My first surprise of the morning was to discover that the ley lines were active; power was drawing down them, from a line up the Cheviot in the direction of Glasgow. A spell or spells were active still, buried somewhere in this fort.
Lest this sound everyday to you, let me emphasize that the fort was eleven centuries old. The last mention of it — Castle Coelwin, it was called — was in the chronicles of the reign of Eadbehrt of Northumbria, who abdicated in 765. I have seen working spells as old, and older — in Rome, and Athens, and China — but who in miserable, divided, warring eighth century England could perform a ritual so strong, so binding?
It was while studying my equipment, dumbfounded at this discovery, that one of the workers ran up to me, out of breath. “Professor Borthwick,” he said, “best coome quick. We’ve found a gel.”
Indeed they had. They had dug a trench about two feet deep in what we termed the Ironmongery, a location toward the center of the fort where we had expected to find a forge, a common feature of fortresses from the period. The rusted remnants of several tools or weapons had already been found there, and the diggers had abandoned spades for trowels and brooms, lest some artifact be damaged by digging. And well that they had, for I shudder to think what a spade might have done to her fair flesh.
About her was loam, evidence of rotted wood; de Laurency, a curious look of epiphany on his face, crouched over her, tenderly brushing away loose dirt with his bare fingers. He had uncovered a hand and a part of an arm.
Her femininity was obvious through the narrowness of the hand. Her fingernails were long, inches in length; God knows when they had last been trimmed.
I cannot count the number of times I have carefully whisked the dirt from a skeleton, uncovering evidence of past violence or disease, looking for artifacts or skeletal damage to learn something of the corpse’s fate. But this was no corpse. It was a living body, clad in flesh — cool to the touch, but with a slow, slow pulse — buried in the cold earth and yet somehow holding on to life.
Gently, we uncovered her; her hair and nails were preserved along with her body, but her hair was matted and filthy, her poor flesh besmirched with a millennium’s dirt.
De Laurency worked by me; the diggers stood back, the other students stood aside to give us room. He said, low enough that I think only I heard him:
I glanced at him, askance; there are times when I greatly appreciate von Stroheim’s brutal practicality. Romanticism is all very well in poetry, but this is science. And that, I believe, was doggerel.
We had uncovered her head and shoulder when von Stroheim appeared, returning from an errand.
“Mein Gott,” he muttered when he saw her, and turned to me with excitement. “Well, Alistair. Another puzzle, eh? What shall we make of this?”
It took a good two hours to dig her cautiously from the earth. And then we put her in a litter and carried her down to the encampment.
Clarice was fascinated, and with her little hands helped us to bathe and barber the girl. Though her hair was golden, it was far too matted and filthy to leave; we were forced to cut it off. For the nonce, we covered her with a simple canvas sheet; we had no women’s clothing with us.
She appeared to be about sixteen; blond-haired and, when an eyelid was held back, blue-eyed. She was a scant five feet tall — probably large for the period — and just under a hundred pounds. She was well-formed, and her skin fine, though faint scarring gave evidence of a bout with smallpox. She breathed shallowly — a breath every five minutes or so; her pulse ran an impossibly slow beat every thirty seconds. Apparently, she had received enough oxygen, filtered through the soil, to survive. Since her discovery, she has never made water, nor passed stool; never eaten nor drunk. Yet her fingernails and hair slowly grow.
Clarice looked up at me with shining eyes. “It’s Sleeping Meg,” she said.
Out of such things are discoveries fashioned: a peculiar magical fluctuation, an unexpected finding in the dirt, the words of children.
An intelligent child, Clarice, my sweetheart; eight going on twenty, her mother’s dark curls and laughing eyes.
She took me to the house of her playmate, Sybil Shaw, a local girl whose widowed mother eked out a living taking in cleaning and letting out rooms. Mrs. Shaw was a stout, tired-looking woman in her forties, hands reddened with her washing, wispy curls of blond turning gray escaping her cap. She greeted us warmly at the door and offered tea; behind her, I could see irons warming before the fire, petticoats laid out for goffering.
“If you would be so kind, Mrs. Shaw,” I told her, a cup of tea balanced on a knee, “I would very much appreciate it if you could tell me the story of Sleeping Meg.”
“Och aye,” she said, a little mystified. “Sleeping Meg? ’Tis but a children’s tale, ye ken, a story of these parts. What mought a scholar like you to do with tha’?”
And so, patiently, I explained what we had found at Castle Coelwin, and Clarice’s words.
Mrs. Shaw snorted. “I misdoubt it has owt to do wi’ the tale,” she said, “but that’s as may be.”
I shall set out the story here in plainer language, for Mrs. Shaw (good heart though she has) possesses a thick North Country accent — and a meandering style — that would simply obscure it.
It seems that in the days when Arthur and Guinevere were still much in love, the Queen gave birth to a daughter whom they named Margaret. She was the darling of Arthur’s knights, and as a child was dandled on the knees of the likes of Gawain and Lancelot. And at sixteen she was betrothed to the King of Scotland, whose armies had several times ravaged towns along England’s northern border, and with whom by this marriage Arthur hoped to cement the peace.
But Morgain heard of this, and saw in it a danger to her son, Mordred, Arthur’s bastard; a legitimate daughter, wed to the Scottish monarch, would have a better claim to Arthur’s throne. With whispers and magic, she turned the King of Scotland against the proposal.
When Arthur and the Scottish King met in Berwick to seal the marriage, the Scot demanded all of Northumberland as a dowry. To this Arthur could not agree; and the King of Scotland took this as confirming Morgain’s words against Arthur. Enraged, he enlisted the sorceress’s aid to wreak his revenge; and she cast a mighty spell on Margaret, that she should sleep and never waken till betrothed to a Scottish prince, the betrothal sealed with a kiss.
In horror, Arthur went to Merlin, who could not directly unweave so mighty a spell; but he altered its terms, so that but a kiss by her own true love would awaken Margaret.
They built her a bed in Camelot, and covered her floor with flowers; many a knight essayed her awakening, but though many loved her, they loved her as a child and not a woman. And dark times soon befell Arthur and his knights; and what became of Margaret none could say, though perhaps she sleeps somewhere still, awaiting her true love’s lips.
“What,” said von Stroheim, feeding a stick to the campfire under the starry October sky, “are we to make of this old wive’s tale?”
“I’ve asked about, and it’s not just Mrs. Shaw’s; it seems to be common in the region.”
“It’s merely a variant on Sleeping Beauty,” von Stroheim said. “My own mother told me that story when I was a child.”
“I’m sure she did,” I told him. “As did mine. But there is often a nugget of truth in legends, as von Schliemann showed at Troy, what? Perhaps rather Sleeping Beauty is a variation on Sleeping Meg. A happier ending, at any rate; surely I would alter the tale in such fashion, if I were to rewrite it.”