Here Be Dragons (17 page)

From the guards' instructions, it can be inferred that passage from mundanity to Faerie must be prevented. The main function of the guard, it is said, “is to prevent the town's children from going through the opening, into the meadow and beyond.” Solitary ramblers and visitors to Wall are also discouraged (7 [4]). Travelers who have come for the Market are similarly kept from crossing until the Market opens. There is only one instruction: “It is the task of the guards to prevent
anything or anyone
from coming through
from the village
,
by any means possible
; and if it was not possible, then they must raise the village” (49 [68]; my emphasis). These instructions can hardly be aimed only at keeping some children from getting into trouble. “[A]nything or anyone” is certainly unequivocal, and would include not only people and animals but also
whatever fairy creatures might be returning after a sojourn in mundanity or who might flee from the encroaching power of science and technology. Most frightening in its implication is the order that the guards prevent the crossing “by any means possible.” Two grown men armed with long cudgels can easily do serious damage. Whoever issued that instruction is willing to go to any lengths to stop any crossing—from the village side. The seemingly all-inclusive command
²⁹
is modified to include only whatever comes “from the village.” It is
entry into Faerie
that is prohibited. When Tristran returns after his adventure, he is forced to debate this point with the guards on duty. He insists that the letter of the instruction is only to stop passage
into
Faerie, whereas the guard, Mr. Brown, claims that the spirit is to stop any crossing of the border. The reason this detail is not part of the guard instruction, Mr. Brown argues, is that no one apart from Tristran has ever tried to cross the border from the Faerie side. Indeed, so certain are the guards of this fact that they stand with their backs to Faerie, and although they are said to stand on either side of the opening (7 [3–4]), they are repeatedly portrayed
in
the opening. Faerie denizens are simply not expected to cross into mundanity and are trusted not to threaten the guards who, apparently, do keep “anything and anyone” out of the Faerie domain.

It is hinted that the watch is organized by Wall's innkeeper, who possibly hails from, and acts as an agent for, Faerie. On the whole, the instructions to the guards suggest that they were issued mainly with Faerie's best interest at heart. It is never made explicit who the master gatekeeper in Wall is; but Mr. Bromios, the innkeeper, appears to carry ultimate responsibility (see 50 [70]; 191 [294–95]), and he is also referred to as an authority on earlier Markets (9 [8]). There are several clues as to the innkeeper's identity, the foremost of which is that his name, Bromios, is one of the names of Dionysus.
³⁰
This tallies with his olive skin, the good wine he serves, his implied longevity, and “items of antique statuary, and clay pots” in his room (192 [297]). The innkeeper's divine identity is further corroborated by the stick entwined with bronze ivy that hangs on his wall (192 [297]; also see ill. pp. 193, 199). This stick closely resembles a thyrsus, a fennel staff topped with ivy, which is one of Dionysus' attributes.
³¹
The innkeeper in Wall, who apparently controls the entrance to Faerie, is in other words closely associated with the Greco-Roman deity of wine and revelry.

Related to Bromios is the Fellowship of the Castle, a group that acts to protect Faerie and could, conceivably, be behind the watch at the gate.
The connection between the Fellowship and the innkeeper is the hairy little man who calls himself “Charmed.” Once in Faerie, Tristran is immediately found by the little man and, at the time, their meeting seems like a coincidence to the boy. The reader, however, can identify Charmed as the man who shared the byre with Tristran's father, Dunstan, almost eighteen years previously, especially by his comment that Dunstan once did him a good turn (94 [131]).

There is more to Charmed than this, though. Even more than Bromios, he seems quietly to watch over Dunstan and Tristran. Even when he is not mentioned in the text, he frequently appears in the illustrations, often at crucial moments.
³²
His timely appearance therefore suggests that he was actually waiting for the boy. This explanation is not only possible but probable: in the bloodthirsty serewood, Charmed tells Tristran that he could “castle” but that “there's no one I could castle with'd be any better off here than we are” (76 [107–8]). At the time, the expression “to castle” appears only to mean some mysterious changing of places (as king and castle can change places in chess). Not until Captain Alberic explains to Tristran that the hairy little man is a member of the Fellowship of the Castle does the expression acquire a wider meaning as an early indication of this secret society. Little else is said about the Fellowship, except that Tristran might have joined later and helped break the power of the Unseelie Court (212 [332]). Although the Unseelie Court is never described in
Stardust
, it is traditionally the court of wicked Faerie creatures; fighting it makes the Fellowship come across as being on the side of good (something the reader is likely to have assumed, as only “good” characters are revealed to be members). This also suggests that they work to protect Faerie. The captain tells Tristran that the hairy little man is “not the only member of the fellowship with an interest in your return to Wall” (165 [244–45]). Who else would want Tristran returned to Wall—that is, out of Faerie? Given his probable connection to Faerie, Bromios is the most likely candidate, and indeed, the innkeeper can be seen drinking amicably with Charmed at the Market (199). The Fellowship of the Castle thus comes across as a likely principal behind Bromios and the diligent watch kept at Wall.

Mundanity threatens Faerie, which explains the rigorous guard duty. People from mundanity are kept out of Faerie on Faerie authority. Although dealings with Faerie beings are traditionally perilous for mundane people, and although magic can leak from Faerie to mundanity, it is Faerie that is at risk when mundanity's scientific hegemony threatens
to spread across the border. The Market as an arena for regular meetings between Faerie and mundanity emphasizes trade as the driving force behind their interactions. According to folktales and fantasy stories, however, Faerie beings generally have the upper hand when dealing with mundane people, or at least usually attempt to trick them. This sinister side of the Market is further alluded to by the presence of goblin sellers from Christina Rossetti's
Goblin Market
of 1862 (pp. 20–21), where neither purveyors nor goods are beneficial to the consumer. (The goblins' appearance recalls Laurence Housman's illustrations of the 1893 edition of Rossetti's poem. See my note 36, in this chapter.) In this way, the Market reminds the reader of how perilous Faerie can actually be. The opposition between the domains is also evident in the opposition between science and magic, which is brought out from the very beginning of the story. The two scientists, Morse and Draper, and the secular rulers, the queen and the prime minister, would all smile disdainfully at anyone who had mentioned magic or Faerie (8 [5]). Yet, at the border, mundane science meets the magical Faerie. Magic and technology cannot coexist: the former appears to overcome the latter. When the wind blows from Faerie, it carries the smells of Faerie along with the propensity for magic, “and at those times there were strange colors seen in the flames in the fireplaces of the village, and when that wind blew the simplest of devices, from lucifer matches to lantern-slides, would no longer function” (40 [54]). Magic gives the impression of being the stronger force, but this is just an illusion. The scientific knowledge of mundanity is simply too inimical to much of Faerie. When explorers prove the nonexistence of mythical lands, these lands take refuge in Faerie; were the fallen star ever to enter mundanity, she would cease to be a person and become what science has “proven” her to be: a lump of ferrous rock.

In mundanity, magic and wonder are crowded out by science and technology. This dynamic at a time of massive technological breakthrough in the heyday of British industrialization brings into focus the disappearance of magic from mundanity. Such a process of disappearance, or diminishing, Clute refers to as
thinning
.
³³
“In low fantasy, crosshatch fantasy, etc., rarely does the world provide venues unthreatened by one or more of a huge range of diminishings or dismissals of the old order,” he remarks before listing examples including “the desiccations of the secular and of technology,” the draining of magic, and the expulsion of the inhabitants of Faerie.
³⁴
Whereas
Stardust
's Faerie is reasonably safe behind the wall, mundanity has been suffering from thinning for
an unspecified while. As is typical of quest or portal fantasies, according to Farah Mendlesohn, the story “begins with a sense of stability that is revealed to be the stability of a thinned land”;
³⁵
but rather than dealing with the thinning,
Stardust
pushes it into the background. Even so, the thinning of mundanity is engaged occasionally: imaginary countries, once they are proved not to exist, are subtracted from mundanity's geography and added to Faerie's. The illustrations of the Market (in particular on pp. 20–21) suggest that legendary and imaginary characters also relocate to Faerie.
³⁶
The Market, which now takes place every nine years, once occurred annually (9 [8]), and Madame Semele claims that fewer visitors come to each Market. Her pessimistic prophesy that it will last “[a]nother forty, fifty, sixty years at the most” (197 [306]) is proved wrong, though. The present-day narrator explains already in the beginning of the story how, even today, the guard at the wall is relaxed every nine years for the Market (7 [4–5]).

Where magic is apparently a property of the air (or at least something that travels with the wind), the thinning of mundanity is a frame of mind. Just as disbelief can destroy the power of a story, it is a force that can threaten the very existence of a magical realm. Thus, only people who would not bring scientific rationality, and thinning, into Faerie are allowed to enter. Unlike the thinning in
The Lord of the Rings
, which is tied to the leaving of the elves, or Tim Powers's
On Stranger Tides
(1988), in which iron drives the magic away, scientific thought (such as the advancements of Draper and Morse) destroys magic in
Stardust
. This is why not only the scientists but also the secular leaders would treat suggestions of magic with disdain—they all subscribe to the rationality brought by science, a rationality inimical to Faerie. In “On Fairy-stories,” Tolkien points out how destructive disbelief can be: “The moment disbelief arises, the spell [of the Secondary World] is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.”
³⁷
The spell is broken; magic fails, Faerie (or whatever secondary world the story concerns) collapses. This theme has been treated repeatedly in fantasy fiction. Religious belief is in focus in Terry Pratchett's
Small Gods
(1992), wherein the true belief of the worshippers is required to keep their gods in existence, just as little children's belief in fairies is needed to keep Tinker Bell alive in J. M. Barrie's drama
Peter Pan
(1904). Disbelief brings Hell to an end, cancels death, and threatens the existence of reality in John Wyndham's “Confidence
Trick” (1954). The most prominent example in the genre, however, is Michael Ende's
Die unendliche Geschichte
(1979; trans.
The Neverending Story
1983), in which the entire world of Phantásien (Fantastica) faces destruction unless the diegetic reader shows belief in it.

In
Stardust
, the entire construction of the border focuses on preventing the thinning in mundanity from spreading into Faerie. Imagination and dreams, rather than scientific rationality, are required to be admitted across the border: only “the minstrels, and the lovers, and the mad” (74 [103]) are to be let through. This allusion to
A Midsummer Night's Dream
makes clear why these figures are allowed into Faerie. “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,” Shakespeare writes, “are of imagination all compact,”
³⁸
and such imaginative and irrational people are eminently suited to Faerie. On the whole, however, Faerie must be defended from mundane people and the thinning they could bring. That, more than anything, is why such brutal guard is kept on the border between the two domains.

Apart and Together: Ancelstierre and the Old Kingdom
³⁹

The opposition between the domains of magic and technology is brought to the fore in Garth Nix's Abhorsen series. The series consists of
Sabriel
and its sequels
Lirael
and
Abhorsen
. (These sequels are technically speaking a two-volume novel, with a single story running through both of them.) The events in the novella “Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case” take place six months after the events in
Abhorsen
.
Sabriel
is a story of the protagonist's coming into her own and defeating a powerful, evil spirit. In
Lirael
/
Abhorsen
, the destructive force called the Destroyer is trying to escape from its eon-long imprisonment but is thwarted by Sabriel's sister, Lirael, and son, Sam. The novella tells of how Sam's friend seeks to defeat a magical monster woken up by a mad scientist.

For the border between Faerie and mundanity in
Stardust
, the principal question was
why
the border is so well-defended. The same question is resolved almost from the beginning in Nix's books. There, both magical and nonmagical defenses have been put in place to protect the citizens of one domain from the dangers of the other. The Abhorsen series is set in the Old Kingdom, a pseudomedieval, magical realm, and its southern neighbor, Ancelstierre,
⁴⁰
magicless and roughly corresponding technologically and socially to Western Europe of the 1920s. The border between the countries is thus the border between the domains of magic and technology. These domains are essentially two different
worlds: they have different stars and a different moon, time flows differently (although not completely unpredictably), and seasons and weather vary (something that becomes distinctly noticeable along the border). The border between these very dissimilar domains is heavily defended, but not because of any actual conflict between the two. The defenses are chiefly meant to stop magical threats from entering Ancelstierre, but also to prevent Ancelstierrans from venturing into the Old Kingdom. Among the magical dangers that may enter Ancelstierre from the north are the Dead—various beings who have been brought back from death or who have managed to return of their own accord. As Ancelstierre has no one who, like the Old Kingdom Abhorsen, can send the Dead back into death, and in general is short on mages to combat any magical threats, the Wall's protection is necessary. It does not prevent living beings from crossing, however, and since the land north of the border is a lawless place (especially in
Sabriel
) where hapless Ancelstierrans would easily fall prey to necromancers or the Dead, the nonmagical defenses of Ancelstierre are required to prevent entry into the Old Kingdom.