by Neil Gaiman
“Why?”
She seemed as if she were about to answer, and then she shook her head, and her lips closed, and she said nothing at all. A stream rilled and splashed to their right, keeping pace with them. The noonday sun was overhead, and Tristran found himself getting increasingly hungry. He took the heel of the dry loaf from his bag, moistened it in the stream, and shared it out, half and half.
The star inspected the wet bread with disdain and did not put it in her mouth.
“You’ll starve,” warned Tristran.
She said nothing, just raised her chin a little higher. They continued through the woodland, making slow progress. They were laboring up a deer path on the side of a hill, which led them over fallen trees, and which had now become so steep it threatened to tumble the stumbling star and her captor down to the bottom. “Is there not an easier path?” asked the star, at length. “Some kind of road, or a level clearing?”
And once the question was asked, Tristran knew the answer. “There is a road half a mile that way,” he told her, pointing, “and a clearing over there, beyond that thicket,” he said, turning to motion in another direction.
“You knew that?”
“Yes. No. Well, I only knew it once you asked me.”
“Let us make for the clearing,” she said, and they pushed through the thicket as best they could. It still took them the better part of an hour to reach the clearing, but the ground, when they got there, was as level and flat as a playing field. The space seemed to have been cleared with a purpose, but what that purpose was Tristran could not imagine.
In the center of the glade, on the grass some distance from them, was an ornate golden crown, which glittered in the afternoon sunlight. It was studded with red and blue stones: rubies and sapphires, thought Tristran. He was about to walk over to the crown when the star touched his arm and said, “Wait. Do you hear drums?”
He realized that he did: a low, throbbing beat, coming from all around them, near at hand and far away, which echoed through the hills. And then there came a loud crashing noise from the trees at the far side of the clearing, and a high, wordless screaming. Into the glade came a huge white horse, its flanks gashed and bloody. It charged into the middle of the clearing, and then it turned, and lowered its head, and faced its pursuer—which bounded into the clearing with a growl that made Tristran’s flesh prickle. It was a lion, but it looked little enough like the lion Tristran had seen at a fair in the next village, which had been a mangy, toothless, rheumy thing. This lion was huge, the color of sand in the late afternoon. It entered the clearing at a run, and then it stopped and snarled at the white horse.
The horse looked terrified. Its mane was matted with sweat and blood, and its eyes were wild. Also, Tristran realized, it had a long, ivory horn jutting from the center of its forehead. It reared up on its hind legs, whinnying and snorting, and one sharp, unshod hoof connected with the lion’s shoulder, causing the lion to howl like a huge, scalded cat, and to spring backwards. Then, keeping its distance, the lion circled the wary unicorn, its golden eyes at all times fixed upon the sharp horn that was always turned toward it.
“Stop them,” whispered the star. “They will kill each other.”
The lion growled at the unicorn. It began as a soft growl, like distant thunder, and finished as a roar that shook the trees and the rocks of the valley and the sky. Then the lion sprang and the unicorn plunged, and the glade was filled with gold and silver and red, for the lion was on the unicorn’s back, claws gashing deeply into its flanks, mouth at its neck, and the unicorn was wailing and bucking and throwing itself onto its back in an effort to dislodge the great cat, flailing uselessly with its hooves and its horn in an effort to reach its tormentor.
“Please, do something.The lion will kill him,” pleaded the girl, urgently.
Tristran would have explained to her that all he could possibly hope for if he approached the raging beasts was to be skewered, and kicked, and clawed, and eaten; and he would further have explained that, should he somehow survive approaching them, there was still nothing that he could do, having with him not even the pail of water which had been the traditional method of breaking up animal fights in Wall. But by the time all these thoughts had gone through his head, Tristran was already standing in the center of the clearing, an arm’s length from the beasts. The scent of the lion was deep, animal, terrifying, and Tristran was close enough to see the beseeching expression in the unicorn’s black eyes
The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown, thought Tristran to himself, remembering the old nursery rhyme.
The Lion beat the Unicorn all about the town.
He beat him once
He beat him twice
With all his might and main
He beat him three times over
His power to maintain
And with that, he picked up the crown from the grass; it was as heavy and as soft as lead. He walked toward the animals, talking to the lion as he had talked to the ill-tempered rams and agitated ewes in his father’s fields, saying “Here, now . . . Easy . . . Here’s your crown . . .”
The lion shook the unicorn in its jaws, like a cat worrying a woolen scarf, and darted a look of pure puzzlement at Tristran.
“Hullo,” said Tristran. There were burrs and leaves in the lion’s mane. He held the heavy crown out toward the great beast. “You won. Let the unicorn go.”
And he took a step closer. Then he reached out both trembling hands and placed the crown upon the lion’s head.
The lion clambered off the prone body of the unicorn and began to pad, silently, about the clearing, its head raised high. It reached the edge of the wood, where it paused for several minutes to lick its wounds with its red, red tongue, and then, purring like an earthquake, the lion slipped away into the forest.
The star hobbled over to the injured unicorn and lowered herself to the grass, awkwardly, her broken leg splayed out by her side. She stroked its head. “Poor, poor creature,” she said. It opened its dark eyes and stared at her, and then it laid its head upon her lap, and it closed its eyes once more.
That evening, Tristran ate the last of the hard bread for his supper, and the star ate nothing at all. She had insisted they wait beside the unicorn, and Tristran had not the heart to refuse her.
The clearing was dark, now. The sky above them was filled with the twinkling of a thousand stars. The star-woman glittered too, as if she had been brushed by the Milky Way, while the unicorn glowed gently in the darkness, like a moon seen through clouds. Tristran lay beside the huge bulk of the unicorn, feeling its warmth radiating out into the night. The star was lying on the other side of the beast. It sounded almost as if she were murmuring a song to the unicorn;Tristran wished that he could hear her properly. The fragments of melody he could make out were strange and tantalizing, but she sang so quietly he could hear next to nothing at all.
His fingers touched the chain that bound them: cold as snow it was, and tenuous as moonlight on a millpond or the glint of light on a trout’s silver scales as it rises at dusk to feed.
And soon he slept.
The witch-queen drove her chariot down a forest path, lashing the flanks of the twin white billy goats with a whip when they flagged. She had observed the small cooking fire burning beside the path from almost half a mile back, and she knew from the color of the flames that it was the fire of one of her people, for witch-fires burn with certain unusual hues. So she reined in her goats when she reached the brightly painted gypsy caravan, and the cooking fire, and the iron-haired old woman who sat beside the fire, tending to the spit over the flames on which a hare was roasting. Fat dripped from the hare’s open gut, hissing and sizzling in the fire, which gave off the twin aromas of cooking meat and of wood smoke.
A multicolored bird sat by the driver’s seat at the front of the caravan, on a wooden perch. It raised its feathers and called out in alarm when it saw the witch-queen, but it was chained to its perch and could not leave.
“Before you says anything,” said the grey-haired woman, “I should tell ye that I’m just a poor old flower-seller, a harmless old biddy who’s never done nothing to no one, and that the sight of a grand and terrifying lady such as yourself fills me with dread and fear.”
“I will not harm you,” said the witch-queen.
The harridan screwed her eyes to slits and looked the lady in the red kirtle up and down. “That’s what you says,” she said. “But how am I to know that it’s so, a sweet old dear like me, who’s all a-tremble from her toes to her water? You might be planning to rob me in the night, or worse.” And she poked the fire with a stick, so it leapt up. The smell of the cooked meat hung on the still evening air.
“I swear,” said the lady in the scarlet kirtle, “that, by the rules and constraints of the Sisterhood to which you and I belong, by the puissance of the Lilim, and by my lips and breasts and maidenhood, that I mean you no harm and shall treat you as if you were my own guest.”
“That’s good enough for me, dearie-ducks,” said the old woman, her face breaking into a smile. “Come and sit down. Supper’ll be cooked in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
“With good will,” said the lady in the red kirtle.
The goats snuffled and munched at the grass and the leaves beside the chariot, eyeing with distaste the tethered mules that pulled the caravan. “Fine goats,” said the harridan. The witch-queen inclined her head and smiled modestly.The firelight glinted on the little scarlet snake wrapped as a bracelet about her wrist.
The harridan went on, “Now, my dear, my old eyes aren’t what once they were by any means, but would I be correct in supposing that one of those fine fellows started life walking on two legs, not four?”
“Such things have been heard of,” admitted the witch-queen. “That splendid bird of yours, for example.”
“That bird gave away one of the prizes of my stock of items for sale, gave it away to a good-for-nothing, nearly twenty years ago. And afterward, the trouble she put me through scarcely bears considering. So these days, she stays a bird, unless there’s work that needs doing, or the flower-stall to run; and if I could find a good strong servant, not afraid of a little hard work, why then she would stay a bird forever.”
The bird chirruped sadly upon her perch.
“They call me Mistress Semele,” said the harridan.
They called you Ditchwater Sal, when you were a young chit of a thing, thought the witch-queen, but she did not say this aloud. “You may call me Morwanneg,” said the witch instead. It was, she reflected, almost a joke (for Morwanneg means wave of the sea, and her true name was long since drowned and lost beneath the cold ocean).
Mistress Semele got to her feet and made her way into the interior of the caravan, emerging with two painted wooden bowls, two wooden-handled knives, and a small pot of herbs, dried and flaked to a green powder. “I was going to be eating with fingers on a plate of fresh leaves,” she said, handing a bowl to the lady in the scarlet kirtle.The bowl had a sunflower painted upon it, under a layer of dust. “But I thought, well, how often does I get such fine company? So nothing but the best. Heads or tails?”
“Let it be your choice,” said her guest.
“Head, then, for you, with the luscious eyes and brains, and the crispy-crunchy ears of him. And I’ll have the rump, with nothing but dull meat to nibble.” She lifted the spit off the fire as she spoke, and, using both knives so fast they seemed little more than a glitter of blades, she parted the carcass and sliced the meat from the bones, and dealt it out, fairly equitably, into each bowl. She passed the pot of herbs to her guest. “There’s no salt, my dear, but if you shake this on, it will do the trick. A little basil, a little mountain thyme—my own receipt.”
The witch-queen took her portion of roasted hare, and one of the knives, and sprinkled a little of the herbs onto the dish. She speared a bite on the point of the knife and ate it with relish, while her hostess toyed with her own portion, then blew on it fastidiously, steam coming from the crisp brown meat.
“How is it?” asked the old woman.
“Perfectly palatable,” said her guest, honestly.
“It is the herbs make it so fine,” explained the harridan.
“I can taste the basil and the thyme,” said the guest, “but there is another taste I find harder to place.”
“Ah,” said Madame Semele, and she nibbled a sliver of the meat.
“It is certainly a most uncommon taste.”
“That it is. It’s a herb that grows only in Garamond, on an island in the midst of a wide lake. It is most pleasant with all manner of meats and fishes, and it reminds me in flavor a little of the leaves of fennel, with but a hint of nutmeg. The flowers of it are a most attractive shade of orange. It is good for wind and the ague, and it is, in addition, a gentle soporific, which has the curious property of causing one who tastes of it to speak nothing but the truth for several hours.”
The lady in the scarlet kirtle dropped her wooden bowl onto the ground. “Limbus grass?” she said. “You dared to feed me limbus grass.”
“That’s how it would seem, dearie,” and the old woman cackled and hooted with delight. “So, tell me now, Mistress Morwanneg, if that’s your name, where are you a-going-of, in your fine chariot? And why do you remind me so of someone I knew once . . . ? And Madame Semele forgets nothing and no one.”
“I am on my way to find a star,” said the witch-queen, “which fell in the great woods on the other side of Mount Belly. And when I find her, I shall take my great knife and cut out her heart, while she lives, and while her heart is her own. For the heart of a living star is a sovereign remedy against all the snares of age and time. My sisters wait for me to return.”
Madame Semele hooted and hugged herself, swaying back and forth, bony fingers clutching her sides. “The heart of a star, is it? Hee! Hee! Such a prize it will make for me. I shall taste enough of it that my youth will come back, and my hair turn from grey to golden, and my dugs swell and soften and become firm and high. Then I shall take all the heart that’s left to the Great Market at Wall. Hee!”
“You shall not do this thing,” said her guest, very quietly.
“No? You are my guest, my dear. You swore your oath. You’ve tasted of my food. According to the laws of our sisterhood, there is nothing you can do to harm me.”
“Oh, there are so many things I could do to harm you, Ditchwater Sal, but I shall simply point out that one who has eaten limbus grass can speak nothing but the truth for several hours afterward; and one more thing . . .” Distant lightning flickered in her words as she spoke, and the forest was hushed, as if every leaf and every tree were listening intently to what she said. “This I say: you have stolen knowledge you did not earn, but it shall not profit you. For you shall be unable to see the star, unable to perceive it, unable to touch it, to taste it, to find it, to kill it. Even if another were to cut out its heart and give it to you, you would not know it, never know what you had in your hand. This I say. These are my words, and they are a true-speaking. And know this also: I swore, by the compact of the Sisterhood, that I would do you no harm. Had I not so sworn I would change you into a black-beetle, and I would pull your legs off, one by one, and leave you for the birds to find, for putting me to this indignity.”
Madame Semele’s eyes opened wide with fright, and she stared over the flames of the fire at her guest. “Who are you?” she said.
“When you knew me last,” said the woman in the scarlet kirtle, “I ruled with my sisters in Carnadine, before it was lost.”
“You? But you are dead, long dead.”
“They have said that the Lilim were dead before now, but they have always lied. The squirrel has not yet found the acorn that will grow into the oak that will be cut to form the cradle of the babe who will grow to slay me.” Silver flashes glittered and flared in the flames as she spoke.
“So it is you. And you have your youth back.” Madame Semele sighed. “And now I, too, shall be young again.”<
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The lady in the scarlet kirtle stood up then and placed the bowl which had contained her portion of hare into the fire. “You shall be nothing of the kind,” she said. “Did you not hear me? A moment after I leave, you shall forget that ever you saw me. You shall forget all of this, even my curse, although the knowledge of it shall vex and irritate you, like an itch in a limb long since amputated. And may you treat your guests with more grace and respect in the future.”
The wooden bowl burst into flames then, a huge gout of flame which singed the leaves of the oak tree far above them. Madame Semele knocked the blackened bowl from the fire with a stick, and she stamped it out in the long grass. “Whatever could have possessed me to drop the bowl into the fire?” she exclaimed aloud. “And look, one of my nice knives, all burned up and ruined.Whatever was I a-thinking of?”
There came no answer. From further down the road came the drumming beats of something that might have been the hooves of goats, racing on into the night. Madame Semele shook her head, as if to clear it of dust and cobwebs. “I’m getting old,” she said to the multicolored bird who sat on its perch by the driver’s seat, and who had observed everything and forgotten nothing. “Getting old. And there’s no doing anything about that.” The bird shifted uncomfortably on the perch.
A red squirrel quested, hesitating a little, into the firelight. It picked up an acorn, held it for a moment in its handlike front paws, as if it were praying. Then it ran away—to bury
the acorn, and to forget it.
Scaithe’s Ebb is a small seaport town built on granite, a town of chandlers and carpenters and sailmakers; of old sailors with missing fingers and limbs who have opened their own grog houses or spend their days in them, what is left of their hair still tarred into long queues, though the stubble on their chins has long since dusted to white. There are no whores in Scaithe’s Ebb, or none that consider themselves as such, although there have always been many women who, if pressed, would describe themselves as much-married, with one husband on this ship here every six months, and another husband on that ship, back in port for a month or so every nine months.