The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight

by Jonathan Strahan

  "It is moving faster and faster," said a thin, red-haired woman who had not spoken previously. "Now it covers a mile, perhaps two miles, each day."

  "It will be here tomorrow," said the sot, and he drained his flagon, then gestured to the innkeeper to fill it once more. "There is nowhere for us to go to escape it. Tomorrow, everything here will be asleep. Some of us have resolved to escape into drunkenness before the sleep takes us."

  "What is there to be afraid of in sleep?" asked the smallest dwarf. "It's just sleep. We all do it."

  "Go and look," said the sot. He threw back his head, and drank as much as he could from his flagon. Then he looked back at them, with eyes unfocused, as if he were surprised to still see them there. "Well, go on. Go and look for yourselves." He swallowed the remaining drink, then he lay his head upon the table.

  They went and looked.

  "Asleep?" asked the queen. "Explain yourselves. How so, asleep?"

  The dwarf stood upon the table so he could look her in the eye. "Asleep," he repeated. "Sometimes crumpled upon the ground. Sometimes standing. They sleep in their smithies, at their awls, on milking stools. The animals sleep in the fields. Birds, too, slept, and we saw them in trees or dead and broken in fields where they had fallen from the sky."

  The queen wore a wedding gown, blindingly white, whiter than the snow, as white as her skin. Around her, attendants, maids of honor, dressmakers, and milliners clustered and fussed.

  "And why did you three also not fall asleep?"

  The dwarf shrugged. He had a russet-brown beard that had always made the queen think of an angry hedgehog attached to the lower portion of his face. "Dwarfs are magical things. This sleep is a magical thing also. I felt sleepy, mind."

  "And then?"

  She was the queen, and she was questioning him as if they were alone. Her attendants began removing her gown, taking it away, folding and wrapping it, so the final laces and ribbons could be attached to it, so it would be perfect.

  Tomorrow was the queen's wedding day. Everything needed to be perfect.

  "By the time we returned to Foxen's inn they were all asleep, every man jack and jill of them. It is expanding, the zone of the spell, a few miles every day. We think it is expanding faster with each day that passes."

  The mountains that separated the two lands were impossibly high, but not wide. The queen could count the miles. She pushed one pale hand through her raven-black hair, and she looked most serious.

  "What do you think, then?" she asked the dwarf. "If I went there. Would I sleep, as they did?"

  He scratched his arse, unselfconsciously. "You slept for a year," he said. "And then you woke again, none the worse for it. If any of the bigguns can stay awake there, it's you."

  Outside, the townsfolk were hanging bunting in the streets and decorating their doors and windows with white flowers. Silverware had been polished and protesting children had been forced into tubs of lukewarm water (the oldest child always got the first dunk and the hottest, cleanest water) and then scrubbed with rough flannels until their faces were raw and red; they were then ducked under the water, and the backs of their ears were washed as well.

  "I am afraid," said the queen, "that there will be no wedding tomorrow."

  She called for a map of the kingdom, identified the villages closest to the mountains, and sent messengers to tell the inhabitants to evacuate to the coast or risk royal displeasure.

  She called for her first minister and informed him that he would be responsible for the kingdom in her absence, and that he should do his best neither to lose it nor to break it.

  She called for her fiancé and told him not to take on so, and that they would still soon be married, even if he was but a prince and she already a queen, and she chucked him beneath his pretty chin and kissed him until he smiled.

  She called for her mail shirt.

  She called for her sword.

  She called for provisions, and for her horse, and then she rode out of the palace, toward the east.

  It was a full day's ride before she saw, ghostly and distant, like clouds against the sky, the shape of the mountains that bordered the edge of her kingdom.

  The dwarfs were waiting for her, at the last inn in the foothills of the mountains, and they led her down deep into the tunnels, the way that the dwarfs travel. She had lived with them, when she was little more than a child, and she was not afraid.

  The dwarfs did not speak to her as they walked the deep paths, except, on more than one occasion, to say, "Mind your head."

  "HAVE YOU NOTICED," asked the shortest of the dwarfs, "something unusual?" They had names, the dwarfs, but human beings were not permitted to know what they were, such things being sacred.

  The queen had once a name, but nowadays people only ever called her Your Majesty. Names are in short supply in this telling.

  "I have noticed many unusual things," said the tallest of the dwarfs.

  They were in Goodmaster Foxen's inn.

  "Have you noticed, that even among all the sleepers, there is something that does not sleep?"

  "I have not," said the second tallest, scratching his beard. "For each of them is just as we left him or her. Head down, drowsing, scarcely breathing enough to disturb the cobwebs that now festoon them..."

  "The cobweb spinners do not sleep," said the tallest dwarf.

  It was the truth. Industrious spiders had threaded their webs from finger to face, from beard to table. There was a modest web between the deep cleavage of the pot girl's breasts. There was a thick cobweb that stained the sot's beard gray. The webs shook and swayed in the draft of air from the open door.

  "I wonder," said one of the dwarfs, "whether they will starve and die, or whether there is some magical source of energy that gives them the ability to sleep for a long time."

  "I would presume the latter," said the queen. "If, as you say, the original spell was cast by a witch, seventy years ago, and those who were there sleep even now, like Red-beard beneath his hill, then obviously they have not starved or aged or died."

  The dwarfs nodded. "You are very wise," said a dwarf. "You always were wise."

  The queen made a sound of horror and of surprise.

  "That man," she said, pointing. "He looked at me."

  It was the fat-faced man. He had moved slowly, tearing the webbing and moving his face so that he was facing her. He had turned toward her, yes, but he had not opened his eyes.

  "People move in their sleep," said the smallest dwarf.

  "Yes," said the queen. "They do. But not like that. That was too slow, too stretched, too meant."

  "Or perhaps you imagined it," said a dwarf.

  The rest of the sleeping heads in that place moved slowly, in a stretched way, as if they meant to move. Now each of the sleeping faces was facing the queen.

  "You did not imagine it," said the same dwarf. He was the one with the red-brown beard. "But they are only looking at you with their eyes closed. That is not a bad thing."

  The lips of the sleepers moved in unison. No voices, only the whisper of breath through sleeping lips.

  "Did they just say what I thought they said?" asked the shortest dwarf.

  "They said, 'Mama. It is my birthday,'" said the queen, and she shivered.

  They rode no horses. The horses they passed all slept, standing in fields, and could not be woken.

  The queen walked fast. The dwarfs walked twice as fast as she did, in order to keep up.

  The queen found herself yawning.

  "Bend over, toward me," said the tallest dwarf. She did so. The dwarf slapped her around the face. "Best to stay awake," he said, cheerfully.

  "I only yawned," said the queen.

  "How long, do you think, to the castle?" asked the smallest dwarf.

  "If I remember my tales and my maps correctly," said the queen, "the Forest of Acaire is about seventy miles from here. Three days' march." And then she said, "I will need to sleep tonight. I cannot walk for another three days."

 
"Sleep, then," said the dwarfs. "We will wake you at sunrise."

  She went to sleep that night in a hayrick, in a meadow, with the dwarfs around her, wondering if she would ever wake to see another morning.

  * * *

  The castle in the Forest of Acaire was a gray, blocky thing, all grown over with climbing roses. They tumbled down into the moat and grew almost as high as the tallest tower. Each year the roses grew out farther: close to the stone of the castle there were only dead, brown stems and creepers, with old thorns sharp as knives. Fifteen feet away the plants were green and the blossoming roses grew thickly. The climbing roses, living and dead, were a brown skeleton, splashed with color, that rendered the gray fastness less precise.

  The trees in the Forest of Acaire were pressed thickly together, and the forest floor was dark. A century before, it had been a forest only in name: it had been hunting lands, a royal park, home to deer and wild boar and birds beyond counting. Now the forest was a dense tangle, and the old paths through the forest were overgrown and forgotten.

  The fair-haired girl in the high tower slept.

  All the people in the castle slept. Each of them was fast asleep, excepting only one.

  The old woman's hair was gray, streaked with white, and was so sparse her scalp showed. She hobbled, angrily, through the castle, leaning on her stick, as if she were driven only by hatred, slamming doors, talking to herself as she walked. "Up the blooming stairs and past the blinking cook and what are you cooking now, eh, great lard-arse, nothing in your pots and pans but dust and more dust, and all you ever ruddy do is snore."

  Into the kitchen garden, neatly tended. The old woman picked rampion and rocket, and she pulled a large turnip from the ground.

  Eighty years before, the palace had held five hundred chickens; the pigeon coop had been home to hundreds of fat white doves; rabbits had run, white-tailed, across the greenery of the grass square inside the castle walls, and fish had swum in the moat and the pond: carp and trout and perch. There remained now only three chickens. All the sleeping fish had been netted and carried out of the water. There were no more rabbits, no more doves.

  She had killed her first horse sixty years back, and eaten as much of it as she could before the flesh went rainbow-colored and the carcass began to stink and crawl with blueflies and maggots. Now she butchered the larger mammals only 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 and 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 uncomfortable in cities, distrusted houses and streets as unnatural things, but they followed their queen.

  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 toys and hoops and the whips for their spinning tops; sleeping flower women at their stalls of brown, rotten, dried flowers; even sleeping fishmongers beside their marble slabs. The slabs were covered with the remains of stinking fish, and they were crawling with maggots. The rustle and movement of the maggots was the only movement and noise the queen and the dwarfs encountered.

  "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 spinning? Can I see?"

  "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 toward 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 tightly 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 honorable," said a dwarf. "We should stay and fight."

  "There is no honor," gasped the queen, "in fighting an opponent who has no idea that you are even there. No honor 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 running until they had left the city by the far gates, and had crossed the bridge that spanned the river.

  * * *

  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, "So I hold the spindle in one hand, and the yarn in the other? My, the tip of the spindle looks so very sharp!"

  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, "My mother has forbidden me to spin."

  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 hesitate: he lopped the hand off with his ax, and the queen pulled the man's fingers away, one by one, until the hand fell on the leaf mold.

  "Let me just spin a little thread," 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 let me spin a little thread."

  The old woman had not climbed the tallest tower in a dozen years, and even she could not have told you why she felt impelled to make the attempt on this day. 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 center of the roun
d room. The bed was opulent: unfaded 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 seventy 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 blooming heart, then you'd not be so pretty-pretty, would you? Eh? Would you?"

  She walked toward 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, and 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."

  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.