Stardust

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 Storm-hold. 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 Crag-land’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 Storm-hold, 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.