Beauty in the Beast

by Christine Danse

  That was all right. I didn’t need to be entertained. What I wanted was another glimpse of his eyes, but he stood with his back to us, stirring intently. I smelled gamey meat, winter roots and thyme. Hush now, I told my stomach.

  I rolled off my socks and scratched my itching ankles furiously. The cold of the packed dirt seeped through my soles. Beyond the lip of the entryway, overlapping furs carpeted the floor in patches of white and black and tan and brown. I stepped up and buried my feet in the soft, warm curls of a sheep pelt.

  The large living room was cozy and rustic, built entirely of wood and stone. Saws, guns and other tools lined the walls, mounted on pegs. Soft pelts hung between them. Besides the wood smoke and meat, the room smelled of animal skins, wet dog and a peculiar harsh, bitter stink.

  Beth squealed. I followed her gaze to the bodies of two tiny fawns, fur slick as if wet, frozen in a standing pose. Dozens of tiny needles stuck from their bodies. Knives, scissors and bits of broken plaster littered the table around them.

  The stranger looked up. “Mounts. I’m stuffing them.”

  “That’s…horrible.” Beth drew back, folding her arms close to herself as if the creatures would reach out and touch her.

  Frederick leaned close to peer at them. “Yes, certainly dead.” As if there was any question.

  Beth clucked her tongue and smacked his arm.

  I looked at the stranger. “You’re a hunter.”

  “Trapper.” He clanged the stir stick against the edge of the pot.

  A knock sounded at the cabin’s back door, and the man opened it, revealing a bundled Miles. Cold air rushed in with him. As he unwrapped his layers, Beth slid her arms around his waist.

  He smiled. “Hello, love.” He lifted his arms over her to uncurl his scarf, then lowered them onto her shoulders and kissed her forehead. To the stranger, he said, “We owe you a debt of gratitude.”

  The trapper inclined his head. “Sit on the benches or the floor. And don’t touch anything. Please.”

  Miles pulled the knit cap from his head and ran a hand over his smooth scalp. The blue and orange of the cap clashed against the green of his sweater. Both had been affectionately knitted by Beth, who loved colors almost as much as she loved Miles.

  “Beg your pardon,” he said. “But I’m Miles Joseph, storyteller. This is my wife, Elizabeth, puppeteer. Frederick, our musician.” Frederick bowed slightly at the waist, his blond hair falling forward to cover his face. “And Tara, our teller of fairytales.” I gave a small curtsy, bowing my head. I looked up a little at the end, hoping to catch a glance of the man’s eyes. They were lowered and dark.

  “Rolph,” he said simply.

  By the firelight, I could see that Rolph was younger than he’d first appeared. The peppering of white was premature, the lines in his face cut by hardship, not age. A man who had seen troubled times and worked hard at a living. I wondered what his story was. I heard no other voices in the cabin and saw no toys. Judging from the mess, the cabin lacked a feminine hand. He lived alone at the edge of the woods. Perhaps he was escaping some past. Ghosts? Guilt? Maybe both. Had he ever had a wife? Children? Where had he come from? Had he been raised in the woods or the city? How long since he’d talked to another person?

  I cocked my head. “Do you have a dog?” It seemed like the most innocuous question to ask. A vital smell of animal, more alive than the musk of the pelts, clung to the room.

  At the mention of “dog,” Beth’s eyes went wide, and her hand flew over her nose and mouth.

  Rolph shook his head. “No.”

  As if on cue, Beth sneezed. “I’m sorry,” she squeaked. “It’s just that I’m terribly sensitive to dogs. Sometimes my nose will start up if it even thinks one is around. My eyes are itchy, but maybe it’s just because of the furs.”

  “I had a dog,” admitted Rolph. “She died two months past.”

  Not such an innocuous question, after all.

  Brilliant, Tara. I searched for something to say—something comforting, or apologetic, or heartening—but he looked away and spoke first. “I have stew.”

  “Kind of you to offer,” said Miles. “It would help a great deal in warming us up.”

  Rolph took a short stack of bowls from a shelf. His hands trembled as he wiped dust from the topmost bowl with a cloth, and his lips thinned with obvious effort to still them. My eyes tracked their movement, wondering if it was anxiety that caused him to shake. I did not sense anger in the room, but a pungent tang that could have been unease, or fear, or grief. I accepted the bowl he handed me with a sympathetic smile, but he had already turned to ladle another.

  I settled on the floor next to Beth and spooned a bite of stew. The broth scalded my mouth, but I hardly cared. I relished the rich flavor of the venison and sweet nuttiness of turnips while following Rolph’s movements from beneath my lowered lashes.

  The trapper served himself last, pouring only one ladleful. His bowl rattled slightly against the table as he placed it down. Settling into his armchair, he gripped the armrests until his knuckles blanched, then took a breath and reached for a small glass vial near where he’d set the bowl. I heard a small clack as his quavering fingers knocked it over. His hand chased the rolling bottle across the table. Grasping it, he fumbled it open and released a stopperful of dark liquid into his stew.

  Laudanum, I guessed. But the sweet smell that reached my nose suggested something else. The tincture of valerian, perhaps. His muscles visibly relaxed as he devoured the laced stew, and when he set the bowl aside his hands were still again. He closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath.

  None of us spoke as we ate. The intent tapping of our spoons against our bowls said it all. Our last meal had been many snowy miles and chilling hours behind us.

  Though Rolph’s eyes were closed, I could feel his awareness of us, an almost tangible force that pulsed through the room along with the heat. I pulled my gaze away from his dark eyebrows and strong jaw to watch the flames lick and curl in the fireplace. Above the mantel hung a painting. Its blues and greens cooled the room. The brush strokes were broad, almost sketchy, but slowly the picture resolved itself into a crystalline drop of water hanging tenuously from the tip of a new spring leaf. The painting had no frame, but rested between two pairs of disembodied antlers, looking terribly delicate, bright and hopeful beside them. Staring at it, I almost wept for spring.

  I considered asking Rolph about the painting, but just my luck it would be a memento of an old lover, or a gift from deceased parents, or some similar object of sentiment. I watched the firelight flicker over his face. I sensed things deep and nameless underneath his skin, stories and thoughts held under pressure like steam in a boiler. I longed to peer inside.

  But how could I coax his story from him without prying?

  Perhaps by sharing my own.

  As if overhearing my thoughts, Rolph opened his eyes. “You say you’re storytellers.” His smile was not unkind, though it seemed wooden and did not quite meet his eyes, as if the expression was unpracticed. It turned decidedly wry. “I’m surprised. Have you not been replaced by talking automatons?”

  Miles snorted a laugh. “The mechanics have tried, though their automatons will never replace us. A tom doesn’t have the imagination to craft its own stories. It can only repeat the ones that we weave.”

  “Indeed.” Rolph arched his eyebrows.

  I straightened. “I have an idea. Why don’t we each tell you a story? To show our gratitude.” I glanced at the others.

  Miles nodded. “That sounds grand.”

  Rolph regarded us for a moment, then threw a long glance out the black front window, mouth turned down as if in thought. Outside, the wind howled like a thing that never lost its breath. At last he nodded. “If the storm still rages when you are finished, you are welcome to stay until morning.”

  Fred smiled sheepishly and gave a nod to Rolph. “My songs are far superior to my stories, so if it’s all the same to you, I would rather accompany my companions.�
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  Rolph nodded.

  “I’ll—” Beth sneezed. “Sorry! I’ll go first. I can perform the piece I’ve rehearsed for the Frost Fair, if you don’t mind children’s stories. My puppets are in the sled, but I can manage without them, I’m sure.”

  Frederick leaped up. “Hold on. I’ll get them.”

  “Fred! Don’t you dare!” But he was already donning his coat.

  “Relax. He needs to fetch his lute. You wouldn’t want him to accompany us with his singing, would you?” I put a hand on Beth’s shoulder and looked up at Fred as he buttoned the coat. The musician winked down at me.

  When Fred returned, he carried his lute in one hand. He paused at the doorway to brush snow from his tangle of blond hair, then set Beth’s portmanteau by her side. She rummaged through it to produce several puppets and props. A Queen Victoria puppet with a foil crown, a suited knight, a long dragon made of silk, a collection of tiny finger puppets, two suited men with top hats and a small, crude replica of an analytical engine.

  She arranged them in front of her. “I call this one ‘The Steam-Powered Knight.’”

  Fred grinned and struck up a light tune. Miles pulled on his knit cap and lowered to the ground on Beth’s other side. Together we lifted the dragon puppet by the wires that articulated its wings and settled it behind Beth, out of sight. She glared at us as the tip of its silk tail tickled over her forehead, then laughed and settled into her story.

  Chapter Two

  “Once upon a time, in a modern London very much like our own, a dragon awoke. Sleeping far beneath the ground in a cavern even deeper than the sewers, it had hibernated for four hundred years. Its rousing shook the streets of the city, and it burst to the surface in a shower of stone. It arrived in a huge, billowing cloud of smoke, so that everyone who saw it thought it was some sort of terrible new technology. Men and women ran screaming. Children’s hoops and balls went rolling. Steamcoaches crashed in the streets.”

  As Beth spoke, Miles and I raised the dragon above her head, stretching its neck and spreading its red wings like two terrible flames.

  “Please excuse me.” Beth interrupted herself. “We’ve a smoke machine for this part. Miles releases a huge burst of smoke as the dragon puppet wakes.” She pointed at the dragon above her head, finger tipped with a tiny puppet.

  Rolph cracked a small smile. The expression erased some of the etched lines in his face and softened the creases at the edges of his eyes, warming his face. My heart lifted just a little. Oh, stop. Not every rugged hermit is a prince in hiding or a tormented knight.

  Beth splayed her fingers, each sporting the tiny puppet of a person, wiggled them like citizens trembling in panic and returned to her narration.

  “‘It’s a war machine!’ some cried.

  “‘A mechanical monster!’ cried others.

  “The dragon flew high into the air over London, hungry and cranky. How would you feel, had you slept four hundred years? It roasted all the tiny people in the street below it and gobbled them up, teeth catching on the hot metal of the automatons it mistook for food. It cracked apart buses and used lampposts as toothpicks.”

  The dragon puppet swooped over Beth’s head, mouth belching invisible fire at the quivering finger puppets. One by one her fingers fell. The dragon dived behind Beth again, and we shucked our puppets for the queen and the two suited men with black silk top hats.

  “The queen and the parliament roused from their beds to address the emergency. They had never dealt with a dragon before, much less a hungry one. Its roars made the walls of the palace tremble.

  “They brought out all of their guns and shot at the dragon. Gatlings, pistols and even old-fashioned cannon. The dragon dodged the cannon balls, and the rain of bullets were like needle pricks to it. Shots of electricity crackled from the Tesla guns and did nothing except anger it. The beast moved too fast through the sky, and its scales were like plate armor.

  “‘Let us fight it from the sky!’ cried the people, and so every airship was deployed. They surrounded the beast from every side, all of Britain’s best pilots. But the fight did not last long. All it took was one blast of fire from the dragon to turn the entire sky armada into ashes.

  “Now much of London lay in ruins. The dragon settled into a hot crater at the center of the city with a pile of horses and ate them like snacks.

  “The people despaired. ‘Something must be done!’

  “Until this time, the Prime Analyzer had remained silent. The House of Commons and the queen assumed that the Analyzer—a construct of logic and modern technology—simply knew nothing of dragons. Perhaps for the first time ever, it had no solution for them.”

  “Prime Analyzer?” asked Rolph.

  Beth raised her open palm with the tiny replica of the analytical engine resting upon it. “Yes. The Prime Analyzer of the Parliament.”

  “Oh.”

  I received the impression that he’d never heard of the analytical engine that had replaced the House of Lords five years ago. But he made no further inquiry, and Beth continued with her narration.

  “Well. So the Prime Analyzer, which had sat silent for hours, its gears and mills slowly turning as they always did—constantly thinking, constantly analyzing—suddenly began to clack as it produced its thoughts.

  “Henry Babbage himself retrieved the printed paper from the Analyzer’s tray. Dumbfounded, he paused, then read its advice aloud. It was a single sentence. ‘Send a knight to defeat it.’

  “The message confused Queen Victoria. ‘A knight? Why, they haven’t existed since the Middle Ages. Where shall we find one?’

  “But the Prime Analyzer stood quiet again. Desperate, the queen released a royal decree: all practicing knights should report to the castle.

  “But of course, the only people to report were honorary knights, not a warrior among them. Had the Prime Analyzer, with no other knowledge of dragons, simply given them a solution drawn from a children’s story?

  “By that evening, they had almost given up. The best they could do was talk the dragon into a treaty, but would the monster be open to diplomacy? Did it even speak or think?

  “With a great clank and a hiss, the door at last opened and a voice rang out, metallic and echoing. ‘I am here at last, my queen! Have no fear! I will slay the dragon!’

  “In the doorway stood a knight! A knight far larger than any normal man, fully encased in shining brass armor.”

  Miles walked the knight puppet through the air, its booted feet stomping across an invisible stage.

  “Bang! Bang! Bang! His steps echoed in the hall, which had gone silent except for that very slow, constant turning of the Prime Analyzer’s parts. From the very tip of the knight’s helmet, where a bird plume should be, curled a plume of smoke instead. Pistons along his legs slid short and long with each of the knight’s strides.

  “‘Sir knight, are you man or machine?’

  “‘My Queen, I am man enhanced by machine.’ The knight pressed the side of his helmet. The visor slid up and a man’s face looked out at them. He extended one arm before him and clenched the metal hand shut, showing the strength in that fist. ‘I am called Sir Coal, steam-powered knight of England.’

  “‘And can you defeat the dragon?’

  “The steam-powered knight bowed his head. ‘I will defeat the dragon or forfeit my life trying.’

  “These were not very reassuring words to the monarch and the parliament, but the Analyzer had called for a knight, so they did not turn him away. Instead they gave him a place to stay for the night because darkness was falling, and anyone who has ever dealt with a dragon knows that night is the worst time to try to slay one.

  “The next morning, at the very crack of dawn, a thunderous roaring noise filled the air, startling the queen from her bed. She ran to the window and threw up the pane, and found not the dragon, but the knight standing below, a billow of smoke surrounding him as his armor warmed up. While she watched, a compartment on his bulky back opened, and out slid
a pole.”

  This was my favorite part. Miles pushed a wire hidden at the knight’s back. It protruded above the knight’s head and telescoped into a long antenna. From its tip, four blades unfolded.

  “The blades of the pole began to spin around very fast, and in moments, the knight was lifting into the air. He waved as he passed the queen. Pulling a lever at his waist, he disappeared over the buildings.

  “The knight flew over the ruins of London, following the destruction toward the center of the city, where it became worse and worse, until finally he found the dragon. It lay curled in a black crater, the metal hull of a bus pillowed under its claws.

  “‘Sir Dragon! Halloo!’

  “The great yellow eyes of the dragon cracked open.”

  I bent my wrist so that the dragon puppet’s head stirred and its neck slowly uncurled, looking for all the world like a creature waking from deep slumber. I peeked at Rolph to see his eyes widen, and wondered if he thought it looked as realistic as I hoped.

  “The dragon looked about until Sir Coal cried, ‘Up here!’

  “And then the dragon cast its horrible gaze upward. ‘A knight! A knight that flies!’

  “‘Yes, Sir Dragon! It is I, Sir Coal, and I have come to challenge you to an honorable duel!’

  “‘I will roast you in your shell and use your bones for toothpicks! Dragons do not fight in honorable duels!’

  “‘Yes, and knights do not fly.’

  “The dragon fell silent. It appeared to be thinking very hard. ‘You are a man! I will crush you like a fly and eat you as a snack.’

  “‘But I am no ordinary man! In me runs the blood of dragons.’ With that, the knight pulled one of his levers, releasing a great big burst of hot steam from the front of his helmet.”

  Here, Beth smiled apologetically and then ducked her head, for that was the cue for the smoke machine.

  “The dragon had never seen such a display. ‘Ai! It’s true! A knight who flies and breathes fire!’

  “‘Yes. And you have grown weak from centuries of sleeping, Sir Dragon. You should prove that you are still a strong, clever dragon.’”