He grunted at my puzzlement, and pointing here and there. “We will end up, perhaps, in a place of much vegetation. Well, that is where we are headed. And the fulsomeness of the image indicated that it will be a very close thing, but that there will be success. Otherwise this would have been the sister card, with barren plants and a yellow sky.”
“I see.”
He nodded, and quickly went to the first card of the second row.
Again he said, “Ah!” It was clear enough: two crowns against a field of blue, one larger than the other. “This –” he began, but I cut him off.
“The larger crown is my mother’s, and the smaller mine.”
He regarded me. “Very good. But completely wrong. The smaller crown is your mother’s, and the larger her father, your grandfather.”
I sank a little into myself. “Sorry.”
“Not to worry. We will make a fortune teller of you yet.”
The next card showed another, firmer image of our present journey, the sun rising over a jagged red cliff. Radion nodded in approval. “Things still look well for the present,” he said. “You must remember that this second row are things that will probably happen, but can be changed by fate.”
“I understand.” For a moment the ludicrousness of this system of prophecy overcame me again, but I did not laugh. At the next card Radion became very serious.
“So.”
“What does it mean? I see an ocean, and a bird in flight, and a distant mountain.”
“It is not an ocean, it is a lake. And the mountain signifies that the bird has a home. It seems you may be triumphant against this Frane.”
“Hurrah!” I said, but then held my tongue, as Radion’s hand shot out to grab my arm in a tight grip.
“Do not make jest at this table again. These are serious matters. And this next row is the most serious of all.”
Without another word he let go of me and turned the seventh card over with the loudest snap! yet.
“The dog,” he said. “Hmmmm.”
I said nothing, but stared at the horrid snarling visage of a mongrel, larger than any dog I had ever seen. Its eyes were lit with fire, and its open mouth filled with sharp teeth like a shark’s.
“When were you born?” Radion asked me.
I told him.
“Hmmmm.
“Are you going to tell me what it means?”
“I don’t know what it means. You must remember that this card represents the past, but one that is certain. According to this card, your birth was very significant. More significant than you know. Did you know that your sister was actually first from the womb?”
“What!”
He pressed the card, as if it were a button. “This is not to be disputed. I would imagine your mother told everyone that you were first in order to save your sister from the crown. Or perhaps she sensed that you would be the stronger of the two. Or, as this card seems to state, she did so because she knew your sister would be murdered.”
“This can’t be true!”
“It is true. The dog represents false secession. That is why he snarls. He is you.”
“Impossible.”
Radion sat back and shrugged. “Very strange. All the more so because the strength of the cards does not indicate false readings. These cards are very solid.”
He took a deep breath. “And now –”
He turned the eighth card quickly, without sound, and lay it down.
He let his breath out. His brow furrowed, as again he studied the card closely. Again there was a body of water, but it was in the distance. There was a small dot over it that on closer examination proved to be a bird. Red soil, a long beach or plain, lay in the foreground. It looked to be a reverse view of the sixth card.
“Is it –” I began, but he hushed me by holding up a paw.
“In a moment. This is more interesting than I thought.”
I was quiet, for such a length of time that I started to lose interest. I looked around me and saw that most of the camp – save for the inevitable stealthy guards – were sleeping. A fire nearby, which must have been attended to quietly to provide us with illumination without sound – was the only one still burning.
“Come, look,” Radion said finally, bringing my attention back to the table.
I bent over the eighth card, which the gypsy covered with most of his paw. Only the sky, a similar darkening cast to the card’s brother, was visible.
“At first, this seems to cancel card six,” Radion said. I could tell he was fascinated. “I have never seen this kind of thing before.”
“The sky looks the same,” I commented.
“No!” he said excitedly. “It is not! Where the other sky was lit from the west, indicating twilight, this one is lit from the east, indicating dawn.”
I was blank.
He looked up at me, his eyes showing his excitement. “Don’t you see? This means that you will exact an even greater victory than card six showed. It will go even easier than you will hope. That is proved by the fact that you are already on land, and not in the lake. In other words, you will not have to travel as far for victory. And yet . . .”
He frowned, drawing his paw down and tapping the faraway bird. “This is the only troublesome point. The bird is your aspiration, and though you have reached the shore your aspirations have not.”
He closed his eyes and, with an almost violent movement which startled me, drew the last card toward him and looked at it.
His face drained of color.
“What is it? Let me see it!” I demanded.
He shook his head quickly, back and forth, and held the card to his tunic as if it were a dagger.
“What is it, Radion?”
I wanted to laugh at his excessive gestures, but a deeper dread stole into me, despite my nonbeliever status.
“It is the future that must be, correct?”
He closed his eyes and nodded once, theatrically.
I tried to sound nonchalant. “What is it, Radion?”
With trembling paws he took the entire deck and tried to shuffle it together. As he fumbled with the last card it turned over and I saw a picture of the most beautiful feline I had ever seen, with a crown of stars circling her head. She smiled, and held an olive branch gently in one paw in offering.
“Why, that’s a beautiful picture, Radion! Does it mean love?”
“Yes,” he said, his voice a cracked bass tone. He turned the card over and quickly pushed it into the middle of the deck.
“But how can this be bad?”
As he had at the beginning of the session, he was about to speak but then held his tongue.
“Go now,” he said, curtly. “Sleep.”
“But –”
Drawing the badly shuffled cards into his bosom, he rose stiffly and turned his back on me.
I noted that the fire had, as if on cue, dimmed to a pile of chuffing coals. As I watched it fell in on itself and sparked redly. Its tender nodded to me and then turned away.
I rose, feeling suddenly cold, and went to the fire, staring into it for a moment and then dropping to all fours before curling into sleep position with the warmth to my back.
I lay awake for a long time, thinking about Radion’s reaction to the last card.
Just before I dropped to sleep, I thought I heard his voice, whispering close by, say in his serious basso tones, “Love. And death.”
Eighteen
Finally, nearly a week later, we came to the surface of Mars.
I blinked like a mole, and then looked back at the yawning cave mouth we had emerged from. It gaped wide and dark, and for a moment I missed the darkness. Everything was too bright, too solid, too sharply etched in this daylight world. The landscape looked as though a hammer of illumination had beaten it into shape. There were distant crags of mountains topped with crowns of glaring white snow. Fields of pink and red sand dotted with oasis of verdant, eye-hurting green led back toward us, cut in the middle by a roaring river, the large
st I had ever seen.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“In Amazonis Planitia, well to the east of Olympus Mons,” Radion replied, drawing up beside me. He looked older in the sunlight, his face not as full as it had underground, the colors of his fur muted, not as bright. He pointed due west, at the distant mountains. “That is our goal. That is where you will find Frane’s army.”
“How long will it take?” I asked.
“As long as it takes,” he answered gruffly, and then turned away from me to give orders for a meal.
After we had eaten, to my surprise we did not set out. When I asked Radion why he merely replied, “We wait.”
And wait we did. I climbed the bluffs blanketing the cave we had emerged from. My eyes were more than used to the light now. This area was similar to the south and my home, but everything was exaggerated, the lakes and streams larger, the verdant areas lusher, the dry areas more arid. I had seen pictures of this region and knew that the city of Robinson was its anchor, and that many of my own clan lived there. When I returned to the camp, which looked meager and a little sad from above, I asked Radion if we would pass through Robinson.
“Never,” he said.
He turned his attention away from me, seeming to concentrate on the music that was being played softly and which echoed against the cave mouth, and so I walked away to talk to Tyron, one of the cooks.
“Why is he like this?” I said, indicating the gypsy king.
Tyron, tall and spare of both frame and words, said, “The surface. He does not trust.”
“But surely you’ve spent much time up here.”
He spat with great feeling. “Used to. Not now.”
“Why?”
He looked at me as if I were stupid. “Trouble.”
“Yes, but –”
“He must think much of you, to do this,” he said, the longest sentence I had ever heard him utter.
Then he turned back to his work and away from me.
“Tyron,” I asked, “will you teach me to cook?”
“Eh?” He turned back to me, surprised.
“It is something I need to know.”
He shrugged. “If you ask, I teach. Watch now, and every day. You learn.”
“Thank you.”
As twilight fell, a beautiful sight as the sun, a distant glowing orange coin dropped and the western horizon purpled and darkened, pushing the violet darkness up the sky, which then began to bulb with the lights of tiny stars, I saw why we had waited, and why Tyron and the other cooks, including me, had not served supper.
One of the sentries, who must have been on the bluff above with me all the time I was there but who I had not seen, gave a hooting warning, which was answered by another and then another. Radion rose from where he had been resting and looked toward the horizon.
I saw nothing but the still darkening sky, and more stars.
And then we were surrounded.
My alarm was only momentary, because all at once Radion clasped the huge feline who had appeared before him to his breast and shouted, “Miklos! My brother!” and Miklos held him tight in kind and answered, “Radion, you dog!” The camp exploded in music and song. Cook fires sprang up like wraiths, four times as many as we had ever had, and the shouting and carousing were nearly intolerably loud. It was as if I had been lowered by balloon into the middle of a circus.
Feeling suddenly trapped, I sought to climb to the bluffs again and study the night sky – already I had spied Earth, a tiny blue gem, in the east – but as I turned to go I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder and turned to face Miklos, with Radion, smiling grimly, beside him.
“So this is the whelp,” Miklos said. His voice was not as deep as his brother’s but it was louder and brasher. His fur was dark gray, streaked with black. And he was nearly a head taller, and though not fat, even wider than Radion. He was quite simply the largest feline I had ever seen.
“Yes, this is the one,” Radion said. “You will teach him to fight.”
Miklos suddenly hefted me up like I was a sack of flour, and moved me up and down as if weighing me.
“There’s nothing to him!” Miklos cried.
“But he is tough already where it counts, I think,” Radion answered, tapping his head.
Miklos stared into my eyes – his own were different colors, I thought in the firelight, one gray, one brown – and then he set me down with a grunt. “If you say so, my brother.”
“Oh, yes, I am sure of it.”
Miklos ignored me, and turned his attention to Radion’s tone of surety.
“Really?”
Radion nodded.
“Then so be it!” Miklos hefted me up again, setting me on his shoulders and striding like a giant into the midst of the mad carnival.
“Listen to me!” he shouted, and instantly the music stopped, the singing stopped, all chatter and laughter stopped. I saw from this great height that the camp was nearly surrounded by wagons, most of them covered, which had come upon us almost unheard. By me, at least. Amazing.
“And listen well!” Miklos went on. He grabbed me from his shoulder and hoisted me even higher. “And I do not jest. This boy is to be your king!”
There were gasps from the assembly, and then the deadest silence I had ever heard. Even the crackling fires seemed to cease their noises.
Miklos slowly turned, so that I faced the crowd. I knew perhaps I must say something, but I was speechless. I thought perhaps there still might be some joke to come.
As one the entire multitude lowered themselves prostrate to the ground.
“I –”
“Be silent, whelp,” Miklos ordered in a whisper. “It will be over in a moment.”
Miklos lowered me gently to the ground, and then threw himself down before me. I saw that Radion had done the same.
When Miklos arose the others did likewise, and he paused for a moment at eye level and said, with frightening solemnity, “I will never call you whelp again, only King.”
Dizzy, I wandered out of the camp, refusing every sweetmeat and dainty morsel thrust at me by these suddenly adoring felines, and made the climb, unmolested this time, to the bluffs. Earth was setting, but distant Venus, a yellow eye, hung in its place, and Jupiter, the King of Planets, was just rising in the east. The sky was full of planets. I thought for a moment of the telescope Newton had promised me, and wondered if I would ever get to use it.
It occurred to me that I had no idea what would happen to me tomorrow, or the day after that.
I felt suddenly cold and small and weak, not like any sort of King at all.
I wished fervently that my mother was alive, if only to counsel me.
She had been so strong . . .
Something flitted down in front of me, and I looked up to see Radion standing there. I could not read his face in the darkness, but he was not laughing.
He sat heavily beside me, and retrieved the card he had dropped in front of me. He turned it over, making it snap.
It was the last, the ninth, card from the reading he had done for me a week ago. He dropped it into my lap, where it landed face up, the most beautiful cat I had ever seen with the circlet of stars surrounding her head and holding what looked like a long, thin olive branch.
“I apologize for not speaking with you earlier of these things,” he said. “But it is difficult for a man to face his own death.”
“You!”
He nodded in the darkness, and seemed to study the sky for a moment. Was he looking for more portents?
I kept silent.
“You must realize that the gypsies have never recognized any King except their own. As a self banished clan we have our own king, of which I am one. This has been our way for a thousand years.
“But there is a legend, and a very old one, the oldest in fact, and it says that one day a king would come who we would serve. Call it a prophecy if you like. And this prophecy said that when that day came we gypsies would, for the first and only time, put the welfare of our
world ahead of our own people.”
He looked at the ground, and then down at the rather more subdued party which was continuing below us. Then he pointed to the card in my lap.
“When that card surfaced as the last card, with all the cards before it, the prophecy came true.”
“But what does it mean?”
He sighed, and for a moment was silent. “It means that the gypsy king will die for the one King. He will lay down his life.”
“And you believe this?” I said. For some strange reason I felt I must comfort him.
“I believe it as I believe the beating of my heart.”
I held the card up to the light.
“So this last card is about you, not about me?”
“I did not say that,” Radion answered, his deep voice sounding sad. “And I will tell you no more. But let me say this. Before I knew who you really were, I was ready to take you to the mouth of the cave below us, and leave you there. That was my bargain with One, for favors owed. But now I, and all my people, will take you to the mouth of hell itself if we must.”
He started to get up and I held the card out plaintively.
“But Radion, didn’t I hear you whisper that night that this card meant love and death for me?”
“I told you: I will say no more.”
He started to move away from me, looking like an old man.
“Does this card mean that I will find love?”
He stopped, and his shoulders sagged.
“You already have.”
I felt a strange mixture of dread and delight.
“Please, Radion, tell me the rest.”
He shook his head, and would not turn around as he trudged off. And then he stopped at the edge of the path down to the food and drink and merriment and song, and turned to regard me.
“Look at what she holds in her hand.”
I gave a short laugh and waved the card at him. “Why, it’s an olive branch – a symbol of peace!”
Without saying another word, he turned and left.
And there, alone, by the light of the stars, I studied the card closely, and saw that what the beautiful feline held was not an olive branch at all, but rather the thinnest and sharpest of daggers.
Sebastian of Mars Page 10