To alleviate her growing frustration, she poured all her energies into another painting, one that reflected her sense that things were going astray, increasingly becoming more rather than less mystifying.
What had happened to the first czarina? Why had her already delicate life being so brutally cut short?
And why, of course, did no one seem to notice, let alone care?
Why, too, did this new czarina also suffer this endless sleep?
Her painting had a sense of the funereal about it, with the darkness of a blue cloak and hat, the sharp contrast of the girl’s white face appearing like a bright moon glittering in a night sky. There were beads of funereal jet too, of blackest amber, along with the short lived hibiscus, its flowering pink the painful love she felt for these poor, suffering, eternally sleeping girls.
Love can cause its own suffering, its own great sense of loss.
Why did she mourn these poor sleeping czarinas?
Why did she feel responsible?
*
Chapter 16
The Opening of the Heart of the Moon
On a night, any shepherd on his own out in the hills will carefully watch the phases of the moon.
When she is young and frivolous, temptingly waxing to fullness.
When she is complete and glorious, the brightest queen of all.
When she is apparently waning yet wise, preparing to reappear again after little more than three days, plump once more with the vibrancy of youth.
She keeps the lonely shepherd company, lighting his way for him whenever she is able.
But she also forewarns him of potential dangers, for it is no myth that many creatures fall to uncontrollably baying at her imperious visage.
She controls (it is claimed by many) even the rise and fall of the greatest oceans: and so who are we to say she has no effect upon the blood or sap flowing through the narrow channels of any living body?
The shepherd Endymion, son of Aethlius, proved no exception when it came to tracking the moon’s languidly serene course across the night sky. And yet he himself was an exception to the more usual shepherd for, Aethlius being a son of Zeus, Endymion was graced with an unrivalled beauty.
Perhaps, too, it was this venerable linage that granted the fair Endymion an insight denied any other mortal shepherd: for he saw the moon stripped of her veils of purest white swan feathers, saw her as she most truly was – the gloriously beautiful goddess Selene.
She rode through the darkness as a blaze of the purest white light in her chariot drawn by long-maned steeds. Upon her head, she wore her crown of the fully bright sphere. Around her neck she wore her shining cloak of swan feathers, which rose up around her as a glowing crescent, perhaps even as wondrously coruscating wings.
It was a glittering gorgeousness that enamoured and entranced even the higher gods: so how could a mere mortal like poor Endymion not be bewitched? The emanated light of beauty spun out from her, cascaded down into his eyes, penetrated so deeply into his heart, opening up that heart to her as an oyster shell must eventually release its glorious pearl.
Stunned, dazed, poor Endymion was unable to think clearly anymore, drunk on what he had witnessed, what he had just experienced. He retired to his rough bed still suffering that delirium, his covering nothing but the filmiest fleece, hoping the sleep would help him recover from his undoubted foolishness.
Naturally, the Queen of the Night remained entirely unaware of the opening of Endymion’s heart to her: not that she would have cared one jot even if she had known.
She continued, uninterrupted, on her course across the night sky, gazing imperiously down upon the earth, her rays dispassionately falling upon all sleeping mortals.
Tonight, however, the slightest smattering of those descending rays were reflected back to her in a way she had never experienced before, their mercurial sheen transformed into purest gold.
Was it a trick of the gods? (For the gods had tried many times to trick her into lying with them.)
It was a golden fleece, strewn out across the ground directly beneath her. A fleece of tumbling golden hair.
Handing the reins of her chariot to her brother Helios the sun, Selene slipped down towards the sleeping Endymion.
The fleece covering him, she saw, was fleece completely different to any other she had ever seen.
It was the sleeper’s own hair that sparkled like streams of flowing gold.
His flesh, too, glowed with a glorious sheen, highlighting every curve and depression of a body as pure and perfect as Adam’s had been in Eden.
The light of beauty spun out from him, whirled up into her eyes, penetrated deeply into a point lying directly within the midst of her heart.
And the heart of the Queen of the Night, that most glorious of pearls, fell open.
*
What is the life of a man compared to the life of the moon?
Nothing.
A man’s life is fleeting.
His delicate beauty even briefer.
At best, I man may flatter himself that he lives on through his seed.
In this, the love of Selene and Endymion proved no exception.
He lived on (if you believe in such things) through their son Narkissos, a youth so beautiful he could fall in love with no one but his own reflection.
As we have already seen, however, Endymion was an exception to the more usual shepherd; for he was the son of Aethlius, son of Zeus.
It is said by some that Zeus himself offered Endymion the chance to remain ageless, even to avoid death – yet only by slipping into an endless slumber. And so Endymion chose this, for he couldn’t bear to think of Selene having to witness his ageing, the loss of his beauty, her love changing to loathing as he himself changed.
It is said by others, however, that there was no choice at all involved, a furious Zeus inflicting his punishment on the lovers who, after all, had brought about an unequal split between night and day.
Whatever the truth of it, even now Endymion’s heavenly bride continues to slip down from the night sky to lie with him, to envelop him with her kisses as he sleeps endlessly.
So open up your heart to Endymion who, in his endless sleep, forever remains unaware that his otherwise fleeting beauty has been preserved.
And open up your heart, too, to the immortal goddess Selene: for now she is all too aware that when you open your heart, you also open yourself up to the unimaginable hurt of mourning a loved one who has slipped into an ageless slumber.
*
Chapter 17
Sandy should have been pleased with the praise lauded on her Portrait of a Girl with a Blue Cloak.
Outwardly, she seemed to gladly accept the acclaim, yet inwardly she remained plagued by her failure to understand why she had been granted the third card.
She had hoped that at some point, as had happened previously, some aspect of magic would intrude upon her life, granting her access to the magical lake or another meeting with the sleeping czarina.
But nothing like that had happened to her.
Rather, both the card and the sketches she had made, placing them all on the mantelpiece, taunted her whenever she glanced their way.
From her own researches and comments made by her brother’s friends, from things half heard, half remembered, she gathered that the very early Egyptians had – like Frederick – seen the upended Cygnus as a falcon. For them, however, it was also a winged serpent, creatures grasping within their mouths (or beak) the North Star around which everything revolved. And so their very first falcon-headed god, Seker – crowned with the horned and full moon, and aided by the fiery Uraeus snakes – was charged with taking the pharaoh through the underworld on his winged serpent boat.
Not that her gathering of such information seemed to help Sandy in any way other than making her task seem all the more impossible.
None of it appeared to tally with her own experiences of the lake and the swan maidens she had seen bathing there.
She had b
egun to wonder, indeed, if the card was simply instructing her to return home, to visit once again the garden and the rope swing she had swung from so many times as a child. It was an experience that bore many similarities to the child swinging on the end of the garlanded maypole after all.
Naturally, she couldn’t see how such a journey would help her: but neither could she see any other way of attempting to decipher the card’s elusive meaning.
What was the point of a card that, far from providing answers, just raised evermore questions?
*
Whatever a pharaoh’s journey across the underworld river entailed, Sandy mused, it couldn’t be a worse experience than strolling along the riverbank of the Thames.
These days, it was always full of foul waste, sometimes even sewage.
The stench was horrendous. Its colour unimaginably terrible. Fortunately, the slight wind was blowing the very worst of the evil smells away from her, along with any of the flakes of dried crust that would otherwise fleck her parasol with the most dreadful stains. Even so, she held her parasol so that it would take the worst of any sudden, unexpected blowback: better that her parasol suffered this indignity, rather than letting any airborne flakes blemish her perfectly white summer garb.
Normally, she would avoid the riverbank as much as possible, but today she had decided to make another attempt at finding the Russian house. In the hope that it might aid her in her search, she had brought the card along with her.
The gods themselves laughed at her stupidity, at her nerve for calling on either their – or at least some other form of – miraculous intervention.
The laughter rippled around her, with no obvious source: no one else was foolish enough to take a stroll along the embankment.
It was a childlike laughter, raucous in parts, girlish giggles in others.
Angels, then (cupids?); not gods.
As she continued to walk on, however, it became clearer to Sandy that the laughter was coming from somewhere slightly ahead and off to her left, on the other side to where the river lay. There was a slight dip in the land there, she recalled, where a sunken tributary snaked its way into the Thames, its course still lined with hardly anything more than rough pebble beaches and the most basically constructed timber banks.
An ancient wooden loading jib rocked precariously from side to side, the rope crudely knotted around the extended arm creaking ominously as it wildly twirled, whatever load it was supporting unseen, too low down and therefore hidden by the river’s raised sides.
Drawing closer, Sandy recognised the laughter as being that of real children, their heads of dirtily tangled hair being the first things that began to pop up one by one into her view. The squeals of excitement abruptly increased as, with an even more violent jolting of the rocking jib, a young girl was suddenly launched out into space on the lower end of the rope.
The girl shrieked, a mingling of terror and joy.
And Sandy gasped; for she couldn’t fail to recognise the similarity of the card’s image and the girl swirling out over the dark waters.
*
Chapter 18
The girl clung on fearfully to the rope, even though the majority of her weight was obviously being supported by the large, lower knot she was seated astride.
She twirled on the end of the rope. She also spun around in a great circle, spinning around a broken mooring post much as the earth whirls around the sun.
Every time she swung back towards the shingle beach, the other girls would gleefully send her spinning out over the waters once more with a hard, well-practised push.
The girl squealed half-heartedly for mercy.
Sandy reached into her small purse, where she kept the card. Naturally, there were a great many differences between the two scenes, but Sandy felt she should compare one with the other in the hope of spotting more similarities.
The card had changed slightly.
From the waters, some form of red seaweed was sprouting, like bloodied hands attempting to grasp at the feet of the twirling girl.
An unexpected gust of wind snatched at the card, deftly tweaked it out from between a surprised Sandy’s fingers – and whirled it up into the air. It twirled, glittered like a white feather; became a feather.
It swirled, it spun, rising up towards the raucously creaking jib, the protesting wood, the shrieking, pained rope.
The old rope was beginning to rapidly fray.
The rotten wood was swiftly splintering.
No!
A horrified Sandy immediately realised what was about to happen.
‘Stop! Stop swinging her!’ she yelled at the other girls as loudly as she could as she rushed down towards the beach.
Too late.
With a crack of wood, the snap of the last threads of rope, and a terrified shriek, the girl briefly twirled off into space – then she plunged and disappeared into the patiently waiting dark waters.
*
The girl didn’t reappear.
Her friends seemed too scared to rush in to rescue her.
‘The currents, miss!’ they cried out to Sandy as they saw she intended to rush into the filthy water. ‘The currents already have her!’
*
Sandy’s vast white dress bloomed around her like an enormous lily as she hurriedly waded into the dark waters.
As she glanced about herself, Sandy forlornly realised the hopelessness of her position, for the water was as dark as the coal dust and oil that regularly washed up on the pebble beaches.
She could never hope to see anyone or anything in this water, even if the poor girl hadn’t been taken away by the fierce currents she could already feel tugging powerfully at her feet. The waters gripped her hard about her ankles, like the eagerly tightening fingers, the flexible wrists, of water sprites.
There was a sudden, fiercer pull on her thighs: and with a vicious jerk, she was dragged under.
The spreading dress was too wide, too buoyant, to fully succumb to the pull of the undercurrents; but with the snapping of restraining straps, Sandy was ripped free of it all. She swiftly plunged lower and lower into the thickening darkness, her previously bright white, flimsy underclothes flailing around her like rapidly blackening wings.
As she uncontrollably slipped ever deeper into the darkness, her fear, her need for a fresh gulp of air, all rapidly increased, a painful rush of blood pounding hard in Sandy’s ears. It was a panicked, quickening heartbeat, one flushing all reason from her brain.
The powerful fluxes drew her down into depths any competently reasoning mind would realise must be impossible, the current of snaking black waters sucking her ever deeper into its belly. Amongst that vast, apparently endless darkness, Sandy couldn’t see anything, could only feel the pummelling of the vibrant streams, hear the heavy pounding of the heart.
Then, suddenly, there was a flicker of light, a sense of another presence.
The girl! It has to be the girl! Sandy’s addled mind managed to wail at her.
The stream of flowing waters she was held captive within abruptly bucked, throwing her clear of its hold. Short of breath, dazed by the lack of oxygen to her brain, Sandy recognised that she had to strike out for the surface immediately: and yet it also abruptly dawned on her that she couldn’t leave the girl down here to drown.
With a sharp kick of her legs, a jerking pull of her arms, Sandy headed down towards the serenely floating girl.
*
Chapter 19
The drumming of Sandy’s beating heart was louder than ever.
Her lungs were close to bursting.
The girl, by comparison, appeared perfectly blissful.
Perfectly motionless, and floating in an upright position, she appeared to be entangled amongst the snaking red threads of a rust toned seaweed. Her eyes were closed, a sign perhaps that the poor girl was already dead.
Or simply asleep.
For it wasn’t the girl that Sandy was swimming towards.
It was the sleeping czarina. r />
*
The entrapping seaweed was far less fragile than Sandy had expected or had hoped it would be.
She tried to tear the czarina free of its hold, but it wasn’t working.
In desperation, she gave the czarina a shrug, in the hope of waking her up.
The czarina’s eyes remained firmly, blissfully closed.
If she couldn’t be woken, Sandy suddenly wondered, was it wise to break the clinging strings of seaweed? If she wasn’t capable of swimming for the surface, wouldn’t the czarina be simply dragged off ever deeper into the darkness?
Naturally, Sandy couldn’t bear the thought that the czarina might be completely carried off. But then again, what sort of life was it for the czarina to be helplessly suspended here?
The seaweed rippled around them both, like bloody veins flowing through the water. They pulsated and surged along with the heavy beating of Sandy’s heart, the direction that her love would take now being the defining factor of the czarina’s precarious position.
To keep her held here, relatively safe, alive but asleep and blissfully unaware of her condition?
Or to free her, to let her go: with Sandy taking on the risk of suffering the heartbreak of losing her completely?
Sandy wondered if the czarina required a breath of air to revive her. She hugged the czarina tightly as she urgently locked mouths with her, breathing out, trying to force air into the poor girl’s lungs.
The czarina’s eyes flicked open, blazes of bright blue within the darkness.
She smiled sleepily as Sandy drew back a little from her.
She gave a kick of her legs, a lazy shrug of her arms: and the entangling strands fell away, releasing her.