tingled, not unpleasantly, where his skin touched hers. She sat on the ground like a tree stump,
making no effort STARE to get up.
“I told you,” she said, “that I would do everything in my power to frustrate your plans and
devices.” She looked around the grove. “How very bland this world does look by day. And how
dull.”
“Just put your weight on me, and the rest on the crutch,” he said. “You’ll have to move
sometime.” He tugged on the chain and, reluctantly, the star began to get to her feet, leaning first
against Tristran, and then, as if proximity to him disgusted her, on the crutch.
She gasped, then, in a hard intake of breath, and tumbled to the grass, where she lay with her
face contorted, making small noises of pain. Tristran knelt down beside her. “What’s wrong?” he
asked.
Her blue eyes flashed, but they were swimming with tears. “My leg. I can’t stand on it. It must
really be broken.” Her skin had gone as white as a cloud, and she was shivering.
“I’m sorry,” said Tristran, uselessly. “I can make you a splint. I’ve done it for sheep. It’ll be all
right.” He squeezed her hand, and then he went to the brook, and dipped his handkerchief in it,
and gave it to the star to wipe her forehead.
He split more fallen wood with his knife. Then he removed his jerkin, and took off his shirt,
which he proceeded to tear into strips which he used to bind the sticks, as firmly as he could,
about her injured leg. The star made no sounds while he did this, although, when he pulled the last
knot tight, he thought he heard her whimper to herself.
“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 eyes...
The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown, thought Tristran to himself,
remembering the old nursery rhyme.
The Lion beat the Unicom 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.
“Hullo,” said Tristran. There were burrs and leaves in the lion’s mane. He held the heavy crown
out toward the great beast. “You won. Let the unicorn go.” And he took a step closer. Then he
reached out both trembling hands, and placed the crown upon the lion’s head.
The lion clambered off the prone body of the unicorn and began to pad, silently, about the
clearing, its head raised high. It reached the edge of the wood, where it paused for several minutes
to lick its wounds with its red, red tongue, and then, purring like an earthquake, the lion slipped
away into the forest.
The star hobbled over to the injured unicorn and lowered herself to the grass, awkwardly, her
broken leg splayed out by her side. She stroked its head. “Poor, poor creature,” she said. It opened
its dark eyes and stared at her, and then it laid its head upon her lap, and it closed its eyes once
more.
That evening,Tristran ate the last of the hard bread for his supper, and the star ate nothing at
all. She had insisted they wait beside the unicorn, and Tristran had not the heart to refuse her.
The clearing was dark, now. The sky above them was filled with the twinkling of a thousand
stars. The star-woman glittered too, as if she had been brushed by the Milky Way; while the
unicorn glowed gently in the darkness, like a moon seen through clouds. Tristran lay beside the
huge bulk of the unicorn, feeling its warmth radiating out into the night. The star was lying on the
other side of the beast. It sounded almost as if she were murmuring a song to the unicorn; Tristran
wished that he could hear her properly. The fragments of melody he could make out were strange
and tantalizing, but she sang so quietly he could hear next to nothing at all.
His fingers touched the chain that bound them: cold as snow it was, and tenuous as moonlight
on a millpond or the glint of light on a trout’s silver scales as it rises at dusk to feed.
And soon he slept.
The witch-queen drove her chariot down a forest path, lashing the flanks of the twin white billy
goats with a I whip when they flagged. She had observed the small cooking fire burning beside the
path from almost half a mile back, and she knew from the color of the flames that it was the fire
of one of her people, for witch-fires burn with certain unusual hues. So she reined in her goats
when she reached the brightly painted gypsy caravan, and the cooking fire, and the iron-haired old
woman who sat beside the fire, tending to the spit over the flames on which a hare was roasting.
Fat dripped from the hare’s open gut, hissing and sizzling in the fire, which gave off the twin
aromas of cooking meat and of wood smoke.
A multicolored bird sat by the driver’s seat at the front of the caravan, on a wooden perch. It
raised its feathers and called out in alarm when it saw the witch-queen, but it was chained to its
perch and could not leave.
“Before you says anything,” said the grey-haired woman, “I should tell ye that I’m just a poor
old flower-seller, a harmless old biddy who’s never done nothing to no one, and that the sight of a
grand and terrifying lady such as yourself fills me with dread and fear.”
“I will not harm you,” said the witch-queen.
The harridan screwed her eyes to slits, and looked the lady in the red kirtle up and down.
“That’s what you says,” she said. “But how am I to know that it’s so, a sweet old dear like me,
who’s all a-tremble from her toes to her water? You might be planning to rob me in the night, or
worse.” And she poked the fire with a stick, so it leapt up. The smell of the cooked meat hung on
the still evening air.
“I swear,” said the lady in the scarlet kirtle, “that, by the rules and constraints of the
Sisterhood to which you and I belong, by the puissance of the Lilim, and by my lips and breasts and
maidenhood, that I mean you no harm, and shall treat you as if you were my own guest.”
“That’s good enough for me, dearie-ducks,” said the old woman, her face breaking into a smile.
“Come and sit down. Supper’11 be cooked in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
“With good will,” said the lady in the red kirtle.
The goats snuffled and munched at the grass and the leaves beside the chariot, eyeing with
distaste the tethered mules that pulled the caravan. “Fine goats,” said the harridan. The witch-
queen inclined her head and smiled modestly. The firelight glinted on the little scarlet snake
wrapped as a bracelet about her wrist.
The harridan went on, “Now, my dear, my old eyes aren’t what once they were by any means,
but would I be correct in supposing that one of those fine fellows started life walking on two legs,
not four?”
“Such things have been heard of,” admitted the witch-queen. “That splendid bird of yours, for
example.”
“That bird gave away one of the prizes of my stock of items for sale, gave it away to a good-for-
nothing, nearly twenty years ago. And afterward, the trouble she put me through scarcely bears
considering. So these days, she stays a bird, unless there’s work that needs doing, or the flower-
stall to run; and if I could find a good strong servant, not afraid of a little hard work, why then she
would stay a bird forever.”
The bird chirruped sadly upon her perch.
“They call me Mistress Semele,” said the harridan.
They called you Ditchwater Sal, when you were a young chit of a thing, thought the witch-
queen, but she did not say this aloud. “You may call me Morwanneg,” said the witch instead. It
was, she reflected, almost a joke (for Morwanneg means wave of the sea, and her true name was
long since drowned and lost beneath the cold ocean).
Mistress Semele got to her feet and made her way into the interior of the caravan, emerging
