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She had killed her first horse sixty years back, and eaten as much of it as she could before the flesh went rainbow-coloured and the carcass began to stink and crawl with blue flies and maggots. Now she only butchered the larger mammals in midwinter, when nothing rotted and she could hack and sear frozen chunks of the animal’s corpse until the spring thaw.
The old woman passed a mother, asleep, with a baby dozing at her breast. She dusted them, absently, as she passed, made certain that the baby’s sleepy mouth remained on the nipple.
She ate her meal of turnips and greens in silence.
***
It was the first great grand city they had come to. The city gates were high and impregnably thick, but they were open wide.
The three dwarfs were all for going around it, for they were not comfortable in cities, distrusted houses and streets as u
Once in the city, the sheer numbers of people made them uncomfortable. There were sleeping riders on sleeping horses; sleeping cabmen up on still carriages that held sleeping passengers; sleeping children clutching their balls and hoops and the whips for their spi
‘We should not be here,’ grumbled the dwarf with the angry brown beard.
‘This road is more direct than any other road we could follow,’ said the queen. ‘Also it leads to the bridge. The other roads would force us to ford the river.’
The queen’s temper was equable. She went to sleep at night, and she woke in the morning, and the sleeping sickness had not touched her.
The maggots’ rustlings, and, from time to time, the gentle snores and shifts of the sleepers, were all that they heard as they made their way through the city. And then a small child, asleep on a step, said, loudly and clearly, ‘Are you spi
‘Did you hear that?’ asked the queen.
The tallest dwarf said only, ‘Look! The sleepers are waking!’
He was wrong. They were not waking.
The sleepers were standing, however. They were pushing themselves slowly to their feet, and taking hesitant, awkward, sleeping steps. They were sleepwalkers, trailing gauze cobwebs behind them. Always, there were cobwebs being spun.
‘How many people, human people I mean, live in a city?’ asked the smallest dwarf.
‘It varies,’ said the queen. ‘In our kingdom, no more than twenty, perhaps thirty thousand people. This seems bigger than our cities. I would think fifty thousand people. Or more. Why?’
‘Because,’ said the dwarf, ‘they appear to all be coming after us.’
Sleeping people are not fast. They stumble, they stagger, they move like children wading through rivers of treacle, like old people whose feet are weighed down by thick, wet mud.
The sleepers moved towards the dwarfs and the queen. They were easy for the dwarfs to outrun, easy for the queen to outwalk. And yet, and yet, there were so many of them. Each street they came to was filled with sleepers, cobweb-shrouded, eyes tight closed or eyes open and rolled back in their heads showing only the whites, all of them shuffling sleepily forward.
The queen turned and ran down an alleyway and the dwarfs ran with her.
‘This is not honourable,’ said a dwarf. ‘We should stay and fight.’
‘There is no honour,’ gasped the queen, ‘in fighting an opponent who has no idea that you are even there. No honour in fighting someone who is dreaming of fishing or of gardens or of long-dead lovers.’
‘What would they do if they caught us?’ asked the dwarf beside her.
‘Do you wish to find out?’ asked the queen.
‘No,’ admitted the dwarf.
They ran, and they ran, and they did not stop from ru
***
The old woman had not climbed the tallest tower in a dozen years. It was a laborious climb, and each step took its toll on her knees and on her hips. She walked up the curving stone stairwell, each small shuffling step she took an agony. There were no railings there, nothing to make the steep steps easier. She leaned on her stick, sometimes, to catch her breath, and then she kept climbing.
She used the stick on the webs, too: thick cobwebs hung and covered the stairs, and the old woman shook her stick at them, pulling the webs apart, leaving spiders scurrying for the walls.
The climb was long, and arduous, but eventually she reached the tower room.
There was nothing in the room but a spindle and a stool, beside one slitted window, and a bed in the centre of the round room. The bed was opulent: crimson and gold cloth was visible beneath the dusty netting that covered it and protected its sleeping occupant from the world.
The spindle sat on the ground, beside the stool, where it had fallen almost eighty years before.
The old woman pushed at the netting with her stick, and dust filled the air. She stared at the sleeper on the bed.
The girl’s hair was the golden-yellow of meadow flowers. Her lips were the pink of the roses that climbed the palace walls. She had not seen daylight in a long time, but her skin was creamy, neither pallid nor unhealthy.
Her chest rose and fell, almost imperceptibly, in the semidarkness.
The old woman reached down, and picked up the spindle. She said, aloud, ‘If I drove this spindle through your heart, then you’d not be so pretty-pretty, would you? Eh? Would you?’
She walked towards the sleeping girl in the dusty white dress. Then she lowered her hand. ‘No. I can’t. I wish to all the gods I could.’
All of her senses were fading with age, but she thought she heard voices from the forest. Long ago she had seen them come, the princes and the heroes, watched them perish, impaled upon the thorns of the roses, but it had been a long time since anyone, hero or otherwise, had reached as far as the castle.
‘Eh,’ she said aloud, as she said so much aloud, for who was to hear her? ‘Even if they come, they’ll die screaming on the blinking thorns. There’s nothing they can do – that anyone can do. Nothing at all.’
***
A woodcutter, asleep by the bole of a tree half-felled half a century before, and now grown into an arch, opened his mouth as the queen and the dwarfs passed and said, ‘My! What an unusual naming-day present that must have been!’
Three bandits, asleep in the middle of what remained of the trail, their limbs crooked as if they had fallen asleep while hiding in a tree above and had tumbled, without waking, to the ground below, said, in unison, without waking, ‘Will you bring me roses?’
One of them, a huge man, fat as a bear in autumn, seized the queen’s ankle as she came close to him. The smallest dwarf did not even hesitate: he lopped the hand off with his hand-axe, and the queen pulled the man’s fingers away, one by one, until the hand fell on the leaf mould.
‘Bring me roses,’ said the three bandits as they slept, with one voice, while the blood oozed indolently onto the ground from the stump of the fat man’s arm. ‘I would be so happy if only you would bring me roses.’
***
They felt the castle long before they saw it: felt it as a wave of sleep that pushed them away. If they walked towards it their heads fogged, their minds frayed, their spirits fell, their thoughts clouded. The moment they turned away they woke up into the world, felt brighter, saner, wiser.