by Neil Gaiman
And she took an awkward step.
They left the inn behind them, the howls of the witch-queen ringing in their ears.
They were underground, and the candlelight flickered from the wet cave walls; and with their next halting step they were in a desert of white sand, in the moonlight; and with their third step they were high above the earth, looking down on the hills and trees and rivers far below them.
And it was then that the last of the wax ran molten over Tristran’s hand, and the burning became impossible for him to bear, and the last of the flame burned out forever.
Chapter Eight
Which Treats of Castles in the Air, and Other Matters
It was dawn in the mountains. The storms of the last few days had passed on and the air was clean and cold.
Lord Septimus of Stormhold, tall and crowlike, walked up the mountain pass, looking about him as he walked as if he were seeking something he had lost. He was leading a brown mountain pony, shaggy and small.Where the pass grew wider he stopped, as if he had found what he was looking for beside the trail. It was a small, battered chariot, little more than a goat-cart, which had been tipped onto its side. Nearby it lay two bodies. The first was that of a white billy goat, its head stained red with blood. Septimus prodded the dead goat experimentally with his foot, moving its head; it had received a deep and fatal wound to its forehead, equidistant between its horns. Next to the goat was the body of a young man, his face as dull in death as it must have been in life.There were no wounds to show how he had died, nothing but a leaden bruise upon his temple.
Several yards away from these bodies, half-hidden beside a rock, Septimus came upon the corpse of a man in his middle years, facedown, dressed in dark clothes. The man’s flesh was pale, and his blood had pooled upon the rocky floor below him. Septimus crouched down beside the body and, gingerly, lifted its head by the hair; its throat had been cut, expertly, slit from one ear to the other. Septimus stared at the corpse in puzzlement. He knew it, yet . . .
And then, in a dry, hacking cough of a noise, he began to laugh. “Your beard,” he told the corpse aloud. “You cut your beard. As if I would not have known you with your beard gone, Primus.”
Primus, who stood, grey and ghostly, beside his other brothers, said, “You would have known me, Septimus. But it might have bought me a few moments, wherein I might have seen you before you knew me,” and his dead voice was nothing but the morning breeze rattling the thorn bush.
Septimus stood up. The sun began to rise, then, over the easternmost peak of Mount Belly, framing him in light. “So I am to be the eighty-second Lord of the Stormhold,” he said to the corpse on the ground, and to himself, “not to mention the Master of the High Crags, Seneschal of the Spire-Towns, Keeper of the Citadel, Lord High Guardian of Mount Huon and all the rest of it.”
“Not without the Power of Stormhold about your neck you’re not, my brother,” said Quintus, tartly.
“And then there’s the matter of revenge,” said Secundus, in the voice of the wind howling through the pass. “You must take revenge upon your brother’s killer before anything else, now. It’s blood-law.”
As if he had heard them, Septimus shook his head. “Why could you not have waited just a few more days, brother Primus?” he asked the corpse at his feet. “I would have killed you myself. I had a fine plan for your death. When I discovered you were no longer on the Heart of a Dream, it took me little enough time to steal the ship’s boat and get on your trail. And now I must revenge your sad carcass, and all for the honor of our blood and the Stormhold.”
“So Septimus will be the eighty-second Lord of Stormhold,” said Tertius.
“There is a proverbial saying chiefly concerned with warning against too closely calculating the numerical value of unhatched chicks,” pointed out Quintus.
Septimus walked away from the body to piss against a grey boulder. Then he walked back to Primus’s corpse. “If I had killed you, I could leave you here to rot,” he said. “But because that pleasure was another’s, I shall carry you with me a little way and leave you on a high crag, to be eaten by eagles.” With that, grunting with the effort, he picked up the sticky-fronted body and hauled it over the back of the pony. He fumbled at the corpse’s belt, removing the bag of rune stones. “Thank you for these, my brother,” he said, and he patted the corpse on the back.
“May you choke on them if you do not take revenge on the bitch who slit my gullet,” said Primus, in the voice of the mountain birds waking to greet the new day.
They sat side by side on a thick, white cumulus cloud the size of a small town. The cloud was soft beneath them, and a little cold. It became colder the deeper into it one sank, and Tristran pushed his burned hand as far as he could down into the fabric of it: it resisted him slightly, but accepted his hand. The interior of the cloud felt spongy and chilly, real and insubstantial at once. The cloud cooled a little of the pain in his hand, allowing him to think more clearly.
“Well,” he said, after some time, “I’m afraid I’ve made rather a mess of everything.”
The star sat on the cloud beside him, wearing the robe she had borrowed from the woman in the inn, with her broken leg stretched out on the thick mist in front of her. “You saved my life,” she said, eventually. “Didn’t you?”
“I suppose I must have done, yes.”
“I hate you,” she said. “I hated you for everything already, but now I hate you most of all.”
Tristran flexed his burned hand in the blessed cool of the cloud. He felt tired and slightly faint. “Any particular reason?”
“Because,” she told him, her voice taut, “now that you have saved my life, you are, by the law of my people, responsible for me, and I for you. Where you go, I must also go.”
“Oh,” he said. “That’s not that bad, is it?”
“I would rather spend my days chained to a vile wolf or a stinking pig or a marsh-goblin,” she told him flatly.
“I’m honestly not that bad,” he told her, “not when you get to know me. Look, I’m sorry about all that chaining you up business. Perhaps we could start all over again, just pretend it never happened. Here now, my name’s Tristran Thorn, pleased to meet you.” He held out his unburned hand to her.
“Mother Moon defend me!” said the star. “I would sooner take the hand of an—”
“I’m sure you would,” said Tristran, not waiting to find out what he was going to be unflatteringly compared to this time. “I’ve said I’m sorry,” he told her. “Let’s start afresh. I’m Tristran Thorn. Pleased to meet you.”
She sighed.
The air was thin and chill so high above the ground, but the sun was warm, and the cloud-shapes about them reminded Tristran of a fantastical city or an unearthly town. Far, far below he could see the real world: the sunlight pricking out every tiny tree, turning every winding river into a thin silver snail-trail glistening and looping across the landscape of Faerie.
“Well?” said Tristran.
“Aye,” said the star. “It is a mighty joke, is it not? Whither thou goest, there I must go. Even if it kills me.” She swirled the surface of the cloud with her hand, rippling the mist. Then, momentarily, she touched her hand to Tristran’s. “My sisters called me Yvaine,” she told him. “For I was an evening star.”
“Look at us,” he said. “A fine pair.You with your broken leg, me with my hand.”
“Show me your hand.” He pulled it from the cool of the cloud: his hand was red, and blisters were coming up on each side of it and on the back of it, where the flames had licked against his flesh.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Quite a lot, really.”
“Good,” said Yvaine.
“If my hand had not been burned, you would probably be dead now,” he pointed out. She had the grace to look down, ashamed. “You know,” he added, changing the subject, “I left my bag in that madwoman’s inn. We have nothing now, save the clothes we stand up in.”
&nb
sp; “Sit down in,” corrected the star.
“There’s no food, no water, we’re half a mile or so above the world with no way of getting down, and no control over where the cloud is going. And both of us are injured. Did I leave anything out?”
“You forgot the bit about clouds dissipating and vanishing into nothing,” said Yvaine. “They do that. I’ve seen them. I could not survive another fall.”
Tristran shrugged. “Well,” he said. “We’re probably doomed, then. But we may as well have a look around while we’re up here.”
He helped Yvaine to her feet, and, awkwardly, the two of them took several faltering steps on the cloud. Then Yvaine sat down again. “This is no use,” she told him. “You go and look around. I will wait here for you.”
“Promise?” he asked. “No running away this time?”
“I swear it. On my mother the moon I swear it,” said Yvaine, sadly. “You saved my life.”
And with that Tristran had to content himself.
Her hair was mostly grey, now, and her face was pouched, and wrinkled at the throat and eyes and at the corners of the mouth. There was no color to her face, although her skirt was a vivid, bloody splash of scarlet; it had been ripped at the shoulder, and beneath the rip could be seen, puckered and obscene, a deep scar. The wind whipped her hair about her face as she drove the black carriage on through the Barrens. The four stallions stumbled often: thick sweat dripped from their flanks and a bloody foam dripped from their lips. Still, their hooves pounded along the muddy path through the Barrens, where nothing grows.
The witch-queen, oldest of the Lilim, reined in the horses beside a pinnacle of rock the color of verdigris, which jutted from the marshy soil of the Barrens like a needle. Then, as slowly as might be expected from any lady no longer in her first, or even her second, youth, she climbed down from the driver’s seat to the wet earth.
She walked around the coach and opened the door. The head of the dead unicorn, her dagger still in its cold eye-socket, flopped down as she did so. The witch clambered up into the coach and pulled open the unicorn’s mouth. Rigor mortis was starting to set in, and the jaw opened only with difficulty. The witch-woman bit down, hard, on her own tongue, bit hard enough that the pain was metal-sharp in her mouth, bit down until she could taste the blood. She swirled it around in her mouth, mixing the blood with spittle (she could feel that several of her front teeth were beginning to come loose), then she spat onto the dead unicorn’s piebald tongue. Blood flecked her lips and chin. She grunted several syllables that shall not be recorded here, then pushed the unicorn’s mouth closed once more. “Get out of the coach,” she told the dead beast.
Stiffly, awkwardly, the unicorn raised its head. Then it moved its legs, like a newborn foal or fawn just learning to walk, and twitched and pushed itself up onto all fours and, half climbing, half falling, it tumbled out of the carriage door and onto the mud, where it raised itself to its feet. Its left side, upon which it had lain in the coach, was swollen and dark with blood and fluids. Half-blind, the dead unicorn stumbled toward the green rock needle until it reached a depression at its base, where it dropped to the knees of its forelegs in a ghastly parody of prayer.
The witch-queen reached down and pulled her knife from out of the beast’s eye-socket. She sliced across its throat. Blood began to ooze, too slowly, from the gash she had made. She walked back to the carriage and returned with her cleaver. Then she began to hack at the unicorn’s neck, until she had separated it from the body, and the severed head tumbled into the rock hollow, now filling with a dark red puddle of brackish blood.
She took the unicorn’s head by the horn and placed it beside the body, on the rock; thereupon she looked with her hard, grey eyes into the red pool she had made. Two faces stared out at her from the puddle: two women, older by far in appearance than she was now.
“Where is she?” asked the first face, peevishly. “What have you done with her?”
“Look at you!” said the second of the Lilim. “You took the last of the youth we had saved—I tore it from the star’s breast myself, long, long ago, though she screamed and writhed and carried on ever-so. From the looks of you, you’ve squandered most of the youth already.”
“I came so close,” said the witch-woman to her sisters in the pool. “But she had a unicorn to protect her. Now I have the unicorn’s head, and I will bring it back with me, for it’s long enough since we had fresh ground unicorn’s horn in our arts.”
“Unicorn’s horn be damned,” said her youngest sister. “What about the star?”
“I cannot find her. It is almost as if she were no longer in Faerie.”
There was a pause.
“No,” said one of her sisters. “She is still in Faerie. But she is going to the Market at Wall, and that is too close to the world on the other side of the wall. Once she goes into that world, she will be lost to us.”
For they each of them knew that, were the star to cross the wall and enter the world of things as they are, she would become, in an instant, no more than a pitted lump of metallic rock that had fallen, once, from the heavens: cold and dead and of no more use to them.
“Then I shall go to Diggory’s Dyke and wait there, for all who go to Wall must pass that way.”
The reflections of the two old women gazed disapprovingly out of the pool. The witch-queen ran her tongue over her teeth (that one at the top will be out by nightfall, she thought, the way it wobbles so) and then she spat into the bloody pool.The ripples spread across it, erasing all traces of the Lilim; now the pool reflected only the sky over the Barrens and the faint white clouds far above them.
She kicked the headless corpse of the unicorn so it tumbled over onto its side.Then she took up its head, and she carried it with her up to the driver’s seat. She placed it beside her, picked up the reins and whipped the restive horses into a tired trot.
Tristran sat at the top of the spire of cloud and wondered why none of the heroes of the penny dreadfuls he used to read so avidly were ever hungry. His stomach rumbled, and his hand hurt him so.
Adventures are all very well in their place, he thought, but there’s a lot to be said for regular meals and freedom from pain.
Still, he was alive, and the wind was in his hair, and the cloud was scudding through the sky like a galleon at full sail. Looking out over the world from above, he could never remember feeling so alive as he did at that moment. There was a skyness to the sky and a nowness to the world that he had never seen or felt or realized before.
He understood that he was, in some way, above his problems, just as he was above the world.The pain in his hand was a long way away. He thought about his actions and his adventures, and about the journey ahead of him, and it seemed to Tristran that the whole business was suddenly very small and very straightforward. He stood up on the cloud spire and called “Halloo!” several times, as loudly as he could. He even waved his tunic over his head, feeling a little foolish as he did so. Then he clambered down the spire; ten feet from the bottom he missed his footing and fell into the misty softness of the cloud.
“What were you shouting about?” asked Yvaine.
“To let people know we were here,”Tristran told her.
“What people?”
“You never know,” he told her. “Better I should call to people who aren’t there than that people who are there should miss us because I didn’t say anything.”
She said nothing in reply to this.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Tristran. “And what I’ve been thinking is this. After we’re done with what I need—got you back to Wall, given you to Victoria Forester—perhaps we could do what you need.”
“What I need?”
“Well, you want to go back, don’t you? Up into the sky.To shine again at night. So we can sort that out.”
She looked up at him and shook her head. “That doesn’t happen,” she explained. “Stars fall. They don’t go back up again.”
“You could be the first,” he told
her. “You have to believe. Otherwise it will never happen.”
“It will never happen,” she told him. “No more than your shouting is going to attract anyone up here where there isn’t anyone. It doesn’t matter if I believe it or not, that’s just the way things are. How’s your hand?”
He shrugged. “Hurts,” he said. “How’s your leg?”
“Hurts,” she said. “But not as badly as it did before.”
“Ahoy!” came a voice from far above them. “Ahoy down there! Parties in need of assistance?”
Glinting golden in the sunlight was a small ship, its sails billowing, and a ruddy, mustachioed face looked down at them from over the side. “Was that you, young feller-me-lad, a-leaping and cavorting just now?”
“It was,” said Tristran. “And I think we are in need of assistance, yes.”
“Right-ho,” said the man. “Get ready to grab the ladder, then.”
“I’m afraid my friend has a broken leg,” he called, “and I’ve hurt my hand. I don’t think either of us can climb a ladder.”
“Not a problem. We can pull you up.” And with that the man tumbled a long rope ladder over the side of the ship. Tristran caught at it with his good hand, and he held it steady while Yvaine pulled herself onto it, then he climbed on below her. The face vanished from the side of the ship as Tristran and Yvaine dangled awkwardly on the end of the rope ladder.
The wind caught the sky-ship, causing the ladder to pull up from the cloud and Tristran and Yvaine to spin, slowly, in the air.
“Now, haul!” shouted several voices in unison, and Tris-tran felt them being hauled up several feet. “Haul! Haul! Haul!” Each shout signaled them being pulled higher. The cloud upon which they had been sitting was now no longer below them; instead there was a drop of what Tristran supposed must be a mile or more. He held on tightly to the rope, hooking the elbow of his burned hand about the rope ladder.