Rose Daughter

by Robin McKinley

  When she came to the end of the little track that led to Rose Cottage and set her feet upon the wider way that came up from the city and wound past Longchance on its way to its end in the wild mountains of the east, she closed her eyes and turned in a circle three times clockwise, and then she walked three steps forward, holding her hand in front of her face just in case she walked into a tree, though she was quite certain she would not. After three steps she opened her eyes and found herself on a track only a little bigger than the one that led off the main way to Rose Cottage, but it was a track she was quite sure she had never seen before.

  The wood on either side of her beyond the track looked older and wilder than that around Rose Cottage. The tangle here told her that there would be no frequent glimpses of farmland beyond, as there were everywhere near Longchance, where the undergrowth was regularly cleared and the old trees were felled for firewood and building.

  Furthermore, running on either side of her, at just a little distance, as if the track had once been broader, were two rows of beech trees, as if lining a drive. She had seen few beeches since they had left the city, and she had missed them. She left the track for a moment when there was a little suggestion of a gap in the low scrub and put her hands on a beech tree. The feel of the smooth familiar bark gave her courage. She touched Jeweltongue’s little embroidered heart and returned to the path.

  She wondered if her father had awakened yet, if he had missed her, if Jeweltongue would tell him she was only out in the garden, if Tea-cosy’s wretchedness would give them all away immediately. She wondered if she had been right to guess that her father would not mend till she left—and that he would mend when she did. Had the Beast sent his illness? Did he watch them from his palace? What a sorcerer could and could not do could never quite be relied on—not even always by the sorcerer. She could hate him—easily she could hate him—for the misery of it if he had sent it. If he kept his promises like a man, did he suppose that they, mere humans as they were, would keep theirs any less? The price was high for one stolen rose, but they would pay it. If he had sent her father’s illness to beat them into acquiescence, she would hate him for it.

  The bitterness of her thoughts weighed her down till she had to stop walking. She looked again at the beech trees and, not waiting for a gap this time, fought her way through to the nearest and leant against it, turning her head so that her cheek was against the bark. The Beast is a Beast, even if he keeps his promises; how could she guess how a Beast thinks, especially one who is so great a sorcerer? It was foolish to talk of hating him—foolish and wasteful. What had happened had happened, like anything else might happen, like a bit of paper giving you a new home when you had none finding its way into your hand, like a company of the ugliest, worst-tempered plants you’d ever seen opening their flowers and becoming rose-bushes, the most beautiful, lovable plants you’ve ever seen. Perhaps it was the Beast’s near presence that made her own roses grow. Did she not owe him something for that if that were the case? It was a curious thing, she thought sadly, how one is no longer satisfied with what one was or had if one has discovered something better. She could not now happily live without roses, although she had never seen a rose before three years ago.

  She could not stand here forever, and she had best not go on standing here at all. If the Beast had been watching them, if he was watching her now, he would see no good reason for her stopping, because there was none. And she wanted no sorcerous prods to send her more swiftly on her way. Would the Beast tell her, if she asked, that her father had recovered?

  It was clear daylight when she reached the beginning of the gardens and the white pebble drive. But even Beauty’s young eyes could not see how far either the clearing or the palace itself extended; the building seemed to run a very long way in both directions, and a distant dark irregular haze seemed to suggest that the trees pressed up close just beyond its corners.

  Beauty walked down the drive, staring at the clipped box and the stark paths and stone pools, thinking forlornly that there was nothing here for her. Her eyes burnt with unshed tears, and she walked stiffly, because her legs were trembling. This will not do at all! she said to herself, a little frantically. I haven’t—I haven’t even met the Beast yet! But this was the wrong thing to think of, because then fear and sorrow broke free of their bounds and seized her.

  She turned off the path, and groped her way through the openings in one of the hedges, and sat down on the edge of a stone pool. The stone was cool and hard like any stone, and this served to comfort her a little; she took a deep sigh and contrived to find some humour in being comforted by the dull grey coping of an uninteresting round pool. She looked at the statue in her pool: a blank-faced maiden carrying an urn and wearing what would have been impractical and highly unstable draperies, except for the fact that they were made of stone. The maiden was not nearly so graceful and attractive as the statue in the centre of the garden at Rose Cottage.

  Beauty turned a little where she sat, to look at the palace again; it seemed to her very bleak, and she wondered if there was any rose that would climb tall enough to soften its harsh face. Even the one galumphing over the rear wall of Rose Cottage (its stems were now appearing on the far side, and Beauty predicted that in another year or two it would likely be locked in a battle for precedence with the slightly more subdued one by the front door) might find this palace too much for it. Then she thought of window-boxes under all those gigantic, joyless windows, full of cheerful, untidy plants like pansies and trailing peas and nasturtiums, in the vividest colours possible. She was by now genuinely smiling.

  I wonder where the Beast’s rose garden is, she thought. For there is no sign of it here.

  She stood up and made her way slowly back to the drive and more slowly yet towards the gaping front door. There were no candles lit today, and in the bright daylight the open door looked like the mouth of a cave. Or of a Beast.

  She came to within a few steps of the portico, and halted, and could make herself go no farther. Her heart was beating so quickly she had to keep swallowing, because it seemed to be leaping up her throat; her head felt light, and there was something wrong with her vision, as if everything she looked at were no more than an elaborate mirage.… She touched Jeweltongue’s embroidered heart again. The decision was made; she was here; she would not turn back; she would not even look back over her shoulder.…

  She had been standing, staring at the portico and the door beyond in a kind of half trance. A shadow caught the corner of her eyes, and she spun round, backing away so quickly that she blundered against the nearest box hedge; it pricked her sharply even through her skirts. She stumbled, regained her balance, and stood staring at the Beast.

  She was less lucky than her father, who had never looked the Beast clearly in the face. The old merchant had had some little warning of the Beast’s approach by hearing him roar before he appeared and was therefore already frightened enough to have difficulty looking at the threat directly; and the Beast had remained, throughout that interview, with his back to the daylight. Beauty had had the warning of her father’s experience, but it was the wrong sort of warning, or she had taken the wrong warning from it. She had thought only that this Beast was a very large, strong, and therefore dangerous Beast, who was the more terrifying because he walked and dressed and spoke like a man.

  Had she had the opportunity to choose, she would still have chosen to look immediately into the Beast’s face upon meeting, to have the worst borne and past at once. But the worst borne is not necessarily past and over with thereby. The worst of fighting a dragon is being caught in its fire, but you do not survive dragon encounters by commanding your muscles to withstand dragon fire, because you and they cannot. You survive by avoiding being burnt. Beauty knew no better than to wish to marshal her forces before she met the Beast, though that marshalling would not have saved her. As it was, she was surprised into looking into the Beast’s face.

  The contrasts she found there were too great: wisdom an
d despair, power and weakness, man and animal. These made him far more terrible than any hungry lion, any half-tamed hydra, any angry sorcerer, terrible as something that should not exist is terrible, because to recognise that it does exist shakes that faith in the foundations of the natural world which human beings must have to bear the burden of their rationality.

  Later Beauty thought of a metaphor to explain the shock of that first sight of the Beast: She felt as if she were melting, like ice in sun. Water is perhaps a kind of ice, but it is not ice, it is water. Whatever—whoever—she was, it was being transformed implacably into something else; she was being undone, unmade, annihilated.… But that unravelling thought—which she would later put the words to of ice burning in the heat of the sun—made her drowning mind throw up a memory of those last days in the city. And she remembered staring into the eyes of the salamander, into those two pits of fire whose dangerous heat she had felt, and she heard the salamander’s dry, scratchy voice saying, I give you a small serenity.

  With her last conscious strength, she cupped her hands and immediately felt the warmth between the palms, as if she held a small sun; and then the heat surged up her arms and into her body, reaching into every niche and cranny, till it had reshaped her flesh into her own precise, familiar, individual contours, and she was neither water nor ice nor unmaking but again herself. And she opened her mouth and gasped for air, for since she had raised her eyes to the Beast’s eyes, she had not breathed.

  All of this took no more than a minute, as clocks understand time.

  She lowered her eyes then, and wishing to regain her composure and not wishing to appear rude, she dropped a curtsy, as she would have done to a great lord of the city, keeping her eyes upon the ground; but the graceful dip of her curtsy was hampered by the box hedge. She could not quite bring herself to step away from it, for any step forward would take her nearer the Beast.

  “You need not curtsy to me,” said the Beast. “I am the Beast, and you will call me that, please. Can you not bear to look at me?”

  She looked up at once, pierced to the heart by the sorrow in his voice and knowing, from the question and the sorrow together, that he had no notion of what had just happened to her, nor why. From that she pitied him so greatly that she cupped her hands again to hold a little of the salamander’s heat, not for serenity but for the warmth of friendship. But as she felt the heat again running through her, she knew at once it bore a different quality. It had been a welcome invader the first time, only moments before; but already it had become a constituent of her blood, intrinsic to the marrow of her bones, and she heard again the salamander’s last words to her: Trust me. At that moment she knew that this Beast would not have sent such misery as her father’s illness to harry or to punish, knew too that the Beast would keep his promise to her, and to herself she made another promise to him, but of that promise she did not yet herself know. Trust me sang in her blood, and she could look in the Beast’s face and see only that he looked at her hopefully.

  This time it was he who looked away first. “If you will follow me, I will show you to your rooms,” he said.

  “I—I would rather see your garden. I—I mean, your flower-garden,” she said almost shyly, and hesitating to mention roses. She took one, two, three tiny steps away from the box hedge. The Beast was so large! And it would be easier to be near him outdoors, in these first few minutes of—of—in her first attempts to adjust to—to—She did not think she could bear to look at the rooms she was now to live in, that did not have her sisters in them. Roses might comfort her, a little. Or if they could not, nothing could.…

  She shook herself free of that thought quickly and allowed instead her gardener’s passion to be drawn by the prospect of roses which bloomed so far out of their season as the one that had decorated their father’s breakfast table, the one which still stood in the window of—No! She would not let herself think of it. Roses; she was thinking of roses, of what a great sorcerer indeed the Beast must be, to have roses blooming in winter.

  She might have been frightened of the Beast’s silence if she had not been so absorbed by her thoughts, in not thinking the thoughts that most pressed on and plucked at her. She came to herself and noticed his silence and wondered if she had offended him, and a small cold prickle of fear touched her. But then he said: “You will see … what remains of my garden.” He looked out over the box hedges, the paths, and the stone pools, and she throught that they brought him no pleasure; this was not what he thought of when he thought of his garden. “Later.”

  He led her into his great house, and Beauty followed timidly, keeping not too near to him, but not—she hoped—too far away. Everything was silent, except when Beauty brushed her hand against a curtain, or a dangling crystal drop from a low sconce—just to hear the sound. The carpet was deep, and neither her footsteps nor the Beast’s made any noise at all; nor did he make any further attempt at conversation, and she could think of nothing she wished to say to him.

  But there was still—wasn’t there?—some odd quality to this silence, a heaviness, as if the air itself were denser here than usual, that it did not carry sound as ordinary air did, that it required a slightly greater effort than usual to walk through. Was this what a sorcerer’s house always felt like? She had never been invited indoors at the house of the salamander’s master, but he had also been retired, so perhaps that would still have told her nothing. There had been no sense of oppression—of otherness—in his front garden, except by what the salamander provided in its own self, and that was all she knew. There was an almost liquid quality to this air, to this unknown ether coiling among the solid objects, herself and the Beast among them. She waved her arm in front of her and fancied that she saw tiny, ghostly ripples of turbulence, like the surface of a troubled pond, following the motion.

  But even this occupied only part of her attention. She was so astonished by everything she saw that this oppression—whatever caused it—was not as great as that simpler oppression of spirits she had anticipated when she had followed the Beast indoors. She knew that her weariness of soul and body, after what had already happened to her both today and all the days since her father had returned from his disastrous journey, made her more susceptible to intimidation, but knowing this, she was still oppressed and intimidated and had little power of resistance.

  This indoors was so unlike what she had left, so unlike even the very grand house they had had, long ago, in the city when they had been wealthy. It seemed to her that this house was as much grander than their city house as their city house was to Rose Cottage, and it was Rose Cottage that she loved, far more than she had ever loved anything in the city. And the walls were so high and wide, the ceilings so distant that the Beast seemed no larger than an ordinary man, in such a setting, but Beauty felt no bigger than a beetle, creeping after him.

  At last they came to an enormous circular room, with an eight-pointed star inlaid upon the floor, and eight doorways leading out of it, and sunlight through a dome overhead, the dome ringed with an inlay that matched the star. Even here the Beast’s footfalls made no sound, but Beauty’s more ordinary shoes made a soft tapping on the smooth bare floor. The Beast strode across the star without hesitation, the wings of his gown laying flying shadows over the sparkling tiles, and threw open one of the doors. “I will leave you now,” he said. “If there is anything you need, say it aloud, and if it is within this house’s power—or mine—it will be brought to you at once.” He turned to go the way they had come.

  “Oh, but wait,” said Beauty. “Please. Your garden—”

  “Later,” said the Beast, his hand on the door, and he crossed the threshold without pausing.

  Beauty looked after him as the door closed behind him, but as soon as she looked away—to the other doors, to the sun lighting up the gilt and coloured enamel tiles in the floor—she no longer knew which door they had entered by. She turned to the one that had remained open, the one the Beast had opened for her.

  Inside was an e
normous room, or rooms. There were no proper doorways with doors, but a series of large spaces semidivided by half-width walls, their demarcations more clearly indicated by the arrangement of the furnishings. There were jungles of furniture, cities of statuary, and the walls were thick with tapestries and paintings.

  The outer rooms of the palace which she had seen had been even larger, more dramatically designed, more spectacularly ornamented; these rooms were almost more humbling by being closer to her own experience of wealth and magnificence. She knew she did not belong in this palace; this recurred to her with every caress of the queer thick air against her skin. But in these rooms … It was a little as if a king had decided to reward a farmer, and knowing the farmer would have no use for, nor interest in, silks and velvets and fancy wines, still gave him a phaeton and a team of blood horses when he would rather have had a good pair to pull his plough.

  It took her a little while to realise that her sense of the wrong sort of familiarity—the not merely disorienting, the distressing pull towards something unsuitable, as the farmer might have admired, and even longed for, the phaeton team—was caused by the fact that every decorative pattern, every carving, every lick of paint and bit of fabric, were of vines and flowers and trees and fruit. And the commonest representation was of roses.

  The carpet she first stepped on from the mosaic floor of the chamber of the star was dark green, but it was also thick with huge pale pink cabbage roses. Towards the first wide door space these grew darker till in the next room the roses were all a vivid pink; but they faded again and lost some of their petals towards the next doorway, till in the next room the roses Beauty walked on opened flat, their golden stamens showing in the centre of but a dozen or so gracefully curved petals which were pink-tipped and cream-hearted … and so on.