hall they inhabited was many times the size of the cottage; the floor was of onyx, and the pillars
were of obsidian. There was a courtyard behind them, open to the sky, and stars hung in the night
sky above.
A fountain played in the courtyard, the water rolling and falling from a statue of a mermaid in
ecstasy, her mouth wide open. Clean, black water gushed from her mouth into the pool below,
shimmering and shaking the stars.
The three women, and their hall, were in the black mirror. The three old women were the
Lilim—the witch-queen— all alone in the woods.
The three women in the mirror were also the Lilim: but whether they were the successors to
the old women, or their shadow-selves, or whether only the peasant cottage in the woods was real,
or if, somewhere, the Lilim lived in a black hall, with a fountain in the shape of a mermaid playing
in the courtyard of stars, none knew for certain, and none but the Lilim could say.
On this day, one crone came in from the woods, carrying a stoat, its throat a splash of red.
She placed it on the dusty chopping board and took a sharp knife. She cut it around at the arms
and legs and neck, then, with one filthy hand, she pulled the skin off the creature, as if pulling a
child from its pyjamas, and she dropped the naked thing onto the wooden chopping block.
“Entrails?” she asked, in a quavering voice.
The smallest, oldest, most tangle-headed of the women, rocking back and forth in a rocking
chair, said, “Might as well.”
The first old woman picked up the stoat by the head, and sliced it from neck to groin. Its
innards tumbled out onto the cutting board, red and purple and plum-colored, intestines and vital
organs like wet jewels on the dusty wood.
The woman screeched, “Come quick! Come quick!”
Then she pushed gently at the stoat-guts with her knife, and screeched once more.
The crone in the rocking chair pulled herself to her feet. (In the mirror, a dark woman stretched
and rose from her divan.) The last old woman, returning from the outhouse, scurried as fast as she
could from the woods.
“What?” she said. “What is it?”
(In the mirror, a third young woman rejoined the other two. Her breasts were small and high,
and her eyes were dark.)
“Look,” gestured the first old woman, pointing with her knife.
Their eyes were the colorless grey of extreme age, and they squinted at the organs on the slab.
“At last,” said one of them, and “About time,” said another.
“Which of us, then, to find it?” asked the third.
The three women closed their eyes, and three old hands stabbed into the stoat-guts on the
board.
An old hand opened. “I’ve a kidney.”
“I’ve his liver.”
The third hand opened. It belonged to the oldest of the Lilim. “I’ve his heart,” she said,
triumphantly.
“How will you travel?”
“In our old chariot, drawn by what I find at the crossroads.”
“You’ll be needing some years.”
The oldest one nodded.
The youngest, the one who had come in from the outhouse, walked, painfully slowly, over to a
high and ramshackle chest of drawers, and bent over. She took a rusting iron box
from the bottommost drawer, and carried it over to her sisters. It was tied around with three
pieces of old string, each with a different knot in it. Each of the women unknotted her own piece
of string, then the one who had carried the box opened the lid. STAB Something glittered golden in
the bottom of the box. “Not much left,” sighed the youngest of the Lilim, who had been old when
the wood they lived in was still beneath the sea.
“Then it’s a good thing that we’ve found a new one, isn’t it?” said the oldest, tartly, and with
that she thrust a clawed hand into the box. Something golden tried to avoid her hand, but she
caught it, wiggling and glimmering, opened her mouth, and popped it inside.
(In the mirror, three women stared out.) There was a shivering and a shuddering at the center
of all things.
(Now, two women stared from the black mirror.) In the cottage, two old women stared, envy
and hope mixing in their faces, at a tall, handsome woman with black hair and dark eyes and red,
red lips.
“My,” she said, “but this place is filthy.” She strode to the bed. Beside it was a large wooden
chest, covered by a faded tapestry. She twitched off the tapestry, and opened the chest,
rummaging inside.
“Here we go,” she said, holding up a scarlet kirtle. She tossed it onto the bed, and pulled off
the rags and tatters she had worn as an old woman.
Her two sisters stared across at her naked body hungrily. “When I return with her heart, there
will be years aplenty for all of us,” she said, eying her sisters’ hairy chins and hollow eyes with
disfavor. She slipped a scarlet bracelet onto her wrist, in the shape of a small snake with its tail
between its jaws.
“A star,” said one of her sisters.
“A star,” echoed the second.
“Exactly,” said the witch-queen, putting a circlet of silver upon her head. “The first in two
hundred years. And I’ll bring it back to us.” She licked her scarlet lips with a deep red tongue.
“A fallen star,” she said.
It was night in the glade by the pool and the sky was bespattered with stars beyond counting.
Fireflies glittered in the leaves of the elm trees and in the ferns and in the hazel bushes,
flickering on and off like the lights of a strange and distant city. An otter splashed in the brook that
fed the pool. A family of stoats wove and wound their way to the water to drink. A fieldmouse
found a fallen hazelnut and began to bite into the hard shell of the nut with its sharp, ever-growing
front teeth, not because it was hungry, but because it was a prince under an enchantment who
could not regain his outer form until he chewed the Nut of Wisdom. But its excitement made it
careless, and only the shadow that blotted out the moonlight warned it of the descent of a huge
grey owl, who caught the mouse in its sharp talons and rose again into the night.
The mouse dropped the nut, which fell into the brook and was carried away, to be swallowed by
a salmon. The owl swallowed the mouse in just a couple of gulps, leaving just its tail trailing from
her mouth, like a length of bootlace. Something snuffled and grunted as it pushed through the
thicket—a badger, thought the owl (herself under a curse, and only able to resume her rightful
shape if she consumed a mouse who had eaten the Nut of Wisdom), or perhaps a small bear.
Leaves rustled, water rilled, and then the glade became filled with light shining down from
above, a pure white light which grew brighter and brighter. The owl saw it reflected in the pool, a
blazing, glaring thing of pure light, so bright that she took to the wing and flew to another part of
the forest. The wild things looked about them in terror.
First the light in the sky was no bigger than the moon, then it seemed larger, infinitely larger,
and the whole grove trembled and quivered and every creature held its breath and the fireflies
glowed brighter than they had ever glowed in their lives, each one convinced that this at last was
love, but to no avail...
And then—
There was a cracking sound, sharp as a shot, and the light that had filled the grove was gone.
Or almost gone. There was a dim glow pulsing from the middle of the hazel thicket, as if a tiny
cloud of stars were glimmering there.
And there was a voice, a high clear, female voice, which said, “Ow,” and then, very quietly, it
said “Fuck,” and then it said “Ow,” once more.
And then it said nothing at all, and there was silence in the glade.
Chapter
Four
“Can I Get There by Candlelight?”
October moved further away with every step Tristran took; he felt as if he were walking into
summer. There was a path through the woods, with a high hedgerow to one side, and he followed
the path. High above him the stars glittered and gleamed, and the harvest moon shone golden
yellow, the color of ripe corn. In the moonlight he could see briar-roses in the hedge.
He was becoming sleepy now. For a time he fought to stay awake, and then he took off his
overcoat, and put down his bag—a large leather bag of the kind that, in twenty years’ time, would
become known as a Gladstone bag—and he laid his head on his bag, and covered himself with his
coat.
He stared up at the stars: and it seemed to him then that they were dancers, stately and
graceful, performing a dance almost infinite in its complexity. He imagined he could see the very
faces of the stars; pale, they were, and smiling gently, as if they had spent so much time above the
world, watching the scrambling and the joy and the pain of the people below them, that they could
not help being amused every time another little human believed itself the center of its world, as
each of us does.
And then it came to Tristran that he was dreaming, and he walked into his bedroom, which was
also the schoolroom of the village of Wall: and Mrs. Cherry tapped the blackboard and bade them
all be silent, and Tristran looked down at his slate to see what the lesson would be about, but he
could not read what he had written there. Then Mrs. Cherry, who resembled his mother so much
that Tristran found himself astonished he had never before realized that they were the same
person, called upon Tristran to tell the class the dates of all the kings and queens of England...
“‘Scuse me,” said a small and hairy voice in his ear, “but would you mind dreamin’ a bit
quieter? Your dreams is spillin’ over into my dreams, and if there’s one thing I’ve never been doin’
with, it’s dates. William the Conker, ten sixty-six, that’s as far as I go, and I’d swap that for a
dancing mouse.”
“Mm?” said Tristran.
“Keep it down,” said the voice. “If you don’t mind.”
“Sorry,” said Tristran, and his dreams after that were of the dark.
Breakfast,” said a voice close to his ear. “It’s mushrumps, fried in butter, with wild garlic.”
Tristran opened his eyes: daylight shone through the briar-rose hedge, dappling the grass in gold
and green. Something smelled like heaven.
A tin container was placed beside him.
“Poor fare,” said the voice. “Country fare, it is. Nothing like the gentry are used to, but the
likes of me treasures a fine mushrump.”
Tristran blinked, and reached into the tin bowl and took out a large mushroom between finger
and thumb. It was hot. He took a careful bite, felt the juices flood his mouth. It was the finest
thing he had ever eaten and, after he had chewed and swallowed it, he said so.
“That’s kind of you,” said the small figure who sat on the other side of a little fire which
crackled and smoked in the morning air. “Kind of you, I’m sure. But you know, and / know, that
it’s just fried field-mushrumps, and never a patch on nothing proper...”
“Is there any more?” asked Tristran, realizing just how hungry he was: sometimes a little food
can do that to you.
“Ah now, that’s manners for you,” said the little figure, who wore a large, floppy hat and a
large, flappy overcoat. “Is there more? he says, as if it were poached quail’s eggs and smoked
gazelle and truffles, not just a mushrump, what tastes more or less like something what’s been
dead for a week and a cat wouldn’t touch. Manners.”
“I really, truly would like another mushroom,” said Tris-tran, “if it’s not too much trouble.”
The little man—if man he was, which Tristran found rather unlikely—sighed mournfully, and
reached into the pan sizzling on the fire, with his knife, and flicked two large mushrooms into
Tristran’s tin bowl.
Tristran blew on them, then ate them with his fingers. “Look at you,” said the little hairy
person, his voice a mixture of pride and gloom, “eatin’ those mushrumps as if you liked them, as if
they wasn’t sawdust and wormwood and rue in your mouth.”
Tristran licked his fingers, and assured his benefactor that they had been the very finest
mushrooms he had ever had the privilege of eating.
“You says that now,” said his host with gloomy relish, “but you’ll not be sayin’ that in an hour’s
time. They’ll undoubtedly disagree with you, like the fishwife who disagreed with her young man
over a mermaid. And that could be heard from Garamond to Stormhold. Such language! It fair
turned my ears blue, it did.” The little hairy personage sighed deeply. “Talkin’ about your guts,”
he said, “I’m going to attend to mine behind that tree over there. Would you do me the signal
honor of keepin’ an eye on that there pack of mine? I’d be obliged.”
“Of course,” said Tristran, politely. The little hairy man vanished behind an oak tree; Tristran
heard a few grunts, and then his new friend reappeared, saying, “There. I knowed a man in
Paphlagonia who’d swallow a live snake every morning, when he got up. He used to say, he was
certain of one thing, that nothing worse would happen to him all day. ‘Course they made him eat a
bowlful of hairy centipedes before they hung him, so maybe that claim was a bit presumptive.”
Tristran excused himself. He urinated against the side of the oak tree, next to which was a
small mound of droppings, certainly not produced by any human being. They looked like deer
pellets, or rabbit-droppings.
“My name is Tristran Thorn,” said Tristran, when he returned. His breakfast companion had
packed up the morning’s breakfast—fire, pans and all—and made it vanish into his pack.
He removed his hat, pressed it to his chest, and looked up at Tristran. “Charmed,” he said. He
tapped the side of his pack: on it was written: CHARMED, ENCHANTED, ENSORCEL-LED AND CONFUSTICATED. “I
used to be confusticated,” he confided, “but you know how these things go.”
And with that he set off along the path. Tristran walked behind him. “Hey! I say!” called
Tristran. “Slow down, can’t you?” For despite the huge pack (which put Tristran in mind of
Christian’s burden in Pilgrim’s Progress, a book from which Mrs. Cherry had read to them every
Monday morning, telling them that, although it was written by a tinker, it was a fine book for all of
that) the little man—Charmed? Was that his name?—was moving away from him as fast as a squirrel
up a tree.
