The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In a Ship of Her Own Making (14 page)

Ell trodded up to the table, happy as anything. “I don’t suppose you’ve any radishes, hm?” he asked--and no sooner than he had, a little spriggan-lad held up a plate of shining red radishes, so bright they must have been polished. Saturday inched toward the table, looking apologetically back at September.

“Well,” she said, “if the damage is already done…it certainly
does
look delicious. And I have a weakness for pumpkin.” Her mother often liked to say she had a weakness for things: for hot cocoa, for exciting novels, for mechanics’ magazines, for her father. September felt it quite a grown-up thing to say.

Let it be said that no other child has ever eaten as September did that night. She tasted some of everything--some more than others, for Fairy food is a most adventurous cuisine, complex and daring. She even sipped the hazelnut-beer and slurped at the cauliflower ice cream. Together, she and Saturday took on the challenge of a Gagana’s Egg, which was not really an egg at all, he explained, but a sugar-glazed shell of many colors containing a whole meal. Saturday deftly placed eight bone cups around a massive copper-rose globe. Saturday pierced the egg with an icepick (thoughtfully provided) in eight places, and let steaming liquid spill into the little cups in eight different colors. September delighted in each one, the violet brew that tasted of roasted chestnuts and honey, the bloody red one that tasted like fig pastry, the creamy pink one a kind of limey rosewater treacle. Saturday drank, too, always after her. His stomach was still weary from starving, and would have preferred a nice saltlick and a lump of schist, but for her he would eat any sugar, drink any red draught. When September finished the cups, Saturday showed her how to pierce the top hemisphere of the egg four more times so that the top of the shell could be lifted away whole and filled with water to steep into a sort of gooseberry-tasting tea. Inside the egg, a golden broiled bird nestled next to oil-soaked bread, brandied clams, and several fiery, spicy fruits September could not name, but which quite took her breath away.

Indeed, by the end of the feast she was only sorry to have waited so long to gorge herself on Fairy food.

Doctor Fallow belched loudly.

“Have you strength in you still to see my offices? I think you’d find them most interesting.” The spriggan’s eyes flashed like a wolf’s in the candlelight, for it was now quite dark. The stars of autumn wheeled overhead, hard and bright and cold. A lonely wind began to pick up outside the warm, ruddy village. “Rubedo and Citrinitas must come along, too, of course.”

“But it’s their wedding night!” protested September. “Surely they would like to retire with milk and a nice book!”

Ell snorted. Bits of radish remained in his whiskers. In the firelight his eyes seemed crinkly and soft. September remembered what he said, that they belonged to each other. She rather liked to think that. She felt it was a thing she might take out and look at when all was dark and cold, and it might warm her.

Doctor Fallow waved his hand. “Rubbish. Every night is their wedding. Every night is their feast. Tomorrow, too, they will be married with just as much pomp and song, and we will eat just as well, and then go to my offices, for work must be done even on wedding nights. And then we will do it all over again. How wonderful is ritual, what a comfort, in dark times!”

September remembered what the Marquess said:
A place where it is always autumn, where there is always cider and pumpkin pie, where leaves are always orange and fresh-cut wood is always burning and it is always, just always Halloween.
So many of the spriggans wore masks, and danced wildly, and leaped out from the shadows to spook one another.

“You may as well come along, September. You were expected, and the expected ought to do what they’re told. It’s only manners.”

“But the casket in the wood…I don’t have much time…it took so long to get here!”

“All that tomorrow, my dear! You can’t worry on a full stomach!”

The whole colorful throng of them, Rubedo and Citrinitas arm in arm, A-Through-L prickly and guarded, Saturday walking silently just behind September, his eyes huge and wary, September herself, and Doctor Fallow leading the way, crossed the square to one of the largest buildings. Thready clouds hid its roof, up above the crowns of the trees. It seemed far too big for the little folk.

Doctor Fallow waggled his bushy eyebrows, winked twice, pinched his long nose, puffed out his cheeks and spun around on one foot. Rubedo and Citrinitas did the same--and all three of them sprouted up like nothing you’ve seen: swelled, grew, stretched, until they were taller than A-Through-L, and of a perfect size to enter the huge building.

“I…don’t think I’m of a girth to walk comfortably in there,” sighed Ell. “though I’m certainly of a height. I shall wait outside. If anything proves wonderful there, do yell out the window.” He settled down, heavy with radishes, to nap in the courtyard of Doctor Fallow’s office.

As they passed through doors and down hallways, the spriggans swelled up and shrunk down to fit each passage. September and Saturday sometimes had to crawl on their bellies, and sometimes could not even see the top of the doorframes above them, and had to scale the staircases like mountain climbers. The building could only be comfortable to a spriggan. Finally, the spriggans settled into something smaller than they had been when they entered, but taller than they had been at the feast, and opened the door to a great laboratory full of bubbling things.

“The heart of our university,” said Doctor Fallow expansively. “Only
broadly
speaking a university, of course.”

“We don’t have classes, really,” said Rubedo.

“Or exams,” said Citrinitas.

“And we’re the only students,” they said together.

“But no work is more important than ours.”

“You’re…alchemists, right?” said September shyly.
The practice of alchemy is forbidden to all except young ladies born on Tuesdays
--and spriggans, who were exempt from everything, if the Green Wind was to be believed.

“Exact as an
equation
!” crowed Doctor Fallow.

“Then I should tell you, I was born on a Tuesday.”

“How
marvelous
!” exclaimed Citrinitas. “I am so weary of running all the student committees myself.”

“And what use I could make of an assistant! The volume of papers is monstrous,” said Rubedo ruefully, glaring at his wife.

“Now, now, let’s not be hasty,” said Doctor Fallow, raising his hands for silence. “The young lady can have no more than the most rudimentary understanding of the Noble Science. Perhaps she would rather be a rutabaga farmer. I hear the market is very good this year.”

“It’s…turning lead to gold, right?” said September.

All three spriggans laughed uproariously. Saturday flinched--he did not like people laughing at September.

“Oh, we solved that
long
ago!” chuckled Rubedo. “I believe that was Greengallows, Henrik Greengallows? Is that right, my love? Ancient history has never been my subject. A famous case study even reported a method for turning straw into gold! The young lady who discovered it wrote a really rather thin paper--but she toured the lecture circuit for years! Her firstborn refined it, so that she could make
straw
from gold, and solve the terrible problem of housing for destitute brownies.”

“
Hedwig
Greengallows, my dear,” mused Citrinitas. “Henrik was just her mercurer. Men are so awfully fond of attributing women’s work to their brothers! But September, you have no idea how freed we all felt by Hedwig’s breakthrough. It is tedious to spend centuries on one problem. Now, we have several departments. Rubedo labors at the task of turning gold to bread, so that we may eat our abundance, while I am writing my dissertation on the Elixir Mortis--the Elixir of Death.”

“It seems to me,” said Saturday shyly, “that the country of Autumn is a strange place to conduct experiments. Nothing here changes, yet alchemy is the science of change.”

“What a well-spoken boy!” exclaimed Doctor Fallow. “But truly, the Autumn Provinces provide the most ideal situation for our program. Autumn is the very soul of metamorphosis, a time when the world is poised at the door of winter--which is the door of Death--but has not yet fallen. It is a world of contradictions: a time of harvest and plenty, but also of cold and hardship. Here we dwell in the midst of life, but we know most keenly that all things must pass away and shrivel. Autumn turns the world from one thing into another. The year is seasoned and wise, but not yet decrepit or senile. If you wrote a letter of requisition you could ask for no better place to practice alchemy.”

“What is the Elixir of Death?” asked September, running her fingers along several strange instruments: a scalpel with a bit of mercury clinging to it, scissors with a great mass of golden hair caught in the shears, a jar full of thick liquid that shifted back and forth from yellow to red.

Citrinitas brightened, if that was possible. She clutched her three-fingered hands to her breast. “Oh, nothing could be more fascinating! The Elixir of Life, as you will certainly know, is produced via the Chymical Wedding, a most secret process. The resulting stuff makes one immortal. The Elixir of Death, more rare by far, returns the dead to life. I expect you’ve heard the tale of the boy and the wolf? No? Well, it was terrible, the boy’s brothers betrayed him and cut him all up, but his friend the wolf got himself a vial of the water of Death and fixed him right up. It’s quite a famous story. Death herself produces the Elixir, when she is moved to weep--not a frequent occurrence, I assure you! I am trying to synthesize it from less…esoteric ingredients.”

“And the casket in the Worsted Wood? Where does that fit in to all these strange studies?” said September shrewdly.

“Well,” said Rubedo uncertainly. “The Worsted Wood lies at the heart of the Autumn country. None of us go in. The geese here, they migrate each evening, and one of them said a girl was on her way who would want to enter the wood, and we felt sorry for her.”

“You are certainly welcome to, though none of us can truly recommend it,” rushed Doctor Fallow. “We confess--we made the casket. One of my undergraduate projects, I’m afraid!
Quite
a long time ago. you’re the first to show any interest in it since, oh, since Queen Mallow claimed her sword here, I expect.”

September started. “It’s Queen Mallow’s sword?”

“No, no, I didn’t say that, did I, girl? I said she claimed it. You can’t claim something that’s already yours, if it’s yours it’s yours, eh? The casket is really quite clever. I received first marks for it. How shall I explain? It is both empty and full, until one opens it. For when a box is shut, you cannot tell what it might contain, so you might as well say it contains everything, because, really, it could contain anything, see? But when you open it, you affect what is inside. Observing something changes it, that’s a law, nothing to be done. Oh, you’ll see in the morning! How splendid you will find it!”

“But September,” said Citrinitas sadly, “these sorts of things, well…they’re always guarded, aren’t they? It might be best to enroll with us now and worry about the casket when you’ve progressed in your studies a bit.”

“I can’t! I haven’t time, I must open the casket tomorrow, or I shan’t have time to get back before the Marquess has my head!”

“September,” whispered Saturday.

“Perhaps you’d like to decide on your class schedule now, then? I have room in my morning Hermetics lecture, and I expect Citrinitas will be happy to get you up to speed in Elemental Affinities.”

“September!” Saturday said, more loudly, but the spriggans were exclaiming and pulling at her, and she could not hear him.

“We’ve even a free space on the squash team! How fortunate!” cried Rubedo, clapping his ruddy hands.

“
September
!” wailed Saturday, tugging at her sleeve. Finally, she turned to him, flustered by all the yelling.

“What?” she said, shaken.

“Your hair is turning red,” Saturday said softly, embarrassed to have all the attention suddenly on him.

September looked down at her long, dark hair. One curl had indeed turned blazing scarlet, terribly bright against the rest of her. She touched it, amazed, and as her fingers brushed the red lock, it broke off and drifted off on an unseen wind, for all the world like an autumn leaf wafting away.

#

In Which September Enters the Worsted Wood, Loses All Her Hair, Meets Her Death and Sings It to Sleep.

“It’s because I ate the food,” sniffed September miserably, hiding her face in the Wyverary’s chest. A-Through-L lay on the leafy ground like a Sphinx, nuzzling her hair with his nose. He stopped that right quick, though as more of it broke off and sailed away into the night.

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “We ate it too!”

“What’s happening to me?” September wept.

Her hair shone, bright red, curling up at the edges in pretty shapes. She had already lost much of it. The spriggans looked discomfited, but tried to be cheery.

“I think it’s rather nice!” chirped Doctor Fallow. “An improvement, I declare!”

“You do match me, now,” said Ell, trying to be helpful and optimistic.

September rolled back the sleeve of the green smoking jacket, which was terribly chagrined and tried to keep covering her, to protect her, but in the end, she wrestled the sleeve up to her elbow and waved her hand for the Doctor to see. The skin, once the same warm brown as her father’s, had gone hoary and rough, tinged with grey and green, like bark.

“Is this an improvement?” she cried.

“Well, this sort of thing happens. We must be adaptable. Autumn is the kingdom where everything changes. When you leave, it’ll be alright, probably. If you haven’t put down roots yet.”

“Still, about my syllabus…” insisted Rubedo. Citrinitas elbowed him roughly.

September rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands--which had begun to grow a healthy bit of silver moss. “Fine,” she said shortly. “Fine. I shall go now, then, to the wood, and get this awful business over with before I turn into an elm.”

“I think you’re a bit more birch-y,” said Doctor Fallow contemplatively.

“Not helping!” snapped Ell. “You could help, if you had some medicine for her in all your weird, ugly tower.”

“Medicine’s not our business,” said Citrinitas helplessly. “And besides…change is the blessing of Autumn. She should feel lucky.”

Ell, as September had never seen him do before, spat a lick of fire at her. Not enough to scorch, but enough to singe her hair. Citrinitas yelped and leapt back, batting at her curls. The Wyverary curled closer around September.

“Well, you can’t go with her, so you might as well stop smothering,” huffed Doctor Fallow. “This is strictly a lone-knight situation.”

“Then she isn’t going! I shan’t let her go anywhere without something large and fire-breathing and double-smart behind her! Since I don’t see a flaming burp between the three of you, I suggest you leave us alone!”

“Ell, if that’s how it’s done, you can’t bellow it into doing it differently,” sighed September. She stood up and disentangled herself from her friend. Blazing curls of her hair fluttered to the ground.

“I can try!” Ell insisted.

“No, I shall go alone. I always thought I would be going alone. I shall be back presently, I promise. Say you’ll wait for me, you and Saturday, that you won’t go anywhere without me, that when I come out of that wood I shall see a red face and a blue one smiling!”

Ell’s eyes filled with panicked turquoise tears. He promised, his wings jangling his chains fretfully.

Saturday did not say anything. He bent and tore the cuff from one leg of his trousers. The cuff was blue and ragged and not a bit muddy with velocipede-grease. The Marid tied it around September’s arm. His fingers trembled a bit. The green jacket introduced itself politely, but coolly, to the cuff. Just so long as the cuff knew who came first.

“What is this?” said September, confused.

“It’s…a favor,” answered Saturday. “My favor. In battle…knights oughtn’t be without one.”

September reached up to touch his face, gently, to thank him. Her fingers grazed his cheek. They had shriveled into thin, bare, dry branches, bundled together at the wrist.

As September walked through the starry, misty night, trying not to look at her ruined hand, she realized that she had not traveled alone in days. She missed Ell immediately, who would tell her all sorts of things to keep her from being afraid, and Saturday, who would be quiet and steadfast and dear at her side.

She shivered, and whispered to herself to keep from shivering: “Bathtub, Bathysphere, Barometer, Bear, Bliss, Bandit…”

Gradually, the trees turned from wood and leaf to something altogether stranger: tall black distaffs wound around with fuzzy silk and wool and fleeces September could not name. They were all colored as autumn woods are colored, red and gold and brown and pale white. They crowded close together, fat and full, shaped more or less like pine trees. She could just see the sharp distaff jutting out of the wispy top of one great red beast of a tree.
This must be where they get the stuff to build Pandemonium!
September thought suddenly.
Instead of cutting down a forest, they weave it!

The moon peeked out of the clouds, too shy to show herself fully. September came, by and by, to a little clearing where several parchment-colored distaffs had left their fibers all over the forest floor like pine needles. In the corner of the clearing sat a lady. September brought her hand to her mouth, so surprised and shaken was she, forgetting that her fingers were only branches now.

The lady sat on a throne of mushrooms. Chanterelles and portobellos and oysters and wild crimson forest mushrooms piled up high around her, fanning out around her head--for the lady too was primarily made of mushrooms, lovely cream-yellow ones opening up like a dress-collar around her brown face, lacy bits of fungus trailing from her every finger and toe. She looked off into the distance, her pale eyes a pair of tiny button mushrooms.

“Good evening, my lady,” said September, curtseying as best she knew how.

The mushroom queen said nothing. Her expression did not change.

“I have come for the casket in the wood.”

A little wind picked up, ruffling the shitakes at the lady’s feet.

“I do hope I’ve not offended, it’s only that I haven’t much time and I seem to be coming all over tree.”

The lady’s jaw sagged open. Bits of dirt fell out.

“Don’t mind her,” came a tiny, breathy voice behind her. September whirled.

A tiny brown creature stood at her feet, barely a finger high. She was brown all over, the color of a nut-husk. Only her lips were red. Her hair was long, covering most of her body like bark. She seemed very young. She wore a smart acorn cap.

“She’s just for show,” breathed the wee thing.

“Who are you?”

“I am Death,” said the creature. “I thought that was obvious.”

“But you’re so small!”

“Only because you are small. You are young and far from your Death, September, so I seem as anything would seem if you saw it from a long way off--very small, very harmless. But I am always closer than I appear. As you grow I shall grow with you, until at the end, I shall loom huge and dark over your bed, and you will shut your eyes so as not to see me.”

“Then who is she?”

“She is…” Death turned her head, considering. “She is like a party dress I wear when I want to impress visiting dignitaries. Like your friend Betsy, I too am a Terrible Engine. I too have occasional need of awe. But between us, I think, there is no need of finery.”

“But if we are so far apart, why are you here?”

“Because Autumn is the beginning of my country. And because there is a small chance that you may die sooner than I anticipated, that I shall need to grow very fast very soon.”

Death looked meaningfully at September’s hand. Within the green jacket, her arm had now shrunk into one long, knobbed branch from shoulder to fingertip.

“Is that why the Worsted Wood is forbidden? Because Death lives here?”

“And also hamadryads. They are very boring to listen to.”

“Then the Marquess sent me here to die.”

“I do not make such judgments, child. I only take what is offered me, in the dark, in the forest.”

September crumpled to the ground. She stared at the winter branches of her hand. A great orange tuft of her hair flew off--she was nearly bald now, only a few wisps of curls clinging to her head. She sniffed and cried--or tried to cry, but her eyes were dry as old seeds, and she could not.

“Death, I don’t know what to do.”

Death climbed up into her lap, sitting primly on her knee, which had already begun to darken and wither.

“It’s very brave of you to admit that. Most knightly folk I happen by bluster and force me to play chess with them. I don’t even like chess! For strategy Wrackglummer and even Go are much superior. And it’s the wrong metaphor entirely. Death is not a checkmate…it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.”

“I've only ever played chess with my mother. I wouldn't feel right, playing with you.”

“I cheat, anyway. When their backs are turned, I move the pieces.”

Slowly, a hole opened up in September’s cheek, just a tiny one. She rubbed at it absently, and it widened. She felt it widening, stretching, and was so terribly afraid. She trembled, and her toes felt awfully cold in the mushroomy mud. Beneath her skin, twigs and leaves had begun to show. Death frowned.

“September, if you do not pay attention you will never get out of this wood! You are closer than you think, human girl. I guard the casket.” Death’s tiny eyes wrinkled kindly. “All caskets are within my power, of course they are.” September yawned. She didn’t mean to. She couldn’t help it. A twig in her cheek popped, turning to dust. “Are you sleepy? That’s to be expected. In Autumn, trees sleep like bears. The whole world pulls on its nightclothes and snuggles in to sleep through all of winter. Except for me. I never sleep.”

Death climbed up onto her knee, looking up at her with hard acorny eyes. September tried very hard to listen to her Death, instead of to the sound of her slowly opening cheek. “I have terrible nightmares, you know. Every night when I come home from a long day’s dying, I take off my skin and lay it nicely on my armoire. I take off my bones and hang them up on the hatstand. I set my scythe to washing on the old stove. I eat a nice supper of mouse-and-myrrh soup. Some nights I drink off a nice red wine. White does not agree with me. I lay myself down on a bed of lilies and still, I cannot sleep.”

September did not want to know. The moon moved silently overhead, making gape-faces at them.

“I cannot sleep because I have nightmares. I dream all the things the dead wish they had done differently. It is dreadful! Do all creatures dream so?”

“I don’t think so…I dream sometimes that my father has come home, or that I have done well on my math exams, or that my mother’s hair is all made of candy canes and we live on a river of cocoa on a marshmallow island. My mother sings me to sleep and only once in awhile do I dream of awful things.”

“Perhaps it is because I have no one to sing me to sleep. I am so tired. All the world earns its sleep but me.”

September felt sure that she was meant to do something. That, like Latitude and Longitude, the Worsted Wood was a kind of puzzle, and if she only knew how the pieces were shaped, she could manage the whole thing handily. Lost in thought and terror at her own nightmares, September’s Death curled, small and feral, on her knee, her cloak of barkish hair wrapping her like a blanket. With her good hand--a relative thing, really, since it was blackened and rough as a hawthorn branch already, and showing sap under the fingernails, September gathered up her Death and laid it in the crook of her arms. She did not quite know what to do. September had never had a brother or a sister to rock to sleep. She could only remember how her mother had sung to her. She felt as though she was in a dream. But she brushed Death’s hair gently from her face and sang from memory, softly, hoarsely, for her throat had gone rough and dry:

Go to sleep, little skylark,

Fly up to the moon

In a biplane of paper and ink

Your wings creak and croon,

borne aloft by balloons

And your engine is singing for you.

Go to sleep, little skylark, do.

Go to sleep, little skylark,

Fly up past the stars

In a biplane of sunshine and ice

Past comets and cars, past Neptune and Mars

Still your engine is singing for you.

Go to sleep, little skylark, do.

Go to sleep, little skylark

Drift down through the night

In your biplane of silver and sighs

Slip under the light,

come down from the heights

For your mother is singing for you.

Go to sleep, little skylark, do.

September reached the end of the song and began again, for Death’s eyes were sliding just the littlest bit closed. Her mother had sung that song, not since she was small, but since her father had left. When she sang it, she curled September in her arms just as September now curled Death, and sang it close to her ear so her long black hair fell over September’s brow, just as the remains of September’s hair now fell on Death’s brow. She remembered her mother’s smell, the comfort of it, even though she mainly smelled of diesel oil. She loved that smell. Had learned to love it, and settle into it like a blanket. When September got to the part about Neptune and Mars again, Death relaxed in her arms, her bark-brown hair falling delicately over September’s elbow. She kept singing, though it hurt her, her throat was so shriveled and sore. And as she sang, an extraordinary thing happened: