Stardust (17 page)

The ship moored beside a dozen other, similar sky-ships, at the top of a huge tree, large enough to support hundreds of dwellings built into the trunk. It was inhabited by people and dwarfs, by gnomes and sylvans and other, even queerer, folk. There were steps around the trunk, and Tristran and the star descended them slowly. Tristran was relieved to be back on something attached to solid ground, and yet, in some way he could never have put into words, he felt disappointed, as if, when his feet touched the earth once more, he had lost something very fine.

It was three days of walking before the harbor-tree disappeared over the horizon.

They traveled West, toward the sunset, along a wide and dusty road. They slept beside hedgerows. Tristran ate fruit and nuts from bushes and trees and he drank from clear streams. They encountered few other people on the road. When they could, they stopped at small farms, where Tristran would put in an afternoon’s work in exchange for food and some straw in the barn to sleep upon. Sometimes they would stop in the towns and villages upon the way, to wash, and eat—or, in the star’s case, to feign eating—and to room, whenever they could afford it, at the town’s inn.

In the town of Simcock-Under-Hill, Tristran and Yvaine had an encounter with a goblin press-gang that might have ended unhappily, with Tristran spending the rest of his life fighting the goblins’ endless wars beneath the earth, had it not been for Yvaine’s quick thinking and her sharp tongue. In Berinhed’s Forest Tristran outfaced one of the great, tawny eagles, who would have carried them both back to its nest to feed its young and was afraid of nothing at all, save fire.

In a tavern in Fulkeston, Tristran gained great renown by reciting from memory Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” the Twenty-Third Psalm, the “Quality of Mercy” speech from
The Merchant of Venice
, and a poem about a boy who stood on the burning deck where all but he had fled, each of which he had been obliged to commit to memory in his school days. He blessed Mrs. Cherry for her efforts in making him memorize verse, until it became apparent that the townsfolk of Fulkeston had decided that he would stay with them forever and become the next bard of the town; Tristran and Yvaine were forced to sneak out of the town at the dead of night, and they only escaped because Yvaine persuaded (by some means, on which Tristran was never entirely clear) the dogs of the town not to bark as they left.

The sun burnt Tristran’s face to a nut-brown color and faded his clothes to the hues of rust and of dust. Yvaine remained as pale as the moon, and she did not lose her limp, no matter how many leagues they covered.

One evening, camped at the edge of a deep wood, Tristran heard something he had never heard before: a beautiful melody, plangent and strange. It filled his head with visions, and filled his heart with awe and delight. The music made him think of spaces without limits, of huge crystalline spheres which revolved with unutterable slowness through the vasty halls of the air. The melody transported him, took him beyond himself.

After what might have been long hours, and might have been only minutes, it ended, and Tristran sighed. “That was wonderful,” he said. The star’s lips moved, involuntarily, into a smile, and her eyes brightened. “Thank you,” she said. “I suppose that I have not felt like singing until now.”

“I have never heard anything like it.”

“Some nights,” she told him, “my sisters and I would sing together. Sing songs like that one, all about the lady our mother, and the nature of time, and the joys of shining and of loneliness.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be,” she told him. “At least I am still alive. I was lucky to have fallen in Faerie. And I think I was probably lucky to have met you.”

“Thank you,” said Tristran.

“You are welcome,” said the star. She sighed, then, in her turn, and stared up at the sky through the gaps in the trees.

*  *  *

T
ristran was looking for breakfast. He had found some young puffball mushrooms and a plum tree covered with purple plums which had ripened and dried almost to prunes, when he spotted the bird in the undergrowth.

He made no attempt to catch it (he had had a severe shock some weeks earlier, when, having narrowly failed to capture a large grey-brown hare for his dinner, it had stopped at the edge of the forest, looked at him with disdain, and said, “Well, I hope you’re proud of yourself, that’s all,” and had scampered off into the long grass) but he was fascinated by it. It was a remarkable bird, as large as a pheasant, but with feathers of all colors, garish reds and yellows and vivid blues. It looked like a refugee from the tropics, utterly out of place in this green and ferny wood. The bird started in fear as he approached it, hopping awkwardly as he came closer and letting out cries of sharp distress.

Tristran dropped to one knee next to it, murmuring reassurances. He reached out to the bird. The difficulty was obvious: a silver chain attached to the bird’s foot had become entangled in the twisted stub of a jutting root, and the bird was caught there by it, unable to move.

Carefully, Tristran unwound the silver chain, unhooking it from the root, while stroking the bird’s ruffled plumage with his left hand. “There you go,” he said to the bird. “Go home.” But the bird made no move to leave him. Instead it stared into his face, its head cocked on one side. “Look,” said Tristran, feeling rather odd and self-conscious, “someone will probably be worried about you.” He reached down to pick up the bird.

Something hit him, then, stunning him; although he had been still, he felt as if he had just run at full tilt into an invisible wall. He staggered, and nearly fell.

“Thief!” shouted a cracked old voice. “I shall turn your bones to ice and roast you in front of a fire! I shall pluck your eyes out and tie one to a herring and t’other to a seagull, so the twin sights of sea and sky shall take you into madness! I shall make your tongue into a writhing worm and your fingers shall become razors, and fire ants shall itch your skin, so each time you scratch yourself—”

“There is no need to belabor your point,” said Tristran to the old woman. “I did not steal your bird. Its chain was snagged upon a root, and I had just freed it.” She glared at him suspiciously from below her mop of iron-grey hair. Then she scurried forward and picked up the bird. She held it up, and whispered something to it, and it replied with an odd, musical chirp. The old woman’s eyes narrowed. “Well, perhaps what you say is not a complete pack of lies,” she admitted, extremely grudgingly.

“It’s not a pack of lies at all,” said Tristran, but the old woman and her bird were already halfway across the glade, so he gathered up his puffballs and his plums, and he walked back to where he had left Yvaine.

She was sitting beside the path, rubbing her feet. Her hip pained her, and so did her leg, while her feet were becoming more and more sensitive. Sometimes at night Tristran would hear her sobbing softly to herself. He hoped the moon would send them another unicorn, and knew that she would not.

“Well,” said Tristran to Yvaine, “that was odd.” He told her about the events of the morning and thought that that was the end of it.

He was, of course, wrong. Several hours later Tristran and the star were walking along the forest path when they were passed by a brightly painted caravan pulled by two grey mules and driven by the old woman who had threatened to change his bones to ice. She reined in her mules and crooked a bony finger at Tristran. “Come here, lad,” she said.

He walked over to her warily. “Yes, ma’am?”

“Seems I owe you an apology,” she said. “Seems you were telling the truth. Jumped to a conclusion.”

“Yes,” said Tristran.

“Let me look at you,” she said, climbing down into the roadway. Her cold finger touched the soft place beneath Tristran’s chin, forcing his head up. His hazel eyes stared into her old green eyes. “You look honest enough,” she said. “You can call me Madame Semele. I’m on my way to Wall, for the market. I was thinking that I’d welcome a boy to work my little flower-stall—I sells glass flowers, you know, the prettiest things that ever you did see. You’d be a fine market-lad, and we could put a glove over that hand of yours, so you’d not scare the customers. What d’ye say?”

Tristran pondered, and said “Excuse me,” and went over and conferred with Yvaine. Together they walked back to the old woman.

“Good afternoon,” said the star. “We have discussed your offer, and we thought that—”

“
Well?
” asked Madame Semele, her eyes fixed upon Tristran. “Don’t just stand there like a dumb thing! Speak! Speak! Speak!”

“I have no desire to work for you at the market,” said Tristran, “for I have business of my own that I shall need to deal with there. However, if we could ride with you, my companion and I are willing to pay you for our passage.”

Madame Semele shook her head. “That’s of no use to me. I can gather my own firewood, and you’d just be another weight for Faithless and Hopeless to pull. I take no passengers.” She climbed back up into the driver’s seat.

“But,” said Tristran, “I would pay you.”

The harridan cackled with scorn. “There’s never a thing you could possess that I would take for your passage. Now, if you’ll not work for me at the market at Wall, then be off with you.”

Tristran reached up to the buttonhole of his jerkin and felt it there, as cold and perfect as it had been through all his journeyings. He pulled it out and held it up to the old woman between finger and thumb. “You sell glass flowers, you say,” he said. “Would you be interested in this one?”

It was a snowdrop made of green glass and white glass, cunningly fashioned: it seemed as if it had been plucked from the meadow grass that very morning, and the dew was still upon it. The old woman squinted at it for a heartbeat, looking at its green leaves and its tight white petals, then she let out a screech: it might have been the anguished cry of some bereft bird of prey. “Where did you get that?” she cried. “Give it to me! Give it to me this instant!”

Tristran closed his finger about the snowdrop, concealing it from view, and he took a couple of steps backwards. “Hmm,” he said aloud. “It occurs to me now that I have a deep fondness for this flower, which was a gift from my father when I commenced my travels, and which, I suspect, carries with it a tremendous personal and familial importance. Certainly it has brought me luck, of one kind or another. Perhaps I would be better off keeping the flower, and my companion and I can walk to Wall.”

Madame Semele seemed torn between her desire to threaten and to cajole, and the emotions chased each other so nakedly across her face that she seemed almost to vibrate with the effort of keeping them in check. And then she took herself in hand and said, in a voice that cracked with self-control, “Now, now. No need to be hasty. I am certain that a deal can be struck between us.”

“Oh,” said Tristran, “I doubt it. It would need to be a very fine deal, to interest me, and it would need certain guarantees of safe-conduct and such safeguards as to assure that your behavior and actions toward me and my companion remained at all times benign.”

“Let me see the snowdrop again,” pleaded the old woman.

The bright-colored bird, its silver chain about one leg, fluttered out of the open door of the caravan and gazed down at the proceedings beneath.

“The poor thing,” said Yvaine, “chained up like that. Why do you not set her free?”

But the old woman did not answer her, ignoring her, or so Tristran thought, and said, “I will transport you to Wall, and I swear upon my honor and upon my true name that I will take no action to harm you upon the journey.”

“Or by inaction, or indirect action, allow harm to come to me or my companion.”

“As you say.” Tristran thought for a moment. He certainly did not trust the old woman. “I wish you to swear that we shall arrive in Wall in the same manner and condition and state that we are in now, and that you will give us board and lodging upon the way.”

The old woman clucked, then nodded. She clambered down from the caravan once more, and hawked, then spat into the dust. She pointed to the glob of spittle. “Now you,” she said. Tristran spat next to it. With her foot she rubbed both wet patches, so they conjoined. “There,” she said. “A bargain’s a bargain. Give me the flower.”

The greed and hunger were so obvious in her face that Tristran was now certain he could have made a better deal, but he gave the old woman his father’s flower. As she took it from him, her face broke into a gap-toothed grin. “Why, I do think that this is the superior of the one that damnable child gave away almost twenty years gone. Now, tell me young man,” she asked, looking up at Tristran with her sharp old eyes, “do you know what manner of thing you have been wearing in your buttonhole?”

“It is a flower. A glass flower.”

The old woman laughed so hard and so suddenly that Tristran thought that she was choking. “It is a frozen charm,” she said. “A thing of power. Something like this can perform wonders and miracles in the right hands. Watch.” She held the snowdrop above her head then brought it slowly down, so it brushed Tristran’s forehead.

For but a heartbeat he felt most peculiar, as if thick, black treacle were running through his veins in place of blood; then the shape of the world changed. Everything became huge and towering. It seemed as if the old woman herself was now a giantess, and his vision was blurred and confused.