Stardust

by Neil Gaiman

  Dunstan walked to the cow byre in the pelting rain. He climbed into the hayloft and was soon asleep.

  He was aware, in the night, of thunder and of lightning, although he did not wake; and then in the small hours of the morning he was woken by someone treading, awkwardly, on his feet.

  “Sorry,” said a voice. “That is to say, ’scuse me.”

  “Who’s that? Who’s there?” said Dunstan.

  “Just me,” said the voice. “I’m here for the market. I was sleeping in a hollow tree for the night, but the lightnin’ toppled it, cracked it like an egg it did and smashed it like a twig, and the rain got down my neck, and it threatened to get into my baggage, and there’s things in there must be kept dry as dust, and I’d kept it safe as houses on all my travelings here, though it was wet as . . .”

  “Water?” suggested Dunstan.

  “Ever-so,” continued the voice in the darkness. “So I was wonderin’,” it continued, “if you’d mind me stayin’ here under your roof as I’m not very big, and I’d not disturb you or nothing.”

  “Just don’t tread on me,” sighed Dunstan.

  It was then that a flash of lightning illuminated the byre, and in the light, Dunstan saw something small and hairy in the corner, wearing a large floppy hat. And then, darkness.

  “I hope I’m not disturbin’ you,” said the voice, which certainly sounded rather hairy, now Dunstan thought about it.

  “You aren’t,” said Dunstan, who was very tired.

  “That’s good,” said the hairy voice, “because I wouldn’t want to disturb you.”

  “Please,” begged Dunstan, “let me sleep. Please.”

  There was a snuffling noise, which was replaced by a gentle snoring.

  Dunstan rolled over in the hay. The person, whoever, whatever it was, farted, scratched itself, and began to snore once more.

  Dunstan listened to the rain on the byre roof, and thought about Daisy Hempstock, and in his thoughts they were walking together, and six steps behind them walked a tall man with a top hat and a small, furry creature whose face Dunstan could not see.They were off to see his Heart’s Desire....

  There was bright sunlight on his face, and the cow byre was empty. He washed his face, and walked up to the farmhouse.

  He put on his very best jacket, and his very best shirt, and his very best britches. He scraped the mud from his boots with his pocketknife. Then he walked into the farm kitchen, and kissed his mother on the cheek, and helped himself to a cottage loaf and a large pat of fresh-churned butter.

  And then, with his money tied up in his fine Sunday cambric handkerchief, he walked up to the village of Wall and bade good morning to the guards on the gate.

  Through the gap in the wall he could see colored tents being raised, stalls being erected, colored flags, and people walking back and forth.

  “We’re not to let anyone through until midday,” said the guard.

  Dunstan shrugged, and went to the pub, where he pondered what he would buy with his savings (the shiny half-crown he had saved, and the lucky sixpence, with a hole drilled through it, on a leather thong around his neck) and with the additional pocket handkerchief filled with coins. He had, for the moment, quite forgotten there had been anything else promised the night before. At the stroke of midday Dunstan strode up to the wall and, nervously, as if he were breaking the greatest of taboos, he walked through beside, as he realized, the gentleman in the black silk top hat, who nodded to him.

  “Ah. My landlord. And how are you today, sir?”

  “Very well,” said Dunstan.

  “Walk with me,” said the tall man. “Let us walk together.”

  They walked across the meadow, toward the tents.

  “Have you been here before?” asked the tall man.

  “I went to the last market, nine years ago. I was only a boy,” admitted Dunstan.

  “Well,” said his tenant, “remember to be polite, and take no gifts. Remember that you’re a guest. And now, I shall give you the last part of the rent that I owe you. For I swore an oath. And my gifts last a long time. You and your firstborn child and his or her firstborn child It’s a gift that will last as long as I live.”

  “And what would that be, sir?”

  “Your Heart’s Desire, remember,” said the gentleman in the top hat. “Your Heart’s Desire.” Dunstan bowed, and they walked on toward the fair.

  “Eyes, eyes! New eyes for old!” shouted a tiny woman in front of a table covered with bottles and jars filled with eyes of every kind and color.

  “Instruments of music from a hundred lands!”

  “Penny whistles! Tuppenny hums! Threepenny choral anthems!”

  “Try your luck! Step right up! Answer a simple riddle and win a wind-flower!”

  “Everlasting lavender! Bluebell cloth!”

  “Bottled dreams, a shilling a bottle!”

  “Coats of night! Coats of twilight! Coats of dusk!”

  “Swords of fortune! Wands of power! Rings of eternity! Cards of grace! Roll-up, roll-up, step this way!”

  “Salves and ointments, philtres and nostrums!”

  Dunstan paused in front of a stall covered with tiny crystal ornaments; he examined the miniature animals, pondering getting one for Daisy Hempstock. He picked up a crystal cat, no bigger than his thumb. Sagely it blinked at him, and he dropped it, shocked; it righted itself in midair and, like a real cat, fell on its four paws.Then it stalked over to the corner of the stall and began to wash itself.

  Dunstan walked on, through the thronged market.

  It was bustling with people; all the strangers who had come to Wall in the previous weeks were there, and many of the inhabitants of the town of Wall as well. Mr. Bromios had set up a wine-tent and was selling wines and pasties to the village folk, who were often tempted by the foods being sold by the folk from Beyond the Wall but had been told by their grandparents, who had got it from their grandparents, that it was deeply, utterly wrong to eat fairy food, to eat fairy fruit, to drink fairy water and sip fairy wine.

  For every nine years, the folk from Beyond the Wall and over the hill set up their stalls, and for a day and a night the meadow played host to the Faerie Market; and there was, for one day and one night in nine years, commerce between the nations.

  There were wonders for sale, and marvels, and miracles; there were things undreamed-of and objects unimagined (what need, Dunstan wondered, could someone have of the storm-filled eggshells?). He jingled his money in his pocket handkerchief, and looked for something small and inexpensive with which to amuse Daisy.

  He heard a gentle chiming in the air, above the hubbub of the market; and this he walked toward.

  He passed a stall in which five huge men were dancing to the music of a lugubrious hurdy-gurdy being played by a mournful-looking black bear; he passed a stall where a balding man in a brightly colored kimono was smashing china plates and tossing them into a burning bowl from which colored smoke was pouring, all the while calling out to the passersby.

  The chinkling chiming grew louder.

  Reaching the stall from which the sound was emanating, he saw that it was deserted. It was festooned with flowers: bluebells and foxgloves and harebells and daffodils, but also with violets and lilies, with tiny crimson dog-roses, pale snowdrops, blue forget-me-nots and a profusion of other flowers Dunstan could not name. Each flower was made of glass or crystal, spun or carved, he could not tell: they counterfeited life perfectly. And they chimed and jingled like distant glass bells.

  “Hello?” called Dunstan.

  “Good morrow to you, on this Market Day,” said the stall holder, clambering down from the painted caravan parked behind the stall, and she smiled widely at him with white teeth in a dusky face. She was one of the folk from Beyond the Wall, he could tell at once from her eyes, and her ears, which were visible beneath her curly black hair. Her eyes were a deep violet, while her ears were the ears of a cat, perhaps, gently curved, and dusted with a fine, dark fur. She was quite beautiful.<
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  Dunstan picked up a flower from the stall. “It’s very lovely,” he said. It was a violet, and it chinkled and sang as he held it, making a noise similar to that produced by wetting a finger and rubbing it, gently, around a wineglass. “How much is it?”

  She shrugged, and a delightful shrug it was.

  “The cost is never discussed at the outset,” she told him. “It might be a great deal more than you are prepared to pay; and then you would leave, and we would both be the poorer for it. Let us discuss the merchandise in a more general way.”

  Dunstan paused. It was then that the gentleman with the black silk top hat passed by the stall. “There,” murmured Dunston’s lodger. “My debt to you is settled, and my rent is paid in full.”

  Dunstan shook his head, as if to clear it of a dream, and turned back to the young lady. “So where do these flowers come from?” he asked.

  She smiled knowingly. “On the side of Mount Calamon a grove of glass flowers grows. The journey there is perilous, and the journey back is more so.”

  “And of what purpose are they?” asked Dunstan.

  “The use and function of these flowers is chiefly decorative and recreational; they bring pleasure; they can be given to a loved one as a token of admiration and affection, and the sound they make is pleasing to the ear. Also, they catch the light most delightfully.” She held a bluebell up to the light; and Dunstan could not but observe that the color of sunlight glittering through the purple crystal was inferior in both hue and shade to that of her eyes.

  “I see,” said Dunstan.

  “They are also used in certain spells and cantrips. If sir is a magician . . . ?” Dunstan shook his head. There was, he noticed, something remarkable about the young lady.

  “Ah. Even so, they are delightful things,” she said, and smiled again.

  The remarkable thing was a thin silver chain that ran from the young lady’s wrist, down to her ankle and into the painted caravan behind her.

  Dunstan remarked upon it.

  “The chain? It binds me to the stall. I am the personal slave of the witch-woman who owns the stall. She caught me many years ago—as I played by the waterfalls in my father’s lands, high in the mountains—luring me on and on in the form of a pretty frog always but a moment out of my reach, until I had left my father’s lands, unwittingly, whereupon she resumed her true shape and popped me into a sack.”

  “And you are her slave forever?”

  “Not forever,” and at that the faerie girl smiled. “I gain my freedom on the day the moon loses her daughter, if that occurs in a week when two Mondays come together. I await it with patience. And in the meantime I do as I am bid, and also I dream. Will you buy a flower from me now, young master?”

  “My name is Dunstan.”

  “And an honest name it is, too,” she said with a teasing grin. “Where are your pincers, Master Dunstan? Will you catch the devil by the nose?”

  “And what is your name?” asked Dunstan, blushing a deep red.

  “I no longer have a name. I am a slave, and the name I had was taken from me. I answer to ‘hey, you!’ or to ‘girl!’ or to ‘foolish slattern!’ or to many another imprecation.”

  Dunstan noticed how the silken fabric of her robe pressed itself against her body; he was aware of elegant curves, and of her violet eyes upon him, and he swallowed.

  Dunstan put his hand in his pocket and pulled out his kerchief. He could no longer look at the woman. He tumbled out his money onto the counter. “Take enough for this,” he said, picking a pure white snowdrop from the table.

  “We do not take money at this stall.” She pushed the coins back toward him.

  “No? What will you take?” For by now he was quite agitated, and his only mission was to obtain a flower for . . . for Daisy, Daisy Hempstock . . . to obtain his flower and to depart, for, truth to tell, the young lady was making him exceedingly uncomfortable.

  “I could take the color of your hair,” she said, “or all of your memories before you were three years of age. I could take the hearing from your left ear—not all of it, just enough that you’d not enjoy music or appreciate the running of a river or the soughing of the wind.”

  Dunstan shook his head.

  “Or a kiss from you. One kiss, here on my cheek.”

  “That I’ll pay with goodwill!” said Dunstan, and with that he leaned across the stall, amid the twinkling jingling of the crystal flowers, and planted a chaste kiss on her soft cheek. He smelled the scent of her then, intoxicating, magical; it filled the front of his head and his chest and his mind.

  “There, now,” she said, and she passed him his snowdrop. He took it with hands that suddenly seemed to him to be huge and clumsy and not at all small and in every way perfect like the hands of the faerie girl. “And I’ll see you back here tonight, Dunstan Thorn, when the moon goes down. Come here and hoot like a little owl. Can you do that?”

  He nodded, and stumbled away from her; he did not need to ask how she knew his surname; she had taken it from him along with certain other things, such as his heart, when he had kissed her.

  The snowdrop chimed in his hand.

  “Why, Dunstan Thorn,” said Daisy Hempstock, when he encountered her by Mr. Bromios’s tent, sitting with her family and Dunstan’s parents, eating great brown sausages and drinking porter, “whatever is the matter?”

  “I brought you a gift,” Dunstan muttered, and thrust the chiming snowdrop toward her; it glinted in the afternoon sunlight. She took it from him, puzzled, with fingers still shiny with sausage grease. Impulsively, Dunstan leaned forward and, in front of her mother and father and sister, in front of Bridget Comfrey and Mr. Bromios and all, he kissed her on her fair cheek.

  The outcry was predictable; but Mr. Hempstock, who had not lived on the border of Faerie and the Lands Beyond for fifty-seven years for nothing, exclaimed, “Hush, now! Look at his eyes. Can’t you see the poor boy’s dazed in his wits, dazed and confused? He’s bespelled, I’ll wager you. Hoy! Tommy Forester! Come here; take young Dunstan Thorn back to the village and keep an eye on him; let him sleep if he wishes, or talk if it’s talk he needs....”

  Tommy walked Dunstan out of the market and back to the village of Wall.

  “There, now, Daisy,” said her mother, stroking her hair, “he’s just a little elf-touched, that’s all. No need to take on so.” And she pulled a lace kerchief from her capacious bosom, and dabbed at her daughter’s cheeks, which had suddenly become covered with tears.

  Daisy looked up at her, and seized the handkerchief, and blew her nose upon it, and sniffled into it. And Mrs. Hempstock observed, with a certain perplexity, that Daisy appeared to be smiling through her tears.

  “But Mother, Dunstan kissed me,” said Daisy Hempstock, and she fixed the crystal snowdrop at the front of her bonnet, where it chimed and glistened.

  After some time spent searching for it, Mr. Hempstock and Dunstan’s father found the stall where the crystal flowers were being sold; but the stall was being run by an elderly woman, accompanied by an exotic and very beautiful bird, which was chained to its perch by a thin silver chain. There was no reasoning with the old woman, for when they tried to question her about what had happened to Dunstan, all her talk was of one of the prizes of her collection, given away by a good-for-nothing, and that was what came of ingratitude, and of these sad modern times, and of today’s servants.

  In the empty village (for who’d be in the village during the Faerie Market?), Dunstan was taken into the Seventh Magpie and given a wooden settle on which to sit. He rested his forehead on his hand and stared off into no-one-knows-where and, from time to time, sighed huge sighs, like the wind.

  Tommy Forester tried to talk to him, saying “Now then, old fellow, buck up, that’s the ticket, let’s see a smile, eh? How’s about something to eat then? Or something to drink? No? My word, you do look queer, Dunstan, old fellow . . .” but gaining no response of any kind, Tommy began to pine after the market himself, where even now (he rubbed hi
s tender jaw) the lovely Bridget was undoubtedly being escorted by some huge and imposing gentleman with exotic clothes and a little monkey that chattered. And, having assured himself that his friend would be safe in the empty inn, Tommy walked back through the village to the gap in the wall.

  As Tommy reentered the market, he observed that the place was a hubbub: a wild place of puppet shows, of jugglers and dancing animals, of horses for auction and all kinds of things for sale or barter.

  Later, at twilight, a different kind of people came out. There was a crier, who cried news as a modern newspaper prints headlines—“The Master of Stormhold Suffers a Mysterious Malady!”, “The Hill of Fire Has Moved to the Fastness of Dene!”, “The Squire of Garamond’s Only Heir is Transformed into a Grunting Pig-wiggin!”—and would for a coin expand further on these stories.

  The sun set, and a huge spring moon appeared, high already in the heavens. A chill breeze blew. Now the traders retreated into their tents, and the visitors to the market found themselves whispered at, invited to partake of numerous wonders, each available for a price.

  And as the moon came low on the horizon DunstanThorn walked quietly down the cobbled streets of the village of Wall. He passed many a merry-maker—visitor or foreigner—although few enough of them observed him as he walked.

  He slipped through the gap in the wall—thick it was, the wall—and Dunstan found himself wondering, as his father had before him, what would happen were he to walk along the top of it.

  Through the gap and into the meadow, and that night, for the first time in his life, Dunstan entertained thoughts of continuing on through the meadow, of crossing the stream and vanishing into the trees on its far side. He entertained these thoughts awkwardly, as a man entertains unexpected guests. Then, as he reached his objective, he pushed these thoughts away, as a man apologizes to his guests, and leaves them, muttering something about a prior engagement.