“Did you know,” Mr. Capulatio began, and placed his hand upon her small shoulder and gripped the place where the bones knitted together. He pointed to the flag with his other hand. “I began sewing that flag myself when I was young?” It was made of five deep-colored oblong cloths, each representing a different one of Mr. Capulatio’s constituents (whatever those were), all stitched together with golden thread. From afar it was uncommonly beautiful. Each of its oblong sections was made of some indeterminable color that wavered with the light like a beetleshell. He sighed. “Well, I’m still young. But in my childhood dreamings I saw that flag, and I knew that color was no color, but full of all the colors. That was my destiny. I couldn’t sew, Aurora, Queenie, but I sewed it anyway with a needle, a whalebone from this place, from the beaches where I was born. I had the needle years before I had the fabric or the even the idea I should make a flag.” He spoke with his eyes closed. “Sometimes it’s a person’s destiny to carry with him the sharp point of victory before he even knows what war he will fight. There is a preternatural sense of destiny among us chosen, I think.” He rubbed the lump of her shoulder. “Did you have such a feeling?”
“A feeling for what?” she whispered. She was often still afraid to talk to him, especially when he spoke like this. His voice was soft. She found herself leaning into his touch. They stared out at the morning-wet landscape, and the girl felt hope stirring inside her. Hope for what? She said, “What kind of feeling do you mean?”
“That you yourself are important.”
She thought, everyone feels that way. Because if you don’t feel important, how could a person bear to go on? “I don’t know what ‘important’ means.”
He laughed sharply. “O my. I do.”
Shortly afterward, Mr. Capulatio left to go tramping about his new encampment. My final encampment ever, Queenie. Glorify! Soon we will live as we have been destined! He locked her inside a cage in his tent and ordered two men outside to guard her. He told her as he shut her inside that this cage had been constructed to house his treasures, and she was his most treasured treasure, and now Especially now! he could not let anyone steal her away. She was the future. She was the rightful queen of Cape. He placed a lock the size and shape of an orange on the cage door and clasped her fingers through bars and twined them around his own, and leaned forward and looked into her face with his clear eyes the color of shallow creek water. “You are so beautiful,” he said. “Truly. You are a gemrock.”
He turned and dropped the key into a skin bag that hung from his belt, but spoke again before leaving the tent. “If I were a stronger man, if I were less mindful of the ways of other men…” he began, running his finger down the golden fringe that edged the tent flap. The length of his fingers always surprised the girl, and also they were thin and somewhat yellowish but from what she did not know, tobacco or an illness or some magic substance he touched in his workings. She liked those fingers that always touched her so very gently. They had, in their time together, become something she looked forward to.
He went on, “I would like to know you were safe no matter what, if I locked you up or not.” He jerked his head back toward the guards outside. She imagined he might hand her the key through the bars of the cage. They both knew she wouldn’t leave. But he stiffened when he heard the men outside laughing softly. She wondered as she looked at him whether he trusted anyone at all. This was wise in a way, and sad in another way, and probably unavoidable. He shrugged and blew her a kiss and then he went away.
The cage was not a terrible place to be. It was made of decorated metal with iron-lace flourishes. To pass the time, she slept and read from the book Argento had given her, which Mr. Capulatio had let her keep. The book was written like a fairytale, and it had been so long since she’d read anything at all. The True King was full of stories she had never heard. The people in the book followed a religion that was hardly anything like Argento’s superstitious worship of the Astronauts: Mr. Capulatio’s religion had real scriptures, they had relics from the old times. She braided and unbraided her hair as she devoured the handwritten pages, wishing she might never come to the end of it.
But before long, a woman strode in carrying a wooden basin of blood, which she set beside Mr. Capulatio’s desk. The girl froze. The woman wore tall leather boots. She made straight for the crates of books and papers around the desk without even noticing the girl. She spent a long while bent over his desk, rifling through his stacks of papers, holding a few up for inspection and then setting them down again. Her back was to the girl, and her light brown hair disheveled but clean. Nearly the same color as the girl’s, and just as long. As she leaned and stretched around the desk in search of more papers, her foot kept bumping the basin of blood. The girl thought she should say something, draw attention to herself, but for some reason she didn’t. The woman had such a fierce expression.
She appeared to be searching for some particular piece of information, but other than the papers Mr. Capulatio had been recently working on, all his books remained in their crates. There had been little time yet to unpack. The woman took a pry-bar lying nearby and began jimmying the lid off a crate.
Suddenly she seemed to stiffen. She turned around like she’d heard a noise, though the girl had not moved. Maybe the woman had heard her breathing. Her age was impossible to decipher—twenty or thirty or even older—but her eyebrows were thick and darker than her hair, mussed slightly. Beneath them, her eyes burned with intelligence. She reminded the girl, for the slightest second, of her mother Gimbal.
A long moment passed before the woman smiled. A frightening smile, like a grotesque shadow on a wall. It contained many emotions, all of which the girl had seen before on different people at different times, but never all at once together. Anger, immediately. A shard of despair. She saw fear, too, in the woman’s eyes.
The woman set down the pry-bar and approached the cage. “Hello,” she said. The dimness obscured her eyes, but they were magnetic all the same. The girl stared at her.
“Hello.”
“Well. You are not what I expected at all. At all.” She blinked.
“Who are you?”
She came nearer. She wore a huge necklace of feathers. Each one long and brown and green and stained to look like blood. It was very well made. The woman fingered it absently as she stared. The girl wondered if people around here wore such things. No one from her settlement had.
“What has David done? What has he done this time? Who are you, is the question.”
“Who’s David?”
The woman squinted. She was slight but looked strong, with small, well-formed muscles like bits of rock crystal running along the insides of her bare arms. She wore a leather shirt, and her face was so small and her features so crowded together that the girl thought she appeared to be squinting even when she was not. Still, there was something lovely about her. Perhaps it was her very appearance of strength. Solidness seemed to gather around her like a wall. “O my. What has he told you? You don’t even know his name?”
The girl felt her cheeks burn even though she was not afraid. “Mr. Capulatio?”
The woman laughed. Though not much taller than the girl, she seemed to crowd out everything else in the tent. She bent toward the cage, the necklace hanging off her chest, and examined the girl more closely. The girl could see her better too. This near, her cheeks were still supple, but the skin around her eyes had tiny fissures like drought-ground. The girl smelled a citrus perfume. She swallowed. “Mr. Capulatio took my brother’s carnival. Everyone there is dead now.”
“Except you? Unfortunately?”
“I was alone. My brother is dead.” The words spilled out because she could sense this woman meant her evil. “He says I am going to be the queen.”
The woman tilted her head. “How’s that?”
“I don’t know.”
“The queen? Or just a queen? There is a difference.” She ran her fingernail through the fronds of a feather on her necklace. “But how wo
uld you know that? You’re just a child.”
The girl felt her face tighten. “Why are you in our tent?”
The woman showed no expression. “Our tent? You are an our with him now? Says who?” She stepped very close and now the girl could see into her eyes, which were set deep in her face and appeared dark in a way that belied their actual color, which was the grayblue of a rock. But the eyes themselves in the riverbed of her face were awful to look at for some reason, so she looked away, until the woman called her back with a soft voice. “Little one, I’m talking to you. Explain to me this, if you can. Are you a prisoner? Perhaps a blessing and a charm to lend luck to our endeavors? Maybe through your honorable transformation from human to Head? Or are you some other part of our Great Work that is soon to transpire?”
“Great Work?”
“Hasn’t he told you that?” The woman smiled strangely. “What did he tell you? Anything at all? How awful for you.” She paused. “Where did you say he picked you up?”
“The field where my brother’s carnival was—”
“Was it perhaps a battlefield?”
“Not until he came and starting killing them all.”
The woman wrapped her fingers about the cage’s bars, just as Mr. Capulatio had done earlier. Perched on one finger was a gigantic blue glass ring. “I see. And you were just an unprotected fawn, as it were, innocently standing there waiting to be found? In the center of the poisonous continental desert?” She looked over her shoulder at the desk and all the books in their boxes, frowning. “You were a girl on a battlefield.”
“I guess I was.”
The woman tossed her hair behind her shoulders. “That is—at least to my ear—highly unlikely. Is it not more likely that he bought you from someone or someones who were hastening to be rid of you? For their own reasons, of course.” She clicked her fingernails on the bars.
“No.”
The woman’s hands were always moving. Now they were on her necklace, lifting and stroking the feathers, which were so glossy and long that they extended nearly to the center of her stomach. She wore a loose tunic, short-sleeved. Her knee-boots were constructed bloody-looking leather. Everything on her body was black but the feathers. “O,” was all she said.
They stared at each other. The girl had a very bad feeling indeed. She longed for him to come back and make this woman go away. “Who are you?” the girl asked again.
But the woman ignored her. Her expression was quickly gathering a darkness. “Has he told you that you are part of a vision?” Her face dropped and she closed her eyes wearily. The girl thought she had seen them tear up for just a moment before she shut them. “One of his visions was of a small girl upon a battlefield who would become queen, but we—or should I say I—had not taken that to mean his queen.”
“Why not?”
“Since he is lawfully married to me. He has been since he was sixteen years of age. That would mean that I am his queen already.” She shrugged. “A man can have only one legitimate wife. That makes you something additional. A concubine. What was your name again?” she demanded.
It made sense now, her jewelry. She was his wife.
The girl found her voice. “Aurora is what he calls me.”
“But what is your name?”
“I can’t remember.”
“How terrible for you,” she murmured. She spoke very much like Mr. Capulatio himself: with half-threats and vague intimations. She shared his cruel manner of a manipulative child. Still, though the girl saw through this behavior, the intended effect of which was to produce in her a great shame, it worked. She felt suddenly stupid for even trying to talk to this woman.
“Well, I was abandoned by my mother when I was a girl and then my brother died a terrible death I had to watch, so I have no family. So I have no name.” She glared at the woman. “Not that I would tell you, anyway.”
But she did have a name. She would never speak it. It was her mother’s name, and her mother had given her over to this life, whatever it was. How terrible or angelic of her, the girl did not know. Whatever risks were here, there would have been others if she’d stayed in the settlement with her mother and her mother’s new husband, riding out on the saferoads with them to learn Doctoring. She was unsure if she had wanted that, or for her mother to become jealous of her youth. But she had not wanted to be abandoned, either. The girl stared now at this angry woman and felt that she had ended up just as bad off here as when her mother left her with Argento. Her punishment back then had been to be in the carnivals with her lunatic brother. What would it be now?
“You’re right to keep it to yourself, at least in these times,” said the woman. “I, for one, wouldn’t ever trust anyone with my real name. Except my husband.” She began to smile. “Who is apparently also your husband, or so you think. Have you told David your name?”
“He didn’t tell me he was called David.”
“Why would he? You’re not his real wife.”
“Not yet.”
“If you were perhaps slightly more beautiful, I would believe he did love you, but his other concubines have generally been attractive or at least fertile. Do you have some other talent I am not seeing? Are you particularly good at cooking? Your mother, maybe, taught you that. I would teach my daughter to cook if I had one.”
The girl scowled.
“You appear to have only recently, in cosmological time, mastered the ability to walk and talk. Tell me, can you menstruate? It’s a fair question for a future queen.”
“Go away.” She had never bled. She felt ashamed of herself, her body. Her mother had told her how it would happen when it happened, and she wasn’t afraid. She expected it soon, but there was the trauma of constant motion to contend with. And her thinness. The woman was nodding as though the girl had said all these things aloud. It was as if she could read minds. “Don’t be sad. You can’t help it.” She stopped nodding. “Do you wish you were dead?”
The girl made a face. “Of course I don’t. Who would wish for death?” In fact, the girl hadn’t wished for death since Mr. Capulatio took her from Argento’s carnival. Not since she’d hidden her eyes when Argento died. She straightened her shoulders.
“Many do. Many have.” The woman studied her more closely. “It’s a fact that I’ve killed more people than David. I am myself an executioner—an executionatrix. I took my carnival by violence from my own brother when I was not much older than you. In fact, it was a marvelous coup. Very bloody.” She looked the girl up and down again. “I would even go so far as to say it helped David to love me. He likes a strong woman.” Then she shrugged. “How does it feel to be in a cage?”
“I’m here to keep me safe. Not because I’m a prisoner. That’s what he said.”
“O, of course. And he always tells the truth, I’m sure you know that.”
She looked to the ground, embarrassed. The blankets and carpets in the bottom of the cage made her feel like a captive animal. But there had been a needle-poke when the woman said she was Mr. Capulatio’s wife. The girl felt it growing now, an envy so sharp and tiny she’d hardly noticed, but now it began to burn. This was his wife? This maniac? He had a wife? Other concubines? How many? She couldn’t believe she’d never allowed herself to wonder about other women. The pricking oozed inside her like blood under the skin. She made a dark face at the woman, who tapped the orange-shaped lock with a clean long fingernail. “O dear, now don’t be angry,” she said. “You can’t have thought you were the only one. What’s he told you about me?”
She squared her shoulders and jutted out her lip, she couldn’t help herself. “He never said anything about you. Or any wife. Except that I would be his wife.”
The woman appeared to think. Finally she went back to the desk and pulled out the chair and sat down. She kicked the wooden bucket of blood for effect. “That’s my offering. My thanks to the heavens for his successful return. Do you know how much blood that is? How many people? I’ve been very busy.”
“It’s
grotesque.”
“Is it grotesque when David executes people?”
She remembered Argento’s dumb eyes as he was led to the block. Had he been drugged? She wanted to think Mr. Capulatio would have granted him—her—that mercy. She thought of her relief and sadness. She said nothing.
The woman began rifling through the papers again, this time with much more urgency. “My name is Orchid.” She spoke with her head in one of the crates. “My carnival is called Loss, this is my tent and David is my husband.” When she looked up, she was angry.
“What are you looking for?”
“A certain book.”
The girl clenched her hands. She had the very sure, very irrational feeling this book was the one she herself had been reading in her cage only moments before the woman arrived. She had not yet admitted to him that she could read, but he knew. Of course he knew. He could see her eyes fly across the pages of his own writing that he brought into their bed, where he sometimes read it aloud, holding the papers at an arm’s length as though this would give him greater clarity. When he hated it, which was all the time, he burned the papers with sulfursticks in a glass bowl set right between their legs on the blankets. They watched as the papers curled up like a dying centipede. He was destroying every evidence of his failures, no matter how small. He wanted to be very sure no one could ever accuse him of getting anything wrong.
The woman rummaged and searched. “Why do you need this certain book?” the girl asked, kicking it as slowly as she could under one of the carpets on the floor of her cage.
Wonderblood Page 7