When Beauty first saw the small flying figure, she guessed it was a bird, trapped somehow indoors, having fallen down a chimney, or mistakenly crept in through a half-open window. But she had caught a glimpse of furry body and naked wing as it swept just in front of her and was now expecting what she found lying panting in her lap. It was a bat.
Beauty had rescued members of most of the commoner animal species in her life, including a few bats. The last one had been in much worse case than this one, terrified by the housemaid’s screaming, beating itself pathetically against a corner of the attic where it had fled. Beauty had trapped it finally by ordering the housemaid to Go away and, when it flopped to the floor half stunned, put a wastebasket over it.
After a few days of hanging upside down in Beauty’s dressing-room (which she kept locked for the duration, for fear of housemaids, and entering it herself only long enough to change the water in the water-dish and to release the fat house-flies she patiently collected in jars), she ordered the dogcart one evening, drove herself to the outskirts of town, and released it.
She’d heard it whirr just a moment, as it had leapt out of her restraining hands and the scarf she had wrapped it in, and had wanted to believe that the perfectly silent shadow, which had then swept low twice over her head—nowhere near enough to risk any danger of becoming tangled in her hair, because as any sensible person knows, bats only lose their sense of distance and direction under such duress as being screamed at by housemaids—had been it saying thank-you, before it went off to find its friends and family. She hoped it had not, during its convalescence, developed such a taste for house-flies that it would ever risk any more attics.
This one was not quite the length of the palm of her hand. She could feel the quiver of its body through the counterpane as it tried to catch its breath, and could see into its open mouth, the delicate pink tongue, smaller than the first leaf of heartsease to open in spring, and the teeth, finer than embroidery needles. Its dark brown fur looked soft as velvet; its wide pricked ears and half-folded wings were only a shade or two paler than its fur. It stared straight at her with its bright black eyes, and lay in her lap, and panted.
“Well,” said Beauty, after a moment. “I have never heard of a tame bat. I suppose you were merely confused, but you are very confused indeed, to be lying in my lap like that and staring at me as if I were a legendary saviour of lost bats whom you have recognised in your extremity. What reputation I had of such is years and miles behind me, little one. The bats at Rose Cottage had—have—the good sense to stay in the garden.… Which is to say, I suppose I need something to muffle you with, so you cannot bite me with all those tiny piercing teeth. Not that I would blame you, mind, but I get quite enough of that sort of thing dealing with roses.…” She reached slowly behind her, so as not to frighten her visitor further, and began awkwardly to work her top pillow out of its pillow slip.
The bat lay where it had fallen, but it had folded its wings neatly against its body, and closed its mouth, and now looked perfectly content. “If I didn’t know that you are supposed to hang upside down—or at least creep into narrow cracks—I would expect you to curl up now, like a very small Tea-cosy, and have a nap. Saints! This is a maddening activity when I cannot see what I am doing!”
But the pillowslip came free at last, and she wrapped it softly round her hands and picked up the bat, keeping its wings closed against its body. It did not even tremble, but it did turn its head a little so it could go on looking at her.
She groped her way out of bed and down the stairs till she stood on the floor, the bat held gently in front of her. “Now, what do I do with you? I cannot lock you in the water-closet, as it is the only one I know where to find in all this mazy hulk of a palace; I would have something to say to the architect about that, if I met him!
“My old dressing-room, where I used to put your sort of visitor, was quite a narrow closet, with one tiny window easily blocked off, and I never used it anyway, even bat-free. But these rooms are full of sunlight, and you know, none of your brethren that I have met have understood about keeping the carpets clean, and so I need to, er, leave you somewhere I can spread something, er, bat-proof beneath you—”
She thought of the bolt of poachers’ jackets material the sisters had found in the housekeeper’s room, and two tears dropped to the breast of her nightgown; but her voice was as steady as ever. “What we need, I feel, is—is an empty wardrobe or even a secret room. I would like that. I would like a secret room.” She spoke half-idly. She had learnt the use of speaking quietly to all rescued animals; even the wild ones seemed to find such noises soothing, and she also wished to fling herself away as quickly as possible from the sudden memory of her sisters.
She began to walk slowly away from her balcony, and when she came to the room hung with the tapestries of a garden in all four seasons, she paused. There came to her there some strange breath of air, some movement just seen at the corner of her eye. She turned her head; the edge of the nearer summer tapestry stirred. She looked down at her bat; her bat still looked at her and lay calmly in her grasp. She shifted it, very slowly, in case it should protest after all, into the crook of one elbow, where it settled, snug and tranquil as a tired kitten. Now she had one hand free and could lift the edge of the tapestry—and push open the crack of door revealed there.
There was a good smell in that darkness, of rich earth and of … peace, of the sort of peace she had been used to find in her garden, and she sighed. “There, little one. This should do for you—I hope. And I will come and let you out again just as soon as it is dusk.”
She raised the tapestry a little farther, so that she could duck under it, as she was unwilling to leave any creature somewhere she had made no attempt to investigate herself first, and found that she was standing in what appeared to be an underground chamber.
If she turned to look behind her, she could see the daylight shining across the rosy carpet of her rooms, could see it winking off the corners of furniture and strips of hangings visible to her through the half-open door; but if she turned inwards again, she saw only rough shadows, dimming quickly to blackness, the shapes of earth and stone only varied by what looked very much like the roots of plants.
She raised her hand to feel over her head, having the sense of little trailing things touching her softly, and fearing spiders, as even she was a little hesitant about spiders; and found instead a great net of what felt like tree roots, if she could imagine what tree roots might feel like from underneath. The trailing things were root hairs. Could anything but root hairs look so like root hairs?
“But we are two storeys above the ground,” she said, bewildered, and turned again to look at the sunlight lying on her carpet. She lifted her gaze to the hinges of the door; it seemed to be pegged straight into the rock, and the frame to be made of some impossible mix of stone fragments and woven roots, impossible, but strangely beautiful, as the veining of marble is beautiful.
“Well,” she said to the bat, “I guess I do not have to worry about protecting the floor here—wherever here is. And there are lovely, er, tree roots for you to hang from, should you wish to hang, and—and bat droppings are excellent fertilizer. I will need fertilizer for my roses as soon as I finish pruning them. I should wish to find a whole colony of you here, I suppose, but—I don’t quite think I do. The results might be a bit … complex. Good-bye, then, till this evening.”
She laid her tiny parcel down in a little hollow in the earth between two roots, loosened the pillow slip so that it could crawl out when it chose, and stepped back, under the summer tapestry, and onto a carpet covered with roses. She closed the door, which from this side was panelled with plain wood, to match the panelling of the wall (plain but for the occasional carving of a rose), and went, very thoughtfully, to eat her breakfast.
She found her gloves with the pruning-knife and the saw on the water-butt in the glasshouse this morning. “Today we will be bold,” she announced, and she was. She cut and lopped and
hacked and sawed, and then she stopped long enough to water her cuttings and check her seedbed, and then her stomach told her it was lunchtime, and she went back to her bedroom balcony, and lunch was waiting for her.
When she returned to the glasshouse after lunch, she looked at the scatter of rubbish she had produced and said, “I need somewhere to build a bonfire.”
She left the glasshouse again and stood in front of its door, looking down the side of the palace away from her balcony. The bulk of the glasshouse prevented her from seeing very far, but she knew there was nothing, between the door to the glasshouse and the door (if it was the same door) she used to enter the palace and return to her rooms, that would do for a bonfire.
This area of the inner courtyard was covered with gravel, gravel just coarse enough not to take footprints, but fine enough that it was smooth and easy to walk on. It was also the same eye-confusing glittery grey-white as the palace and the front drive. Studying it now, Beauty teased herself with the notion that if she narrowed her eyes to take in none of the details of where pebbles became walls, she might walk straight to the end of the courtyard and up the wall without noticing, like an ant or beetle.… She looked up, blinking, at the bright sky. The scale was about right, she thought. If Rose Cottage is the right size for human beings, then here I am an ant or a beetle. A small beetle. Probably an ant. Even if my feet cannot carry me up walls. How confusing, when one came to walk on the ceiling, to be abruptly blinded by one’s skirts.…
In any event, there was nowhere here to light a bonfire; it would make a dreadful mess of the whiteness, and even magical invisible rakers and polishers might resent the effort to remove the ashes and the heat-sealed stains and the bits that wouldn’t burn no matter how often you poked them back into the hottest heart of the fire. And she didn’t want to annoy—any more than she could help—whoever was responsible here … the Beast? She was beginning to wonder. She remembered his words last night: When I was first here … I had forgotten … I was very glad when Fourpaws came.
She had never seen any sorcerer who had chosen not to appear human, though she had heard tales of them; her friend the salamander had met one who looked like a centaur. His familiar pretended to be a lion, and while I knew he was not, still, he kept me busy enough with his great paws and his sense of humour that I could never look long enough at either him or his master to see who—or what—he really was, the salamander had said, laughing his rustling laugh. My master was vexed with me, but I told him he should have made me appear to be a panther.
Beauty thought of the salamander’s gift to her—and of her first sight of the Beast. Can you not bear to look at me? he had said. Most sorcerers enjoyed making the sort of first impression that would give them the upper hand in any dealings to come; but that first sight had almost … and the Beast had taken no advantage as he certainly … And then Beauty remembered the story of a sorcerer who looked like the Phoenix, and who had married a human princess because her hair, he said, was the colour of the fire of his birth.
I am no princess, she said to herself.
She turned away from the familiar end of the palace courtyard and began to walk towards the end she could not see. She went on a long way, a very long way, and the way disconcertingly seemed to adjust itself somehow as she walked, like the corridor from the chamber of the star to the door into the courtyard. The sense of mortar and stone fluidly running into and out of each other, like a cat standing up and stretching or curling up into a cat cushion, was much more unsettling out of doors in sunlight.
She glanced to her right; if the palace was adjusting, then so must be her darling glasshouse. She was sure it was not this big from the inside—unless the other end of the palace was horseshoe-shaped, and she was going clear round it and would eventually find herself at the opposite corner of the one square-ended wall that held her balcony. But the glasshouse itself had corners—at least from the inside—and she had not passed any, and she was not willing to suppose that her glasshouse was anything other than what she saw—that it would pretend to be a panther when it was a salamander.
She stopped once and looked up, reassuring herself that the sky, at least, even here, looked as it had from her garden at Rose Cottage or from the city. But how was she to know that? The sky was blue, or it was grey, and it was full of clouds, or it was not, and the walls of the palace blocked too much of it. There was no horizon; it was like standing in the bottom of an immense well. Or of a trap. The sky was too far away to be of much comfort.
Once she paused because her eye was caught by some variation in the wall of the palace, a break in the tall ranks of windows. She peered at the gap, unsure of what she saw as she would be of shapes found in clouds or fish swimming in a dappled pond; were they there or not? But she held her ground and stared and at last could say: Here was an archway, but barred by solid gates, fitting so perfectly into both the wall itself and the plain formal architecture of the rest of the facade that they were difficult to see unless searched for—and she would not have searched had she not wondered (and been grateful for the distraction) at a stretch of wall that had gone on too long without a window in it.
She stepped up close and laid her hand on the crack between the left-hand door and the wall; closing her eyes, she could barely find it with her fingertips and could sense no difference between the texture of the wall and that of the door. Opening her eyes, she was redazzled by the surface shimmer and lost both doors entirely; it was not till she stepped back and looked again that she could pick out the thin line of the arch, silver as fish scales.
It was all so silent! There was the scuff of her shoes in the fine gravel, and the occasional whisper of wind, and that was all. Not even any birds sang. But what was there for birds here, in this bleak stone wasteland?
She went on; how long she did not know. She began to feel tired and discouraged and, without meaning to, swerved in her course till she could reach out and touch the glasshouse. She trailed her fingers idly over the width of one pane, bumped over the tiny ridge of its connecting frame, onto another pane.… But then, suddenly, there was a corner of the courtyard after all, and another wall running at right angles to it, and her glasshouse produced a corner of its own to keep parallel pace with it. And very soon after she turned the corner, she found a great dark tunnel running through the palace, like a carriage-way, though she saw nothing to suggest the presence of stables, and the curve of its arch was much the same shape as the nearly invisible doors she had found in the last wall.
She walked through the tunnel, shivering a little, for it was surprisingly cold in its shadow, and the tunnel was surprisingly long. I should stop being surprised by things being very long, she said to herself. When she came out the other side at last, she found herself in a wild wood and halted in astonishment. She took a few cautious steps forward and then whirled to look back through the carriage-way and was reassured by the glint of the glasshouse she could see on the far side.
She remembered her glimpses of something that might have been wild wood at the edges of the formal gardens fronting the palace, but such wilderness still seemed so unlikely a neighbour for a palace. But then, she reminded herself, this was a sorcerer’s palace, and sorcerers could surround their palaces with anything they liked. There was a story of one, known to dislike visitors, who had surrounded his with the end of the world. (Whether it was the real end or not was moot; you disappeared into it just the same.)
But the only magic she knew that still connected her to Rose Cottage and her family was on the other side of the dark carriage-way. She did not want to wander into any wild woods and not be able to find her way back.
But here was a splendid site for a bonfire.
The old branches and other bits and pieces had been tidily swept together and were waiting for her—just inside the carriage tunnel, just within the edge of its shadow, at the mouth that led to the wild wood. Beauty shivered again, thinking that the magic ended there for certain, or that if this wood was magic too, the
n it belonged to some other sorcerer than the one who ruled the Beast’s palace. She would much rather that it was merely a wild wood and not magic at all, but this was not something she was likely to learn—at least not until it was too late, when she found herself dangling from the roc’s claws or cornered by the wild boar, and even then who was to say the wild boar wasn’t a familiar in disguise? Oh dear.
She dragged the branches clear of the tunnel and into the middle of the ragged little clearing among the trees, and then she muttered, “Knife, candle, tinder-box, besom,” and went back to an especially deep shadow near the far end of the tunnel, where she might not have seen them till she was looking for them. She swept her bonfire into a rough hummock, and while it took a little while for the candle flame to catch the old leaves and twig shreds she’d made with her knife, the branches were all dry and brown-hearted and burned very satisfactorily once they were going.
Beauty stood and watched for a little time, waving away sparks and wiping smuts put of her eyelashes, turning occasionally to look again at the winking glasshouse, to make sure it was there, and sweeping the edges towards the centre of the fire again as it tumbled apart. One did not leave a bonfire till one was sure of its burning down quietly, even in a wild wood—perhaps especially in a wild wood.
She went back to the glasshouse, walking near it down the length of the palace wing, reaching out to touch it occasionally—it was a much shorter journey on the return, she was sure; she was almost sure—and tidied up, or pretended to tidy up, since most of it had been done for her already. “Tomorrow, please, may I have a small rake that I can use among the rosebushes and a bag or a basket to collect leaves in? And if you would be kind enough to leave the besom somewhere I can find it again.”
She addressed the water-butt for lack of a better choice and a dislike for looking up. She tended to feel that magic must descend, and she did not want to see it happening. Furthermore, the water-butt was so straightforward a thing to find in a glasshouse. And almost as comforting as a cat in an immense shadowy dining-hall.