by Neil Gaiman
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 blue flies and maggots. Now she only butchered the larger mammals 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, 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 not comfortable 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 balls 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 towards 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 tight 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.
THE OLD WOMAN HAD not climbed the tallest tower in a dozen years. 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 round room. The bed was opulent: 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 almost eighty 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 heart, then you’d not be so pretty-pretty, would you? Eh? Would you?”
She walked towards 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, 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.”
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, “My! What an unusual naming-day present that must have been!”
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, “Will you bring me roses?”
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 even hesitate: he lopped the hand off with his hand-axe, and the queen pulled the man’s fingers away, one by one, until the hand fell on the leaf mold.
“Bring me roses,” 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 bring me roses.”
THEY FELT THE CASTLE long before they saw it: felt it as a wave of sleep that pushed them away. If they walked towards 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 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 upwards 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, and jabbed it hard into the queen’s thumb, and pulled it out again. A drop of dark 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 only spread 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 upwards: 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 head over 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 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.”
“It’s my 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 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, 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 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 finger out before running her fingertips 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.”
