Her ghostly princes have come to her severally with bites and squeezes, probing fingers, slaps and tickles, have pricked her with their swords and switched her thighs with briar stems, have licked her throat and ears, sucked her toes, spilled wine on her or holy water, and with their curious lips have kissed her top to bottom, inside and out, but they have not in these false wakings relieved her ever of her spindled pain. Often they are beautiful, at least at first, with golden bodies and manelike hair and powerful hands and lean rippling flanks, yet are sad and tender in their gaze in the manner of martyred saints; but at other times they are doddering and ugly, toothless, malodorous and ravaged by disease, or become so even as they approach her pallet, a hideous transformation that sends her screaming to the servery, if a servery is what it is, and sometimes they become or are more like beast than man, fanged and clawed and merciless as monsters are said to be. Once (or more than once: she has no memory) she has been visited by her own father, couched speculatively between her thighs, dressed in his crown and cloak and handsome boots and chewing his white beard, a puzzled expression on his kind royal face, as, with velvety thrusts, he searches out the spindle. In her waking life there might have been something wrong about this, but here in sleep (she knows she is asleep and dreaming, a century’s custom having this much taught her) it hardly seems to matter and in some wise brings her comfort for he rests lightly on her and softens her cracked lips and nipples with his tears or else his moist paternal tongue, whilst he attends her mother, standing at the bedside with cloths and lotions at his service and offering her advice. Over her head, as though she were not present (and she is not), they lament the loss of their only child and worry about the altered kingdom and whether it can ever be put right again. It’s that damned spindle, her mother says. Can’t you do something about it? Yes, yes, I’m working on it, he gasps as his face turns red and his eyes pop open and his beard falls off.
Who am I? She wants to know. What am I? Why this curse of an endless stupor and its plague of kissing suitors? Do their ceaseless but ineffectual assaults really prefigure a telling one, or is my credulous anticipation (I have no memory!) merely part of the stuporous and stupefying joke? These are the sorts of childish questions the fairy must try to answer throughout the long night of the hundred-year sleep, as the princess, ever freshly distressed, heaves again and again into what she supposes to be the old castle servery or else her nursery or the musicians’ gallery in the great hall, or something of each of these, yet none. Patience, child, the fairy admonishes her. I know it hurts. But stop your whinging. I will tell you who you are. Come here, down this concealed passageway, through this door that is not a door. You are such a door, accessible only to the adept, you are such a secret passageway to nowhere but itself. Now, do you see this narrow slot in the wall from which the archers defend the castle? It is called, like you, a murderess. If you peer through it, perhaps you will see the bones of your victims, rattling in the brambles down below. Like you, this slot has long since fallen into disuse, and, see here, a pretty black spider has built her web in it. You are that still creature, waiting silently for your hapless prey. You are this window, webbed in spellbinding death, this unvisited corridor, that hidden spiral staircase to the forbidden tower, the secret room at the top where pain begins. You are all things dangerous and inviolate. You are she who has renounced the natural functions, she who invades the dreams of the innocent, she who harbors wild forces and so defines and provokes the heroic, and yet you are the magical bride, of all good the bell and flower, she through whom all glory is to be won, love known, the root out of which all need germinates. You are she about whom the poets have written: The rose and thorn, the smile and tear:/The burden of all life’s song is here. Do you see this old candleholder? asks the fairy, pointing to the sharp iron spike in the petaled center of the wall bracket lamp by the archers’ window. She grasps a slender tallow candle the color of bedridden flesh and with a sudden violent gesture impales it on the spike, causing the sleeper to shriek and shrink away and her dormant heart to pound. With a soft cackle, the fairy lights the candle with her breath and says: You are that flame, flickering like a burning fever in the hearts of men, consuming them with desire, bewitching them with your radiant and mysterious allure. What the fairy does not say, because she does not want to terrify her (always a mess to clean up after, linens to change), is: You are Beauty. She says: When others ask, who am I, what am I, you are the measure and warrant of their answers. Rest easy, my child. You are Briar Rose. Your prince will come.
He, the chosen one, as he presumes (I am he who will awaken Beauty!), presses valiantly through the thickening briar hedge, hacking without mercy at the petals that so voluptuously caress him, aware now that they were his first test and that he has perhaps lingered too long in their seductive embrace and so may have already failed in his quest, or may even have made a wrong turning and lost his way: those castle turrets, where are they—?! The bones of his ill-fated predecessors clatter ominously in the assaulted branches, and the thorns, exposed by his cropping of the blossoms, snag in his flesh and shred what remains of his clothing. But he is not frightened, not very anyway, nor has he lost any of his manly resolve to see this enterprise through, for he knows this is a marvelous and emblematic journey beyond the beyond, requiring his unwavering courage and dedication, but promising a reward beyond the imagination of ordinary mortals. Still, he wishes he could remember more about who or what set him off on this adventure, and how it is he knows that his commitment and courage are so required. It is almost as though his questing — which is probably not even ‘his’ at all, but rather a something out there in the world beyond this brambly arena into which he has been absorbed, in the way that an idea sucks up thought — were inventing him, from scratch as it were (he is not without his lighter virtues): is this what it means ‘to make one’s name’? In reply, all around him, the pendulous bones whisper severally in fugal refrain: I am he who will awaken Beauty! I am he who will awaken Beauty! I am he who will awaken Beauty!
Her true prince has come at last, just as promised! He is lean and strong with flowing locks, just a little hair around his snout and dirt under his nails, but otherwise a handsome and majestic youth, worthy of her and of her magical disenchantment. She sleeps still, eyes closed, and yet she sees him as he bends toward her, brushing her breast with one paw — hand, rather — and easing her thighs apart with the other, his eyes aglow with a transcendental love. It is happening! It is really happening! she thinks as he lowers his subtle weight upon her as a fur coverlet might be laid upon a featherbed. The only thing unusual about her awakening is that it is taking place in the family chapel and she is stretched out in her silken chemise on the wooden altar, itself draped for the occasion in fine damask. Her parents are watching from the upper gallery, having just wandered in from their bedchamber, her father still pulling on his cream-colored woolen drawers, her mother dressed in a long black tunic, clasped at the throat with a ruby brooch. Below them stand the steward and the marshal and the cook and the butler and chamberlain, the entire staff of domestic servants and household knights, but they all seem to be dead. No, they are merely asleep, awaiting your own awakening, explains the old crone, midwifing her prince’s kiss, who seems not to know how it is done. His mouth approaches hers and she is filled with his presence, it is as though he is melting into her body or she into his, but when in joy (the new day dawns at last!) she opens her eyes he is nowhere to be found, nor is she in the chapel nor in her sickbed either. She is in what is probably the kitchen, where the familiar old crone, her head wreathed in a flickering glitter of tiny blue lights like otherworldly fireflies, is sitting by a door that is not a door, one leading to a hidden corridor (she does not know how she knows this to be true), slitting the white throat of a trussed piglet, which is squealing madly as though for a mother who has abandoned him. Probably this has happened before, perhaps many times, she doesn’t remember, can’t remember. Who am I? she demands. What am I? The crone hangs the gurgling piglet by its trotters on a beam to let it drain and says: Calm down, child. Let me tell you a story …