The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

  September’s eyes filled with tears. She remembered the first time she saw him, cramped and bent and broken in the Marquess’s cruel lobster cage, penned in and forgotten. She shook her head; her tears flew aside.

  “I am happy for you,” she said as brightly as she could. And she was, it was not a lie. But even he, even poor beautiful Saturday knew what he could be and do in the world. Ell had his Library, the Sibyl had had her door, Ballast had her ships—and September, still, was only herself, in the audience watching Saturday moving and seeming. “Back home everyone is always asking ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ As if everyone is a Pooka and you can just change, from a girl or a boy into something else, a griffin or an armchair or a shark! But you have, you’ve changed into…into a flight of fancy, like the sign says. A circus man.” And it was the first time she had thought of the word man in connection to Saturday.

  Saturday looked at her strangely. His dark eyes shone. “No, no, I haven’t. I’m still Saturday. A slightly more airborne Saturday is all! And I am going with you, of course I am going with you! That’s what understudies are for! September, I have waited and waited for you! If you say we must go and see about a Yeti, well, that is what I want most in the world.”

  Valentine and Pentameter looked at each other. They grinned identical grins. Together, they leaned into Saturday and kissed him on each cheek, squeezed his arms, and dashed away as quickly as they’d come running over the ring to meet them. They scurried up the little footholds on the trapeze poles, nimble as cats. On one of Valentine’s bare feet the dedication My Dearest Pickle—flashed. One the other: My Own Boy—Pentameter’s heels announced joyfully: I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.

  When they reached their positions, the two of them nodded to each other, and then down to Saturday and September. They swung out on their bars and as they did, their bodies opened up—but not into paper airplanes this time. Triangles of paper opened and closed along their limbs so that when Valentine and Pentameter met, grasping wrists or ankles or under the shoulders, when they somersaulted together or dropped so fast even Saturday gasped, new words formed from the fragments of letters and sonnets printed upon their bodies. As Aeroposte danced above them, September read the message they acrobaticked into being:

  He missed you

  like a fish in a bowl

  misses the open sea.

  As Ell flew toward the mouth of Almanack, Saturday holding onto her waist and Ell humming beneath them, September opened her mouth to talk. Several times she stopped herself. She had gotten so used to not saying what was important that she could not quite get the habit going again. The words would not come out. Perhaps she did not even know the words she wanted. I missed you, too, seemed such a little name to put on the bigness of the feeling inside her.

  Saturday squeezed her hand. Blushing furiously, her heart battering at her bones, September leaned over and kissed him. It was a quick kiss, as though speeding through to the other side of it would make other kisses easier. When she pulled away, the Marid’s eyes shone.

  Ell laughed a big, rumbling, beastly laugh. He started to turn a loop-de-loop, so joyful was he. Remembering his passengers, he haroomed instead. “Next stop: Orrery, City of Lenses! Traveling by Wyverary cannot be beat!”

  September suddenly realized something. “But Ell, Orrery begins with O! How can you know so much about it?”

  The Wyverary soared high, his neck stretching into a long red ribbon, full of words and pies and relief and flying.

  “I’m growing up!” he cried.

  CHAPTER XII

  NEXT SATURDAY

  In Which September and Her Friends Contract a Serious Case of Restlessness, Get Bashed About by an Invisible Fist, and Meet Someone Again for the First Time

  Night washed over the Moon. The scarlet sea glimmered blackly on one side of the peculiar troupe; high mountains creased and folded into sharp shadows on the other. A Wyverary walked happily alongside a weatherbeaten Model A Ford driven by a girl all in black—as much as you could call it driving when the Ford seemed happy to trundle along on its own. A blue-skinned boy rode in the passenger seat, marveling at the sounds of the engine, the feel of the cracked dash, the cracks in the mirrors.

  September said nothing in particular to Aroostook on the subject of her new horn. Nor her throttle lever, which was no longer rusty and bent but a twisted, shining ebony branch ending in a small hand carved out of gold, its palm facing upward in a friendly fashion. Tiny china mushrooms clung to the gnarls of the branch. She did not understand what the car was about. How could September possibly figure out her trouble? And was it trouble at all? She simply would not discuss it until the Model A stopped this gussying up and settled into whatever she was going to be. A-Through-L and Saturday, having never seen a car, assumed they all had sunflower-wheels and big striped phonograph horns and golden hands on their levers and were simply delighted with the noise of his engine. No use in yelling at something till it makes sense. It doesn’t work with me, after all.

  Besides, September felt shivery and strange, quite as though her skin meant to jump off and run away howling into the mountains. She fairly trembled; she wanted to run, not drive, or dive into the sea, or just see how far into the air she could jump. At the moment she felt certain she would fly off like a firework. She wanted to drive faster—the sooner they got over the ridge of the Moon the better, that was definitely right, why was Aroostook so damnably slow?

  Ell looked in the window at her, grinning. His eyes danced. A little ripple ran along his spine.

  “It’s the Sea of Restlessness,” he said. “Fills you up with go go go, like you’re a bowl full of reaching and wanting but you don’t know what you’re reaching and wanting for.”

  “When we first came to the Moon, we nearly turned around and ran off again,” Saturday said. “It just lights you, like a candle.”

  “But Almanack seems so peaceful! Shouldn’t everyone there be itching to leave? Shouldn’t Almanack feel like this? Just…boiling up with off we go?”

  Saturday laughed a little. “I think it does, really. I think maybe that’s what a Restless Whelk looks like.”

  A-Through-L just whipped his tail up toward the stars. “Inside the shell, we’re safe!”

  September felt as though her heart were a kettle boiling on a stove, that screaming whistle just nearly bubbling out. She looked up toward the tip of Ell’s tail, snapping like a lick of fire at the night sky. And there—there, suddenly—was Fairyland. September gaped. She brought her hand to her mouth. It hung in the sky like an emerald, huge and green and streaked with blue, rose, gold. But it was nothing like she ever imagined a planet could look like when she daydreamed during Mrs. Henderson’s astronomy club talks. Tufts of creamy, popsicle-colored clouds drifted around the globe and out into the black like a wheel of birds. And Fairyland had rings! Like Saturn, rings like great glittering wedding bands looped round at a rakish angle, breaking through the clouds. But the rings were not just rocks and ice, they were train tracks. Jeweled and empty, with no engine in sight, but tracks all the same, with switches and trestles glowing softly. September could not even say it was beautiful. It was ever so much bigger and grander than beautiful. She had a feeling stuck in her and she could not name it. It bobbed up and down in her heart like a crystal bottle with a message inside—but she could not get out the stopper.

  Many years later, folk whose names you and I studied in school went up to the roof of our world and looked down. Perhaps they could name the feeling for her. It’s something like suddenly stepping out of your own skin and seeing yourself from the outside, seeing the body you live in the way it looks to the stars and the sun and the sky and everyone who knows you, without mirrors or photographs or reflections in shop windows. You look at that silly old place you’ve been walking around in and forgetting to brush your teeth or braid your hair neatly and it is nothing like you thought, but somehow, someway, better than you ever hoped it could be.
If you want to know a secret—and I do love to tell you secrets when no one else can hear—you cannot grow up at all until you’ve done it, not if you are a little girl nor a whole species.

  “Stop!” September cried. And Ell did. And Aroostook did. She pointed, and Saturday and the Wyverary looked up with her. Even the Model A seemed to strain upward, ever so slightly. They looked together for a little while, and the light on their faces was as green and warm as wishing. Saturday and September put out their hands at the same time and knocked knuckles before lacing their fingers together. A-Through-L wrapped his tail in a knot around their hands and they giggled.

  But they could not stand still long. The restless sea air prickled at them and tugged at their hair and their whiskers and their fenders. September broke away before her skin burst into flame, for that was truly how it felt, as though suddenly she were made of kindling the way Valentine and Pentameter were made of paper. She grabbed the Stethoscope’s box from the rear of the Model A, leapt out of the car, and pulled the gleaming sapphire tubes out of the ivory.

  “She said we could hear anything! Anything!” September’s hands jittered like they had when Aunt Margaret filled her doll’s tea set with coffee and coaxed her into drinking it. “Why couldn’t we hear the paw? There’s no reason! Everything makes a sound, one way or another! It could be scrabbling underground or tapping its hairy old fingers against a tree!”

  September put the jeweled cup of the Stethoscope against the earth of the Moon. The soil was chalky and pale, greenish white. September remembered the Fairy newsreel ages and ages ago telling her that the Moon was made of pearl—and so it really seemed to be. The weeds and scrub-flowers grew hard and luminous and slick. They bent and snapped under her as she lay down on the surface of the Moon. But the sapphire ear-knobs were far too big for her own ears. September offered them to A-Through-L.

  “Erm,” said the Wyverary. “Ah.” He listened very intently, tapping his claws restlessly. “I…I can hear noise.” His great red face quivered, winced. He sucked in his cheeks and cried out: “Just the most noise you ever heard! All at once. Oh, September, it hurts!” he wailed suddenly. “It’s so loud, everyone talking and sleeping and eating! Everything growing and stomping and digging! Moon-moles! And an old Wyrm eating Kappa shells! It’s so thick, it’s so loud! I don’t like this at all!” He squeezed his eyes painfully shut, trying to listen. “I don’t know how to listen for a paw. There’s paws everywhere! Stomping and scratching and padding and pummeling! But, oh, wait, oh…there’s a great big thumping in there. Like thunder. Boom, boom, boom. Under everything! It’s down there—oh! Not one thumping but two thumpings! Hear them go! Oh, they will crush me! Boom, boom, boom!”

  “It must be Ciderskin,” breathed Saturday. “And his dog. Thumping on the Moon to break it.”

  Finally, Ell could bear it no more. He clawed the Stethoscope out of his ears and lay down, panting against the pearly scrub.

  “I’m sorry, September,” he gulped. “It was a good idea. I tried to find a clenching or a scratching or a tapping in the middle of it, a sound a Yeti’s paw might make, but you just hear everything all at once, one thing on top of the other and it’s like a radio tuned to every channel. Maybe there’s a trick to Stethoscoping, but if there is I don’t know it. S’what comes of consorting with things that start with S.”

  “I think we ought to turn inland,” September said nervously. “You’re liable to let your fire out after all that—I feel as though I could breathe fire right now!”

  And so they did, veering off the long opaline beach road. Ell felt certain he knew the way and September nestled into her old trust of the Wyvern. They curved around away from the shore toward a dark thatch of forest and murky shadows. Lights flashed within it, crackling, flickering, rolling into little balls and out again.

  “Oh, I do know all about Lightning!” said Ell, eager to be back on familiar ground. “When my mother was a tiny little lizard, no bigger than a castle, she lived with the giants of Thunderball Monastery. They grew lightning in their herbarium, just the healthiest, juiciest, brightest bolts you ever saw. Lightning buds off a great gleaming rod, you know. You have to pick it right after the first frost; that’s when the forks are sweetest. The giants peddled their lightning all over Fairyland, sold to Winds and Witches and Writers alike. That was how my mother met her fated Scientiste—Scientists of any stripe are just mad for Lightning. Hang it in a basket, stuff it in a bottle, tie it in a bow! But that there is wild Lightning. Not the nice neat rows the giants hoed or the bushels my sainted mother carried to market in her claws. Unkempt and untamed and ungrounded!” The Wyverary ran a little harder, the Sea of Restlessness still tugging at them with its briny air, whispering at their heels: Come back, have a swim, wrestle a whale, have you considered naval warfare as a profession? Aroostook jumped forward and gave a little rev all of her own.

  Distances on the Moon can deceive. September thought they’d be deep in the lightning jungle in hardly a moment, but it danced off beyond them still. They rumbled down a long open plain, quite unprotected. Snowy sands blew away from their wheels and their feet. The green disc of Fairyland set quickly and all went dark save stars like thousands of dice thrown across the velvet of the sky, turning up numbers lucky and not so.

  It happened quickly, so quickly, unfathomably fast. But then, how else could it have happened?

  A fearsome, hideous bawl broke the night open. September and Saturday twisted around in their seats, but they could not find who it belonged to. It came from every direction and up from the Moon and down from the air as well. Another bellow exploded over the plain. Ell groaned, his ears aching already. Something vast and heavy thumped toward them—they could hear it, they could feel it—but they were alone on the wide moon-prairie.

  A fist heaved into Aroostook and sent them spinning, headlights turning like a mad lighthouse, colliding with Ell and cartwheeling off away from him again. The Wyverary yelped piercingly; purple fire shot out into the night. September saw the dark, wild tongues of it come in and out of view as they spun and screamed. Oh, Ell, don’t! she thought as her teeth jarred into her cheek and she bled. But she could hear his terrified harooms and she knew it was no good. That awful, awful sound could scare fire from a bar of soap. Finally the spinout slowed and ground into a stop. Saturday clung to her arm miserably; September wiped her bloody lip. Her arm and shoulder crunched painfully into Aroostook’s door. She yelped herself, but a girl’s body is not equipped to belch fire at anything that insults it, though we might sometimes wish this were not the case. She rubbed at the windshield with her good arm; their frightened breath had fogged it up.

  A figure stood before them, directly in their path, his skin dark and glossy and dancing with coiling patterns in the headlamps’ glare.

  It was Saturday.

  But it was not Saturday. Yes, he stood quite tall and slender, like the Marid September knew. He stood looking down at the automobile and the people in it with the same curious expression Saturday used when something interested him. But the man—for he was certainly a man and not a boy—wore his dark hair long, gathered up into a topknot. And he had the most beautiful blue skin, the color of a sea deeper than the sky. Even in the night she could see the blue of him shining. The muscles in his back swept in broader and stronger lines. He wore no shirt above his long, black silk trousers, either, and September could see his graceful, familiar tattoos there. His face was older, so much older than fourteen or fifteen. Older than twenty. Perhaps older than thirty.

  September knew him. She’d know him anywhere—but she also knew it was not him and besides, Saturday was here, right here next to her! Right here, digging his nails into her arm and refusing to look at the version of himself standing outside the Model A.

  “Don’t look, September,” he pleaded, lifting his eyes to hers. They searched September, begging. She had never seen him beg, not even to be set free on that first wretched day in Pandemonium. “Don’t listen to him, either. Look at
me. Look at me and remember the velocipedes, remember when you turned into a tree, remember how we wrestled and I didn’t let you win even a little…”

  But September could not look away from the Marid in her headlamps. Seeing the other Saturday standing there on the white plain was like looking at a photograph of your house when you are well and truly inside it. She felt a little ill, stretched taut between the two of them. Finally, September called out his name—a little shyly, a little too quiet, perhaps, for her voice to get outside the car. But the man snapped his head toward her, surprise moving like a tide on his face. Beside her, Saturday cringed and shut his eyes tighter. September called his name again, this time so unsure that it came out a whisper. The man who might have been Saturday raised his blue hand up hesitantly—and September remembered suddenly what it meant to be a Marid. They were the djinni of the ocean. They lived out of time. A Marid could meet himself many times in his life, older and younger, wiser and more foolish. He might even meet his parents before he was ever born, as Saturday had. This was Saturday, it was. But he was an older Saturday, one September had never met, a grown man and strong, no longer timid or bashful. She felt very strange, seeing this person her friend would one day become. There are emotions that we have no words for, since their circumstances do not come up often enough for committees to form and decide on the proper terms. This was one of them, this time-tangled future-present unsettling recognition.

  Slowly, without warning, snow began to fall.

  September leapt out of the car at the same instant the other Saturday leapt toward it. Her black silks rippled, warming her skin against the icy air. They met in the snow. September looked up into the eyes of someone very grown-up. More grown-up, she thought, than she could ever be.