Chapter 4
31 May, 1942 CE
Oxford
“How is your sister doing, Professor?” Charlotte ducked under a wing, handing Helge a fresh bundle of steel wool.
Professor is better, Helge thought. At least she has stopped calling me my prince or my liege. The girl was funny, she made him laugh, but he flinched at the word prince. He had grown increasingly worried that he wouldn’t be able to carry out King Haakon’s wishes. “Gert’s not so good, I’m afraid.” He had seen her last night. A loose fistful of straw strewn in the bed. Her smile was wide, and her mind was sharp. “Fifty coins left, though, she says, so she’s hanging on.”
“Tell me again, how the coins work,” Charlotte said, starting in earnest to sand off every molecule of the Nazi symbols from the sides of the plane.
“It’s our birthday tradition. Gert started it when we were kids. I had seventy-seven coins this year, seventy-seven stories to hear, all about me.” It sounded ridiculous, telling it that way. Selfish somehow. “I can’t believe she keeps it up. It takes longer than an evening over cake so now my birthday stories go on forever.” It was, what, May? He and Charlotte had been working on the plane for months. The repairs to the propeller and engine were finally done. Selling some of the coins from the velvet bag, he’d been able to hire (or bribe, in these times) a mechanic to work with them on the plane and keep his mouth shut. He knew Gert would understand. Approve of how those coins were being spent. His sister wanted him to fly the plane home almost as much as he did.
He had started telling Gert stories now. About what he saw when he paced. His dream of finding the birthplace of the auroras. About Charlotte and how it felt like she was sent to him as a gift from the stars. These stories were their last gift to each other on this earth, that much he knew. The listening. Believing it all was true. “Fly us home,” she had chirped last night, “then go find what you are looking for.”
“I will,” Helge told her. Kissed her on both cheeks. Charlotte had come along on the visit. She and Gertie got on like two peas in a pod. Charlotte called her Nana G, and Gertie beamed. Charlotte had climbed right on the bed and given Gert a great big hug. “Careful now, you’ll break her in half,” Helge had laughed. He laughed often now, thanks to Charlotte.
“Nana G said fly us home last night. What did she mean?”
To explain it so she’d truly understand, he’d have to start with the story the King had given him on the night of his birthday.
“Do you want to hear the whole story, it might take a bit,” he asked Charlotte.
“I’m covered in paint dust and my arms are about to fall off! We’ve got all night, so yes, get my mind off this blasted plane.”
“Well, the plane is the story. Do you remember Gertie telling you about inviting the King of Norway to my birthday party?”
Charlotte raised an eyebrow. “That was true?”
“Yup. And so is the story he told me, as far as I can tell.” Helge climbed up on the tail of the plane and continued sanding. He and Charlotte got into a rhythm, the whisking of steel on steel making a soundtrack to his tale. A tale that had been passed on in awed whispers at every exchange of those who had helped move this plane. Details had been added, for interest or fun, but the bones weren’t strayed from. “Once, in the dark winter days of 1940 . . .” he began.
“Wait,” Charlotte paused sanding, “you’re telling me a story from two years ago? You’re starting it like a fairytale!”
“Yes, that’s how I tell stories, now listen,” Helge admonished. “And, work.”
“ . . . a farmer named Geir woke up to a flash of light that glanced over his eyes and crossed the bedroom floor, illuminating the far wall like a movie screen, then blinked out like the projector had blown a fuse. Geir fell out of the bed, covers tangled around his legs, and nearly took his wife with him, though she continued to sleep. She slept like the dead.
He could hear the whine of something huge and mechanical over the farmhouse while he ran down the stairs and out the front door. The whine quit suddenly and the air softened to the whup whup of propellers.
The plane grounded in the frozen ruts of the wintering field but the angle was too steep; the front propeller caught on a ridge and flipped the plane on its back. It cartwheeled twice more before slamming to a halt. One of the wings was sheared off and landed right next to the barn. The metallic clatter gave way to the silent night, as if nothing had happened at all.
Geir wondered if this was a dream—no—he was too cold for that. The moon was low and only half full yet he could see the broken body of the plane clearly outlined, and, in his mind, in a thirty second rewind, saw the black twirling crosses that told him which part of the war had just occupied his west field.
Geir walked quickly back into the house and got his shotgun. Shouldering the weapon, which he'd hoped to never use on a man, he crossed the rutted ground toward the wreckage. The pilot didn't move as he approached. Geir could see a dark silhouette in the cockpit, the head fallen forward. So it is true, he thought, the Germans are taking us. He was more angry than afraid, in the quiet way of his people. He prodded the shoulder of the man in the cockpit with the barrel end of his gun. There was no response. He climbed up on the wing, stretching his considerable length until he could lay his head, awkwardly, against the pilot's chest. There was life.
By the time the sun was up, and his wife, Reidun, made breakfast in the sparse kitchen, Geir had carried the soldier into the house and put him in the bed of the daughter that had recently married and moved to the city. He had covered the plane with a tarp meant for covering stacks of straw and sat down for his coffee.
Wife, he said, there is a man in our daughter's bed.
Reidun whirled on him with a shocked look on her ruddy, thin face, sending runny eggs flying out of the pan onto the linoleum. She raised the pan over her head and started toward the back bedroom.
Whoa! He said. Wait, wait. The other daughter! The one married and moved away. They both burst out laughing. Geir stood to help Reidun wipe up the mess.
Start again, Husband.
Last night a plane crashed in our field, you slept through it. The pilot is alive and I put him in our spare bed for the moment.
Reidun eyed him, concerned of course, yet not panicked even though she was as informed as he that the Germans were upon them. She remained silent and sat in her chair, inviting him to think through this situation with her.
We'll wait until he wakes up or heals or dies to see what to do next, agreed?
Wife nodded, she was wise and so was he. They finished their coffee.
“And this is that plane,” Charlotte guessed. “But this one has both of its wings. And you said you found it in a bush,” she accused.
“You knew I was lying and, yes. The wings were repaired just before you found me here. Now listen. Work,” Helge said.
Four nights later the soldier woke up and threw himself on the mercy of the husband and wife, though they couldn't understand a word he said. They studied his face and could see his anguish and desire to leave his post, if not his life altogether.
The boy was fair-haired and light-eyed. He resembled their new son-in-law in many ways, though this boy was stockier in build. They would take their chances and hide him among their people as best they could. The soldier and the farmers, with some help from a neighbor, pushed the plane into their barn, with some trouble as the floats on the bottom were better adapted to water. They’d had to remove the other wing too.
Floats. Water. Wings. These words tumbled together in Charlotte’s head coming to rest at the gate to her memories on the bank of the Thames. The gates opened with a click and the words rearranged into a vision of the ghost plane drifting silently past the girl and the tree. More memories came spooling out, some Charlotte couldn’t understand, didn’t recognize as her own. She sat very still while her insides whirled like a crazed carousel.
The next part of their plan was to get word to the King. No one at that moment could conceive of the next weeks but the plane couldn't stay in their barn. Geir only trusted the highest authority in the country to decide what was to be done.
By a chain of events, worthy of their own telling, the King sent word that he was to take exile in London and could the farmers possibly find a way to transport the plane to England. The farm roads through the countryside were open yet, and though it took months and dozens of hand-offs from one family and friend to another, the plane was spirited out of Norway only days before the Nazi occupation and into the hands of King Haakon.
“Do you believe me so far, Charlotte?” Helge asked, noticing how still she had grown.
“How did it get here?” She managed.
Helge took her manner as skepticism and continued. Helge decided to jump to his birthday. “The King of Norway came to dinner.”
“What?” Charlotte asked, sounding confused. She wanted to ask if the plane had been floated down the Thames but the words wouldn’t come. She already knew the answer and more.
Helge laughed, missing her distress signals, as happy as he was to be sharing this story with the daughter he’d never had, and, he hoped, a partner in his task.
“King Haakon had escaped and was ruling in exile from the Norwegian Legation in London. Every Norwegian in the region was invited to a reception to welcome the king. (The esteemed professor from Oxford was asked to make a presentation on the history of exploration and discovery from the shores of the homeland to bolster morale and honor their ruler. Of course he regaled his countrymen with facts about the auroras and his own theories weaved into the country's most beloved folktales so poetically that the king was brought to tears. He asked would the professor dine with him alone the next day. The two struck up a friendship based on love of the North and science and literature.) I got his ear, something I’d said, and we talked well into the night. Got to be friends. So Gert got it in her fool head to invite him to my birthday, and he came!”
Helge hesitated, then made a decision. He told Charlotte the part he hadn’t told Gert—how he had shared with King Haakon his dream of flying a plane into the north sky in an attempt to slip through the door he'd seen open to spill forth an aurora. They had been several scotches into the night. He would give his life for a glimpse of the world through that doorway, he’d confessed. (Helge didn't fully appreciate that he'd already seen it.)
King. Plane. North. These words cut through the whining noise filling Charlotte’s head. Another image, she flying a white plane. Cliffs made of ice. An urn filled with ash and a bag of coins. She could hear Helge’s voice in the distance, above her?
“I was surprised to see my friend standing in my sister’s kitchen, even more surprised after he left.” Helge had climbed into the cockpit, looking for the envelope he kept there in the boot. “The king said he wanted to give me a special present and told me the story of the plane, which brought me to mind of my lost country. I had felt a growing ache in my heart and I thanked him, stories being the favorite gifts in our family. When he was gone, I saw an envelope on the table. The paper was thick and official looking, secured with the wax seal of the king.”
Charlotte took the envelope Helge held out to her. She read.
My Friend,
I hope you won’t think ill of me, that I would put my people in danger for nothing, for a plane. When I got word from the farmer that they had captured a Nazi airship and held it in their barn, I became consumed by the notion that if I had that plane with me, in exile, as our whole country was about to be from itself, that one day our country—our land and our history—would be returned to us. We would be re-made whole. When you told me of your grandfather’s great adventure, flying his own seaplane in search of true north, I knew I had found my man. He taught you to fly, now I ask you to do this deed for us all. When this war is over, take this plane and fly us home.
July, 1942 CE
The Goddesses’ Cavern, Beneath the Red Sea
Once Hestia took her place at the council table, everyone shushed, Athena’s the last voice to trail off. “ . . . I can’t be to blame.” Her words echoed off the mineral-streaked walls of the cavern, wavering through the damp air. The firestone rose from Hestia’s hands to hang over the center of the table and began spinning slowly, flashing and sparking as blame blew past.
“Blame for what, Athena?” Hestia asked.
A list formed in Athena’s mind that she knew Hestia was stewing about. Briefly wondered which one this council was called to address. She glanced around and registered the odd mix of goddesses in attendance.
“The skirmishes of weak-minded men,” Athena said, choosing the one she could most likely defend.
“The slaughter, you mean. The skirmish in which the weak-minded men you speak of are murdering families and villages in the name of wisdom and justice and have somehow enchanted villages and nations to see and say nothing?” Though Hestia’s voice remained calm, the firestone flared and emitted a tone that bore a hole into Athena’s skull.
Athena winced. Recalled the argument she’d won over Artemis just moments before she started turning to stone. “The animals are dying,” Artemis had cried, bereft. And Athena had only truly wanted to win, even faced with her sister’s pain. She suppressed the same urge now. So difficult. Winning was her nature. “We can’t control what the humans love and hate,” she said, without much conviction. She didn’t dare speak of the gods—her father, uncles, brothers—as the goddesses had tried to reason with them directly, and they had declined. Once the goddesses declared their own position, starting their own war, it was forbidden to blame the gods for anything. The goddesses must transform the world on their own. The cards were a gift from the One, a map. In it they would find all that they needed. In this they had faith, even Athena (even if she didn’t like where the map led).
Raven appeared, gliding in circles around the firestone, growing smaller as he descended. The bird lit on Hestia’s shoulder.
“Traitor,” Athena hissed, sitting back and crossing her arms. The ravens were hers, always had been.
After a moment of silent nods between Hestia and the black bird, The Goddess of the Hearth stood to address the assembly.
“As you all know, the story of the next aeon, written by the One, Mother of Mothers, has been repainted. Our request for guidance has been fulfilled and now it is up to us to bring the new story forward before it’s too late.”
Athena seethed as Hestia’s eyes came to rest on her face. That the eyes remained kind riled her even more.
“There are matters concerning that fate, which I would like us to address, though I know our powers to see and intervene are so very limited.” Hestia did something she’d never done in front of an audience, drawing the tarot deck from a fold in her wrap and laying the cards out on the huge round table in a wheel with four spokes. The goddesses gathered pushed back from the table, unnerved, when two of the cards ascended to orbit the firestone and the wheel slowly started to turn. Not one of them had seen the sacred storybook before, except Athena (although at least a handful of those present had slipped through the doorway Frieda’s skrying had opened and happily occupied her body, sometimes while she painted).
Athena fingered the edge of the shield strapped to her back, steeling herself to take Hestia’s wrath as the card depicting the Princess of Disks turned in a slow pirouette at the hub of the wheel, her pale skin glowing under the light of the firestone.
“The war of men must be stopped somehow,” Hestia continued.
Athena looked up, caught off guard as she had been ready to respond for re-coloring the Princess of Disks. It was only the one card, the paintings refusing her influence after that as if this one had warned all the rest. But the one card she had marred pictured she-who-would-inherit-the-throne ascending to the highest of high. Once she mustered the courage to leap, she would become the priestess who ruled all of creation on the One’s behalf until it filled the world again. If Hestia knew she had changed the painting, well, Athena was powerless to imagine those consequences.
“They are learning to manipulate the elements in such a way as to cause a reaction that can, and will, incinerate the earth and all that occupy her,” Hestia continued, gesturing toward the middle of the gathering. Between the firestone and the table, a moving picture began. A landscape. A city surrounded by fields, those surrounded by villages, forests, and rivers. A burst of light at the center rippled out like a raindrop does in still water, then the ripples reversed, sucked back toward the center, and erupted in a column of pure energy stolen from every life form in its path, transforming the energy into poison. The goddesses gasped. Athena closed her eyes against the blast, trying to veil the rest of her thoughts. Hestia had pulled the images straight from her mind and projected it for all to witness her folly. Athena felt all eyes turn on her.
She thought, Behold the perfect strategic weapon.
The moving image changed and continued, blessedly without sound: farmers starved in their fields on the Siberian steppes; human lab rats in Japan, flesh boiling and sloughing off bone; bedraggled and shocked citizens across Europe herded onto trains, mounds of gray wool pinned with bright yellow stars empty of the bodies now being shoveled like coal into carts, now into ovens, now ash sifting in between roof boards and shingles mingling with the dust in the attics, unnoticed.
The goddesses wept.
Athena stormed to her feet, “ENOUGH,” pounding her fists on the table, making the raven flap its wings and squawk.
“Yes,” Hestia said quietly, “quite enough. Please, make it stop.”
Athena sat back down. The wheel of cards slowed as if in response to Hestia’s words; ATU II | THE HIGH PRIESTESS settled in front of Athena’s chair. Athena’s heart leapt. She sat up straight. Was this a coincidence? A sign? Another cruel, crabbed finger pointed at her?
That day in the attic came back. Frieda, painting the High Priestess, painting a goddess born of wood and fire and time, with a bow on her lap and three moons as her crown. There was no denying who it was. Not me, Athena knew. Those eyes opened for a moment and connected sister to sister. Eyes the color of heartbreak and the promise of a future.
Perhaps she had misunderstood, been delusional, she was so very tired. ATU II pointed to her and she hoped two things at once, to be the High Priestess and to have her sister back. If she had to choose she didn’t think that she could. “You are the Goddess of Wisdom and Justice,” Athena heard in her head. (No, Hestia’s voice, soft, from across the vast table.) “And that gift is perhaps the heaviest burden any of us carry, I know. You are your nature, Athena, you will know what to do.” And this. “I love you and trust in you.”
Athena grimaced against the pain those words caused in her body, her chest so tight her ribcage moaned, something stuck in her throat, temples pounding like drums. She had no words to name this response, not one.
She finally managed to look up and met Hestia’s eyes, listened as best she could.
“You will have enough to do stopping their war, I will go to The Village of Ash and take care of Asmeret. Take all of the goddesses that you need and do what you can to intervene. Raven and I will be taking up residence in the woods north of the girl’s village. A witch lives there who calls on me often and has agreed to share her body and hut. The child has started dreaming the dreams that come when their nature is denied or not recognized by their people. These are not a direct threat to her life, yet she lives in a dangerous place and her grandmother and her ancestors need help to train and protect her until she is of age to know her true name and claim her part in this story.” The wheel started spinning again. “Even more so with Anbessa, Asmeret’s father, away fighting the war in the north and her aunt, Daniat, seeming bent on not killing her, but breaking her.”
There was a question in Hestia’s tone, which Athena declined to answer.
Athena rose. “May I go?”
“There is one other thing.”
Athena’s stomach clenched, another new, unwelcome sensation.
“I am putting you in charge of the basecamp. I can’t be there and in Africa at the same time. You are still the commander of our own war to reclaim this world, Athena, we need you to lead us.”
Athena nodded. Hestia was their hearth and their home. She was trusting Athena to tend the north fire.
Athena started to go, then heard the goddesses tentatively start to ask Hestia questions.
“Who will be the High Priestess?” Idiots, couldn’t they see? That honor was to go to Artemis, so forgotten to men that she was powerless, curled up in a ball, shrinking—elements rearranging, reshaping into stone—while Athena, the most revered goddess in all of history was not pictured in the fucking cards at all. Even ATU VIII, the traditional card of wisdom and justice had been named ADJUSTMENT by the fool Crowley, who wrote in his pathetic book that the name of the goddess pictured was Maat, of Egypt. Frieda hadn’t minded, didn’t care really which goddess was named what in the deck. She was painting “across beliefs, myths, and cultures,” she’d told that reporter. But it did matter. Didn’t she, of all people, understand? Names are everything.
She stopped. Turned back to the assembly of goddesses.
“It appears Artemis has been given the honor,” she said, having great difficulty hiding her disdain, “and her daughters, the earth princesses, will inherit the throne for the next aeon.”
Gasps went up all around. Hestia shot Athena a look. I thought she was dead, someone said. Might I inherit? another whispered. No, because you are foolish, another answered.
“Calm down now, please, everyone,” Hestia said, “we are not the reader of these cards, not even I.” Athena rolled her eyes. “We don’t know what it means yet. I believe the girl born in the Village of Ash, the one called Asmeret, is the reader foretold, but we cannot be sure, she is still very young.”
Without another word, Athena shook herself into White Raven form then took off toward the chamber where ghost animals cascaded down, in search of their lost queen. Toward the sister she loved, and mourned. And who stood between her and the title she had earned, and deserved.
July, 1942 CE
Oxford
It took both of them to roll one towering door on its track. They grunted and laughed, then pushed the other. Helge and Charlotte stood for a moment to catch their breath and check the conditions of the sky one more time. Helge stuck a finger up in the air, as if checking the cross winds, which made Charlotte punch him lightly. “I know you can’t tell that from here,” she said. He smiled in return. Charlotte had learned all he could tell her and show her about the technical aspects of flying from inside the safety of this oversized barn. Tonight, she would learn the magic.
They had waited for the right night: the sliver of new moon shedding just enough light, a low-hanging, thin raft of clouds moving through to give them cover and help them read the wind. What more they might encounter up there was beyond their ability to predict and observe before takeoff. The German airstrikes were sporadic since the horrific attacks on London last fall. The airspace over Oxford remained relatively clear but they would have to be prepared for anything.
“Ready?” He asked.
“Yes.” She said. No hesitation.
She had disappeared for two weeks after the night he told her about King Haakon’s request, not even sitting for Helge’s final exam. The nurses told him she visited Gertie so he knew she was okay. At his sister’s memorial service Charlotte had silently slipped in beside him and taken his hand. The next day they painted the plane black.
“Take the pilot seat,” he told her as they walked to the plane. She didn’t argue. He watched her kiss her own fingers and touch the name brushed in white script under the pilot’s window before climbing in: The Amelia, Princess of Air.
The Amelia whirred to life and bumped over the threshold of the warehouse into the night. She glided over the ground Helge had paid the farmer to scrape flat. Even so they would need the luck of the gods to clear this takeoff space, he thought. He watched Charlotte execute the maneuvers as if she’d invented flying herself. When The Amelia’s nose lifted and wheels lost contact with the earth, barely missing the tops of a row of fully grown oaks, Charlotte tipped her own nose to the air, closed her eyes and howled. Helge was startled, then laughed, then joined her in howling with his inky deep voice.
They soared, making lazy turns, Helge teaching Charlotte how to use the position of the moon to navigate. When they slipped into a gray thicket of cloud The Amelia rattled and shook, Charlotte grinned, excited, and winked at Helge as they burst through the other side. The stars seemed to dance and rearrange as they flitted from window to window in response to The Amelia’s loops and rolls. Once, the plane dropped into an air pocket and fell straight down like a lift whose cables had been cut from above. Charlotte never flinched, following Helge’s voice until they recovered. He said to her after, “You are the Princess of Air,” and she had smiled and said, “No, I am but a bit of cloud, ruled by the moon.”
July, 1942 CE
Freedom, Iowa
The porch door banged shut behind her as she hurried down the rotting wood steps. “Gosh, Alicia, wake the whole darn house up,” she admonished herself. She broke into a run down the long, sloping yard of her parents’ farmhouse hoping to get out of earshot if Jerome had woken up. Her son was five now, big for his age, and still didn’t like his mother to be out of his sight. She didn’t blame him, the poor boy had no way to understand where his dad had gone, understand about war, and why all the talk about when Jerry would come home had stopped. Couldn’t understand how that future was gone. She didn’t understand either.
The sun was just cresting over the roof of the Whitford’s barn a half mile down the road but it was hot as blazes already. The dust clung to her legs as she ran, still damp from the bath she’d taken at three in the morning; her cracked skin easier to soothe than her cracked heart.
Alicia thought the dust would drive her mad in this god forsaken place, always pawing at her. Insinuating itself into every fold and crevice of her skin. Coating her teeth and her tongue, salting the lace runner on her dressing table when she brushed out her hair. This was dust unlike anything else. Grainy and thick. Laced with cow dung and chemicals sprayed in endless cycles to super-enhance the growth and death, simultaneously, of the six main crops and two thousand plus varieties of ‘weeds’ grown in this county. She could taste it all through her pores.
She slowed when she came to the rutted tracks where the tractors lurched toward the back fields. She picked over the rocks jutting out of the dried mud on feet that never hardened into calluses on the bottom. Alicia couldn’t bear the weight of shoes, so her feet were perpetually bruised and tender. When she reached the field, planted in corn, she considered stripping off the white nightgown. She hiked it up to her thighs instead. The gown had been a wedding gift from her grandmother. Something old, she’d said. Made in the old country, kept in her trunk for the eldest granddaughter; a tradition Alicia wasn’t sure her grandmother hadn’t made up to quench any jealousies between the three girls. They were so close in age, the Hanson sisters. They fought to claim the best of what little Freedom had to offer.
They were all three pretty, but Alicia’s beauty was deeper—she had an inner calm and coolness that drew people of all ages to her. Jerry was the biggest prize you could win in Freedom when she was seventeen, so she took him for herself. He was built like a draft horse and tanned to near black every summer. She had loved running her cool hands all over his straining body while he moaned with pleasure. She wouldn’t let him make love to her until he drove her out to the lake. She’d leap from his truck, stripping as she went and dive off the dock. He’d find her underwater and carry her back to where he’d laid a blanket in the long grass. Make love to her wet and clean under the stars where the dust couldn’t touch her. The telegram telling her Jerry was dead won her the prize of twentieth war widow in the county. She’d worn her grandmother’s wedding gift every night since.
Alicia waded through the corn, knee high by fourth of July, at least something is going right. She tugged at the hem of the delicate fabric where it had snagged on a young stalk, careful lest one of the tiny crystals sewn into the lace come off. Freed, she continued through an overgrown orchard where she took care not to startle the deer from their beds. She came to her pond in a clearing where the orchard met with a forest of sorts on three other sides. A mish-mash of trees—seeds transplanted by wind from their original stands—tilted at crazy angles fighting for light. The result made the pond appear surrounded by a dance troupe of giants flinging their arms and hair, all in the bright costumes and jewels of their native countries. This was Alicia’s secret place; she hadn’t even told Jerry about it.
The sun broke over the heads of the dancers as Alicia stepped into the pond, nightgown and all, making the swan who nested here every year rock side to side. Alicia noted the missing mate. No sign of him yet and her alone, but not lonely. She was surprised and pleased at the thought—relieved by that possibility for herself. The dust peeled off her, swirling in eddies to the edges where little flotillas got caught in the reeds. White water lilies opened lazily and rocked on their stems, rooted in the muck a good four or five feet under the blossom. Tiny turtles peeked out of their shells and plopped into the water, jostled from their lily pad beds. Alicia floated on her back, the white gown soaked to her skin, turning pink where the curves of her breasts and belly described the line between above and below. As the crystals glinted and flashed back at the sun in a code only they understood, Alicia let the dream come.
July, 1942 CE
Chipping Campden
As soon as Frieda emerged in the attic, the key in her hand started to vibrate. She let it go and watched, mesmerized still, as it rose up to hover just under the rafters and the interlaced circles started to turn. Little flashes of light, sometimes actual sparks, flew out of the space between the three orbs. It had happened the first time a few months ago. The key, which she generally set down on a small side table by the door in the floor, suddenly started to rattle and rise. Frieda was used to the key in motion by now, always connected to her own body somehow, and now the key seemed connected to the cards.
Frieda took the cards from their silk scarf, laid them out in a wheel with four spokes, and waited. Ben would arrive soon. She hoped he could understand, or at least not run, when she showed him how the cards and the key had started to move on their own. She hadn’t seen Ben since last September when she’d said goodbye. With bombs raining down in London, such a short train ride to the north, goodbyes were serious business these days but life had to go on. It had become the whole country’s mantra. Ben needed to finish school, see about Charlotte, and Frieda needed to let him go.
He’d sent her a telegram last week. Staying in Oxford. Worried about C. Need to see you.
A lone blue spark drifted down from the key and landed on one of the minor arcana cards. Frieda brushed it away. “I have to get a second set made,” she thought. What would she do if this one burned up? The process of getting the cards accepted by a publisher was longer and harder, and more expensive, than she had ever imagined. She’d had to cajole sponsors into hosting two more gallery shows and had nearly tapped out all of her friends’ and Percy’s good will. Damn that printer, if only they hadn’t misplaced the other two sets she’d had made from this one. Now their operation had been put into one hundred percent service to the war effort. They wouldn’t even take her calls.
The door in the floor flipped opened with a bang. Frieda nearly jumped out of her skin. She’d left the door to the cottage unlocked for Ben and was so lost in her thoughts she hadn’t heard him. As he stepped into the room she felt herself flush on top of her racing heart. God he was beautiful. This thought that of a proud elder of the man’s clan, not a goddess-addled old woman filled with lust. Frieda had been feeling quite herself again, well, herself with a magicked key and cards that rearranged themselves on her floor.
“Bloody Hell?” Ben stared at the key. It was shooting out tiny lightning bolts at his arrival. This was going to be interesting.
“Hello Ben,” Frieda started, hoping he would follow her lead and ignore the spectacle for now. “Come over here and hug an old lady.”
Ben didn’t move so Frieda went to him. Tipped up on her toes and pecked the cheek he leaned down to offer, never taking his eyes off the floating spheres.
“Sit. Drink. Tell me about Charlotte.” That did it. Mention the name of the woman a man hopelessly loves and you have his attention.
Together, they padded to the same spot where they had spent long nights last summer trying to read the cards and occasionally succumbing to the Will of those shimmering creatures who slipped into their bodies then left them trembling and spent in a rumpled mound of pillows and guilt.
Ben paused, dropping her hand.
“They’re gone,” Frieda said, “but now this.” She waved her hand at the wheel of cards on the floor and the key he had used many nights to let himself into the cottage.
“What is this?” Ben asked, finding his voice. It sounded deeper to Frieda. More serious.
“Off the record?” Frieda laughed.
Ben cocked that eyebrow. Their relationship had gone completely ‘off the record’ pretty quickly after he filed his article on the Randolph Hotel show. The phrase had become their shield against the darker side of whatever it was that was happening to them. Saying it broke the awful silence after and they would laugh and begin crafting outrageous headlines for his paper about their behavior.
“Do you remember ATU V, The Hierophant?” As if on command the wheel turned, landing the card at his feet.
Ben jumped back, “I do now!” He was starting to prance like a panicky deer.
“Calm down, sit down. I can explain.” I think.
“I’ll stand, thanks.”
“Very well, have it your way.” Frieda picked up The Heirophant and stepped inside the rim of the wheel. “You have held the key, felt it vibrate, right?”
Ben nodded, folding his arms.
“And you agreed that our, um, strange affair wasn’t us all the time, well not me all of the time anyway, but somehow an act of the goddesses.”
“I think agreed is a strong term,” he retorted.
“You were happy enough with the explanation when it suited your needs,” Frieda shot back, her ire rising fast. Blue light flashed over her head, white-silver-white sparks exploding like fireworks. Ben sat down, or was knocked down by the force of her.
“Are you a witch?” he asked.
She laughed, nervous at the question. “I don’t think so,” she said quietly.
Frieda sat down too.
“Mystic, I think.” She handed him the card. He took it.
“Look at the scepter he is holding. Aleister gave me no description to follow for The Hierophant’s staff, so I painted the key. It seemed right. I remember wishing I could capture in paint how the rings are all interconnected and not. Of course it wasn’t doing that then,” she said, looking up. “Later, when we met for him to approve this painting he became quite agitated, asking me where I’d gotten the idea. I told him from a book. An Italian family, the Borromeans, used the rings as their crest, which is true. He shut up then so I kept him drinking and finally he spilled what he knew.”
“Which is?” Ben asked. Frieda smiled to herself, she had him. Curiosity was Ben’s nature, especially when it came to their country’s pre-Christian history. She told him a version of this story.
Aleister examined the three interlaced circles on the painting with a loupe he extracted from his coat pocket; the unmistakable shadows on the iron, discernible only by the practiced eye, defined the continuous gap between every ring. Under the gas lamplight, the rings even appeared to be spinning on their own axes, never touching.
"What is this?" he had demanded, his voice slicing the smoky air into sharp strips.
Frieda looked at him coolly, waiting him out. He often sputtered like an engine with bad gas in the tank, and then choked himself quiet. This time his eyes went from his usual angry squint to a wide-eyed countenance that reminded her of a cornered animal.
"Where did you get—" He stopped mid-sentence, shut his mouth, and narrowed his eyes again.
Frieda realized he knew something about her key and she lied.
"I saw a photograph in one of my books about old Italian gardens and those lovely scrollwork gates. You didn't specify what the top of the staff looked like, and I thought this design looked fine. Balanced, don't you think?"
She had found through difficult trial and error that downplaying her knowledge, which was considerable and surpassed Aleister's in many ways, created a space where his elephantine ego could stomp around without having to change a thing she had done. Revision was time consuming anyway, and costly. Working in watercolor made it nearly impossible to alter a canvas, and starting over meant losing something of the work's original energy. It was in both of their interests to keep moving ahead. She watched Aleister raise his trunk and flare his nostrils.
"Well of course the blasted Christians will think this is their holy trinity. The three rings represent the outgoing aeons of Isis and Osiris and the incoming Aeon of Horus." He trumpeted this news as if he had told her to paint the ringed staff himself for just this effect.
Frieda pried a bit then, buying him drinks and dumping hers on the floor, making a dark mud of sawdust and ale. "Tell me more," she said every so often as the unexpected history of her key poured out.
Aleister blustered against the noise of the pub. "Pictographs dated to the eighth century BC show the staffs and rings forged by men then magicked by gods. The scepters were given to the three most powerful mystics and carried all of the secrets of the universe. Long training and an unbroken bloodline from the original three were required to wield their power and interpret the mysteries,” he explained, drawing circles and lines on the table with a craggy finger he wetted with beer. “In this way the scepters were the source of all the world's greatest folklore and myths. One by one the scepters fell silent and finally all were lost and thought gone forever."
This concluded his oratory. He wiped the table clean with his sleeve for emphasis and stood up to relieve himself in the alley.
While Aleister crashed around the pub, drunk and surly, Frieda had understood he was humiliated to think she had somehow known that this was the scepter the priest of ATU V would be holding, while it hadn't occurred to him.
She had wondered what he would think if he knew she had one of the scepters under her porch steps and that it orbited her as if she were the largest mass in its universe.
If she believed Aleister, which she was inclined to do given the uncanny actions of the thing, the relic that floated overhead was one of three scepters forged in the British Isles to mark the start of the period now called the Iron Age of Men.
“The key found me, Ben. It was buried in the ruins of a castle on the Rhine. It literally came to my hands. I think I am the next link in a very long chain. The key and the cards are tied together somehow. When the key rises, I lay the cards where it moves my hands, in this wheel usually. Then it delivers me cards and I can see bits of a story. I know there is more.”
Ben whistled through his teeth, “Lady, you are one crazy bird.” He grinned and she could see the boy in him again.
Frieda sighed with relief. Ben was smart, but he didn’t overthink.
“So, about Charlotte?” She asked.
“Can this thing tell the future?” He asked, tossing his head toward the wheel.
“Not with me at the helm, though it always seems dead on with what I need to see most right now.”
Ben settled back; took a sip of the ale she’d had ready for him.
“Charlotte came to my flat a couple months ago, right before the end of term. She’d been avoiding me since the day she arrived back in January. Then there she was. Said she wanted what I wanted. For us to be together, and we had this amazing two weeks. Said I was good for her. Grounded her, my better half and all that. I almost proposed to her, I swear. Then she disappeared.”
“Is she all right?” Frieda interrupted. She felt she knew Charlotte, as much as Ben talked about her, and went cold at the word disappeared.
“No, yeah, I mean she’s fine. Not fine. But not dead. Bloody hell, that sounds awful. I am an idiot.”
“No, honey, you are worried. Slow down, tell me what happened next.”
“So she tells me right before she goes that this old lady died and her brother, one of her professors, left her a plane and now she is going to fly it!”
“Who left her a plane?”
“I don’t know, that isn’t the point.” Ben sounded as mad as a bull.
“I am listening,” Frieda said, trying to stay calm, which definitely was not in her nature.
“She dropped out of school. Wrote her father, she showed me the letter. She is going to have this professor teach her to fly this dodgy old plane. There is a war on!” He nearly screamed.
No wonder he is so jumpy, Frieda thought. She was feeling jumpy herself.
“Do you know where to find her?” Frieda asked.
“Yeah, probably. She took me to see the plane. Met the old guy. She called him Professor G. He called her his Princess of Air. Something’s not right and I can’t punch out an old geezer. I don’t know what to do. I told her the guy was a creeper and to get out of there and she hasn’t spoken to me since.”
Frieda’s heart was pounding so hard she could barely hear.
“Did you say Princess of Air?”
September, 1942 CE
Eastern Front, Russia
Charlotte had lost track of her own lies. She hadn’t even told Helge about these night flights. Oh, he knew she was flying The Amelia, nearly every night. He encouraged her, understanding the pull of the sky. Even while he worried endlessly, he helped procure fuel and keep the plane tuned, so that she could practice under cover of dark. The war was on, of course, so flying by day was out of the question. As was becoming a pilot for the Royal Air Force. Even if they’d have her, she didn’t know if she could fly their planes. Even she knew that the maneuvers she made in The Amelia should be impossible for a seaplane in the hands of a novice. And truly, she was no warrior, she was a scientist. So how had she gotten here? Here in this plane. (Here on the shifting border between the Ukraine and the USSR, near Stalingrad, she estimated, 4,000 kilometers from home!) For once in her life, she hadn’t thought it out. She’d followed her instincts, (which had sharpened considerably, along with her night vision and hearing), and now her life had become completely irrational. When she tried to make sense of it all, even any small part of it, she felt as if she was going mad.
A faint ring in her ears snapped her back to attention.
She couldn’t see them, yet her ability to sense the vibrations in the air had grown so keen she knew not only where the enemy planes were in relation to her, but how many. Nine. Knew their formation, (three groups of three, stacked like arrows shot from a bow one after the other); and their intentions, dropping their payload on the sleeping, unsuspecting, and perhaps innocent (perhaps not), people on the ground. What is innocence, what is guilt? What is good and what is evil? She asked herself these questions night after night, driving these planes and their pilots out of the night sky—some died in the impact and she knew that too. When she tried to think through the answers, and their implications, her brain seemed to overload and shut off. Still, she needed an answer to what she was doing, and what that made her. One she could live with.
Charlotte was about to turn toward the on-coming pack, to engage them in ways the seaplane she flew shouldn’t have been capable of, when she felt something else approaching the formation from the north. Charlotte pulled up to position herself in the airspace where the German planes would pass below in less than a minute. As she watched, three biplanes, no more than crop dusters bearing Soviet red stars, attacked the bombers on their flank. It was like watching sparrows attack hawks, doing their damage with quick pokes and jabs that harassed the bigger crafts into mistakes that caused their demise. Out of the ensuing melee of swirling wings, Charlotte watched all nine bombers spiral to the ground, one by one, on the Russian side of the River Don.
As the Soviet planes circled back, Charlotte swore she heard whoops and war cries of voices that were distinctly in the frequency range of women. Where had they come from? Who were these night flyers? Charlotte thought about following them; she knew how to keep an undetectable distance (for a brief moment she hoped that these warring women might be her pack and that she could belong somewhere at last), then she had another, stronger, urge. She headed for the field where the planes had gone down.
Finding her opening (she didn’t need much) Charlotte landed The Amelia with a line of trees between her and the newly plowed graveyard.
She sat in the cockpit of The Amelia for a long time, no one knows how long. Then pulled herself up and out of the plane, stripping off her leather flight gear and goggles. It was a warm night, with no wind to speak of, but she shivered and clutched her arms over her chest, hunching over as she walked as if into a stiff, cold gust. For a moment she stood between two trees, reluctant to get any closer. They were in full leaf and the canopies rustled gently above her, the trees settling after the great disturbance. As the smoke thinned, Charlotte could see these trees had been lucky. Others had been crushed and mangled under the weight and velocity of the metal hulks that rained down upon them in their unsuspecting, innocent slumber. What had they done but bear witness to this chaos and madness, silently converting poison to breathable air? Charlotte reached out and stroked the bark of the tree nearest, letting herself feel the rough coat on her fingertips. Distracting herself from feeling anything else. She sat down, closed her eyes. Only a minute, she thought, then I will look.
A screech made her jump up. A white bird landed in the top branches of a tree across the field. The bird was giant, almost as tall as herself, Charlotte calculated given the expanse of the smoldering wreckage. As if on command, a fleet of flapping, winged creatures whisked in from all directions and descended on the ruins of airplanes and men.
Moments later, the white bird took off. A raven, Charlotte noted. The black fleet were ravens too, she realized. Dozens of them.
They hopped and flitted toward the carcasses—hunched, hanging, strewn in pieces between metal that had been sculpted by force into unrecognizable, evocative forms. Charlotte followed a raven—the biggest one.
Watched it flutter up to a body, broken and torn, muscle and bone visible through the scorched uniform. Watched the bird pick its way to the mouth. Dip its hooked beak as if taking a drink, then stand—still and silent—digesting. Charlotte made herself listen to the slick rip and pop when the bird began to dismantle flesh from skeleton.
She held her breath as the massive raptor gulped down a strip of meat then leaped off the body and stood right in front of her. The top of the raven’s head reached Charlotte’s chin. They looked one another in the eyes, then the raven unfolded his wings and took off.
The rest of the birds followed.
Charlotte was alone.
She turned back toward The Amelia. She’d gotten the answer she needed, for now.
If Athena had stayed she would finally have seen the Princess of Air’s face. She would have claimed her, too soon, and where would we be now? Thank God it didn’t happen that way, if I might borrow a familiar phrase to convey the importance of the moment in a way you might appreciate.
Instead, Athena flew from the treetop overlooking the carnage (where the ravens were doing their work, releasing the memories and souls of the dead from the husks that had housed them), to follow her Night Witches home. They would want to celebrate, to be congratulated by their commander. Athena played the role well, always had. Never before for women though. It had its own challenges. Running the goddess’ basecamp these past months had prepared her, somewhat.
She arrived before they did (thanks to her power to fly outside of time by a small margin when in the form of White Raven) watching them come in. The small regiment landed, one after the other, with perfect technique. Athena was waiting for her pilots on the tarmac. She had employed her usual methods (in this case helping herself to the body and reputation of Major Marina Raskova) to get the proper approvals and equipment to train and deploy these warriors. Night Witches. Athena wasn’t fond of the nickname the German’s had given the women, out of mortal dread, they not having the perspective to more accurately name them Night Goddesses.
“Мой коммандер,” the six women greeted Athena/Marina, then gave their report in clipped, crisp tones.
“Хорошо. Уволенный.”
Athena watched them go. Will it be enough, she wondered, to change this careening course toward the end of the world? Her powers of foreseeing every possible outcome had waned considerably in the last two years. Since the cards had been repainted, she’d felt herself weaken in numerous, small ways. Enough to evoke something approaching fear, if fear was any part of her nature.
Hestia trusted her. That had been a shock. And Athena found herself wanting to please her. Not let her down. She’d assembled every goddess in basecamp and, for the first time, asked them what they thought could be done. Gave them three days and nights to come back with ideas. And so they had. Small groups of fifty to one hundred reported their strategies, all with one common, unified thread. The women, they all said. It lies in their hands and their hearts to bring the war of men to an end. We can’t control what they love and hate, but we can help them have what they truly desire.
Athena had taken on the air strategy herself. It was her specialty so of course no one argued. She didn’t confess that finding and training squadrons of female night warriors would also help her find the one in the cards, the Princess of Air. The one who should be hers.
Athena sighed. She was growing tired. If only she did have a crystal ball, like one of those gypsy fortunetellers, she could check in on the other goddesses’ work without lifting a finger, or a wingtip. Instead she shook herself into White Raven and did her rounds.
It had been intense for the goddesses at first. The women had the desire yet not necessarily the courage or confidence to step forth with their gifts. Thankfully, when Frieda had begun painting the cards a door cracked open that had been closed for some time. One that allowed a goddess to slip into a human body and shape her thinking, share the complete confidence in the gifts they carried in common, and move her to act in ways she never thought that she could. Once the inspiration had taken root, once an idea in a woman’s head grew into an obsession and the woman stepped out of her house, or her flat, or her office or classroom and into the costume and name of spy, smuggler, pilot, assassin, poet, the goddess could slip out and leave the woman to carry on. Athena remembered the night when the goddesses gathered at basecamp in despair. “There are simply not enough of us,” they cried. “Persist, do what you can,” Athena had thundered. And then the next report. A shift. The woman had begun inspiring one another, calling each other out. Reaching toward one another across the lines of the invisible web, coming up with new strategies and conjuring strengths and powers that had been, until then, unseen and untapped.
These women. It might be enough to end this war without ending the species, or the world, but what then of me? Sometimes she thought humans deserved to wipe themselves out, if only she could ensure her own survival. Athena thought of her own blurry future and the child who had been chosen to read the new story. To write her out of it, if she chose. The whole notion was completely absurd! She dared not finish the thought about the One that started to form, even if she didn’t say it out loud. The child. It all hinged on the Ash Girl. Perhaps there was still some kind of hope. After all, the girl was only two, anything could happen.
Could she go there without Hestia knowing, she wondered? I will only take a look. I won’t intervene, she promised herself.
By dawn, Athena watched Asmeret and the other one, the pretty little girl, holding hands, step past the dirt floor of the village compound and into the tall grass. Watched Daniat fly out of nowhere with a hatchet and behead the snake that had reared up, hooded and poised in front of the girls. Heard her hiss to Asmeret, “That’s what you did to your brother.”
Athena looked away when the child started to cry, astounded by the impulse to pick up the girl and tell her everything would be all right.
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