by Neil Gaiman
Another jerk upwards and Yvaine was level with the top of the ship’s railing. Someone lifted her with care and placed her upon the deck. Tristran clambered over the railing himself and tumbled down onto the oaken deck.
The ruddy-faced man extended a hand. “Welcome aboard,” he said. “This is the Free Ship Perdita, bound on a lightning-hunting expedition. Captain Johannes Alberic, at your service.” He coughed, deep in his chest. And then, before Tristran could say a word in reply, the captain spied Tristran’s left hand and called “Meggot! Meggot! Blast you, where are you? Over here! Passengers in need of attention. There lad, Meggot’ll see to your hand. We eat at six bells. You shall sit at my table.”
Soon a nervous-looking woman with an explosive mop of carrot-red hair—Meggot—was escorting him belowdecks and smearing a thick, green ointment onto his hand, which cooled it and eased the pain. And then he was being led into the mess, which was a small dining room next to the kitchen (which he was delighted to discover they referred to as the galley, just as in the sea stories he had read).
Tristran did indeed get to eat at the captain’s table, although there was in fact no other table in the mess. In addition to the captain and Meggot there were five other members of the crew, a disparate bunch who seemed content to let Captain Alberic do all the talking, which he did, with his ale-pot in one hand, and the other hand alternately concerned with holding his stubby pipe and conveying food into his mouth.
The food was a thick soup of vegetables, beans and barley, and it filled Tristran and contented him. To drink, there was the clearest, coldest water Tristran had ever tasted.
The captain asked them no questions about how they came to find themselves high on a cloud, and they volunteered no answers. Tristran was given a berth with Oddness, the first mate, a quiet gentleman with large wings and a bad stammer, while Yvaine berthed in Meggot’s cabin, and Meggot herself moved into a hammock.
Tristran often found himself looking back on his time on the Perdita, during the rest of his journey through Faerie, as one of the happiest periods of his life. The crew let him help with the sails, and even gave him a turn at the wheel from time to time. Sometimes the ship would sail above dark storm clouds, as big as mountains, and the crew would fish for lightning bolts with a small copper chest. The rain and the wind would wash the deck of the ship, and he often would find himself laughing with exhilaration, while the rain ran down his face, and gripping the rope railing with his good hand to keep from being tumbled over the side by the storm.
Meggot, who was a little taller and a little thinner than Yvaine, had lent her several gowns, which the star wore with relief, taking pleasure in wearing something new on different days. Often she would climb out to the figurehead, despite her broken leg, and sit, looking down at the ground below.
“How’s your hand?” asked the captain.
“A lot better, thank you,” said Tristran. The skin was shiny and scarred, and he had little feeling in the fingers, but Meggot’s salve had taken most of the pain and sped the healing process immeasurably. He had been sitting on deck, with his legs dangling over the side, looking out.
“We’ll be taking anchor in a week, to take provisions, and a little cargo,” said the captain. “Might be best if we were to let you off down there.”
“Oh. Thank you,” said Tristran.
“You’ll be closer to Wall. Still a good ten-week journey, though. Maybe more. But Meggot says she’s nearly got your friend’s leg up to snuff. It’ll be able to take her weight again soon.”
They sat, side by side.The captain puffed on his pipe: his clothes were covered in a fine layer of ash, and when he was not smoking his pipe he was chewing at the stem, or excavating the bowl with a sharp metal instrument, or tamping in new tobacco.
“You know,” said the captain, staring off toward the horizon, “it wasn’t entirely fortune that we found you.Well, it was fortune that we found you, but it’d also be true to say that I was keeping half an eye out for you. I, and a few others about the place.”
“Why?” said Tristran. “And how did you know about me?”
In reply, the captain traced a shape with his finger in the condensation on the polished wood.
“It looks like a castle,” said Tristran.
The captain winked at him. “Not a word to say too loudly,” he said, “even up here. Think of it as a fellowship.”
Tristran stared at him. “Do you know a little hairy man, with a hat and an enormous pack of goods?”
The captain tapped his pipe against the side of the boat. A movement of his hand had already erased the picture of the castle. “Aye. And he’s not the only member of the fellowship with an interest in your return to Wall. Which reminds me, you should tell the young lady that if she fancies trying to pass for other than what she is, she might try to give the impression that she eats something—anything—from time to time.”
“I never mentioned Wall in your presence,” said Tristran. “When you asked where I came from, I said ‘Behind us’ and when you asked where we were going, I said, ‘Ahead of us.’ ”
“That’s m’boy,” said the captain. “Exactly.”
Another week passed, on the fifth day of which Meggot pronounced Yvaine’s splint ready to come off. She removed the makeshift bandages and the splint, and Yvaine practiced hobbling about the decks from bow to stern, holding onto the rails. Soon she was moving about the ship without difficulty, albeit with a slight limp.
On the sixth day there was a mighty storm, and they caught six fine lightning bolts in their copper box. On the seventh day they made port.Tristran and Yvaine said their goodbyes to the captain and the crew of the Free Ship Perdita. Meggot gave Tristran a small pot of the green salve, for his hand and for Yvaine to rub onto her leg. The captain gave Tristran a leather shoulder-bag filled with dried meats and fruits and fragments of tobacco, a knife and a tinderbox (“Oh, it’s no bother, lad.We’re taking on provisions here anyway”), while Meggot made Yvaine a gift of a blue silk gown, sewn with tiny silver stars and moons (“For it looks so much better on you than it ever has on me, my dear”).
The ship moored beside a dozen other, similar sky-ships, at the top of a huge tree, large enough to support hundreds of dwellings built into the trunk. It was inhabited by people and dwarfs, by gnomes and sylvans and other, even queerer, folk. There were steps around the trunk, and Tristran and the star descended them slowly. Tristran was relieved to be back on something attached to solid ground, and yet, in some way he could never have put into words, he felt disappointed, as if, when his feet touched the earth once more, he had lost something very fine.
It was three days of walking before the harbor-tree disappeared over the horizon.
They traveled West, toward the sunset, along a wide and dusty road. They slept beside hedgerows. Tristran ate fruit and nuts from bushes and trees and he drank from clear streams. They encountered few other people on the road. When they could, they stopped at small farms, where Tristran would put in an afternoon’s work in exchange for food and some straw in the barn to sleep upon. Sometimes they would stop in the towns and villages upon the way, to wash, and eat—or, in the star’s case, to feign eating—and to room, whenever they could afford it, at the town’s inn.
In the town of Simcock-Under-Hill, Tristran and Yvaine had an encounter with a goblin press-gang that might have ended unhappily, with Tristran spending the rest of his life fighting the goblins’ endless wars beneath the earth, had it not been for Yvaine’s quick thinking and her sharp tongue. In Berinhed’s Forest Tristran outfaced one of the great, tawny eagles, who would have carried them both back to its nest to feed its young and was afraid of nothing at all, save fire.
In a tavern in Fulkeston, Tristran gained great renown by reciting from memory Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” the Twenty-Third Psalm, the “Quality of Mercy” speech from The Merchant of Venice, and a poem about a boy who stood on the burning deck where all but he had fled, each of which he had been obliged to commit to mem
ory in his school days. He blessed Mrs. Cherry for her efforts in making him memorize verse, until it became apparent that the townsfolk of Fulkeston had decided that he would stay with them forever and become the next bard of the town; Tristran and Yvaine were forced to sneak out of the town at the dead of night, and they only escaped because Yvaine persuaded (by some means, on which Tristran was never entirely clear) the dogs of the town not to bark as they left.
The sun burnt Tristran’s face to a nut-brown color and faded his clothes to the hues of rust and of dust. Yvaine remained as pale as the moon, and she did not lose her limp, no matter how many leagues they covered.
One evening, camped at the edge of a deep wood, Tristran heard something he had never heard before: a beautiful melody, plangent and strange. It filled his head with visions, and filled his heart with awe and delight. The music made him think of spaces without limits, of huge crystalline spheres which revolved with unutterable slowness through the vasty halls of the air. The melody transported him, took him beyond himself.
After what might have been long hours, and might have been only minutes, it ended, and Tristran sighed. “That was wonderful,” he said. The star’s lips moved, involuntarily, into a smile, and her eyes brightened. “Thank you,” she said. “I suppose that I have not felt like singing until now.”
“I have never heard anything like it.”
“Some nights,” she told him, “my sisters and I would sing together. Sing songs like that one, all about the lady our mother, and the nature of time, and the joys of shining and of loneliness.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be,” she told him. “At least I am still alive. I was lucky to have fallen in Faerie. And I think I was probably lucky to have met you.”
“Thank you,” said Tristran.
“You are welcome,” said the star. She sighed, then, in her turn, and stared up at the sky through the gaps in the trees.
* * *
Tristran was looking for breakfast. He had found some young puffball mushrooms and a plum tree covered with purple plums which had ripened and dried almost to prunes, when he spotted the bird in the undergrowth.
He made no attempt to catch it (he had had a severe shock some weeks earlier, when, having narrowly failed to capture a large grey-brown hare for his dinner, it had stopped at the edge of the forest, looked at him with disdain, and said, “Well, I hope you’re proud of yourself, that’s all,” and had scampered off into the long grass) but he was fascinated by it. It was a remarkable bird, as large as a pheasant, but with feathers of all colors, garish reds and yellows and vivid blues. It looked like a refugee from the tropics, utterly out of place in this green and ferny wood. The bird started in fear as he approached it, hopping awkwardly as he came closer and letting out cries of sharp distress.
Tristran dropped to one knee next to it, murmuring reassurances. He reached out to the bird. The difficulty was obvious: a silver chain attached to the bird’s foot had become entangled in the twisted stub of a jutting root, and the bird was caught there by it, unable to move.
Carefully, Tristran unwound the silver chain, unhooking it from the root, while stroking the bird’s ruffled plumage with his left hand. “There you go,” he said to the bird. “Go home.” But the bird made no move to leave him. Instead it stared into his face, its head cocked on one side. “Look,” said Tristran, feeling rather odd and self-conscious, “someone will probably be worried about you.” He reached down to pick up the bird.
Something hit him, then, stunning him; although he had been still, he felt as if he had just run at full tilt into an invisible wall. He staggered, and nearly fell.
“Thief!” shouted a cracked old voice. “I shall turn your bones to ice and roast you in front of a fire! I shall pluck your eyes out and tie one to a herring and t’other to a seagull, so the twin sights of sea and sky shall take you into madness! I shall make your tongue into a writhing worm and your fingers shall become razors, and fire ants shall itch your skin, so each time you scratch yourself—”
“There is no need to belabor your point,” said Tristran to the old woman. “I did not steal your bird. Its chain was snagged upon a root, and I had just freed it.” She glared at him suspiciously from below her mop of iron-grey hair. Then she scurried forward and picked up the bird. She held it up, and whispered something to it, and it replied with an odd, musical chirp. The old woman’s eyes narrowed. “Well, perhaps what you say is not a complete pack of lies,” she admitted, extremely grudgingly.
“It’s not a pack of lies at all,” said Tristran, but the old woman and her bird were already halfway across the glade, so he gathered up his puffballs and his plums, and he walked back to where he had left Yvaine.
She was sitting beside the path, rubbing her feet. Her hip pained her, and so did her leg, while her feet were becoming more and more sensitive. Sometimes at night Tristran would hear her sobbing softly to herself. He hoped the moon would send them another unicorn, and knew that she would not.
“Well,” said Tristran to Yvaine, “that was odd.” He told her about the events of the morning and thought that that was the end of it.
He was, of course, wrong. Several hours later Tristran and the star were walking along the forest path when they were passed by a brightly painted caravan pulled by two grey mules and driven by the old woman who had threatened to change his bones to ice. She reined in her mules and crooked a bony finger at Tristran. “Come here, lad,” she said.
He walked over to her warily. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Seems I owe you an apology,” she said. “Seems you were telling the truth. Jumped to a conclusion.”
“Yes,” said Tristran.
“Let me look at you,” she said, climbing down into the roadway. Her cold finger touched the soft place beneath Tristran’s chin, forcing his head up. His hazel eyes stared into her old green eyes. “You look honest enough,” she said. “You can call me Madame Semele. I’m on my way to Wall, for the market. I was thinking that I’d welcome a boy to work my little flower-stall—I sells glass flowers, you know, the prettiest things that ever you did see. You’d be a fine market-lad, and we could put a glove over that hand of yours, so you’d not scare the customers. What d’ye say?”
Tristran pondered, and said “Excuse me,” and went over and conferred with Yvaine. Together they walked back to the old woman.
“Good afternoon,” said the star. “We have discussed your offer, and we thought that—”
“Well?” asked Madame Semele, her eyes fixed upon Tristran. “Don’t just stand there like a dumb thing! Speak! Speak! Speak!”
“I have no desire to work for you at the market,” said Tristran, “for I have business of my own that I shall need to deal with there. However, if we could ride with you, my companion and I are willing to pay you for our passage.”
Madame Semele shook her head. “That’s of no use to me. I can gather my own firewood, and you’d just be another weight for Faithless and Hopeless to pull. I take no passengers.” She climbed back up into the driver’s seat.
“But,” said Tristran, “I would pay you.”
The harridan cackled with scorn. “There’s never a thing you could possess that I would take for your passage. Now, if you’ll not work for me at the market at Wall, then be off with you.”
Tristran reached up to the buttonhole of his jerkin and felt it there, as cold and perfect as it had been through all his journeyings. He pulled it out and held it up to the old woman between finger and thumb. “You sell glass flowers, you say,” he said. “Would you be interested in this one?”
It was a snowdrop made of green glass and white glass, cunningly fashioned: it seemed as if it had been plucked from the meadow grass that very morning, and the dew was still upon it. The old woman squinted at it for a heartbeat, looking at its green leaves and its tight white petals, then she let out a screech: it might have been the anguished cry of some bereft bird of prey. “Where did you get that?” she cried. “Give it t
o me! Give it to me this instant!”
Tristran closed his finger about the snowdrop, concealing it from view, and he took a couple of steps backwards. “Hmm,” he said aloud. “It occurs to me now that I have a deep fondness for this flower, which was a gift from my father when I commenced my travels, and which, I suspect, carries with it a tremendous personal and familial importance. Certainly it has brought me luck, of one kind or another. Perhaps I would be better off keeping the flower, and my companion and I can walk to Wall.”
Madame Semele seemed torn between her desire to threaten and to cajole, and the emotions chased each other so nakedly across her face that she seemed almost to vibrate with the effort of keeping them in check. And then she took herself in hand and said, in a voice that cracked with self-control, “Now, now. No need to be hasty. I am certain that a deal can be struck between us.”
“Oh,” said Tristran, “I doubt it. It would need to be a very fine deal, to interest me, and it would need certain guarantees of safe-conduct and such safeguards as to assure that your behavior and actions toward me and my companion remained at all times benign.”
“Let me see the snowdrop again,” pleaded the old woman.
The bright-colored bird, its silver chain about one leg, fluttered out of the open door of the caravan and gazed down at the proceedings beneath.
“The poor thing,” said Yvaine, “chained up like that. Why do you not set her free?”
But the old woman did not answer her, ignoring her, or so Tristran thought, and said, “I will transport you to Wall, and I swear upon my honor and upon my true name that I will take no action to harm you upon the journey.”
“Or by inaction, or indirect action, allow harm to come to me or my companion.”
“As you say.” Tristran thought for a moment. He certainly did not trust the old woman. “I wish you to swear that we shall arrive in Wall in the same manner and condition and state that we are in now, and that you will give us board and lodging upon the way.”