The three whose names Elphie will be able to recall are vividly present. Boozy the itinerant cook; Severin and Snapper, the navigators. The other attendants may have skived off into the overgrowth. If the navigators are on-site, then her father must be, too. He doesn’t take the canoe out on his own. So where is he?
Snapper is a mere adjacency to Severin; he won’t yield up his secrets, if he has any. He sports a shadow of hair on his upper lip suggesting a distant drop of northern or western blood. If Severin moves this way, Snapper moves that. Related, or friends?—or they may merely be co-workers for the duration, hired from the day-laborer yard in Qhoyre.
Snapper giggles a bit. He sings while paddling, scaring off the serpents and charming the passengers. Songs through his midnight teeth. It is nearly all Elphie will recall of Snapper.
Severin. The older, the alpha of the two. Here he is. Moving with more grace on trees and on water than he does on the ground. Not all that surprising; many clan communities live in settlements slung in the candelabra branches of oakanthus or teak baobabs. Most able-limbed adult Quadlings swing, climb, pace, and leap. The stealth of the jaguar, the poise of the cobra.
Having heard the pock-pockity hint of unwelcome guests approaching, Severin had got one arm looped about a branch, one bare foot flexed against the trunk. His ear is trained for the percussion of drumheads, for human voices imitating river birds. He knows stealth communication when he hears it. He knows a little about what this party of pale missionaries is about. He is a loyal employee and he’s no turncoat, but neither is he a convert to their cause. (Spreading the gospel of unionism among the already sufficiently spiritual.) Severin holds his job with honor, and not just for the pay. He’s responsible for the women and children in this vulnerable party, not to mention the guilt-harried minister himself, Brother Frex. However much penitential suffering these foreigners need to endure in order to atone, Severin won’t allow it to be served up to them on the spear or with the rifle.
Oh, yes, the Quadlings have rifles, sometimes. They had firsthand experience of firing arms from the spelunkers and mineralogists who descended upon them five years ago. Nominally to find a way to lay down a brick road to link the provincial swamps with Qhoyre, the putative capital. But honestly? To suss out where scooping out the underswamp mud would reveal the more lucrative seams of ruby. (The exportation of which, to be sure, would be rendered that much easier if a road existed.) The Quadlings are just as noble as any other race, and just as pliable with cash. Some foreign explorers went back to the Emerald City with tentative maps and treaties for development rights. The venturers left behind rifles, the odd fatal cough, and a new appetite for just a little—a little more—that will never, ever, ever be slaked. A new economy of—agglomeration.
The senior porter shifts his feet, cranes his neck in another direction. Here the sounds of spattered raindrops speak their coordinates more accurately. Closer than Severin has guessed. And he knows that the approaching group has not come with picnic baskets. It’s time to sound the alarm more broadly.
He swings to another limb and coo-coos in semaphore to Boozy. Ah, but now she’s picked up on the warning herself, she’s no fool. She’s forsaken her breakfast stew and is rolling up her family totems in a shawl, in case she needs to abandon her employers. The semaphored messages of the support staff go something like this—
—brute gang on its way, round the river bend, under the string-magnolia canopy. (That is Severin.)
—and what they want with these stupid people (Boozy.)
—where the mouthy man, where is the wife? (Severin.)
—who cares, who cares, what they doing here, why they coming here?
—find the holy man, Boozy! (a pause.) They quiet now. Snapper, what’s this?
Snapper doesn’t answer, he’s begun listening, pressing his extended palm flat against the tree trunk. Then he speaks in that sing-tune way.
—Severin! They have more coming along behind, and are waiting them to catch up, to gather before attack.
—how many there, how many more coming?
—I don’t do numbers. Just: more. There’s time.
—maybe they mean us to hear and to get out first?
—maybe, but why so many? Two elders with axes and an argument could scare these holy busybodies away.
Boozy has salvaged the most important parts of her supplies. The rest she can come back for if she gets the chance. She scans the encampment for her employers as she draws knots in her bundles.
—but why they take up rage against these fool Munchkinland people? (Boozy)
Severin has left the tree and begun to holler for Melena. She bolts from her tent at his tone of voice, grasping the gravity of the moment if not the reason for alarm. Lacing herself up, she hisses for Nanny. Running in circles, these people. Snapper scurries into the near undergrowth to see if he can find out where Frexspar has gone—relief of his bowels, probably. Boozy tries one more time.
—what they do so wrong, Severin?
—wife is from family of status. It is her house that murder the young prophet Turtle Heart. Last year. Someone has found it out at last, and this war party comes to make vengeance.
—Turtle Heart, who he, small life, who cares so much, why his death provoke more death? There are children here, Severin. Where are the failed children?
Nanny has fallen in a faint on the grass. Melena is screaming because Elphie has wandered off. The child is in no danger of drowning, as she won’t go near the shore of the river, but where is she? And Snapper has underestimated how long they have before encounter. And the mission group is too far from the berthed canoes to make an escape now.
The attack launches with a single falsetto aria followed by a chorale of high shrieks, while the air is perforated with whistling arrows. The sun starts to rise over the bank of mist. The incoming canoes draw themselves visible, emerging against the testimonial glass of the water.