But he wished someone would come and reassure him they did know he was here. And he wished that whoever it was that came might be more or less human. Or at least not too large. There had been a sorcerer he had had mercantile dealings with who had a hydra to answer his door. He’d had to call on the sorcerer himself because his clerks were all too frightened to go. But he had been younger then too.
They came to a room. It was a small room for the size of the palace, but a very large room to a man who lived in Rose Cottage. The soft crimson carpet of the corridor con—
tinued here, and the candelabra on the walls were ornate gold, with great golden pendant drops made to look like dripping candle wax, and the wallpaper was a weave of red and gold, patterned to look like ripples of fabric bound with golden cords. There was a fire in a fireplace large enough to roast the pony, and a table drawn up beside it, with a place laid for only one person but with enough food for twenty.
The merchant gave a great sigh and unsaddled the pony. She staggered forward and stood, swaying and steaming, in front of the fire; then she turned her head and ate three apples out of a silver-gilt bowl on the table. “I wish there was hay for you,” said the merchant, picking up a loaf of bread and breaking it into pieces with his hands and offering it to her; she ate it greedily. But as he held it out to her, something caught at the corner of his eye; he looked over her shoulder and saw ... a golden heap of hay in a little alcove on the other side of the fireplace, opposite the table. He would have sworn that neither hay nor alcove had been there a minute before. But when the pony had linished the bread, he turned her gently round, and she went lo the hay at once, as he sat down at the table.
He did not fall to as quickly as she; he was too worried about his host. But he was tired and hungry almost past bearing, and he tried to comfort himself with the thought that there was plenty of food here for two, should the master of this place appear after all—or perhaps his hydra. He looked again at the amount of food provided, and the single place setting, and worried about the appetite of the creature usually catered for. Finally, and half embarrassed, the merchant moved the single place setting round the edge of the table, so that he was not sitting at the head but only on the master’s right hand.
He ate eagerly but hesitantly, looking often towards the mouth of the lit corridor where he had entered, taking great pains to spill nothing on the snowy tablecloth, laying the serving spoons exactly back where he found them, choosing nothing that would by its absence spoil the elegant appearance of the whole. By the time he was no longer hungry, his eyelids seemed to be made of lead; with a tremendous effort of will he stood up from the table, thinking he would lie down in front of the fire to sleep. His knee knocked against something, and he discovered a little bed with many blankets drawn up close behind him where he had sat at the table. He shivered because he knew there had been no bed there earlier and he had heard nothing. But there it was, and he was tired. He stayed awake jusl enough longer to pull the biggest blanket off the bed and throw it over the now-dozing pony.
He woke to the sound of munching. There was more hay in the alcove, and his pony was going at it busily. There was also a bucket of water and another of the remains of a feed of mixed corn. The blanket was still over her, barely; it hung down to her toes on one side and was halfway up her ribs on the other, and it was caked with rnud and pony hair. The merchant pulled it off her—she paused to say good-morning, shoving at his breast with her nose—and laid it in front of the fire, thinking sadly that their ghostly presence here did not extend quite far enough after all, and hoping that perhaps he might be able to brush the worst of the mud and hair off when the blanket was dry.
But he was growing accustomed; when he turned back to his side of the fire, he was not surprised to discover that his bed had disappeared, and the largo table replaced with a smaller one, again with a place setting for only one, but enough breakfast for six hungry old merchants. “They are adjusting,” he murmured to himself. There was also a single red rose in a silver vase.
When he looked up from his breakfast, his eye was caught by a small door in the wall opposite him, standing a little open. He obediently crossed the room to investigate; within was a bathroom, gloriously appointed and the bath full of steaming hot water; beyond that was a water-closet. When he had climbed at length from the delightful bath, he found a new suit of clothes waiting for him; when he returned to the main room, the blanket he had laid before the fire was not merely dry but clean, and the pony herself was clean and brushed and saddled with tack as fresh and supple as if it had been oiled every night since the day it was made. The pony’s thatch of a forelock had been braided and tucked under the browband, and she looked very pleased with herself.
“Thank you,” he said helplessly, standing in the middle of the floor. “Thank you, thank you. You saved our lives.” There was no answer. He turned towards the door and then paused, looking back at the breakfast table. The remains of his breakfast were still there, as was the rose in the silver vase. He remembered Beauty’s sad, half-joking wish, and plucked the rose out of the vase, and put it into the breast of his coat. Then he took up the pony’s rein and went through the archway, down the long crimson-carpeted corridor towards the door, open now on a bright spring day.
But the silence of the palace was shattered by roars as of some enormous wild beast; his quiet pony reared and shrieked and .jerked the rein out of his hands. He was knocked winded to the floor; when he struggled to stand up, the bright doorway was blocked by a Beast who stood there.
The merchant’s heart almost stopped beating in the first moments of dumb terror. The Beast seemed not merely to blot out the sunlight but to absorb it and grow even larger by its strength. The outside edge of his silhouette was fuzzy and shimmering, as confusing to the eye as the merchant’s view of the grey-white palace with its glinting white driveway had been the day before. When the Beast stirred, rays of dazzling light shot in at the merchant like messages from a lost world, but as he moved again, and they were effaced, it was as if the Beast deliberately struck them away from the merchant, as a cruel gaoler might strike at the outstretched hands of his prisoner’s beseeching friends.
The merchant’s first fumbling thought was that this Beast was rearing on his hind legs, but then he saw that his shape was not unlike a man’s—only hugely, grotesquely, bigger than any man—and that he dressed like a man. Grasping at his reason, the merchant hoped it was only fear, and the dazzling, narrow bursts of light, which made the Beast so difficult to see. He lifted his eyes, trying to find this man-shaped Beast’s face, to look into his eyes, the belter to plead with him, for would not a man-shaped Beast respond to the direct look of a man? His gaze travelled up the vast throat, found the great heavy chin, the jaw of a carnivore, the too-wide mouth, thin lips curled back in a snarl, the deadly gleam of teeth—He could raise his eyes no farther; his mind was disintegrating with terror.