Stardust

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 good-byes 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 memory 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.