Her dreamtime moral lessons: out one ear and out the other, as the saying goes. In spite of all the fairy’s promises and reprimands, when the little ninny’s not bewailing her fate, she’s doubting it, or if not doubting, dreading it, afraid of what she longs for. It’s frustrating, she simply cannot, will not learn, and it sometimes makes the fairy, haunting too long this empty head, lose her temper, even though she knows that could she, would she, her own magical ends would surely be thwarted. That the child sometimes fears what she most desires, the fairy can appreciate, princely heroes being the generally unreliable and often beastly lot that they are, but that she doubts that her prince will ever come suggests she underestimates her own legendary beauty and its power to provoke desire in men. That such desire is a kind of bewitching (no wonder they blame it on the fairies!), the fairy knows and uses to her frequent advantage, though just how it actually works is something of a mystery to her, one of the main differences between humankind and fairies being that, for fairies, to desire something is to possess it. The nearest she can come to it is desiring desire itself so as to know the seeming pleasure got from its withheld satisfaction. She is not all-powerful, of course, and so sometimes suffers as well a certain ephemeral longing for the more absolute powers denied her, but, as a caster of spells and a manipulator of plots, the fairy understands that her talents by their very nature assume other powers and prior plots which provide the necessary arena for her transactions; it might even be said that she is empowered by the very powers she lacks, so she cannot really desire them. If, for example, in order to experience desire and its gratification firsthand, she were to try to take Rose’s place in the bed and receive her prince (unlike Rose, she can learn, would), she knows she might lose power over her spell and either reveal herself prematurely or get trapped in her new role with no way to escape it. In a sense, omnipotence is a form of impotence. No, a stool in the servants’ quarters of this mooncalf’s head where she can sit quietly, filing her teeth, is the closest the fairy can come to witnessing desire’s strange mechanisms, or, passing fancies apart, would wish to.
She is awakened by a band of ruffians, all having a go on her lifeless body, sometimes more than one at a time. At first she believes, she doesn’t know why, that they are drunken peasants who have invaded the castle to loot it, but she soon discovers, recovering somewhat her foggy wits, that they are her father’s household knights. They seem more dead than alive, ghostly pale, drooling, their eyes rolled up, showing only the whites. They have roped her to the bedposts, there is no escape, so she leaves her struggling there and goes looking for her ancient friend in the servery, if that’s what it is, perhaps it is the great hall, or even the chapel. Oh mother, she groans, why am I the one? Because you won’t listen! cries the ill-tempered old scold, flinging the carcass of a plucked goose at her. I’m sorry, child, she says then, picking up the featherless bird and sending it flying out the oriel bay window as though to right a wrong, I didn’t mean that, I know you can’t help it, but, believe me, you should stop complaining, you are one of the lucky ones. And, poking around in her leathery old ear with a blackened claw as though to dig the story out of there (what comes out are more of those little blue lights like a swarm of sparkling nits), she tells her about a poor princess married to a wild bear who smelled so bad she had to stuff pebbles up her nose. He pawed her mercilessly and took her violently from behind and bit her when he mated and scratched her with his great horny claws. But the worst thing was his she-bear. He was married—?! Of course, you silly booby, what did you think? The old crone’s ferocious tale seems to come alive and she is lying with the stinking bear while his enraged wife snarls and bares her sharp teeth and snaps cruelly at her exposed parts. Why are the crone’s stories always about, you know, the natural processes? she asks, though she does not know why she knows this to be so, ‘always’ itself a word whose meaning eludes her. Because, grunts the bear, who seems to be trying to push another painful spindle into her from behind, she’s merely an enchantress, my love, it’s all the old hag knows.
Not true; though, true, it’s what she’s best at, feelings and perceptions the very gestures of her intimate art, the foolish passions of the world-beguiled what best she can get her iron teeth into. But the prison of the flesh is not her only theater, the wheel of sensuous agony and delight not her one and only turn. She is also, in her waggish way, a devotee of the higher learning, an interpreter and illuminator, concerned with truth and goodness and, above all, beauty, the mind her stories’ true domain, body merely their comic relief. Though reputed to carry a sack of black cats on her back and to delight in slitting open the tums of indolent girls and stuffing them up with scurf and rubble, she prefers in fact to provision their desolate heads, ravaged by ignorance and sentiment, and what she carries on her back, alas, is the weight of eternity, heavy as a cartload of cowshit. A mere hundred years? It’s nothing, you ninny, she replies to the sniveling dreamer, really you are one of the lucky ones. And she tells her the story of the princess chained to a rock thousands of years ago (it seems like only yesterday!) and guarded by a fire-breathing sea monster, who could never understand why this wailing creature, so ruinously chafed by wind and tide, should be thrust upon him like some kind of unanswerable riddle. Well, nothing to do but eat the bony little thing, he supposed, compelled less by appetite than by the mythical proprieties, and he was just tucking dutifully in when a prince turned up intent on rescue, so the dragon asked him in effect the question you have asked. He, too, had no sequential memory, knew only that he was born, so they said, of chaos, she of love, and thus they were cosmological cousins of a sort, and should bear no grudge against one another, so how had they arrived at this moment of mortal encounter, which seemed more theoretical in nature than practical? The prince, well schooled, was interested in this question, touching as it did on the sources of the heroic quest, about which he too sometimes had his misgivings, but the dragon’s breath was so hot and noxious all he could do was gasp that it not only always comes down to a family story in the end, but it’s always the same one. The monster gaped his jaws in awe of this wisdom and the prince fired a fatal arrow down his throat and into his doubting heart. And they lived happily ever after? How could they, the dragon was dead. No, I mean the princess and the — Oh, who can say? The prince had other tasks and maidens to attend to, making a name for himself as he was, for all I know, my dear, that one’s chained there still.
Inextricably ensnared in the briars, yet never ceasing to resist (he will remain a hero to the end), he attempts to conjure up an image of the legendary princess who waits inside (but not for him), hoping to assuage his terrible pain and disappointment and stay his rising panic, but it is not her incomparable radiance and beauty that appear to his imagination but more cadaverous traits: her deathly pallor, sunken flesh, crumbling gown, her empty eye sockets. And the ghastly silence that reigns over her. Oh no! Too late! He wets her shrunken bosom with his tears, strokes her cold cheeks, gazes with horror upon her dreadful inertness. He turns her over: her backside is eaten away, crawling with worms and — no, he does not turn her over! He hacks desperately at the brambles and, as the hedge closes round him like the grasping flesh-raking claws of an old crone, imagines instead her dreams, sweet and hopeful and, above all, loving: loving him who is to come, slashing through the briars and scaling the castle walls to reach her bedside with his spellunbinding kiss. She does not yet dream of that dream-dissolving kiss, however, but rather of his excitement when he discovers her there in all her resplendent innocence, her unconscious body at the mercy of his hungry gaze and impassioned explorations before he quickens it with his kiss, his excitement and her own unwilled passivity before it exciting her in turn, making her eager to awaken and not to awaken at the same time, so delightful is this moment, though of course, he may not be there yet, it is no simple matter to scale the sheer walls of the castle, many have fallen, and once inside he might get lost in the maze of halls and stairs and corridors, not knowing for certain where to find her, and there might be other sleepers along the way who attract his kisses, not to mention his excited explorations, delaying him until it is too late, and even before he can get to the walls there is the infamous briar hedge, noisy with the windblown clatter of bones, the bones of those for whom commitment to love, adventure, honor, and duty and a firm sense of vocation were not enough, their names unmade, forever-aftered into the ignominious anonymity of the nameless dead. No! he cries. Don’t just lie there! Get up! Come help!