by Neil Gaiman
The mouse dropped the nut, which fell into the brook and was carried away, to be swallowed by a salmon.The owl swallowed the mouse in just a couple of gulps, leaving just its tail trailing from her mouth, like a length of bootlace. Something snuffled and grunted as it pushed through the thicket—a badger, thought the owl (herself under a curse, and only able to resume her rightful shape if she consumed a mouse who had eaten the Nut of Wisdom), or perhaps a small bear.
Leaves rustled, water rilled, and then the glade became filled with light shining down from above, a pure white light which grew brighter and brighter. The owl saw it reflected in the pool, a blazing, glaring thing of pure light, so bright that she took to the wing and flew to another part of the forest. The wild things looked about them in terror.
First the light in the sky was no bigger than the moon, then it seemed larger, infinitely larger, and the whole grove trembled and quivered and every creature held its breath and the fireflies glowed brighter than they had ever glowed in their lives, each one convinced that this at last was love, but to no avail And then—
There was a cracking sound, sharp as a shot, and the light that had filled the grove was gone.
Or almost gone. There was a dim glow pulsing from the middle of the hazel thicket, as if a tiny cloud of stars were glimmering there.
And there was a voice, a high clear, female voice which said, “Ow,” and then, very quietly, it said “Fuck,” and then it said “Ow,” once more.
And then it said nothing at all, and there was silence in the glade.
Chapter Four
“Can I Get There by Candlelight?”
October moved further away with every step Tristran took; he felt as if he were walking into summer. There was a path through the woods, with a high hedgerow to one side, and he followed the path. High above him the stars glittered and gleamed, and the harvest moon shone golden yellow, the color of ripe corn. In the moonlight he could see briar-roses in the hedge.
He was becoming sleepy now. For a time he fought to stay awake, and then he took off his overcoat, and put down his bag—a large leather bag of the kind that, in twenty years’ time, would become known as a Gladstone bag—and he laid his head on his bag, and covered himself with his coat.
He stared up at the stars: and it seemed to him then that they were dancers, stately and graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity. He imagined he could see the very faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they had spent so much time above the world, watching the scrambling and the joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as each of us does.
And then it came to Tristran that he was dreaming, and he walked into his bedroom, which was also the schoolroom of the village of Wall: and Mrs. Cherry tapped the blackboard and bade them all be silent, and Tristran looked down at his slate to see what the lesson would be about, but he could not read what he had written there. Then Mrs. Cherry, who resembled his mother so much that Tristran found himself astonished he had never before realized that they were the same person, called upon Tristran to tell the class the dates of all the kings and queens of England....
“ ’Scuse me,” said a small and hairy voice in his ear, “but would you mind dreamin’ a bit quieter? Your dreams is spillin’ over into my dreams, and if there’s one thing I’ve never been doin’ with, it’s dates. William the Conker, ten sixty-six, that’s as far as I go, and I’d swap that for a dancing mouse.”
“Mm?” said Tristran.
“Keep it down,” said the voice. “If you don’t mind.”
“Sorry,” said Tristran, and his dreams after that were of the dark.
* * *
“Breakfast,” said a voice close to his ear. “It’s mushrumps, fried in butter, with wild garlic.”
Tristran opened his eyes: daylight shone through the briar-rose hedge, dappling the grass in gold and green. Something smelled like heaven.
A tin container was placed beside him.
“Poor fare,” said the voice. “Country fare, it is. Nothing like the gentry are used to, but the likes of me treasures a fine mushrump.”
Tristran blinked and reached into the tin bowl and took out a large mushroom between finger and thumb. It was hot. He took a careful bite, felt the juices flood his mouth. It was the finest thing he had ever eaten and, after he had chewed and swallowed it, he said so.
“That’s kind of you,” said the small figure who sat on the other side of a little fire which crackled and smoked in the morning air. “Kind of you, I’m sure. But you know, and I know, that it’s just fried field-mushrumps, and never a patch on nothing proper....”
“Is there any more?” asked Tristran, realizing just how hungry he was: sometimes a little food can do that to you.
“Ah now, that’s manners for you,” said the little figure, who wore a large, floppy hat and a large, flappy overcoat. “Is there more? he says, as if it were poached quail’s eggs and smoked gazelle and truffles, not just a mushrump, what tastes more or less like something what’s been dead for a week and a cat wouldn’t touch. Manners.”
“I really, truly would like another mushroom,” said Tristran, “if it’s not too much trouble.”
The little man—if man he was, which Tristran found rather unlikely—sighed mournfully and reached into the pan sizzling on the fire, with his knife, and flicked two large mushrooms into Tristran’s tin bowl.
Tristran blew on them, then ate them with his fingers.
“Look at you,” said the little hairy person, his voice a mixture of pride and gloom, “eatin’ those mushrumps as if you liked them, as if they wasn’t sawdust and wormwood and rue in your mouth.” Tristran licked his fingers and assured his benefactor that they had been the very finest mushrooms he had ever had the privilege of eating.
“You says that now,” said his host with gloomy relish, “but you’ll not be sayin’ that in an hour’s time.They’ll undoubtedly disagree with you, like the fishwife who disagreed with her young man over a mermaid. And that could be heard from Garamond to Stormhold. Such language! It fair turned my ears blue, it did.” The little hairy personage sighed deeply. “Talkin’ about your guts,” he said, “I’m going to attend to mine behind that tree over there.Would you do me the signal honor of keepin’ an eye on that there pack of mine? I’d be obliged.”
“Of course,” said Tristran, politely.
The little hairy man vanished behind an oak tree;Tristran heard a few grunts, and then his new friend reappeared, saying, “There. I knowed a man in Paphlagonia who’d swallow a live snake every morning, when he got up. He used to say, he was certain of one thing, that nothing worse would happen to him all day. ’Course they made him eat a bowlful of hairy centipedes before they hung him, so maybe that claim was a bit presumptive.”
Tristran excused himself. He urinated against the side of the oak tree, next to which was a small mound of droppings, certainly not produced by any human being. They looked like deer pellets, or rabbit-droppings.
“My name is Tristran Thorn,” said Tristran, when he returned. His breakfast companion had packed up the morning’s breakfast—fire, pans and all—and made it vanish into his pack.
He removed his hat, pressed it to his chest, and looked up at Tristran. “Charmed,” he said. He tapped the side of his pack: on it was written: CHARMED, ENCHANTED, ENSORCELLED AND CONFUSTICATED. “I used to be confusticated,” he confided, “but you know how these things go.”
And with that he set off along the path. Tristran walked behind him. “Hey! I say!” called Tristran. “Slow down, can’t you?” For despite the huge pack (which put Tristran in mind of Christian’s burden in Pilgrim’s Progress, a book from which Mrs. Cherry had read to them every Monday morning, telling them that, although it was written by a tinker, it was a fine book for all of that) the little man—Charmed? Was that his name?—was moving away from him as fast as a squirrel up a tre
e.
The little creature hurried back down the path. “Somethin’ wrong?” he asked.
“I cannot keep up,” confessed Tristran. “You walk so confoundedly fast.”
The little hairy man slowed his pace. “Beg your puddin’,” he said, as Tristran stumbled after him. “Bein’ on me own so much, I gets used to settin’ me own pace.”
They walked side by side, in the golden-green light of the sun through the newly opened leaves. It was a quality of light Tristran had observed, unique to springtime. He wondered if they had left summer as far behind as October. From time to time Tristran would remark on a flash of color in a tree or bush, and the little hairy man would say something like, “Kingfisher. Mr. Halcyon they used to call him. Pretty bird,” or “Purple hummingbird. Drinks nectar from flowers. Hovers,” or “Redcap.They’ll keep their distance, but don’t you go scrutinizin’ ’em or looking for trouble, ’cos you’ll find it with those buggers.”
They sat beside a brook to eat their lunch. Tristran produced the cottage loaf, the ripe, red apples, and round of cheese—hard, tart and crumbly—that his mother had given him. And although the little man eyed them both suspiciously, he wolfed them down and licked the crumbs of bread and cheese from his fingers, and munched noisily on the apple. Then he filled a kettle from the brook and boiled it up for tea.
“Suppose you tell me what you’re about?” said the little hairy man as they sat on the ground and drank their tea.
Tristran thought for some moments, and then he said, “I come from the village of Wall, where there lives a young lady named Victoria Forester, who is without peer among women, and it is to her, and to her alone, that I have given my heart. Her face is—”
“Usual complement of bits?” asked the little creature. “Eyes? Nose? Teeth? All the usual?”
“Of course.”
“Well then, you can skip that stuff,” said the little hairy man. “We’ll take it all as said. So what damn-fool silly thing has this young lady got you a-doin’ of?”
Tristran put down his wooden cup of tea, and stood up, offended.
“What,” he asked, in what he was certain were lofty and scornful tones, “would possibly make you imagine that my lady-love would have sent me on some foolish errand?”
The little man stared up at him with eyes like beads of jet. “Because that’s the only reason a lad like you would be stupid enough to cross the border into Faerie. The only ones who ever come here from your lands are the minstrels, and the lovers, and the mad. And you don’t look like much of a minstrel, and you’re—pardon me saying so, lad, but it’s true—ordinary as cheese-crumbs. So it’s love, if you ask me.”
“Because,” announced Tristran, “every lover is in his heart a madman, and in his head a minstrel.”
“Really?” said the little man, doubtfully. “I’d never noticed. So there’s some young lady. Has she sent you here to seek your fortune? That used to be very popular. You’d get young fellers wanderin’ all over, looking for the hoard of gold that some poor wyrm or ogre had taken absolute centuries to accumulate.”
“No. Not my fortune. It was more of a promise I made to this lady I mentioned. I . . . we were talking, and I was promising her things, and we saw this falling star, and I promised to bring it to her. And it fell . . .” he waved an arm toward a mountain range somewhere in the general direction of the sunrise “. . . over there.”
The little hairy man scratched his chin. Or his muzzle; it might well have been his muzzle. “You know what I would do?”
“No,” said Tristran, hope rising within him, “what?”
The little man wiped his nose. “I’d tell her to go shove her face in the pig pen, and go out and find another one who’ll kiss you without askin’ for the earth.You’re bound to find one. You can hardly throw half a brick back in the lands you come from without hittin’ one.”
“There are no other girls,” said Tristran confidently.
The little man sniffed, and they packed up their things and walked on together.
“Did you mean it?” said the little man. “About the fallen star?”
“Yes,” said Tristran.
“Well, I’d not mention it about if I were you,” said the little man. “There’s those as would be unhealthily interested in such information. Better keep mum. But never lie.”
“So what should I say?”
“Well,” he said, “f’r example, if they ask where you’ve come from, you could say ‘Behind me,’ and if they asked where you’re going, you’d say ‘In front of me.’ ”
“I see,” said Tristran.
The path they were walking became harder to discern. A cold breeze ruffled Tristran’s hair, and he shivered. The path led them into a grey wood of thin, pale birch trees.
“Do you think it will be far?” asked Tristran. “To the star?”
“How many miles to Babylon?” said the little man rhetorically. “This wood wasn’t here, last time I was by this way,” he added.
“How Many Miles to Babylon,” recited Tristran, to himself, as they walked through the grey wood.
“Three score miles and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again.
Yes, if your feet are nimble and light,
You can get there by candlelight.”
“That’s the one,” said the little hairy man, his head questing from side to side as if he were preoccupied, or a little nervous.
“It’s only a nursery rhyme,” said Tristran.
“Only a nursery . . . ? Bless me, there’s some on this side of the wall would give seven years’ hard toil for that little cantrip. And back where you come from you mutter ’em to babes alongside of a ‘Rock-a-Bye-Baby’ or a ‘Rub-a-Dub-Dub,’ without a second thought Are you chilled, lad?”
“Now that you mention it, I am a bit cold, yes.”
“Look around you. Can you see a path?” Tristran blinked. The grey wood soaked up light and color and distance. He had thought they were following a path, but now that he tried to see the path, it shimmered, and vanished, like an optical illusion. He had taken that tree, and that tree, and that rock as markers of the path . . . but there was no path, only the mirk, and the twilight, and the pale trees. “Now we’re for it,” said the hairy man, in a small voice.
“Should we run?” Tristran removed his bowler hat, and held it in front of him.
The little man shook his head. “Not much point,” he said. “We’ve walked into the trap, and we’ll still be in it even if we runs.”
He walked over to the nearest tree, a tall, pale, birchlike tree trunk, and kicked it, hard. Some dry leaves fell, and then something white tumbled from the branches to the earth with a dry, whispering sound.
Tristran walked over to it and looked down; it was the skeleton of a bird, clean and white and dry.
The little man shivered. “I could castle,” he told Tristran, “but there’s no one I could castle with’d be any better off here than we are.... There’s no escape by flying, not judgin’ by that thing.” He nudged the skeleton with one pawlike foot. “And your sort of people never could learn to burrow—not that that’d do us much good....”
“Perhaps we could arm ourselves,” said Tristran.
“Arm ourselves?”
“Before they come.”
“Before they come? Why—they’re here, you puddenhead. It’s the trees themselves.We’re in a serewood.”
“Serewood?”
“It’s me own fault—I should’ve been paying more attention to where we was goin’. Now you’ll never get your star, and I’ll never get my merchandise. One day some other poor bugger lost in the wood’ll find our skellingtons picked clean as whistles and that’ll be that.”
Tristran stared about him. In the gloom it seemed that the trees were crowding about more thickly, although he had seen nothing actually move. He wondered if the little man were being foolish, or imagining things.
Something stung his left hand. He slap
ped at it, expecting to see an insect. He looked down to see a pale yellow leaf. It fell to the ground with a rustle. On the back of his hand, a veining of red, wet blood welled up. The wood whispered about them.
“Is there anything we can do?”Tristran asked.
“Nothing I can think of. If only we knew where the true path was . . . even a serewood couldn’t destroy the true path. Just hide it from us, lure us off of it....” The little man shrugged, and sighed.
Tristran reached his hand up and rubbed his forehead.
“I . . . I do know where the path is,” he said. He pointed. “It’s down that way.”
The little man’s bead-black eyes glittered. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, sir. Through that copse and up a little way to the right. That’s where the path is.”
“How do you know?” asked the man.
“I know,” replied Tristran.
“Right. Come on!” And the little man took his burden and ran, slowly enough that Tristran, his leather bag swinging and banging against his legs, his heart pounding, his breath coming in gasps, was able to keep up.
“No! Not that way. Over to the left!” shouted Tristran. Branches and thorns ripped and tore at his clothes. They ran on in silence.
The trees seemed to have arranged themselves into a wall. Leaves fell around them in flurries, stinging and smarting when they touched Tristran’s skin, cutting and slicing at his clothes. He clambered up the hill, swiping at the leaves with his free hand, swatting at the twigs and branches with his bag.
The silence was broken by something wailing. It was the little hairy man. He had stopped dead where he stood, and, his head thrown back, had begun to howl at the sky.
“Buck up,” said Tristran. “We’re nearly there.” He grasped the little hairy man’s free hand in his own larger hand and pulled him forward.
And then they were standing on the true path: a swath of green sward running through the grey wood. “Are we safe here?” asked Tristran, panting, and looking about apprehensively.