The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In a Ship of Her Own Making (2 page)

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In Which September Passes Between Worlds, Asks Four Questions and Receives Twelve Answers, and Is Inspected by a Customs Officer.

By the time a lady reaches the grand, golden evening of her life, she has accumulated a great number of things. You know this--when you visited your grandmother on the lake that summer you were surprised how many portraits of people you didn’t recognize hung on the walls, how many porcelain ducks and copper pans and books and collectible spoons and old mirrors and scrap wood and half-finished knitting and board games and fireplace pokers she had stuffed away in the corners of her house. You couldn’t think what use a person would have for all that junk, why they would keep it around for all this time, slowly fading in the sun and all turning the same shade of parchmenty-brown. You thought your grandmother was a bit crazy, to have such a collection of glass owls and china sugarbowls.

That is what the space between Fairyland and our world looks like. It is grandmother’s big, dark closet, her shed out back, her basement, cluttered with the stuff and nonsense of millenia. The world didn’t really know where else to put it, you see. The earth is frugal, she doesn’t toss out perfectly good bronze helmets or spinning wheels or water clocks. She might need them one day. As for all the portraiture, when you’ve lived as long as she has, you’ll need help remembering your grandchildren, too.

September marveled at the heaps of oddities in the closet between worlds. The ceiling was very low, with roots coming through, and everything had a genteel fade to it, the old lace and code-breaking machines, the anchors and heavy picture frames, the dinosaur bones and orreries. As the Leopard proceeded through the dimly-lit passage, September looked into the painted eyes of pharaohs and blind poets, chemists and serene philosophers. September could tell they were philosophers because they had on drapey clothes, like curtains. But most of the portraits were just people, wearing whatever they had liked to wear when they were living, raking hay or writing diaries or baking bread.

“Sir Wind,” September said, when she had recovered herself and her eyes had adjust to the darkness, “I want to ask you a question, and I want you to answer me seriously and not call me any pretty names or tease me.”

“Of course, my…September. And you can call me Green. I feel we’re becoming very well acquainted.”

“Why did you take me out of Omaha? Do you take very many girls? Are they all from Nebraska? Why are you being so nice to me?”

September could not be sure, but she thought the Leopard of Little Breezes laughed. It might have been a snort.

“That’s rather more than one question. Therefore I think it’s only fair I give you rather more than one set of answers.” He cleared his throat dramatically. “One: Omaha is no place for anybody. Two: No, my schedule keeps me quite busy enough. Three: See above. Four: So that you will like me, and not be afraid.”

Up ahead, there was a line of folk in long, colorful coats, moving slowly, checking watches, smoothing hair under hats. The Leopard slowed.

“I said no teasing,” said September.

“One: I was lonely. Two: I have been known to spirit a child or two away, I shan’t lie. It is the nature of winds to Snatch and Grasp at things, and Blow Them Away. Three: Nebraska does not grow many of the kinds of girls who ought to go to Fairyland. Four: If I were not nice, and did not know the way to Fairyland, and did not have a rather spectacular cat, you would not smile at me or say amusing things. You would tell me politely that you like teacups and small dogs and to please be on my way.”

They came up short and took their place in line. Everyone towered above September--the line might have been long or short, she could not tell. September leapt off of the Leopard and onto the dry, compact dirt of the closet between worlds. The Green Wind hopped lightly down beside her.

“You said I was ill-tempered! Was that really why?”

“One: There is a department in Fairyland entirely devoted to spiriting off young boys and girls (mostly orphans, but we are have become liberal in this late age) so that we may have a ready supply of a certain kind of story to tell when winter comes and there is nothing to do but drink fennel-beer and peer at the hearth. Two: See Above. Three: dry, brown places are prime real estate for children who want to escape them. It’s much harder to find wastrels in New York to fly about on a Leopard. After all, they have the Metropolitan Museum to occupy them. Four: I am not being very nice at all. See how I lie to you and make you do things my way? That is so you will be ready to live in Fairyland, where this sort of thing is considered the height of manners.”

September curled her fists. She tried very hard not to cry.

“Green! Stop it! I just want to know--”

“One! Because you were born in--”

“If I was special,” finished September, halfway between a whisper and a squeak. “In stories, when someone appears in a poof of green clouds and asks a girl to go away on an adventure, it’s because she’s special, because she’s smart and strong, and can solve riddles and fight with swords and give really good speeches, and…I don’t know that I’m any of those things. I don’t even know that I’m as ill-tempered as all that. I’m not
dull
or anything, I know about geography and chess and I can fix the boiler when my mother has to work, but what I mean to say is: maybe you meant to go to another girl’s house and let her ride on the Leopard. Maybe you didn’t mean me at all, because I’m not like storybook girls, I’m short and my father ran away with the army and I wouldn’t even be able to keep a dog from eating a bird.”

The Leopard turned her prodigious, spotted head and looked at September with large, solemn, yellow eyes.

“We came for you,” she growled. “Just you.”

The big cat licked the child’s cheek roughly. September smiled, just a little. She sniffed and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of the green jacket.

“NEXT!” boomed a deep, severe voice which echoed all over the closet. It was so strong that they were blown back into the folk who had silently joined the line behind them. The party in front of them, all pink eyeshadow and spangled, spiky hair, exploded past a tall podium in a flutter of papers and luggage.

At the top of the podium loomed an enormous gargoyle, its face a mass of bronze and black rock, waggling stone eyebrows and stern metal jaw. Its lolling eyes burned red flame. Its heavy arms clicked and whirred, greasy pistons pumping. The creature’s chest was plated in gnarled, knuckled silver, half-open along a thick seam, showing a thudding, white-violet heart within.

“PAPERS!” The gargoyle thundered. Portraits rattled along the earthen walls. Its breath was smoky and hot, and in its mechanical jaw, a steel tongue rattled. September shrank against the Leopard, the force of the gargoyle’s breath pushing at her face.

“BETSY BASILSTALK YOU COME OUT OF THERE THIS SECOND!” The Green Wind hollered back, though not quite so loud, having no leather-bellow lungs to help him along.

The creature paused. “NO,” it bellowed.

“You’re not impressing anyone, you know,” sighed the Green Wind.

“SHE’S IMPRESSED. LOOK, SHE’S ALL SHAKING AND THINGS.”

“Betsy, I will thrash you a good one, and you know I can. Don’t forget who whipped the Lord of Leafglen and rode him about like a dog. I am not a tourist, Betsy. I will not be treated like one.”

“No, you’re not a tourist,” growled a thick, phelgmy, but much quieter voice. The gargoyle’s eye-flames snuffed out and its great shoulders sagged. A little woman hopped up onto the podium, no bigger than September, and perhaps a bit smaller. Her muscled chest was shaped like a bear’s, her legs thick and knobbly, her short hair sludged up and spiked along her scalp, sticking up in knifepoints. She chewed on a hand-rolled cigarette; the smoke smelled sweet, like vanilla and rum and maple syrup and other things not terribly good for you. “You’re not a tourist,” she repeated in a grumbly, gravelly voice, “you’re
Greenlist
, and that means No Good Scoundrel, and that means No Entry Allowed, Orders of the Marquess.”

“I filed my immigration request with the stamps of the Four Clandestines, weeks and weeks ago. I even have a letter of reference from the Seelie Parliament. Well, the clerk. But it’s on official letterhead and everything and I think we all know that stationary makes a
statement
.”

Betsy quirked her hairy eyebrow at him and hopped back into the gargoyle-puppet, quick as a blink. It roared to life, all fiery eyes and clanking arms.

“GO AWAY. OR SEE WHO GETS THRASHED.”

“Green,” whispered September, “is she…a gnome?”

“Too right I am,” grumbled Betsy, squeezing out of the puppet again. It slumped in her absence. “And very perceptive of you, that is. What gave it away?”

September’s heart still hammered all over the place from the yelling of the gargoyle. She held her trembling hand a little above her head.

“Pointy,” she squeaked, and cleared her throat. “Gnomes have…pointy hats? I thought…pointy hair is as good as a hat, maybe?”

“She’s a regular logician, Greeny. My
grandmother
wears a pointy hat, girl. My
great-grandmother
. I wouldn’t be caught dead in one any more than you’d like to wear a frilly bonnet. Gnomes are
modern
now. We’re better than modern, even. Just look, you,” and Betsy flexed an extremely respectable bicep, the size of an oil can. “None of this flitting about in gardens and blessing thresh-holds for me. I went to trade school, I did. Now I’m a customs agent with my own great hulking hunk of heave here. What have you got?”

“A Leopard,” answered September quickly.

“True,” considered Betsy. “But you have haven’t got papers or both shoes, and that’s a trouble.”

“Why do you need that thing?” September asked. “None of the airports back home have them.”

“They do, you just can’t see them right,” grinned Betsy Basilstalk. “All customs agents have them, otherwise, why would people agree to stand in line and be peered at and inspected? We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say:
lines on maps are silly
. Where you live, the awful machinery is smaller, harder to see. Less honest, that’s all. Whereas Rupert here? He’s as honest as they come. Does what it says on the box.”

She scratched the hulking shell behind what might have been an ear. It remained still and dark.

“Then why tell me it’s all puppets and engines? Don’t you want me to let you peer at me?” asked September.

Betsy beckoned her closer, until they stood nose to nose and all September could smell was the vanilla and rum and maple syrup of her cigarette, which was all through her skin, too.

“Because when humans come to Fairyland, we’re supposed to trick them and steal from them and whap them about the ears--but we’re also supposed hex them up so that they can see proper-like. Not everything, just enough so as to be dazzled by mushroom-glamours, not so much that we can't fool you twice with Fairy gold. It's a real science. Used to be done with ointment. It’s in the rulebook.”

“Are you going to put something very foul in my eyes, then?”

“I told you, kid. Gnomes are modern now. I have personally picketed the Hallowmash Pharmacy. There’s other ways of opening your thick head. Like Rupert. He’s great with thick heads. Most people, I show them Rupert, they see anything I tell them to. Now,
papers
, please.”

The Green Wind looked sidelong at September and then at his feet. September could swear he was blushing, blushing green through his beard. “You know very well, Betsy,” he whispered, “that the Ravished need no papers. It’s in the manual, page 764, paragraph 6.” The Green Wind coughed politely. “The Persephone clause.”

Betsy gave him a long look that plainly said:
so that’s what’s afoot, you old bag of air?
She blew her sweet, thick smoke up into his face and grunted.

September knew she could not have been the only one.

“Don’t answer for you, though, tall thing. All right, she can go, but you stay.” Betsy chewed her cigarette. “And the cat, too. I’m not violating the Greenlist for the likes of you.”

The Green Wind stroked September’s hair with his long fingers.

“Time for us to part, my acorn-love. I’m sure my visa will come through soon…maybe if you put in a good word for me with the embassy. In the meantime, remember the rules, don’t go swimming for an hour after eating, and never tell anyone your true name.”

“My true name?”

“I came for you, September. Just you. I wish you the best that can be hoped for, and no worse than can be expected.”

He leaned in close and kissed her cheek, courtly, gentle, dry as desert wind. The Leopard licked her hand passionately.

“Close your eyes,” he whispered.

September did, and felt a warm, sunny wind on her face, full of the smells of green things: mint and grass and rosemary and fresh water, frogs and leaves and hay. It blew her dark hair back, and when she opened her eyes, the Green Wind and the Leopard of Little Breezes had gone. In her ear floated his last airy sigh:
check your pockets, my chimney-child
.

Betsy waved her hands in the air as if to disperse an unpleasant perfume. “He’s such a lot of bother. You’re better off--theatrical folk are nothing but a bundle of monologues and anxiety headaches.”