A Game of Cards
Carrie Richerson

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FOR THOSE UNFAMILIAR WITH DOGS, it might be difficult to imagine how much of the personality of those intelligent animals resides in their ears—until they hold in their hands a smooth canine skull, shorn of those semaphores of mood, temperament, and interest.

I keep the skull of Anubis upon my mantelpiece, where it tells me of the past, the future, and the far distant present. An invaluable seer. Yet without the twitch, the prick, the swivel, the laying-back of its ears, I have difficulty interpreting what it tells me in its dry, husky growl.

* * * *

I saw him this evening, my enemy, my nemesis: on the gangway, boarding the sternwheeler Fidel, bound for New Orleans from St. Louis. At least, I think it was he. He had affected the fashion of a riverboat gambler: tight black breeches and jacket, a snowy ruffled shirt, shiny black boots with ridiculously pointed toes, and a flat-brimmed black hat with a narrow silver band. Somewhere on his person he would have concealed a derringer. It was all so overdone.

He looked up, caught my eye, and smiled. Of course, when I fought my way through the onrushing crowd, he had disappeared. I was sure it was he, however. Even if his appearance had not been designed to goad me (and he could be sure I would understand the reference), the way the cards leaped in their wrappings in the pocket above my heart would have declared his presence. It is a good sign that I have spotted him so early in the voyage. So early in the game.

Unless the obviousness of the character was a diversion. Unless he was really the stoop-shouldered man leaning on a cane, hobbling along to the left of the young rake. Or the generously fleshed matron sweeping along behind him. And whichever passenger he had disguised himself as this time, he would know that I knew he was laughing as he watched me watch his proxy.

I ground my teeth in rage. But he is aboard, of that I am sure. The cards know their master, and they never lie.

* * * *

I deal out the cards on the bed in my stateroom. Clubs and spades, black on black on black, in a spiral pattern. So he was the young dandy.

But then I remember the matron wore widow’s black. And the elderly gentleman carried a black valise. Even the mincing, blonde maiden in her pink, flounced dress carried a cage containing a small, black bird. I must bide my time until I am sure of my target.

* * * *

Still abroad in the world, still destroying and creating. For has he not created me: his shadow, his reflection, his image? His blood, and his sworn enemy.

He is my father and I am yet his son. Once, so long ago implacable Time has hazed the events in even my memory, I was his beloved heir and I looked up to him as everything I aspired to be: a wise judge, a compassionate ruler, a loving father. Builder, seer, provider. I adored him.

I even saved his life. When an ancient foe attacked and murdered him, and cruelly mutilated his body, I tracked down and slew the enemy, then scoured the earth for the scattered parts of my father’s body. With the help of my mother’s magicks, I restored his life, his honor, his throne. My exploits on his behalf are the stuff of legend, even now.

So what went wrong between us? How did we come to this place of fury and longing? In the same way fathers and sons have always found to hate one another: I coveted his power; he mistrusted my ambition.

Why could it not be enough that in his new life he should hold sway over the endless ranks of the dead? Why must he continue to claim this earth as his kingdom also? What about me? What about my birthright? He could not die, he could not even grow old, and he would not step aside.

Eventually our squabbles broke into open warfare, and my mother, fickle witch! changed allegiance so many times that soon the only thing my father and I had in common was our hatred of her. For a hundred generations we warred, until our own soldiers and subjects rebelled. Until our followers stopped following us into folly. Until the very land we fought over was destroyed. Where once were fertile valleys and nourishing streams, fields of wheat and barley stretching to the horizon, forests of cedar and fir to shelter the people and provide timbers for their ships—are now only eroded fissures, scoured rocks, hills of sand, and the endless, howling wind.

And still we strive against one another whenever we meet in our diaspora throughout this wide world. Are we not a model family for these modern times? Even for us, there is no turning back the pointing finger of Time, no return to that lost era of harmony and trust. I will mourn for my father when I have killed him. And I will miss him when I take his place.

* * * *

The lamp hangs too low over the card table: it casts a glow like yellow cream over the cards and the hands of the players, but the faces are half-shadowed and the eyes shy and feral. A porter, dressed in crisp whites that pick up an unfortunate green tinge in the light reflected from the baize, takes murmured orders and silently places drinks at elbows. I order a whiskey, neat; the florid businessman orders the same with ice and soda. The gambler smiles with too many teeth and orders a brandy; he tips the porter lavishly when the snifter arrives. The matron frowns at the liquor and at the mogul’s cigar and shakes her head primly when the porter asks her order. The maid has something green and sticky-looking in a tiny glass.

The businessman deals. A clubfooted jack winks up at me, a slow, sultry communication. He is joined by a shy nine, a hearty eight, and a pair of yeoman sevens. The cabin is small and the air close and still, heavy with the aromas of alcohol, tobacco, and sweat. To my right, the mogul unbuttons his waistcoat, calls for the bet, and puffs aggressively on his cigar. Smoke tendrils coil upward and knot under the lamp. I read their complex patterns to learn what cards are abroad.

In the matron’s hand, a pair of queens lean their heads together to whisper and giggle about the king’s “little problem.” The king flushes and averts his gaze angrily. The florid businessman holds a full house of the number of the Beast and the caliber of a bullet; four of the cards are red. Somewhere aboard, blood will be spilled tonight.

The patterns of light and smoke tell me nothing, of course, about the cards in the gambler’s hand. He can shield that information from me. But my jack knows where his brothers roam, and two of his kin are in the dandy’s grasp. I am not fool enough to draw to an inside straight this early in the evening; when the betting comes round to me, I fold without regret. The night is yet young and my reserves are ample.

I am troubled, however, that the maiden’s hand is opaque to me. Her eyes meet mine and she smiles shyly, but something else lives behind them. Something cannier, more sinister. Do I have more than one enemy at this table?

The matron plays for an hour and retires in tight-lipped annoyance when she has lost to her limit. The businessman stays longer, and should not have: he loses badly and leaves in blustery confusion at his bad fortune. Until this point the gambler and I have managed to control the hands almost evenly, winning here and losing there to each other and, occasionally, to the maiden—but always driving the other two out of the game. I have seen the realization slowly dawn in my opponent’s eyes that there is a third will at this table that contests us both. The maid smiles and laughs over her wins and protests it must be “luck,” that she has no skill at cards—but we are not fooled.

Now the three of us sit alone, and look hard at one another. The maid reaches for the cards in the middle of the table, and there is nothing amateurish about the way she shuffles and flips them in suddenly knowing hands. “Gentlemen—shall we play?” What looks out of her eyes now is neither shy nor silly, but very old.

I am overmatched, and flee. When next I see the dandy, he wears a humbled and grim air. And a glint of fear in his eyes as he meets mine across the dining table. The cards in my pocket stir uneasily, and my dinner whiskey is bitter on the tongue.

* * * *

After dinner I walk slowly around the deck and stop near the bow. A waxing moon turns the water that curls from the prow to a silvered splash. The wide river has a dull gray sheen in this light, like pewter: so unlike the brown, sluggish, silty flood of the daytime. The banks are mere shadows, too far away to guess at details, but before sunset we passed a section of red-clay bluffs crowned with pines and scrubby brush, falling to marshy coves thick with tall, cane-like reeds that reminded me of papyrus. Now the muskiness of swamp and rotted wood comes clearly across the water.

Above the chug and gurgle of the wheel churning through the water, I hear an owl hooting in the distance, a nightjar’s rising cry, and a repetitive trill I don’t recognize. On the other side of the bow, a linesman tosses a weighted, knotted rope into the water, pulls it up, and chants out the depth, over and over. The numbers vary dramatically, even over a short stretch of the river. The pilot is steering us slowly mid-channel tonight, lest even our shallow draft go aground on one of the many, ever-shifting sandbars.

So powerfully this wide, brown, fertile flood reminds me of the river beside which I grew up: half a world apart, yet they might be twins, save that one flows north and this other south. Each the mother of her people, life-giver, life-taker, regulator of planting, growth, harvest. River of souls.

Later my father finds me leaning on the railing, watching the curling foam in the moonlight and listening to the calls of the linesman. He offers me a cigar, and we smoke in silence for a time.

“We have a problem that I do not think either of us can face alone,” he says at last. It is carefully phrased, but it is still an admission that he is not supreme here. I never thought to hear him say it, and I marvel.

“The enemy of my enemy ... is still my enemy,” I observe. “I should stand back and let her gobble you down.”

“What pleasure would you take in letting her do what is your deepest desire?” he asks with genuine curiosity. When I nod in acknowledgement of his point, he continues, “If you ally with her, you are a fool who deserves his fate. I will be only an appetizer to her, to whet her palate before she takes you. And do not try to deny she has the power—to defeat each of us individually.”

Again I nod at the accuracy of his analysis. I take the cigar from my lips and contemplate its glowing end. It could have been poisoned, and so he would have been rid of me—but there are rules to our game.

“I hate you with every fiber of my being. You know that,” I say to him. “But it is my hate, and my fight. I need no allies to contest with you, and I will brook no interference from another. This ... intruder ... is powerful and dangerous, but she needs to be taught a lesson.”

He extends his hand. “A partnership between us then, until our common enemy is vanquished.”

I take the hand. His grip is firm and steady, but there is a hint of fear in his sweat, still.

* * * *

In my cabin after dinner, I inventory my stakes. First the coins, poured out of their bag in a clattering stream onto the bunk where I sit cross-legged. Most are silver, some bronze, a few verdigrised copper. Some are so old they only approximate roundness. All bear the signs of much handling, the faces of long-dead conquerors rubbed to indistinguishable humps in the metal.

The ingots of gold are next. In contrast to the coins, these bear designs as clean-edged as though they had been stamped into the soft metal yesterday: sheaves of barley, pomegranates, the all-seeing Eye of heaven, and my favorite: the falcon’s wing. My fingers trace the intaglios fondly, then I wrap each thin rectangle in a fold of my handkerchief to keep them from clinking together in my pocket.

Lastly, I check over the jewels. Not the showy crystals for me—I carry the semi-precious gems that are easier to spend and wager: carnelian and malachite, lapis and moonstone, onyx and opal. I slip the small handful back into its leather pouch and nestle the pouch in a hidden pocket inside my waistcoat.

From another pocket I take my watch. I cradle it in my palm and listen to the precise, mechanical tick, letting it soothe me for a minute before I flip open the cover and check the time. Inside the lid I carry a small portrait of my mother. She looks young and vulnerable in this picture—not the scheming harridan I knew later. I gaze at the likeness for long moments, lost in memories of a wondrous childhood under her protection and tutelage. Those days are long past. Now my own strength and what she taught me must sustain me.

I check myself in the smoky glass on the cabin wall. Every hair in place, watch chain draped just so, suit immaculate. My eyes betray no sense of my tension. Something will end tonight, something else begin.

I leave without locking my cabin. Let the game begin.

* * * *

Just the three of us tonight: maiden, gambler, and me. No porter, no drinks. No witnesses. By common consent, my father and I push the cards toward the maid when she asks who wishes to deal.

Her hands look small, but her fingers move deftly over and around the cards. As she shuffles, the gambler and I place our antes in the center of the table. His is a golden florin with a profile I recognize as one of the Medicis. I answer with a wafer of gold stamped with the sickle moon.

The cards flutter and hiss in the maiden’s hands. On the second shuffle I seem to hear a faint stutter in their rhythm. Between one breath and the next I slow myself. The hissing becomes ticking. Slower. The cards tap distinctly against one another. Slower still, and slower. Yes, now I can hear the irregularity in the slapping pasteboards, see the tiny movements with which our dealer stacks the deck.

The maiden finishes her clever task and pushes the deck toward my father for the courtesy cut. As expected, he only taps the top card. But in my heightened awareness I see the ripple of power that slides through the cards and undoes what the dealer has carefully arranged. I am sure the maiden is aware of it, too. The cards are truly random now. I take another breath and return myself to this world’s time. The gambler is smiling, and I watch impassively as the maiden deals out the hands.

We play, and the hours pass. We skirmish, fence, plot. Even though I know my father will back me, or I him, when the time is right to make a move, the time does not ripen. It seems that I have sat here for an eternity, will sit here, dealing, betting, folding, losing, for all eternity. But slowly and surely, the maiden is winning the majority of the hands. It may take all night, but it is clear that eventually the maiden will win all, and the gambler and I will fall under her power.

The air in the cabin is stifling. The figures sitting at the table with me waver as though seen through water, or the air above furnace-hot sands. Is that my father who sits across from me, or a dandified gambler, or an ancient and implacable judge? Is this a maiden who deals me cards, or a smiling mother whose tender breasts are swollen with milk for her beloved child? A wizened crone, or a desiccated and malefic corpse? And what do they see when they look at me: a pretender, an heir, a loved son, or a yellow-eyed warrior?

I pick up my hand. King of spades, queen of clubs, jack of hearts, ten of diamonds, nine of clubs. A frail straight, hardly a hand to bet all that I have on, but the time has come to stop being conservative. Even as long ago I thrust all my armies into one fatal assault, now I push all my winnings to the center of the table, empty my pockets and pouches of coins, gold, and jewels, and dare my opponents to see my bet.

My father grins and matches me. The maid bares her tiny, pointed teeth and whispers, “I will eat you,” then pushes her hoard to the center.

My father looks at me with a steady gaze, and suddenly I see the cards in his hand as if through his eyes, and I know what to do. In a blink it is done, and I am sure even the maid could not detect it. I spread my now-worthless hand on the table for all to see: queen of clubs, jack of hearts, ten of diamonds, nine of clubs, three of spades.

The maiden laughs, a keening gone shrill and brittle, and lays down a full house: three queens of majestic and malevolent power, attended by two humbled jack-knights. The faces of the jacks are lowered, but they are attired as my father and me. She stands, as tall as the sky now and wreathed in the power of night; I see her true face and tremble.

She raises her hand to unleash her lightnings against us, but my father says softly, “A moment, please,” and in the silence he lays his cards down one at a time: three kings, an ace—her face grows still—and the last card, the one I sent him from my hand, the king of spades. It wears my father’s face.

In my mind’s eye I see the skull of Anubis. Its empty eye sockets glow a fiery red, there is blood on its fangs, and an eerie howling, like the wind between the stars, issues from its gaping jaws. Enraged, the Queen of Night begins to pronounce her curse, until I leap across the table and seize her throat in my jaws.

She writhes like a huge python in my grip, wrapping me about with coils that crush the air from my lungs, but I do not release her. As a tawny desert lion she rakes me with claws, but I clamp my teeth deeper into her flesh. She is a slip of a maid again and she batters me with her fists until I grab her wrists and pinion them. The bones crack in my grip, but she cannot scream, for I have crushed her windpipe. Gradually her struggles grow weaker. Finally she is still, and I shake her limp body until I am sure she is dead, before I release my grip on her throat.

I sit back on my haunches on the table. There is no sound but my hoarse gasping and the drip of blood from my chin. Across the room, my father watches me warily.

I climb off the table and stand swaying, every muscle aching. I stretch out a hand to the body, but it bursts into greenish flame. I bury my face in my hands and sink to the floor, sobbing.

My father lifts me and holds me against his shoulder as I cry. “Shhh, my son. All is, as it ever was and will be,” he murmurs. He takes the lace-trimmed handkerchief from his breast pocket and cleans the blood and tears from my cheeks. The handkerchief smells of sandalwood and pomegranate. I had forgotten the strength of his arms, how safe I feel within their circle.

At last I am cried out. Of my mother’s body, nothing is left but a small pile of ash and the odor of scorched felt. Father scoops a handful of ash into his handkerchief and folds it closed with care.

Without speaking, we walk out onto the promenade together. The sky is beginning to lighten. I hear a splash, and see a long, reptilian shape swimming with powerful strokes of its tail alongside the ship. Father unfolds the handkerchief, stirs the ash, blood, and tears with his finger, and breathes over the mixture. Now his hand is filled with seeds; within each one I can see pulsing the green of life, a silver swirl of moonlight, the golden disk of the sun, and a fat chocolate-colored drop of silt-rich water.

Father lifts his hand to the breeze and the seeds float away, some lifting into the sky, some drifting toward the banks on either side of the wide river. I wonder what marvels will sprout from these small containers of possibility. I wonder what grace of fertility the magic of my mother Isis will bring to this new land.

When I turn back to my father, the sharp black eyes and curved beak of the ibis greet me. He touches my cheek lightly in farewell, then unfurls his snowy wings and springs into the air. I run up the stairs to the topmost deck. Three times Osiris circles the steamboat, then he flies away to the west. Against my heart, the cards in their wrappings feel strangely warm.

I lean over the railing and shout to the dark shadow in the water, “Nothing for you today, Sobek!” The slap of a massive tail and a toothy grin answer me before he turns and swims away. Our brother wears a different snout in this New World, but his heart is still the fiercest of us all.

Before and behind, the great brown river of life stretches like a highway from birth to death. My heart is as light as a feather in Ma’at’s scale. Raising my arms to the east, I lift my voice in song, as I, Horus, greet my brother Aten at the dawn of a new day.