The man was sleek and fit. When he removed his cap his hair fell out in greasy hanks, sunset red. He washed at the pump, stripping off his shirt, and Melena noticed it was nice to see a waist on a man again (Frex, bless him, had run to plumpness in the year-and-some since Elphaba’s birth). Were all Quadlings this delicious dusty rose color? The man’s name, Melena learned, was Turtle Heart, and he was a glassblower from Ovvels, in little-known Quadling Country.
She bundled up her breasts at last, reluctantly. Elphaba squawked to be let loose, and without so much as flinching the visitor unbuckled her and swept her in the air and caught her again. The child crowed with surprise, even delight, and Turtle Heart repeated the trick. Melena took advantage of his concentration on the brat to scoop up the uneaten minnow from the dirt and rinse it off. She plopped it among the eggs and mashed tar root, hoping that Elphaba would not suddenly learn to speak and embarrass her. It would be just like the child to do that.
But Elphaba was too charmed by this man to fuss or complain. She didn’t even whine when Turtle Heart finally came to the bench and sat to eat. She crawled between his sleek, hairless calves (for he had shucked off his leggings) and she moaned some private tune with a satisfied smirk on her face. Melena found herself jealous of a female not yet two years old. She wouldn’t have minded sitting on the ground between Turtle Heart’s legs.
“I’ve never met a Quadling before,” she said, too loudly, too brightly. The months of solitude had made her forget her manners. “My family would never have Quadlings in to dine—not that there were many, or even any for all I know, in the farmlands around my family’s estate. The stories make out that Quadlings were sneaky and incapable of telling the truth.”
“How can a Quadling to answer such a charge if a Quadling is given always to lie?” He smiled at her.
She melted like butter on warm bread. “I’ll believe anything you say.”
He told her of the life in the outreaches of Ovvels, the houses rotting gently into the swamp, the harvest of snails and murkweed, the customs of communal living and ancestor worship. “So you believe your ancestors are with you?” she prodded. “I don’t mean to be nosy but I’ve become interested in religion despite myself.”
“Does Lady to believe ancestors are with her?”
She could hardly focus on the question, so bright were his eyes, and so wonderful it was to be called Lady. Her shoulders straightened. “My immediate ancestors couldn’t be farther away,” she admitted. “I mean my parents—they’re still living, but so uninteresting to me they might as well be dead.”
“When dead they may to visit Lady often.”
“They are not welcome. Go away.” She laughed, shooing. “You mean ghosts? They’d better not. That’s what I’d call the worst of both worlds—if there is an Other Land.”
“There is an otherworld,” he said with certainty.
She felt chilled. She scooped Elphaba up and hugged her tightly. Elphaba sagged as if boneless in her arms, neither fussing nor returning the hug, just falling limp from the novelty of being touched. “Are you a seer?” said Melena.
“Turtle Heart to blow glass,” he said. He seemed to mean that as an answer.
Melena was suddenly reminded of the dreams she used to have, of exo-tic places she knew she was too dull to invent. “Married to a minister, and I don’t know that I believe in an otherworld,” she admitted. She hadn’t meant to say that she was married, although she supposed the child implicated her.
But Turtle Heart had finished talking. He put down his plate (he had left the minnow) and he took from his satchels a small pot, a pipe, and some sacks of sand and soda ash and lime and other minerals. “Might Turtle Heart to thank Lady for her welcome?” he asked; she nodded.
He built up the kitchen fire and sorted and mixed his ingredients, and arranged utensils, and cleaned the bowl of his pipe with a special rag folded in its own pouch. Elphaba sat clumplike, her green hands on her green toes, curiosity on her sharp pinched face.
Melena had never seen glass blown, just as she had never seen paper made, cloth woven, or logs hewn from tree trunks. It seemed as marvelous to her as the local stories of the traveling clock that had hexed her husband into the professional paralysis from which he still hadn’t quite escaped—though he tried.
Turtle Heart hummed a note through his nose or the pipe as he blew an irregular bulb of hot greenish ice. It steamed and hissed in the air. He knew what to do with it; he was a wizard of gla
ss; Melena had to hold Elphaba back to keep her from burning her hands as she reached for it.
In what seemed like no time at all, in what felt like magic, the glass had gone from being semiliquid and abstract to a hardening, cooling reality.
It was a smooth, impure circle, like a slightly oblong plate. All the while Turtle Heart worked with it, Melena thought of her own character, going from youthful ether to hardening shell, transparently empty. Breakable, too. But before she could lose herself in remorse, Turtle Heart took her two hands and passed them near, but not touching, the flat surface of the glass.
“Lady to talk with ancestors,” he said. But she would not struggle to connect with old boring dead people in the Other Land, not when his huge hands covered hers. She breathed through her nose to suppress the smell of breakfast in an unwashed mouth (fruit and one glass of wine, or was it two?). She thought she might well faint.
“Look in glass,” he urged her. She could only look at his neck and his raspberry-honey-colored chin.
He looked for her. Elphaba came and steadied herself with a small hand on his knee and peered in, too.
“Husband is near,” said Turtle Heart. Was this prophecy through a glass dish or was he asking her a question? But he went on: “Husband is traveling on a donkey and to bring elderly woman to visit you. Is ancestor to visit?”
“Is old nursemaid, probably,” Melena said. She was sloping downward into his crippled syntax, in unabashed sympathy. “Can you really to see that in there?”
He nodded. Elphaba nodded too, but at what?
“How much time do we have before he gets here?” she asked.
“Till this evening.”
