Allegories of the Tarot (25 page)

“The first to be revealed, the
Leviathan!”

Khasar tugged away the boy’s covering. There was silence
at first, as the people tried to understand why they should marvel at that most
ordinary of things, a child. What did it matter that he was ink marked?

Khasar whispered the next, his voice vibrating in every
crevice of the tent.

“Leviathan, Serpent of the World!”

The boy—if it was a boy—stood, head bowed in the
spotlight, naked but for the patterns on his flesh. His nakedness didn’t
register, however, because he seemed entirely clothed in the figure that began
in green-and-gold glory at his ankle and wound thickly around him: knee to
thigh to waist to shoulder. The coils shone with the burnished weight of
hundreds upon hundreds of scales, and it was breathtaking to consider that they
must have each been drawn and not grown. The snaky creature lay heavy over the
boy’s shoulder, and the head rested on his chest—a monstrous head with golden
eyes and tendrils coiling from jaw and temple, teeth overlapping the lower lip,
a hint of smoke about the nostrils.

A susurration grew from the crowd as they understood the
artistry, the brutality of the thing. At the sound, the boy raised his head and
looked at them with flat despair. I felt the girl’s hand creep into mine, and
behind me, past the flaps of the tent kept open for ventilation, the tiger’s
vigilant eye hot on my back. The hiss of the crowd settled to the floor of the
tent and spread like night fog, just over the threshold of hearing, independent
of them.

Khasar knew his audience now, and didn’t give them time
to recover. He threw open his hand towards me and the children in the aisle,
not even looking at us, and like an automaton I obeyed, unlooping the chain
from the second boy’s wrist. He walked towards Khasar with a tremulous grace,
and I understood that the hypnotist held them in a thrall that made a gold
chain an iron cuff, and escape unthinkable. The hiss continued in the still,
over-warm air.

I felt the heat of the tiger’s gaze on me and then a
cool pause as it blinked, indifferent to Khasar’s powers.
You know what to do,
it thought, a lazy purr in my head.
And I will not kill you until it happens.

With a flourish, the soul-eater whipped away the shroud.
“The Horse-Boy,” he declaimed, and if it wasn’t as grand a name as Leviathan no
one noticed.

Two horses before, two horses
behind—ink-black, bay, leaf-brown, and palomino.
His body was quartered
with them; each took the entirety of one flat pectoral or shoulder blade,
extended down a nipped-in waist and hipbone or buttock. Their legs were his
legs. They were caught mid-gallop, and as he shifted his weight under the
hungry eyes of the audience they quivered and twisted, and if the hiss
continued in one corner of the tent, from another came the urgent drumbeat of
hooves. They ran out of him, not as if he was a canvas or a tattooed boy, but
as if he was a vast prairie. The crowd leaned close, and I saw in them a primal
longing to mount and ride. The gift of a horse is to be not one place but
another, something I felt through my fingers when I groomed the carnival
horses.

With the audience still enthralled by the dragon and the
horses, Khasar turned his burning eyes to the girl and her hand clenched on
mine. Still, we were both powerless: I removed the chain and she walked out to
him. The boys moved apart while the girl stood before Khasar an entire,
breath-holding minute. This time he said nothing. He only nodded, and she
lifted her arms, the shroud falling away and pooling, discarded, on the
trampled grass.

The entirety of her body was inked the blue of a sky at
the edge of twilight, contrasting with the pale yellow mass of the star incised
in the center of her back. It looked like she was a vessel carved so that an
internal flame blazed outwards. The rays of the star were elongated, and edged
in black, extending high between her shoulder blades, across her ribs, and down
almost to her buttocks. The rest of her was spotted with smaller, gilded stars
of eight points that seemed to float above her skin.

“The Star,” he whispered, and let the word hang a moment.
"L’Etoile Flamboyant, the Burning Flame, the Light that Illuminates.
Imagined and sought for in the world-that-was, here only for you, Gentlemen and
Ladies.”

Cutting through the wonder, a gasp.
Khasar had broken the bargain implicit between
entertainer
and entertained, ignored the tender, implicit bargain between the con man and
the rube. No one at the carnival mentioned, ever, the world-that-was. Knowing
this, he made a sign and the lamps cut out. In the sudden twilight, the Star
glowed, pulsing, a fragile heart brutally exposed.

Khasar’s last words
dropped,
stones in the gut of a river. “Never will you see anything so rare.”

A snap of fabric, and the Star vanished; the light came
on, making everyone blink, and Khasar and the children were gone. I pitied the
acrobats who tumbled and contorted afterwards, trying to make that dazzled,
moon-struck crowd smile. Before, when Khasar’s act was finished, the audience
was pleasantly fearful and craved the sex-tinged refresher the acrobats could
provide. Tonight they had gone inside themselves and nothing could coax them
out, and the performers had the bewildered air of a whore trying to pleasure a
dead man. After, Hobart declared Khasar and the Painted Children would be the
last act, assuming anyone came back.

It was even odds whether we would fill every space the
next night, or be run out. Perhaps if we battened on the green of a single
township, they would have none of us. But here, with settlements scattered
around the edges of a new and alien sea, high on the hills beside ruins, we’ve
become some sort of hybrid of circus and temple, and Khasar’s Painted Children
the vessels of a dreadful and compelling sacrament.

***

A path wound down the cliff, and at its base a trickle
of pure water poured into the brackish sea. I led the horses down, two by two
twice a day to water them, so they didn’t foul the sweet water higher up.
Hobart’s had camped beside the drowned city about a week, and I was leading two
mares to drink and bathe a bruised fetlock when I spied a small shadow between
them. I didn’t know which of them had slipped from Khasar’s golden chain, and I
hunched my twisted back further so I wouldn’t see. As the horses sucked water I
heard one of them whicker, and a small
splash,
and I
did look then, to see a small dark figure arrowing, swift towards the center of
the sea.

I halted up the path and wondered which it was, and how
Khasar would balance his act between Star and Dragon, Dragon and Horse, Horse
and Star. On the green in the center of the triangle of tent, obelisk, and
three-domed ruin, the soul-eater stood snarling at Hobart, the two remaining
children head-bowed beside him. I just registered that they were the
Star—Le’Etoile, he called her—and the Horse-Boy when there was a great roar and
a shadow that struck at the same time. Something writhed as it
rose
behind the ruins, coil upon green-gold coil, and a head
twice the size of my tiger’s cage.

The mares screamed and reared, and it took all I had to
tug one down. The other pulled away and ran for the brown hills and the broken
teeth there. We never saw her again. I could hear the other horses screaming,
and prayed that their tethers held and that they didn’t break themselves apart
against the ropes.

Suspended in the sky and twisting upon itself like an
eel in water was Leviathan, Serpent of the World. It had no wings but flew
nonetheless, as if the air was a thick medium it had mastered. Its head was
half mouth, its mouth was half fangs, each like an ivory dagger, and its
flame-gold eyes glared at Khasar. Swift as a sparrow it lunged at him, the
ferocious maw wide.
Hobart jump-stumbled to the side,
sprawling on the grass.

Swifter than a sparrow, Khasar drew a knife and grasped
the Star’s thin arm, pulling her to him and the point of the knife to her
throat in one fluid motion. The point dipped into the skin beneath her jaw, and
I imagined I saw—at too great a distance to see—a welling drop of blood that
was not red. He never took his eyes off the Dragon.

The beast stopped, mouth open, spanning the soul-eater
from head to waist. A neat snap and Khasar would be cut in two—just a pair of
legs and an abbreviated waist, spouting scarlet—but the girl would vanish down
her brother’s throat. The Dragon drew back, just a fraction, impossibly
suspended and the heat of its eyes blazing just as furiously.

Water, I thought. The water had hatched this creature as
if the boy was a mere egg, the tattoo a shadow of what was inside.

The Star said something—softly, but we were all dead
silent and frozen, even the mare in my grip. We’d never heard any of them
speak, and it mattered little now we did, for it didn’t even sound like a human
speech—more like the popping of a broken branch, or the sizzle of a stone
falling from the sky to earth.

The Dragon’s mouth snapped shut and the head tilted
toward her. She made that sound again. Khasar didn’t move, except to tighten
his grip on her arm. She didn’t look at him.

The Dragon recoiled, segment by segment until it hovered
again over the ruined observatory. Its golden glare bathed all of us, one by
one, as if it considered a hostage it could take in its turn. But we knew
Khasar loved none. Love is a rare thing these days; we use each other to live,
to grasp us in midair like the catcher in the trapeze act. I am loved only by
the tiger.

If the Dragon devoured any of us, Khasar and Hobart
would not even shrug. With a low growl that rattled the earth, the Dragon shot
away like an arrow. In passing, the tip of its tail flicked a dome, crumbling
it like sugar.

The Night Circus was cancelled that evening, while
Khasar regrouped. By some miracle, we lost no more horses, although Hobart,
angry at the loss of the evening’s takings, cuffed me hard for losing the mare
and my ear trickled into the hay all that night.

***

I don’t know how the Dragon escaped, but I saw Khasar
leading his two remaining children in their shrouds to the tent, saw the Star
stop suddenly, like a sleepwalker awaking, saw her dart forward and tug the
gold chain away from the boy. Khasar whirled about but was slower with a
grasping hand than with a knife, and the Horse Boy danced away, found sure
footing, and ran.

At first I thought he was running to me, but then I
realized the cliff was open at my back and he would pass me by on the way to
that oblivion. Khasar uttered a word I didn’t know, except I knew it was
terrible, and gave chase, leaving the girl standing alone. In my mind’s eye I soared
over the scene, as the Dragon might, seeing the boy, a tiny dot, Khasar, a
bigger dot streaking after, and many other dots, at the edge of comprehension,
beginning to converge on the boy.

His legs pistoned like any other horse, faster and
faster, and even after he went over the lip of the cliff they stuttered in the
air, carrying him even further. The air gave beneath him and he fell, even as
the horses burst forth from his body, even as the Dragon burst forth from the
other boy’s body, deep in the sea. Peering over the precipice, I could see how
it should have been as hooves, flaring nostrils, thrashing manes hatched from
his chest, his back—as he landed they would’ve galloped off in all four
directions, lost like my poor mare yesterday.

But the fall was too short, perhaps—no time to emerge
fully. Or, like real horses, the fall was too much. The rest of the
carnival were
at the clifftop, and when he hit the ground
everyone drew in breath, a quick hiss, to ward off the pain of an expected
blow. I could almost see the earth bend beneath him like a rubber sheet. I
clapped my hands over my ears as the horses, four of them, bay, brown, black
and golden, half-hatched from his body, writhed and screamed.

Khasar watched, turned, and marched back to the Star,
who made no attempt to run herself. He stood before her a long time, and when
he moved his right hand there was a noise from the rest of the carnival, a
small movement forward. Even carnie folk, at the edge of extinction, have their
limits, and he stopped, for once uncertain.

He must have done something, though, because that night
as he led her, solo, to the tent she wore a mask of pulped and gilded paper.
Long spines of stripped feathers grew from
it,
a
shimmering blob of feather left at each tip, and gave her the look of an exotic
insect. Through the eyeholes, a black shiny glitter made her look less human,
more like a bird. But also, if you knew where to look, skin bruised
purple-black, so it looked like her face was painted. I didn’t see the show but
I heard the rubes leaving, and swearing that L’Etoile Flamboyant had risen in
the air, to the apex of the tent, and showered down gold.

I was squatting by the tiger’s cage, thick in its cat
musk, when Khasar and the Star left the tent. There was a barrel-fire, for
warmth and light, in the center of the green, and I saw Khasar slide between
the girl and the orange glow. I have my own stupidity to blame for not seeing
it sooner. I thought Khasar kept the Children away from the campfires so no one
would see them close in the firelight, but it was the girl he was keeping from
fire—the open flame of the bonfire, the contained metal heat of the warming
bins. Her bruised eyes beneath the thick paper of her masked darted, openly
longing, craving the flames.
No, not the flame.
The glowing coal beneath.

I moved as fast I ever did before, in the
world-that-was, and knocked the barrel over. Flame and embers spilled along the
ground like gold coins, and burning wraiths flared through the air. Startled
for once, Khasar dodged one, and lost track of the girl, who bent to grasp a
glowing coal that tumbled to her feet.