by Neil Gaiman
And, at those times, Tristran Thorn’s daydreams were strange, guilty fantasies, muddled and odd, of journeys through forests to rescue princesses from palaces, dreams of knights and trolls and mermaids. And when these moods came upon him, he would slip out of the house, and lie upon the grass, and stare up at the stars.
Few of us now have seen the stars as folk saw them then—our cities and towns cast too much light into the night—but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas, uncountable as the trees in a forest or the leaves on a tree.Tristan would stare into the darkness of the sky until he thought of nothing at all, and then he would go back to his bed and sleep like a dead man.
He was a gangling creature of potential, a barrel of dynamite waiting for someone or something to light his fuse; but no one did, so on weekends and in the evenings he helped his father on the farm, and during the day he worked for Mr. Brown, at Monday and Brown’s, as a clerk.
Monday and Brown’s was the village shop. While they kept a number of necessaries in stock, much of their business was conducted by means of lists: villagers would give Mr. Brown a list of what they needed, from potted meats to sheep-dip, from fish-knives to chimney-tiles; a clerk at Monday and Brown’s would compile a master list of everything requested; and then Mr. Monday would take the master list and a dray pulled by two huge shire horses, and he would set off for the nearest county town and return in a handful of days with the dray loaded high with goods of all description.
It was a cold, blustery day in late October, of the kind that always seems about to rain but never actually does, and it was late in the afternoon. Victoria Forester walked into Monday and Brown’s with a list, written in her mother’s precise handwriting, and she rang the small bell on the counter for service.
She looked slightly disappointed to see Tristran Thorn appear from the back room. “Good day, Miss Forester.”
She smiled a tight smile and handed Tristran her list.
It read as follows:
½ lb of sago
10 cans of sardines
1 bottle of mushroom ketchup
5 lb of rice
1 tin of golden syrup
2 lb of currants
a bottle of cochineal
1 lb of barley sugar
1 shilling box of Rowntrees Elect Cocoa
3d tin of Oakey’s knife polish
6d of Brunswick black
1 packet of Swinborne’s Isinglass
1 bottle of furniture cream
1 basting ladle
a ninepenny gravy strainer
a set of kitchen steps
Tristran read it to himself, looking for something about which he could begin to talk: a conversational gambit of some kind—any kind.
He heard his voice saying, “You’ll be having rice pudding, then, I would imagine, Miss Forester.” As soon as he said it, he knew it had been the wrong thing to say. Victoria pursed her perfect lips, and blinked her grey eyes, and said, “Yes, Tristran. We shall be having rice pudding.”
And then she smiled at him, and said, “Mother says that rice pudding in sufficient quantity will help to stave off chills and colds and other autumnal ailments.”
“My mother,” Tristran confessed, “has always sworn by tapioca pudding.”
He put the list on a spike. “We can deliver most of the provisions tomorrow morning, and the rest of it will come back with Mister Monday, early next week.”
There was a gust of wind, then, so strong that it rattled the windows of the village, and whirled and spun the weathercocks until they could not tell north from west or south from east.
The fire that was burning in the grate of Monday and Brown’s belched and twisted in a flurry of greens and scarlets, topped with a fizz of silver twinkles, of the kind one can make for oneself at the parlor fire with a handful of tossed iron filings.
The wind blew from Faerie and the East, and Tristran Thorn suddenly found inside himself a certain amount of courage he had not suspected that he had possessed. “You know, Miss Forester, I get off in a few minutes,” he said. “Perhaps I could walk you a little way home. It’s not much out of my way.” And he waited, his heart in his mouth, while Victoria Forester’s grey eyes stared at him, amused. After what seemed like a hundred years she said, “Certainly.”
Tristran hurried into the parlor and informed Mr. Brown that he would be off now. And Mr. Brown grunted in a not entirely ill-natured way and told Tristran that when he was younger he’d not only had to stay late each night and shut up the shop, but that he had also had to sleep on the floor beneath the counter with only his coat for a pillow.
Tristran agreed that he was indeed a lucky young man, and he wished Mr. Brown a good night, then he took his coat from the coat-stand and his new bowler hat from the hat-stand, and stepped out onto the cobblestones, where Victoria Forester waited for him.
The autumn twilight turned into deep and early night as they walked. Tristran could smell the distant winter on the air—a mixture of night-mist and crisp darkness and the tang of fallen leaves.
They took a winding lane up toward the Forester farm, and the crescent moon hung white in the sky and the stars burned in the darkness above them.
“Victoria,” said Tristran, after a while.
“Yes, Tristran,” said Victoria, who had been preoccupied for much of the walk.
“Would you think it forward of me to kiss you?” asked Tristran.
“Yes,” said Victoria bluntly and coldly. “Very forward.”
“Ah,” said Tristran.
They walked up Dyties Hill, not speaking; at the top of the hill they turned and saw beneath them the village of Wall, all gleaming candles and lamps glimmering through windows, warm yellow lights that beckoned and invited; and above them the lights of the myriad stars, which glittered and twinkled and blazed, chilly and distant and more numerous than the mind could encompass.
Tristran reached down his hand and took Victoria’s small hand in his. She did not pull away.
“Did you see that?” asked Victoria, who was gazing out over the landscape.
“I saw nothing,” said Tristran. “I was looking at you.”
Victoria smiled in the moonlight.
“You are the most lovely woman in all the world,” said Tristran, from the bottom of his heart.
“Get along with you,” said Victoria, but she said it gently.
“What did you see?” asked Tristran.
“A falling star,” said Victoria. “I believe they are not at all uncommon at this time of year.”
“Vicky,” said Tristran. “Will you kiss me?”
“No,” she said.
“You kissed me when we were younger. You kissed me beneath the pledge-Oak, on your fifteenth birthday. And you kissed me last May Day, behind your father’s cowshed.”
“I was another person then,” she said. “And I shall not kiss you, Tristran Thorn.”
“If you will not kiss me,” asked Tristran, “will you marry me?”
There was silence on the hill. Only the rustle of the October wind. Then a tinkling sound: it was the sound of the most beautiful girl in the whole of the British Isles laughing with delight and amusement.
“Marry you?” she repeated, incredulously. “And why ever should I marry you, Tristran Thorn? What could you give me?”
“Give you?” he said. “I would go to India for you,Victoria Forester, and bring you the tusks of elephants, and pearls as big as your thumb, and rubies the size of wren’s eggs.
“I would go to Africa, and bring you diamonds the size of cricket balls. I would find the source of the Nile and name it after you.
“I would go to America—all the way to San Francisco, to the gold-fields, and I would not come back until I had your weight in gold. Then I would carry it back here, and lay it at your feet.
“I would travel to the distant northlands did you but say the word, and slay the mighty polar bears, and bring you back their hides.”
“I think you were doing quite well,” said Victoria Forester, “until you got to the bit about slaying polar bears. Be that as it may, little shop-boy and farm-boy, I shall not kiss you; neither shall I marry you.”
Tristran’s eyes blazed in the moonlight. “I would travel to far Cathay for you and bring you a huge junk I would capture from the king of the pirates, laden with jade and silk and opium.
“I would go to Australia, at the bottom of the world,” said Tristran, “and bring you. Um.” He ransacked the penny dreadfuls in his head, trying to remember if any of their heroes had visited Australia. “A kangaroo,” he said. “And opals,” he added. He was fairly sure about the opals.
Victoria Forester squeezed his hand. “And whatever would I do with a kangaroo?” she asked. “Now, we should be getting along, or my father and mother will be wondering what has kept me, and they will leap to some entirely unjustified conclusions. For I have not kissed you, Tristran Thorn.”
“Kiss me,” he pleaded. “There is nothing I would not do for your kiss, no mountain I would not scale, no river I would not ford, no desert I would not cross.”
He gestured widely, indicating the village of Wall below them, the night sky above them. In the constellation of Orion, low on the Eastern horizon, a star flashed and glittered and fell.
“For a kiss, and the pledge of your hand,” said Tristran, grandiloquently, “I would bring you that fallen star.”
He shivered. His coat was thin, and it was obvious he would not get his kiss, which he found puzzling. The manly heroes of the penny dreadfuls and shilling novels never had these problems getting kissed.
“Go on, then,” said Victoria. “And if you do, I will.”
“What?” said Tristran.
“If you bring me that star,” said Victoria, “the one that just fell, not another star, then I’ll kiss you. Who knows what else I might do. There: now you need not go to Australia, nor to Africa, nor to far Cathay.”
“What?” said Tristran.
And Victoria laughed at him, then, and took back her hand, and began to walk down the hill toward her father’s farm.
Tristran ran to catch her up. “Do you mean it?” he asked her.
“I mean it as much as you mean all your fancy words of rubies and gold and opium,” she replied. “What is an opium?”
“Something in cough mixture,” said Tristran. “Like eucalyptus.”
“It does not sound particularly romantic,” said Victoria Forester. “Anyway, should you not be running off to retrieve my fallen star? It fell to the East, over there.” And she laughed again. “Silly shop-boy. It is all you can do to ensure that we have the ingredients for rice pudding.”
“And if I brought you the fallen star?” asked Tristran lightly. “What would you give me? A kiss? Your hand in marriage?”
“Anything you desire,” said Victoria, amused.
“You swear it?” asked Tristran.
They were walking the last hundred yards now, up to the Foresters’ farmhouse. The windows burned with lamplight, yellow and orange.
“Of course,” said Victoria, smiling.
The track to the Foresters’ farm was bare mud, trodden into mire by the feet of horses and cows and sheep and dogs. Tristran Thorn went down on his knees in the mud, heedless of his coat or his woolen trousers. “Very well,” he said.
The wind blew from the east, then.
“I shall leave you here, my lady,” said Tristran Thorn. “For I have urgent business, to the East.” He stood up, unmindful of the mud and mire clinging to his knees and coat, and he bowed to her, and then he doffed his bowler hat.
Victoria Forester laughed at the skinny shop-boy, laughed long and loud and delightfully, and her tinkling laughter followed him back down the hill, and away.
Tristran Thorn ran all the way home. Brambles snagged at his clothes as he ran and a branch knocked his hat from his head.
He stumbled, breathless and torn, into the kitchen of the house on Westward Meadows.
“Look at the state of you!” said his mother. “Indeed! I never did!”
Tristran merely smiled at her.
“Tristran?” asked his father, who at five and thirty was still middling tall and still freckled, although there were more than a few silvering hairs in his nut-brown curls. “Your mother spoke to you. Did you not hear her?”
“I beg your pardon, Father, Mother,” said Tristran, “but I shall be leaving the village tonight. I may be gone for some time.”
“Foolishness and silliness!” said Daisy Thorn. “I never heard such nonsense.”
But Dunstan Thorn saw the look in his son’s eyes. “Let me talk to him,” he said to his wife. She looked at him sharply, then she nodded. “Very well,” she said. “But who’s going to sew up the boy’s coat? That’s what I would like to know.” She bustled out of the kitchen.
The kitchen fire fizzed in silver and glimmered green and violet. “Where are you going?” asked Dunstan.
“East,” said his son.
East. His father nodded.There were two easts—east to the next county, through the forest, and East, the other side of the wall. Dunstan Thorn knew without asking to which his son was referring.
“And will you be coming back?” asked his father.
Tristran grinned widely. “Of course,” he said.
“Well,” said his father. “That’s all right, then.” He scratched his nose. “Have you given any thought to getting through the wall?”
Tristran shook his head. “I’m sure I can find a way,” he said. “If necessary, I’ll fight my way past the guards.”
His father sniffed. “You’ll do no such thing,” he said. “How would you like it if it was you was on duty, or me? I’ll not see anyone hurt.” He scratched the side of his nose once more. “Go and pack a bag, and kiss your mother good-bye, and I’ll walk you down to the village.”
Tristran packed a bag, and his mother brought him six red, ripe apples and a cottage loaf and a round of white farmhouse cheese, which he placed inside his bag. Mrs. Thorn would not look at Tristran. He kissed her cheek and bade her farewell.Then he walked into the village with his father.
Tristran had stood his first watch on the wall when he was sixteen years old. He had only been given one instruction: That it was the task of the guards to prevent anyone from coming through the gap in the wall from the village, by any means possible. If it was not possible to prevent them, then the guards must raise the village for help.
He wondered as they walked what his father had in mind. Perhaps the two of them together would overpower the guards. Perhaps his father would create some kind of distraction and allow him to slip through . . . perhaps . . .
By the time they walked through the village and arrived at the gap in the wall, Tristran had imagined every possibility, except the one which occurred.
On wall duty that evening were Harold Crutchbeck and Mr. Bromios. Harold Crutchbeck was a husky young man several years older than Tristran, the miller’s son. Mr. Bromios’s hair was black, and curled, and his eyes were green, and his smile was white, and he smelled of grapes and of grape juice, of barley and of hops.
Dunstan Thorn walked up to Mr. Bromios and stood in front of him. He stamped his feet against the evening chill.
“Evening, Mister Bromios. Evening, Harold,” said Dunstan.
“Evening, Mister Thorn,” said Harold Crutchbeck.
“Good evening, Dunstan,” said Mr. Bromios. “I trust you are well.”
Dunstan allowed as that he was; and they spoke of the weather and agreed that it would be bad for the farmers and that, from the quantity of holly berries and yew berries already apparent, it would be a cold, hard winter.
As he listened to them talking,Tristran was ready to burst with irritation and frustration, but he bit his tongue and said nothing.
Finally, his father said, “Mister Bromios, Harold, I believe you both know my son Tristran?” Tristran raised his bowler hat to them, nervously.
And then
his father said something he did not understand.
“I suppose you both know about where he came from,” said Dunstan Thorn.
Mr. Bromios nodded, without speaking.
Harold Crutchbeck said he had heard tales, although you never should mind the half of what you hear.
“Well, it’s true,” said Dunstan. “And now it’s time for him to go back.”
“There’s a star . . .” Tristran began to explain, but his father hushed him to silence.
Mr. Bromios rubbed his chin and ran a hand through his thatch of black curls. “Very well,” he said. He turned and spoke to Harold in a low voice, saying things Tristran could not hear.
His father pressed something cold into his hand.
“Go on with you, boy. Go, and bring back your star, and may God and all His angels go with you.”
And Mr. Bromios and Harold Crutchbeck, the guards on the gate, stood aside to let him pass.
Tristran walked through the gap, with the stone wall on each side of him, into the meadow on the other side of the wall.
Turning, he looked back at the three men, framed in the gap, and wondered why they had allowed him through.
Then, his bag swinging in one hand, the object his father had pushed into his hand in the other, Tristran Thorn set off up the gentle hill, toward the woods.
* * *
As he walked, the chill of the night grew less, and once in the woods at the top of the hill Tristran was surprised to realize the moon was shining brightly down on him through a gap in the trees. He was surprised because the moon had set an hour before; and doubly surprised, because the moon that had set had been a slim, sharp silver crescent, and the moon that shone down on him now was a huge, golden harvest moon, full, and glowing, and deeply colored.
The cold thing in his hand chimed once: a crystalline tinkling like the bells of a tiny glass cathedral. He opened his hand and held it up to the moonlight.
It was a snowdrop, made all of glass.
A warm wind stroked Tristran’s face: it smelled like peppermint, and blackcurrant leaves, and red, ripe plums; and the enormity of what he had done descended on Tristran Thorn. He was walking into Faerie, in search of a fallen star, with no idea how he would find the star, nor how to keep himself safe and whole as he tried. He looked back and fancied that he could see the lights of Wall behind him, wavering and glimmering as if in a heat-haze, but still inviting.