Robert Coover - Briar Rose & Spanking the Maid

Searching in himself for the magical knowledge that might make the murderous briars sheathe their thorns and fade away, he has seemed to hear the sleeping princess say (perhaps this is just before awakening her, or perhaps it is years later): There is a door that is not a door. That is where it all begins. He knows that nothing at this castle is simply what it is, everything here has a double life, so he supposes she is trying to tell him something else, the way out of this thorny maze, for example, or the way in to her own affections. She is in front of a mirror (the doubled redoubled), letting down her golden hair. Her beauty numbs him. Now that I am awake, she says, the truth is more hidden than before. Her mirrored eyes meet his: When will this spell be broken? she asks. When will my true prince come? So, as he feared: he is not the one. Or perhaps he is the one, or could be, this her plea that he become the prince she has been dreaming of. He does indeed feel himself becoming that imagined prince, and he wonders if perhaps she is a sorceress. His doubts darken her countenance, either with sorrow or with anger. Or with desire. She holds the mirror up to his face and he sees something hairy and toothy, halfway between a wolf and a bear, and he feels overwhelmed by lust and stupidity, a not unpleasant sensation, the best he’s had probably since he set forth upon this adventure. It doesn’t last, forget happily ever after, she is dressing him in pretty new clothes with all the needles left inside and leading him by the paw into the great hall for the castle ball. As he enters the hall, engulfed in pain, he realizes he has arrived at the perilous edge of the world and that from this entering there will be no departing. Help! he howls. Wake up! Get me out of here!

She imagines him (a conjuring of sorts) somehow scaling the unscalable walls and, his flesh stinging still from the barbed briars, searching through the webbed labyrinth of the ancient castle for the bedchamber of the legendary sleeping princess, but finding instead a door that is not a door, leading down a secret corridor to a spiral staircase. He climbs it, sword drawn, and, in a room at the top of the tower, finds a beautiful maiden with flaxen hair spinning alone by candlelight. Ah, there you are! she exclaims breathlessly. You have come at last! That’s strange, I was told you would be sleeping, he says. I couldn’t wait, she replies with a seductive smile. Now come on in here and close the door, you’re letting in a draft. He hesitates, framed by an abysmal darkness, his sword still drawn, then looks away, keeping her only in the corner of his eye, no doubt hoping to catch her changing back to her real shape when she thinks she is not being watched. Ah, nothing worse, from the fairy’s point of view, than a cogitative prince. Brave and handsome, yes, and perhaps a few of the social graces, a smooth dancer, comfortable with the clichés: Charming, as they’re so often called. But not too much introspection, thank you, not too much heavy pondering, else the game’s up for distressed maidens like her present seeming self, who weeps now as though her heart has been broken. You don’t love me! she sobs. You are not the one! Yes, I am! he cries, sheathing his sword and rushing to her side. I’m sorry, my love! He falls to one knee and clasps her to his wounded bosom. That’s better. But it’s so hard to know what’s real and not in such a place, he pleads. I know, I know, she groans, hugging him tight, pressing the thorns in deeper. She has one hand between his legs, peeling away the bloody tatters that remain. I’m such a silly goose, she sighs, smiling tenderly at him, her iron teeth, she knows, glinting like nuggets of gold in the guttering candlelight, a voluptuous sight not even she, in his boots, could resist. Then, with a rueful sigh (such is the fairy’s lonely burden!), she unravels the knots, loosing thread from thread, and, allowing her hump to rise once more, her hide to hornify, her multitude of breasts to fall, commences to spin again. Desire: what is it exactly?

She is seated beside the king at the high table in the great hall. He looks like her father, yet is not her father. There is something heavy weighing on her head which makes her want to lie down under the table and go to sleep. She touches it: a crown. A great span of time seems to have passed since her awakening, which she cannot at the moment remember. Or, more likely, she is still asleep and dreaming, this merely another of the old crone’s wicked entertainments. The room is full of banqueters and servants but they are not moving or speaking. Perhaps they have been turned to stone. Two naked children, who may be hers, are playing in the dirty rushes under the trestle tables, their rosy bottoms bobbing like apples in a tub of dirty water, the only things moving in the hall. She would like to give them both a good spanking, or else go play with them (she could be the dragon), but she is too tired to move. Happily ever after, the king says. It’s never quite like you imagine it. She nods. A mistake. The weight of her crown carries her head all the way into her plate of food. She has, literally, to lift her head with both hands and put it upright on her shoulders again. Time disfigures everything, he sighs and belches, scratching his hairy belly. But at least we have our memories. We do? An ancient humpbacked creature shuffles in from the kitchen and gives her a cloth with which to wipe the gravy from her face. One of the old crone’s petticoats, by the smell of it. Of course we do. Don’t you remember the musical parade at our wedding feast, this crowned and bearded stranger asks, the flutes and trumpets, the kettledrums, the tambourines? No … The dancing girls? She flies into a sudden rage and wheels round to dig her nails into his face, her crown toppling. She claws deep red grooves through his cheeks. He does not resist. You are not the one! she screams. His beard, catching the rivulets of blood, seems to whiten as though a century were passing. Sometimes, he says, gazing at her tenderly as if indeed he might know her or have known her once upon a time, I feel the reason I never escaped the briars was that, in the end, I loved them, or at least I needed them. Let’s say, he adds with a curling smile, licking at the blood at the corners of his lips, they grew on me …

Although still trapped in the hedge, he has somehow clawed his way through, scaled the castle walls, awakened the sleeping princess, broken the spell, and saved the moribund kingdom. Even the flies, they say, got up off the wall and flew again. But it all happened so long ago, his memory of it is as though a borrowed one, and he feels substantially unrewarded for all his pain and suffering. Which she, for one (the entire kingdom is another), has never truly appreciated, taking it all for granted as part of the devotion due her. Or else doubting it altogether, as she doubts him: Are you really the one? she will ask from time to time, gazing darkly at him with fear and suspicion. Perhaps not, he thinks, licking his unhealed wounds. Perhaps I have come to the wrong castle. When he first arrived here, or imagined arriving here, it was like returning home again, so familiar was it. He knew, for example, even before escaping the briars, just where the sleeping princess lay. But it may be that his knowing was itself part of the spell, for the castle has grown in strangeness ever since. Or perhaps he has grown more complex, his quest less clear and pure, the castle recognizable only to an unmazed mind. He can no longer even find at will her sleeping chamber, though he is often in it, transported there as though by sorcery when simplified by desire and wine, or by his terror of the briared night. What happens there is a periodic reminder to him of the brevity of all amorous pursuits and the symmetries of love and death, and seems intended to recall for him, or perhaps for her, that night he is said to have first awakened her: the stale morbidity of the bed in which she lay, canopied in dark dusky webs, its linens eaten by the vermin scurrying within, she spread upon it like a sentient bolster, so sweetly vulnerable, hands crossed primly on her pubescent breast, knees together, the rouge of her cheeks and the coral of her parted lips like painterly touches of the embalmer’s art, her gown a silky gauze turned by time to dust that vanished in a puff when he blew upon it, or so she has told him, explaining the powdering of her body and what he must do now to please her. These nightly rituals pass like dreams, or rather like a single dream redreamt, so indistinguishable are they from one another, which also seems a portion of her pleasure. Yes, yes, that’s how it was! Her obsessive recreations of love’s awakening delirium are perhaps what most oppress him, not because, as he blows the dust away, they cast a shadow of what might have been upon their workaday royal lives, but because they suggest to him what might yet, if he could but escape this castle, be. He hears rumors of enchanted princesses out on the perilous fringe, asleep for a hundred years or more, and longs to ride out once again on new adventure, to tame mystery and make his name in the old way, but she does not understand such restlessness, she was born to these stacked stones, so haunted by her dreams, it’s all the life she knows or wants to know, heroic endeavor a kind of wickedness to her, all quests but one unholy. When he makes the mistake of announcing to all present at high table in the great hall his noble intention to sally forth to rescue another sleeping maiden, she explodes with sudden fury, clawing at his face as though to scratch his eyes out, and then, just as suddenly, falls asleep with her face in the soup, provoking a general alarm. The chamberlain hauls her out of the soup by her golden hair and the sauce cook throws water on her, her lady-in-waiting unlaces her corsets and rubs her temples with eau de cologne, the chaplain slaps her hands and the kitchen boy her face, but nothing wakes her. He can feel their hostility mounting, the hairs bristling on his snout and back. His wounded face burns with pain and chagrin. I’ll never get out of here, he laments. The others circle round, their faces going slack, eyes narrowing to dark bloody slits. All right, all right, he barks irritably, lifting her up and carrying her out of the great hall toward her bedchamber. I’ll do it!