by Neil Gaiman
The mathematics of the thing have always kept most folk satisfied; and if ever it disappoints and a man returns to his wife while one of her other husbands is still in occupancy, why, then there is a fight—and the grog shops to comfort the loser. The sailors do not mind the arrangement, for they know that this way there will, at the least, be one person who, at the last, will notice when they do not come back from the sea, and will mourn their loss; and their wives content themselves with the certain knowledge that their husbands are also unfaithful, for there is no competing with the sea in a man’s affections, since she is both mother and mistress, and she will wash his corpse also, in time to come, wash it to coral and ivory and pearls.
So it was to Scaithe’s Ebb that Lord Primus of Stormhold came one night, all dressed in black with a beard as thick and serious as one of the storks’ nests in the town’s chimneys. He came in a carriage drawn by four black horses and he took a room in the Seaman’s Rest on Crook Street.
He was considered most peculiar in his needs and requests, for he brought his own food and drink into his rooms, and kept it locked in a wooden chest, which he would only open to take himself an apple, or a wedge of cheese, or a cup of pepper-wine. His was the topmost room in the Seaman’s Rest, a high and spindly building built on a rocky outcrop to facilitate smuggling.
He bribed a number of the local street urchins to report to him the moment they saw any fellow they did not know come to town, by land or sea; in particular, they were to look for a very tall, angular, dark-haired fellow, with a thin hungry face and blank eyes.
“Primus is certainly learning caution,” said Secundus to his four other dead brothers.
“Well, you know what they say,” whispered Quintus, in the wistful tones of the dead, which sounded, on that day, like the lapping of distant waves upon the shingle, “a man who is tired of looking over his shoulder for Septimus is tired of life.”
In the mornings, Primus would talk to the sea captains with ships in Scaithe’s Ebb, buying them grog liberally, but neither drinking nor eating with them. In the afternoon he would inspect the ships in the docks.
Soon the gossips of Scaithe’s Ebb (and there were many) had the gist and juice of it all: the bearded gentleman was to be taking ship to the East. And this tale was soon chased by another, that he would be sailing out on the Heart of a Dream under Captain Yann, a black-trimmed ship with its decks painted crimson red, of more or less savory reputation (by which I mean that it was generally held that she kept her piracies for distant waters) and this would be happening as soon as he gave the word.
“Good master!” said a street urchin to Lord Primus. “There’s a man in town, come by land. He lodges with Mistress Pettier. He is thin and crowlike, and I saw him in the Ocean’s Roar, buying grog for every man in the room. He says he is a distressed seafaring man, seeking a berth.”
Primus patted the boy’s filthy head and handed him a coin.Then he returned to his preparations, and that afternoon it was announced that the Heart of a Dream would leave harbor in three short days.
The day before the Heart of a Dream was to set sail, Primus was seen to sell his coach and four horses to the stableman on Wardle Street, after which he walked down to the quay, dispensing small coins to the urchins. He entered his cabin in the Heart of a Dream and gave strict orders that none was to disturb him, for any reason, good or bad, until they were at least a week out of port.
That evening an unfortunate accident befell an able seaman who had crewed the rigging on the Heart of a Dream. He fell, when drunk, on the slippery cobblestones of Revenue Street, and broke his hip. Luckily there was a replacement at the ready: the very sailor with whom he had been drinking that evening, and to whom the injured man had been persuaded to demonstrate a particularly complicated hornpipe step on the wet cobbles. And this sailor, tall, dark and crow-like, marked his ship’s papers with a circle that night and was on deck at dawn when the ship sailed out of the harbor in the morning mist. The Heart of a Dream sailed east.
Lord Primus of Stormhold, his beard freshly shaven, watched it sail from the cliff top until it was lost to view. Then he walked down to Wardle Street, where he returned the stableman’s money and something more besides, and he rode off on the coast road toward the west in a dark coach pulled by four black horses.
It was an obvious solution. After all, the unicorn had been ambling hugely behind them for most of the morning, occasionally nudging the star’s shoulder with its big forehead. The wounds on its dappled flanks, which had blossomed like red flowers under the lion’s claws the day before, were now dried to brown and scabbed over.
The star limped and hobbled and stumbled, and Tristran walked beside her, cold chain binding wrist to wrist.
On the one hand,Tristran felt there was something almost sacrilegious about the idea of riding the unicorn: it was not a horse, did not subscribe to any of the ancient pacts between Man and Horse. There was a wildness in its black eyes and a twisting spring to its step which was dangerous and untamed. On the other hand, Tristran had begun to feel, in a way that he could not articulate, that the unicorn cared about the star and wished to help her. So he said, “Look, I know all that stuff about frustrating my plans every step of the way, but if the unicorn is willing, perhaps it would carry you on its back for a little way.”
The star said nothing. “Well?”
She shrugged.
Tristran turned to the unicorn, stared into its pool-black eyes. “Can you understand me?” he asked. It said nothing. He had hoped it would nod its head or stamp a hoof, like a trained horse he had once seen on the village green when he was younger. But it simply stared. “Will you carry the lady? Please?”
The beast said not a word, nor did it nod or stamp. But it walked to the star, and it knelt down at her feet.
Tristran helped the star onto the unicorn’s back. She grasped its tangled mane with both hands and sat sidesaddle upon it, her broken leg sticking out. And that was how they traveled for some hours.
Tristran walked along beside them, carrying her crutch over his shoulder, with his bag dangling from the end. He found it as hard to travel with the star riding the unicorn as it had been before. Then he had been forced to walk slowly, trying to keep pace with the star’s limping hobble—now he was hurrying to keep up with the unicorn, nervous lest the unicorn should get too far ahead and the chain that linked them both should pull the star from the beast’s back. His stomach rumbled as he walked. He was painfully aware how hungry he was; soon Tristran began to think of himself as nothing more than hunger, thinly surrounded by flesh, and, as fast as he could, walking, walking...
He stumbled and knew that he was going to fall.
“Please, stop,” he gasped.
The unicorn slowed, and stopped. The star looked down at him. Then she made a face and shook her head. “You had better come up here, too,” she said. “If the unicorn will let you. Otherwise you’ll just faint or something, and drag me onto the ground with you. And we need to go somewhere so that you can get food.”
Tristran nodded gratefully.
The unicorn appeared to offer no opposition, waiting, passively, so Tristran attempted to clamber up onto it. It was like climbing a sheer wall, and as fruitless. Eventually Tristran led the animal over to a beech tree that had been uprooted several years before by a storm, or a high wind, or an irritable giant, and, holding his bag and the star’s crutch, he scrambled up the roots onto the trunk, and from there onto the back of the unicorn.
“There is a village on the other side of that hill,” said Tristran. “I expect that we can find something to eat when we get there.” He patted the unicorn’s flanks with his free hand.The beast began to walk. Tristran moved his hand to the star’s waist, to steady himself. He could feel the silken texture of her thin dress, and beneath that, the thick chain of the topaz about her waist.
Riding a unicorn was not like riding a horse: it did not move like a horse; it was a wilder ride, and a stranger one. The unicorn waited unt
il Tristran and the star were comfortable upon its back, and then, slowly and easily, it began to put on speed.
The trees surged and leapt past them.The star leaned forward, her fingers tangled into the unicorn’s mane;Tristran—his hunger forgotten in his fear—gripped the sides of the unicorn with his knees and simply prayed that he would not be knocked to the ground by a stray branch. Soon he found he was beginning to enjoy the experience. There is something about riding a unicorn, for those people who still can, which is unlike any other experience: exhilarating and intoxicating and fine.
The sun was setting when they reached the outskirts of the village. In a rolling meadow, beneath an oak tree, the unicorn came to a skittish halt and would go no further. Tristran dismounted, and landed with a bump on the grass of the meadow. His rump felt sore, but, with the star looking down at him, uncomplaining, he dared not rub it.
“Are you hungry?” he asked the star.
She said nothing.
“Look,” he said, “I’m starving. Perfectly famished. I don’t know if you—if stars—eat, or what they eat. But I won’t have you starving yourself.” He looked up at her, questioning. She stared down at him, first impassively, then, in a trice, her blue eyes filled with tears. She raised a hand to her face and wiped away the tears, leaving a smudge of mud on her cheeks.
“We eat only darkness,” she said, “and we drink only light. So I’m nuh-not hungry. I’m lonely and scared and cold and muh-miserable and cuh-captured but I’m nuh-not hungry.”
“Don’t cry,” said Tristran. “Look, I’ll go into the village and get some food. You just wait here. The unicorn will protect you, if anyone comes.” He reached up and gently lifted her down from the unicorn’s back. The unicorn shook its mane, then began to crop the grass of the meadow contentedly.
The star sniffed, “Wait here?” she asked, holding up the chain that joined them.
“Oh,” said Tristran. “Give me your hand.”
She reached her hand out to him. He fumbled with the chain to undo it, but it would not undo. “Hmm,” said Tristran. He tugged at the chain around his own wrist, but it, too, held fast. “It looks,” he said, “as if I’m as tied to you as you are to me.”
The star threw her hair back, closed her eyes, and sighed deeply. And then, opening her eyes, once again self-possessed, she said, “Perhaps there’s a magic word or something.”
“I don’t know any magic words,” said Tristran. He held the chain up. It glittered red and purple in the light of the setting sun. “Please?” he said. There was a ripple in the fabric of the chain, and he slid his hand out of it.
“Here you go,” he said, passing the star the other end of the chain that had bound her. “I’ll try not to be too long. And if any of the fair folk sing their silly songs at you, for heaven’s sake, don’t throw your crutch at them. They’ll only steal it.”
“I won’t,” she said.
“I’ll have to trust you, on your honor as a star, not to run away,” he said.
She touched her splinted leg. “I will do no running for quite some time,” she said, pointedly. And with that Tristran had to content himself.
He walked the last half a mile into the village. It had no inn, being far off the beaten track for travelers, but the portly old woman who explained this to him then insisted he accompany her to her cottage, where she pressed upon him a wooden bowlful of barley porridge with carrots in it, and a mug of small beer. He exchanged his cambric handkerchief for a bottle of elderflower cordial, a round of green cheese and a number of unfamiliar fruits: they were soft and fuzzy, like apricots, but were the purple-blue of grapes, and they smelled a little like ripe pears; also the woman gave him a small bale of hay, for the unicorn.
He walked back to the meadow where he had left them, munching on a piece of the fruit, which was juicy, and chewy and quite sweet. He wondered if the star would like to try one, whether she would like it if she did. He hoped that she would be pleased with what he had brought her.
At first, Tristran thought that he must have made a mistake, and that he had lost his way in the moonlight. No: that was the same oak tree, the one beneath which the star had been sitting.
“Hello?” he called. Glow-worms and fireflies glittered green and yellow in the hedgerows and in the branches of trees.There came no reply, and Tristran felt a sick, stupid feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Hello?” he called. He stopped calling, then, because there was no one to answer.
He dropped the bale of hay, and then he kicked it.
She was to the southwest of him, moving faster than he could walk. He followed after her in the bright moonlight. Inside, he felt numbed and foolish, stung by a pang of guilt and shame and regret. He should not have loosed her chain, he should have tied it to a tree; he should have forced the star to go with him into the village. This went through his head as he walked; but another voice spoke to him also, pointing out that if he had not unchained her then, he would have done it sometime soon, and she would have run from him then.
He wondered if he would ever see the star again, and he stumbled over roots as the way led him between old trees into the deep woods. The moonlight slowly vanished beneath the thick canopy of leaves, and after stumbling vainly in the dark for a short while, he laid himself down beneath a tree, rested his head on his bag, and closed his eyes, and felt sorry for himself until he fell asleep.
* * *
On a rocky mountain pass, on the southernmost slopes of Mount Belly, the witch-queen reined in her goat-drawn chariot and stopped and sniffed the chilly air.
The myriad stars hung cold in the sky above her.
Her red, red lips curved up into a smile of such beauty, such brilliance, such pure and perfect happiness that it would have frozen your blood in your veins to have seen it. “There,” she said. “She is coming to me.”
And the wind of the mountain pass howled about her triumphantly, as if in answer.
Primus sat beside the embers of his fire and he shivered beneath his thick black robe. One of the black stallions, waking or dreaming, whinnied and snorted, and then rested once more. Primus’s face felt strangely cold; he missed his thick beard. With a stick he pushed a clay ball from the embers. He spat on his hands, then he split open the hot clay and smelled the sweet flesh of the hedgehog, which had cooked, slowly, in the embers, as he had slept.
He ate his breakfast meticulously, spitting the tiny bones into the fire circle once he had chewed the meat from them. He washed the hedgehog down with a lump of hard cheese and a slightly vinegary white wine.
Once he had eaten, he wiped his hands upon his robe and then he cast the runes to find the topaz stone which conferred the lordship of the crag towns and the vast estates of the Stormhold. He cast them, then he stared, puzzled, at the small, square, red granite tiles. He picked them up once more, shook them in his long-fingered hands, dropped them onto the ground and stared at them again. Then Primus spat into the embers, which hissed lazily. He swept the tiles up and dropped them into the pouch at his belt.
“It is moving faster, further,” said Primus to himself.
He pissed on the embers of the fire, for he was in wild country, and there were bandits and hobgoblins and worse in those lands, and he had no desire to alert them to his presence. Then, he hitched the horses to the carriage and climbed into the driver’s seat and drove them toward the forest, to the west, and to the mountain range beyond.
The girl held tight to the unicorn’s neck as it tumbled headlong through the dark forest.
There was no moonlight between the trees, but the unicorn glimmered and shone with pale light, like the moon, while the girl herself glittered and glowed as if she trailed a dust of lights. And, as she passed through the trees, it might have appeared to a distant observer that she seemed to twinkle, on and off and off and on, like a tiny star.
Chapter Six
What the Tree Said
Tristran Thorn was dreaming.
He was in an apple tree, staring through a wind
ow at Victoria Forester, who was getting undressed. As she removed her dress, revealing a healthy expanse of petticoat, Tristran felt the branch begin to give way beneath his feet, and then he was tumbling down through the air in the moonlight . . .
He was falling into the moon.
And the moon was talking to him: Please, whispered the moon, in a voice that reminded him a little of his mother’s, protect her. Protect my child. They mean her harm. I have done all I can. And the moon would have told him more, and perhaps she did, but the moon became the glimmer of moonlight on water far below him, and then he became aware of a small spider walking across his face, and of a crick in his neck, and he raised a hand and brushed the spider carefully from his cheek, and the morning sun was in his eyes and the world was gold and green.
“You were dreaming,” said a young woman’s voice from somewhere above him. The voice was gentle and oddly accented. He could hear leaves rustle in the copper beech tree overhead.
“Yes,” he said, to whoever was in the tree, “I was dreaming.”
“I had a dream last night, too,” said the voice. “In my dream, I looked up and I could see the whole forest, and something huge was moving through it. And it got closer, and closer, and I knew what it was.” She stopped talking abruptly.
“What was it?” asked Tristran.
“Everything,” she said. “It was Pan. When I was very young, somebody—maybe it was a squirrel, they talk so much, or a magpie, or maybe a fishie—told me that Pan owned all this forest. Well, not owned owned. Not like he would sell the forest to someone else, or put a wall all around it—”
“Or cut down the trees,” said Tristran, helpfully. There was a silence. He wondered where the girl had gone. “Hello?” he said. “Hello?”