Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales (10 page)

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 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.”

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.

A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE
…………………………………

The first book I remember owning was a picture book about a mermaid. The first book I loved was an illustrated “Snow White.” The illustrations were, to my three-year-old self, beautiful, and the story was gripping, terrifying, and it ended perfectly. Years later I retold it as something very dark, and that version of the story seems to be making its own way in the
world.

As a young journalist, I was assigned to read a small pile of “sex and shopping” blockbusters and write about them. I noticed, with a small amount of surprise, that the plots were all fairy-tale plots. I remember constructing, as an exercise, a high-tech, contemporary version of “Sleeping Beauty.” I did not write it—I was not that cynical—but Sleeping Beauty has hovered at the edges of
my mind ever since.

When Melissa and Tim asked me to visit a story I had loved, I thought of so many authors I have loved, so many stories. And then I asked if I could go back to the Sleeping Beauty In The Wood, and felt very lucky when they said yes.

Kai Lung’s Golden Hours
(1922). English author Ernest Bramah wrote several collections of stories that feature his droll storyteller, Kai Lung, beginning with
The Wallet of Kai Lung
and followed by
Kai Lung’s Golden Hours
, and then by
Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat
and
Kai Lung Beneath the Mulberry Tree.
They are all set in a China created entirely from Bramah’s own imagination (since he never once
even visited the country), a misty landscape rife with sly dragons, ferocious bandits, wily mandarins, and beguiling maidens continually placed into dramatic circumstances that always offer his titular hero yet another chance to spin a tale studded with small delights and exquisite language.

On first reading, I simply fell head over heels into Bramah’s world, and my imagination still patiently
treads its subtle paths.

—Charles Vess.

T
IM
P
RATT

I left home five years ago, and haven’t been back since—so why do I still think of it as home at all?

After almost a week spent driving across the country on I-40 East, I cut north on Highway 202, and within an hour reached the outskirts of my hometown, Cold Corners. The only corners are in the endless rectangular fields of soybeans and tobacco, and with triple-digit
heat and 90 percent humidity in summer, it’s hardly “cold,” so I don’t know where it got the name. (Local wisdom contends the name is a corruption of some Cherokee word meaning “fertile land,” but I’m willing to bet that’s pure Carolina invention.)