Anthony, Piers - Tarot 3 - Faith of Tarot

by Faith of Tarot (lit)

Brother Paul scooped up some frumenty and washed it down with a gulp of wine. Hoo! That stuff was strong! They had to spice it to cover its rabid bite! Yet if his memory of conditions in the medieval cities was true, this stuff was a good deal safer than water to drink; the alcohol cleaned out the other contaminants. The water of the upper reaches of the Rhine might be sanitary, but Paris was far from that wilderness.

  He was allowed to eat undisturbed, standing by the fire, and to drink several tumblers of wine. His head began to feel light; he would have preferred something nonalcoholic, but his thirst overrode that consideration. Apparently it was true: the Inquisition had no power in the palace of the King. If he wanted to avoid torture...

  Yvette peered past the pillars that supported the roof. "King Charles has not come," she remarked. "I shall have to take you to his bedroom."

  "Is that proper?" Brother Paul inquired.

  "Oh, yes—I have been there often," she said, leading the way. Well, he had asked.

  But the bedroom, set on a higher level than the main hall, was more than a sleeping place. There was a fireplace set against the wall, and it had a genuine flue so that the smoke was not intrusive. Courtiers abounded; this was evidently a semi-public receiving hall.

  The King reclined on his great square canopied bed. The thing was like a chariot, and he the charioteer. He wore a turban-like headdress instead of a crown, but his ornate embroidered robe showed his rank. Regardless, Brother Paul knew him—for he was Therion. As Lee had progressed from heretic to Dominican, Therion had gone from Jew to Monarch. Was Satan taking care of his own?

  King Charles VI of France looked up and spied them. "Hey, my pretty!" he "exclaimed. "Come up for a kiss!"

  Yvette went to him—and suddenly Brother Paul, remembering the conclusion of the Black Mass, could stand it no more. He turned and stalked out of the room.

  And Brother Thomas was there before him, present at a suspiciously opportune occasion. "Now you comprehend the alternative. Would it not be better to return to the bosom of the Church?"

  The alternative: reprieve through the intercession of the mistress of the Mad King. And Amaranth would play that part faithfully, as the minionette of the Monarch, to spare Brother Paul from torture. The cards were only a pretext. It was not intellectual gratification Charles most craved.

  Brother Paul's real choice was between torture—and betrayal of his relation with Amaranth. Whatever that relation might be.

  He suffered an indefinable terror. There seemed to be a heavy weight on his chest, interfering with his breathing, yet nothing was visible. He felt completely helpless in the face of this unknown menace—yet there was an ironically voluptuous element. Was he a masochist—one who derived erotic pleasure from pain?

  Then an extremely shapely young woman entered the room, whose very presence seemed to illuminate the air. It was Yvette, nude, glowing. He knew he must avoid her, and as she approached he struck at her with his fist; but he felt nothing, only air. She was an illusion.

  Then she touched him, drawing off the covers and removing his night clothes, laying him bare before her. Though he resisted with all his strength he could do nothing, for his hands passed through her while hers handled him with substance. He was invisibly bound, and could not move from the bed or change his supine position. He had to lie there in stasis, except for his uselessly flailing arms.

  She leaned down over him, her fine breasts dangling ponderously, and kissed him on the mouth, and her lips were solid. He could not turn his head away or even close his eyes. He remembered that one of the Saints had bitten off his own tongue to prevent contamination in a similar situation, but his jaws were immobile.

  Her deep kiss stirred him immeasurably despite his reluctance. He concentrated on diversionary thoughts, on icy-cold showers, on trigonometric functions, and his body relaxed.

  But the nymph had only begun to fight. More correctly, to love. Small difference! She moved down and leaned over his hips, lifting up his member and placing it between her smooth breasts. She pressed them together with her hands, his member sandwiched between their protean fullness. The flesh flowed warmly around it, enclosing it with gentle hydraulic pressure. She kneaded her own breasts, and the motions were transmitted to him muted yet quintessentially potent. Under that firm yet fluid incentive, his member swelled until it seemed ready to burst, becoming simultaneously as rigid as cast iron.

  But I'm castrate! he cried in his mind. This can't be happening! I can't react sexually!

  Obviously he could react! She had seen his empty scrotum—empty? It didn't exist at all!—and knew his handicap. What did she know that he didn't?

  Satisfied with her priming operation, the nymph let go her breasts and lifted them away with a flex of her upper torso. Now his member angled up stiffly. She climbed upon him, moving carefully to slant her posterior and take him neatly into her hot, moist orifice. Once more he struck at her with his fist—and once more her visible body was no more than smoke. Yet her vulva moved down, melting about him, and he felt himself penetrating her, being enveloped. At last the connection was complete, full depth.

  Now she brought her lips to his again, and as she kissed him she slid her body slowly up and down, drawing it slickly along his torso and causing his penetration to diminish, then increase again. Her tongue slid between his lips and played with his own in counterpoint. It was the rhythm of coitus, and he had no defense.

  It continued for seconds, then minutes; then it seemed an hour. The weight on his body was the same; before it had been nameless, but now it was female. His terror had been replaced by disgust: a mere transmutation of the same emotion. This was merely torture in a different form.

  And he realized: his masculinity was like that of a boy before puberty. He could be stimulated to the point of urgency—but could never climax. This could go on until his penis blistered...

  The door crashed open. Brother Thomas stood there, glowering. Yvette evanesced: she faded gently away, leaving Brother Paul lying naked with erection.

  "So you have lain with a succubus!" Brother Thomas thundered. "Pollution of Satan! You are an unrecalcitrant heretic!"

  Brother Paul could not deny it.

  Now he was in the torture chamber. Brother Thomas sprinkled Holy Water on the instruments. "Bless these holy mechanisms, God's tools on Earth," he intoned. "Thy will be done."

  He put both Brother Paul's hands together in the vise and screwed it inexorably closed. Brother Paul screamed, but the pressure did not abate. The agony quickly became intolerable. The fingernails cracked; blood 'spurted forth like a series of ejaculations, one from each digit. Flesh and bone were pulped together. He knew he would never be able to use his hands again.

  And was that not fitting? His hands—during his stasis, they alone had been free. They had not touched the succubus because she did not exist; she was a phantasm. Yet hands had touched him—and what hands could these have been except his own? He had touched his own lips, poked his finger in his own mouth, and stroked his own body under the guise of flailing at the apparition. He had manipulated and stimulated his own member in a desperate effort to refute his demoniac castration. His own hands were the instruments of his attempted pollution; they had now paid the Churchly penalty.

  The scribe-witness held his quill ready. "We will record your recantation now," Brother Thomas said.

  Brother Paul suffered a lucid moment. "Shove it up your ass," he said delicately.

  "The mouth must pay the penalty for blasphemy," Brother Thomas said sadly. Now he inserted the metal choking-pear into Brother Paul's mouth, and rotated the handle so that the two halves of it pressed pitilessly apart, forcing open the mouth until the hinge of the jaw broke. The temperomandibular joint. He could no longer even scream effectively—

  Yet out of his mouth he had spoken heresy, supporting the gross impertinence of the Waldenses. He had uttered the sacrilegious interpretations of the Tarot and demeaned the Holy imperatives of the loving Mother Church. Thus the mouth that h
ad so gravely transgressed was indeed punished: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—

  No! he cried internally. I may be a sinner, but the Waldenses are good people and the Tarot is valid. I cannot betray them!

  Brother Paul woke in sweat. It had been a nightmare—a demon of sleep. His hands were whole, his jaw hinged.

  As he lay there and let his sweat dissipate, he realized that the signs of nightmare had been evident all along. The succubus had looked like Yvette—like Amaranth. That meant she was a creation from his memory, rather than an external character of the Animation. Real women did not act like that, which was why men had to make do with the guilty dreams. And the torture instruments—the hand-press and choking-pear—these had been levered by threaded metal screws. They were more sophisticated devices, more technologically progressed; they existed in the later centuries of the Inquisition, not here in the 14th century.

  The whole thing had been a Freudian dream-within-a-dream, a mechanism of double censorship showing him the lusts and fears his own mind balked at admitting. Now he had reverted to the more general dream, which was this Animation—itself a vision sponsored by Satan in the original Animation. Now that he had seen what was buried within the triple prison—

  Well, what about it? So he had lusts! So he feared pain! Weren't these natural feelings? The dream had only shown up the foolishness of his secrets!

  Still, the local tortures were fully sufficient to the need. If he were tortured at this level of reality, he would surely yield up his information and betray his friends. Only in the exaggerated dream state was he bold enough to tell the Inquisition to shove anything, anywhere. No one could withstand such savage physical coercion indefinitely! Thus he could only hurt himself by holding out.

  Yvette opened the door and stood there a moment, a lamp in her hand, like the succubus she had seemed to be. She glided in. "Juggler—I came in haste before dawn, lest we both suffer. You acted precipitously by walking out on the King. But I convinced him you had a sudden call of nature and fled lest you disgrace yourself in his presence like old Blowhard in the dining room. Charles is so fascinated by the notion of the magic cards he is willing to forgive your indiscretion if you return to him immediately." She stood over him, an ethereal female spirit, breathtakingly lovely. If he were to draw her down now, remove her dress, would she perform, after all, like the succubus? He suffered abrupt, savage temptation, yet did not act. "I beg of you, friend," she continued. "Come with me before the Holy Office takes you below. Once the torture starts even the King will not intercede, lest he suffer excommunication by Pope Clement."

  Excommunication by the Pope! The Church knew no limits to its abuses! On top of that, Clement was known historically as an antipope, though his election had been no more political than that of a number of authorized popes. Perhaps his major crime was that he did not reside in Rome. The Church forced complete compliance with its dictates, yet could not even agree on its Pope, or that the Office was more important than the residence. Suddenly Brother Paul decided. "I will come with you."

  "You will?" she asked, amazed.

  Her surprise made him pause. What was he doing? He knew that giving the cards to the King would be the same as confessing to Brother Thomas. In either case the Waldenses in France, the Holy Roman Empire, and perhaps even in Italy itself would be routed out by the Inquisition. They would be tortured and perhaps exterminated, as the Albigensians had been.

  Yet there was no way he could hold out against the tender persuasions of the Church. It was not a choice between right and wrong, but between obvious wrong and subtle wrong. The only question was whether he would yield up the information before or after suffering dislocation of his arms or destruction of his fingers. Since he was bound to capitulate, he might as well do it comfortably, feasting at the King's table and dallying with the King's mistress.

  Shame! Yet what better course was there? His sense of personal dignity, the last of the qualities in himself he valued, had been beaten down. He had been degraded by this Hell stage by stage, until he could not maintain his pride intact any longer. So he would do what he had to do—if only he knew what that was.

  Well, he could run away. They could not watch him all the time, and in time his health should improve, and if he started out describing unimportant cards of the deck he might get a chance to make his break before the key cards came up. By accepting King Charles' offer, he was buying time and leeway—

  No! He would not bargain in bad faith. If he gave his word to produce the cards for the Mad King, he would have to do the job. His pride had not yet descended below that level.

  Though the originators of the Tarot suffered their special genocide in consequence? What kind of pride was that?

  Yvette was leading him on, in more senses than one, out of the silent monastery into the hooded chariot away from the place of torture. The eastern horizon was brightening. He wished he could see the sunrise!

  She paused to kiss him. "I'm so glad you have come to your senses! Everything is ready. I shall introduce you to the artist immediately."

  "Artist?"

  "The one who will paint the cards as you direct. His name is Jacquemin Gringonneur. It is imperative that the work proceed quickly, for the King is impatient and already just a bit wroth with you. He is a young man, not yet twenty-five years of age, but let that not deceive you. He is capable of truly mad acts."

  "I'm sure he is," Brother Paul agreed, thinking of the historical Charles VI who assumed the throne as a boy of twelve and became insane at age twenty-four—and of Therion now playing that part. But he was more concerned with his own problem. It seemed the only practical and honorable way remaining to him to save himself from torture and to save the Waldenses from destruction—was suicide. That must have been hovering somewhere in his secret mind when he agreed to come to the palace. So long as the Juggler lived, in any form, the Waldenses were not safe, and the Tarot itself was in danger of obliteration. That last was especially ironic: the rendering of the Tarot in a beautiful court edition, publicizing it—would destroy it because of the extermination of its originators. It would cease to have meaning and become—just another pack of cards.

  Did he have the courage to sacrifice himself? Was this the pass that prior investigators of the Animation phenomenon had come to? Very soon he would find out!

  The chariot stopped. Yvette led him this time to a garden within the palace estate concealed from outside by a stone wall. "Wait here," she said. "I will fetch the artist."

  As she spoke, the dawn sun emerged from behind clouds to shine brilliantly over the wall into the garden. Its first beam struck a sundial set on a pedestal. Tall flowers waved in the morning breeze; were they sunflowers so early in the season? Yet he could not know precisely what season it was; he had assumed spring, but it might be fall. The sun was so brilliant the beams of it speared out in sixteen directions, quartering the quarter circles, illuminating all the world.

  Brother Paul stood there, holding Yvette's hand, loath to let her go despite his judgment of her nature. After all, she was doing it for him; she could have seduced King Charles without bothering with any Tarot deck. By her morality, she was doing right. It was wrong to condemn her merely because her values differed somewhat from his own. And somehow it was easier to forgive a lovely woman.

  Suddenly, in an incandescence rivaling that of the sun, he had his revelation. He had another alternative—one that would satisfy all parties, hurting none—except perhaps the Inquisition itself.

  "Let me tell you of the first card I shall describe to the court artist," he said to her. "This one is dedicated to you, my pretty minionette."

  "For me?" She smiled, flattered.

  "For you, child of the garden. It is a scene of this very place at dawn with the wall and the flowers—and two young people, virtually children before the glories of creation, naked as it were like Adam and Eve—"

  "Sir?" she inquired archly.

  "Clothed, then," he said with a smile. He
had visualized the card of the Holy Order of Vision Tarot, but of course that was anachronistic. "Bathed in the brilliant light of the golden disk. And the name of this picture is—The Sun."

  "The Sun!" she repeated, pleased.

  Her pleasure was no less than his own. For now he knew his course. He would create a Tarot for the King—but not precisely the Tarot of the Waldenses. He would truncate it, eliminating certain cards of the Triumphs so that the Inquisition would never be able to divine the full meaning of the deck. Some cards the Dominicans already knew about, so these Brother Paul had to retain, though he would delete key symbols so as to render the meanings obscure. Since the pictures were already designed to be interpreted on two levels, the genuine and the superficial, this part was easy; he would never betray the true nature of any picture. And if he could eliminate entirely as many as eight Triumphs and abolish in one bold stroke the whole of the key suit of Spirit-He smiled again, still holding her hand as they stood before the wall. Mad King Charles VI would never know the difference; he cared only for the beauty of the cards (or the beauty of the lady who sold him on the project) and their supposedly magic properties. Brother Thomas would not realize that the deck was incomplete for some time because he had not had an opportunity to count the cards of the full deck, and Brother Paul would present the cards in mixed order. He would retain the first half-dozen of the Waldens' order intact just in case. Given the time it would take the artist to complete each one, especially if Brother Paul arranged to be picky about details—so that the King might have the very best deck of course—it could be months before the deck was done. By then, who could say for sure whether it was complete or which items might be missing? Lee would know, but as Brother Thomas he would not be able to prove it—not by the rules of this game.

  Brother Paul would in fact create a new Tarot, consisting of a score or so of Triumphs, and four suits of thirteen cards each—well, maybe fourteen, no harm in that. A full deck of around 75 to 80 cards, each with its superficial title and interpretation concealing the real message. The Inquisition could play with copies of this deck as long as it chose; it would only waste its effort. The Waldenses would not long be fooled by a "Juggler" who never spoke of the Ghost, or Nature, or Vision, or the Lady of Expression, or the Two of Aura. Or who, for that matter, failed to discuss the underlying meaning of the Triumph known popularly as The Sun.