Leaks of light poked from around the edges of his curtains and John scrunched down into his bed and groaned into his pillow, muffling the sound. His bed was splendidly comfortable, but all he could feel was a heavy pounding over his brows. The curtains were thick and blocked out most of the morning light, and the vast bed was overstuffed with feathers and covered in silken blankets. If Mizar heard him stirring, he would inevitably bustle inside, and then John would be duty-bound to rise. John rarely drank too much—there had been only one or two other times since he was a boy that he could recall such a revolting lapse in his judgment.
He was certain, when he awoke, that he felt a good deal worse than he had the previous day, and not just physically. But why? When they had succeeded in contacting something otherworldly? It was more than John had ever achieved on his own. He barely opened one eye, but still could see by the light seeping beneath the curtains that it was far later than he normally rose. Was there any point at all to waking up and taking yet another very dangerous carriage ride back to the palace compound?
Their meeting with Queen Alyson—he dreaded it even though he had news to report. Tygo and Alyson’s flirtation had angered him. He hated the ambiguity of emotion: this was why he had no friends, only servants. The idea of them thrilling one another with flutters of their eyelashes. As though he were a child who didn’t understand.
John Sousa was many things, and he did know himself to be perplexingly unattractive to most people even though he had been blessed with a strangely handsome face and an equally adequate body and even a position he’d won through merit and heredity. And yet he remained unliked. There had been occasions when he did have some girl or another sent to him for pleasure, although the entire business was a distraction in the most base sense. What did he care what some low-born courtesan thought of his naked member? And yet always they seemed to judge him, rightly or wrongly, and enough of them had passed through his bedchamber that he’d decided there was no pleasing any of them. He had stopped trying. Now, it was only when his own physical urges reached a distracting pitch that he even remembered he could call for one of these girls. And it was always a different one. Did they wish never to return or was there some rule about courtesans visiting the same man over and over? John had never thought to ask, though it might have been nice to see the same one more than once.
He had given up the idea of a wife some ten years ago; no, longer. He found the prospect of living with a woman odd—he had shared his life with Mizar and no one else for as long as he’d been a fully formed and thinking human, and he saw no reason to upset that order. His health was weak enough. He needed significant rest and time to think. Truly, the arrival of Tygo was enough of an upheaval to cause a surge in John’s chronic unease. So much that the previous evening, he’d drunk nearly three times the amount he had ever consumed in one sitting.
And now he was paying the price.
He turned over in his bed and finally pulled the cord on the curtain. In rushed cool gray light—odd to see clouds, he’d imagined it would be sunny. The air was a limpid glaze over his coverlet, his arms hairy pastel tubes atop the fabric. He could not get that word out of his mind. Tellochvovin. Falling death. Had he been more superstitious, he might’ve assumed out of hand that the word portended evil.
But John was not superstitious.
Chronically skeptical, perhaps. Demanding of proof, certainly.
Because of this quality of his character, he had begun to suspect that no shuttles were returning, ever, because none had ever existed. Or if they had existed, it was in such a way that man would never unlock their secrets to understand what they had meant to the ancients. They were as mysterious as the angel’s language, artifacts of a past so distant now that it might as well have been a fiction.
In the morning light, John couldn’t believe he’d swallowed Tygo’s little show. Now that he was sober he saw it plainly.
Yet still there remained a niggling germ of belief. In the darkest part of John’s heart, a hope. Tygo’s word, tellochvovin, had remained with him, freezing his heart with fear even now, when he was no longer under the sway of Tygo’s unseeing eyes. Even after his faculties had returned to normal.
What had happened in that room?
Suddenly, he felt sick. As soon as Mizar appeared with a bowl of steaming porridge, John threw himself across the room toward the washbasin but missed it entirely, and vomited on the floor, a scorched yellowish bile with a smell that caused him to wretch again. Mizar cheerfully withdrew a rag from his back pocket. “I had a feeling, sir.”
John wiped his mouth, uninterested. “I feel terrible.”
“Yes,” Mizar agreed. “So does Tygo Brachio. What an odd fellow, that one. Inciting you to drink. That’s not like you.”
He spat out acrid saliva.
“You know he slept all night in your office, on the sofa? With his hands still chained. I offered him a bed. But he said he preferred to be near the mirror. What a funny man.”
John panted. “You let him sleep all night in my office? All my records and books are in there!”
“I didn’t see any harm in it. He was just as sick as you are now. It wasn’t as though he was pawing at your belongings, sir.” He paused. “His arms are chained.”
“Have you given him free rein of my courtyard, as well?”
Mizar bent stiffly and began wiping up the vomit. “I thought he was to be your assistant. I didn’t know he was to be watched like a prisoner.”
“He was in jail for treason. You just said he was shackled. It should be evident that he’s to be watched!”
“Not to me it wasn’t.”
“You left him all night with my mirror and all my books—”
“He was only checking the mirror for faults, he told me.”
John goggled at his servant. “You let him touch it again? Mizar, that mirror is perhaps the only link between our world and the heavens and you…” he sputtered. “You just let a known con-man finger it as though it were his own?”
Mizar stopped wiping up the vomit and glared at John. “I don’t know him to be any con-man. I thought he was a Walking Doctor.”
John hurried to dress and went at once to his study, where he found Tygo standing in a corner with a large book balanced upon his chained forearms. Gray light fell from the window onto the floor just beyond where he stood, so he was partially in shadow. John noted with some relief that the mirror was still in its holder, unharmed, though still uncovered. He rushed across the stone floor and threw the dust-cloth over it again.
Despite what Mizar had said, Tygo Brachio looked just as well as he had the night before. No sign he had been sick. John ran his hands fretfully over the dust-cloth, feeling the shape of the mirror beneath it.
“Good morning to you, too,” Tygo chirped, from behind the book. “Although maybe not so good, eh? How do you feel?”
John scowled. “I don’t recall giving you permission to scavenge my rare books. What are you looking at? Those are some of my oldest volumes, not fit for daily use. Some of them are so old I’ve only held them a few times, for cataloguing. Don’t touch them.”
Tygo held the book up. “This one isn’t too fragile, I don’t know what you’re so excited about.” He eyed the mirror, John’s hands on it. “Got it in your head that I’m a thief, did you?”
John flushed. “It’s Lord Astronomer to you. You are to call me by my title. And you are not to read my books! You are not to … to do anything. Unless I say so. Give me that.” He extended his hand and Tygo, snickering, gave him the book.
“O, I think you’ve read that particular one more than a few times.”
John turned it over and looked at the spine. Sexual Astrology: Effective Positions for Begetting Heaven’s Children.
“Were you intending to beget yourself some star children?” Tygo’s eyes furrowed with laughter. “Tell me, have you used any of the techniques in here? It’s so stupid. Look at this.” He snatched it back and opened it. “‘The position
for a boy will be best achieved after a thorough massage to the feet and legs. You will find the leg massage tilts the cervix back, allowing for easier passage of the seed.’” Tygo flipped the pages. “There’s more: ‘Caress the underside of the breasts. Elementals delight in a winding motion applied to the nipples.’ Did you know that a leg massage opens the cervix? I didn’t.”
John grabbed the book. “I’ve never read this book.”
“But the drawings, you’ve looked at those.” Tygo turned it sideways. “It has very good drawings.”
John felt a glut of hate and jealousy for Tygo rising in his throat like more vomit. So at ease all the time; talking, poking fun, slinking along as though everything were a joke when almost nothing ever was.
“It may astonish you,” John snapped. “But some people think about more important things than sex. That book is a relic. I inherited it from my father’s library, and I imagine he inherited it from his own father’s, ad infinitum. If you’d bothered to look”—now he was stammering—“you’d have noticed that this corner of the library is dusty. In fact I hardly ever come here. Not that I could expect you to possess such basic powers of observation. Being that you are a drunk. Now.” He took a long, slow breath. “We’re late already for our audience with Alyson. Although I don’t know what we’ll tell her. We haven’t even begun studying the transcription.”
Tygo’s face lurched with pleasure. “There was a message from her earlier. She wishes for us to meet her at her golf course, since you were so late getting up. Did you know she plays golf?”
John could feel his still-hot face. “Everyone knows that.”
“Fine. Sorry for asking,” Tygo said.
“I’m sorry too,” was all John could think to say.
“The Hierophant will play golf with us.” Tygo’s eyes became strange and bright.
John’s head throbbed. “That’s just wonderful. He will surely have plenty of wrong-headed suggestions about how we should do our jobs. He always does.” He sighed. “You best not stare at the queen the way you did yesterday. Marvel is her father.”
“I gathered that. I think the queen didn’t mind being stared at, though.”
John had to get away from the little man or else he would surely hit him again. He did not even check that Tygo followed him out.
CHAPTER 17
HULDAH
Mr. Capulatio woke her before dawn and went at once outside to urinate, leaving her in the knot of their blankets. She heard him outside talking to someone. It was some time before she smelled and felt the green fizz of rain in the air. She was surprised she wasn’t cold. And then she felt it, all at once like slap. Pain in her thigh. In the dim light she examined the spot. A smear of yellow-copper had oozed through the bandage. It looked better than it felt. But from moment to moment it burned so hotly she wanted to tear off the bandage and pour cool water over it.
Mr. Capulatio came back inside the tent, yawning and stretching. Today they would do the ritual, but first he had to make things ready. He seemed tired, but she could tell he had something fixed in his mind. They’d slept with their foreheads touching but now he knelt before her while she lay on the bed, his face a limitless plain of calm. But she sensed his anxiety. “You really should read.” He handed her The True King. “While you wait.”
She stared at it. “Orchid wrote this.”
“Ah, you’ve figured it out. A girl of many talents.” He pulled his hair halfway back and secured it with a tie, then looked down at her sternly. “Let me tell you something before you get ideas. I do love her. She has been an asset. A great advantage to me in many, many ways.”
The girl’s heart contracted. “But she tried to humiliate you in front of everyone.”
“Her magic is a special kind. She has bent the world to my own will with her words.”
“She tried to kill me,” the girl said in a flat voice.
“That will happen.”
“But how can you let her try to kill me?”
“I’m not,” he growled. “Leave it alone, Aurora. Read the book. When I come back you will have read it. As much as you can.”
After he left, she was angry. But she had nothing to do. So she did what he said.
“The carnivals began after the Blood Rain. They brought terror and relief by turns to the people of these lands, a people who are few enough these days and were even fewer in times past. The people were so enraptured by the carnivals that they kept proficient records, which I have long studied to collect this history. About the origins of the execution carnivals there can be no misunderstanding. I will tell you now how they came about.
The history of the new religions and the carnivals begins some thousand years ago, when a rain of blood and viscera fell over a great swathe of land in the center of the continent. It fell upon the place that had been called Kansas, when it was but a wasteland ravaged by the Disease. The rain came from a clear sky, red drops and globs of tissue, and ever afterward people called it the Blood Rain. They did not know what it could be, if some gargantuan floating animal had exploded in the sky above them, or if the massacred dead from an unknown war had been lifted into the sky by a cyclone and then dumped upon them by chance, or even if the rain had been sent by evil forces or good ones. No one knew, and so the people were terrified.
The Blood Rain occurred in April and lasted five days, soaking the ground in blood up to the ankles of the wild cattle that roamed freely in those days. Much to the astonishment of the Cape and the king’s court at Canaveral, the Blood Rain did not fall there. Even in those ancient times the Cape was already a holy and famous place, one filled with magicians and Orbital Doctors. They had already embarked upon the use and refinement of magic, the outlawry of medicine, and many more tenets of our faith that we still hold to be true. They had done all these things, and yet still nothing had been able to quell the spreading of a terrible Disease known as Bent Head, and people were still dying, and the world had continued to grow worse in every generation.
The Disease killed more people in Kansas than anywhere on the continent. Some even believe the Disease originated in the cattle there. Whatever the case, Kansas had become a wasteland, where nothing grew. The few people who still resided there lived like wretches in tiny settlements they were terrified to leave, in case they should stray from the roads they had come to believe safe. They were afraid to contract Bent Head.
But after the Blood Rain, the land, so long fallow, bloomed. Wildflowers, grasses, ferns, and rushes sprang up almost overnight, carpeting the countryside. The land brought forth greenery and living creatures, and for the first time anyone could remember, there were as many calves in the fields as grown cattle, and the cattle did not seem to die as they usually did when they crossed patches of Diseased ground. For several years the world was lush, even in winter. The fall of blood had nourished the earth itself, and its beauty was excruciating. There are records of men who went mad with the splendor of it, the rolling hills of soft summer grass, and the cattle which multiplied a hundredfold and then a thousandfold, until people could not look upon the land in Kansas without seeing cows walking dreamily from this place to that one, glossy and happy in their herds.
What were the people to make of this abundance, where before there had been only death? The folk had no inkling of the forces at work. So they reveled in the glory all around them, the warm wind blowing down the prairies, the birth of new calves. They spoke to each other in hushed tones, like the entire world was a holy space. And yet they were still afraid to walk among the cattle. It was the case that the land looked beautiful, but they did not yet trust it. How many of them had watched loved ones die of Bent Head? It could not leave the soil—in hundreds of years it hadn’t, why should it be different after the Blood Rain?
We still ask this question, but its answer is not one for our age.
Now, in that time and in that place lived a woman called Huldah, who would become the first Prophetess. All the Prophets and ultimately the True King descend f
rom her line. Huldah was by then already an aged woman, and in the seasons following the Blood Rain she was first among those who wanted to understand why the land had changed. Each day she went onto the saferoads and made meticulous records of what she saw: how many cattle, how many calves, where they seemed to be walking, how many dead lay around. Soon enough there were so few dead as to be accounted for merely by natural causes. Huldah kept track of the plants as well, for it seemed to her that corn grew in places where it never had been, and higher than she had ever seen in any person’s small garden, and there were soybeans again in the fields, and by and by she even saw wheat growing. But she dared not sample these blessings, for they grew some ways off the saferoads and she was still afraid. All the same, the people began to call the land the Garden, because it overflowed with abundance.
Huldah had two sons, Hector and Lee, but only one still lived with her in her small house in her settlement, which we still know by its ancient name: Lucas. At that time, Lucas was home to fewer than forty people, a fair-sized settlement for that time. Huldah’s older son, Hector, was married and lived in his own home, but her younger son, Lee, was her constant companion and joy. The records speak very clearly about Huldah’s love for Lee, for his energetic nature, for his curiosity and mischievous ways. He went with her everywhere while she was engaged in recording the effects of the Blood Rain.
Lee was by her side when at last she decided to sample some of the corn that had been growing, seasonless, for a year. Since the Disease first ravaged the world, fields where edible food could be grown had been reduced almost to nothing, as more and more land every year was found to be infected. But after the Blood Rain there had been no winter, only more and endless greenery, shooting toward the heavens, prairie grass growing even through the cracks in people’s floors. Huldah went with Lee off the saferoad and out into a field, and they took in a basket of corn and boiled the ears, and then Huldah did eat one, with Lee watching and waiting to record what happened to her, and then they waited another year to see if Huldah would die of Bent Head.
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