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 Longchance, 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 take 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 Jeweltongue’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 mazes, 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 either 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 cloud 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 nothing 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 feet 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 either 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 hy
dra 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 continued 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 finished the bread, he turned her gently round, and she went to 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 just enough longer to pull the biggest blanket off the bed and throw it over the now-dozing pony.
He woke to the sound of munching. There was more hay in the alcove, and his pony was going at it busily. There was also a bucket of water and another of the remains of a feed of mixed corn. The blanket was still over her, barely; it hung down to her toes on one side and was halfway up her ribs on the other, and it was caked with mud and pony hair. The merchant pulled it off her—she paused to say good-morning, shoving at his breast with her nose—and laid it in front of the fire, thinking sadly that their ghostly presence here did not extend quite far enough after all, and hoping that perhaps he might be able to brush the worst of the mud and hair off when the blanket was dry.
But he was growing accustomed; when he turned back to his side of the fire, he was not surprised to discover that his bed had disappeared, and the large table replaced with a smaller one, again with a place setting for only one, but enough breakfast for six hungry old merchants. “They are adjusting,” he murmured to himself. There was also a single red rose in a silver vase.
When he looked up from his breakfast, his eye was caught by a small door in the wall opposite him, standing a little open. He obediently crossed the room to investigate; within was a bathroom, gloriously appointed and the bath full of steaming hot water; beyond that was a water-closet. When he had climbed at length from the delightful bath, he found a new suit of clothes waiting for him; when he returned to the main room, the blanket he had laid before the fire was not merely dry but clean, and the pony herself was clean and brushed and saddled with tack as fresh and supple as if it had been oiled every night since the day it was made. The pony’s thatch of a forelock had been braided and tucked under the browband, and she looked very pleased with herself.
“Thank you,” he said helplessly, standing in the middle of the floor. “Thank you, thank you. You saved our lives.” There was no answer. He turned towards the door and then paused, looking back at the breakfast table. The remains of his breakfast were still there, as was the rose in the silver vase. He remembered Beauty’s sad, half-joking wish, and plucked the rose out of the vase, and put it into the breast of his coat. Then he took up the pony’s rein and went through the archway, down the long crimson-carpeted corridor towards the door, open now on a bright spring day.
But the silence of the palace was shattered by roars as of some enormous wild beast; his quiet pony reared and shrieked and jerked the rein out of his hands. He was knocked winded to the floor; when he struggled to stand up, the bright doorway was blocked by a Beast who stood there.
The merchant’s heart almost stopped beating in the first moments of dumb terror. The Beast seemed not merely to blot out the sunlight but to absorb it and grow even larger by its strength. The outside edge of his silhouette was fuzzy and shimmering, as confusing to the eye as the merchant’s view of the grey-white palace with its glinting white driveway had been the day before. When the Beast stirred, rays of dazzling light shot in at the merchant like messages from a lost world, but as he moved again, and they were effaced, it was as if the Beast deliberately struck them away from the merchant, as a cruel gaoler might strike at the outstretched hands of his prisoner’s beseeching friends.
The merchant’s first fumbling thought was that this Beast was rearing on his hind legs, but then he saw that his shape was not unlike a man’s—only hugely, grotesquely, bigger than any man—and that he dressed like a man. Grasping at his reason, the merchant hoped it was only fear, and the dazzling, narrow bursts of light, which made the Beast so difficult to see. He lifted his eyes, trying to find this man-shaped Beast’s face, to look into his eyes, the better to plead with him, for Would not a man-shaped Beast respond to the direct look of a man? His gaze travelled up the vast throat, found the great heavy chin, the jaw of a carnivore, the too-wide mouth, thin lips curled back in a snarl, the deadly gleam of teeth—He could raise his eyes no farther; his mind was disintegrating with terror.
Before he lost himself to madness, he dropped his gaze to look at the Beast’s garments, forced himself to stare at them, to recognise, and to name to himself, cloth, buttons, laces, seams, gores, pleats. He saw that the Beast was dressed entirely in black, and the clothes were themselves odd, of no fashion the merchant knew. He wore an open, sleeveless gown, of some kind of stiff heavy material overlaid with black brocade and trimmed in black braid, which fell from thick gathers at the shoulders to a great whipping length of hem which roiled out round him like half-opening wings as he paced and roared. Beneath this was a long, soft, but close-fitting waistcoat, embroidered, also in black, but in a pattern the merchant could not make out. Even the shirt beneath it, the ruffle at the collar and wrists were unrelieved black, as were the trunk-hose and the low boots, strapped tightly round the ankles.
The Beast threw back his head and roared a last time; then he spoke, and his voice shook the walls. “I have fed and sheltered you and your creature when you both would have died in the blizzard else! And you repay my kindness and hospitality by stealing my rose!”
The merchant opened his mouth, but no words came. He leant against the wall of the corridor and closed his eyes, waiting for the blow.
“Speak!”
The merchant opened his eyes. The Beast was standing still at last, and now the sunlight st
reamed in round him; there was a wide channel of light from the doorway to the merchant’s feet, one edge of it sculpted by the shape of the Beast’s shoulder and the fall of his gown. Perhaps that gave the merchant courage; perhaps it was that as the Beast was now standing, he was half turned sideways, and with the wings of the gown collapsed round him, he looked only huge, no longer big enough to obliterate the sky. The merchant wondered where his pony had got to.
“I—I—” The merchant’s voice was a croak, but as he discovered he could again speak, his mind began to race, spilling out frantic excuses. “I am very grateful—I am very grateful—truly I am—I know we would have died—we were nearly dead—I am sorry about the rose—I was not thinking—that is, I was thinking, but your house is so grand—I thought you would not miss it—it is just that my youngest daughter grows roses, but the weather this year meant none of them bloomed, and she was so sad, so sad, her roses are her friends, and she is such a good girl, a kind girl, I thought to bring this one to her.…”
As the merchant said, “Her roses are her friends,” the Beast gave a little shudder. The merchant saw it in the ripple in the edge of the channel of light, as the Beast’s gown swirled and fell still again. The merchant had kept his eyes fixed on that track of sunlight as he spoke, and now both edges of the channel ran suddenly straight, as the Beast moved away from the door. The merchant looked longingly out upon the shimmering white driveway, at the border of smooth lawn he could see, and the dark haze of trees beyond, but he knew there was no point in trying to run. The Beast would snatch him out of the air before he reached the door. He wished again he knew where his pony was.