by Neil Gaiman
The old woman clucked, then nodded. She clambered down from the caravan once more, and hawked, then spat into the dust. She pointed to the glob of spittle. “Now you,” she said. Tristran spat next to it. With her foot she rubbed both wet patches, so they conjoined. “There,” she said. “A bargain’s a bargain. Give me the flower.”
The greed and hunger were so obvious in her face that Tristran was now certain he could have made a better deal, but he gave the old woman his father’s flower. As she took it from him, her face broke into a gap-toothed grin. “Why, I do think that this is the superior of the one that damnable child gave away almost twenty years gone. Now, tell me young man,” she asked, looking up at Tristran with her sharp old eyes, “do you know what manner of thing you have been wearing in your buttonhole?”
“It is a flower. A glass flower.”
The old woman laughed so hard and so suddenly that Tristran thought that she was choking. “It is a frozen charm,” she said. “A thing of power. Something like this can perform wonders and miracles in the right hands. Watch.” She held the snowdrop above her head then brought it slowly down, so it brushed Tristran’s forehead.
For but a heartbeat he felt most peculiar, as if thick, black treacle were running through his veins in place of blood; then the shape of the world changed. Everything became huge and towering. It seemed as if the old woman herself was now a giantess, and his vision was blurred and confused.
Two huge hands came down and picked him up, gently. “ ’Tain’t the biggest of caravans,” said Madame Semele, her voice a low, slow liquid boom. “And I shall keep to the letter of my oath, for you shall not be harmed, and you shall be boarded and lodged on your journey to Wall.” And then she dropped the dormouse into the pocket of her apron and she clambered onto the caravan.
“And what do you propose to do to me?” asked Yvaine, but she was not entirely surprised when the woman did not reply. She followed the old woman into the dark interior of the caravan. There was but one room; along one wall was a large showcase made of leather and pine, with a hundred pigeonholes in it, and it was in one of these pigeonholes, in a bed of soft thistledown, that the old woman placed the snowdrop. Along the other wall was a small bed, with a window above it, and a large cupboard.
Madame Semele bent down and pulled a wooden cage from the cluttered space beneath her bed, and she took the blinking dormouse from her pocket and placed it into the cage. Then she took a handful of nuts and berries and seeds from a wooden bowl and placed them inside the cage, which she hung from a chain in the middle of the caravan.
“There we go,” she said. “Board and lodging.”
Yvaine had watched all this with curiosity from her seat on the old woman’s bed. “Would I be correct,” she asked politely, “in concluding from the evidence to hand (to wit, that you have not looked at me, or if you have your eyes have slipped over me, that you have not spoken a word to me, and that you have changed my companion into a small animal with no such provision for myself) that you can neither see me nor hear me?”
The witch made no reply. She walked up to the driver’s seat, sat down and took up the reins. The exotic bird hopped up beside her and it chirruped, once, curiously.
“Of course I have kept my word—to the letter,” said the old woman, as if in reply. “He shall be transformed back at the market meadow, so shall regain his own form before he comes to Wall. And after I have turned him back, I shall make you human again, for I still have to find a better servant than you are, silly slut. I could not have been doing with him underfoot all the livelong day, poking and prying and asking questions, and I’d’ve had to’ve fed him into the bargain, more than nuts and seeds.” She hugged herself tightly and swayed back and forth. “Oh, you’ll have to get up pretty early in the morning to put one past me. And I do believe that that bumpkin’s flower was even finer than the one you lost to me, all those years ago.”
She clicked her tongue, and shook the reins, and the mules began to amble down the forest track.
While the witch drove, Yvaine rested upon her musty bed. The caravan clacked and lurched its way through the forest. When it stopped, she would awake and rise. While the witch slept Yvaine would sit on the roof of the caravan and look up at the stars. Sometimes the witch’s bird would sit with her and then she would pet it and make a fuss of it, for it was good to have something about that acknowledged her existence. But when the witch was about, the bird ignored her utterly.
Yvaine also cared for the dormouse, who spent most of his time fast asleep, curled up with his head between his paws. When the witch was off gathering firewood or fetching water, Yvaine would open up his cage and stroke him and talk to him, and, on several occasions, she sang to him, although she could not tell whether anything of Tristran remained in the dormouse, who stared up at her with placid, sleepy eyes, like droplets of black ink, and whose fur was softer than down.
Her hip did not pain her, now that she was not walking every day, and her feet did not hurt her so much. She would always limp, she knew, for Tristran was no surgeon when it came to mending a broken bone although he had done the best he could. Meggot had acknowledged as much.
When, as happened infrequently, they encountered other people, the star did her best to stay out of sight. However, she soon learned that, even should someone talk to her within the witch’s hearing—should someone, as once a woodcutter did, point to her, and ask Madame Semele about her—the witch never seemed able to perceive Yvaine’s presence, or even to hear anything pertaining to her existence.
And so the weeks passed, in a rattling, bone-jarring sort of a way, in the witch’s caravan, for the witch, and the bird, and the dormouse, and the fallen star.
Chapter Nine
Which Deals Chiefly With the Events at Diggory’s Dyke
Diggory’s Dyke was a deep cut between two chalk Downs—high, green hills, where a thin layer of green grass and reddish earth covered the chalk, and there was scarcely soil enough for trees.The Dyke looked, from a distance, like a white chalk gash on a green velvet board. Local legend had it that the cut was dug, in a day and a night, by one Diggory, using a spade that had once been a sword blade before Wayland Smith had melted it down and beaten it out, on his journey into Faerie from Wall. There were those who said the sword had once been Flamberge, and others, that it was once the sword Balmung; but there were none who claimed to know just who Diggory had been, and it might all have been stuff and nonsense. Anyway, the path to Wall went through Diggory’s Dyke, and any foot-traveler or any person going by any manner of wheeled vehicle went through the Dyke, where the chalk rose on either side of you like thick white walls, and the Downs rose up above them like the green pillows of a giant’s bed.
In the middle of the Dyke, beside the path, was what appeared at first glance to be little more than a heaped pile of sticks and twigs. A closer inspection would have revealed it to be something in nature partway between a small shed and a large wooden teepee, with a hole in the roof through which grey smoke occasionally could be seen to trickle out.
The man in black had been giving the pile of sticks as close an inspection as he could for two days now, from the top of the Downs far above and, when he dared chance it, from closer. The hut, he had established, was inhabited by a woman of advanced years. She had no companions, and no obvious occupation, apart from that of stopping each and every lone traveler and each conveyance that passed through the Dyke and passing the time of day.
She seemed harmless enough, but Septimus had not become the only surviving male member of his immediate family by trusting appearances, and this old woman had, he was certain of it, slit Primus’s throat.
The obligations of revenge demanded a life for a life; they did not specify any way that the life should be taken. Now, by temperament, Septimus was one of nature’s poisoners. Blades and blows and booby traps were well enough in their way, but a vial of clear liquid, any trace of taste or odor gone when it was admixtured with food, that was Septimus’s metier
.
Unfortunately the old woman seemed to take no food she did not gather or trap herself, and while he contemplated leaving a steaming pie at the door to her house, made of ripe apples and lethal baneberries, he dismissed it soon enough as impractical. He pondered rolling a chalk boulder down from the hills above her, dropping it onto her little house; but he could not be certain that he would hit her with it. He wished he was more of a magician—he had some of the locating ability that ran, patchily, in his family line, and a few minor magics he had learned or stolen over the years, but nothing that would be of use to him now, when he needed to invoke floods or hurricanes or lightning strikes. So Septimus observed his victim-to-be as a cat watches a mouse hole, hour after hour, by night and by day.
It was past the mid-hour of the night, and was quite moonless and dark, when Septimus finally crept to the door of the house of sticks, with a firepot in one hand and a book of romantic poetry and a blackbird’s nest, into which he had placed several fircones, in the other. Hanging from his belt was a club of oak-wood, its head studded with brass nails. He listened at the door, but could hear nothing but a rhythmic breathing and, once in a while, a sleeping grunt. His eyes were used to the darkness, and the house stood out against the white chalk of the Dyke. He crept around to the side of the building, where he could keep the door in sight.
First he tore the pages from the book of poems and crumpled each poem into a ball or a paper twist, which he pushed into the sticks of the shack’s wall at ground level. On top of the poems he placed the fircones. Next, he opened the firepot, and with his knife he fished a handful of waxed linen scraps from the lid, dipped them into the glowing charcoal of the pot and, when they were burning well, he placed them on the paper twists and the cones, and he blew gently on the flicker-ing yellow flames until the pile caught. He dropped dry twigs from the bird’s nest onto the little fire, which crackled in the night and began to blossom and grow. The dry sticks of the wall smoked gently, forcing Septimus to suppress a cough, and then they caught fire, and Septimus smiled.
Septimus returned to the door of the hut, hefting his wooden club on high. For, he had reasoned, either the hag will burn with her house, in which case my task is done, or, she will smell the smoke and wake affrighted and distracted, and she will run from the house, whereupon I shall beat her head with my club, staving it in before she can utter a word. And she will be dead, and I will be revenged.
“It is a fine plan,” said Tertius in the crackling of the dry wood. “And once he has killed her, he can go on to obtain the Power of Stormhold.”
“We shall see,” said Primus, and his voice was the wail of a distant night bird.
Flames licked at the little wooden house, and grew and blossomed on its sides with a bright yellow-orange flame. No one came to the door of the hut. Soon, the place was an inferno, and Septimus was forced to take several steps backwards, from the intensity of the heat. He smiled, widely and triumphantly, and he lowered his club.
There came a sharp pain to the heel of his foot. He twisted and saw a small bright-eyed snake, crimson in the fire’s glow, with its fangs sunk deep into the back of his leather boot. He flung his club at it, but the little creature pulled back from his heel and looped, at great speed, away behind one of the white chalk boulders.
The pain in his heel began to subside. If there was poison in its bite, thought Septimus, the leather will have taken much of it. I shall bind my leg at the calf, and then I shall remove my boot and make a cross-shaped incision in the place where I was bitten, and I shall suck out the serpent’s venom. So thinking, he sat down upon a chalk boulder in the fire’s light, and he tugged at his boot. It would not come off. His foot felt numb, and he realized that the foot must be swelling fast. Then I shall cut the boot off, he thought. He raised his foot to the level of his thigh; for a moment he thought his world was going dark, and then he saw that the flames, which had illuminated the Dyke like a bonfire, were gone. He felt chilled to the bone.
“So,” said a voice from behind him, soft as a silken strangling-rope, sweet as a poisoned lozenge, “you thought that you would warm yourself at the burning of my little cottage. Did you wait at the door to beat out the flames should they prove not to my liking?”
Septimus would have answered her, but his jaw muscles were clenched, his teeth gritted hard together. His heart was pounding inside his chest like a small drum, not in its usual steady march but in a wild, arrhythmic abandon. He could feel every vein and artery in his body threading fire through his frame, if it was not ice that they pumped: he could not tell.
An old woman stepped into his view. She looked like the woman who had inhabited the wooden hut, but older, so much older. Septimus tried to blink, to clear his tearing eyes, but he had forgotten how to blink, and his eyes would not close.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” said the woman. “Attempting arson and violence upon the person of a poor old lady living upon her own, who would be entirely at the mercy of every passing vagabond, were it not for the kindness of her little friends.” And she picked something up from the chalky ground and placed it about her wrist, then she walked back into the hut, which was miraculously unburned, or restored, Septimus did not know which and did not care.
His heart juddered and syncopated inside his chest, and if he could have screamed, he would. It was dawn before the pain ended and, in six voices, his older brothers welcomed Septimus to their ranks.
Septimus looked down, one last time, on the twisted, still-warm form he had once inhabited, and at the expression in its eyes. Then he turned away.
“There are no brothers left to take revenge on her,” he said, in the voice of the morning curlews, “and it is none of us will ever be Lord of Stormhold. Let us move on.” And after he had said that, there were not even ghosts in that place.
* * *
The sun was high in the sky that day when Madame Semele’s caravan came lumbering through the chalk cut of Diggory’s Dyke.
Madame Semele noticed the soot-blackened wooden hovel beside the road and, as she approached closer, the bent old woman in her faded scarlet dress, who waved at her from beside the path. The woman’s hair was white as snow, her skin was wrinkled, and one eye was blind.
“Good day, sister. What happened to your house?” asked Madame Semele.
“Young people today. One of them thought it would be good sport to fire the house of a poor old woman who has never harmed a soul. Well, he learned his lesson soon enough.”
“Aye,” said Madame Semele. “They always learn. And are never grateful to us for the lesson.”
“There’s truth for you,” said the woman in the faded scarlet dress. “Now, tell me, dear. Who rides with you this day?”
“That,” said Madame Semele, haughtily, “is none of your never-mind, and I shall thank you to keep yourself to yourself.”
“Who rides with you? Tell me truly, or I shall set harpies to tear you limb from limb and hang your remains from a hook deep beneath the world.”
“And who would you be, to threaten me so?”
The old woman stared up at Madame Semele with one good eye and one milky eye. “I know you, Ditchwater Sal. None of your damned lip. Who travels with you?
Madame Semele felt the words being torn from her mouth, whether she would say them or no. “There are the two mules who pull my caravan, myself, a maid-servant I keep in the form of a large bird, and a young man in the form of a dormouse.”
“Anyone else? Anything else?”
“No one and nothing. I swear it upon the Sisterhood.”
The woman at the side of the road pursed her lips. “Then get away with you, and get along with you,” she said.
Madame Semele clucked and shook the reins and the mules began to amble on.
In her borrowed bed in the dark interior of the caravan the star slept on, unaware how close she had come to her doom, nor by how slim a margin she had escaped it.
When they were out of sight of the stick-house and the de
athly whiteness of Diggory’s Dyke, the exotic bird flapped up onto its perch, threw back its head and whooped and crowed and sang, until Madame Semele told it that she would wring its foolish neck if it would not be quiet. And even then, in the quiet darkness inside the caravan, the pretty bird chuckled and twittered and trilled, and, once, it even hooted like a little owl.
The sun was already low in the western sky as they approached the town of Wall. The sun shone in their eyes, half blinding them and turning their world to liquid gold. The sky, the trees, the bushes, even the path itself was golden in the light of the setting sun.
Madame Semele reined in her mules in the meadow, where her stall would be. She unhitched the two mules and led them to the stream, where she hitched them to a tree. They drank deeply and eagerly.
There were other market-folk and visitors setting up their stalls all over the meadow, putting up tents and hanging draperies from trees. There was an air of expectation that touched everyone and everything, like the golden light of the westering sun.
Madame Semele went into the inside of the caravan and unhooked the cage from its chain. She carried it out into the meadow and put it down on a hillock of grass. She opened the cage door, and picked out the sleeping dormouse with bony fingers. “Out you come,” she said. The dormouse rubbed its liquid black eyes with its forepaws and blinked at the fading daylight.
The witch reached into her apron and produced a glass daffodil. With it she touched Tristran’s head.
Tristran blinked sleepily, and then he yawned. He ran a hand through his unruly brown hair and looked down at the witch with fierce anger in his eyes. “Why, you evil old crone—” he began.
“Hush your silly mouth,” said Madame Semele, sharply. “I got you here, safely and soundly, and in the same condition I found you. I gave you board and I gave you lodging—and if neither of them were to your liking or expectation, well, what is it to me? Now, be off with you, before I change you into a wiggling worm and bite off your head, if it is not your tail. Go! Shoo! Shoo!” Tristran counted to ten, and then, ungraciously, walked away. He stopped a dozen yards away beside a copse and waited for the star, who limped down the side of the caravan steps and came over to him.