The Oracle of Maracoor, page 4
In the past few weeks Leorix had shadowed his father to the remote island of Maracoor Spot, and then into the courtrooms at the House of Balances. He’d witnessed the trial for murder of that girl called Cossy. He’d found appalling his father’s acquiescence at the girl’s arraignment and conviction. How could Lucikles fail to take any responsibility for it, when he’d kidnapped the child and brought her to “justice”? So weak in moral muscle, so wet, so—uggh—as to make everyday chatter nearly impossible. His papa would say, “Hey there, chief; how’d you sleep?” and Leorix’s jaw muscles would clench. It took all he had to hold his tongue for four or five seconds and then let a monotonic “Fine” slip out between his teeth. To add, “And you?” would have been to become a collaborator in his father’s failings. He didn’t care if his father ever slept well again. The old bastard didn’t deserve to.
So Leorix largely kept out of Lucikles’s way.
His mother, his quiet, sober, upright, capable mother—well, he had to stand at a distance from her, too, but for a different reason. Given the slightest threat to him, she lost her sense of propriety and treated him like an infant. His chums in the agora said that at home they all suffered the same thing. Mothers were, apparently, insane. Incapable of growing up. But this hardly made the condition easier to bear.
Now he loitered for long, lazy periods by the gate, waiting for life to show up. Betwixt and between, a dangerous way station for a boy hankering to become something else, something next.
Not long ago, when he’d been feverish with wolf-scratch and recovering in his grandmother’s loft, he’d looked out the window and been startled by an apparition. He’d imagined he was seeing a figure sitting on the tree-stump seat in stark and magnificent nudity, a male figure of regal bearing who shimmered in and out of focus. A god of some sort. He wore an ornamental collar and nothing else. Leorix was too bewildered to bring the matter up to his parents or grandmother, but he was pretty sure the character was one of the deities honored by statues in the temples of Maracoor Crown. Leorix didn’t know which personage his callow mind was conjuring up. He couldn’t figure out how to ask a parent about which god or demi-god was a handsome male youth wearing only a neck ornament. It would have sounded iffy. So he’d let it go.
3
Lucikles and Oena had tucked their children up in their blankets, taken a last sip of cherry ale, and bid Mia Zephana good night. They lay for a while unspeaking in the dark, letting the issues of the day try to unknot themselves separately in their two separate hearts.
They weren’t at peace with each other, but what husband and wife could manage to be when the nation was being invaded? What near or distant future danger lurked for their children? And so in their soft cooling sweat they lay in parallel prisons of resentment about insignificant matters. So tired that nonsense irritants were all that they could manage to consider.
She thought: He shouldn’t have given the girls two extra biscuits for their chickies; the children were conniving him, and the sweet will jump the girls awake all night. (The girls were already sleeping soundly.)
He thought: She oughtn’t send Leorix to the gate to fend off the grasping homeless; it will overwhelm him. Leorix needs a duty cut to the size of his competence. Guarding the family was a father’s job, and as the father, tomorrow he would insist.
Each one thought: My spouse takes too much responsibility, and upon such tired shoulders; I should do more. I will do more. Still, I wish I could get some help at this, or that, or the other. I’m alone in my worry; mine is the deeper capacity for dread.
Eventually a hand reached out and another hand met it. It didn’t matter whose was first. Their marital relations began as a performance of tenderness that neither one of them felt. But then the human apparatus of mood did its old trick of not being able to read two texts at once: The text of the skin took precedence over the text of the uncertain heart. The familiar fiction of erotic theater. In which both spouses pretended to be less aggrieved and more aroused than was true. And in the time they took for it, such pretense at romance once again had the power to convince them love was near. The catharsis enacted upon the stage of the mattress proved to imitate true feeling so well that neither partner could fully return to the attitude of offense in which they’d begun.
Oena fell asleep first. Lucikles gathered lengths of her hair and moved them off his pillow because they were tickling his jaw. He might have slept, but if so he awoke again soon enough. The light had shifted in the room; the moon was crawling about the clouds.
The last time they’d been here together, a month ago or so, he’d sensed a quickening of the world outside. An assembly of energies, like the coiling power of a cat’s haunches as the creature prepares to spring. He had thought he’d heard creatures on the roof. Not the usual rats in the thatch. Something larger, investigative. Something foreign.
The morning had cleared that sensation away so well that he hadn’t thought about it again until tonight.
He tried to relax. He prayed to the family deity. A different sort of letting go than that of sex. The loneliness of the mid-level civil servant. Reading nuances of atmosphere wasn’t his métier; he tried nonetheless. With three children and a wife and mother-in-law in the house, it was his job to do his crude best in the protection of them all.
Eventually he caught a sound in the kitchen or larder. A normal noise, the sound of human agency. He got up to make sure it wasn’t one of the children filching apples or getting into other mischief.
His mother-in-law was rolling out a round of pastry. “Couldn’t sleep either?” she said.
“Not with the racket you’re making.” He grinned and sat down.
She worked in silence for a while, though she gestured toward the flagon of wine and nodded for him to help himself if he wanted. He didn’t.
After she’d finished with the brisk work and stored the disc of dough in the tin box slotted in the cold outside wall, she sat down opposite Lucikles. She began to scrape the peels off apples. He offered to help but she said, “Stretching out a job gives me more time to think.”
“What are you having to think about?”
“Other than how old I’m getting, and just as our nation is under attack?”
She was right; in this light he saw something aged in her that he’d never observed before. As if there was a second skin upon this vigorous farmwoman, an invisible skin but it had weight; and it was exhaustion.
He said evenly, “Can’t do anything about the former, I’m afraid. And you and I can do precious little about the latter, either.”
“True. We can’t stop a military threat against us. But how we behave while it happens is still up to us,” she said, congenial in disagreement. “However old we are.”
“You sound as if you have a campaign in mind.”
“Oena is asking me to get someone to lay in a binding spell around the place. She was spooked a month ago, Lucikles, by having to flee with the children when the vandal Skedes first came into the harbor of Maracoor Crown. She hasn’t recovered yet—you being away when it happened. The rushed evacuation on the road. Leorix attacked by that wolf.”
He didn’t need to be reminded. “I wasn’t malingering on some holiday island. I was at work at my job. As usual. And the boy has recovered just fine.”
“That’s a reasonable response, but reason isn’t always useful against alarm. Oena is just so jittery about unknown people wandering this pastoral outback.”
“What do you have against a binding spell, then? Assuming such a thing even works?”
“Oh, they work, but often against one’s best interests. I know an old fellow over to Kloixou Stables who might do it well enough, and he’d only charge twice what he’s worth instead of eight times. But I’m thinking it’s the wrong thing to do. In fact, I’m inclined to take the opposite approach. Which would drive my daughter crazy. And that’s why I’m peeling apples. Because worrying about her is driving me crazy.”
“The opposite approach? What do you mean?”
“It’s not good for the children to see us bar the door just when someone else’s need is so obvious. We ought to take someone in. Then anyone who follows could see that we’ve already opened our doors to the refugee. Besides—I’m not a fool—nothing stops us from applying a binding spell later if it becomes necessary.”
“And you’d put your own family in danger by admitting a stranger?”
“There are many legends of how it’s the stranger who brings the blessing.”
“Or the curse at the child’s naming, or the scrap of pox, or the evil eye.”
Mia Zephana waved her hand distractedly in the air, as if brushing off invisible flies. “You don’t like it, you can take yourselves elsewhere and then watch and see who opens their gate to you. It’s my house, sonny.”
“Always admired you for your winning ways. I’ll put myself on sentry duty tomorrow and choose a safe candidate for inviting in.” He went back to bed.
4
The morning had turned clearer. The blue overhead seemed to throb. Sipping peligrasse tea, he realized that his mother-in-law’s midnight argument had changed his mind. As his family wandered in for rusks of bread and jam—all but Mia Zephana, who was already out watering the sheep—he rubbed his jaw, as if it had been dislocated in a lumpy sort of sleep. “Leorix,” he told the boy, “I’ve decided to lurk around the roadside today. Give you a day off.”
“You don’t think I’ve been doing a good job? You have any complaints?”
“You need some rest. All the excitement of the past month—the wolf attack, the ocean voyage, the trial, the invasion. You ought to go off with your sisters and play.”
“I don’t play,” he said. “I’m not an adult yet but I am a student, Papa. I haven’t played since I started at the lyceum.”
“Your lyceum is overrun with Skedes and we’re in the hinterlands anyway. You’re spared. If you don’t want to play, take the girls and go exploring. There are stands of trees beyond the pond that we’ve never ventured into. I doubt you can get lost—the woods will fetch up on some other farm’s backfield. But see if you can keep within hollering distance of the house here.”
“You talk as if I’m going to do what you tell me.”
“Oh, do I? Well, you are. Take a break from this worry, my boy. We’ve got things covered here, your mother and grandmother and I.”
“The three of you will hold off the invaders by yourselves? Right.”
“I’ll yell for you if we need backup.”
“You mock me,” he said. “I hate that.”
“We don’t want him to play with us,” said Poena, finishing her apple.
With her usual dazzling incoherence, little Star said, “Me too.”
Lucikles yawned and ran a hand through his hair. “Well, I’m off for a morning constitutional. I’ll keep on the lane so I’ll be able to see if anyone is coming along. I’ll handle them. I mean it, Leorix. Do as I say.”
As Lucikles stumped out the door, Leorix swiveled toward his sisters. He was in so foul a temper that he was nearly enjoying himself. “You can take care of yourselves or go drown in the pond. It doesn’t matter to me.”
“I love how you’re learning to be a jerk,” said Poena. “You’re so good at it, but you should practice some more.” She fled his uplifted hand. He wouldn’t have hit her, but it was fun to raise his fist sometimes.
The girls got dressed and put together a sack of crusts and carrots. Every time their mother turned her head, they squirreled away more scraps. Leorix returned to the loft room where he had recuperated from the wolf attack. From here he could lean down and peer through the low-slung window, out under the eaves, across the meadow. He waited to watch his sisters make their trudging way, lugging the sack between them. He would find out where they went and then go to spy on them. What could be more annoying than that?
They reached the pond, hugged the margin of the water, and headed toward the Throne Tree. Then they diverted into the tall grasses.
He lay there, feeling as much wolf as boy. He didn’t know for how long. His breath was hot upon his own clavicle. A mood of election stole over him, as if the world had centered its ambitions in his own hollowed-out soul. It was tough to hover between duty and delinquency. He supposed anyone who had ever been mauled by a wolf might be intrigued to know what the wolf had actually wanted with him. More than, say, his liver.
Time inched in patterns of leaf-shadow cast on the whitewash. Hints and hunches. Leorix stole down the stairs on bare feet. He was a shadow of himself, now being a kid again, now trying out his new, older self. Wolf-boy.
He achieved the blind of a clump of thick holly and paused there, listening. The sound of his sisters’ voices came to him from over the water and the stone wall, indistinct but fluting with excitement. Behind him, his grandmother called something to his mother. In the farmhouse, a tin pail dropped noisily to the stone floor. He trained his eyes on the light that trembled around the Throne Tree. A peculiar wind stirred the leaves there with precision while the rest of the slope lay stupefied, languid.
Over the wall, along the pond. He moved with stealthy movements to keep as silent as possible but he didn’t crouch. He guessed that whatever the girls were doing, they weren’t paying attention to the perimeters of their game. Lupine?—as if the scars left by boss wolf a month ago had infected him? But he shook the panic off and lowered his nose and slunk forward, listening, listening. He would never hurt his sisters. Them and their stupid idiocies.
“I don’t think the little chicks like apples anymore,” Poena was saying. “They aren’t eating a bite.”
He was at the Throne Tree and he still couldn’t see them. They were somewhere close by. Maybe he should pretend-roar to flush them out, and chase them and tickle them. Or act more like a wolf-prince and really growl, to scare them. He practiced.
He put one foot and then the other on the flat trunk of the Throne Tree, squatting, and then slowly he stood up on the seat, steadying himself on the high backboard of the chair. The feeling was fierce, from the soles of his feet to his jutted jaw. Leorix of the House of Korayus, age thirteen, firstborn son of a miserable if reliable public servant. A family boy at home, but in flashier self-disguise, a rogue, an outlier.
“What’s the matter, chickie?” Poena’s voice had taken on a change of tone. “You don’t like Papa’s pipe tobacco?”
Something flushed through Leorix then, an unnerving jolt, like a bad tooth biting on tin. A shooting awareness. He sensed wolf nearby. Something not pretend, realer than he was, maybe centering in on his sisters without their knowledge. Or were they talking to a baby wolf? He was humiliated, jealous, terrified, all at once.
Leorix tensed his thigh muscles and bent his knees, preparing to leap. Before he launched, though, the reeds and grasses rustled. A head lifted up and glared at him. It wasn’t Poena or Star, nor was it a wolf before whom he was ready to die or pledge troth. A face of a vicious little demon sorceress of some sort.
Star and Poena rose to their feet too, and stared at their brother.
“Get away from that thing before I kill it.” Leorix’s menacing wolf voice came out in a squeak. “Don’t run, just move away.”
“Chickie, I said no. Now you behave,” said Star. “Go home, Lorry.”
“You shouldn’t have come here, we told you,” added Poena in a voice of sorrow.
“Who is this nuisance?” said the bird-thing, its humanesque face flashing a hostile bronze.
The girls stood up and turned to their brother. The creature’s expression was frightened and menacing at once. She roared, her little point-teeth flashing at Leorix.
“I don’t know who your imaginary friend is,” was all Leorix could say. “But there’s a wolf nearby. This game is over. Star. Poena. Let’s go back. Now.” He held out his paws. They came to take his hands; reluctantly; but he was the big brother, after all.
5
Lucikles lounging against the gatepost. Drawing on his pipe, watching the smoke unfurl. He had already refused one old couple who had hobbled along with a nasty mutt on a rope. “I’m afraid we have a fierce guard dog who doesn’t take kindly to visitors,” Lucikles had ventured. The little critter, Cur, came sprigging up from nowhere and greeted the new arrivals with wagging tail and attempted sniffing of nethers. “That’s not the pup I’m talking about,” said Lucikles. “Cur, get back here.”
“We’ll lose our hound if you like,” said the old woman. “We’ll take Old Pretty out in that field and brain him with a big stone. Balls, but I’m knackered, I need a break.”
“You take Old Pretty out in any field and I’ll brain you, for that idea,” said her tatterdemalion husband, spitting.
“You’ll have better luck just a little way along,” said Lucikles, hoping it was so. Old Pretty snarled, as if he understood human mendacity. The couple left. Cur followed them until Old Pretty lunged at him. Cur suffered a change of heart and came whimpering home at a clip.
“You don’t know when you have it good,” said Lucikles. He was fond of the dog, perhaps because although Cur was old enough to know better, he remained one of those happy creatures who didn’t learn from experience. In that regard Lucikles felt that he and Cur were soul mates.
When his pipe was done and Lucikles was ready to head for a midmorning ale, along came another pair, traveling from the direction that Old Pretty and his people had headed. An older man and a younger. A hunched fellow with a farmer’s hat and a satchel dragging from his shoulders. The younger one, carrying a larger rucksack, was limping and rubbing his left calf.
