“I had wanted it so I could record the names and numbers of the carnivals that have met here today on the plain. To support him. To crown him. To defend him. But now I want it to prove to him that he was in error to have brought you here.” She eyed her. “Grievous error.” When she was met with the girl’s uncomprehending grimace, she returned to the desk chair. She spun it around and threw her slender limbs over it, sitting like a man but much more beautifully. “I am his scribe.”
“Did you write the book?”
“Do you know the book I’m talking about?”
The girl shook her head.
“Let me tell you a story, since you are just a child.” She lowered her voice to a dramatic whisper. The girl could feel herself beginning to hate this woman. “Only I trusted him in the beginning. Because I loved him. He was just an orphan once upon a time, with strange visions that would possess him body and soul. And I was a girl, not much older than yourself. We had made our covenant already, passionately and many times, upon the green grass, in the streams and brooks of the countryside. Yes, we were careless. In our desire to be alone together, we strayed from the saferoads. So you must understand that at first we worried his visions might be a raving illness. Maybe Bent Head, who knew? We were on the land so often, and who could account for his frightening premonitions without at least considering a medical causation? We came from a settlement where they still ate cows. A backward place. Not far from here. Even I wondered if he was sick—I admit my faith was tested then.”
“We ate cows in my settlement too,” the girl whispered. “At least the other people did. My mother said it was bad.”
“Florida, land of the cow-eaters. Only idiots and magicians are from Florida.” Orchid kicked her heels on the carpeted ground and rolled her eyes. “How he does love strange women.”
“I’m not strange.”
Orchid ignored her. “The point is I trusted his divine knowledge. He told me he wasn’t sick, and I believed him. Only me. Because I loved him. Do you know how he felt all those years? When it was only me who believed he was the True King?” She leaned back again, waving her hand. “Who are you, anyway, to comfort him? You’re a child, you have no thoughts of eternity.”
“I—”
She put her finger to her lips. “When he would go out with the carnivals preaching and cutting heads, before we ever had a carnival of our own, I would wait at the settlement, transforming his scribbles into legibility. His writing is unformed, it is…” She reached for the papers and shook one in the air to make her point. “I made sense of what he saw in the visions.” She paused thoughtfully, her hand lingering on the paper. “I’ve been with him through all that.”
The girl crossed her arms.
“Do you love him?” She came over to the cage again and picked up the orange-shaped lock and let it fall loudly against the bars, once, then twice. In her thin hand the gold lock bulged nearly obscenely and the girl tried to imagine this woman with a sword, hacking off heads before a windblown crowd, and found she could see it better than she would’ve liked. And then the girl felt a stirring in her chest that was difficult to bear: a renewed awareness of her captivity. The woman clanged the lock again and leaned her face in very close to the bars. “Love is impossible without history.”
That was the very moment when Mr. Capulatio himself strode back into the tent and beheld them at odds—the girl standing on her guard at the center of the cage, and the strange woman with the necklace rattling the lock. He did not meet the girl’s eyes or even look at her. He stared directly at Orchid, who sucked her cheeks in and pursed her lips. They formed a narrow “o.” “You’re here,” he said easily to her, after a long silence. “I was out looking for you.”
“I was looking for you. But instead I found this.” She fanned her hand at the cage but her face remained impassive.
“You won’t even come kiss me? It’s been a whole six months, Radiance. Come here.” He opened his arms. That day he had worn his most spectacular cape, which was the color of goldenrod on the outside and lined with midnight blue, to greet his constituents at the meeting. The girl had watched him pluck the cloak from a trunk, shake it out, and admire himself in the small mirror above his writing desk. He swept this cape behind his shoulders, smiling handsomely. Evidently his meeting had been a success.
Orchid was not smiling. “O, but you had many other touches I’m sure in the meantime.”
“That’s the first thing you say to me after six months?”
Orchid’s expression became a frown. “I shouldn’t be saying a single thing to you. I’ve spent this last half-year at my desk working on the revelations you left in such a half-formed glob, making sense of them and circulating them here, at the risk of my own life and certainly at the expense of my own happiness. I’ve spent this last half-year readying all this that you see around you, this entire gathering, your constituents from all the corners of the land and who have met here to defend your cause because they believe in you and love you, despite dangers and troubles and unknowns! And I come to your tent to find this? This child?”
“Yes.” He was nodding. “Another queen. Not any queen, but the queen. Of our revelation. My queen.”
“What?” The girl saw her fingers knotting and unknotting behind her back.
“The fulfillment of my prophecy. This girl is a solid piece of our destiny.”
“That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
He clasped her shoulder. “You should have been there! Her appearance! Upon the field! In a battle! Just as I saw in my head many years ago! In a white gown! Can I help it that she’s beautiful?”
Orchid raised her eyebrows. “I was not there, David, because I was here. Doing what you needed me to do here.”
He wrapped his arms around her with a familiarity that made the girl’s heart blacken like meat on a stake. She wished she could turn away, but instead she held on to a cage bar and interlaced her fingers through them as though they could pull her up out of her jealousy.
Mr. Capulatio whispered, “Perhaps, my love. But I found her just like my vision predicted. I can’t take the Cape without my divinely appointed queen. It would be madness.”
“The prophecy in the book is certainly not about anyone living now. I should know, I wrote it myself. It would be madness to enter the coming battle with a child by your side instead of me. What are you even thinking?”
“Hear me, Orchid—you haven’t been infallible in the past, have you? Dearest? The girl queen we wrote about is not a future-queen of a distant age. She’s here today, now, in front of you. This is her. That is my interpretation of the passage. Please consider it before giving in to this, ah, unflattering jealousy. How was I to know that you were wrong until I saw that you were wrong with my own eyes? When I saw the girl standing on the field?”
Orchid said nothing.
He said, “She was wearing white.”
Nothing.
“I trust you. I have trusted you all along. I hope that you trust me too.”
Orchid’s silence went on too long and seemed like a challenge between them.
“It’s my vision,” he said at last. “I should be able to interpret it.”
Orchid whirled on her heels and went back to the books. “O no,” she repeated again and again, tossing books aside. “O no, O no, you are wrong wrong wrong. You haven’t spent time with the words the way I have, you haven’t studied them—”
He went after her and grasped her shoulder, pulling her back. “I am not wrong.”
“I’ll find it and prove it to you. It says, ‘A young sigil dressed all in white shall appear when at last the rockets have returned to earth, and this sigil shall sit enthroned during all the days of heaven.’” She was muttering now. “I wrote it a hundred times in a hundred letters to a hundred of your constituents.” She looked up and a plaintive note entered her voice. “‘Heaven’ is not now, David.”
“But how can you know?” he asked.
She threw s
ome more books from the trunk onto the rugs and kept digging, all the while speaking more angrily. “I know, David, because this does not feel like Heaven to me. Seven in my own carnival died of Bent Head since you left, even though we created more Heads this season than we ever have. They did nothing. The Disease is still in the ground everywhere, even on the saferoads, no matter what you say. I know, David, because I am still here on his wretched planet with these wretched people and I am not gliding freely up through the sunshine glare of ozone in a celestial vehicle, like you promised, David,” she spat. “I know because my own humanity is not disintegrated, is not made perfect. I—” Her voice wavered slightly, but when she turned to make what the girl assumed would be a spiteful face, her eyes were dense and unreadable and showed no emotion at all. “The rockets have not returned for us.”
Mr. Capulatio merely shrugged. “I love you dearly. You speak like a warrior-scholar, your gift for translating my words into beautiful writing has gained us thousands of followers. But Radiance, the rockets have returned. As I knew they would. Even at the precise time I suspected and not a minute sooner. I am here at the Cape, and so are they.”
Orchid’s brows knit together. “What?”
“Did you stargaze lately, my beautiful wife, wife of my boyhood, wife of my first heart?”
“Yesterday.” She frowned. “No, two nights ago.” Her face was losing color. The girl knew that Mr. Capulatio looked at the sky every night, without fail. Orchid wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. “The days run together. I can’t remember. I have been so busy, I…”
Mr. Capulatio was nodding vigorously. “As sometimes happens. We are all busy people. But we shouldn’t fall down in our worship, ever, especially in this Age of Times. Our hearts should always be afloat with the ecstasy of shame, which drives us ever toward vigilance. Constance, Radiance, is required of us all.”
“Stop talking like that to me. I was constant.” She spread her arms in a helpless flourish but her voice had weakened. “All this. This carnival, all this—” She paused and narrowed her eyes. “What is the Age of Times?”
“A new revelation. Soon we’ll write it down together. But now is the time for rejoicing; we will go to the shore and build an altar of oyster-shells. Then, tonight when you go out to look at the heavens, you will see the new light of the first rocketship. You will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am divinely blessed. Tonight we shall make upon our altar a green phosphorescent flame and go on a raft into the circle of the sea and there you—you, Orchid, Priestess-Wife and scribe—will marry us. You will be her sister, her guidance, her own Radiance as you have been mine. Who better to teach her how to be the king’s queen than the king’s first wife?”
Orchid breathed quietly for a few moments. Then she turned to the girl and cried, “Did you hear? Do you understand?”
She did not understand. The rockets had returned? Did this mean the world was ending? Or just beginning? Their religion was strange to her, their faith baffling, but she understood that she was important to whatever they believed, just as she understood the look of eagerness in Mr. Capulatio’s eyes when he gazed at her. Her mother had said all religions were madness, and here in her cage, the girl thought again she may have been right.
Mr. Capulatio unfastened his cape and stood before them both in his beautiful clothes. He opened his arms. After a time, Orchid slipped into them, all the while eying the girl with a look not of hate but of gigantic loss—fresh-cut, still squirting. She was not finished with her objections, far from it. The girl was more scared of her than before. With Mr. Capulatio’s back to her, all she saw of him was the way his shoulders curved around Orchid’s body, how they formed the top of an inverted triangle, and she saw how strong he was, and she again felt a thrust of agonic jealousy, so she turned her eyes away and did not watch them as they kissed in the low lamplight. She heard their mouths touching wetly together, and when she did finally look she saw Orchid’s eyes blazing at her over his shoulder.
CHAPTER 4
THE COMET
It was a lonesome truth that John D. Sousa, Chief Orbital Doctor, astronomer, and scholar of holy texts, named as he was after ancient magicians both celestial and musical, had still not discovered how to make that which was unvisible visible. Though he used ancient mirrors and water tables and though he fasted and studied and sacrificed and calculated, he had not yet, in all his years, been able to call down any real revelation. Not a single one.
He was now nearly forty, and it was recognition of this monstrous failure that drove him at present to discount the manifold wonders he had created over the course of his life. During his tenure at court, John had adjusted and re-cast thousands of pages of his predecessors’ charts, compiling them finally into what was considered the foremost work of scholarship of the age—a vast New Cosmology of Orbits. The book was expansive and contained information from hundreds of places, translated and reinterpreted and reimagined. It was a beautiful work. But now, when John looked at the book, he felt only revulsion. Huge and ungainly, it signified nothing but a torturous waste of his talents—as precise as it was uncreative. They were scientific but not revelatory. They declared, in short, nothing that was not already known.
He continued to pour over texts and pray as though he might yet make some discovery that could give meaning to his life. He still rose every day at the golden dawn and worked some nights straight through until morning again. But in those sweaty torch-lit hours John had begun to understand what was perhaps the most lonely truth of all: failure meant something far worse than he’d imagined as a younger man. For John had tried his entire life to predict the exact day and hour of the return of the rocketships, but recently, he found himself pursuing this vocation with not a little fear and trembling in the face of the what-if, for what-if he had indeed succeeded—not in predicting the exact day and hour—but what-if he had proved inadvertently that there were no shuttles to begin with? That no such artifacts ever existed?
Did John anymore believe it was even possible that the shuttles (which were supposed to convey the chosen heavenward into the forever of forevers) were really and truly coming back? If they had ever existed to begin with, why should they return? From where? They would come back to earth, past the dome of heaven? Preposterous. The only objects that ever descended were ragged pieces of burnt-up metal from the ancient past. And meteorites. And rain and wind. What-if all his scrying and magic and pursuit of the illusory had already revealed an answer? An unpalatable one, but an answer nonetheless? This was the bleak possibility that troubled him more each day.
It so happened that in the almanacs John drew up yearly for the court, he included all the changes an observer of the heavens might have occasion to witness, should he turn his eyes to the sky on any given night of the year—constellations, meteor showers, phases of the moon, star-risings and star-settings. Though valued by King Michael, who was particularly fond of divination, these predictions were an art to which John had not devoted considerable time in years; the formulas had been worked out centuries before his birth by men with more mathematical genius than himself, and John merely applied them diligently, like a fastidious clerk. They did not engage his imagination or advance his larger quest, which was of course the discovery of the Return Date.
So when, on the fourteenth day of November, after a tedious day of calculating horoscopes for friends and enemies of the crown, John crossed his own small courtyard and happened to glance into his newly filled reflecting pool, he was astonished to see shining in the center of the glassine water a bright, unfamiliar orb. He bent down and looked closer. Under the water were brocaded carp, just purchased for his new manor house. They were arm-thick tubes of variegated flesh, with fins wavering gently in the currentless pond. But atop them, on the water’s surface, John saw the unmistakable curve of light that indicated a celestial body in motion.
For a long moment, he gazed at that radiant bend and felt nothing. Then a thin panic leapt into his throat and he realiz
ed he had been holding his breath. His heartbeat sped up. He had not forecast this—whatever it was. John flopped back on his behind in the sandy earth and looked upward finally, searching the sky.
He called in a hoarse voice for his servant Mizar. The man emerged shortly from the gardening shed and brandished a small box, talking as he approached. “You can see,” Mizar barked, “how wonderfully the new pond comets are faring! The colors! The dealer said you cannot find carp this color anywhere, that he has made them himself in his own laboratories specifically for your lordship. And that we should only feed them these.” He opened the wooden box and tilted it downward; John did not look inside because he was still looking up. “They are dried and pulverized tadpoles. I will of course do the drying and pulverizing myself for subsequent batches. But the catching of the tadpoles might better be assigned to a younger member of your household, although I suppose the exercise would be not so terrible for my”—and here he gestured to his paunch, John sensed it without even looking—“well, I could use it.” Mizar paused and shook the box in John’s face and then pointed to the carp. “Sir, do you like the pond comets?”
It was Mizar’s habit to peck about fretfully. He was as boring as a woman, but John had long ago learned that Mizar had to be extraordinarily annoyed to raise his voice. “Do you like the new pond comets, sir! They only just arrived today. I acclimated them to the pool as instructed by the breeder, by submerging them in their own separate bowls over the course of five hours.” Mizar knelt beside his master and pointed at the pond. “That is one of the new ones, I believe, with the darker head. Have you ever seen such a lovely fish? I say they were worth every cent.”
“Look up, Mizar,” John said gloomily. Mizar glanced at him. John said, “At the sky, look up!” He shrugged upward.
Mizar looked. The white underglobes of his eyes shimmered blue with the condensed light of the skies. He looked back at John. Between them lay some fundamental gulf that John had only ever been able to guess at in moments like this, when he knew himself to be filled with the horror of the possible, and Mizar to be merely amused by it. “A real comet?” he asked.
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