Anthony, Piers - Tarot 3 - Faith of Tarot

by Faith of Tarot (lit)

  In less than a minute he was through washing. He dumped the basin into the tub, whose drainpipe poked through a hole in the wall to empty into the weeds outside, and he charged back upstairs. Theoretically this expenditure of energy should warm his body, but the magnitude of cold was simply too great to be dented by such measures. He used no towel; the water dried as he moved. Now at last he could dress, and that was a comfort. The worst of the morning was done. Pants and shirt and sweater and socks. He knocked his boots together at the heels before trusting his feet to them; once he had donned them without doing that, and he felt something funny, and found a big black multilegged roach inside. That had been enough to condition him for some years yet. He was not bug shy, but he didn't like such things in his shoes. Some bugs liked to bite.

  Down to the warm kitchen heated by the wood stove. These same power crises had made wood fashionable again, especially in the country where wood was free for the picking up and cutting. That stove was lit in the morning and kept going all day; sometimes when it was zero outside, it was a hundred in the kitchen in the old F degrees the backwoods people still used. In real degrees C, it was minus 18 out, plus 38 in.

  Paul liked the stove; there was just room behind it next to the back wall where he could sit, enjoying a steady temperature around 40° C. He could never get too much heat; it reminded him of the old happy years in Africa when it had always been warm physically and emotionally. The two were strongly linked for him. But no time for that now; his cracked-wheat porridge was ready, and he had to hurry. He poured some white goat's milk on top to cool it enough for the first spoonful and started in. It was good, filling stuff, and there was always plenty of it; he never went hungry.

  "I wonder if we're getting anywhere?" Satan murmured. "Well, we have plenty of time. On with it."

  Then the rush to cram into galoshes, overcoat, mittens, and hood, tying it close about his face to protect his ears. It was a long walk to school, but not bad once the path had been beaten down. It was cold out, but the wind was down; an inch of snow (a scant two centimeters in real measure) had fallen in the night, but this hardly obscured the deep track that had been broken through the crust last week. Snow crusts were something; they formed when the sun melted the top layer of snow, and then the night froze it back tight like ice on a lake. Once he had slipped on a hard crust at the top of the hill, and been unable to regain his footing because only an axe could cut through it when it was strong, and had to slide helplessly a quarter kilometer to the bottom. No harm done; it had been fun in fact. Another time he had stamped his foot to break through a thin crust to find the solid ground some centimeters below. Suddenly he had sunk down another ten centimeters: that was not ground, but a second crust! The ground was deeper than he had remembered. Then that, too, had broken, and he came at last to the real ground, hidden beneath three crusts, a full meter down. Once a crust was covered by new snowfall, it never melted until spring. Like life in a way; once he settled into a new level, he could not go back to the old one. Sometimes he tunneled under a crust, hollowing out a snow cave, using the crust as a roof. Snow was cold, but it had its points.

  He crested the ridge and started down through the forest on the other side. Here there was wind; it whistled through the bare trees. Beeches, sugar maples, scattered clumps of white birches, scattered patches of white pine—which, of course, was not white but green, even in winter. It was four kilometers to the school, but he was used to the walk and liked it. The animals were harmless; he saw their tracks crisscrossing in the fresh snow. Sometimes he would spy a deer bounding away. He had never seen a bear though they were present. But at times the snow itself was more interesting. One night there had been a freezing rain; it formed icicles on every twig of every tree, weighting them down. The forest had become a fairyland of glassy pendants, tinkling as his passage disturbed them. He had never before witnessed such absolute beauty! Maybe part of his attraction was its fragility, its crystalline evanescence. In one day the ice had been dirtied and broken, and in three days it was largely gone. Trees were beautiful too—but you could always see a tree. The ice forest had been a once-in-a-lifetime experience, treasured less for its nature than for its rarity.

  He passed a large old oak tree leaning over the trail. "Far and wide as the eye can wander, heath and bog are everywhere," he sang aloud, picturing the snow as heath and bog. "Not a bird sings out to cheer us, oaks are standing gaunt and bare. We are the peat-bog soldiers, marching with our spades, to the bog." He liked folk songs and enjoyed singing and humming them, but he couldn't do it at home. His foster father objected, calling it noisemaking. "But for us there is no complaining, winter will in time be past. One day we shall cry rejoicing: homeland, dear, you're mine at last!" He felt the tears coming to his eyes and got choked up so he couldn't sing any more. Would winter ever pass for him?

  Down the mountain two kilometers, then up the next slope. This was a wilderness route though there was a plowed-out road he could have used. The problem with the road was that it went by the house of Mrs. Kurry. That story went way back to last year. One day at school, Paul had washed his hands and noted how distinctive the surface of the bar of soap was: firm yet impressionable. His artistic sense was awakened. He put the bar against the tap and twisted. Sure enough, there was a neat circular indentation as if a spaceship had landed in this miniature planet, melting the very stone by the heat of its jet, then departed, leaving only this melt mark on the airless surface. But later that day there was an outcry: "This water tastes like soap!" Oh oh—it had not occurred to Paul that soap would attach to the tap; he had been contemplating the other end of it, the art. He confessed what he had done, accepted his ridicule, and cleaned it off the tap, and forgotten the matter. But others had not forgotten. To them, this was an injury due to be avenged.

  Another day Paul had enjoyed himself in new, light, fluffy snow beside the road to school by lying on his back and waving his arms to make "Angels" and running around saplings, one hand on the trunks to guide him in a perfect circle, to leave donut-shaped paths. How easy it was to form geometric shapes in nature if you only knew how! It was merely idle play on the way to school, not taking long enough to make him late. It happened to be near Mrs. Kurry's house. She stormed out and delivered the worst verbal abuse of his life. She accused him of ruining her trees, cutting a hole in one of her tires, and being sassy—when he tried to explain that he had not harmed the trees, knew nothing of her tire, and did not possess a knife. "You did it!" she screamed. "Just like you broke that tap at school!" And she chased him off.

  The matter had not ended there; there was a letter to the teacher, complaints to Paul's family, and a charge from her house whenever he passed by. But he had to go to school, and this was the only road. Finally this alternate trail through the forest was set up so that Paul would not have to pass her house. His life had been made harder, and he had been terrorized—because this neighbor had borne false witness against him.

  "Ah, yes," Satan observed. "We have her here in Hell now. Beelzebub's dominion; I must make sure the Lord of The Flies has her doing penance for false witness." The papers rustled as He made a note.

  At school it was okay. The kids hardly teased him anymore about his hand twitches or compulsive counting of things, and he had a lively interest in many fields, so it wasn't so bad. He had a couple of stomach aches in the course of the day, but he was used to these. Only when a bad one struck, the kind that hung him up writhing in agony for half a day straight, did he really mind—and fortunately those powerful ones did not come often. Today was just a minor-pain day, no problem at all.

  He finished his written work early and doodled on his paper, trying to draw a realistic dormer window—the kind that poked out of a slanting roof. A straight window was easy because it was all straight lines, but a dormer had all sorts of angles that were hard to visualize. It was difficult to draw it on a flat paper so that it looked real, and he wasn't quite sure it could be done at all. After all, it was three dimensio
nal. But if was a challenge. Maybe if he angled a line here—

  Uh-oh. The teacher had called on him, and he hadn't heard her at all. His classmates were laughing at him. They thought he was stupid, and he suspected they were right. Why couldn't he pay proper attention? Others were smart; they paid attention. And he had lost his inspiration for the dormer.

  On the way home he heard the distant barking of a dog. The hair on his skin reacted, and he looked about nervously, hoping the animal didn't come this way. Once he had petted a strange dog, and it had jumped up and bared its teeth in his face with such a growl he had fled in tears. Other children had thought that very funny. Last year some lumbercamp dogs had charged him in a pack, barking, nosing up, scaring him. One had nipped him in the rear, but no one paid attention. They always said that a barking dog didn't bite though that was manifestly untrue. The thing was, a twenty kilogram dog seemed a lot bigger to a twenty-seven kilogram boy than it did to a seventy kilogram man. But today Paul was lucky; the distant dog went elsewhere.

  Actually, the dogs were not nearly so bad as the Monster. At least he could see them. The Monster was quite another matter. It followed him home from school each day, huge and malignant, like a centipede the size of a dragon with deadly pincers in front and a ten meter long sting tail behind and little glowing eyes on the ends of its eye stalks that could twist about to see anything. Its myriad side legs stretched out to comb the brush: that was to prevent Paul from hiding in a bush in order to let it pass and get ahead of him. If that ever happened, Paul would have power over the Monster because then he would be following it and he would have seen it. But he dared not ambush it because of the extreme care it took with bushes. He had to see it from behind. That was the law of their encounter.

  He looked back, feeling that prickle of apprehension up his back. Nothing was visible. That was also the way of it; the Monster could retreat in an instant. If Paul only had eyes in the back of his head... the thing was, it could only approach him from behind, from the direction he wasn't looking. When he turned around, the direct force of his vision made it back off, giving him more leeway. But if he should run without turning back to look, too long, it would overtake him and—

  No! Paul stopped, nerved himself, turned, and strode back down the snow trail. He would show it he was not afraid of it though he trembled in his knees. He would spot its tracks, proving it had been following him. That would be a point for him. Once he got an advantage, however trivial, he would be able to use that leverage to drive the Monster back and back until finally it was gone. Then it would seek some other prey instead of him.

  There were no tracks, of course; he should have anticipated this. Its hundred padded feet made little impression in the snow; each carried very little weight, and the Monster was very cunning about brushing away any telltale marks. Almost too clever for him...

  Paul turned about again. With a soundless gloat the Monster resumed the pursuit. Paul looked back, but it had dodged out of sight already. He could not defeat it this way. Now he had to re-retrace his path, enduring the hazard again. He had only complicated his journey.

  Strange that the Monster never pursued him in the morning. Maybe that was because then he was fresh and vigorous—or because he was going toward the long chore that was school. Why should the Monster interfere when he was heading in to trouble? It preferred to go after him when he was on the verge of safety. But mostly, he thought, it was because the shadows were lengthening in the afternoon. The Monster was a devotee of shadows, a beast of darkness, whose strength increased as light decreased.

  "You were a bit too smart for the Monster," Satan remarked appreciatively. "I remember with what gnashing of tooth it complained about the way you kept backing it off, just when it thought it had you. We finally had to reassign it." Infernal humor!

  Now, as Paul came near the crest, he saw the late sun shifting through the trees, making the forest brighter, prettier, as though there were a clearing. In the summer this effect was enhanced, shaping seeming glades where ferns and flowers grew lovely. In winter the entire forest was lighter, so the effect diminished. Still, in places it remained strong, and this was such a place. But Paul gave no glad start of discovery; instead he averted his eyes from the effect, breathing hard, and ran until he could no longer see it.

  He made it home. Junie was nibbling the bark of a tree near the house; she made a little bleat of pleasure and plowed through the snow toward him. He liked Junie as he liked all goats; not only did she provide good milk, she was affectionate. He stroked her white-striped nose. She was a Toggenburg, the handsomest of goats. Too bad she couldn't come to school with him; if the Monster came, she would just butt it with her sawed-off horns. No one won a head-to-head collision with a goat!

  But he had chores to do. First he had to split tomorrow's kindling for the stove, then wash out last night's sheets. The splitting was fun; he liked wood, and he liked the feel of its splitting. The first split was hard, halving the log; but doing the halves was easier, and rendering each quarter into fine kindling was easiest with such a rapid feeling of accomplishment. If only the problems of life could be divided and conquered similarly!

  Laundering the big sheet was not fun. The water was cold, making his hands get pink and hurty, and it was hard to wring out. He twisted it, on and on, until it resembled a giant rope, a hawser like that used to anchor a ship, but there was always more water in it, waiting to drip, no matter how hard he squeezed. But it had to be done.

  He looked at the drips descending from the sheet. He was suddenly thirsty—and he had forgotten to tank up on water. He was under a proscription. They had taken him to a doctor one day about the bed-witting, and the doctor had said: "No water after four in the afternoon." And that had been the word. It had had no effect on the bedwetting, but it made his evening life a torment of thirst. Now he put a corner of the wet sheet between his teeth, tasting the faint remainder of urine, helping to hold it while he wrung it out with both hands (he told himself), and sucked a few precious drops surreptitiously. It wasn't enough, but it helped some; even a single drop became gratifying.

  In the evening his foster father read to him: stories of adventure, fantasy, history—all fascinating. Paul was in love with the past, the future, and the imaginary. Those other realms were always so interesting, partly because of their exotic nature and partly because they were not here.

  But at last it was full night and time to sleep. Paul had a lamp, a dim night light, but it wasn't enough. For now the ultimate dread of his existence loomed, and the name of it was Fear. Yet it was admixed with wonder, too, that lured him back again and again to—

  America! Perhaps only the foreign born could appreciate the full meaning of that word. He had come to find the glories of the new land spelled out by a single beautiful song. He did not know its title or all its words and could not fathom its allusions, but he did not need to. This song—it was not so much a reflection of the new world, it was the new world itself.

  He could see the vast terrain, covered with fruited plains and waving with amber grain and studded with jewel-like alabaster cities that gleamed under the spacious skies. Magnificent purple mountains extended from the ordinary sea in the east, that he had crossed, to the wonderful shining sea in the far far west, almost beyond imagination. It all blended into a vague yet brilliant image somewhat resembling a single field where the great trees became smaller, dwindling to saplings and finally to brush and green fern and pretty flowers. A field of rapture whose brief image brought warmth to his being. America! America! He loved her through that song.

  Yet America was the city too—a great metropolis whose architecture scraped the sky, the smoke of industry rising up toward God. Cars, trains, ships, aircraft, spacecraft, printing presses, atomic power plants, huge solar reflectors in orbit—the wonderful technology of civilization. Nature and Science: two images, each alluring.

  The two fragmented into four, and these became framed and frozen. Four pictures seemingly innocent—y
et taken together, they were nightmare.

  1. A woman walking along a city street, a small boy at her side.

  2. The woman in a vidphone booth, the child looking in through the glass.

  3. A man standing in a clearing, a lion at his side. Nearby, a lightly but richly clad woman, lying on a pallet.

  4. The man holding the lion in the air, chest high.

  What was the secret of these still images that made them horrible? His mind proceeded inexorably to the interpretation though he dreaded it.

  America! Yet somehow the rousing cadences echoed hollowly, for the city through which he walked with his foster mother was not exactly alabaster. Nevertheless, it had some of the luster and excitement characteristic of the new world. It was not lonely like the farm; there were people, and stores, and television, and things happening. A happy picture.

  One of his earliest memories of Africa was not Africa at all, but the vision of Tomorrow. Tomorrow was a row of houses down the street, and he knew he was going down that street and that someday he would be there at those strange houses instead of here in the familiar. Suddenly Tomorrow came, and it was called America, and he was unprepared for it. He had thought his parents would be there with him. There were nice people in the new world, but all he really wanted was to go back home.

  He realized that the city could be a trap. His foster mother went into the glassy doorway to play with the marvelous contraption called the vidphone: some mysterious adult business of the machine age. Then she put her hand to the door to come out again, but the door was stuck. She could not leave. Sudden alarm; the machines could not be trusted, the city would not let go. The promise of America had become a threat even to its own people.