“ ’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 I 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 Tristran, “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, ENSORCELLED 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.
The little creature hurried back down the path. “Somethin’ wrong?” he asked.
“I cannot keep up,” confessed Tristran. “You walk so confoundedly fast.”The little hairy man slowed his pace. “Beg your puddin’,” he said, as Tristran stumbled after him. “Bein’ on me own so much, I gets used to settin’ me own pace.”They walked side by side, in the golden-green light of the sun through the newly opened leaves. It was a quality of light Tristran had observed, unique to springtime. He wondered if they had left summer as far behind as October. From time to time Tristran would remark on a flash of color in a tree or bush, and the little hairy man would say something like, “Kingfisher. Mr. Halcyon they used to call him. Pretty bird,” or “Purple hummingbird. Drinks nectar from flowers. Hovers,” or “Redcap.