Sing me, O Muse, the unheroic morning. When the bruised world begins to fracture for them all. Sing me the cloudless dawn that follows a downright shroud of a night.
A long night, one that had lasted for days.
Rain had run along the edge of it, playing for time.
Wind had sounded, then silence sounded—in that uncanny, hollow way that silence can sound. Then wind picked up again.
A world waiting to be made, or remade. As it does every night.
Waves slapped the harbor sand with soft, wet hands.
At sea level, strokes of lightning silently pricked the horizon.
The seagrass bent double from wind and wet. Bent double and did not break.
Above the clouds—but who could see above the clouds?
Build the world, O Muse, one apprehension at a time. It’s all we can take.
With ritual dating from time out of mind, the brides on Maracoor Spot welcomed the first day after the storm. One by one they took up the whips of serrated seagrass from the basket in the portico. They wound the ends of the grass around their hands, using cloth mittens for protection. Each bride in her private nimbus of focus, they set to work etching their skin, laterally and crosswise. They flayed until the first drops of blood beaded up. Raw skin was better because it bled faster—the calluses from last week’s mutilations took longer to dig through.
Then the brides bound their bruises with muslin already dyed maroon. It cut down on the frequency of bridal laundering if the linen was a deadblood color to begin with.
Then the brides—the seven of them—picked their way down the path along lengths of salt-scrubbed basalt. The ledge dropped in levels, finishing at a natural amphitheater shaped to the sandy harbor.
The world today, as they found it, as they preserved it:
A few thornbushes torn up and heaved on their sides, their leaves already going from green to corpse brown.
A smell of rot from fish that had been flung ashore in tidal surge and died three feet from safety.
The brides sat in a row on the lowest step. After chanting an introit, they began their work of twisting kelp with cord into lengths of loose netting. One by one each bride took a turn to wade into the calmed water up to her ankles, where the salt stung her daily wounds and cleansed them.
The oldest among them needed help getting up from a sitting position. She’d been a bride for seven decades or maybe eight, she’d lost count. She was chronically rheumy, and she panted like a fresh mackerel slapped on the gutting stone. Her stout thumbs were defter than those of her sister brides. She could finish her segment of the nets in half the time it took the youngest bride, who hadn’t started yet this morning because her eyes were still glossed with tears.
Acaciana—Cossy, more familiarly—was the youngest bride. She wouldn’t be menstrual for another year or two. Or three. So she cried at the sting of salt, so what?—she still had time to learn how to suffer. Some of the others thought her feeble, but perhaps they’d just forgotten how to be young.
Helia, Cossy, and the five others. Helia and Cossy, the oldest and youngest, wore white shifts that tended to show the dust. Only the oldest and youngest went bareheaded at tide weaving. Their hair, though pinned up close to the scalp, moistened in the insolent sun that came sauntering along without apology for its absence.
Beneath their sea-blue veils, the other brides kept their eyes on their work. Mirka. Tirr and Bray. Kliompte, Scyrilla. Their conversation wasn’t as guarded as their faces. Mirka, the second oldest, muttered, “I don’t think Helia is going to last another winter.”
“Netting for drama already?” murmured Tirr, the bride to her right. “And it’s just come summer.”
The others grunted.
“No, I mean it,” continued Mirka. “Look at the poor damaged old ox. She’s forgotten how to stand by herself. Those waves are almost too much for her.”
“Well, these storms,” piped up Cossy, trying to air a voice unthrottled by tears. “A whole week of it! Did that ever happen before?”
The more seasoned brides didn’t answer the novice. The oldest woman did seem unsteady as she walked in. She’d looped her garment in her forearms to keep the hems dry. Her mottled shanks trembled while the sea pulsed against her calves.
“What happens if Helia dies?” asked Cossy.
The youngest one always asked this question, always had to.
The second oldest, who was proud of the pale mustache that proved her status as deputy-in-readiness, snorted. “You remember the coracle that comes round the headland now and then. If it beaches and fewer than seven brides are here to greet the overseer, he goes back to procure a replacement bride.”
“Goes back where?” asked Cossy. “Mirka? Where?”
This question went unanswered. Since each new bride always appeared in swaddles, arriving before her own memory could set in, the notion of anyone’s specific origins was largely hypothetical.
Though they all knew where baby animals came from.
Cossy was at the obstinate age. “Goes back where? Someone must know. Does Helia know? I will ask her.”
“Don’t bother Helia,” said the deputy-in-readiness. “Look at her. At that venerable age! She’s about to move on ahead of us, she can’t think backward.”
“You’re not the boss of me, not yet,” Cossy replied. “And don’t think you are, Mirka.”
Helia had finished soaking her wounds. Using her staff for balance, she picked her way back to her place. Once she’d taken up her portion of netting, she muttered, “I’m not as deaf as you think, Mirka. Don’t be getting airs. You’re not going to be senior bride anytime soon. Cossy, I don’t know much about the mainland but I know it exists, and it is where we come from. But listen: you can ask me anything you want. What little I know I share. That’s my last job before I die. All in good time, so Mirka, don’t go pushing me off a cliff.”
But that night at the temple Helia suffered some contortion, and the next morning, while she took breakfast, she didn’t speak at all. Cossy might ask all the questions she wanted, but to no avail. Helia was beyond answering.
But who could see above the clouds? Or from them? And descending through them, spy Maracoor Spot? Seeing, what, what—if you were to approach the place from above—say, as a traveler in a hot-air balloon, or a harpie out of the old stories? Looking upon this dollop of land in the midst of the great cold sea?
A spine, foremost. A spine to the island, heaving its rim-rock crenellations out of green wilderness. You might say: like a pivoting lizard with finned vertebrae on display.
On the east side, marine cliffs. Shellacked a glaring white, guano from cliff-dwelling rocs and gulls. At the base of this unapproachable break-front, rollers ate away at the ankles of the island, scooping them out. In a million years the ocean would snap the spine of the island at last, then pass over it to munch upon some farther shore.
Toward the west, the slopes were more relaxed. They tumbled upon one another like fresh, unfolded laundry. The climate here balmier, the winds less belligerent. Pine forests gave way to more relaxed orchard. And the colors here proved more various—olive leaves cupping tiny blossoms of pale yellow; fringe-headed grasses turning mint or amethyst over the hours; stony earth or sable, torn up by the single plow. Bees threaded the apple groves. A few fields of hay and grain, vegetable gardens, two donkeys in a paddock, goats on the loose, a chicken coop. Freshwater springs made Maracoor Spot habitable to humans, fowl, and wild boars, and a small inbred population of skittish, piebald gazelles.
The harbor was deep enough to drown a giant out of prehistory, as far as anyone knew, but the mouth of it had been silted up for aeons. Ships couldn’t cross except once every few years, at a storm tide. This was access so unpredictable that no traders bothered. There was little to plunder, in any case, and nobody to trade with. Brides didn’t count.
Was Maracoor Spot beautiful? The brides who lived there couldn’t say. It was the only home they’d ever known. No one had ever left except in death. Standards of beauty—like those of truth, or justice—are arrived at by the practice of making comparisons.
Another word for poverty of choice is innocence.
By holy writ Maracoor Spot supported seven human citizens, no more, and no less, and made do with only one real building. The temple, or grange, was a boxy arrangement of pockmarked, smeary marble. It stood on a platform of large rectangular blocks and was flanked on three sides by ranks of grey-white stone columns, some of which had lost conviction and lain down. Inside, a single large chamber was divided by rattan screens. That was it, unless you counted the windowless, sacred space at the back of the building, which just about ran into the hillside.
At this stage in its unimaginable history, the columns supported triangular pediments front and rear. In their recesses lurked statues of writhing, blurred, and genderless humans. Their motivations remained vague and their lessons unknowable, the specifics thumbed away by wind and time. Above the sculptural drama, a roof made of logs and thatch. This fell or blew off every few years. The brides knew something about construction, but perhaps not enough. Their repairs were always temporary. But so were their lives.
Any scrutinizing eye aloft in the trade winds, looking down upon that whole world, would see the spine of Maracoor Spot hugging the island’s single harbor, its entrance channel so narrow that from certain viewpoints the sides could seem to be touching.
And opposite the harbor mouth, that tablet of temple roof: the only stamp of rationality in the organic blot and curl of nature.
If you were climbing the highlands on a certain day, you might see a coracle coming around the headland. That day couldn’t be predicted. It happened when it happened. Like the occasional ship with pale sails that, appearing and disappearing, proved the horizon had a future as well as a past. But little else.
Cossy claimed perhaps ten summers under her cincture. The adolescent bride nearest her in age had begun her menses a year ago. Oh, but Cossy’s former friend had grown aloof! Scyrilla the Scourge. Pimply and moody. Scyrilla didn’t like to talk about the secret wound. Old Helia had been brusque about the matter when Cossy asked. Herself was out the other side and a good thing too, Helia said. The other brides were opaque on the matter, or inept. Though Cossy tried not to show it, the mystery of that red flood terrified her.
The chores of the day were winding down. Cossy sat at the foot of Helia’s cot, rubbing olive oil into the senior bride’s wounds. Helia was sitting up so she could glance out the doorway. Not that there was much to look at—a scoop of sea, emerald green at this hour, and a peerless, watered-down sky without clouds. So welcome after those storms.
The aged woman cleared her throat. While words had fled today, her grunts and sighs, oh my. Opinions plenty. Cossy guessed they were riddled with bitterness and gratitude alike. And perhaps compassion—Helia didn’t shut out Cossy as the other brides so often did.
In sailed Mirka, folding back her blue veil. Though her hair was clasped at the nape of her neck with string, the long grey coils below had come free, an animal pulling from a snare.
“You’re dawdling here, Cossy.” A statement, not a question.
“I just finished with Helia’s salve.”
“It’s not suppertime yet. You’re still wanted in the garden. Turnips ready to pull. The moles will get them if we let them sit another night. And bring a bucket of water to sprinkle on the redweed. It’s looking peaky.”
Cossy sighed and squeezed Helia’s hand. The strong old thumbs pressed down in Cossy’s palm.
“We’re sorry to see you brought low, Helia,” said Mirka with icy formality. She was getting the clean pails used for milking the goats. “You’ve been a great inspiration to all of us. I want you to know this if your time among us is coming to a close.”
Behind Mirka’s back, Helia made a rude gesture at her. Cossy, who now was truly dawdling, tried to swallow a giggle. Mirka ignored it.
“Where will we bury Helia?” asked Cossy. “With the goat bones?”
Helia clapped her hands once and raised them to the ceiling.
“All in good time, Cossy, don’t be rude,” said Mirka. “Run along now. I have some things to say to Helia before I get back to the goats.”
“But she can’t answer you.”
“No concern of yours. Some statements require no reply. Go away.”
So Cossy left for the turnips, but she dawdled along the outside wall, listening. A time-honored custom among the younger brides. A year ago it would have been Cossy and Scyrilla together. Part of their schooling, you might say.
Mirka was purring in a low voice, but full of urgency. “You need to let me know where the key is hidden. There’s little time left, Helia. You could kick off this evening or tomorrow morning. It’s forbidden to take your knowledge to the grave. Would you threaten all our lives? If the key isn’t in the temple, point out which way it is, and I’ll help you walk there. I’ll bring a shovel if it’s buried somewhere. This is your final obligation, Helia. You are obliged to yield your authority. You may not deny me this.”
No doubt Helia had flashed another obscene gesture, for Mirka remarked, “How dare you be so rude to me. I could suppress your dinner portion for that.”
Though she couldn’t have said why, Cossy was glad that Helia was still too obstinate to obey Mirka’s commands. The youngest bride tiptoed away, skittered off the porch, and flew like a gull’s shadow toward the garden.
Along the path she stopped to collect the bucket of rainwater. It was nearly full. She peered at it. A mouse was paddling away, three inches from the rim, unable to get purchase. She left the bucket there—the redweed could manage. She wanted to see what a drowned mouse would look like. Maybe it would be dead by the time she came back from the garden. She could tip it out and see if it came back to life, the way fish sometimes did if you threw them back.
When she was nearly done with the turnips, she glanced up to gauge the sun’s position on the horizon. She saw a movement not unlike the flailing mouse, but larger, out there crossing the harbor mouth. It skirted on the safe side of the buoy, that bobbing knob of cork warning against the most treacherous of the submerged rocks.
A dolphin? But dolphins rarely came into the harbor, as if they were afraid they might beach themselves in the shallows.
On second glance, Cossy knew it was no dolphin. Nor was it the coracle of the overseer, though the other brides were saying, since the squash vines were in flower, that the time of his annual visit was nearing. Anyway, he always arrived in the morning.
Cossy didn’t speak, didn’t cry out. Even though two of the brides were working nearby beneath the stunted apple and sparrowleaf trees. In the bellies of their blue veils they were gathering wormy fruit for the donkeys.
The women were turned uphill, away from the harbor. “I’ve dug the last turnip,” Cossy called. “I’m off to the keeping-stall.” Her companions didn’t swivel to verify. Cossy had no history of lying. (That they knew of.)
The girl scrabbled down the rocky path with such haste that a few turnips bounced from her bucket. Most of the brides were working at outdoor chores. And no doubt Mirka was ensconced in the goat shed by now. The brides usually spent early morning at their nets and midday at the gardens, while reserving late afternoon for animal husbandry. By then the wind had begun again to sweep in from the sea, keeping the flies down and pushing the odor of animals upland.
Helia would be alone at the temple.
Cossy tore through the doorway. She’d thought she might hiss the news at Helia, making her raise herself and glance out the doorway, but the oldest bride lay still, her white shawl pulled up to her chin. Her eyes were closed. She had the look of a squid that has exhausted itself in the nets. Cossy let her be.
Rolling the turnips out upon the unpainted tabletop, the youngest bride rushed back outside. Through the stripes of the pillars, she saw that the sun had begun its evening spectacle of shine upon the waters. The item she’d first thought a dolphin was more frantic than before. Forget the drowning mouse. Something about the panic in the harbor made Cossy hurtle herself toward a rescue.
A moment for her alone. A sign of fate, one way or the other. Any other day of the year, Helia would have been eagle-eyed on the stone porch, pithing apricots or sifting lentils.
Cossy the only witness vouchsafed for this instant of flex and fracture.
So down she flew, like a white bird among sawgrass. At the edge of the harbor she shielded her eyes to peer at the progress of the beleaguered creature.
So much water dashed about the entity in trouble that Cossy couldn’t identify it at first. Then she saw. A large bird—roughly the size of a roc from the island’s cliffs. But rocs didn’t come into the harbor. And they were believed rarely to land on the sea. They dove for fish but lifted back up again at once.
Cossy whispered a basic magick, perhaps the most basic. Whether it was child’s play or powerful, she was too young to guess.
Spill a spell
To make things well.
Something was trapping the creature’s second wing, looping about it. The bird, rather like a goose, turned a desperate and intelligent eye toward the shore. It saw Cossy, and quawked as if giving instructions. The closer it came, the more it headed toward her, as if for help.
Cossy paid no mind to the white hems of her chiton or to her cross-hatched heels and soles. She plunged into the harbor up to her waist. She met the goose. She helped release the noose that was constricting the second wing. It was the arm of a human being locked around the bird. The salt water buoyed up the person’s body enough for Cossy to drag it up on the sand. The goose sank its chinless chin in the soil, panting.
Cossy wasn’t sure which she hoped more: that the sodden human castaway was a male, or wasn’t. She backed off, waiting to find out. The figure was more grown up than Cossy—perhaps closer to the age of Scyrilla, the second youngest bride of Maracoor. The one who had vied with Cossy for being most petted. Scyrilla now a scheming, adolescent viper.
But female, yes, that much was now certain. And alive. The goose, having rallied, was jostling upon the girl’s belly. Seawater gurgled from the human lungs with a back-gulping sound, the kind that water makes when poured too quickly from a narrow-necked flask.
The goose quawked again at Cossy, and again. Cossy had only seen geese a few times, as they weren’t native to Maracoor. She didn’t know their ways. Whenever they preened about, looking belligerent, she’d always kept her distance. This one, more dark brown than grey, fairly seethed with outrage. Cossy felt upbraided. She decided that, as long as the drowned lump wasn’t a man, there was no benefit in keeping the secret to herself any longer.
She hurried up the track, pivoting on the path once or twice to make sure she hadn’t imagined the whole affair. The goose and the castaway weren’t going anywhere. They’d fallen upon their own shadows, amidst spreading pools of seawater.
“Mirka,” cried Cossy, then “Helia!”
Mirka the officious emerged from the goat-hold. She made an angry gesture that meant, Silence befits you first, and everything follows from that, but she set the milk pails down so she could hurry faster. When she drew near, she said, “Cossy, you must govern your spirit with greater restraint, or it shall have to be governed for you.”
“It’s important.” Cossy wheezed and held her side against a stitch of pain there. “A person has arrived. On the sands.”
Mirka grabbed Cossy’s hand. They ran together to the nearest rise, where the harbor opened before them like a book.
When she could speak, Mirka said to Cossy, “Ring the bell, child; ring the bell at once.”
“Do we need to tell everyone?”
“We don’t know what danger this is to us. Do as I say.”
Cossy regretted not having found a way to hide the castaway, keep her for herself, but now there was nothing left for her to do but obey Mirka’s orders.
The other brides, all but old Helia, gathered in a knot and linked arms. Mirka muttered some sort of a prayer under her breath that Cossy couldn’t make out and didn’t try. Then, five women in blue veils and a girl in a white veil, they made their way with improvised ceremony to where the victims of sea still lay, nearly insensate, upon the sands. The sun was a gold brooch in pale orange netting. The air smelled faintly of herring. Herring, and distance.
“The goose has given up on the human. She’s probably dead,” said Cossy.
“Cossy, shut up,” said Mirka.
The intruder’s eyes were closed. The brides didn’t want to hurt her. They didn’t want to touch her.
But when Mirka gave the word, she and Bray, who was stout and strong, took the foreign girl by the shoulders and sat her up. Water drained out of her nostrils. Bray cradled the crown of her skull as one would an infant’s, to protect the neck from snapping. The others removed their veils and lifted the person upon them. They hauled her up the slope to the temple. Cossy carried the waterlogged broom that had been dislodged, with some effort, from the castaway’s clenched armpit.
The goose followed at a distance, settling on the portico. With that capacity for skewing that birds’ eyes have, it trained its gaze at several points of the horizon at once. Before long, however, it tucked its head under the wing that had done all the work hauling the traveler to shore. It became a statue: Sleeping Goose.
Though Mirka had made a sign that they were to be quiet, Helia must have heard them. From her corner of the dormitory the senior bride banged her oakthorn staff against the wall.
“You go quiet the old maenad,” said Mirka to Cossy. “She is soft on you.”
“What’ll I say?”
“Say nothing.”
That was little help.
Cossy didn’t want to leave. What if the visitor died while Cossy was gone? What a thrilling moment to have to miss. But with Helia bedridden and mute, Mirka was thumping around as senior bride, even if she wasn’t yet sporting the white veil. So Cossy had little choice but to obey.
Helia rolled her fist forward in the air, a gesture that meant Haul me up to a sitting position. Cossy didn’t think she was strong enough to do it by herself, but Helia leaned on her staff and pushed, too.
Then the old sack of bones was sitting up, sniffing the air like a cave dog. She grunted in the form of a question. Cossy replied as nonchalantly as she could manage: “Everyone’s come in early today.”
Helia wiggled one hand forward laterally, clearly meaning Coracle spotted on its approach?
Cossy raised her eyebrows. She didn’t want to lie to Helia or disobey Mirka. “Do you want some water?”
Helia bit her lip, thinking. Then she nodded.
Cossy hurried to the water basin and dipped a clay cup. When she got back to the side of Helia’s bed, she said, “Here.”
Helia took it, smiled at Cossy a little, and dashed the water to the floor. Then she placed the cup upside down on the end of the staff and hurled the clay item over the screen. It shattered against the wall above the other brides.
At once, Mirka was at the screen-fold, a scold. Fists furled, old Helia pumped both her arms up and down. The message was clear.
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