The Captain of the Coblynows gripped the hilt of his cutlass until his knuckles looked like they might make a run for it. His red eyes smoked like coals in a furious hearth.
“I’m going to hang your bones from my mainsail, you ladle-brained peasant! You’ve got the brain of a sunburned badger, the courage of a bowl of porridge, and the grace of a giant with a head injury! You prancing, marshmallow-hearted cow!” Cutty’d run out of breath by the end of it, but he yanked out that last with a hoarse belch.
“That’s the second time I’ve been called a cow today.” September sighed. “I don’t know what’s so horrid about being a cow. Mrs. Powell’s cow is called Marjorie and she’s well behaved and very useful. But I suppose I did jump over the Moon.”
September talked slowly to buy herself time. He called me an ape, she thought furiously. That’s all right, humans evolved from apes, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Don’t get sad, get smart! Think! Coblynows evolved from … I think Sir Sanguine said chimneys? There ought to be something juicy there …
The waters of Mumkeep Reef roiled and glugged again. A gang of giants with bandaged heads galloped out across the ocean floor. They wore peasants’ rags and rode majestic, ice-hoofed cows with horns forged from beaten plowshares. Marshmallow bells hung from the beasts’ necks, skins crinkling black, as though roasted by an invisible campfire. The deep water slowed them down, but they did not wait. Each giant hoisted a monstrous ladle aloft and whirled it round his head like a mace. Every time the ladles came round, they lobbed boiling black porridge at September, Saturday, Sepia, Brother Tinpan, the Pieces of Eight, anything they could see through their bandages. The dark globs ate through whatever they landed on like acid with butter and brown sugar on top. A mob of flaming badgers wove in and out of the cows’ legs, scampering across the dueling field, their fur burning the water around them into acrid steam and smoke.
September tried to get a roar going down in the bottoms of her feet, but it would not come. The giants hollered out battle songs in the old tongue. She took a deep breath through the mouth of her mask.
“Go eat an anchor, you soot-addled pile of bricks!”
It wasn’t bad. She put a nice, solid sneer on it. The Blue Wind clapped her hands in her judge’s frame—she always wanted September to learn to sneer properly. And it did genuinely hurt Cutty’s feelings. But all she got for her efforts was a shower of chimney-bricks floating down to her like flakes of fish food dropped into an aquarium. They mortared themselves neatly into a wall any garden would love to bring home to meet the tomatoes. September and Saturday crouched quickly behind it, but the wall could do nothing more for them than be the best wall it knew how. So it swiveled round and circled them safely, mortaring up its own seam quick as oats.
“I tried!” September insisted. “It’s hard enough to think of something cutting without having to make it something that’s good for battling as well.”
“Go again,” urged Saturday. “He got about twenty in one breath, surely you get more than one.”
“That was the best I had!”
September felt a small hand tug at her recently tattooed wrist. It gave her such a startle she nearly vaulted over the wall and into a gaggle of giants. She turned to look what had her by the arm, her heart bouncing all round her insides like a lost pinball.
A small boy squeezed her hand. A small blue boy. A small blue boy with a topknot and the very beginnings of a long, lovely tattoo that would one day look like curling waves breaking over his shoulder blades. It was Saturday, when he was young and small, a Marid in his natural habitat: out of time and out of order, popping out of the past to pull on her sleeve.
“Hullo, Bear Lady,” said this new Saturday. He was no more than four or five, his little black eyes quick and mischievous. “I saw you be a bear so that’s what I’m going to call you.”
Saturday blinked at his younger self. Then he laughed, really rather loudly, as though he’d only just understood a joke he’d heard years before. “Hiya, Little S,” he said, and tugged affectionately on the boy’s much-shorter topknot.
Four-year-old Saturday hopped up on his own blue feet. “Hiya, Big S! I came to help! I’m top of the food chain when it comes to name-calling.” He put his hands on his hips. “Slights, mockeries, slanders, cheap shots—if you want someone to run home crying, I’m your fish.”
“Saturday!” September gasped. “That’s not you! You wouldn’t curse a storm if it flooded your house!”
The older Marid shrugged, half embarrassed, half proud of the pixyish little hooligan he’d once been. “I wasn’t always quiet, you know. Befo
re I got locked up in a lobster cage and wrestled every day for wishes, I ran wild through the Sea. Marids are all orphans for a while. We live in jumbled-up order—what Papa could keep up? I told you I met my mother on a beach when I was twelve and she was twenty-four. I gave her a dune daisy. But all the versions of me before I turned twelve still had to have something to do while they were waiting to be born. Some of me sold cockleshells, some of me played high-level hopscotch with the narwhals, and some of me picked pockets and ran with the rougher schools of mackerel and mermaids.”
“You said you’d never stolen anything before.”
Saturday laughed. “Well, only some of me has. It wasn’t really a lie. Don’t be angry.” He turned to Little S. “I remember being you. It was fun. Before the Marquess’s nets came down.”
Little S didn’t seem too worried about the nets or cages in his future. A Marid lives all at once, like sparkles of sunlight darting through moving water. Why wear yourself out gnawing on the rind of the future? Right here and now, Little S meant to call some giants nasty names, which was the most fun he could imagine. “Let’s not tell our life stories when we’ve got a pirate to put down and flaming badgers to put out!” he scolded them. “I’m small, but I have a big mouth. You have to, on the mean old Seas! Grammy doesn’t like it when I swear, and she won’t let me drown anyone because it makes a mess, but I can do you at least a hundred bang-up taunts and five or six scorchers without breaking her rules. This is gonna be a day for my scrapbook!” The boy bent down and kissed September’s hand quite gallantly. He deliberately twinkled his eyes at her. “I’m gonna love you some day, Bear Lady, so I wanna get started on impressing you.”
Little S put his foot into a crack in the brick wall. The wall dug out a row of handholds for him and he scrambled up, sticking his nose up over the ledge.
“Oy! Bilge-rat!” he shouted. The Night Wagon came about sharply, pointing its sea horse nose at the cause of this new ruckus. “Yes, you! Bilge-rat! You scurrilous scurvy-sore! You preening putrid princess! Why don’t you come out of that gloomy-two-shoes merry-go-round pony and scrub our bricks like the filthy chimney brush you are?”
Cutty Soames, Captain of the Coblynows, fixed the boy with a stare like a walked plank. Shall I tell you what lay smoldering behind that stare? Duel or no duel, he meant to murder that child. The worst lashings come from a truthful whip: Thousands of years ago, the Coblynows had indeed been born from chimneys, bound to them like a dryad to her tree, forced to keep house for people with no personal hygiene at all. When Cutty took the helm of Fairyland, he and his boys smashed every chimney in the kingdom, broke every brush over their knees, rubbed every slovenly Fairy’s nose in soot until they promised to clean their chimneys twice a year as they’d repeatedly been told. It was the greatest day in Coblynow history. Cutty forbade anyone to speak of the Brick and Mortar Years forever after, and the Coblynows took to the high seas, where they could live in the open air and never let the fires of their plundering go out and never pick up after themselves or anyone else again. And no one had spoken of those dark days since. They hadn’t dared. Until this miserable brine shrimp of a lad.
“You heard me!” the little blue guttersnipe brayed again. “Who’s a fussy ’fraidy-crab who won’t get his toesies wet? It’s you, sir!”
But not the same guttersnipe. This one was seven or eight. The one who’d called Cutty a bilge-rat was still thumbing his nose over the top of their pathetic brick wall. The one calling him a ’fraidy-crab was flashing in and out of the arches of Mumkeep Reef like a tropical fish.
“Boiler-brained grog-for-guts!” giggled another child, much older, nearly twelve.
“Spoiled spaniel of the seven seas!” hooted a fourth, a bouncing three-year-old Saturday with seaweed in his long hair. He didn’t even have a topknot yet.
“Lime-loving lackspine buccane’er-do-well!” howled yet a fifth tittering, mocking blue nine-year-old Marid backstroking casually through the current. Cutty found that one particularly unnecessary. He had to love limes or else lose his teeth to scurvy! How was he to help the plain facts of naval life?