Tristran shook his head.
“D’you know where His Vastness the Freemartin Mus-kish’s Transluminary Citadel is?”
Tristran pointed, with certainty.
“And what of Paris? The one in France?”
Tristran thought for a moment. “Well, if Wall’s over there, I suppose that Paris must be sort of
in the same sort of direction, mustn’t it.”
“Let’s see,” said the little hairy man, talking to himself as much as to Tristran. “You can find
places in Faerie, but not in your world, save for Wall, and that’s a boundary. You can’t find
people... but... tell me, lad, can you find this star you’re lookin’ for?”
Tristran pointed, immediately. “It’s that way,” he said.
“Hmm. That’s good. But it still doesn’t explain nuffink. You hungry?”
“A bit. And I’m tattered and torn,” said Tristran, fingering the huge holes in his trousers, and in
his coat, where the branches and the thorns had seized at him, and the leaves had cut at him as he
ran. “And look at my boots ...”
“What’s in your bag?”
Tristran opened his Gladstone bag. “Apples. Cheese. Half a cottage loaf. And a pot of fishpaste.
My penknife. I’ve got a change of underwear, and a couple of pairs of woolen socks. I suppose I
should have brought more clothes...”
“Keep the fishpaste,” said his traveling companion, and he rapidly divided the remaining food
into two equal piles.
“You done me a good turn,” he said, munching a crisp apple, “and I doesn’t forget something
like that. First we’ll get your clothes took care of, and then we’ll send you off after your star.
Yus?”
“That’s extremely kind of you,” said Tristran, nervously, slicing his cheese onto his crust of
bread.
“Right,” said the little hairy man. “Let’s find you a blanket.”
At dawn three lords of Stormhold rode down the craggy mountain road, in a coach pulled by six
black horses. The horses wore bobbing black plumes, the coach was fresh painted in black, and
each of the lords of Stormhold was dressed in mourning.
In the case of Primus, this took the shape of a long, black, monkish robe; Tertius was dressed in
the sober costume of a merchant in mourning, while Septimus wore a black doublet and hose, a
black hat with a black feather in it, and looked for all the world like a foppish assassin from a
minor Elizabethan historical play.
The lords of Stormhold eyed each other, one cautious, one wary, one blank. They said nothing:
had alliances been possible, Tertius might have sided with Primus against Septimus. But there were
no alliances that could be made.
The carriage clattered and shook.
Once, it stopped, for each of the three lords to relieve himself. Then it clattered on down the
hilly road. Together, the three lords of Stormhold had placed their father’s remains in the Hall of
Ancestors. Their dead brothers had watched them from the doors of the hall, but had said nothing.
Toward evening, the coachman called out, “Nottaway!” and he reined his team outside a
tumbledown inn, built against what resembled the ruins of a giant’s cottage.
The three lords of Stormhold got out of the coach, and stretched their cramped legs. Faces
peered at them through the bottle-glass windows of the inn.
The innkeeper, who was a choleric gnome of poor disposition, looked out of the door. “We’ll
need beds aired, and a pot of mutton stew on the fire,” he called.
“How many beds to be aired?” asked Letitia the chambermaid, from the stairwell.
“Three,” said the gnome. “I’ll wager they’ll have their coachman sleep with the horses.”
“Three indeed,” whispered Tilly, the pot-girl, to Lacey, the ostler, “when anyone could see a
full seven of those fine gentlemen standing in the road.”
But when the lords of Stormhold entered there were but three of them, and they announced
that their coachman would sleep in the stables.
Dinner was mutton stew, and bread loaves so hot and fresh they exhaled steam as they were
cracked open, and each of the lords took an unopened bottle of the finest Baragundian wine (for
none of the lords would share a bottle with his fellows, nor even permit the wine to be poured
from the bottle into a goblet). This scandalized the gnome, who was of the opinion—not, however,
uttered in the hearing of his guests— that the wine should be permitted to breathe.
Their coachman ate his bowl of stew, and drank two pots of ale, and went to sleep in the
stables. The three brothers went to their respective rooms and barred the doors.
Tertius had slipped a silver coin to Letitia the chambermaid when she had brought him the
warming-pan for his bed, so he was not surprised at all when, shortly before midnight, there came
a tap-tapping on his door.
She wore a one-piece white chemise, and curtsied to him as he opened the door, and smiled,
shyly. She held a bottle of wine in her hand.
He locked the door behind him, and led her to the bed, where, having first made her remove
her chemise, and having examined her face and body by candlelight, and having kissed her on the
forehead, lips, nipples, navel and toes, and having extinguished the candle, he made love to her,
without speaking, in the pale moonlight.
After some time, he grunted, and was still.
“There, lovey, was that good, now?” asked Letitia.
“Yes,” said Tertius, warily, as if her words guarded some trap. “It was.”
“Would you be wanting another turn, before I leave?”
In reply, Tertius pointed between his legs. Letitia giggled. “We can have him upstanding again
in a twinkling,” she said.
And she pulled out the cork from the bottle of wine she had carried in, and had placed beside
the bed, and passed it to Tertius.
He grinned at her, and gulped down some wine, then pulled her to him.
“I bet that feels good,” she said to him. “Now, lovey, this time let me show you how I like it...
why, whatever is the matter?” For Lord Tertius of Stormhold was writhing back and forth on the
bed, his eyes wide, his breathing labored.
“That wine?” he gasped. “Where did you get it?”
“Your brother,” said Letty. “I met him on the stairs. He told me it was a fine restorative and
stiffener, and it would provide us with a night we should never forget.”
“And so it has,” breathed Tertius, and he twitched, once, twice, three times, and then was
stiff. And very still.
Tertius heard Letitia begin to scream, as if from a very long way away. He was conscious of four
familiar presences, standing with him in the shadows beside the wall.
“She was very beautiful,” whispered Secundus, and Letitia thought she heard the curtains
rustle.
“Septimus is most crafty,” said Quintus. “That was the self-same preparation of baneberries he
slipped into my dish of eels,” and Letitia thought she heard the wind, howling down from the
mountain crags.
She opened the door to the household, woken by her screams, and a search ensued. Lord
Septimus, however, was nowhere to be found, and one of the black stallions was gone from the
stable (in which the coachman slept and snored and could not be wakened).
Lord Primus was in a foul mood when he arose the next morning.
He declined to have Letitia put to death, stating she was as much a victim of Septimus’s craft
as Tertius had been, but ordered that she accompany Tertius’s body back to the castle of
Stormhold.
He left her one black horse to carry the body, and a pouch of silver coins. It was enough to pay
a villager of Nottaway to travel with her—to ensure no wolves made off with the horse or his
brother’s remains—and to pay off the coachman when finally he awoke.
And then, alone in the coach, pulled by a team of four coal-black stallions, Lord Primus left the
village of Nottaway, in significantly worse temper than he had arrived there.
Brevis arrived at the crossroads tugging at a rope. The rope was attached to a bearded,
horned, evil-eyed billy goat, which Brevis was taking to market to sell.
That morning, Brevis’s mother had placed a single radish upon the table in front of him and had
said, “Brevis, son. This radish was all I was able to pull from the ground today. All our crops have
failed, and all our food has gone. We’ve nothing to sell but the billy goat. So I want you to halter
the goat, and take him to the market, and sell him to a farmer. And with the coins you get for the
goat—and you’ll take nothing less than a florin, mark you—buy a hen, and buy corn, and turnips;
and perhaps we shall not starve.”
So Brevis had chewed his radish, which was woody, and peppery to the tongue, and spent the
rest of the morning chasing the goat about its pen, sustaining a bruise to the rib and a STARE bite to
the thigh in the process, and, eventually, and with the help of a passing tinker, he had subdued the
goat enough to have it haltered, and, leaving his mother to bandage the tinker’s goat-inflicted
injuries, he dragged the billy goat toward the market.
Sometimes the goat would take it into his head to charge on ahead, and Brevis would be
dragged behind him, the heels of his boots grinding into the dried mud of the roadway, until the
goat would decide—suddenly and without warning, for no reason Brevis was able to discern—to
stop. Then Brevis would pick himself up and return to dragging the beast.
He reached the crossroads on the edge of the wood, sweaty and hungry and bruised, pulling an
uncooperative goat. There was a tall woman standing at the crossroads. A circlet of silver sat in the
crimson headpiece that surrounded her dark hair, and her dress was as scarlet as her lips.
“What do they call you, boy?” she asked, in a voice like musky brown honey.
“They call me Brevis, ma’am,” said Brevis, observing something strange behind the woman. It
was a small cart, but there was nothing harnessed between the shafts. He wondered how it had
ever got there.
“Brevis,” she purred. “Such a nice name. Would you like to sell me your goat, Brevis-boy?”
Brevis hesitated. “My mother told me I was to take the goat to the market,” he said, “and to
sell him for a hen, and some corn, and some turnips, and to bring her home the change.”
“How much did your mother tell you to take for the goat?” asked the woman in the scarlet
kirtle.
“Nothing less than a florin,” he said.
She smiled, and held up one hand. Something glinted yellow. “Why, I will give you this golden
guinea,” she said, “enough to buy a coopful of hens and a hundred bushels of turnips.”
The boy’s mouth hung open.
“Do we have a deal?”
The boy nodded, and thrust out the hand which held the billy goat’s rope halter. “Here,” was
all he could say, visions of limitless wealth and turnips beyond counting tumbling through his head.
The lady took the rope. Then she touched one finger to the goat’s forehead, between its yellow
eyes, and let go of the rope.
Brevis expected the billy goat to bolt for the woods or down one of the roads, but it stayed
where it was, as if frozen into position. Brevis held out his hand for the golden guinea.
The woman looked at him then, examining him from the soles of his muddy feet, to his sweaty,
cropped hair, and once more she smiled.
“You know,” she said, “I think that a matched pair would be so much more impressive than just
one. Don’t you?”
Brevis did not know what she was talking about, and opened his mouth to tell her so. But just
then she reached out one long finger, and touched the bridge of his nose, between his eyes, and he
found he could not say anything at all.
She snapped her fingers, and Brevis and the billy goat hastened to stand between the shafts of
her cart; and Brevis was surprised to notice that he was walking on four legs, and he seemed to be
no taller than the animal beside him.
The witch-woman cracked her whip, and her cart jolted off down the muddy road, drawn by a
matched pair of horned white billy goats.
The little hairy man had taken Tristran’s ripped coat and trousers and waistcoat, and, leaving
him covered by a blanket, had walked into the village which nestled in the valley between three
heather-covered hills.
Tristran sat under the blanket, in the warm evening, and waited.
Lights flickered in the hawthorn bush behind him. He thought they were glow-worms or
fireflies, but, on closer inspection, he perceived they were tiny people, flickering and flitting from
branch to branch.
He coughed, politely. A score of tiny eyes stared down at him. Several of the little creatures
vanished. Others retreated high into the hawthorn bush, while a handful, braver than the others,
flitted toward him.
They began to laugh, in high, bell-tinkling tones, pointing at Tristran, in his broken boots and
blanket, and underclothes, and bowler hat. Tristran blushed red, and pulled the blanket about
himself.
One of the little folk sang:
Hankety pankety
Boy in a blanket, he’s
Off on a goose-chase to
Look for a star
Incontrovertibly
Journeys through Faerie
Strip off the blanket to
See who you are.
And another one sang:
Tristran Thorn
Tristran Thorn
Does not know why he was born
And a foolish oath has sworn
Trews and coat and shirt are torn
So he sits here all forlorn
Soon to face his true love’s scorn
Wistran
Bistran
Tristran
Thorn.
“Be off with you, you silly things,” said Tristran, his face burning, and, having nothing else to
hand, he threw his bowler hat at them.
Thus it was, that when the little hairy man arrived back from the village of Revelry (although
why it was so called no man alive could say, for it was a gloomy, somber place, and had been for
time out of mind) he found Tristran sitting glumly beside a hawthorn bush, wrapped in a blanket,
and bewailing the loss of his hat.
“They said cruel things about my true love,” said Tristran. “Miss Victoria Forester. How dare
they?”
“The little folk dare anything,” said his friend. “And they talks a lot of nonsense. But they talks
an awful lot of sense, as well. You listen to ‘em at your peril, and you ignore ‘em at your peril,
too.”
“They said I was soon to face my true love’s scorn.”
