First comes the question of who will join Boozy on the expedition. The end in sight: to ask pardon for the ways that Frex and Melena, delaying Turtle Heart in his quest, may have set him up for danger. Frex, the lead plaintiff in this campaign. But who else? Shell is too abrasive, too unpredictable to bring along, also to leave behind. “I’ll take on that charge,” says Nanny, theatrically, “as was ever my burden.” She’s relieved to be let off the hook.
Frex wants Nessa to join the delegation. At first the girl agrees. But when Nanny brings out Nessa’s shoes and kneels down to affix them upon her feet, the first shoe drops a glistening beige scorpion upon the earth. The second shoe does the same. Creeped out by this, Nessa changes her mind. The docile girl refuses to oblige. (She’s growing up, too.)
“All this is a sign,” she insists. “The Unnamed God has sent two sacred poisoned messengers to show me that my coming with you is risky, maybe fatal.”
“Fatal for you, or all of us?” Elphie muses innocently. “Makes a bit of a difference.”
“I’m not going to be paraded for my deficits,” Nessa continues. “Father, if you’re to blame for arranging Turtle Heart to be in the right place at the right time for his own death, that’s your problem. I’m not going to march around for sympathy so you can be let off the hook. I’m not putting on the bloody poison shoes. Go without me.”
A ferocity of conviction in her mood, and—such clarity. “I didn’t raise you to be so authoritative,” her father mumbles—but he backs down. “Well, you can help Nanny and watch Shell.”
“She’s not the boss of me,” says Shell, who at eight is a firecracker of increasing combustibility. Frex slaps Shell across the mouth.
“I know you’re wound up, but that’s uncalled for, really,” says Nanny softly. “Get a hold of yourself, sir.”
They set off from the nameless hamlet, along a track crowded on both sides by murkweed. Boozy, Frex, and Elphie. She knows why she’s included in the party. Melena is dead and Elphie is the minister’s oldest child. It’s her job to stand behind him in a moment like this. The unspoken obligation of the senior child.
The path leads through a sameness of new-growth forest, low and scrubby and damp. Boozy remarks that this part of Quadling Country had been drained by Emerald City engineers. By now the mineral seam of ruby has been played out, leaving wreckage of the vegetable pearl plantations. The fish and waterfowl upon which the migrant Quadlings rely had all disappeared, and they’re coming back only slowly. “Oh,” says Boozy, recounting this tale in her languid way, “but the water table dropped, of course, and what should emerge from the shrinking riverbank but the carcass of that old perqu’unti.”
At first no one knows quite what she is talking about. Elphie has forgotten, and Frex had been largely absent on that long-ago morning of confrontation with the armed Quadling men.
But Boozy rattles on. “And to think, Boozy find it, of all people! The usual feasting little grubbies never dare demolish it. So it a whole preserved corpse.”
“How far away was that?” asks Frex flatly, not really interested.
Boozy raises an eyebrow. “You still a bit of a puffball. Don’t you recognize where you are? This the old riverbank. Where you slept last night is where you were camped a dozen years ago or whenever suchlike. Now we walking along the old riverbed. Up ahead the water is refreshed again, where dikes and berms got built to contain it. But now, you hiking on the ghost of water.” And Elphie sees this must be true. The track is in a declivity, and older, wilder forest thickens on either side of them as they stumble forward.
Frex mutters, “I certainly hope there are no more crocodriloi to pester us today.”
“They died out for now,” says Boozy, but adds cheerfully, “if your no-name god powerful enough, maybe he bring them back to life by your atonement.”
They continue in a silence that grows more spiteful and more welcome the longer it lasts.
At a ferry slip of sorts, three men are squatting in a group, throwing bones and smoking. They stand as Boozy approaches. She addresses one of them as Ti’imit, and introduces him to the missionary party as her husband. Frex gives no sign of having ever met him before. Ti’imit returns the nonchalance. Caution on both sides. Boozy browbeats Ti’imit into leaving the game of chance and taking take them down the river, which here is shallow and sluggish. “Mangrove thicket,” she tells Ti’imit.
“A raft,” says Elphie, blanching—to the extent she can blanch. “Not even a boat with sides?”
“Oh, right, you shrink from the wet. But this a raft sits high on the water.”
“Not high enough,” says Elphie. She refuses to step aboard while it rides so low. Frex insists. So a stool is brought forward and Elphie can perch on it, putting her shoes on the rung. Little sheets of riverwater wash over the boards in sinuous curves. By holding her breath and doing mathematical constructions in her head, Elphie is able to endure.
It’s not a long trip by water, probably not half an hour. Soon enough they’re delivered to the other side, a break in the mangrove defenses large enough to beach the raft. “The crocodrilos, its back busied like that,” said Boozy, waving a hand at the fractally complicated fretwork of roots and stems. “Smart. It disguise itself as mangrove till supper swim along.”
Ti’imit stays with the raft as the others go inland on foot. Frex begins to fret. “You don’t mean to tell me that this clan of Turtle Heart’s was here all along, when I started my ministry to Quadling Country, and you didn’t even say so?”
Boozy shrugs. “No, of course not. Our people move, they camp, they leave camp, they camp again. The ruby thieves unsettle everyone. This clan we visiting been here only a year. I mean this time; they been here before.”
Up the slope, along a sort of chalky ledge, through a grove of limp-looking baby oaks, and then down into a small settlement of tents erected on bamboo platforms set about four feet off the ground. “The land still angry,” says Boozy. “Sometimes it just flood with old water to make its opinion known. Higher floor better.”
“Works for me,” murmurs Elphie. “Where’s a mountaintop when you need one?”
Boozy bids them to wait while she arranges an introduction. When she comes back, she looks a little drunk. That long forehead of hers is a ruddier brown. “I do not know how it work,” she says, “but the someone who remember Turtle Heart, whether yours or some other one, will see you. Briefly. Did you bring tribute?”
“Oh,” says Frex. “What will he do if we didn’t think of tribute?”
“The chieftain is a her. Chaloti’in. Come forward, both of you.” Boozy leads Frex and Elphie to a clearing behind the tents. A small group has assembled. Men summoned from their chores stand in a half-circle behind a woman about Frex’s age. She is seated in a folding chair with X-shaped legs. Chaloti’in, apparently. A woman of nervy expression. Her hair looks unnaturally black though her face shows the lines of time and tragedy. She holds in one hand a white porcelain object. It takes Elphie some time to recognize it as the skull of a small monkey. Were she back in Ovvels she’d be measuring it for wings.
The matriarch gestures the guests to approach. Boozy stands to one side, ready to translate if needed. But after all these years in Quadling Country, Frex and Elphie between them manage the dialects pretty well on their own.
“Explain,” says Chaloti’in, her voice holding everything back but suspicion.
“Elphaba,” says her father. “You sing first. That can be our tribute.”
So the green girl stands forward, what else can she do, after all this time what else is she there for but to help her father buy some pardon? Frex doesn’t identify a sacred tune, and Elphaba closes her eyes and lets her voice out, afraid to go far at first. She extemporizes. Coaxes forward a melismatic loop of wordless melody clustered around a root note. Slowly extends it up and down the scale. Her drawn-out vowels, unbuckled from consonants, seem tentative. She files a melodic petition before this wizened, middle-aged queen of the swamp on behalf of her family, and perhaps of the whole world. What can anyone ever do but ask for mercy.
Frex may be startled at his daughter’s instincts but he doesn’t post any opposition. He watches Elphie with gratitude, but she doesn’t know that, because she closes her eyes as the melody ventures abroad.
When she draws the voluntary to a whispered finish, neither high note nor low, just there, she drops her hands to her sides. She keeps her eyes down and hears her father bring forward his petition pertly, as if guessing that Chaloti’in won’t stand for embroidered rhetoric. But Chaloti’in cuts him off and speaks to Elphaba. “Singing is only for our ancestors,” says the striking woman. “Who are your forebears?”
Elphie indicates Frex. “My father is the seventh son of a seventh son.”
“I don’t mean him.” Chaloti’in curls her upper lip, the first sign they have that this interview might not land Frex his absolution. “I mean your forebears. Where does your instinct come from?”
“Well.” Elphie doesn’t glance at her father for fear of how offended he might be at attention paid to his daughter over himself. “I suppose, then, my mother? Who died seven or eight years ago.”
“A start,” says Chaloti’in. “But ancestors go back and back, and far and far. We cherish them and are wary, too. They are the beaded net that collected our souls and brought us forward into light. You have a strange provenance.”
“My father is a minister in the unionist faith—”
“I am not talking about that man.” Chaloti’in sounds fed up. “Is what you sang a funeral song for the lands of the Quadlings? For all of us? You give us a longing but we do not recognize for what.” Now she sounds bereaved, as if Elphie has arrived with bad news. “I am a seer,” Chaloti’in continues, “like many of my family. It comes in our blood and breath. The one you call Turtle Heart and that we call Chelo’ona Stah was a prophet. And a glassblower. Yes, I knew him. Tender and flighty, but he could see threats and provocations. He warned us. Long ago he went off to the imperialists to tell their military to stop sending troops to build that highway of yellow steps. To stop draining the wetlands for the crystallized blood of the land beneath us. He went away and he never came back, and the ruination of the earth continues until this day. We are crowded off of the marshes beyond Qhoyre, we are made to wander for our sustenance farther than is easy to manage.”
She’s left the subject of Elphaba’s talents and weirdness, for which the girl is grateful. Elphie takes a step back and extends a wide-open palm to her father.
“I have news of your clansman,” says Frex. When Chaloti’in tries to cut him off he keeps going. “No, I will be heard, Madame Seer. I’m partly to blame for what happened to Turtle Heart. Your prophet left Quadling Country and meandered into Munchkinland. I suppose because the houses of the Eminences there are nearer than the court of the Emerald City. Along the way, Turtle Heart stopped for sustenance at our outback outpost. Mine and my wife’s. Stone cottage. I was not home at the time. My wife took him in and they became friendly. When I returned from my labors, I also took up with him. We cherished him as a member of our family.”
Elphie steals a glance at Chaloti’in. The chief looks as if she thinks stories of affection are a waste of time, and untrustworthy. But at least she’s now listening to Brother Frexispar the Godly.
“Our attentions delayed Turtle Heart from his mission,” concludes Frex. “Had we been less smitten with him, had my wife merely given him a meal and sent him onward, had I not been entranced by his foreign mystique, he might have arrived where he was going at a more advantageous time. It was only bad luck that a human sacrifice was needed—a peasant response to the drought, and a family response to decisions my wife and I had made. But there he was. He showed up. Bad timing. And so he was killed. And I am partly to blame. I have stumbled through life ever since, making amends, trying to bring news of the Unnamed God to your nation—”
Chaloti’in has had enough of this. Without looking around. she opens and closes her free hand. An attendant comes forward and slips into her grasp a crozier of river rushes, perhaps eight feet high. Chaloti’in nods Frex forward. He obliges, descending to one knee as before royalty. With confidence in his god he keeps his chin high and his forehead reared back. Before Elphie can protest, Chaloti’in has whisked the rushes down upon her father’s face, striping blood from skin. It beads in vertices. “We don’t shrive, we don’t shrive,” she says calmly, as if concluding a business deal with a river merchant. Which perhaps she is doing. “And not for Turtle Heart. What’s done is done. You find your comfort somewhere else, not from us. Go away from here. Stay away from here.” She glares at Boozy, and the former cook seems taken aback. “You are tainted by your association with these monsters. Shame on you.” But she flicks one reed in the air toward Elphie, not as a whip but as a pointer. “Except for her. See her safely to where she is going next.”
Frex crumples on his hands and knees, blood in his eyes. His visible wounds will heal but the scar of shame beneath them will remain. Chaloti’in gets up and walks away, munching on a segment of marsh plum that someone has handed her, perhaps as a palate cleanser after such vitriol.