Free The Summoning by Carol Wolf Page B

deck is this?”
    “It’s based on one of the Lombardy copies,” he answered.
    She drew apart a couple of the face cards with two of her long fingers. “These were never in the Lombard deck.”
    “If I may?” Richard reached across the table, moved two cards aside to reveal one showing a bear holding a club, destroying some twisted creature on the ground. Strength, said the caption, in gothic lettering. Tamara stared at the bears, lifted the card from the table, stared at it again, then up at Richard.
    “They change,” Richard explained. “It’s one of the ways they talk to me. Look.” He drew out another. Against a background of stars, a dark-skinned woman in a blue robe, with cymbals in her hands, danced, eyes shut, above a precipice. The Priestess, the caption said. “I have never seen this aspect of the Priestess either, before today. And I have used this deck for four hundred years.”
    She took the card and gazed at it for a long moment. “Then by all means,” she said at last, “you must do a reading.” She let the card fall on the table.
    Richard looked at me. “Sure,” I said. “Go ahead.”
    He gathered up the cards while Tamara cleared a place at the table between us. When she finished, Richard rearranged the space for himself, making the clear place twice as large as she had. He shuffled the deck deftly despite the largeness of the cards, then handed the deck to Tamara.
    “You must ask your question of the cards,” he told her. “You may say it aloud or not, as you please. When you are ready, cut the cards and return them to me.”
    She cut the cards, turning them as she did so. She cut them again, pulled out a few cards, fed them into the deck in another place, her long fingers deft and precise. “How many times do I cut them?” she asked, smiling.
    “You may cut them or shuffle them till Doomsday, if that is your wish.”
    Still smiling, she handed them back to him. Richard held them for a moment in both hands, and then began dealing them out, face down. He put one in the center of his space and crossed it with the other, then put one each up, down, right, left, saying, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit—”
    “Don’t you blaspheme—” Tamara shot to her feet.
    Richard stopped, the fourth card of the cross he was making on the table still in his hand. He said, in the same patient voice, “This is the way I was taught to do it.”
    She glared at him a long moment, then sat down again, lifting her hand for him to continue. He laid the fourth card, murmuring now under his breath, then laid two more to the right above the cross he had made, and two more to the left and below. When he finished he had three interlocking squares with a cross in the middle of it. He studied the pattern for a moment, then he said, “I’m sure you know how this works…”
    She shook her head. “I’ve never seen the cards laid out that way before.”
    “It isn’t very different. It’s just the way I was taught.” He lifted the center card and turned over the one under it, saying, “This represents the questioner—” He stopped, puzzled. It was not The Priestess, the dancer that he had showed her before, but a young woman with very dark skin, beautifully robed, her eyes downcast, pouring liquid from one jug to another in her hands. Temperance, said the inscription at the bottom of the card. Above her, there were bright stars in a dark blue sky.
    Tamara was looking at the card with as much interest as Richard was. “Go on,” she said. She then smoothed her face of all other expression.
    Richard turned over the card that he had laid across the first. The Eight of Swords. “This is what crosses her. The card represents strife, a coming battle—”
    “I know what the cards mean,” Tamara interrupted. “Go on.”
    “I don’t,” I told them. I had a cousin who once experimented with tarot, so I’d seen a deck before, but I didn’t know anything about