by Jon Jacks
No doubt the elderly Russian similarly wished that the question she would ask of the czarina would be as equally innocent as the young couple’s.
The great hall was abruptly no longer generally silent: everyone was whispering excitedly, hurriedly.
Then it dawned on Sandy that, actually, not even one of those standing about her was speaking. Indeed, the mouths of everyone around her were, if anything, grimly set.
The voices simply hovered in the air, suffusing them all.
The feathers of the swan’s wings were frenziedly fluttering, as if caught in a strong breeze: and yet it was the feathers themselves that were creating the gentle gusts whipping around the ballroom.
More remarkably still, they also seemed responsible for the hushed, excited whispers.
The effect was strangely mesmerising, Sandy’s eyelids feeling suddenly heavier, hard to keep raised.
She was drifting off to sleep.
She couldn’t stop herself from succumbing to the hypnotic effects of the now gentle, soothing voices, to the tender caresses of the rippling breezes.
*
Chapter 6
Naturally, Sandy couldn’t be sure exactly how long she’d been asleep, yet she presumed it couldn’t have been long.
She was still standing, for one thing, rather than having fallen to the floor as she slept.
Around her, people were gently shrugging their shoulders or slowly lifting bowed heads as they too awoke from their brief sleep. It seemed to Sandy that everyone had drifted off, including the elderly Russian who had brought her into the ballroom, for he too was rapidly blinking his eyes, as though struggling even more than anyone else to fully wake up.
Sandy inhaled deeply, briefly imagining that even the czarina herself had woken up; for she had moved, or at least her wings had slipped off slightly to each side, revealing the young girl’s heavily bejewelled chest.
But unfortunately the czarina still slept on.
One of the brightly coloured cards was positioned directly above her heart. Her hands also lay slightly across her chest, but not symmetrically as Sandy might have supposed: rather, one was lower than the other, which was also farther across her chest, the index fingers on both protruding such that they each pointed to a different jewel.
The couple gawped in wide-eyed exhilaration at the card and the pointing hands. They both eagerly spoke at the same time, a single word each, but a different word in each case.
They swapped embarrassed glances, more tightly grasped each other’s hand; then both spoke together once more, but this time in agreement.
Sandy briefly wondered if the wings had been moved aside by some of the attendants standing around the bier as she and the others had slept: but then, as the couple spoke this second time, the card lying upon the czarina’s heart appeared to rapidly dissolve, to vanish. The wings, too, rose back into their original positions, completely cloaking the czarina, as if cocooning her within the very purest shroud.
The couple turned towards the cake-like pillar, where an attendant was already removing a single card from one of its many layers. Without even glancing at this card, let alone offering some form of interpretation of its meaning as Sandy had expected, the attendant handed it to the couple, the young man graciously allowing what could be his future bride to take it.
With yet another eager tightening of their hands, another sharing of happy grins, the couple trotted off across the dancefloor as if about to elatedly launch into an excitable waltz.
Sandy was bemused by their happy acceptance of nothing more than some form of tarot card, and one apparently chosen at random at that.
How could such a thing produce any worthwhile answer to the couple’s questions and needs?
Glancing once more at the pillar of layered boards and innumerable cards, she noticed that the level the card had been chosen from was edged on one side with rubies, on the other with amethysts. Every layer was edged differently, some with emeralds and rubies, or sapphires and pearls; there was another layer featuring both amethysts and rubies, but here they edged different sides.
The czarina had been pointing with her right hand to a line of rubies on her dress, a line of amethysts with her left. Moreover, she had pointed to a ruby about the midpoint of the line, whereas the amethyst she’d indicated was nearer to the line’s end: and, similarly, the attendant had taken the card from a square on the board that lay more or less half way down the ruby-edged side of the board, and towards the end of the line of amethysts.
‘Excuse me…?’
The elderly Russian who had escorted her into the ballroom was standing alongside her, indicating with a slight nod of his head that one of the attendants was inviting her to draw alongside the sleeping czarina.
Sandy stepped closer and, looking down at this remarkably beautiful girl, had to resist the urge to reach out and tenderly caress that flawless skin.
‘Why do you sleep?’ she asked concernedly.
Around her there were gasps and expressions of horror, as if this were a question that must never be asked.
Only the elderly man seemed resigned to her query; no doubt, Sandy thought, the czarina had already warned him that this would be the question she would ask.
Even if Sandy had wanted to withdraw the question, it was now too late: everyone was dropping off to sleep.
*
Chapter 7
‘It’s beautiful,’ Frederick announced as he admired the intense colouring of the card, its rainbow-like tones swirling around in the air as he made even the slightest twirl of his hand, ‘and like nothing I’ve ever seen before.’
Indeed, as Gabriel had observed, to call it a card was to do it an injustice; for rather than being a construct of paper, it was made of an incredibly light and transparent substance that none of them could identify, the nearest equivalent they could think of being the very finest vellum, or even some form of communion wafer – ‘or frozen mist,’ Mary added with an uncertain, embarrassed light-heartedness.
As such, the card shone like a miniature stained glass window, the colours brought into being by the refracted light suffusing it in the most marvellous glow.
The image, too, left everyone bemused: a garden at night, with a naked lady bathing in a fountain, a salmon twirling about her feet.
Depending on the way the card was viewed, she could even be bathing in the light of the stars, for the Milky Way flowed completely across the night sky like a glistening river – one that frustratingly changed in the way it glittered with even the slightest movement of a hand, eye, or any nearby light. Within that light, there were what appeared to Sandy to be seven flying swans, but Frederick insisted they must be doves: ‘They’re in the formation of the Pleiades: the seven sisters Zeus transformed into birds, so they could flee Orion the hunter.’
Gabriel reluctantly agreed, pointing out that, just like the constellation, one of the seven was much fainter than the rest, ‘only six of them now being visible to the naked eye.’
‘It’s tarot-like, definitely – and yet not exactly like any I know of,’ Mary admitted a little dispiritedly, for she had always seen herself as a highly-knowledgeable expert on such matters.
Sandy had taken the card from the sleeping czarina’s breast; she had almost moaned in surprise as she had felt the movement and warmth of the girl’s beating heart lying just below her fingers.
Nevertheless, she had suffered a pang of disappointment when she had taken her first glimpse of the card, despite its remarkable nature, its otherworldly gorgeousness.
She had no idea what it might possibly mean.
She had hoped that, somehow, having witnessed the excitement of the young couple, that its meaning would be inherently obvious to her.
But…it was just a card.
It didn’t provide an answer to her question: it didn’t seem to grant an answer to any question.
‘Ah, clearly esoteric!’ a highly-amused Gabriel had chuckled when Sandy had returned from the Russian
house and handed the card to him.
‘And no one offered you any interpretation of its meaning?’ Mary asked now, clearly puzzled by its imagery.
‘And you didn’t ask, naturally?’ Frederick said, observing her knowingly with lowered eyes.
Sandy shook her head in answer to both questions.
‘I got the distinct impression that you were supposed to just accept the card, then leave,’ she explained, recalling how the young couple hadn’t appeared in anyway bewildered or disappointed by the card they had been given.
‘So…why take the card from the heart,’ Gabriel asked with a quizzical stare, ‘rather than from this pillar-thing, like this young couple you told us about?’
‘I just felt – well, as you put it just there, Gabriel; it was from the heart!’
As soon as she said this, Sandy sensed there was some truth behind her statement, even though it hadn’t been a reason she had considered before. Hadn’t the young girl chosen differently to her young man at first?
‘Yes, yes; it was decision taken from the heart,’ she added surprisingly hurriedly, as if by saying it she actually made it so. ‘Rather, too, than from the head: through reason.’
‘Hence, then, why it makes so little sense to us now,’ Frederick scoffed, staring intently at the card once more, this time as he scratched at its surface. ‘This isn’t paint or ink: unless, somehow, it’s inside this thin film of whatever it is!’
Sandy took the card from him, spinning it curiously in her hand, realising for the first time that the image was indeed perfectly clear on both sides.
Why hadn’t she noticed that before?
She slowed her more rapid twirling of the card, staring so incredulously at it that it couldn’t escape the attention of her friends.
‘What’s wrong?’ Frederick asked. ‘What have you seen now?’
‘The image, Frederick: it can’t be printed on the inside!’ Sandy exclaimed in surprise, holding the card closer to him as she continued to turn it back and forth. ‘Because no matter which way you look at it, the picture’s not reversed: it’s exactly the same.’
*
Alone in her room, Sandy curiously studied the card once more.
Why had no one noticed before that the image appeared on both sides, that it remained unchanged no matter which side you were looking at?
But then, it didn’t really remain completely unchanged, did it?
There was that curious effect caused by the angle of the light either striking or passing through the card, causing the Milky Way in particular to shine in a number of differing ways – rapidly waxing and waning as if it were an actual event captured within this strangely diaphanous substance. The faint, seventh ‘dove’ also glowed brighter than the rest when the card was barely illuminated.
This was happening now: and when Sandy glanced about herself, she was surprised to see that it had grown darker in her room, much more so than it had been only a moment before.
There was little light coming in through the window, the scene beyond the glass being one of a gathering storm, the sky rapidly greying, the overshadowing clouds gloomy in their drenched darkness. The air prickled with the static electricity that also precludes a fierce storm.
The large French windows gracing Sandy’s room opened up onto the house’s secluded rear garden, one of trailing vines, roses, and clematis hanging from the close-set walls and wrought iron arches. The moon adorned it all with her silvery glow, soaking up the colours of the blooms, granting them instead an ethereal, mercurial glimmer, a milky pool of stems and flowers rippling in the breeze.
The moon?
It was too early for the moon to have risen.
It was too late in the month for it to be a fully bright moon, one that could create this silvery-watered scene.
Sandy stepped closer towards the glass doors, peering higher up into the sky in the hope of seeing what might be causing this ghostly glow.
It wasn’t the moon, of course.
Yet even more bizarrely, it was the Milky Way, flowing across what was indeed a night sky like a mystically sparkling river.
Recognising what she was seeing, Sandy held up the card, positioning it so that the band of stars on the card exactly overlaid the real Milky Way.
The seven swans were now soaring, it seemed, across the sky.
As if refracted, perhaps even focused, the glow from the stars shining through the card now bathed her in their wraith-like shimmer. Suffused in this silvery, mystical milk, Sandy sensed the nakedness of the bathing woman being projected over her. It was an image perfectly matching her own form, lying directly over her own torso, her own limbs, even the raised arm, granting her another sense of an earlier, more innocent era of life that strangely appealed to her.
She could, indeed, have been truly naked.
She should, indeed, be truly naked.
And then she was, indeed, truly naked.
*
Chapter 8
The glass doors leading out to the garden opened up before her.
An electrically crackling breeze swam everywhere about her naked flesh, somehow whispering, beckoning her to step forward. It caressed her, kissed her, clutched and pulled.
She didn’t wish to resist. She stepped through the doors, out into the starlit garden.
A garden of marigolds, roses, jasmine, hibiscus, and columbine.
A garden enveloped in what could be milky water, the stars now outshone by a fully bright moon. It dominated what could only be described now as a night sky, like a vast hole within that darkness, a portal into another world.
And beneath it all, Sandy was as pure as Eve in Eden, wearing nothing but her own glorious fleece of tumbling hair.
The card she had been holding had dissolved, becoming just another part of the flowing, silvery light that hung everywhere about her like a dewy mist. Where the dew touched the lawn, transforming into tear-like droplets, it sprang into life as a carpet of carnations. Yet through those carnations, there swum crayfish and salmon, the mist now more like tingling water as it caressingly trickled all over Sandy’s naked flesh.
She felt herself rising, her whole body light and buoyant within this mystical water.
She rose upwards, heading towards the glittering moon.
*
No; it wasn’t a moon she was rising up towards, Sandy realised.
She was bubbling up through flowing water towards the brightly lit surface of a vast, circular lake.
The closer she rose towards that surface, the less of it she could see, such that it stretched off seemingly endlessly in every direction but one: for she was thankfully rising up towards a section of that lake – no, that great sea, that vast ocean – where an island rose from the waters, a towering white mountain looming over everything.
When she at last broke the surface, she wasn’t gasping for breath as she might have feared: even so, she was glad to see that she had indeed surfaced by the island’s coastline. Beyond a bright beach, there lay a paradisiacal scene of trees and bushes decked with bright blooms.
The light suffusing it all was ethereal in its silvery glow, for it came purely from the constellations of stars, particularly the Milky Way; all of them far more glorious and glittering than Sandy had ever seen them, as if they had rushed down towards Earth and now hovered only a mile or two above her.
More startling still, it was a constellation of the cross that lay directly above her, its upper section slightly crooked but ending in a blazing star that all others revolved around, as if it formed the very centre of the universe – as if the cross itself was the pole about which everything turned.
As she stared at this amazing sight, it dawned on her that the movement of the other constellations was far more complicated than she had first supposed – for they also twirled around in other ways, the whole effect reminding Sandy of a childhood experience when she had swung out in a vast circle on the end of a rope swing, her own twirling adding to the sense of strangeness
as she stared up towards the thick knot holding her to the branch,
In contrast to all this movement, the water of the immense ocean was almost motionless, as bright and reflective as the most expensive mirror.
Just along the shore, a small flock of swans was swooping into land: five of them, rather than the seven she might have been given to expect from the image inscribed upon the card.
As they came to land on the very edges of water, with not even one of them raising a disruptive ripple, each swan shed and threw off what appeared to Sandy to be a fine dewy mist, or perhaps the filmiest of veils: and in that instant, the swans transformed into young girls, as innocently naked as on the day when they first came into the world.
And one of those girls, Sandy was sure, was the czarina.
*
Chapter 9
The girls played on the edges of the sea as children would play; laughing as they ran through the waters, mischievously splashing each other.
Sandy was treading water, remembering the phenomenal depth that lay beneath her. Yet as she stretched out a leg and a foot only slightly, she realised that there was now a soft bed of sand and fine pebbles there. Letting her other foot down, finding that that too stood upon firm ground, she began to slowly make her way through the water towards the excitedly playing girls.
Or rather, she saw as she drew closer, towards four girls and a young man, the smallest amongst them being an exceptionally beautiful boy.
The czarina glanced her way. She saw Sandy approaching; but far from being shocked, let alone horrified, she smiled.
She turned away from the others and started striding out towards Sandy, raising a hand in greeting.
‘You’re here at last!’ she cried out elatedly. ‘I thought you’d never come!’