But it proves more difficult than they’ve guessed, to follow the clues that Ta’abi, the master glassblower, had written out for them on the back of Unger’s bill. Imagine a spider trying to describe which radial thread it just took to acquire the breakfast bug near the web’s vortex. Same problem. The family is looking for a stretch of river with an unusually dense mangrove overhang. But the nameless braided rivers are mostly free of permanent settlements, and nearly identical. Only the grace of fate will lead them to Turtle Heart’s kin. Or it won’t.
Still, they keep on, in bark canoes and on foot, in monsoon rains and in rarer dry dusty days. And they ask everyone they meet for advice, and sometimes follow it.
It’s tricky. For one thing, the name Turtle Heart being a translation of Chelo’ona, too many variants proliferate. In the fungal-like relationships of small hamlets and knock-’em-up seasonal posts, people with names something like Stah Chelo’ona, or Heart of Turtle, or Chelo’ona Goah, Turtle Pulse, are always cropping up. The Thropps have only a clue; they don’t have a map.
As the weeks turn to months and the months drone on, and Frex goes back to that more hardscrabble life as a traveling preacher, they discover that the more efficient question to ask isn’t about Turtle Heart, or Stah Chelo’ona, but this: Does anyone even remember a disappeared young man, a handsome young man who had been both glassblower and prophet? One who had sounded an alarm about the miners of rubies swarming down from the Emerald City? Who had gone away, to protest and to petition for cease-and-desist?
Since the Quadlings are in general such a complacent type, compared anyway to striving Munchkinlanders, Turtle Heart’s personality type stands out more in local memory than his name does. Some of the older members of the communities nod sagely. But he always seems to be from a different clan, one that has upped and moved, north is it, or maybe south. As Frex has no other ambition but to preach until he dies, and his family has no recourse but to stick with him, their meanderings are discouragingly random. Maybe they will eventually find someone who had known Turtle Heart, and then Frex will ask forgiveness for the prophet’s murder in the forecourt of Colwen Ground all those years ago. Or maybe they won’t. Meanwhile they’re doing the work of the Unnamed God. Perhaps the wild goose chase nature of this enterprise is a divine plan. And they should just shut up and stop complaining about it.
It might go on like this for the rest of Elphie’s life except that one day, a sweltery day in which gnits and gnasties swarm, the mission party is hiking into a new enclave when a familiar voice rings out. Their names are being languorously announced. “Cattery Spunge and Frexispar the Godly. And that scrap of fern now grown to a beanpole, Elphie-Fabala-Fae herself!” From the shadows of a beaded curtain behind which she’s been squatting, protected from the biting insects, their erstwhile, sly cook pokes her head. Boozy herself.
She must have been very young back in those days, thinks Elphie, because she hardly seems middle-aged now. A few lines on her forehead and around her memorable mouth. Her hips are broader, but her posture is much the same, and the vigor—or lack of it—brings back memories that Elphie can’t place. But those sensations of unseen memory, oh, they’re strong indeed; she feels lifted by something invisible.
This, maybe, is the antidote to her epiphany of loneliness in the cedar grove. It’s a first for her: reunion.
“Nessie-nessie, walking like a holy maiden. Miracles happen. And this the little prince, coming up fine,” Boozy says of Shell, looking him up and down. “I thought they’d drown you for the trouble you gave to your mother.”
“Apparently not,” says Shell, chin up. He doesn’t know who Boozy is but he can recognize the dangerous tone of intimacy.
“As I live and breathe,” says Frex, limited joy at this happenstance.
“You’ll be a big help.” Nanny mops her brow and shoos away the insects. “For one thing, you can tell us where in the mucklands we actually are.”
“Oh, this place has no name, too ugly,” says Boozy. “But this someplace between Ovvels and Qhoyre, more or less. Maybe closer to Qhoyre. Bengda to the that-way, and on the other arm, you get to the wide salt fields and the white wild wheat. You not still looking for the folks of that nobody your in-laws done in?”
“Turtle Heart’s kin. Yes,” says Frex. “Or Stah Chelo’ona, as we’ve heard it said. Or some such wrinkle.”
“Well, you come to the right place,” says Boozy. “They here the last little somewhile. At least I think it’s them.”
“You knew? And you could have told us?”
“I don’t know where you go after I leave you.” Boozy isn’t as easily scared as she’d been when she was a younger cook. “Besides, I forgot all about you.”
The family sets up the single tent. They’ve become used to rather too close quarters, so they’re happy that Nanny agrees to doss down in Boozy’s little cabin. The children want to join her, just for the change, but Boozy will have none of it. “You all got diseases I don’t need,” she declares. While she won’t elaborate, Elphie assumes Boozy means the birthmarks, apparent in the case of the sisters, and probably hidden somewhere in Shell’s cranky troublemaker soul, too.
They discuss strategies over a simple supper Boozy serves up—a kind of spicy mud stew, by the look of it. The clan they are hunting for—if it’s the right people—camps a morning’s journey north-ish of here, in the direction of the salt fields but not as far. If they haven’t upped and moved on, she warns them. Nobody sticks around anyplace very long unless they live in a place like Ovvels or Qhoyre, where buildings are more solid than tents and too much trouble to move. Still, Boozy will lead the missionary family out that way and wait for them and lead them back again. But they can only stay one more night at the edge of her home because she doesn’t want to get a reputation for harboring witches.
“Again? What is this witch thing?” says Frex. “An ugly new anxiety. We are pious folk who bow down before the Unnamed God.”
“You can’t see your god, can’t even give him a name,” says Boozy. “So how do you know which way to bow? I never understand that part.”
“Some of us are partial to Lurline, the fairy queen,” insists Nanny.
“Codswallop and pigspittle,” says Frex.
Still, Elphie thinks the domestic rancor has a convivial aspect to it. Elphie misses Unger, and she almost admits to missing Pari’isi To’or, so to bump into Boozy in the middle of nowhere is sweet accident. And that Boozy is still disagreeable! What weird consolation. Frex even allows Shell to enjoy a small glass of rivergrape wine, thinking it’s Shell’s first taste of such.
They raise a toast to times past and times yet to come. Nanny warbles a soft little hymn to Lurline, and for once Frex doesn’t shush her. They all float off on rafts of sleep in a state that comes as close to something called happiness as Elphie has ever really dared to think possible.
Overnight, of course, the world inches back to its ordinary vexatiousness. Tranquility is but a fleeting guest, and under scrutiny it dissolves, shy as a ghost.