THE SLEEPING LANDS By David LeVack
She awoke to the cacophony of unsettling sounds. She was not a woman easy to stir; she was not of boundless and bundled nerves. Her gait was of determined steps and her movements of the most precise and definite. She was of savvy and not flights of fancy, for that of which her sister was guilty. A trait she can only with passing, endear her sister all the more for. She lay, with patulous lids drawn, discerning the cause of her alarmed rousing. She sought first the culprit most credulous: That of debris, wild and whipped from the stables by the wind, flittering against the glass of her window pane. This thought terminated as abruptly as it had occurred, sure as she had become it was not this discord that had awaken her to nervousness. It was then, through firm scrutinizing, that she heard the efflorescent labored whimpering from her sister’s chambers. She slued her fair delicate legs, as grace and poetry from under the bedding. Her nightgown pattered as she bent forward to light her carrying lantern. The last of her matches had been used in the birth of the eve when she was taken of insomnia. Where in sleeps stead she read a maladroit letter, januis clausis, by the tawny light of that once glorious lantern that now sat cold and indifferent. As for that maladroit letter, upon which her mind has circled as a buzzard of carrion does assess the smells and sights of its ultimate desire, A token from the young man whom she had left in Novgorod. Its simplicity made it all the more heart achingly beautiful, in this bare sterile land. Those streets of Novgorod. So full of pestilence and death for a young lady and man in love. Plague and vermin cared not for the simple emotions of man and woman. There was, what little could be drawn, incentive by decree of the lords of Russia, in the inelastic lands of north Siberia. Cold Siberia. Stagnant Siberia of dark and lumbering and sleeping lands. Where the lords of Russia did banish their Gorgons and Hecatonchires to a domain of interminable death and unrelenting cold.