Authors: Robin McKinley
The Beast still stood silent.
“Oh—am I still describing it all wrong? I told you our governesses
never taught us much. And Jeweltongue is the artistic one of us. Lionheart is
the bold one, and I—I—I am the practical one. I don’t mind being the practical
one, but these—oh, these pictures do not make me feel the least bit practical!”
She took a deep breath and clasped her hands over her heart, as if she felt some
stirring in her blood she had not felt before.
“Tell me—please tell me—do you know how they came here—these
pictures? It is so odd that they should be here.
where they will be rained on and scoured by wind. Do you
know how they came here?”
There was a long silence. “Hmm,” rumbled the Beast at last.
“I drew them.”
“You?” she said, amazed. “But—but you told me you are
clumsy!”
“My hands are clumsy,’
1
said the Beast, “but they
are steady. I have had .,. enough time, to learn how to do what I wish to do. I
tried ... different things. Sometimes I use a very long brush, which I hold
between my teeth.”
“But—you have said you spend the nights here! Do you work in
the dark?”
“I see very well in the dark, so long as the sky is clear,”
said the Beast. “The shadows indoors are much darker.”
She crept, feeling foolish but too entranced to care, across
the roof, stooping even lower to peer at a particularly fine bit of work: a
deer’s flank, a peacock’s feather, the vine leaves winding up a pole. There
were more stars and stories here than she could learn in years of nights. She
came at last to the low balustrade which ran along the edge of the roof. There
was something painted here too, but it was almost entirely in shadow, and she
could not see it.
She looked down the vast length of the roof—for they had
walked round only one tiny bit of this wing of the palace—and along its
balustrade, and it seemed to her that all the shadows were populated by the
Beast’s fine, living, vivid painting, but nowhere could she see any bit of
balustrade that did not stand so thoroughly in its own shadow that she thought
her weak human eyes could make out what was upon it.
“Candles,” she said aloud—a little too loud—and went firmly
to the low door, which projected into the roof no higher than the balustrade,
and looked inside on the top stair. She saw nothing, but she persisted, seeing
candles in her mind’s eye, insisting on candles, and eventually she found a
nook, and in it a candle in a small holder and a tinder-box. She lit the one
with the other, and stood up, and went back to the balustrade where she had
first noticed the patterns she suspected were painting, and stooped again, and—
somehow she had known this was what she would find—the Beast
had painted roses all along the balustrade, as far as she walked, stooping for
the candle flame to light them but careful with the candle, that no wax would
drip on the paintings she could not help but walk on.
She walked back to the Beast, who had moved away from her as
soon as she began examining his paintings. She touched his arm timidly. “They are
all so beautiful,” she said.
He looked down at her. “Not half so beautiful as you are,”
he said. “Nor do they speak to me, nor touch me. Even Fourpaws will not touch
me. Beauty, will you marry me?”
She shivered as if she had been struck by winter wind, but
she left her hand on his arm. ‘‘Good night, Beast,” she said, and turned away,
to go through the little door, and find her way to her bedroom, and sleep.
“Good night, Beauty,” said the Beast behind her, “Do not forget:
Keep your eyes downcast while you are on the stairs.”
“I will not forget,” whispered Beauty.
Ohc was not sure when the dream began. She remembered
walking down the long vortex of stairs, keeping her eyes on the next tread, and
the next, as her feet stepped down, and down, and she remembered how the
darkness seemed to rise towards her as she neared the bottom, till when she
stood on the floor again, she could see no more than she had at the top, before
the Beast had opened the door that let in the starlight, though it had not been
dark at the bottom of the stairs when the Beast had been with her. She stood
for a moment, her heart again beating in her ears, and this time the Beast did
not stand near her; but then a door opened in front of her, and the twinkle of
candlelight beckoned to her from the darkness, although the little light seemed
to struggle, as if with some fog or miasma.
She did not remember how long she walked through corridors,
familiar and unfamiliar—a little familiar, a little less familiar—till she came
again to the chamber of the star, eerily lit by its sky dome, and she walked
through her rooms, and rather than at once undressing and climbing into her
bed, she went to stand upon the balcony. The spider-web glistened in its corner
like hoarfrost.
As she stood, leaning against the railing, her mind and heart
still spinning with the images of the Beast’s painting, she looked idly out
into the starlit courtyard. Arid she saw a bent old woman carrying a basket
walk slowly round the corner of the glasshouse, as if she came from the
carriageway where the wild wood lay, and she walked slowly down the wing of the
palace where the closed gates were hidden. Beauty could not see the gates from
where she stood, but the old woman set the basket she carried down, in front of
where they might be. And then she turned and walked slowly away again.
And now Beauty knew she dreamt, for she saw the old woman
turn the far corner of the glasshouse and walk through the carriage-way into
the wild wood, and Beauty watched her till her shadow emerged from the darkness
of the tunnel to lie briefly against the starlit ground of the bonfire
clearing. Beauty could only just make out what she was now seeing, and she
thought she saw silver shapes, like four-legged beasts, come out of the woods
round the glade and touch the woman with their long slender noses. But this was
very far away, and the trees threw confusing shadows, and it was over very
quickly, as the woman disappeared beyond the narrow opening of the archway.
But when Beauty turned to run downstairs and into the courtyard,
to see what was in the old woman’s basket, she found herself turning over in
bed, with the sunlight streaming onto the glowing carpet, and Fourpaws purring
on the pillow, and breakfast on the table, and the deep wild scent of the
crimson rose tangled in her hair.
Her first impulse was to rush downstairs in her nightgown
and look for the basket even now, knowing it was too late, even knowing that
what she remembered must be a dream. At least, she thought, as she threw back
the bedclothes, she could look for any sign that those barred and inimical
gates had opened recently.
She paused at the top of the bed stairs. There was something
very odd about the caipet this morning. She thought back to the morning before
last. More hedgehogs? Many more hedgehogs? Positively a lake of hedgehogs? No.
This—these were not hedgehogs.
There was a low forlorn croak from one corner of the room
and a following gruff murmur that ran all round the floor. “Oh, my lords and
ladies,” said Beauty. Frogs? The shore of the lake round the bed stairs rippied
and shifted a little. No—toads. Hundreds of toads.
Fourpaws, still purring, went daintily down the stairs, and
leapt to the floor. Toads scattered before her, pressing themselves under
furniture and into walls. She sat down, looked up at Beauty still paralysed at
the edge of the bed, waited for the duration of three tail-lashings, and then
stood up again and began to walk towards the opposite wall.
Toads hurtled out of her way, tumbling over one another, making
small distressed grunting sounds and a great deal of scrabbling with their
small slapping feet. “Oh, stop!” said Beauty. “Please. I’m not really afraid of
them—really I’m not—not poor toads—it’s just—it’s just there are so
many of
them.”
Fourpaws sat down again and began washing a front foot. The
toads quieted, and there was the gentle flickering light of many blinking
yellow and coppery eyes from ankle level all round the room and in clumps round
the legs of furniture.
Beauty came down the stairs and stepped very softly in the
toad-free space in the centre of the carpet. Nothing moved, except Fourpaws
beginning on the other front foot. “Well,” said Beauty, only a little shakily,
“there are too many of you to carry in my skirt, and frankly, my pets, I don’t
wish to handle you, for my sake as well as yours; but how am I to convince you
thai I will lead you to a wonderful garden full of—of—well, you’ll have to ask
the hedgehogs what it’s full of, but I’m sure you will like it. That is, you
will like it if I can get you there.”
She stood still a moment longer and then sidled towards the
chair next to the hearth, where her dressing-gown lay. There was a flurry of
toads from that end of the room. She picked up her dressing-gown very softly
and eased herself into it. “On the whole, I think I would rather try to shift
you first. I don’t fancy breakfast by the light of toad blinks.” She paused and
added under her breath, “Thank the kind fates that only one spider was enough.”
She walked towards the doorway, paused, and looked back.
“This way,” she said, not knowing what else to do. Several toads hopped out
from under her bed and stopped again. Several from the far corner between the
bed and the hearth joined them. Toad eddies drifted out from under the wardrobe
and the gilt console tables and pooled near the centre of the room, in front of
the breakfast table. Fourpaws stopped washing lo watch.
Beauty turned and walked to the door that led into the
chamber of the star; as the door swung open, she turned round. There was an
army of toads following her, ochre-coloured companies, low brown regiments,
yellowy-green battalions, and last of all came Fourpaws, tail high, the tip
just switching back and forth, eyes huge and fascinated.
She led them all into the chamber of the star; but the noise
their flapping feet made, and the little topping echoes that ran up into the
dome, obviously upset them, and she went on as quickly as she could through the
door that opened onto another corridor. The corridor made itself short for
them, and it was not long before she saw the courtyard door opening onto
sunlight. She paused again on this threshold and addressed her army: “Now you
must be brave, because you won’t like this bit. It is still quite early, and
the sunlight will not be too strong for you, but I am sure you will find it unpleasant,
and the pebbles will scratch your bellies. But it will be over quickly—I
hope—and then there will be lovely grass for you, and dirt, and an orchard, and
a garden.”
The toads blinked at her. She turned and walked out into the
morning light; and the rustling noise behind her told her that the loads were
following, flapping and pattering through the stones. She was so preoccupied
with how far they might have to walk that it took her a little while to notice
that the rustling noises had increased and somewhat changed their note; and
that there was now a humming in the air as well.
She had gone instinctively to her glasshouse and put her
hand on it, and as she had done once before, she ran her ringers along it as
she walked next to it. And the rustlings increased, and the humming grew
louder, and as she came to the corner of the glasshouse, she heaved a great
sigh of relief, and turned, and saw the tunnel into the orchard only a short
distance farther, At that moment it registered with her that she had been
hearing a humming noise for some time, and she looked up. and there was a cloud
of bumblebees, hovering in the air, as if they were waiting for her and the
toads.
‘*Oh!” she said. Their black and yellow backs gleamed bright
as armour in the sunlight. “Oh, how I wish I could let you all into the
glasshouse! Perhaps the trouble began because the roses are lonely! But you,
you bees, you must have been here all along, or how does the fruit grow in the
Beast’s orchard? How does the com swell in the fields? But why has he not seen
you? Why have I never seen nor heard you til! now?”
As she said this, the bumblebee swarm rushed upwards,
trailing a long tail of single bees behind it, and whizzed along the slope of
the glasshouse as if seeking a way in. There were one or two left behind,
buzzing disconcertedly and making little zigzag lines in the air as if
wondering where the others had gone. One of them very near her bumbled against
a pane of the glasshouse, near a strut.
And disappeared.
As it disappeared. Beauty’s hand, which was resting gen-tiy
against the next strut supporting the next pane of glass, felt a sudden faint
draught of air, and her third and little fingers, which had been touching the
pane of glass inside the frame, were resting on nothing at all. She snatched
her hand away as she saw the bumblebee disappear, looked at what should have
been a pane of glass, and was just reaching out to touch it timidly, because
the glasshouse panes were always so shining clear that but for their reflective
sparkle it was hard to say if they were there or not, when she heard the bee
cloud returning.
There were too many things to attend to at once. She looked
up at the windstorm sound of the bees, her hand hesitating just before touching
the pane of glass that should be there; the bumblebees stopped politely before
they flew into her face; and she saw the bumblebee which had dis—
appeared reappear from behind the strut,., where it had
flown in, and out, of a glasshouse pane.
Beauty touched the glass. It was there, and solid. She
touched the pane that the bumblebee had flown through. It was there, and solid.
There was a faint scuttling noise behind her, and her dazed
mind flew to the easier recourse of remembering her toads, growing too hot in
the sunlight, and worrying about their comfort. She began walking away from the
glasshouse, taking the shortest route to the tunnel to the orchard. But her
astonishment-heightened senses now reminded her that the susurration of the
toad army had changed, and she turned to look, expecting. .. something. And so
she was no more astonished than she already was when she saw the grass-snakes,
and the slow-worms, and the red mist of ladybirds, so thick it threw a dappled
shadow on the backs of the toads, and which made no sound at all. And as she
looked, she saw the crickets creeping out, as it seemed, from among the white
pebbles of the courtyard, as if they had been sleeping in hollows beneath. They
paused, as if surprised by the sunlight, and then they sprang into the air, as
if to hurry to catch up with the toads, and the snakes, and the slow-worms, and
the ladybirds, and the bees; and then there was not merely the faint clicking
of their legs against the small stones, but the soft
tink-tink-tink
as
the ones with imperfect aim bounced off the wall of the glasshouse as they
leapt.