Blood, Bone, and Water

by Ash Huang

Today, knights come from all corners of the world to fight the rose hedge, clanking in metal suits, wielding curved swords and spears, lobbing flaming arrows. Because the reward for defeating the hedge is so great, the men do not guard their secrets. They gather by bonfires and trade strategies, knowing if they split the prize seven, eight, nine ways, they still make a tidy profit.

The hedge is a dark mass on the horizon, heavy with scarlet roses. According to legend, there is a castle swallowed up inside, all peaky spires and stained glass. Each room is piled in treasures and lost knowledge. Chests spill over with precious gems, carpeting the floors like acorns.

Most men never make it inside the hedge. They socialize and hack at the bushes, then return to their villages laughing, proud, with scars to show the little ones.

Once in a while, the vines choose a hapless man. When his back is turned, the branches snatch him up. They close over his quivering cheeks, around his eye whites, his gaping mouth, and the rest of the knights thrash against the fist-sized thorns to no effect.

At least if a man is taken by the hedge, his compatriots will whisper about him forever.

A hundred years ago, a knight wandered through an abandoned village. He stopped under the shade of an oak tree, brushing a place to sit from the carpet of acorns. He enjoyed a fire and a lunch of apples and venison, and a cupful of cold water from the well.

The rose hedge had already grown huge. In the slanted light it was a gloomy smear against the autumn sky. The knight wondered what ancient treasures must be hidden inside such a hazard. A wizard or a king must have bewitched the very earth to keep his riches safe.

The knight found a rusted axe and honed its edge beside a campfire, flinching at every howl and caw that came from within the thorns. He approached the hedge with a torch held high, and any nearby beasts fled from the flame, scattering into the shadows.

The white roses put him at ease, and he approached with a sense of destiny. Carefully, he tested the stems of the hedge, slicing a single branch.

The vines wrapped around him, thorns biting flesh, lifting him off the ground. He shrieked and shrieked, but the next village was much too far to hear his cries.

The bush shook him hard, twice, and released him to the ground. The knight’s wounds wept, and he dripped blood at the base of hedge. As soon as he regained his breath, he fled back to the city he came from, eager to tell his story.

Five hundred years ago, a hedge sat behind town. It ran mostly wild, poking any trespassers who happened near. In the spring, the bleak bush burst with pinks and yellows as its flowers bloomed and took in sun.

A gardener sought to tame the hedge, made vows to conceal any mysteries it protected. He was handy with a rake, and knew where to prune, when to water. The hedge needed a little convincing, and carved many long scratches through the gardener’s thick work clothes.

It became tame under his care. Still a bit wicked if he trimmed the wrong leaf, prone to nicking a calf or elbow, but the gardener didn’t mind. He brewed healing potions from the rose petals, and the hedge protected his children and animals from wolves.

He buried fish skeletons, bones, tea grounds, old fruit beneath its roots. He grafted new cuttings when parts of the hedge looked thin. But all things die: chickens, men, and rose bushes. The gardener’s children went away to war, and they died, too.

The town emptied. The hedge would have been content to expire, too, if the first knight hadn’t come, a torch clenched in his hand.

A thousand years ago, a woman lay on a threadbare blanket outside of her newly built cottage. She thought she would miss the city and all its daily distractions, but she loved the country.

She planted a rose bush as a little piece of home. Her auntie had been in a rivalry with the neighbors and grew roses on the balcony to signal excellence, fastidiousness. The poor things suffered in the claustrophobic shade of the neighboring building, and never survived more than a season.

Here in this small sunny town, a rose could thrive. No one would be monitoring its progress. It would flourish freely.

The plant became a bush and then a hedge. The woman tended to it daily. No matter how bent her back went over the years, no matter how hot the morning, she watered it religiously, cutting the spent golden flowers to encourage the hedge to grow.

Until the day she died, she could be found singing to the branches every morning: you’re perfect, I love you, you needn’t sprout a single flower.

Ash Huang is a Chinese American writer. Her words appear in Alien Magazine, Catapult, and elsewhere. Her novel in progress, featuring motherhood and a shapeshifting secret society, won the 2022 Diverse Worlds Grant from the Speculative Literature Foundation. She is an alum of the Roots. Wounds. Words. Workshop, the Tin House Winter Workshop, and the Periplus Fellowship. Find her online at ashsmash.com.