Chapter 13
Of course; it had been almost a year since Sandy had first come across the Russian house.
So why should she be surprised that it was suddenly snowing in London, in July?
As before, the snow began to fall thickly and hard, driven by a harsh, freezing wind. Once again, Sandy hadn’t dressed in preparation for such an odd squall of weather; the material of her dress was too thin, the frilly silk surrounding her neck inadequate when it came to preventing the gusts penetrating her clothes and rippling coldly across her flesh.
She staunchly forced herself on, lowering her face against the wind and taking a tight hold of her bonnet. Far from regarding the snowstorm as a problem, she saw it rather as proof that she was drawing closer to her goal.
Through the veiling whirl of crisply icy flakes, everything about her appeared indistinct, everything merging, with no clean lines of substance, of being. Amongst it all, houses were simply slightly darker shapes, yet even these were diffused, like shadows shredded by the hurriedly swirling snow.
A glow of gold shone through it all, the burning amber of brightly illuminated windows.
It was the Russian house, with its array of large, ballroom windows.
And as before, as it had been exactly a year ago, a grand dance was in progress.
*
As before, too, the house’s slim porch gave her a welcome degree of cover from the rapidly swirling snow.
Sandy knocked on the door, wondering if it would be already open: it wasn’t, so she hoped that this time her knocking would be heard.
As she knocked, she realised with a start that she didn’t know the elderly Russian’s name; she didn’t know whom to ask for if a maid or servant answered the door.
Why, in all the meetings she had had with the gent, had she never enquired after his name?
Why had Frederick shown him into the house without requesting a name?
Before she could work out any answer to these questions, the door opened.
And fortunately, her knocking had been answered by the very man she wanted to see.
‘The czarina said you would be calling,’ he said, moving aside and, with a gracious wave of a hand, inviting Sandy to step inside.
*
Sandy was shown into the room containing the paintings rather than towards the ballroom. Many painters might have stopped to admire their own painting, but Sandy’s eyes were drawn instead towards the glittering icon, which seemed to grace the room with its own light.
It sparkled with colours she hadn’t noticed on her first visit here, renditions of flowers that shone as if they were brightly coloured jewels.
Mary’s tears were falling and blossoming into carnations, while a blood-red rose was growing by her son’s feet. There were marigolds too, the gold of Mary, and a pink hibiscus, so delicately beautiful, just as its life appears short until it blooms again. Above everything there hovered the dove of the Holy Spirt, bringing the seven gifts of a star-pointed columbine.
‘The czarina says you already have a new card,’ the Russian declared rather bluntly, his eyes lowered inquisitively beneath a frowning brow.
Her card!
With a gasp of horror, Sandy abruptly realised she no longer held her card.
*
Chapter 14
‘I must have dropped it! Out by the door!’
Whirling around, hiking up her voluminous skirt so that its bottom edges cleared the floor, Sandy made as if to rush outside; only for the elderly Russian to bring her to a sudden halt with a miserable shake of his head.
‘No, you won’t have dropped it,’ he firmly assured her. ‘Whatever purpose the card needed to serve has now obviously been fulfilled.’
Sandy paused, unintentionally glowering at the man in puzzlement.
Surely the card was supposed to do more than lead her back here!
‘But…what has it done for me?’ she asked disappointedly.
The Russian shrugged his shoulders.
‘That is for you to know, not me,’ he replied. ‘It may not seem so at the moment, but it must have altered your perception of something important to you.’
Sandy paused once again while she considered this.
‘The stone…’ she began uncertainly, recalling her confusion on first studying the card.
‘Stone?’ the man repeated, waiting for her to continue, to divulge more information.
‘A stone, yes: it was on the card, but inscribed with letters I didn’t recognise.’
The man smiled in a way he probably used to calm a petulant child.
‘If you don’t have it with you, then…’
‘It wasn’t Russian; they were letters I’ve never seen the like of before,’ Sandy admitted.
The man nodded sagely, as if he regarded this as making perfect sense.
‘An older language, obviously,’ he stated assuredly. ‘Even if you still had the card, I doubt that anyone would be able to offer you a reliable translation: much as even the most learned man in England would be troubled to decipher earlier inscriptions of the people originally inhabiting this land.’
Sandy sadly nodded in agreement.
‘The czarina said–’
Her eyes abruptly widened in horror as it dawned on her that she had once again spoken to this poor man without making any attempt to determine his name.
‘Oh, I’m ever so sorry,’ she blurted out, ‘it’s ever so rude of me: I’ve never thought to enquire of your name, sir! Please accept my apologies!’
The man nodded and even slightly bowed in acceptance of her apology.
‘My name serves no real importance,’ he answered modestly, ‘so I too am at fault as I’ve made no real attempt to disclose it: but as you ask, my name is General Elias Tatishchev.’
Of course, as she wasn’t in any way familiar with Russian ideals of etiquette, Sandy still remained unsure as to how she should address him. Thankfully, the general must have noticed the frown of confusion that briefly flitted across her face, for he continued:
‘Most people simply refer to me as General.’
Although he delivered it in a more or less helpful tone, he also said it with a sigh, leaving Sandy wondering if this was a sign of his exasperation with her or if it signified that he wasn’t wholly happy with this term of address.
‘Now,’ he added quickly, standing up taller with a pulling in of his stomach as if he wanted to return to more serious matters, ‘you were saying, “The czarina said”?’
‘Oh, yes, yes: sorry – the czarina said it was the Alatyr stone. On the card, I mean: she said it was the Alatyr stone.’
‘The czarina said?’ the general repeated yet again, but far more suspiciously this time, as if he found it hard to believe that the czarina would have spoken to Sandy.
He also frowned doubtfully, his stare probing and questioning.
Sandy was more confused than ever: didn’t anyone else ever visit the czarina in this strange world where the card had led her?
‘I mean…’ Seeking to appease the general, Sandy was briefly lost for words, ‘I mean I sensed it was this Alatyr stone: the one created by your god Svarog, on which he set out his laws.’
‘Svarog is far from being my god, young lady,’ the general replied sternly, apparently appalled by Sandy’s unintentional accusation. ‘However,’ he continued in a calmer, more resigned mood, ‘such a stone does exist within our creation myths; though it is created by the very first god Rod – whose name actually means birth, origin – who also creates Svarog.’
‘Then this Svarog has nothing to do with this stone?’
Sandy grimaced, unable to fathom why the czarina might have misinformed her.
The general once again let out a resigned, exasperated sigh.
‘Like many creation legends,’ he began, emphasising the word to draw attention to the fact that he didn’t believe a word of the tale he was about to relate, ‘ours starts with an egg containing the first god; an egg that breaks with the birth of love
, or Lada, the Ziva Swan of life, birth, and fertilising waters. The shining Svarog, the sky and the heavens, are released; but so also is the shadow of darkness and death, the Great Ocean on which the Black Swan of grievances swims. It is into these dark waters that the Alatyr stone – formed from the churning of the milk of the stars – tumbles, the Black Swan attempting to swallow it all until Svarog caused the stone to grow and grow. From the handful of grains the Black Swan managed to retain in its beak, Svarog created Moist Mother Earth on the Great Ocean’s surface; while the stone itself continued to grow until it reached up into the Hall of the Heavenly Swan of the Circle of Svarog, where the Ziva Swan is the Guardian Makosh, or Fate.’
Sandy’s brow furrowed as she quickly mulled all this over.
‘Then…this stone is the Milky Way? That’s what it sounds like: the milky stars, the way it rises from darkness into the heavens, curving around the Earth.’
Then why, she wondered had the card shown the stone with inscriptions?
‘So what is it I’m supposed to find?’ she mumbled disquietly to herself.
‘Find?’ The general observed her as curiously as he would a child who he believed hadn’t been listening properly. ‘It’s a legend, no different to the ancient Egyptian belief in the Great Cackler – or the Chinese, and their Magpie Bridge; linking the Weaver Princess with the King’s Herdsman across the starry river of the Milky Way.’
Sandy thought it odd that he seemed so dismissive of such tales when he regularly accepted mystical cards from an apparently endlessly sleeping czarina.
‘Could I…’ she began uncertainly, ‘could I see her again?’ adding hurriedly, when she detected the general’s irritation, ‘I won’t ask the czarina another question!’
*
Inside the ballroom, the scene could have been a mingling of the two previous occasions when Sandy had been here.
Everyone was elaborately dressed, a mix of uniforms and exotic gowns. Yet as on the second time Sandy had entered the ballroom, everyone was nervously clustered around the sleeping czarina, rather than still displaying the exhilaration of rudely interrupted dancers.
Precisely as before, however, the glittering light of chandeliers reflected in immense mirrors was almost heavenly entrancing in its brightness. And yet the most vibrant glow of all emanated purely from the ballroom’s very centre, where the czarina lay sleeping upon her raised bier.
Naturally, the general had sighed exasperatedly when Sandy had rudely asked to see the czarina once more. Yet he had resignedly stood aside, indicating that she was free to make her way towards the ballroom.
‘That’s what the czarina said you would ask for,’ he’d mumbled a touch irritably.
Which card had told him that? Sandy wondered as she drew closer towards the sleeping czarina, who once again had brightly coloured cards mixed in amongst the otherwise gloriously white feathers of her magnificent wings.
The sleeping czarina, as Sandy had expected, looked resplendently beautiful.
What she hadn’t expected, however, was that the sleeping girl wasn’t the czarina.
It was an entirely different girl.
*
Chapter 15
Not one person amongst the many dancers had seemed to notice that the sleeping girl was no longer the czarina Sandy had first seen lying here.
Of course, it could simply be that they did notice, yet saw no need to bring the matter to her attention, let alone explain it; yet when she stared back in puzzlement at the general who had followed her into the ballroom, he returned nothing but his own puzzled expression, one querying her bewilderment.
It seemed to Sandy, then, that everyone here believed this to be their czarina. That there had been no change in how she looked, as far as they were concerned.
Bewildered by this, Sandy looked once more at the sleeping girl. Observing her more closely and carefully this time, Sandy noticed features about her that were familiar after all.
She had seen this girl before.
She had seen her on the shore of the lake, along with the czarina.
The girl was the czarina’s sister.
*
What had the czarina said, when she had handed Sandy the white feather?
This is from my sister?
Wasn’t that it, or at least words to that effect?
If so, that also meant she’d already had a card from this new sleeping czarina.
A card she had failed to understand.
A card she had already lost.
Which was a shame in so many ways, of course; because now she was standing here alongside the sleeping swan princess, Sandy wished for all the world that she could ask another question. That she could receive another card.
How do I wake you?
What is the meaning of the white stone?
Noticing the sudden silence that had fallen about her, apart from a series of hushed, irate exclamations, Sandy briefly worried that she had unintentionally spoken her questions out loud: but then she saw that, as she had witnessed once before, the silence that had fallen across the mute courtiers and dancers was overlaid with the excited flurry of feathers, the elated murmurs that drifted through the air on winds generated by the gently rippling wings.
She wondered who had asked the sleeping czarina a question: she hadn’t seen anyone draw close, hadn’t heard anyone speaking directly to the girl.
But, as before, the hypnotic whispers were lulling her into a delicious sleep.
*
‘Another card!’ Frederick exclaimed with a mix of amusement and surprise as he studied the card Sandy handed him.
He frowned in bemusement as he took in the image of a girl swinging gaily around a maypole. She was spinning over dark waters, for the maypole rose out of what could be the middle of this dark lake.
Sandy was briefly tempted to explain that the young girl twirling around on the end of the stretched garland reminded her of the way she used to swing out in a great loop on the end of the rope they used to attach to a large tree in their garden. It reminded her too, of course, of the strangely whirling stars she had looked up at when she had appeared within the magical lake.
‘The maypole’s something to do with Cygnus,’ Mary pointed out, leaning over the back of Frederick’s chair and indicating the wings attached to either side of the pole, the bright sparkles that reflected the positions of the stars within the constellation.
Sandy had naturally been surprised when she had woken up from the trance in the ballroom to find that the general was indicating with a smile that the card that had appeared on the czarina’s breast was hers. She was even more surprised that he appeared more resigned than angry that Sandy had somehow managed to ask the czarina a question.
Of course, when she had looked at the card, Sandy still remained at a loss to explain what it might mean. She had headed off home in a daze similar to the one she had been in the first time she had visited the house, the ferocious squalls of swirling, veiling snow refusing to weaken in any way until she reached the river, at which point the icy gusts had vanished as completely as if they had been nothing but figments of her imagination.
‘A swan?’ Frederick said, giving a puzzled pout as he studied the positions of the stars more closely. ‘It’s a hawk, surely: if the very top of the pole is its beak.’
Far from disagreeing with him, Mary nodded in agreement.
‘The early gods were seen as being falcons; the shamans would have winged sticks to aid them in their ascent into the heavens.’
Frederick handed the card back to Sandy.
‘One to go with your other one then,’ he said with a mischievous grin. ‘Perhaps we won’t understand what they mean until you have a full pack.’
‘Oh, er…I seem to have mislaid the first card,’ Sandy mumbled apologetically.
She didn’t like lying to her brother and his friends, but what choice did she have? If she made any attempt to explain how she had lost it, they would think her mad. And of course, for
very similar reasons she hadn’t been able to explain that this was actually a third card.
‘Frederic – Frederic Leighton, I mean – might be able to help explain the card’s symbolism,’ Mary offered helpfully, referring to another one of their wide group of artistic friends. ‘Symbols usually have some legendary base after all.’
As soon as she was on her own once more, Sandy quickly sketched out the images she could recall seeing on the two missing cards. She also carefully copied the third card, presuming that this too might similarly disappear one day.
The top of the pole, she noted as she more closely observed it, featured a small, descending white swan, its long neck blending into the pole itself. The pole, in fact, could be the light cast by the uppermost star, which shone like a full moon. This ‘moon’ nestled in the embrace of the opened wings, giving her the impression of the horned moon and solar disc she had seen surmounting actual maypoles.
The pole formed by the beam of light was either reflected in the dark waters below, or the pole itself continued to plunge deeply into the black depths. There was a swan here too, at the very base of the pole, one striving upwards, its feathers black or at least darkened by the waters.
The girl was lightly tripping over the surface of the lake, implying perhaps that the rippling waves were more substantial than normal waters. Then again, Sandy realised, it could be either because the garland was adequately supporting her, or the sky itself was more substantial than she had first presumed, for even this rippled slightly, as if it too were a fluid, formed of whiter rather than dark waters.
As the days passed, she would stare at the card and the copies of its siblings, attempting again and again to interpret their message. On visits to the British Library, she would access every book she could on ancient legends and religions, hoping she would come across some small detail that would help her begin to piece the meaning of the cards together.
The Russian house seemed to have vanished once more: naturally, she caught a carriage out to where she had the last time she had visited, but whenever she set off walking, she failed to recognise any landmarks that would help her find the house. She faced exactly the same problem whenever she tried to retrace her steps after leaving the house in the snowstorm, for the rapidly swirling flakes had obviously confused her, the streets remaining utterly unrecognisable to her.