Fair Weather

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  He turned it over. It was number seventeen of the major arcana, the card of The Star.

  The card was me. I saw myself in his hands, kneeling on the banks of the cold pool I loved, half into the water which was silver ripples around my legs. I was naked as Vespasian had found me there before, and my brown hair, sun tinted, curled like a cloak across my shoulders. Behind me eight stars glistened so vividly that they blinded, card to eye. One star was the larger and I looked up to the sky above the glade and saw it shine also there. The tarocchi stars moved in an arc through paper and ink, and the paper water swung around my paper knees. I looked from the card to the pool among the trees, for it was also there, and the gentle ripples were the same.

  I felt great peace and sighed, looking up at Vespasian. The card’s spangled stars were so bright, they under lit his cheekbones. But it was not until I saw the sincerity of his smile that I realised he had not been completely confident of picking the right number.

  A bitter wind was building, swirled and curling in the trees above our heads. I heard its force and watched its anger turn to fury, so that black leaf scattered across the moon and hurled screeching into the glade. A witch’s wind, a turmoil of infuriation, and the branches swayed and crashed one against the other, creaking as if to break and whipping up the leaves that had already blown. The gale cannoned into tornadoes of stinging twig, bark and foliage.

  I tugged my cloak around myself as the hood was flung from my head. Vespasian held me tighter. Gerald moved closer. We all recognised the increasing threat of something coming, more than wind or storm, but heralded by the powers of nature.

  Arthur jostled, furious, striding over, his own cloak slapped against his body and streamed behind him. “I deny your right to take the card for the path-holder,” he shouted over the tumult. “I challenge your place. Make her pick the card for herself. Make her cut the pack again.”

  “Fool,” said Lilith, turning momentarily to Arthur. Her long tails of thin hair were in her face, tangled into the blood oozing from her eyes. “You dare challenge? You accuse me of ignorance? Is destiny not mine and tarocchi not my slave? Everything has been done according to the rites.” She stretched out her clawed arm and Arthur was swept aside like loose parchment. The card of The Star lay on the grass at our feet. Above it, Lilith snarled, still spitting, at Vespasian. “But now I claim you,” she growled, “and I will eat you this night as I told you I would. Yes, you have paid the price demanded for once worshipping at my altar and for the power I gave you and the knowledge I taught you. I took your wife in splendid sacrifice and I received your earthly ruin, all sweetly ravished by my new acolytes. That debt is paid. But you are still a foresworn traitor and now I come for you.”

  Vespasian stood unmoving, his legs straight and a little apart, well balanced. In one hand he still held his sword, in the other, the seal of Thoth. Fiery hieroglyphs raced across the intaglio. The mark of the Ibis was clear white within the etched triangle, and the triangle within the square, the square within the circle. The flames did not burn but they lit his hand so it seemed they danced by his control.

  “Yes, I have come as the final sacrifice.” He spoke very clearly, his voice again raised. “But first you must learn how to claim me. If you touch me now, you will burn. Already your source is stifled. I have closed the gates and you have no recourse to the Underworld. Look to your black breath before it is choked from you. I am holder of the seal of Thoth and this is my witness. I stand in place of the Way-Holder and she is my witness. My power is greater than any other human here, and you are my witness.”

  My hands were shaking and if someone had attacked me, my sword would have struck only grass. I gripped the little circular snake tightly and watched Lilith hesitate and step back, the heavy folds of her skin swaying. Then I could feel someone behind me and when something touched me on the shoulder, I jumped as though beaten. When I whirled around I saw Uta. I could still see why I had once wanted to be like her.

  The steely drizzle had become flying ice and although Uta’s hair was wet and her blonde plaits swung and curved like little plump eels twisting around her head, the rain made them gleam and she remained beautiful. Her eyes were almond, blue, soft, and filled with shining tears from the sting of the wind. “Do you know,” she said sweetly, “why Jasper can demand the right to take the card in your place? He chose a card that saved your destiny, but not for your own salvation. He now has the power to control the paths between what is above and what is below, though only while you’re placid, too stupid and cowed to fight him. He believes he’s beaten and conquered the gatekeeper and now all the power is his, but do you know how you were tamed? Can you imagine what he did to you in Arthur’s castle?”

  I shivered. I should have ignored her but I couldn’t. “Yes, I know,” I answered.

  “I’ll tell you anyway,” she said, “because I don’t believe you know.”

  I looked up at Vespasian. “She will tell you the truth,” he said softly, still aware of my presence though his eyes were on Lilith and not on me, and I knew he was ready for her. He had waited many long years for this night. He knew and welcomed whatever it would bring. “Let her tell you, if you wish it,” he murmured. “You have always demanded answers to your questions and I have always denied them. I’ll risk your hatred. Perhaps now it is time you knew everything.”

  Time seemed to stand very still and the stars arched and spun as they had in my tarot card. I felt terribly alone, separated from everything else so that now I saw neither Vespasian nor any of the others except Uta. I looked at my feet. Between my shoes and their wet, bedraggled bows, and amongst the scattered spread of the tarocchi pack Vespasian had discredited, was a single white rose. I was standing on Ingrid’s grave.

  I turned to Uta. “I don’t care what Vespasian did,” I shouted at her. “I don’t care if he still craves power. He’s welcome to mine.”

  “Because you lust after him, but he pledged himself to me,” hissed Uta. “Arthur held him chained in the dungeons but he swore he’d be mine if I released him, and I did. He swore on Lilith’s altar but he left me and went to you. Now he’s foresworn and that’s why she’s claiming him now. So I have asked, and Lilith has agreed. She will eat him at midnight.”

  I hated her so much it hurt. “He doesn’t seem overawed at the prospect,” I said. I could no longer see him but I could hear him. Somewhere distant I could hear his laugh. I wondered what he could possibly have to laugh at.

  “Do you know, I watched while he raped you?” smiled Uta. She licked her lips. She only wanted to disgust me but I believed her. “Did you think he’d do it without an audience? He wanted a witness and I stood at his side.”

  Over the mounting winds, I could hear her. “I don’t care,” I yelled in her face, though I lied, and I cared with all my heart. “He told me. I know why he did what he had to do. I won’t listen to you.”

  “You will,” said Uta. “You have the power of the gatekeeper but no magic and no alchemy. You will listen to every word because I tell you to.”

  I held tightly to the ouroboros, my sword still in the other hand. “I am protected too,” I said. “There is also magic in my life.”

  “He stripped you,” she persisted, “and strapped you to the pillars of Lilith’s altar. I watched. He was vicious. So brutal. I thought he would break your back. He climbed on the great stone slab and straddled you. Then he whipped and burned you before he raped you. Were you a virgin? Of course you were. I watched you sob and bleed.”

  Through the screaming gale the mists rolled briefly back and I saw the black hunched crowd of Arthur’s people, moving, massing, rushing from the edges of the glade to its centre. The storm had weakened the power of the trees.

  There was more Uta wanted to tell me, all plumply eager with her delicious memories, like the miller’s daughter drawing the hot, crusty loaves from the depths of her oven. I was saved by my mother. She interrupted, saying, “They are coming closer. Soon the two realms will touch. You have
given your power to the mortal and he has closed the gates, but if you do not reopen them, the collision will kill you both.”

  I stared back at her. “I trust Vespasian,” I said. “I’ll do nothing without him.” But I was no longer sure I trusted Vespasian. What Uta said had hurt. Knowing it, and hearing it from her, was very different.

  Now I wondered if this was Vespasian’s plan, to annihilate Arthur and all his brood, ourselves, the power of alchemy which he now repudiated, and Lilith in our midst. It was a sad ambition but I was prepared to die for a thirst like that. I was prepared to lose my life, as Vespasian was, if all this evil and the horror that was Lilith died with us. But the mists in my mind were thicker than those in the glade, with no moonshine in my thoughts.

  “Perhaps you’re right to trust him,” my mother said, looking over my head at Lilith’s shadow and the focus of the storm. “He chose the right card, though Lilith had hoped for others. She tried to influence his hand. He avoided her malice.”

  So I had realised. “What did she want me to pick?” I whispered.

  “The Devil of course,” said the veleda. “Or perhaps Death. Even The Tower would have served her purpose and put you into her power. Best of all would have been The World, for that is her own card and personal to her.”

  “And if I had?”

  “As the gate-keeper, you would have belonged to her,” said my mother, “as she believes you should by right.”

  “Do you cut cards?” I asked. “Is life just a game?”

  She nodded. “I cut the pack, when she demands it,” she said. “We all walk a fate symbolised by Lilith’s cards of destiny. I am The Priestess and that is my card. I know my path.”

  I was adjusting. Uta had gone, running to Malcolm’s side at my mother’s appearance. I was isolated now, a pocket of time that held just myself and the veleda. The glade could tighten or remove us as it wished. Even Lilith’s storm now barely touched us, just a flurry and an echo of the roar beyond. “So,” I said, trying to keep my breath steady. “May I ask the same question that Arthur asked of you at the beginning? Whose side are you on? His, or Vespasian’s?”

  “I take no sides,” she said. “There is no such thing as side. Life is the challenge of growth fulfilling potential, an endless clamber towards perfection, whether the perfection of beauty and love, or of perfect malefic evil. True spirit is beyond right and wrong. That is what alchemy is all about. Your lover knows this.”

  “He’s not my lover,” I sighed. “He’s never made love to me. He raped me, just to gain power.”

  “Of course,” she said. “What else could he do? Are you squeamish about such things?”

  I stared at her. I reminded myself she was inhuman, and even less my mother than the mad woman I’d once known her to be. “Yes,” I said dully. “I’m strangely prejudiced about such things. So tell me, why did he have to do it?”

  “You delay me,” she said, frowning down her long nose. “You remind me of the daughter I once let you be. You ask questions that are not your business to ask.”

  “It’s not my business to know why I was raped?” The wind was leaking through the hushed walls of our isolation. I had to raise my voice.

  “To dominate the gatekeeper takes great control. It must be done with pain and violence and intimidation,” said my mother, watching the shimmer of the rain from the wild black sky. We were once again entering the storm. “Your essence could never be taken by any creature or any assault unworthy of you. Holding you prisoner, Arthur imposed pain in blood. To take you from Arthur, Vespasian exercised the only greater and more personal violence that exists. Had he not done this, as the gatekeeper you would have become Arthur’s, and the servant of Lilith. The man you call Vespasian saw what the creature Arthur had done to you, and so to take you as his own, exerted a greater torture to supersede and overwhelm that which had already been done in Lilith’s name. Perhaps in your humanity you whine in self pity, but the Way Holder I called upon to represent me between the worlds, can only be subjugated by a dominance as lofty as her own.”

  “I’m Molly,” I said, shouting now over the newly released winds. “I’m Tilda too, who is not your daughter. I feel nothing inside me of this other creature, this keeper of gates, this thing you call me.”

  “I allowed you too much humanity,” sneered the veleda. “So, he hurt you, this pitiful man, and you complain? Yet he took you so easily. What of a little suffering? Many humans live by it and wallow in it. The suscipient of torture is flattered by the torturer’s concentrated attention. His delight in her is ultimate. Lilith brings pleasure to many through pain, both to bestow and to receive.”

  I winced. “I know why you don’t take sides.” I shuddered. “You see beauty where I feel revulsion. And Vespasian takes no pleasure in – causing pain.”

  “And if he lies?” suggested my mother. “All humanity lies and especially to themselves. This is the man that once called me from the peace of my grave, to answer his own craving for knowledge. At that time the judgement between good and evil was not one he chose to make. You must know he is capable of cruelty, even though he believes in a higher motive than mere pleasure. What of it? As your mother I taught you pain and the strength it brings. You’ve weakened since I left you.”

  “You taught me hate,” I said, sounding childish and sullen.

  She smiled, same lizard lip stretch and a flick of the tongue. “I will tell you one more thing,” she said, “before we must return to the battle. This pathetic sensitivity and your physical denial of sweet degradation does not interest me in the least. My body birthed yours but that does not unite us, nor bind me to responsibility. In some previous life long ago, you might have been my mother. You will never know. It’s as my spiritual representative by the Gateway that we are united, and my watcher by the path does not snivel about a little discomfort. She also, like the pallid child Mathilda, was virgin. None had ripped her integrity from her before. Now she respects the dominance that stole her power by force. But power you still have, and will always have. So the one last thing I tell you, before I take my place at Lilith’s shoulder, is this. When you return to the body of my physical daughter, come to visit me before I die. I have arranged my end and it will come quickly, so you will have to hurry. I have a gift for you, which I will give you when you come to witness my physical disintegration. A special gift. It is not any longer the gift of pain which taught you strength, nor one of love, which I have never had to give. But it is a gift you will value as you have valued no other.”

  I began to answer, but she had gone. So I stood there, staring into the blizzard, with my eyes half blind and my hair all tangled around my head. I was still clutching the ouroboros but it was offering me no protection against the wilderness of attack and the battering of wind, rain and ice. I could not see Vespasian. I could not even see Arthur, Uta, or any of them. The air was filled with flying debris and the manic swirl of leaf and branch. I heard the creak of falling trees but all I saw was Lilith.

  She squatted and the flesh of her thighs rolled to the ground around her like a frill of skirts. Her body continued to change, swollen and discoloured. The storm centred her, snatched from nature, an indiscriminate attack, a great heaving tidal sea of pulsing violence. She was still summoning turmoil as the veleda went back to her side, standing calmly within the tornado. Almost untouched by the chaos, my mother looked across at me, speaking again without emotion. “The collision that must occur if you do not take back the power to open the ways, will destroy you,” she said. “And that is not the destiny of The Star.”

  “I don’t know how,” I screamed back at her. I couldn’t even hear my own voice over the screech of the wind, but I could hear hers.

  “Fool,” she said to me. “Know yourself. Know your strengths and take them within you. Intend it and the gates will open.”

  I couldn’t hold onto intention nor onto anything except the ouroboros. I was lifted by the storm and felt myself fly. My cloak turned to ice and I dropped my
sword.

  I faced the stars. For a moment I didn’t know if I was looking at my tarocchi card or the real night sky and whether the smashing trees around me were fantasy or nightmare. I even wondered if this was only the dark sadness that always came after an interlude with my mother, sending me as usual into my other world, my secret place, that was secret no longer.

  Then I saw Uta. Her mouth was huge, a scarlet circle of terror filling her face as the same wind that lifted me, lifted her. But not quite the same wind. I had thought the ouroboros was no match for the storm but the violence that spun Uta, carried me gently below her as though I drifted on breezes like an uncrushed autumn leaf. Instead, as I watched her, she was gripped and pirouetted by a bizarre and horrifying force. I continued to watch as her hair, those two gorgeous plaits I’d once imagined around my own face, were torn from her head in swirls of blood. Her scalp was left bare and white, but razed crimson in a thousand cut ribbons. I could not hear her scream though I saw her throat swell with it. She sped on and up, still spinning, a maniacal puppet caught in a frenzied hurricane, battered now by hail that tore at her flayed skin, the clothes swept from her, and finally, as I still watched because I could do nothing else, both flailing arms revolved in their sockets and were ripped loose, spinning free, grasping alone at the cloud blurred stars.

  Distorted, naked, armless, hairless and dissolving in blood, she continued up. I had always thought the underworld to be down. I had been wrong.

  I floated back to earth, soft as a duckling feather.

  Joanna and Arthur stood together, facing Lilith and my mother and between them they held Gerald. I had no idea what had happened to Vespasian. For one crazy, stunning moment I imagined him flying, armless and screaming, in the gigantic horror of the storm above us. Then I blinked and turned to Gerald. “They can’t keep you,” I said to him. I pointed the ouroboros at Arthur. “Let him go.”