Annetta Ribken (ed) Allegories of the Tarot (epub)

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.She kept her window open so she could see the roiling sea beyond her home.Her sister, the empress, had come to visit earlier, but warned she might not be able to return because of rising waters.Katrine had sent her servants home to parents and mates rather than ask them to stay in her palace to be stranded.She was alone now, subject to the whim of weather, but she could far-see and knew she’d persevere.As for others in the city, she worried for their safety, petulant in interpreting the visions plaguing her.The sights she saw playing out in thin air before her disrupted her sleep.Many would die.That’s what she saw in the visions.Bodies piled like cord wood, fires set to consume flesh.There were too many for burial in the underground crypts.Far-seeing was Katrine’s gift.With her help as his main confidant, Solomon made the kingdom happy and prosperous.The land was a Mecca for trade, with ships coming from foreign shores like South India, Ophir, and Tarshish.Camel trains from across the vast deserts, from Arabia or Egypt, sometimes Tyre.The crops grew in fertile ground so the granaries were full each fall to feed the city’s citizens.Do this, she told Solomon, and he did.Do that, she advised, and he never refused.In this way Katrine felt she served both the Spirit and her country.Solomon was known far and wide as a good king, a fair and caring ruler over his people.At least he had been a fine man and king until he met Sheba, the queen of a land in Ethiopia, a country none of Solomon’s people had ever seen.When Katrine first met Sheba, she’d been highly impressed.The young girl’s hair was braided with gold threads all across her scalp.She wore a gold bodice that sparkled in the sun and a long, body-hugging, diaphanous scarlet skirt worked with streaks of gold thread.Her skin was even darker than any of Solomon’s people, so dark it was like stony night.The contrast between her color and her clothes made her look like a waltzing, ribald angel.She came to Solomon bearing gifts—barrels of fragrant olive oil, tankards of rich, heady wine, dried mango and coconut, barrels of gold nuggets.She bowed to him and when she smiled the audience was swayed to love her.It was the first night of the queen’s visit when Katrine saw the vision of downfall.The next morning she hurried to Solomon’s chambers.He sat, immersed with writing on a scroll, perched on a cane chair before a table inlaid with chips of abalone.He paused in his work, looked up, and frowned.“Something is wrong, isn’t it?” he asked.“I don’t have to far-see to know from the look on your face.”“Master! The woman from over the sea! She brings dissolution and catastrophe with her.”“Are you speaking of Sheba, our latest visitor?”“I am, Master.I saw a vision wherein she.she.”He waved at her with his quill pen.“Katrine, isn’t it too early to make these kinds of pronouncements on a stranger? Shouldn’t we give the girl a small chance to show herself either good or evil?”“But, Master, she’ll manipulate you.She’ll bring down the tem.”He spoke a word meaning the whole idea ridiculous and returned his attention to the scroll.“She’s just a girl.I’m not afraid of a girl.”Katrine, dismissed, bowed low and backed from the room.She had failed to warn him, to make him understand the seriousness of her vision.She would have to approach him again when the girl began to work her magic.She mustn’t let her master and her country be brought to ruin.That evening the empress sent carriage bearers to the palace where Katrine lived in a room separate from Solomon, asking her to come.When Katrine told her sister of the dire warning, the empress laughed, for she was sometimes amused by the idea of far-seeing.“You don’t know that for sure, Kat.The girl’s so clever and generous.She’s such good company.She even brought her own dancers for our evening’s amusement.”“You’re seeing the outward person,” Katrine insisted.“It’s the inner one of which I speak.The inner one is dark purple as the rind of shriveled valley grapes.I tell you, she’ll bring down Solomon.”The empress laughed happily at the idea of dried grapes and sent her maid servant to fetch a platter of them.“Since this gift has befallen you, your worries have mounted, my sister.You know yourself sometimes they are for nothing.”It was true some of Katrine’s visions failed to materialize.She believed it was because she’d waylaid the chaos by turning the people involved another way, speaking a different phrase, or praying a new prayer to some old deity.How could she explain some visions remained unfulfilled only because her advice had prevented them? She couldn’t prove it.***Solomon took Sheba to his bed.The whole city knew it and none more intimately than Katrine [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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