*
Unembarrassed by the nakedness of either of them, the czarina threw her arms around Sandy, embracing her as warmly as if she were a long lost sister.
Taken by surprise, sandy didn’t have time to ask any questions before the czarina stated happily, ‘You wonder why I sleep?’
Of course, that was indeed the very question she had asked the sleeping czarina; ‘Why do you sleep?’
It was the asking of that question that had resulted in her receiving the card and, ultimately, the reason why she was now standing here, naked, in this mystical lake.
‘As you can see,’ the czarina added brightly, stepping back a little and opening her arms wide to indicate the glorious surroundings, ‘I’m not asleep here.’
But where was here? Sandy wondered, glancing up once again towards the cross of stars, pinioned to and slowly revolving about that single, central star.
There were other reasonably bright stars to either side of the cross, the horizontal beam now appearing to her as wings: Hermes’ winged caduceus, that’s what it now looked like to her.
She had to restrain a self-admonishing laugh as she realised it was the constellation of Cygnus, the swan; a swan whose long, slender neck was pointing back towards Earth.
Of course!
She hadn’t recognised it because she had never seen it take such a central position.
‘It’s how the stars appeared a thousand years before your time.’
The czarina, having seen Sandy glancing skywards, was now also looking up at the stars.
‘Or rather, from Earth, it would have appeared more like this…’
With nothing more than an airily wave of a hand, the czarina caused the stars above them to shift, such that the upended swan now spun about its own tail star; but now so did every other star, the strangely disconcerting twirling around multiple axes abruptly stilled.
‘And thousands of years in the future,’ the czarina continued, ‘it will eventually appear like this once more, when the tail of the swan becomes the North Star yet again.’
‘The North Star changes? But I thought it was a fixed star; used by the captains of ours ships to navigate.’
‘Over a cycle of around twenty seven thousand years – Svarog’s Period – the stars lying on the rim of Celestial Heaven – Svarog’s Circle, or Svarga – take their turn to become the North Star.’
With another airy wave of a hand, the czarina set the revolving stars into an even swifter movement, the swan that had originally appeared to be striking directly away from the central star now taking on a circular flight as the star at the tip of its wing became the North Star. Then, as another star took up that central position, the swan dipped away slightly, until it was circling this new North Star in a way that Sandy recognised from her own views of the night sky.
‘Svarog?’ Sandy asked in a dazed awe, her original reason for coming to this magical place temporarily forgotten.
‘His name means “shining”, a god of the universe, the spirit, and the highest heaven; and who inscribed his laws on the White-inflammable Stone, Alatyr.’
With a deft twist of that previously airily waved hand, the czarina produced a feather as if from nowhere, as if from the very silvery light reflecting off the lake surface.
‘From my sister!’ she exclaimed brightly, handing the feather to Sandy with a beaming smile.
‘Your sister?’ Sandy repeated curiously, peering over the czarina’s shoulder to look once again at the girls and the boy gleefully playing at the shore’s edge.
Without another word, with nothing but another cheery smile, the czarina spun around, swimming with amazing speed and agility back towards the shore.
‘No, wait!’ Sandy vainly cried after her, trying to catch up yet finding she moved awkwardly and slovenly through the restricting waters. ‘I still don’t understand…’
A slight breeze coming off the shore suddenly rippled the previously stilled waters, and threatened to snatch the feather from her fingers. She grasped the feather’s stem harder, not wishing to lose it.
When she looked back towards the swiftly moving czarina, she was surprised to see how far the distance had grown between them. The breeze, despite its weakness, had picked at and lifted up the veils that had been cast aside onto the sands, seemingly granting them a life of their own.
The veils fluttered out across the waters, already swan-like in their glisteningly white forms as they draped themselves around the girls and the boy. The point of transformation was imperceptible: they weren’t girls and a boy anymore – they were swans, rushing across the water, rising effortlessly and gracefully into the air.
With a last shattering of the lake’s silvered surface, the czarina herself, the last to rise from the waters, elegantly lifted herself up on those gloriously expansive wings, swooping across the shallow waves as smoothly as any goddess. Rapidly ascending with only the very briefest fluttering of wings, she and the other swans soared into the surrounding darkness until, at last, they vanished with a final star-like sparkle of a resplendently perfect white.
Even as she watched them rise so fluidly into the darkness, Sandy refused to give up her frustratingly inadequate chase: she hadn’t asked the czarina any one of so many questions she could have asked!
She rushed up onto the beach, glad to be free of the cloying, restricting waters. She glanced urgently about herself, hoping – despite recognising what a foolish hope it was – that a magical veil was similarly waiting for her to don.
Naturally, there was no such veil lying there.
Recalling that she was still holding the feather the czarina had given her, Sandy stared at it curiously, wondering if this was supposed to grant her some magical way of flying after the vanished swans. She twirled it in her fingers, even ashamedly wafted it a little, guffawing at her own ridiculousness.
She forlornly looked out over the immense, apparently endless lake stretching out before her.
If she couldn’t fly away from here, how was she supposed to get home?
*
Chapter 10
She had come up from the very bottom of the lake; she realised that, of course.
But she had been travelling upwards from that lakebed for what had seemed to her to be quite a long time. Far longer, at least, than she could be expected to hold her breath.
On her way here, she hadn’t had any problems breathing while being so long underwater; would that also be the case now, when she attempted to reverse her direction of travel?
She plunged back into the waters of the lake, her feet coming down again and again on its sandy bottom.
Was there a point where it all just came to an abrupt end, some sort of sill, a shelf coming to a sudden, sharp drop? Would it be like launching herself off a submerged cliff, an almost endless precipice?
Glancing back over her shoulder at the coastline, she thought she must have surely reached that point by now: she hadn’t been this far out from the beach when she had surfaced!
Taking a deep breath, clamping her lips tightly shut as she placed the feather’s stem in her mouth, she slipped beneath the lake’s surface; and suddenly, there was nothing under her feet but apparently impossibly deep waters.
*
The farther away the waters stretched, the darker they became.
She couldn’t see where the bed lay.
And yet, as if she were actually looking up into an otherwise starless night sky, there was a glittering white glow, unknowably far off.
Just as you couldn’t hope to judge the distance to a sparkling star, it wouldn’t be possible to work out how far she would have to swim to get within touching distance of that brightly coruscating speck.
She headed down towards it anyway: hoping it was something small, hoping that would mean it was relatively closer than if it were something huge.
Her chest ached with the pain of working muscles with nothing but the stale air reserved within her lungs. Bizarrely, she sensed her chest was close to explodin
g, the agony was so intense.
She wondered if she should risk opening her mouth, taking a breath; perhaps, just like when she had made her ascent, she would find she didn’t need to hold her breath after all
She didn’t dare take the risk; she feared she would suck in nothing but cold water. That she would drown and die.
The glow had grown a little larger, a sign no doubt that it wasn’t something lying so far away that it would be entirely unapproachable. Even so, it obviously lay way beyond any point where her own limited capabilities would take her.
She had to give up trying to reach it before it was too late, before her air ran out and she ended up gulping lungful’s of water as she struggled for breath: she kicked urgently upwards, sending herself rushing back up towards the surface in a sheen of overly excited bubbles.
As she rose up towards the glittering surface, both her mind and her lungs were screaming at her that she’d left it too late, that she wasn’t going to make it. Unable to hold her breath any longer, with a gasp she opened her mouth, the trapped but already used air bubbling out all around her.
Instinctively, she breathed in, her body fighting to replenish what it has lost, what it needs so urgently: and equally instinctively panicked when cold, agonisingly hard water rushed up her nose and down into her lungs.
*
Chapter 11
Fortunately, yet another instinct for survival kicked in: with a frantic flailing of her legs, Sandy brutally propelled herself upwards. Being closer to the lake’s upper layers than she had realised, there wasn’t far to go before she broke through the silvered surface, her whole body racked with a bout of harsh coughing and spluttering as she fought to drag air into her lungs.
Exhausted, she collapsed on her back in a partial daze, gratefully letting the gently supporting waters take her, comfort her. The lake’s surface was no longer completely stilled, there now being a steady rippling of waves, all heading towards the shore.
Sandy’s limp body rode on these waves until, at the point where they lapped with satisfied whispers against the beach, they set her down on the sands. She was still dazed, still partially choking on what remained of the waters lying in her throat and lungs.
She saw and was aware only of a cold darkness.
No; there was a white light, lying far, far below.
She struck out for it, swimming down through that darkness.
Swimming?
How was she swimming again?
It didn’t matter; what did matter was that she had to get closer to that white light, to see what it was that was drawing her closer and closer towards it.
Her lungs were bursting once again, her cheeks bulging as she fought against the urge to open her mouth.
Near the edges of her vision, she caught the white glow of the swan feather she held between her lips.
She mustn’t let it go this time.
She swam on, farther than she had managed last time.
The glow of purest white lying directly ahead of her wasn’t, as she had hoped, the Earth she had left behind when she had first set off on this bizarre journey. It came from what seemed to be a curved stone, a slightly toppled grave stone perhaps – only this stone appeared to her to rise up without end into the surrounding darkness of the farthest reaches of the lake. Similarly, she couldn’t see where it was grounded, for it vanished into the even deeper, more solid black of the lake’s bottom.
As before, however, she was reaching a point where her entire body was shrieking out for air. Her lips briefly opened, the air bubbling out as it had the first time; but she managed to clamp her mouth shut, to resist the instinctive urge to breathe in through her nose.
Even so, she felt a pang of anguish as she saw that she had released the feather, which was now swiftly rising like a whirling white star with the ascending bubbles. She urgently reached out for it, internally sighing with relief as she managed to grasp its stem before it swam completely out of her reach.
But she was still dangerously short of air.
There was no oxygen getting to her muscles, to her brain.
She sensed a dizziness coming on: and then the thick blackness of the lake seemed to suddenly swim inside her.
*
Sandy spluttered agonisingly as the very last of the water cascaded out of her slackly gawping mouth.
She was lying on her front, her face half buried in soft grass.
Grass?
It was even dry grass!
Groggily, she moved her head slightly, looking down at herself.
She was dry too.
And she wasn’t naked anymore, but once again garbed in her many-layered dress.
From her odd position low on the ground, with only one eye granting her a relatively clear view (the innumerable blades of grass blocking off most of her already limited vision), she saw a few odd items around her – a badly worn and stained statue of Aphrodite, a thinly gravelled path – and she realised with a sigh of relief that she was back in the garden.
Had she knocked herself out? she wondered.
Or simply fainted?
No: there was the pool of water, the water she’d just ejected from her mouth.
Besides, she could feel something clasped between her fingers; the feather!
Still a little dazed from her experience, she could only get a glimpse of the feather through a mix of lifting her head up a little and bringing the hand closer to her face.
She grimaced in weary disappointment.
It wasn’t a feather.
It was the card.
Wait!
Yes, it was a card; but one that was completely different to the one she had previously held in her hand.
*
Chapter 12
At first glance, the new card appeared to portray an unnaturally elliptical moon.
And yet it wasn’t the moon at all: it was, rather, more an illustration of her recent experience.
For the silvered oval was the lake’s surface, seen when looking up from below. As if to substantiate Sandy’s observation, the night sky hanging above the mercurial lake was dominated by a perfectly upright Cygnus, its tail the North Star, its elongated neck gracefully pointing back towards Earth.
An actual swan was swooping down from that otherwise dark sky, its goal a throne placed upon a towering white stone whose base was rooted in the lake’s dark bed. On that stone, too, there were inscriptions, but in a language – even a style of lettering – that Sandy didn’t recognise.
Frederick might know, she thought: or at least, know someone amongst his wide array of friends who might have some idea of what the inscriptions meant.
Their paintings and poetry were based on ancient legends, on the esoteric knowledge being uncovered everyday by Europe and America’s most eminent archaeologists, philosophers, and bibliologists.
But – how would she explain how she had obtained this new card?
She didn’t want to have to explain to Frederick anything about her odd, recent journey.
As her elder brother – her much older brother – he would undoubtedly see it as his role to protect her from delving into what might be some form of dark art. And that, of course, was he if he believed her, rather than assuming she must be on the verge of some form of hysteria.
She could say she had obtained this new card from the czarina, in the same way that she had received the last one: but, of course, she had had no time to make any new visit.
Besides, it was well known amongst Frederick’s friends that no one had yet managed to work out exactly where this Russian house stood: even when Sandy had last visited the house, it had been the elderly Russian who had accompanied her within the heavily draped carriage sent to meet her and bring her back to Frederick’s. Similarly, the elderly Russian had organised the picking up and delivery of Sandy’s painting to the house.
Even so, despite only having the crudest idea of where the house must lie (at a late point in their journey to the house, she had overheard the
distinctively thunderous, echoing crash of hooves and wheels that could only be the crossing of a wide bridge) she decided she must try and visit the house once more.
It would give her both a reason for possessing a new card and an opportunity to ask the elderly Russian for a translation of the card’s unusual calligraphy – and, as an extra bonus, allow her to see the exotically enigmatic czarina once more.
*
The hansom cab driver thought it was an odd request: to ride over three of the Thame’s bridges, while the lady remained cloistered inside the cab with curtains drawn.
It was the third bridge that created the sounds Sandy had been wanting to hear – that echoing thunder of suspended iron. As soon as she had found her bridge, she dismissed the cab, realising she would have more chance of finding the house if she spent her time walking around the maze of streets she found herself set down amongst.
Besides, as she had listened inside the darkened cab for familiar sounds, she had noticed that the card she held in her hands had changed ever so slightly, the cross of Cygnus revolving slightly around its central point, as if it were a compass needle.
Was the card attempting to help her find the house?
It seemed so.
As she walked along the streets, the cross still spun, still kept its tail star locked on one particular destination it seemed to be guiding Sandy towards. Like this, however, it seemed less like a tail star and more like a star grasped in the beak of a smaller bird, such as a dove or a falcon: is this why, Sandy wondered, many of the earlier gods had been portrayed as hawks, a hawk that would have appeared to the men below as a mystical bird flying up towards the universe’s very centre?
The milky mistiness of the card seemed more pronounced here, suddenly lacking any sense of weight or true substantiality. It could have been a strip of fog, a veil made of the finest spider webs.
Snowflakes fell upon it, melted, seemed to soak into its very being.
Snow?
In July?
*