Allegories of the Tarot (24 page)

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 eyes,
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.