Stardust

In Which We Encounter Several Other Persons, Many of Them Still Alive, With an Interest in the Fate of the Fallen Star

The Stormhold had been carved out of the peak of Mount Huon by the first lord of Stormhold, who reigned at the end of the First Age and into the beginning of the Second. It had been expanded, improved upon, excavated and tunneled into by successive Masters of Stormhold, until the original mountain peak now raked the sky like the ornately carved tusk of some great, grey, granite beast. The Stormhold itself was perched high in the sky, where the thunder clouds gathered before they went down to the lower air, spilling rain and lightning and devastation upon the place beneath.

The eighty-first Lord of Stormhold lay dying in his chamber, which was carved from the highest peak like a hole in a rotten tooth. There is still death in the lands beyond the fields we know.

He summoned his children to his bedside and they came, the living and the dead of them, and they shivered in the cold granite halls. They gathered about his bed and waited respectfully, the living to his right side, the dead on his left.

Four of his sons were dead: Secundus, Quintus, Quartus and Sextus, and they stood unmoving, grey figures, insubstantial and silent.

Three of his sons remained alive: Primus, Tertius and Septimus. They stood, solidly, uncomfortably, on the right of the chamber, shifting from foot to foot, scratching their cheeks and noses, as if they were shamed by the silent repose of their dead brothers. They did not glance across the room toward their dead brothers, acting—as best they could—as if they and their father were the only ones in that cold room, where the windows were huge holes in the granite through which the cold winds blew. And whether this is because they could not see their dead brothers, or because, having murdered them (one apiece, save Septimus, who had killed both Quintus and Sextus, poisoning the former with a dish of spiced eels, and, rejecting artifice for efficiency and gravity, simply pushing Sextus off a precipice one night as they were admiring a lightning storm far below), they chose to ignore them, scared of guilt, or revelation, or ghosts, their father did not know.

Privately, the eighty-first lord had hoped that by the time his end came upon him, six of the seven young lords at Stormhold would be dead, and but one still alive. That one would be the eighty-second Lord of Stormhold and Master of the High Crags; it was, after all, how he had attained his own title several hundred years before.

But the youth of today were a pasty lot, with none of the get-up-and-go, none of the vigor and vim that he remembered from the days when he was young. . . .

Somebody was saying something. He forced himself to concentrate.

“Father,” repeated Primus in his deep boom of a voice. “We are all here. What would you do with us?”

The old man stared at him. With a ghastly wheezing he pulled a breath of the thin, chill air into his lungs, and then said, in high, cold tones, like the granite itself, “I am dying. Soon my time will be done, and you will take my remains deep into the mountain, to the Hall of Ancestors, and you will place them—me—in the one-and-eightieth hollow you come to, which is to say, the first that is not occupied, and there you shall leave me. If you do not do this thing, you will each be cursed, and the tower of Stormhold shall tumble and fall.”

His three living sons said nothing. A murmur ran through the four dead sons, though: regret, perhaps, that their remains had been gobbled up by eagles, or carried away by the fast rivers, tumbled down waterfalls and off to the sea, never to rest in the Hall of Ancestors.

“Now. The matter of succession.” The lord’s voice wheezed out of him, like the wind being squeezed from a pair of rotten bellows. His living sons raised their heads: Primus, the oldest, with white hairs in his thick brown beard, his nose aquiline, his eyes grey, looked expectant; Tertius, his beard red-and-golden, his eyes a tawny brown, looked wary; Septimus, his black beard still coming in, tall and crowlike, looked blank, as he always looked blank.

“Primus. Go to the window.”

Primus strode over to the opening in the rock wall and looked out.

“What do you see?”

“Nothing, sire. I see the evening sky above us, and clouds below us.”

The old man shivered beneath the mountain-bear skin that covered him.

“Tertius. Go to the window. What do you see?”

“Nothing, Father. It is as Primus told you. The evening sky hangs above us, the color of a bruise, and clouds carpet the world beneath us, all grey and writhing.”

The old man’s eyes twisted in his face like the mad eyes of a bird of prey. “Septimus. You. Window.”

Septimus strolled to the window and stood beside, although not too close to, his two elder brothers.

“And you? What do you see?”

He looked out of the opening. The wind was bitter on his face, and it made his eyes sting and tear. One star glimmered, faintly, in the indigo heavens.

“I see a star, Father.”

“Ahh,” wheezed the eighty-first lord. “Bring me to the window.” His four dead sons looked at him sadly as his three living sons carried him to the window. The old man stood, or almost stood, leaning heavily on the broad shoulders of his children, staring into the leaden sky.

His fingers, swollen-knuckled and twiglike, fumbled with the topaz that hung on a heavy silver chain about his neck. The chain parted like a cobweb in the old man’s grip. He held the topaz out in his fist, the broken ends of silver chain dangling.

The dead lords of Stormhold whispered amongst themselves in the voices of the dead, which sound like snow falling: the topaz was the Power of Stormhold. Who wore it would be Stormhold’s master, as long as he was of the blood of Stormhold. To which of the surviving sons would the eighty-first lord give the stone?

The living sons said nothing, but looked, respectively, expectant, wary, and blank (but it was a deceptive blankness, the blankness of a rock face that one only realizes cannot be climbed when one is halfway up, and there is no longer any way down).

The old man pulled free of his sons, and stood straight and tall, then. He was, for a heartbeat, the lord of Stormhold who had defeated the Northern Goblins at the battle of Cragland’s Head; who had fathered eight children—seven of them boys—on three wives; who had killed each of his four brothers in combat, before he was twenty years old, although his oldest brother had been almost five times his age and a mighty warrior of great renown. It was this man who held up the topaz and said four words in a long-dead tongue, words which hung on the air like the strokes of a huge bronze gong.

Then he threw the stone into the air. The living brothers caught their breath, as the stone arced up over the clouds. It reached what they were certain must be the zenith of its curve, and then, defying all reason, it continued to rise into the air.

Other stars glittered in the night sky, now.

“To he who retrieves the stone, which is the Power of Stormhold, I leave my blessing, and the Mastership of Stormhold and all its dominions,” said the eighty-first lord, his voice losing power as he spoke, until once again it was the creak of an old, old man, like the wind blowing through an abandoned house.

The brothers, living and dead, stared at the stone. It fell upwards into the sky until it was lost to sight.

“And should we capture eagles, and harness them, to drag us into the heavens?” asked Tertius, puzzled and annoyed.

His father said nothing. The last of the daylight faded, and the stars hung above them, uncountable in their glory.

One star fell.

Tertius thought, although he was not certain, that it was the first star of the evening, the one that his brother Septimus had remarked upon.

The star tumbled, a streak of light, through the night sky, and it tumbled down somewhere to the south and west of them.

“There,” whispered the eighty-first lord, and he fell to the stone floor of his chamber, and he breathed no more.

Primus scratched his beard, and looked down at the crumpled thing. “I’ve half a mind,” he said, “to push the old bastard’s corpse out of the window. What was all that idiocy about?”

“Better not,” said Tertius. “We don’t want to see Stormhold tumble and fall. Nor do we want a curse on our heads, for that matter. Better just place him in the Hall of Ancestors.”

Primus picked his father’s body up, and carried him back to the furs of his bed. “We will tell the people he is dead,” he said.

The four dead brothers clustered with Septimus at the window.

“What do you think he’s thinking?” asked Quintus of Sextus.

“He’s wondering where the stone fell, and how to reach it first,” said Sextus, remembering his fall down the rocks and into eternity.

“I damned well hope so,” said the late eighty-first master of Stormhold to his four dead sons. But his three sons who were not yet dead heard nothing at all.

A question like “How big is Faerie?” does not admit of a simple answer.

Faerie, after all, is not one land, one principality or dominion. Maps of Faerie are unreliable, and may not be depended upon.

We talk of the kings and queens of Faerie as we would speak of the kings and queens of England. But Faerie is bigger than England, as it is bigger than the world (for, since the dawn of time, each land that has been forced off the map by explorers and the brave going out and proving it wasn’t there has taken refuge in Faerie; so it is now, by the time that we come to write of it, a most huge place indeed, containing every manner of landscape and terrain). Here, truly, there be Dragons. Also gryphons, wyverns, hippogriffs, basilisks, and hydras. There are all manner of more familiar animals as well, cats affectionate and aloof, dogs noble and cowardly, wolves and foxes, eagles and bears.

In the middle of a wood, so thick and so deep it was very nearly a forest, was a small house, built of thatch and wood and daubed grey clay, which had a most foreboding aspect. A small, yellow bird in a cage sat on its perch outside the house. It did not sing, but sat mournfully silent, its feathers ruffled and wan. There was a door to the cottage, from which the once-white paint was peeling away.

Inside, the cottage consisted of one room, undivided. Smoked meats and sausages hung from the rafters, along with a wizened crocodile carcass. A peat fire burned smokily in the large fireplace against one wall, and the smoke trickled out of the chimney far above. There were three blankets upon three raised beds—one large and old, the other two little more than truckle beds.

There were cooking implements, and a large wooden cage, currently empty, in another corner. There were windows too filthy to see through, and over everything was a thick layer of oily dust.

The only thing in the house that was clean was a mirror of black glass, as high as a tall man, as wide as a church door, which rested against one wall.

The house belonged to three aged women. They took it in turns to sleep in the big bed, to make the supper, to set snares in the wood for small animals, to draw water up from the deep well behind the house.

The three women spoke little.

There were three other women in the little house. They were slim, and dark, and amused. The hall they inhabited was many times the size of the cottage; the floor was of onyx, and the pillars were of obsidian. There was a courtyard behind them, open to the sky, and stars hung in the night sky above. A fountain played in the courtyard, the water rolling and falling from a statue of a mermaid in ecstasy, her mouth wide open. Clean, black water gushed from her mouth into the pool below, shimmering and shaking the stars.

The three women, and their hall, were in the black mirror.

The three old women were the Lilim—the witch-queen—all alone in the woods.

The three women in the mirror were also the Lilim: but whether they were the successors to the old women, or their shadow-selves, or whether only the peasant cottage in the woods was real, or if, somewhere, the Lilim lived in a black hall, with a fountain in the shape of a mermaid playing in the courtyard of stars, none knew for certain, and none but the Lilim could say.

On this day, one crone came in from the woods, carrying a stoat, its throat a splash of red.

She placed it on the dusty chopping board and took a sharp knife. She cut it around at the arms and legs and neck, then, with one filthy hand, she pulled the skin off the creature, as if pulling a child from its pyjamas, and she dropped the naked thing onto the wooden chopping block.

“Entrails?” she asked, in a quavering voice.

The smallest, oldest, most tangle-headed of the women, rocking back and forth in a rocking chair, said, “Might as well.” The first old woman picked up the stoat by the head, and sliced it from neck to groin. Its innards tumbled out onto the cutting board, red and purple and plum-colored, intestines and vital organs like wet jewels on the dusty wood.

The woman screeched, “Come quick! Come quick!” Then she pushed gently at the stoat-guts with her knife, and screeched once more.

The crone in the rocking chair pulled herself to her feet. (In the mirror, a dark woman stretched and rose from her divan.) The last old woman, returning from the outhouse, scurried as fast as she could from the woods.

“What?” she said. “What is it?”

(In the mirror, a third young woman rejoined the other two. Her breasts were small and high, and her eyes were dark.)

“Look,” gestured the first old woman, pointing with her knife.

Their eyes were the colorless grey of extreme age, and they squinted at the organs on the slab.

“At last,” said one of them, and “About time,” said another.

“Which of us, then, to find it?” asked the third.

The three women closed their eyes, and three old hands stabbed into the stoat-guts on the board.

An old hand opened. “I’ve a kidney.”

“I’ve his liver.”

The third hand opened. It belonged to the oldest of the Lilim. “I’ve his heart,” she said, triumphantly.

“How will you travel?”

“In our old chariot, drawn by what I find at the crossroads.”

“You’ll be needing some years.”

The oldest one nodded.

The youngest, the one who had come in from the outhouse, walked, painfully slowly, over to a high and ramshackle chest of drawers, and bent over. She took a rusting iron box from the bottommost drawer, and carried it over to her sisters. It was tied around with three pieces of old string, each with a different knot in it. Each of the women unknotted her own piece of string, then the one who had carried the box opened the lid.

Something glittered golden in the bottom of the box.

“Not much left,” sighed the youngest of the Lilim, who had been old when the wood they lived in was still beneath the sea.

“Then it’s a good thing that we’ve found a new one, isn’t it?” said the oldest, tartly, and with that she thrust a clawed hand into the box. Something golden tried to avoid her hand, but she caught it, wiggling and glimmering, opened her mouth, and popped it inside.

(In the mirror, three women stared out.)

There was a shivering and a shuddering at the center of all things.

(Now, two women stared from the black mirror.)

In the cottage, two old women stared, envy and hope mixing in their faces, at a tall, handsome woman with black hair and dark eyes and red, red lips.

“My,” she said, “but this place is filthy.” She strode to the bed. Beside it was a large wooden chest, covered by a faded tapestry. She twitched off the tapestry and opened the chest, rummaging inside.

“Here we go,” she said, holding up a scarlet kirtle. She tossed it onto the bed, and pulled off the rags and tatters she had worn as an old woman.

Her two sisters stared across at her naked body hungrily.

“When I return with her heart, there will be years aplenty for all of us,” she said, eying her sisters’ hairy chins and hollow eyes with disfavor. She slipped a scarlet bracelet onto her wrist, in the shape of a small snake with its tail between its jaws.

“A star,” said one of her sisters.

“A star,” echoed the second.

“Exactly,” said the witch-queen, putting a circlet of silver upon her head. “The first in two hundred years. And I’ll bring it back to us.” She licked her scarlet lips with a deep red tongue.

“A fallen star,” she said.

It was night in the glade by the pool and the sky was bespattered with stars beyond counting.

Fireflies glittered in the leaves of the elm trees and in the ferns and in the hazel bushes, flickering on and off like the lights of a strange and distant city. An otter splashed in the brook that fed the pool. A family of stoats wove and wound their way to the water to drink. A fieldmouse found a fallen hazelnut and began to bite into the hard shell of the nut with its sharp, ever-growing front teeth, not because it was hungry, but because it was a prince under an enchantment who could not regain his outer form until he chewed the Nut of Wisdom. But its excitement made it careless, and only the shadow that blotted out the moonlight warned it of the descent of a huge grey owl, who caught the mouse in its sharp talons and rose again into the night.

The mouse dropped the nut, which fell into the brook and was carried away, to be swallowed by a salmon. The owl swallowed the mouse in just a couple of gulps, leaving just its tail trailing from her mouth, like a length of bootlace. Something snuffled and grunted as it pushed through the thicket—a badger, thought the owl (herself under a curse, and only able to resume her rightful shape if she consumed a mouse who had eaten the Nut of Wisdom), or perhaps a small bear.

Leaves rustled, water rilled, and then the glade became filled with light shining down from above, a pure white light which grew brighter and brighter. The owl saw it reflected in the pool, a blazing, glaring thing of pure light, so bright that she took to the wing and flew to another part of the forest. The wild things looked about them in terror.

First the light in the sky was no bigger than the moon, then it seemed larger, infinitely larger, and the whole grove trembled and quivered and every creature held its breath and the fireflies glowed brighter than they had ever glowed in their lives, each one convinced that this at last was love, but to no avail. . . .

And then—

There was a cracking sound, sharp as a shot, and the light that had filled the grove was gone.

Or almost gone. There was a dim glow pulsing from the middle of the hazel thicket, as if a tiny cloud of stars were glimmering there.

And there was a voice, a high clear female voice which said, “Ow,” and then, very quietly, it said “Fuck,” and then it said “Ow,” once more.

And then it said nothing at all, and there was silence in the glade.