Neil Gaiman - Stardust

“How is it?” asked the old woman.

“Perfectly palatable,” said her guest, honestly.

“It is the herbs make it so fine,” explained the harridan.

“I can taste the basil and the thyme,” said the guest, “but there is another taste I find harder to place.”

“Ah,” said Madame Semele, and she nibbled a sliver of the meat.

“It is certainly a most uncommon taste.”

“That it is. It’s a herb that grows only in Garamond, on an island in the midst of a wide lake. It is most pleasant with all manner of meats and fishes, and it reminds me in flavor a little of the leaves of fennel, with but a hint of nutmeg. The flowers of it are a most attractive shade of orange. It is good for wind and the ague, and it is, in addition, a gentle soporific, which has the curious property of causing one who tastes of it to speak nothing but the truth for several hours.”

The lady in the scarlet kirtle dropped her wooden bowl onto the ground. “Limbus grass?” she said. “You dared to feed me limbus grass.”

“That’s how it would seem, dearie,” and the old woman cackled and hooted with delight. “So, tell me now, Mistress Morwanneg, if that’s your name, where are you a-going-of, in your fine chariot? And why do you remind me so of someone I knew once… ? And Madame Semele forgets nothing and no one.”

“I am on my way to find a star,” said the witch-queen, “which fell in the great woods on the other side of Mount Belly. And when I find her, I shall take my great knife and cut out her heart, while she lives, and while her heart is her own. For the heart of a living star is a sovereign remedy against all the snares of age and time. My sisters wait for me to return.”

Madame Semele hooted and hugged herself, swaying back and forth, bony fingers clutching her sides. “The heart of a star, is it? Hee! Hee! Such a prize it will make for me. I shall taste enough of it that my youth will come back, and my hair turn from grey to golden, and my dugs swell and soften and become firm and high. Then I shall take all the heart that’s left to the Great Market at Wall. Hee!”

“You shall not do this thing,” said her guest, very quietly. “No? You are my guest, my dear. You swore your oath. You’ve tasted of my food. According to the laws of our sisterhood, there is nothing you can do to harm me.”

“Oh, there are so many things I could do to harm you, Ditchwater Sal, but I shall simply point out that one who has eaten limbus grass can speak nothing but the truth for several hours afterward; and one more thing …” Distant lightning flickered in her words as she spoke, and the forest was hushed, as if every leaf and every tree were listening intently to what she said. “This I say: you have stolen knowledge you did not earn, but it shall not profit you. For you shall be unable to see the star, unable to perceive it, unable to touch it, to taste it, to find it, to kill it. Even if another were to cut out its heart and give it to you, you would not know it, never know what you had in your hand. This I say. These are my words, and they are a true-speaking. And know this also: I swore, by the compact of the Sisterhood, that I would do you no harm. Had I not so sworn I would change you into a black-beetle, and I would pull your legs off, one by one, and leave you for the birds to find, for putting me to this indignity.”

Madame Semele’s eyes opened wide with fright, and she stared over the flames of the fire at her guest. “Who are you?” she said.

“When you knew me last,” said the woman in the scarlet kirtle, “I ruled with my sisters in Carnadine, before it was lost.”

“Vow? But you are dead, long dead.”

“They have said that the Lilim were dead before now, but they have always lied. The squirrel has not yet found the acorn that will grow into the oak that will be cut to form the cradle of the babe who will grow to slay me.”

Silver flashes glittered and flared in the flames as she spoke.

“So it is you. And you have your youth back.” Madame Semele sighed. “And now I, too, shall be young again.”

The lady in the scarlet kirtle stood up then, and placed the bowl which had contained her portion of hare into the fire. “You shall be nothing of the kind,” she said. “Did you not hear me? A moment after I leave, you shall forget that ever you saw me. You shall forget all of this, even my curse, although the knowledge of it shall vex and irritate you, like an itch in a limb long since amputated. And may you treat your guests with more grace and respect in the future.”

The wooden bowl burst into flames then, a huge gout of flame which singed the leaves of the oak tree far above them. Madame Semele knocked the blackened bowl from the fire with a stick, and she stamped it out in the long grass. “Whatever could have possessed me to drop the bowl into the fire?” she exclaimed aloud. “And look, one of my nice knives, all burned up and ruined. Whatever was I a-thinking of?”

There came no answer. From further down the road came the drumming beats of something that might have been the hooves of goats, racing on into the night. Madame Semele shook her head, as if to clear it of dust and cobwebs. “I’m getting old,” she said to the multicolored bird who sat on its perch by the driver’s seat, and who had observed everything and forgotten nothing. “Getting old. And there’s no doing anything about that.” The bird shifted uncomfortably on the perch.

A red squirrel quested, hesitating a little, into the firelight. It picked up an acorn, held it for a moment in its handlike front paws, as if it were praying. Then it ran away—to bury the acorn, and to forget it.

Scaithe’s Ebb is a small seaport town built on granite, a town of chandlers and carpenters and sailmakers; of old sailors with missing fingers and limbs who have opened their own grog houses or spend their days in them, what is left of their hair still tarred into long queues, though the stubble on their chins has long since dusted to white. There are no whores in Scaithe’s Ebb, or none that consider themselves as such, although there have always been many women who, if pressed, would describe themselves as much-married, with one husband on this ship here every six months, and another husband on that ship, back in port for a month or so every nine months.

The mathematics of the thing have always kept most folk satisfied; and if ever it disappoints and a man returns to his wife while one of her other husbands is still in occupancy, why, then there is a fight—and the grog shops to comfort the loser. The sailors do not mind the arrangement, for they know that this way there will, at the least, be one person who, at the last, will notice when they do not come back from the sea, and will mourn their loss; and their wives content themselves with the certain knowledge that their husbands are also unfaithful, for there is no competing with the sea in a man’s affections, since she is both mother and mistress, and she will wash his corpse also, in time to come, wash it to coral and ivory and pearls.

So it was to Scaithe’s Ebb that Lord Primus of Stormhold came one night, all dressed in black with a beard as thick and serious as one of the storks’ nests in the town’s chimneys. He came in a carriage drawn by four black horses and he took a room in the Seaman’s Rest on Crook Street.

He was considered most peculiar in his needs and requests, for he brought his own food and drink into his rooms, and kept it locked in a wooden chest, which he would only open to take himself an apple, or a wedge of cheese, or a cup of pepper-wine. His was the topmost room in the Seaman’s Rest, a high and spindly building, built on a rocky outcrop to facilitate smuggling.