Tygo turned to John. Was it desperation in his eyes? John couldn’t tell. But as quickly as John had seen it, Tygo nodded and bowed. “I’m at your service.” What could it mean, Marvel’s interest in Tygo? John had no time to wonder, however, before Alyson took her father’s arm.
“Do you think the outlaw carnival means us harm?” she asked him quietly. “This meeting, will it be dangerous?”
He seemed to recoil slightly at her touch and acted as though she hadn’t spoken. She said, “Father?”
“Alyson. I have no idea what they want.”
She stepped back. If she was stung by his tone, she did not show it. She took up her club again and walked alone to another hole. Did she often feel alone, John thought, perplexed.
Then Michael rushed John into his office, and they had spread out their charts and water bowls. John was seated at the rough wooden table and locked for an hour within the heavenly math of so many overlapping orbits, and he drew triangles upon triangles upon semicircles, and for the hundred-thousandth time he wondered if these shapes meant everything or nothing at all, and if people all did indeed live their lives as prescribed inside of them, or if the shapes were merely patterns thrust upon them arbitrarily. The king smoked as he waited, exhaling blue lungfuls of air that choked John until silently he opened a window.
Outside on the green lawn Alyson had begun her golf course over again, this time with another maiden for a partner, and they shrieked with laughter as a warm, gentle rain began, and John felt something inside him tighten and release, tighten and release, until he realized it was only his breath, entirely mundane and predictable. But suddenly he understood it had been the opposite all along: each breath he took meant something, in spite of his every effort to render it meaningless.
CHAPTER 19
THE THUNDER, PERFECT MIND
Mr. Capulatio came back to the tent. It was nearly afternoon, and the girl could hear sparse droplets beginning to strike the tent. He took the box of her belongings down again, and handed her her own brooch, the one Argento had given her that had come from their mother, and pressed it into her hand.
She said, “What is this for?” The brooch in her hand like a black spider.
“Black amber, sugarplum,” he said, and picked up his hat from one of the sofas. “You wear it when somebody dies. Come on.” He dusted off the hat and popped it back into a more perfect shape, then went into the damp light of the day, holding his arm above his head as though this could shield him from the droplets. She heard him laughing with another man just outside the tent. “Come on, I said,” he called.
She put on the only clothes she could find, the white tunic she had been wearing before the wedding. She pinned the brooch to her chest and went outside. Whoever Mr. Capulatio had been speaking to had gone. Her new husband took her hand and opened a parasol above both their heads. For the first time since they’d camped, there was almost no one around. She was not cold. Her soft leather shoes wet through as they walked.
The black amber rock hung too heavily to the thin fabric of the dress-front; she feared it might rip. Her thigh hurt where she’d burned it. They walked out past the boundaries of the carnival. Past the sentinel fires and a field where some draft animals were pastured, then through a hedge of pricking bushes.
They saw a group of men when they mounted a tufted hill and came plodding around a thicket of low wet cactuses. The men stood in a slight natural basin. She’d never seen any of them before. They were huddled together around something she couldn’t see. All of them were damp from the sprinkling rain. Mr. Capulatio led her closer.
The tallest was old, a dark-skinned barrel; he wore a brilliant yellow tunic and seemed like the sort of man she might have trusted if she hadn’t met him here, now. So she did not trust him, but he smiled sympathetically at her anyway, as though he knew her from somewhere, and she had the same thought, but then she wondered if it just happened that way sometimes—if there are people in the world who are instantly familiar to you.
The other men parted to reveal what they had been crowded around. The girl froze. It was Mr. Capulatio’s executioner’s block, that black shining death-creation, and standing there beside it with her hair chopped to her chin and very dirty but calm as a lakeshore was Orchid. Her heavy blond brows smudged all out of order. She still wore the dress from the wedding, which had been a brilliant deep blue, though now it was dingy and stained all down the front with what the girl could only assume was blood. The girl felt hypnotized, rooted in place. It was a feeling similar to when she’d first seen Mr. Capulatio on the battlefield—a knowledge that she should run compounded by her absolute lack of ability to do it.
No one had held a parasol for Orchid; the rain had cut a rivulet down her face.
“Are you going to kill her?” she whispered.
“I don’t like to talk about ‘killing’ or ‘dying’ in this special place,” Mr. Capulatio said. He handed her the parasol, then swept his hand out over the whole of the landscape, which in this spot was ringed on all sides by scrub and palm-bushes. To the left she could hear the endless murmur of the sea. “My star,” he said to her. “My sapphire. This place is the most holy in the world. This is where we left the earth, where
