Wonderblood

by Julia Whicker

  “Part of your job is to explain things to me when I wish them explained, right? But it’s like you’re speaking a different language. You do this thing where you start in the middle and then I’m lost.”

  “Your Majesty…”

  “You’re paying for these sheets. It’s coming from your salary.”

  “I insist!”

  “You were saying something about an assistant?

  He was dazed. The handmaid still fussed with the sheets, using first her left foot and then her right to swab them into some unintelligible order. The heft and locomotion of them across the floor, all the blood—O! Might the women have died? Had Tygo magicked them after all? His mouth moved. “My assistant?”

  She huffed. “This is what I mean! You were just saying!”

  “Yes, my Lady Queen, of course. May I bring him in? I am sorry to say that only he can aptly explain it to you. Forgive me for everything. I’ll pay, a hundred times over, I’ll pay for all this.”

  “Yes, okay,” she sighed, glancing at the door.

  John called for the guard to produce Tygo, handcuffed again, but this time with his feet unbound. He came right into the room as though he had been waiting for just this chance to explain everything. His too-large pants gapped at the waist and dragged slightly on the floor. John noticed again then how uncommonly short Tygo was, and yet he did not seem short. Nor did he appear to have any misgivings about this or any situation John had yet observed him in. Tygo smiled at the queen, a quick and dazzling smile, and John could not understand the look that momentarily crossed her face: amusement?

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello,” he said, still smiling.

  She waited for Tygo to speak. But he said nothing. John wished he were standing closer so he could nudge him—didn’t he sense that Alyson did not like speaking first? But Tygo waited and waited. His smile slowly slid down his chin and left his body altogether. Alyson narrowed her eyes at him palely. John had often noticed she looked nothing like her rumpled, stocky father Marvel. He saw no hint of her father in her, except … except in her eyes, so very pale green, like diluted sulfurous nuggets, chalky and impermeable. They remained on her earless guest like veils, opaque partitions separating her soul from her face. Alyson gazed without blinking at Tygo, and at last, with no hint of retreat in her voice, she asked, “You are…?”

  “Tygo Brachio. Or people have called me the Peacock, or William Tygo, or one of a hundred other names. Didn’t the Lord Astronomer tell you? I’m his new assistant.”

  She laughed. Laughed? Her cheeks crowded upward and forced her eyes into small crescents. Now it was she who blushed as her laughter left off, and still she looked at Tygo most intently, unconcerned, it seemed, with the livid pulsation in her face. “You’re both dressed terribly,” she said. “Didn’t you have anything nicer to wear to visit the queen?”

  Tygo pulled a handful of dull fabric free from his chest and let it fall back again. “Servant’s clothes was all they gave me, I don’t know his excuse. Also I didn’t expect the queen to be a smoker. You must smoke all the time. It smells like it.”

  She ducked her head indignantly and waved her blue pipe with her other hand, dispersing the haze around her. “I can do what I want. I’m the queen.”

  “I’m only saying it’s bad for you.” He smiled again.

  John’s stomach dropped. “Your Beauteousness, I apologize again—”

  Alyson ignored John and leaned forward. “You don’t know that.”

  Tygo shrugged. “No, I do. I also knew you would all be bleeding, and here we are. You want to know why you’re all bleeding. Right?”

  “Do you know?”

  “The question you’re asking is really ‘did I do it?’ Am I right in assuming that? And the short answer is no, of course not, it’s not possible for me or any other person, ‘magician’ or otherwise, to fix it so you and all your ladies…” He looked pointedly at John then, but John would not meet his eyes. Tygo straightened and enunciated, “… Are bleeding at once. That’s the medical term. The discharge of blood from your bodies is not caused by magic. That’s not my opinion, it’s a simple truth. Now, I don’t want to have a discussion about politics, so we should agree to disagree here. But let me promise you, Queen Alyson, I don’t do ‘magic.’ The Astronomer and I have covered this at length.”

  “Well, did he do it?” she said, with a cursory nod in John’s direction.

  “From my admittedly short experience with him, I’ll say that he doesn’t do ‘magic’ either. He spends most of his time with his instruments—”

  “His what?”

  “Telescopes. Astrolabes. Charts,” Tygo replied, with a wink at the queen, so quick John could hardly believe he saw it. “Math.”

  She smirked. “John Sousa, in my mind, is always doing spells or stabbing birds through the throat or something like that to make his predictions. But you’re saying he doesn’t?”

  It was as though the little hideous man had put John over a burner, and steam rose up through the top of his head. “I perform calculations based on numbers our forefathers collected many years ago,” he said through a tight mouth. “I would have been delighted to show you. I could easily make up a simple series of predictions while you look on—”

  “O god. No.” She was laughing again now. “No, please, it’s okay.” John’s face went slack. Tygo smiled openly, and greater still was the joy in his eyes, precise dark pools with a black sheen, water at the bottom of a well.

  Alyson said, “At least Michael makes it sound interesting when he talks about it. Which is all the time, god.” She waved her hand, a swirl of multicolored nailtips. “You were saying, Tygo Brachio?”

  He stepped forward. “I was saying this: although it’s well known to most Walking Doctors that women, when boarding together, will often begin to cycle together, we don’t know why. There doesn’t seem to be any accepted explanation, but a guess recorded in the books has been that the lead woman—the most fertile woman, that is, in the group—somehow changes the bodies of the subordinate women to bring menstruation in line with her own cycle.”

  She smirked but said nothing.

  Tygo said, “But obviously this is not what happened here, as you have all been living together for a long time. So whatever has caused the bleeding could only be something impressively out of order, a thing of the most extreme magnitude.” He held up a finger. “I’m sure you and your ladies have noticed the stella nova?”

  Keenly, she nodded. “We saw it earlier and now they are saying there is another.”

  John heard this but could make nothing of it. Another one? A deep distress began to crash within him, knocking his worries together like cylinders on a wind chime. Another comet? Tygo too appeared confused, but quickly blustered through it with a nod. They had just been outside, had they not? In the widening luminous evening they had just ridden through, cut as it was by gray-purple clouds stacked atop one another, they had seen no trace of another comet. Had they? Even as John uneasily recalled the landscape from their carriage ride, he knew he had been distracted and not at all in a state of mind to properly notice anything, least of all some new, miraculous manifestation that was most likely hidden by clouds. He hadn’t really looked up, he who should always be looking.

  He had read nothing in his books about a double comet, not during this century. O god, when had he last read up on comets? Would Mizar know? John looked about without realizing it, so used was he to Mizar clicking behind him in some spirit of helpfulness; Mizar had memorized almost as many of the charts as John. But his servant was nowhere to be seen, probably down taking a luxurious look at the exposed bodies on the east wall of the palace, holding his nose and cackling with some guard or another.

  “Yes, another one,” said Tygo. “And I’m sure you’ve already figured out what they must be.”

  Alyson answered, a slight pursing of her lip betraying her puzzlement. “Of course it must be the shuttles returning. Right? You’re saying that�
��s what’s caused our bleeding.”

  Tygo began pacing in front of her. He hunched over just so, to indicate deep consideration, even a little confusion. John bristled in silence.

  “Yes, it may be the Return.” Tygo nodded slightly. “When I predicted the bleeding, I was hoping to prove myself of immediate usefulness to the Lord Astronomer—I confess that it wasn’t so much a prediction as it was a guess. An educated one. I was hoping he’d take me in, let me help him sort all this out, since he doesn’t seem able to make heads or tails of the physical aspects of what’s happening to you all. And—” Tygo held up his hand. “I admit, I wanted to save my own skin. I don’t want to die, your Majesty, just because I know a thing or two about the human body. Just because I’ve done some surgeries in my day. Anyway, I figured such an extreme celestial event was bound to be affecting you ladies bodily. I even feel it in myself,” he said, lowering his voice and moving his chained wrists near his waist. “I’d tell you where, but…” He shrugged. “I wouldn’t want to offend your dignities. I’m sure the Lord Astronomer concurs.” He looked over at John, eyebrows high, and then Tygo flashed one lid up and then down; another wink, this time at John, and Alyson could not have seen it for Tygo was turned at that moment entirely toward John himself. “Would you agree, John?” he asked. “May I call you that, Lord Astronomer? John?” He leaned back toward the queen and said in a low conspiratorial tone, “We haven’t even had time to discuss the formalities of our professional collaboration yet. But I think Lord Astronomer would agree that I’ve already made myself more than useful.”

  Agitated, John ran his dehydrated hands through his hair, which flopped back unworkably onto his forehead. Tygo was lying to her—he no more believed in the return of the shuttles than he believed in the efficacy of any magic, as he’d made plain on the carriage ride. He’d been cast into a jail cell precisely because of his heretical beliefs. Why would he tell her it was the shuttles? John felt he was losing track of some important thread, that he was watching it slip past him into the open world, and afterward that he would never see it again—the thread was his singular agency, that he would never draw back. Tygo even now was spinning out some story that made only the dimmest sense to John. To save his life. To impress the queen. And why not? It was a performance. It struck him that Tygo was an actor more than anything else.

  He didn’t understand anyone or anything around him. He found himself numbly agreeing with Tygo, even heard himself talking as if from a far-off prominence: “Yes. It must be the Return, I have every evidence of it. The charts indicate … well, there is much to suggest that we should … In fact, your Beauteousness, I was just about to insist that you bring the king thusly or else we should go to him; this is the moment. We should begin making a … a … a plan of some kind.”

  Her face, inexpressive still. “A plan for what?”

  Tygo stepped between them. “We don’t know, is what the Lord Astronomer is trying to say. What we’re trying to say—both of us—is that please, please don’t be distressed about the bleeding or any other vagaries of the body during this unique time. Something much more important is about to happen! Have you not wondered at the arrival of the enormous outlaw carnival?”

  “They have their eye on it.” She said slowly, knitting her brows. “We’ve had uprisings before, like during the Unrest. They never get inside the walls.” Then she shrugged. “Nothing comes of it in the end.”

  “This may be different. Maybe they’ve come because they know it’s the Return. Who knows? Maybe they’ve come because they want to be here when it happens,” Tygo said.

  She bent forward excitedly. “What do you think will happen?”

  Tygo took his place by John—he was clearly closing the interview. An acrimonious bile rose in John’s throat. Tygo had caught the queen’s eye and now was looking somewhat impertinently at her, in way that John distrusted, leaning in to meet her with barely restrained interest. Her own eyes seemed to search every corner of Tygo’s face, looking across the slope of his nose and up to those idiotic star tattoos, clustered like freckles on the left cheekbone. “Do we have your permission to keep at our magic?” Tygo asked. “Our work is important, John’s right.”

  Her lips, full and small as two buttons, turned downward as she nodded. She said, “You know those tattoos look stupid on you. I just noticed you have no ears.”

  He bowed a little and swung his arms as if to stretch them above his head, if they had been unchained. “Youth!” he laughed. “I had a good time. And then a very bad time. It’s a common tale.”

  “You’ll come back in one day to tell me everything you’ve discovered?” Was she asking him? Her lips parted, resolved themselves again into a perfect bud.

  “I’d tell you anything, my Queen.” He smirked delicately. Tygo took John’s sleeve and turned him physically toward the door. As they exited the chamber, they heard her giggling with her handmaiden, and then the dog was placed on the floor and they heard its jubilant scrabbling as it raced after them, but before it reached their heels the heavy white door slammed shut, and at John’s side Tygo had also begun laughing. “I think she liked me, eh?” he demanded. “What a gorgeous creature she is. I can’t stand it.”

  John glowered.

  Then they were walking alone past one of the immense windows at the top of the tower, and John stopped in a stupor, squinting. Wait, it was there. Just there, in the gleaming dark. A second arc, faint to be sure, but soaring high in the sky not more than a few degrees from the first light. And beneath them, a growing mass of people had convened an outlaw carnival—for what? What reason could there be besides the obvious?

  There came over him the undeniable impression that all reason was leaking from the world, that he was a faucet, that through his miscalculations all things would slowly but surely upend themselves. What could these lights be, if not the shuttles? It seemed fitting that after decades of failure, John, who had his whole life long desired truth and order, should now be reliant upon a con-man who may well have real visions. Why shouldn’t the truth, when it finally came to John Sousa, be revealed by a liar?

  CHAPTER 12

  THE WEDDING

  The way to the shoreline had been lit for them by a legion of the faithful. People lined the rocky path in a winding route that seemed meant to prolong their march to the sea. The surrounding crowd was innumerable in the half-light, face after face turned to the girl in a euphoria of shared belief: here a set of eyes that cried, there a pair of hands reaching to touch Mr. Capulatio or his betrothed. And somehow, she found she was on the cusp of sharing their hope. Excitement welled up inside her as she completed the final steps of the processional and arrived at the first dune, hand in hand with Mr. Capulatio. The ocean now was very loud, breaking only a hundred yards in front of them. They mounted a weatherworn set of steps that crossed the dunes and fell down again onto the soft pale beach. When their feet touched the sand, Mr. Capulatio whispered in her ear, “We’ve made it.” And she didn’t know if he meant to the sea or something else.

  At the base of the steps, they removed their shoes. Piked Heads loomed all around, grinning deaths lit up by torches thrust in the sand between them, one after the other, all the way down to the foam of the ocean. The girl counted thirty, forty Heads at least, all lined up opposing one another to form a kind of aisle, and wafting around them a tangle of streamers in the colors of his carnival, purple, red, orange. Beyond this, the people were all waiting in the darkness, all watching her.

  She was trembling—with excitement, confusion. Damp in her armpits. They were going to walk down the center of the aisle. That was how weddings went. Mr. Capulatio took her face in his hands while they still waited. Shadows, colored like the inside of an eyelid, bounced across the sand at her feet. Suddenly the crowd seemed quieter. There was whispering, the breathy sound of a wind instrument from someplace close by, and the murmur of the ocean. It was only then she fully realized she was back. He had taken her home, just as he said he would. He had
kept his word—he had taken her to the sea. It lay black and silver in front of them like a wavering net. “Are you all right, Queenie?” he asked her softly.

  How could she answer? Her mouth yielded up some formation of the word “yes,” and then he had his arms all around her in a happy daze. They swung together like dancers. As he spun her, she looked at everything. The beach beyond the throng of people was dark, until a mile away the east wall of the palace compound rose up, with cords of hanging lanterns strung from the four towers to Canaveral Tower in the center, so it formed what looked like the frame of a large carnival tent. It was beautiful indeed. And then Mr. Capulatio’s lips found hers—soft, unbelievably so, and she was looking at his face and nothing else. So many people were watching them. He kissed her fiercely and then they were cheering. He said in her ear, “Aurora. Will you marry me?”

  Out of the sky came the warmest wind, and it stirred many emotions in her that threatened to bring her to tears. She did not know if she wanted to marry him but she had accepted—forever ago now, it seemed—that she would. As far as she could disentangle one feeling from the next, she found she was flattered by his public kisses, and she was full of pride because he was the leader, and she was pleased with her own beautiful wedding dress as well as the delicate opalescent crown he had set upon her head to signify that she was queen.

  But mostly she was thrilled at her place in the center of this crowd, buffeted by the blaze of torches and smells, with him. The eyes made her shy, but she wanted them upon her. She nodded, “Yes.” And at that he clapped his hands and thrust his hand high in the air together with hers and shouted: “The young sigil dressed in white! Here she is! Columbiachallengerdiscoveryatlantisendeavour!” Her loose sleeve sliding backward down the cylinder of her arm. The crowd cheered again, and the girl felt that this, this must be happiness, this, and if it was, then perhaps she had been happy all her life after all, so unsurprising was this feeling of inevitability and excitement.