She stared up at him. He was leaning on a podium and waiting.
Mr. Capulatio would execute six or seven, the women said, but Argento first, and this was an act of kindness. Mr. Capulatio must love her so, they chirped, and stroked her back. His new little queenlet, blessed with a grand destiny. Suddenly she saw Argento; he was bound, and two men conducted him to the stage, where he stepped up like a drunk. Silence swept the crowd. She heard her brother’s footsteps, the whistle of breath through his broken nose, as he trudged over the boards and stiffly knelt before the polished block. He stared ahead with all the foreknowledge of a sheep, blue-blank membranous eyes, but then she saw his hands behind his back, shaking just a little, and a minute cry escaped her lips. She had seen executions before, knew to brace herself against those rolling waves of pity she couldn’t enter, otherwise, that feeling she could not feel until a man began screaming and she imagined his family, watching him die like that, to be made into a lucky charm. She thought maybe Argento deserved his fate, but pity kept her from wishing it upon him. Mr. Capulatio certainly had no pity—he was half-smiling. And Argento had none, not even now. But they were men, and she was different. She hoped he couldn’t see her. Better for him to die alone. But Mr. Capulatio straightened, pointed his knife, and announced, “She’s right there.” Argento wouldn’t look. Mr. Capulatio took a powerful step forward and raised the knife and said, “Last chance.”
He was not joking. Argento wouldn’t look, and without ceremony, Mr. Capulatio brought the blade down, his face contorted by effort but not emotion. And in the end she couldn’t look either, but hid her eyes in the shawl and wished she had never met Argento so she wouldn’t have to remember him. The wet sawing lasted much longer than he’d earned. The crowd cheered. The birds.
* * *
Summer came and went, and though Mr. Capulatio tried to keep her from the unpleasantness of the executions, she always heard the beheadings and that gasping mob, their breath released together as laughter because laughter was all they could muster. He left her alone in the afternoons, when he left with bags of magic paraphernalia, and returned bloody in the evenings.
She walked around this new camp with an audacity she’d never had at her brother’s carnival. She belonged to Mr. Capulatio and so everyone treated her well, and this knowledge shamed her because she felt so safe, and sometimes also it caused a twinge of excitement deep in her belly. There was a tent full of dancing girls, not much older than herself, and they caused fights between the men and even some of the crones, who considered them like daughters and fought over which one was prettiest or the best dancer. The girl liked to spy on them. She watched them draw on each other’s faces before they performed, butterflies and stars, and once she heard them singing together in such a crystalline collective voice that it was like a knife in her chest. She imagined herself with them, laughing and shimmying onstage for the men, but stopped her spying when she realized she was jealous.
And sometimes, because she missed Argento, she went to watch the Head Makers at their task. Chanting and chalk and brands and blood. Heads were bought and sold at the booths, spines removed, ground, burned, eaten, sigils etched into dead flesh and live flesh. These Head Makers didn’t venerate the Astronauts or the hexagram that symbolized the six towers at the Cape; their brand was a rocketship and there were booths devoted to each of the space rockets. The man in charge of the largest booth had a red beard and black hair and he was a ratty skinny thing but the way he said, O, Queenie, you tell Mr. King I took extra special care with those Heads he brought in the other day was genuine and kind, and his smile had a black front tooth but the way he smiled made her want to smile back. She was not afraid, even when he held a freshly beheaded body over a basin to collect its blood, he said. Collecting blood had been illegal in Argento’s carnival, because according to Wonderblood the blood from the dead was supposed to saturate the earth. She had thought it was illegal everywhere because of the Primary Law, and wondered if the people in this carnival were happier because Mr. Capulatio was a blessed redeemer, or because he let them break the law.
Mr. Capulatio himself, though, confused her more day by day. He often took her outside to present the sky to her like a gift, something made special by his attention, and he bore it upward on his palms so familiarly, like it was his. Like a deep dark sapphire, he’d say, is the sky. Like the sea. They stood on a butte under the stars, at the center of five pikes and Heads, on these breezy summer nights. He could talk in such a beautiful way, it was hard not to listen. He kept his fingers clasped around her shoulders, so tight it hurt, and he said hypnotizing things like, This field used to be underwater. Extraordinary, how the world reinvents itself. Inspiring. Promising. Once, during a moment of mad terrible loneliness, she’d asked, Do you believe that magic is real? My mother told me it’s all just lunatic-ravings. They were staring at the stars, like always. His mood darkened almost imperceptibly but then
