Stardust (14 page)

She walked over to the goats and whispered a word of power to each of them.

Where the goats had been stood a man with a white chin-beard, and a boyish, dull-eyed young woman. They said nothing.

She crouched beside her chariot and whispered several words to it. The chariot did nothing, and the witch-woman stamped her foot on the rock.

“I am getting old,” she said to her two servants. They said nothing in reply, gave no indication that they even understood her. “Things inanimate have always been more difficult to change than things animate. Their souls are older and stupider and harder to persuade. If I but had my true youth again . . . why, in the dawn of the world I could transform mountains into seas and clouds into palaces. I could populate cities with the pebbles on the shingle. If I were young again . . .”

She sighed and raised a hand: a blue flame flickered about her fingers for a moment, and then, as she lowered her hand and bent down to touch her chariot, the fire vanished.

She stood up straight. There were streaks of grey now in her raven-black hair, and dark pouches beneath her eyes; but the chariot was gone, and she stood in front of a small inn at the edge of the mountain pass.

Far away the thunder rumbled, quietly, and lightning flickered in the distance.

The inn sign swung and creaked in the wind. There was a picture of a chariot painted upon it.

“You two,” said the witch-woman, “inside. She is riding this way, and she will have to come through this pass. Now I simply have to ensure that she will come inside.
You,
” she said to the man with the white chin-beard, “are Billy, the owner of this tavern. I shall be your wife, and
this
,” pointing to the dull-eyed girl, who had once been Brevis, “is our daughter, the pot-maid.”

Another crash of thunder echoed down from the mountain peaks, louder than before.

“It will rain soon,” said the witch-woman. “Let us prepare the fire.”

T
ristran could feel the star ahead of them, moving steadily onward. He felt as if he were gaining ground upon her.

And, to his relief, the black carriage continued to follow the star’s path. Once, when the road diverged, Tristran was concerned that they might take the wrong fork. He was ready to leave the coach and travel on alone, if that should happen.

His companion reined in the horses, clambered down from the driver’s seat, and took out his runes. Then, his consultation complete, he climbed back up, and took the carriage down the left-hand fork.

“If it is not too forward of me to enquire,” said Tristran, “might I ask what it is that you are in search of?”

“My destiny,” said the man, after a short pause. “My right to rule. And you?”

“There’s a young lady that I have offended with my behavior,” said Tristran. “I wish to make amends.” As he said it, he knew it to be true.

The driver grunted.

The forest canopy was thinning rapidly. Trees became sparser, and Tristran stared up at the mountains in front of them, and he gasped. “Such mountains!” he said.

“When you are older,” said his companion, “you must visit my citadel, high on the crags of Mount Huon. Now
that
is a mountain, and from there we can look down upon mountains next to which
these
,” and he gestured toward the heights of Mount Belly, ahead of them, “are the merest foothills.”

“Truth to tell,” said Tristran, “I hope to spend the rest of my life as a sheep farmer in the village of Wall, for I have now had as much excitement as any man could rightly need, what with candles and trees and the young lady and the unicorn. But I take the invitation in the spirit in which it was given, and thank you for it. If ever you visit Wall then you must come to my house, and I shall give you woolen clothes and sheep-cheese, and all the mutton stew you can eat.”

“You are far too kind,” said the driver. The path was easier now, made of crushed gravel and graded rocks, and he cracked his whip to urge the four black stallions on faster. “You saw a unicorn, you say?”

Tristran was about to tell his companion all about the encounter with the unicorn, but he thought better of it, and simply said, “He was a most noble beast.”

“The unicorns are the moon’s creatures,” said the driver. “I have never seen one. But it is said that they serve the moon and do her bidding. We shall reach the mountains by tomorrow evening. I shall call a halt at sunset tonight. If you wish, you may sleep inside the coach; I, myself, shall sleep beside the fire.” There was no change in his tone of voice, but Tristran knew, with a certainty that was both sudden and shocking in its intensity, that the man was scared of something, frightened to the depths of his soul.

Lightning flickered on the mountaintops that night. Tristran slept on the leather seat of the coach, his head on a sack of oats; he dreamed of ghosts, and of the moon and stars.

The rain began at dawn, abruptly, as if the sky had turned to water. Low, grey clouds hid the mountains from sight. In the driving rain Tristran and the coach driver hitched the horses to the carriage and set off. It was all uphill, now, and the horses went no faster than a walk.

“You could go inside,” said the driver. “No point in us both getting wet.” They had put on one-piece oilskins they had found beneath the driver’s seat.

“It would be hard for me to be wetter,” said Tristran, “without my first leaping into a river. I shall stay here. Two pairs of eyes and two pairs of hands may well be the saving of us.”

His companion grunted. He wiped the rain from his eyes and mouth with a cold wet hand, and then he said, “You’re a fool, boy. But I appreciate it.” He transferred the reins to his left hand, and extended his right hand. “I am known as Primus. The Lord Primus.”

“Tristran. Tristran Thorn,” he said, feeling that the man had, somehow, earned the right to know his true name.

They shook hands.The rain fell harder. The horses slowed to the slowest walk as the path became a stream, and the heavy rain cut off all vision as effectively as the thickest fog.

“There is a man,” said the Lord Primus, shouting to be heard now over the rain, the wind whipping the words from his lips. “He is tall, looks a little like me, but thinner, more crowlike. His eyes seem innocent and dull, but there is death in them. He is called Septimus, for he was the seventh boy-child our father spawned. If ever you see him, run and hide. His business is with me. But he will not hesitate to kill you if you stand in his way, or, perhaps, to make you his instrument with which to kill me.”

A wild gust of wind drove a tankardful of rainwater down Tristran’s neck.

“He sounds a most dangerous man,” said Tristran.

“He is the most dangerous man you will ever meet.”

Tristran peered silently into the rain, and the gathering darkness. It was becoming harder to see the road. Primus spoke again, saying, “If you ask me, there is something unnatural about this storm.”

“Unnatural?”

“Or more-than-natural; super-natural, if you will. I hope there is an inn along the way. The horses need a rest, and I could do with a dry bed and a warm fire. And a good meal.” Tristran shouted his agreement. They sat together, getting wetter. Tristran thought about the star and the unicorn. She would be cold by now, and wet. He worried about her broken leg and thought about how saddle sore she must be. It was all his fault. He felt wretched.

“I am the most miserable person who ever lived,” he said to the Lord Primus, when they stopped to feed the horses feedbags of damp oats.

“You are young, and in love,” said Primus. “Every young man in your position is the most miserable young man who ever lived.”

Tristran wondered how Lord Primus could have divined the existence of Victoria Forester. He imagined himself recounting his adventures to her, back at Wall, in front of a blazing parlor fire; but somehow all of his tales seemed a little flat.

Dusk seemed to have started at dawn that day, and now the sky was almost black. Their path continued to climb. The rain would let up for moments and then redouble, falling harder than ever.

“Is that a light over there?” asked Tristran.

“I cannot see anything. Maybe it was fool’s fire, or lightning . . .” said Primus. And then they gained a bend in the road, and he said, “I was wrong. That
is
a light. Well-spotted, young ’un. But there are bad things in these mountains. We must only hope that they are friendly.”

The horses put on a fresh burst of speed, now that their destination was in sight. A flash of lightning revealed the mountains, rising steeply up on either side of them.

“We’re in luck!” said Primus, his bass voice booming like thunder. “It’s an inn!”

“At the Sign of the Chariot”

T
he star had been soaked to the skin when she arrived at the pass, sad and shivering. She was worried about the unicorn; they had found no food for it on the last day’s journey, as the grasses and ferns of the forest had been replaced by grey rocks and stunted thorn bushes. The unicorn’s unshod hooves were not meant for the rocky road, nor was its back meant to carry riders, and its pace became slower and slower.

As they traveled, the star cursed the day she had fallen to this wet, unfriendly world. It had seemed so gentle and welcoming when seen from high in the sky. That was before. Now, she hated everything about it, except the unicorn; and, saddle sore and uncomfortable, she would have even happily spent time away from the unicorn.

After a day of pelting rain, the lights of the inn were the most welcoming sight she had seen in her time on the Earth. “
Watch your step, watch your step
,” pattered the raindrops on the stone. The unicorn stopped fifty yards from the inn and would approach no closer. The door to the inn was opened, flooding the grey world with warm yellow light.

“Hello there, dearie,” called a welcoming voice from the open doorway.

The star stroked the unicorn’s wet neck and spoke softly to the animal, but it made no move, stood there frozen in the light of the inn like a pale ghost.

“Will you be coming in, dearie? Or will you be stopping out there in the rain?” The woman’s friendly voice warmed the star, soothed her: just the right mixture of practicality and concern. “We can get you food, if it’s food you’re after. There’s a fire blazing in the hearth and enough hot water for a tub that’ll melt the chill from your bones.”

“I . . . I will need help coming in . . .” said the star. “My leg . . .”

“Ach, poor mite,” said the woman. “I’ll have my husband Billy carry you inside. There’s hay and fresh water in the stables, for your beast.”

The unicorn looked about wildly as the woman approached. “There, there, dearie. I won’t be coming too close. After all, it’s been many a long year since I was maiden enough to touch a unicorn, and many a long year since such a one was seen in
these
parts . . .”

Nervously, the unicorn followed the woman into the stables, keeping its distance from her. It walked along the stable to the furthest stall, where it lay down in the dry straw, and the star scrambled off its back, dripping and miserable.

Billy turned out to be a white-bearded, gruff sort of fellow. He said little, but carried the star into the inn and put her down on a three-legged stool in front of a crackling log fire.

“Poor dear,” said the innkeeper’s wife, who had followed them inside. “Look at you, wet as a water-nixie, look at the puddle under you, and your lovely dress, oh the state of it, you must be soaked to the bone...” And, sending her husband away, she helped the star remove her dripping wet dress, which she placed on a hook near the fire, where each drip hissed and fizzed when it fell to the hot bricks of the hearth.

There was a tin tub in front of the fire, and the innkeeper’s wife put up a paper screen around it. “How d’you like your baths?” she asked, solicitously, “warm, hot, or boil-a-lobster?”

“I do not know,” said the star, naked but for the topaz-stone on the silver chain about her waist, her head all in a whirl at the strange turn that events had taken, “for I have never had a bath before.”

“Never had one?” The innkeeper’s wife looked astonished. “Why, you poor duck; well, we won’t make it
too
hot, then. Call me if you need another copperful of water, I’ve got some going over the kitchen fire; and when you’re done with the bath, I’ll bring you some mulled wine, and some sweet-roasted turnips.”

And, before the star could protest that she neither ate nor drank, the woman had bustled off, leaving the star sitting in the tin tub, her broken leg in its splints sticking out of the water and resting on the three-legged stool. Initially the water was indeed too hot, but as she became used to the heat she relaxed, and was, for the first time since she had tumbled from the sky, utterly happy.

“There’s a love,” said the innkeeper’s wife, returning. “How are you feeling now?”

“Much, much better, thank you,” said the star.

“And your heart? How does your heart feel?” asked the woman.

“My heart?” It was a strange question, but the woman seemed genuinely concerned. “It feels happier. More easy. Less troubled.”

“Good. That’s good. Let us get it burning high and hot within you, eh? Burning bright inside you.”

“I am sure that under your care my heart shall blaze and burn with happiness,” said the star.

The innkeeper’s wife leaned over and chucked the star under the chin. “There’s a pet, such a duck it is, the fine things it says.” And the woman smiled indulgently and ran a hand through her grey-streaked hair. She hung a thick toweling robe on the edge of the screen. “This is for you to wear when you are done with your bath—oh no, not to hurry, ducks—it’ll be nice and warm for you, and your pretty dress will still be damp for a while now. Just give us a shout when you want to hop out of the tub and I’ll come and give you a hand.” Then she leaned over, and touched the star’s chest, between her breasts, with one cold finger. And she smiled. “A good strong heart,” she said.

There
were
good people on this benighted world, the star decided, warmed and contented. Outside the rain and the wind pattered and howled through the mountain pass, but in the inn, at the Sign of the Chariot, all was warm and comfortable.

Eventually the innkeeper’s wife, assisted by her dull-faced daughter, helped the star out of her bath. The firelight glinted on the topaz set in silver which the star wore on a knotted silver chain about her waist, until the topaz, and the star’s body, vanished beneath the thick toweling of her robe.

“Now my sweet,” said the innkeeper’s wife, “you come over here and make yourself comfortable.” She helped the star over to a long wooden table, at the head of which were laid a cleaver and a knife, both of them with hilts of bone and blades of dark glass. Leaning and limping, the star made it to the table and sat down at the bench beside it.

Outside there was a gust of wind, and the fire flared up green and blue and white. Then a deep voice boomed from outside the inn, over the howl of the elements. “Service! Food! Wine! Fire! Where is the stableboy?”

Billy the innkeeper and his daughter made no move, but only looked at the woman in the red dress as if for instructions. She pursed her lips. And then she said, “It can wait. For a little. After all, you are not going anywhere, my dearie?” This last to the star. “Not on that leg of yours, and not until the rain lets up, eh?”

“I appreciate your hospitality more than I can say,” said the star, simply and with feeling.

“Of course you do,” said the woman in the red dress, and her fidgeting fingers brushed the black knives impatiently, as if there were something she could not wait to be doing. “Plenty of time when these nuisances have gone, eh?”

T
he light of the inn was the happiest and best thing Tristran had seen on his journey through Faerie. While Primus bellowed for assistance, Tristran unhitched the exhausted horses, and led them one by one into the stables on the side of the inn.There was a white horse asleep in the furthest stall, but Tristran was too busy to pause to inspect it.

He knew—somewhere in the odd place inside him that knew directions and distances of things he had never seen and the places he had never been—that the star was close at hand, and this comforted him, and made him nervous. He knew that the horses were more exhausted and more hungry than he was. His dinner—and thus, he suspected, his confrontation with the star—could wait. “I’ll groom the horses,” he told Primus. “They’ll catch a chill otherwise.”

The tall man rested his huge hand on Tristran’s shoulder. “Good lad. I’ll send a pot-boy out with some burnt ale for you.”

Tristran thought about the star as he brushed down the horses and picked out their hooves. What would he say? What would
she
say? He was brushing the last of the horses when a blank-looking pot-girl came out to him with a tankard of steaming wine.

“Put it down over there,” he told her. “I’ll drink it with goodwill as soon as my hands are free.” She put it down on the top of a tack box and went out, without saying anything.

It was then that the horse in the end stall got to its feet and began to kick against the door.

“Settle down, there,” called Tristran, “settle down, fellow, and I’ll see if I cannot find warm oats and bran for all of you.”

There was a large stone in the stallion’s front inside hoof, and Tristran removed it with care.
Madam,
he had decided he would say,
please accept my heartfelt and most humble apologies. Sir,
the star would say in her turn,
that I shall do with all my heart. Now, let us go to your village, where you shall present me to your true love, as a token of your devotion to her

His ruminations were interrupted by an enormous clattering, as a huge white horse—but, he realized immediately, it was not a horse—kicked down the door of its stall and came charging, desperately, toward him, its horn lowered.

Tristran threw himself onto the straw on the stable floor, his arms about his head.

Moments passed. He raised his head. The unicorn had stopped in front of the tankard, was lowering its horn into the mulled wine.

Awkwardly, Tristran got to his feet. The wine was steaming and bubbling, and it came to Tristran then—the information surfacing from some long-forgotten fairy tale or piece of children’s lore—that a unicorn’s horn was proof against . . .

“Poison?” he whispered, and the unicorn raised its head, and stared into Tristran’s eyes, and Tristran knew that it was the truth. His heart was pounding hard in his chest. Around the inn the wind was screaming like a witch in her madness.

Tristran ran to the stable door, then he stopped and thought. He fumbled in his tunic pocket, finding the lump of wax, which was all that remained of his candle, with a dried copper leaf sticking to it. He peeled the leaf away from the wax with care. Then he raised the leaf to his ear and listened to what it told him.

“W
ine, milord?” asked the middle-aged woman in the long red dress, when Primus had entered the inn.

“I am afraid not,” he said. “I have a personal superstition that, until the day I see my brother’s corpse cold on the ground before me, I shall drink only my own wine, and eat only food I have obtained and prepared myself. This I shall do here, if you have no objection. I shall, of course, pay you as if it were your own wine I was drinking. If I might trouble you to put this bottle of mine near the fire to take the chill from it? Now, I have a companion on my journey, a young man who is attending to the horses; he has sworn no such oath, and I am sure that if you could send him a mug of burnt ale it would help take the chill from his bones . . . ? ” The pot-maid bobbed a curtsey, and she scuttled back to the kitchens.

“So, mine host,” said Primus to the white-bearded innkeeper, “how are your beds here at the back of beyond? Have you straw mattresses? Are there fires in the bedrooms? And I note with increasing pleasure that there is a bathtub in front of your fireplace—if there’s a fresh copper of steaming water, I shall have a bath later. But I shall pay you no more than a small silver coin for it, mind.”