She began to cry, finally, big hot tears. “But somebody’s always dying.” In that moment, the girl felt the pain of the entire world and also her smallness in it, and it felt like: hopeless. There was another word. Endless. “I hate it here.”
He seemed surprised she’d said it out loud. He looked at her the way adults look at children, with pity and sweetness and compassion, but then he hardened his face and nodded gravely. “Isn’t anyone alive who wouldn’t.”
* * *
Banded blue and gold sky and no trees and stages everywhere, for the executions. There was an old sign someone had found deep in the ground, mostly rusted away, the rest so buried that it had needed to be physically dug out, which took a long while because the metal had turned to lace, it was so delicate—that was what her brother told her—a gigantic wheel with red letters. That was how they knew this place had been called Iowa. She had no idea when that had been—so long ago.
The carnival was made up of magicians and merchant Head Makers, and they set up booths and sold severed heads and polished bones and all sorts of intimidating talismans, and throughout the summer people came to the carnival country to buy their wares, to watch the executions, to trade horses, and to gamble. Always, this led to more executions. And more Heads, which was good for everyone, one and all. Her brother said so. Her mother had said they were all raving idiots.
Argento never killed people himself—at least, he never killed the people he made into Heads. He bought his Heads from the executioners, who sought out magical humans, captured them, and beheaded them onstage while uttering the standard incantations. In Argento’s carnival, the incantations sounded like, Everymanandwomanisastar! and Silverstarfantasticspeardienow!
Or sometimes the executioners didn’t behead their victims onstage, but hunted them like they’d hunted Cosmas the Uncrusher. Those Heads were harder to get and so more expensive to buy, so Argento charged triple for them. He threaded black quartz beads into burn marks on their foreheads to enhance their beauty. She’d watched him many times, outside at his workbench, squinting while he embedded the beads one by one. His tongue lolled to one side and occasionally he wiped sweat from his forehead. To embroider an entire unicursal hexagram took a day or more. The girl’s own Head, Cosmas, had a glittering forehead star, an always-open eye, lumpy like the cancers her mother used to cut from people. The thought of touching it made the girl shudder. Everything about her brother’s work revolted her, the way he made her sit by the tents while he sawed neckbones and yanked out the cervices of the spine, how he held each vertebra up to the light and inspected it, how he handed the good ones to her and made her polish them with a scratchy cloth until they were smooth, and then how he made her paint them bright black. How she had the feeling he would’ve kept her chained to the ground if he could’ve, if it had been acceptable, how he had chained her to the ground, actually—during her first weeks in the carnival—he’d chained her to the ground! Just so everybody knows, he’d said.
So everybody knows what? It was only a few days before some of the old women—there were never any young women in the camps—arrived to squawk at Argento until he used a huge pair of shears to cut the chain. There? he’d screamed back at them, brandishing the blades. There, are you happy? If somebody grabs her it’s gonna be your fault, you sickdry wrinkle fucks. Stupid women!
One of them, the older one, although it was hard to tell, had taken the girl’s hand and helped her up. She bent close and whispered, You will never be more important than you are right now. The girl had blinked.
Argento’s carnival ran a northerly circuit, all the way up the center of the continent. It was dictated by Law that all carnivals had to winter over in the north, so that the countryland was free of them for some short time. She did not understand why things were this way, or who made the Law or what happened on the land when all the carnivals went north, but she knew she hated the cold. Her brother’s carnival wintered with a small settlement of northern people. These people did not seem to care much about making Heads. They never judged the ways of others, no matter how peculiar. Many of the carnival men kept wives in little timber cabins: during her first winter there, the girl met Argento’s wife, a tiny large-breasted woman who slept odd hours and cooked river-fish in three inches of grease. The girl dreaded that cabin—the fat bodies so close together, the nameless children underfoot, the putrid skins of caribou nailed to the walls. The wife had bright eyes but she never looked at anyone.
But if the cabin was bad, the journey to get there was worse. The merchants struck their booths in late summer and piled their furniture into wagons, repainted the giant skulls on the oilcloth tarps, re-shod their horses, and killed all the sheep and goats they couldn’t bring with them on the journey. By the end of the three-month walk up the center of the continent, they were ragged and half-dead, and their northern wives sometimes could not recognize them. But the women still came joyously out of their timber cabins like they were greeting old friends, bearing gifts they’d stored up all summer—pelts and painted skis and beautiful bowls carved from gypsum, and they brought with them the men’s children, too, now older and wilder. These children spoke a different language, so the girl couldn’t play with them. She never knew what to do in the northcountry, so she prayed for the months to pass quickly and sometimes she prayed for her brother to freeze to death
