Out of the sky came the warmest wind, and it stirred many emotions in her that threatened to bring her to tears. She did not know if she wanted to marry him but she had accepted—forever ago now, it seemed—that she would. As far as she could disentangle one feeling from the next, she found she was flattered by his public kisses, and she was full of pride because he was the leader, and she was pleased with her own beautiful wedding dress as well as the delicate opalescent crown he had set upon her head to signify that she was queen.
But mostly she was thrilled at her place in the center of this crowd, buffeted by the blaze of torches and smells, with him. The eyes made her shy, but she wanted them upon her. She nodded, “Yes.” And at that he clapped his hands and thrust his hand high in the air together with hers and shouted: “The young sigil dressed in white! Here she is! Columbiachallengerdiscoveryatlantisendeavour!” Her loose sleeve sliding backward down the cylinder of her arm. The crowd cheered again, and the girl felt that this, this must be happiness, this, and if it was, then perhaps she had been happy all her life after all, so unsurprising was this feeling of inevitability and excitement.
Just as they began their walk down the aisle of Heads and streamers, a great globe of green light sprang up at the shore below, as though a lamplighter had been watching for a signal, as she and Mr. Capulatio passed some invisible marker. The path before them ran directly into the sea, and there at the seam where the ocean met the sand was a large raft, suddenly lit up brilliantly. A driftwood barge big enough to hold three people at least, and on the barge stood Orchid in her own fine dress, holding a burning torch in her hand that sent spirals of emerald light and shadow down her forearm, with her hair bound up on one of those stiff forms that the crones wore. She wore face paint like a crone. Her smile when she saw them was dreadful. The torch had been treated with some chemical that made it burn green.
At the water, the girl hesitated, but Mr. Capulatio tugged her into the sea, which swirled around her ankles and billowed her dress between them, and when they were knee deep he boosted her up onto the raft, which must have been anchored because it remained in place despite the jostling. The girl stood for a moment alone with Orchid, who glared without a shred of sympathy. She offered no encouraging word, not even a nod of acknowledgment. The girl looked at her, and Orchid, hard-eyed, looked back over the umber stripes on her cheekbones. Once Mr. Capulatio ascended the raft and they’d all regained their balance, he laughed and exclaimed, “My wives. My hearts.” It was such a jubilant laugh. The torch in Orchid’s hand winked in the breeze and she set it in a brace bolted to the back of the raft.
The crowd massed at the waterline. They stood shoulder to shoulder, and the low pitches of their voices were no longer audible. She felt the raft straining against its hidden tethers with the tide. Orchid moved closer to Mr. Capulatio. “Are we really going to do this, David? You can still stop this hideousness. I’ll say anything you want me to say to them. But stop it.” She paused. Though she was begging, she did not sound like it. Her voice, the girl noticed, was quite high. “I need time to read the texts again. There is a mistake in my interpretation.”
“Read your lines,” he replied, forcing her slightly away from him with his thigh.
“I will not,” she hissed. “I cannot, this is too awful.”
It seemed to the girl that Mr. Capulatio might strike Orchid. But the scowl passed nearly instantly and he grasped the girl by her hand again and stroked the inside of her wrist. “My Radiance,” he said to Orchid. “Wife of my first heart—”
“Quiet with that!” she whispered. “I will not do this, David. Tell them that she is a sacrifice to the Great Work. Say that you will marry her here and now, and then we will make her a Head, together; she is our great sacrifice. Look, I’ve brought my knife.” She lifted her dress and exposed her tall leather boots, the ones she had been wearing earlier. Poking from the left one, just visible up against her pale thigh, was a knife handle. “I’ve read the scriptures over and over today and I cannot agree with you. You are not supposed to take another queen. You are making an erroneous interpretation. Please forgive me for saying this, but perhaps it’s brought on by your fear of what is to come. David, my dear husband, my spiritual master whom I have loved with all my heart since I was a girl. That was not so long ago, I am not that old! Please listen to me. We both know how afraid you have been of these days, of our Work coming to its apex. Let us at least admit that? Can you admit it?” She stared at him imploringly.
He said nothing.
“Fear has clouded your vision,” she raised her voice. The folds of the silk around Orchid’s thigh, the handle of the knife catching the light as she bent forward ever
