I merely sounded a murmur of a concern. For the good of the vicinity.”
“For someone’s good,” says Elphie, hopelessly, darkly. Then: “So what has happened to them? Were they chased off by a mob?”
“I couldn’t possibly say. I, myself, don’t run with a mob.”