The Sleeper and the Spindle

t was the first great, grand city they had come to. The city gates were high and impregnable thick, but they were open wide.

The three dwarfs were all for going around it, for they were uncomfortable in cities, distrusted houses and streets as unnatural things, but they followed their queen.

Once in the city, the sheer numbers of people made them uncomfortable. There were sleeping riders on sleeping horses; sleeping cabmen up on still carriages that held sleeping passengers; sleeping children clutching their balls and hoops and the whips for their spinning tops; sleeping flower women at their stalls of brown, rotten, dried flowers; even sleeping fishmongers beside their marble slabs. The slabs were covered with the remains of stinking fish, and they were crawling with maggots. The rustle and movement of the maggots was the only movement and noise the queen and the dwarfs encountered.

“We should not be here,” grumbled the dwarf with the angry brown beard.

“This road is more direct than any other road we could follow,” said the queen. “Also, it leads to the bridge. The other roads would force us to ford the river.”

The queen’s temper was equable. She went to sleep at night, and she woke in the morning, and the sleeping sickness had not touched her.

The maggots’ rustlings, and, from time to time, the gentle snores and shifts of the sleepers, were all that they heard as they made their way through the city. And then a small child, asleep on a step, said, loudly and clearly, “Are you spinning? Can I see?”

“Did you hear that?” asked the queen.

The tallest dwarf said only, “Look! The sleepers are waking!”

He was wrong. They were not waking.

The sleepers were standing, however. They were pushing themselves slowly to their feet, and taking hesitant, awkward, sleeping steps. They were sleepwalkers, trailing gauze cobwebs behind them. Always, there were cobwebs being spun.

“How many people, human people I mean, live in a city?” asked the smallest dwarf.