The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In a Ship of Her Own Making (11 page)

Iago shrugged his furry shoulders. “As you like. Saves me the work of picking the lock with my incisor.”

His almond-shaped eyes fixed suddenly on Saturday and narrowed. The Panther padded over to Saturday and sniffed at him. With slinky deliberateness, he licked the boy’s face. “Keep in touch, blueberry-boy. And if you should see my sister again, September, lick her cheek for me.”

Iago strode away, tail held high. The three of them, Ell, September, and Saturday, leaning on September for strength, tried to look as though they belonged and were not doing a thing wrong as they walked quickly to the gate of the Briary, never looking back, not once.

“September,” said the Wyverary wonderingly when the brambles and golden flowers and babbling moat were behind them at last, “where did you get those shoes?”

#

In Which September, the Wyverary, and Saturday Leave Pandemonium and Make Their Way Across Fairyland By Means of Several Large Bicycles.

“Well,” said A-Through-L, sniffing hugely through his scarlet nostrils, “We had better be on our way. Autumn begins with A, you know. The Provinces are very far away.”

September stopped in a shadowy alley. On one side of the street rose the toasty brown woolen wall of a bakery, on the other the gold lamé of a bank. A Switchpoint on the corner readied its hands, flexing and cracking its hundred bronze fingers.

“Ell, aren’t you ashamed of me?” cried September miserably. “Aren’t you going to tell me I’m awful?”

The Wyverary scrunched up his face uncomfortably and hurried on. “Do you remember where I found you? By the sea? Well, the Autumn Provinces are all the way over by the other sea, on the other side of Fairyland. If I ran dead fast, stopping only to nap and drink, I might make it in something like good time. But you wouldn’t. You’d fly right off, or break your bones on my spine as I bounced you!”

“Ell! I’m working for the Marquess! I didn’t even stand up to her a little bit! I met the villain--surely it’s obvious she’s a villain--and I wasn’t brave, I wasn’t!”

Ell nuzzled her gently with his enormous head. “Well, no one expected you to, love. She’s a Queen, and Queens have to be obeyed, and even the very bravest aren’t brave at all when a Queen tells them they ought to do something. When the lions came to put on my chains, I just sort of lay there and cried. At least you stood on your feet, wee as they are. You said no once--that’s more than I’ve ever done! And for me! To save me! A silly half-library lizard. What kind of friend would I be if I scolded you for saving me?” He made a little, weird, wild sound deep in his throat, something like
cluork
. “When I am weak, when I am poorly, I cannot bear to be scolded. But if it will make you feel loved, I will scold you right proper, I will.”

“And you broke my cage,” added Saturday. “You didn't have to.” His voice was strange and slushing, as if a crashing wave had stood up and asked after tea. “The Marquess likes it best when you don’t want to do as she says, but you have to do it anyway. That’s like…a big bowl of soft cream and jam to her.”

“Besides, what’s the difference really, between fetching a Spoon for the witch and fetching a sword for the Marquess? Not much, I’d say.”

September thought about it. “I suppose it’s because I offered to get Goodbye’s Spoon for her. I wanted to do it. To make her happy, and to do something grand, so that, maybe, I could be a little grand, too. But the Marquess demanded that I do it, and then she said she’d kill you if I didn’t, and me if I didn’t do it fast enough. That’s not the same thing at all.”

“It’s service, though, either way,” said Saturday softly.

“It’s
slavery
, when you can’t say no,” said September, quite sure she was right.

“It’s still very far away,” insisted the Wyverary. “And we haven’t any more time than we did a moment ago, indeed, a fair bit less.”

“Why do you keep speaking as if you are coming, Ell? You’re here, in Pandemonium! You ought to go to your Grandfather, and be happy, and learned, and careful of your fiery breath!”

“Don’t be silly, September. I am coming. How could I face my Grandfather if he knew I had let a small one go off into dangerous places alone?”

“Not alone,” whispered Saturday.

“How much more lovely would it be to enter the Library with laurels, having accomplished a great deed involving a sword? My Grandfather must have hundreds of books praising the deeds of such knights. And we shall all be knights, all three of us! And not punished at all!”

September looked dubiously at him. She neatly tucked her long dark hair behind her ears.

“Please, small friend. Now that I’m here, so close I can smell the glue of his bindings, I am not sure, I am afraid he will not love me. I should feel much better if I had a dashing story to tell him. I should feel much better if I knew you were safe, and not crowning the topiaries in the Marquess’s garden. I should feel much better if no one could call me a coward. I don’t want to be a coward. It is not a nice thing to be.”

September reached up and the Wyverary dropped his long, curved snout into her hands. She kissed it gently.

“I shall be ever so much more glad if you are with me, Ell.”

Saturday looked away from them, to give them privacy. You could not ask for a more polite Marid, even then, when he was so feral he could only remember to breathe every third breath. Polite, and eager to be helpful.

“You’re right, of course, the velocipedes
are
running,” he said meekly, as though someone else had suggested it. He was still too shy to suggest anything without wrapping it up tight, to keep it safe.

“What a funny, old-fashioned word!” said September, placing her hand on the hilt of the Spoon stuck into her belt. She felt stronger just holding onto it.

“I’m sure you know it means bicycle,” Saturday shifted from one foot to another. September had not thought to find someone more unsure of the world than she. “I didn’t mean to say you didn’t know.”

“Oh!” cried Ell. “Bicycle! Yes, well, now we’re in my section of the alphabet! It’s high summer, September! That means the running of the bicycles, and that means Lickety-Split Transportation!”

September looked uncertainly at her denuded sceptre, hanging sadly from Ell’s bronze chain. “I don’t think I’ve anything like enough rubies left to buy bicycles for both of us.”

“Pish! We don’t buy, we catch! September, the bicycle herds, well, I suppose they’re called
voleries
, not herds, right, Saturday? Voleries. Anyhow, their migration path runs though the meadowflats just east of the City, and if we are lucky, and have a bit of rope with us, we can hitch on with them all the way to the Provinces. Or nearly all the way. It’s difficult, they’re wild beasts, you know. And if I run just as hard as I can I shall be able to keep up with you and no one’s bones need be smashed or jangled. It goes without saying, I think, that it would be a bit ridiculous for me to ride a highwheel, even a big, brawny bull. Let us go now, right away! I shouldn’t want to miss it, we would feel much chagrined, and stuck.”

“September,” pleaded Saturday, his blue eyes growing even wider and darker. “I have to eat. If I don’t eat, I will fall, soon, and not ever get up.”

“Oh, how rude of me!” September had forgotten her own hunger in all the excitement, but now it was back, in force. And so, quite without thinking about it, September spent the last of her chipped rubies at a public house called The Toad and the Tabernacle, where the tables and chairs and walls were a deep black widow’s weeds, and the milky yellow light from the silken candelabra made Saturday’s skin just as black as the ceiling.

“Salt,” whispered the boy regretfully. “I need salt, and stone.”

“Is that what you eat?” September wrinkled her nose. Saturday drooped in shame.

“It’s what the sea eats. When I have been starved, no other food will sustain me. When I am well I shall have goose-foot tarts and hawthorn custard with you, I’m sure.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings! Please, you mustn’t slump so! Besides, I’m not certain I can eat anything here. It’s all sure to be Fairy food and I think I’ve been reasonable enough about that so far, and safe, but surely eating in a Fairy public house is right out.”

A-Through-L’s lips quirked, as if he knew a bit about both Fairies and Food, beginning as they both did with F. But he said nothing. September sat politely and drank a glass of clear water which was not food in the least and so obviously innocent. She tried to bargain with her stomach not to growl as A-Through-L demolished three plates of radishes and a flagon of genuine Morrowmoss well-water. Saturday gnawed a slab of blue sea-stone and daintily licked a joint of salt. He offered some to her uncertainly, and she demurred politely.

“I have a delicate digestion,” she said. “I don’t think it would bear much stone.”

A platter of painted duck eggs, sweet, dense bread, and marshmallow-fondue passed by on the shoulders of a waiter who might well have been a dwarf. September drank her water vigorously, trying not to look at it. And when all was done and swallowed and September still hungry but pleased with herself for avoiding temptation, the last of the sceptre went into the toll-chest of a much smaller, less splendid ferry. Without incident, its paddlewheel splashed through the other side of the Barleybroom. It took the three of them away from the soft, gleaming spires of Pandemonium and deposited them on a grassy, empty shore.

“It seems so sad to leave,” September remarked mournfully as she stepped onto the muddy shore, “when we have only just arrived. How I wish I could get to know Pandemonium a little better!”

September tucked the green smoking jacket under the Wyverary’s bronze chain, knotting the sleeves together. The jacket mourned, crying out in silent, emerald-colored consternation. Alas, the ears of folk with legs and noses and eyebrows are not made to hearken to the weeping of those with inseams and buttonholes and lapels. Already September could hear a kind of thunder in the distance. The Meadowflats stretched long and far around them as they walked: even, well-tempered grass, without tree or welcoming shade or the smallest white flower. If the grass were not so rich and green, she would have called it desolate.

“Remember, they are fast and tall and vicious! Many have perished or at least been roundly dumped off and bruised in the attempt to travel by wild bicycle.” A-Through-L fretted and stamped his great feet in the grass. The thunder grew closer.

September re-tied the green sash of the smoking jacket around the hilt of the Spoon. No money had remained for proper adventuring equipment, but she was her mother’s daughter, always and forever, and felt sure whatever she set her hands to would work. Once, they had spent a whole afternoon fixing Mr. Albert’s broken-up Model A so that September would not have to walk every day to school, which was several miles away. September would have been happy to watch her mother shoulder-deep in engine grease, but her mother wasn’t like that. She made September learn very well how a clutch worked, and what to tighten, and what to bend, and in the end September had been so tired, but the car hummed and coughed just like a car ought to. That was what September liked best, now that her mother was not about and she had the freedom to think about her from time to time. She liked best to learn things, and that her mother knew a great number of them, and never said anything was too hard or too dirty, and had never once told her that she would understand when she was older. On account of all of this, September could make a very respectable knot in the sash, and the sash, being part of the jacket, dutifully tightened itself even further and prepared for what was sure to be great discomfort to come. Saturday watched it all with vivid interest, but said nothing.

A long, loud horn sounded, and several answering hoots honked into the blazing day.

“They’re coming!” shouted Ell excitedly, his wings wobbling under the chains as he leapt up, his tongue lolling like a puppy’s. Really, he needn’t have said anything. The velocipede volery sent up a choking cloud of dust, and Saturday and September could see quite clearly that as soon as they heard the horns the bicycles were nearly upon them, a great throng of old-fashioned highwheels, the wheel in front enormous, the wheel behind tiny--though tiny in this case meant somewhat larger than Saturday’s whole body. Their seats, borne loftily into the sky, were battered velvet of various motley, dappled shades, their tires spotted like hyenas, their spokes glittering in the naked meadowflat sun.

“Hold onto me, Saturday!” yelled September. He tucked his arms around her waist, and again she was struck by how heavy he was, when he seemed so small. The horns
sqwonked
again and as a great, soaring highwheel came roaring by, September threw the Spoon as hard as she could. It flew, far and true, and she clutched the end of the sash, which extended much further than you might think, so eager was the sash to please its mistress. The Spoon tangled in the spokes of the large wheel and up they shot into the air, the turning of the wheel pulling them forward. Saturday shut his eyes--but September did not. She laughed as she flew nearer and nearer to the broad speckled orange-and-black seat. She reached out to catch it and just caught her fingers in the copper springs beneath. Her knees banged against the tire and burned against the spinning, bloody and painful--but still September scrambled up as best she could.

“September! I can’t!” Saturday called after her, his blue face contorted in fear and strain as he tried to hold onto her but slipped, more by each minute, until he was only barely clutching her ankle. “I’ll fall!”

September tried to raise her leg and pull him up, but she could not fight the the jostling and honking of the velocipede as it angrily tried to dislodge its would-be rider. She hooked her elbow around the musky-smelling seat and reached down as far as she could, her fingers stretched to their limit, to catch him up. It was not enough. He could not get hold, and he was so terribly, awfully heavy. September cried out wordlessly as the highwheel reared up, determined to dash her bones against the meadow.

Saturday fell.

He did not shriek. He just looked at September as she rushed upward, away from him, his dark eyes terribly sad and sorry.

September screamed for him, and the honking horns seemed to laugh in wild victory--at least one child they could trample underfoot! But Ell came thumping up behind them, his powerful legs knocking weaker, younger velocipedes aside. He caught Saturday by the hair as he fell and tossed the Marid up as though he weighed not a thing, bumping him at the last with the tip of his nose so that September could catch his elbow and haul him onto the speckled seat beside her.