Authors: Robin McKinley
She slunk back through the orchard, looking only at her
feet, not even interested in exploring the pond or stream the bulrushes
heralded, not stopping to twist a fruit off any of the generously Jaden trees,
because she suddenly felt she did not deserve such a pleasure. She went up to
her balcony and stared at her lunch with no appetite.
There was a slab of cheese, and she poked it with her
finger. “Where do you come from then? Herbivore dung is exactly what I want.
Cow would be splendid—goat, sheep, even horse. I’m not particular. Chicken is
also good, although I’m quite sure one cannot produce cheese from chickens. 1
wish I knew more about cheese.” She tried to recollect everything the dairymaid
who had married a city man might have told her about cheese varieties, but it
was all too long ago. She had not been a good pupil because she had had too
much on her mind, and the woman had been careful to give her only the most
basic instructions. She thought of her own experiments with goat’s cheese and
smiled grimly; no help for her there.
She broke off a bit of this cheese and nibbled it, stared at
the pattern of crumbs as if they were tea-leaves which could tell her fortune.
“This isn’t even like any cheese I can remember anywhere else. It’s—it’s—” She
stopped.
She had eaten cheese in the palace before, and no doubt what
was happening now was only because she was concentrating so hard that her mind
had to leap in some direction, like a horse goaded by spurs. But suddenly she
seemed to stand in a forest, and there was an undulating sea of moss underfoot,
and the sunlight fell through the green and coppery leaves in patterns as
beautiful as those on a spider’s back, and there was a smell of roses in her nostrils
and in her mouth. But just as she would know Lionheart from Jeweltongue in the
dark simply by her smell, just as each of the roses at Rose Cottage possessed a
smell as individual as the shape of its stems and leaves and the colour of its
flowers, so was this smell of roses different from the rich wild scent that
belonged to the Beast. This scent was light and delicate and fine and reminded
her of apples after rain, but with a flick, a touch, a tremor of something
else, something she could not identify. She drew in a deep breath, and her
heart lifted, and then the vision—and the scent—dissolved, and she was back in
her rose-decorated room, staring at a plate of cheese and cheese crumbs.
She hardly knew how she got through the afternoon, and she
was preoccupied at dinner. When Fourpaws failed to put in an appearance, she
found herself playing fretfully with the tails of the ribbons woven into her
bodice, fidgeting with the silken cord of her embroidered heart, and twisting
the gold chain set with coral that hung round her neck.
“May I ask what troubles you?” said the Beast at last.
Beauty laughed a little. “I am sorry; I am not good company
this evening. No, I think I want to worry my problem one more day. It would
please me to be abie to solve it myself, although at present I admit I am
baffled.”
“I will help you any way I can,” said the Beast. “As I have
told you.”
Beauty looked at him. He had turned his head so that the candlelight
fell on one cheekbone, lit the dark depths of one eye; the tips of his white
teeth showed even when his mouth was closed. He always sat so still that when
he moved, it was a surprise, like a statue gesturing, or the wolf or chimera’s
deadly spring from hiding.
“Yes, Beast,” she said. “I know ... you have told me this.”
He made his own restless motion, plucking at the edge of his
gown, as she had seen him do before. The fabric rippled and glistened in the
candlelight, seeming to turn of its own volition to show off its black sheen,
like a cat posing for an audience. She repressed the urge to stroke it, to
quiet the Beast’s hand by placing her own over it.
“It is a little early,” he said after a moment, “but I could
take you on the roof tonight.”
“Oh, yes!” said Beauty. “Please. When I woke up this
morning, I was angry, because I usually do wake at least once in the night.”
“Do you?” said the Beast, as he stood behind her chair while
she folded her napkin and rose to her feel. “Does something disturb you?”
She turned round and looked up at him. He was very near, and
the rose scent of him was so heavy she felt she might reach out and seize it,
wrap it round herself like a scarf. “I have always woken in the night.’’ she
said, * ‘since I was a little child, since—since 1 first had the dream I told
you of, my—my first evening here.”
The Beast was silent for a moment. “I have forgotten,” he
said at last, and the words /
have forgotten
echoed down a dark corridor
of years. “I too used to wake most nights, when—before—when I slept more than I
do now. I had forgotten.”
He turned away, as if still lost in thought, but she skipped
round after him and slipped her hand beneath his elbow. His free hand drew her
hand through and smoothed it down over his forearm, and his arm pressed hers
against his side.
She was aware that he was walking slowly to allow for both
her height and her elegant burden of skirts—thank fate my shoes are more
reasonable tonight, she thought—but still they made their way swiftly through
what seemed to her a maze of corridors and then up a grand swirl of stairs.
Magnificent furnishings demanded her attention on every side, but she turned
her gaze resolutely away from them, preferring to stare at the fine black
needlework on the Beast’s sleeve, glimpsed and revealed as they walked through
clouds of candlelight and into pools of darkness.
She was tired of looking up at portraits that stared down
scornfully at her. She was tired of ormolu cabinets and chi-noiserie cupboards
that when she first looked bore sprays of leaves and flowers which when she
looked again were deer or birds; tired of divans that had eight legs and were
covered with brocade but between blink and blink had six legs and were covered
with watered silk. She moved her ringers to lie lightly on a ridge of braid on
the Beast’s sleeve; it was the same ridge in or out of candlelight. The rich
scent of the crimson rose embraced her.
But as they paced up the stairs, she looked up, for the
ceiling was now very far away, and she wondered if she was seeing to the roof
of the palace. It seemed much higher than the cupola on her glasshouse, and
this puzzled her, and before she could remember not to let anything she seemed
to see in this palace puzzle her, her eyes were caught by the painted pattern
on the ceiling, which seemed to be of pink and gold—and auburn brown and ebony
black, aquamarine blue and willow leaf green—and perhaps had people worked into
it, or perhaps only rounded shapes that might be limbs and draperies, but
certainly it seemed to reflect the swirling of the staircase—except that it did
not, and the spiral over—
head began to turn quickly, too quickly, and she lost her
sense of where her feet were, and she stumbled because she could not raise her
feet fast enough, and she tripped over the risers.
The Beast stooped and picked her up as easily as she might
have picked up Fourpaws and continued up the stairs. “Pardon me, please,” he
said. “Close your eyes, and hold on to me because I am only . . . what I am.
And forgive me. for I should have warned you. I went up this stair on all fours
more than once before I learnt not to look up. This house—this place—has a
strange relationship with the earth it stands upon. If you want to look round
you, stop. When you walk, look only where you are walking. And in particular,
do not took at the ceiling when you climb a turning stair, and do not look out
any windows when you are walking past them. I—I should have said these things
to you before; I have never had occasion to explain to—” He stopped. “I do not
think the contents of any of the rooms will make you dizzy if you stand still
to look at them. They mostly only, er ...”
“Change their clothing,” said Beauty, and the Beast gave a
low rumble of laugh.
“Yes,” he said. “And please forgive me also for treating you
so—’
“Lightly,” suggested Beauty, and was gratified by another
quick growly laugh.
“—disrespectfully,” continued the Beast. “But I have also
learnt that it is better not to—not lo acknowledge when something here has had
the better of you, if you need not.”
And at that he reached the top of the stairs, and took two
steps into the darkness there, and set her gently down on her feet. Involuntarily
she leant against him, listening to the slow thump of his heart, hearing her
own heart pattering frantically in her ears in counterpoint as she stirred and
put herself away from him, feeling with her hands for the wall. “It is so
dark!” she said,
“Yes,” said the Beast’s voice, and it seemed to come from
all round her, as if he still held her in his arms, or as if he had swallowed
her up, like an ogre in a nursery tale.
“This hall is always dark; I do not know why. I do not know
why this great staircase leads you to something you are not permitted to see; I
can tell you that candles will not stay kindled here, though the air is sweet
to breathe. But this is the shortest way to the roof. I told you that any stair
up will lead you to the roof eventually; it will, but sometimes it is a tedious
process. And it is the sky we want.”
He leant past her and threw open a door. Starlight flowed in
round them, lighting up her pale hands, which she still held out in front of
her against the dark of the hallway, playing in the carved surfaces of the
cameo rings on her fingers and tweaking glints and gleams from the lace overlay
of her skirt. The Beast was a darkness the starlight could not leaven.
She turned, went up a narrow half Might of stairs, and
ducked through a low opening. She was on the roof, surrounded by sky, “Directly
before you,” said the Beast, and she could hear him stooping behind her, so
that when he pointed over her shoulder, his arm was low enough for her eyes to
follow, “is the Horse and Chariot. There”—his arm moved a little—“is the Ewer,
and there”—only his finger moved—“the Throne.”
“And there,” she said dreamily, “is the Peacock, and the
Tinker—how clear his pack is, 1 have never seen it so clear—and the Sailing
Ship.”
“Then you are a student of the skies as well,” said the
Beast.
She laughed, turning to him. “Oh, no—I have told you nearly as
many as I know. Our governesses taught us a little—a very little—a very little
of anything, I fear, but the night sky was not their fault, for we lived in the
centre of a city, where the gas-tamps were lit all night, and in weather fine
enough to stand outdoors with your governess, there was probably also a party
going on in some house nearby, with its grounds lit as bright as day. Please
tell me more. I have never seen so many stars, so much sky. At home”—she
faltered—“at... outside Longchance, where I lived with my sisters, although
there are no gas-lamps, there are trees. I know no stars that stay low to the
horizon, and the turning of the seasons always confuses me.”
And so he told her more, and sometimes, with the name of
some star shape, he told her the story that went with it. She knew the story of
the Peacock, who was so proud of his tail that he was willing to be hung in the
sky instead of marrying his true love, and how his true love, both sad and
angry, asked that peahens, at least, might be spared having tails so grand that
conceit might make them forget necessary things, like looking for supper and
raising children.
But she did not know the story that the Tinker was not a
tinker at all, but a brave soldier who, having stolen the Brand of War, carried
it in his pack till he could come up to die Ewer, which contained the Water of
Life, where he could quench it forever. But the Ewer always went before him,
and he chased her round and round the earth, because she knew that humanity
could not be freed of its burden so easily and, for love of the Tinker, could
not bear him to know his courage was in vain. Beauty had never seen the Three
Deer, who dipped back and forth above and below the horizon, ever seeking to
escape the Tiger, who ran after them; nor the Queen of the Heavenly Mountain,
whose reaim touched both the earth and the sky, and if you were the right sort
of hero and knew exactly the right path, you might visit her, and she would
show you the earth constellations spread out at your feet and tell you the stories
they held.
Beauty at last sighed and bowed her head. “You are tired,”
said the Beast. “I am sorry; I have kept you too long. You must go to bed.”
“I am not tired—or, that is, only my neck is tired,” said
Beauty, reaching beneath the gold and coral chain, and the silken rope of the
embroidered heart, to rub it. But then she blinked, looking down at her feet,
and backed up a step, and backed up another. “But. sir—Beast—what is this we
walk on? Why are we walking on anything so lovely?” And she went on backing up
and backing up, but the roof was covered with the delicate, glowing paintwork.
She knelt down and touched the arched neck of the fiery chestnut
Horse drawing the red-and-blue-and-gold Chariot, and the face of the Queen of
the Heavenly Mountain was so kind and the eyes so welcoming that Beauty almost
spoke to her, and, between opening her mouth and, remembering, closing it
again, had reached out to brush a lock of hair from where it had fallen across
her cheek, as she might have done to one of her sisters. For several minutes
after that she was too stunned, too enthralled to speak; at last she said
wonderingiy, “There is nothing as splendid as these anywhere inside your
palace.
“Bui—no—splendid is not the right word. They are splendid,
but they are—they are so friendly. Oh dear!” she said, and looked up at him,
half laughing, half embarrassed. “How childish that sounds! But so many of the
beautiful things in the rooms beneath us—push you away—tell you to stand
back—order you to admire and be abashed. These—these draw you in. These make
you want to stay and—and have them for company. Yes. that’s right. But I—I am
still making them sound like a—like—sort of comfortable, though, am I not? Like
a bowl of warm bread and milk and an extra pillow, and that’s not it at all.
They are not comfortable. Indeed, I feel that if I lived with them for long, 1
should have to learn to be ... better, or greater, myself. If this Queen of the
Heavenly Mountain looked down at me from my bedroom wall every day, soon I
should have to go looking for that path to her domain. I wouldn’t be able to
help myself.”