(Return to) The Discworld Tarot
The Minor Arcana
Gods know what I'm taking on here as there are fifty-six cards in the Minor Arcana, the familiar sequence of Ace-to-Ten, then Princess (Page or Jack) Prince (Knight), Queen and King. The parents of the familiar deck of playing cards, each family of court cards is slimmed down to King, Queen and Jack, and the only survivor of the Major Arcana is the Fool, who lives on as the Jester.
In no particular order, I shall tackle them as the Muse takes me – I can always re-order them afterwards - and I know it's going to be a long slog!
Currently waiting on the guys who are going to insulate the loft. Maddeningly, their arrival time was given as "between eight a.m. and one p.m." it's currently 10:18 and no sign and while I'm waiting on them I can't leave the house... aargh. There must be a Tarot card about this... (the Five of Wands? Conflict and frustration?) Ah well. Just write.
The Three of Cups – the Eternal Triangle
the Threes build on the relative stability of the twos. They introduce a dimension of instability and dynamic conflict to a situation. With a third player, the situation becomes intrinsically unstable and however you juggle the balls, sooner or later you are going to lose one. As any juggler will tell you, three is a tricky number to keep in the air at once – but paradoxically it becomes easier with four. So stability can be achieved by dropping back to two or advancing to four.
The Three of Cups is a card about the age-old eternal triangle. This is one of the situations potential in Major Arcana 6, The Lovers, where a man is pictured as caught between two women and faced with a choice between them. This card is about a sort of state of emotional laziness where the person with more than one ball in the air, romantically speaking, knows they can't keep it up forever but doesn't want to make the decision just yet. The man with a wife and mistress, perhaps, deceiving his wife and reassuring the mistress that one day he'll leave his wife for her – but not just yet. And sometimes it isn't even a man in this position... This card also has overtones of Negotiable Affection.
Alice Band sighed a very deep resigned sigh and wondered how the Hells she'd ever let herself get into this position in the first place. Donna sat on the edge of the bed and pouted, her pretty face frowning as something of a sulk set in.
I'm almost certain this is not professional behaviour for a Seamstress, Alice thought. But if I draw it to Rosie Palm's attention, it could get Donna into trouble with her boss, and I really don't want that. But what the Hell do I do?
Alice's association with Donna Catterail went back for over ten years. It had all begun when she was a student Assassin, one of the original Mature Students class. (1) The overwhelmingly male class had been taken to the Seamstresses' Guild one evening, with the intention of, er, rounding out their social and personal deportment skills, those of a certain delicate nature, that all young men of Quality needed to be grounded in. Nobody had thought that four members of the Class were, in fact, not male, and could only be expected to approach the night with academic interest, maybe, you know, talk frocks and make-up with the Seamstresses, make professional contacts, that sort of thing.
And not many people knew Alice's particular secret. She'd been forced to come out of one particular closet in a humiliating and embarrassing sort of way – well, nobody likes to have to admit the only musical instrument they can play is the tuba. (2) But in another respect, as her worldly friend Emmanuelle-Marie Lapoignard les Deux-Epées had pointed out, Alice was so far back in the closet that she could see the tail of the Coathanger Elk. (3)
Consequently, she had found more use and purpose in an expenses-paid jolly to the Seamstresses' Guild than anyone had anticipated: the shrewd Rosemary Palm had taken one glance at her, assessed her personal preferences as expertly as a tailor sizing somebody up for a new suit, and discreetly shown her a special list for clients such as yourself, Miss Band.
"Indulge yourself, as the Guild will be paying, and my invoice for services does not identify either the client nor the specific service provided."
Fortified by a large Zlobenian vodka, Alice had indulged herself, selecting Donna from the, er, special list. A happy and pleasant night had followed on. At the end, Donna had sighed and expressed hope that she might see Alice again, regretting that it wasn't possible for them to meet in the normal course of events outside the Guild, as there were strict rules about that sort of thing.
And, in the manner of Seamstress-client relationships, that should have been the end of it.
But Alice had discovered things were not going to be that simple.
I'm almost certain male customers of the Guild don't get this, she thought. They turn up, pick a girl, do what they need to do, pay up, and go home. No emotional commitment. It's what that Fourecksian woman said in her book, The Female Harem Attendant, about women needing to adopt a more male attitude to sex. And Eroica Mungbean called it "the zipless fuck". Sex on demand, when you need it, with no emotional ties. (4) That's what Seamstressing is all about, surely? Meeting that need.
He looked at Donna again, whose face had set in the sort of lines that suggested she could keep it up all night if needs be. Alice sighed. This was quite unsatisfactory. She hadn't come to Sheer Street and paid nearly eight hundred dollars just to be sulked at. She dealt with teenage girls all day. She could get all the sulking fits she wanted for free, and more, in Filigree Street. But she'd known Donna now for, what was it, eleven years? They'd grown a little older together.
I wonder if this is how those sort of situations work out? Rosie Palm talked to me once about how a client might initially come to the Guild looking for commitment-free sex with no need to court the girl involved. He chooses his girl. And at first that's the end of it. He might come back and see other girls. (And oh, how Donna had sulked when Alice had revisited the Seamstresses' Guild, flush with a hard-won contract fee, and tried other girls out! She'd taken some pacifying and reassurance.) But after a few years of visiting the Guild, a man might find himself coming back to the same Seamstress again and again and again. After fifteen years, it became as cosy an arrangement as a long-standing marriage where the initial flush of attraction had worn off. After twenty years, with neither party growing any younger and the Seamstress contemplating retirement from the active profession, some men actually bought out the girl's contract and married her.
Alice had grown to know and like several Seamstresses. She had attended several retirement parties and a couple of weddings. They had invariably been sad but joyous affairs where everyone enjoyed themselves and Alice had been impressed with the vitality and joie de vivre of the Seamstresses. As yet no female Assassin had actually retired – they were a new and generally young phenomena – but Alice was determined any Assassin retirement party would be as much fun and as pleasurable. It had been at such a party that Donna had tentatively raised the possibility of Alice buying out her contract and setting her up somewhere. It was a lot to ask. But Alice had become quite fond of Donna over the years. She felt she at least had to consider the possibility.
She had asked for a discreet word with Rosemary Palm. It was important to do these things by the rules. There was the Assassin concept of noblesse oblige, for one thing, which meant scrupulous respect for the rights and privileges of other Guilds. Besides, the Seamstresses' Guild enforcers, the Agony Aunts, were, in their own meticulous and persistent way, as lethal as any Assassin.
Rosie Palm had sat down with Alice and gone through the procedure. There was a one-off fee to pay to compensate the Guild for the projected loss of revenue through losing a girl to marriage... well, the equivalent of marriage, to be precise, in this case. Donna had just turned thirty. She might expect to be active in the Guild until her middle forties. Some Guild members still turned in a healthy income until well into their fifties.
"Miss Band, we would be looking at twenty-five thousand dollars here. At least."
Alice winced. And then there was the cost of setting Donna up with a place of her own. Even for a well-compensated career Assassin, this was not small money.
"I am sympathetic and I respect the perfectly natural desire to marry, give themselves more-or-less exclusively to one person, and to live a happy and fulfilled life. I would not deny this to any of my ladies. But you do see my position, Miss Band? The Guild will need to be compensated for the Guild Tax it would lose on transactions involving Donna, who is a popular young woman among clients of a certain disposition."
Alice sighed. How to tell Donna this was not at the moment a cost she was prepared to meet?
"Of course, the Guild would be delighted to meet the cost of her retirement party." Rosie said, smoothly. "You know Mrs Ogg, from Lancre? She likes to visit the city a couple of times a year. If it coincided with her visit, we could ask her to do the party catering. Mrs Ogg's parties are always a roaring success. They generate so much new business!"
Alice had met Gytha Ogg.
Yes. I bet they are!
And then there was the other thing that she had to broach with Donna. It had helped precipitate tonight's mega-sulk.
"Look. Donna. Even if I bought you out and set you up – and it remains a possibility – you will need to know you will not, and you will never, have sole rights to me. There are other people. If you've got any rose-tinted dreams of our being two dykes who'll grow old together in the sapphic equivalent of happy marriage, forget it. That will never happen. I'm sorry. But I try to be honest with people!"
Alice was not a cold and uncaring woman. Discounting Donna for the moment, there were three occasional lovers she met up with from time to time. Any of the three, while Alice was with her, could count on her complete attention and in-the-moment devotion. Alice thought of this as not serial monogamy but parellel monogamy. It suited her not to get too attached to one person, and anyway, she was not jealous. They were all free to see other women – and in one case, she suspected, a man – as they chose. And all three knew of each other, had even met, and two of them had even had a brief scene with each other. Good. As a career Assassin, Alice knew only too well that a contract could go wrong or the cardinal sin of over-confidence could rear its ugly head. Her profession was well-paid, but carried enormous risks. If she died on a contract, she did not want anyone to follow her to the grave with a broken heart. Jocasta, Dolores and Steffi all knew and accepted this. Besides, all three were in high-risk professions. Jocasta was an Assassin, like her. Steffi was a career Thief. Dolores was a high-wire, trapeze and stunt artist who taught advanced circus skills at the Fools' Guild School. (6) People in these professions found it easier not to make exclusive or permanent arrangements. Alice fretted that Donna did not understand this.
But Donna... Donna had got under her skin. It wasn't just a commercial arrangement any more. Eleven years of regular visits to Sheer Street had seen to that. She admired the girl for her personality and the way she'd reinvented her life. The daughter of textile factory manager Ronald Catterail – and what a bloody father-in-law HE would make! - she had grown up with all the usual trimmings of a bourgeois life. Then she'd found out how the family money was made – by sweating workers in clothing factories, underpaying and overworking them in foul conditions – and this had revolted her. She'd also come out as gay, which had enraged her bigoted small-minded shit of a father. Donna claimed she had cut him off, rather than the other way around. Thrown out by her father, her parting shot had been "I'm going to work as a Seamstress, if that's what it takes. And I tell you what, dad. It's a far cleaner way of making money than yours!"
Catterail was the sort of man who would visit the Seamstresses' Guild for the usual reasons, using other peoples' daughters whilst hypocritically cutting off his own for being a Seamstress. Alice kept hopefully looking for a contract being taken out on him and had expressed an interest, but so far he hadn't annoyed anyone influential or rich enough to want him dead. Shame.
Alice sighed. She couldn't keep this up for ever. It was fun and it was nice to be desired and even lusted after. But something had to give. Her working day, and sometimes nights, at the Guild School were energetic enough. Keeping three lovers plus an additional Seamstress might just possibly prove to be too much. She wasn't just burning the candle at both ends, she'd split it down the middle and was holding a match there, too.
But in the exhilaration of completing a contract and coming out alive, she needed, wanted, must have, sex. There was nothing else for it. And it had become her ritual to celebrate her renewed life, and the fact she hadn't been killed yet, by visiting the Seamstresses' Guild and having a woman. Usually, drat it, Donna, who was the beneficiary of her enhanced libido at these times.
And on one occasion, she'd brought her assistant and protégé Jocasta Wiggs here, ostensibly to widen Jocasta's experience. While boys at the Guild School, at roughly sixteen or seventeen, were brought to the seamstresses in small well-managed groups (it was the expectation that the Guild would school them in ALL the skills necessary to equip a young gentleman for his place in society), their female classmates were subjected to a double standard: upper class expectations for them was that they remained virgins till their wedding day. It was the role of the female teachers to police this and discourage any deeper liaisons between the sexes. Jocasta was different. She had become Alice's lover shortly after graduating, when they had brought off a contract together.(7)
Now her Resident Teaching Assistant, Jocasta had flourished under Alice's personal guidance. Alice had brought her here as a "thank you", and as a clear hint to her not to fall too deeply in love with her former teacher. Alice had asked for Donna – as usual – and she had been interested that Jocasta's eventual choice from the Special List had been an older Seamstress in her late fifties, although shapely, well-kept, and capable of passing for twenty years younger. The four of them had opted to share a room and had enjoyed a different and eventful sort of night. Donna had not refrained from swapping partners, she had noted, and Alice had taken the opportunity to try out Sandra, the older woman. She had approved of Jocasta's choice. It showed a discerning eye.
She pulled her mind back to the present. Who would she drop? And could she do it without generating bitterness or ill-will? Dolores? No, unthinkeable. She's nearer my own age than Cass or Steffi, in fact a few years older than me. She's well-travelled, urbane, witty, clever. I've always had a soft spot for Latatians, fiery passionate Toledan-speakers...
Alice sat down next to Donna and put an arm around her.
"Look. I can't promise anything. But there are a couple of fifty thousand dollar contracts on the books right now. I'll check them out and if I choose to take one... well, then we'll see. And I've heard of a couple of flats on King's Way that are up for sale."
And if it gets me killed, I'll come back and bloody well haunt you. I'll go for Zombie status. Do Zombies have sex? Well, they say strong unfulfilled drives and desires bring you back as a Zombie, and my libido is raging right now.
Donna looked up and the old radiant smile was back.
"Alice" she said. "I think I love you."
"Yes." said Alice. "That's what I'm afraid of."
And the Seamstress was suddenly professional again... Alice gave herself to the moment. Tomorrow could wait.
(1) See chapter 25 of my novella, The Graduation Class.
(2) As per Guild requirements that the Assassin must be able to demonstrate that they can play at least one musical instrument fluently.
(3) A unique and endangered large deer whose habitat is the common wardrobe. It is a placid and understanding beast that doesn't mind you hanging your clothes on its antlers and, if you can put up with the all-pervading smell, makes a useful and engaging house-pet. This creature is further described in Miss Felicity Beedle's engaging work, The World of Poo.
(4) Several feminist writers are being parodied here. On Roundworld, Erica Jong was a militant feminist whose novel, Fear of Flying, expounded exactly this theme. On the Disc, Eroica Mungbean was arraigned before the Patrician for indecency and obscene publication as were her first publishers, Goatbergers, who at the time had launched their Spare Rib From Named Animal With Hoisin Sauce imprint.(5) This was aimed at capturing the growing militant feminist market and hoovering up their dollars. Vetinari's attitude to militant feminists was shown to be in the same general area as his thoughts about mime artists and modern artists, although not nearly as virulent. Ms Mungbean was invited to conduct further research on the oppression of women in the female section of the Tanty, with four months in which to make a really thorough field study. People wanting copies of her books now have to illegally import them from Pseudopolis or Quirm.
(5) They were really trying hard. But like Leonard of Quirm, they couldn't quite get the phrasing right.
(6) See my story Clowning Is A Risky Business.
(7) See my story Career Guidance.