John eyed Tygo. “What is he talking about?” he whispered.
The streamers on the pikes whipped around in a sudden gust of breeze. Yellows and reds, maroons, illuminated by the fires spluttering. The dark was complete now. It was fully night. Tygo shook his head. “Come with us, David.”
David pulled up one of the pikes, then drove it down again in another place. He seemed not to like this placement either, and repeated the gesture, hissing an incantation beneath his breath, some string of words that John couldn’t catch. Then he spoke louder: “Orchid still believes she is meant to be queen of the Cape.”
“No one is meant to rule here. Damn you, listen to me,” Tygo said. “We should leave. We must.” A plaintive note entered his voice. John had heard it only once before, when Tygo was begging for his life, making his prediction about the ladies’ bleeding.
“We’ll take the Cape. It’s what we came here to do,” David said.
“The Mystagogue needs you alive.”
“I’m a lucky son of a bitch, I was born for this.” He straightened his shoulders. “I won’t die. It’s not possible.”
Tygo opened his mouth again, but suddenly the ground shook with a force that knocked the three of them to their knees. Many of the piked Heads fell over and one landed next to John. He batted it away, even though up close the Head was somewhat less upsetting than he had imagined, just the hardened leather of skin, the smell of sand and sun and a wisp of rot thrown in. No more redolent than a mildewed bedsheet. There were only X’s for eyes to look back at him. “Are they trying to blow up the wall?” John choked, clamoring to his feet. “It’s ten feet thick, it’s stood for a thousand years.”
David pushed a stack of pikes and Heads off his back. “They will get through.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small thing, a black amber brooch, just a plain piece of polished stone with a pin stuck to the back. It caught the torchlight. John knew these things. They were for executions, though the ones people wore at the Cape were much more finely crafted, often made in the shape of a family’s patron animal. He owned himself one that looked like a guinea hen, passed down from his mother. He’d never worn it.
David pinned it to his shirtfront. “Ah,” he said. “They will be needing me at the front for inspiration.”
He strode away from them then, his hand wandering to his belt in search of a knife. Finding none, he picked one up off the ground, checked it over, wiped the blade between the folds of his shirt, and kept walking.
At once terrified of their surroundings, John and Tygo scurried after him. In this place everything blinked in and out of shadow and every eye seemed alight with madness. David was hard to catch—he so quickly blended into the crowd. A mile away in the distance and to John’s right, he could just see the metallic castle within the compound walls. The high outer wall, encrusted with broken glass, reflected the torches of the approaching carnival men. Shanties and booths and huts and people appeared in increasing numbers, clotting as they went closer to the wall. He passed sheep and goats, spindle-legged and black with curved vicious horns and daemonic eyes and hooves that could kill a man with one kick. Farther down the path they met men on horses, magicians with their girdles of chalky severed heads and intoxicated eyes. Carts with wood for fires, a man with a musket, a barking dog.
The fighting had begun. David was lost in the crowd.
* * *
The battle raged on unchecked around them, people circulating like blood. Standing, falling, crying out at the moment of their own deaths. For the longest time, John just watched, until a huge man came at him with a club studded with spikes. He was confused momentarily, because it was a palace guard and John was obviously himself, a court official, an important courtier. Whyever would this guard run at him, with such a look of bloodlust in his eyes? But that was exactly why: it was a lust, John thought, the idea coming to him wildly as he dodged the blow. Some instinct kicked in, a kind of levity raised him out of his body. He saw himself narrowly avoid the clubbing. He saw himself turn, and take up a pike from a man who had fallen dead beside him. Then, he saw himself thrust it deep between the guard’s shoulders.
The passion ran past the moment of doing it, and after the man had fallen, John stood there, panting. Tygo shrugged a little, as if to say, It was that or die yourself, and then John pulled the pike from the still-breathing man. He did not look back because he did not want to see a thing he could never unsee.
After that, he found himself a part of the battle, not as a believer fighting for the truth, because in the moment of the fight all ideology, old and new, vanished. He fought as a person who wanted simply to keep on being alive.
He
