He is caught in the briars. The gnarled branches entwine him like a vindictive lover, the thorns lacerate his flesh. Everywhere, like a swampy miasma: the stench of death. He longs now for the solace of the blossoms, their caresses, their fragrance. Ever life’s student, he reminds himself that at least he has learned something about the realm of the marvelous, but it does not comfort him. Nothing does, not even fantasies of the beautiful sleeper who lies within, though he does think of her, less now in erotic longing than in sympathetic curiosity. He is young but has adventured the world over, while she, though nearly a century his senior, knows only a tiny corner of a world that no longer even exists, and that but innocently. What kind of a thing is this that jumps about so funnily? she is said to have asked just before being pricked by the fatal spindle and falling into her deep swoon. And now, what if no one ever reaches her, what if she goes on dreaming in there forever, what sort of a life would that be, so strangely timeless and insubstantial? Yet, is it really any different from the life he himself has until now led, driven by his dream of vocation and heroic endeavor and bewitched by desire? Ah, the beautifuclass="underline" what a deadly illusion! Yet, still he is drawn to it. Still, though all progress through the hedge has been brought to a painful halt and the thorns tear at him with every stroke, he labors on, slashing determinedly at the hedge with his sword, beating back the grasping branches, and musing the while upon this beautiful maiden, fast asleep, called Briar Rose. Does she ever dream of her disenchantment? Does she ever dream of him?
Certainly, she dreamt of her sweetlipped prince all the time, says the fairy, in reply to Rose’s question. But that was not who finally kissed her awake. No? No, in the end she was taken rather rudely by a band of drunken peasants who had broken into the castle, intent on loot. I don’t believe this. Of course you believe it, says the fairy. You have no choice. They thought she was dead and commenced to strip her of her finery and naturally one thing led to another and they all had a turn on her, both before she was kissed and after. As the poet put it: Lucky people, so ’tis said,/Are blessed by Fortune whilst in bed. But that’s terrible! The dreaming child has come to her, fleeing a nightmare about being awakened by an old administrator of her father’s kingdom, a stuffy and decrepit ancient with fetid breath, and the fairy has told her an antidotal story about Sleeping Beauty (Have I heard this story before? Rose wanted to know), one of several in the fairy’s repertoire, this one with a happy ending. Of course, when the ruffians woke up Beauty they also woke up everything else in the castle, down to the flames in the hearth and the flies on the wall, and including the household knights, who captured the thieves and made them eat their own offending privates before hanging them in the courtyard as an edifying entertainment for the domestic servants, failing to realize that, in effect, they were at the same time severally widowing the poor princess, soon heavy with child. And that was how, fatherless, Dawn and Day were born. Rose is clearly not consoled by this story. She’s had enough, she cries. She wants to wake up. Why me? she demands. Why am I the one? It’s not fair!
Caught in the briars, but still slashing away valiantly, driven more by fear now than by vocation, he seeks to stay his panic with visions of the sleeping princess awaiting him within, as much in love with her deep repose as with any prospect of her awakening. He has imagined her in all states of dress and undress and in all shapes and complexions, spread out inertly like soft bedding on which to fall and take his ease or springing ferally to life to consume him with her wild pent-up passion, but now he thinks of her principally as a kind friend who might heal his lacerations and calm his anguished heart. It’s all right, nothing to fear, dear love, lie back down, it’s only a nightmare. Ah, would that it were so! he gasps aloud, his voice sucked up into the dense black night, his desperate heroism’s only witness. He pauses to pluck the stinging thorns snagged in his flesh and is immediately pricked by dozens more as the briar hedge, woven tight as a bird’s nest, presses up around him. He’s not even sure his feet are still on the ground so painfully is he clasped, though he still wears his boots at least, if little else of his princely raiment remains. At times he doubts there is really anyone in the castle, or that there is even a castle, those ghostly turrets glimpsed before notwithstanding. Or if there is a castle and a waiting one within, perhaps it is only the bad fairy who set this task for him and for all these dead suitors, defined their quest with her legendary spite and spindle, this clawing briar hedge the emblem of her savage temper, her gnarled and bitter soul. And even if there is a princess, is she truly the beautiful object of pure love she is alleged to be, or is she, the wicked fairy’s wicked creature, more captor than captive, more briar than blossom, such that waking her might have proven a worse fate than the one that is seemingly his, if worse than this can be imagined?
She dreams of her handsome prince, cutting his way through the torturous briars and heroically scaling the high castle walls to reach her bedside and free her from this harsh enchantment. Or perhaps she thinks of him doing so: what, in her suspended condition, is the difference? In either case, there is no residue. Always when she thinks of him, or dreams of him, it is as if for the first time, though she doubts that it can be, there being little else to fill the vast hollow spaces of her pillowed skull but such thoughts, such dreams, and though she remembers very little, she does remember remembering. Moreover, each awakening seems to be enacted against a field of possible awakenings, and how can she know what is possible, even if it is not possible, without, in some manner, remembering it? What she does remember, or believes she does, is being abandoned by her parents on her fifteenth birthday, so little did they care for her and all the omens cast upon her, leaving her once again to her own lonely explorations of the drafty old castle, explorations which have since provided the principal settings for all her dreams, or thoughts, but which on that day led her up a winding staircase to the secret room at the top of the old tower, there to meet (she remembers this) her cruel destiny. It’s not fair. Why was she the one? It was nothing bad she had done, she was famous for her goodness, if anything it was for what she’d not done, having aroused the wrath of malefic powers, envious of her goodness and her beauty, or so her ancient friend in the servery tells her now when she complains, as she has, as she’s told now, so often done. You are one of the lucky ones, the old crone says, wagging a gnarled finger at her. Your sisters were locked away in iron towers, lamed and stuck in kitchens, sent to live with savage beasts. They had their hands and feet cut off, were exiled, raped, imprisoned, reviled, monstrously deformed, turned to stone, and killed. Even worse: many of them had their dreams come true. My sisters? Yes, well, long ago. Dead now of course.