“O.”
The man knew the name. He cleared his throat. “O,” he said again. “Many apologies. It wasn’t … I didn’t think you would be dressed so—”
He waved his hand. “You know, I think you’re a spy. I’m almost sure. I might have you thrown in prison.”
The man smiled again, while shaking his head. Perhaps he enjoyed being ridiculed. Marvel had met other men who did.
“But,” Marvel went on. “I like you. If you’ve crossed the continent lately, I could see my way to a compromise.” He shrugged. “Are you a spy?”
“Never.”
“Did you cross the deathscapes to get here?”
Young and audacious and beautiful in the way that impudence can render a young man beautiful, the guard stood a bit taller and replied, “On my own. Without so much as a mule. No sickness, no death.” He bowed at last. “Your Majesty.”
Marvel found himself nodding. There would be time to discover who had sent him and why. But before then Marvel would hear about the deathscapes.
He had dealt with many smarter men than this. In these, his final days at the Cape, when his desperation to return to Kansas had all but transformed him from statesman back into a sort of cautious zealot, Marvel had begun once more to dream. He thrust out his hand, opened it, and waited until the guard placed his knife in his palm. Marvel clapped him on the back. The rain had stopped falling, but when? He hadn’t noticed. He must become better about noticing the weather.
“Walk with me, young man. We have a few things in common,” Marvel said, sticking the knife into his own belt and steering the guard toward Canaveral Tower, toward the jail. He would show him an interrogation, he would show him the jail in all its white horror, and then, perhaps, he would ask him again if he were a spy.
Or perhaps not. Marvel could simply kill him after he learned how the man had crossed the deathscapes. If, say, he was in possession of a map.
He had done worse things.
* * *
When Marvel was born in Kansas, his mother the nun laid him in a black stone cradle. She presented him with a swaddling blanket fit for a king, a sheer black cloth inscribed with gold thread that spelled out his name in stars. Later he was told the heavens themselves would have mirrored it, had he proven worthy.
Alas, Marvel had been an unkingly boy from his first breath, which emerged reluctantly from clogged airways—Marvel had been born dead. He came to life when at last a midwife held him up to declare him lifeless. As though he had considered her offer and rejected it. His mother cried with relief, but those tears turned quickly to despair. The Mystagogue at the Watchtower, highest priest of the Kansas sect, declared Marvel deficient the instant he saw him limply breathing in the cold birthing room. Barely squirming in that starry blanket. He turned the baby around so Marvel was no longer facing him and handed him back to the midwife, who handed him to his mother, who stared up at the Mystagogue in awe of his cruelty. By rights, said the Mystagogue, Marvel should be thrown from the tower, but his mother was a nun, after all, and more importantly a descendent of Huldah the Prophetess. Which made Marvel also a descendent of Huldah. Marvel would be educated as a monk, no more and no less, and Nasa Whiteside should be grateful for that small mercy.
He became ordinary in those first instants of his life, and his stricken mother became a failure. Nevertheless the account of his birth cheered him in a strange way. Even as an infant, he had been a complicated person, one capable of bearing tremendous weight as well as casting it off. Defying expectation was in his blood.
That was his destiny. He had faith in that.
He still had that swaddling blanket somewhere, shoved into a wooden crate and stored away. From time to time, Marvel enjoyed imagining himself from the vantage point of history, which stretches onward until the morality of events is winnowed until it appears to be fate—one action begetting the next and so on. Progress. This was the place where treachery and failure transformed themselves. What once seemed terrible could become courageous if given enough time. Marvel imagined that one day his sins might be tallied as virtues, that time could render him honorable, as he knew himself to be.
He would leave the Cape. He would leave them all, even his own daughter the queen, to their empty frivolities, their misguided readings of holy texts, to their gentle, ineffectual king who was not the True King.
He would go back to Kansas, he would start again, where he’d started in the first place. It was the only way he knew how to save himself.
* * *
Above the jail that housed all dissidents, Canaveral Tower spun sharply upward. The heartclot of the palace compound, of such terrific height and magnificence that even the macabre collection of corpses exposed on the eastern parapet could not detract from its excellence, the tower shone with a sunsharpened triumph both terrifying and cheerful. Together with its five flanking minarets, it represented the shuttles and their glorious passages off the world, and waited in bannered anticipation for their return.
Marvel and the young guard entered the jail through a plain door in the side of the tower. The jail was not wet or cold, which was itself an achievement of engineering given the high water table at the Cape. But all through it ran a smell of despair and death and rotting corpses from the bodies exposed on the compound’s high parapets. The jail’s walls and floor and even all the washstands in the cells were painted white—Marvel’s idea. He had conceived of it as a maddening reminder of the light and air outside, but additionally it served to give the prisoners an endless amount of menial work,
