The Castle of Crossed Destinies

An unnamed narrator arrives at a castle deep in a thick forest, exhausted from his journey. He joins other travelers at a candlelit supper in a hall that feels at once like a sumptuous court and a disordered inn. When he tries to speak, no sound comes from his lips; his fellow diners confirm through resigned gestures that crossing the forest has cost all of them the power of speech.

After supper, the lord of the castle places a deck of tarot cards on the cleared table. The guests spread them face up, transfixed by the gilded images. One guest draws a card resembling his own face and places it before him. The company understands he means to say "I" and is preparing to tell his story through the cards.

A blond youth conveys that after inheriting a fortune, he ventures into the forest, where a brigand strips him of everything. A barefoot maiden frees him, and the two share a brief love affair, but the ungrateful knight abandons her. He finds a wealthy bride, only to be confronted at the wedding by the abandoned maiden, now a mounted Amazon, who announces their child is his son and defeats him in a duel. A mysterious figure informs him he has offended Cybele, goddess of the forest, and the goddess's followers tear him to pieces.

A second guest tells a story the company recognizes as Doctor Faust's. A magician offers the secret of gold in exchange for his soul, then expands the bargain: Faust will build a city, and the Devil wants the entire city's soul. The Metropolis of Precious Metal locks its gates, but a maiden warns that a city of solid metal harbors no flowing life. By transforming everything into gold, the citizens have lost the very souls they hoped to protect.

A melancholy warrior tells the tale of a doomed bride. He lends his armor to a pale maiden fleeing a betrothed she abhors and chooses love as his reward, but Saint Peter declares Heaven's gates forever closed to her. The warrior discovers the woman's face has become a skull; her feared betrothed is the Devil himself, who carries her into the earth.

A bold grave-robber breaks open a papal tomb and finds not a corpse but a tree trunk growing upward. Climbing it, he reaches a suspended city of the Possible, where an archangel offers him riches, power, or wisdom. He chooses riches but receives only clubs, the forest's wooden currency, and plummets back through crashing branches.

A gigantic warrior is recognized as Roland, the great paladin of Charlemagne's court. He pursues the enchantress Angelica from Cathay (China) deep into the forest, only to discover she has chosen a youth named Medoro. His reason shatters. He rampages across the countryside, uprooting oaks and abandoning his sword, until he descends, tattered and feathered, into the chaotic center of the card pattern. Strung up as the Hanged Man, his face serene, he declares the world must be read backward for everything to be clear.

Astolpho, a small elfin knight, tells of being summoned by Charlemagne to recover Roland's lost reason. Consulting the wizard Merlin, he learns he must ascend to the Moon, whose storerooms preserve in phials the stories men do not live and the thoughts that vanish. Riding his Hippogryph, a winged horse, Astolpho encounters a poet who tells him the Moon is simply a desert. From this arid sphere every discourse sets forth, and every journey returns to the center of an empty horizon.

The narrator reveals that the card square is now entirely covered. His own story is contained within it, though he can no longer distinguish it from the others. Each story runs into another, and the same card changes meaning depending on the narrator and the direction of reading. Additional tales emerge from the pattern, including stories of Helen of Troy, a master of the City of Death, and the innkeeper-lord. The hostess scatters the cards, shuffles the deck, and begins again.

The second part shifts to a tavern. A different group of mute, white-haired travelers gathers around a table scattered with Marseilles tarot cards, a cruder, woodblock-printed deck. They grab for the cards simultaneously, each trying to assemble a personal story.

A wavering young man tells of fleeing his own wedding, paralyzed between two women. At every crossroads his chariot stops. He reaches a treetop city where an enthroned figure offers him everything, yet he faces two identical wells and two queens on facing balconies. Desperate, he demands the total mingling of all waters. The enthroned figure transforms into the Devil, the angel who dwells where lines fork. The young man plunges through a cycle of dissolution and rebirth until he encounters his own double, the man who would have made every choice he refused.

A gigantic maiden raised in the forest rescues a knight who proves to be the Crown Prince. He promises to return but never does. She gives birth to twins and sets off to claim her rights, only to find civilization destroyed: Cities lie under sand and machines run without operators. The tale ends with the vengeance of terrestrial forces and the day of Judgment.

A staff officer recounts a virtuosic duel with a periwinkle-armored knight, a battlefield of massacred soldiers, and the revelation that his adversary is a woman. Torn between shame, desire, and wounded pride, he tries to steal her sword. An army of warrior women seizes and torments him, and a hermit prophesies that the avenging Amazons will sweep away all male dominion.

A gravedigger tells of a modern King who follows his Queen into a cemetery by night and discovers a hooded woman identical to the Queen. The King insists she must be a witch. She revives a corpse that is the King's own double and shares a toast of blood. The King traps the sorceress in bat form, but a thunderbolt strikes his metropolis, the Queen falls from a tower and dies in the wires, and the populace accuses the King of murder, declaring the kingdom in the grip of vampires.

Two quests converge on the Ace of Cups. An elderly alchemist seeks to arrange the tarots into a pattern equivalent to the Great Work, alchemy's ultimate perfected transformation. A young knight-errant pursues the Holy Grail to earn a place at King Arthur's Round Table. Their stories merge with those of Faust and Parsifal, the innocent knight who arrives at the castle of the wounded Fisher King but fails to ask the redeeming question. Faust concludes the world exists only as a finite number of elements producing fleeting combinations. Parsifal reaches the opposite conclusion: The world's core is empty, existence is built around absence, and the Tao, the underlying emptiness at reality's heart, lies at the bottom of the Grail. He points to the empty rectangle surrounded by the tarots.

The narrator, now identifying himself as a writer, attempts his own tale. He recognizes himself in the King of Clubs, whose implement resembles a pen. He traces the Oedipus story through the cards, invokes Sigmund Freud as interpreter of hidden narratives, and meditates on paintings of Saint Jerome and Saint George, concluding they represent one story: the same fierce animal, confronted both outside and inside the self.

Three final guests compete for the same card, The Tower, each claiming it for a different Shakespeare tragedy. A young man reads it as the platform at Elsinore, where the ghost of Hamlet's father demands justice. A distraught lady insists it is Dunsinane castle, where the witches' prophecy in Macbeth unfolds. An old man claims it for King Lear, driven mad on the heath. The tales proceed in tangled simultaneity. The Hermit becomes at once Polonius, the courtier Hamlet kills behind a curtain; the ghost of Banquo, Macbeth's murdered companion; and Lear himself. The Star becomes Cordelia, Lear's loyal daughter; Lady Macbeth sleepwalking; and Ophelia, Hamlet's beloved, drowning. For all three, the advancing chariot of a victorious king signals the fall of the curtain, as Macbeth declares he is weary of the sun and wishes the syntax of the world undone, the playing cards shuffled and the mirror-shards of disaster scattered.