Stardust

by Neil Gaiman

  The moon was setting.

  Dunstan raised his hands to his mouth and hooted. There was no response; the sky above was a deep color—blue perhaps, or purple, not black—sprinkled with more stars than the mind could hold.

  He hooted once more.

  “That,” she said severely in his ear, “is nothing like a little owl. A snowy owl it could be, a barn owl, even. If my ears were stopped up with twigs perhaps I’d imagine it an eagle-owl. But it’s not a little owl.”

  Dunstan shrugged, and grinned, a little foolishly. The faerie woman sat down beside him. She intoxicated him: he was breathing her, sensing her through the pores of his skin. She leaned close to him.

  “Do you think you are under a spell, pretty Dunstan?”

  “I do not know.”

  She laughed, and the sound was a clear rill bubbling over rocks and stones.

  “You are under no spell, pretty boy, pretty boy.” She lay back in the grass and stared up at the sky. “Your stars,” she asked. “What are they like?” Dunstan lay beside her in the cool grass and stared up at the night sky. There was certainly something odd about the stars: perhaps there was more color in them, for they glittered like tiny gems; perhaps there was something about the number of tiny stars, the constellations; something was strange and wonderful about the stars. But then . . .

  They lay back to back, staring up at the sky.

  “What do you want from life?” asked the faerie lass.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “You, I think.”

  “I want my freedom,” she said.

  Dunstan reached down to the silver chain that ran from her wrist to her ankle, and off away in the grass. He tugged on it. It was stronger than it looked.

  “It was fashioned of cat’s breath and fish-scales and moonlight mixed in with the silver,” she told him. “Unbreakable until the terms of the spell are concluded.”

  “Oh.” He moved back onto the grass.

  “I should not mind it, for it is a long, long chain; but the knowledge of it irks me, and I miss my father’s land. And the witch-woman is not the best of mistresses....”

  And she was quiet. Dunstan leaned over toward her, reached a hand up to her face, felt something wet and hot splash against his hand.

  “Why, you are crying.”

  She said nothing. Dunstan pulled her toward him, wiping ineffectually at her face with his big hand; and then he leaned into her sobbing face and, tentatively, uncertain of whether or not he was doing the correct thing given the circumstances, he kissed her, full upon her burning lips.

  There was a moment of hesitation, and then her mouth opened against his, and her tongue slid into his mouth, and he was, under the strange stars, utterly, irrevocably, lost.

  He had kissed before, with the girls of the village, but he had gone no further.

  His hand felt her small breasts through the silk of her dress, touched the hard nubs of her nipples. She clung to him, hard, as if she were drowning, fumbling with his shirt, with his britches.

  She was so small; he was scared he would hurt her and break her. He did not. She wriggled and writhed beneath him, gasping and kicking, and guiding him with her hand.

  She placed a hundred burning kisses on his face and chest, and then she was above him, straddling him, gasping and laughing, sweating and slippery as a minnow, and he was arching and pushing and exulting, his head full of her and only her, and had he known her name he would have called it out aloud.

  At the end, he would have pulled out, but she held him inside her, wrapped her legs around him, pushed against him so hard that he felt that the two of them occupied the same place in the universe. As if, for one powerful, engulfing moment, they were the same person, giving and receiving, as the stars faded into the predawn sky.

  They lay together, side by side.

  The faerie woman adjusted her silk robe and was once more decorously covered. Dunstan pulled his britches back up, with regret. He squeezed her small hand in his.

  The sweat dried on his skin, and he felt chilled and lonely. He could see her now, as the sky lightened into a dawn grey. Around them animals were stirring: horses stamped, birds began, waking, to sing the dawn in, and here and there across the market meadow, those in the tents were beginning to rise and move. “Now, get along with you,” she said softly, and looked at him, half regretfully, with eyes as violet as the cirrus clouds, high in the dawn sky. And she kissed him, gently, on the mouth, with lips that tasted of crushed blackberries, then she stood up and walked back into the gypsy caravan behind the stall.

  Dazed and alone, Dunstan walked through the market, feeling a great deal older than his eighteen years.

  He returned to the cow byre, took off his boots, and slept until he woke, when the sun was high in the sky.

  On the following day the market finished, although Dunstan did not return to it, and the foreigners left the village and life in Wall returned to normal, which was perhaps slightly less normal than life in most villages (particularly when the wind was in the wrong direction) but was, all things considered, normal enough.

  Two weeks after the market, Tommy Forester proposed marriage to Bridget Comfrey, and she accepted. And the week after that, Mrs. Hempstock came to visit Mrs. Thorn of a morning. They took tea in the parlor.

  “It is a blessing about the Forester boy,” said Mrs. Hempstock.

  “That it is,” said Mrs. Thorn. “Have another scone, my dear. I expect your Daisy shall be a bridesmaid.”

  “I trust she shall,” said Mrs. Hempstock, “if she should live so long.”

  Mrs.Thorn looked up, alarmed. “Why, she is not ill, Mrs. Hempstock? Say it is not so.”

  “She does not eat, Mrs. Thorn. She wastes away. She drinks a little water from time to time.”

  “Oh, my!”

  Mrs. Hempstock went on,“Last night I finally discovered the cause. It is your Dunstan.”

  “Dunstan? He has not . . .” Mrs. Thorn raised one hand to her mouth.

  “Oh, no,” said Mrs. Hempstock, hastily shaking her head and pursing her lips, “nothing like that. He has ignored her. She has not seen him for days and days. She has taken it into her head that he no longer cares for her, and all she does is hold the snowdrop he gave her, and she sobs.”

  Mrs. Thorn measured out more tea from the jar into the pot, added hot water. “Truth to tell,” she admitted, “we’re a little concerned about Dunstan, Thorney and me. He’s been mooning. That’s the only word for it. His work isn’t getting done. Thorney was saying that he needs some settling down, that boy. If he’d but settle down, why Thorney was saying he’d settle all the Westward Meadows on the lad.”

  Mrs. Hempstock nodded slowly. “Hempstock would certainly not be averse to seeing our Daisy happy. Certain he’d settle a flock of our sheep on the girl.” The Hempstocks’ sheep were notoriously the finest for miles around: shaggy-coated and intelligent (for sheep), with curling horns and sharp hooves. Mrs. Hempstock and Mrs. Thorn sipped their tea. And so it was settled.

  Dunstan Thorn was married in June to Daisy Hempstock. And if the groom seemed a little distracted, well, the bride was as glowing and lovely as ever any bride has been.

  Behind them, their fathers discussed the plans for the farmhouse they would build for the newlyweds in the western meadow. Their mothers agreed how lovely Daisy looked, and what a pity it was that Dunstan had stopped Daisy from wearing the snowdrop he had bought for her at the market at the end of April, in her wedding dress.

  And it is there we will leave them, in a falling flurry of rose petals, scarlet and yellow and pink and white.

  Or almost.

  They lived in Dunstan’s cottage, while their little farmhouse was erected, and they were certainly happy enough; and the day-to-day business of raising sheep, and herding sheep, and shearing them, and nursing them, slowly took the faraway look from Dunstan’s eyes.

  First autumn came, then winter. It was at the end of February, in lambing season, when the world was cold, and
a bitter wind howled down the moors and through the leafless forest, when icy rains fell from the leaden skies in continual drizzling showers, at six in the evening, after the sun had set and the sky was dark, that a wicker basket was pushed through the space in the wall. The guards, on each side of the gap, at first did not notice the basket. They were facing the wrong way, after all, and it was dark and wet, and they were busy stamping the ground and staring gloomily and longingly at the lights of the village.

  And then a high, keening wail began.

  It was then that they looked down, and saw the basket at their feet. There was a bundle in the basket: a bundle of oiled silk and woolen blankets, from the top of which protruded a red, bawling face, with screwed-up little eyes, a mouth, open and vocal, and hungry.

  And there was, attached to the baby’s blanket with a silver pin, a scrap of parchment, upon which was written in an elegant, if slightly archaic, handwriting the following words:

  Chapter Two

  In Which Tristran Thorn Grows to Manhood and Makes a Rash Promise

  Years passed.

  The next Faerie Market was held on schedule on the other side of the wall. Young Tristran Thorn, eight years old, did not attend, finding himself packed off to stay with extremely distant relations in a village a day’s ride away.

  His little sister, Louisa, six months his junior, was, however, allowed to go to the market, and this was a source of great ranklement to the boy, as was the fact that Louisa brought back from the market a glass globe, filled with speckles of light that glittered and flashed in the twilight, and which cast a warm and gentle radiance into the darkness of their bedroom in the farmhouse, while all Tristran brought back from his relatives was a nasty case of the measles.

  Shortly afterward, the farm cat had three kittens: two black-and-white ones like herself, and a tiny kitten with a dusty blue sheen to her coat, and eyes that changed color depending on her mood, from green and gold to salmon, scarlet and vermilion.

  This kitten was given to Tristran to make up for missing the market. She grew slowly, the blue cat, and she was the sweetest cat in the world, until, one evening, she began to prowl the house impatiently, to mrowll and to flash her eyes, which were the purple-red of foxgloves; and when Tristran’s father came back from a day in the fields, the cat yowled, bolted through the door and was off into the dusk.

  The guards on the wall were for people, not cats; and Tristran, who was twelve by this time, never saw the blue cat again. He was inconsolable for a while. His father came into his bedroom one night and sat at the end of his bed, saying gruffly, “She’ll be happier, over the wall. With her own kind. Don’t you fret now, lad.”

  His mother said nothing to him about the matter, as she said little to him on any subject. Sometimes Tristran would look up to see his mother staring at him intently, as if she were trying to tease some secret from his face.

  Louisa, his sister, would needle him about this as they walked to the village school in the morning, as she would goad him about so many other things: the shape of his ears, for example (the right ear was flat against his head, and almost pointed; the left one was not), and about the foolish things he said: once he told her that the tiny clouds, fluffy and white, that clustered across the horizon at sunset as they walked home from school, were sheep. It was no matter that he later claimed that he had meant simply that they reminded him of sheep, or that there was something fluffy and sheeplike about them. Louisa laughed and teased and goaded like a goblin; and what was worse, she told the other children, and incited them to “baa” quietly whenever Tristran walked past. Louisa was a born inciter, and danced circles around her brother.

  The village school was a fine school, and under the tutelage of Mrs. Cherry, the schoolmistress, Tristran Thorn learned all about fractions, and longitude and latitude; he could ask in French for the pen of the gardener’s aunt, indeed for the pen of his own aunt; he learned the kings and queens of England from William the Conqueror, 1066, to Victoria, 1837. He learned his reading and had a fair copperplate hand. Travelers to the village were rare, but occasionally a peddler would come through the village, selling “penny dreadful” accounts of grisly murders, fateful encounters, dire doings and remarkable escapes. Most peddlers sold song sheets, two for a penny, and families would buy them and gather about their pianos to sing songs such as “Cherry Ripe” and “In My Father’s Garden.”

  So the days went by, and the weeks went by, and the years went by also. At age fourteen, by a process of osmosis, of dirty jokes, whispered secrets and filthy ballads,Tristran learned of sex. When he was fifteen he hurt his arm falling from the apple tree outside Mr.Thomas Forester’s house: more specifically, from the apple tree outside Miss Victoria Forester’s bedroom window. To Tristran’s regret, he had caught no more than a pink and tantalizing glimpse of Victoria, who was his sister’s age and, without any doubt, the most beautiful girl for a hundred miles around.

  By the time Victoria was seventeen, and Tristran also, she was in all probability, he was certain, the most beautiful girl in the British Isles. Tristran would have insisted on the most beautiful girl in the entire British Empire, if not the world, and boxed you, or been prepared to, had you argued with him.You would have been hard-pressed to find anyone in Wall who would have argued with him, though; she turned many heads and, in all probability, broke many hearts.

  A description: She had her mother’s grey eyes and heart-shaped face, her father’s curling chestnut hair. Her lips were red and perfectly shaped, her cheeks blushed prettily when she spoke. She was pale, and utterly delightful.When she was sixteen she had fought vigorously with her mother, for Victoria had taken it into her head that she would work in the Seventh Magpie as a pot-maid. “I have spoken to Mister Bromios about this,” she told her mother, “and he has no objection.”

  “What Mister Bromios thinks or does not think,” replied her mother, the former Bridget Comfrey “is neither here nor there. That is a most improper occupation for a young lady.”

  The village of Wall watched the battle of wills with fascination, wondering what the outcome would be, for no one crossed Bridget Forester: she had a tongue that could, the villagers said, blister the paint from a barn door and tear the bark from an oak.There was no one in the village who would have wanted to get on the wrong side of Bridget Forester, and they did say that the wall would be more likely to walk than for Bridget Forester to change her mind.

  Victoria Forester, however, was used to having her own way, and, if all else failed, or even if it did not, she would appeal to her father, and he would accede to her demands. But here even Victoria was surprised, for her father agreed with her mother, saying that working in the bar at the Seventh Magpie was something that a well-brought-up young lady would not do. And Thomas Forester set his chin and there the matter ended.

  Every boy in the village was in love with Victoria Forester. And many a sedate gentleman, quietly married with grey in his beard, would stare at her as she walked down the street, becoming, for a few moments, a boy once more, in the spring of his years with a spring in his step.

  “They say that Mister Monday himself is counted amongst your admirers,” said Louisa Thorn to Victoria Forester one afternoon in May, in the apple orchard.

  Five girls sat beside, and upon the branches of, the oldest apple tree in the orchard, its huge trunk making a fine seat and support; and whenever the May breeze blew, the pink blossoms tumbled down like snow, coming to rest in their hair and on their skirts.The afternoon sunlight dappled green and silver and gold through the leaves in the apple orchard.

  “Mister Monday,” said Victoria Forester with disdain, “is five and forty years of age if he is a day.” She made a face to indicate just how old five-and-forty is, when you happen to be seventeen.

  “Anyway,” said Cecilia Hempstock, Louisa’s cousin, “he has already been married. I would not wish to marry someone who had already been married. It would be,” she opined, “like having someone else break in one’s own p
ony.”

  “Personally I would imagine that to be the sole advantage of marrying a widower,” said Amelia Robinson. “That someone else would have removed the rough edges; broken him in, if you will. Also, I would imagine that by that age his lusts would long since have been sated, and abated, which would free one from a number of indignities.”

  A flurry of hastily suppressed giggles amid the apple blossom.

  “Still,” said Lucy Pippin hesitantly, “it would be nice to live in the big house, and to have a coach and four, and to be able to travel to London for the season, and to Bath to take the waters, or to Brighton for the sea-bathing, even if Mister Monday is five and forty.”

  The other girls shrieked, and flung handfuls of apple blossom at her, and none shrieked more loudly, or flung more blossom, than Victoria Forester.

  Tristran Thorn, at the age of seventeen, and only six months older than Victoria, was half the way between a boy and a man, and was equally uncomfortable in either role; he seemed to be composed chiefly of elbows and Adam’s apples. His hair was the brown of sodden straw, and it stuck out at awkward, seventeen-year-old angles, wet and comb it howsoever much he tried.

  He was painfully shy, which, as is often the manner of the painfully shy, he overcompensated for by being too loud at the wrong times. Most days Tristran was content—or as content as a seventeen-year-old youth with his world ahead of him can ever be—and when he daydreamed in the fields, or at the tall desk at the back of Monday and Brown’s, the village shop, he fancied himself riding the train all the way to Lon-don or to Liverpool, of taking a steamship across the grey Atlantic to America, and making his fortune there among the savages in the new lands.

  But there were times when the wind blew from beyond the wall, bringing with it the smell of mint and thyme and red-currants, and at those times there were strange colors seen in the flames in the fireplaces of the village. When that wind blew, the simplest of devices—from lucifer matches to lantern-slides—would no longer function.