The Oracle of Maracoor
Dedication
For Patricia McMahon and Joseph McCarthy
Epigraphs
Castle remembered how . . . he had asked his father whether there were really fairies. . . . His father had been a sentimental man; he wished to reassure his small son at any cost that living was worthwhile. It would have been unfair to accuse him of dishonesty: a fairy, he might well have argued, was a symbol which represented something which was at least approximately true. There were still fathers around even today who told their children that God existed.
—Graham Greene, The Human Factor
“Have you ever known a magician, Uncle Stephen?”
“I have known people—unpleasant people—who tried experiments in magic.”
. . . “Did you help them—in the experiments?”
“Yes.”
“And were they unpleasant too?”
“Not at the beginning—only foolish; but in the end—yes.”
—Forrest Reid, Uncle Stephen
Rain, Rain, go away.
Come again another day.
—trad.
Contents
Cover
Endpaper
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraphs
Part One A Story Is a Room 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Farmstead 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Haunts of the Thalassic Wood 1
2
3
4
5
The Company of the Scarab 1
2
3
Part Two A Story Is a Seed 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
The Caryatids 1
2
3
The Winds of Chance 1
2
3
4
5
6
Ascent 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
About the Author
Also by Gregory Maguire
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part One
A Story Is a Room
1
Sidestep the hangman’s noose, don’t show up for your own execution, and where has it got you?
A hurtling between warehouses. Alleys overhung with laundry heavied by sudden rain. Stink of tannery—ammonia and piss. Goat blood leaching from some dodgy abattoir.
Yet turn a corner: the wind off the harbor, the freshness of sea-salted air. Now the sun of late afternoon, look at it. Casual as a holiday. Stems of ivory glass tilting among thunderheads.
Troubled weather benefits the jailbreak. Ambition in every thudded footprint. A cramp in the calf, a barked shin. Go go go.
The clockwork of organic life all but seizes up with greed. Biology may be little more than a fuel grab, but hold your heart, what biology dares to make of such a hoist.
Sidle. Dart. Stop drop-dead still—a marble bust in a niche doesn’t do it better. Breathe out. Breathe in. Naked, unapologetic rapture at the whole setup.
Though a busybody god murmurs, Well done; come home, the world sometimes replies, not so fast.
2
The skies over Maracoor Crown echoing with populations of the alarmed. Pigeons, rattled mourning doves, gusts of grasshoppers. Armies on the approach unsettle an entire city.
Some denizens of Maracoor Crown had caught sight of winged monkeys upon the roofs of municipal offices. A few crones swore they could pick up on the nervous energy of a flying horse nearby. Couldn’t you just about smell it?
Hush, you, elder-crank, you’re putting sweet vapors in our children’s minds, who must keep up, must build the barricade, have to collect stones for the catapult. The Skedian army is nearly upon us. If you can’t help, shut up and sit down. No, over there. Out of the way.
3
The two prison escapees needed crowds. Comes a mêlée, comes opportunity.
Cossy, a scrappy kid about ten years old. Dashing ahead. Followed by a figure in her late teens, an adult by comparison to Cossy but truly only a girl herself—if well traveled for her years.
Lucky, that the impending assault on the capital distracted its citizens from flinching at the sight of a girl with green skin in their midst. She could slip by in the frenzy. A girl, a young woman, a figure with childhood still itchy in her limbs but a rich, adult sorrow on her brow.
Her name was Rain. If no one in Maracoor knew her, so what; she hardly knew herself. Having survived a plunge into the sea from a great height, she’d awakened to a life only partly remembered—a faded etching glimpsed through a cloudy broth. Moods and inclinations. Memory loss—amnesia, they called it. The old person’s ailment in a girl with fresh breath still. Here and there she clutched a scrap of her life with a name attached, but nothing distinct.
She had words for solid things—she knew a spoon from a stone, a duck from a donkey. She could speak and even argue. If her friend Iskinaary told her something about the past, she could remember it the next day. And the next. But she couldn’t yet go back into her closed mind of her own accord. Her past seemed a padlocked box hidden in a black velvet sack—she could imagine putting her hands inside the sack and trying to work open the lock by mere feel—but she had no skill at this yet. At least she could remember what a velvet sack was. But so much of her brief life remained sealed in darkness. She was merely a creature running for her life.
With Rain, and the young Cossy, flapped the brown-grey Goose called Iskinaary. Also four flying monkeys who had flown in across the eastern ocean from some unknown why-hello-there place called Oz.
They were fleeing, these two female humans. Fleeing jail (the child) and probably worse than that (the older girl). Final details of their crimes and sentences hadn’t yet been established by the court. In its brazen manner, however, fate had afforded the convicts an escape route by way of a wind-snapped tree trunk. Guards otherwise occupied. Neither Rain nor Cossy had asked permission to skive off. Something in the world wanted them to survive a little while longer.
Watch out. Here comes the rain again. A burst at first, enough to darken stone walls. A perfume of damp—that arresting trick, how dirt can seem full of potential when newly wet. The cobbles slickened. The Goose and the flying monkeys lifted aloft a few feet at a time, but thumped to earth, to keep close to the girls.
“Should we hide someplace till the hunt for us dies down?” asked Cossy.
“Don’t be self-important. No one’s looking for you yet,” huffed the Goose. “This city’s got other menace on its mind. According to our simian friends, who’ve been circling the skies searching for Rain, an army’s advancing from the south. No, if we’re going to skedaddle before the city buttons up entirely, we have to hurry. We’ll head west, or north.”
“Won’t that take us through the city centre?” asked Rain.
“No time to be timid. We’ll snatch a shawl from somewhere and you can pull it over your face. Find something, Tiotro, if you can?”
Tiotro seemed the most reliable of the flying monkeys. Diving under a spice merchant’s awning, he returned trailing a length of burlap. Rain twisted it around her head—it smelled of cumin and kumquat—riding it low upon her forehead and draping it above her nostrils. It would have to do.
So she could remember disguise. Another tiny thrill, to realize this. But every new clarity seemed packed with potenti
al for harm. What is disguise when it is used against you—when your mind is disguising you from yourself?
They were moving all the while, in patches of downpour followed by spells of wet rainless wind.
“No point in trying to go by sea?” asked Rain.
“No pleasure excursions heading out today. Check for yourself—we’re right here.”
Sure enough, clearing the warrens of light industry, they’d arrived at the harborside. To their left, the palisades of legislative and orthodox Maracoor Crown. Marble columns streaked with cloudburst, pox on copper domes. To their right, the black waters of Maracoor Harbor, where the few vessels that had weathered the naval invasion some weeks earlier were trying, and failing, to string themselves into a cordon.
The waterfront desolate but for seagulls and blown trash. Then Rain said, “Cossy . . . Cossy.”
Cossy looked where Rain was pointing.
Huddled on the quay, in a bit of a dilemma—the four stranded brides of Maracoor Spot. Cossy’s only people. Until her arrest for murder the girl had been one of that rare sect: the brides of Maracoor. But no ship strained at tie-up, ready to carry the brides back to their island cloister. In their clutched veils and wind-snapped skirts they looked a study of bleak expectation. They didn’t see their former companion. Their eyes trained seaward.
“Cossy,” hissed Rain again, and grabbed her by the shoulder. “Cossy. There they are. This is your chance to rejoin your life with theirs, if you want. You may never get this moment again. They came here to be your family, after all.”
Cossy paused. She glanced at them. “I hate all of them. Are you trying to dump me already?”
Rain grabbed the child’s hand and squeezed it. “Don’t be a fool. I just don’t want you to tell yourself later that you were kidnapped. Leave or stay, it’s your decision. I won’t stop you. But these brides can take proper care of you. They know you.”
“Am I better off with you?” said Cossy, as if asking herself. Then she shrugged and turned her shoulder on her past, turned toward the thoroughfare opposite the corniche. Between slatternly, cross-eyed sphinxes it advanced past a palace, perhaps the home roost of that avatar of the Great Mara, the Bvasil of Maracoor himself.
“Are you sure, Cossy?” But Rain guessed that no child at ten could see how today’s decision determined tomorrow’s sorrow. Could she have been any wiser at Cossy’s age? Velvet sack blackout again: she didn’t remember.
Cossy said nothing more. The small group—the green teenager, the ten-year-old girl, the Goose, the winged monkeys—made a run for it. The wind and rain came about again, this time from the east, across the harbor. The fugitives ducked their heads. They didn’t turn to catch a last glimpse of the four brides of Maracoor waiting quayside for some rescue that might never arrive.
4
In the streets beyond the palace, oh, such panic. Soldiers in incomplete uniform clattered by with their spears. Pedestrians flattened themselves against shop fronts, hoping not to be run through. The hammering of shutters over windows, the boarding up of doorways.
The human mess of it all. Couples, families. Packs of youths screaming with laughter. Merchants with heaps of wares, artisans spilling from their guildhalls. A few single women trying to look less ravishing than their profession ordinarily called for. The hubbub of a market day, a festival day, thought Rain. But the tone was wrong.
The crowd had to be straining toward the nearest gate for escape. The fugitives joined them, funneling onto a stone bridge spanning a canal cut between close-set buildings. The girls and the monkeys and the Goose were stuck, as a pinch-point between buildings at the far end slowed everyone’s passage.
“Lookit.” Cossy pointed upstream. Another bridge. A sound of brass and drum over there had cleared the way. Marching six feet apart, men in sharp uniform hoisted aloft a long canopy of saffron-colored fabric. Underneath it, at the bridge’s arch, a quartet of lackeys labored with the handrails of a gilded palanquin.
“The Bvasil!” cried people from every side. “Hail the Bvasil of Maracoor!”
“He’s fleeing too, the bastard,” muttered some smart-mouth kid.
“We’ll be lucky to get through,” said Rain. “Everyone’s got the same idea.”
The Goose flapped his wings. “I should peel off. Likewise, these monkeys. They won’t be allowed just to slip by. They’ll be thought enemy agents. Or anyway, bad omens. We’ll wing it. But how to get you two out?”
Debouching into a plaza, they came upon the western gates. Stout wooden wings, bound with iron, looming but still ajar. Soldiers in cuirasses and greaves were allowing certain groups and individuals through. Women and children, the elderly. No single men. The throng quietened, cowed by the military protocols. The selection seemed arbitrary—mere chance whether you would be deemed old, or young, or infirm, or female enough to get an exit visa.
The Goose said, “Someone might recognize you. You don’t exactly disappear into a crowd, not with your, um, complexion of pale avocado.”
“We’ll try,” replied Rain. “Cossy, you up for whatever happens?”
“Anything’s better than prison.” The girl looked sideways at Rain. A snarl of contradictions, this child Cossy. Sullen. Not trustworthy. But who was trustworthy these days? “I don’t care, whatever,” said the girl. “Suit yourself.”
“Okay,” said Iskinaary. “We’ll perch on the city wall over that way and keep guard. If the Bvasil’s minions try to arrest you, we’ll dive into their faces, and you make a dash for it. Again. After that, we improvise. Let’s go.”
Without a goodbye, good-luck, it’s been swell, the Goose and the winged monkeys diverted into a side street and took off in the air.
As the crowd began to murmur, heads swiveled in the opposite direction. Along a parapet at the top of a slight hill—some pleasure garden up there, or memorial grove—the saffron serpent on its tilting verticals came into view again. “What is that all about?” asked Cossy.
“The Bvasil himself in his veiled sedan chair. No one else merits such magnificence,” said a straw-hatted farmer standing a few feet away. His tone might have been ironic; Rain couldn’t tell. “The Great Mara showing his solidarity with his panicked subjects.” He ran his fingers through the ends of his lank, shoulder-length grey hair and whistled some uncertain editorial opinion.
Rain pulled the sackcloth even lower on her forehead, the way she’d seen the brides of Maracoor wearing theirs. What showed of her green nose and cheeks—and hands—would give her away if anyone were looking for her. But her face was in shadow and she could tuck her hands under the yardage. “You’ll have to hold on to my skirt as if you’re scared,” she murmured to Cossy. “Can you do the talking? If anyone asks, you’re my sister. I’ll play mute—my accent might be suspicious. We’re going to Auntie’s house in the hills. You don’t know any more because you’ve never been there before, and I can’t speak. Ready?”
“I’ll do you one better than that,” said the farmer, who’d begun to inch along beside them. “I’ve been watching the guards. You’ll increase your chances of slipping through if you’re pregnant. Here, can you rearrange that shawl to take a parcel underneath it? My satchel can play the part of an infant in your belly. The soldiers respect motherhood more than anything. Happy to oblige.”
A middle-aged man by the sound of his voice, in a pair of rural trousers. His straw hat sloped unraveling latticework over his eyes. He addressed a younger companion at his side. “Tycheron, this is perfect. We’ll be a family unit. I’ll be the papa, you my son, and these two can be your wife and her little sister. You, you young newlywed, here’s your first baby on its way. Hold still.”
“I don’t want a baby,” protested Rain.
“That’s what all women say till they have one,” said the farmer. His companion, rabbity with alertness, pushed Rain into a recessed doorway. Rain didn’t dare start screaming or she’d just draw attention to herself. “You’re taking liberties, fellows,” she said in a low, throt
tled voice as the older man reached under her shawl to tie a leather keep-sack around her waist. When he’d pulled the cords tight, he shifted the sack from her strong hip to her front. It pulled her down, the weight of it; it made her months pregnant in one go.
“Train your fingers on the hems of your cloth to keep the veil closed,” he said. “You’re a natural. So you’re mute: that’s good. Tycheron, this is your wife. You can call her Pet.”
“No, he can’t,” said Rain.
“It’s a charade. Act the part, Pet. As if you’re in the troupe of players that annually mounts the mystery cycle in the cypress grove. Easy and slow. Your role will be over when we get through the gate. We’re helping you, honey, and your little sister. Let her carry the broom—you’re playing beleaguered, remember? Be reticent. Be mute. What could be easier.”
“Rain?” said Cossy warningly.
“Not yet,” said the older man, glancing skyward. “It’ll pour again before long but let’s push through while they’re still letting people leave.” He spied a bucket of sand and ash for putting out street fires. He scooped up a handful. “Tycheron, your outfit needs the soil of honest labor. There, that’s more convincing.” He smeared grit on his own elbows and knees. Glancing at Rain and Cossy, he said, “You’ve already got this look mastered, I see. Let’s go.”
There was nothing for it but to join the throng. They waited in turn, jostling elbows. “Tycheron,” practiced Cossy. “Tycheron. What’s your name, you other guy?”
“Uncle will do for you,” said the bossy man.
The weight of the satchel dragged Rain’s belly toward the pavement. It wasn’t hard to act ungainly. “Are you smuggling gold bullion out of the capital?” she murmured. “What have you got in here?”