I finished my peroration lamely, “Chinanga, though very lovely, remains a singularly inhibited creation.”
My mother regarded me with wonder. “The way you talk!”
I chose to take this as fondness and smiled modestly. “I was a college student, majoring in literature.”
“What is literature?” she asked.
It was not the time to discuss such things, so I replied only briefly.
“Still,” she yawned when I had finished, “if I take your meaning correctly—which is, darling, somewhat difficult to do when you use all those strange words—it might explain why Constanzia’s father has summoned me up. The poor Viceroy is simply bored out of his senses.”
“I have not yet been able to translate the rites mentioned in The Diaries,” Constanzia murmured. “But I think Daddy has done so. He is not alone in being bored. Mother is bored. Colonel Esquivar is bored. Even Roland Mirabeau is bored. I have tried to deny it to myself, but I am bored also. What have we to look forward to except things we know are going to happen but which happen less frequently than others? The Stugos Queen arrives less often than do the seasonal festivals, and her arrival is therefore cause for more excitement. The river rises less often than the Queen arrives, and the rising is considered cause for celebration. A gallivant causes depredations only once in a very great while and brings, therefore, almost a quality of surprise. I’m amazed the people here at Novabella want the gallivant hunted and killed, for even the woman whose buttock it ate admits it has made an interesting change.”
[We did not foresee this. I had never thought the place would be boring. So much life and color and exotic splendor should not be boring. And yet, I suppose, given sufficient time, everything becomes boring.
“We should have known,” said Israfel. “We, of all creatures, should have known.”]
Constanzia’s voice trailed away into silence. She shook her head somewhat petulantly and excused herself, the tiny frown on her face betraying troubled thought. Perhaps she was beginning to realize that Chinanga was an imaginary land, and what the implications of that might be. I reproached myself silently for having said anything about Chinanga within her hearing. I had wanted to impress Mama with my intelligence, and all I had done was make Constanzia apprehensive. It would be better if Mama and I could leave Novabella at once, before I was the cause of any further disruption. I suggested to Mama that since I had the seven-league boots in my pocket, we might depart together, dispensing with any ceremony. She said it was worth a try, so I put them on. “Boots,” I said, holding Mama tightly about the waist and refusing to acknowledge that she shrank slightly from my embrace, “take us to Ylles.”
[Israfel and I held our breaths. She was not supposed to do this. She was not supposed to try to leave Chinanga! We muttered enchantments and held fast!]
At once the boots attempted to depart with my feet inside them. Mama, however, remained rooted in place. It was as though I had taken hold of one of the great forest trees, a mighty monarch rooted deep through the swampy soil of Chinanga into the eternal substance of whatever lay beneath. Mama could no more move than such a tree could move, but I was being whipped to and fro like a flag attached to an immovable mast, feeling my grip slowly loosened by the force of the fairy shoes.
“Boots,” I cried in a strangled voice, “desist!” I fell to the floor, for a moment unable to stand, feeling as though my legs were made of water.
“It will do no good,” Mama murmured in my ear. “Whatever spell has caught me here in Chinanga will not let me go. We must find out what the enchantment is before it can be broken.”
I did not think it was the Viceroy who had done it. I thought it was more likely Carabosse. I determined to talk to her the next time I saw her, to learn what she was doing to me and why.
In any case, it seemed we must defer our departure until later, and we could not return to Nacifia at once. We had the choice of joining the Stugos Queen as it completed its voyage upstream to the wall below Baskarone, or of remaining in Novabella. Since we were assured by everyone that nothing in Novabella was worthy of our attention—except the hunt for the predacious gallivant in which Colonel Esquivar was even now engaged, but which we, as non-hunters, could hardly share—Mama, Constanzia and I decided to go on upriver with the Captain and his remaining passengers.
We shared a large cabin. Roland and Mrs. Gallimar accompanied us upon the trip. Whenever Mama emerged from the cabin, one or both of them were in attendance. Though I was certain Senora Carabosse had been on the ship when we came to Novabella, she was not there when we left.
[I had gone home, to attempt to find out what we were doing wrong!]
Upriver from Novabella, the aspect of the country began to change. The river became swifter and less spread out; the land on either side sloped away more steeply. There were fewer drowned trees and more great rock pillars, accumulating as we traveled into ramparts, escarpments, and pinnacles of stone set well back from the flow but still visible whenever the mists lifted. During the entire voyage, Constanzia scarcely left the rail or the window. Each turn in the river made her exclaim.
“Then there is something new in Chinanga,” I teased her, wondering if I had been mistaken about the country’s reality. “You have not seen this stretch of country before.”
“Oh,
