The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Catherynne M. Valente
“Ell! I’m working for the Marquess! I didn’t even stand up to her a little bit! I met the villain—surely, it’s obvious she’s a villain—and I wasn’t brave; I wasn’t!”
Ell nuzzled her gently with his enormous head. “Well, no one expected you to, love. She’s a Queen, and Queens have to be obeyed, and even the very bravest aren’t brave at all when a Queen tells them they ought to do something. When the lions came to put on my chains, I just sort of lay there and cried. At least you stood on your feet, wee as they are. You said no once—that’s more than I’ve ever done! And for me! To save me! A silly half-library lizard. What kind of friend would I be if I scolded you for saving me?” He made a little, weird, wild sound deep in his throat, something like cluork. “When I am weak, when I am poorly, I cannot bear to be scolded. But if it will make you feel loved, I will scold you right proper, I will.”
“And you broke my cage,” added Saturday. “You didn’t have to.” His voice was strange and slushing, as if a crashing wave had stood up and asked after tea. “The Marquess likes it best when you don’t want to do as she says, but you have to do it anyway. That’s like … a big bowl of soft cream and jam to her.”
“Besides, what’s the difference, really, between fetching a Spoon for the witch and fetching a sword for the Marquess? Not much, I’d say.”
September thought about it. “I suppose it’s because I offered to get Goodbye’s Spoon for her. I wanted to do it. To make her happy and to do something grand, so that maybe I could be a little grand, too. But the Marquess demanded that I do it, and then she said she’d kill you if I didn’t—and me if I didn’t do it fast enough. That’s not the same thing at all.”
“It’s service, though, either way,” said Saturday softly.
“It’s slavery when you can’t say no,” said September, quite sure she was right.
“It’s still very far away,” insisted the Wyverary. “And we haven’t any more time than we did a moment ago, indeed, a fair bit less.”
“Why do you keep speaking as if you are coming, Ell? You’re here, in Pandemonium! You ought to go to your grandfather and be happy and learned and careful of your fiery breath!”
“Don’t be silly, September. I am coming. How could I face my grandfather if he knew I had let a small one go off into dangerous places alone?”
“Not alone,” whispered Saturday.
“How much more lovely would it be to enter the Library with laurels, having accomplished a great deed involving a sword? My grandfather must have hundreds of books praising the deeds of such knights. And we shall all be knights, all three of us! And not punished at all!”
September looked dubiously at him. She neatly tucked her long dark hair behind her ears.
“Please, small friend. Now that I’m here, so close I can smell the glue of his bindings, I am not sure. I am afraid he will not love me. I should feel much better if I had a dashing story to tell him. I should feel much better if I knew you were safe and not crowning the topiaries in the Marquess’s garden. I should feel much better if no one could call me a coward. I don’t want to be a coward. It is not a nice thing to be.”
September reached up, and the Wyverary dropped his long, curved snout into her hands. She kissed it gently.
“I shall be ever so much more glad if you are with me, Ell.”
Saturday looked away from them, to give them privacy. You could not ask for a more polite Marid, even then, when he was so feral he could only remember to breathe every third breath, polite, and eager to be helpful.
“You’re right, of course, the velocipedes are running,” he said meekly, as though someone else had suggested it. He was still too shy to suggest anything without wrapping it up tight to keep it safe.
“What a funny, old-fashioned word!” said September, placing her hand on the hilt of the Spoon stuck into her belt. She felt stronger just holding onto it.
“I’m sure you know it means bicycle.” Saturday shifted from one foot to another. September had not thought to find someone more unsure of the world than she. “I didn’t mean to say you didn’t know.”
“Oh!” cried Ell. “Bicycle! Yes, well, now we’re in my section of the alphabet! It’s high summer, September! That means the running of the bicycles, and that means Lickety-Split Transportation!”
September looked uncertainly at her denuded sceptre, hanging sadly from Ell’s bronze chain. “I don’t think I’ve anything like enough rubies left to buy bicycles for both of us.”
“Pish! We don’t buy; we catch! September, the bicycle herds, well, I suppose they’re called voleries, not herds, right, Saturday? Voleries. Anyhow, their migration path runs though the Meadowflats just east of the City, and if we are lucky and have a bit of rope with us, we can hitch on with them all the way to the Provinces. Or nearly all the way. It’s difficult: They’re wild beasts, you know. And if I run just as hard as I can, I shall be able to keep up with you, and no one’s bones need be smashed or jangled. It goes without saying, I think, that it would be a bit ridiculous for me to ride a highwheel, even a big, brawny bull. Let us go now, right away! I shouldn’t want to miss it; we would feel much chagrined, and stuck.”
“September,” pleaded Saturday, his blue eyes growing even wider and darker. “I have to eat. If I don’t eat, I will fall, soon, and not ever get up.”
“Oh, how rude of me!” September had forgotten her own hunger with all the excitement, but now it was back, and all the more insistent. And so, quite without thinking about it, September spent the last of her chipped rubies at a public house called the Toad and the Tabernacle, where the tables and chairs and walls were a deep-black widow’s weeds, and the milky yellow light from the silken candelabra made Saturday’s skin appear just as black as the ceiling.
“Salt,” whispered the boy regretfully. “I need salt and stone.”
“Is that what you eat?” September wrinkled her nose.
Saturday drooped in shame. “It’s what the sea eats. When I have been starved, no other food will sustain me. When I am well, I shall have goosefoot tarts and hawthorn custard with you, I’m sure.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings! Please, you mustn’t slump so! Besides, I’m not certain I can eat anything here. It’s all sure to be Fairy food, and I think I’ve been reasonable enough about that so far—and safe—but surely eating in a Fairy public house is right out.”
A-Through-L’s lips quirked, as if he knew a bit about both Fairies and Food, beginning as they both did with F. But he said nothing. September sat politely and drank a glass of clear water, which was not food in the least and so obviously innocent. She tried to bargain with her stomach not to growl as A-Through-L demolished three plates of radishes and a flagon of genuine Morrowmoss well-water. Saturday gnawed a slab of blue sea-stone and daintily licked a joint of salt. He offered some to her uncertainly, and she demurred politely.
“I have a delicate digestion,” she said. “I don’t think it would bear much stone.”
A platter of painted duck eggs, sweet dense bread, and marshmallow fondue passed by, hoisted on the shoulders of a waiter who might well have been a dwarf. September drank her water vigorously, trying not to look at it. And when all was done and swallowed and September was still hungry but pleased with herself for avoiding temptation, the last of the sceptre went into the toll chest of a much smaller, less splendid ferry. Without incident, its paddle wheel splashed through the other side of the Barleybroom. It took the three of them away from the soft, gleaming spires of Pandemonium and deposited them on a grassy, empty shore.
“It seems so sad to leave,” September remarked mournfully, as she stepped onto the muddy shore, “when we have only just arrived. How I wish I could get to know Pandemonium a little better!”
September tucked the green smoking jacket under the Wyverary’s bronze chain, knotting the sleeves together. The jacket mourned, crying out in silent, emerald-colored consternation. Alas, the ears of folk with legs and noses and eyebrows are not made t
o hearken to the weeping of those with inseams and buttonholes and lapels. Already, September could hear a kind of thunder in the distance. The Meadowflats stretched long and far around them as they walked: even, well-tempered grass, without tree or welcoming shade or the smallest white flower. If the grass were not so rich and green, she would have called it desolate.
“Remember, they are fast and tall and vicious! Many have perished or, at least, been roundly dumped off and bruised in the attempt to travel by wild bicycle.” A-Through-L fretted and stamped his great feet in the grass. The thunder grew closer.
September retied the green sash of the smoking jacket around the hilt of the Spoon. No money had remained for proper adventuring equipment, but she was her mother’s daughter, always and forever, and felt sure whatever she set her hands to would work. Once, they had spent a whole afternoon fixing Mr. Albert’s broken-up Model A so that September would not have to walk every day to school, which was several miles away. September would have been happy to watch her mother shoulder-deep in engine grease, but her mother wasn’t like that. She made September learn very well how a clutch worked, what to tighten, what to bend, and in the end, September had been so tired, but the car hummed and coughed just like a car ought to. That was what September liked best, now that her mother was not about and she had the freedom to think about her from time to time—to learn things, and her mother knew a great number of them. She never said anything was too hard or too dirty and had never once told September that she would understand when she was older. On account of all of this, September could make a very respectable knot in the sash, and the sash, being part of the jacket, dutifully tightened itself even further and prepared for what was sure to be great discomfort to come. Saturday watched it all with vivid interest but said nothing.
A long, loud horn sounded, and several answering hoots honked into the blazing day.
“They’re coming!” shouted Ell excitedly, his wings wobbling under the chains as he leapt up, his tongue lolling like a puppy’s. Really, he needn’t have said anything. The velocipede volery sent up a choking cloud of dust, and Saturday and September could see quite clearly that as soon as they heard the horns, the bicycles were nearly upon them, a great throng of old-fashioned highwheels, the wheel in front enormous, the wheel behind tiny—though tiny in this case meant somewhat larger than Saturday’s whole body. Their seats, borne loftily into the sky, were battered velvet of various motley, dappled shades, their tires spotted like hyenas, their spokes glittering in the naked meadow-flat sun.
“Hold onto me, Saturday!” yelled September. He tucked his arms around her waist, and again she was struck by how heavy he was, when he seemed so small. The horns sqwonked again, and as a great, soaring highwheel came roaring by, September threw the Spoon as hard as she could. It flew, far and true, and she clutched the end of the sash, which extended much farther than you might think, so eager was the sash to please its mistress. The Spoon tangled in the spokes of the large wheel, and up they shot into the air, the turning of the wheel pulling them forward. Saturday shut his eyes—but September did not. She laughed as she flew nearer and nearer to the broad speckled orange-and-black seat. She reached out to catch it and just caught her fingers in the copper springs beneath. Her knees banged against the tire and burned against the spinning, bloody and painful—but still, September scrambled up as best she could.
“September! I can’t!” Saturday called after her, his blue face contorted with fear and strain as he tried to hold onto her but slipped, more by each minute, until he was only barely clutching her ankle. “I’ll fall!”
September tried to raise her leg and pull him up, but she could not fight the jostling and honking of the velocipede as it angrily tried to dislodge its would-be rider. She hooked her elbow around the musky-smelling seat and reached down as far as she could, her fingers stretched to their limit, to catch him. It was not enough. He could not get hold, and he was so terribly, awfully heavy. September cried out wordlessly as the highwheel reared up, determined to dash her bones against the meadow.
Saturday fell.
He did not shriek. He just looked at September as she rushed upward, away from him, his dark eyes terribly sad and sorry.
September screamed for him, and the honking horns seemed to laugh in wild victory—at least, one child they could trample underfoot! But Ell came thumping up behind them, his powerful legs knocking weaker, younger velocipedes aside. He caught Saturday by the hair in mid-fall and tossed the Marid up as though he weighed not a thing, bumping him at the last with the tip of his nose so that September could catch his elbow and haul him onto the speckled seat beside her.
He clung to her, shaking a little. September could not make herself let go of the long brass handlebars. Her grip tightened until she could hardly feel her hands, but she bent her head and rubbed her cheek against Saturday’s forehead, the way Ell had done with her when she’d been frightened. He seemed to calm a little. Yet still, the noise and dust blew awfully all around them. Ell ran alongside them, whooping and lolling and laughing, as little velocipedes took him for a bull and tried to roll up to ride on his shoulders.
“Excellent save, chickie-dear!” came a hollering voice over the pounding bicycle herd. September looked around and saw on a nearby highwheel a handsome woman with lovely dark-brown skin and wild curly hair. She wore something like a leather bomber jacket with a fleecy collar and a hat with big flopping earflaps. She had on big goggles to keep the dust out of her eyes and thick boots with dozens of buckles over the kind of funny riding pants September had only seen in movies, the kind that bow out on the sides and make one look like one has squirreled away watermelons in one’s pockets. Behind her were two delightful things: a pair of iridescent coppery-black wings bound up in a thin chain, and a little girl dressed just the same.
The woman deftly steered her velocipede in and out of the volery to come up alongside them.
“Calpurnia Farthing!” she hollered again over the din. “And that one’s my ward Penny!” The little girl waved cheerfully. She was much younger than September, perhaps only four or five. Her blue-black hair stuck out in tangled pigtails, and she wore a necklace of several bicycle chains which left her neck quite greasy. She wore mary janes like September’s old shoes, but the girl’s were golden—dirty and muddy, but golden all the same.
“H … hello!” answered September, barely holding on.
“You’ll get used to it! Gets to be pretty natural after a while, the banging and bedlam! That’s quite a cow you’ve lashed there; she’s an alpha and no joking! I’d have tried for one of the milking calves my first time.”
“Beggars can’t be—”
“Oh, yes, I’m just congratulating, you know! She’s a beaut!”
“Erm, right now, you understand, Miss Farthing, it’s hard to carry on a conversation…”
“Oh, well, it would be, if you’re not accustomed!” Calpurnia Farthing held out her hand. Penny spat a wad of beech-sap gum into it. Calpurnia reached down and wedged the gunk into a broken spoke. Her highwheel screeched, possibly in relief, possibly in indignation at her particular brand of field medicine. “Well,” she yelled, “they do stop to drink at night! They’ve a powerful thirst, you know. Takes hours to slurp their fill!”
“Till then?” said September politely.
“Ayup!” And Calpurnia veered off wildly, with Penny laughing all the way.
The campfire crackled and sparked, sending up smoke into a starry sky. September had never seen so many stars, and Nebraska was never poor in stars. There were so many unfamiliar constellations, spangled with milky galaxies and the occasional wispy comet.
“That’s the Lamp,” whispered Saturday, poking the fire with a long stick. He seemed to be most comfortable whispering. “Up there, with the loopy bit of stars in a circle—that’s the handle.”
“Is not,” humphed Ell. “That’s the Wolf’s Egg.”
“Wolves don’t lay eggs,” said Saturday, staring into the fire.
“Well, there’s a story. I read it when I was a lizard. There’s a wolf, a banshee, and a bird of prophecy, and they all make a bet—”
“And the wolf says, ‘Ain’t what’s strong, but what’s patient,’” said Calpurnia, tossing a palm frond into the fire. Penny threw a clump of grass.
“No, he says, ‘Give me that egg, or I’ll eat your mother,’” huffed A-Through-L.
“Regional folkloric differences.” Calpurnia shrugged.
The highwheel pilot opened her jacket and pulled out several long strips of dark meat. She passed them around, along with a fancy oakwood flask. Penny gnawed her jerky contentedly.
“What … is it?” asked September dubiously.
“What do you think? Dried tire. I share and share alike with fellow velocipeders. Only fair; it’s a hard life. Don’t turn up your nose at it! It’s as good as any other meat. A little gamy, sure, but they’re wild. Not all fattened up like mutton. Go on, eat. And drink—that’s good axle grease in there. Just as nice as yak blood.”
Ell chomped his and swallowed it right quick. September chewed slowly. This could hardly qualify as food at all, let alone Fairy food. But it wasn’t awful, not nearly. And not rubbery in the least. It was as though someone had found an extremely skinny, tough old turkey and burnt it thoroughly in the oven. The flask smelled rich and salty, and when she drank, she came near to spitting it out—or throwing it up—for it was indeed the closest thing to raw blood she had ever tasted. But she felt strength in her afterward, sinewy and springy and warm. Saturday ventured a little tire and a sip of grease but could not stomach it. He nursed a bit of stone he had dug up from the earth instead. Penny stuck out her tongue in disgust.
“That’s not nice, love,” admonished Calpurnia. “Changelings, you know? No manners at all.”
