To get to Argento in his carnival of the Silver Star, she and her mother had walked across land gray as a storm-sky, through hail the size of fists. They stayed on the saferoads. They rode an old white mule decorated with a faceplate made from a piece of ancient plastic, they carried an old Head in a saddlebag—so they looked like believers on a pilgrimage. Her mother detested the ruse, but said they would be even stupider not to carry the Head. Anyone who stopped them would wonder what business two women had riding alone in the deathscapes. They could fabricate some relic, her mother said—even a shard of glass would do, for the magicians in the carnivals were notorious idiots who could be bespelled by a dung beetle. But having a Head with them would mark them as magicians themselves, and no one would question them much.
They’d traveled for months, from April to July, together on that mule, sometimes one of them walking, one riding, and they passed through fragrant mud and grasses heaving with summer and all the beauty and terror of the middle of the continent. They rode toward the heart of the Disease, where it had begun all those hundreds of years ago. That was what her mother had told her, with a sad laugh. You best hope we don’t encounter a Kansas Cow, she muttered. I for one wouldn’t know how to kill it. If they can even be killed by anything other than the Disease, and believe me I have no idea. How do you kill what’s already dead?
Are the Kansas Cows real? the girl had asked, her eyes on the farthest horizon, a purple bank of clouds that flattened at its top into a deep blue dusk. She still remembered that day, the sky. She remembered so many skies. She had imagined a black Kansas Cow stumbling across the prairie on spider legs, eyes red and unseeing. She had heard of Kansas Cows, of course—everyone had. But she had never thought of them because she had never before left Florida.
Her mother, walking beside her then, shot her a look. How should I know? People say they’re real. People also join stupid carnivals and go around cutting off heads. You shouldn’t believe everything you hear, because even if it’s true, it could be wrong. Gimbal’s hair was long and dirty and she wore a plain dress with no buttons, for buttons were wasteful. She did not look like what she was, which was a dissident. She performed the illegal magic of surgery, during which she physically altered the human body in order to affect its form and function. A Walking Doctor, who went out on the saferoads to heal the sick and mend the wounded.
Gimbal’s occupation had been cause for strife as long as the girl could remember. Once, her mother received a written command from the Hierophant himself in Cape Canaveral to cease and desist her “damnable surgeries and return to the proven methods of magic, astrologics, and bloodshed.” He’d cited the carnivals as beacons of virtue. He’d invoked the doctrine of Wonderblood, the rinsing of the world in blood and pain for one Eon. “It is our collective debt,” the letter said. “It is the Primary Law.” If she did not follow it she would be executed. Her mother had torn up the letter, spat on it, and ground it into the dirt. How’s that for magic? She had no time for the Cape’s hysterics. There were people who could be healed, and she and her husband would heal them.
The reason she was abandoning the girl was: her newest husband was only twenty-five and a surgeon like herself, a true believer, and he had aspirations. They would leave the panhandle eventually, to go about as Walking Doctors on a wider circuit, just as her own parents and grandparents had done. It was true there was no cure for the Disease, but there were many people who would still pay for the old medicine. That is, if they believed it was tempered with a touch of modern theory. So she and her husband ground bird bones and collected thimblefuls of fresh morning dew. But those flourishes were for show; their real magic was that they’d memorized thousands of pages of anatomy diagrams, that they knew the names and formulas for ancient medicines that worked and tried to resynthesize them using molds and magnetic salt. On the saferoads, among the people, they used the incantation “primum non nocere,” since it meant do no harm in the language of their books, and if people thought those were the magic words of a particular sect, so much the better. Though her mother hated to indulge idiots, she did it for what she called the greater good.
The girl had felt safe there in the settlement with Gimbal. Her two brothers, much older, had left years before, Argento off to the carnivals. The other one, William, had become a thief and was run out of the settlement. That was what Gimbal said, anyway. The girl didn’t remember either of them. As she grew up, she even imagined she would become a Walking Doctor like her mother. But a time came when Gimbal explained that the larger world needed her more than any one child could. The girl was
