“It is the hair of dead men, very powerful this is.” The man looked at Jamie’s head, shining like a freshly-minted guinea in the dim shop and narrowed his eyes like someone getting ready to barter. He reached out to touch Jamie’s hair and Jamie jumped back not wanting the dirty, long-nailed hand anywhere near him. Instead the man grabbed Jamie by the wrist, his nails like long talons and each one inscribed with a dark crescent moon.
He felt his grandfather come into the shop behind him, and the senior James spoke in Arabic, his voice quiet, but with an edge to it that other men ignored at their own peril.
“This one has magic in him, I could teach him many things,” the man said, his fingers digging more deeply into Jamie’s wrist. He said something in Arabic then, something that caused his grandfather to step forward and detach the man’s hand from Jamie’s wrist and then put his arm around his grandson’s shoulders.
“He is not for you,” his grandfather said and Jamie breathed out a sigh of relief. “We need to go.”
“I can’t leave just yet,” Jamie said, though he longed to run out of the dark hovel and back up into the light and color and the surging crowds of the souk.
“The bird?” His grandfather knew him better than anyone else in the world and he understood without Jamie explaining.
The man smiled, his gold tooth winking obscenely. “The bird is special; he came here all the way from the snow covered Koh-i-baba Mountains of Afghanistan. He came with a great magician, who had crossed the sands between there and here a hundred times in his life. He left me the bird and a special deck of cards, and said they must stay together for these two things were all he had left from a lifetime of magic.”
“We don’t need the cards,” his grandfather said.
“If the boy wants the bird, he has to take the cards, they go together or not at all.”
“I’ll take the cards, too,” he said before his grandfather could say no. All he knew was that he had to save the falcon. He was not leaving the souk without it.
“The cards go to the gypsy,” the man spit to the side, “that lives with you. She will recognize them for what they are.”
Jamie felt a jolt of shock that this man knew of Yevgena, but then Marrakesh was like that, as if a sinuous vine of information ran beneath its streets and people could tap into it at will.
“We need to go, son,” his grandfather said, and he realized at no point had his grandfather said his name in front of the man. He took the cage with the falcon in it and his grandfather took the small lettered bag with the cards after handing over his lovely watch, which was the price the seller insisted upon. They did not speak until they were well into the medina and his grandfather stopped to get them each a sweet mint tea. They drank their tea where they stood, the falcon quiet and watchful in its cage.
Even after the tea Jamie was still shivering and the bones in his wrist ached where the little man had clutched them. “What did he want?”
His grandfather looked at him, his face thoughtful but somehow sad. “There are people, Jamie, who want to cage anything they find beautiful and use it to serve their own purposes. I think that is as much as you need to know just now.”
He had named the falcon Sameyel, for the hot desert wind that blew in the spring. He had spent his month in Morocco feeding the bird and caring for it until it could fly on its own power. The cards he had given to Yevgena, who had thanked him but had, he noted, touched them with reluctance. He thought she had tucked them away or perhaps discarded them years ago, and now here they were in Pamela’s hands and he felt a dread premonition at the sight of them.
Yevgena’s eyes were trained on Pamela as she shuffled the cards, though Jamie knew she had heard his own thoughts as clearly as if he had spoken them aloud. There was a terrible concentration on Pamela’s face, lashes shuttering her eyes; he knew they were dark and strained, as they had often been these many long months.
Pamela stopped and looked up.
“Lay the top ten cards out in a circle around the stone,” Yevgena said. Jamie didn’t like the sound in her voice, there was something under the usual Gypsy glamor, something that didn’t sound like her at all.
Pamela laid them out one by one, face up, as the tarot required.
“This is the present day,” Yevgena said, pointing to the first card that had come up, which was the Queen of Swords. The picture was of a weeping woman alone in a forest, blood dripping from the end of the two swords she held. In the upper left-hand corner was an Arabic symbol. He remembered the symbol from the carved table in the souk that day. Black magic. The sort that was not meant to be trifled with by someone like Yevgena, who had always been a dweller of the in-between places.
“The Queen in this position represents many things—loneliness, anxiety, sadness. She is lost and alone in the forest, but this position also represents change and the hope of direction out of the forest.”
Yevgena flashed a look up at Jamie, and he knew she was leaving out part of the card’s meaning. The Queen in this position was a widow, which also carried a variety of meanings but Pamela was likely to only see one.
“The Lovers,” Yevgena said and Jamie’s head snapped up in alarm, for her voice didn’t sound like it was her own anymore, but rather being channelled from some other place, beyond that door in the thin spring night. He had seen this happen once before with her and it wasn’t something he enjoyed, nor come to that did she.
Pamela leaned forward, and he could see that she was trembling, as if she shook with a great chill. He felt a bit of it himself. There was something else in this caravan with them, something that was standing near, a presence that was undeniable. The same presence he had felt that night in his own bedroom, when Pamela had reached out for a man who was not there. Pamela’s eyes had turned a deep and heavy green with agitation, every hair standing up on her arms.
“There is a longing, a yearning that will cross continents and seas, a longing that does not understand its own mind, but that is of little account in matters of love and passion—there is such passion, one that would burn all to ashes that come near it.”
The candles flickered suddenly, as if something had passed through the vardo and attempted to extinguish them.
Vanya stood and left the vardo then, a gust of chilly night wind heavy with the scent of hawthorn filling the small space before he shut the door behind him. Jamie did not blame him one bit, he did not like the feeling that had seized the air around them.
“Are you certain you wish to continue, Pamela?” Yevgena asked, and there was something distant in the question that made Jamie fear the worst, that what was coming in the rest of the cards was not going to be anything Pamela wished to hear.
“Yes, I do, please go on,” she said. Her hands were fisted in her lap, the skin on her face drawn tight against the elegant bones. Every inch of her spoke of both tension and longing, a longing that would indeed, cross continents and seas, if only it could.
“The Knight of Cups. It is the knight that holds hope; it is his gift after a long search the world over. He has traveled over and under a boundless sea. There is great darkness as well, a darkness that could snuff the moon. And pain, and a very long journey both of spirit and body.”
He could not bear to watch the woman at his side anymore, and so he stood and opened the door of the vardo, stepping down onto the stairs. Vanya was nowhere to be seen. There was no moon, and beyond the small glow of the fire, the darkness was absolute. In Russia he had learned the art of hearing but not listening, of shutting the gates to the senses, and allowing nothing through which he did not want to deal with. He had discovered recently that when it came to certain people, certain moments, certain stresses, he was no longer a master of this art. He had seen the cards, all ten—the card of judgment, the djinn, the warrior, the star, the tower and the devil, as well as one strange card in the tenth spot with which he was not familiar. He knew much of what Yevgena would say had she the choosing of her words this night, and knew just as certai
nly that it was not her in command of the words, but something darker, something that brought with it the knowledge of that world between. Something that had always been with these particular cards.
The bird and the cards go together or not at all.
The seller’s words had come true, for although he had set the falcon free, it had returned to the doorstep of the house they rented in Marrakesh, where he found it one morning, its neck snapped and its wings torn. He had learned long ago that he could not alter the destiny of another. He could not make Julian his son in anything but biology, he could not bring Andrei back to life, nor save the lives of his three sons, and nor could he save this woman from her pain and the journey she must make through this darkest of forests, alone.
He stepped back into the vardo a few moments later, hoping the reading might be done, just in time to hear Yevgena say, “And now for the last card.”
The words snagged on his ears, and the gates to his senses, jarred, opened again.
“This is the Lazarus card, foretelling of those who die but are reborn. This can mean many things, of course. A fresh start in life, the turning of a corner in a road long traveled, a change of heart. A dying to a life that is done in order to begin again in a new life.”
Pamela swallowed, her face deathly white. “That card is upside down, Yevgena. What is the meaning when it’s upside down?”
“It means nothing, darlink, please do not worry.” She pushed the card to the side, but Jamie saw how her hand trembled and knew the card troubled her greatly.
“Pamela, it’s late, I think perhaps—”
“No, Jamie. Yevgena, please, what does that card mean when it’s upside down?”
Yevgena shook her head. “I am telling you the truth, Pamela, I do not know what that card means. It should not be in the deck.”
“Just—tell—me,” she said through gritted teeth.
Yevgena merely shook her head again, the light from the candles casting a gruesome shadow over her face, so that she looked both ancient and forbidding, like some Greek soothsayer of old.
“It is darkness,” she said finally and Jamie wanted to stop her, even though it was far too late for such things. “The sort of darkness that is between heaven and hell, what you might call purgatory, but what I would call Gehenna.”
“Oh,” she said, and it was a small sound, like the pop of a bubble or the last of a woman’s hope. “Purgatory or simply death without any life to follow.”
“Pamela—please, do not set too much store in what I say. I am only an old woman, I get muddled sometimes and they are, after all, only cards,” Yevgena said, her face pained by the effect her words had wrought.
“I think we both know that’s not true, Yevgena,” Pamela said and stood, slender form rigid with dashed hope. “It’s all right, you only did what I asked you to do, it’s not your fault if I can’t bear the answers. Now, please excuse me, I’m tired. I’ll say good night now.”
Jamie watched her until she disappeared beyond the edge of the fire’s glow and he heard the door of the blue vardo open and close. He looked back at Yevgena, who was huddled in her shawl, looking suddenly exhausted, as if she had held a glamor about her all evening which had suddenly broken and crumbled to dust.
“What the hell was that about?” he asked, for she had upset Pamela badly and he was angry.
Yevgena clasped her hands together, her face pale and drawn. There was not much in this world that could upset Yevgena, and he felt his anger die back a little.
“I am sorry for that, you know I love Pamela, Jemmy, and I thought perhaps I could bring her some small comfort. But I have never seen a spread of cards like that. It’s like he is neither dead nor alive, but in limbo or purgatory. And those cards—I have never used those cards, they are cursed! I don’t know how they got into the box with the others. I never had the courage to burn them, but I always keep them separate from the rest.”
In all the years he had known her, Jamie had never seen Yevgena so agitated.
“They are, after all, only cards,” he said, echoing her own words in an effort to soothe her fears a little.
She shook her head. “No, Jemmy, not tonight. Sometimes they are just cards and I am just reading the person, rather than the spread. But a few times in my life, something else has come over me, entered into me and then I know whatever the cards say is true.”
“Well, they can’t be this time,” he said with some exasperation, “because the man can’t be both alive and dead at the same time.” Her words had unnerved him for he had seen it—seen the shadow that passed over and through her, and had felt Pamela start toward it, a terrible yearning in her face.
“Yes, he could,” Yevgena said, clutching her shawl around her tightly, face strained in the low light of the candles.
“How?” he asked, curious but also with a strange feeling stealing over him, as if Casey stood out there in the dark night, just beyond the reach of the firelight.
“Long ago,” she said, “I met a man who did not know himself. He wandered into our camp from somewhere in the mountains, he’d been lost for weeks, maybe even months. By the time he came across us, he was half-starved, injured, and more mulo than man.”
The strange tingle passed over Jamie’s skin again. Mulo was Romany for ghost. He sat down across from her and took her hands in his own, to steady her while she told her tale.
“You know how Gypsies are, Jemmy, we did not want this outsider amongst us. He frightened many in our camp, for how can a man not know his own person? He was angry, too, so angry—that frightened me, though I understand it better now—how could a man not be angry when he couldn’t remember his own story, for what are we if we have not our stories to tell?
“He came to me one night, a night not unlike this one, with the wind wild in the treetops and the moon gone away to its dark side so that the very air was like black velvet, so thick you could taste it on your tongue and feel it with your fingers. He asked me to use the crystal ball or the cards and tell him what he could not remember. But of course that is not the way such things work. I tried to do it for him. I was curious, and I felt sad for him, too. He did not frighten me as he did the others, for I was different—of the tribe and yet not, with a history and entire life from before, from that other land, before I met Mihai and married him. And so he spoke to me. He said inside his head it was like a very bad snowstorm, where he was condemned to walk, and that now and again he would see figures in that snowstorm, just outlines but when he reached for them, they would disappear.”
She paused for a moment to take a swallow of brandy-laced tea.
“Dreams are strange things, Jemmy, and belong to another realm, one that most of us cannot cross over to without sleep to aid us. All those dreams we have, all the love and hate we feel, all the joy and all the pain, all those things do not leave this world. I think perhaps at night when we dream, those things mingle with the dreams of others—with their hate and their joy and their pain. So there it is, all those things rising into the night, over our humble little vardos, like smoke drifting toward and through the smoke from another person. That night I dreamed his dreams, and felt that he had once been loved and known, that he had once had an affinity for the land, had known passion and gotten a woman with child. But also he had done bad things, had bad intentions in his heart and seen them through to actions. It was both dream and nightmare and when I woke I was sweating and my heart was pounding. I stayed awake for a long time, Mihai and my children breathing peacefully around me. Near dawn I fell back to sleep, and dreamed no more. When morning came, like smoke, all of it had vanished. And so had he. The men looked for him, but they could find no trace of him, it was like he had gone up into the air and extinguished, like the spark from a fire. Later I wondered if he truly had been mulo and had somehow crossed into our world, to haunt us for a little time and then vanish again when he found the door back to his own world.”
The grue was firmly back in his spine now, though his pragmatic sid
e told him it was a combination of the lateness of the hour and Yevgena’s ability to convey the chill of an event that had taken place fifty years before. The cold feathers trailing up his back said otherwise.
“You and I both know that the obvious answer is that Casey is dead and that he has been dead from the day he disappeared. I met the man while you were in Russia, and there is nothing that would stop him from coming back to his family and to Pamela. Their love was a living force; I could feel it all around them.”
“I know. I can’t see how the man could be alive and not find his way back to her and their children. I know how he felt about her. It just isn’t possible that he’s out there somewhere. I haven’t been able to find a trace of him, Yevgena, not a single clue or sign.”
Yevgena shook her head slowly, the wings of dark hair threaded through with a silver like that of fresh forged metal.
“Then tell me, Jemmy, how can a man be both dead and alive all at once?”
Part Four
The Lotus Eater
San Francisco, Spring 1976
Chapter Forty-three
The Lotus Eater
THE BIG MAN HAD come into the shelter on a bitterly cold night two months ago. At first Father Jan had been a little afraid, for the man was rather formidable looking, dark and large and with an aura about him that said he wasn’t a man to be regarded lightly. But he had been polite and quiet, merely wanting somewhere to shelter from the weather, which was cold enough to kill a man that particular night. There was something about him for he seemed as if he was dislocated in time and space. That was common enough with the people who sought shelter in his church, mind you. It was more than that though, for he seemed like the sort of man who ought to have a more solid existence, rather than the ghostly one homeless people often led of drifting with neither the anchor of home nor the love of family and friends.
In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4) Page 47
