The cat crouched in the corner of the tent hissing, drawing in its scent if it could. She stared fixedly at Abdullah while he painted the final card. He lifted it up and waved it in the air to dry.

Nardil nearly snatched the card from Abdullah’s hand, while gathering up the rest of the set. The boy raced toward the flap, clutching them tightly in his fist. He turned once to look at the artist and was gone.

Nardil ran through the coming dust storm toward the Mamluk General’s luxurious tent. He was proud to have the task of presenting the tarot to the great man. He high-stepped even though his scrawny legs were getting caught up in his tattered clothes.

Safiya, his younger sister, crouched outside the artist’s tent, waiting for him. He shot out of it like a racing Saluki, and she followed discreetly, a ghost in her hijab, lost in the wind.

She saw one of the cards in the deck slip from his fingers, and she raced after it. Bobbing and weaving, reaching for and losing it in the gusts. She was afraid to step on it. By catching it with her foot, she feared such an act would bring her misfortune. The minute she grabbed the card was the same moment the dust storm struck.

Looking behind her, she fully expected to see Nardil about to slap her, demanding the return of the card. Instead there was the red glow coming from the swirling sea of sand obscuring her vision. Disoriented, Safiya tucked the card into her hijab, feeling it against her cheek. She fought the storm back to her parent’s tent.

“Hand me the Nã’ib,” the General ordered.

Nardil proffered the cards with both hands. The Mamluk General snatched them away, and Nardil backed out of the tent, to the smirks of the Captains and Lieutenants gathered within. This would be the first time the tarot would be used for divination instead of play. The General sought guidance as the furies sang around his çadır. He would never know the set was incomplete.

Safiya lay on her bed staring intently at the card she saved from the tumult. It was the most beautiful thing her seven year old eyes had ever seen. The colors jumped from the velum, dancing on her iris, as they played over them randomly. When she heard Nardil return, the flap sweeping dust inside, she hid it for fear of retribution.

He boasted proudly to his father, how he met the great man giving him a gift. His father, a soldier slave, laughed and patted Nardil on the head.

“Someday you will be a great soldier, a great Mamluk like me.”

“Not a Mamluk, Father. I will be a great General!” Nardil corrected.

“Now sit for supper, my brave men,” his mother requested.

Once the men were served, Safiya and her mother took their humbler meal behind a screen. Safiya’s secret was burning in her throat as she swallowed the bits of lamb. She so wanted to tell her mother about the card, but was afraid, not only for herself but for her mother, who would be held responsible.

The dust blew strong and relentless throughout the night. Fortunes were made, lost, and sealed within the secrets of the tarot held greedily in the General’s hands. Just before sunrise, everyone was sleeping fitfully within the camp.

The soldiers themselves rose with the dawn, the horizon clear, but still tinged crimson. They assembled on the parade ground as the General looked out and said to his Lieutenant, “Today, it will rain blood!”

They marched out to battle in what would later be known as North Africa. The families stayed behind. All except Nardil, too bored in camp, too excited to join the fight. Safiya looked for him, but unable to find her brother, she told her mother that he had followed the army. Hearing this, she wept.

That evening, less than half of the army returned, boasting triumph despite their losses. Neither Nardil nor his father returned. Mother and daughter tore the hair from their head mourning the loss.

Safiya’s mother soon found herself a bride again. Safiya having new step brothers and sisters. In the dim light, before dawn and sunset, she’d take the card from her breast, where she had kept it hidden all the time, and gaze upon it.

***

The card was more a window. Peering through stained glass into the heavens. Safiya could feel Allah looking back through the refracted light. On the glass itself were two swimmers. Swimming in opposite directions, shoulder to hip. They swam with their eyes closed. Dreamers in motion, circumscribed within the water of a well. She pondered its meaning time and again in those vacant hours.

Following her family, following the army, Safiya watched the Mamluks cut a swath of triumph and despair wherever they went. New slaves joined, old slaves died. Broken families remade again and again, some children orphaned, while others were lost to the desert.

Safiya grew up among her step sisters who, for the most part, ordered her around or ignored her. Her brothers beat her or teased her when her sisters pushed her aside. She was often blamed for their bad deeds. Such cruelty that adults flinched from was layered upon her unrelentingly.

***

As the Mamluk army entered Dabiq, Safiya saw her opportunity to break free as a cheering crowd fell upon the parade. She slipped away easily, disappearing into the side streets unnoticed. Had she stayed with her family, she would have been a child bride, sold off to the highest bidder. Now she was alone, but the danger was no less.

Evening was settling on the great city, the call to prayer echoing through the canyons of dusty streets. An old man was pulling down the shutters to his business when he spotted the lone woman wandering the shadowed lane. He beckoned to her. At first, Safiya was confused, not feeling addressed, but when she looked around, she realized it could only be her he was signaling.

She approached cautiously. The man had kindly eyes. Fully covered, her eyes was all he could see of her. He invited her inside. Beyond she could see a fire, and vapor coming from a pot that an old woman was stirring. Safiya felt safe.

The shutters dropped with a finality that sent a shiver through her.

“As-Salaamu-Alaikum,” she offered.

“Marhaba, Bint. First we pray, then you may join us to eat. If Allah wills it, you may stay as well.”

“I’m Safiya, shukran for your hospitality.”

That night, the Ottoman army fell upon the city attacking the Mamluk. Driven to the outskirts, the two armies clashed bringing an end to one empire and the rise of another. The sounds from the battle were horrific and terrifying to those in Dabiq. Safiya trembled in the straw.

***

Days later, she walked out on the abandoned battlefield, and like others, began to scavenge. Safiya found her family and her mother amongst the dead. The Ottoman’s spared no one in the slaughter.

The Mamluk General’s tent had been crushed and ransacked, but the Nã’ib was left behind. Scattered but untouched, as if the cards were an evil talisman to any that possessed them. They fairly glowed in the sand and sun.

Unafraid, Safiya gathered the cards, and inserted the one she had secreted back into the deck. In so doing, she was no longer a slave, no longer a Mamluk. The barren couple she had stayed with that fateful night, made her their own.

As an Egyptian woman, she grew taller than her Syrian charges, and to serve them Safiya became a fortune teller. Her words and cards were prescient. Whenever she drew the ‘two dreamers in a well’ card, she shared the truth of it.

On one side of the table, the cards foretold one possible future, on the other side of the table a completely different future. When the ‘two dreamers’ card was in the middle, the chances of either were equally likely. This, Safiya shared with her customers to their deep frustration.

***

“Which is why the ‘two dreamers’ card, recently discovered, has not appeared in the tarot since that time,” said the tall Egyptian historian to the group of Turkish soldiers in Dabiq, five centuries later.

General Nardil smiled to Professor Safiya. “Thank you Professor for coming. Your lecture has shed light on the historic relics we need to preserve.”

He felt an undefinable connection to her that was not attraction, but something else. 

– Keith Raymond

Note: This piece was first published in The Black Warrior Journal‘s September 2019 issue of The Wire’s Dream.