Rose Daughter (10 page)

“Beauty. There must be something I can bring you.”

He looked so sad that Beauty cast her mind round for something
she could suggest. He would know she did not mean it if she asked for jewels
and pretty dresses. They had Teacosy and did not need another house pet, nor
could they afford to feed and shelter anything beyond Lydia, her latest kid,
and the chickens. Whatever it was, it needed to be something small, that would
not burden him on the way. They really lacked for nothing at Rose
Cottage—nothing but the sun—nothing, so long as they wished to stay here, and
it seemed to her that they did wish to stay here.

Nothing but the sun. Her eyes moved to the windowsill, where
an empty vase stood, and she gave a little laugh that was mostly a sob. “You
could bring me a rose.”

Her father nodded gravely, acknowledging the joke. And when
the convoy returned, he went with them.

The winter the old merchant spent in the city he had been
born in and lived in all his life till the last three years was sadder and
emptier even than he had expected. His clerk had not succeeded in keeping die
impoundment proof against raids from his old creditors; there was little enough
left even by the time he arrived, and he saw none of it at all. Winter frosts
came early, but no snow fell; the muddy, churned ground Croze solid and into
such rutted, tortured shapes that many of the roadways were impassable. He
found himself stranded in the city week after week, with almost no money even
to put food in his mouth; if the Lambs had not taken him in, he did not know
what he would have done.

Yet he had to keep hidden even that kindness, for his
clerk’s new master disliked any expression of loyalty—or even human sympathy—to
his old. The old merchant rather thought that Mr Lamb’s new master had taken
him on as a deliberate gesture of spite against himself, but he found he no
longer cared. He lived in a tiny house called Rose Cottage, very far away from
here, and as soon as the weather broke, he would return. He knew now that his
daughters had been right, and he should never have come in the first place.
Well, he had learnt his lesson.

But he was not able to wait for the weather. His old
business rival discovered his clerk’s, as he put it, duplicity, and declared
that the clerk couid choose between his job and sheltering a ruined man. Mr
Lamb did not tell him this; the captain of the ship that had returned found out
about it. The captain offered his own home as alternative, but the old merchant
declined. He was bad luck in this city, and the sooner he left the better.
Reluctantly he did accept the loan of a horse—or rather of a stout shaggy pony—from
the captain, on the man’s flatly refusing to let him leave town on any other
terms. “It’s winter out there, you old fool; you could die of it, and then
where would your daughters be?”

My daughters would do very well without me, thought the old
man, but he did not say the words aloud. Instead he admitted the pony would be
useful and thanked the captain for his offer.

There was little traffic leaving the city. The old merchant
found a few people to travel with; but he had to make a zigzag course from one town
to the next, for no one (sensibly) was travelling very far, and some people
turned back—or had to turn back—when they discovered the state of the roads. He
was daily grateful for the pony, who, nose nearly at ground level and ears
intently pricked, found her way carefully over and round the twisted furrows
and rough channels where the frozen mud crests sometimes curled as high as her
shoulder, and who seemed to have a sixth sense about which murky, polluted ice
would hold her and which would not.

At long last he was within a few days of Longchancc, and of
Rose Cottage, and the weather was breaking at last. Spring was here—nearly. He
had been gone the entire winter.

There was no one travelling in his direction, but he
thought—so near to home—he could risk it alone. The track itself was easy to
find; there were so few roads this far into the back of beyond it was hard to
lake a wrong one. And bandits usually stayed in the warmer, richer lands. He
set out.

The first day was fine: blue and clear. He could not
remember when he had last seen blue sky; he stared up till he was dizzy and had
to cling to the pony’s mane. Little soft airs moved round him, brushing his
face and hands, toying as if in disbelief with the heavy, fraying edges of his
winter cloak. When he made camp that evening, he was as near to being happy as
he had been in the months since the letter had come. He was warm; he knew where
he was; he would see his daughters soon. He thought of his secret work waiting
for him and smiled; maybe sometime this year he would be ready to satisfy
Jcweltongue’s curiosity. ... He wondered drowsily how many knots the sawyer and
carter and wheelwright had got their accounting into in the last few months. He
would sort them out soon enough. He fell asleep dreaming pleasantly of long
straight columns of figures.

But the clouds rolled up while he slept, and the temperature
began ominously to drop. When he woke, he found the pony lying beside him, her
warm back against his, and there were snowflakes falling.

He saddled up, frightened, and turned the pony’s nose to the
road. But the flakes grew thicker and thicker, and the wind rose and howled
round them, and soon the pony was going where she chose, because he no longer
had any idea where they were and could not see the track for the drifting snow.

But the pony toiled on, showing no sign of wanting to stop;
the old man was glad enough to hold on to the pommel and let her go, for he
knew that to halt would be to freeze to death. He grew wearier and wearier and
slumped lower and lower; once or twice he woke up just before he fell off. The
pony’s steps were growing slower. Soon he would have to get off and lead
her....

The snow stopped and the pony’s hoofs struck bare ground at
the same moment.’She stopped, and he looked up in amazement, snow sluicing off
his shoulders and back. They had come out of the woods into a clearing. The merchant,
dazed with exhaustion and astonishment, at first could not make out what he was
looking at. It was not merely that no snow was falling here now, no snow had
fallen; the ground before him was green with grass. Immediately around them was
a vast formal garden, laid out in low box ma/.es, dotted by small round pools
with classical statues rising from their centres. The box looked freshly
clipped, the pools quiet and untroubled by ice, and the paths were recently
raked. This stretched as far as his tired eyes could see on cither hand. Beyond
the garden before him, at the end of a straight drive surfaced with small
twinkling white pebbles, was the most magnificent palace he had ever seen, even
in his days as the wealthiest merchant of the wealthiest city in the country.

The palace was perhaps only three storeys high, but each
storey was twice the height of those in an ordinary house; the windows were as
tall and wide as carriage-house gates. The facade was impressively handsome but
forbiddingly plain, the heavy square pediments of the ranks of windows
emphasising a glowering look, and all was made of a grey-white stone which
glittered slightly, like the pebbles in the drive, and which made the building
hard to look at for very long. It seemed to shimmer slightly, like an elaborate
mirage.

The merchant blinked, but the garden and the palace
remained. He looked down at himself. The snow was melting on his sleeves and
along the pony’s mane. He looked up. The sky overhead was iron grey, but he
could not tell if it was twilight or cioud cover that made it so. But no snow
fell from it. He was afraid to turn round; would he see wintry woods again. The
blizzard that might have killed them? If this was a mirage, he wished to
believe it was real till it was too late.... May kind fate preserve me, he
thought. If it is not a mirage, this must be the dwelling of the greatest
sorcerer that has ever lived. But where are his guardian beasts? His messenger
spirits? Everything was wrapped in the deepest silence and stillness, deep as
the snowbound stillness that follows a blizzard. When his pony bowed her head
and blew, the sound unnerved him.

The merchant dismounted stiffly, took his pony’s rein, and
walked forward. His numbed face began to hurt, for the air here was warm. He
stripped off his sodden gloves and loosened his cloak. The pony had come out of
the blizzard and into this—this place at the head of the drive, as if she had
been following a clear path. Perhaps she had. Their feet crunched on the
pebbles; the sound was notliing like the squeak of feet on fresh-fallen snow.

The huge arched portico over the doorway into the palace was
lit with hundreds of candles. There was not even so much wind as to make the
candle flames flicker.

He stopped on the threshold, but only for a moment; he was
too tired, and too precariously balanced between fear of what lay behind them
and fear of what lay before, to risk any decision. His feel, had decided for
him; let them have their way. He took the pony through the archway too, partly
for company, partly because he would not leave her behind after all they had
been through together. She balked, briefly, when her hoofs touched carpeting, but
she did not wish to be left alone either, so she crowded up close behind the
merchant and pushed her face into his back.

They walked down a long corridor together; the old merchant
was simply following the line of lit candles. He saw great dark doorways on
cilher side of him, but he had no urge to explore. The way they went was full
of light, and he went on hopefully, though he would not have wanted to say precisely
for what. He and his pony both needed sleep and food as well as shelter, but it
seemed ridiculous that they should be wandering through an enchanted palace
looking for these things.

He looked back once over his shoulder. Their passage was
leaving no muddy footprints, no dark damp patches of melted snow. He did not
look back again, He knew they were caught up in some great magic, but this
little reminder of it was almost more frightening than the fact of the palace
itself. They walked here without trace; it was as if they were invisible,
insubstantial, as if they were ghosts.... He tried to rally himself: Think of
the row in an ordinarily grand house if one such as I, and leading a dirty,
shaggy pony as well!, should be found indoors, and uninvited! Think of the
cries of outrage, the rush of servants with their buckets of soapy water to
scrub the carpet—think of the disdainful footmen hustling us back to the door!

He remembered the passionate strength he had had in the
first weeks following his wife’s death, when he had forbidden any magic or any
practitioners of magic in his house ever again. It was the only absolute law he
could ever remember making. He would have laughed, now, had he the strength, at
what seemed to him suddenly the wild wastefulness of his younger self. For the
truth was that he had no wish now to spurn what appeared to be offered to him.
He was grateful to have his life, to be granted the hope that he might, after
all, see his daughters again.

But he wished someone would come and reassure him they did
know he was here. And he wished that whoever it was that came might be more or
less human. Or at least not too large. There had been a sorcerer he had had mercantile
dealings with who had a hydra to answer his door. He’d had to call on the
sorcerer himself because his clerks were all too frightened to go. But he had
been younger then too.

They came to a room. It was a small room for the size of the
palace, but a very large room to a man who lived in Rose Cottage. The soft
crimson carpet of the corridor con—

tinued here, and the candelabra on the walls were ornate
gold, with great golden pendant drops made to look like dripping candle wax,
and the wallpaper was a weave of red and gold, patterned to look like ripples
of fabric bound with golden cords. There was a fire in a fireplace large enough
to roast the pony, and a table drawn up beside it, with a place laid for only
one person but with enough food for twenty.

The merchant gave a great sigh and unsaddled the pony. She
staggered forward and stood, swaying and steaming, in front of the fire; then
she turned her head and ate three apples out of a silver-gilt bowl on the
table. “I wish there was hay for you,” said the merchant, picking up a loaf of
bread and breaking it into pieces with his hands and offering it to her; she
ate it greedily. But as he held it out to her, something caught at the corner
of his eye; he looked over her shoulder and saw ... a golden heap of hay in a
little alcove on the other side of the fireplace, opposite the table. He would
have sworn that neither hay nor alcove had been there a minute before. But when
the pony had linished the bread, he turned her gently round, and she went lo
the hay at once, as he sat down at the table.

He did not fall to as quickly as she; he was too worried
about his host. But he was tired and hungry almost past bearing, and he tried
to comfort himself with the thought that there was plenty of food here for two,
should the master of this place appear after all—or perhaps his hydra. He
looked again at the amount of food provided, and the single place setting, and
worried about the appetite of the creature usually catered for. Finally, and
half embarrassed, the merchant moved the single place setting round the edge of
the table, so that he was not sitting at the head but only on the master’s
right hand.

He ate eagerly but hesitantly, looking often towards the
mouth of the lit corridor where he had entered, taking great pains to spill
nothing on the snowy tablecloth, laying the serving spoons exactly back where
he found them, choosing nothing that would by its absence spoil the elegant
appearance of the whole. By the time he was no longer hungry, his eyelids
seemed to be made of lead; with a tremendous effort of will he stood up from
the table, thinking he would lie down in front of the fire to sleep. His knee
knocked against something, and he discovered a little bed with many blankets
drawn up close behind him where he had sat at the table. He shivered because he
knew there had been no bed there earlier and he had heard nothing. But there it
was, and he was tired. He stayed awake jusl enough longer to pull the biggest
blanket off the bed and throw it over the now-dozing pony.