Stardust (9 page)

She wore a one-piece white chemise, and curtsied to him as he opened the door, and smiled, shyly. She held a bottle of wine in her hand.

He locked the door behind him and led her to the bed, where, having first made her remove her chemise, and having examined her face and body by candlelight, and having kissed her on the forehead, lips, nipples, navel and toes, and having extinguished the candle, he made love to her, without speaking, in the pale moonlight.

After some time, he grunted, and was still.

“There, lovey, was that good, now?” asked Letitia.

“Yes,” said Tertius, warily, as if her words guarded some trap. “It was.”

“Would you be wanting another turn, before I leave?”

In reply, Tertius pointed between his legs. Letitia giggled. “We can have
him
upstanding again in a twinkling,” she said. And she pulled out the cork from the bottle of wine she had carried in, and had placed beside the bed, and passed it to Tertius.

He grinned at her, and gulped down some wine, then pulled her to him.

“I bet that feels good,” she said to him. “Now, lovey,
this
time let me show you how
I
like it . . . why, whatever is the matter?” For Lord Tertius of Stormhold was writhing back and forth on the bed, his eyes wide, his breathing labored.

“That wine?” he gasped. “Where did you get it?”

“Your brother,” said Letty. “I met him on the stairs. He told me it was a fine restorative and stiffener, and it would provide us with a night we should never forget.”

“And so it has,” breathed Tertius, and he twitched, once, twice, three times, and then was stiff. And very still.

Tertius heard Letitia begin to scream, as if from a very long way away. He was conscious of four familiar presences standing with him in the shadows beside the wall.

“She was very beautiful,” whispered Secundus, and Letitia thought she heard the curtains rustle.

“Septimus is most crafty,” said Quintus. “That was the self-same preparation of baneberries he slipped into my dish of eels,” and Letitia thought she heard the wind howling down from the mountain crags.

She opened the door to the household, woken by her screams, and a search ensued. Lord Septimus, however, was nowhere to be found, and one of the black stallions was gone from the stable (in which the coachman slept and snored and could not be wakened).

Lord Primus was in a foul mood when he arose the next morning.

He declined to have Letitia put to death, stating she was as much a victim of Septimus’s craft as Tertius had been, but ordered that she accompany Tertius’s body back to the castle of Stormhold.

He left her one black horse to carry the body, and a pouch of silver coins. It was enough to pay a villager of Nottaway to travel with her—to ensure no wolves made off with the horse or his brother’s remains—and to pay off the coachman when finally he awoke.

And then, alone in the coach, pulled by a team of four coal-black stallions, Lord Primus left the village of Nottaway, in significantly worse temper than he had arrived there.

B
revis arrived at the crossroads tugging at a rope. The rope was attached to a bearded, horned, evil-eyed billy goat which Brevis was taking to market to sell.

That morning, Brevis’s mother had placed a single radish upon the table in front of him and had said, “Brevis, son.This radish was all I was able to pull from the ground today. All our crops have failed, and all our food has gone.We’ve nothing to sell but the billy goat. So I want you to halter the goat, and take him to the market, and sell him to a farmer. And with the coins you get for the goat—and you’ll take nothing less than a florin, mark you—buy a hen, and buy corn, and turnips; and perhaps we shall not starve.”

So Brevis had chewed his radish, which was woody, and peppery to the tongue, and spent the rest of the morning chasing the goat about its pen, sustaining a bruise to the rib and a bite to the thigh in the process, and, eventually, and with the help of a passing tinker, he had subdued the goat enough to have it haltered, and, leaving his mother to bandage the tinker’s goat-inflicted injuries, he dragged the billy goat toward the market.

Sometimes the goat would take it into his head to charge on ahead, and Brevis would be dragged behind him, the heels of his boots grinding into the dried mud of the roadway, until the goat would decide—suddenly and without warning, for no reason Brevis was able to discern—to stop. Then Brevis would pick himself up and return to dragging the beast.

He reached the crossroads on the edge of the wood, sweaty and hungry and bruised, pulling an uncooperative goat. There was a tall woman standing at the crossroads. A circlet of silver sat in the crimson headpiece that surrounded her dark hair, and her dress was as scarlet as her lips.

“What do they call you, boy?” she asked, in a voice like musky brown honey.

“They call me Brevis, ma’am,” said Brevis, observing something strange behind the woman. It was a small cart, but there was nothing harnessed between the shafts. He wondered how it had ever got there.

“Brevis,” she purred. “Such a nice name. Would you like to sell me your goat, Brevis-boy?”

Brevis hesitated. “My mother told me I was to take the goat to the market,” he said, “and to sell him for a hen, and some corn, and some turnips, and to bring her home the change.”

“How much did your mother tell you to take for the goat?” asked the woman in the scarlet kirtle.

“Nothing less than a florin,” he said.

She smiled and held up one hand. Something glinted yellow. “Why, I will give you this golden guinea,” she said, “enough to buy a coopful of hens and a hundred bushels of turnips.” The boy’s mouth hung open.

“Do we have a deal?”

The boy nodded and thrust out the hand which held the billy goat’s rope halter. “Here,” was all he could say, visions of limitless wealth and turnips beyond counting tumbling through his head.

The lady took the rope.Then she touched one finger to the

goat’s forehead, between its yellow eyes, and let go of the rope.

Brevis expected the billy goat to bolt for the woods or down one of the roads, but it stayed where it was, as if frozen into position. Brevis held out his hand for the golden guinea.

The woman looked at him then, examining him from the soles of his muddy feet to his sweaty, cropped hair, and once more she smiled.

“You know,” she said, “I think that a matched pair would be so much more impressive than just one. Don’t you?”

Brevis did not know what she was talking about and opened his mouth to tell her so. But just then she reached out one long finger, and touched the bridge of his nose, between his eyes, and he found he could not say anything at all.

She snapped her fingers, and Brevis and the billy goat hastened to stand between the shafts of her cart; and Brevis was surprised to notice that he was walking on four legs, and he seemed to be no taller than the animal beside him.

The witch-woman cracked her whip, and her cart jolted off down the muddy road, drawn by a matched pair of horned white billy goats.

T
he little hairy man had taken Tristran’s ripped coat and trousers and waistcoat and, leaving him covered by a blanket, had walked into the village which nestled in the valley between three heather-covered hills.

Tristran sat under the blanket, in the warm evening, and waited.

Lights flickered in the hawthorn bush behind him. He thought they were glow-worms or fireflies, but, on closer inspection, he perceived they were tiny people, flickering and flitting from branch to branch.

He coughed, politely. A score of tiny eyes stared down at him. Several of the little creatures vanished. Others retreated high into the hawthorn bush, while a handful, braver than the others, flitted toward him.

They began to laugh, in high, bell-tinkling tones, pointing at Tristran, in his broken boots and blanket, and underclothes, and bowler hat. Tristran blushed red and pulled the blanket about himself.

One of the little folk sang:

Hankety pankety

Boy in a blanket, he’s

Off on a goose-chase to

Look for a star

Incontrovertibly

Journeys through Fäerie

Strip off the blanket to

See who you are.

And another one sang:

Tristran Thorn

Tristran Thorn

Does not know why he was born

And a foolish oath has sworn

Trews and coat and shirt are torn

So he sits here all forlorn

Soon to face his true love’s scorn

Wistran

Bistran

Tristran

Thorn.

“Be off with you, you silly things,” said Tristran, his face burning, and, having nothing else to hand, he threw his bowler hat at them.

Thus it was, that when the little hairy man arrived back from the village of Revelry (although why it was so called no man alive could say, for it was a gloomy, somber place, and had been for time out of mind) he found Tristran sitting glumly beside a hawthorn bush, wrapped in a blanket, and bewailing the loss of his hat.

“They said cruel things about my true love,” said Tristran. “Miss Victoria Forester. How dare they?”

“The little folk dare anything,” said his friend. “And they talks a lot of nonsense. But they talks an awful lot of sense, as well. You listen to ’em at your peril, and you ignore ’em at your peril, too.”

“They said I was soon to face my true love’s scorn.”

“Did they, indeed?”The little hairy man was laying a variety of clothes out upon the grass. Even in the moonlight,Tris-tran could see that the clothes he was laying out bore no manner of resemblance to the clothes that Tristran had removed earlier in the day.

In the village of Wall, men wore brown, and grey, and black; and even the reddest neckerchief worn by the ruddiest of farmers was soon faded by the sun and the rain to a more mannerly color. Tristran looked at the crimson and canary and russet cloth, at clothes which looked more like the costumes of traveling players or the contents of his cousin Joan’s charades chest, and said, “My clothes?”

“These are your clothes now,” said the little hairy man, proudly. “I traded ’em. This stuff’s better quality—see, it won’t rip and tear as easy—and it’s neither tattered nor torn, and withal, you’ll not stick out so much as a stranger. This is what people wears hereabouts, y’see.”

Tristran contemplated making the rest of his quest wrapped in a blanket, like a savage aboriginal from one of his schoolbooks. Then, with a sigh, he took off his boots, and let the blanket fall to the grass, and, with the little hairy man as his guide (“No, no, laddie, those go
over
that. Mercy, what do they teach them nowadays?”) he was soon dressed in his fine new clothes.

The new boots fit him better than the old ones ever had.

They certainly
were
fine new clothes. While clothes do not, as the saying would sometimes have it, make the man, and fine feathers do not make fine birds, sometimes they can add a certain spice to a recipe. And Tristran Thorn in crimson and canary was not the same man that Tristran Thorn in his overcoat and Sunday suit had been. There was a swagger to his steps, a jauntiness to his movements, that had not been there before. His chin went up instead of down, and there was a glint in his eye that he had not possessed when he had worn a bowler hat.

By the time they had eaten the meal the little hairy man had brought back with him from Revelry—which consisted of smoked trout, a bowl of fresh shelled peas, several small raisin-cakes, and a bottle of small beer—Tristran felt quite at home with his new garb.

“Now then,” said the little hairy man. “You’ve saved my life, laddie, back there in the serewood, and your father, he done me a good turn back before you was born, and let it never be said that I’m a cove what doesn’t pay his debts—” Tristran began to mutter something about how his friend had already done more than enough for him, but the little hairy man ignored him and continued. “—so I was a-ponderin’: you know where your star is, don’t you?”