Sebastian of Mars (13 page)

“Is this you? Is this a false image of the
past?”

I became defensive. “What does it mean?”

“It means you were always falling over
yourself, that you had the grace of a beast with too many limbs –
ha!”

“That wasn’t me,” I fumed.

Radion leaned over the card and stared at me.
There was a curl of smile on his face. “Are you sure?”

I blushed. “Well, perhaps a little. I was
rather awkward –”

“I’ll bet you were! I’ll bet you were at
that!”

With that he snapped over the second card in
the first row, revealing a riot of colors haloing a bright yellow
crown. Radion studied it for a moment.

“This is certainly you at the moment – do you
need me to interpret?”

“My crown?” I offered.

He nodded. “But there is more.” He circled
the halo of riotous colors. “This indicates turmoil, which is apt
for a first card of this rank. So far the cards are very solid . .
.”

Something dark passed across his eyes, but I
did not speak.

He turned the third card.

“Ah!” he said. “And this denotes the end of
our particular journey.”

I could not for the life of me see what he
meant. The card was filled to the edges with green plants of every
description – vines, thick stems bursting with red and yellow
flowers, tall trees smothering the sky and throwing their branches
out like sentries.

He grunted at my puzzlement, and pointing
here and there. “We will end up, perhaps, in a place of much
vegetation. Well, that is where we are headed. And the fulsomeness
of the image indicated that it will be a very close thing, but that
there will be success. Otherwise this would have been the sister
card, with barren plants and a yellow sky.”

“I see.”

He nodded, and quickly went to the first card
of the second row.

Again he said, “Ah!” It was clear enough: two
crowns against a field of blue, one larger than the other. “This –”
he began, but I cut him off.

“The larger crown is my mother’s, and the
smaller mine.”

He regarded me. “Very good. But completely
wrong. The smaller crown is your mother’s, and the larger her
father, your grandfather.”

I sank a little into myself. “Sorry.”

“Not to worry. We will make a fortune teller
of you yet.”

The next card showed another, firmer image of
our present journey, the sun rising over a jagged red cliff. Radion
nodded in approval. “Things still look well for the present,” he
said. “You must remember that this second row are things that will
probably happen, but can be changed by fate.”

“I understand.” For a moment the
ludicrousness of this system of prophecy overcame me again, but I
did not laugh. At the next card Radion became very serious.

“So.”

“What does it mean? I see an ocean, and a
bird in flight, and a distant mountain.”

“It is not an ocean, it is a lake. And the
mountain signifies that the bird has a home. It seems you may be
triumphant against this Frane.”

“Hurrah!” I said, but then held my tongue, as
Radion’s hand shot out to grab my arm in a tight grip.

“Do not make jest at this table again. These
are serious matters. And this next row is the most serious of
all.”

Without another word he let go of me and
turned the seventh card over with the loudest
snap!
yet.

“The dog,” he said. “Hmmmm.”

I said nothing, but stared at the horrid
snarling visage of a mongrel, larger than any dog I had ever seen.
Its eyes were lit with fire, and its open mouth filled with sharp
teeth like a shark’s.

“When were you born?” Radion asked me.

I told him.

“Hmmmm.

“Are you going to tell me what it means?”

“I don’t know what it means. You must
remember that this card represents the past, but one that is
certain. According to this card, your birth was very significant.
More significant than you know. Did you know that your sister was
actually first from the womb?”

“What!”

He pressed the card, as if it were a button.
“This is not to be disputed. I would imagine your mother told
everyone that you were first in order to save your sister from the
crown. Or perhaps she sensed that you would be the stronger of the
two. Or, as this card seems to state, she did so because she knew
your sister would be murdered.”

“This can’t be true!”

“It is true. The dog represents false
secession. That is why he snarls. He is you.”

“Impossible.”

Radion sat back and shrugged. “Very strange.
All the more so because the strength of the cards does not indicate
false readings. These cards are very solid.”

He took a deep breath. “And now –”

He turned the eighth card quickly, without
sound, and lay it down.

He let his breath out. His brow furrowed, as
again he studied the card closely. Again there was a body of water,
but it was in the distance. There was a small dot over it that on
closer examination proved to be a bird. Red soil, a long beach or
plain, lay in the foreground. It looked to be a reverse view of the
sixth card.

“Is it –” I began, but he hushed me by
holding up a paw.

“In a moment. This is more interesting than I
thought.”

I was quiet, for such a length of time that I
started to lose interest. I looked around me and saw that most of
the camp – save for the inevitable stealthy guards – were sleeping.
A fire nearby, which must have been attended to quietly to provide
us with illumination without sound – was the only one still
burning.

“Come, look,” Radion said finally, bringing
my attention back to the table.

I bent over the eighth card, which the gypsy
covered with most of his paw. Only the sky, a similar darkening
cast to the card’s brother, was visible.

“At first, this seems to cancel card six,”
Radion said. I could tell he was fascinated. “I have never seen
this kind of thing before.”

“The sky looks the same,” I commented.

“No!” he said excitedly. “It is not! Where
the other sky was lit from the west, indicating twilight, this one
is lit from the east, indicating dawn.”

I was blank.

He looked up at me, his eyes showing his
excitement. “Don’t you see? This means that you will exact an even
greater victory than card six showed. It will go even easier than
you will hope. That is proved by the fact that you are already on
land, and not in the lake. In other words, you will not have to
travel as far for victory. And yet . . .”

He frowned, drawing his paw down and tapping
the faraway bird. “This is the only troublesome point. The bird is
your aspiration, and though you have reached the shore your
aspirations have not.”

He closed his eyes and, with an almost
violent movement which startled me, drew the last card toward him
and looked at it.

His face drained of color.

“What is it? Let me see it!” I demanded.

He shook his head quickly, back and forth,
and held the card to his tunic as if it were a dagger.

“What is it, Radion?”

I wanted to laugh at his excessive gestures,
but a deeper dread stole into me, despite my nonbeliever
status.

“It is the future that must be, correct?”

He closed his eyes and nodded once,
theatrically.

I tried to sound nonchalant. “What is it,
Radion?”

With trembling paws he took the entire deck
and tried to shuffle it together. As he fumbled with the last card
it turned over and I saw a picture of the most beautiful feline I
had ever seen, with a crown of stars circling her head. She smiled,
and held an olive branch gently in one paw in offering.

“Why, that’s a beautiful picture, Radion!
Does it mean love?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice a cracked bass
tone. He turned the card over and quickly pushed it into the middle
of the deck.

“But how can this be bad?”

As he had at the beginning of the session, he
was about to speak but then held his tongue.

“Go now,” he said, curtly. “Sleep.”

“But –”

Drawing the badly shuffled cards into his
bosom, he rose stiffly and turned his back on me.

I noted that the fire had, as if on cue,
dimmed to a pile of chuffing coals. As I watched it fell in on
itself and sparked redly. Its tender nodded to me and then turned
away.

I rose, feeling suddenly cold, and went to
the fire, staring into it for a moment and then dropping to all
fours before curling into sleep position with the warmth to my
back.

I lay awake for a long time, thinking about
Radion’s reaction to the last card.

Just before I dropped to sleep, I thought I
heard his voice, whispering close by, say in his serious basso
tones, “Love. And death.”

Finally, nearly a week later, we came to the
surface of Mars.

I blinked like a mole, and then looked back
at the yawning cave mouth we had emerged from. It gaped wide and
dark, and for a moment I missed the darkness. Everything was too
bright, too solid, too sharply etched in this daylight world. The
landscape looked as though a hammer of illumination had beaten it
into shape. There were distant crags of mountains topped with
crowns of glaring white snow. Fields of pink and red sand dotted
with oasis of verdant, eye-hurting green led back toward us, cut in
the middle by a roaring river, the largest I had ever seen.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“In Amazonis Planitia, well to the east of
Olympus Mons,” Radion replied, drawing up beside me. He looked
older in the sunlight, his face not as full as it had underground,
the colors of his fur muted, not as bright. He pointed due west, at
the distant mountains. “That is our goal. That is where you will
find Frane’s army.”

“How long will it take?” I asked.

“As long as it takes,”
he answered gruffly, and then turned away from me to give orders
for a meal.

A
fter we had eaten,
to my surprise we did not set out. When I asked Radion why he
merely replied, “We wait.”

And wait we did. I climbed the bluffs
blanketing the cave we had emerged from. My eyes were more than
used to the light now. This area was similar to the south and my
home, but everything was exaggerated, the lakes and streams larger,
the verdant areas lusher, the dry areas more arid. I had seen
pictures of this region and knew that the city of Robinson was its
anchor, and that many of my own clan lived there. When I returned
to the camp, which looked meager and a little sad from above, I
asked Radion if we would pass through Robinson.

“Never,” he said.

He turned his attention away from me, seeming
to concentrate on the music that was being played softly and which
echoed against the cave mouth, and so I walked away to talk to
Tyron, one of the cooks.

“Why is he like this?” I said, indicating the
gypsy king.

Tyron, tall and spare of both frame and
words, said, “The surface. He does not trust.”

“But surely you’ve spent much time up
here.”

He spat with great feeling. “Used to. Not
now.”

“Why?”

He looked at me as if I were stupid.
“Trouble.”

“Yes, but –”

“He must think much of you, to do this,” he
said, the longest sentence I had ever heard him utter.

Then he turned back to his work and away from
me.

“Tyron,” I asked, “will you teach me to
cook?”

“Eh?” He turned back to me, surprised.

“It is something I need to know.”

He shrugged. “If you ask, I teach. Watch now,
and every day. You learn.”

“Thank you.”

As twilight fell, a beautiful sight as the
sun, a distant glowing orange coin dropped and the western horizon
purpled and darkened, pushing the violet darkness up the sky, which
then began to bulb with the lights of tiny stars, I saw why we had
waited, and why Tyron and the other cooks, including me, had not
served supper.

One of the sentries, who must have been on
the bluff above with me all the time I was there but who I had not
seen, gave a hooting warning, which was answered by another and
then another. Radion rose from where he had been resting and looked
toward the horizon.

I saw nothing but the still darkening sky,
and more stars.

And then we were surrounded.

My alarm was only momentary, because all at
once Radion clasped the huge feline who had appeared before him to
his breast and shouted, “Miklos! My brother!” and Miklos held him
tight in kind and answered, “Radion, you dog!” The camp exploded in
music and song. Cook fires sprang up like wraiths, four times as
many as we had ever had, and the shouting and carousing were nearly
intolerably loud. It was as if I had been lowered by balloon into
the middle of a circus.

Feeling suddenly trapped, I sought to climb
to the bluffs again and study the night sky – already I had spied
Earth, a tiny blue gem, in the east – but as I turned to go I felt
a heavy hand on my shoulder and turned to face Miklos, with Radion,
smiling grimly, beside him.

“So this is the whelp,” Miklos said. His
voice was not as deep as his brother’s but it was louder and
brasher. His fur was dark gray, streaked with black. And he was
nearly a head taller, and though not fat, even wider than Radion.
He was quite simply the largest feline I had ever seen.

“Yes, this is the one,” Radion said. “You
will teach him to fight.”

Miklos suddenly hefted me up like I was a
sack of flour, and moved me up and down as if weighing me.

“There’s nothing to him!” Miklos cried.

“But he is tough already where it counts, I
think,” Radion answered, tapping his head.

Miklos stared into my eyes – his own were
different colors, I thought in the firelight, one gray, one brown –
and then he set me down with a grunt. “If you say so, my
brother.”