The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two (Fairyland 3)

The Taxicrab nodded at Saturday and little Ell in his silk pendant.

?

??They are. And you’re theirs. Family is a transitive property. Almanack wants you all safe in the shell. Even when Almanack’s given up and headed on down the road with the rest, to weather it out by some strangely named sea in Fairyland and who knows if it’ll be a kind one. Even when the shell is gone. ’Course, I knew you’d be needing an escort ages back. I’m right on time, as usual and I don’t mind saying! Follow me!”

Spoke skittered off in his madcap fashion, his ten legs scrabbling against the barren dunes of the Moon’s inner edge. Aroostook bounded down the rocky valleys after the Taxicrab. Sprays of fine pearly soil shot up around her wheels and September believed that if she could, the automobile would be whooping with joy. They wound through ashen crags and riverbeds hardened into hematite and wide, curving salt flats and finally, finally, out onto a scarred plain they had seen only in pictures.

Down below them lay a city.

Down below them lay something awful and red rising up out of the surface of the Moon. Its hump swelled into the sky like some terrible fish cresting in a sea of light. September touched the little basket around her neck where A-Through-L rode, stroking his tiny head with her thumb.

The city was Patience—it could hardly be anything else. The towers and clocks and halls and theaters had no leaves or blossoms, but the branches of them twisted into the same shapes, bare and brown and black. Dried grass flowed into streets where fresh, thick grass had done in the photographs. The awful red blister rose out of the place where a certain pedestal had once been, shattering the ground around it and buckling cobblestones and squares of ancient lawn in its rising. All around it rubbish lay in heaps and scatters, flotsam and jetsam and ruin.

Someone was moving down there. Patience was not wholly abandoned.

“Thank you, Spoke,” Saturday said. “Please give Valentine and Pentameter—and Almanack—my care.”

September put out her hand and Spoke shook it with one checkered claw—service rendered and done. He scuttled off back over the edge of the world, toward the road and the shell already tottering down through the stars like a long, bright train.

At first September saw nothing living except rushes of wind and the rustling it made as it passed over dead weeds cluttering the rim of the red dome. Shadows bloomed up on that scarlet surface like handprints—and faded just as quickly. But as Aroostook roared down into the valley, pouncing through the lunar flats, September clinging desperately to the green sunflower of the steering wheel, she could feel her heart twist strangely. It felt as though the whole of the Sea of Restlessness poured through her in a great huge swallow, prickling along her limbs and in her blood and to the ends of her hair. Saturday felt it, too—the tattoos along his back wriggled and swam, braiding and unbraiding themselves.

“September,” he hollered over the crash and bang of the automobile. “When I climb up high, onto the highest platform, and the lights are on and the seats are full and I have the trapeze bar in my hand but it hasn’t started yet, when my toes are hanging over the edge and I can see all the way down and there’s no practice net and for a moment I forget everything I practiced and my stomach wants free of the rest of me—this is what it feels like!”

September smiled. She remembered his flying through the air above the Stationary Circus and the ringmaster below blowing peonies, before he knew she was watching, before they’d touched again. Could it have only been this morning? She wished they could have stayed there and eaten typewriter pies and fallen asleep in the contortionists’ tent.

She brought Aroostook to a halt in the great pavilion of Patience. She hardly had a choice—all that junk crowded every inch of street and courtyard. Aroostook’s wheels ground over sledgehammers, rakes, chisels, straight-edge razors, sickles and scythes, spades and hammers, jewelers’ glasses, telescopes, wheels, abaci, longshoremen’s hooks and seamstresses’ tape, wrenches, knives, swords, fishing rods, and wrenches, shears and knitting needles and frying pans and brooms and axes and typewriters and film projectors and dead lightbulbs and clocks. Yet though the bulbs at the very least ought to have shattered, they held under the weight of car and girl and Marid and tiny, thimble-light Wyverary. The knitting needles ought to have snapped, the clocks burst, but they did not. Still, September had to press on the brake with both her feet and all the strength in her legs to stop them. The Model A hummed and thrilled as though she did not want to stop. Did she feel it, too? The terrible tumult, the terrible quickness soaking them all like electric sweat? The red dome soared up, patterns of dark bloody shades and shimmering fiery veins moving over it like fish under the water. A handprint blackened one side of the great orb, vanished, then appeared again a little ways away. Finally, without warning, the hand that made the print popped into view, and then the body attached to it, the cause tripping over itself to catch up with effect.

It was a Yeti.

He stood taller even than Ell once had, a dizzying tower of tangled, matted white-blue fur and muscle. Black horns curved around his shaggy, heavy head, almost wrapping up his whole skull. Deep ruby eyes glowed within the dark folds of his face and his wide, long nose sniffed deeply at the air of the Moon. His left arm hung to the boulder of his knee, ending in a monstrous hand, black and six-fingered, nails dark and shiny as onyx, his palm a vast blank page.

The Yeti was missing his right paw. His arm ended in a stump overgrown with mossy, snarled fur knotted up around his wrist like an old bandage.

September stared. It was him. It had always been him. It had always been Ciderskin, his own paw, stolen and used to batter the Moon through time.

Ciderskin moved around the dome, touching it, sniffing at it, prodding it with his long, many-knuckled fingers, pressing his horns up against it, listening intently. He kicked a typewriter out of the way, sending up a clatter of shovels and brooms. Every so often he would growl at the strange marbled blister, a crooning, rasping, chewing sound that rubbed hideously along September’s bones. But the dome seemed to like it; it rippled and flushed when he rumbled. A black shape darted around the Yeti and the dome, between his massive white legs and over the garbage heaps of long-dead Patience.

September could not speak. Her throat held itself as closed as a fist. A single, almost childish thought repeated over and over in her mind: He’s so big. He’s just so big. She had never been afraid of Ell’s size, but then, he had always crouched down to her, lay on his belly in long grass, let her ride upon his back, bent his head when she spoke. Ciderskin had no reason to make himself reachable to a small human. He stood at his full height, even standing on his tiptoes to reach some invisible, vital part of the dome he had not yet examined.

But she could make her feet work. September opened Aroostook’s bent door and stepped out onto the far side of the Moon. She took one step and then another, pretending that she was still walking up toward the broken fence her father had never gotten round to mending, the hot June sun still singing on her skin, Skadi still choosing her husband from the dancing-girl lineup of the great gods’ legs, one butterscotch toffee still to be eaten. That she had never heard the words war, or shift, or hospital.

Saturday took her hand. She had not heard him come round to her. His fingers shook a little in hers. She was glad of him then, so terribly glad. That she did not have to stand alone in that lonely lunar city, as she had stood with the Marquess, as she had stood with her shadow.

The black shape saw them first. It stopped, quivering with the effort of stopping, peering at them from behind the blood-colored curve of the dome—was it bigger than it had been? September could not tell. The black shape sniffed the air. It was a huge dog, wet of nose and long of ear, his curly fur lit strangely, tangled up with tiny white stars like burrs. The dog bounded out from behind the moon-blister, spraying dusty pale pearly soil from his hind legs. He was tall enough to look September in the eye and he did it then, both Saturday and September, one to the other and back again. He stared with depthless black eyes. His tail swept back and forth through the air.

“You can’t have it,” September whispered, for it is easier to speak to a dog with conviction than a Yeti.

“What’s that?” came a bassoon of a voice, a long blare of sound full of frosty echoes and windswept notes. Ciderskin turned toward them, his wrinkled face crowded with white wool, his horns glinting in the misty ruby light.

“The Moon,” said September, and tried to put into her voice all the bravery she did not feel. She had no paw, no weapons, no notion of what to do except to stand and say what must be said. “It’s not yours, or at least not only yours. I’m very sorry for what happened to you but you must know the Fairies are gone now. I know you must feel awfully sore about it.” September glanced at Ciderskin’s severed paw. Could it really have been this same Yeti, all those years ago? “But you’ll shake the place apart and it’ll rain Moon and fire and stone in Fairyland and I can’t let you.”

“Begging your pardon,” groused the Yeti, “but I believe you haven’t the first idea of what’s happened to me or the weather in Fairyland or the least fact about the least thing in the known universe. Just my opinion, of course.”

The black dog opened his mouth. His pink tongue flopped out, panting through a wide grin. September could see straight down his dark throat.

September cocked her head to one side. “Are you a Capacitor?” she asked the dog.

He yelped a little, the way a person would give the kind of short, sharp laugh that isn’t really a laugh but punctuation. “That’s not my name but it’s not a bad one. Not bad at all,” he barked.