Bent Head is known to strike in a very predictable way, so after a year of no illness, Huldah rejoiced that the fruit of the land was edible again. She called her son Lee to her and instructed him to inform the settlement at once, but Lee determined he must try the food as well, and he ate it and called it Holy, saying it was from Heaven, and Huldah declared it must have been sent by the Astronauts who had left the earth so long ago. The Blood Rain had restored the earth at last.
They went together to tell the people that the land was cured.
Also at this time Huldah, an aged woman, discovered she was pregnant, although her husband had been dead for many years. The land itself had given her a child, she said, for what else could it be? She had long ago reckoned her childbearing years were finished, and yet she was plainly with child. Moreover, during the pregnancy her health flourished. She blazed with vigour and walked about unencumbered through her ninth month, going from settlement to settlement and telling the people to eat the fruit of the land, for the Disease had been conquered by the Blood Rain. She was the proof. This was the occurrence that convinced many people in Kansas that Huldah was a Prophetess, as she had been inspired to observe the effects of the Blood Rain. Some celestial courage had made her unafraid. For her bravery, she was called High Priestess, and people came to her from then on to beg her wisdom.
After the birth of her daughter, who was very respectfully named Rain, Huldah began to receive visions. Lee recorded these visions with care, so Huldah would know every detail of what she uttered in her trances. She saw visions of a king—not the king at the Cape but a holier, innocent king, the True King, whose reign would begin when the shuttles at last returned to earth. The Astronauts who had sent the Blood Rain would return only when this True King sat on the throne—only this king could save the world from destruction by the Disease, and only those who followed him would ascend to Heaven within the perfected shuttles. Only they would be transformed into light and cosmic radiance and go on and on forever. Glorify! This vision gave people hope, and they were overjoyed to hear that this king would come from Kansas. Who would have thought such a cursed place might give the world salvation?
Huldah’s most unhappy vision, however, concerned the Kansans’ ingratitude for the Blood Rain, which had poured from the mouth of the cosmos—a gift, just when the world most required it. And how had they responded? With feasting and dancing and singing and lovemaking, but no great gesture of thanks to the Astronauts in Heaven for sending the rain, nor even a thought of how they should thank Heaven. When Huldah awoke from her trance and read what Lee had recorded of her vision, she was struck with grief and declared that men must at once build the most beautiful tower, a tower that would rival the Cape. Where the Astronauts had come from.
So the tower was built. It was made of an igneous stone, jet-colored, brought from the northeastern settlements, and when it was finished Huldah called it the Black Watchtower. There, the faithful would await the True King. During the years it took to build this magnificent structure, the land continued to produce staggering harvests. The Garden existed in such indescribable beauty that men believed they must surely have at last stumbled on the path of righteousness. The tower was a fitting tribute to honor the cosmos, and Huldah herself was the bravest woman in history, as well as a Prophetess whose words were wise and benevolent.
Now, at this time Huldah’s older son, Hector, was jealous at the hand his younger brother Lee had in all their mother’s affairs. Hector complained to his mother that he was the older son and by rights her heir and right hand. But Huldah only remarked that it was Lee who had followed her into the fields, and it was Lee who had accompanied her to tell men that the Blood Rain had healed the land, and it was Lee who witnessed her visions and interpreted them with her. Hector had been occupied with his own pursuits during these times.
Hector also protested her complacency with the perpetual growing season and the unending bounty of the land. It seemed quite an odd thing, as all Kansans were familiar with the harshness of the continental winter. Kansas had not seen a winter for many years. Four, he counted. Where was the cold? Did this aberration seem truly benevolent? Huldah chided him for his ungratefulness, and he went away unsatisfied.
Hector spoke of his disbelief with Lee, and the two opposed one another greatly, in both belief and temperament, for where Lee was bright and energetic, Hector was brooding and doubtful. They argued for many hours as they walked around the tower, their voices rising as they debated the unnatural weather and their mother’s favor. At last their conflict came to blows.
Lee was the smaller of the two, but he struck Hector with a stone, his strength bolstered by his unwavering devotion. Hector limped away, bleeding and badly injured. Some time later, Hector crept into his mother’s house and there, whether driven by jealousy or humiliation or greed, he poisoned Lee’s drink with hemlock and within hours Lee had died a terrible death, paralyzed slowly until he could no longer draw air. Hector was incarcerated in the Black Watchtower for murder, and that was where he remained.
It happened that after five years of seasonless and overabundant growing, the land again became fallow. The marvelous numbers of cattle began not only to die but to change, for where they had once been lustrous and fat, they were now craggy and rageful, and they grew larger but uglier than before, and men could no longer approach them. They scraped their hides on the ground for days and weeks, until they wore away much of their skins and it hung in bloodied strips off their bodies. They teetered on skeletal legs, with eyes as dim and furious as demons. They became what we know as the Kansas Cow, that dreaded creature which still roams those dark places, whose saliva can kill a man on the spot. After several weeks of this terrible existence, they ran in wild circles before they finally, mercifully, died.
Men encountered other, even more monstrous creatures, the manticore being the most fearsome, and all these still exist, although they have been seen by very few who are still alive. For with their appearance, men too began dying in droves—of Bent Head once again. So many died that it was impossible to bury them, and even Huldah feared for her life, for she wondered if their food was poisoned again with the Disease.
And yet she did not die. It came to her in a vision that her son Hector was to blame for the reversal of their fortunes. His jealousy had undone them all. This vision was recorded by a different scribe, as her son Lee was dead of poison, but we have copies of this scripture and thus can be certain of Huldah’s intention. When she regained her senses after her vision, she understood that she must spill Hector’s blood onto the land as a sacrifice. When Hector was taken from his jail, he was glad of heart because he believed he had been proven correct in his misgivings. The land was now in turmoil and they had all been wrong to trust the Blood Rain. But then Hector heard he was to be beheaded, so his blood would soak the earth in penitence for his ungratefulness, and he cursed his mother.
He did not meet his fate willingly, but grimaced and trembled. To immortalize his indignity and to remind all others of the consequences of ingratitude, Huldah asked her magicians to prepare his severed head in such a way as to preserve it for eternity. And ever afterward, Huldah kept the Head of Hector with her at every moment, sometimes gazing upon it sadly, for he was her lost son, sometimes cursing it angrily, as he had cursed her before his death. Soon his severed head became a charm she could not do without, a bitter memorial of Lost Hope.
Hector’s blood did not stop the desolation of the land. The verdant hills regained their former character over time: dead, almost entirely poisoned and very dangerous: they became the selfsame land we know and live in fear of today. The great numbers of Kansas Cow and the other beasts died as well, since the land can support very few creatures of any kind, except those which still roam those wilds and terrify men who come upon them.
Huldah’s visions revealed to her that her elder son’s blood was not recompense enough for the slaughter of his brother, who would have been named Prophet upon her death, nor for Hec
tor’s denial of the beneficence of the Blood Rain. A larger sacrifice was in order. She meditated on this for several years, while she watched the world around her continue to die.
During this time of extreme darkness, Huldah was gifted. She saw in great detail the doctrine of Wonderblood, the rinsing of the world in blood for one Eon. She saw the legions of Heads, the stages for the executions, the blood running from the stone beheading blocks. She saw it and she commanded her followers do just as she had seen, and thus began the Eon of Pain. The first carnival was Huldah’s own daughter’s carnival, the Rain Carnival, and this miraculously conceived daughter became the next Prophetess, and it has been her line we have watched ever since for the emergence of the True King. Glorify!
The carnivals soon numbered many, each one believing a version of the story recorded above, although many are dangerously blasphemous and have veered from the truth. Still others are vectors only of violence and show no devotion at all, to Heaven or the shuttles or even the line of Prophets. These do none of the work for which they were originally intended: bathing the world in blood until the land lives again. They only are havens of sex magic and debauchery.
Cape Canaveral was the birthplace of a religion that found its perfection in another, sadder place: Kansas, the Center of the Universe. Only when the True King returns to the seat of Heaven, the throne at the Cape—where the men first took leave of this earth and journeyed into the cosmic openness—can the World begin anew. Until then, our carnivals merely staunch the flow of humanity’s evil. When the True King emerges, the shuttles will return for the faithful.
This is the only truth that one must accept in order to begin the journey toward salvation: that we will be perfected and transformed and taken upward through the ionosphere. When the True King has taken his rightful place at the Cape, the Holy of Holies, when he sits upon the throne in his holy city, then surely will the shuttles arrive soon afterward. These days will be called the Days of Heaven, when the shuttles will deliver the faithful from the Diseased earth and into the cosmos among our ancestors. Away from the earth. Away!”
She put down the book. The girl remembered her mother Gimbal suddenly, unbidden thoughts of her tumbling back—she had imagined Huldah in the story to be her mother. The long dirty white hair. Her doctor’s bag slung across her body as she went up and down the saferoads. On a personal mission that even the danger of the Disease couldn’t sway. It was the only image she could conjure of such a fearless person. Yet after all this, she had still not forgiven her mother. At all. She had forgiven Mr. Capulatio. Argento, even. But not her mother.
When she had ridden with Gimbal up to the carnival country two years before, her mother had said to her, Fortune is a kind of uncontrollable ignorance, girl. You will know this soon enough. Who says such a thing to a child, the girl wondered now, angry. Her mother had spoken in her ear, seated behind her on their white mule with the faceplate. The land was wide and calm—they were the only people for a hundred miles. That was what her mother had told her. Then Gimbal said, This trial will better you, will move you closer to understanding the blind indifference of the World. There is no magic, she’d said harshly. Only fortune, good and bad, which you can meet with ingenuity or ignorance.
The girl had argued. Where does fortune come from, though?
It’s a gift.
So it’s magic?
She’d clicked her tongue. Maybe the only magic in the world.
Her mother had taught her to rely on her own resourcefulness, which was a gift, to be sure. But from who? Mr. Capulatio said magic was all around.
Her fingers touched her oozing bandage, where she had branded herself with his sign of the rocketship. Curiously proud of the strength that had taken. She had changed his mind. She had done that herself. And the brand, a pain anyone would have dreaded.
She had done that herself, as well.
CHAPTER 18
THE GAME
John stood at the edge of Queen Alyson’s golf course. He had never actually stood on the course before, and he didn’t know anyone who had, besides Michael—but then, he did not talk to many other courtiers. He greatly disliked their chatting and rumor-mongering, and had been not in the least regretful to leave the compound for his own Urania.
Where at least he could work in peace.
Michael had razed a few courtiers’ homes to make the course: he had known she would like it. The king himself never played, but would sometimes gaze out at her from a window in his modest house while John calculated the horoscopes, and he’d remark upon Alyson’s beauty as she swung her club. Her long brown hair swaying with the strokes of the club. At these moments, John would pretend to look out the window as well, but really he fixed his eyes on some other point so he would not have to look at Alyson’s lovely form, the pin-straight hair, the slender waist, all of which caused his heart to sputter.
John stepped tentatively upon the damp grass, blinking and disorganized in the cloudy noon light. It had rained in the morning, he guessed, but now the two comets—stella novae, rather, since no one was yet sure what they were—twinkled weakly overhead. They did not appear any larger or brighter, but there were most certainly two of them. He searched for a third but could not see one, so he turned his eyes to the course, which was roughly the size of several large tents and their surrounding booths, with each hole marked by a partition containing some particular challenge—knocking the ball through a small passageway formed by several wooden blocks, for instance. Or hitting the ball up a hillock but not over the hillock. He could not see what fascination it could possibly hold for a woman such as Alyson, who seemed uninterested in precision of any sort, but Michael once told him she’d read about it in an old book and had wanted to play it since she was a child. John could not grasp the point of the game. It seemed geometric, but Alyson was not mathematically inclined. Perhaps it was meant to be devotional? Did she meditate on the positions of the stars while she played through the obstacles? It did not seem likely.
John and Tygo were handed clubs and balls by a servant as soon as they stepped through the rickety gate and onto the course. From across the grass Alyson, dressed in loose white pants and an egg-colored tunic, lifted her own club and smiled at them. “I suppose we’re actually doing this,” John said dully, not even wanting to look at his companion in case Tygo was smiling effortlessly. He’d never walked on such perfect grass before and now regretted his choice of heavy boots.
“Just be yourself,” Tygo said, stifling a chuckle. “I’m sure she likes you fine.”
“I have no thoughts on that subject,” John snapped. “I’m concerned that we actually have nothing of note to tell her, since all we did last night was become drunk.”
Tygo swung his club in a shallow arc as they walked toward her. “That’s not all I did.” Then he said, “Tell her anything, man. You don’t have to be nervous. She doesn’t care what you say. She only wants someone to talk to her. For godsakes. It’s incredibly obvious.”
John snorted.
“Suit yourself.”
He whacked his club on the ground, discontented, and said nothing.
They reached her at the seventh hole, concentrating on hitting the ball a short distance into the cup, having evidently forded the valleys and sand-spots within the enclosure in previous strokes. She didn’t look at them until she’d hit the purple ball into the hole. When she did, her face seemed held together by strange smears of makeup. A cosmetic glaze one shade lighter than her actual skin hid her freckles, her eyebrows darkened with brown pencil. This mask moved barely at all when she greeted them, except her lips pursing into that bud. She leaned on her club and said, “I’ve been waiting all morning for you.”
“We got drunk last night,” blurted Tygo, before John could even open his mouth.
She appraised him with what John could clearly see was approval. “Very nice. I hope it won’t affect your game. I hope one of you will beat me, no one ever does.”
“So I’ve heard,” said Tyg
o.
“I’m tired of going against my girls, I know all their moves. Most of them are up in bed with cramps, anyway. So when is the bleeding supposed to stop?” She swung her club and turned to Tygo. “Do you like my makeup? We were bored this morning waiting for you.”
Tygo pretended to hit a ball. “I don’t know. It looks a little … like you’re trying. You know?”
Her eyes endless green phosphorescent nuggets. “We were trying! I was thinking I could surprise Michael with it.” She turned her cheek to Tygo. John watched his assistant pull suddenly back to make it seem like he did not wish to be close to her, but then bend forward from the waist to study the spackle on her face. Alyson asked, “Well?”
“Eh,” said Tygo. He removed a rag from an inner pocket and dangled it for her to take. His hands were still shackled. “You want to wipe some off?”
She swatted him away. “My best handmaid did it, the one who does my hair.” She gestured to the length of brown silk falling down her back, but didn’t ask what they thought of that. She gazed again at Tygo, not at all offended. “You’re mean,” she said, smiling. “Michael never criticizes me.”
“Well, you asked,” he said. “I just said what I think.”
She continued to look at him, a half-smile trapped on her lips. “Why don’t they unchain you?”
“Shall we play some golf?” he asked brusquely.
“If you’re prepared to lose.”
“You win because you’re good, not because you’re the queen and no one is allowed to beat you. Right?”
“I always tell everyone to do their best,” she exclaimed, delighted. “If you can’t compete, you probably shouldn’t play.”
And so John found himself, just as he’d feared, an observer to their coy match, a third when clearly no one needed one—O, he played with them, and quite glumly, but inside he alternated between seething embarrassment and dismal self-pity. Though neither he nor Tygo knew the rules to the stupid game, they kept whacking at the ball, which John surmised was meant to symbolize the moon or some other heavenly body. What other purpose could it possibly serve?
Wonderblood Page 21