Stardust

Meggot, who was a little taller and a little thinner than Yvaine, had lent her several gowns, which the star wore with relief, taking pleasure in wearing something new on different days. Often she would climb out to the figurehead, despite her broken leg, and sit, looking down at the ground below.

“How’s your hand?” asked the captain.

“A lot better, thank you,” said Tristran. The skin was shiny and scarred, and he had little feeling in the fingers, but Meggot’s salve had taken most of the pain and sped the healing process immeasurably. He had been sitting on deck, with his legs dangling over the side, looking out.

“We’ll be taking anchor in a week, to take provisions, and a little cargo,” said the captain. “Might be best if we were to let you off down there.”

“Oh. Thank you,” said Tristran.

“You’ll be closer to Wall. Still a good ten-week journey, though. Maybe more. But Meggot says she’s nearly got your friend’s leg up to snuff. It’ll be able to take her weight again soon.”They sat, side by side.

The captain puffed on his pipe: his clothes were covered in a fine layer of ash, and when he was not smoking his pipe he was chewing at the stem, or excavating the bowl with a sharp metal instrument, or tamping in new tobacco.

“You know,” said the captain, staring off toward the horizon, “it wasn’t entirely fortune that we found you.

Well, it was fortune that we found you, but it’d also be true to say that I was keeping half an eye out for you. I, and a few others about the place.”

“Why?” said Tristran. “And how did you know about me?”In reply, the captain traced a shape with his finger in the condensation on the polished wood.

“It looks like a castle,” said Tristran.

The captain winked at him. “Not a word to say too loudly,” he said, “even up here. Think of it as a fellowship.”Tristran stared at him. “Do you know a little hairy man, with a hat and an enormous pack of goods?”The captain tapped his pipe against the side of the boat. A movement of his hand had already erased the picture of the castle. “Aye. And he’s not the only member of the fellowship with an interest in your return to Wall. Which reminds me, you should tell the young lady that if she fancies trying to pass for other than what she is, she might try to give the impression that she eats something — anything — from time to time.”

“I never mentioned Wall in your presence,” said Tristran. “When you asked where I came from, I said ‘Behind us’ and when you asked where we were going, I said, ‘Ahead of us.’ ”

“That’s m’boy,” said the captain. “Exactly.”Another week passed, on the fifth day of which Meggot pronounced Yvaine’s splint ready to come off. She removed the makeshift bandages and the splint, and Yvaine practiced hobbling about the decks from bow to stern, holding onto the rails. Soon she was moving about the ship without difficulty, albeit with a slight limp.

On the sixth day there was a mighty storm, and they caught six fine lightning bolts in their copper box. On the seventh day they made port.

Tristran and Yvaine said their goodbyes to the captain and the crew of the Free Ship Perdita. Meggot gave Tristran a small pot of the green salve, for his hand and for Yvaine to rub onto her leg. The captain gave Tristran a leather shoulder-bag filled with dried meats and fruits and fragments of tobacco, a knife and a tinderbox (“Oh, it’s no bother, lad.

We’re taking on provisions here anyway”), while Meggot made Yvaine a gift of a blue silk gown, sewn with tiny silver stars and moons (“For it looks so much better on you than it ever has on me, my dear”).

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.