Allegories of the Tarot (12 page)

There was no place to sit and neither of them moved to
offer an old man a seat, so I leaned on my staff and waited. I was accustomed
to being on my feet. I could wait a little longer to sit. I’d been avoiding
Zelda for decades. I could wait a little longer for her.

“Zat’s what you fink, daaaaahling,” her familiar voice
purred through the curtain.

The teens stopped their sniffling.

“’That’s what you think?’ Is she talking to us?” one
of them asked the other.

A curtain moved and the heavily draped figure of an
Eastern European woman with jet-black hair and huge, knowing eyes filled the
space. Behind her, a muted television played Days of Our Lives, backlighting
the one and only Zelda. Despite her robes, she cut a surprisingly shapely
hourglass in the doorway before loosing the curtain with lacquered nails as
long as talons in shades of amber. Zelda’s skin was flawless with the exception
of the shade of foundation she’d chosen, but here in the red light of her
indoor caravan tent, the effect was quite fetching. She glowed like an old
gypsy Mona Lisa.

She glanced down at the lantern at my feet as she
dismissed the teenagers. “No, Zelda no see you girls today, so sorry.”

“But, we paid you already!” one of them gasped, before
dissolving into tears.

“Zelda,” I said. “Surely you can find it in your heart
to help these young ladies. It does seem like an emergency.” I spoke so
quietly, the sobs of the teens would have washed out my voice to anyone else’s
ear. Not Zelda’s, though. She could hear me across the miles if necessary. Such
was the attachment of student to master.

Zelda narrowed her eyes and nodded. “Very well, but I
see no good things for zees girls.” She shrugged then pulled the curtain back
to another room in the tent, indicating the girls should enter.

Zelda glared as I started after them. I lifted my
lantern and shone it about the room. “You would prefer I waited out here and
had a look around?”

Zelda stepped out of my way and allowed me into the
small reading room.

The girls were already seated, one of them with her
head down on the table. Her friend eyed me, asking Zelda “Is he going to watch?”
The crying girl lifted her head.

By all rights, I could have taken over the
conversation, but I waited for Zelda to answer. My authority in the situation
was not important. I was curious to see how she’d handle this.

“Yes, um, my darlings, you are in for a treat today. Madame
Zelda, she is old, yes? She is old and wise, but zis man...zis man was Zelda’s
teacher, girls. He is even wiser, and his gifts are...well, Zelda cannot begin
to say. It is not every day that a seer of his abilities comes to the Trolling
for Bargains flea market in Laurents County, Indiana.” She pulled out her chair
and
sat,
a look of triumph on her face.

“You are too kind.
I really only
want to observe.”
Smiling to the girls, I added, “Checking up on an old
pupil, right?” I pulled out a chair and sat. We were quite the quartet around the
little table.

They smiled,
then
one blurted
out her question. “I want to know how long my Mom has to live.” She almost didn’t
get the words out before the sobs began.

Zelda pulled out a deck of tarot cards from a shiny
wooden box. She shuffled and cut the deck, then slowly flipped the first card
so it faced her. From my vantage point, I could see it, but the girls could
not.
Death.
I tapped the card as Zelda let it fall,
and it transformed into another.

“Ah, my darling, you have drawn the de—ha ha—my
darlings, zis is
Temperance.” She pointed to the wings on
the angelic figure, and eyed me before continuing. “Zees mean your mother, she
protected by guardian angel. Is Mommy sick, darling?”

The girl began to sob so deeply she could not speak. Her
friend patted her around the shoulders before looking at Zelda pleadingly. “Is
there anything else you can tell? Her mother has cancer. The doctors say it’s
not the good kind.”

“No good cancers, darlings,” Zelda murmured, as if
discussing the weather, or what movies were playing. She shuffled and drew
again.
Death.
This time, she lay the card down without
flipping it.

“No, darling.
I
only see Mommy surrounded by peace and love.” She reached out and patted the
young girl’s hand.

“I want to see the card,” her friend said.

“No, you don’t want to see any more cards,” Zelda
said, firmly.

The teen reached out to take the card and Zelda
grabbed her by the wrist. Whispering, she warned the girl, “Never touch a witch’s
totem.
Never.
You understand?” The amulet that had
lay
fallow around her neck now crackled with fiery flame. The
eye of the dragon swung heavily beneath Zelda’s neck, just before her heart. The
girl’s hand turned white as Zelda calmly gripped her wrist like a tightening
vise. “It is good thing your friend no watching you. You take her home, buy her
ice
cream,
you watch zee chick flicks all night, okay?
Tomorrow you make sure she
spend
lots of time with
Mommy, as much time as possible, you understand?” She hissed it so angrily, the
teen’s face turned white.
As white as her blood-deprived
hand.

When the girls were gone, Zelda hopped right up. “You
like a glass of mead, Friend?”

“Ah, like old times?
Of course.”

She brought me the goblet and I watched her face
closely.

“What? You never big talker, Friend, but you come all
zis way and zay nothing? Zelda not so soft, you know. Zelda take it.”

I reached out for her deck and drew a card. Without
looking, I knew it.
Strength.
As she stared at me I
studied the face which had once been the model for the very card I held in my
hand. “Time has changed you, Zelda, but soft isn’t a word I’ve ever associated
with you.”

“You zink I should tell girl her dying mother has no
hope? Share your wisdom, oh, wise one. Zelda not forget, you only one card
above her in ladder. Beside, in zees many years, who to say we cards not change
our aspects, eh? Are we not to grow? Or is zat only for human fools? Sometimes
I think we cards biggest fools of all.”

“If only I could have been permitted to be your proper
teacher, Zelda. “ After the lesson I’d learned at Monte Carlo, I’d never again
denied a talented girl her teachings, no matter what the Merlins had to say on
the matter. Still, my lessons to Zelda were behind closed doors, totally on the
hush-hush, and she was never able to come out as a sorceress in training. After
the Tarocco deck was published and our rogue wizard academy run out of Italy,
we scattered. I was lucky to place her in a nunnery while the rebel son of the
head Merlin fled to Britain with my apprentice and me.

I hadn’t meant to abandon Zelda there, but when I’d
come back to check on her, she was gone. She’d hidden herself well, too, taking
up with the trolls and immigrating to America. Only in the past thirty years
had I realized we both ended up in the same Indiana territory—me,
an emissary of the new wizard order
, working case files on a
freelance basis, she as a...well, that was why I was here. What exactly was she
doing?

“Hard for me to believe someone with Strength such as
yours would be content telling five dollar fortunes to country rubes.
Seems an awful waste of talent.”

“Eh, what can I say? There are charms to country
living, especially where no dragons, eh?” She sighed.
“Even
Zelda fall in love.”
She drew her lips tight after she said it, as if
she regretted the slip.

“Zelda?
In love?”

She sighed. “Yes, dahling, Zelda fall in love with
little troll, dream of little gypsy-troll babies.”

I couldn’t help but smile. I sat the lamp on the table
and the Light illuminated her face. Through the expired orange foundation,
through the years of weathered skin, through the terse lips, I saw within her
the same heart of the child who had refused to let her brother’s sacrifice
be
in vain. As I watched, she produced a small polished
wooden box, similar to the one which held her cards. She slid it across the
table toward me.

“A gift for teacher,” she said.

The Light showed me what was inside.
The other eye of the dragon, the mate to the one around her neck.
I opened the box and pulled it out, its pupil narrowing as it looked about the
room.

“Zelda, you didn’t,” I said.

“I didn’t kill it, no,” she confessed.
“Zelda only strong enough to blind dragon on her own, as a girl.
Has probably died of old age by now, yes?”

“So that’s where you went when I tried to reclaim you
from the convent.”

Her eyebrows arched. “You come back?”

“Go on and read my cards,” I said. “Don’t take my word
for it.”

“You no interfere with Zelda’s reading zis time?”

“I no interfere.”

“Smartass,” she groaned. She flipped the first card.
“Hermit.
Biggie surprise.
I do
three card reading, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, zee Hermit means...
well,
is you, darling. Means you
is
painted into Tarocco
deck forever, zat all of Europe knows you are rascal, are vagabond magic man. Means
you no like other people—“

“Not true.”

“No? You take up with someone new?”

I considered, for a moment, telling her about my new
apprentice, Lucian; about my annual volunteerism with the League of Jolly Old
Elves; that I had seen Merlin II and Merlin III recently at a wedding. The
problem was
,
I wasn’t sure if I could trust Zelda. I
had never known if I could trust her. Even when she was my pupil, educating her
sometimes felt like an exercise in keeping my friends close and enemies closer.
I was never sure which one she was, so I always pulled her closer, just in
case.

As I fingered the chain on the unblinking dragon’s
eye, I couldn’t help but admire the person across the table, whether she was
truly my friend or my foe. I might have been the teacher and she the student,
but she was only a rung behind me in the Tarocco.

”Remember who you’re talking to, Zelda. The Hermit is
a loner. No, I haven’t taken up with anyone.”

She
smiled,
a sinister,
knowing smile I never could discern. Was it sincere? Was it plotting? For all
my wisdom, I could not see through her strength.

But it was this weakness keeping me distant. Not just
from her, but from others. Sure, I had learned a lot, and I loved to teach. But
the only way I could remain to live another day—to right another wrong—was to
keep my cards close to my chest.
As close as Zelda kept her
dragon’s eye.

She flipped another card. “Situation is...Hermit. Yes,
yes, of course is Hermit, you are Hermit.” She cut the cards again and drew,
but did not flip.
Hermit.
“You mock Zelda.”

“No, no, that’s not my magic. I’m not doing that.”

“Yes, Zelda is so sure of that! You avoid Zelda for
five hundred years, then you show up and accept dragon’s eye as gift and then
insult Zelda in her own tent! The nerve! If you were anyone lesser I would cut
that fool beard from your face!”

“Challenge is...

“Don’t you ‘challenge ees’ me! I not read another card
until you apologize.” The dragon’s eye around her neck flickered and seemed to
vibrate subtly. I felt the one in my hand doing the same. I wasn’t sure what
the end result of this magic would be, but I feared it.

“Zelda, I do apologize, but I give you my word as a
wizard, this disruption with the Tarocco is not of my doing. I want to see what
happens next.”

Zelda reached beneath the table and brought out a long
cigarette holder, and a thin cigarette. She joined them, then leaned back to
light her smoke on a candle. She took a luxurious drag then asked “Why? Why
now?”

I spread my hands apart on the table linen, feeling
the thin cloth beneath my papery skin. The printed paisley with violet and gold
print on a red calico background fuzzed before me then remade itself in runes. For
a moment, my eyes didn’t know what I was seeing, until the ancient script
clicked into place.

WHY YOU LEAVE

Zelda always had been a master at image manipulation. During
the Enlightenment, she was adept at inserting her face into the paintings of
many a master. She could send a message via minstrel or scroll, the messenger
never quite understanding his role as conduit for her gift. I wondered if she
were still up to that old magic today—if it extended to more than just runes on
a tablecloth or a face on a beer sign. Truly, this woman was formidable. Should
I pull her closer?

She snapped her fingers, and her television spoke in
the next room. “Like sands through the hourglass,” intoned the announcer, “so
are the—“