A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [51]
“Is that me?” Marka asked.
“It might be, it might be—or else, you will someday serve the princess. Not sure which yet. But I don’t much like the look of this knave. Hum. A lover, maybe; he’s the same suit, but he’s no prince, is he? Watch out for him, girl. I do like the look of this six. Good fortune, girl, very good fortune indeed, though not without some trouble.” She laid a long and bony forefinger on the two of spears. “But nothing your wits won’t be able to get you out of, I’d say. Three flowers in the first draw is very lucky, very lucky. Now draw me four groups of three.”
Each group formed a triangle. For a long time Akantha sucked her teeth in silence while she studied the layout; once or twice she started to speak, then merely shook her head. Marka knew just enough about the tiles to understand that the expanded reading simply wasn’t coalescing into a whole. Omens of splendid good luck lay right next to signifiers of the grimmest bad fortune, while the minor, numbered tiles contradicted all the important trumps around them. The first was the three of flowers.
“Well, then, the reading should be a good one. Here’s a flower coming up from the Earth. Now, we’ve got the nine of swords for Air, so you’re in for a bit of rough sailing, sure enough. And now for Water we’ve got the queen of birds, which is not the kind of location I’d like to see for that tile. No, water and birds aren’t a happy marriage, girl, not at all. But well, look at this! For Fire here’s the ten of golds! Very good luck, the best there is. And finally, for the Ether, we have the… the prince of Swords? Oh, by the Star Goddesses themselves! This isn’t making sense again. Listen, young Marka, sometimes the gods just don’t want us to know the future. That’s all there is to it. Don’t you pay one bit of attention to anything I’ve said this morning, and as for your money, come back after dark and I’ll try again for free. Sometimes letting the sun set on a reading changes things.”
“Thank you, but I can’t. We’ll be putting on our show once it’s dark.”
“Ah. You’re one of that bunch from Main Island, then?”
“Yes. I do the slack wire. I mean, I used to.” She stopped herself just in time from venting all her bitterness on this sympathetic if hired ear. “I juggle now.”
As she hurried away, Marka tried to leave the reading behind, but its bad aura hung round her like a wet cloak. Nothing, it seemed, was going right these days, not even a simple thing like getting her fortune told. Although Luvilae was the capital of Zama Mañae, the southernmost island in the Orystinnian archipelago, at a mere twenty thousand inhabitants it was not the sort of place where a wandering troupe of acrobats could make its fortune. Marka wondered why her father had brought them there, but then, these days her father did a lot of things that made no sense. She felt a constant dread, a line of ice down her back, a knowledge that she refused to face. He promised, she would think, it couldn’t be that again.
She forced her mind away from old memories with a wrench of will. She’d been sent into town, after all, for more important reasons than just hearing her fortune. She bought a chunk of roast pork on a stick and wandered round, nibbling her meal and looking over the other street performers at the fair. The only jugglers she saw were clumsy; there were no slackrope walkers at all. Although she found a band of tumblers, they couldn’t compete with the complex routines that the men in her troupe performed. Most of the solitaires were musicians. Overall, the best show she saw in that first look round featured trained monkeys and apes.
As she was buying herself a piece of sugared cake, she noticed a small crowd gathering off to one side in the shade of a big plane tree. The cake seller gestured with snow-white fingers, all sticky from her wares.
“If that’s the barbarian, you should take a look at him. Puts on a good show, though I swear the