Anthony, Piers - Tarot 3 - Faith of Tarot

by Faith of Tarot (lit)

  Paul's foster father preferred the farm, while his foster mother preferred the city. The two seemed destined never quite to meet. Paul did not understand the laws of the conflict; he saw only the opposing forces: the city and the country. The woman was the creature of the city, the man of the country. They were married, yet could not unite. He could call neither one good or evil, right or wrong; both were good, both right—yet they warred.

  The man stood in the country amid the trees, the symbol of strength, dominating the lion. The woman was now in his power, spirited from the vid-trap to the pallet, sedated. Surely the man would prevent the lion from doing her harm!

  Paul wandered one day through the open fields so like the glorious spaces of the song. He had not chosen, could not choose between the rival forces; both city and country were parts of America, the promised land, Tomorrow. At the foot of a grassy hillside he saw a skull. It was the vast white hollow-eyed bone of a cow. He realized that this dead thing had once been part of a living animal similar to the animals he knew like Junie. Now it was defunct, its warm flesh gone, its hooves nevermore to walk the green field. Had it mooed high, or had it mooed low? He could not know; it was gone. He looked upon the fact of death, the face of death, and began to realize the utter finality of it. Nevermore! How had it died? Maybe an African lion had killed it.

  Now the man was holding the lion in the air, happy with the beast, smiling. Yet death was in that picture: not the specific act of killing, but the morbid knowledge that death had come and swept its scythe and left its mark, and nothing would ever take that mark away, for it was final. The lion had fed. The pallet was empty. The country had devoured the city. The man was holding up the lion to see how much weight it had gained.

  Now the field that was America was intertwined with the stigmata of horror, terror, and death. The fear was real, the fear was ultimate; by day it could be largely avoided or blunted, but by night it became overwhelming. He was gifted, cursed, with a graphic imagination; when darkness cut off normal sight, his mind's eye filled the world with spectral images so real that he could see every detail. Light was the only defense; so long as his eyes remained open and seeing, the nightmare was held at bay, like the Monster of the forest.

  It was the body that haunted him. The body that had not quite been in the four pictures, but that he knew was there, perhaps in the hidden fifth picture. The body with the flesh torn off where the lion had fed; the hollow, sightless eyes, the bleached white bones protruding from that which had once been—

  Screams, screams in the night! It was a sight too mind shattering to face, yet too persistent to ignore. It impinged upon his consciousness, inescapable no matter how he fled. It loomed in fair fields, it cruised by like the engine of a locomotive, always lurking, a mass of horror driving him relentlessly toward insanity. It impinged upon his very soul, and almost, now, it had become his soul.

  "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep," he whispered. "If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." He repeated it in singsong, in the tune he had learned for it, trying to blot out the horror, to shove it away so he could sleep at last. But it would not be denied, and every flicker of the lamp brought it closer until he fancied he could feel it touching his cold toes, nudging them, where he could not quite see, and he dared not look. How could he look at a feeling? How he wished day would come to release him from his torture. But the somber mass of the night loomed between him and day, forcing its torture on him. Tomorrow—yet this was Tomorrow, and so there was no escape. This night's Tomorrow would only start the cycle again; he was bound to it with no relief possible. For the horror was what was past, not what was to happen. With sudden inspiration, he modified his prayer: "May I sleep—and never wake," he said, and then he slept.

  "And so you sealed it over," Satan said as Brother Paul lay bathed in sweat steaming like urine, eyes staring, hands twitching. "You had adapted to everything in your youth, except for that. You could neither explain it nor accept it. You chose to block out that entire segment of your life; that was the only course available to you, given your then existing needs and capabilities. But of course it did not leave you. It remained as subconscious motivation. The five great forces of your life—Fire, Water, Air, Earth and Spirit—evoked piecemeal by the cards of the Tarot. The Fire of the burning wood, granting temporary relief from the encompassing cold; the Water of your wet bed, while yet you suffered from thirst; the Air of the violence about you in the form of Mrs. Kurry, the dogs and the invisible Monster, not to mention the gas in your tummy that caused you small and great pains; the Earth of your ruptured self-esteem, your neurotic twitchings, lack of social status; and the Spirit that ruled over all of you supreme: Fear."

  "Fear," Brother Paul repeated weakly.

  "Yet you had a lot of frustrated talent, for art is a thing of the Spirit," Satan continued. "You might have been a sculptor, but your soap carving on the tap scotched that. You could have gone into music, but your parents stopped your singing in company at the outset. You had fair artistic talent and could have been a painter—but your teacher thought your drawings mere distractions. So your potential achievement of self-esteem and escape from nothingness via the route of creative expression was denied, and in the end you had to write it all off as a loss."

  Brother Paul did not argue.

  Satan shook his head. "This is a tough one! I had figured you for hidden sexual or racial sin, considering your background, but fear is not a sin by conventional definitions. Cowardice is another matter—but there is little to suggest you were ever a coward. You tried to fight back, but were overwhelmed by events."

  "But the sealing off—I finally gave up on the problem," Brother Paul said, not caring that he was arguing against his own interest. "I couldn't face the fear, so I fled it. I—"

  "You are honest; that's the most awkward thing about you," Satan said. "You were uprooted, removed from your home and family in Africa, and planted in new soil. But your foster parents had problems of their own. It was in part the city-country schism. Their lifestyles differed, and they could not agree, so they engaged in a decade-long tug-of-war that terminated in separation and divorce. Your fragile new roots were broken again as you shuttled from city to country, needing both, needing a unified family. You finally got the country—at the price of the family. You were too small to understand that it was not your fault; when your foster mother returned to the city, you thought you had driven her away: figuratively killed her. You were unable to stand on one foot, on half a family—not in your root-pruned condition. So it is scarcely surprising that you fell. Your bedwetting, twitching, and nightmare were merely symptoms; it was no longer possible for you to survive whole and sane in that situation. So—you stepped out of it when you had the opportunity—by orienting your life around the lifestyle of judo and sealing off your memories of home. I really hesitate to condemn you to eternal damnation for that."

  "You have already done it," Brother Paul said. "You have opened out my secret. Now Hell is with me—in my memory where it once was shut out."

  "But you are stronger now than you were then," Satan pointed out. "You have regrown your roots in the Holy Order of Vision. Your life in that capacity has been exemplary ever since you suffered your Vision of Conversion. And in fact you have not been dragged before Me kicking and screaming; you descended voluntarily to Hell itself. Your last free act before being consumed by Me was to plead for your innocent daughter, who does not even exist yet, named in honor of a girl you admired twenty years ago, and for her safety you sacrificed your manhood."

  Satan paused thoughtfully, rustling His papers again. "Of course, that was governed by your fear of losing your sight, so that you would not be limited to the nightmares of perpetual darkness, the Monster and the Corpse. But overall, the nobility of the sacrifice outweighs the specific motive of choice of punishments. No, I'm very much afraid your case remains in doubt. You do have evil on your conscience, and you are humanly fallible, but the
re is no clear shifting of the scales."

  Brother Paul was coming out of his lingering shock of memory. This might be an Animation, but those memories were real. Yet Satan was correct: he was stronger now than he had been as a child: he had a much broader perspective. He could appreciate how much beauty and good there had been in his sealed-over life; it had been a shame to obliterate that along with the un-faceable. Satan had made an accurate assessment. "Do with me what you will," Brother Paul said. He was discovering a genuine, fundamental, disconcerting respect for Satan.

  "I shall put you to the torture of the Three Wishes," Satan decided. "Three because it took me three attempts to evoke your guiltiest secret. I am always fair."

  "Three wishes?"

  "That is correct. I will grant you three wishes—and upon the use you make of them, shall you be judged."

  "But I could simply wish for Salvation!" Brother Paul protested.

  Satan shook His horned head again. "So hard to deceive an honest man! Now I must confess the trap: you could wish for Salvation—and you would lose it because your wish was selfish. I would honor it by shipping you to Heaven—you alone, not your friends or your daughter—and the Pearly Gates would not open for your selfish soul. You cannot knowingly seek purely personal gain by demonic means."

  "That rules out a lot of things," Brother Paul said. "But I don't see that it should be a torture even so. There are innocuous wishes I could make."

  Satan smiled, and now the tusks showed. "You will surely find out."

  "Do I have any time to think about it?"

  "You have eternity. Right here."

  "Oh. Very well. I wish for knowledge of the true origin and meaning of Tarot."

  Satan nodded slowly. "You are a clever man. I perceive the likely nature of your following wishes."

  No doubt. Brother Paul hoped that the responses to the first two wishes would enable him to phrase the third one in such a way as to obtain the answer to his quest here. If he finally discovered the way to learn whether there was a separate, objective God of Tarot—

  "But knowledge itself is neither good nor evil," Satan continued. "It is how you acquire it and what you do with it that counts—as you shall discover. Therefore—on your way, Uncle!"

  Suddenly Brother Paul dropped through a hole in the floor. He slid down a chute that twisted and looped like an intestine. Oh, no! he thought. I'm to be shit out, colored brown, like the insult of the Dozens game!

  But as he reached the nadir, the passage closed in about him, squeezing him through a nether loop, then upward. Fluid surrounded him, moving him hydraulically on. The pressure became almost intolerable as the tube constricted yet more. Then there was an abrupt release as he was geysered up and out with climactic force. He had a vision of the Tarot Tower exploding. He sailed through the air, looking back, and realized: this was indeed the meaning of that card, the House of God or the House of the Devil. This was Revelation! He had been ejaculated from Satan's monstrous erect phallus. He was the Seed, proceeding to what fate he could not guess.

  III

  Hope/Fear: 22

  When the High Patriarch of the Christians in Constantinople made a motion, the priests would diligently collect it in squares of silk and dry it in the sun. Then they would mix it with musk, amber and benzoin, and, when it was quite dry, powder it and put it up in little gold boxes. These boxes were sent to all Christian kings and churches, and the powder was used as the holiest incense for the sanctification of Christians on all solemn occasions, to bless the bride, to fumigate the newly born, and to purify a priest on ordination. As the genuine excrements of the High Patriarch could hardly suffice for ten provinces, much less for all Christian lands, the priests used to forge the powder by mixing less holy matters with it, that is to say, the excrements of lesser patriarchs and even of the priests themselves. This imposture was not easy to detect. These Greek swine valued the powder for other virtues; they used it as a salve for sore eyes and as a medicine for the stomach and bowels. But only kings and queens and the very rich could obtain these cures, since, owing to the limited quantity of raw material, a dirham-weight of the powder used to be sold for a thousand dinars in gold.

  —The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night: translated from Arabic to French by Dr. J.C. Mardrus, and from French to English by Powys Mathers: Volume I, London, The Casanova Society, 1923.

  The first thing Brother Paul saw was the star. It hovered just above the horizon, bright and beautiful and marvelously pure: the Star of Hope.

  But immediately he felt fear: where was he? Was this another aspect of Hell? What menace lurked in this unknown region? He hardly dared move until he knew whether he stood on a plain—or the brink of a precipice.

  Fortunately he had not long to wait. Light grew; it was breaking dawn, brighter in one portion of the firmament, giving him convenient orientation. He knew which way North was. Now if only he knew where in the universe he was. Not Planet Tarot, it seemed; the vegetation, air and gravity were too Earth-like to occur anywhere but on Planet Earth. But he needed to narrow it down more than that! It had to be the temperate zone, for now he saw that the trees were deciduous.

  Perhaps he had seen the Morning Star, actually the Planet Venus, symbol of love. He hoped that was a good sign. But other stars could shine in the morning too, depending on the season, cloud cover, and mood of the viewer.

  He stood on a pleasant hillside. It was evidently spring. Though the morning was cool, it was not unpleasant, and the odors of nature were wonderful. Flowers were opening, and they seemed to be of familiar types though he could not identify them precisely. If he had his life to do over again, he would pay more attention to flowers! Carolyn would have enjoyed this scene.

  Carolyn—where was she now? Not until the recent review of his past had he realized consciously the rationale of her naming. Carolyn, one-sixteenth black, in honor of the all-black Karolyn who had shown him what judo could do and never snickered. Satan had said Carolyn did not yet exist—yet she did exist, for he knew her and loved her and she was his daughter. The colonist child was merely the actress, standing in lieu of the real Carolyn, who was—where? He could not believe she was a creature solely of his imagination; he was emotionally unable to accept that. Well, at least she had avoided Hell; probably Lee had taken her back out of the Vision. Thank God!

  Or was it Satan that deserved the thanks?

  Music interrupted his thoughts. Beautiful, flute-like—was the melody the "Song of the Morning"? Edvard Grieg, who composed it as part of the famous Peer Gynt suites, had lived in the late 19th century, and he was Swedish—no, Norwegian. Could that be where and when Brother Paul found himself—in historical Europe? Given the capacities of Animation, this was well within the range of possibility. How he would love to meet that marvelous musician, one of his favorites! But no, this melody was not that; one passage had merely seemed similar. So—forget Grieg, unfortunately. Satan would hardly have granted him that incidental pleasure.

  But why guess at all? The tune issued from the vale to the west. Brother Paul walked toward it. He realized he was wearing a belted tunic and crude leather shoes made comfortable by use. But something itched him—ouch! He suspected it was lice. That put him back somewhere in the Middle Ages, probably Europe. Sanitation was not well regarded then. Not by the Christians. In fact it had been said that Christianity was the only great religion where dirtiness was next to Godliness. The Moslems in particular had ridiculed that attitude, perhaps angered by the impertinence of the Crusades. Only in relatively recent times had the Christian attitude changed.

  The musician came into view. He was a young man, tall and slim and strong, garbed in garishly colored pantaloons and jacket and hat. One slipper was blue, the other red. His stockings were the reverse. There were small bells on his knees, and he wore a bright blue cape. The brim of the hat spread so widely it flopped down over his eyes. Yet this comic personage seemed in no way embarrassed. He rested on the ground under a densely leaved tree, and he
was playing on a strange double flute, his right hand fingering the holes on one side, his left the other.

  "Pan pipes!" Brother Paul exclaimed.

  The man stopped. He looked up questioningly. "Ja?" he inquired.

  Brother Paul did some quick readjusting. That sounded like German! He was not proficient in that language, but he might get by. "I—was admiring your music," he said haltingly in German.

  "The shepherd's flute," the man agreed in the same language. His accent was strange, but not unintelligible. "It sets the mood for the day. Will you join me?"

  "I would like to," Brother Paul said.

  "Have some bread," the man said, tearing off the end of a long loaf and proffering it. This was hard black stuff, but it smelled good.

  "Thank you," Brother Paul said. "I fear I have no favor to return. I am a stranger here, without substance."

  The man smiled. "There are no strangers under the eye of God."

  "None indeed!" Brother Paul agreed, encouraged. "I am Brother Paul of the Holy Order of Vision." He broke off, uncertain whether that would make any sense in this context.

  "Would that have anything to do with the Apostle Paul's vision on the road to Damascus?"

  "Yes," Brother Paul agreed, gratified. Here was a kindred soul! The actor was obviously Lee, but now the role itself was harmonious. "For both my Order and myself. We believe that the foundation of present-day Christianity was when the Pharisee Jew of Tarsus was converted to Christ. To a considerable extent, he made Christianity what it is. More correctly, he laid down the principles this great religion should follow although many bearing the title of Christians have strayed from those precepts. We of the Order of Vision try to restore, to the extent we are able, the Christianity of Saint Paul's vision. A faith open to all people, regardless of the name they choose to put upon their belief." He knew he was not speaking with the eloquence he wished, handicapped by the language, but it was getting easier as he progressed. Lee, of course, knew all this—but it was necessary to get it on record for this Animation, as it were anchoring the philosophical basis.