“But first come down,” Saturday said, holding September’s hands as tight as he could, though he was very careful not to crush her fingers. “Sit still a moment. There’s so much I want to show you! You must be so hungry, if you’ve only just gotten here. I know…” he flushed a little, blue against blue, “I know how hungry you get, when you are adventuring.”
In long, even circles, A-Though-L bore them down from the high trapeze platforms to the main ring. The ring, paved with thick, glossy postcards, gleamed up at them, showing a thatch of beach umbrellas and snowy peaks and the streets of Pandemonium and the whitewater rum rivers of Parthalia and the magicians’ cafes of Buyan and a thousand versions of the great crescent Moon of Fairyland, in every season and every sort of weather. Where the postcards creased together, words shouted and beckoned: VISIT! COME! WISH! HERE!
The ringmaster moved to meet them, but before she could get past the greeting-card horses tossing their confetti-manes in the air, a boy and a girl dashed toward them at full speed, hardly waiting until they’d climbed down from the Wyvern’s back to barrel into September and Saturday, wrapping them both up in their paper arms.
“Oh, forgive us, of course we don’t know you yet,” said the boy, whose long, tall body was covered in blocks of text, little birthmarks of fourteen lines each. He was made of sonnets, from head to toe. His hair was a flutter of motley ribbon marks. An intricate origami looked September in the eye, folded and smoothed and peaked into a friendly, narrow face.
“But we feel as though we do!” cried the girl, whose body was the warm, expensive gold of old letters, an elegant calligraphy covering every inch of her round, excited cheeks, her acrobat’s costume, her long, red, sealing-wax hair, the postmarks like freckles on her shoulders. September could make out a number of addresses and signatures, words like Dearest, Darling, Yours Forever, Heart of My Heart: love letters, woven together to make a girl. “I’m Valentine,” she said, holding out her angular hand.
“I’m Pentameter,” said the sonnet boy. “We’re them.” Both Valentine and Pentameter pointed their thumbs over their shoulders at a vivid sign, nailed to the pole that hoisted up the trapeze platforms. In deep scarlet it read: AEROPOSTE: WINGED WORDS AND FLIGHTS OF FANCY! Small golden wings flapped at the edges of the letters, the tail of the Y, the bar of the T.
Valentine pressed September’s hand to her heart, which read: My dearest Robert, henceforward I am yours for everything. “We feel as though we know you because Saturday talks about you whenever he’s not breathing, eating, or sleeping. And sometimes he’ll make an exception for all three!”
Pentameter grinned. Silky, blackly inked words formed his top lip: For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings. The cursive line of his bottom, smiling lip curved to finish the couplet: That then I scorn to change my state with kings. “The contortionists call him Saturday-When-September-Comes-Back!” he said with a laugh that was pleasant and prodding all at once.
The Marid stared at his feet as though he could burn a hole in the ground and be swallowed up by it. Poor Saturday. There is nothing like a friend to blurt out what we would most like to keep hidden.
September laughed a little. She tried to make it sound light and happy, as though it were all over now and how funny it was, when you think about it, that simply not having another person by you could hurt so. But it did not come out quite right; there was a heaviness in her laughing like ice at the b
ottom of a glass. She still missed Saturday, yet he was standing right beside her! Missing him had become a part of her, like a hard, dark bone, and she needed so much more than a few words to let it go. In all this while, she had spent more time missing Saturday than seeing him.
Valentine pressed on. “Though he certainly never mentioned you being a Criminal. How dashing!” September started to argue; she even pulled off her cap. All her dark hair came tumbling out and it did feel nice to take off some part of those black silks.
“Oh don’t worry,” said Pentameter with his rough, kind voice. “We’re a circus. We’re used to rogues and charlatans and hooligans and rascals! They’re our favorite sorts of people!”
In the midst of the ring, as though it were an act, part of the circus about to start, four Lunaphants busied their long trunks with setting up a banquet table. Now that September stood on the ground and could see them much more clearly than while hanging upside-down to the back of a Taxicrab, she was struck quiet by the creatures. As tall and strong and broad as a usual elephant, if a girl from Omaha could ever think of an elephant as usual, they gleamed silvery and white and twilit blue. Their bodies were costly stationary, letterheads from offices and writing paper meant for folk you wanted to impress most. Their trunks, which they used more gracefully than September could use her own hands, were twisted ropes of scratch paper, cluttered with crossed-out equations, bits of verse, telephone numbers, and the scribbles people make when testing a pen to see if it works. The glass inkwells of their eyes dripped, now and again, navy-colored tears onto the circus ring. They floated in the air without effort, nimble as sparrows—and so September could see, when she looked up, the bottoms of their feet, which each bore a miniature model of the Moon, every crater and mountain exact and exquisite.
When the Lunaphants finished with the furniture, they trumpeted all together. A shower of envelopes popped into the air between them, each sealed with a different thick wax blot. They drifted to the table and landed perfectly, one at each place set for September, Saturday, A-Through-L, Valentine, and Pentameter. Saturday and the acrobats fell to immediately, popping the seals on their post. Like lifting the silver dome on a dish in a fine restaurant, dishes appeared steaming and fragrant. September looked at her own plate. Her envelope looked up at her with an orange seal with a little wrench stamped in the circle of wax. She slid her finger under it and with a satisfyingly thick cracking noise her dish filled with a rich pie—whose crust was a riot of writing, crossed-out, rewritten, X’d out once more, written a third time, as if by a poet who could not quite get his verse to obey him, no matter how he tried, could not find the perfect phrase. The only line left unscratched was: Turn, Beatrice, O turn your holy eyes upon your faithful one… September’s stomach announced that it had no intention of turning down a meal just because someone had done their homework on it. She stuck her fork into the center of the O. Black, purple, and blue ink gurgled out, thick with pen-nibs, typewriter keys, and blocks of moveable type from some ancient printing press.
“I am sure to break my teeth!” she exclaimed. Saturday had already dug into his own pie. A-Through-L shrugged and bit off the whole crust of his, slurping up the filling with relish.
“Just try it,” he coaxed, licking a bit of ink-sauce off of his blue lip.
September did not take much comfort—she had seen the Marid chew seastones to dust. But all the same, she lifted a forkful of key and type into her mouth, an exclamation point and a Gothic letter H.
They burst against her teeth like soft grapes and summer cherries, savory and sweet, slippery and rich, the crust buttery and smooth, like a shepherd’s pie baked full of lamb and chocolate and nutmeggy apples. Without quite meaning to, September let out a little cry of deliciousness. She was so hungry! Aroostook had had her lunch, but September had eaten no more than a hard butterscotch since this morning—could it really be only this morning she had set out across the fields to mend the old fence? She felt Ballast Downbound’s orange fizz in her pocket and reached for it, for nothing could taste better with any sort of food than orange fizz, as far as she was concerned. But Saturday popped the top off of a squat little poster-tube and produced a pretty newsprint goblet of fine brown ink. This time, September did not hesitate, but drank deeply. The taste of walnuts and cream and cinnamon and—could it be? Yes! Moonkins! The lovely glowing fruits the Hreinn grew in the Glass Forest, distilled down into a thick brew. A little ribbon of something like the brandy her parents kept for special occasions wriggled through the other flavors. This must be what the Blue Wind meant when she waxed about the cocktails on the Moon! But it did not make September feel dizzy, no matter the ribbon of brandy, only full and strong and awake.
“Have you really joined the circus, Saturday?” she asked between wolfish, huge bites.
The Marid flushed with pride. Had she ever noticed how pretty he got when he did that? Like foam cresting on the deep sea.
“When I first came to the Moon I had no idea what to do with myself,” he said ruefully. “Ell had his Library and it kept him so busy. Some days I would sit very quietly in the empty half of the Lopside and read the lonely books on those shelves so they wouldn’t feel neglected. But, oh, September! I am a child of the sea! I cannot stay in one place for long without stretching and swelling and dancing and surging and crashing and rolling. I walked over all of Almanack, never taking the same path twice. It was very lonely.” Saturday lowered his eyes; he could not quite say it while September looked so intently at him. “How often I wished you were there so that I could point things out to you and hear what you thought of them. Who would you have bet on at the capricorn races? Would you have liked the rice cakes the giant rabbits whack out with their silver mallets? Would you laugh at the moonmummers in the amphitheater near my little house?”
“You have a little house?” Suddenly Saturday seemed so much older than she, though she knew he was not, not really. To have one’s own little house and walk alone every night through such a great city! But Saturday went on in a rush, hardly hearing her.
“And I would come and watch the Stationary Circus. Not the performances—I came to watch them practice. They do such beautiful shows, but what I liked was to see them working out their routines, making mistakes sometimes, trying different costumes, different combinations of players and animals, different steps and leaps and flips and grips. Practice seemed like a very alive thing to me. I thought often of how much I would like to practice something like that, to shape it bit by bit, every day, to be so good at moving and seeming that I could change just a tiny turn of my toe and have it become something new, from a comedic tumble to a tragic fall, from a leap of faith to a twist ending, from a nosedive to lifted spirits. Because you would take that with you, you know?” Saturday looked up to see if she understood him. “You couldn’t help it, if you’d practiced enough. Your body would remember, like how a piano player drums her fingers on her leg in the pattern of her favorite song without even noticing. You’d take it with you into everyday doing and walking and singing and reading in the Library and dreaming and sleeping. Every time you moved or seemed it would mean something, the way it means something in the circus, when you’re performing and everyone below you is gasping and clapping and covering their eyes but still peeking through their fingers. Even the littlest turn of your toe.” He took a deep breath. September had never seen him so excited.
Pentameter tweaked Saturday’s topknot gently. “He thought we wouldn’t want him because he’s flesh and bone.”
“But we’re open minded,” chirped Valentine, giving his knee a sisterly punch. September could not help reading her soft brown cheek, though she could not tell if this might be rude or not. Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what an extraordinary influence you have over my heart… “After all, he comes from the sea and the best ink comes from cuttlefish, so there’s a family connection.”
September marveled at how easy they were together. Saturday didn’t blush at all when they jostled him.
r /> “I did have to practice awfully hard.”
“Rubbish!” said Valentine, chewing on a fat fountain pen that snapped off when she bit down, like a ripe carrot. “He did a Quad Folio Fold with a Double Dogear on his first day!”
Pentameter slid a second envelope toward A-Through-L, whose rumbling stomach, being so much bigger than any of theirs, announced a need for a second course. On his strong brown hand September read: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, when a new planet swims into his ken…the rest vanished around the curve of his thumb. “You are wickedly heavy, though, brother. We had to bench press the Gunpowder Ghouls—in full gear!—every night just to work up to catching your big blue dumbbells in mid-air!”