He clasped her shoulder. “You should have been there! Her appearance! Upon the field! In a battle! Just as I saw in my head many years ago! In a white gown! Can I help it that she’s beautiful?”
Orchid raised her eyebrows. “I was not there, David, because I was here. Doing what you needed me to do here.”
He wrapped his arms around her with a familiarity that made the girl’s heart blacken like meat on a stake. She wished she could turn away, but instead she held on to a cage bar and interlaced her fingers through them as though they could pull her up out of her jealousy.
Mr. Capulatio whispered, “Perhaps, my love. But I found her just like my vision predicted. I can’t take the Cape without my divinely appointed queen. It would be madness.”
“The prophecy in the book is certainly not about anyone living now. I should know, I wrote it myself. It would be madness to enter the coming battle with a child by your side instead of me. What are you even thinking?”
“Hear me, Orchid—you haven’t been infallible in the past, have you? Dearest? The girl queen we wrote about is not a future-queen of a distant age. She’s here today, now, in front of you. This is her. That is my interpretation of the passage. Please consider it before giving in to this, ah, unflattering jealousy. How was I to know that you were wrong until I saw that you were wrong with my own eyes? When I saw the girl standing on the field?”
Orchid said nothing.
He said, “She was wearing white.”
Nothing.
“I trust you. I have trusted you all along. I hope that you trust me too.”
Orchid’s silence went on too long and seemed like a challenge between them.
“It’s my vision,” he said at last. “I should be able to interpret it.”
Orchid whirled on her heels and went back to the books. “O no,” she repeated again and again, tossing books aside. “O no, O no, you are wrong wrong wrong. You haven’t spent time with the words the way I have, you haven’t studied them—”
He went after her and grasped her shoulder, pulling her back. “I am not wrong.”
“I’ll find it and prove it to you. It says, ‘A young sigil dressed all in white shall appear when at last the rockets have returned to earth, and this sigil shall sit enthroned during all the days of heaven.’” She was muttering now. “I wrote it a hundred times in a hundred letters to a hundred of your constituents.” She looked up and a plaintive note entered her voice. “‘Heaven’ is not now, David.”
“But how can you know?” he asked.
She threw some more books from the trunk onto the rugs and kept digging, all the while speaking more angrily. “I know, David, because this does not feel like Heaven to me. Seven in my own carnival died of Bent Head since you left, even though we created more Heads this season than we ever have. They did nothing. The Disease is still in the ground everywhere, even on the saferoads, no matter what you say. I know, David, because I am still here on his wretched planet with these wretched people and I am not gliding freely up through the sunshine glare of ozone in a celestial vehicle, like you promised, David,” she spat. “I know because my own humanity is not disintegrated, is not made perfect. I—” Her voice wavered slightly, but when she turned to make what the girl assumed would be a spiteful face, her eyes were dense and unreadable and showed no emotion at all. “The rockets have not returned for us.”
Mr. Capulatio merely shrugged. “I love you dearly. You speak like a warrior-scholar, your gift for translating my words into beautiful writing has gained us thousands of followers. But Radiance, the rockets have returned. As I knew they would. Even at the precise time I suspected and not a minute sooner. I am here at the Cape, and so are they.”
Orchid’s brows knit together. “What?”
“Did you stargaze lately, my beautiful wife, wife of my boyhood, wife of my first heart?”
“Yesterday.” She frowned. “No, two nights ago.” Her face was losing color. The girl knew that Mr. Capulatio looked at the sky every night, without fail. Orchid wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. “The days run together. I can’t remember. I have been so busy, I…”
Mr. Capulatio was nodding vigorously. “As sometimes happens. We are all busy people. But we shouldn’t fall down in our worship, ever, especially in this Age of Times. Our hearts should always be afloat with the ecstasy of shame, which drives us ever toward vigilance. Constance, Radiance, is required of us all.”
“Stop talking like that to me. I was constant.” She spread her arms in a helpless flourish but her voice had weakened. “All this. This carnival, all this—” She paused and narrowed her eyes. “What is the Age of Times?”
“A new revelation. Soon we’ll write it down together. But now is the time for rejoicing; we will go to the shore and build an altar of oyster-shells. Then, tonight when you go out to look at the heavens, you will see the new light of the first rocketship. You will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am divinely blessed. Tonight we shall make upon our altar a green phosphorescent flame and go on a raft into the circle of the sea and there you—you, Orchid, Priestess-Wife and scribe—will marry us. You will be her sister, her guidance, her own Radiance as you have been mine. Who better to teach her how to be the king’s queen than the king’s first wife?”
Orchid breathed quietly for a few moments. Then she turned to the girl and cried, “Did you hear? Do you understand?”
She did not understand. The rockets had returned? Did this mean the world was ending? Or just beginning? Their religion was strange to her, their faith
