The Sleeper and the Spindle

sleep?” asked the queen. “Explain yourselves. How so, asleep?”

The dwarf stood upon the table so he could look her in the eye. “Asleep,” he repeated. “Sometimes crumpled upon the ground. Sometimes standing. They sleep in their smithies, at their awls, on milking stools. The animals sleep in the fields. Birds too, slept, and we saw them in trees or dead and broken in fields where they had fallen from the sky.”

The queen wore a wedding gown, whiter than the snow. Around her, attendants, maids of honour, dressmakers and milliners clustered and fussed.

“And why did you three also not fall asleep?”

The dwarf shrugged. He had a russet-brown beard that had always made the queen think of an angry hedgehog attached to the lower portion of his face. “Dwarfs are magical things. This sleep is a magical thing also. I felt sleepy, mind.”

“And then?”

She was the queen, and she was questioning him as if they were alone. Her attendants began removing her gown, taking it away, folding and wrapping it, so the final laces and ribbons could be attached to it, so it would be perfect.

Tomorrow was the queen’s wedding day. Everything needed to be perfect.

“By the time we returned to Foxen’s Inn they were all asleep, every man jack-and-jill of them. It is expanding, the zone of the spell, a few miles every day.”

The mountains that separated the two lands were impossibly high, but not wide. The queen could count the miles. She pushed one pale hand through her raven-black hair, and she looked most serious.

“What do you think, then?” she asked the dwarf. “If I went there. Would I sleep, as they did?”

He scratched his arse, unselfconsciously. “You slept for a year,” he said. “And then you woke again, none the worse for it. If any of you big people can stay awake there, it’s you.”

Outside, the townsfolk were hanging bunting in the streets and decorating their doors and windows with white flowers. Silverware had been polished and protesting children had been forced into tubs of lukewarm water (the oldest child got the first dunk and the hottest water) and scrubbed with rough flannels until their faces were raw and red. They were then ducked under the water, and the backs of their ears were washed as well.

“I am afraid,” said the queen, “that there will be no wedding tomorrow.”

She called for a map of the kingdom, identified the villages closest to the mountains, sent messengers to tell the inhabitants to evacuate to the coast or risk royal displeasure.

She called for her first minister and informed him that he would be responsible for the kingdom in her absence, and that he should do his best neither to lose it nor to break it.

She called for her fiancé and told him not to take on so, and that they would still be married, even if he was but a prince and she a queen, and she chucked him beneath his pretty chin and kissed him until he smiled.

She called for her mail shirt.

She called for her sword.

She called for provisions, and for her horse, and then she rode out of the palace, towards the east.