Stardust

Chapter Nine which Deals Chiefly With the Events at Diggory’s Dyke

Diggory’s Dyke was a deep cut between two chalk Downs—high, green hills, where a thin layer of green grass and reddish earth covered the chalk, and there was scarcely soil enough for trees. The Dyke looked, from a distance, like a white chalk gash on a green velvet board. Local legend had it that the cut was dug, in a day and a night, by one Diggory, using a spade that had once been a sword blade before Way-land Smith had melted it down and beaten it out, on his journey into Faerie from Wall. There were those who said the sword had once been Flamberge, and others, that it was once the sword Balmung; but there were none who claimed to know just who Diggory had been, and it might all have been stuff and nonsense. Anyway, the path to Wall went through Diggory’s Dyke, and any foot-traveler or any person going by any manner of wheeled vehicle went through the Dyke, where the chalk rose on either side of you like thick white walls, and the Downs rose up above them like the green pillows of a giant’s bed.

In the middle of the Dyke, beside the path, was what appeared at first glance to be little more than a heaped pile of sticks and twigs. A closer inspection would have revealed it to be something in nature partway between a small shed and a large wooden teepee, with a hole in the roof through which grey smoke occasionally could be seen to trickle out.

The man in black had been giving the pile of sticks as close an inspection as he could for two days now, from the top of the Downs far above and, when he dared chance it, from closer. The hut, he had established, was inhabited by a woman of advanced years. She had no companions, and no obvious occupation, apart from that of stopping each and every lone traveler and each conveyance that passed through the Dyke, and passing the time of day.

She seemed harmless enough, but Septimus had not become the only surviving male member of his immediate family by trusting appearances, and this old woman had, he was certain of it, slit Primus’s throat.

The obligations of revenge demanded a life for a life; they did not specify any way that the life should be taken. Now, by temperament, Septimus was one of nature’s poisoners. Blades and blows and booby traps were well enough in their way, but a vial of clear liquid, any trace of taste or odor gone when it was admixtured with food, that was Septimus’s metier.

Unfortunately the old woman seemed to take no food she did not gather or trap herself, and while he contemplated leaving a steaming pie at the door to her house, made of ripe apples and lethal baneberries, he dismissed it soon enough as impractical. He pondered rolling a chalk boulder down from the hills above her, dropping it onto her little house; but he could not be certain that he would hit her with it. He wished he was more of a magician—he had some of the locating ability that ran, patchily, in his family line, and a few minor magics he had learned or stolen over the years, but nothing that would be of use to him now, when he needed to invoke floods or hurricanes or lightning strikes. So Septimus observed his victim-to-be as a cat watches a mouse hole, hour after hour, by night and by day.

It was past the mid-hour of the night, and was quite moonless and dark, when Septimus finally crept to the door of the house of sticks, with a firepot in one hand and a book of romantic poetry and a blackbird’s nest, into which he had placed several fircones, in the other. Hanging from his belt was a club of oak-wood, its head studded with brass nails. He listened at the door, but could hear nothing but a rhythmic breathing, and, once in a while, a sleeping grunt. His eyes were used to the darkness, and the house stood out against the white chalk of the Dyke. He crept around to the side of the building, where he could keep the door in sight.

First he tore the pages from the book of poems, and crumpled each poem into a ball or a paper twist, which he pushed into the sticks of the shack’s wall, at ground level. On top of the poems he placed the fircones. Next, he opened the firepot, and with his knife he fished a handful of waxed linen scraps from the lid, dipped them into the glowing charcoal of the pot and, when they were burning well, he placed them on the paper twists and the cones, and he blew gently on the flickering yellow flames until the pile caught. He dropped dry twigs from the bird’s nest onto the little fire, which crackled in the night and began to blossom and grow. The dry sticks of the wall smoked gently, forcing Septimus to suppress a cough, and then they caught fire, and Septimus smiled.

Septimus returned to the door of the hut, hefting his wooden club on high. For, he had reasoned, either the hag will burn with her house, in which case my task is done; or, she will smell the smoke and wake, affrighted and distracted, and she will run from the house, whereupon I shall beat her head with my club, staving it in before she can utter a word. And she will be dead, and I will be revenged.

“It is a fine plan,” said Tertius in the crackling of the dry wood. “And once he has killed her, he can go on to obtain the Power of Stormhold.”

“We shall see,” said Primus, and his voice was the wail of a distant night bird.

Flames licked at the little wooden house, and grew and blossomed on its sides with a bright yellow-orange flame. No one came to the door of the hut. Soon, the place was an inferno, and Septimus was forced to take several steps backwards, from the intensity of the heat. He smiled, widely and triumphantly, and he lowered his club.

There came a sharp pain to the heel of his foot. He twisted, and saw a small bright-eyed snake, crimson in the fire’s glow, with its fangs sunk deep into the back of his leather boot. He flung his club at it, but the little creature pulled back from his heel, and looped, at great speed, away behind one of the white chalk boulders.

The pain in his heel began to subside. If there was poison in its bite, thought Septimus, the leather will have taken much of it. I shall bind my leg at the calf, and then I shall remove my boot, and make a cross-shaped incision in the place where I was bitten, and I shall suck out the serpent’s venom. So thinking, he sat down upon a chalk boulder in the fire’s light, and he tugged at his boot. It would not come off. His foot felt numb, and he realized that the foot must be swelling fast. Then I shall cut the boot off, he thought. He raised his foot to the level of his thigh; for a moment he thought his world was going dark, and then he saw that the flames, which had illuminated the Dyke like a bonfire, were gone. He felt chilled to the bone.

“So,” said a voice from behind him, soft as a silken strangling-rope, sweet as a poisoned lozenge, “you thought that you would warm yourself at the burning of my little cottage. Did you wait at the door to beat out the flames should they prove not to my liking?”

Septimus would have answered her, but his jaw muscles were clenched, his teeth gritted hard together. His heart was pounding inside his chest like a small drum, not in its usual steady march but in a wild, arrhythmic abandon. He could feel every vein and artery in his body threading fire through his frame, if it was not ice that they pumped: he could not tell.

An old woman stepped into his view. She looked like the woman who had inhabited the wooden hut, but older, so much older. Septimus tried to blink, to clear his tearing eyes, but he had forgotten how to blink, and his eyes would not close.

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” said the woman. “Attempting arson and violence upon the person of a poor old lady living upon her own, who would be entirely at the mercy of every passing vagabond, were it not for the kindness of her little friends.”

And she picked something up from the chalky ground and placed it about her wrist, then she walked back into the hut, which was miraculously unburned, or restored, Septimus did not know which and did not care.

His heart juddered and syncopated inside his chest, and if he could have screamed, he would. It was dawn before the pain ended and, in six voices, his older brothers welcomed Septimus to their ranks.

Septimus looked down, one last time, on the twisted, still-warm form he had once inhabited, and at the expression in its eyes. Then he turned away.

“There are no brothers left to take revenge on her,” he said, in the voice of the morning curlews, “and it is none of us will ever be Lord of Stormhold. Let us move on.”

And after he had said that, there were not even ghosts in that place.

The sun was high in the sky that day when Madame Semele’s caravan came lumbering through the chalk cut of Diggory’s Dyke.

Madame Semele noticed the soot-blackened wooden hovel beside the road and, as she approached closer, the bent old woman in her faded scarlet dress, who waved at her from beside the path. The woman’s hair was white as snow, her skin was wrinkled, and one eye was blind.

“Good day, sister. What happened to your house?” asked Madame Semele.

“Young people today. One of them thought it would be good sport to fire the house of a poor old woman who has never harmed a soul. Well, he learned his lesson soon enough.”

“Aye,” said Madame Semele. “They always learn. And are never grateful to us for the lesson.”

“There’s truth for you,” said the woman in the faded scarlet dress. “Now, tell me, dear. Who rides with you this day?”

“That,” said Madame Semele, haughtily, “is none of your never-mind, and I shall thank you to keep yourself to yourself.”

“Who rides with you? Tell me truly, or I shall set harpies to tear you limb from limb and hang your remains from a hook deep beneath the world.”

“And who would you be, to threaten me so?”

The old woman stared up at Madame Semele with one good eye and one milky eye. “I know you, Ditchwater Sal. None of your damned lip. Who travels with you?”

Madame Semele felt the words being torn from her mouth, whether she would say them or no. “There are the two mules who pull my caravan, myself, a maid-servant I keep in the form of a large bird, and a young man in the form of a dormouse.”

“Anyone else? Anything else?”

“No one and nothing. I swear it upon the Sisterhood.”

The woman at the side of the road pursed her lips. “Then get away with you, and get along with you,” she said.

Madame Semele clucked and shook the reins and the mules began to amble on.

In her borrowed bed in the dark interior of the caravan the star slept on, unaware how close she had come to her doom, nor by how slim a margin she had escaped it.

When they were out of sight of the stick-house and the deathly whiteness of Diggory’s Dyke, the exotic bird napped up onto its perch, threw back its head and whooped and crowed and sang, until Madame Semele told it that she would wring its foolish neck if it would not be quiet. And even then, in the quiet darkness inside the caravan, the pretty bird chuckled and twittered and trilled, and, once, it even hooted like a little owl.

The sun was already low in the western sky as they approached the town of Wall. The sun shone in their eyes, half blinding them and turning their world to liquid gold. The sky, the trees, the bushes, even the path itself was golden in the light of the setting sun.

Madame Semele reined in her mules in the meadow, where her stall would be. She unhitched the two mules, and led them to the stream, where she hitched them to a tree. They drank deeply and eagerly.

There were other market-folk and visitors setting up their stalls all over the meadow, putting up tents and hanging draperies from trees. There was an air of expectation that touched everyone and everything, like the golden light of the westering sun.

Madame Semele went into the inside of the caravan and unhooked the cage from its chain. She carried it out into the meadow and put it down on a hillock of grass. She opened the cage door, and picked out the sleeping dormouse with bony fingers. “Out you come,” she said. The dormouse rubbed its liquid black eyes with its forepaws, and blinked at the fading daylight.

The witch reached into her apron and produced a glass daffodil. With it she touched Tristran’s head.

Tristran blinked sleepily, and then he yawned. He ran a hand through his unruly brown hair and looked down at the witch with fierce anger in his eyes. “Why, you evil old crone—” he began.

“Hush your silly mouth,” said Madame Semele, sharply. “I got you here, safely and soundly, and in the same condition I found you. I gave you board and I gave you lodging—and if neither of them were to your liking or expectation, well, what is it to me? Now, be off with you, before I change you into a wiggling worm and bite off your head, if it is not your tail. Go! Shoo! Shoo!”

Tristran counted to ten, and then, ungraciously, walked away. He stopped a dozen yards away beside a copse, and waited for the star, who limped down the side of the caravan steps, and came over to him.

“Are you all right?” he asked, genuinely concerned, as she approached.

“Yes, thank you,” said the star. “She did not ill-use me. Indeed, I do not believe that she ever knew that I was there at all. Is that not peculiar?”

Madame Semele had the bird in front of her now. She touched its plumed head with her glass flower, and it flowed and shifted and became a young woman, in appearance not too much older than Tristran himself, with dark, curling hair and furred, catlike ears. She darted a glance at Tristran, and there was something about those violet eyes that Tristran found utterly familiar, although he could not recall where he had seen them before.

“So, that is the bird’s true form,” said Yvaine. “She was a good companion on the road.” And then the star realized that the silver chain that had kept the bird a captive was still there, now that the bird had become a woman, for it glinted upon her wrist and ankle, and Yvaine pointed this out to Tristran.

“Yes,” said Tristran. “I can see. It is awful. But I’m not sure there’s much that we can do about it.”

They walked together through the meadow, toward the gap in the wall. “We shall visit my parents first,” said Tristran, “For I have no doubt that they have missed me as I have missed them”—although, truth to tell, Tristran had scarcely given his parents a second thought on his journeyings—“and then we shall pay a visit to Victoria Forester, and—” It was with this and that Tristran closed his mouth. For he could no longer reconcile his old idea of giving the star to Victoria Forester with his current notion that the star was not a thing to be passed from hand to hand, but a true person in all respects and no kind of a thing at all. And yet, Victoria Forester was the woman he loved.

Well and all, he would burn that bridge when he came to it, he decided, and for now he would take Yvaine into the village, and deal with events as they came. He felt his spirits lift, and his time as a dormouse had already become nothing more in his head than the remnants of a dream, as if he had merely taken an afternoon nap in front of the kitchen fire and was now wide awake once more. He could almost taste in his mouth the memory of Mr. Bromios’s best ale, although he realized, with a guilty start, he had forgotten the color of Victoria Forester’s eyes.

The sun was huge and red behind the rooftops of Wall when Tristran and Yvaine crossed the meadow and looked down on the gap in the wall. The star hesitated.

“Do you really want this?” she asked Tristran. “For I have misgivings.”

“Don’t be nervous,” he said. “Although it’s not surprising that you have nerves; my stomach feels as if I had swallowed a hundred butterflies. You shall feel so much better when you are sitting in my mother’s parlor, drinking her tea—well, not drinking tea, but there will be tea for you to sip—why, I swear that for such a guest, and to welcome her boy back home, my mother would break out the best china,” and his hand sought hers and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

She looked at him, and she smiled, gently and ruefully. “Whither thou goest…” she whispered.

Hand in hand the young man and the fallen star approached the gap in the wall.