The Master Of Misrule Part 25

Her eyes were blindfolded. Her smile was knowing.

She beckoned lovingly.

At her summoning, a dark wind thundered through the sky and swept the board clean. Cards flew upward from the tear in the marble, twisting and lifting across the threshold of the temple, and into the Wheel's axle.

The last kings and queens of the Game of Triumphs stood and watched its end. As the cards blew away forever, they ached for their loveliness. Some floated past slowly, reluctantly; some rushed forward; others swooped in intricate spirals around the door. One was caught by a splinter in its frame. Toby saw it but looked away. The card was fluttering like a trapped bird. He reached to free it, faltered and- Fortune lifted up a hand and spun her Wheel.

The scars on their palms glowed silver-white. Pain flashed through the wheel's mark, so bright and searing it felt as if their own hearts had been branded by the flame. And the four of them were falling, then flying-through solid earth and marble floor, through black and white, among images that cascaded like a stack of cards. Love and loss ... hope and sorrow ... beauty ... fear ... triumph ...

All their possibilities, all of them infinite.

DOGS FRISKED THROUGH the mud as their owners called and cajoled; a group of boys milled around a football. Their scuffles kicked up the remains of a flyer among the leaves, but its glister was long gone. If people did remember flashy coins and a fiery wheel, it was in terms of a craze that had fizzled out as quickly as it had begun. A practical joke or elaborate scam-who knew, who cared? The Lottery of Luck's promises were as dead as the old year.

Charlie and Flora were idling on the steps of a summerhouse that had once borne a threshold wheel. Across the park, the trees' bare branches shone wetly in the brightening afternoon.

"It was a nice evening," he was saying. "I thought your parents looked well."

"Yes. They're ... doing better, actually," Flora replied.

"My mother in particular. Which is strange. I always thought she'd take Grace's death the hardest."

It was only a month since the end of the world. The end of a world, rather. The shock of its fall was still with her.

Flora tilted her head toward the sky, thinking of her sister's final moments.

"Mummy's convinced the angels came for Grace."

"Perhaps they did," Charlie said seriously. "How does that line go? 'There are more things in heaven and earth ...' "

He touched his cheek, feeling for a bruise that was no longer there. Both of them remembered the blow that couldn't have been dealt, in a place that never existed.

Their eyes met, asking their different questions. An indefinite kind of acknowledgment pa.s.sed between them.

"Look," said Flora, in mingled embarra.s.sment and pleasure and relief. "Look, there's Toby."

Toby's face broke into a grin as he returned her wave. He began to jog toward them.

"Apparently, he's got some secret project he wants to talk about." Flora lifted her brows mischievously. "I'm rather afraid he's writing a novel.... Come on, let's go."

They went to meet Toby, across the sunlit park.

At the same time, in a different part of the city, Cat was sitting on a bench, watching pigeons squabble over crumbs. The back of her seat was engraved with a couplet: ONE DAY I'LL BE WAITING THERE

NO EMPTY BENCH IN SOHO SQUARE.

The words kept running through her head; she was so absorbed in trying to fit a tune to them that she didn't see Blaine until he was standing over her.

"Sorry," he said. "Stupid bus. It's always late."

"Doesn't matter."

Blaine put his bag down and pulled her toward him. Cat put her fingertips to the shadows under his eyes, as she had once wanted to long before. They looked at each other searchingly and a little shyly. They were still getting used to these reunions, adjusting to togetherness after weekdays apart.

"How's Helen?"

"She's started playing the piano again. And she and Liz are going out tonight."

"That's good."

The Game had ended with Flora at her sister's clinic and Cat at her aunt's casino. Toby was back with Mia in Mercury Square, in the dazed aftermath of a party that no one could quite remember. But Blaine had found himself outside Arthur's house.

Helen had opened the door as if she was expecting him. She said she always knew he would come back to her. Afterward, he broke the news that Arthur wouldn't, and she said she knew that, too. When she cried, he thought it was from relief.

"We're getting there." Blaine settled next to Cat on the bench. "There's a lot of stuff we don't talk about. We haven't really talked about that night in the study. Not yet. Still ... I dunno. Being without me, being without Arthur, perhaps it was good for her. Helen will never be strong. But she's trying. In our different ways, we're both moving on."

Cat nodded. She knew there was no going back. She and Bel would never be quite the same. They had both been stripped down to their rawest, most wounded selves, and although the closeness that had grown out of this was healing, it was different from the old. But they would be the stronger for it.

"Speaking of moving," she said, "we're supposed to be meeting Toby and Flora in a minute."

"They'll wait." Blaine took her hand in his again, drawing her close. "I missed you," he murmured into her neck. "All the time."

Their smiles moved, met, opened; their individual warmth enfolded into one.

Afterward they sat and watched the square, in the intimacy of shared silence.

"I miss it sometimes," Cat said quietly. No need to name names. Through trees, a couple of tourists were photographing the gardener's half-timbered cottage: a fairy-tale fantasy in the heart of London. "I never thought I would. But I do."

"It will always be a part of who we are." Blaine circled his finger around her palm, tracing the line of a vanished scar. "And that's OK. But it won't be part of what we do next. Whatever happens, we're free."

There are many cities with a quiet square, an ancient house, a door that is just ajar.

At the same time, in a different city, a piece of paper was blowing down a street. It bore no mark from its long journey, or from the splinter on which it had once been caught. It had been saved from banishment and now it danced in freedom on the breeze.

The gilt edges glinted. The card was thick and richly colored, designed to catch the eye. Its movements were not as haphazard as they might first appear. It would find a resting place.

The cards played in the Game of Triumphs are based on the cla.s.sic Rider-Waite Tarot designs. However, Tarot imagery is full of variations, and my conception of some of the cards in the Greater Arcana also draws on the Visconti-Sforza deck, the Tarocchi del Mantegna and the Tarot de Ma.r.s.eilles.

I have made one small amendment to the excerpts from the Vision of Ezekiel. The rolling wheels, and the four creatures within them, are described in two pa.s.sages, the first in Ezekiel 1 and the second-which is the one quoted by the High Priestess-in Ezekiel 10. The latter replaces the bull with a cherub's face. No biblical scholars have come up with a satisfactory explanation for this discrepancy, and since the bull featured on the Triumph of Eternity (the World, in the Rider-Waite deck) is a reference to both Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 4:7, I have subst.i.tuted bull for cherub in my quotation of Ezekiel 10.

The lines of poetry quoted by the Emperor on this page are from stanza 69 of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward FitzGerald (1879 edition).

A lot of people put a lot of time and effort into this book. Huge thanks are due to Sarah Lilly at Orchard Books, but for this edition, I'd like to give a big cheer to Nancy Siscoe and Katherine Harrison at Knopf. Their insightful and encouraging editing has been truly inspirational.

May Lady Luck smile on them all!

end.