“Can I Get There by Candlelight?”
October moved further away with every step Tristran took; he felt as if he were walking into summer. There was a path through the woods, with a high hedgerow to one side, and he followed the path. High above him the stars glittered and gleamed, and the harvest moon shone golden yellow, the color of ripe corn. In the moonlight he could see briar-roses in the hedge.
He was becoming sleepy now. For a time he fought to stay awake, and then he took off his overcoat, and put down his bag—a large leather bag of the kind that, in twenty years’ time, would become known as a Gladstone bag—and he laid his head on his bag, and covered himself with his coat.
He stared up at the stars: and it seemed to him then that they were dancers, stately and graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity. He imagined he could see the very faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they had spent so much time above the world, watching the scrambling and the joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does.
And then it came to Tristran that he was dreaming, and he walked into his bedroom, which was also the schoolroom of the village of Wall: and Mrs. Cherry tapped the blackboard and bade them all be silent, and Tristran looked down at his slate to see what the lesson would be about, but he could not read what he had written there. Then Mrs. Cherry, who resembled his mother so much that Tristran found himself astonished he had never before realized that they were the same person, called upon Tristran to tell the class the dates of all the kings and queens of England. . . .
“ ’Scuse me,” said a small and hairy voice in his ear, “but would you mind dreamin’ a bit quieter? Your dreams is spillin’ over into my dreams, and if there’s one thing I’ve never been doin’ with, it’s dates. William the Conker, ten sixty-six, that’s as far as I go, and I’d swap that for a dancing mouse.”
“Mm?” said Tristran.
“Keep it down,” said the voice. “If you don’t mind.”
“Sorry,” said Tristran, and his dreams after that were of the dark.
* * *
“Breakfast,” said a voice close to his ear. “It’s mushrumps, fried in butter, with wild garlic.”
Tristran opened his eyes: daylight shone through the briar-rose hedge, dappling the grass in gold and green. Something smelled like heaven.
A tin container was placed beside him.
“Poor fare,” said the voice. “Country fare, it is. Nothing like the gentry are used to, but the likes of me treasures a fine mushrump.”
Tristran blinked and reached into the tin bowl and took out a large mushroom between finger and thumb. It was hot. He took a careful bite, felt the juices flood his mouth. It was the finest thing he had ever eaten and, after he had chewed and swallowed it, he said so.
“That’s kind of you,” said the small figure who sat on the other side of a little fire which crackled and smoked in the morning air. “Kind of you, I’m sure. But you know, and I know, that it’s just fried field-mushrumps, and never a patch on nothing proper. . . .”
“Is there any more?” asked Tristran, realizing just how hungry he was: sometimes a little food can do that to you.
“Ah now, that’s manners for you,” said the little figure, who wore a large, floppy hat and a large, flappy overcoat. “Is there more? he says, as if it were poached quail’s eggs and smoked gazelle and truffles, not just a mushrump, what tastes more or less like something what’s been dead for a week and a cat wouldn’t touch. Manners.”
“I really, truly would like another mushroom,” said Tristran, “if it’s not too much trouble.”
The little man—if man he was, which Tristran found rather unlikely—sighed mournfully and reached into the pan sizzling on the fire, with his knife, and flicked two large mushrooms into Tristran’s tin bowl.
Tristran blew on them, then ate them with his fingers.
“Look at you,” said the little hairy person, his voice a mixture of pride and gloom, “eatin’ those mushrumps as if you liked them, as if they wasn’t sawdust and wormwood and rue in your mouth.” Tristran licked his fingers and assured his benefactor that they had been the very finest mushrooms he had ever had the privilege of eating.
“You says that now,” said his host with gloomy relish, “but you’ll not be sayin’ that in an hour’s time. They’ll undoubtedly disagree with you, like the fishwife who disagreed with her young man over a mermaid. And that could be heard from Garamond to Stormhold. Such language! It fair turned my ears blue, it did.” The little hairy personage sighed deeply. “Talkin’ about your guts,” he said, “I’m going to attend to mine behind that tree over there. Would you do me the signal honor of keepin’ an eye on that there pack of mine? I’d be obliged.”
“Of course,” said Tristran, politely.
The little hairy man vanished behind an oak tree;Tristran heard a few grunts, and then his new friend reappeared, saying, “There. I knowed a man in Paphlagonia who’d swallow a live snake every morning, when he got up. He used to say, he was certain of one thing, that nothing worse would happen to him all day. ’Course they made him eat a bowlful of hairy centipedes before they hung him, so maybe that claim was a bit presumptive.”
Tristran excused himself. He urinated against the side of the oak tree, next to which was a small mound of droppings, certainly not produced by any human being. They looked like deer pellets, or rabbit-droppings.
“My name is Tristran Thorn,” said Tristran, when he returned. His breakfast companion had packed up the morning’s breakfast—fire, pans and all—and made it vanish into his pack.
He removed his hat, pressed it to his chest, and looked up at Tristran. “Charmed,” he said. He tapped the side of his pack: on it was written: CHARMED, ENCHANTED, ENSORCELLED AND CONFUSTICATED. “I used to be confusticated,” he confided, “but you know how these things go.”
And with that he set off along the path. Tristran walked behind him. “Hey! I say!” called Tristran. “Slow down, can’t you?” For despite the huge pack (which put Tristran in mind of Christian’s burden in Pilgrim’s Progress, a book from which Mrs. Cherry had read to them every Monday morning, telling them that, although it was written by a tinker, it was a fine book for all of that) the little man—Charmed? Was that his name?—was moving away from him as fast as a squirrel up a tree.
The little creature hurried back down the path. “Somethin’ wrong?” he asked.
“I cannot keep up,” confessed Tristran. “You walk so confoundedly fast.”
The little hairy man slowed his pace. “Beg your puddin’,” he said, as Tristran stumbled after him. “Bein’ on me own so much, I gets used to settin’ me own pace.”
They walked side by side, in the golden-green light of the sun through the newly opened leaves. It was a quality of light Tristran had observed, unique to springtime. He wondered if they had left summer as far behind as October. From time to time Tristran would remark on a flash of color in a tree or bush, and the little hairy man would say something like, “Kingfisher. Mr. Halcyon they used to call him. Pretty bird,” or “Purple hummingbird. Drinks nectar from flowers. Hovers,” or “Redcap. They’ll keep their distance, but don’t you go scrutinizin’ ’em or looking for trouble, ’cos you’ll find it with those buggers.”
They sat beside a brook to eat their lunch. Tristran produced the cottage loaf, the ripe, red apples, and round of cheese—hard, tart and crumbly—that his mother had given him. And although the little man eyed them both suspiciously, he wolfed them down and licked the crumbs of bread and cheese from his fingers, and munched noisily on the apple. Then he filled a kettle from the brook and boiled it up for tea.
“Suppose you tell me what you’re about?” said the little hairy man as they sat on the ground and drank their tea.
Tristran thought for some moments, and then he said, “I come from the village of Wall, where there lives a young lady named Victoria Forester, who is without peer among women, and it is to her, and to her alone, that I have given my heart. Her face is—”
“Usual complement of bits?” asked the little creature. “Eyes? Nose? Teeth? All the usual?”
“Of course.”
“Well then, you can skip that stuff,” said the little hairy man. “We’ll take it all as said. So what damn-fool silly thing has this young lady got you a-doin’ of?”
Tristran put down his wooden cup of tea, and stood up, offended.
“What,” he asked, in what he was certain were lofty and scornful tones, “would possibly make you imagine that my lady-love would have sent me on some foolish errand?”
The little man stared up at him with eyes like beads of jet. “Because that’s the only reason a lad like you would be stupid enough to cross the border into Faerie. The only ones who ever come here from your lands are the minstrels, and the lovers, and the mad. And you don’t look like much of a minstrel, and you’re—pardon me saying so, lad, but it’s true—ordinary as cheese-crumbs. So it’s love, if you ask me.”
“Because,” announced Tristran, “every lover is in his heart a madman, and in his head a minstrel.”
“Really?” said the little man, doubtfully. “I’d never noticed. So there’s some young lady. Has she sent you here to seek your fortune? That used to be very popular. You’d get young fellers wanderin’ all over, looking for the hoard of gold that some poor wyrm or ogre had taken absolute centuries to accumulate.”
“No. Not my fortune. It was more of a promise I made to this lady I mentioned. I . . . we were talking, and I was promising her things, and we saw this falling star, and I promised to bring it to her. And it fell . . .” he waved an arm toward a mountain range somewhere in the general direction of the sunrise “. . . over there.”
The little hairy man scratched his chin. Or his muzzle; it might well have been his muzzle. “You know what I would do?”
“No,” said Tristran, hope rising within him, “what?”
The little man wiped his nose. “I’d tell her to go shove her face in the pig pen, and go out and find another one who’ll kiss you without askin’ for the earth. You’re bound to find one. You can hardly throw half a brick back in the lands you come from without hittin’ one.”
“There are no other girls,” said Tristran confidently.
The little man sniffed, and they packed up their things and walked on together.
“Did you mean it?” said the little man. “About the fallen star?”
“Yes,” said Tristran.
“Well, I’d not mention it about if I were you,” said the little man. “There’s those as would be unhealthily interested in such information. Better keep mum. But never lie.”
“So what should I say?”
“Well,” he said, “f’r example, if they ask where you’ve come from, you could say ‘Behind me,’ and if they asked where you’re going, you’d say ‘In front of me.’ ”
“I see,” said Tristran.
The path they were walking became harder to discern. A cold breeze ruffled Tristran’s hair, and he shivered. The path led them into a grey wood of thin, pale birch trees.
“Do you think it will be far?” asked Tristran. “To the star?”
“How many miles to Babylon?” said the little man rhetorically. “This wood wasn’t here, last time I was by this way,” he added.
“How Many Miles to Babylon,” recited Tristran, to himself, as they walked through the grey wood.
“Three score miles and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again.
Yes, if your feet are nimble and light,
You can get there by candlelight.”
“That’s the one,” said the little hairy man, his head questing from side to side as if he were preoccupied, or a little nervous.
“It’s only a nursery rhyme,” said Tristran.
“Only a nursery . . . ? Bless me, there’s some on this side of the wall would give seven years’ hard toil for that little cantrip. And back where you come from you mutter ’em to babes alongside of a ‘Rock-a-Bye-Baby’ or a ‘Rub-a-Dub-Dub,’ without a second thought. . . . Are you chilled, lad?”
“Now that you mention it, I am a bit cold, yes.”
“Look around you. Can you see a path?”
Tristran blinked. The grey wood soaked up light and color and distance. He had thought they were following a path, but now that he tried to see the path, it shimmered, and vanished, like an optical illusion. He had taken that tree, and that tree, and that rock as markers of the path . . . but there was no path, only the mirk, and the twilight, and the pale trees. “Now we’re for it,” said the hairy man, in a small voice.
“Should we run?” Tristran removed his bowler hat, and held it in front of him.
The little man shook his head. “Not much point,” he said. “We’ve walked into the trap, and we’ll still be in it even if we runs.”
He walked over to the nearest tree, a tall, pale, birchlike tree trunk, and kicked it, hard. Some dry leaves fell, and then something white tumbled from the branches to the earth with a dry, whispering sound.
Tristran walked over to it and looked down; it was the skeleton of a bird, clean and white and dry.
The little man shivered. “I could castle,” he told Tristran, “but there’s no one I could castle with’d be any better off here than we are. . . . There’s no escape by flying, not judgin’ by that thing.” He nudged the skeleton with one pawlike foot. “And your sort of people never could learn to burrow—not that that’d do us much good. . . .”
“Perhaps we could arm ourselves,” said Tristran.
“Arm ourselves?”
“Before they come.”
“Before they come? Why—they’re here, you puddenhead. It’s the trees themselves. We’re in a serewood.”
“Serewood?”
“It’s me own fault—I should’ve been paying more attention to where we was goin’. Now you’ll never get your star, and I’ll never get my merchandise. One day some other poor bugger lost in the wood’ll find our skellingtons picked clean as whistles and that’ll be that.”
Tristran stared about him. In the gloom it seemed that the trees were crowding about more thickly, although he had seen nothing actually move. He wondered if the little man were being foolish, or imagining things.
Something stung his left hand. He slapped at it, expecting to see an insect. He looked down to see a pale yellow leaf. It fell to the ground with a rustle. On the back of his hand, a veining of red, wet blood welled up. The wood whispered about them.
“Is there anything we can do?”Tristran asked.
“Nothing I can think of. If only we knew where the true path was . . . even a serewood couldn’t destroy the true path. Just hide it from us, lure us off of it.. . . .” The little man shrugged, and sighed.
Tristran reached his hand up and rubbed his forehead.
“I . . . I do know where the path is,” he said. He pointed. “It’s down that way.”
The little man’s bead-black eyes glittered. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, sir. Through that copse and up a little way to the right. That’s where the path is.”
“How do you know?” asked the man.
“I know,” replied Tristran.
“Right. Come on!” And the little man took his burden and ran, slowly enough that Tristran, his leather bag swinging and banging against his legs, his heart pounding, his breath coming in gasps, was able to keep up.
“No! Not that way. Over to the left!” shouted Tristran. Branches and thorns ripped and tore at his clothes. They ran on in silence.
The trees seemed to have arranged themselves into a wall. Leaves fell around them in flurries, stinging and smarting when they touched Tristran’s skin, cutting and slicing at his clothes. He clambered up the hill, swiping at the leaves with his free hand, swatting at the twigs and branches with his bag.
The silence was broken by something wailing. It was the little hairy man. He had stopped dead where he stood, and, his head thrown back, had begun to howl at the sky.
“Buck up,” said Tristran. “We’re nearly there.” He grasped the little hairy man’s free hand in his own larger hand and pulled him forward.
And then they were standing on the true path: a swath of green sward running through the grey wood. “Are we safe here?” asked Tristran, panting, and looking about apprehensively.
“We’re safe, as long as we stay on the path,” said the little hairy man, and he put down his burden, sat down on the grass of the path and stared at the trees about them.
The pale trees shook, although no wind blew, and it seemed to Tristran that they shook in anger.
His companion had begun to shudder, his hairy fingers raking and stroking the green grass. Then he looked up at Tristran. “I don’t suppose you have such a thing as a bottle of something spirituous upon you? Or perchance a pot of hot, sweet tea?”
“No,” said Tristran, “ ’fraid not.”
The little man sniffed and fumbled at the lock of his huge package. “Turn round,” he said to Tristran. “No peekin’.”
Tristran turned away.
There was a rummaging, scuffling noise. Then the sound of a lock clicking shut, and then, “You can turn around, if you like.” The little man was holding an enamel bottle. He was tugging, vainly, at the stopper.
“Um. Would you like me to help you with that?” Tristran hoped the little hairy man would not be offended by his request. He should not have worried; his companion thrust the bottle into his hands.
“Here go,” he said. “You’ve got the fingers for it.”
Tristran tugged and pulled out the stopper of the bottle.
He could smell something intoxicating, like honey mixed with wood smoke and cloves. He passed the bottle back to the little man.
“It’s a crime to drink something as rare and good as this out of the bottle,” said the little hairy man. He untied the little wooden cup from his belt and, trembling, poured a small amount of an amber-colored liquid into it. He sniffed it, then sipped it, then he smiled, with small, sharp teeth.
“Aaaahhhh. That’s better.”
He passed the cup to Tristran.
“Sip it slowly,” he said. “It’s worth a king’s ransom, this bottle. It cost me two large blue-white diamonds, a mechanical bluebird which sang, and a dragon’s scale.”
Tristran sipped the drink. It warmed him down to his toes and made him feel like his head was filled with tiny bubbles.
“Good, eh?”
Tristran nodded.
“Too good for the likes of you and me, I’m afraid. Still. It hits the spot in times of trouble, of which this is certainly one. Let’s get out of this wood,” said the little hairy man. “Which way, though . . . ?”
“That way,” said Tristran, pointing to their left.
The little man stoppered and pocketed the little bottle, shouldered his pack, and the two of them walked together down the green path through the grey wood.
After several hours, the white trees began to thin, and then they were through the serewood and walking between two low rough-stone walls, along a high bank. When Tristran looked back the way they had come there was no sign of any wood at all; the way behind them was purple-headed, heathery hills.
“We can stop here,” said his companion. “There’s stuff we needs to talk about. Sit down.”
He put down his enormous bag and climbed on top of it, so he was looking down at Tristran, who sat on a rock beside the road. “There’s something here I’m not properly gettin’. Now, tell me. Where are you from?”
“Wall,” said Tristran. “I told you.”
“Who’s your father and mother?”
“My father’s name is Dunstan Thorn. My mother is Daisy Thorn.”
“Mmm. Dunstan Thorn . . . Mm. I met your father once. He put me up for the night. Not a bad chap, although he doesn’t half go on a bit while a fellow’s trying to get a little kip.” He scratched his muzzle. “Still doesn’t explain . . . there isn’t anythin’ unusual in your family, is there?”
“My sister, Louisa, can wiggle her ears.”
The little hairy man wiggled his own large, hairy ears, dismissively. “No, that’s not it,” he said. “I was thinkin’ more of a grandmother who was a famous enchantress, or an uncle who was a prominent warlock, or a brace of fairies somewhere in the family tree.”
“None that I know of,” admitted Tristran.
The little man changed his tack. “Where’s the village of Wall?” he asked. Tristran pointed. “Where are the Debatable Hills?” Tristran pointed once more, without hesitation. “Where’s the Catavarian Isles?”Tristran pointed to the southwest. He had not known there were Debatable Hills or Catavarian Isles until the little man had mentioned them, but he was as certain in himself of their location as he was of the whereabouts of his own left foot or the nose on his face.
“Hmm. Now thens. Do you know where His Vastness the Freemartin Muskish is?”
Tristran shook his head.
“D’you know where His Vastness the Freemartin Muskish’s Transluminary Citadel is?”
Tristran pointed, with certainty.
“And what of Paris? The one in France?”
Tristran thought for a moment. “Well, if Wall’s over there, I suppose that Paris must be sort of in the same sort of direction, mustn’t it.”
“Let’s see,” said the little hairy man, talking to himself as much as to Tristran. “You can find places in Faerie, but not in your world, save for Wall, and that’s a boundary. You can’t find people . . . but . . . tell me, lad, can you find this star you’re lookin’ for?”
Tristran pointed, immediately. “It’s that way,” he said.
“Hmm. That’s good. But it still doesn’t explain nuffink. You hungry?”
“A bit. And I’m tattered and torn,” said Tristran, fingering the huge holes in his trousers, and in his coat, where the branches and the thorns had seized at him, and the leaves had cut at him as he ran. “And look at my boots . . .”
“What’s in your bag?”
Tristran opened his Gladstone bag. “Apples. Cheese. Half a cottage loaf. And a pot of fishpaste. My penknife. I’ve got a change of underwear, and a couple of pairs of woolen socks. I suppose I should have brought more clothes. . . .”
“Keep the fishpaste,” said his traveling companion, and he rapidly divided the remaining food into two equal piles.
“You done me a good turn,” he said, munching a crisp apple, “and I doesn’t forget something like that. First we’ll get your clothes took care of, and then we’ll send you off after your star. Yus?”
“That’s extremely kind of you,” said Tristran, nervously, slicing his cheese onto his crust of bread.
“Right,” said the little hairy man. “Let’s find you a blanket.”
At dawn three lords of Stormhold rode down the craggy mountain road in a coach pulled by six black horses. The horses wore bobbing black plumes, the coach was fresh painted in black, and each of the lords of Stormhold was dressed in mourning.
In the case of Primus, this took the shape of a long, black, monkish robe; Tertius was dressed in the sober costume of a merchant in mourning, while Septimus wore a black doublet and hose, a black hat with a black feather in it, and looked for all the world like a foppish assassin from a minor Elizabethan historical play.
The lords of Stormhold eyed each other, one cautious, one wary, one blank. They said nothing: had alliances been possible, Tertius might have sided with Primus against Septimus. But there were no alliances that could be made.
The carriage clattered and shook.
Once, it stopped, for each of the three lords to relieve himself. Then it clattered on down the hilly road. Together, the three lords of Stormhold had placed their father’s remains in the Hall of Ancestors. Their dead brothers had watched them from the doors of the hall, but had said nothing.
Toward evening, the coachman called out, “Nottaway!” and he reined his team outside a tumbledown inn, built against what resembled the ruins of a giant’s cottage.
The three lords of Stormhold got out of the coach and stretched their cramped legs. Faces peered at them through the bottle-glass windows of the inn.
The innkeeper, who was a choleric gnome of poor disposition, looked out of the door. “We’ll need beds aired and a pot of mutton stew on the fire,” he called.
“How many beds to be aired?” asked Letitia the chambermaid, from the stairwell.
“Three,” said the gnome. “I’ll wager they’ll have their coachman sleep with the horses.”
“Three indeed,” whispered Tilly, the pot-girl, to Lacey, the ostler, “when anyone could see a full seven of those fine gentlemen standing in the road.”
But when the lords of Stormhold entered there were but three of them, and they announced that their coachman would sleep in the stables.
Dinner was mutton stew, and bread loaves so hot and fresh they exhaled steam as they were cracked open, and each of the lords took an unopened bottle of the finest Baragundian wine (for none of the lords would share a bottle with his fellows, nor even permit the wine to be poured from the bottle into a goblet). This scandalized the gnome, who was of the opinion—not, however, uttered in the hearing of his guests—that the wine should be permitted to breathe.
Their coachman ate his bowl of stew, and drank two pots of ale, and went to sleep in the stables. The three brothers went to their respective rooms and barred the doors.
Tertius had slipped a silver coin to Letitia the chambermaid when she had brought him the warming-pan for his bed, so he was not surprised at all when, shortly before midnight, there came a tap-tapping on his door.
She wore a one-piece white chemise, and curtsied to him as he opened the door, and smiled, shyly. She held a bottle of wine in her hand.
He locked the door behind him and led her to the bed, where, having first made her remove her chemise, and having examined her face and body by candlelight, and having kissed her on the forehead, lips, nipples, navel and toes, and having extinguished the candle, he made love to her, without speaking, in the pale moonlight.
After some time, he grunted, and was still.
“There, lovey, was that good, now?” asked Letitia.
“Yes,” said Tertius, warily, as if her words guarded some trap. “It was.”
“Would you be wanting another turn, before I leave?”
In reply, Tertius pointed between his legs. Letitia giggled. “We can have him upstanding again in a twinkling,” she said. And she pulled out the cork from the bottle of wine she had carried in, and had placed beside the bed, and passed it to Tertius.
He grinned at her, and gulped down some wine, then pulled her to him.
“I bet that feels good,” she said to him. “Now, lovey, this time let me show you how I like it . . . why, whatever is the matter?” For Lord Tertius of Stormhold was writhing back and forth on the bed, his eyes wide, his breathing labored.
“That wine?” he gasped. “Where did you get it?”
“Your brother,” said Letty. “I met him on the stairs. He told me it was a fine restorative and stiffener, and it would provide us with a night we should never forget.”
“And so it has,” breathed Tertius, and he twitched, once, twice, three times, and then was stiff. And very still.
Tertius heard Letitia begin to scream, as if from a very long way away. He was conscious of four familiar presences standing with him in the shadows beside the wall.
“She was very beautiful,” whispered Secundus, and Letitia thought she heard the curtains rustle.
“Septimus is most crafty,” said Quintus. “That was the self-same preparation of baneberries he slipped into my dish of eels,” and Letitia thought she heard the wind howling down from the mountain crags.
She opened the door to the household, woken by her screams, and a search ensued. Lord Septimus, however, was nowhere to be found, and one of the black stallions was gone from the stable (in which the coachman slept and snored and could not be wakened).
Lord Primus was in a foul mood when he arose the next morning.
He declined to have Letitia put to death, stating she was as much a victim of Septimus’s craft as Tertius had been, but ordered that she accompany Tertius’s body back to the castle of Stormhold.
He left her one black horse to carry the body, and a pouch of silver coins. It was enough to pay a villager of Nottaway to travel with her—to ensure no wolves made off with the horse or his brother’s remains—and to pay off the coachman when finally he awoke.
And then, alone in the coach, pulled by a team of four coal-black stallions, Lord Primus left the village of Nottaway, in significantly worse temper than he had arrived there.
Brevis arrived at the crossroads tugging at a rope. The rope was attached to a bearded, horned, evil-eyed billy goat which Brevis was taking to market to sell.
That morning, Brevis’s mother had placed a single radish upon the table in front of him and had said, “Brevis, son. This radish was all I was able to pull from the ground today. All our crops have failed, and all our food has gone. We’ve nothing to sell but the billy goat. So I want you to halter the goat, and take him to the market, and sell him to a farmer. And with the coins you get for the goat—and you’ll take nothing less than a florin, mark you—buy a hen, and buy corn, and turnips; and perhaps we shall not starve.”
So Brevis had chewed his radish, which was woody, and peppery to the tongue, and spent the rest of the morning chasing the goat about its pen, sustaining a bruise to the rib and a bite to the thigh in the process, and, eventually, and with the help of a passing tinker, he had subdued the goat enough to have it haltered, and, leaving his mother to bandage the tinker’s goat-inflicted injuries, he dragged the billy goat toward the market.
Sometimes the goat would take it into his head to charge on ahead, and Brevis would be dragged behind him, the heels of his boots grinding into the dried mud of the roadway, until the goat would decide—suddenly and without warning, for no reason Brevis was able to discern—to stop. Then Brevis would pick himself up and return to dragging the beast.
He reached the crossroads on the edge of the wood, sweaty and hungry and bruised, pulling an uncooperative goat. There was a tall woman standing at the crossroads. A circlet of silver sat in the crimson headpiece that surrounded her dark hair, and her dress was as scarlet as her lips.
“What do they call you, boy?” she asked, in a voice like musky brown honey.
“They call me Brevis, ma’am,” said Brevis, observing something strange behind the woman. It was a small cart, but there was nothing harnessed between the shafts. He wondered how it had ever got there.
“Brevis,” she purred. “Such a nice name. Would you like to sell me your goat, Brevis-boy?”
Brevis hesitated. “My mother told me I was to take the goat to the market,” he said, “and to sell him for a hen, and some corn, and some turnips, and to bring her home the change.”
“How much did your mother tell you to take for the goat?” asked the woman in the scarlet kirtle.
“Nothing less than a florin,” he said.
She smiled and held up one hand. Something glinted yellow. “Why, I will give you this golden guinea,” she said, “enough to buy a coopful of hens and a hundred bushels of turnips.”
The boy’s mouth hung open.
“Do we have a deal?”
The boy nodded and thrust out the hand which held the billy goat’s rope halter. “Here,” was all he could say, visions of limitless wealth and turnips beyond counting tumbling through his head.
The lady took the rope. Then she touched one finger to the goat’s forehead, between its yellow eyes, and let go of the rope.
Brevis expected the billy goat to bolt for the woods or down one of the roads, but it stayed where it was, as if frozen into position. Brevis held out his hand for the golden guinea.
The woman looked at him then, examining him from the soles of his muddy feet to his sweaty, cropped hair, and once more she smiled.
“You know,” she said, “I think that a matched pair would be so much more impressive than just one. Don’t you?”
Brevis did not know what she was talking about and opened his mouth to tell her so. But just then she reached out one long finger, and touched the bridge of his nose, between his eyes, and he found he could not say anything at all.
She snapped her fingers, and Brevis and the billy goat hastened to stand between the shafts of her cart; and Brevis was surprised to notice that he was walking on four legs, and he seemed to be no taller than the animal beside him.
The witch-woman cracked her whip, and her cart jolted off down the muddy road, drawn by a matched pair of horned white billy goats.
The little hairy man had taken Tristran’s ripped coat and trousers and waistcoat and, leaving him covered by a blanket, had walked into the village which nestled in the valley between three heather-covered hills.
Tristran sat under the blanket, in the warm evening, and waited.
Lights flickered in the hawthorn bush behind him. He thought they were glow-worms or fireflies, but, on closer inspection, he perceived they were tiny people, flickering and flitting from branch to branch.
He coughed, politely. A score of tiny eyes stared down at him. Several of the little creatures vanished. Others retreated high into the hawthorn bush, while a handful, braver than the others, flitted toward him.
They began to laugh, in high, bell-tinkling tones, pointing at Tristran, in his broken boots and blanket, and underclothes, and bowler hat. Tristran blushed red and pulled the blanket about himself.
One of the little folk sang:
Hankety pankety
Boy in a blanket, he’s
Off on a goose-chase to
Look for a star
Incontrovertibly
Journeys through Fäerie
Strip off the blanket to
See who you are.
And another one sang:
Tristran Thorn
Tristran Thorn
Does not know why he was born
And a foolish oath has sworn
Trews and coat and shirt are torn
So he sits here all forlorn
Soon to face his true love’s scorn
Wistran
Bistran
Tristran
Thorn.
“Be off with you, you silly things,” said Tristran, his face burning, and, having nothing else to hand, he threw his bowler hat at them.
Thus it was, that when the little hairy man arrived back from the village of Revelry (although why it was so called no man alive could say, for it was a gloomy, somber place, and had been for time out of mind) he found Tristran sitting glumly beside a hawthorn bush, wrapped in a blanket, and bewailing the loss of his hat.
“They said cruel things about my true love,” said Tristran. “Miss Victoria Forester. How dare they?”
“The little folk dare anything,” said his friend. “And they talks a lot of nonsense. But they talks an awful lot of sense, as well. You listen to ’em at your peril, and you ignore ’em at your peril, too.”
“They said I was soon to face my true love’s scorn.”
“Did they, indeed?”The little hairy man was laying a variety of clothes out upon the grass. Even in the moonlight, Tristran could see that the clothes he was laying out bore no manner of resemblance to the clothes that Tristran had removed earlier in the day.
In the village of Wall, men wore brown, and grey, and black; and even the reddest neckerchief worn by the ruddiest of farmers was soon faded by the sun and the rain to a more mannerly color. Tristran looked at the crimson and canary and russet cloth, at clothes which looked more like the costumes of traveling players or the contents of his cousin Joan’s charades chest, and said, “My clothes?”
“These are your clothes now,” said the little hairy man, proudly. “I traded ’em. This stuff’s better quality—see, it won’t rip and tear as easy—and it’s neither tattered nor torn, and withal, you’ll not stick out so much as a stranger. This is what people wears hereabouts, y’see.”
Tristran contemplated making the rest of his quest wrapped in a blanket, like a savage aboriginal from one of his schoolbooks. Then, with a sigh, he took off his boots, and let the blanket fall to the grass, and, with the little hairy man as his guide (“No, no, laddie, those go over that. Mercy, what do they teach them nowadays?”) he was soon dressed in his fine new clothes.
The new boots fit him better than the old ones ever had.
They certainly were fine new clothes. While clothes do not, as the saying would sometimes have it, make the man, and fine feathers do not make fine birds, sometimes they can add a certain spice to a recipe. And Tristran Thorn in crimson and canary was not the same man that Tristran Thorn in his overcoat and Sunday suit had been. There was a swagger to his steps, a jauntiness to his movements, that had not been there before. His chin went up instead of down, and there was a glint in his eye that he had not possessed when he had worn a bowler hat.
By the time they had eaten the meal the little hairy man had brought back with him from Revelry—which consisted of smoked trout, a bowl of fresh shelled peas, several small raisin-cakes, and a bottle of small beer—Tristran felt quite at home with his new garb.
“Now then,” said the little hairy man. “You’ve saved my life, laddie, back there in the serewood, and your father, he done me a good turn back before you was born, and let it never be said that I’m a cove what doesn’t pay his debts—” Tristran began to mutter something about how his friend had already done more than enough for him, but the little hairy man ignored him and continued. “—so I was a-ponderin’: you know where your star is, don’t you?”
Tristran pointed, without hesitation, to the dark horizon.
“Now then, how far is it, to your star? D’you know that?”
Tristran had not given the matter any thought, hitherto, but he found himself saying, “A man could walk, only stopping to sleep, while the moon waxed and waned above him a half a dozen times, crossing treacherous mountains and burning deserts, before he reached the place where the star has fallen.”
It did not sound like the kind of thing that he would say at all, and he blinked with surprise.
“As I thought,” said the little hairy man, approaching his burden and bending over it, so Tristran could not see how it unlocked. “And it’s not like you’re the only one’ll be lookin’ for it. You remember what I told you before?”
“About digging a hole to bury my dung in?”
“Not that.”
“About telling no one my true name, nor my destination?”
“Nor yet that.”
“Then what?”
“How many miles to Babylon?” recited the man.
“Oh. Yes. That.”
“Can I get there by candlelight? There and back again. Only it’s the candle-wax, you see. Most candles won’t do it. This one took a lot of findin’.” And he pulled out a candle-stub the size of a crabapple and handed it to Tristran.
Tristran could see nothing in any way out of the ordinary about the candle-stub. It was a wax candle, not tallow, and it was much used and melted. The wick was charred and black.
“What do I do with it?” he asked.
“All in good time,” said the little hairy man, and took something else from his pack. “Take this, too. You’ll need it.”
It glittered in the moonlight. Tristran took it; the little man’s gift seemed to be a thin silver chain, with a loop at each end. It was cold and slippery to the touch. “What is it?”
“The usual. Cat’s breath and fish-scales and moonlight on a mill-pond, melted and smithied and forged by the dwarfs. You’ll be needin’ it to bring your star back with you.”
“I will?”
“Oh, yes.” Tristran let the chain fall into his palm: it felt like quicksilver. “Where do I keep it? I have no pockets in these confounded clothes.”
“Wrap it around your wrist until you need it. Like that. There you go. But you’ve a pocket in your tunic, under there, see?”
Tristran found the concealed pocket. Above it there was a small buttonhole, and in the buttonhole he placed the snowdrop, the glass flower that his father had given him as a luck token when he had left Wall. He wondered whether it was in fact bringing him luck, and if it were, was it good luck or bad?
Tristran stood up. He held his leather bag tightly in his hand.
“Now then,” said the little hairy man. “This is what you got to do. Take up the candle in your right hand; I’ll light it for you. And then, walk to your star. You’ll use the chain to bring it back here. There’s not much wick left on the candle, so you’d best be snappy about it, and step lively—any dawdlin’ and you’ll regret it. Feet be nimble and light, yes?”
“I . . . I suppose so, yes,” said Tristran.
He stood expectantly. The little hairy man passed a hand over the candle, which lit with a flame yellow above and blue below. There was a gust of wind, but the flame did not flicker even the slightest bit.
Tristran took the candle in his hand, and he began to walk forward. The candlelight illuminated the world: every tree and bush and blade of grass.
With Tristran’s next step he was standing beside a lake, and the candlelight shone brightly on the water; and then he was walking through the mountains, through lonely crags, where the candlelight was reflected in the eyes of the creatures of the high snows; and then he was walking through the clouds, which, while not entirely substantial, still supported his weight in comfort; and then, holding tightly to his candle, he was underground, and the candlelight glinted back at him from the wet cave walls; now he was in the mountains once more; and then he was on a road through wild forest, and he glimpsed a chariot being pulled by two goats, being driven by a woman in a red dress who looked, for the glimpse he got of her, the way Boadicea was drawn in his history books; and another step and he was in a leafy glen, and he could hear the chuckle of water as it splashed and sang its way into a small brook.
He took another step, but he was still in the glen. There were high ferns, and elm trees, and foxgloves in abundance, and the moon had set in the sky. He held up the candle, looking for a fallen star, a rock, perhaps, or a jewel, but he saw nothing.
He heard something, though, under the babbling of the brook: a sniffling, and a swallowing. The sound of someone trying not to cry.
“Hello?” said Tristran.
The sniffling stopped. But Tristran was certain he could see a light beneath a hazel tree, and he walked toward it.
“Excuse me,” he said, hoping to pacify whoever was sitting beneath the hazel tree, and praying that it was not more of the little people who had stolen his hat. “I’m looking for a star.”
In reply, a clod of wet earth flew out from under the tree, hitting Tristran on the side of the face. It stung a little, and fragments of earth fell down his collar and under his clothes.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said, loudly.
This time, as another clod of earth came hurtling toward him, he ducked out of the way, and it smashed into an elm tree behind him. He walked forward.
“Go away,” said a voice, all raw and gulping, as if it had just been crying, “just go away and leave me alone.”
She was sprawled, awkwardly, beneath the hazel tree, and she gazed up at Tristran with a scowl of complete unfriendliness. She hefted another clod of mud at him, menacingly, but did not throw it.
Her eyes were red and raw. Her hair was so fair it was almost white, her dress was of blue silk which shimmered in the candlelight. She glittered as she sat there. “Please don’t throw any more mud at me,” pleaded Tristran. “Look. I didn’t mean to disturb you. It’s just there’s a star fallen somewhere around here, and I have to get it back before the candle burns out.”
“I broke my leg,” said the young lady.
“I’m sorry, of course,” said Tristran. “But the star.”
“I broke my leg,” she told him sadly, “when I fell.” And with that, she heaved her lump of mud at him. Glittering dust fell from her arm, as it moved.
The clod of mud hit Tristran in the chest.
“Go away,” she sobbed, burying her face in her arms. “Go away and leave me alone.”
“You’re the star,” said Tristran, comprehension dawning.
“And you’re a clodpoll,” said the girl, bitterly, “and a ninny, a numbskull, a lackwit and a coxcomb!”
“Yes,” said Tristran. “I suppose I am at that.” And with that he unwound one end of the silver chain and slipped it around the girl’s slim wrist. He felt the loop of the chain tighten about his own.
She stared up at him, bitterly. “What,” she asked, in a voice that was suddenly beyond outrage, beyond hate, “do you think you are doing?”
“Taking you home with me,” said Tristran. “I made an oath.”
And at that the candle-stub guttered, violently, the last of the wick afloat in the pool of wax. For a moment the candle flame flared high, illuminating the glen, and the girl, and the chain, unbreakable, that ran from her wrist to his.
Then the candle went out.
Tristran stared at the star—at the girl—and, with all his might, managed to say nothing at all.
Can I get there by candlelight? he thought. There, and back again. But the candlelight was gone, and the village of Wall was six months’ hard travel from here.
“I just want you to know,” said the girl, coldly, “that whoever you are, and whatever you intend with me, I shall give you no aid of any kind, nor shall I assist you, and I shall do whatever is in my power to frustrate your plans and devices.” And then she added, with feeling, “Idiot.”
“Mm,” said Tristran. “Can you walk?”
“No,” she said. “My leg’s broken. Are you deaf, as well as stupid?”
“Do your kind sleep?” he asked her.
“Of course. But not at night. At night, we shine.”
“Well,” he said, “I’m going to try to get some sleep. I can’t think of anything else to do. It’s been a long day for me, what with everything. And maybe you should try to sleep, too. We’ve got a long way to go.”
The sky was beginning to lighten. Tristran put his head on his leather bag in the glen and did his best to ignore the insults and imprecations that came his way from the girl in the blue dress at the end of the chain.
He wondered what the little hairy man would do when Tristran did not return.
He wondered what Victoria Forester was doing at the moment and decided that she was probably asleep, in her bed, in her bedroom, in her father’s farmhouse.
He wondered whether six months was a long walk, and what they would eat on the way.
He wondered what stars ate. . . .
And then he was asleep.
“Dunderhead. Bumpkin. Dolt,” said the star.
And then she sighed and made herself as comfortable as she could under the circumstances. The pain from her leg was dull but continual. She tested the chain about her wrist, but it was tight and fast, and she could neither slip from it nor break it. “Cretinous, verminous oaf,” she muttered.
And then she, too, slept.
