Stardust

Mr. Brown smiled the same smile he had been used to use when he docked Tristran a morning’s wages for five minutes’ lateness. “Exactly,” he said. “There was no rule against it because it doesn’t happen. No one comes through from the other side. Not while I’m on duty, any road. Now, be off with you, before I take my stick to your head.”

Tristran was dumbfounded. “If you think I have gone through, well, everything I’ve gone through, only to be turned away at the last by a self-important, penny-pinching grocer and by someone who used to crib from me in History…” he began, but Yvaine touched his arm and said, “Tristran, let it go for now. You shall not fight with your own people.”

Tristran said nothing. Then he turned, without a word, and together they walked back up the slope of the meadow. Around them a hodgepodge of creatures and people erected their stalls, hung their flags and wheeled their barrows. And it came to Tristran then, in a wave of something that resembled homesickness, but a homesickness comprised in equal parts of longing and despair, that these might as well be his own people, for he felt he had more in common with them than with the pallid folk of Wall in their worsted jackets and their hobnailed boots.

They stopped and watched a small woman, almost as broad as she was high, do her best to put up her stall. Unasked, Tristran walked over and began to help her, carrying the heavy boxes from her cart to the stall, climbing a tall stepladder to hang an assortment of streamers from a tree branch, unpacking heavy glass carafes and jugs (each one stoppered with a huge, blackened cork and sealed with silvery wax, and filled with a slowly swirling colored smoke), and placing them on the shelves. As he and the market-woman worked, Yvaine sat on a nearby tree stump and she sang to them in her soft, clean voice the songs of the high stars, and the commoner songs she had heard and learnt from the folk they had encountered on their journeyings.

By the time Tristran and the little woman were done, and the stall was set out for the morrow, they were working by lamplight. The woman insisted on feeding them; Yvaine barely managed to convince her that she was not hungry, but Tristran ate everything he was offered with enthusiasm and, unusually for him, he drank the greater part of a carafe of sweet canary wine, insisting that it tasted no stronger than freshly squeezed grape juice and that it had no effect upon him of any kind. Even so, when the stout little woman offered them the clearing behind her cart to sleep in, Tristran was sleeping drunkenly in moments.

It was a clear, cold night. The star sat beside the sleeping man, who had once been her captor and had become her companion on the road, and she wondered where her hatred had gone. She was not sleepy.

There was a rustle in the grass behind her. A dark-haired woman stood next to her, and together they stared down at Tristran.

“There is something of the dormouse in him still,” said the dark-haired woman. Her ears were pointed and catlike, and she looked little older than Tristran himself. “Sometimes I wonder if she transforms people into animals, or whether she finds the beast inside us, and frees it. Perhaps there is something about me that is, by nature, a brightly colored bird. It is something to which I have given much thought, but about which I have come to no conclusions.”

Tristran muttered something unintelligible, and stirred in his sleep. Then he began, gently, to snore.

The woman walked around Tristran, and sat down beside him. “He seems good-hearted,” she said.

“Yes,” admitted the star. “I suppose that he is.”

“I should warn you,” said the woman, “that if you leave these lands for … over there …” and she gestured toward the village of Wall with one slim arm, from the wrist of which a silver chain glittered, “… then you will be, as I understand it, transformed into what you would be in that world: a cold, dead thing, sky-fallen.”

The star shivered, but she said nothing. Instead, she reached across Tristran’s sleeping form to touch the silver chain which circled the woman’s wrist and ankle and led off into the bushes and beyond.

“You become used to it, in time,” said the woman.

“Do you? Really?”

Violet eyes stared into blue eyes, and then looked away. “No.”

The star let go of the chain. “He once caught me with a chain much like yours. Then he freed me, and I ran from him. But he found me and bound me with an obligation, which binds my kind more securely than any chain ever could.”

An April breeze ran across the meadow, stirring the bushes and the trees in one long chilly sigh. The cat-eared woman tossed her curly hair back from her face, and said,”You are under a prior obligation, are you not? You have something that does not belong to you, which you must deliver to its rightful owner.”

The star’s lips tightened. “Who are you?” she asked.