Stardust Page 16

  “Are you all right?” he asked, genuinely concerned, as she approached.

  “Yes, thank you,” said the star. “She did not ill-use me. Indeed, I do not believe that she ever knew that I was there at all. Is that not peculiar?” Madame Semele had the bird in front of her now. She touched its plumed head with her glass flower, and it flowed and shifted and became a young woman, in appearance not too much older than Tristran himself, with dark, curling hair and furred, catlike ears. She darted a glance at Tristran, and there was something about those violet eyes that Tristran found utterly familiar, although he could not recall where he had seen them before.

  “So, that is the bird’s true form,” said Yvaine. “She was a good companion on the road.” And then the star realized that the silver chain that had kept the bird a captive was still there, now that the bird had become a woman, for it glinted upon her wrist and ankle, and Yvaine pointed this out to Tristran.

  “Yes,” said Tristran. “I can see. It is awful. But I’m not sure there’s much that we can do about it.”

  They walked together through the meadow, toward the gap in the wall. “We shall visit my parents first,” said Tristran, “for I have no doubt that they have missed me as I have missed them”—although, truth to tell, Tristran had scarcely given his parents a second thought on his journeyings—“and then we shall pay a visit to Victoria Forester, and—” It was with this and that Tristran closed his mouth. For he could no longer reconcile his old idea of giving the star to Victoria Forester with his current notion that the star was not a thing to be passed from hand to hand, but a true person in all respects and no kind of a thing at all. And yet, Victoria Forester was the woman he loved.

  Well and all, he would burn that bridge when he came to it, he decided, and for now he would take Yvaine into the village and deal with events as they came. He felt his spirits lift, and his time as a dormouse had already become nothing more in his head than the remnants of a dream, as if he had merely taken an afternoon nap in front of the kitchen fire and was now wide awake once more. He could almost taste in his mouth the memory of Mr. Bromios’s best ale, although he realized, with a guilty start, he had forgotten the color of Victoria Forester’s eyes.

  The sun was huge and red behind the rooftops of Wall when Tristran and Yvaine crossed the meadow and looked down on the gap in the wall. The star hesitated.

  “Do you really want this?” she asked Tristran. “For I have misgivings.”

  “Don’t be nervous,” he said. “Although it’s not surprising that you have nerves; my stomach feels as if I had swallowed a hundred butterflies. You shall feel so much better when you are sitting in my mother’s parlor, drinking her tea—well, not drinking tea, but there will be tea for you to sip—why, I swear that for such a guest, and to welcome her boy back home, my mother would break out the best china,” and his hand sought hers and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

  She looked at him, and she smiled, gently and ruefully.

  “Whither thou goest . . .” she whispered.

  Hand in hand the young man and the fallen star approached the gap in the wall.

  Chapter Ten

  Stardust

  It has occasionally been remarked upon that it is as easy to overlook something large and obvious as it is to overlook something small and niggling, and that the large things one overlooks can often cause problems.

  Tristran Thorn approached the gap in the wall, from the Faerie side, for the second time since his conception eighteen years before, with the star limping beside him. His head was in a whirl from the scents and the sounds of his native village, and his heart rose within him. He nodded politely to the guards on the gap as he approached, recognizing them both. The young man shifting idly from foot to foot, sipping a pint of what Tristran supposed to be Mr. Bromios’s best ale, was Wystan Pippin, who had once been Tristran’s schoolfellow, although never his friend; while the older man, sucking irritably upon a pipe, which appeared to have gone out, was none other than Tristran’s former employer at Monday and Brown’s, Jerome Ambrose Brown, Esquire.The men had their backs to Tristran and Yvaine, and were resolutely facing the village as if they thought it sinful to observe the preparations occurring in the meadow behind them.

  “Good evening,” said Tristran, politely, “Wystan. Mister Brown.”

  The two men started. Wystan spilled his beer down the front of his jacket. Mr. Brown raised his staff and pointed the end of it at Tristran’s chest, nervously. Wystan Pippin put down his ale, picked up his staff, and blocked the gap with it.

  “Stay where you are!” said Mr. Brown, gesturing with the staff, as if Tristran were a wild beast that might spring at him at any moment.

  Tristran laughed. “Do you not know me?” he asked. “It is me,Tristran Thorn.”

  But Mr. Brown, who was, Tristran knew, the senior of the guards, did not lower his staff. He looked Tristran up and down, from his worn brown boots to his mop of shaggy hair. Then he stared into Tristran’s sun-browned face and sniffed, unimpressed. “Even if you are that good-for-nothing Thorn,” he said, “I see no reason to let either of you people through. We guard the wall, after all.”

  Tristran blinked. “I, too, have guarded the wall,” he pointed out. “And there are no rules about not letting people through from this direction. Only from the village.”

  Mr. Brown nodded, slowly. Then he said, as one talks to an idiot, “And if you are Tristran Thorn—which I’m only conceding for the sake of argument here, for you look nothing like him, and you talk little enough like him either—in all the years you lived here, how many people came through the wall from the meadow side?”

  “Why, none that ever I knew of,” said Tristran.

  Mr. Brown smiled the same smile he had been used to use when he docked Tristran a morning’s wages for five minutes’ lateness. “Exactly,” he said. “There was no rule against it because it doesn’t happen. No one comes through from the other side. Not while I’m on duty, any road. Now, be off with you, before I take my stick to your head.”

  Tristran was dumbfounded. “If you think I have gone through, well, everything I’ve gone through, only to be turned away at the last by a self-important, penny-pinching grocer and by someone who used to crib from me in History . . .” he began, but Yvaine touched his arm and said, “Tristran, let it go for now. You shall not fight with your own people.”

  Tristran said nothing. Then he turned, without a word, and together they walked back up the slope of the meadow. Around them a hodgepodge of creatures and people erected their stalls, hung their flags and wheeled their barrows. And it came to Tristran then, in a wave of something that resembled homesickness, but a homesickness comprised in equal parts of longing and despair, that these might as well be his own people, for he felt he had more in common with them than with the pallid folk of Wall in their worsted jackets and their hobnailed boots.

  They stopped and watched a small woman, almost as broad as she was high, do her best to put up her stall. Unasked, Tristran walked over and began to help her, carrying the heavy boxes from her cart to the stall, climbing a tall stepladder to hang an assortment of streamers from a tree branch, unpacking heavy glass carafes and jugs (each one stoppered with a huge, blackened cork and sealed with silvery wax and filled with a slowly swirling colored smoke), and placing them on the shelves. As he and the market-woman worked, Yvaine sat on a nearby tree stump and she sang to them in her soft, clean voice the songs of the high stars, and the commoner songs she had heard and learnt from the folk they had encountered on their journeyings.

  By the time Tristran and the little woman were done and the stall was set out for the morrow, they were working by lamplight. The woman insisted on feeding them; Yvaine barely managed to convince her that she was not hungry, but Tristran ate everything he was offered with enthusiasm and, unusual for him, he drank the greater part of a carafe of sweet canary wine, insisting that it tasted no stronger than freshly squeezed grape juice and that it had no effect upon him of any
kind. Even so, when the stout little woman offered them the clearing behind her cart to sleep in, Tristran was sleeping drunkenly in moments.

  It was a clear, cold night. The star sat beside the sleeping man, who had once been her captor and had become her companion on the road, and she wondered where her hatred had gone. She was not sleepy.

  There was a rustle in the grass behind her. A dark-haired woman stood next to her, and together they stared down at Tristran.

  “There is something of the dormouse in him still,” said the dark-haired woman. Her ears were pointed and catlike, and she looked little older than Tristran himself. “Sometimes I wonder if she transforms people into animals, or whether she finds the beast inside us, and frees it. Perhaps there is something about me that is, by nature, a brightly colored bird. It is something to which I have given much thought, but about which I have come to no conclusions.”

  Tristran muttered something unintelligible and stirred in his sleep. Then he began, gently, to snore.

  The woman walked around Tristran and sat down beside him. “He seems good-hearted,” she said.

  “Yes,” admitted the star. “I suppose that he is.”

  “I should warn you,” said the woman, “that if you leave these lands for . . . over there . . .” and she gestured toward the village of Wall with one slim arm, from the wrist of which a silver chain glittered, “. . . then you will be, as I understand it, transformed into what you would be in that world: a cold, dead thing, sky-fallen.”

  The star shivered, but she said nothing. Instead, she reached across Tristran’s sleeping form to touch the silver chain which circled the woman’s wrist and ankle and led off into the bushes and beyond.

  “You become used to it, in time,” said the woman.

  “Do you? Really?” Violet eyes stared into blue eyes, and then looked away. “No.”

  The star let go of the chain. “He once caught me with a chain much like yours. Then he freed me, and I ran from him. But he found me and bound me with an obligation, which binds my kind more securely than any chain ever could.”

  An April breeze ran across the meadow, stirring the bushes and the trees in one long chilly sigh. The cat-eared woman tossed her curly hair back from her face, and said,“You are under a prior obligation, are you not? You have something that does not belong to you, which you must deliver to its rightful owner.”

  The star’s lips tightened. “Who are you?” she asked.

  “I told you. I was the bird in the caravan,” said the woman. “I know what you are, and I know why the witch-woman never knew that you were there. I know who seeks you and why she needs you. Also, I know the provenance of the topaz stone you wear upon a silver chain about your waist. Knowing this, and what manner of thing you are, I know the obligation you must be under.” She leaned down, and, with delicate fingers, she tenderly pushed the hair from Tristran’s face. The sleeping youth neither stirred nor responded.

  “I do not think that I believe you, or trust you,” said the star. A night bird cried in a tree above them. It sounded very lonely in the darkness.

  “I saw the topaz about your waist when I was a bird,” said the woman, standing up once more. “I watched, when you bathed in the river, and recognized it for what it was.”

  “How?” asked the star. “How did you recognize it?”

  But the dark-haired woman only shook her head and walked back the way that she had come, sparing but one last glance for the sleeping youth upon the grass. And then she was taken by the night.

  Tristran’s hair had, obstinately, fallen across his face once more. The star leaned down and gently pushed it to one side, letting her fingers dwell upon his cheek as she did so. He slept on.

  Tristran was woken a little after sunrise by a large badger walking upon its hind legs and wearing a threadbare heliotrope silk dressing-gown, who snuffled into his ear until Tristran sleepily opened his eyes, and then said, self-importantly, “Party name of Thorn? Tristran of that set?”

  “Mm?” said Tristran. There was a foul taste in his mouth, which felt dry and furred. He could have slept for another several hours.

  “They’ve been asking about you,” said the badger. “Down by the gap. Seems there’s a young lady wants to have a word with you.”

  Tristran sat up and grinned widely. He touched the sleeping star on her shoulder. She opened her sleepy blue eyes and said, “What?”

  “Good news,” he told her. “Do you remember Victoria Forester? I might have mentioned her name once or twice on our travels.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You might have.”

  “Well,” he said, “I’m off to see her. She’s down by the gap.” He paused. “Look. Well. Probably best if you stay here. I wouldn’t want to confuse her or anything.”

  The star rolled over and covered her head with her arm and said nothing else. Tristran decided that she must have gone back to sleep. He pulled on his boots, washed his face and rinsed out his mouth in the meadow stream, and then ran pell-mell through the meadow, toward the village.

  The guards on the wall this morning were the Reverend Myles, the vicar of Wall, and Mr. Bromios, the innkeeper. Standing between them was a young lady with her back to the meadow. “Victoria!” called Tristran in delight; but then the young lady turned, and he saw that it was notVictoria Forester (who, he remembered suddenly, and with delight in the knowing, had grey eyes. That was what they were: grey. How could he ever have allowed himself to forget?). But who this young lady could have been in her fine bonnet and shawl, Tristran could not say, although her eyes flooded with tears at the sight of him.

  “Tristran!” she said. “It is you! They said it was! Oh Tristran! How could you? Oh, how could you?” and he realized who the young lady reproaching him must be.

  “Louisa?” he said to his sister. And then, “You have certainly grown while I was away, from a chit of a girl into a fine young lady.”

  She sniffed and blew her nose into a lace-edged linen handkerchief, which she pulled from her sleeve. “And you,” she told him, dabbing at her cheeks with the handkerchief, “have turned into a mop-haired raggle-taggle gypsy on your journeyings. But I suppose you look well, and that is a good thing. Come on, now,” and she motioned, impatiently, for him to walk through the gap in the wall, and come to her.

  “But the wall—” he said, eyeing the innkeeper and the vicar a little nervously.

  “Oh, as to that, when Wystan and Mister Brown finished their shift last night they repaired to the saloon bar at the Seventh Pie, where Wystan happened to mention their meeting with a ragamuffin who claimed to be you, and how they blocked his way. Your way. When news of this reached Father’s ears, he marched right up to the Pie and gave the both of them such a tongue-lashing and a telling-of-what-for that I could scarcely believe it was him.”

  “Some of us were for letting you come back this morning,” said the vicar, “and some were for keeping you there until midday.”

  “But none of the ones who were for making you wait are on Wall duty this morning,” said Mr. Bromios. “Which took a certain amount of jiggery-pokery to organize—and on a day when I should have been seeing to the refreshment stand, I could point out. Still, it’s good to see you back. Come on through.” And with that he stuck out his hand, and Tristran shook it with enthusiasm. Then Tristran shook the vicar’s hand.

  “Tristran,” said the vicar, “I suppose that you must have seen many strange sights upon your travels.”

  Tristran reflected for a moment. “I suppose I must have,” he said.

  “You must come to the Vicarage, then, next week,” said the vicar. “We shall have tea, and you must tell me all about it. Once you’re settled back in. Eh?” And Tristran, who had always held the vicar in some awe, could do nothing but nod.

  Louisa sighed, a little theatrically, and began to walk, briskly, in the direction of the Seventh Magpie. Tristran ran along the cobbles to catch her up, and then he was walking beside her.

  “It does my heart good to se
e you again, my sister,” he said.

  “As if we were not all worried sick about you,” she said, crossly, “what with all your gallivantings. And you did not even wake me to say good-bye. Father has been quite distracted with concern for you, and at Christmas, when you were not there, after we had eaten the goose and the pudding, Father took out the port and he toasted absent friends, and Mother sobbed like a babe, so of course I cried too, and then Father began to blow his nose into his best handkerchief and Grandmother and Grandfather Hempstock insisted upon pulling the Christmas crackers and reading the jolly mottoes and somehow that only made matters worse, and, to put it bluntly,Tristran, you quite spoiled our Christmas.”

  “Sorry,” said Tristran. “What are we doing now? Where are we going?”

  “We are going into the Seventh Pie,” said Louisa. “I should have thought that was obvious. Mister Bromios said that you could use his sitting room. There’s somebody there who needs to talk to you.” And she said nothing more as they went into the pub.There were a number of faces Tristran recognized, and the people nodded at him, or smiled, or did not smile, as he walked through the crowds and made his way up the narrow stairs behind the bar to the landing with Louisa by his side.The wooden boards creaked beneath their feet.

  Louisa glared at Tristran. And then her lip trembled, and, to Tristran’s surprise, she threw her arms about him and hugged him so tightly that he could not breathe. Then, with not another word, she fled back down the wooden stairs.

  He knocked at the door to the sitting room and went in. The room was decorated with a number of unusual objects, of small items of antique statuary and clay pots. Upon the wall hung a stick, wound about with ivy leaves, or rather, with a dark metal cunningly beaten to resemble ivy. Apart from the decorations the room could have been the sitting room of any busy bachelor with little time for sitting. It was furnished with a small chaise longue, a low table upon which was a well-thumbed leather-bound copy of the sermons of Laurence Sterne, a pianoforte, and several leather armchairs, and it was in one of these armchairs that Victoria Forester was sitting.