Dandelion War Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Twelve Pincer Movement

On the ground of intersecting highways, join hands with your allies.

 — Sun Tzu, The Art of War (c. 512 BCE)

Beryl noticed the advent of our troops, followed closely by another cohort of our enemies, with what were obviously mixed emotions. “I may have acted rashly, Sapphire, in my haste to obtain more information.”

“Bosh, piffle!” I replied. “The alternative would have been to walk up and knock upon the gate, which would, in hindsight, have been a fatal mistake. Let’s… just call your so-called ‘haste’ something more like ‘prescient inspiration’ and have done with pointless kibitzing after… the fact.” My speech was less fluent and more halting than my wont, primarily for lack of breath as I swept my makeshift sword through as many necks as possible. Every once in a while they didn’t line up as well as I’d have liked, so I’d run my blade partway through a skull or shoulder and have to pull it free with a sudden jerk. It was hard work, and more to come it seemed.

“How’re our girls holding up?” Beryl asked without looking, which I could easily understand, because her weapon, whilst more powerful than my disassembled rocket launcher, also took quite a bit of concentration and interactive feedback to control. At the first sign that her metal lash might be wrapping around too much green monster to cut cleanly, she had to flick it into another path to either clear it or obtain a better purchase that might prove more quickly lethal.

I took some little time to look toward our ranks, cutting with my imperfect blade more by instinct than any particular plan. “They’re doing well, so far, as they have enough hands to handle the advance of the green goblins using machetes, and a few have sabres, evidently from the Reiver’s stores somewhere, although I don’t recall actually seeing them before.” I turned again to my more urgent task just in time, for three of the nasty things had begun to crawl upon their bellies, beneath the reach of my makeshift sword from horseback. “Watch out for creeping goblins!” I cried. “It seems a new tactic, at least amongst my lot.” I dismounted at once, of course, and was immediately regretful, despite the grim necessity, because the creeping bloodsuckers immediately attacked my lovely mare from the other side and began to suck her blood with their vicious fangs. I vaulted over her body as she collapsed, first to her knees and then rapidly to her side as the blood left her brain. I killed her killers with cold efficiency, then leapt up to stand upon her sprawled body to give myself better access to their necks whilst still remaining low enough to dismember any creepers on the ground.

Beryl adjusted instantly, of course, shortening up her chain enough to have a shorter length to twirl with her other hand, making two intersecting arcs of flashing steel to hit them both high and low. “They’re not very bright on their own,” she said, “so there must be one or more central vantage points they’re being directed from.”

That sounded like something I could handle, so I immediately focused on my mental deck of cards. Beryl might be able to hear human thoughts from anywhere within a mile or two, but I was much better at abstractions. One card forced itself to my attention. Major Arcanum V, the Heirophant! Upright! “Southeast!” I said, “Somewhere to the Southeast!” The card was also fit to represent the monsters, at least in its negative sense, because it represented rigid authority and conformity, and one could hardly be more subservient than to have no sense of self at all.

“I see it!” Beryl shouted from her better vantage point on horseback. “That tall longleaf pine, almost completely smothered in kudzu vines! Lynette! Do you see it?”

Lynette was busy on her own, but was armed only with her machete, so wasn’t taking as large a rôle as we were, not to mention that she’d been partially shielded from the main onslaught by Beryl and I. I heard her speak behind me.

“I see it! But what can I do?”

Beryl shouted out immediately, “Ride hell for leather toward our main body of troops and tell them to fire half a dozen HE missiles at it and set the damned thing burning as quick as ever you can! Tell them to keep firing, and if they see any more giant piles of kudzu, burn those too!”

“But! You’ll both…”

“Get going, Lynette!” she shouted with that inimitable Queenly arrogance she had sometimes. “We’re depending on you to do your duty and follow orders! That tree — with its burden of vines — is the real danger right now and we’re fresh out of HE missiles.”

“Yes, Ma’am!” she said smartly. I’ll just bet that she saluted Beryl as well, but didn’t turn around to look. Beryl had that effect on people, so I sort of took it for granted, and I was rather busy at the time in any case. I heard her galloping off toward our advancing troops as the green goblins closed in toward us with renewed urgency, so evidently the tall pine kudzu had noticed our change of tactics.

I won’t go into details about our stand against the goblins, because it was horrible, sticky, tiring work, until an explosion, then several more, heralded our main body’s successful operation against the piney nest of the nasty things. Almost instantly, the goblins became less organized and much easier to kill. When they’d first attacked us, so close to their main nest — or whatever that massive central structure was — even chopping off their heads hadn’t slowed them down too much at all, but too much distance seemed to impair their overriding control of their pet goblins, and certainly their being set afire had done wonders for our success against our robotic attackers. After a short time, I heard another salvo of HE missiles against some other target — evidently Lynette had taken to heart Beryl’s order to seek out any prominent nests of the things — and their coördination dropped off to almost nothing, and they began wandering around almost at random, except that they were still bloodthirsty, but were just as likely to attack and kill each other as they were to turn toward us. It might have been amusing, were it not for my memories of my lovely pregnant mare, felled by these muderous green goblins with her foal yet unborn.

“I quite like ‘green goblins,’ I think,” Beryl said quietly, obviously having read my mind as we were mopping up the last of them. “It nicely encapsulates their most prominent characteristics, as well as their malice.”

“Well, I briefly flirted with ‘Kudzu Klan,’ but I imagine the reference would have been lost on most.” This was a quip, of course, I’d thought of no such thing — until just now — but I thought Beryl might get the joke.

She smiled. “Just as well, I think. We’d have to call these concentrated vine bodies ‘Grand Dragons’ or the equivalent, which would quite turn their vulnerability to fire on its head.”

I laughed, because she’d seen the joke, and because I was so very glad that we were both alive. “I do think ‘Goblin castle’ has a certain air about it, though.”

“Or perhaps ‘goblin tower’ might do, and minimize confusion between our castles and theirs.”

“That’s an interesting idea, Beryl!” I said. “It sounds almost like something out of a fairy tale; just the right amount of menace without being too daunting.”

“Exactly!” she answered me. “The propaganda war is at least half the battle, of course, so let’s get our stories straight before we rejoin the troops.”

“No problem!” I said. “They never listen to me when you’re around anyways, especially now, I think, when you’ve raised ‘Off with their heads!’ to an art form, so I daresay your legend will grow in the telling. By the time we get back, they’ll probably have reïnvented curtsies and constructed a portable throne.”

She laughed at that. “Courtly manners I can live without; I’ve had my fill of them, but a proper sit-down toilet would be awfully nice, now that I think about it.”

I sighed. That was one thing I missed badly from my first few weeks in The City, when I’d discovered working fire hoses in my huge building, fed from rain-collecting cisterns on the roof, by means of which I was able to use buckets of water to flush the toilets in the ladies room. They even had closets filled with toilet paper and paper towels, which had seemed an almost inconceivable luxury at the time. I made a mental note to arrange a similar convenience, if we ever settled down for any length of time. It couldn’t be all that hard to arrange a cistern to collect water, and gravity could do the rest, although I supposed that we’d have to arrange some sort of leach field to handle the waste, since we couldn’t depend on streams and rivers in the long run. It was all well and good when we were riding through essential wilderness, but eventually our population centers would outstrip the ability of natural streams to handle the waste. The Roman Empire, after all, was enormously popular not least because their first major building projects in any conquered land were convenient public water fountains, heated baths, and sanitary public toilets. “I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

“Really? You can do that?”

Beryl might be long on derring-do, but I was the ingenious one. I nodded… and she smiled.

“Lynnette!” I yelled when we’d finally dragged our weary selves back to our sisters. We’d had some casualties, I quickly saw, but no more than a handful, by my rough guesstimate. “I’m so glad you managed to save our bacon!”

She colored as she answered, “Well, you two did most of the heavy lifting….”

“Nonsense1” Beryl said as we approached. “If it hadn’t been for your insights into the creatures, based upon your intimate scientific knowledge of plants, we’d still be out there fighting, if not sucked dry of every bodily fluid.”

“That puzzled me,” she said, “until I reasoned that at some point the pseudo-epiphytic climbing vines must have developed parasitic capabilities, which were then passed on to their motile offspring.”

“Epiphytic?” I asked succinctly, completely mystified, but tackling the problem from left to right.

“Normally,” she said, “the various forms of kudzu are true vines, so any damage they do is down to simple crowding out of other species, eliminating access to sunlight, and so on, coupled with what is — for plants, at least — a fantastically rapid growth rate. Like every true plant, they originally required a connection to the soil for nutrients and moisture. In the recent memories of those few modern botanists I was able to contact in the Underworld, they’d developed a partially epiphytic habit, in that they sometimes depended upon trees and other plants for access to sunlight in regions of heavy shade, but without giving up their ability to flower and reproduce independently of any of their neighbors. I reason that — at some point, either through evolution or some other form of gene transfer — they developed the equivalent of a haustorium, the modified root or hyphal tip of a plant or fungus that allows it to pierce into the circulatory systems of other plants, either in the xylem, the phloem, or both, and steal nutrients made by other plants.”

“Xylem? Phloem?” I do wish she’d speak English sometimes, though she didn’t ever seem bothered by having to explain herself.

“The xylem is the plant structure primarily responsible for transporting water from the roots — or whatever plant structure has access to moisture — to the rest of its body. The phloem is similarly responsible for transplanting sugars and other nutrients from wherever they’re being made to where the plant needs them to be for growth and reproduction. You might think of them as somewhat analogous to veins and arteries in animals and human beings, except that a plant’s fluids are transported by hydrostatic pressure from transpiration and osmosis.”

“So, exactly what has this to do with the creatures — we’re calling them ‘goblins,’ for lack of a better word — we were fighting?”

Lynette looked at me in surprise. “I was just telling you! The so-called ‘fangs’ I found in the creature’s head were modified haustoria! I presume that the demands of an ambulatory existence required a more energy-laden food supply than mere photosynthesis could provide, so the plants took to preying upon animals as well as other plants.”

I rolled my eyes. “Couldn’t you have just said that they were vampires?”

“We already knew that, for Heaven’s sake!” she said indignantly. “Why bother to yank a respected scientist out of a reasonably comfortable afterlife if you weren’t looking for definitive answers in the first place‽ It wasn’t as if I were just lounging about in the Elysian Fields and twiddling my thumbs, after all! I was able to engage in intense conversations with Galen, Pythagoras, Theophrastus, Pliny, Aristotle, Cesalpino, and countless other scientists and sages, all on a daily basis, without once having to worry about some damned green parasite gnawing on my leg!” She looked a little irritated.

“I… I’m sorry, Lynette,” I said. “I thought that you volunteered. I suppose I imagined that you were bored or something.”

She scowled at me. “Well, I wasn’t. I did volunteer, but I did so out of a general sense of civic duty, not because I was yearning for a fun-filled idle holiday in the middle of a war zone! From the Queen’s description, these things sounded like a very dangerous threat to human life, and I do feel an obligation to take sides in any such primal conflict.”

“Oh,” I said, nonplused.

“Indeed,” she said, in low dudgeon.

“So,” Beryl asked Lynette, “are we any closer to figuring out how these things can be decisively defeated?”

“Of course,” Lynette answered archly. “Simply manipulate a very large asteroid and send it crashing down on Earth. The resulting confusion will cause many life forms to go extinct, amongst which our Kudzu Goblins will hopefully be numbered.”

Beryl scowled in irritation. “Any way short of global catastrophe?”

“Of course not!” she answered. “Hasn’t the experience of the Horticultural Forces over the past several hundred years taught you anything about living things? The main purpose of every living creature is to survive long enough to reproduce another generation. In some sense, it’s their only purpose, and while it’s possible through overzealous predation and/or relentless destruction of a local habitat to drive one or more individual species to extinction, their place in the resultant œcology of any given area will eventually be taken up by some other species, most often less desirable from a human viewpoint, and thus less subject to predation. Kill enough mice, you get rats. Kill enough itty-bitty dandelions ‘infesting’ urban lawns, you get the monstrous hybrids which laid siege to your walled ‘fortresses’ and killed people by the score. I strongly suspect that these ‘goblins’ arose because every other top predator in this entire region had been eliminated by human beings, leaving an œcological vacuum into which the kudzu eventually found a way to expand.”

“But how can we possibly live with these murderous fiends lurking in every field and forest?”

“The same way we used to live with dandelions, of course. Did you know that at one time dandelions were not only a cheerful ornament on urban lawns, but most people considered them a valuable crop, something to be treasured for more than the fun of blowing the ripe florets into the air and watching them waft away to create new dandelions elsewhere. Every part of those ancient dandelions was edible; the leaves and buds made a lovely salad, the flowers could be brewed into a delightful wine, the roots ground and roasted made a tolerable hot beverage. Various portions of the plant even had medicinal uses, primarily as a fairly gentle diuretic, but were also said to help with hepatic disorders. It was only when obsessive-compulsive idiots decided that they wanted lawns that looked like putting greens — lawns that children weren’t allowed to play on because they were saturated with toxic chemicals, lawns as flat and boring as a billiard table — that things really started to change.”

“There’s a hell of a lot of difference between dandelions on a lawn and those goblin vampires!” Beryl said furiously.

“Not really,” Lynette said calmly. “Your current incarnation is the result of many converging lines of separate evolution, but evolution is still going on, albeit usually a bit too slow to notice on a human scale. Is it too much to imagine that other beings might also coëvolve into something other than they were before?” She gestured to the plain around us, or as far as the horizon, or beyond. “This is the wide world we live in, but even this is just a speck within the vast immensity of time and space. Tomorrow, next week, a hundred years from now, great ships of space might land carrying beings far more clever and powerful than we mere humans could ever hope to be; does that prevent us from living out our own lives and preferring that we and our descendants survive, even if we have to slay these putative godlike beings to do so? Even the tiniest mouse will bite if captured in a hand. Are we less courageous than that wee mousie?”

For once, especially since her transubstantiation, Beryl was speechless. I sympathized. It must be difficult, to be a Queen, and then discover an upstart minion who wasn’t cowed, a scientist whose agenda encompassed only truth, whose essential courage enabled her to boldly confront the truth wherever it lay hidden. Oddly, although I’d always been very fond of Beryl, almost from the start, had initiated sex with her, had imagined that I was in love with her, was even now carrying her child, for the first time — as I observed Lynette’s dispassionate defiance from the sidelines, as it were — my chest quite suddenly ached with love and it felt like my heart had expanded to fill all the space there was beneath my breastbone, as if I couldn’t breathe, the oxygen driven from my lungs by swelling passion, all-encompassing, and all the world around me changed in the twinkling of an eye. I saw what Lynette saw — or thought I did — that we were all connected to the same world, that these horrible goblin things were our neighbors, and that we had to somehow come to an accommodation. “What do we need to do, Lynette?” I asked her, my eminently practical question breaking a silent tension so ominous and fragile that I could almost hear it shatter, then fall tinkling in ragged shards to the Earth beneath our feet. They both blinked and stared at me as if I were a miraculously-talking horse, then both spoke simultaneously, to each other.

“Shut up! Both of you!” I shouted at them. “You’re both wrong,” I continued quietly, “and both right, both at the same time.”

Somehow, that stopped them, and they both stood there staring at me again; the talking horse had repeated her miracle, had spoken for the second time, and was suddenly something that had to be reckoned with. “Beryl, I love you, probably more than I know words enough to express, and certainly more than I’ve ever managed to tell you, but you can’t run around like the damned Red Queen shouting ‘Off with their heads!’ and expect instant results. Lynette is right. We can’t possibly defeat them all. We don’t know how many thousands of square miles of forest and kudzu empire there is between here and whatever end there is of them, but our ancestors never managed to eradicate the kudzu, so I doubt that we will either, certainly not in our lifetimes, and certainly not with their new adaptations to encroachments by other lifeforms.”

Then I turned to Lynette and said, “Don’t forget that you’re wrong too. We’re not going to be patsies for anyone, and if we’re mice, we’re mice that roar like lions from time to time. For a million years or more, human beings have been shaping the world around them, and these creatures are just another piece of that same world. What we’re going to do is to domesticate these goblins until their own mothers — if they have mothers — won’t recognize them. We tamed the fierce and dangerous giant aurochs to such an extent that ‘cow’ is now a word that means ‘to subdue,’ and we use castrated oxen to pull carts around. Mark my words, those goblins will be our servants before this encounter is over, however long it takes.”

Both of them stared at me dumbfounded, evidently unable to find words either to agree with me or call me seven kinds of idiot for my arrogant delusions of human grandeur. ‘Tough luck!’ I thought. ‘I started all this — I’ll finish it. This particular mouse knows how to bite!’ “Lynette, start figuring out what they need and how we can control it so completely that they become dependent on our good will. Beryl, you can tell me what these things might be good for, so we can convince people to let them alone until we figure out how to snap a leash on them. Whatever it is that we wind up doing, we can’t let it escalate to the point that it did before the Dandelion War began and blunder our way into the same long series of mistakes all over again.”

“Yes, Ma’am!” Lynette replied smartly, evidently well content to leave the driving to someone with any semblance of command and any idea that seemed somewhat less than stupid. “Although they appear to have developed other resources, in that they can prey upon animals for nutrients and moisture, I can’t imagine that there would be sufficient animal life in any region dominated by these things to sustain the sort of intelligence they seem to display, as witnessed by their obvious profusion of leafy growth. Like any plant, therefore, they need access to water, light, nutrients, and a friable soil which allows for root growth, and especially soil depth enough to contain their root crown, at least six feet, I’d guess, considering the size of the visible portions above the soil, although younger plants undoubtedly require less depth, but then I haven’t had the opportunity to excavate one of the mutated specimens to determine actual dimensions.”

“You mentioned the ‘root crown before. Is this necessary for growth?’”

“Not absolutely, no, but certainly for regrowth after any destruction of the vines above ground. The root crown contains a large store of nutrients that fuel rapid regrowth after consumption of the portions of the plant that perform photosynthesis above the ground. Any seeds left behind can do the same, but regeneration from seed is much slower, and requires more favorable conditions. I believe we can extrapolate from their historic behavior that they compete with others of their own kind as well, since there were far too many of their mobile ‘goblins’ available to imagine that they all sit idly by until a large animal or human army comes wandering by. Like ants, which I think might furnish at least a tentative model, these goblins would be the means by which ‘foraging parties’ could venture forth to snatch up the resources of other plants. In fact, we saw what seemed to be analogous behavior when we saw the first colony removing what appeared to be ‘eggs’ from that tower of them that our Queen set alight with chemical fire. The creatures were evidently attempting to rescue their own genetic heritage, so it follows that the ‘goblins’ themselves are probably sterile, or they could have done the same thing by simply running away, as humans or other mammals might have done.”

I thought about that for a moment, and it appeared that Beryl was thinking too, then asked, “Consumption, you say? Is the plant edible?”

“Yes, of course,” Lynette said with assurance. “The vines were originally imported to the Americas to serve as rapidly-growing forage for herbivores of various sorts, although humans had also consumed the more tender portions for many years, and have used almost every part of for various herbal remedies for many centuries, perhaps thousands of years. The root crowns especially contain large amounts of starch which can fairly easily be extracted to form a human staple, although there are better-quality sources found in other plants, so very few human populations appear to have depended upon kudzu, except in times of famine.”

I grinned in gleeful surmise and said, “Beryl, are Gumball and the boys anywhere within shouting distance?” They tended to be slower than our mounted troops, so often lagged behind, and Beryl had become much more sensitive to their presence than even I was, after her astonishing rebirth within the belly of the beast himself. Come to think of it, since Gumball was in some sense Beryl’s surrogate-mother, or something, perhaps we should start calling them ‘girls.’ ‘Nah!’ I thought. ‘Why mess up our heads with tiresome analogies?’ I gave a little mental shrug. ‘ “Boys” is close enough. I overthink sometimes.’

Beryl, of course, intuited my purpose. “Gumball is, but the rest of the boys are about three miles behind our line of march.”

“Gumball!” I thought and shouted at the same time. At first there was nothing, and then finally a roiling disturbance in the soil approaching us like an invisible snake with an endless tail. Then Gumball himself erupted from the head of the dirt snake like a happy ball of green fur. “Gumball!” I cried aloud, although I knew that he depended more on thought than sound. Quickly, I filled him in on what had happened, and he took a ‘look’ around, using whatever he used for analogous eyes, then promptly dove underground again and headed off toward the largest massing of kudzu still unburnt. this time, he dove deep, so he left no trail behind, but soon enough sprang up again, almost at our feet this time — if a creature that towered so far above us could possibly be so described — with must be a ‘root crown’ in his mouth, which he spat out in front of us with obvious pride.

Lynnette, of course, was ecstatic, and almost immediately had the thing in pieces, roughly dissected with her trusty machete, which did yeoman service as a scalpel for an object that large. “Ha!” she said aloud. “See this?” she said, showing us a peculiar formation that looked nothing like any root I’d ever seen. “I believe this to be roughly equivalent to the cerebral cortex in the Animal Kingdom — begging your pardon, my Queen — and possibly enervated with some sort of sensory structure that communicates to the outside world, although I’ve never seen or heard of anything like it in the literature. In theory, though, there seems sufficient evidence to surmise that this is what runs the show.” Then she turned to Gumball with a calculating look, flexing the muscles of her right hand on the hilt of her machete.

“Don’t you dare, Lynette!” I yelled at her. “Gumball is our friend!”

With what might have been a guilty start, if she’d looked anything like regretful, she let the blade fall to her side and said, almost grudgingly, “Sorry….” She was obviously just itching to figure out what made Gumball tick, though, and I made a mental note to have Beryl lay down the law.

Beryl, of course, figured it out on her own, or maybe she was reading my thoughts; she’d done that often enough. “Lynette! Gumball and all his companions are off-limits to dissection by anyone, especially you. They’ve been our allies from the beginning, and they’re intelligent living beings who’ve kindly helped us ever since Sapphire here first encountered and befriended them. If you have any questions, ask her, or me, if she’s not available for any reason.”

“Yes, my Queen,” she said instantly, which made me wonder exactly what sort of government they had in the Underworld, although I guessed from Beryl’s story of capture and rape by the head honcho that it wasn’t anything like egalitarian. I made a mental note to give him, or her — Beryl seemed flexible in her references to him — a good thrashing, if ever I encountered the sorry bastard.

Beryl laughed without smiling, although I didn’t know quite what for, and the whole interaction seemed odd, since Lynette had seemed to have had no trouble standing up to her when science was more directly involved. I made another mental note not to dwell upon imponderables until the opportunity arose to do something about it, and just then Beryl snorted in a most unladylike fashion. That irritated me. “Stay the Hell out of my head!” I told her, in no uncertain terms. “You may think that you know what I can do, but if I ever see that nasty little twerp, the so-called Hades, I’ll have his or her balls off before you can say, ‘Rat snap!’ Just you wait and see if I don’t!” At that point, I could have chewed red-hot nails and spit out bullets, and I wasn’t all that picky about where I spat them.

Beryl… Beryl! seemed taken slightly aback, and Lynette was horrified, although I didn’t know exactly which lèse majesté the more discomfited her. “You too, Lynette. I don’t take crap from anyone!”

“Yes, Ma’am,” she said, eyes wide, obviously weighing the political situation a bit more carefully than she had in the past.

My glare toward Beryl could easily have melted osmium, and was just as hard and sharp. “Any further comments from the peanut gallery, Queen Beryl?”

“Not that I can think of, just off-hand,” she said, not in the least abashed, but just a trifle wary.

‘As well she should be,’ I thought. ‘I was just getting started.’

As it turned out, the Bandersnatches were just what we needed to begin controlling the kudzu and shaping them toward our needs. The human world had been at least partially depopulated, so there were ample niches available where a ready supply of cheap labor, which the remaining root crown entities were eventually happy to supply in exchange for fertilizer and water. The bandersnatches were happy too, because the uncoöperative root crowns contained just the right combination of concentrated starches and protein to allow them to flower and seed, so it wasn’t long until we had almost more bandersnatches rolling around than either we or they knew what to do with. Mind you, a baby bandersnatch is awfully cute, and might even make a nice pet, except for the fact that they seem to grow without stopping, given an adequate food supply.

Beryl had her army too, in an almost endless series of very small platoons: a dozen humans, a ship, and a gross or two of dormant root crowns carefully packed in balls of soil and wrapped carefully for the voyage. Add a dozen baby bandersnatches grown in pots and we had a heavy infantry troop with armored support. A little water was enough to keep them happy on the trip, and then add a few bags of fertilizer and lots of water at the end of the voyage to grow an army of fearless warriors in a week or two, like Athena’s dragon’s teeth scattered on the ground.

Which left me with a little time on my hands, and idle hands are the Devil's plaything, as they say, so naturally I took out one of my Tarot decks, the Devil's primer, according to some. For some reason — possibly intuitive — I chose the Golden Tarot, perhaps because it was created by a woman and carried  — in my mind, at least — a greater weight of femininity, without the feminine excess of some of the more extreme extravagations in the past half-millennium or so, but also because the images had been chosen from real paintings by real artists, so was literally the work of many hands and thus its emotional and intellectual scope seemed broader, if one can resist the pun, and the quality of the artwork allowed for interpretations that went beyond the merely superficial. The first card I drew was The Fool, First amongst Les Atouts, Les Arcanes Majeures, which didn't surprise me in the least, since I hadn't actually shuffled the deck. When I looked at it carefully, though, I saw myself, a woman boldly standing at the brink of a precipice after emerging from the shaded depths of a deep forest, playing a large bodhrán, so there was no question of stealth, and she was stylishly dressed in the late Medieval style, with a relatively simple white gown and contrasting girdle, but it was hemmed with gold. She wore a simple cap — something like a pilos, the historic symbol of freedom — in gold and red, the soul and life entwined. I also saw my dear Gumball in her whippet, the aforesaid Fool's prescient companion. It certainly seemed appropriate, even aside from its traditional significance, since I was widely-known for coloring outside the lines, and here I was stepping out into space, marching to the beat of a truly different drummer.

My next card was equally purposeful, but drawn almost by chance, Trump Thirteen, Death, but this particular Death was itself transformed, here shown as the guardian of the boundary between the light and darkness, Death itself reduced to a hovering winged skeleton embracing the entirety of the waking world, at one with the ministering angels who pay homage to the central figure, a dying woman, who blesses all around her with her flowery wand of power, a reversal both of focus and of integral dynamic.

‘That's good enough for me!’ I thought. “Gumball!”

He must have been lurking nearby, because he erupted from the earth as quickly as a genie out of a magic lamp, without the showy mystical theatrics. “Gumball,” I said, “We're going on a little trip. Now open wide.”

Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2012-2013 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved