Juniper’s horse stomped the ground. Tygo looked at him pleadingly. John felt a dizzy alarm, as though the two of them—Tygo and himself—were about to embark on a journey for which they were not prepared. Tygo straightened his coat. They looked up into the vast sky overhead and the diffuse late afternoon sunlight throbbing beneath the gauze of clouds, and yet the comet beyond was brighter yet and more mysterious still, and choked John with a presentiment of danger beyond the physical. He could not explain it.
Tygo’s face, apart from the star tattoos, was very pale. “I’ll go back with him, if that’s what I have to do.”
“It’s not your decision.” John closed his eyes and opened them again.
“It’s not yours, either,” said Juniper.
Tygo said in a pleading voice, “You don’t understand.”
“No, you don’t,” Juniper shook his head.
John looked between the two of them, bewildered. “Let’s take my carriage, then,” he said slowly. “I will talk to Marvel myself. My god, this is a gigantic waste of time when we may have precious little—”
Mizar clicked his tongue. “The outlaws on the plain, sir—”
He whirled around. “This miscreant got here all right, didn’t he? I assume we will be fine.”
Tygo laughed unhappily. “You should never assume anything.”
John was already stalking back to the house to put on decent clothes. “I assume things only when blundering idiots force me to.”
* * *
From John’s vantage point in his open cart, in the darkening gray and green afternoon, he observed a crowd of carnival people gathering down by the shoreline. Peeking from between the dunes as the mule-drawn carriage bumped along was an impressive collection of booths and tents. There was a raft of some kind down there, some structure being erected a ways out in the water, past the breaking surf. The people milled about like they were waiting for something.
The outlaw carnival winked in and out of sight. Still, John could hardly believe his eyes; there were so many people by the shore, more than there were palace guards and infantry at the palace, that was certain. The landscape before their own carriage lay bare, exposed and open all the way to the Cape compound, and he suddenly felt they were very stupid to have set out upon this Uland. The guard riding his horse beside them gave him little comfort. If anything his uniform might attract attention.
Mizar, unflappable, did not slow or hasten the carriage, but muttered gently from the driver’s bench, “They’re building something down there, aren’t they? If it’s for a good purpose I’ll be most surprised.”
John’s mouth was dry. His heart lurched but he kept his face expressionless. “Surely the palace guards are watching these outlaws.”
Beside him in the back seat Tygo was kicking the wooden floorboards rhythmically with his heels. John saw in his face a firm determination to distract himself from their immediate task—it seemed he was tapping out some familiar tune, but John could not place it. The noise set his teeth on edge.
These ill omens will come to naught, he assured himself, they must, all of them. The comet, the prophetic prisoner, the outlaw carnival. All at once he couldn’t imagine the idea that he and this ignominious man might be the only people in the world who could interpret the meaning of these strange occurrences. It seemed dreadful, and yet this was how the world worked, wasn’t it? The world gave you nothing, until that nothing added up over the years in some obscure way to produce something.
“Speed up, you fool,” he grumbled to Mizar, just so someone would be talking. “Do you think these criminals would not grab us for a ransom?”
“I have no idea, sir,” said Mizar, and smiled. His knotty hands flicked the reins, and the two mules drawing the wagon roused themselves minimally, protesting with alternating percussive snorts. “You know,” said John to Tygo after a time. “I confess I thought you were lying before. About predicting the comet.” He considered. “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that you have a very dishonest face.”
“Others have let me know.”
“But do tell me truly, do you think we will be snatched from the road, here? Can you predict that?” John laughed uneasily. “Because I have a worry we will.”
Tygo kept his eyes facing forward. “Prediction doesn’t work like that.”
“How then does it work? I’m curious.”
He sighed. “I don’t know. I told you, I’m a Surgeon. Ask me to pull out your bowel and have it function in a sack beside you for weeks on end and I can do that, I’d like to do it, it gives me joy to do it. But I don’t know how to predict anything. It just happens. I went to sleep, I had a dream, I woke up in a trance and my shaving mirror showed me the comet. It showed me…” He paused, embarrassed. “Well, the angels showed me…”
John rolled his eyes.
Tygo said, “The proof is here before your face. The ladies are bleeding. You’ll see. It will be just like I told you.”
“You could have magicked those ladies at any point and this ‘prediction’ will be nothing more than a trick you devised to get yourself released. I wasn’t born yesterday.”
Tygo balled his fists and unballed them. “I told you, I don’t believe in your stupid star-magic. I believe in science, sir, and that’s the end of it. No spells, no magic, no bloodletting, no executions, no rocketships. None of that is for me. I don’t think it works. Science is the first and the last, and whatever else there is in the world has got no business influencing anything important, least of all human lives. So call me a liar, by all means. I’m used to it. Or call me a con-man. But never say I’ve done magic. Nothing insults me more. I’ve spent my whole life hiding from the Law and groveling for my head when I’m caught. I’d slit my throat before I did magic, and
