Red as Blood, or Tales from the Sisters Grimmer: Expanded Edition by Tanith Lee Read Free Book Online

under the whitening moon.
    The prince drank swiftly at the stream. There was a curious compulsion on him. As the night darkened and the moon brightened, he climbed down the treacherous slope. Eventually he stood on the outskirts of a ruined city.
    It was the most beautiful city he had ever seen, perhaps because it was empty and desolate. The wind curled itself about the slim white towers and runneled down the colonades, and the stars glittered on fragments of colored glass still spiking in the narrow windows. At its center rose a low hill that seemed to be covered by a wood of some sort, he couldn’t be sure, for the moon had slunk behind clouds—perhaps the place was a park or garden run wild.
    He walked about in the city for an hour, and by then its beauty had begun to oppress him. Finally the sky clouded completely, thunder muttered and rain began to fall. He picked a way over toppled columns and emerged into a tangle of pine woods. All the trees seemed crippled and curiously leaning, but after a time he came on a straggling village, and there were lights showing.
    The moment he got near, all the watch dogs started barking and snarling. Almost immediately doors opened and men ran out. Clearly they distrusted strangers. In the murky light he noticed something very odd. Not one of them had a knife, only thick wooden stakes angled at him.
    He’d thought from his welcome they’d prove unfriendly and send him away, probably with the dogs to see him off, but they seemed satisfied by his explanation of himself, and when he offered to help with anything they might need doing—in their fields or their houses, or chopping their wood—they seemed to warm to him. He was shown into the headman’s house—a rough botched affair like all the rest—and given food, and beer to drink.
    But the longer he sat there, the stranger things seemed. They gave him no knife, either, to eat his meat with. The garments of the men and the women were made of animal skins, unmended and full of rents, and bundled round them and tied with tough grass stems, dried and plaited together. There was not a scrap of wool or cloth to be seen. Later on he got a look at their work tools and was astonished to find them made of stone, even to the blade of the axe—he saw now why they were so pleased to have someone else labor with it for a change. He asked the headman about this, and he looked puzzled, and said that it was the same all through the valley.
    “Do traders never come here?” asked the prince.
    “Oh, seldom, sir. You’re the first we’ve seen in a year or more.”
    The headman’s daughter said sullenly: “Once a man came with colored stones that sparkled and they were on a sharp little stick that would go through clothes like so—but Old Man told me it was bad luck, so I had to give it back.”
    The prince glanced aside at the one they called Old Man, a hunched-over grandfather sitting close to the fire. He had turned his wrinkled face to look at the girl when she spoke. Now he chanted in a dry, quavering tone: “No needle, no needle, no blade and no dart.”
    “It’s just his way,” said the headman uneasily. “He’ll say that from time to time. But it’s best to be careful. No sharp things must come into the valley—that’s what all the old ones say.”
    The prince felt the hair stir again on his head. He looked about the room, and realized at last what was so wrong. Not only were there no knives, but no brooches on the women’s dresses or ornamental pins in their hair. And there was not one sewn-up seam in their clothing. He saw, too, why they wore skins—somehow they had never learnt—or else they had forgotten.… He had recalled what was the most important item of every dwelling. You would always find it somewhere, in the corner of a village cot, in the upper rooms of the rich woman’s house. A spinning wheel.
    When they had gone to bed, the prince lay down by the fire on the hides they had lent him. But he couldn’t