1953 CE

The Road to Asmara

Asmeret walked out of the woods as the sun came up to her right. North. How far, how long a walk, how many hours or days before she should turn west, into the mountains? She opened her mouth to ask the question aloud; closed it again. No bird or dog to hear. The girl’s chest felt punched in and hot remembering the way she’d screamed at the dog last night, starting as a whisper, time to go, and building to hysteria—Go! JUST GO! The dog crouching, tail tucked tight, ears and eyes down. She finally threw a stone at the dog, missing the squatty haunch. They hadn’t been apart for more than a few hours in four years. The dog would be safe in the village, she told herself as she watched the dog slink away. Her mother would take the dog in; keep her from joining the wild pack that roamed the woods, shield her from the cruelty of the newest clutch of swaggering boys and preening girls.

She couldn’t protect the dog where she was going.

Even as she thought this, so sad she could hardly move her legs and arms, Asmeret knew her own lie. But a thirteen-year-old cannot describe the compulsion to cast aside the thing she loved fiercely as a child.

For three days Asmeret walked, making camp at dusk—the cape staked for a tent and the firestone heating what little she hunted. She was more concerned with making progress than stalking a meal. On the third day she missed easy kills, berating herself as she retrieved the useless arrows.

The landscape had gradually become less familiar, less forgiving. The grasses thinner and patchy, broad swaths of bare dirt cracked in the sun. On the fourth day she crossed a wide paved road, guessing that this was the fabled Road to Asmara. She hurried through, grateful that nobody passed by that might see her. Her father had warned her, along with so many things fathers warn daughter against, never to travel the main roads alone. Especially the road to the City of Clouds. Soldiers traveled this road, and worse. Women had been attacked, even in groups. Not often, but once is enough in any family man’s mind, he said. She hadn’t known what he meant, exactly, yet heeded his words. Another half day past the road and she would turn.

Asmeret figured if she kept the road on her left, she could follow it all the way to Asmara. Soon after she turned to follow the sun setting into the mountains, Asmeret came to a wall, nearly straight up, taller than the cliff between the beach and the tree. She paused, contemplating the climb, and also thinking how she couldn’t quite see the tree in her mind. One step at a time, she told herself. Finding purchase in tiny crevasses with her fingers and toes, the bow slung across her back, her cloak swaying around her with every move, she picked her way up the craggy face.

Focus, Raven’s voice, behind her, she thought. She didn’t dare turn her head to look. Where had he been anyway? Asmeret tried to count the days since she had seen the raven, weeks, months maybe, but her foot slipped and she nearly fell. He can’t be here. Why isn’t he here? We could have flown much easier. Stupid, stop acting like some dumb little girl.

She reached the top by full dark and stood on the edge, looking out where she’d been. Asmeret could smell the sea, and was that little sliver of wavering, not quite light, way out, the water hugging the beach? She had never been this far north—had she?—had no sense of the shape of the land, only what was right in front of her—under her toes, clutched in her hands. Jump. No, what? Fly. You’re crazy, don’t! She was so very tired. Didn’t bother to prop up the cloak, just wrapped up in it, tucked like a cocoon, and slept.

Hyena walked the ledge, dropping the leg and the liver nearby then curled up back to back with the girl.

When Asmeret sat up the next morning to the fresh meat, she smiled and silently thanked the raven. He knows my favorite parts for breakfast. If only she had a clutch of plover eggs. Each morning after Asmeret found enough food for the day, so retired her bow. It didn’t occur to her that she should have needed to use it for protection where the lowlands buckle up into hills and finally grow into the Abyssinian mountains and plateaus. She simply never crossed paths with anything harmful, as if a call had gone out to clear her way. It was a good thing given that the further she got from the tree, the Village of Ash, and the Red Sea, the weaker she was. As she climbed, her head ached and her vision dimmed. Nausea plagued her and she had to stop and wretch soon after breakfast. Streams coursed down the mountainsides with abundant fresh water, and she knew enough to keep drinking even if it made her feel awful.

One day Asmeret was sure she was lost, the clouds ringing the mountains obscured the sun by day and stars by night. She stumbled in circles, crossing her own tracks again and again, frustrated more than frightened. Why can’t I think clearly? Her father’s voice, “sometimes the Great Mother looks like a snake, sometimes a goat, and sometimes an Italian.” What? Then the witch’s, “When you are most lost, most confused, most surrounded by chaos and half-truth, the quartz will guide you.”

Asmeret took the pouch from her neck and dumped out the contents. The bones and the feather looked ancient and withered, dull and lifeless. She couldn’t imagine what they were for. She reached out and picked up the quartz. Vague images came to mind: A fire; boys on their knees. Then nothing. A dead tree. Dead animals everywhere, floating in a river. She wretched again. A hooded snake rising up in the grass, sliding between and around her legs.

Asmeret retraced her tracks one more time. At the point where her footprints crossed, one set this way and the other that, she dropped the piece of quartz on the intersection. It landed on edge and wobbled, then turned and fell flat on the ground. Asmeret put the crystal back into the bag and set out in the direction it had favored. Within minutes she came through the trees and squinted her eyes at the distant side of the next rise.

A black, hard line snaked across the ridge, clinging to the side of the mountain as if by magic. She stared for a long time, no one knows how long, at the train shuffing silently along the track, dark smoke trailing behind. The train to Asmara. The Italians had built the lines. The way her father traveled to his councils, he’d said, “A miracle those trains, part snake and part goat.” Now it made sense.

Asmeret had a burst of energy. She had a plan. Get to that train. Ride to the City of Clouds. Find her brother, then together, they would find their father—take him home to their mother and be a family again. Return everything Asmeret had taken from them.

She let the wind whip at her face, eyes closed, whole body shaking, charging ahead. She imagined this is what it would be like to ride the back of a galloping lion, not chasing down prey, but sprinting across a wide open plain for the thrill, the joy of knowing you are in your full bloom of the earth’s finest gifts, powerful, lustrous, tireless. Asmeret let one leg drop over the side, swinging with the motion of the train, her back braced against the rails of the open door. Stalking the train had been a game. After two days she had come to know how it moved through this pass, slowing to nearly a stop around a tight bend, right beside a jutting outcrop of rock. It had been nothing to leap onto the back of the huffing beast. Climb the ladder down, conveniently tacked to the side of the car, a staircase, carved into stone, and slip into an empty box.

Asmeret opened her eyes when she felt the train slow. Another bend? No. Ahead a cluster of buildings, square and solid. Closer, a platform, a cluster of people, not her shape and color (not quite), waving whatever they had in their hands—white bits of cloth, white bits of paper. The train stopped. Asmeret sat watching the people from the doorway of her box. A man stared at her, furrowed his eyebrows. The woman next to him, wide-eyed under her hat, hand and white cloth to her mouth, nudged the man with her elbow. He reached into his pocket, putting a small coin beside her on the floorboards. The woman reached into a covered basket and placed a small round of bread and an apple next to the money. Asmeret watched them board the train, several cars up, then grabbed the apple and bit, nearly delirious with joy as the tart juice soaked her dry tongue. Her water had run out last night.

That afternoon the train started a slow, chuffing climb up and around a wall of stone on the open door side. So close Asmeret thought she might be able to brush it with her fingertips if she leaned way out. Stupid. You’ll kill yourself. She watched out the dirty windows on the other side of the box, curious when the white mist starting streaming by. It occurred to her that they were now in the clouds. The airy buzz in her head started again. Not nauseous this time—sleepy. Strange, in the middle of the day. Just lay down for a bit.

When she woke up the train was still. Silent. Outside the windows, dark. The door was shut. Her heart started pounding wildly, trapped. Then breathe. Deep, slow. Like her father had taught her before letting loose the arrow. The door to the boxcar was heavy, and Asmeret’s arms bent, flimsy against its weight. Finally, it gave. The first thing she noticed were the stars, she hadn’t seen them like this since leaving the sea. Leaving the sea, what had she left? Her mind was still fuzzy, thoughts peeking out like burrowing animals poking out of their holes, then gone again. Diving for cover from talons and fangs.

The stars made a river of white froth where they clung together. She looked for the huntress. Couldn’t see her. Maybe hadn’t risen yet, or had already set. Abo called it Orion, the Great Hunter. A man. Gods tore him to pieces for trying to take a virgin who wasn’t his; another warning in his voice. All of her father’s stories seemed to contain warnings. Orion. Her heart pounded faster at the name. Asmeret shifted her focus to the dark shapes on the ground, lurking all around her. Trains. Lined up. Criss-crossed. Empty metal husks lit eerily by the stars. Elephant graveyard. Bones remember the shape of things. What was this place? Whatever was here would be no match for her bow and arrow, that much she knew. Asmeret found a stack of cut wood behind one of the squat buildings and stashed her bow then sat and watched the sky, comforted by the sameness of the world over her head. Waited for daylight.

The sun crested the tallest peak overlooking the city and caught the shiny white paint of the towering gate. Asmeret flinched at the sudden flash in her eyes. Floating spots of every color dappled the road in front of her. She raised her arm to blot out the light and slowly the spots faded to the color of dust. Two steps more and she was inside.

The streets were empty of people. Asmeret didn’t notice the absence. The tall buildings lining the road took her full concentration to see and take in. Walls. Windows, four rows stacked up, up, up. Bars covered the openings where glass or nothing should have been, curtains flicked their tongues out between them. What were the bars keeping in? You always know what animals will do, her grandmother said, but people are dangerous. Asmeret turned in the canyon of windows and walls, almost turned back to the train, back to the plains and the sea and the tree and the . . .

Then she saw the birds: small flocks of four or five, pecking at breakfast, atop heaps of refuse—fluttering up with bits of rind or strips of cloth in their beaks. She eyed the pile and made out the scuffed edges of a dog, stiff and ratty, bony legs askew, wedged in among dull, pitted tin cans; thin shredded planks of wormy wood; bones and gristle; feces—both human and animal—chinked between making a mound shaped like one of the huts back home. Worse than the sight, the smell enveloped Asmeret like a swarm of flies. She swatted at the rank cloud and soon realized this was the air, made of the stink of these piles, which loomed in front of every building like miniatures of the mountain peaks that surrounded the city. Asmeret looked back toward the gate and the air she could breathe.

Before she could flee, doors started to open and people poured out, speaking torrents of words that had no shape at all. The people bowled into her, as if she didn’t exist. As if she were one of them. With her cracked lips, dull skin, and bone-thin arms Asmeret fit right in; she the lowest of low in the highest city in the nation.

Her eyes ached after only a few minutes, squinting into the swarm; her ears were hot, filling with the din that muffled everything as if the dust from the streets had found its way inside her head. The taste in her mouth was sour, unfinished decay—too many people living in their own waste. The wall of the city loomed at the end of every alley and street and she realized the walls kept out the wild, locking the people in. Who would carry off the gristle and bone? What would render the dog back into soil? Why would people choose to pile their dead next to their houses? Why build a wall to keep out the wind? As the clatter consumed her Asmeret’s clearest thought was this: How could these people hear the land?

Asmeret moved uneasily through the crowd. A goat clopped across her path and she reached out to touch its filthy hide. Two more goats and a man followed behind. For a moment she found small comfort—animals, alive here. Then a blaring honk behind her, “Get outta the way boy, and move those goats!” English. She knew enough to get the idea and jumped to the side.

“Pardon, sir,” the goat herder called to the driver. “On our way to the market.”

Market. Boy. Brother. Crabbled fingers in her mouth. She followed the goats, hurrying to catch up to the one out in front. Let her hand ride lightly on its back. Let the herder prod her ahead. Then the smell of spices and bread. The white tents clustered together like egrets on the banks of a river, lightly riffling their wings. Like a river of stars. Like mist caught in thorns. Like snow swirling in a storm.

“Kill your lover, fuck his brother? Give birth to six sons? Die wealthy or poor? Tell your fortunes!”

The sing-song shape of these words bellowed through the opening of the only red tent in the square. She’d caught sight of the wisp of red in the white and known it was the one. The flaps framed the lipsticked mouth, blowing out the sickish smell of perfume and incense. Asmeret recognized most of the words and knew the meaning of some—the woman inside was speaking a cousin-language to her tribe’s own. The word for ‘brother,’ pulled her inside.

“Fortune, my sweet?”

Circles of silver and gold glinted in the light of dozens of candles, seeming to orbit the woman wearing the hooped earrings and bangles. As her eyes adjusted to the heat and smell and red of the room, Asmeret noticed the etchings in the woman’s face; the long braid and the amber streaked eyes that marked her as belonging to a nomadic tribe her father said could not be trusted. “They’ll steal your soul and put it in a stone jar, bury it in the desert where you will wander in search of it forever,” he’d told her.

Asmeret eyed the tapestries hung from the ribs of the tent—twenty-one of them, all picturing trees—and the white-silver-white sparks slow popping behind a scrollwork grate. Three interlaced circles in the middle. Her palm itched. Her eyes fell on the hands of the fortuneteller, then back at her face. Strange, but what was it?

“How much?” Asmeret asked.

The fortuneteller’s eyes narrowed to slits.

“Ah, more than you have in that pouch, I can tell. What have you got?”

Asmeret searched the pouch for the thirteen coins—thought of gold and gifts and a witch came and went like a breeze on her cheek. There was only one coin in the bag, the one from the man on the train. Had the others been there at all? Asmeret handed the coin to the woman.

The fortuneteller pinched the coin the princess gave her between long, pointy nails, turning it over in her palm. It was unusual. Made of very old wood—as if sliced from the stump of a thousand-year tree yet no wider around than a branch from its crown. Sheared thin and oiled so that it shone in the light of the candles arrayed on pedestals of all heights in the shadows. The tiny growth rings were barely the width of her fingernail. She tried to count them, losing track of the lines in the dim, wavering light. The woman held the disk closer to her eye and turned it slightly. Light flickered across the glossy surface and there she saw tracings of pinecones and feathers splayed out in a circle, shifting into one another and back again, like the patterns spinning inside a kaleidoscope. Three tiny, gold circles overlapped in the center. The Ace of Disks rose in her mind, a card whose message vexed and eluded her, yet it turned up again and again. She was shaken, but covered it with a sly smile. Held up the wood chip and raised an oiled-black eyebrow.

“Worthless. I’ll hang on to it for now. What else have you got?”

“Only my clothes, a slingshot, a bag of old bones.”

At this, the amber-striped eyes slid down Asmeret’s neck to the pouch on her chest then looked the thin girl up and down. The fortuneteller sat back, crossing her arms.

“Give me the cape. Lion, is it?”

Asmeret nearly exploded, “You can’t have it, it’s all I have left. It’s my father’s . . . no, my mother’s—it’s mine!”

“There there darling, don’t fret. I wouldn’t take such a thing from a child.”

Though from the looks of her, Asmeret was sure that she would, given the chance. She glanced at the opening behind her. Took a step back.

“Wait. Don’t go. I’ve frightened you. I can see that you have a question that needs an answer, and I am intrigued by your cloak. Perhaps I can find another just like it. You tell me more about how you came by it, your father, your mother? And I will read your cards. Give you your answer.”

Cards. Asmeret shuddered. Thrilled. Terrified.

“Tell you about the cape? Then you will tell me where my brother is?” Asmeret was suspicious, but no other choice presented itself.

“That is your question? You’re sure?” The fortuneteller asked, smiling wider, mocking her? She slid the coin off the table, then gestured at Asmeret to sit.

Asmeret sat on the pillow-topped chair with arms that curved up and held her like a cup. She was reminded of the witch and the sweet tea and bread they had shared at her round table under the oculus roof and of Raven—flying on his back—and the little black dog, the other half of her heart. For the first time in weeks, she could see it all clearly, and for the first time in months, years perhaps, it felt perfectly true and right. What had she done, leaving that life? She looked at the fortuneteller again, her eyes, her hands. The saplings that held up the walls of the tent. The silver wisps of smoke curling through a hole in the roof. “Yes.”

The crabbled hands reached under the table again—that was it, the fortuneteller had the hands of an old woman, despite her youth—this time emerging with a small marble box. She slid open the lid, took out the cards. Set them in the center of the table.

“Shuffle them, if you will,” she said to Asmeret.

Later, she couldn’t say what moved her to do it. All she knew was that these cards were familiar, no, her familiars. Same paintings as Hestia’s cards.

Asmeret picked up the deck, setting the 0 and XXI face to face in the center. She laid the rest out in a wheel, the rim spiraling out from four arrow-shaped spokes. She pulled her firestone out of the pouch and held it in her left hand over the 0/XXI, ignoring the gasp and scramble of the fortuneteller as the rings and stone and beginning/end cards of the Tarot rose and started to spin.

“You are the reader they are searching for.”

Asmeret threw the bones and watched the crystal slide into place. “I know nothing of that,” Asmeret said, avoiding the fortuneteller’s eyes, “but I will tell you the story you asked for and then you will answer my question. That was our bargain.”

The fortuneteller nodded, watching the girl watch the cards.

The red lion stepped from ATU VI | THE LOVERS and strode to the card covered with spinning stars. Galaxies rose up over the lion’s head. A knight with a shield joined the lion, pushing back the faceplate of his helmet and turning toward the sun just rising over the mountains. The Princess of Disks strode over, stripped off her crown, her cloak, her gown, and climbed naked onto the back of the lion. Asmeret had no idea what would come next so she started with the words she had learned from her grandmother and leapt.

—Once there was a story and no one to tell it.

Lion knew the story. He had been told the tale by a star that passed close by his shaggy head as it fell from the sky. Lion had been wakeful, watching the sea from his favorite place on a towering cliff. He was afraid of the water yet it called to him when the stars rose in the east. Lion stretched his long body on the ledge, the nails of his great paws grazing the edge of the world. Sometimes, from far below, Wind carried bits of the sea and splashed Lion’s face, which made him sneeze and snort in an undignified way where the water got up his nose and wince where the salt got into his eyes. Just such a wind had come up that night. When Lion was done sneezing and pawing he happened to catch sight of one gleaming star—one he often gazed at for its brilliance and sparkle—begin to shudder and shake, as if being chiseled out of its rightful place with a knife.

Lion had seen stars cross the sky before; one would streak past the others with hasty disregard and Lion would wonder where the star might be going, what pulled it across the sky. This star was falling toward him, Lion thought, mildly alarmed. It hovered now and then like White Eagle did when he hunted for fish. As Lion watched, the star began to speak. Not in the way lions speak, nor the way Grass or Sea or Wind speak, but as it fell the star made a trail—a wake in which the other stars rearranged into new constellations. Perhaps too, there were some tears left in Lion’s eyes from the salt that had got in them. Nonetheless he could see a lion made of stars, with long curving claws and billowing mane, crossing the sea.

Lion had always thought his cliff to be the edge of life and bliss and the sea the edge of pain and death. Lion could see now that something lay on the other side of the black water. Just then the falling star shot past his nose, blowing his mane back with its bluster and peppering him with tiny flecks of silver ash. Lion leapt to his feet to watch the star make its path, jutting his chin out dangerously over the rim of his perch.

The star crashed into the sea, which hissed like a snake at the intrusion. Lion gripped the spit of dirt with his claws as never before when the earth started to shake and the sea began to spin, spiraling upward into a mountain of water with a black, bottomless hole in its center. White fire and sparks spewed from the hole followed by thick ropes of burning mire shooting into the air, higher than the ledge where Lion hung on the thin wedge of life and bliss. Even while the earth crumbled beneath him, Lion’s heart beat steady and strong and his breaths came deep and long. His eyes were clear and a voice he recognized as both belonging to the star and to him, spoke these words, “This is your story now.”

Falling into the burning water, Lion roared and roared louder and fiercer than ever before. He called in this way to his future to prepare for his coming. From that moment forward, Lion feared nothing.

Asmeret paused, moved to stillness by her own words. The creatures on the table paused too as if waiting for a signal from her. She took a breath, felt for the beat in her chest. Strong. Steady. Begin again.

Lion swam through the water, hot lava rained down on his head. Puddles of fire singed his bay skin. For three nights the volcano raged and Lion swam until he reached land. When he walked out of the water he had turned deep red, the color of fire and roses and blood.

The red lion traveled the world, visiting every land beyond the fiery sea, meeting on his path every kind of animal and tree and tribes of beasts on their way to be human. Each place he went he had great adventures with magicians and kings, jinni and trolls. The goddesses threw him parties and the forest creatures gave him their bodies for feast. Lion watched and listened as hard as he had that night to the star. In him grew every story that ever was.

Thousands of years passed in this way, though to Lion it seemed only a handful of days. At last he knew it was time to return to the place where he’d begun. As he swam across the red sea he came to an island where the fire had been and rested. The island was green and ripe with fruit trees and birds of every color twittering and tweeting a harmonious chorus. From its shore he could see many islands that hadn’t been there before.

The crossing this time took him ten days, not three, as the lands had grown farther apart. If he had learned one thing it was this: everything moves, shifts shape and name but everything in the world is made of the same very few things—light and dark and ash and heart.

Lion slept a while then stepped back into the water.

Asmeret’s eyes closed and her right hand pawed the air gently, as if testing the surety of her next step. Then drew it back and placed the hand in her lap. Tilted her head to the side ever so slightly, listening.

On the shore below the cliff, where he’d once watched the stars, he found a small child, a girl of no more than five. She was sitting quietly all by herself, looking across the red sea. Perhaps she had watched him swim from the island. Perhaps she was thinking to swim across too. Lion was so taken with the child, something about her face reminded him of the way he had once longed to know where the shooting stars were going in such a hurry, he thought to tell her one of his stories.

He began to speak, and of course he let out a roar. The girl wasn’t frightened, not one little bit. She said to Lion, matter-of-factly, Sir, I don’t know your words. Having traveled the world, he knew some of hers, yet he couldn’t form their shapes with his tongue and his teeth. He had an idea. Lion roared again, a different kind of roar, even the girl could tell it was different, and soon she heard the clatter of hoofs and the caws of birds. Every kind of animal came and stood around the lion on the beach. He gave them each a part to play, and the animals had a great deal of fun, for once playing the part of something else. In fact, it filled them with such joy they begged Lion to give them more roles to play. The girl clapped and laughed at their ways and they grew fond of her over time even though it was not in their nature. Sometimes they acted out stories of their own ways, the days of good hunting and eating and teaching their offspring how to be in the world and the days of starving and shuddering against bitter cold. The child shuddered when they did and in this way they could see she was an animal too.

Back with her people, the girl first told the animals’ stories as they did, acting out all the parts. The adults shooed her away. They were busy now—Go!

The girl did as Lion had done and gathered the children. She gave them roles to play, and it was good fun for a while. When they asked how she knew these things were true, she answered that the animals told her. After that, the children left her alone. Animals don’t talk, they said.

Over the years, without others to act the parts, the girl put all of Lion’s stories into words. In time she had a son and she told all of the lion’s stories to him. When he was old enough to ask how she knew these things to be true, she told him, “A red lion gave me his stories to tell, and now I give them to you.” This pleased the boy and filled him with visions of journeys and adventures.

When the boy was near the size of a man, he left his mother’s hut to learn to hunt and do the other things the men of his people did. The time came for him to make his first kill, to earn his right to be a man. To earn the right to take a wife. He already knew the one he would marry. They had loved one another best for as long as they could remember. The pair knew one another’s hearts. As it was, the boy was the last to kill an animal worthy of a man—a meat eater big enough to eat him. A hyena would do, or even a boar, but a lion was what the boys all hoped for. To bestow a lion’s hide at the feet of one’s intended bride was the highest honor. No one could deny that man his choice, and as the eldest son of the chief, the boy had more eyes on him than most. He had grown frustrated as every lion evaded his spear and his bow. Every lion seemed to be hiding that season; the other boys settled for hyenas and pigs.

One night, in despair, the boy walked to the edge of the red sea, a good half-day’s walk from his village. His mother had so often spoken of this place he thought there he might find a moment of peace. The night was still and warm. Stars filled the sky so that their black bed could hardly be seen. The boy sat at the edge of the sea where the water rushed at him and pulled at his feet. His breath soon whooshed in and out with the waves. The boy lay back in the sand and watched the show of stars overhead, he squinted, hard, as the sky seemed to be rearranging. All at once he jumped to his feet, every hair on his body sizzling.

The beast was on him, a flash of red. For a second the boy thought a ball of fire had dropped from the sky. They wrestled on sand, snarling and gnashing their teeth. They rolled into the surf, dark water pulling them under, then came up sputtering and clawing salt from their eyes. The boy and lion thrashed their way back to the beach, wet sand sucking under their feet. The boy had only a knife. He pulled it out of the sheath he wore strapped to his waist and thrust it in front of his chest just as the lion leaped. They fell together, the lion on top of the boy and the knife pressed straight through the beast’s heart. The lion died instantly.

Asmeret’s eyes snapped open but she continued, leaning in and speaking urgently to the woman with amber-striped eyes.

The boy could feel the weight of the beast change, pressing his own body deep into the sand. If not for the forgiveness of the ground the boy would have died under the weight of the lion. As it went he dug himself free.

Under the light of the stars and the half moon, the boy and the lion glowed. With the help of the waves, the boy rolled the lion on its back and retrieved his knife. He slit the animal from its throat to its genitals, careful not to pierce the stomach or intestines. The heart and liver, still pulsing and warm, slid from the cavity of the lion into his hands. The boy ate from them both then slept until morning.

As the sun rose, red-yellow-gold, the boy carefully cleaved the skin of the lion from muscle and bone, all in one piece, with the hands of a man.

He walked into his village at noon, the lion’s head upon his head like a crown and the skin flowing around him like a fantastic, red cape. At least that is what she saw, his beloved, his Wife-Becoming. She would make him a cloak fit for a chief and together, someday, she could see they would lead their people and raise six sons—one for each of the directions between the sun and the moon.

The boy’s mother saw something else. Her son would be chief, but the time of their chiefs and their people was coming to an end. He would have no sons, only a daughter. She would travel far and carry the stories of the Red Lion.

At the end of the telling, the girl across from the fortuneteller drew a breath as deep and sudden as one returned from the dead. Blooms of fire bent on their wicks, like ripe heads of wheat on their stalks in a gust.

Freya watched her intently. Wondered again, what does she see in the cards? What makes the rings spin and the stone spit blue sparks? The cards themselves were shockingly beautiful and frighteningly ambiguous. Each one was a tiny masterpiece of color and light—water captured and sliced, laid in the sun to dry. They were as confusing as they were glorious to look at. For weeks she had studied the pictures, all seventy-eight, trying to divine the meaning of their painted shapes, and failed. She was frustrated that this deck didn’t seem to want her.

Freya looked at the girl whose eyes were the exact color of this morning’s sky—bright white-blue-white, clear as glass.

“You’ve studied these cards. Who is your teacher?” Freya demanded.

The girl stood up, gathering the bones and the crystal back into her bag. Letting the firestone drop into her hand. The rings turned to smoke and curled up through the hole in the roof.

“I don’t know what you are talking about. I have to go.”

Freya leaned forward, bracelets jangling, trying to catch those blue eyes in hers; most still thought blue eyes in a black face a sign of evil. The girl wasn’t evil but a liar knows a liar.

“Don’t you want to know the answer to your question?”

Asmeret shook her head, miserable, yes.

“You are asking the wrong question—the answer to which is nowhere. Your brother is lost and you won’t find him here, or anywhere on this earth, not in this life.” Freya said this, not to be cruel, but from the part of her knowing things about the living and dead that she was born with and the disposition to speak the truth when it served.

The girl looked even more miserable now, if that was possible. Freya stifled a smile. Being chosen came with its burdens. “Don’t cry.” Freya muttered, “Think. There is another question you need to ask.”

Silence.

Then the girl whispered, Freya leaning in to catch the words from under the red hood.

“What am I?”

Freya scooped the cards with both hands. Not the question she had hoped for, but close enough. “You are the one these cards have been waiting for, clearly, so take them. They are yours.” The old woman who had brought her the cards hadn’t said the girl in the red cape had to ask for them directly, only that Freya would be handsomely rewarded if the girl took them freely.

She thrust the handful of cards at the girl and the little brat knocked them away.

Two cards fell to the ground, side by side, one face down the other face up. ATU II, the stony High Priestess sits on her throne with her bow on her lap and casts the web of all life from her palms. Freya leaned down and turned over the second card: ATU XIV. Alchemy. Art, she read aloud. A two-headed human, neither man nor woman, wears the queen’s cape and two crowns, one silver one gold. They have two faces, one for each crown—one white, the other blue-black-blue—the faces give the impression of splitting apart and pulling back together at the same time. They pour fire from one hand and water from the other into a gold cauldron. Lion is there, though has turned from red to white, and White Eagle, now red. The beast and the bird drop gold coins in the brew. Embossed on the pot, Raven sits atop a human skull and three rings interlaced, but never touching.

Freya read the script in the rainbow that arches over the whole picture:  Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenfies Occultum Lapidum”

The girl spoke low: Visit the interior of the earth; return to right that unjustly hidden in stone.

“How do you know Latin?” Freya spat.

Asmeret spun on her heel, cape swirling around her bare ankles and ran out of the tent.

“Wait!” Freya called after her, “don’t forget your cards!”

A third card slipped out of Freya’s hands. She watched, fascinated. It slid across the other two, sideways—a bridge. ATU XIII | DEATH. She knew enough to see that whatever the child was, or was to become, the road was going to be long and dangerous.

That evening Freya emptied the purse she kept hanging on a hook hidden under her table. Shook out her take for the day. Small change. The wooden disk was gone. In its place—a gold coin engraved with the symbol of three interlaced circles. Was this the reward the old woman had promised? But the girl hadn’t accepted the cards.

Freya thought of the cards back in their marble box and the way the girl had laid them in a wheel, magicked them into a spin and drawn out the story—mythic, mysterious, and entirely true. This much she knew.

She eyed the gold coin. It would buy her what she most wanted now. She’d heard of a witch in a wood near the Red Sea who read the Tarot, for a price. Freya needed a teacher. A real one.

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