Neil Gaiman has been making his way through a rereading of all the Andrew Lang fairy books, and so his poem take elements from throughout the whole fairy tale corpus.
And Still She Sleeps
GREG COSTIKYAN
Greg Costikyan designs games and writes novels, short stories, and articles about the games industry. His most recent games include Fantasy War and Seven Wonders, an historical graphic adventure game. His most recent novel is Sales Reps From the Stars.
He lives in New York with zero TVs, one guinea pig, three cats, four computers, two children, and a redhead.
He asserts that he is not a Romantic.
“’Ow’d ye like to kiss them smackers, eh?” said the fellow in the queue ahead of me — cloth cap, worn tweed trousers, probably his only shirt. I gave him a stern look, and he, suitably chastened, turned away.
There she stood in her glass case; they had dressed her in someone’s idea of Medieval garb, a linen dress at least four centuries wrong. Slowly, her breast rose and fell; slowly enough to show that this was no mortal slumber.
I forbore from saying that I had indeed kissed her, poor dear. To no avail, to no avail.
I found her, after all. Well, to be literal about it, one of von Stroheim’s diggers found her, but von Stroheim was away at the time. I was in charge of the excavation.
We were in the Cheviot Hills, not far from the village of Alcroft in Northumberland. It was a crisp October day, a brisk breeze off the North Sea some miles to our east, the sky pellucid; a good day to dig, neither cold enough to stiffen the fingers nor hot enough to raise a sweat. I had been with von Stroheim in Mesopotamia, and this was far more pleasant — though the stakes were surely smaller, a little Northumbrian hill fort, not a great city of the Urartu. Still, it was a dig; while many of my profession prefer less strenuous scholarship — days and nights spent with cuneiform and hieroglyphs — I enjoy getting out in the field, feeling the dust of ages between my fingers, divining the magics and devices the ancients used.
This, indeed, is my dear Janet’s despair: that I am forever, so she says, charging off to Ionia or Tehran or the Valley of the Kings, places where a woman of refinement is unlikely to find suitable accommodation. Ah, but the homecomings after such forays are sweet; and truthfully, they are not so common, a few months out of each year. And between times, there is our little Oxford cottage, the rose garden, the faculty teas; a pleasant enough life for a man of scholarly bent and a woman of intelligence, a serene and healthful environment for our children. Far better this than the life of many of my classmates, amid the stinks and fumes and poverty of London, or building the Empire amid ungrateful savages in some tropical hell a thousand miles from home.
When I told Janet that von Stroheim proposed to excavate in Northumberland, she was pleased. She and the children could accompany us; after all, it was in England. What was the difficulty?
So I had let a little house in Alcroft, and rode up each morning to join von Stroheim and his men.
I brought Clarice with me that morning, she riding behind me, small arms about my waist, a picnic lunch in the panniers. I doubted she would want to come with me often, as there is not much to excite a child at a dig; but she could play on the lea, pet the sheep, wander about and plague us with questions.
The encampment made me glad that I had taken the house in Alcroft; the tents were downwind from the jakes, today, the sheep browsing amid them. The diggers were breaking their fast on eggs and kippers, while our students dressed in their tents. De Laurency was missing, I saw — my prize pupil, but a bit of a trial, that man.
While Clarice happily chased sheep, I went up the hill. The diggers — rough men in work shirts and canvas trousers — and such of the students as had completed their toilet came with me. They resumed excavation along the lines von Stroheim had marked out with lengths of twine, while I pottered about with a surveyor’s level, an enchanted pendant, a dowsing rod of ash.
It was while I was setting up my equipage that de Laurency appeared, striding up the hill, burrs in his trouser legs, his hair windblown and wild, a gnarled old walking stick in one hand. “Where the devil have you been?” I asked him.
He smiled vaguely. “Communing with the spirits of the moor,” he said.
“Damme, fellow,” I told him. “There’s work to be done. And hard work, too; you can’t expect to gad about the countryside all night and—”
“Bosh, Professor,” he said gently. “I’ll dig like a slavey, never you fear.”
I returned to my equipment; if it weren’t for his brilliance, I’d shuck de Laurency off on some other don. Dig like a slavey indeed; the man was slight and prone to sickness. He’d be exhausted by midday, I had no doubt, and wandering Northumberland in a mid-October night is a good way to become consumptive.
But to work. My task was to delineate the ley lines, the lines of magical force that converged on this site. They were the reason we had chosen to dig here; in this part of Northumbria, there was no site so propitious for ritual. That, no doubt, was one reason a fort had been built here; another was its defensibility and its capacity to dominate the region. From the hilltop, one could see as far as Woolet to the north, to the peak of the Cheviot to the west.
There was not much left of the old hill fort: a hummock of sod marking where walls had run. It was one of a series of forts built by the Kings of Northumbria along these hills, defenses against the Picts, though by the eighth century it was well within the Northumbrian borders, for the kingdom stretched north as far as the Firth of Forth.
Still, it was the prospect of magic that had drawn us here. We knew so little about the period, really; we knew the Romans had bound the Britons with powerful spells, had tamed the wild Celtic magic of their precursors. We knew the Anglo-Saxons had brought with them their own pagan power; and we knew the Church preserved much Roman knowledge through the fall, magic well used by the Carolingians in their doomed attempt to re-create the Empire. But how much exactly had survived, here in Britain? What was the state of the art in the eighth century? We could not ask the question in the south, for modern works have masked so much of the past, but here in sparsely inhabited Northumberland we had a better chance to find some answers.