CHAPTER 17
HULDAH
Mr. Capulatio woke her before dawn and went at once outside to urinate, leaving her in the knot of their blankets. She heard him outside talking to someone. It was some time before she smelled and felt the green fizz of rain in the air. She was surprised she wasn’t cold. And then she felt it, all at once like slap. Pain in her thigh. In the dim light she examined the spot. A smear of yellow-copper had oozed through the bandage. It looked better than it felt. But from moment to moment it burned so hotly she wanted to tear off the bandage and pour cool water over it.
Mr. Capulatio came back inside the tent, yawning and stretching. Today they would do the ritual, but first he had to make things ready. He seemed tired, but she could tell he had something fixed in his mind. They’d slept with their foreheads touching but now he knelt before her while she lay on the bed, his face a limitless plain of calm. But she sensed his anxiety. “You really should read.” He handed her The True King. “While you wait.”
She stared at it. “Orchid wrote this.”
“Ah, you’ve figured it out. A girl of many talents.” He pulled his hair halfway back and secured it with a tie, then looked down at her sternly. “Let me tell you something before you get ideas. I do love her. She has been an asset. A great advantage to me in many, many ways.”
The girl’s heart contracted. “But she tried to humiliate you in front of everyone.”
“Her magic is a special kind. She has bent the world to my own will with her words.”
“She tried to kill me,” the girl said in a flat voice.
“That will happen.”
“But how can you let her try to kill me?”
“I’m not,” he growled. “Leave it alone, Aurora. Read the book. When I come back you will have read it. As much as you can.”
After he left, she was angry. But she had nothing to do. So she did what he said.
“The carnivals began after the Blood Rain. They brought terror and relief by turns to the people of these lands, a people who are few enough these days and were even fewer in times past. The people were so enraptured by the carnivals that they kept proficient records, which I have long studied to collect this history. About the origins of the execution carnivals there can be no misunderstanding. I will tell you now how they came about.
The history of the new religions and the carnivals begins some thousand years ago, when a rain of blood and viscera fell over a great swathe of land in the center of the continent. It fell upon the place that had been called Kansas, when it was but a wasteland ravaged by the Disease. The rain came from a clear sky, red drops and globs of tissue, and ever afterward people called it the Blood Rain. They did not know what it could be, if some gargantuan floating animal had exploded in the sky above them, or if the massacred dead from an unknown war had been lifted into the sky by a cyclone and then dumped upon them by chance, or even if the rain had been sent by evil forces or good ones. No one knew, and so the people were terrified.
The Blood Rain occurred in April and lasted five days, soaking the ground in blood up to the ankles of the wild cattle that roamed freely in those days. Much to the astonishment of the Cape and the king’s court at Canaveral, the Blood Rain did not fall there. Even in those ancient times the Cape was already a holy and famous place, one filled with magicians and Orbital Doctors. They had already embarked upon the use and refinement of magic, the outlawry of medicine, and many more tenets of our faith that we still hold to be true. They had done all these things, and yet still nothing had been able to quell the spreading of a terrible Disease known as Bent Head, and people were still dying, and the world had continued to grow worse in every generation.
The Disease killed more people in Kansas than anywhere on the continent. Some even believe the Disease originated in the cattle there. Whatever the case, Kansas had become a wasteland, where nothing grew. The few people who still resided there lived like wretches in tiny settlements they were terrified to leave, in case they should stray from the roads they had come to believe safe. They were afraid to contract Bent Head.
But after the Blood Rain, the land, so long fallow, bloomed. Wildflowers, grasses, ferns, and rushes sprang up almost overnight, carpeting the countryside. The land brought forth greenery and living creatures, and for the first time anyone could remember, there were as many calves in the fields as grown cattle, and the cattle did not seem to die as they usually did when they crossed patches of Diseased ground. For several years the world was lush, even in winter. The fall of blood had nourished the earth itself, and its beauty was excruciating. There are records of men who went mad with the splendor of it, the rolling hills of soft summer grass, and the cattle which multiplied a hundredfold and then a thousandfold, until people could not look upon the land in Kansas without seeing cows walking dreamily from this place to that one, glossy and happy in their herds.
What were the people to make of this abundance, where before there had been only death? The folk had no inkling of the forces at work. So they reveled in the glory all around them, the warm wind blowing down the prairies, the birth of new calves. They spoke to each other in hushed tones, like the
