Stardust Page 18

  “Then I must apologize for having called you a slattern, Lady Una,” she said, as if each word of it were bitter sawdust that she spat from her mouth.

  Lady Una nodded. “Good. And I believe that you owe me payment for my services, now my time with you is done,” she said. For these things have their rules. All things have rules.

  The rain was still falling in gusts, then not falling for just long enough to lure people out from underneath their makeshift shelters, then raining on them once more. Tristran and Yvaine sat, damp and happy, beside a campfire, in the company of a motley assortment of creatures and people.

  Tristran had asked if any of them knew the little hairy man he had met upon his travels, and had described him as well as he could. Several people acknowledged that they had met him in the past, although none had seen him at this market.

  He found his hands twining, almost of their own volition, into the star’s wet hair. He wondered how it could have taken him so long to realize how much he cared for her, and he told her so, and she called him an idiot, and he declared that it was the finest thing that ever a man had been called.

  “So, where are we going once the market is done?” Tristran asked the star.

  “I do not know,” she said. “But I have one obligation still to discharge.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes,” she said. “The topaz thing I showed you. I have to give it to the right person. The last time the right person came along, that innkeeper woman cut his throat, so I have it still. But I wish it were gone.”

  A woman’s voice at his shoulder said, “Ask her for what she carries, Tristran Thorn.”

  He turned and stared into eyes the color of meadow-violets. “You were the bird in the witch’s caravan,” he told the woman.

  “When you were the dormouse, my son,” said the woman. “I was the bird. But now I have my own form again, and my time of servitude is over. Ask Yvaine for what she carries. You have the right.”

  He turned back to the star. “Yvaine?”

  She nodded, waiting.

  “Yvaine, will you give me what you are carrying?”

  She looked puzzled; then she reached inside her robe, fumbled discreetly, and produced a large topaz stone on a broken silver chain.

  “It was your grandfather’s,” said the woman to Tristran. “You are the last male of the line of Stormhold. Put it about your neck.”

  Tristran did so; as he touched the ends of the silver chain together they knit and mended as if they had never been broken. “It’s very nice,” said Tristran, dubiously.

  “It is the Power of Stormhold,” said his mother. “There’s no one can argue with that. You are of the blood, and all of your uncles are dead and gone. You will make a fine Lord of Stormhold.”

  Tristran stared at her in honest puzzlement. “But I have no wish to be a lord of anywhere,” he told her, “or of anything, except perhaps my lady’s heart.” And he took the star’s hand in his, and he pressed it to his breast and smiled.

  The woman flicked her ears impatiently. “In almost eighteen years, Tristran Thorn, I have not demanded one single thing of you. And now, the first simple little request that I make—the tiniest favor that I ask of you—you say me no. Now, I ask of you, Tristran, is that any way to treat your mother?”

  “No, Mother,” said Tristran.

  “Well,” she continued, slightly mollified, “and I think it will do you young people good to have a home of your own, and for you to have an occupation. And if it does not suit you, you may leave, you know. There is no silver chain that will be holding you to the throne of Stormhold.”

  And Tristran found this quite reassuring. Yvaine was less impressed, for she knew that silver chains come in all shapes and sizes; but she knew also that it would not be wise to begin her life with Tristran by arguing with his mother.

  “Might I have the honor of knowing what you are called?” asked Yvaine, wondering if she was laying it on a bit thickly. Tristran’s mother preened, and Yvaine knew that she was not.

  “I am the Lady Una of Stormhold,” she said. Then she reached into a small bag, which hung from her side, and produced a rose made of glass, of a red so dark that it was almost black in the flickering firelight. “It was my payment,” she said. “For more than sixty years of servitude. It galled her to give it to me, but rules are rules, and she would have lost her magic and more if she had not settled up. Now, I plan to barter it for a palanquin to take us back to the Stormhold, for we must arrive in style. Oh, I have missed the Stormhold so badly. We must have bearers, and outriders, and perhaps an elephant—they are so imposing, nothing says ‘Get out of the way’ quite like an elephant in the front . . .”

  “No,” said Tristran.

  “No?” said his mother.

  “No,” repeated Tristran. “You may travel by palanquin, and elephant, and camel and all that, if you wish to, Mother. But Yvaine and I will make our own way there, and travel at our own speed.”

  The Lady Una took a deep breath, and Yvaine decided that this argument was one that she would rather be somewhere else for, so she stood up and told them that she would be back soon, that she needed a walk, and that she would not go wandering too far. Tristran looked at her with pleading eyes, but Yvaine shook her head: this was his fight to win, and he would fight it better if she were not there.

  She limped through the darkening market, pausing beside a tent from which music and applause could be heard, and from which light spilled like warm, golden honey. She listened to the music, and she thought her own thoughts. It was there that a bent, white-haired old woman, glaucous-blind in one eye, hobbled over to the star, and bade her to stop a while and talk.

  “About what?” asked the star.

  The old woman, shrunk by age and time to little bigger than a child, held onto a stick as tall and bent as herself with palsied and swollen-knuckled hands. She stared up at the star with her good eye and her blue-milk eye, and she said, “I came to fetch your heart back with me.”

  “Is that so?” asked the star.

  “Aye,” said the old woman. “I nearly had it, at that, up in the mountain pass.” She cackled at the back of her throat at the memory. “D’ye remember?” She had a large pack that sat like a hump on her back. A spiral ivory horn protruded from the pack, and Yvaine knew where she had seen that horn before.

  “That was you?” asked the star of the tiny woman. “You, with the knives?”

  “Mm. That was me. But I squandered away all the youth I took for the journey. Every act of magic lost me a little of the youth I wore, and now I am older than I have ever been.”

  “If you touch me,” said the star, “lay but a finger on me, you will regret it forevermore.”

  “If ever you get to be my age,” said the old woman, “you will know all there is to know about regrets, and you will know that one more, here or there, will make no difference in the long run.” She snuffled the air. Her dress had once been red, but it seemed to have been much patched and taken up and faded over the years. It hung down from one shoulder, exposing a puckered scar that might have been many hundreds of years old. “So what I want to know is why it is that I can no longer find you, in my mind. You are still there, just, but you are there like a ghost, a will o’ the wisp. Not long ago you burned—your heart burned—in my mind like silver fire. But after that night in the inn it became patchy and dim, and now it is not there at all.”

  Yvaine realized that she felt nothing but pity for the creature who had wanted her dead, so she said, “Could it be that the heart that you seek is no longer my own?”

  The old woman coughed. Her whole frame shook and spasmed with the retching effort of it.

  The star waited for her to be done, and then she said, “I have given my heart to another.”

  “The boy? The one in the inn? With the unicorn?”

  “Yes.”

  “You should have let me take it back then, for my sisters and me. We could have been young again, well into the next age
of the world. Your boy will break it, or waste it, or lose it. They all do.”

  “Nonetheless,” said the star, “he has my heart. I hope that your sisters will not be too hard on you, when you return to them without it.”

  It was then that Tristran walked across to Yvaine, and took her hand, and nodded to the old woman. “All sorted out,” he said. “Nothing to worry about.”

  “And the palanquin?”

  “Oh, Mother will be traveling by palanquin. I had to promise that we’d get to the Stormhold sooner or later, but we can take our time on the way. I think we should buy a couple of horses and see the sights.”

  “And your mother acceded to this?”

  “In the end,” he said blithely. “Anyway, sorry to interrupt.”

  “We are almost done,” said Yvaine, and she turned back to the little old woman.

  “My sisters will be harsh, but cruel,” said the old witch-queen. “However, I appreciate the sentiment. You have a good heart, child. A pity it will not be mine.”

  The star leaned down, then, and kissed the old woman on her wizened cheek, feeling the rough hairs on it scrape her soft lips.

  Then the star and her true love walked away, toward the wall. “Who was the old biddy?” asked Tristran. “She seemed a bit familiar. Was anything wrong?”

  “Nothing was wrong,” she told him. “She was just someone I knew from the road.”

  Behind them were the lights of the market, the lanterns and candles and witch-lights and fairy glitter, like a dream of the night sky brought down to earth. In front of them, across the meadow, on the other side of the gap in the wall, now guardless, was the town of Wall. Oil lamps and gas lamps and candles glowed in the windows of the houses of the village. To Tristran, then, they seemed as distant and unknowable as the world of the Arabian Nights.

  He looked upon the lights of Wall for what he knew (it came to him then with certainty) was the last time. He stared at them for some time and said nothing, the fallen star by his side. And then he turned away, and together they began to walk toward the East.

  Epilogue

  In Which Several Endings May Be Discerned

  It was considered by many to be one of the greatest days in the history of the Stormhold, the day that Lady Una, long lost and believed to be dead (having been stolen, as an infant, by a witch), returned to the mountain land. There were celebrations and fireworks and rejoicings (official and otherwise) for weeks after her palanquin arrived in a procession led by three elephants.

  The joy of the inhabitants of Stormhold and all its dominions was raised to levels hitherto unparalleled when the Lady Una announced that, in her time away, she had given birth to a son, who, in the absence and presumed death of the last two of her brothers, was the next heir to the throne. Indeed, she told them, he already wore the Power of Stormhold about his neck.

  He and his new bride would come to them soon, though the Lady Una could be no more specific about the date of their arrival than this, and it appeared to irk her. In the meantime, and in their absence, the Lady Una announced that she would rule the Stormhold as regent. Which she did, and did well, and the dominions on and about Mount Huon prospered and flourished under her command.

  It was three more years before two travel-stained wanderers arrived, dusty and footsore, in the town of Cloudsrange, in the lower reaches of the Stormhold proper, and they took a room in an inn and sent for hot water and a tin bath. They stayed at the inn for several days, conversing with the other customers and guests. On the last night of their stay, the woman, whose hair was so fair it was almost white, and who walked with a limp, looked at the man, and said, “Well?”

  “Well,” he said. “Mother certainly seems to be doing an excellent job of reigning.”

  “Just as you,” she told him, tartly, “would do every bit as well, if you took the throne.”

  “Perhaps,” he admitted. “And it certainly seems like it would be a nice place to end up, eventually. But there are so many places we have not yet seen. So many people still to meet. Not to mention all the wrongs to right, villains to vanquish, sights to see, all that. You know.”

  She smiled, wryly. “Well,” she said, “At least we shall not be bored. But we had better leave your mother a note.”

  And so it was that the Lady Una of Stormhold was brought a sheet of paper by an innkeeper’s lad. The sheet was sealed with sealing wax, and the Lady Una questioned the boy closely about the travelers—a man and his wife—before she broke the seal and read the letter. It was addressed to her, and after the salutations, it read:

  Have been unavoidably detained by the world.

  Expect us when you see us.

  It was signed by Tristran, and beside his signature was a fingerprint, which glittered and glimmered and shone when the shadows touched it as if it had been dusted with tiny stars.

  With which, there being nothing else that she could do about it, Una had to content herself.

  It was another five years after that before the two travelers finally returned for good to the mountain fastness. They were dusty and tired and dressed in rags and tatters, and were at first, and to the shame of the entire land, treated as vagabonds and rogues; it was not until the man displayed the topaz stone that hung about his neck that he was recognized as the Lady Una’s only son.

  The investiture and subsequent celebrations went on for almost a month, after which the young eighty-second Lord of Stormhold got on with the business of ruling. He made as few decisions as possible, but those he made were wise ones, even if the wisdom was not always apparent at the time. He was valiant in battle, though his left hand was scarred and of little use, and a cunning strategist; he led his people to victory against the Northern Goblins when they closed the passes to travelers; he forged a lasting peace with the Eagles of the High Crags, a peace that remains in place until this day.

  His wife, the Lady Yvaine, was a fair woman from distant parts (although no one was ever entirely certain quite which ones). When she and her husband first arrived at Stormhold, she took herself a suite of rooms in one of the highest peaks of the citadel, a suite that had long been abandoned as unusable by the palace and its staff; its roof had collapsed in a rock fall a thousand years earlier. No one else had wished to use the rooms, for they were open to the sky, and the stars and the moon shone down upon them so brightly through the thin mountain air that it seemed one could simply reach out and hold them in one’s hand.

  Tristran and Yvaine were happy together. Not forever-after, for Time, the thief, eventually takes all things into his dusty storehouse, but they were happy, as these things go, for a long while. And then Death came in the night and whispered her secret into the ear of the eighty-second Lord of Stormhold, and he nodded his grey head and he said nothing more, and his people took his remains to the Hall of Ancestors where they lie to this day.

  After Tristran’s death, there were those who claimed that he was a member of the Fellowship of the Castle, and was instrumental in breaking the power of the Unseelie Court. But the truth of that, as so much else, died with him and has never been established, neither one way nor another.

  Yvaine became the Lady of Stormhold, and proved a better monarch, in peace and in war, than any would have dared to hope. She did not age as her husband had aged, and her eyes remained as blue, her hair as golden-white, and—as the free citizens of the Stormhold would have occasional cause to discover—her temper as quick to flare as on the day that Tristran first encountered her in the glade beside the pool.

  She walks with a limp to this day, although no one in the Stormhold would ever remark upon it, any more than they dare remark upon the way she glitters and shines, upon occasion, in the darkness.

  They say that each night, when the duties of state permit, she climbs, on foot, and limps, alone, to the highest peak of the palace, where she stands for hour after hour, seeming not to notice the cold peak winds. She says nothing at all, but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow d
ance of the infinite stars.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost, my thanks to Charles Vess. He is the nearest thing we have today to the great Victorian fairy painters, and without his art as an inspiration none of these words would exist. Every time I finished a chapter I phoned him up and read it to him, and he listened patiently and he chuckled in all the right places.

  My thanks to Jenny Lee, Karen Berger, Paul Levitz, Merrilee Heifetz, Lou Aronica, Jennifer Hershey and Tia Maggini: each of them helped make this book a reality.

  I owe an enormous debt to Hope Mirrlees, Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell and C.S. Lewis, wherever they may currently be, for showing me that fairy stories were for adults too.

  Tori lent me a house, and I wrote the first chapter in it, and all she asked in exchange was that I make her a tree.

  There were people who read it as it was being written, and who told me what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong. It’s not their fault if I didn’t listen. My thanks in particular to Amy Horsting, Lisa Henson, Diana Wynne Jones, Chris Bell and Susanna Clarke.

  My wife Mary and my assistant Lorraine did more than their share of work on this book, for they typed the first few chapters from my handwritten draft, and I cannot thank them enough.

  The kids, to be frank, were absolutely no help at all, and I truly don’t think I’d ever have it any other way.

  —Neil Gaiman, June 1998

  Writing and the Imagination

  By Neil Gaiman

  A speech delivered at the Chicago Humanities Festival, October 2000

  When I grew up, I wanted to be a werewolf. Or a writer. But writer was definitely the number two alternative. Werewolfing was an easy number one.

  I expected it would begin with the onset of puberty. Instead I got a number of other things, all of them a lot of fun. I got everything, pretty much, except turning into a wolf when the moon was full.