Cygnet Czarinas

by Jon Jacks

  (Now at this point, it’s only fair that any storyteller admits the tale could head off in at least two slightly different directions: indeed, in the original tales of Wayland, there is no mention of a mother, for he lives with his two brothers, who similarly entrap a Swan-May each for seven years. Yet I prefer the version of events related below, for it thankfully remains free of any children who might end up being abandoned.)

  Of course, Wayland’s mother had kept the wondrously white dress that she herself had been married in, carefully storing it away so that it now emerged from its protective sheets as immaculate as ever.

  ‘Every girl shines in her wedding dress!’ she told herself elatedly, ‘and this is the finest dress anyone in the village has ever worn!’

  And yet, when the poor girl wore it, it hung off her as if it were nothing but the very lowliest of smocks. Far from shining out, this pitiful girl seemed to be trying to disappear into her surroundings.

  ‘Something else; trust me, it just needs something else!’ Wayland’s mother declared brightly, rushing off to urgently search her home for anything that might enhance the sorry young girl’s derisible appearance.

  But there was nothing suitable in her sewing basket.

  There was nothing in her linen cupboard.

  There was nothing in her wardrobe.

  In desperation, Wayland’s mother even searched the shed where the hunting gear was stored.

  And there, amongst all her son’s clutter, she found and opened his back pack.

  And in his back pack, she discovered and opened the casket.

  And in this casket (within which the veil was neither safe nor untouchable), Wayland’s mother surprisingly found just what she was looking for: the most exquisitely fine veil she had ever seen.

  ‘Of course!’ she announced gleefully. ‘Trust Wayland to have already ensured his bride-to-be would have a beautiful wedding veil!’

  Excitedly dashing back to the sorrowfully waiting girl, Wayland’s mother breathlessly presented the delicate veil before her.

  ‘See,’ she announced proudly, ‘Wayland has been keeping this beautiful wedding veil in trust for you!’

  Naturally, the poor girl immediately recognised the veil.

  Gratefully reaching out for it, her face blossomed into a gracious smile.

  Even as she touched the veil, enough of the cares of the world fell away from her to reveal her remarkable prettiness.

  As she draped the veil about her, she instantly glowed with its smooth purity, its incomparable beauty.

  She shone with the radiance of angels, the gloriousness of an immortal goddess.

  The veil rose about her like immense, powerful wings.

  ‘I trust you will forgive me,’ she said to Wayland’s pitifully startled mother, ‘but my trust in your son was obviously a mistake.’

  And with a surge of her wings, she flew out of the door: and poor Wayland never saw either her or the magical lake of precious dew again.

  *

  Chapter 27

  A crusting of morning dew made each blade of the garden’s grass sparkle like slivers of the moon.

  The mist swirling just a few inches above it all gave the whole scene an air of the ethereal, of at the very least an otherworld, a mystical lake.

  Sandy stepped out bared and barefoot into that whirling pool, wishing that, as once before, it would help transport her to another, better realm.

  Of course, no such thing happened.

  These things cannot be rushed, cannot be forced.

  We must bide our time; we must be patient.

  Sandy turned back towards the house, her movement setting the ankle-high mist whirling, forming into playful whirlpools, eddying ripples.

  These rushed out before her, racing towards the steps, the beckoning and still open French windows, curling up the stone slabs, slipping silently along the bared floorboards: wafts entwining as weft and warp, as twist and transformation, the most delicate of embroideries coming together on life’s very own loom.

  This material of mist – of mist itself formed from the sun’s warming of sparkling dew, of the tears of the moon – flowed everywhere about the room, seeking out the card, discovering it patiently waiting where Sandy had left it on her dresser top. Now the misty lace sought out unsealed seams, the most minuscule of spaces that always lie unseen to the naked eye – then suddenly it was seeping into and through these microscopic gaps, joyously whirling into the casket’s interior, wrapping itself like a silken cocoon around the sleeping angel.

  The transformation complete, the transparent lid of the casket sprung open.

  And within the casket there lay a veil of the finest materials, the most diaphanous of lace that even the minutest spider might envy: waiting for Sandy to pull free and don.

  *

  Naturally, Sandy couldn’t fail to notice the changes the card had undergone.

  What had once been beautifully rendered in two dimensions now existed in three.

  A casket that had been closed, and impossible to open, now lay with its glass lid lying slightly to one side.

  Seeing the angel wrapped within its veiling cocoon, Sandy of course wondered what kind of butterfly-like liquefaction and transmutation might have taken place inside.

  Tentatively, she took a corner of the veil within her fingers, fearful that pulling on it might be the wrong thing to do.

  Yet she didn’t need to pull any harder upon the veil.

  The veil was so incredibly weightless it began to rush free of its own accord.

  There was no weight to it at all. No weight of any stone angel or any other thing that might be contained within it.

  The veil continued to whirl up into the air as effortlessly as if Sandy had disturbed nothing but the mist it had originally been formed from. Now, however, the veil had garnered a delicious coating of the purest feathers, the whitest and purest that Sandy had ever seen, as if they were more soul than physically substantial.

  It was so fine that, even emanating from that small casket, it opened up into a full veil, one easily embracing the whole of Sandy’s naked form as it at last began to fall lightly about her.

  Once gracing Sandy’s amber flesh, the veil sparkled like a mingling of captured moonbeams and sunlight.

  And the most gorgeous of swan’s wings began to spring from her virtually bared back.

  *

  Chapter 28

  There was no longer any room rising about her, confining her.

  There was no longer any house, any garden.

  Any street.

  Any city of London.

  Above Sandy there now lay nothing but a darkness graced by the sparkling of endless stars and planets.

  Below her, nothing but an even darker sea.

  Rising up from the dark waters, rising up apparently endlessly into the dark heavens, was a towering, looming stone of the most gleaming white.

  As Sandy flew across the abyss towards the towering stone, it grew larger in her vision the closer she drew towards it, such that it became a mountain, an island in possession of its own inlets, its own beaches.

  Yet somehow she knew she wasn’t here to land by its shorelines, to bathe in the waves lapping gently against the sands.

  She began to rise, to catch the prevailing currents of warm, elevating air, to coil up around the ever ascending stone.

  The stone that, after all, seemed to literally rise endlessly, to literally have no end.

 

  *

  It is written that the island of Buyan lies in the very centre of a Great Ocean that can only be crossed by the living with the help of magical serpents.

  It is also written that at the very peak of this white hot burning stone, there is a great palace, containing the great throne of the Wise Maiden; and that this is the Hall of the Heavenly Swan of the Circle of Svarog.

  The whole of creation spins around the head and feet of this beautiful maiden, for it is, after all, from her locks and her spindle
that everything is continually created.

  Seeing all this through the great windows that opened up onto the hall, Sandy couldn’t discern if the lady was herself a swan, or partially a swan, or if she held a swan in her lap: the glow emanating from the throne being too strong to allow anything but an unsatisfactorily veiled vision of her.

  There was, however, a swan at her feet. And it was this swan that abruptly seemed aware of Sandy’s presence, glancing up towards the window, rising curiously from the floor. Yet as the swan rose to her feet she became a girl, albeit one that could have been deftly woven from the maiden’s white hair; although Sandy couldn’t be sure if this was just an effect of the sparkling bright glow suffusing everything around her.

  And within that child there was a heart or a flame of weeping blood red.

  The child looked up towards Sandy, their eyes latching onto each other, locking: and Sandy instantly recognised that look, those eyes, the person lying behind them.

  They were her own eyes, Sandy instinctively sensed.

  Somehow this girl was her.

  This girl was the real Sandy.

  *

  Chapter 29

  It was a leap of consciousness that naturally took Sandy by surprise.

  Her hitherto effortless flight faltered, her wings flailed uselessly, finding nothing capable of supporting them.

  It couldn’t be possible!

  It made no sense!

  Her instinct had to be wrong!

  There was an abrupt flurry of wings, the fluttering of a vast number of immaculately white feathers; but it wasn’t the beating of Sandy’s wings, for she remained too shocked to respond even to the realisation that she was falling. As she plummeted down the face of the blanched mountain, she was surrounded by a whirl of countless doves, a flowing river of purest white.

  They could have been so so many stars.

  They could have been so so many flakes of snow.

  They could have been so so many flashes taking place within her brain, fruitlessly attempting to warn her that she was about to plunge into the dark Waters of Death.

  *

  She struck the surface of the dark waters so hard that the veil she had been entrusted with was instantly stripped from her, immediately transforming back into nothing but the misty dew it had been formed from.

  She penetrated the upper layers of the dark waters so hard that her body was shattered by the violence of it all, a liquefaction of all that was flesh, all that was bone, all that was physical.

  She plunged so hard into the lower levels of the dark waters that she sank deeper and deeper.

  And yet she retained the presence of mind to keep a firm grasp of the corner of the now hazy veil.

  She couldn’t let it go: it had been entrusted to her.

  *

  In the dark waters, the veil swirled as immaterially as a stream of grey smoke attempting to flow away from her.

  And yet within the gloom, the whirling veil was the brightest thing there, like the grey band of the Milky Way amongst the darkness of the heavens.

  Sandy didn’t need to pull any harder upon the veil than she had already done for, supported by thickened waters that made her virtually weightless, she was the one now being pulled along by the veil in its urge to rush free of the dark ocean.

  It was seeking out unsealed seams, those most minuscule of spaces that always lie unseen to the naked eye; and so the veil seeped through the otherwise unfathomable darkness, through the waters that wished to continue to wash away at an already fluidly reformable Sandy.

  The swirling, eddying ripples of the insubstantial veil rushed out before her, racing towards where the first rays of a bright light made the darkness a similar grey to itself, towards a beckoning yet unknowing half-life, half-death that joyously whirled in the upper reaches of the hall’s interior; an entwining, wafting smoke curling down towards the inhalers of so many elegantly wielded cigarettes.

  And before it appeared to completely disperse, the veil graciously encased Sandy in a silken cocoon, one substantial enough to preserve her modesty as she found herself standing within the crowded ballroom of the Russian house.

  *

  Chapter 30

  ‘Hah, I see you’ve safely returned my sister’s soul: thank you!’

  The glow that the veil had so instinctively headed towards came from the young girl standing directly before Sandy.

  She wasn’t, of course, the girl Sandy had seen upon the top of the towering white mountain. (For Sandy still firmly believed that the girl she had seen there was – in some strange, unfathomable way – a manifestation of herself.)

  She struck Sandy as being a younger sister of the swan maidens she had already come across. A more playfully mischievous, uncontrollable sister, for like everyone else around her she was happily and ostentatiously smoking a cigarette. In the crook of her other arm she held a small dog, one that Sandy believed was of a Japanese breed.

  The girl’s eyes weren’t on Sandy but on the very last vestiges of the departing veil, for her own glow illuminated it, separating it from the rest of the duller smoke.

  ‘Her soul?’

  Of course, Sandy was surprised to hear that the veil was regarded as being in some way a soul. She was even more shocked when it dawned on her that such a precious artefact had been entrusted to her.

  ‘Yes: why else do you think you’re still here, alive and talking to me?’ the girl replied matter-of-factly – adding with equal bluntness, when she noticed Sandy’s disapproving observation of the cigarette, ‘My father taught me; he thought it amusing.’

  Like an expertly practised magician, she deftly twirled the cigarette through her fingers, transforming it into a glistening feather.

  ‘The Waters of Death knit together a broken body,’ she said, returning to the point she had been making, ‘but life is only restored through the Waters of Life.’

  With another deft twirl of her fingers, she transformed the feather into a gleaming white card.

  ‘Choose a card – any card,’ she said with an impish chuckle as she handed the card to Sandy. ‘The only question we have time for is; is this card yours?’

  *

  The knight’s armour was of finest aurichalcum, one formed of previously molten amber, and glowing and electrically crackling as if forged from the sun itself.

  Even so, he was sorely pressed, his shield already shattered by the relentlessly ferocious attacks of unsurmountable odds. The shields device was of seven white swans, but only the central swan remained unsullied by the blows of axe, hammer, and mace, the strike of swords, arrows, and lances.

  Sandy couldn’t help but wonder if her acceptance of the card signalled that her visit to the Russian house had come to an end, that she would now have to spend the next few months attempting to interpret its meaning.

  The girl grinned cheekily at her, as if she had read Sandy’s thoughts and found her disappointment amusing.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said kindly, reaching out to take Sandy’s hand, expertly leading her through the crowded ballroom towards the doors, ‘I could say it’s time for things to move much quicker: because there’s no time to waste.’

  ‘And yet,’ she continued with a joyous laugh, an excited and urgent skipping of her feet, ‘it’s really because time is running short.’

  *

  Although the girl’s cryptic comment caused Sandy to frown in confusion, she also sighed in relief when, instead of being shown to the house’s front door, she was led across the hall towards the room containing the icon and paintings.

  As well as Enid, which Sandy was naturally expecting to be on display in here, there was also her Portrait of a Girl with a Blue Cloak, along with her The Beautiful Wallflower: yet this came as no surprise to her either, for she had always presumed that the ‘secret purchaser’ of these paintings had been the Russian house.

  There was, however, another large painting gracing the walls, one she recognised as being painted in her style, ye
t could only be by some other artist: A Lady Holding a Rose. She couldn’t be sure why, but Sandy also understood it to be a study of Elaine, the Lady of Asholt, a subject she had covered herself in a much earlier painting, Elaine.

  The girl in the painting was innocently waiting, ‘sub-rosa’, for a love that wouldn’t be returned, for a lover who would leave her waiting in this Moon Garden of jasmine, of lovers’ secret meetings, and romantic whispers under the stars.

  *

  Chapter 31

  Worshiping at The Reliquary of The Heart

  Like many castles, Astolat boasts a particularly high tower, one that effortlessly looms over all the others.

  And as long as she remains confined within the very highest room of this tower, Elaine the Fair is completely cut off from the rest of the world around her.

  She rarely, even, stands by the window, to look out over the glorious meadows stretching out on all sides from the castle.

  Instead, she endlessly sits before a battered shield, polishing it over and over again until it shines more brilliantly than any mirror.

  Within this mirror-like surface, Elaine sees way beyond the confines of the tower, way beyond, even, the confines of her father’s extensive lands.

  She sees right to very edges of Arthur’s kingdom.

  She sees the valiant knight fighting against odds that anyone else would find insurmountable.

  She sees the chivalrous knight sparing the lives of the defenders of a captured castle.

  She sees the handsome knight swearing to protect a lady and her lands from the unwelcome attentions of an evil earl.

  She sees everything she loves about this knight, for like an icon (or maybe even like an idol) this shield grants her images of the man she has grown to adore and worship.