Boozy’s name is Bouze’ezi. The word derives from the concept known as “dust on the soup.” To a house-proud Munchkinlander, this sounds like criminal slovenliness. But to Quadlings, it suggests an attitude of sacred serenity toward one’s ancestors. Dust on the soup: even a boiling broth would settle itself in order to apprehend the seraphic dead. A state of readiness, a patience for revelation. A setting of priorities, divine over domestic.
It’s a pretty notion. Though perhaps not the right name for Boozy, dust on the soup in her case being more like a dubious recipe for leftovers.
Or maybe this is shortchanging Boozy. Bouze’ezi. Here she is, in this moment of almost comic dreadfulness. She’s carrying on while her Quadling colleagues and two of her foreign employers are corralled mere yards from her cooking tent. Frex is on walkabout, which is unlike him. Though Melena and Nanny haven’t yet noticed the baby’s hammock is empty, they’re aware that Elphie’s blanket is devoid of Elphie.
No one calls Elphie’s name again, in the hopes she will stay where she must be hiding.
The menacing party draws nearer, the spears jabbing without yet poking. Severin’s bravado is going nowhere. It falls to Boozy to sort things out.
—Why you pester these people, they mean nothing to anyone, how could they, they are just big dung beetles! (Boozy’s longest spoken sentence since anyone in this party has met her.)
—What is she saying, is she selling us out? (Nanny.)
—Go argue with the ones who actually killed your kinsman Turtle Heart, not with these stupid people!
—Did she just call us stupid? (Nanny again, who has picked up more Qua’ati than she’s realized.)
—We need to solve the equation. (The chief of the sortie.) These termites will eat our home and our lives out from under us unless we show them the cost. A life for each life. It is too bad but we have no choice. Stop your squealing, cook. We will not harm you. We need one of them. The lowest of them, in fact. It is only a gesture.
—But you already brought down that boy at the riverbank. (Boozy.)
—That was an accident.
—I won’t tell.
—It has to be one of the Munchkinlanders. We can be merciful. Who is the least valued?
It isn’t for Boozy to say.
Severin speaks.
—Boozy, where is Frex’s shield? It was right there on the slope. Has he taken it with him wherever he went? Did he know this was going to happen? Has he abandoned his family?
Boozy bites her crimped lip. She thinks it improves her looks by concealing her mild deformity when in fact she seems deranged, as if she is eating herself. But dust on the soup; something settles; in her courage and awkwardness she puts her hand on Melena’s shoulder and talks to the chief over Severin’s attempts at negotiation.
—It is all as it should be. (Boozy, primed for argument, now lets loose.) You’ve come to terrify this family and its retainers. You’ve done your job. No one needs to know that you didn’t slay any of them. You killed one of your own. Let that boy’s death count as a sacrifice. It will put these people in greater debt to you. It will prove your greater strength—that you could have killed the highborn daughter or her wag-tongue husband, and you didn’t. They stink with chagrin and shame. You bloom in mastery and honor. You have already achieved what you came for, to show them whose land this is. Rely on your own scales and weights, not theirs. You shall go away triumphant.
Boozy steps forward. She opens her hands and drops a wooden cooking spoon into the grass; she lifts her chin and sings a threnody. She has never known Turtle Heart nor anything about his original and ill-fated mission, but she sings for him, a song to put him to rest though his body is dropped in some ditch in a Colwen Grounds dung yard.
When she’s done, she brushes the aggressors aside and steps toward the threatened group. She attaches herself to the mission group as one of them. Severin grasps her hand, as if they have just finished a binding ceremony.
—You do our brother Turtle Heart proud. (The chief.) We will not slay. All right. We will fall back. But not without proof of our engagement here. We will take one of the children. There are two of them, we understand. Bring them forward and we will take one, and they can have the other, and we will be done here.
—What the hell are you all talking about? (Melena.)
—We will take one of the children.
—Is that the word for children? Did he say children?