Stardust

“Really,” he told her, “we ought to get you to a proper doctor. I’m not a surgeon or anything.”

“No?” she said dryly. “You astonish me.”He let her rest for a little, in the sun. And then he said, “Better try again, I suppose,” and he raised her to her feet.

They left the glade at a hobble, the star leaning heavily on her crutch and on Tristran’s arm, wincing at every step. And every time she winced or flinched Tristran felt guilty and awkward, but he calmed himself by thinking of Victoria Forester’s grey eyes. They followed a deer path through the hazel-wood, while Tristran — who had decided that the right thing to do was to make conversation with the star — asked how long she had been a star, whether it was enjoyable to be a star and whether all stars were women, and informed her that he had always supposed stars to be, as Mrs. Cherry had taught them, flaming balls of burning gas many hundreds of miles across, just like the sun only further away.

To all of these questions and statements she made no answer.

“So why did you fall?” he asked. “Did you trip over something?”She stopped moving, and turned, and stared at him, as if she were examining something quite unpleasant a very long way away.

“I did not trip,” she said at length. “I was hit. By this.” She reached into her dress and pulled out a large yellowish stone, which dangled from two lengths of silver chain. “There’s a bruise on my side where it hit me and knocked me from the sky. And now I am obligated to carry it about with me.”

“Why?”She seemed as if she were about to answer, and then she shook her head, and her lips closed, and she said nothing at all. A stream rilled and splashed to their right, keeping pace with them. The noonday sun was overhead, and Tristran found himself getting increasingly hungry. He took the heel of the dry loaf from his bag, moistened it in the stream, and shared it out, half and half.

The star inspected the wet bread with disdain and did not put it in her mouth.

“You’ll starve,” warned Tristran.

She said nothing, just raised her chin a little higher. They continued through the woodland, making slow progress. They were laboring up a deer path on the side of a hill, which led them over fallen trees, and which had now become so steep it threatened to tumble the stumbling star and her captor down to the bottom. “Is there not an easier path?” asked the star, at length. “Some kind of road, or a level clearing?”And once the question was asked, Tristran knew the answer. “There is a road half a mile that way,” he told her, pointing, “and a clearing over there, beyond that thicket,” he said, turning to motion in another direction.

“You knew that?”

“Yes. No. Well, I only knew it once you asked me.”

“Let us make for the clearing,” she said, and they pushed through the thicket as best they could. It still took them the better part of an hour to reach the clearing, but the ground, when they got there, was as level and flat as a playing field. The space seemed to have been cleared with a purpose, but what that purpose was Tristran could not imagine.

In the center of the glade, on the grass some distance from them, was an ornate golden crown, which glittered in the afternoon sunlight. It was studded with red and blue stones: rubies and sapphires, thought Tristran. He was about to walk over to the crown when the star touched his arm and said, “Wait. Do you hear drums?”He realized that he did: a low, throbbing beat, coming from all around them, near at hand and far away, which echoed through the hills. And then there came a loud crashing noise from the trees at the far side of the clearing, and a high, wordless screaming. Into the glade came a huge white horse, its flanks gashed and bloody. It charged into the middle of the clearing, and then it turned, and lowered its head, and faced its pursuer — which bounded into the clearing with a growl that made Tristran’s flesh prickle. It was a lion, but it looked little enough like the lion Tristran had seen at a fair in the next village, which had been a mangy, toothless, rheumy thing. This lion was huge, the color of sand in the late afternoon. It entered the clearing at a run, and then it stopped and snarled at the white horse.

The horse looked terrified. Its mane was matted with sweat and blood, and its eyes were wild. Also, Tristran realized, it had a long, ivory horn jutting from the center of its forehead. It reared up on its hind legs, whinnying and snorting, and one sharp, unshod hoof connected with the lion’s shoulder, causing the lion to howl like a huge, scalded cat, and to spring backwards. Then, keeping its distance, the lion circled the wary unicorn, its golden eyes at all times fixed upon the sharp horn that was always turned toward it.

“Stop them,” whispered the star. “They will kill each other.”The lion growled at the unicorn. It began as a soft growl, like distant thunder, and finished as a roar that shook the trees and the rocks of the valley and the sky. Then the lion sprang and the unicorn plunged, and the glade was filled with gold and silver and red, for the lion was on the unicorn’s back, claws gashing deeply into its flanks, mouth at its neck, and the unicorn was wailing and bucking and throwing itself onto its back in an effort to dislodge the great cat, flailing uselessly with its hooves and its horn in an effort to reach its tormentor.

“Please, do something.

The lion will kill him,” pleaded the girl, urgently.

Tristran would have explained to her that all he could possibly hope for if he approached the raging beasts was to be skewered, and kicked, and clawed, and eaten; and he would further have explained that, should he somehow survive approaching them, there was still nothing that he could do, having with him not even the pail of water which had been the traditional method of breaking up animal fights in Wall. But by the time all these thoughts had gone through his head, Tristran was already standing in the center of the clearing, an arm’s length from the beasts. The scent of the lion was deep, animal, terrifying, and Tristran was close enough to see the beseeching expression in the unicorn’s black eyesThe Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown, thought Tristran to himself, remembering the old nursery rhyme. The Lion beat the Unicorn all about the town.

He beat him once

He beat him twice

With all his might and main

He beat him three times over

His power to maintain And with that, he picked up the crown from the grass; it was as heavy and as soft as lead. He walked toward the animals, talking to the lion as he had talked to the ill-tempered rams and agitated ewes in his father’s fields, saying “Here, now . . . Easy . . . Here’s your crown . . .”The lion shook the unicorn in its jaws, like a cat worrying a woolen scarf, and darted a look of pure puzzlement at Tristran.