Allegories of the Tarot

by Ribken, Annetta

  The sound of music rose from the amphitheater, accompanied by the muffled roar of the crowd. Raph gently traced my jaw with his fingers. “Maybe the concert was a little much to start with,” he said.

  “You’re probably right.” I summoned up a smile, and found to my surprise it didn’t feel half as awkward as I’d expected. “Why don’t we start off smaller? Your place?”

  Raph’s fingers twined gently with the shaky fingers of my right hand. “I’d love that.”

  ***

  Jordan L. Hawk grew up in the wilds of North Carolina, where she was raised on stories of haints and mountain magic by her bootlegging granny. After using a silver knife in the light of a full moon to summon her true love, she turned her talents to spinning tales. She weaves together couples who need to fall in love, then throws in some evil sorcerers and undead just to make sure they want it bad enough. In Jordan’s world, love might conquer all, but it just as easily could end up in the grave.

  ***

  THE STAR

  L’Etoile Flamboyant

  By Samantha Henderson

  Last night I dreamed about the Painted Children: the Dragon Leviathan, the Boy Made of Horses, and the girl, L’Etoile Flamboyant. In the dream, I sat at the edge of the cliff beside the ruins, not far from where I lie now, but I was straight and whole again, the tiger reclining beside me like an outsized housecat. The water at the foot of the cliff glistened in the starlight, and the Children were in a boat, little wider than a rowboat, looking up at me. The girl stretched out her arms, and I shifted as if to rise. The tiger gave me a lazy nudge. Not yet, it said, silently. We are still at the business of dying.

  ***

  It doesn’t matter where I came from and what I was before, when there were cities with power that came from vast engines, water came with a turn of the wrist, there were telephones and television and flying a mile above the ground was taken for granted. In the chaos that came with the ending of that world my body was broken more than once, and I lost my family and our beautiful house filled with beautiful things, like crystal glasses to serve chilled wine and machines that sang.

  Or perhaps I was always crippled, an indigent. Perhaps the woman, my girl, my boy, or the things I remembered having are some of the many stories people create after a world is destroyed and remade. Truth becomes a house built from splintered lumber, and it’s better to tread carefully around the bad joins and makeshift foundation lest the whole blessed structure comes tumbling down. That is why, as part of the grace we share in this violent world, no one asks a lot of questions. No one disturbs the fragile foundation of another's truth.

  I joined Hobart’s Carnival because one of his mares got loose. I found her in the waste behind Goddard’s market, where I was cleaning blood from the stalls for my bread. I got a piece of rope around her neck, and found her thrushy foot. I had it soaking when Hobart found me—I’d learned about curing horses from when Goddard’s was a post-stop, before they gave up and sold the animals for meat—and he offered me bed and board to stay a week until it was cured. Better food than Goddard’s, so I agreed.

  Hobart didn’t like me much, but even after the beast was fixed he kept me on—in part because I’m good with horses, but there are many more able-bodied that can keep a hoof sound and stop the mares from bickering. When the Carnival started to move and it was time to strike the tents I saw him eye me with my back so twisted I couldn’t scurry up the poles and bring the sailcloth down. I saw him think useless trow, for everyone with Hobart’s, fortuneteller and fairy dancers included, did double duty and knew not to shirk their share of labor, down to fighting if it was needed. I would have been dumped in the next backwater we played, had it not been for the tiger.

  Hobart had found or bought or stolen, in the back alleys of the world-that-was, a tremendous, slinky, striped beast that twisted in its cage like the tawny embodiment of the jungle itself. Hobart’s was a good show, with horses that danced and curtseyed enough to please any girl, and acrobats that played their dangerous games overhead with a cheerfulness that seemed to welcome death. But most people have seen clever horses and know a boy who can do a trick or too. Few people, even in the world-that-was, have seen a tiger up close enough to understand the orange-black immensity of it, its slow burning gaze, the ivory architecture of its jaws as it yawns its contempt. A tiger is a threat, a delightful creep of fear along the spine, and a promise as well. People will come from their farms in the valleys, their lairs in the cliffs and pay hard-won coin to see a tiger.

  Hobart had been able to control the beast so far, to make it leap from its cage and sit like a housecat, to roar on cue and offer its paw. But he knew that dark rumble from the creature’s side as it contemplated the first and second row meant one day soon it would shrug off his will and make a red harvest of the tent.

  When I stood in the aisles and let the tiger see me, that rumble stopped and the cat became quiescent, calm, and bowed its grisly head under Hobart’s touch. When I reached into its cage and patted its flank after feeding—Hobart let nobody but himself feed the creature its meat—it grumbled and settled down into sleep. I heard the others whisper that tiger loved me. It was a strange kind of love. Whether because my crippled spine made me suitable prey, or whether I smelled of the sins of a past I couldn’t remember, I saw in the tiger’s regard a restrained hunger, a willingness to wait until the right moment to snap my ill-healed bone, to sink its teeth into my belly. The tiger took pleasure in that suspended time between the decision to kill me and the actual act, and I was content to live upon its whim.

  The tiger--and I--to keep it from killing the rubes, were necessities now that Khasar had left the Carnival. They called Khasar a soul-eater, what used to be called a hypnotist, but he wasn’t a sideshow trickster that made you recite the alphabet backwards and bark like a dog. And they told me he didn’t work the day shows at Hobart’s Carnival, the time when hard-faced children laughed at the clowns juggling handkerchiefs and young girls fell in love with the dancing horses. During the day, the snake handler hefted a milky albino python over her head, and acrobats spun fluid down the ropes from the summit of the big top, and the air was tinged with the smell of burning sugar and cut grass.

  But we must make our way in a hard world any way we can, so Hobart’s had a night circus, where the snake handler did something quite different with the python, and the fairy dancers wore paint and nothing else, and the smell of sugar turned to musk. Children didn’t come to the night circus, but their fathers did, and their uncles and brothers and a few of the bolder women. The night circus was when Khasar flourished. He would ask for three volunteers—never more or less—and sit them in straight-back bentwood chairs, facing the audience. With a word he would cast them into unnatural sleep, with another wake them, empty eyed. At his bidding, they would rise and climb the air, step by step on the aether. Twenty feet up they paced restlessly over the audience’s heads, until he called them down again, and made flame sprout from their fingers, and made them weep blood.

  At night in the dust and amber light of the tent, it would be a simple matter for a skilled illusionist to find a way to make people walk on the air. Thin ropes, which, in their mesmerized state, they were convinced they could walk, or maybe thick sheets of glass judiciously placed. This is what they told themselves in the morning, back to wresting a living from a shattered land with no magic to it. Those he made paddle the empty air overhead never remembered what happened. But during those musky nights when Khasar commanded the tent, the snake handler told me that there was not a wight there, no, not even the carny folk, who did not believe that he could take the soul out of a man and replace it with something inhuman. Fallen angels, the fortuneteller whispered. The animals who have died in the service of the carnival, the snake handler said.

  I only knew what they told me because a few nights before I found Hobart’s wandering mare limping through Goddard’s garbage, something had gone wrong with Khasar’s act. The rubes sat, listened, opened vacant ey
es, climbed the air as before. But although the hypnotist snapped his fingers and spoke the words to bring them back, they stayed—so they said—possessed, and climbed the upper air of their own dwellings in a manner most disconcerting. It was a rare, green place the Carnival had landed, so there were many people, and they were not half-starved and fearful. By the time their relatives were back to have an accounting, their blood-weeping kin in tow, Khasar had disappeared into the night, and Hobart thought it sane to do likewise, even into the gritty dry places where garbage-heaps like Goddard’s were the best shelter.

  We were headed for another green place now, a city half-drowned in the sea, they told me, where the trade was rough but profitable. On the way, wherever we saw clusters of houses and not too many desperate-looking men, we stopped and made a little show, not bothering to unfurl the big tent. They came to see the fortuneteller, the horses, and the tiger yawning in its cage. I suspect some of them were as entertained by seeing healthy horseflesh as anything else, because I kept the mares and the lone, put-upon gelding as glossy and sound as they had ever been.

  It was after one of these half-shows, when we were packing for an early departure, that Khasar returned with the Painted Children. I hadn’t known him before, so the uneasy feeling when a man, tall and well built with black hair as glossy as my horses, came to the hitching-fence and asked to see Hobart was a surprise. He had a spiky moustache full of wax and a will of its own, which should have made him absurd, but his eyes, flat and shiny as a snake’s, put an end to all impulse to find him funny. He had three small figures with him, shrouded and still, and as he was led away to see the carnival master by one of the fairy dancers (who stifled a squeak and trembled when she saw him) I saw that each was joined to each, and then to Khasar’s wrist, by a thin gold chain, almost invisible in the morning light. Soul-eater, I thought, as I finished wrapping the horses’ legs for the journey.

  No one knew what bargain Khasar struck with the carnival master, and no one asked where Khasar found his children. No one much liked asking the hypnotist anything. He didn’t perform or exhibit his finds while we traveled, and all three of the children rode on the back of one horse, a normally lazy mare who acted as if they weighed nothing, but who also sometimes paused and tilted her head towards her back, an un-equine look of puzzlement on her face.

  I wondered whether they were children at all. They were child-small, of course, two boys and a girl with heads a little too big for their height and wide, clear, set-apart eyes. Glance at them quickly and there’d be no doubt; you’d take them for children, as a matter of course. But study them at a distance, or speak to one, however briefly, and you’d wonder. There was a way they had of moving, too fast between one stance and the next, as if they stuttered on the air, and any word they said was as if they sculpted it in their mouths before they said it. I remembered, or thought I remembered, a story from the world-that-was, of green-skinned children that were not children who came to a small village and died without revealing where they had come from, and everyone was left with an indefinable sense of mystery and wrongness.

  Maybe it was simply hard to imagine anyone putting ink and needle, in such detail, so extensively, to a child’s tender skin—for we could see, through the thin shrouds worn by Khasar’s small retinue, patterns blossoming over every visible square inch of them. It could not be that he had inked them himself—this was the work of months and years, not to mention the time it would take to heal. He must have bought them, but who in this world would have the time to make over human children into such creatures? The carnies whispered, at the campfires when Hobart and Khasar were nowhere in sight, that they were a kind of fallen angel, the embodiment of the broken souls Khasar put into the bodies of his subject-victims, the ones who walked on air and wept blood. They said that the time he was away he’d hunted out the three who hadn’t come back to themselves, and rendered their bodies into these painted forms. Nonsense, I thought, because why weren’t we all done-and-dead when the hearty folk who lived in that last green place hunted Khasar down, him and anyone who sheltered him?

  We came to the place where the sea had fingered into the basin where a city sat, leaving enclaves that glowed at night along the shore. We found the place Hobart remembered from the last great circle the Carnival followed, above the still, brown waters of the old city, a flat place with a three-domed building at the edge of a cliff. A distant echo of my old self whispered observatory, and through one of the broken domes I could see the remains of a telescope. The able-bodied raised the big top beside the ruins, where an obelisk still stretched toward the sky, the figures incised into the sides long since defaced. Brown hills rose behind us, carved with ancient trails, and the fragments of an old sign that stuck up out of the ground like broken teeth.

  We rested a day, while people came from the enclaves to see what we were about, marveling at the jugglers and the tiger. When it was time for the show, we learned that Khasar, once again, would have nothing to do with the day circus, and that he kept the Painted Children (avoiding that cruel word, Tattooed) for the nighttime.

  I saw them waiting with Khasar while the snake charmer writhed and the acrobats twisted naked, and though the soul-eater flashed me a gutting-knife glare, I went to stand with them. He still had them chained with a thin gold line that shouldn’t have held a kitten, and they peeked at me through their shrouds.

  Khasar mopped a fat drop of sweat from his temple, but showed no other sign of nervousness. When Hobart, playing ringmaster, promised the crowd a wonder of the world and when those in the audience who had heard of Khasar murmured in anticipation, he unlooped the chain from one of the boys, thrust the lose end in my hand, and muttered at me to keep them there.

  Khasar walked to the center of the ring, where the arclights could swivel and pin him under their glare. The boy followed him like an acolyte. He eyed the front row occupants one by one, as if considering cows at market, judging just how long he could keep them waiting, wondering what he would do, what the small figure beside him was for.

  “Gentlemen,” he intoned, just before they got restless. He let a small smile curl under his moustache and eyed the women scattered here and there in the stands. “And…Ladies.”

  I saw some of them shiver as if he’d made phantom fingers dance across the backs of their necks.

  “It is my pleasure to share with you something so rare, so precious, that I feel confident in telling you that you are an exclusive group, some of the very few who have the opportunity to see such.”

  In the background, Hobart took a deep breath and blew it out. I could smell sweat and sawdust. I turned to one of the children, the girl. She was looking at me intently, almost at my eye level because of my broken back.

  “Don’t be afraid,” I told her. It was absurd. All small things should be afraid at the night circus.

  She tilted her head as if she didn’t understand me. The thin chain bit into my fingers. I winced as she placed the tips of her fingers on my wrist.

  “The first to be revealed, the Leviathan!”

  Khasar tugged away the boy’s covering. There was silence at first, as the people tried to understand why they should marvel at that most ordinary of things, a child. What did it matter that he was ink marked?

  Khasar whispered the next, his voice vibrating in every crevice of the tent.

  “Leviathan, Serpent of the World!”

  The boy—if it was a boy—stood, head bowed in the spotlight, naked but for the patterns on his flesh. His nakedness didn’t register, however, because he seemed entirely clothed in the figure that began in green-and-gold glory at his ankle and wound thickly around him: knee to thigh to waist to shoulder. The coils shone with the burnished weight of hundreds upon hundreds of scales, and it was breathtaking to consider that they must have each been drawn and not grown. The snaky creature lay heavy over the boy’s shoulder, and the head rested on his chest—a monstrous head with golden eyes and tendrils coiling from jaw and temple, teeth overlapping the l
ower lip, a hint of smoke about the nostrils.

  A susurration grew from the crowd as they understood the artistry, the brutality of the thing. At the sound, the boy raised his head and looked at them with flat despair. I felt the girl’s hand creep into mine, and behind me, past the flaps of the tent kept open for ventilation, the tiger’s vigilant eye hot on my back. The hiss of the crowd settled to the floor of the tent and spread like night fog, just over the threshold of hearing, independent of them.

  Khasar knew his audience now, and didn’t give them time to recover. He threw open his hand towards me and the children in the aisle, not even looking at us, and like an automaton I obeyed, unlooping the chain from the second boy’s wrist. He walked towards Khasar with a tremulous grace, and I understood that the hypnotist held them in a thrall that made a gold chain an iron cuff, and escape unthinkable. The hiss continued in the still, over-warm air.

  I felt the heat of the tiger’s gaze on me and then a cool pause as it blinked, indifferent to Khasar’s powers. You know what to do, it thought, a lazy purr in my head. And I will not kill you until it happens.

  With a flourish, the soul-eater whipped away the shroud. “The Horse-Boy,” he declaimed, and if it wasn’t as grand a name as Leviathan no one noticed.

  Two horses before, two horses behind—ink-black, bay, leaf-brown, and palomino. His body was quartered with them; each took the entirety of one flat pectoral or shoulder blade, extended down a nipped-in waist and hipbone or buttock. Their legs were his legs. They were caught mid-gallop, and as he shifted his weight under the hungry eyes of the audience they quivered and twisted, and if the hiss continued in one corner of the tent, from another came the urgent drumbeat of hooves. They ran out of him, not as if he was a canvas or a tattooed boy, but as if he was a vast prairie. The crowd leaned close, and I saw in them a primal longing to mount and ride. The gift of a horse is to be not one place but another, something I felt through my fingers when I groomed the carnival horses.