Gregory Maguire - The Brides of Maracoor

Halfway through the morning, Tirr tossed her length of net down to her feet. It swayed in the sudsy wavelets as if one of them. We need to figure this out, she said. Look at the sea. Its coming on time for the overseer.

They glanced up from their handiwork. Tirr knew what she was talking about. At a certain point every summer, the waves began to approach the mouth of the harbor in successive lengths of raveled froth. The dark blue showed between each white wave. The striped sea, blue and white, was called a ribbon tide. This was the favorable sea across which the overseers coracle arrived annually. Tirr was right to be fretful.

We have to figure out if weve broken code by giving shelter to a guest, said Tirr. What will the overseer say when he arrives? What will he do?

Maybe he cant count, said Scyrilla. Well line up, put the guest in an extra veil, and no one the wiser.

Of course he can count, shouted Tirr. He comes here to count, you moron. Tirr must have been stewing over this for a while; her voice was throttled.

Mirka glanced sideways at the old woman next to her. Helia just kept working her length of the net. It was a meditative act, this time of netting, this netting of time. It was why they were there, why they even lived. Helia wouldnt or couldnt be moved from her private calm. She didnt even look up. Prayer is its own reason.

Youre wrong to agitate us at our devotions, said Mirka in a voice smooth as thrice-pressed oil, but, Tirr, youre not wrong to worry. This is the first waking moment weve had to ponder. Lets take the question into our hearts. Let us each bring her best thought to share at the table over the midday bite.

Tirr couldnt be stopped. And if the overseer arrives while were laying the table?

So it will be. If Tirr couldnt be calmed, Mirka couldnt be riled. Acting the queen bee already. She leaned down and grabbed where her length of net joined to Tirrs stretch, and lifted Tirrs portion back to her lap. To your work. It will help, Tirr. Trust me. Work always helps.

Cossy didnt know if it would help. Tirrs gestures were raw and unthoughtful, more erratic than Helias. The practice of the seven brides was to braid, knot, inch along; to sever yesterdays cords and retie them for today, in a balletic movement of hands. They repaired stripped or broken lengths and replaced rotten ones. Who knew how long the brides had been knotting nets? Or why there should be seven brides? Perhaps for no sounder reason than because that was how many the lowest stone step could comfortably seat.

Cossy kept glancing up at the ribbon tide. She wanted to be the first one to catch the coracle rounding the headland, should today prove to be the day. Instead, Cossy was the one to noticeagain it was she, this singularity felt holy, this was nearly magicand thus she was the one to be able to say, Our guest is awake.

Cossy didnt know much about memory.

All existence measures itself in creeps and ticks, as far as she knew.

The tide came in and went out; that was regular. Storms came and went; vines grew full and fell back. Baby goats were born and older goats were eaten. Once in a while if a stupid boar managed to get itself trapped in one of the laughable cages that the brides maintained in the woods, they had boar ragout. You could notch the sequence of life by its menus if you had no other variables on hand.

The more notable movements of change in Cossys ten years were social ones.

One year, for reasons beyond Cossy, Tirr had been so angry at Mirkas bullying the others that she had slept in the lean-to with the squashes, driven back to society only when the rats grew accustomed to her presence and began to run over her in the night.

Then, there was the time, not long ago, that Scyrilla had begun her bleeding. This a big change indeed. Cossy recalled it with minute detail. No one had made fun of Scyrilla; in fact, both Mirka and Tirr grew uncharacteristically tender. Or at least less caustic. Scyrilla had cried at night, and Tirr had warmed at the hearth a flat round stone, like an unleavened loaf, and wrapped it in a towel and brought it to press on her lower belly.

Cossy, remanded into the corner space with old Helia, hadnt watched. But she had lain awake, listening to the sobs. She dreaded her turn for that, whenever it might come.

Then there was the time that Kliompte had decided to try to hang rough curtains across the doorway, thinking they would move prettily in the breeze. She had spent weeks weaving the curtains with a goats wool warp and a weft of yellowed grasses. As she was standing on the top rung of the ladder, however, the winds had wrapped the drapes around her legs, and Kliompte had fallen nearly twice her height. Shed spent half a year limping. Her failure to complain was deemed both a confession of her error and a sign of hubris. But in time shed recovered and things had gone back to normal. The brides lived without drapes.

All elsethe arrival of the overseer during the season of the ribbon tide, the planting, the harvesting, the moons, the mensesall else was the very definition of rhythm.

While Cossy loved Helia perhaps more than she did any of the other brides, even she was curious about what would happen when Helia died. Cossy would finally see a death. Then she would get a baby bride of her own to raise. She didnt want to say goodbye to Helia but her appetite for a dramatic occasion was immense. She had long ago understood that, eventually, time would have an irrevocable seam in it: life before Helia and life after Helia.

So for Cossy to turn and look at the green guest standing on the portico, one hand on the white column and the other touching the head of the goose, was to learn that there were other ways in which silken history could be torn by circumstance. Cossys life was now utterly changed. Her calendar of memory had been hijacked by the castaway. Life before and life after the arrival of human spindrift.

The brides all looked, but their hands kept at their work.

What are we to do? asked Tirr.

Helia was wordless, watching, so Mirka said, It isnt for us to do anything. Were at our station, performing our act of devotion. Theres no rabid boar rushing us from the margins of the cove, no lightning storm. Maracoor requires that we assemble time at this place. We follow the code of custom.

But it was too much for Cossy. A guest on the steps of the house, her hand at her brow looking this way and that, and noticing the brides at their duties. This was just another version of lightning, a wild boar in a disguise.

It was then that Cossy broke time, ripped it at the hem.

She stood and let her end of the netting trail back into the water. She gestured again, this time with both hands: Come down!

Cossy! Most of the brides were appalled.

But, Cossy thought, So what that she broke the line? Time would survive. Newborn brides carried to the harbors edge in their baskets hadnt been expected to do their share of netting with their unfurled infant hands, had they?

Cossy climbed three or four steps up the curved slabs of the basin. The guest was descendingwalking slowly on her ugly, tender feet. The goose came with her.

Standing, the guest proved taller than Cossy had expected. It had been hard to tell when she was laid flat on the floor. In fact, she wasnt unlike Kliompte in buildslight and strongthough where Kliompte was curves and curls, the guest was arranged on a stricter design. Shoulder-length dark hair whipped about her unveiled head. Above the maroon-striped tablecloth she had borrowed for a shawl, she seemed a green mask of exoticism; a walking pod of a maya-fruit tree.

Somehow when more clearly alive she seemed scarier. Cossy loved it.

Acaciana, warned Mirka in a low voice. But there was no stopping the youngest bride now. Greenie was