Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer: Expanded Edition (5 page)

THORNS

It was almost sunset when he met the dark woman on the road.

He’d been traveling for most of his eighteen years, across the dry orange lands in the west, the plains and green forests of the east and in wide-sailed ships on the back of uneasy, spiteful seas. Sometimes he rode with caravans and helped sell their wares, sometimes he’d stop at some great city or poor town and work for a bit, driving the chariot horses of lords, or else chopping up wood, whatever they’d pay him for. He had seen a good many strange things—huge beasts with gold towers on their backs, carrying kings, a serpent lady in a circus, scaled from chin to ankle; even once, in an Eastern city, a man brought back to life. But there was something about the dark woman standing on the road that tensed his muscles and shivered his spine.

She was all black cloak and black hair blowing on the chilly upland wind, and somehow, though he looked straight in her face, he could never seem to see it properly, although perhaps this was a trick of the westering light.

She was standing in his path, and when he came up level with her, one long pale hand snaked out and grasped his arm. He didn’t like her touch, it was very cold. She said:

“Where are you going, Royal Born?”

At that, he knew he was in the presence of something supernatural, for there was no other way she could have known he had once been a king’s son. Nevertheless he said lightly: “You’re mistaken, madam. Take a look at my rags.”

“There was a towered palace in the north, sacked by enemies, and a little prince carried to safety by a serving man. Now the prince travels the world, having no birthright left, and you are he.”

The hair seemed to rise on his head and he looked down at her hand. On one long white claw burned a strange ring, made of silver, and shaped like a wheel.

“I shall give you land,” she said, “and riches, if you go no farther. You shall be royal again. I promise you.”

He looked up the road to that parting in the hills he had been making for since noon.

“Why?” he asked.

“There is a thing there I would rather were left alone.”

He realized then, of course, that if she had been able to stop him by sorcery she would already have done so, and not be trying to dissuade him here. So he shook off her hand and said: “That’s a thing I’d like to see.”

She made no further move to detain him, but he never looked back till he reached the road’s crest where the rocky uplands fell away into a narrow valley below. Then he turned, but there was nothing on the road behind—except for a tall black stone standing on the path.

* * * *

As it turned out, it was a dismal and infertile valley. Perhaps if he’d not met the dark woman, he’d have left it alone, for it seemed to offer little.

The sky went up in a last blaze of scarlet, and a wood of dead trees wailed in the wind. He saw a few poor huts, but no sign of life in them, and the clouds changed from red to violet. Just then he heard the noise of water. He was thirsty, as well as hungry—hunger he was very used to. He came out of the wood, and found himself suddenly on the brink of a great slope. Here a stream flung itself off from its bed into the air, plunging down two hundred feet in a slender silver fall. Below stretched an inner secret valley, hidden from the hills above. And in the valley something gleamed like the ivory bones of a giant under the whitening moon.

The prince drank swiftly at the stream. There was a curious compulsion on him. As the night darkened and the moon brightened, he climbed down the treacherous slope. Eventually he stood on the outskirts of a ruined city.

It was the most beautiful city he had ever seen, perhaps because it was empty and desolate. The wind curled itself about the slim white towers and runneled down the colonades, and the stars glittered on fragments of colored glass still spiking in the narrow windows. At its center rose a low hill that seemed to be covered by a wood of some sort, he couldn’t be sure, for the moon had slunk behind clouds—perhaps the place was a park or garden run wild.

He walked about in the city for an hour, and by then its beauty had begun to oppress him. Finally the sky clouded completely, thunder muttered and rain began to fall. He picked a way over toppled columns and emerged into a tangle of pine woods. All the trees seemed crippled and curiously leaning, but after a time he came on a straggling village, and there were lights showing.

The moment he got near, all the watch dogs started barking and snarling. Almost immediately doors opened and men ran out. Clearly they distrusted strangers. In the murky light he noticed something very odd. Not one of them had a knife, only thick wooden stakes angled at him.

He’d thought from his welcome they’d prove unfriendly and send him away, probably with the dogs to see him off, but they seemed satisfied by his explanation of himself, and when he offered to help with anything they might need doing—in their fields or their houses, or chopping their wood—they seemed to warm to him. He was shown into the headman’s house—a rough botched affair like all the rest—and given food, and beer to drink.

But the longer he sat there, the stranger things seemed. They gave him no knife, either, to eat his meat with. The garments of the men and the women were made of animal skins, unmended and full of rents, and bundled round them and tied with tough grass stems, dried and plaited together. There was not a scrap of wool or cloth to be seen. Later on he got a look at their work tools and was astonished to find them made of stone, even to the blade of the axe—he saw now why they were so pleased to have someone else labor with it for a change. He asked the headman about this, and he looked puzzled, and said that it was the same all through the valley.

“Do traders never come here?” asked the prince.

“Oh, seldom, sir. You’re the first we’ve seen in a year or more.”

The headman’s daughter said sullenly: “Once a man came with colored stones that sparkled and they were on a sharp little stick that would go through clothes like so—but Old Man told me it was bad luck, so I had to give it back.”

The prince glanced aside at the one they called Old Man, a hunched-over grandfather sitting close to the fire. He had turned his wrinkled face to look at the girl when she spoke. Now he chanted in a dry, quavering tone: “No needle, no needle, no blade and no dart.”

“It’s just his way,” said the headman uneasily. “He’ll say that from time to time. But it’s best to be careful. No sharp things must come into the valley—that’s what all the old ones say.”

The prince felt the hair stir again on his head. He looked about the room, and realized at last what was so wrong. Not only were there no knives, but no brooches on the women’s dresses or ornamental pins in their hair. And there was not one sewn-up seam in their clothing. He saw, too, why they wore skins—somehow they had never learnt—or else they had forgotten.… He had recalled what was the most important item of every dwelling. You would always find it somewhere, in the corner of a village cot, in the upper rooms of the rich woman’s house. A spinning wheel.

When they had gone to bed, the prince lay down by the fire on the hides they had lent him. But he couldn’t sleep, and presently he heard the shuffling steps of the one they called Old Man coming back across the red-glowing room. Old Man stood over him and the prince sat up.

“Tell me, grandfather, why no spinning wheel to grace this house?”

“Nothing sharp, nothing sharp, no needle, no dart,” Old Man chanted.

“Why not?”

“Death will come and the curse will fall, and the city will lie empty.”

“Which curse is that, old man?”

“She will send it, the dark one, the Thirteenth Lady.”

The prince grew very cold, despite the fire.

“It already came, grandfather.”

“Thorns!” the old man suddenly cried out in a sharp and startling wail. “Thorns! Thorns! Thorns!” Then he bowed his head and whispered like a dry old leaf: “Seek the Oldest One, in the city. He will be there.”

He turned then, and shuffled away. The prince lay down, and a black, dank shadow seemed to eat up the room. He fell at once into a deathlike and unbroken sleep.

* * * *

In the morning he did what he could with the stone axe to repay them for his lodging. It was an icy but somehow airless day, and the pines craned about him like black shadows.

At noon he set off back through the trees towards the city, and, as he went, he heard every dog in the village begin to howl.

Why he went toward the city he was not sure. Perhaps he intended to search out in the ruins the “Oldest One” the grandfather had whispered of—yet how he would find him he had no notion. Besides, he was uncertain altogether—he might have dreamed that dark conversation, even the black-haired woman on the road, the Thirteenth Lady with her silver wheel ring.

In the city everything was as before in the pale cold daylight, except that now he could see the colors of the glass in the windows, red and gold and indigo. Then he looked up, and stared again at that central hill, covered by its black, thickly-clustered growth. The sense of compulsion came once more. “There is a thing there I would rather were left alone,” the sorceress had said to him on the road. He began to climb the slanting streets towards the hill.

Another storm came sweeping over the valley as he climbed. The sky went black, dazzling with green lightning forks, and he hurried with his head bowed against the rain. Turning a corner, he came upon a huge circular wall, the boundary of some great house or palace in earlier times. He moved along in its sheltering lee, and then there was a pair of rusty gates. He pushed at them and they slewed apart. As he went between, the lightning opened the sky, and its livid fire burst on a solid shining darkness, and threw over him a shadow as black as ink. Slowly he raised his head, and saw then what grew on the hill.

Thorns.

A vast, rearing stronghold of thorns, taller than tall trees, black as night, thick stems interwoven and sharp with blades. A tangle of daggers dripping the diamond rain. The prince gazed at it and his heart lurched. He felt the cold hand close again on his arm. Strewn among the knots and claws were white human bones, and further on a skull hung like an open rose. A mad impulse took hold of him when he saw the skull; he drew his knife and raised it to slash at the thorns. A voice came then, behind him.

“No, Royal Born. Not yet.”

The prince turned about, still holding the knife. A man stood in the gateway. He wore skins like the people of the village, and he leaned on a wooden staff. He was old, older than Old Man. The flesh of his face and hands was like lizard skin or tree bark.

“I mean you no harm, Royal Born,” he said in a voice as thin and as penetrating as the wind. “I am the Oldest One in the valley. I remember things, and I have waited for you.”

“What is this place?” The prince cried out over the thunder.

“A place of thorns,” said the Oldest One.

Then he turned and moved down the street without a word, and without a word the prince followed him.

* * * *

He lived in the lowest room of a thin tower, and he had few belongings: a lamp, a pallet and a little wooden chest. The chest caught the prince’s eye at once, for it was intricately carved and would have needed sharper tools than stone. A few pine branches burned on the hearth.

“You said you waited for me,” the prince said, “yet how could you know me?”

“You are of no importance except that you are Royal Born. This I could see, having a gift for such things. One who is Royal Born was expected.”

“Why? And for what?”

“To enter the place you saw, and to go in to what lies beyond the briars.”

“What, then, lies there?”

“Ah,” The Oldest One smiled, and his wrinkled skin moved on his face like sea waves. “I know only what was said, this being what my father told me. If you would care to listen, I’ll tell you as much.

“Well then. I was born at sunset on a strange day. It was the day the curse fell upon the valley. The nature of the curse is vague—it had to do with the Thirteenth Lady, the dark sorceress, and with a needle. For some sixteen years before my birth the king had allowed no sharp object into the valley—not an axe or a knife, not even a pin. And he had made a great bonfire and burned every spinning wheel in his kingdom on it. After which anyone who defied the law was put to death. I know nothing of the curse beyond this, except that on the day of my birth, at the very same moment that I arrived in the world, the curse came about, despite every precaution. Immediately a wall of thorns sprang up about the palace. My father and his neighbours saw it happen. The thorns twisted and turned and threaded together until the topmost towers of the palace could no longer be seen. No one could get in, and no one out. The city sent for help. Kings’ sons came, for it was said that only one Royal Born could cleave through the thorn wall. But the thorns impaled them and they died horribly. As you have seen, their bones hang there yet. After a few years the people abandoned the city. It was a place full of ghosts and fear. The walls cracked and the roofs fell in until it was as you find it now. Only my father and mother remained, and I, their child. I have outlived them, and I have known no other life than waiting for the last Royal Born.”

“But how can you know who will be the last?” the prince asked, very low.

“That was the softening of the curse. After a hundred years it might be broken if there were any man here to dare it.”

“You stayed my hand,” the prince said.

“Yes, for it was not the time. When the sun sinks tonight beyond the hills, that will be as at the hour of my birth and the hour of the curse. I shall be a hundred years old at sunset.”

* * * *

All through the afternoon the rain darted and rang on the stones of the city. But at last the sky cleared and turned golden, and the sun rested like a great red lamp on the crown of the hills.

“Now it is the time,” said the Oldest One, and the prince rose. It was very chill and his arm burned coldly where the dark woman had touched it.

“What shall I find?” he asked, as he stood in the doorway. “Suppose I should only turn away, and leave the valley by the quickest route?”