The Oracle of Maracoor Page 3

  “Except Thilma,” said Thilma.

  “Oh, slight mistake. Apologies,” said the Goose. “No offense.”

  “Offense taken,” said Thilma, “stored for Thilma to chew on later, when bored.”

  The sense of calamity died down, thanks to the screening woods. More common needs reasserted themselves. Supper, water. Shelter from the rainstorm, which would break again, eventually.

  Iskinaary sent the flying monkeys scavenging for food. He and the girls hunted for a place to hunker down for the night. Before long they found a lean-to whose sloping roof needed only a bit of replacement thatching. Cossy and Rain, being the ones equipped with opposable thumbs, dragged fallen cedar boughs to hitch onto the roof-frame. And just in time. The woods lost definition behind a thrum of downpour.

  Rain and Cossy tucked themselves in as far as they could get. They bent their heads over their knees and watched Iskinaary standing in the rain. “What are you doing out there?” called Rain.

  “Getting wet,” he replied. “You, too. Come here.”

  Rain pulled her shawl thing over her head and joined him in the rain. He quawked in as soft a voice as he had—which wasn’t very. “We need to devise an exit strategy,” he said. “Out of Maracoor. Back to Oz.”

  “But the girl.”

  “She’s not your charge. Lose her,” said the Goose. “She had her chance at the quay.”

  “She’s a child.”

  “So are you, and I came with you to flap some sense into your head when you need it. Like now. We have to turn back. Back to Oz.”

  “Give it a break, Iskinaary. First things first. We’re not abandoning a child in the woods.”

  “I can hear you both perfectly well, you know,” said Cossy, “and you’re stuck with me. You couldn’t lose me if you tried. I’m not losable.”

  The monkeys had no trouble finding the lean-to. Tiotro brought fistfuls of nuts, quite a few of them wormy as it turned out, and berries that had gotten crushed in the pockets of his vest. Faro and Finistro offered a decomposing squirrel and the foot of a rabbit that looked as if it had been removed from an iron trap. Thilma had a capful of wild cherries and tart orange olives. It wasn’t a balanced meal. The rotten meat was inedible. But the rest was enough.

  “Shall I tell you a story?” asked Rain as night fell.

  “Something ordinary,” said Cossy. “Nothing about monsters or magicks.”

  “Nothing ordinary is without magic,” said Rain.

  “Well, try,” said Cossy, who wasn’t about to put up with existential philosophy at this point in her day. The child had been convicted of murder hardly six hours earlier. There was a limit to how much you could tolerate between dawn and dusk. “Something ordinary to you is still a story to me. Start with: Do you have a mother and do you have a father?”

  “Everyone has a father and mother.”

  That was so patently false to Cossy, who’d been raised not by wolves but by unmarried religious women, that she rolled her eyes. Rain took pity. “I’ll tell you an old story that doesn’t have to do with me or you.”

  “What’s the point then?”

  “I don’t know. It passes the time.”

  “I don’t even really know what a story is,” said Cossy in a tone that said, And I don’t know why I should be bothered to learn.

  “A story,” said Rain, “is like a room. You enter it through a door, like ‘Once upon a time’ or ‘Once there was a little girl’ or something like that. You stay in the room and things happen there to the little girl. Then you find a door that says something like, ‘And they lived happily ever after,’ or ‘So that’s all there is, there isn’t anything else.’ And you walk out of the room and the story is all done. It’s only one thing that happened, and nothing else that ever happened can be in it.”

  “And that,” said Iskinaary from his place in the downpour, “is why Geese don’t tell stories.”

  “Why?” asked Rain, despite herself, because the Goose could be such a kick in the knickers.

  “Because we don’t go in rooms if we can help it,” said the Goose. “Too many doors can slam shut, and without hands we are helpless to turn the knobs. The world to us is one thing; everything that happens is simultaneous and diffuse. A story seems to me to be a very small box in which to find meaning. But that’s humans for you, and why they need us Geese. To see a little farther.”

  “Thilma likes the story,” piped up Thilma, and gave a tortured expression that, just in time, Rain interpreted as a smile.

  “Well, thank you. But it wasn’t really a story,” said Rain.

  “That’s what Thilma likes about it,” said Thilma.

  The roof leaked only a little. The silent monkeys—Faro and—Rain was trying to remember their names, Faro and Finistro, that was it—spread their wings over Rain and Cossy like blankets. The wings were more or less waterproof, though there was an animal odor that Rain swore she could never sleep through.

  But escaping from prison and from a city about to be besieged, both on the same afternoon, it takes the bounce out of you. Rain was only half aware that Cossy was asleep in a scatter of mangy wings before Thilma had finished the simple monkey lullaby she was crooning. Maybe it comprised a story to Thilma, at least all the story she could need to tell. It went:

  “Fly, fly, fly, fly, fly, fly, fly.”

  As Rain closed her eyes, she thought how odd that she couldn’t say the story of her own life, really; but she could describe what a story was to Cossy. A situation; a challenge; a struggle of some sort; an outcome. The shape of story must be an undergirding element of perception, a structure that outlasted all the dissolving details. Even the very elderly, lost to language, would lean forward if someone said, “Shall I tell you a story about the time Maracoor Crown was besieged by an invading army . . . ?”

  A few moments later, in the swimmy obscurities of pre-sleep, she caught a sense of menace. For a moment she thought: a wolf in these woods, and he’s stalking me. The rank aroma of danger. Then she thought: Or is the wolf just the story of my own life that I can’t yet reassemble? Pacing with me? She floated laterally into the black sack of dreamlessness, curled up like a nameless pet inside it, with nothing in her head, nothing graspable to exhume in tomorrow’s light.

  Farmstead

  1

  Within a few days of their arrival, the little girls had settled into the routine of household chores and private games. Their grandmother’s farm was a known thing to them, beloved and safe. When the first attack by those bad guys happened last month, while Papa was away at sea, Mama had brought her children to stay with their grandmother. The repeat flight from the capital this week had been less alarming than the earlier exodus. This time the family had command of a donkey cart, the one they’d borrowed from the barn last time. That was fun. Though the fear of wolves on the open road had sort of ruined it. Especially for their brother, Leorix. He’d been attacked last time, and fended them off. Even now his wounds oozed at night as he tossed in bad dreams. He didn’t describe them when he woke up. Though the girls wheedled, really, they were secretly glad. It was funner to imagine than to know for sure.

  The girls were Poena and Star. Ages eight and five. They pattered into and out of the kitchen, paying little mind to the discussions their parents and their grandmother were having. They wanted a sip of water. There was an ouchy needing a kiss. Shhh, go play now, Mama’s busy.

  The farm wasn’t situated on a trunk road. No such item existed across High Chora, this tableland rising west of Maracoor Crown. Branching tracks linked farmsteads and villages, but without an urban hub, all destinations were equally incidental.

  Therefore, as fugitives from the capital city breasted the highland, they fanned out. Some sought distant family members. Others posed as victims of history. The grandmother worried. “We locals are pinched between an instinct of charity and the common sense to husband our resources. I hear the Speziou brothers have taken to sleeping in their barns to avert cattle theft. Roosters cry themselves hoarse, hearing fricassee at every footfall.”

  Who cared. The children were safe.

  Leorix and his father, Lucikles, had tried to help with the cows. They weren’t good with cows. Father and son got shooed away by inbred cousins whose backbones and forearms helped keep Mia Zephana on her own homestead this late in her life. So father and son merely gathered brush for kitchen fires instead. They didn’t talk much, though they stuck close together in the dales—now bucolic, now doomy. It was all in the light. Sometimes they came home with mushrooms.

  “We found two baby chicks who are eating dirt,” said Poena, darting through the kitchen door at a clip. Star followed, panting too hard to chime in. “Mamanoo, can I have an apple for their supper?”

  “Birds don’t eat apples,” said their grandmother, but she nodded anyway and continued cleaning the next fleece. Her daughter worked the other end. “I don’t like the thought of setting a binding spell upon this home, Oena. I’ve never stooped to that. When neighbors have done so, it leaves a nasty stink after it wears away.”

  “An actual stench of deteriorating magic, or just a bad impression?” said Oena.

  “These apples are kind of yucky so can I have three of them?” asked Poena.

  The grandmother said, “The Tonneros family, a little downslope of the falls? They put a binding spell on their establishment last year because they thought someone was going to abduct the teenage girl. Who, to be honest, didn’t shy away from being attractive. But she wasn’t old enough yet to manage her appeal. You never had that problem, Oena.”

  “The binding spell,” said Oena drily, who was a handsome woman by all accounts but had seen some hardships in her day. “Can we keep to the matter at hand?”

  “Another family group approac
hing on the road from the Springs of Cynerra,” reported Lucikles, coming in through the cold storage room. “Shall I greet them and offer them yesterday’s bread?” So mingy a gesture could encourage the hungry into passing by in the hopes for richer fare up the road.

  “Set Leorix at the gate,” said his wife. “They won’t browbeat a beardless lad, and it’ll make him feel as if he’s contributing.”

  Lucikles picked his moments of disagreement carefully. “I’ll give him a sack of hard rolls, but I’ll linger in the shrubbery in case things get out of hand.”

  “But do call in the girls.” Oena didn’t like them running around carefree while hard-up families were passing by. She could imagine the resentment. “See what I mean?” she continued to her mother. “A binding spell would do the job for us. Deflect these uninvited callers.”

  “You asked about the stink,” replied Mia Zephana. “Our neighbors would know if we decided to shirk our duty during this crisis. And what would happen to the needy if everyone in High Chora were to do the same?”

  “What happened to the Tonneros family?” pushed Oena.

  Her mother said, “They kept to themselves. But on market days, folks looked the other way when they came through. And then their sheep shed caught fire.”

  “Malice? Revenge? Surely not.”

  “You think maybe the sheep were smoking in bed? No, I don’t think it was malice. Would have been hard to manage, though the binding spell was eroding at its usual rate. My point is that the neighbors didn’t bestir themselves to help save the flock until they were good and ready. So the family upped and left. Though perhaps they’ve come back now, too. No, Oena, a binding spell is a last-ditch measure. Listen, I’ve lived here on my own since your father died. And I haven’t needed a binding spell so far. I don’t want to become wary in my final years.”

  The girls pushed in again, huffing and teary. “Why do we have to come back every time someone walks on the road, it’s not fair,” cried Poena. “The chicks said they liked the red apples but would rather a green one.”

  “What are you singing about,” said their grandmother. “Never knew a chick to order off a menu. These are the last of the autumn apples—deal with it. Oena, the night is about to fall. Those passersby ask for a roof, we’ll tell them to go find the Tonneros farmstead. If the place is still abandoned, they can harbor there until they collect their wits and press on to somewhere else.”

  “Maybe they’ll pass by of their own accord. Let’s hold the Tonneros home in reserve for a more pressing moment.” Oena moved to the window and shifted a curtain. “They look harmless enough. A substantial woman wearing heavy jewelry. No wonder she’s exhausted. Her man must be a merchant or a court appointment. But the bedazzle won’t do her any good in these parts.”

  “Poor thing. She meant to impress.” Mia Zephana kept to her task. “A family group? Children?” She looked wary; children in wartime deserve dispensations.

  “Hardly. A dicey brood of young men in the down of their first whisker.”

  “Then they ought to have stayed to defend the Bvasil and his city. We shouldn’t offer them old dishwater to drink.”

  “By that reckoning, I should have stayed behind, too,” said Lucikles, coming back in.

  “You have three children, a wife, and a mother-in-law. It was your duty to evacuate,” said Mia Zephana, seeing no contradiction in her assertions. “Children, you’re driving me mad. If you won’t climb up in the loft, you’ll have to go back outside, but stay behind the house till the strangers pass by.”

  “I’ll go with the girls,” said Oena.

  “Leorix is doing a fine job, holding his own,” said his father. “He’s learned a lot from his adventures this year, my dear. But I’ll keep an eye out anyway.”

  My dear was a splinter under Oena’s fingernail, a hot twinge in her eyeball. She hadn’t wanted the boy to leave the farm with his father on that sudden mission to the city, let alone to sail off to the island of Maracoor Spot. She hadn’t forgiven Lucikles for allowing the boy to join him at sea. Still, the appearance of normalcy was better for everyone. Indeed, probably for her. For half a day at a time she could forget her resentment, a lingering offshoot of her terror at the time. (The throb of outrage never failed to return sooner or later.)

  Despite all that, there was much to love about being back at the farmstead. Oena had grown up here with her parents and a few brothers who had married and settled nearby, or near enough. The holding wasn’t a showpiece, but it wasn’t shabby. The thatch was fresh, the shutters retouched from time to time, the fences in good repair. The grange appealed to the kids, as it was home to the cozier farm animals. Also the standard sort of country rodents: mice, rats, stoats. Meadows for crops; pastures for grazing; paddocks for animal husbandry. A barn in better nick than the house. A hen coop, a few scattered sheds. A pond more ornamental than useful.

  In this pink and gold late-afternoon light the trees nodded like ancestral presences. Here all at once Oena was a child and a young woman in love and a mother of three and, for all she knew, a widow in the making. She breathed deeply, trying to block out the chatter of her daughters, those small me-but-not-mes.

  “Have they gone yet, can we go back to our chickies?” asked Poena. Her mother wondered how any child could determine, unerringly, which register of plangency to employ for maximum persuasion. A human mystery no sage or scholar had yet plumbed.

  “Bossy birds,” endorsed Star, putting her hands behind her back the way her father sometimes did when contemplative.

  “Where are your little friends? Do they have a nest in a hedge? I’d like to come see.”

  “I think the birds don’t want company,” said Poena.

  Oena thought, I’ve taken the kids on this gallop from town to farm twice in the past few weeks. They’re feeling unmoored. They need something of their own to serve as an anchor. Who knows how long we’ll be here this time. If the capital falls to the barbarian—if the nation falls—how do we live then? Let them have their secret childhood while they can. As I had mine.

  “Very well,” she said. “I can hear your brother in the house now. The wanderers must have passed by. Tell me where you’re going so I know where to look if it gets dark.”

  “Over by the Throne Tree,” said Poena, pointing across a stone wall to a meadow that cupped the pond. Oena knew the reference. A flat-topped elm stump with a rising backboard left over from where the trunk had split as it fell. It had been there in her childhood too, and she had played Queen of the Forest from that seat, even though Oena’s brothers had rarely kowtowed to her supreme authority.

  How marvelous that Poena and Star had each other.

  “Don’t pester your birds,” said the mother. “It’s spring, they might be guarding their eggs. They’ll come at you if you get too close.”

  “We’re not stupid,” said Poena.

  “Stupid,” whispered Star, which seemed neither argument nor agreement, but such was the vagary of a five-year-old’s editorial stance that it couldn’t be challenged.

  2

  Leorix didn’t know he was both a hero and a monster to his sisters.

  The boy, now thirteen years of age, was neither sensitive nor doltish. He was a lad’s lad. Inquisitive if not yet rational. Impulsive, though still cautious.

  He was glad his parents and grandmother trusted him to deal with the rabble-de-roy on the path. They’d been easy enough to deflect, that fat woman with her baubles, her shuffling sons who slid their eyes to the ground, avoiding Leorix’s direct gaze. He offered water in clay cups and the bread his father had supplied before slipping away. One of the travelers cursed, but another made a gesture of blessing. The woman accepted two refills of water. When it was clear Leorix wasn’t going to mention lodging, her stamina gave up and the party shuffled away. “We’re shafted, aren’t we,” muttered one of the sons. “Not yet,” replied his mother in society tones, “that’s on the schedule for tomorrow, if it can be arranged.”

  About his parents, the boy entertained the usual apprehensions. He wanted their approval but not too openly, their love only if given drily. With the luck of the stars, he intended to be as unlike his father as he could manage. Leorix found the paterfamilias, Lucikles, to be overly accommodating. Open to persuasion, guilty of rumination. The boy considered these weaknesses of character. A boy wants, in a father, either a pirate or a minor deity. Not someone good at finding a legal work-around for pesky import duties. That type of papa was, by definition, a loser.