Wonderblood

by Julia Whicker

  When they’d finally arrived in the carnival country, in its cosmic wideness across which the girl sometimes thought she could see the curve of the world, and when her mother rode away home on her white mule, when she vanished across the grasses, when Argento used a hot iron to sizzle that six-pointed star on her upper thigh, where he licked her, when her mother was gone and the girl had nothing and no one to believe in, she traced the star and wished, hoped, wondered. The pain of it all—Wonderblood—made the unreal real and so sometimes magic didn’t seem so much like a lie after all, and that confused her.

  She glanced at her brother, now. He waited, his breath in her ear surprisingly soft, odorless. He reached past her and touched the book. She sighed.

  “Come on. What’s the book about?”

  The pages were damp-heavy, words spidering across them, glaring up at her, but she loved them anyway because she knew she’d read this book again and again in the coming months, until she knew every word in it—she would read sitting under trees, hunched against the continental winds, she’d read it by the ponds where they’d stop to wash out their bedrolls. She’d read it in the timber cabin when they finally reached Manitoba, where the cold would freeze the eggs in her womb (her brother said), where she’d fall asleep thinking of crabs on the summer beach. O, lucidity, leave me, leave me. She turned the pages, full of words she didn’t understand and names she had never heard: Huldah, Lee, and yes, Kansas Cow. “It’s about the True King, I think.” She paused. “It’s written by an Executioner.”

  “The True King of what?”

  “I don’t know. It just says the True King. And then there are a lot of names and places.” She flipped more pages over gingerly. “It doesn’t look that old. Maybe someone made it.”

  Her brother made an expression, not a smile. “Someone makes everything. Read it to me. Why do you think I got it?”

  She read to him, a long and incomprehensible genealogy, and he seemed satisfied but she knew he understood not a word of it, because she didn’t. He was acting because he didn’t want her to think he was stupid. Then he leaned back and said, “Do you think the True King is one of the Astronauts? That’s got to be what it means.”

  She closed the book. A sadness had begun in her. She wanted to go outside the tent. She wanted to be away from him.

  His face bent horribly and he hunched forward. “You do believe that they’re coming back, don’t you? The Astronauts. It’s heresy if you don’t believe that.”

  She began to panic. “Yes?”

  He snatched the book from her and threw it into the corner, onto a pile of rags, where it sank like a fishing weight. With his other hand he pulled the cord on the tent flap, closed out the night and the glisten of dew on grass.

  “No,” she said, and braced her knee in front of her body. “Stop.”

  His almond eyes like unpolished metal. “No. Look.” And he took a little box from his pocket. “This too. This is the best thing. Here.”

  A white paper box. Inside, sawdust. In the sawdust, a pin, black glass, jet maybe, or obsidian, liquid shiny and faceted. A black so black it was silver. He snatched it from her and rubbed it on his shirt, blew away the last shavings of wood, then needled it to her nightshirt. “Pin’s loose. It’s old,” he frowned. “But I’ll fix it.”

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Ma. She gave it to me when she brung you here, told me to save it. Well. I saved it two years.”

  “I—” She felt numb. He called their mother Ma. The girl had never called her that. She wondered who Argento’s father had been, how he had become this. Her hand on the heavy brooch, pulling the fabric of her nightshirt down toward her nipple. “I don’t know what to do with it.”

  “Don’t do nothing with it for all I care. Anyhow some loony crone would kill you for it if you ever wore it for real.” He lowered his voice. “It’s nightrock. Black amber they call it. Fuck if I know how Ma got it, maybe she stole it off the dead. Or out of some sick bastard’s house.” He touched her cheek.

  “What’s it for?”

  He pinched her. “You wear it when somebody dies.”

  She began to cry, finally, big hot tears. “But somebody’s always dying.” In that moment, the girl felt the pain of the entire world and also her smallness in it, and it felt like: hopeless. There was another word. Endless. “I hate it here.”

  He seemed surprised she’d said it out loud. He looked at her the way adults look at children, with pity and sweetness and compassion, but then he hardened his face and nodded gravely. “Isn’t anyone alive who wouldn’t.”

  * * *

  Banded blue and gold sky and no trees and stages everywhere, for the executions. There was an old sign someone had found deep in the ground, mostly rusted away, the rest so buried that it had needed to be physically dug out, which took a long while because the metal had turned to lace, it was so delicate—that was what her brother told her—a gigantic wheel with red letters. That was how they knew this place had been called Iowa. She had no idea when that had been—so long ago.

  The carnival was made up of magicians and merchant Head Makers, and they set up booths and sold severed heads and polished bones and all sorts of intimidating talismans, and throughout the summer people came to the carnival country to buy their wares, to watch the executions, to trade horses, and to gamble. Always, this led to more executions. And more Heads, which was good for everyone, one and all. Her brother said so. Her mother had said they were all raving idiots.

  Argento never killed people himself—at least, he never killed the people he made into Heads. He bought his Heads from the executioners, who sought out magical humans, captured them, and beheaded them onstage while uttering the standard incantations. In Argento’s carnival, the incantations sounded like, Everymanandwomanisastar! and Silverstarfantasticspeardienow!

  Or sometimes the executioners didn’t behead their victims onstage, but hunted them like they’d hunted Cosmas the Uncrusher. Those Heads were harder to get and so more expensive to buy, so Argento charged triple for them. He threaded black quartz beads into burn marks on their foreheads to enhance their beauty. She’d watched him many times, outside at his workbench, squinting while he embedded the beads one by one. His tongue lolled to one side and occasionally he wiped sweat from his forehead. To embroider an entire unicursal hexagram took a day or more. The girl’s own Head, Cosmas, had a glittering forehead star, an always-open eye, lumpy like the cancers her mother used to cut from people. The thought of touching it made the girl shudder. Everything about her brother’s work revolted her, the way he made her sit by the tents while he sawed neckbones and yanked out the cervices of the spine, how he held each vertebra up to the light and inspected it, how he handed the good ones to her and made her polish them with a scratchy cloth until they were smooth, and then how he made her paint them bright black. How she had the feeling he would’ve kept her chained to the ground if he could’ve, if it had been acceptable, how he had chained her to the ground, actually—during her first weeks in the carnival—he’d chained her to the ground! Just so everybody knows, he’d said.

  So everybody knows what? It was only a few days before some of the old women—there were never any young women in the camps—arrived to squawk at Argento until he used a huge pair of shears to cut the chain. There? he’d screamed back at them, brandishing the blades. There, are you happy? If somebody grabs her it’s gonna be your fault, you sickdry wrinkle fucks. Stupid women!

  One of them, the older one, although it was hard to tell, had taken the girl’s hand and helped her up. She bent close and whispered, You will never be more important than you are right now. The girl had blinked.

  Argento’s carnival ran a northerly circuit, all the way up the center of the continent. It was dictated by Law that all carnivals had to winter over in the north, so that the countryland was free of them for some short time. She did not understand why things were this way, or who made the Law or what happened on the land when all the carnivals wen
t north, but she knew she hated the cold. Her brother’s carnival wintered with a small settlement of northern people. These people did not seem to care much about making Heads. They never judged the ways of others, no matter how peculiar. Many of the carnival men kept wives in little timber cabins: during her first winter there, the girl met Argento’s wife, a tiny large-breasted woman who slept odd hours and cooked river-fish in three inches of grease. The girl dreaded that cabin—the fat bodies so close together, the nameless children underfoot, the putrid skins of caribou nailed to the walls. The wife had bright eyes but she never looked at anyone.

  But if the cabin was bad, the journey to get there was worse. The merchants struck their booths in late summer and piled their furniture into wagons, repainted the giant skulls on the oilcloth tarps, re-shod their horses, and killed all the sheep and goats they couldn’t bring with them on the journey. By the end of the three-month walk up the center of the continent, they were ragged and half-dead, and their northern wives sometimes could not recognize them. But the women still came joyously out of their timber cabins like they were greeting old friends, bearing gifts they’d stored up all summer—pelts and painted skis and beautiful bowls carved from gypsum, and they brought with them the men’s children, too, now older and wilder. These children spoke a different language, so the girl couldn’t play with them. She never knew what to do in the northcountry, so she prayed for the months to pass quickly and sometimes she prayed for her brother to freeze to death in a snowbank, and sometimes she prayed for the courage to run away. And sometimes she wondered if courage could well up like blood under bruised skin, and if what she needed was just a needle to poke herself with to start the flow. Like freedom might pour out of pain.

  * * *

  When the girl woke, Argento was already gone, his blankets twirled in a nest, not even warm. The tent flap was open. She saw clammy sunlight on the deserted fire-ring. A yellow streamer tumbled across the field. A dog barked, a lone sheep in a bridle stalked past on shorn and twiggy limbs. Then, high above, almost like a breeze, came the roars of men in the distance. She raised herself on her elbows and listened. Metal ringing against metal. Fighting. She pulled the blanket back over her head and underneath it was moist, coppery, the smell of testicles. She could not sleep and she shivered, and soon she heard thumping hooves outside, then the chain-clank of wagons being dragged past by teams of horses. The men were hiding everything magical: all the gypsum and the glass and the mirrors, the hanging charms. Still Argento didn’t come for her and she felt like a fawn in the weeds—like her mother used to say—hide and wait for me, hide and wait. But when her brother finally stuck his head through the flaps, her heart popped, and she realized she’d been hoping he was dead.

  “It’s some other carnival.” He had blood on his cheeks, his lips, a foolish grin. “They want this field, but we’ve had this field ten years now. I helped take it, and sure as shit I ain’t about to let it go.”

  “The carnivals don’t start for a month,” she whispered. “Why do they want it now?”

  He shrugged. The blood on his hands was gritty and black; he snatched her wrists and pulled her into the morning. He shook her. “This is dangerous. I got to put you in with the Heads—Storch is pulling all the wagons into a ring to make them defensible.” He looked at her, her nightshirt, colorless fabric, and her knobby body beneath it. She felt him looking as though she were looking at herself. He wanted to protect her, not because he cared for her but because he wouldn’t abide anyone taking anything from him. He rubbed the thin fabric between his fingers. “Don’t let me catch you out once I put you away. Doesn’t matter what happens. If I catch you out—”

  A man staggered past, half his face hidden under red-purple pulp; clubbed. His destroyed head was a flower. She didn’t want to look, didn’t, but she did. Storch. He was bent double but glaring up at them as though they had hurt him, like he deserved more than this death, and she thought of Cosmas the Uncrusher, and wondered why anyone would execute a man who could heal. Storch’s blood made her feel nothing. That seaweedy smell of gore, though, reminded her of when her mother practiced surgeries on dogs. She was thankful when Argento flung her aside to steady his friend. “Fuck!” Argento said. “Storch! What happened?”

  A shattered skull. There was nothing to stop the bleeding. Storch wept, his eyes peculiar bright blue orbs. It would not be long before the blood was gone. He glowed the way dying people do. She dimly recalled that Storch was her brother’s business partner, that they shared the same wagon and two bony yellow horses, but somehow, at that moment, the thought made no sense. She stared at the two of them tangled together, at Argento cradling Storch’s head and cursing. He motioned her away and screamed, “Get to the wagon. Now!”

  She couldn’t move. Finally he kicked her.

  As she stumbled across the camp, among the pikes and ribbons and dead hair blowing in the wind, she passed a pierced horse, men scrambling for more weapons, an old woman staring into her tent as though trying to decide what to save. She passed empty booths, devoid now of their wares. Above her, a flock of birds. Storch had already circled the wagons at the bottom of a slight hill, on the other side of the field, this field that lay upon the earth like an unfurled scroll. She could not have imagined this place before she saw it, the highness of the land, or maybe it was nearness of the sky; she felt she saw it now for the first time, even though she’d been here before. She heard the fighting better now, could even see bodies beyond a copse of trees, past the border-fires. People rushed by but no one looked at anyone.

  Halfway to the wagons, she passed a tent, and beside the tent stood a man. He was not quite tall, perhaps her brother’s age, with a slick knot of black hair and a long curved knife. Clean, the knife, and him. A vest buttoned halfway up and leather boots with brass buttons. He was strange looking, not like anyone she’d ever seen before, so her stomach lurched and she stopped involuntarily. But he was just standing, staring across the field, at the shapes shrieking and colliding beyond the trees. Like he’d stopped mid-stride to bask. He wasn’t smiling but she got the terrifying impression he could smile at this fight. The girl turned to run but he’d already seen her and grabbed her and stuck the knife at her throat.

  He didn’t speak for the longest moment, but held her eyes, held them, and exhaled a word, nonsense, or maybe something in a magician’s language. Then he laughed. Why was he laughing? His fingers around her arm hurt. She drew back as far as she could but he tilted his head and regarded her gently, with eyes like an illustration in a book—he was from far away, she realized, except when he spoke his accent was familiar. Her innards pitched at the sound—home, Florida. “What’s your hurry?” he said. “I don’t often see a little girl. Dangerous times, dangerous place, all that.” At last he smiled, and she wanted to cry.

  She couldn’t reply. Terror twitched inside her and she was cold and hot again. Just do it.

  “I’m Mr. Capulatio. You are?”

  She shook her head.

  “Name? Come on, you got a name. I won’t tell.”

  She shook her head.

  He took down the knife and slid his hand from her upper arm to her fingers, and clasped them. His skin was damp and callused. “Makes the heart glad to see a young girl. Makes me feel lucky.” He pointed across the field at the killing. “That’s my carnival. Better to be with me, don’t you think? With us? We got this whole circuit locked up and then some. And for a grander purpose. What’s your name?”

  She felt tears and the powerful urge to tell him, but bit her lip until she tasted blood. He continued to smile. “That’s all right,” he said. He leaned toward her, blew sweet breath in her face. The air tasted like mint, like he’d been chewing herbs. She threw a desperate glance over her shoulder toward Argento, who was surely not watching, who was probably already dead, he was so stupid. Mr. Capulatio chuckled. “You look like a beginning, a sunrise. An aurora. A girl in white, on a battlefield? That’s hope for a new day, if ever I saw it. So that’s
what I’ll call you.” Then he said frankly, “Nobody’s going to save you, Aurora. Nobody will even try. Not from me, not now. You know why?”

  She kept quiet. He began ushering her across the field. In the air floated a silence, eerie and loud and filled with the erasure of life. Soon enough they were stepping over bodies, and her feet were covered in blood and worse. She kept catching her legs in her nightshirt. He marched her to a great tent festooned with banners and garlanded with Heads, some old and some fresh, still dripping, uncured, spinal bones spiking obscenely from their necks. In her ear, he whispered, “I am the future. The True King. You can call me King if you want. It’s what everybody is going to be calling me.”

  * * *

  Mr. Capulatio sent someone for her belongings, because she kept crying. She couldn’t stop, not once she understood what was happening. Her brother’s carnival was mostly dead—she’d stepped in their viscera at the edge of the field—and the captives would shortly become Heads, and though she didn’t care about that, she must’ve cared about something because she sobbed and sobbed in Mr. Capulatio’s huge tent while he watched her merrily, drinking and occasionally consulting a mysterious book. He took notes. This lasted hours, him watching her and smiling. She watched him back when she couldn’t cry any more: his eyes were mesmeric, suspended above the slashes of his cheekbones like leaping fish. He was some kind of king. People came to the tent and he told them what to do, many of them dressed in finer clothing than anyone in her brother’s carnival. They wore yellows and purples and blues deeper than the middle of the night. And other men came and went too, these just as ragged as Argento, but their eyes burned bright with what seemed like a mad love for him.