WHEN I SAID “GOOD MORNING” to my bound-wife, I tried to hide my panic at having such a thing. The weight of her hung on me like a stone. Could I step out of her tent without telling her where I was going? What if I met some other girl right away who was better? Terpsichore sat in her bedroll watching me dress, taking a handful of the beads she had from the apothecary. I missed my own tent, my books, my roof. She gave me a long list of the things I would have to do today to satisfy her guild’s requirements for apprentices. I would not have to take exams to be accepted, she said, because I was wed to her, as if it were some great honor to make rags and flies. On and on she went like a roof master. Had I said I would apprentice here? Had I agreed to subject myself for life to the infinite ropewalks of Lascaux? Feh. Was I to provide for her or was she able to make her own work? Could we stay on the roofs? I went dismally with her to breakfast in Lascaux’s yurt. She and I looked like guilders now, rumpled and committed.
The girls elbowed one another and flirted with me. They were safe, now that I had a bound-wife. The boys stuffed their shirts with two buns each and rolled their eyes at me and winked. Idiots. I’d have done that myself the night before.
And then, worst of all, they all picked up their plates of breakfast and left us alone. They thought what? That I would undress her here and now if I could. But I wanted the opposite. She was attractive enough. However—oh, I could fill a book with however.
When I passed Grid later in the morning on the plank at Thebes, she looked me over and said, “Congratulations?” She asked me if the muse was happy and I shrugged, and said, “Of course she is. She has me.” But the joke fell flat. Truth: I didn’t know how my bound-wife was. Parsival might have checked in to see how his new bride felt after such a hasty binding, whether she looked at him and felt her spirits rise. But I was not, in fact, him.