It was with a heavy heart that John allowed Mizar to lug him off to his chamber and place him in bed. Beside him on the night table Mizar filled a blue crystal glass with water and instructed John to drink all of it before he slept, but John drank none.
CHAPTER 14
THE UNICURSAL HEXAGRAM
On her wedding night she thought of her brothers. Argento, of course, there was always Argento. But also she wondered about her other brother, William, who had been driven from her mother’s settlement for thievery before she was born. Her mother said William had run off to be a con-man, a swindler who posed as a Walking Doctor. Could he have been in that crowd of onlookers? Was one of those faces his? If so, she wouldn’t have known him.
She thought of them both as she walked hand in hand with her new husband back to the tent. Now she had a husband. He would protect her from men like them. Men who could hurt her. Mr. Capulatio had said The difference is I’ll only hurt you on the inside. She remembered Argento’s broken body, before Mr. Capulatio cut off his head. Argento had kept his courage in the end. The girl’s hate for him had transformed, and her pity as well, and now she wondered how she had ever been afraid of him. He seemed so far away. He could not touch her.
When the wedding dance ended and they came back to the tent, Mr. Capulatio sat across from her on the carpets. There had been laughing and singing and dancing, and then cups had appeared and folk had begun a raucous revel. Mr. Capulatio had stolen her away, back here to the soft pillowed ground. The quiet. Then, slowly, as her head cleared, she found herself trying to transform her husband’s face into her brother’s. There were no wrinkles on Mr. Capulatio’s forehead, but she remembered Argento’s thick and somewhat scarred skin so fully in that instant that she couldn’t believe he wasn’t here, that she wasn’t there, back in his musty tent beneath mildewed blankets. If she tried, she could see in Mr. Capulatio some likeness of Argento. If she looked hard enough. Their eyes, for instance, were nearly the same color. And their hair was not that different. Maybe they looked like brothers. Suddenly she couldn’t tell. She wondered if she had drunk too much.
She searched for something on his face that didn’t remind her of her brother, and it was a long while before she realized that they hardly looked similar at all—they looked nothing alike! Her brother had been tall, very tall. She remembered that well. But Mr. Capulatio was of an average height. Was she disappointed by that? How shallow. She wondered if she was also of an average height; Orchid was a woman, and taller than the girl, and there was no one else to compare herself to.
She felt her eyes closing. But he still wanted to sit there in silence. What was he doing? Now she felt sad that there had been no one she knew to witness her marriage and tell her if she’d looked happy. There had been no one to tell the girl if she looked beautiful. Had she looked beautiful? Had she been happy? She couldn’t tell. She thought she should feel different, now that they were married. But she didn’t know if she did.
And in that instant the dam of emptiness burst within her. She did miss Argento. He had burned the unicursal hexagram into her thigh and dragged her through blood-spattered fields on her knees and never spoken to her with any kindness at all, but she missed him. He was her brother. The only one she had ever known. She wanted to hold Cosmas, the Head he’d made her, Cosmas the Uncrusher, but Mr. Capulatio had hidden it high up in one of his boxes. She began to sob.
Mr. Capulatio studied her as though this were no great thing. They continued to sit across from one another while she cried, him with his legs crossed beneath him and she with her knees drawn up to her chest. At first she sobbed loudly, with heaving breaths, but finally they slowed and Mr. Capulatio extended a hand to her and caressed the bulb of her knee. His fingers were gentle. He pulled her forward by her leg and kissed her forehead. He whispered, “Did you not like the wedding?” He kissed her again. “I think other people liked it. I’m sorry about Orchid. She acted very badly.” He shrugged. “But the wedding was still nice.”
She said nothing.
“Do you know what today is?”
She shook her head.
“It’s November fourteenth, your wedding day. We’ve been together now for seven months.”
She began to cry again. She couldn’t help it; all the moments of the life she’d lived with her oldest brother rushed back to her at once. It was a torture she could not will from her mind. She remembered the horse Argento had let her ride—a broken down palomino that he cursed and said was no good for pulling their wagon anymore. Where was that horse now? Surely dead, like everyone else. And also the way at night Argento had crept into her tent with his bottle of foul-smelling drink clutched like a baby to his breast, and how he would take long voracious gulps while barely sitting up, and sometimes he would choke, and she was forced to slap him on the back to clear the fluid from his windpipe and how he stared at her with watery eyes and smiled—something he never did when he wasn’t drinking. And how he looked when he slept: so compressed and uncomfortable on his bedroll. How she had,
