Chapter 70
Aria: “With a wicked pack of cards”
Of all of her tutors, she liked Mrs. Timberstone the best. Old as the hills but sill spry enough to surprise you, Mrs. Allison Timberstone (or “Allie” if you were so fortunate to have gained membership to that minority of the human race) was one of those few elderly that did not spend a lot of their time complaining or bragging about their infirmities. She was serene in a way that Aria wanted to be someday, and it wasn't by being famous, wealthy, or popular.
What Mrs. Timberstone taught was difficult to define. She liked to describe it as “filling in the bits your other teachers left out” which was a fair if vague description of it. Today's lesson seemed to be about something called Archetypes.
Very little wind stirred the dust on the top of the building. The day was surprisingly warm, with no clouds at all yet, and so they had moved to the roof to enjoy the fresh air and the sunshine before the cold heart of winter began beating. Mrs. Timberstone shook out a blanket and they sat on it as she drew something rectangular from her satchel. It was a deck of cards, but not like any cards Aria had ever seen. The cards were old, but hardly wrinkled, and they reflected the sunlight as if sheathed in glass.
“Plastic laminate,” Mrs. Timberstone explained without explaining. “Something the Ancients developed that is proof against water and dirt.”
Aria felt awed. “You're saying this's from before the Fall?”
“Handed down in my family. My mother gave it to me.”
“Has my mother seen it?”
“Of course. I taught the governor, back when she was your age. Now pay attention. You know that the cards people use to play games are very old, going back more than a thousand years. The design of this deck is not as old as the usual decks, though even though the actual cards themselves, their physical manifestation, are older than the ones people use these days. The design was done by a man named A. E. Waite, although it used to be known as the Rider pack.”
“Did you play games with them when you were a girl?”
“Not like you think. They were not designed for games. They were made to encode and preserve certain concepts. People have used them to tell fortunes, for which purpose they are better than the ordinary, everyday deck.”
The deck had four suits like the ordinary cards Aria had seen and played with, but in this deck the suits were called Wands, Swords, Cups, and Pentacles, which, Mrs. Timberstone explained, corresponded to the ordinary Clubs, Spades, Hearts, and Diamonds.
It was larger than the usual deck of 52 cards. Each suit had an additional Court card, called the Page. Aria asked about it, and learned page was an ancient word for an assistant of sorts. So each suit ran from one to ten, then the Page, Prince, Queen and King. But there were still more cards left in her hand after she dealt all these out on the blanket.
“What are those other cards?” she asked. “Jokers?”
Mrs. Timberstone laughed. “No, dear. Those are the most important part of this set. They are called the Major Arcana. It means 'great secrets' and they are the Archetypes I wanted to talk about today.”
“What's an archetype? I know in the Church an archbishop is higher than a bishop.”
“An archetype,” said Mrs. Timberstone, dangerously close to launching into lecture mode, “is a common model, a type that we all share unconsciously. A universal pattern in our heads – a concept that we recognize in many forms that all have the same set of associations. For example, what do a bear's cave, a bird's nest, and a gopher's burrow all have in common?”
“They're all homes?”
“Exactly right. The outward form of a home might not be the same, but we still recognize that it is a home – somewhere where something or someone lives. The twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana are archetypes like that. For example, here is the first one, numbered zero in some traditions and one in others: the Fool.”
“So he is the archetype of idiots? Or is it suicides – he's about to step off a cliff!”
Mrs. Timberstone smiled. “Not really. The Fool represents the beginning of a quest, the beginning of wisdom which is the realization that we know nothing, as Socrates said, and the willingness to leap into the unknown to acquire experience. He's pictured here as a vagabond, and the bag tied to his stick represents the baggage we can't help carrying along for the journey: our preconceptions and hopes and worries.”
She dealt out the next card. “This is the Magician. In the older decks he was called the Juggler. You can see a sword, cup and pentacle on the table in front of him, and a wand in his hand. There are many ways to interpret this card. He represents the transformation of ideas into actuality, a magical process. As he points his wand skyward, his other hand is pointing down at the ground, encoding the ancient saying “as above, so below.”
Aria's brow wrinkled. “What does that mean?”
“The correspondence of patterns at many levels of existence. As the Earth orbits the sun, so the electrons in an atom can be said to orbit the nucleus. Light radiates from the sun, just as light radiates from a candle here on earth.”
A thought struck Aria. “Magician is another word for Wizard, so it represents Xander too, doesn't it?”
“Of course.” She dealt another card.
Aria, who was beginning to get the hang of this, recognized the next archetype immediately. “The High Priestess is you! A guardian and transmitter of secrets.”
Mrs. Timberstone smiled. “In a way, yes, I suppose so. You picked up on that even faster than your mother did. I can see your father's influence. You inherited strength and quickness of mind from both your parents.”
“Did you teach the General, too?”
Something flitted over the teacher's features. “Um. No, I hadn't come to Denver back then.” She turned over more cards. “The Empress, and the Emperor.”
“She reminds me of my mother, but more relaxed. He ought to remind me of the General,” said Aria, “but for some reason he reminds me more of the Honcho. Especially since he calls his country an Empire, and mother doesn't say that about Rado.”
“Remember that,” Mrs. Timberstone advised. “It is a significant difference between them. Often what we call something says more about us than it does about the thing itself.” She laid down another card. “The Hierophant.”
“He reminds me of the Pope.”
“And for a very good reason. In older versions of the Tarot, he is called the Pope. He is often taken to represent organized religion, or religious authorities.”
A deep humming filled the air, like a cloud of giant bumblebees. As Aria jumped to her feet, Mrs. Timberstone, who recognized the sound immediately, scooped up the cards on the blanket before they could be blown away. Aria shaded her eyes with her hand and peered around the horizon, finally spotting three objects approaching.
The roaring grew as they tilted up over the roof and went vertical to land. Lester was the first to do so. Xander came down more slowly, and at the same time as the third rider, who looked, improbably, like a lost priest on a broomstick.
The blanket surfed off to the side and Mrs. Timberstone chased it, managing to step on a corner before it was swept off the rooftop. She turned to Xander. “I can't believe you're still doing that!”
He shrugged. “When necessary.” He turned to the priest. “Are you all right Father?”
The man in priestly garb let his pipe fall with a clang and bent down trembling to kiss the rooftop. “Never in all my life did I know how blessed it is to feel something beneath my feet.”
Mrs. Timberstone observed this in an interested silence.
“We had a bit of a close scrape,” Xander explained. “A very storybook scene, peasants with torches ready to burn Lester at the stake. All it lacked was a lightning-lit castle on a hill.” he turned to the priest. “I hope you don't regret accompanying us, Father. I could have dropped you off along the way.”
“Not at all.” The priest seemed to be checking to make sure all his parts were still attached, a
nd then he froze as he realized he was being observed by Aria and her teacher.
Xander rescued him. “Mrs. Timberstone, Aria, I present to you one Father Andrews, recently of Texas. Father, this is Mrs. Timberstone, an esteemed tutor, and Aria D'Arcy, her current student.”
Father Andrews sketched a slight bow to them. “I must confess, ladies, that you do not catch me at my best. Even so, the pleasure of meeting you both shall do me a power of good in recovering from the harrowing journey north.”
Behind him, Lester looked a little unhappy that the two newcomers had crowded his return. She caught his eye and winked, and he brightened up immediately. Inwardly she smiled. Men are so easy. “I'm glad you got away,” she told him. We were all worried when you didn't make it back, especially Xander.”
“Nonsense,” the wizard snorted. “I just didn't like to lose an apprentice in the middle of his training. Would be such a burden to have to go find another one so soon.”
“Don't listen to him. We had to put him under armed guard while he recovered or he would have been off to retrieve you before he was up to it. However did you manage in prison?”
He opened his mouth to say something but Xander jumped in. “It's a long story, and I look forward to hearing it as much as you do. But let's get in out of the cold and grab some lunch, shall we? The jailers took Lester's boots and his toes must be getting chilly.”
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