“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 forwards.
The queen turned and ran down an alleyway and the dwarfs ran with her.
“This is not honourable,” said a dwarf. “We should stay and fight.”
“There is no honour,” gasped the queen, “in fighting an opponent who has no idea that you are even there. No honour 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.
he 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 in agony. There were no railings there, nothing to make the steep steps easier. She leaned on her stick, sometimes, 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 centre 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 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 semi-darkness.
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 cannot. 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 thorns. There’s nothing they can do. That anyone can do. Nothing at all.”
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 mould.
“Bring me roses,” said the three bandits as they slept, with one voice, while the blood oozed indolently on to the ground from the stump of the fat man’s arm. “I would be so happy if only you would bring me roses.”
hey 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 forwards, 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.