“I can’t talk about this right now,” she whispered. “I would rather fight the Yeti. A Yeti is big and angry and you can’t deny it’s a Yeti. All that fur. All that snow. A Yeti is a Yeti and that’s very straightforward, which is admirable in its own way!”
“I do so love arguments,” came a raspy, silky, cottony voice behind them. All four of them jumped.
The voice belonged to a creature watching them, chewing an unripe lightning-sprout in her mouth like cud. She had the body of a white donkey, muscled and powerful, with electric hooves. But a magnificent peacock’s tail spread out from her rump, dark green-violet wings folded along her back, and where a long horse’s face ought to be, a human face beamed at them. She had dark hazelnut-colored skin and silver-black hair curling out from beneath a domed red cap festooned with copper stars and prongs. A crescent moon stuck out of the top on a slender spike. The creature was not young: wrinkles creased her skin like map-lines, little starbursts near her dark eyes, deep trenches on her brow. September realized she had not seen many old folk in Fairyland.
“You can call me Candlestick, if I can be in your argument,” she said, trotting closer. “I once argued with my fate until it clapped its hands over its ears and bellowed for peace—and that means I am very good at bickering. My fate behaved itself after that. It would tie itself up in a bow and walk to the sun barefoot if I looked at it crosswise, and that’s the sort of attitude you want in your fate if you ask me, which you should, because this is my jungle and you should defer to the sorts of people who run whole jungles.”
September’s head felt heavy and fuzzy. She had put so many things out of it to consider later. They crowded in at the edges, buzzing, insistent. But she would not let them in.
“Miss Candlestick, if you please, we do not mean to barge into your very nice jungle. We are on our way to Orrery. If there is a toll or something we might be able to pay it, but we must get through and on.” September twisted her hands.
Candlestick reared up, turned round, and trotted off, her peacock tail fanning darkly in the stormy light. For a moment September thought she had left them. But her thin, pointed face appeared again around the side of a lightning-yew.
“Come on then,” she said.
They followed the pale donkey through the winding paths of the Lightning Jungle. A-Through-L nudged Aroostook’s bumper with his snout, rolling her along behind September and Saturday, who felt it rude to drive while their host walked. Long shapes that might have been vines and might have been some brand of thundery snake coiled through the canopy overhead.
“How did you make your fate talk to you?” Saturday asked Candlestick. His voice sounded low and bruised. “I suspect a Marid’s fate is a very obstinate thing, and not at all social.”
Candlestick shook her gray hair. “In my younger days, I was the most cantankerous Buraq you should ever like to meet. If the sun came out in the summertime, when it had every right, I raged at it because I wanted snow. If the stars shone bright, I let forth with a diatribe on the virtues of darkness. My mother and father thought me wretched; my cousins said I was the most unhappy creature to walk the Moon and could, the next time I wanted to harangue them on the subject of their faults and their choices, go and soak my head. They did not understand me! Though it is true that no one understands other people. Other people are the puzzle that will not be solved, the argument that cannot be won, the safe that cannot be cracked. They just could imagine the truth: I was happiest when I was arguing! When you argue with verve in your saddlebags, you are extremely alive. That is why you yell and holler and shake your fist—could there be anything sweeter than convincing someone to see the world your way? What else is talking for, or jokes, or stories, or battles? The Loudest Magic, and how I loved it. They saw a jennet red in the face—they could not see me red in the heart, so full of knowing that I had to make them know it, too. Until I changed my mind, of course. There’s no fun in arguing if you never get shown up. Who plays a game if there’s no chance they’ll lose? I do so crave to be proven wrong. It is as sweet as proving yourself right, when done properly. The trouble is, most people only argue with their friends and their family, which a real sportsman knows is no way to practice. If no one you know can prove you wrong, you’re in peril and that’s the truth. Well, I do go on—the devil of a thesis is digression! When my herd could no longer get a word in edgewise—and that’s the best way to get a word in, where no one can see it coming—I flew off to find the Sajada, where all the things worth knowing are kept. There, someone would best me, I was sure. After all, growing up is nothing but an argument with your parents on the topic of whether or not you are grown. You scream am so am so am so from the moment you’re born, and they fire back are not are not are not from the moment they’ve got you, and on it goes until you can say it loudest. I won my argument by lighting out for parts unknown—it’s a good rejoinder, but a last resort.”
Is that what I’ve done? September thought. Lit out?
Candlestick pawed the brilliant earth and went on. “You know what a fate looks like, don’t you? It’s just a little toy version of yourself, made out of alabaster and emerald and a little bit of lapis lazuli and ambition and coincidence and regret and everyone else’s expectations and laziness and hope and where you’re born and who to and everything you’re afraid of plus everything that’s afraid of you. They’re all kept in the Sajada. And I went all the way to Pluto to find out where they keep the Sajada!”
“There’s a Pluto here? We have a Pluto in my world!” September exclaimed.
“Oh, every place has a Pluto! It’s where a universe keeps the polar bears and last year’s pickled entropy and the spare gravity. You need a Pluto or you’re hardly a universe at all. Plutos teach lessons. A lesson is like a time-traveling argument. Because, you see, you can’t argue until you’ve had the lesson or else you’re just squabbling with your own ignorance. But a lesson is really just the result of arguments other people had ages ago! You have to sit still and pay attention and pantomime their arguments over again until you’re so sick of their prattle that you pipe up to have your own. You can’t learn anything without arguing.”
“What does Fairyland’s Pluto teach?”
“That’s for it to teach and me not to step on its toes. I could tell you, but you won’t learn it, because you haven’t been to Pluto and you haven’t fought the ice-ostriches and you haven’t even ridden the Undercamel until he collapses in a heap of his own dreamsweat so it’ll be just words to you. They’ll only mean themselves.”
“But who knows if I’ll ever get to Pluto?” September countered. “I’d bet the state of Nebraska it’ll never happen in my world, and I don’t get much choosing in where I go in Fairyland!”
Candlestick stopped in her tracks, her hooves squishing into a crackling electric mud.
“That’s a fair point, girl. But it doesn’t sit right. The Undercamel would spit in my eye and I’d never stop weeping. I shall give you half of it—the other half you’ll have to race down proper. Very well! Here is the great lesson of Pluto: What others call you, you become.” The Buraq’s eyes danced with mirth. “Very helpful indeed! I hope you feel edified.”
They continued on through the trees. September thought on this as hard as she could, but without an ice-ostrich, she supposed, it was rather hopeless.
“You do love to distract me!” said Candlestick. “I was saying that I went to Pluto to find the Sajada, which is a secret place known only to that very Undercamel, an extremely ill-temper
ed individual with great heaps of black fur and frozen humps and eyes like a slot machine and big hooves made all of terrible iron nails that bleed him even though a fellow can hardly get away from his own feet. Also he spits. And not like you spit or I do. He spits sorrow. One glob and you’ll never get off your knees again. You’ll weep until there’s no water left in you, just another mummy blowing around the plains of Pluto like a tumbleweed.”
“That’s dreadful!” cried Saturday.
“That’s sort of the point of an Undercamel,” agreed the Buraq. Her peacock tail shimmered in the stormlight. “Well, I’m sworn not to tell you the trick of doing it but you have to ride him till he breaks. Only then will he spit out his secret. I’m hardly equipped for dressage, having no arms and far too many legs, but I drove him seven times around Pluto, pole to pole, chasing his miserable tufted tail and dodging his bubbling green spit until he fell down half-dead. And I bent down to his slavering undermouth and he told me this: The Sajada is a planet, too, all covered with a mosaic of every possible color and a few that got kicked out of the family for being too wild and unruly. The mosaic makes the most radiant pictures, so many you can never see them all. The Sajada rises up from the tiles, a thousand thousand domes stuck over with stars like pincushions. And under every little pebble of the mosaic is somebody’s fate. No place more holy in the heavens. And do you know what I did then?”
“No,” breathed A-Through-L, who had quite forgotten his own trouble in the Buraq’s tale.
“I laughed. I laughed like the whole world was a joke and I was the punchline. And the Undercamel did not appreciate my sense of humor, I can tell you. I laughed because I knew just where it was. I knew a planet with a mosaic exactly like that.”
“Where?” asked the Wyverary eagerly.
“Well, not to put too fine a point on it,” Candlestick said, “but here.”
They stumbled out into a clearing in the Lightning Jungle. The sharp whip of ozone snapped at their noses. Lightning sprouts buzzed and tingled all in a ring round a thousand thousand domes like a pincushion—and quite the size of a pincushion, too. The Sajada spread out before them, the domes gorgeous and ornate and no bigger than toadstools. Crescent moons pronged up from their tips just like the one on Candlestick’s diadem. Little courtyards and fountains and walkways dotted the meadow between the domes. The fountains made a tiny trickling sound like the lightest rain. The domes flashed in cascading patterns, flickering pale colors, bright and dark, bright and dark.