They felt the castle long before they saw it: felt it as a wave of sleep that pushed them away. If they walked toward 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.
The queen and the dwarfs pushed deeper into the mental fog.
Sometimes a dwarf would yawn and stumble. Each time the other dwarfs would take him by the arms and march him forward, struggling and muttering, until his mind returned.
The queen stayed awake, although the forest was filled with people she knew could not be there. They walked beside her on the path. Sometimes they spoke to her.
"Let us now discuss how diplomacy is affected by matters of natural philosophy," said her father.
"My sisters ruled the world," said her stepmother, dragging her iron shoes along the forest path. They glowed a dull orange, yet none of the dry leaves burned where the shoes touched them. "The mortal folk rose up against us, they cast us down. And so we waited, in crevices, in places they do not see us. And now, they adore me. Even you, my stepdaughter. Even you adore me."
"You are so beautiful," said her mother, who had died so very long ago. "Like a crimson rose fallen in the snow."
Sometimes wolves ran beside them, pounding dust and leaves up from the forest floor, although the passage of the wolves did not disturb the huge cobwebs that hung like veils across the path. Also, sometimes the wolves ran through the trunks of trees and off into the darkness.
The queen liked the wolves, and was sad when one of the dwarfs began shouting, saying that the spiders were bigger than pigs, and the wolves vanished from her head and from the world. (It was not so. They were only spiders, of a regular size, used to spinning their webs undisturbed by time and by travelers.)
The drawbridge across the moat was down, and they crossed it, although everything seemed to be pushing them away. They could not enter the castle, however: thick thorns filled the gateway, and fresh growth was covered with roses.
The queen saw the remains of men in the thorns: skeletons in armor and skeletons unarmored. Some of the skeletons were high on the sides of the castle, and the queen wondered if they had climbed up, seeking an entry, and died there, or if they had died on the ground and been carried upward as the roses grew.
She came to no conclusions. Either way was possible.
And then her world was warm and comfortable, and she became certain that closing her eyes for only a handful of moments would not be harmful. Who would mind?
"Help me," croaked the queen.
The dwarf with the brown beard pulled a thorn from the rosebush nearest to him, jabbed it hard into the queen's thumb, and pulled it out again. A drop of deep blood dripped onto the flagstones of the gateway.
"Ow!" said the queen. And then, "Thank you!"
They stared at the thick barrier of thorns, the dwarfs and the queen. She reached out and picked a rose from the thorn-creeper nearest her and bound it into her hair.
"We could tunnel our way in," said the dwarfs. "Go under the moat and into the foundations and up. Only take us a couple of days."
The queen pondered. Her thumb hurt, and she was pleased her thumb hurt. She said, "This began here eighty or so years ago. It began slowly. It spread only recently. It is spreading faster and faster. We do not know if the sleepers can ever wake. We do not know anything, save that we may not actually have another two days."
She eyed the dense tangle of thorns, living and dead, decades of dried, dead plants, their thorns as sharp in death as ever they were when alive. She walked along the wall until she reached a skeleton, and she pulled the rotted cloth from its shoulders, and felt it as she did so. It was dry, yes. It would make good kindling.
"Who has the tinder box?" she asked.
The old thorns burned so hot and so fast. In fifteen minutes orange flames snaked upward: they seemed, for a moment, to engulf the building, and then they were gone, leaving just blackened stone. The remaining thorns, those strong enough to have withstood the heat, were easily cut through by the queen's sword, and were hauled away and tossed into the moat.
The four travelers went into the castle.
The old woman peered out of the slitted window at the flames below her. Smoke drifted in through the window, but neither the flames nor the roses reached the highest tower. She knew that the castle was being attacked, and she would have hidden in the tower room had there been anywhere to hide, had the sleeper not been on the bed.
She swore, and began, laboriously, to walk down the steps, one at a time. She intended to make it down as far as the castle's battlements, where she could make it to the far side of the building, to the cellars. She could hide there. She knew the building better than anybody. She was slow, but she was cunning, and she could wait. Oh, she could wait.
She heard their calls rising up the stairwell. "This way!" "Up here!" "It feels worse this way. Come on! Quickly!" She turned around, then did her best to hurry upward, but her legs moved no faster than they had when she was climbing earlier that day. They caught her just as she reached the top of the steps, three men, no higher than her hips, closely followed by a young woman in travel-stained clothes, with the blackest hair the old woman had ever seen.
The young woman said, "Seize her," in a tone of casual command.
The little men took her stick. "She's stronger than she looks," said one of them, his head still ringing from the blow she had got in with the stick before he had taken it. They walked her back into the round tower room.
"The fire?" said the old woman, who had not talked to anyone who could answer her for seven decades. "Was anyone killed in the fire? Did you see the king or the queen?"
The young woman shrugged. "I don't think so. The sleepers we passed were all inside, and the walls are thick. Who are you?"
Names. Names. The old woman squinted, then she shook her head. She was herself, and the name she had been born with had been eaten by time and lack of use.
"Where is the princess?"
The old woman just stared at her.
"And why are you awake?"
She said nothing. They spoke urgently to one another then, the little men and the queen. "Is she a witch? There's a magic about her, but I do not think it's of her making."
"Guard her," said the queen. "If she is a witch, that stick might be important. Keep it from her."
"Eh? It's my blooming stick," said the old woman. "I think it was my father's. But he had no more use for it."
The queen ignored her. She walked to the bed, pulled down the silk netting. The sleeper's face stared blindly up at them.
"So this is where it began," said one of the little men.
"On her birthday," said another.
"Well," said the third. "Somebody's got to do the honors."
"I shall," said the queen, gently. She lowered her face to the sleeping woman's. She touched the pink lips to her own carmine lips and she kissed the sleeping girl long and hard.
"Did it work?" asked a dwarf.
"I do not know," said the queen. "But I feel for her, poor thing. Sleeping her life away."
"You slept for a year in the same witch-sleep," said the dwarf. "You did not starve. You did not rot."
The figure on the bed stirred, as if she were having a bad dream from which she was fighting to wake herself.
The queen ignored her. She had noticed something on the floor beside the bed. She reached down and picked it up. "Now this," she said. "This smells of magic."
"There's magic all through this," said the smallest dwarf.
"No, this," said the queen. She showed him the wooden spindle, the base half wound around with yarn. "This smells of magic."
"It was here, in this ruddy room," said the old woman, suddenly. "And I was little more than a girl. I had never gone so far before, but I climbed all the steps, and I went up and up and round and round until I came to the topmost room. I saw that bed, the one you see, although there was nobody in
it. There was only an old woman I didn't know, sitting on the stool, spinning wool into yarn with her spindle. I had never seen a spindle before. She asked if I would like a go. She took the wool in her hand and gave me the spindle to hold. And then she held my thumb and pressed it against the point of the spindle until blood flowed, and she touched the blooming blood to the thread. And then she said..."
A voice interrupted her.
A young voice it was, a girl's voice, but still sleep-thickened. "I said, now I take your sleep from you, girl, just as I take from you your ability to harm me in my sleep, for someone needs to be awake while I sleep. Your family, your friends, your world will sleep too. And then I lay down on the bed, and I slept, and they slept, and as each of them slept I stole a little of their life, a little of their dreams, and as I slept I took back my youth and my beauty and my power. I slept and I grew strong. I undid the ravages of time and I built myself a world of sleeping slaves."
She was sitting up in the bed. She looked so beautiful, and so very young.
The queen looked at the girl and saw what she was searching for: the same look that she had seen, long ago, in her stepmother's eyes, and she knew what manner of creature this girl was.
"We had been led to believe," said the tallest dwarf, "that when you woke, the rest of the world would wake with you."
"Why ever would you think that?" asked the golden-haired girl, all childlike and innocent (ah, but her eyes! Her eyes were so old). "I like them asleep. They are more... biddable." She stopped for a moment. Then she smiled. "Even now they come for you. I have called them here."
"It's a high tower," said the queen. "And sleeping people do not move fast. We still have a little time to talk, your darkness."
"Who are you? Why would we talk? Why do you know to address me that way?" The girl climbed off the bed and stretched deliciously, pushing each fingertip out before running each fingertip through her golden hair. She smiled, and it was as if the sun shone into that dim room. "The little people will stop where they are, now. I do not like them. And you, girl. You will sleep too."
"No," said the queen.
She hefted the spindle. The yarn wrapped around it was black with age and with time.
The dwarfs stopped where they stood, and they swayed, and closed their eyes.
The queen said, "It's always the same with your kind. You need youth and you need beauty. You used your own up so long ago, and now you find ever-more-complex ways of obtaining them. And you always want power."
They were almost nose to nose now, and the fair-haired girl seemed so much younger than the queen.
"Why don't you just go to sleep?" asked the girl, and she smiled guilelessly, just as the queen's stepmother had smiled when she wanted something. There was a noise on the stairs, far below them.
"I slept for a year in a glass coffin," said the queen. "And the woman who put me there was much more powerful and dangerous than you will ever be."
"More powerful than I am?" The girl seemed amused. "I have a million sleepers under my control. With every moment that I slept I grew in power, and the circle of dreams grows faster and faster with every passing day. I have my youth – so much youth! I have my beauty. No weapon can harm me. Nobody alive is more powerful than I am."
She stopped and stared at the queen.
"You are not of our blood," she said. "But you have some of the skill." She smiled, the smile of an innocent girl who has woken on a spring morning. "Ruling the world will not be easy. Nor will maintaining order among those of the Sisterhood who have survived into this degenerate age. I will need someone to be my eyes and ears, to administer justice, to attend to things when I am otherwise engaged. I will stay at the center of the web. You will not rule with me, but beneath me, but you will still rule, and rule continents, not just a tiny kingdom." She reached out a hand and stroked the queen's pale skin, which, in the dim light of that room, seemed almost as white as snow.
The queen said nothing.
"Love me," said the girl. "All will love me, and you, who woke me, you must love me most of all."
The queen felt something stirring in her heart. She remembered her stepmother, then. Her stepmother had liked to be adored. Learning how to be strong, to feel her own emotions and not another's, had been hard; but once you learned the trick of it, you did not forget. And she did not wish to rule continents.
The girl smiled at her with eyes the color of the morning sky.
The queen did not smile. She reached out her hand. "Here," she said. "This is not mine."
She passed the spindle to the old woman beside her. The old woman hefted it, thoughtfully. She began to unwrap the yarn from the spindle with arthritic fingers. "This was my blooming, bollocking life," she said. "This thread was my life..."
"It was your life. You gave it to me," said the sleeper, irritably. "And it has gone on much too long."
The tip of the spindle was still sharp after so many decades.
The old woman, who had once, long, long ago, been a princess, held the yarn tightly in her left hand, and she thrust the point of the spindle at the golden-haired girl's breast.
The girl looked down as a trickle of red blood ran down her breast and stained her white dress crimson.
"No weapon can harm me," she said, and her girlish voice was petulant. "Not anymore. Look. It's only a scratch."
"It's not a weapon," said the queen, who understood what had happened. "It's your own magic. And a scratch is all that was needed."
The girl's blood soaked into the thread that had once been wrapped about the spindle, the thread that ran from the spindle to the raw wool in the old woman's left hand.
The girl looked down at the blood staining her dress, and at the blood on the thread, and she said only, "It was just a prick of the skin, nothing more." She seemed confused.
The noise on the stairs was getting louder. A slow, irregular shuffling, as if a hundred sleepwalkers were coming up a stone spiral staircase with their eyes closed.
The room was small, and there was nowhere to hide, and the room's windows were two narrow slits in the stones.
The old woman, who had not slept in so many decades, she who had once been a princess, said, "You took my blinking dreams. You took my sleep. Now, that's enough of all that." She was a very old woman: her fingers were gnarled, like the roots of a hawthorn bush. Her nose was long, and her eyelids drooped, but there was a look in her eyes in that moment that was the look of someone young.
The old woman swayed, and then she staggered, and she would have fallen to the floor if the queen had not caught her first.
The queen carried the old woman to the bed, marveling at how little
she weighed, and placed her on the crimson counterpane. The old woman's chest rose and fell.
The noise on the stairs was louder now. Then a silence, followed, suddenly, by a hubbub, as if a hundred people were talking at once, all surprised and angry and confused.
The beautiful girl said, "But –" and now there was nothing girlish or beautiful about her. Her face fell and became less shapely. She reached down to the smallest dwarf, pulled his hand ax from his belt. She fumbled with the ax, held it up threateningly, with hands all wrinkled and worn.
The queen drew her sword (the blade's edge was notched and damaged from the thorns) but instead of striking, she took a step backward.
"Listen! They are waking up," she said. "They are all waking up. Tell me again about the youth you stole from them. Tell me again about your beauty and your power. Tell me again how clever you were, your darkness."
When the people reached the tower room, they saw an old woman asleep on a bed, and they saw the queen, standing tall, and beside her, the dwarfs, who were shaking their heads, or scratching them.
They saw something else on the floor also: a tumble of bones, a hank of hair as fine and as white as fresh-spun cobwebs, a tracery of gray rags across it, and over all of it, an oily dust.
"Take care of her," said the queen, pointing with the
dark wooden spindle at the old woman on the bed. "She saved your lives."
She left, then, with the dwarfs. None of the people in that room or on the steps dared to stop them or would ever understand what had happened.
A mile or so from the castle, in a clearing in the Forest of Acaire, the queen and the dwarfs lit a fire of dry twigs, and in it they burned the thread and the fiber. The smallest dwarf chopped the spindle into fragments of black wood with his ax, and they burned them too. The wood chips gave off a noxious smoke as they burned, which made the queen cough, and the smell of old magic was heavy in the air.
Afterward, they buried the charred wooden fragments beneath a rowan tree.
By evening they were on the outskirts of the forest, and had reached a cleared track. They could see a village across the hill, and smoke rising from the village chimneys.
"So," said the dwarf with the beard. "If we head due west, we can be at the mountains by the end of the week, and we'll have you back in your palace in Kanselaire within ten days."
"Yes," said the queen.
"And your wedding will be late, but it will happen soon after your return, and the people will celebrate, and there will be joy unbounded through the kingdom."
"Yes," said the queen. She said nothing, but sat on the moss beneath an oak tree and tasted the stillness, heartbeat by heartbeat.
There are choices, she thought, when she had sat long enough. There are always choices.
She made her choice.
The queen began to walk, and the dwarfs followed her.
"You do know we're heading east, don't you?" said one of the dwarfs.
"Oh yes," said the queen.
"Well, that's all right then," said the dwarf.
They walked to the east, all four of them, away from the sunset and the lands they knew, and into the night.
CAVE AND JULIA
M. John Harrison
M. John Harrison (ambientehotel.wordpress.com) joined New Worlds in 1968 as editor and reviewer. His first novel, The Committed Men, appeared in 1971, as did The Pastel City, first in the "Viriconium" fantasy series that continued with A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium, and collections Viriconium Nights and Viriconium. His other novels include The Centauri Device, Signs of Life, Climbers, and Kefahuchi Tract trilogy Light, Nova Swing, and Empty Space. Harrison has also written four contemporary cat fantasies as Gabriel King (collaborating with Jane Johnson), beginning with The Wild Road, and several short story collections, including Things That Never Happen. He continues to review fiction and non-fiction for the Guardian.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight (Best SF & Fantasy of the Year) Page 12