Which Treats of Castles in the Air, and Other Matters
It was dawn in the mountains. The storms of the last few days had passed on and the air was clean and cold.
Lord Septimus of Stormhold, tall and crowlike, walked up the mountain pass, looking about him as he walked as if he were seeking something he had lost. He was leading a brown mountain pony, shaggy and small. Where the pass grew wider he stopped, as if he had found what he was looking for beside the trail. It was a small, battered chariot, little more than a goat-cart, which had been tipped onto its side. Nearby it lay two bodies. The first was that of a white billy goat, its head stained red with blood. Septimus prodded the dead goat experimentally with his foot, moving its head; it had received a deep and fatal wound to its forehead, equidistant between its horns. Next to the goat was the body of a young man, his face as dull in death as it must have been in life. There were no wounds to show how he had died, nothing but a leaden bruise upon his temple.
Several yards away from these bodies, half-hidden beside a rock, Septimus came upon the corpse of a man in his middle years, facedown, dressed in dark clothes. The man’s flesh was pale, and his blood had pooled upon the rocky floor below him. Septimus crouched down beside the body and, gingerly, lifted its head by the hair; its throat had been cut, expertly, slit from one ear to the other. Septimus stared at the corpse in puzzlement. He knew it, yet . . .
And then, in a dry, hacking cough of a noise, he began to laugh. “Your beard,” he told the corpse aloud. “You cut your beard. As if I would not have known you with your beard gone, Primus.”
Primus, who stood, grey and ghostly, beside his other brothers, said, “You would have known me, Septimus. But it might have bought me a few moments, wherein I might have seen you before you knew me,” and his dead voice was nothing but the morning breeze rattling the thorn bush.
Septimus stood up. The sun began to rise, then, over the easternmost peak of Mount Belly, framing him in light. “So I am to be the eighty-second Lord of the Stormhold,” he said to the corpse on the ground, and to himself, “not to mention the Master of the High Crags, Seneschal of the Spire-Towns, Keeper of the Citadel, Lord High Guardian of Mount Huon and all the rest of it.”
“Not without the Power of Stormhold about your neck you’re not, my brother,” said Quintus, tartly.
“And then there’s the matter of revenge,” said Secundus, in the voice of the wind howling through the pass. “You must take revenge upon your brother’s killer before anything else, now. It’s blood-law.”
As if he had heard them, Septimus shook his head. “Why could you not have waited just a few more days, brother Primus?” he asked the corpse at his feet. “I would have killed you myself. I had a fine plan for your death. When I discovered you were no longer on the Heart of a Dream, it took me little enough time to steal the ship’s boat and get on your trail. And now I must revenge your sad carcass, and all for the honor of our blood and the Stormhold.”
“So Septimus will be the eighty-second Lord of Stormhold,” said Tertius.
“There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of unhatched chicks,” pointed out Quintus.
Septimus walked away from the body to piss against a grey boulder. Then he walked back to Primus’s corpse. “If I had killed you, I could leave you here to rot,” he said. “But because that pleasure was another’s, I shall carry you with me a little way and leave you on a high crag, to be eaten by eagles.” With that, grunting with the effort, he picked up the sticky-fronted body and hauled it over the back of the pony. He fumbled at the corpse’s belt, removing the bag of rune stones. “Thank you for these, my brother,” he said, and he patted the corpse on the back.
“May you choke on them if you do not take revenge on the bitch who slit my gullet,” said Primus, in the voice of the mountain birds waking to greet the new day.
They sat side by side on a thick, white cumulus cloud the size of a small town. The cloud was soft beneath them, and a little cold. It became colder the deeper into it one sank, and Tristran pushed his burned hand as far as he could down into the fabric of it: it resisted him slightly, but accepted his hand. The interior of the cloud felt spongy and chilly, real and insubstantial at once. The cloud cooled a little of the pain in his hand, allowing him to think more clearly.
“Well,” he said, after some time, “I’m afraid I’ve made rather a mess of everything.”
The star sat on the cloud beside him, wearing the robe she had borrowed from the woman in the inn, with her broken leg stretched out on the thick mist in front of her. “You saved my life,” she said, eventually. “Didn’t you?”
“I suppose I must have done, yes.”
“I hate you,” she said. “I hated you for everything already, but now I hate you most of all.”
Tristran flexed his burned hand in the blessed cool of the cloud. He felt tired and slightly faint. “Any particular reason?”
“Because,” she told him, her voice taut, “now that you have saved my life, you are, by the law of my people, responsible for me, and I for you. Where you go, I must also go.”
“Oh,” he said. “That’s not that bad, is it?”
“I would rather spend my days chained to a vile wolf or a stinking pig or a marsh-goblin,” she told him flatly.
“I’m honestly not that bad,” he told her, “not when you get to know me. Look, I’m sorry about all that chaining you up business. Perhaps we could start all over again, just pretend it never happened. Here now, my name’s Tristran Thorn, pleased to meet you.” He held out his unburned hand to her.
“Mother Moon defend me!” said the star. “I would sooner take the hand of an—”
“I’m sure you would,” said Tristran, not waiting to find out what he was going to be unflatteringly compared to this time. “I’ve said I’m sorry,” he told her. “Let’s start afresh. I’m Tristran Thorn. Pleased to meet you.”
She sighed.
The air was thin and chill so high above the ground, but the sun was warm, and the cloud-shapes about them reminded Tristran of a fantastical city or an unearthly town. Far, far below he could see the real world: the sunlight pricking out every tiny tree, turning every winding river into a thin silver snail-trail glistening and looping across the landscape of Faerie.
“Well?” said Tristran.
“Aye,” said the star. “It is a mighty joke, is it not? Whither thou goest, there I must go. Even if it kills me.” She swirled the surface of the cloud with her hand, rippling the mist. Then, momentarily, she touched her hand to Tristran’s. “My sisters called me Yvaine,” she told him. “For I was an evening star.”
“Look at us,” he said. “A fine pair. You with your broken leg, me with my hand.”
“Show me your hand.”
He pulled it from the cool of the cloud: his hand was red, and blisters were coming up on each side of it and on the back of it, where the flames had licked against his flesh.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Quite a lot, really.”
“Good,” said Yvaine.
“If my hand had not been burned, you would probably be dead now,” he pointed out. She had the grace to look down, ashamed. “You know,” he added, changing the subject, “I left my bag in that madwoman’s inn. We have nothing now, save the clothes we stand up in.”
“Sit down in,” corrected the star.
“There’s no food, no water, we’re half a mile or so above the world with no way of getting down, and no control over where the cloud is going. And both of us are injured. Did I leave anything out?”
“You forgot the bit about clouds dissipating and vanishing into nothing,” said Yvaine. “They do that. I’ve seen them. I could not survive another fall.”
Tristran shrugged. “Well,” he said. “We’re probably doomed, then. But we may as well have a look around while we’re up here.”
He helped Yvaine to her feet, and, awkwardly, the two of them took several faltering steps on the cloud. Then Yvaine sat down again. “This is no use,” she told him. “You go and look around. I will wait here for you.”
“Promise?” he asked. “No running away this time?”
“I swear it. On my mother the moon I swear it,” said Yvaine, sadly. “You saved my life.”
And with that Tristran had to content himself.
Her hair was mostly grey, now, and her face was pouched, and wrinkled at the throat and eyes and at the corners of the mouth. There was no color to her face, although her skirt was a vivid, bloody splash of scarlet; it had been ripped at the shoulder, and beneath the rip could be seen, puckered and obscene, a deep scar. The wind whipped her hair about her face as she drove the black carriage on through the Barrens. The four stallions stumbled often: thick sweat dripped from their flanks and a bloody foam dripped from their lips. Still, their hooves pounded along the muddy path through the Barrens, where nothing grows.
The witch-queen, oldest of the Lilim, reined in the horses beside a pinnacle of rock the color of verdigris, which jutted from the marshy soil of the Barrens like a needle. Then, as slowly as might be expected from any lady no longer in her first, or even her second, youth, she climbed down from the driver’s seat to the wet earth.
She walked around the coach and opened the door. The head of the dead unicorn, her dagger still in its cold eye-socket, flopped down as she did so. The witch clambered up into the coach and pulled open the unicorn’s mouth. Rigor mortis was starting to set in, and the jaw opened only with difficulty. The witch-woman bit down, hard, on her own tongue, bit hard enough that the pain was metal-sharp in her mouth, bit down until she could taste the blood. She swirled it around in her mouth, mixing the blood with spittle (she could feel that several of her front teeth were beginning to come loose), then she spat onto the dead unicorn’s piebald tongue. Blood flecked her lips and chin. She grunted several syllables that shall not be recorded here, then pushed the unicorn’s mouth closed once more. “Get out of the coach,” she told the dead beast.
Stiffly, awkwardly, the unicorn raised its head. Then it moved its legs, like a newborn foal or fawn just learning to walk, and twitched and pushed itself up onto all fours and, half climbing, half falling, it tumbled out of the carriage door and onto the mud, where it raised itself to its feet. Its left side, upon which it had lain in the coach, was swollen and dark with blood and fluids. Half-blind, the dead unicorn stumbled toward the green rock needle until it reached a depression at its base, where it dropped to the knees of its forelegs in a ghastly parody of prayer.
The witch-queen reached down and pulled her knife from out of the beast’s eye-socket. She sliced across its throat. Blood began to ooze, too slowly, from the gash she had made. She walked back to the carriage and returned with her cleaver. Then she began to hack at the unicorn’s neck, until she had separated it from the body, and the severed head tumbled into the rock hollow, now filling with a dark red puddle of brackish blood.
She took the unicorn’s head by the horn and placed it beside the body, on the rock; thereupon she looked with her hard, grey eyes into the red pool she had made. Two faces stared out at her from the puddle: two women, older by far in appearance than she was now.
“Where is she?” asked the first face, peevishly. “What have you done with her?”
“Look at you!” said the second of the Lilim. “You took the last of the youth we had saved—I tore it from the star’s breast myself, long, long ago, though she screamed and writhed and carried on ever-so. From the looks of you, you’ve squandered most of the youth already.”
“I came so close,” said the witch-woman to her sisters in the pool. “But she had a unicorn to protect her. Now I have the unicorn’s head, and I will bring it back with me, for it’s long enough since we had fresh ground unicorn’s horn in our arts.”
“Unicorn’s horn be damned,” said her youngest sister. “What about the star?”
“I cannot find her. It is almost as if she were no longer in Faerie.”
There was a pause.
“No,” said one of her sisters. “She is still in Faerie. But she is going to the Market at Wall, and that is too close to the world on the other side of the wall. Once she goes into that world, she will be lost to us.”
For they each of them knew that, were the star to cross the wall and enter the world of things as they are, she would become, in an instant, no more than a pitted lump of metallic rock that had fallen, once, from the heavens: cold and dead and of no more use to them.
“Then I shall go to Diggory’s Dyke and wait there, for all who go to Wall must pass that way.”
The reflections of the two old women gazed disapprovingly out of the pool. The witch-queen ran her tongue over her teeth (that one at the top will be out by nightfall, she thought, the way it wobbles so) and then she spat into the bloody pool. The ripples spread across it, erasing all traces of the Lilim; now the pool reflected only the sky over the Barrens and the faint white clouds far above them.
She kicked the headless corpse of the unicorn so it tumbled over onto its side. Then she took up its head, and she carried it with her up to the driver’s seat. She placed it beside her, picked up the reins and whipped the restive horses into a tired trot.
Tristran sat at the top of the spire of cloud and wondered why none of the heroes of the penny dreadfuls he used to read so avidly were ever hungry. His stomach rumbled, and his hand hurt him so.
Adventures are all very well in their place, he thought, but there’s a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.
Still, he was alive, and the wind was in his hair, and the cloud was scudding through the sky like a galleon at full sail. Looking out over the world from above, he could never remember feeling so alive as he did at that moment. There was a skyness to the sky and a nowness to the world that he had never seen or felt or realized before.
He understood that he was, in some way, above his problems, just as he was above the world. The pain in his hand was a long way away. He thought about his actions and his adventures, and about the journey ahead of him, and it seemed to Tristran that the whole business was suddenly very small and very straightforward. He stood up on the cloud spire and called “Halloo!” several times, as loudly as he could. He even waved his tunic over his head, feeling a little foolish as he did so. Then he clambered down the spire; ten feet from the bottom he missed his footing and fell into the misty softness of the cloud.
“What were you shouting about?” asked Yvaine.
“To let people know we were here,”Tristran told her.
“What people?”
“You never know,” he told her. “Better I should call to people who aren’t there than that people who are there should miss us because I didn’t say anything.”
She said nothing in reply to this.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Tristran. “And what I’ve been thinking is this. After we’re done with what I need—got you back to Wall, given you to Victoria Forester—perhaps we could do what you need.”
“What I need?”
“Well, you want to go back, don’t you? Up into the sky. To shine again at night. So we can sort that out.”
She looked up at him and shook her head. “That doesn’t happen,” she explained. “Stars fall. They don’t go back up again.”
“You could be the first,” he told her. “You have to believe. Otherwise it will never happen.”
“It will never happen,” she told him. “No more than your shouting is going to attract anyone up here where there isn’t anyone. It doesn’t matter if I believe it or not, that’s just the way things are. How’s your hand?”
He shrugged. “Hurts,” he said. “How’s your leg?”
“Hurts,” she said. “But not as badly as it did before.”
“Ahoy!” came a voice from far above them. “Ahoy down there! Parties in need of assistance?”
Glinting golden in the sunlight was a small ship, its sails billowing, and a ruddy, mustachioed face looked down at them from over the side. “Was that you, young feller-me-lad, a-leaping and cavorting just now?”
“It was,” said Tristran. “And I think we are in need of assistance, yes.”
“Right-ho,” said the man. “Get ready to grab the ladder, then.”
“I’m afraid my friend has a broken leg,” he called, “and I’ve hurt my hand. I don’t think either of us can climb a ladder.”
“Not a problem. We can pull you up.” And with that the man tumbled a long rope ladder over the side of the ship. Tristran caught at it with his good hand, and he held it steady while Yvaine pulled herself onto it, then he climbed on below her. The face vanished from the side of the ship as Tristran and Yvaine dangled awkwardly on the end of the rope ladder.
The wind caught the sky-ship, causing the ladder to pull up from the cloud and Tristran and Yvaine to spin, slowly, in the air.
“Now, haul!” shouted several voices in unison, and Tristran felt them being hauled up several feet. “Haul! Haul! Haul!” Each shout signaled them being pulled higher. The cloud upon which they had been sitting was now no longer below them; instead there was a drop of what Tristran supposed must be a mile or more. He held on tightly to the rope, hooking the elbow of his burned hand about the rope ladder.
Another jerk upwards and Yvaine was level with the top of the ship’s railing. Someone lifted her with care and placed her upon the deck. Tristran clambered over the railing himself and tumbled down onto the oaken deck.
The ruddy-faced man extended a hand. “Welcome aboard,” he said. “This is the Free Ship Perdita, bound on a lightning-hunting expedition. Captain Johannes Alberic, at your service.” He coughed, deep in his chest. And then, before Tristran could say a word in reply, the captain spied Tristran’s left hand and called “Meggot! Meggot! Blast you, where are you? Over here! Passengers in need of attention. There lad, Meggot’ll see to your hand. We eat at six bells. You shall sit at my table.”
Soon a nervous-looking woman with an explosive mop of carrot-red hair—Meggot—was escorting him belowdecks and smearing a thick, green ointment onto his hand, which cooled it and eased the pain. And then he was being led into the mess, which was a small dining room next to the kitchen (which he was delighted to discover they referred to as the galley, just as in the sea stories he had read).
Tristran did indeed get to eat at the captain’s table, although there was in fact no other table in the mess. In addition to the captain and Meggot there were five other members of the crew, a disparate bunch who seemed content to let Captain Alberic do all the talking, which he did, with his alepot in one hand, and the other hand alternately concerned with holding his stubby pipe and conveying food into his mouth.
The food was a thick soup of vegetables, beans and barley, and it filled Tristran and contented him. To drink, there was the clearest, coldest water Tristran had ever tasted.
The captain asked them no questions about how they came to find themselves high on a cloud, and they volunteered no answers. Tristran was given a berth with Oddness, the first mate, a quiet gentleman with large wings and a bad stammer, while Yvaine berthed in Meggot’s cabin, and Meggot herself moved into a hammock.
Tristran often found himself looking back on his time on the Perdita, during the rest of his journey through Faerie, as one of the happiest periods of his life. The crew let him help with the sails, and even gave him a turn at the wheel from time to time. Sometimes the ship would sail above dark storm clouds, as big as mountains, and the crew would fish for lightning bolts with a small copper chest. The rain and the wind would wash the deck of the ship, and he often would find himself laughing with exhilaration, while the rain ran down his face, and gripping the rope railing with his good hand to keep from being tumbled over the side by the storm.
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.
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 fingers 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.
Two huge hands came down and picked him up, gently. “ ’Tain’t the biggest of caravans,” said Madame Semele, her voice a low, slow liquid boom. “And I shall keep to the letter of my oath, for you shall not be harmed, and you shall be boarded and lodged on your journey to Wall.” And then she dropped the dormouse into the pocket of her apron and she clambered onto the caravan.
“And what do you propose to do to me?” asked Yvaine, but she was not entirely surprised when the woman did not reply. She followed the old woman into the dark interior of the caravan. There was but one room; along one wall was a large showcase made of leather and pine, with a hundred pigeonholes in it, and it was in one of these pigeonholes, in a bed of soft thistledown, that the old woman placed the snowdrop. Along the other wall was a small bed, with a window above it, and a large cupboard.
Madame Semele bent down and pulled a wooden cage from the cluttered space beneath her bed, and she took the blinking dormouse from her pocket and placed it into the cage. Then she took a handful of nuts and berries and seeds from a wooden bowl and placed them inside the cage, which she hung from a chain in the middle of the caravan.
“There we go,” she said. “Board and lodging.”
Yvaine had watched all this with curiosity from her seat on the old woman’s bed. “Would I be correct,” she asked politely, “in concluding from the evidence to hand (to wit, that you have not looked at me, or if you have your eyes have slipped over me, that you have not spoken a word to me, and that you have changed my companion into a small animal with no such provision for myself) that you can neither see me nor hear me?”
The witch made no reply. She walked up to the driver’s seat, sat down and took up the reins. The exotic bird hopped up beside her and it chirruped, once, curiously.
“Of course I have kept my word—to the letter,” said the old woman, as if in reply. “He shall be transformed back at the market meadow, so shall regain his own form before he comes to Wall. And after I have turned him back, I shall make you human again, for I still have to find a better servant than you are, silly slut. I could not have been doing with him underfoot all the livelong day, poking and prying and asking questions, and I’d’ve had to’ve fed him into the bargain, more than nuts and seeds.” She hugged herself tightly and swayed back and forth. “Oh, you’ll have to get up pretty early in the morning to put one past me. And I do believe that that bumpkin’s flower was even finer than the one you lost to me, all those years ago.”
She clicked her tongue, and shook the reins, and the mules began to amble down the forest track.
While the witch drove, Yvaine rested upon her musty bed. The caravan clacked and lurched its way through the forest. When it stopped, she would awake and rise. While the witch slept Yvaine would sit on the roof of the caravan and look up at the stars. Sometimes the witch’s bird would sit with her and then she would pet it and make a fuss of it, for it was good to have something about that acknowledged her existence. But when the witch was about, the bird ignored her utterly.
Yvaine also cared for the dormouse, who spent most of his time fast asleep, curled up with his head between his paws. When the witch was off gathering firewood or fetching water, Yvaine would open up his cage and stroke him and talk to him, and, on several occasions, she sang to him, although she could not tell whether anything of Tristran remained in the dormouse, who stared up at her with placid, sleepy eyes, like droplets of black ink, and whose fur was softer than down.
Her hip did not pain her, now that she was not walking every day, and her feet did not hurt her so much. She would always limp, she knew, for Tristran was no surgeon when it came to mending a broken bone although he had done the best he could. Meggot had acknowledged as much.
When, as happened infrequently, they encountered other people, the star did her best to stay out of sight. However, she soon learned that, even should someone talk to her within the witch’s hearing—should someone, as once a woodcutter did, point to her, and ask Madame Semele about her—the witch never seemed able to perceive Yvaine’s presence, or even to hear anything pertaining to her existence.
And so the weeks passed, in a rattling, bone-jarring sort of a way, in the witch’s caravan, for the witch, and the bird, and the dormouse, and the fallen star.
