“I’m alone again,” she whispered. “Just me and the sea and not much of anything else. Oh, how I wish my friends were here! I am coming, I promise, it’s only that I must eat something and drink fresh water, or I shall not make it round the horn of Fairyland at all.”
“N’ whol al,” said a quiet voice. September started and looked round.
A lady stood uncertainly by, looking as if she might run at any moment—if indeed she could run, for the lady was truly only half a lady. She was cleanly cut in half lengthwise, having only one eye, one ear, half a mouth, half a nose. It did not seem to trouble her any. Her clothes had been made to fit her shape, lavender silk trousers with only one leg, a pale blue doublet—or singlet—with only one padded sleeve. Half a head of hair tumbled down her side, colored like night.
“What?” said September. The one-legged woman flushed and hopped backward a little, ducking her half face into a high yellow collar.
“Oh, I don’t mean to be rude—I didn’t understand you, is all!”
“Ot ly one,” tried the lady again, and then leapt away on her one leg, bounding up the beach and over a tangled heath that led into the center of the island. She hopped gracefully, as if it were the most natural way of moving invented. Little black flowers wavered in her wake.
Now, September knew she ought to stay straight on course and never turn aside until she reached the Lonely Gaol. But one cannot simply say mysterious things and then run off! That’s practically begging to be followed. September’s feet were already scrambling up through the heath before her mind could worry about her little ship or what terrible clock might be ticking toward a miserable prison at the bottom of the world. She was off and running, calling after the half-lady, so thirsty she thought her throat might catch on fire. We must simply count ourselves lucky that she remembered her wrench and did not leave it to be carried off by some enterprising turtle.
The island was not great or broad, and September might well have caught the lady, but that both of them ran right into the center of a village before a victor could be declared in their race. September understood immediately that the strange creature was home—all the houses were cut neatly in half. Arranged in a gentle half circle, each sweet, small green-grass house had half windows and half doors and half roofs of coral tile, each and everything precisely and deliberately built for half a soul. Half a great edifice stood at one end of the long village green, with half pillars and half stairs all of silver. The lady ran full tilt toward a young man, tall and half formed just as she was. His trousers, too, were silk and purple, his collar yellow and high. The two joined—smack!—at the seam, and she turned to face September. A glowing line ran down their bodies where the join had been made.
“Not wholly alone,” said the creature, in a voice neither male nor female. “That’s what I said. You are not wholly alone.”
“Oh!” said September simply, and sat down on the smooth green. Now that she had run all that way, she was quite beside herself with tiredness and strangeness. If only she could get a drink of water! She would not mind half a glass.…
“When I am myself, I cannot speak as you would understand me. I can only say half my words. I need my twin to speak to outsiders—not that you are an outsider!”
“I rather think I am!”
“All things being equal,” the half-lady continued in her same soft voice, “outsiders are to keep to the outside. But we can see you are one of us.”
“One of … who?”
“The Nasnas. The half-a-whole, whom the gods saw fit to bisect. I am Nor. My brother is Neither.” The two of them bowed in perfect unison, the glowing line between them intact.
“My name is September, but I’m not a … a Nasnas.”
“And yet you’ve been cut in half.”
“But I haven’t!” September clutched at her chest to be sure.
“You have no shadow,” said Neither/Nor, wandering away up toward the great silver half-palace. “Half of you is gone,” she called over her shoulder.
September scrambled after her.
“It’s no bother to me not to have a shadow,” she panted, trying to keep up with the hopping Neither/Nor as she bounded over a tangled heath. “But it must be terribly difficult to live without a left part!”
“All Nasnas are twins. I have a left part. It is only that he is not attached to me. Much as your shadow is not attached to you, but off and having its own adventures, singing its own shadow songs, eating feasts of shade and gloam. It’s still your shadow, even if you are not bound to it. And, perhaps, it is a bother to it, to be separated from you. One must always be considerate of one’s other half.”
Nor shuddered, and the glowing seam between her and her brother went dim. She leapt away from him and caught the hand of a passing girl, spinning her like a dance partner. The two leapt up and joined as Nor and her brother had done. “Not!” the new creature cried to itself. “It’s been too long!” A new Nor turned toward September, almost a normal woman, but for the seam in her face. Her voice was different, too, higher, more musical.
“Of course, one may have a number of other halves,” Nor said with a grin. “We have always felt sorry for those who are forced to be only one person, forever and ever until they die. My brother and I are Neither/Nor, my sister and I are Not/Nor, and on and on the combinations go, sharing dreams and labor and life. We are halves, but we make an infinite whole.”
“I’m … not like that,” whispered September. She could not say why they frightened her, but the Nasnas lady and her many siblings made her feel more unsure and unsettled than even Death had. “Why are you like that?”
“Why do you have two legs? Why is your hair brown?”
September remembered Charlie Crunchcrab, the ferryman. “Evolution, I guess.”
“Well, we guess, too.”
“But don’t you have stories? About yourself. About why the world is the way it is.”
“You mean folklore?”
September shrugged uncertainly.
Not/Nor scratched her chin. “I think we had a folklore once. I seem to remember. We locked it up in a vault to keep it safe. Or a library. Terribly similar. But bandits, you know. Bandits, bandits, always about! Wearing masks and carrying sacks. I’m afraid there was a break-in. They left a few crumbs—bandits are slovenly. I think I recall something about ‘Cosmic Scissors,’ and ‘Entropy,’ and ‘Where Love Comes From.’ But no one remembers more, and the police don’t visit the hinterlands much.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“And I for yours! I was born half, but to lose yourself in the prime of life! What a trauma!”
“Honestly, I hadn’t really thought about it much. It hurt while the Glashtyn cut it away, but I’m not sick or anything.”
“What do you suppose your shadow is doing without you? She might be ill with pining!”
September thought back to her shadow’s vicious smile, dancing on the shoulders of the horse-headed Glashtyn. “I don’t think so,” she said and, for the first time, felt it had been a bit shabby of her to have cast off her shadow so quickly and not to have written to it or asked after it at all.
“I have to go to work now, little girl. Not’s shift is already done, and I’m keeping her from roast fish and nap.”
“What sort of shift do you have?” said September curiously. “And mightn’t there be some water there?” She knew about shifts, of course, because her mother had them. Shifts were the suns and moons of her old world, dividing everything into times when her mother was there and when she was not.
“I work at the shoe factory, girl! We all do; it’s what we do. Why, before the Marquess came, we just lay about on beaches and ate mangoes and drank coconut milk and knew nothing about industry whatever! How gladsome we are, now that she has shown us our laziness! Now we know the satisfaction of a full day’s labor, of punchcards and taxable income.”
September bit her lip. She wondered if the Marquess had happened by around the time their fo
lklore had been stolen. “I like mangoes,” she said glumly.
“We make the changelings’ shoes,” continued Not/Nor, striding toward the silver half-palace that September now understood was a factory.
“That’s all? No shoes for anyone else?”
“Well, there are rather a lot of changelings. Bandits, again. Always about. Besides, it’s quite hard, to make the sorts of shoes changelings wear.”
September waited. She long ago learned that if she waited and blinked and behaved like a pupil, eventually someone would lecture her on something.
“It’s why we’re best suited, you know. Being this far southerly. It’s all magnetized, see. If we didn’t make the shoes, why, changelings would just float away back to their own world, and where would that leave all the honest folk who stole them fair and square?”
“I haven’t floated away.”
“You’re not a changeling! There’s no poppet or goblin in your bed, taking your place at supper. There’s more than one way between your world and ours. There’s the changeling road, and there’s Ravishing, and there’s those that Stumble through a gap in the hedgerows or a mushroom ring or a tornado or a wardrobe full of winter coats. It’s all dangerous, but changelings are terrible hard to keep track of. Someone’s always trying to capture them back or pull them off their horses during dress parade. The shoes, though, the shoes keep them here. Otherwise they’d just … fwoop! Like balloons. I make right-foot shoes. With iron in the soles. Iron won’t go through, see. Fairyland’s allergic. So am I, of course, but I take my pills like the Marquess taught us.”
“What about the Ravished? How do they get home?” September realized that she was considering how to get home for the first time.
Not/Nor grinned. She had sharp, wolfish teeth. “Can’t say, can I? Or won’t say, won’t I? But it’s better to Stumble, really, if you’ve a heart set on home.”
At the factory door, Not/Nor gathered up a great deal of leather into the crook of her arm. She pointed with her eyebrows at a communal well just outside the gate. September fell upon a copper ladle and drank deep. As she slurped, the Nasnas scratched her chin again. “I might could make you a pair that works the other way,” she said finally. “Reverse engineering, and all? A pair that would take you home.”
“Really? You could do that?”
“Shoes are funny beasts. You think they’re just clothes, but really, they’re alive. They want things. Fancy ones with gems want to go to balls, big boots want to go to work, slippers want to dance. Or sleep. Shoes make the path you’re on. Change your shoes, change the path.” Not/Nor looked meaningfully at the Marquess’s dandied black shoes. September wished she’d gone barefoot. “Changeling shoes want to stay here. I wager I can make a pair who want to go to the place you come from. Bit of old mud on the heel, bit of devil’s salt in the buckle, bit of growing up hammered in. You’ll wake up, as if it were a dream. It will have been a dream. No worries, no faults, no blame. Off to school with you and your peanut-butter sandwich, too!”
September squeezed back tears. She suddenly missed her mother, and she’d lost her shadow and her hair, and salt creaked in her elbows, and she was so awfully tired, and really, she hadn’t counted on adventures being so exhausting. She was hungry, still, and she missed her Wyverary so! And how could she know how much farther there was to go? September still did not think herself terribly brave, and she trembled when she thought of the thirst of the sea and the possibility—even probability—of sharks and other terrible things. When the stars were out and the night warm and Mr. Map’s brandy had been hot in her belly, it had been all right, even wonderful. But now her knees hurt—and her fingers—and she was lonely. September shivered in her wet, salt-crusted dress. And she hated her cursed shoes, hated them wholly and utterly.
“I can’t,” she squeaked finally. “I can’t. My friends are not dreams. They need me.” And she remembered the awful dream and little Saturday chained up again on the floor of that dark cell. “Who else will come for them if I don’t?”
“What a dear heart you have, girl,” said Not/Nor. “Of course, that’s how she’ll catch you, in the end.”
“How did you—”
“I know shoes, little one. And I know those shoes.” The Nasnas shrugged helplessly. “I can’t be late to work, you know. Other beasts in the world have troubles.”
Nor slid her fingers into the glowing seam between her and Not, and the two popped apart. Not bowed to her sister and bounded away. Nor punched her card in the machine near the silver door of the factory.
September let the half-lady go. She walked back over the heath where the little black flowers waved. Down at the beach, she wriggled out of her dress again and strung up her sail. She pushed off with her wrench into the current and watched the island dwindle.
“I’m not one of them,” she said to herself. “No matter what they say. I don’t work at some awful old factory, and my shadow isn’t half myself.”
But she thought of Ell and Saturday, lost at the bottom of the world, bound up in the dark. And some part of her hurt, a part which had been joined to them as if along a glowing seam.
CHAPTER XVI
UNTIL WE STOP
In Which September Feeds Herself by Gruesome Means
“I shall catch a fish, just see how I do!” cried September to no one but the moon. The moon, for his part, smiled behind one white hand and tried to look very serious.
But September had been thinking about the problem of a hook, and when she had her lock of hair tied up to the wrench again, she suddenly seized the hilt of the wrench and brought it banging down on the curlicued head of one of the silver sceptres. The wrench, eager for something to do, quite crushed the wand’s head, and bits of metal flew over the deck of the raft. September picked out a likely shard and knotted it into her long, braided strands of hair.
“Now for bait,” she said, “which I’ve none of at all.”
September suddenly cursed herself for not having thought to save a few berries from the beach.
“No points for ought to have,” she sighed.
September pushed the makeshift hook into the pad of her thumb until she could not help but yelp in pain. Blood welled up, and she rubbed the hook in it, all over, until it shone red. Her eyes watered, but she did not cry. The sound of her stomach was louder than the pain of her thumb. Slowly, she sunk the bloody hook into the water, and waited.
Fishing, as many of you know, is a very tedious activity. Fish are stubborn and do not like to be killed and eaten. One has to stay very still, so still one almost falls asleep, and even then no fish might come. Even the moon busied himself elsewhere, watching a pine forest full of martens and Harpies chase each other round in circles. The stars moved overhead, racing on their long silver track, and still, September sat, her line in the water, patient as death.
Finally, the line went taut and tugged beneath the mild waves. September leapt up. “What have I caught?” she cried with excitement. “What will it be? Why, this is like Christmas, when you’ve no idea what might be in the packages!”
September hauled hard on the wrench and fell backward as her prize flew up onto the deck. It was pink, the very color of a pink crayon, and its eyes bulged huge and emerald. It gaped pitifully, suddenly forced to contend with air instead of water. September felt sorry for it, all in a rush.
“I know you don’t want to be eaten,” she said wretchedly. “And I don’t want to eat you! But it’s been two days now, and I must have something!”
The fish gaped.
“If only you were a magic fish, you could grant a wish, and I could have more of the lovely spriggans’ feast—or Ell’s radishes.”
The fish sucked at the air but found no sea to breathe there.
“I am so sorry,” she whispered finally. “I don’t want to chew up another creature just to keep on for another day! You’re alive. But I’m alive, too! Alive doesn’t much care about anything but staying that way. Just like you meant to eat my blood,
and that’s why you were caught. I suppose I ought to stop talking. I don’t think you are a magic fish.”
September did not know anything about killing fish, really. Her mother and grandfather usually did that part. But she could think logically enough. She brought the hilt of the wrench down hard on the pink fish’s head. She shut her eyes at the last moment, though, and missed. Twice more and she had it, though she quite wished she hadn’t. However, September knew that was not the worst part. You couldn’t just bite into a fish. The guts had to come out. Wincing, not wanting to watch what her hands were doing, September took up the hook and brought it down on the fish’s soft pink belly. The skin was tougher than she thought, and she had to saw at it. Her hands got quite soaked in blood, which looked black in the moonlight. Finally, she got the belly open and reached inside, where it was warm and slimy, and she was crying by then, big, hot tears rolling down her face and into the ruined fish. With one pull, she hauled the fish’s organ parts out and threw them overboard, sobbing on her knees over her supper.
You mustn’t think poorly of her for crying. Up until that moment, fish had mainly come into her life filleted, cooked, and salted with lemon juice on top. It is a hard thing to be starving and alone with no one to show you how to do it right. She got such sprays of blood on her face and on her knees.
September had no way to cook it. The sodden smoking jacket wanted to make fire for her, but that was beyond its power. The moon wished her a hearth but had to content himself with watching the young girl, kneeling on her raft as the sea rushed by around her and she pulled raw fish from the bone in strips. September ate slowly, deliberately. Some instinct told her that she had to have the blood, too, for at sea water is so scarce. It took her until morning to eat the fish. She wept all the while, a terrible circuit, all the water she drank from the fish pouring out again.