Sometimes she remembered to be afraid. If they were caught returning to the Cape out of season, it would mean more deaths in a world that was already overflowing with death. But she didn’t desire anymore to escape Mr. Capulatio, who had rescued her from certain death—she saw that now. He had scooped her up before she’d been killed in battle or wandered lost into the country and contracted the Disease and died a shivering chattering husk. Had she run off alone, she might have walked across one of a hundred thousand fields still harboring the blood-sickness. Her mother had said the Disease was a “predictable consequence” of the derelict society that produced it a thousand years before. Everyone called it the Bent Head Death, and no one wanted to die of it.
The girl had once gone with her mother to the bedside of a dying woman. The woman, dark-skinned and old, had wild eyes and thudded her head in an endless rhythm against her driftwood headboard, thump-thump-thump, the teeth in her mouth clacking almost angrily. The girl’s mother could do nothing because there was no medicine on earth that could reverse the progressive spongifying of the brain due to the consumption of contaminated meat, which was what Bent Head was. Her mother believed that she and a few other Walking Doctors were the only people left alive who knew what actually caused Bent Head. As far as they were concerned, there never had been a cure, ever. They could find no mention or hint of one in their books. The best her mother could do was euthanize the woman and remove the brain for study. Bent Head was dreadful way to die—victims were transformed into angular, famished horrors. They could not be buried, as the fluid seepage contaminated the land for an Eon. The girl did not understand science or magic, or even if they were different from each other. But she knew it was Bent Head that had somehow brought Wonderblood into the world, and Wonderblood was the law on which all the other laws were based. It decreed that this purge was inevitable and sacred, and that until all lands were “rinsed at the cosmic basin in clean and virtuous blood,” there would be no end to suffering.
Her mother scoffed: the religions had it all backward, she said—more blood on the land just kept contaminating it, and so they were now locked in an endless cycle of blood and sickness. But when the girl told that to Mr. Capulatio, he called her mother a faithless wretch who placed her trust in surgery instead of religion. Who could surgery save? A single person? In a lifetime, how many? A few thousand? Wonderblood, the executions, could save them all, eventually. Her mother’s impatience was a great sin. Didn’t she see that? Didn’t the girl see that what they were doing was for everyone’s good? And the girl could not at these times keep herself from marveling at the force of his belief. He spoke with such magnetism that she yearned to listen to him, even when she did not understand.
He answered questions she had not even known she was asking.
At last they made their camp outside the Cape compound’s walls. Mr. Capulatio’s carnival was already the mightiest in the land and functioned with a frightening efficiency. His men could raise it entirely in under nine hours. His own giant tent was so large it contained his wagon wholly; he and the girl used the wagon as their bedchamber. Outside, men laid planks for walkways, the merchants and charm-makers pitched their booths, and just as soon as they finished tying down the last tent pegs of Mr. Capulatio’s new, great flag was hoisted over the encampment. This was a flag of conquering, he mused to her as he watched it unfurl. His chest rose and fell as they stood together in the tent’s doorway. They looked out upon the carnival, and farther away they could see the metal spires of the castle beginning to whirl the morning light back to them and all around the land was low and flat, and the air heavy, and beyond that began the pink-blue crescent of the sea.
“Did you know,” Mr. Capulatio began, and placed his hand upon her small shoulder and gripped the place where the bones knitted together. He pointed to the flag with his other hand. “I began sewing that flag myself when I was young?” It was made of five deep-colored oblong cloths, each representing a different one of Mr. Capulatio’s constituents (whatever those were), all stitched together with golden thread. From afar it was uncommonly beautiful. Each of its oblong sections was made of some indeterminable color that wavered with the light like a beetleshell. He sighed. “Well, I’m still young. But in my childhood dreamings I saw that flag, and I knew that color was no color, but full of all the colors. That was my destiny. I couldn’t sew, Aurora, Queenie, but I sewed it anyway with a needle, a whalebone from this place, from the beaches where I was born. I had the needle years before I had the fabric or the even the idea I should make a flag.” He spoke with his eyes closed. “Sometimes it’s a person’s destiny to carry with him the
