Marianne, the Magus & the Manticore by Sheri S. Tepper

Author:Sheri S. Tepper [Tepper, Sheri S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-09-07T19:08:56+00:00

He had forbidden her to say goodbye to him, which made leavetaking somewhat tenuous. She was never quite sure when he would go or if he would go at all. When she laid her hand upon the doorlatch, however, he went away, leaving her to climb the four long flights to the cold room and the sagging bed. Evidently the reception was long over, for no sounds came from the woman's apartment. Sometimes Marianne did not see her for days, many long days, and she felt somehow that the woman had somewhere else to go from time to time, unlike the rest of them.

The next morning, however, it was the woman from Lubovosk who woke her, tapping on the door, calling, "Marianne, get up, get dressed. They're doing something new at the embassy today." Marianne almost refused to answer, almost kept her word to Macravail, but then decided that any hope was better than none. She agreed to go with them after breakfast, remembering from some misty past a voice telling her she was contrary—or was it to be contrary?—asserting her independence by refusing to hurry from the dining room even though the others were shifting impatiently in the hall. The red-faced woman was there, and the two sons of the duchess. The little old woman who swept the hallways was with them as well, her eyes frightened and soft beneath the swath of veiling on her hat. Marianne had never seen her in anything but apron and dusty skirt, a tattered shawl around her shoulders, but today she wore mittens and carried a parasol above the silly hat.

"It's a pretty parasol," offered Marianne, sorry now to have kept the old thing waiting,

"Everyone ought to have something," the old woman said.

"Don't you think so?"

The five of them moved off under the sardonic gaze of the woman who could have come from Lubovosk. Marianne expected to hear her laugh behind them at any moment, almost as though she remembered the laughter. When she looked back from the edge of the carnival ground, however, the woman was gone. In the zoo the phantoms moved restlessly in their cages, but only Marianne glanced at the spectral arms thrust through the bars, begging for food. The twin sons of the duchess strode along side by side, their arms around one another's waists to hide the fact they were joined at the lower body. When they arrived at the embassy, a fussy clerk sent them all to various rooms and told them to wait. Marianne sat in the empty office, listening to the hopelessly frustrated buzzing of a fly against the gray glass, dirty from a hundred rains and a hundred dust storms, admitting light only through the accidental fact that the filth was not perfectly evenly distributed. Outside lay the famed gardens of the ambassador, but Marianne could not see them.

A very long time went by before one of the consular staff entered the room, a bundle of forms under one arm, to sit at the desk and begin the questions.

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