Brother Tinpan inclined his head toward them. “Time,” he said courteously. Bubbles drifted up from his seaweed cowl.
Sepia rolled her sorrowful eyes. “Meet the Mysterious Monkfish, Only Two Bits! Forgive him. Conversation with a Monkfish takes some problem-solving skills. They don’t really talk, they just answer riddles, so you have to work backward and figure out the riddle he’s answering before you can get a spotlight on what he means to say. So time will be … ‘Until I am measured, I cannot be known, yet how you will miss me, when I have flown!’ He’s pleased to meet you and can tell you’re a jolly sort he’ll miss once you’ve gone and left him alone with this old pun-and-punchline girl again. Any great actress learns to speak the special language of stage managers if she wants her fins lit right!”
Saturday put his head to one side, his posture full of longing. “I miss it, too,” he said.
“Oh! Are you also a refugee of the stage? A mummer, a mugger, a knockabout rogue? Tell me, what did you play? Clamlet? Oedipod Rex? Tuna Tartuffe? Quayrano de Bergerac? No, wait! I want to guess! A quick-change act? A song-and-dance man?”
“I was in the circus,” Saturday said. The pride in his voice was a wild trapeze singing through the sea. “I only ever had one review, though. In the Almanack Tribune. Page twenty-two, bottom-left corner. In very small print.”
“No matter, no matter! It’s the praise that counts, my lad, not the page! Let’s have it!”
Saturday reached up to the blue-white stone he wore round his neck. He put his fingernail against one side and it popped open—a locket! Inside, a scrap of newsprint nestled safely under glass. It read: A promising newcomer. The Marid grinned jubilantly. His fingers shook a little as he closed up the locket again and let it fall where it belonged, over his heart.
The cuttlefish rippled happily. “Magnificent! Tip-top stuff! Ah, the circus! How stupendous. The circus is pure, I’ve always said. Nothing but spectacle. No squirrelly little words getting in the way of the rings of fire and the dancing bears. Were you a clown? I would so dearly love to talk shop with another practitioner of the comic arts! We could debate the rule of three or the horrors of improv!”
Saturday’s eyes dimmed and filled with shadows. He shook his head, his topknot floating upward in the seawater like a question mark. “I … I was … not a lion tamer. I don’t think. I have a fear of lions, you know. No!” Relief washed over his face. He’d caught the ragged edge of the answer as it tried to get away. “No, I was a trapeze artist! The trapeze. I flew through the air with the greatest of ease.”
September stared at him. How could Saturday forget his trapeze, even for a moment? He loved the Stationary Circus almost as much as the Sea itself. Almost as much as her and A-Through-L. How could he let it slip from his mind when he carried his only review in a locket round his neck? September remembered every job she’d ever done. Fixing Mr. Albert’s fence or battling her own shadow in the underworld—any of it sat at the tip of her tongue, ready to perform a death-defying leap of truthfulness as soon as anyone asked. But he had remembered, in the end. Perhaps it was only the excitement of coming home at last.
“Ah, well, never mind. It does my three hearts good to meet another thespian, whether or not he knows a catchphrase from a callback. Now, you say you’ve married this penguin. Come closer, birdie, let me get a look at those flippers.”
September swam down to Sepia Siphuncle, breathing easily, though the air tasted salty and thick. The cuttlefish’s spangled eyes roamed over her. She lifted her veils and ran them along September’s arms.
“Before I get started, princess penguin, tell me: What do you call your mother’s sister?”
“Aunt … Aunt Margaret!”
“Bzzz! Wrong! Aunt-Arctica!” Sepia guffawed. Her zebra stripes flushed a dazzling lilac. “You can clap now,” she allowed. September and Saturday did, politely. The Octopus Assassin glowered darkly and refused.
“Fair enough, one-liners are a chump’s game, after all. Like scrounging up pennies to pay for lunch. You may get what you need, cent by cent, but dollars fill you faster. Give me a role again! Let me be a protagonist once more! Let me trade alliterating insults with a squid for all seasons! Give me a script and I’ll give you anything you ask. A part, a part, my kingdom for a part!”
“Wheel,” Brother Tinpan admonished gently.
The cuttlefish wriggled and writhed. “Wheel? Oh, which one is that—no, I know it, just give me a moment. Ah-ha! ‘I go round in circles, but always straight ahead. I never complain, no matter where I am led.’ Well, that’s not very nice, is it, Tinny? He means to tell me you’d prefer I get my inks going and quit talking about myself so much, but you’ve got the kind of stubborn manners that won’t let you tell me to stuff my own tentacles in my mouth and jump off the continental shelf. You’re such a cynic, Tinpan! Trying to saw my audience in half and make them disappear. Fine. I’ll make her the greatest wife ever to trod the aisles. But you have to listen to my new jokes for a full hour tonight. Not a minute less! And if you complain, the hour starts over again!”
“I think you’re tops. Honest! A-list material,” September said slyly, though she meant it, really. You can be sly and sincere at the same time, though it takes practice and if you’re not careful, you will throw out your back. “A one-cuttlefish show not to be missed. It’s only that we’re running a race, and I don’t have the faintest idea what’s happening on land, or to whom! It took some time to get here. I’ve an awful worry in my stomach that it’s all slipping by up there.”
“I understand completely,” said Sepia Siphuncle. “The curtain goes up on time, whether you turn up or not. The show must go on. Even if the show is mostly a chase scene. Pull up your sleeve and give me your flipper, pretty penguin. Left or right, doesn’t matter. Whichever one you like best.”
September held out her left arm. She’d never given any thought to liking one more than the other. But she wrote with her left hand and used left-handed scissors and strummed her aunt Margaret’s funny old mandolin with her left hand, so it seemed to her that her left arm liked her best. The sleek seal-suit the emerald-colored smoking jacket and the Watchful Dress had made together parted along an invisible seam. The cuttlefish wrapped her tentacles around September’s fingers, then her wrist, then swallowed her all the way up to the forearm. It didn’t hurt—Sepia’s suckers rested on her bare skin like kisses. Her glitter-ringed eyes locked on to September’s, deep within her diving mask, black into copper, cephalopod into primate, W into O, sea into land.
September felt something hot and thick running up her arm. I’m bleeding, she thought frantically. She’s bitten me and I’m bleeding! Oh, it’s so much! I can’t live without that much blood! But she didn’t feel woozy or weak. In fact, she felt strong, really fantastically strong, as though her left arm could battle a hundred Octopus Assassins before her right had even woken up in the morning. She tried to lean back carefully and get a look at what Sepia had done to her. The way she felt just then, she thought that if she raised her arm up, she’d just lift the whole huge cuttlefish up over her head.
Rivers of black ink began to creep out of Sepia’s mouth onto September’s skin. Not the usual flat sort of black that comes in a paint can, or even the rich, bottomless, gorgeous sort of black that the sea knows how to make in the moonless Winter. This was cuttleblack, traced in speckles of electric blue and green like Sepia’s W-shaped eyes, stippled
all through with feverish, dancing drops of gold. Five bands of ink wound around one another like serpents in love, chasing one another, but slowly, deliberately, up September’s arm, past her elbow, surging for the shoulder. They made graceful, curving lunar patterns on her skin. The patterns seemed to move the longer she watched them—now like waves, now like briars, now like stars parading down the streets of the sky. They weren’t the same as Saturday’s lovely tattoos that she had spent so many days memorizing. These were her own, but they would look very pretty next to his. September thought them so beautiful that she didn’t think about whether or not they were permanent and she’d be stuck this way and have to explain it to most everyone she met until much later. Sepia Siphuncle, star of stage and reef, let September go. Her left arm looked like a map of heaven.
“Fire!” screamed Brother Tinpan. “Fire! Fire!”
Saffron ripples of irritation flowed up and down the cuttlefish’s body. “Can’t you let me take my bow at the end of a performance without making it all about you, you, you?” She sighed. “The penguin was about to give me my review! I need it! I’m starving for it! I don’t even know that one. You’ve never yelled ‘Fire!’ before.”
Hugger-Muggery, who had fumed in silence all this while, snapped to attention, her tentacles locking into position as straight and tense as an arrowhead. “‘I am always hungry, I must always be fed. The finger I touch will soon turn red.’ Someone is coming! Arm the alarums! Assassins, to me!”
Someone was coming. A black beast hurtled toward them out of the deep salt blue of the sea, a shadow in the shape of a tremendous sea horse.
Ajax Oddson’s voice filled every nook and cranny of Mumkeep Reef, gurgling happily, like children do when they try to pass messages back and worth under water.
“I say! What do I see in that sea? Why, it’s two Derbymen about to obey my decree! It’s that time again!”