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Stardust
Neil
Gaiman
Also by Neil Gaiman
Novels
Neverwhere Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett)
For Children
The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish (illustrated by Dave McKean)
Collections
Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions Angels & Visitations, A Miscellany
Graphic Novels
(with Dave McKean)
Violent Cases
Signal to Noise
Mr. Punch
Sandman
Preludes & Nocturnes
The Doll’s House
Dream Country
Season of Mists
A Game of You
Fables and Reflections
Brief Lives
Worlds’ End
The Kindly Ones
The Wake
Death
The High Cost of Living The Time of Your Life
Miscellaneous Graphic Novels
The Books of Magic
Miracleman: The Golden Age
Black Orchid
Non-fiction
Don’t Panic! Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Kirn Newman)
As Editor
The Sandman: Book of Dreams (with Ed Kramer) Now We Are Sick (with Steve Jones)
For Gene and Rosemary Wolfe
Song
Go, and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me, where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil’s foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy’s stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
If thou be’est born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return’st, wilt tell me
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear
Nowhere
Lives a woman true, and fair.
If thou find’st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet,
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet,
Though she were true when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.
—John Donne, 1572-1631
Chapter
One
In Which We Learn of the Village of Wall, and of the
Curious Thing That Occurs There Every Nine Years
There was once a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire.
And while that is, as beginnings go, not entirely novel (for every tale about every young man
there ever was or will be could start in a similar manner) there was much about this young man and
what happened to him that was unusual, although even he never knew the whole of it.
The tale started, as many tales have started, in Wall.
The town of Wall stands today as it has stood for six
hundred years, on a high jut of granite amidst a small forest woodland. The houses of Wall are
square and old, built of grey stone, with dark slate roofs and high chimneys; taking advantage of
every inch of space on the rock, the houses lean into each other, are built one upon the next, with
here and there a bush or tree growing out of the side of a building.
There is one road from Wall, a winding track rising sharply up from the forest, where it is lined
with rocks and small stones. Followed far enough south, out of the forest, the track becomes a real
road, paved with asphalt; followed further the road gets larger, is packed at all hours with cars and
trucks rushing from city to city. Eventually the road takes you to London, but London is a whole
night’s drive from Wall.
The inhabitants of Wall are a taciturn breed, falling into two distinct types: the native Wall-
folk, as grey and tall and stocky as the granite outcrop their town was built upon; and the others,
who have made Wall their home over the years, and their descendants.
Below Wall on the west is the forest; to the south is a treacherously placid lake served by the
streams that drop from the hills behind Wall to the north. There are fields upon the hills, on which
sheep graze. To the east is more woodland.
Immediately to the east of Wall is a high grey rock wall, from which the town takes its name.
This wall is old, built of rough, square lumps of hewn granite, and it comes from the woods and
goes back to the woods once more.
There is only one break in the wall; an opening about six feet in width, a little to the north of
the village.
Through the gap in the wall can be seen a large green meadow; beyond the meadow, a stream;
and beyond the stream there are trees. From time to time shapes and figures can be seen, amongst
the trees, in the distance. Huge shapes and odd shapes and small, glimmering things which flash
and glitter and are gone. Although it is perfectly good meadow-land, none of the villagers has ever
grazed animals on the meadow on the other side of the wall. Nor have they used it for growing
crops.
Instead, for hundreds, perhaps for thousands of years, they have posted guards on each side of
the opening on the wall, and done their best to put it out of their minds.
Even today, two townsmen stand on either side of the opening, night and day, taking eight-hour
shifts. They carry hefty wooden cudgels. They flank the opening on the town side.
Their main function is to prevent the town’s children from going through the opening, into the
meadow and beyond. Occasionally they are called upon to discourage a solitary rambler, or one of
the few visitors to the town, from going through the gateway.
The children they discourage simply with displays of the cudgel. Where ramblers and visitors are
concerned, they are more inventive, only using physical force as a last resort if tales of new-
planted grass, or a dangerous bull on the loose, are not sufficient.
Very rarely someone comes to Wall knowing what they are looking for, and these people they
will sometimes allow through. There is a look in the eyes, and once seen it cannot be mistaken.
There have been no cases of smuggling across the wall in all the Twentieth Century, that the
townsfolk know of, and they pride themselves on this.
The guard is relaxed once every nine years, on May Day, when a fair comes to the meadow.
The events that follow transpired many years ago. Queen Victoria was on the throne of
England, but she was not yet the black-clad widow of Windsor: she had apples in her cheeks and a
spring in her step, and Lord Melbourne often had cause to upbraid, gently, the young queen for her
flightmess. She was, as yet, unmarried, although she was very much in love.
Mr. Charles Dickens was serializing his novel Oliver Twist; Mr. Draper had just taken the first
photograph of the moon, freezing her pale face on cold paper; Mr. Morse had recently announced a
way of transmitting messages down metal wires.
Had you mentioned magic or Faerie to any of them, they would have smiled at you disdainfully,
except, perhaps for Mr. Dickens, at the time a young man, and beardless. He would have looked at
you wistfully.
People were coming to the British Isles that spring. They came in ones, and they came in twos,
and they landed at Dover or in London or in Liverpool: men and women with skins as pale as paper,
skins as dark as volcanic rock, skins the color of cinnamon, speaking in a multitude of tongues.
They arrived all through April, and they traveled by steam train, by horse, by caravan or cart, and
many of them walked.
At that time Dunstan Thorn was eighteen, and he was not a romantic.
He had nut-brown hair, and nut-brown eyes, and nut-brown freckles. He was middling tall, and
slow of speech. He had an easy smile, which illuminated his face from within, and he dreamed,
when he daydreamed in his father’s meadow, of leaving the village of Wall and all its
unpredictable charm, and going to London, or Edinburgh, or Dublin, or some great town where
nothing was dependent on which way the wind was blowing. He worked on his father’s farm and
owned nothing save a small cottage in a far field given to him by his parents.
Visitors were coming to Wall that April for the fair, and Dunstan resented them. Mr. Bromios’s
inn, the Seventh Magpie, normally a warren of empty rooms, had filled a week earlier, and now the
strangers had begun to take rooms in the farms and private houses, paying for their lodgings with
strange coins, with herbs and spices, and even with gemstones. As the day of the fair approached
the atmosphere of anticipation mounted. People were waking earlier, counting days, counting
minutes. The guards on the gate, at the sides of the wall, were restive and nervous. Figures and
shadows moved in the trees at the edge of the meadow.
In the Seventh Magpie, Bridget Comfrey, who was widely regarded as the most beautiful pot-girl
in living memory, was provoking friction between Tommy Forester, with whom she had been seen
to step out over the previous year, and a huge man with dark eyes and a small, cluttering monkey.
The man spoke little English, but he smiled expressively whenever Bridget came by.
In the pub’s taproom the regulars sat in awkward proximity to the visitors, speaking so: “It’s
only every nine years.”
“They say in the old days it was every year, at midsummer.”
“Ask Mister Bromios. He’ll know.” Mr. Bromios was tall, and his skin was olive; his black hair
was curled tightly on his head; his eyes were green. As the girls of the village became women they
took notice of Mr. Bromios, but he did not return their notice. It was said he had come to the
village quite some time ago, a visitor. But he had stayed in the village; and his wine was good, so
the locals agreed.
A loud argument broke out in the public lounge between Tommy Forester and the dark-eyed
man, whose name appeared to be Alum Bey.
“Stop them! In the name of Heaven! Stop them!” shouted Bridget. “They’re going out the back
to fight over me!” And she tossed her head, prettily, so that the light of the oil lamps caught her
perfect golden curls.
Nobody moved to stop the men, although a number of people, villagers and newcomers alike,
went outside to spectate.
Tommy Forester removed his shirt and raised his fists in front of him. The stranger laughed, and
spat onto the grass, and then he seized Tommy’s right hand and sent him flying onto the ground,
chin-first. Tommy clambered to his feet and ran at the stranger. He landed a glancing blow on the
man’s cheek, before finding himself facedown in the dirt, his face being slammed into the mud,
with the wind knocked out of him. Alum Bey sat on top of him and chuckled, and said something in
Arabic.
That quickly, and that easily, the fight was over.
Alum Bey climbed off Tommy Forester and he strutted over to Bridget Comfrey, bowed low to
her, and grinned with gleaming teeth.
Bridget ignored him, and ran to Tommy. “Why, whatever has he done to you, my sweet?” she
asked, and mopped the mud from his face with her apron and called him all manner of
endearments.
Alum Bey went, with the spectators, back into the public rooms of the inn, and he graciously
bought Tommy Forester a bottle of Mr. Bromios’s Chablis when Tommy returned. Neither of them
was quite certain who had won, who had lost.
Dunstan Thorn was not in the Seventh Magpie that evening: he was a practical lad, who had, for
the last six months, been courting Daisy Hempstock, a young woman of similar practicality. They
would walk, on fair evenings, around the village, and discuss the theory of crop rotation, and the
weather, and other such sensible matters; and on these walks, upon which they were invariably
accompanied by Daisy’s mother and younger sister walking a healthy six paces behind, they would,
from time to time, stare at each other lovingly.
At the door to the Hempstocks’ Dunstan would pause, and bow, and take his farewell.
And Daisy Hempstock would walk into her house, and remove her bonnet, and say, “I do so wish
Mister Thorn would make up his mind to propose. I am sure Papa would not be averse to it.”
“Indeed, I am sure that he would not,” said Daisy’s mama on this evening, as she said on every
such evening, and she removed her own bonnet and her gloves and led her daughters to the
drawing room, in which a very tall gentleman with a very long black beard was sitting, sorting
through his pack. Daisy, and her mama, and her sister, bobbed curtseys to the gentleman (who
spoke little English, and had arrived a few days before). The temporary lodger, in his turn, stood
and bowed to them, then returned to his pack of wooden oddments, sorting, arranging and
polishing.
It was chilly that April, with the awkward changeability of English spring.
The visitors came up the narrow road through the forest from the south; they filled the spare-
rooms, they bunked out in cow byres and barns. Some of them raised colored tents, some of them
arrived in their own caravans drawn by huge grey horses or by small, shaggy ponies.
In the forest there was a carpet of bluebells. On the morning of April the 29th Dunstan Thorn
drew guard duty on the gap in the wall, with Tommy Forester. They stood on each side of the gap
in the wall, and they waited.
Dunstan had done guard duty many times before, but hitherto his task had consisted of simply
standing, and, on occasion, shooing away children.
Today he felt important: he held a wooden cudgel, and as each stranger to the village came up
to the break in the wall, Dunstan or Tommy would say “Tomorrow, tomorrow. No one’s coming
through today, good sirs.”
And the strangers would retreat a little way, and stare through the break in the wall at the
unassuming meadow beyond it, at the unexceptional trees that dotted the meadow, at the rather
dull forest behind it. Some of them attempted to strike up conversations with Dunstan or Tommy,
but the young men, proud of their status as guards, declined to converse, contenting themselves by
raising their heads, tightening their lips, and generally looking important.
At lunchtime, Daisy Hempstock brought by a small pot of shepherd’s pie for them both, and
Bridget Comfrey brought them each a mug of spiced ale.
And, at twilight, another two able-bodied young men of the village arrived to relieve them,
carrying a lantern each, and Tommy and Dunstan walked down to the inn where Mr. Bromios gave
each of them a mug of his best ale—and his best ale was very fine indeed—as their reward for doing
