Here Be Dragons (16 page)

The narrators thus offer distinct differences in perspective on the Dragaeran afterlife. Vlad focuses on the injustice of an afterlife restricted to the few, and it is his refusal to play by the rules that allows him to return to the domain of life. Paarfi, although he reports Zerika's disapproval
of some aspects of the afterlife (
Paths
365), treats her quest for the Orb as precisely that: a trial for a hero on her way to save the world. Where Vlad's sojourn into the domain of death and back again is an act of social defiance, Zerika's is an act of heroism sprung from social responsibility.

Regardless of whether crossing the border between the domains of life and death is constructed as a means for criticizing or upholding the social order, death in Dragaera is, as was pointed out earlier, not a great leveler. Apart from Dragaerans' ability to live for millennia, Dragaeran sorcery can resurrect recently dead bodies—making someone stay dead therefore requires a special effort from the killer. Even after death, status and wealth are important. Revivification is very expensive, and thus a privilege of the rich. Furthermore, even in those cases in which revivification is too costly (or impossible for some other reason), not everyone is sent to the Paths of the Dead. Only those “deemed important (and rich) enough” are brought to the Deathgate and sent over the Falls to the Paths (
Taltos
99). In other words, this afterlife is not for everyone—which also implies that either another afterlife exists for everyone else (presumably without a geographical position) or these other souls meet some other fate, for instance reincarnation (see
Paths
365). The Paths, and the Halls, may be reasonably well known to Dragaerans; but for a large number of the Empire's citizens, they are not the final destination. To them, and certainly to all Easterners, death remains an undiscovered country, one from which no traveler has so far returned. Discrimination is built into the Dragaeran afterlife, but whether the journey into the domain of death and back is used to criticize that discrimination or to uphold the society from which it springs depends on who tells the tale.

Protection from a Hostile World
:
Faerie and Wall in
Stardust
²¹

Stardust
tells the story of how Tristran Thorn ventures into Faerie to find a fallen star in order to win the love of the beautiful Victoria Forester. It was originally published as an illustrated story in serialized form in 1997 and 1998, as a result of the collaboration between Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess. Even though it was later published in a text-only edition (in 1998), the illustrations provide an essential paratext that greatly extends the text,
²²
and it is thus the illustrated version that is considered here.

The narrator introduces the story of Tristran and Victoria by constructing
a bridge between the reader and, ultimately, Faerie. From the village Wall, where the two youngsters live, there is a track, the narrator explains, that if “[f]ollowed far enough […] becomes a real road, paved with asphalt; followed further the road gets larger, is packed at all hours with cars and lorries rushing from city to city. Eventually the road takes you to London, but London is a whole night's drive from Wall” (6 [2]). This almost anxious attempt by the narrator to persuade the reader that Wall is located in the same world as London—that the reader could, in fact, drive from one to the other—could have been written to illustrate Brian Attebery's description of how extension works in reportorial mode to suggest a connection between the fictive place and the reader's location in the actual world:

Once we know we are in a story in reportorial mode, we can extend the narrator's observations in any direction. If the story mentions London, we can assume Paris. We can fill in Tower Bridge and the dome of St. Paul's, whether or not they are invoked specifically. We can supply Henry VIII and Victoria, Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf. Even the least well-read can provide traffic and parks and shops and cinemas to fill in the background of what the narrator actually chooses to notice. Ultimately the world of the story extends in an unbroken path to the reader's own doorstep. Thus the reader does a lot of the hard work of bringing a story to life.
²³

The route from Wall to London is offered as a pattern for further extension. From London, the reader can extend the story world to Cardiff, or Vancouver, or Auckland. And to make certain that the extension is not only geographical, the narrator also supplies a number of historical references, clues that allow anyone with sufficient knowledge or interest to work out when the story takes place.
²⁴
With a narration set in a modern age of cars and lorries and a story set in the early Victorian era, historical extension is thus introduced along with the geographical.

Stardust
is not written in the reportorial mode, however, and the part of the world that is extended is biased toward logic and reason. That this is a fantasy story is given away by its title and subtitle (
Being a Romance within the Realms of Faerie
); and as if this hint were not enough, the text quickly mentions curious events that happen on a nine-year basis and odd figures glimpsed on the other side of the wall in Wall. Yet the reader is encouraged to extend the world of Wall, geographically and historically. The extension only brings part of the story's world to life—the lion's
share of the “hard work” of bringing to life what I call mundanity is left to the reader. This extension of mundanity is biased in a certain direction by the narrator's encouraging measures: the step-by-step route description and the historical puzzle (with men of science smiling disdainfully at any mention of Faerie) imply an extension of mundanity as a place of reason, of logic and science, but devoid of fairies. The world in
Stardust
thus becomes constructed of two domains: a domain of rational mundanity that extends along the “unbroken path” of the reportorial mode to the reader's doorstep and, separated from it by a stone wall, the domain of Faerie.

In fact, mundanity never manages to extend all the way to Wall, and the extension becomes part of the process that places magic and science in opposition. Whereas the path to London is unbroken, the route description unobtrusively takes the reader off that path. Only if followed “far enough” does the road become a “real road.” While the town of Wall and Faerie beyond it are accessible to the reader in a way very different from a formulaic fairy-tale introduction such as “Once upon a time,” or the rather more modern “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” getting there still requires a leap of imagination. Instead,
Stardust
uses the extension of the reportorial mode to set up a world of two domains, where magic and reason are clearly opposed to each other from the very beginning.

There are several differences between the domains. The starkest distinction between Faerie and mundanity is that in Faerie, magic works. Other differences include disparity in time and season, space and geography. When Tristran enters Faerie, “[h]e felt as if he were walking into summer” (70 [95]), leaving the late October of mundanity behind. The harvest moon that shines down on him suggests a late September that, as he travels deeper into Faerie, becomes more springlike (73 [101]).

Crossing the border thus becomes a movement back through the seasons, but the relation between Faerie time and mundane time is not simply a question of being out of sync. The relationship itself is indeterminable. Some time periods are approximately of the same length in both realms: in Wall, nine months pass from Tristran's conception until the basket with the newborn boy is left at the gate, and the eighteen years that pass as he grows up in Wall correspond to Madame Semele's “nearly twenty years” in Faerie (113 [158]). On the other hand, there is a distinct impression that Tristran's adventure in Faerie takes much less time than the twenty-five or so weeks that pass in mundanity. With this temporal
slipperiness,
Stardust
joins a rich tradition of folktales and fantasy texts.
²⁵
Under “Time in Faerie” in
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
, Langford observes that “[v]isitors to Faerie find that time there is subjective, disengaged from real-world clocks and calendars.”
²⁶
He further suggests that there are two types of relations between Faerie time and mundane time. Either a given time interval in Faerie is longer (often much longer) than the corresponding interval in mundanity or it is (much) shorter. Years in Faerie hence equal hours in mundanity or vice versa. The first type, which according to Langford suggests a time polder, is discussed further with regard to polders. The second type is ultimately a way of bringing characters into a more or less distant future.
Stardust
's Faerie does not fall neatly into either of Langford's categories but has a time flow that denies a simple relation to the time flow of mundanity.

This temporal slipperiness is mirrored in an equally slippery geography and fanciful inhabitants. “Maps of Faerie are unreliable, and may not be depended upon” (61 [84]), the reader is told, and the narrator explains why:

Faerie is bigger than England, as it is bigger than the world (for, since the dawn of time, each land that has been forced off the map by explorers and the brave going out and proving it wasn't there has taken refuge in Faerie; so it is now, by the time that we come to write of it, a most huge place indeed, containing every manner of landscape and terrain).
Here
, truly,
there be Dragons
. (61 [84])

This unmappable land is, in other words, a land where imagination is real, a land not of proof and evidence but of imagination and belief. The very notion of maps is anathema to its geography. “Here be Dragons” doubly supports the idea that Faerie is a land of the imagined. First, this phrase alludes to the monsters and descriptions of monsters found on some medieval maps, descriptions that “served to fill up embarrassing empty spaces in unknown regions, a custom which went back to Roman times and forward to the sixteenth century.”
²⁷
These monsters, which were never found by explorers, are given a refuge in Faerie together with the lands in which they were supposedly residing. But use of the “Here be Dragons” phrase also suggests that not everything is known and that fancy rules Faerie. It is, in fact, a common misconception that the expression can be found on medieval maps. Its only occurrence is on the early sixteenth-century Lenox globe, where the phrase is given in Latin (
Hic sunt dracones
).
²⁸
“Here, truly, there be Dragons” thus brings the
monsters of medieval maps into Faerie, but it also becomes a comment on how, even today, people believe in what amounts to fables.

Despite its everyday, solid appearance, the wall from which the town has taken its name does not follow the rules of any common or garden wall. It is “a high grey rock wall” that “is old, built of rough, square lumps of hewn granite, and it comes from the woods and goes back to the woods once more” (7 [3]). This brief description conveys an impression of solidity and antiquity: this is a border that cannot be breached or crossed, and that is how it has always been. The wall is also conspicuously delimited: it appears from the depths of the woods and returns again, surfacing, as it were, briefly at Wall. Rather than being a long border along which the two realms lie side by side, the wall is only a point of contact where they happen to touch. Although it is never mentioned, the impression is that the wall cannot be followed; the circumference of Faerie cannot be traced. This restricted contact is underlined by the bird's-eye view in the illustration on page 209, where the wall is seen coming out of the trees, snaking along the margin of a meadow with Wall on its far side, and disappearing in the forest again. Beyond that, the woods of Faerie and mundanity cannot be told apart, although a flying ship and Stormhold keep on the horizon imply that the viewer is actually looking out from the Faerie side and that everything except the small portion of Wall is part of Faerie.

As in the case of Brust's Deathgate Falls, the border in
Stardust
is not a distinct line between two realms. Some of the land on the far side of the wall also belongs to the border, with a crosshatch stretching from the wall to where Faerie truly begins. Beyond the wall is a meadow; beyond the meadow a small stream; and on the other side of the stream a forest. While the rules of Faerie work all the way up to the wall (the star, Yvaine, can come with Tristran that far without turning into a meteorite), Faerie proper begins in the forest. It is among its trees that inhabitants of Faerie can be glimpsed (7 [3]), and that is where the Market is held. There, October starts changing into summer (70 [95]), and when Tristran sets off in search of the star, it is not until he has crossed the meadow and the stream that he finds himself in Faerie:

[O]nce in the woods at the top of the hill he was surprised to realize the moon was shining brightly down on him through a gap in the trees: surprised because the moon had set an hour before; and doubly surprised, because the moon that had set had been a slim,
sharp silver crescent, and the moon that shone down on him now was a huge, golden Harvest moon, full, and glowing, and deeply colored. (51 [71–72])

Not until he has passed the meadow and the stream is it mentioned—but then twice—how Tristran walks into Faerie (51 [72–73]). Rather than a single border consisting of the wall, with mundanity on one side and Faerie on the other, there are two borders and a transitional zone between them. The meadow, in other words, is where Faerie and mundanity overlap.

The sentry on duty by the wall draws attention to why the wall is guarded. Leading through the wall to the meadow crosshatch and on to Faerie is a single opening. The gateway is “an opening about six feet in width” guarded on the town side by two townsmen with wooden cudgels (7 [3–4]). That it is the single possible crossing is made plain not only by the many travelers who come to Wall for the Market but also by the comment that “the Market at Wall […] is too close to the world on the other side of the wall” (158 [235]). The diligence with which the border crossing is guarded by the men of Wall raises questions. First of all, against whom do they keep guard—that is, who is prevented from crossing? Is this a self-serving act of protection from some real or imagined danger, or altruistic protection of something or someone? Second, on whose orders (and authority) do they keep guard? These two questions provide a basis for understanding the most central issue about the border in
Stardust
: why do guards monitor the way between mundanity and Faerie so assiduously? The answers to these questions, in no way obvious, reveal interesting facts about the relationship between the two domains.