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

“Stop!” September cried. And Ell did. And Aroostook did. She pointed, and Saturday and the Wyverary looked up with her. Even the Model A seemed to strain upward, ever so slightly. They looked together for a little while, and the light on their faces was as green and warm as wishing. Saturday and September put out their hands at the same time and knocked knuckles before lacing their fingers together. A-Through-L wrapped his tail in a knot around their hands and they giggled.

But they could not stand still long. The restless sea air prickled at them and tugged at their hair and their whiskers and their fenders. September broke away before her skin burst into flame, for that was truly how it felt, as though suddenly she were made of kindling the way Valentine and Pentameter were made of paper. She grabbed the Stethoscope’s box from the rear of the Model A, leapt out of the car, and pulled the gleaming sapphire tubes out of the ivory.

“She said we could hear anything! Anything!” September’s hands jittered like they had when Aunt Margaret filled her doll’s tea set with coffee and coaxed her into drinking it. “Why couldn’t we hear the paw? There’s no reason! Everything makes a sound, one way or another! It could be scrabbling underground or tapping its hairy old fingers against a tree!”

September put the jeweled cup of the Stethoscope against the earth of the Moon. The soil was chalky and pale, greenish white. September remembered the Fairy newsreel ages and ages ago telling her that the Moon was made of pearl—and so it really seemed to be. The weeds and scrub-flowers grew hard and luminous and slick. They bent and snapped under her as she lay down on the surface of the Moon. But the sapphire ear-knobs were far too big for her own ears. September offered them to A-Through-L.

“Erm,” said the Wyverary. “Ah.” He listened very intently, tapping his claws restlessly. “I…I can hear noise.” His great red face quivered, winced. He sucked in his cheeks and cried out: “Just the most noise you ever heard! All at once. Oh, September, it hurts!” he wailed suddenly. “It’s so loud, everyone talking and sleeping and eating! Everything growing and stomping and digging! Moon-moles! And an old Wyrm eating Kappa shells! It’s so thick, it’s so loud! I don’t like this at all!” He squeezed his eyes painfully shut, trying to listen. “I don’t know how to listen for a paw. There’s paws everywhere! Stomping and scratching and padding and pummeling! But, oh, wait, oh…there’s a great big thumping in there. Like thunder. Boom, boom, boom. Under everything! It’s down there—oh! Not one thumping but two thumpings! Hear them go! Oh, they will crush me! Boom, boom, boom!”

“It must be Ciderskin,” breathed Saturday. “And his dog. Thumping on the Moon to break it.”

Finally, Ell could bear it no more. He clawed the Stethoscope out of his ears and lay down, panting against the pearly scrub.

“I’m sorry, September,” he gulped. “It was a good idea. I tried to find a clenching or a scratching or a tapping in the middle of it, a sound a Yeti’s paw might make, but you just hear everything all at once, one thing on top of the other and it’s like a radio tuned to every channel. Maybe there’s a trick to Stethoscoping, but if there is I don’t know it. S’what comes of consorting with things that start with S.”

“I think we ought to turn inland,” September said nervously. “You’re liable to let your fire out after all that—I feel as though I could breathe fire right now!”

And so they did, veering off the long opaline beach road. Ell felt certain he knew the way and September nestled into her old trust of the Wyvern. They curved around away from the shore toward a dark thatch of forest and murky shadows. Lights flashed within it, crackling, flickering, rolling into little balls and out again.

“Oh, I do know all about Lightning!” said Ell, eager to be back on familiar ground. “When my mother was a tiny little lizard, no bigger than a castle, she lived with the giants of Thunderball Monastery. They grew lightning in their herbarium, just the healthiest, juiciest, brightest bolts you ever saw. Lightning buds off a great gleaming rod, you know. You have to pick it right after the first frost; that’s when the forks are sweetest. The giants peddled their lightning all over Fairyland, sold to Winds and Witches and Writers alike. That was how my mother met her fated Scientiste—Scientists of any stripe are just mad for Lightning. Hang it in a basket, stuff it in a bottle, tie it in a bow! But that there is wild Lightning. Not the nice neat rows the giants hoed or the bushels my sainted mother carried to market in her claws. Unkempt and untamed and ungrounded!” The Wyverary ran a little harder, the Sea of Restlessness still tugging at them with its briny air, whispering at their heels: Come back, have a swim, wrestle a whale, have you considered naval warfare as a profession? Aroostook jumped forward and gave a little rev all of her own.

Distances on the Moon can deceive. September thought they’d be deep in the lightning jungle in hardly a moment, but it danced off beyond them still. They rumbled down a long open plain, quite unprotected. Snowy sands blew away from their wheels and their feet. The green disc of Fairyland set quickly and all went dark save stars like thousands of dice thrown across the velvet of the sky, turning up numbers lucky and not so.

It happened quickly, so quickly, unfathomably fast. But then, how else could it have happened?

A fearsome, hideous bawl broke the night open. September and Saturday twisted around in their seats, but they could not find who it belonged to. It came from every direction and up from the Moon and down from the air as well. Another bellow exploded over the plain. Ell groaned, his ears aching already. Something vast and heavy thumped toward them—they could hear it, they could feel it—but they were alone on the wide moon-prairie.

A fist heaved into Aroostook and sent them spinning, headlights turning like a mad lighthouse, colliding with Ell and cartwheeling off away from him again. The Wyverary yelped piercingly; purple fire shot out into the night. September saw the dark, wild tongues of it come in and out of view as they spun and screamed. Oh, Ell, don’t! she thought as her teeth jarred into her cheek and she bled. But she could hear his terrified harooms and she knew it was no good. That awful, awful sound could scare fire from a bar of soap. Finally the spinout slowed and ground into a stop. Saturday clung to her arm miserably; September wiped her bloody lip. Her arm and shoulder crunched painfully into Aroostook’s door. She yelped herself, but a girl’s body is not equipped to belch fire at anything that insults it, though we might sometimes wish this were not the case. She rubbed at the windshield with her good arm; their frightened breath had fogged it up.

A figure stood before them, directly in their path, his skin dark and glossy and dancing with coiling patterns in the headlamps’ glare.

It was Saturday.

But it was not Saturday. Yes, he stood quite tall and slender, like the Marid September knew. He stood looking down at the automobile and the people in it with the same curious expression Saturday used when something interested him. But the man—for he was certainly a man and not a boy—wore his dark hair long, gathered up into a topknot. And he had the most beautiful blue skin, the color of a sea deeper than the sky. Even in the night she could see the blue of him shining. The muscles in his back swept in broader and stronger lines. He wore no shirt above his long, black silk trousers, either, and September could see his graceful, familiar tattoos there. His face was older, so much older than fourteen or fifteen. Older than twenty. Perhaps older than thirty.

September knew him. She’d know him anywhere—but she also knew it was not him and besides, Saturday was here, right here next to her! Right here, digging his nails into her arm and refusing to look at the version of himself standing outside the Model A.

“Don’t look, September,” he pleaded, lifting his eyes to hers. They searched September, begging. She had never seen him beg, not even to be set free on that first wretched day in Pandemonium. “Don’t listen to him, either. Look at

me. Look at me and remember the velocipedes, remember when you turned into a tree, remember how we wrestled and I didn’t let you win even a little…”

But September could not look away from the Marid in her headlamps. Seeing the other Saturday standing there on the white plain was like looking at a photograph of your house when you are well and truly inside it. She felt a little ill, stretched taut between the two of them. Finally, September called out his name—a little shyly, a little too quiet, perhaps, for her voice to get outside the car. But the man snapped his head toward her, surprise moving like a tide on his face. Beside her, Saturday cringed and shut his eyes tighter. September called his name again, this time so unsure that it came out a whisper. The man who might have been Saturday raised his blue hand up hesitantly—and September remembered suddenly what it meant to be a Marid. They were the djinni of the ocean. They lived out of time. A Marid could meet himself many times in his life, older and younger, wiser and more foolish. He might even meet his parents before he was ever born, as Saturday had. This was Saturday, it was. But he was an older Saturday, one September had never met, a grown man and strong, no longer timid or bashful. She felt very strange, seeing this person her friend would one day become. There are emotions that we have no words for, since their circumstances do not come up often enough for committees to form and decide on the proper terms. This was one of them, this time-tangled future-present unsettling recognition.

Slowly, without warning, snow began to fall.

September leapt out of the car at the same instant the other Saturday leapt toward it. Her black silks rippled, warming her skin against the icy air. They met in the snow. September looked up into the eyes of someone very grown-up. More grown-up, she thought, than she could ever be.

He said her name. He said it so gently it was as though he was holding it in his hand, trying not to crush it. Slowly, he reached out a hand and touched her hair. He smiled at her, a smile so full of knowing and warmth and merriness that what he said next hit September as though he had reached out and shoved her.

“You have to get out of my way,” he said. His voice boomed deep and hard. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, “but you’re in my way and you have to get out of it.”

September was frozen. She could not move. The awful bawl sounded again and a gust of wind blew as though someone had dashed by without stopping long enough to be seen.

The older Saturday had had enough. His arms shot out, and, knocking September aside, curled behind Aroostook’s seat. He snatched the ivory casket from the backseat without a word.

“Get in and sit down,” the taller Saturday said calmly. “Or this will hurt more.”

September did, numbly. She pulled her legs into the car just as that walloping fist came banging into the other side of Aroostook and they twisted out into the black again. September fell forward against the hard green sunflower and did not hear the other, older, colder, stranger Marid’s voice chasing her down into dreams.