The Book of Speculation: A Novel

“Dog means many things. Protector, enemy. It depends.” She talked for hours as her bent hands drew lines and crosses over the symbols. Deep in the night, she patted the crate and chuckled at Amos. “You listen well. We will make good work. I see you yawn. The tired mind does not hear well. To bed with you.” With a light kick to his shin, she shooed him from the wagon. “Tomorrow you will come again and I will teach.”


Ryzhkova instructed after shows, by candlelight. Rich red and blue fabrics were left hanging if she was tired, making Amos’s classroom a gentle chamber for watching, listening, and on occasion vanishing. Ryzhkova’s rhythmic speech lulled him until he became part of the cards, falling into them and letting his body disappear. When this happened, she pounded her boot on the floor and shouted a single guttural word. Once he reappeared she smiled, slapped his hand, and started anew.

Amos began to learn. He grew to love the Fool, saturated with yellow and orange—he liked the dog, how it at the last moment pulled its master to safety. He became accustomed to Ryzhkova’s voice; it reminded him of wind in trees and the days when he had run through forests. Over time he found that even when not in her presence her voice vibrated through him. On evenings between towns he watched Ryzhkova lay cards—a cross with a line down the side. Two cards set across each other, then one above and one below, one to the left and its mirror on the right. Four cards down the side. What was to come, what would affect it, what ruled at the moment, and the question’s outcome. She did readings for unvoiced queries, answering blank nothings.

“Chariot,” she said, and turned a card up on the makeshift table. A man on a throne, pulled by animals with human heads. Amos shifted, uncomfortable at the sight of the uncanny animal men. “Conquest and journey. Triumph. See? Man ruling over beast.” She rubbed her knuckles through his hair and clucked at him as if he were her child. “Paired with this card, makes much good.” She set another card at its side. “World, see?” She raised an arm as though gesturing to the sky. “Not the woman in center but all around the woman, yes?” He nodded, eyes focused on the dancing woman’s bare form and her knowing expression.

Before and after lessons Ryzhkova cleared the wagon with a smoldering bushel of herbs that stank of horse sweat. “Smudge,” she coughed. “This is how to clear with fire, how you keep cards clear. Clean.” She wrote words in the air with smoke plumes. “It is not the cards that tell the future as much as the person holding them. Me, you, whoever asks the question.” She tapped the herbs against the wagon’s door, sending embers and ash tumbling. “People touch the cards, leave themselves behind. Dreams. Hope. All trapped inside the cards.” When the room became oppressive she threw the door open and let in the night air. “You. Me. We have no need for dreams from others. Sometimes bad thoughts, bad ideas, get caught in them. You and I, we clear them. Clean, good cards.” She tossed the burned herbs to a blackened spot on the floor and snuffed the embers with a boot heel. She patted his head and the boy and the animal inside him smiled.

She taught him how to bind his hair, giving him one of her silks, a beautiful cloth covered with complex purple and gold patterns. She first twisted his hair into a coil, then folded the silk around it and wound it about his head.

“Good for appearance.”

His scalp ached, but in time the pain eased, and the effect was dramatic. He was transformed from a nut-brown boy easily mistaken for a savage into an elegant, foreign young man. Ryzhkova clapped in praise of her efforts. “Now you look a proper young man of fate and destiny.” Under her watchful crinkling eyes he felt himself changing. Inexplicably he began to think of the little house and the brown-haired woman who had smelled so familiar.

*

Amos was a solitary creature. Too many eyes on him at once made him itch, and meals with the troupe were like being trapped in a game with unknown rules. He liked to while away rainy mornings paging through Peabody’s book, tracing his fingers over sketches. When Ryzhkova was too tired to teach and shooed him from her wagon he spent his evenings with the small horse, a lovely animal called Sugar Nip, who was ruddy brown, but for a white blaze down her muzzle. She was perfect, except in that she was one eighth the size of what she should be and did not seem to know it. She snorted and stamped as well as any of the cart horses, but was quiet when Amos sat with her. When he hunkered in the straw and pressed his forehead to hers, he felt a warm calm. He enjoyed the quiet that came from combing her forelock, and snatched carrots and apples for her, tucking them deep into the pockets of his britches.

Three days after Ryzhkova bound his hair, she waved him off after a complex lesson on reversed cards. “To bed, boy. You make me weary.”

Amos made his way to the wagon Sugar Nip shared with the animal known as llama. He dug through his pocket, searching for a radish he’d kept for her. He was running his hand around it when he walked into Benno. Startled, he gasped.