General
It was a wet spring. The ground didn't get a chance to dry out between rainfalls. Beryl tramped through the bushes in St. Vital Park, away from the well-trodden paths. She slogged through long grass and thistles, poison ivy and mushrooms. Mushrooms in June! That's how wet it was. Her sneakers were soaked through.
Something long, solid and rounded, like a thin baseball bat, caught her hard in the arch of her foot. She lost her balance and toppled to a sitting position in the drenched forest. With one hand sunk in the boggy soil she boosted herself onto a fallen log where it wasn't quite so wet. Beryl removed her shoe and massaged the sore area. I should have stuck to the regular trail, she thought. I should be home drinking coffee.
"What the hell was that?" she muttered. Something stunk; she smelled her hand. And then her gaze drifted to the ground.
Her chest clenched. It squeezed and let go, squeezed again. A female form lay next to Beryl in the woods; she had touched it. It was the shin bone that had caused her to tumble to the ground. Bone on bone. No wonder it hurt so much.
Her breath didn't return for so long she thought she would die. She forced it. Manually -- like turning off the toaster before it popped up the toast on its own -- it could be done.
With her eyes she followed the long length of the girl -- she was tall and very slender. Beryl hoped she was dead. Dealing with a live thing so close to death seemed beyond what she was capable of doing. She needn't have worried. This person was gone. Beryl knew this when she forced her gaze to rest upon the face. She had no experience with long-dead bodies, but no experience was necessary.
The dead girl's mouth was open wide. Mushrooms were growing there. Someone must have filled her mouth with dirt. How else could this be? Beryl closed her eyes for a long minute to give the face a chance to disappear. It didn't. A colony of mushrooms was using the head of a girl as a planter. It rained softly at first, then hard, like a punishment.
She held out her hand and the rain washed it clean.
Pain in her foot. Pain from the shin bone of a dead girl. She could still feel the hard roundness pressing into her.
She wished she hadn't seen the face. The mushroom face. But she had; it was hers to keep. Like a birthmark, like a tattoo. Let me go back, she prayed, so I don't have to carry this forever.
from Chapter One
These cards had been held in the hands of the Italians who had ordered them created. Used for what purpose? To play games, as jaded historians would have everyone believe? I couldn't believe that such beauty -- each card a hand-painted treasure of Renaissance art! -- could only exist to kill time in some overstuffed castle. I had to prove that these cards weren't simply a European spin on the ancient Chinese game of "money cards," but a sacred tool of the ancient Egyptians brought to Europe by nomadic Arabs and Romani gypsies -- a connection many occultists swore by, even if secular Tarot researchers scoffed at the notion.
For me, though, the cards were too charged with symbolism and meaning to be simply a game. Their intricate facades overwhelmed me with the fine detailing of those master craftsmen who'd created them. Each tiny brush mark, each application of pigment, a stroke of genius. For a moment, I forgot about the divinatory significance of each card and was struck merely by the beauty of the artistic technique...
And then the gloved hand unveiled the fourth card in its transparent sheath.
I had studied the reproduction of this card before viewing the original, but nothing had prepared me for the earthiness of its tone, and that smudge along the young page's profile in such a rich hue. I was reminded of Egyptian hieroglyphs and African pottery. There in the Renaissance depiction of the archetype I carry within me -- this message-bearing page who has crossed centuries on his quest to enlighten others -- I found the earth of Africa.
I'm not talking about a symbolic earth, but rather an actual physical quality to the pigment used to paint the card: a gritty streak of savannah sludge worn into the delicate figure as if by the cruel thumb of fate. No, it wasn't a streak, but rather more like an exposed foundation revealed through the chipped plaster of the white figure's fragile cheek.
These cards were not born in Europe.
Had I gasped out loud at my discovery, I wondered, as the librarian whisked away the final image from me? My time with the cards had come to an end.
"You are lucky," she said, as she placed the page back into the box she had used to transfer it from the dark recesses of the library where it was presumably stored. "Normally this particular card is kept in Bergamo."
I was stunned. "Really? Then why is it here?"
"A wealthy collector of Tarot art was looking to verify the authenticity of a privately acquired piece..." She stopped herself, as if realizing she'd revealed too much.
