Stardust

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.

Tristran 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.”