The Sleeper and the Spindle

he fair-haired girl in the high tower slept.

All the people in the castle slept. Each of them was fast asleep, excepting only one.

The woman’s hair was grey, streaked with white, and so sparse her scalp showed. She hobbled, angrily, through the castle, leaning on her stick, as if she were driven only by hatred, slamming doors, talking to herself as she walked. “Up the blooming stairs and past the blooming cook and what are you cooking now, eh, great lard-arse, nothing in your pots and pans but dust and more dust, and all you ever do is snore.”

Into the kitchen garden, neatly tended. The old woman picked rampion and rocket.

Eighty years before, the palace had held five hundred chickens; the pigeon coop had been home to hundreds of fat, white doves; rabbits had run, white-tailed, across the greenery of the grass square inside the castle walls, while fish had swum in the moat and the pond: carp and trout and perch. There remained only three chickens. All the sleeping fish had been netted and carried out of the water. There were no more rabbits, no more doves.

She had killed her first horse sixty years back, and eaten as much of it as she could before the flesh went rainbow-coloured and the carcass began to stink and crawl with blueflies and maggots. Now she only butchered the larger mammals in midwinter, when nothing rotted and she could hack and sear frozen chunks of the animal’s corpse until the spring thaw.

The old woman passed a mother, asleep, with a baby dozing at her breast. She dusted them, absently, as she passed and made certain that the baby’s sleepy mouth remained on the nipple.

She ate her meal in silence.