Rose Daughter

by Robin McKinley

  Just where did the food she ate come from? Conjured out of the air from dust motes? There were hardly even dust motes in the Beast’s palace; the sunbeam that woke her in the mornings was washed clean. But even sorcerers had to negotiate with ordinary merchants for some things; she knew her father’s story about the hydra who answered the front door. Her friend the salamander preferred real flies to the magical banquets his master laid out on grand occasions.

  Beauty thought of the fourth side of the courtyard she stood in, which she had not yet explored. There were doors on each of the other three, even if one only led (at least, led her) to her rooms, and one was sealed shut. Her curiosity rearoused by the mysterious weather vane, her conscience pricked by hedgehogs, and her memory disturbed by dreams, she decided that lunch could wait a few more minutes. She would have a look first at the fourth side of the courtyard.

  She walked along the glasshouse wall instead of nearer the palace, half thinking that she should begin looking for vents or vent openings; she was a little worried that just as the glasshouse door opened by putting your hand on the handle and turning it, like all the other doors she had known except the ones in the Beast’s palace, and as she had taken on the dying roses as her special care, so perhaps the glasshouse cooling system might be her practical responsibility too.

  Perhaps it was studying the shining ridged whorls and scintillant beams and bars—sometimes it was as though they ran up and down for no other reason than to give her pleasure, for she could often make no sense of them architecturally; but she found herself laughing as she looked—that made the time pass so quickly. Almost before she thought of it, she was already rounding the corner of the glasshouse and looking down that fourth side. And there was another open archway, like the one to the wild wood. She went towards it eagerly, teasing herself with ideas of what might lie beyond in the few moments before she could see for herself.

  The tunnel felt shorter, perhaps because it was so much brighter. This one did not debouch upon a wild wood; here was an orchard.

  It was the wrong time of year for apples and pears—and plums and peaches and apricots—but they were there all the same. She plucked a peach and bit into it, cupping her free hand under her chin for the juice she knew would run down it; when she finished the peach, she lapped the little pool of juice from her palm and then knelt and wiped her hands on the grass and her face on a reasonably clean corner of her skirt. It wasn’t lunch, but it would keep her a little longer while she explored.

  She didn’t see him at first; she saw only another huge old tree at a little distance; his back was to her, and the near black of his hair blended into the unrelieved black of his clothing, and both into their background. Then he turned without seeing her and pulled an apple off the tree he stood next to and ate it, neatly, in two bites, core and all. I am a Beast; I cannot eat like a man. She thought of the peach juice running down her chin, but she waited till his hands had dropped to his sides again before she stepped forward.

  He saw her but made no move towards her, and so she hesitated, uncertain of her welcome. “It is a lovely day for a picnic,” she said, but her voice betrayed her, and picnic wavered, ending like a question.

  He still said nothing, so she turned to go. “If you are enjoying my orchard, stay,” he said.

  “I do not wish to disturb you,” she said.

  He shook his shaggy head. “You do not—” he began, and stopped. “I would be glad of your company,” he said.

  She came to stand next to him, and then, uncertain again, stepped away, leant against a tree. “You must be very fond of fruit, to have so magnificent an orchard,” she said.

  He gave a rumble that might have been a laugh. “The magic consents to feed me, to keep me alive,” he said.

  “Fruit?” she said, astonished. “You—” Her mind flew back over her meals in the Beast’s palace. “There is no meat on your table.”

  The Beast nodded. “I am a Beast, and other beasts fear me. They cannot live here in peace because of my presence, and I cannot give them a merciful death. I sent them away, long ago. No beast—no other beast—comes here now but Fourpaws.”

  And a few hundred butterflies, a bat, and four hedgehogs, thought Beauty, and ask me again tomorrow morning. But she did not interrupt.

  “Fruit sustains me,” continued the Beast. “When I was first here, the orchard fruited in the autumn, as orchards do; and sometimes in early summer, no matter how careful I had been about storing my previous year’s crop, before the next harvest, I grew very hungry. I ate grass, but it did not agree with me. Over the years the trees have carried their fruit earlier and earlier—and longer and longer.

  “I told you last night that the magic here can touch nothing living. Within the walls of the courtyard, it is master; outside those walls it … may ask. The front garden answered and obeyed. But here, in this orchard … It is the trees who have chosen to carry their fruit early and late; it is not magic that compels them.”

  Beauty knew what he was about to say before he said it, and she had her mouth open to protest almost before he spoke: “But my poor roses—”

  “The glasshouse is different,” said Beauty almost angrily. “The glasshouse is not like the rest of the palace. It doesn’t change. It isn’t one thing one minute and something else the next. It is itself.”

  “It is the heart of this place,” said the Beast, “and it is dying.”

  Beauty put her hands over her ears, as if she would not hear him. “No. No. There is something wrong there, but we are putting it right, the roses and I. I do not know what it is that has gone wrong. I think it is only that it has been neglected for too long. Neither you nor the magic can tend it, but I can. It will not die. It will not. I will not let it.” She took her hands away from her ears and took a deep breath. A little breeze curled round her warm face and patted her cheeks, bringing with it a whiff of a deep-scented rose. Her hands were shaking. “There is cheese on your table—and butter,” she said abruptly, remembering.

  “Yes,” said the Beast. “There is cheese and butter.”

  “But—” She looked at him, and he looked at her; but it came to her that she was learning to read his face, and she knew he would answer no questions about the cheese and the butter. But even after she realised this, she went on looking at him, and he at her. The little breeze swerved round her and blew the heavy mane off the Beast’s forehead. It was only the strangeness of what he is, she thought. It is as if you looked at a—a hedgehog and expected it to be a rabbit, or looked at a cat while anticipating a phoenix. I wonder what the hydra thought of the first human being it ever saw, and whether it liked answering a front door that always opened on creatures with only one head.

  She looked away. “And bread.” She thought of Lionheart and added hastily, “And vegetables.”

  “Vegetables,” agreed the Beast, without enthusiasm. “They are all grass, as far as I am concerned, but the vegetable garden is that way, if you are interested.”

  She laughed at him then, because he sounded like a small boy, not like a very large grown-up Beast with a voice so deep it made the hair on the back of your neck stir when you heard it. “But vegetables are good for you,” she said, and added caressingly, “They make you grow up big and strong.”

  He smiled, showing a great many teeth. “You see why I wish to eat no more vegetables. But I am sure the magic is glad of someone to cook and bake for more capable of being pleased than I.”

  Beauty thought of the five slices of toast she had eaten that morning, and the half pot of marmalade. She had been very hungry, after no supper the night before. “You speak of—of it—as if it were a person.”

  “I think of it as such. Or”—he hesitated—“as much of a person as I am. I think—I sometimes think—we are both a bit bewildered by our circumstances. But as with this orchard, we have grown into each other’s ways, over the years.”

  You speak and you move, and the echo in your voice says that you know yourself to be trappe
d here. As if you and—and the magic are both trapped. But the trees carry their fruit for you, and you sent the other beasts away, that they might not be unhappy. “You have been here a very long time,” she said tentatively.

  “Yes. I have been here a very long time. And you have been standing talking to me a very long time. Go eat your lunch. Even magic can’t keep it hot forever.”

  Dismissed, she ran off, wishing she dared invite him to accompany her, aware of his gaze on her back, watching her go, wondering if he would still be there by the time she returned after lunch, to smuggle a few hedgehogs into the vegetable garden. He had sent all the other beasts away, long ago. But the trees had learnt to listen to him, and now the beasts were returning.

  She was both disappointed and relieved that she did not see the Beast later, with her skirt full of hedgehogs. She made her way as swiftly as she could through the long pathless grass in the orchard, keeping the courtyard archway behind her; her burden made her a little slow and cautious, both for her sake and for her passengers’, and a little clumsy; nor could she entirely resist the temptation to look round her, even at the risk of losing her footing or straying from the shortest route. The grass was spangled with wildflowers, and she saw tall bulrushes a little way off, at the bottom of a gradual slope, suggesting water, but it was too far away for a diversion.

  It was not too long before there rose up before her another sort of wall, an old brick wall, such as might contain an old garden. There was a wrought-iron gate in the wall, and the glimpse she had through it gave her a little warning, but still the garden was a surprise. “Oh! This is how the glasshouse should look!” The words burst out of her. She knelt, to let the hedgehogs roll off her lap, but she was looking round her all the time.

  The paths that ran away from her in three directions were wide enough to walk along—and to let sunlight in—but no wider, and in some places the great vegetable forest leant over them, and in other places it sprawled across plots the size of banqueting halls. The rhubarb were tall as trees, the runner bean vines taller than giants; the red-stemmed chard, brilliant as rubies in the afternoon sun, grew as high as her waist, though the leaves were still a fresh young green; and the cabbages, some of them so big around she could not have circled them with her arms, bore extravagant frills as elaborate as ball gowns and as exquisitely coloured; and there were melons nearly the size of Rose Cottage. Did the Beast eat melons? she thought. I must ask. And figs—for there were fig trees espaliered against the walls, looking as if they needed the support of the wires to hold up their splendid weight of fruit.

  She looked down, so as not to step on any hedgehogs, and saw that they had all uncurled, and were standing up on their legs, and sniffing the air in an interested manner. She thought one of them looked up at her and deliberately met her eyes, as if to say, “Thank you.”

  “Well,” she said, “thank you too. I hope you’ll stay here, and eat lots of slugs and things, and be happy. Be happy too, please. You won’t be very small hedgehogs here for long, will you? Although I can’t say this place looks as if it has ever seen a slug in its life—I guess if there are hedgehogs, there will be slugs too. Oh—and to think I told the bat to fly to the wild wood. Perhaps it already knew better. Perhaps that’s why it came, and it only got a little lost and flew through my balcony instead.”

  She wandered down the paths for a little while, thinking about a rose jungle like this vegetable jungle. All her bushes would be at least as tall as she was, and the climbers would climb right up into the cupola, and there would be so many leaves and flowers everywhere that the overeager gardener wouldn’t know where the thorns were lying in wait until it was too late.… She laughed. As she walked, she picked a handful of pods, and shelled them, and ate the peas raw, and they melted on her tongue; and she pulled off handfuls of different lettuces, and every leaf was as sweet and tender as the peas, and she was sorry for the lunch she had had, that she could not eat more.

  In her wanderings she came to another wrought-iron gate, and she opened it and went through it, and here were great fields of sweet-corn, with fat green ears trailing golden tassels as long as her arm, and of wheat, and the longer-haired barley. She walked just a little way along the barley, to run her hands through the feathery awns, softer than any birds’ down, softer than Fourpaws’ flank. “But I must go back,” she said, “for I have work to do.”

  Inside the walled garden again she put her hand out, for one last mouthful of peas, for a fig to eat on her road; but her hand paused in the reaching, and even though the sunlight still shone on her warm and bright, she shivered. The taste of the peas and the lettuce in her mouth was not as sweet as it had been, for it seemed to her suddenly somehow soulless—as if while her tongue could be fooled, her body knew this food would not nourish her. And she thought again of the meals in the Beast’s palace—and wondered again about the cheese and the butter.

  It was not until that moment that she noticed the silence. She was growing accustomed to silence, to the nearly unbroken silence of the palace and its grounds, the silence that made her talk aloud to herself in a way that would never have occurred to her when she still lived with two sisters and a father (and a dog, a goat, and chickens), and a little town not far away. But she now realised that there had been an uneasiness shadowing her from the moment she had stepped through me first gate, struggling with her hedgehog-filled overskirt. And the uneasiness was that she neither saw nor heard any birds.

  In the palace there was some excuse for soundlessness; in the courtyard, perhaps, as well, but in a garden, in any garden, let alone one so magnificent as this one … There must be birds in a garden, just as there must be midges and flies and aphids, and slugs and beetles and borers, and spiders and hedgehogs and butterflies. But there were none here, neither flying overhead, nor calling from the branches, nor hopping through the leaves at ground level.

  As she went back towards the gate into the orchard, she found herself brushing against the plants for the soughs and swishes and rustles, just as she had brushed her hand against curtains and sconce pendants when she had followed the Beast into the palace for the first time. Before she let herself through the second gate, she looked round for the hedgehogs, but they had all disappeared.

  It was later than she realised; the light was already lengthening towards evening. The long grass in the orchard seemed to drag at her, and by the time she came to the tunnel into the courtyard, she was conscious of how tired she was. She stood for a minute at the edge of the orchard, listening to the wind moving among the grass blades and the trees; it was a comforting sound, but not so comforting as the chirp of a single sparrow would have been. She was thinking about nothing in particular—about the end of day, about weariness, about the likelihood of a hot bath waiting for her. But there was a little, itchy, tickling sense of some thought trying to catch her attention, something about … about strength, about sorrow, about joy; about the joy of … of … As soon as she was aware even of so much, it was gone.

  CHAPTER

  9

  Her dress that evening was dark green, with long close-fitting sleeves buttoned with many tiny buttons, and a high neck, and round it went a wide necklet of great square emeralds, each as large as the palm of a child’s hand. There were emerald drops for her ears that were so heavy she was not sure she could wear them all evening; when she had put them on and turned her head, the tiny spray of opals and peridots that hung below the emeralds brushed her shoulders. There were two heavy emerald wristlets whose clasps closed with small substantial snicks like the locks of treasure vaults; her shoes were so stiff with the gems sewn closely all over them she could barely bend her feet. When she leant down to pick up a dark green bath towel and hang it over the back of a chair, she creaked. “All I need is—let’s see—a tiara, and perhaps a cape, sewn all over to match the shoes, and I will be too ponderous to move,” she said, “and you will have to send a coach and four to transport me to the dining-hall.”

  There was a sudden
wild sibilance from inside the wardrobe, and she started. “That was a joke!” she said hastily; her voice had gone all high and thin. She turned and half ran—tittupping in her unyielding shoes—through her rooms to the chamber of the star; there her shoes made a dramatic, resonant clatter, as if the coach and four were there, waiting for her, invisible but not inaudible.

  “Oh dear!” she said. “No more jokes!” She ran across the star and through the door that opened for her, and at once her shoes were muffled by carpeting. “Maybe that is the trouble with this place,” she said. “No sense of humour.” But her words were muffled even as her shoes were, and she began to feel her spirits muffled too; and she went on silently to the dining-hall, where the Beast silently waited.

  She sat down, tasted the wine the Beast had poured for her, and resolutely began to eat. She was not going to miss any more dinners. The shadows that were the Beast caught at the corner of her vision. She only knew he was there because she had seen him sit down; he sat as still as some great predator waiting for his prey. The tinkle of her cutlery hid the sound of his breathing, as the mutter of dry leaves underfoot might hide the hunter’s. She tried to recall the mood of the morning. “Do you go every day to the orchard?” she said.

  “Yes. I spend much of each day there. Nights I spend on the roof.”

  Beauty said, astonished, “But when do you sleep? And does not the weather trouble you?”

  “I do not sleep much. And the weather troubles me little … in this shape. It is harder on my suits of clothing. The magic can turn the weather too, when it chooses. I prefer it to come as it will; mostly I have my way in this.” The Beast looked at her. “In the winter, occasionally, sanctuary is provided to some traveller.”

  Beauty shivered and, because she could not help herself, said, “It has happened more than once then.”