Briar Rose & Spanking the Maid Page 5

  When he finally, with a last desperate stroke, slashed through and emerged from the dark night of the briars, he found that day had broken and the world had changed. He’d evidently lost his way inside the hedge and got turned around, for there was his horse, still tethered where he’d left him. But the forest he’d tethered him in was gone. Everything was gone. As far as he could see: a vast barren landscape under the noonday sun. A fairy came, the horse explained, and took everything away. What—? The horse could talk—? Of course it could talk, says the old crone irritably, peering up at her from her spinning wheel. What’s wrong with that? I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem right. She wonders if her own prince could have a talking horse, and since, in her stuporous condition, thinking and speaking are the same thing, the crone replies: A talking horse? Don’t be ridiculous! Why do you always suppose every story is about you? Now come on in here and stop interrupting. She remains in the drafty doorway, afraid to enter (something bad has happened here) but afraid to back away, uncertain if the spiral staircase she has climbed is still there behind her. She does not like this story, but knows that its teller knows this without her having to say so. Little blue sparks fly as the crone, turning the wheel slowly, lets the flax slide through her old gnarled fingers. The prince, she continues, wanted to know what the fairy looked like, what color was she, how many teats did she have, was she good or bad, did she come from outside or inside? Inside what? asked the horse. The hedge, stupid, said the prince with an impatient gesture. But then he saw that the hedge was gone, too, they were all alone in the blazing emptiness. He thought about this for a moment, and then he said: Maybe everything is really still here. Maybe it only appears to our bewitched senses to be gone. That may seem reasonable to you, snorted his horse, but it doesn’t make my kind of sense. No, really, insisted the prince, it’s one of the fairies’ favorite tricks. So maybe now, knowing this, I can finally get through to the hidden castle and break the spell. Is this possible? Can he do it? Her interest in the story has picked up, and she takes a tentative halfstep into the room, bringing a curling smile to the dry lips of the old crone. So the prince raised his sword and, bracing himself for the worst, went charging about under the hot sun like one possessed, hoping to bump up against something solid, but in the end all he got out of it was sunblindness and a terrible thirst. The horse snickered at all this human folly and said they should move on and try to find something to eat, but the prince, who was on a heroic quest which he felt determined to see through to the end, even if seeing was no longer what he did best, stubbornly refused, so the horse trotted off without him. The prince went on frantically hunting for the invisible castle for the rest of his life, which was not long, there being nothing to eat in that desert but sand. He died—? Oh yes, raisined up like a dogturd out there in the sun, my pet, a worshipful sight. They would have made him a saint, but they didn’t know what to call him since he had failed in his quest and so had never made his— No, she insists from the doorway, backing away. You can’t do that. That’s not how stories are.

  The more the possibility of reaching her bedside recedes, the closer he seems to come to her. He does not know if, consumed by fear and desire, he is generating this illusion himself, or if it is fairy magic. But he is scaling the castle walls before he has escaped the briars, exploring the castle before he has scaled the walls. It feels as if an impossible problem is being solved, all by itself. The castle itself is a strange and haunted place, unlike any he has ever seen before, yet also oddly comforting, more like home than home. Searching for her through its webby mazes, he feels like he is opening doors to his own past, though it is more like a past that might have been than a real one. Before he has found her, he is already at her bedside. He is so stunned by her beauty, he can’t move, even though his lips are already approaching hers. He thinks: Won’t it all be spoiled if I wake her up? But he has already awakened her: they are in the great hall, or else in front of the oriel window, gazing out on the manicured gardens, bordered by a small trimmed hedge of sweetbriar. She is just as he has imagined her: beautiful, gentle, innocent, devoted, submissive. He is suffused with love and desire, but he also feels like he would like to take a nap. Today, she says, I saw a strange thing. I saw a plucked goose flying. It flopped into my room where I was sleeping or else lying awake and said to me: You will never awaken because the story you were in no longer exists. Oh yes? He is thinking about the quest that brought him here. Has he made his name then? If so, what is it? Or has he perhaps come to the wrong castle? When she says, perhaps not for the first time, that, even when sitting in the same room with him, she feels like she’s all alone, he realizes his mind has been elsewhere. I’m sorry, my love, he says. What is your heart’s desire? To live happily ever after, she replies without emotion. Of course, he replies, it’s yours for the asking. And also I wonder if you’d mind watching the babies for a while? Babies—?!

  She is in the kitchen, or else the nursery, playing with the babies. They seem to have been conjured up by one of the old crone’s tales, but she’s glad they’re there, strange as they are, more like her parents than any children, the boy with his little tuft of beard, the girl gazing upon her in haughty disapproval even as she changes her breechcloth. The crone, stirring a thick steamy brew in a cauldron big as a bathtub, hung over the fire on an iron chain (they are in the kitchen then, or else in the bedchamber and that is a bathtub), is telling her a story about a princess guarded by a fire-breathing dragon known for his ferocity and his insatiable appetite for tender young maidens, breath-roasted while spitted on a claw. The crone provides several of the dragon’s favorite recipes for basting and dipping sauces, which Rose does not find amusing. Usually – if one with a memory such as hers can really have any idea about what might be usual – she is alone in the castle with the old crone, but sometimes it is full of other people, servants, knights, even princes, and the children come and go at random (they are gone now), an arrangement which also somewhat perplexes her, though only when she imagines she is awake, not often. Today she was fooled by a prince who approached her bedside and began probing her as though examining her systematically for the source of her spindled pain. He was tall and handsome, but badly wounded, his clothing shredded and clinging to him by bloody tatters. My prince! You have come at last! Yes, well, it was a matter of honor, he said gravely, disappointing her. I did it for the love of love. But what kind of a thing is that that jumps about so funnily? she added sleepily, although it was not what she had meant to say at all, it just seemed to pop to mind. For providing relief from sorrow and contact with the numinous, he replied tersely, even as his fingers burrowed deeper. Though it is all an illusion of course. Yes, I know, she sighed and opened her eyes. No prince. Of course. Just a family of nesting churchmice, scurrying beneath her gown. She closed her eyes again and, without transition, found herself here in the kitchen, where now the old crone is down on her haunches, adding a few sticks of firewood to the embers and fanning them into flames with her thick layers of smelly black skirts. In her story, the hero has just flown in with the head of a lady with snaky hair that turns everyone into statues. He aims the frightful thing at the dragon, but the dragon ducks and looks away and the head stuns the princess instead. Now she’s useless to everyone. She may have heard this story before, the part about a princess turned to stone is familiar, but she can’t be sure. What was the princess’s name? she asks. Don’t interrupt! snaps the old crone, shaking the slotted spoon at her, sparks flying from her clashing teeth, her wild unkempt hair twisting about her head like a nest of vipers. She ladles something out of the cauldron that looks like another baby. The important question, you little ninny (her own knees and elbows have gone numb, perhaps she has been lying too long in the same position), is whose head was he using?

  Searching in himself for the magical knowledge that might make the murderous briars sheathe their thorns and fade away, he has seemed to hear the sleeping princess say (perhaps this is just before awakening her, or perhaps it is
years later): There is a door that is not a door. That is where it all begins. He knows that nothing at this castle is simply what it is, everything here has a double life, so he supposes she is trying to tell him something else, the way out of this thorny maze, for example, or the way in to her own affections. She is in front of a mirror (the doubled redoubled), letting down her golden hair. Her beauty numbs him. Now that I am awake, she says, the truth is more hidden than before. Her mirrored eyes meet his: When will this spell be broken? she asks. When will my true prince come? So, as he feared: he is not the one. Or perhaps he is the one, or could be, this her plea that he become the prince she has been dreaming of. He does indeed feel himself becoming that imagined prince, and he wonders if perhaps she is a sorceress. His doubts darken her countenance, either with sorrow or with anger. Or with desire. She holds the mirror up to his face and he sees something hairy and toothy, halfway between a wolf and a bear, and he feels overwhelmed by lust and stupidity, a not unpleasant sensation, the best he’s had probably since he set forth upon this adventure. It doesn’t last, forget happily ever after, she is dressing him in pretty new clothes with all the needles left inside and leading him by the paw into the great hall for the castle ball. As he enters the hall, engulfed in pain, he realizes he has arrived at the perilous edge of the world and that from this entering there will be no departing. Help! he howls. Wake up! Get me out of here!

  She imagines him (a conjuring of sorts) somehow scaling the unscalable walls and, his flesh stinging still from the barbed briars, searching through the webbed labyrinth of the ancient castle for the bedchamber of the legendary sleeping princess, but finding instead a door that is not a door, leading down a secret corridor to a spiral staircase. He climbs it, sword drawn, and, in a room at the top of the tower, finds a beautiful maiden with flaxen hair spinning alone by candlelight. Ah, there you are! she exclaims breathlessly. You have come at last! That’s strange, I was told you would be sleeping, he says. I couldn’t wait, she replies with a seductive smile. Now come on in here and close the door, you’re letting in a draft. He hesitates, framed by an abysmal darkness, his sword still drawn, then looks away, keeping her only in the corner of his eye, no doubt hoping to catch her changing back to her real shape when she thinks she is not being watched. Ah, nothing worse, from the fairy’s point of view, than a cogitative prince. Brave and handsome, yes, and perhaps a few of the social graces, a smooth dancer, comfortable with the clichés: Charming, as they’re so often called. But not too much introspection, thank you, not too much heavy pondering, else the game’s up for distressed maidens like her present seeming self, who weeps now as though her heart has been broken. You don’t love me! she sobs. You are not the one! Yes, I am! he cries, sheathing his sword and rushing to her side. I’m sorry, my love! He falls to one knee and clasps her to his wounded bosom. That’s better. But it’s so hard to know what’s real and not in such a place, he pleads. I know, I know, she groans, hugging him tight, pressing the thorns in deeper. She has one hand between his legs, peeling away the bloody tatters that remain. I’m such a silly goose, she sighs, smiling tenderly at him, her iron teeth, she knows, glinting like nuggets of gold in the guttering candlelight, a voluptuous sight not even she, in his boots, could resist. Then, with a rueful sigh (such is the fairy’s lonely burden!), she unravels the knots, loosing thread from thread, and, allowing her hump to rise once more, her hide to hornify, her multitude of breasts to fall, commences to spin again. Desire: what is it exactly?

  She is seated beside the king at the high table in the great hall. He looks like her father, yet is not her father. There is something heavy weighing on her head which makes her want to lie down under the table and go to sleep. She touches it: a crown. A great span of time seems to have passed since her awakening, which she cannot at the moment remember. Or, more likely, she is still asleep and dreaming, this merely another of the old crone’s wicked entertainments. The room is full of banqueters and servants but they are not moving or speaking. Perhaps they have been turned to stone. Two naked children, who may be hers, are playing in the dirty rushes under the trestle tables, their rosy bottoms bobbing like apples in a tub of dirty water, the only things moving in the hall. She would like to give them both a good spanking, or else go play with them (she could be the dragon), but she is too tired to move. Happily ever after, the king says. It’s never quite like you imagine it. She nods. A mistake. The weight of her crown carries her head all the way into her plate of food. She has, literally, to lift her head with both hands and put it upright on her shoulders again. Time disfigures everything, he sighs and belches, scratching his hairy belly. But at least we have our memories. We do? An ancient humpbacked creature shuffles in from the kitchen and gives her a cloth with which to wipe the gravy from her face. One of the old crone’s petticoats, by the smell of it. Of course we do. Don’t you remember the musical parade at our wedding feast, this crowned and bearded stranger asks, the flutes and trumpets, the kettledrums, the tambourines? No … The dancing girls? She flies into a sudden rage and wheels round to dig her nails into his face, her crown toppling. She claws deep red grooves through his cheeks. He does not resist. You are not the one! she screams. His beard, catching the rivulets of blood, seems to whiten as though a century were passing. Sometimes, he says, gazing at her tenderly as if indeed he might know her or have known her once upon a time, I feel the reason I never escaped the briars was that, in the end, I loved them, or at least I needed them. Let’s say, he adds with a curling smile, licking at the blood at the corners of his lips, they grew on me …

  Although still trapped in the hedge, he has somehow clawed his way through, scaled the castle walls, awakened the sleeping princess, broken the spell, and saved the moribund kingdom. Even the flies, they say, got up off the wall and flew again. But it all happened so long ago, his memory of it is as though a borrowed one, and he feels substantially unrewarded for all his pain and suffering. Which she, for one (the entire kingdom is another), has never truly appreciated, taking it all for granted as part of the devotion due her. Or else doubting it altogether, as she doubts him: Are you really the one? she will ask from time to time, gazing darkly at him with fear and suspicion. Perhaps not, he thinks, licking his unhealed wounds. Perhaps I have come to the wrong castle. When he first arrived here, or imagined arriving here, it was like returning home again, so familiar was it. He knew, for example, even before escaping the briars, just where the sleeping princess lay. But it may be that his knowing was itself part of the spell, for the castle has grown in strangeness ever since. Or perhaps he has grown more complex, his quest less clear and pure, the castle recognizable only to an unmazed mind. He can no longer even find at will her sleeping chamber, though he is often in it, transported there as though by sorcery when simplified by desire and wine, or by his terror of the briared night. What happens there is a periodic reminder to him of the brevity of all amorous pursuits and the symmetries of love and death, and seems intended to recall for him, or perhaps for her, that night he is said to have first awakened her: the stale morbidity of the bed in which she lay, canopied in dark dusky webs, its linens eaten by the vermin scurrying within, she spread upon it like a sentient bolster, so sweetly vulnerable, hands crossed primly on her pubescent breast, knees together, the rouge of her cheeks and the coral of her parted lips like painterly touches of the embalmer’s art, her gown a silky gauze turned by time to dust that vanished in a puff when he blew upon it, or so she has told him, explaining the powdering of her body and what he must do now to please her. These nightly rituals pass like dreams, or rather like a single dream redreamt, so indistinguishable are they from one another, which also seems a portion of her pleasure. Yes, yes, that’s how it was! Her obsessive recreations of love’s awakening delirium are perhaps what most oppress him, not because, as he blows the dust away, they cast a shadow of what might have been upon their workaday royal lives, but because they suggest to him what might yet, if he could but escape this castle, be. He hears rumors of enchanted
princesses out on the perilous fringe, asleep for a hundred years or more, and longs to ride out once again on new adventure, to tame mystery and make his name in the old way, but she does not understand such restlessness, she was born to these stacked stones, so haunted by her dreams, it’s all the life she knows or wants to know, heroic endeavor a kind of wickedness to her, all quests but one unholy. When he makes the mistake of announcing to all present at high table in the great hall his noble intention to sally forth to rescue another sleeping maiden, she explodes with sudden fury, clawing at his face as though to scratch his eyes out, and then, just as suddenly, falls asleep with her face in the soup, provoking a general alarm. The chamberlain hauls her out of the soup by her golden hair and the sauce cook throws water on her, her lady-in-waiting unlaces her corsets and rubs her temples with eau de cologne, the chaplain slaps her hands and the kitchen boy her face, but nothing wakes her. He can feel their hostility mounting, the hairs bristling on his snout and back. His wounded face burns with pain and chagrin. I’ll never get out of here, he laments. The others circle round, their faces going slack, eyes narrowing to dark bloody slits. All right, all right, he barks irritably, lifting her up and carrying her out of the great hall toward her bedchamber. I’ll do it!

  She awakens to repeated awakenings as though trapped in some strange mechanism, and she longs now to bring it to a standstill, to put an end once and for all to all disquiet, even if it means to sleep again and sleep a dreamless sleep. And so she goes in search of an old crone who has befriended her, one she believes may have magical powers, or at least some useful pharmaceutical ones, and while looking for her she comes upon a door that is not a door. She knows, though she does not know how she knows, that beyond it there is a long dark corridor leading to a spiral staircase, at the top of which, in the highest tower of the castle, is a spinning room. Where something bad happened. Or will happen. But something perhaps that she desires. She steps through into the secret corridor and there discovers her true prince in all his manly radiance embracing a scullery maid. Oh, sorry, he says. But she was asleep and I was only trying to— She wants to scratch his eyes out, but he has already disappeared. She seems to hear galloping hooves, though it may be only the clattering of her unhappy heart. Perhaps he has abandoned her forever, returning to his ogress wife or riding off to new adventures. It is easy for him. She has no horse, could not steer it if she did, would not know where to take it if she could, this castle all she knows or dares to know. Such a ninny, as the old crone says. But his exuberance frightens her, his worldly heroics do. He is young enough to be her great-great-great grandson, yet he seems a hundred years older. Sometimes I think it was better when we was all asleep, mum, the maid says wistfully, hands cupped under her belly, swollen with child. I had such pretty dreams then. Yes, I know. She will have the girl’s throat slit tomorrow and serve her up to him when he returns, his unborn between her jaws like a baked apple, if tomorrow ever comes, but for now, feeling like an abandoned child, those who might protect her from the fairy’s curse gone off to their houses of duty or pleasure, she continues her lonely explorations, down the shadowy corridor and up the swaying spiral staircase, her eyes closed, hands crossed demurely on her breast, her silken gown disintegrating in the chill draft, lips parted slightly to receive what fate awaits her.