The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two, Page 21

  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.

  Ciderskin crouched down and put his great blue-black paw on a swirling patch of the red and rising dome where it met the cracked, chalky lunar earth, slabs of stone and peat bursting and buckling wretchedly. As September and Saturday watched, paralyzed by fear and a large and attentive dog, the Yeti moved his fingers in strange circles, each finger
tip tracing its own path. A wind picked up; the light of afternoon went out like a book snapping shut, gold to black in less than a gasp. Stars bustled quick and hurried over the arch of the sky. Gold returned and was gone again, whipping by like those little books where a little figure dances if you flip through the pages fast enough. September felt the terrible restlessness in her heart pick up speed and put on muscle. The Yeti glanced at them. His face rearranged itself into a craggy, weather-beaten smile. It looked out of place, like a volcano smiling.

  “It works better when it’s attached,” he said with a bit of sheepishness hidden in his growl. He held up his good hand. “Better still if I had both, but I haven’t in a long while. You can beat time about the head with a hacked-off hunk of flesh, but my body is my own. No one can use it better than me. Time is no one’s friend—time has no social niceties and holds the door for nobody nowhere. But I hold the door for time, with my one good paw.” The stars slowed up above, and dark settled down over the open dust bowl of the Moon. “I was very young when I lost it. And I did lose it—I was careless. I know that now. I was meeting a mountain. I meant to kiss her in secret. I meant to wed her under the midnight dark. The prettiest mountain you ever saw, sparkling with snow in all the right places, rich with granite and tourmaline and silver, sturdy and sensible and weathered by the experience of eons. When she saw me, my mountain’s pine trees bristled and the wind in her heights whistled my name. When I saw her, I felt rivers break through the rock of my heart and carve me into a new shape.”

  “Do all Yetis wed mountains?” asked Saturday softly.

  Ciderskin smiled a private smile. “Only the lucky ones,” he said. “She agreed to meet me, to pick up her skirts and come to me away from her brothers and sisters who watched over each other with unclosing eyes. I came early. I was eager. I was young. I was lost in my dream of living quick and slow and quick and slow on her slopes, being near her every day, hearing the small mountain particulars of daily living: which foxes had kits and which had fallen off of cliff-faces, which avalanches wanted to come round for tea, what still meadows had business with alpine hypnodaisies, a thousand dropping pinecones. Some look at a mountain and see only the peak. I looked with a lover’s eyes and saw every tremble of every pebble. And so lost was I in contemplating the future happiness of my life with and on my mountain that I did not see the trap—the crude, stupid, idiot trap that would not have caught a bee-addled bear—until it crunched into my wrist. My mountain heard my screams of rage and pain and ran, the tremors of her going quaking me apart. I was angry at myself. A body is never so vicious as when it has only itself to blame for its trouble. And so much grief came bubbling up from my single thoughtless snap of a clock-hand.” Ciderskin pushed one of his fingers, as long and thick as a sapling, into the flesh of the blister with infinite slowness and patience. He dug inside like a lemur scratching for insects. A distant thundering, quivering sound bubbled up around them, from everywhere and nowhere. “Yetis are better than that. We have to be. We are the Moon’s children.”

  “If you’re the Moon’s child,” September cried, “how can you hurt it so? What is that thing coming out of the ground? I should never crack my mother’s bones and shake her limbs the way you’ve done!”

  As if to support her argument, the land gave a sickening lurch. Ciderskin scrabbled at the innards of the red dome. September nearly fell into the body of the black dog; she and Saturday clutched for each other as the moonquake tore through Patience.

  Ciderskin laid his head to one side. “Do you know what the Moon is, little girl?”

  “A Moon is a Moon. It orbits around an Earth.”

  “Well, yes, that’s true. Just as it’s true that a girl is a girl and orbits around a life. But the Moon is many things. Nothing is only itself. The Moon is the Moon, forever and always. But she is also alive. And like anything alive, she ages and grows and has rebellious years and takes up with passing planets and has her moods and her stubborn ways. It is only that her ways are so big they become our ways. She changes her face over the course of a month, well, who doesn’t? Who is the same creature on the first as on the thirty-first? Anything might happen, in such a space. But when the Moon changes, she keeps the time for the world below. She pulls the tides up like a blanket when she is cold and pushes them down again when she is too warm and thus rolls out the hours of the day and night. I will tell you the truth: The heart of the Moon is a month. She is an Engine, and as she turns she spins out month after month, like the pages of a book flying free. And down below, folk pack them up into a calendar and understand the rhythm of the world. Full Moon to full Moon and twelve of those make a year. I hope you understand: The Moon makes time. All Moons make time. And a Yeti, born on the Moon, fed of the rocks of the Moon and the water of her snows, is like a clock full of blood and bone that walks and talks and sings rhyming songs at eternity. When the Fairies took my hand—and it is a hand, you know. A hand and not a paw. A hand that uses tools and manipulates objects and touches the face of a beloved and counts off the years until joy.”

  “A paw is not so useless as all that,” growled the black dog. It could speak—a rolling, rough, raveled voice.

  “The Fairies called it a paw because they wanted to believe I was an animal—and not the sort of animal that discusses junkyard philosophy and enjoys Turkish coffee and knows Bone Magic and holds down a mortgage, no, the kind you can cut up for meat and only feel bad about it on Fridays. It’s easier to use somebody if you can think of them as mute and dumb and made for your pleasure.” Ciderskin’s mouth twisted; he rubbed his furry stump. “That is how Fairies think of everyone, you know. They used the world as a tool for their delight. We hated them so much and they could never see it. Our hate was a great red beast scraping the walls and they could not see it.”

  September could not bear this further. “I have met Fairies and none of them were like that. They have helped me; they have been kind! How shall I believe a monster stabbing at the Moon over my own friends!”

  Ciderskin shook his woolly head. “If you have known Fairies, you have known only those who heard of a Yeti’s Paw on the Moon and did not come. Who heard of a way to lash time to a sleigh and whip it till it bled, and did not wish to drive it. Rare creatures. There is no such thing as a people who are all wicked or even all good. Everyone chooses. But even they, even they looked at people and saw only tools. No one is a cup for another to drink from. And yet the Fairies sucked deep of us all.”

  And September did remember that Calpurnia had a changeling girl, a child who could not have been her own child. And that Charlie Crunchcrab ruled Fairyland with a hand heavier than she could ever have thought.

  “I will answer your question before you ask,” continued the Yeti, pulling his fingers out of the blister and bending to clear more slabs of white stone from its growing body. And September could see it swelling now, pulsing a little, even, as though it were taking a long, deep breath. “And the answer is: You are wrong. The Fairies are not gone. But they are no longer what they were. I watched it and did not help them, though I could have. I cheered. I cheered and I wept and I was glad. Perhaps I should not have been. Perhaps laughing at agony is a Fairy’s game and I should not have moved my pieces on their board.”

  “What happened?” asked Saturday and September together.

  “No one will tell us!” September went on alone, her fear outboxed by her curiosity. “The Fairies seem to think it is a secret, or else they do not know.”

  The Yeti shrugged at the mounds of rubbish around them. “They are not gone,” he said again. “You are surrounded by Fairies. Pressed in on all sides and crushed by them. You have held them in your arms, I have no doubt, and carried them on your back. You have thought them precious, sought them, found them, lost them.” Ciderskin pulled from the depths of his impossibly thick fur the long blue length of the Sapphire Stethoscope. He put the knobs in his ears and the cup against the red blister. “I suppose you’ve noticed the Moon has no Queen, nor any K
ing, nor a Marquess nor a Prime Minister nor even so much as a hedgehog perched on a barstool with a paper hat. The Moon is anarchistic—she has her own mind and will not be told what to do by folk less long lived than she, which is no one. Some say the Moon hated the Fairies as much as anyone. That she did not take kindly to being ridden about by a bunch of overgrown dragonflies fueled by the elixir of thinking you’re in charge. I’ll tell you for nothing, that’s the worst sort of drunk you can get. When people tell it now, they say that the Moon wanted to shake off the gadflies on her haunches and so she whipped up a Thaumaturge. Just pushed her up out of the ground, made of the Moon’s own pearl and the cold breath of that eternal month ticking by inside the lunar depths. It’s true that she took after the Moon: long silver hair and stars dancing on her black skin. Her eyes were panther’s eyes, they whisper even though they never met her. In their slitted pupils, if you looked closely, you could see the soft boom of magic detonating within. She called herself the Pearl, no different than the stuff of the Moon. I suppose she had a school of magic, but who could guess what it was? Everyone tried to claim her later—Dry Magic, Severe Magic, No Magic, even the Quiet Physickists. But she, like the Moon, had no kind of heart for rules. The Fairies welcomed her and squabbled over whether the Seelie or the Unseelie ought to get to drive her mad by dancing or turn her head into a cockatiel’s. And all the while my poor hand had time draped over it like a cat’s cradle. When the Pearl first appeared she was young, but the Fairies kept her dancing and squawking in their parlors until she was a woman grown, who’d spent more of her days as a toy than a girl. And finally, the booming magic the Pearl kept tied down in her burst out. In the midst of Patience, she smiled. That was all. She stood next to my severed hand and leant into it like it was a throne made just for her. And she smiled. The Pearl went dark, like a lamp going out. All to silky black. Stars blazed briefly in her skin, like wishes falling. The Pearl smiled and the Fairies disappeared.”