He said her name. He said it so gently it was as though he was holding it in his hand, trying not to crush it. Slowly, he reached out a hand and touched her hair. He smiled at her, a smile so full of knowing and warmth and merriness that what he said next hit September as though he had reached out and shoved her.
“You have to get out of my way,” he said. His voice boomed deep and hard. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, “but you’re in my way and you have to get out of it.”
September was frozen. She could not move. The awful bawl sounded again and a gust of wind blew as though someone had dashed by without stopping long enough to be seen.
The older Saturday had had enough. His arms shot out, and, knocking September aside, curled behind Aroostook’s seat. He snatched the ivory casket from the backseat without a word.
“Get in and sit down,” the taller Saturday said calmly. “Or this will hurt more.”
September did, numbly. She pulled her legs into the car just as that walloping fist came banging into the other side of Aroostook and they twisted out into the black again. September fell forward against the hard green sunflower and did not hear the other, older, colder, stranger Marid’s voice chasing her down into dreams.
“I love you,” Saturday whispered after September and Ell and his own small, miserable self, and vanished.
CHAPTER XIII
ONLY THE DEAD DON’T ARGUE
In Which September Is Troubled by the Mechanics of Time and Fate, the Course of a Curse, the Unlikelihood of Visiting Pluto, and a Very Argumentative Donkey
September woke washed in light.
At first she thought she was back home and doused in a bubbling bath—light fizzed and frothed all around her, a shade of white that had great ambitions to grow up to be purple. Great tall viney stalks rose up all around, thick as trees and thicker. Balls of light clung to their sides like brussels sprouts, crackling and sizzling and popping. The white-violet brilliance turned everything brighter than day. Aroostook, battered but still sputtering, showed deep, shadowed claw marks in her doors. September had to squint; her skin looked like the slope of a lightbulb. Saturday’s face leaned down over her, his teeth blinding against his lightning-shadowed skin.
“Please be all right,” he whispered, and it did not take September’s heart long to catch up with her memory. He did not only mean that they’d had their heads knocked about by, presumably, a Yeti with a fist like a train car.
“It was you,” she said, rubbing her glowing, aching arm. “That was you, just now, just then.”
Beside her, Ell groaned. He shook his head from side to side like a bull, his black horns catching wisps of light and tossing them into the air like fireflies. The whole forest hummed and snapped. September winced before she even turned her head—how many times had he breathed his fire to protect them?
The Wyverary stood up. He stood a hand taller than Mr. Powell’s pregnant roan, his face perplexed and unhappy. He patted his own head with one wing.
“Is it bad?” he whispered. “Am I little?”
“No, no!” said September. “You’re a great big beast, just like always!” She crawled to her feet and went to him. She put her arms around his long neck with ease, and the easiness of it unsettled them both.
“Little begins with L, but I don’t want to be it,” the Wyverary said as quietly as he had ever said anything.
“It’s not so bad to be little, you know!” September smiled when she said it though she felt no more like smiling than like writing a composition with her mashed arm.
“Oh, it’s all right for you!” cried Ell. “You’re meant to be little! I like your littleness! It means I can hoist you up and make you feel big and show you all the things I can see from where I stand. But…but if I get much littler, who will be big, among the three of us? Wasn’t it my job to be big and stomp and carry you and look menacing if looking menacing was called for?” A-Through-L’s orange, feline eyes filled with turquoise tears. He whispered: “Who will hoist me up, if I am little?”
September shook her head helplessly. She did not know what to say to comfort him except to hold him tight, which is a language primates use to say: Everything will be all right somehow. Reptiles, however, prefer for everything to simply be all right, at once, and then they will feel comforted. Above them, a cluster of lightning-sprouts flashed a hot blanket of light like a summer storm and then quieted again. September listened for the thunder by instinct; none came. It felt very strange, this silent and thunderless storm.
“You have to try not to,” she begged the Wyverary. “We’ve ever so much farther to go.”
“Oh, September, if you tell me how I shall, I promise!” How awful it was to see fear swimming in those kind eyes!
But she could not tell him.
“He has it,” she whispered instead. “Ciderskin has the Stethoscope. We hardly made it out of Almanack before he took it—and I couldn’t do anything! We couldn’t! We were helpless. And now he can hear us!” September felt sick with failure. A simple box and she couldn’t keep it in her hands for a day.
“Maybe not,” Ell said miserably. “It’s a frightful mess when you listen to the Moon—maybe Ciderskin won’t be able to sort it out, either.”
“Did he come because I took the Stethoscope out of the box? Did he smell it? It was so fast! I should have left it where it was! I just needed to do something, I was crawling with it! I was so sure we’d hear the paw…”
September sank into a long quiet. Finally, she took out the troubling thing that would not leave her be and opened it up like a dark picnic between them.
“But it was you,” she said through her teeth. Saturday looked away from her. “And you were helping the Yeti!”
“Please remember that I am a Marid…”
“I know you are! And that was yourself from some day a long time from now, yourself older and another Saturday and I understand that but how could you be helping Ciderskin, even a hundred years from now?”
“I don’t know!” yelled Saturday. September jumped inside her skin. Her belly went cold. Saturday had never yelled. He had never spoken crossly to her. His voice had never hardened up along the edges like other people’s voices did; the light had never gone out of it the way it went out of anyone’s when the upset got too wet and heavy and snuffed it out. His first words to her at the circus drifted back: I’m glad I found you first.
“Oh, September, I’ve seen him, of course I’ve seen him. All of them, not just that one. There and everywhere, and sometimes he talks to me and sometimes he doesn’t and I don’t know why he does what he does because I’m not him yet. Maybe he’s not even me yet! The me and the him cross over but we’re not the same and maybe he knows something I don’t or maybe I know something he doesn’t or maybe he’s just gone cold and wicked because of some dreadful thing that will have happened but hasn’t yet happened and maybe that thing will definitely have happened and maybe it will tentatively have happened or maybe he got put in a cage again and he just couldn’t bear it and now he’s got to do whatever he can to stay out of it or maybe he just doesn’t care about anything because he lost the girl he loved—I don’t know. I can think of a million million waves he could have ridden to get to where he is but I won’t find out till I’m drowning in them. No one understands this but a Marid—this is what it means to be a Marid. You see him and you think me and I knew if you saw him first you would be afraid because it is frightening! I’m frightened! I have to turn into him! He’s already been all the Saturdays it takes to be that Saturday, but whatever happened is still coming for me, I still have to stand up for the hurts and the grief that made him and I can’t not do it, but knowing I will is like looking at a hot stove and knowing you’re going to touch it, knowing you’re going to burn, and feeling the blisters and the peeling before you even reach out your hand. I have to feel it now, all the time, and I don’t even know what the stove is. You have to understand, September, you have to. I told you when we met, I told you and you liked me
anyway.” His voice broke a little.
September tried to be stern. She didn’t like it. She didn’t know what to do with it. It seemed to say something deeply wrong that she could not quite put her hand to. It sat on the floor of her heart like a toy with a thousand working pieces that could not possibly be put together. But her sternness, which was after all only a very young thing, crumbled when Saturday’s voice cracked like a glass. She touched his shoulder, very gingerly, as if her hand might go through him.
“I can’t talk about this right now,” she whispered. “I would rather fight the Yeti. A Yeti is big and angry and you can’t deny it’s a Yeti. All that fur. All that snow. A Yeti is a Yeti and that’s very straightforward, which is admirable in its own way!”
“I do so love arguments,” came a raspy, silky, cottony voice behind them. All four of them jumped.
The voice belonged to a creature watching them, chewing an unripe lightning-sprout in her mouth like cud. She had the body of a white donkey, muscled and powerful, with electric hooves. But a magnificent peacock’s tail spread out from her rump, dark green-violet wings folded along her back, and where a long horse’s face ought to be, a human face beamed at them. She had dark hazelnut-colored skin and silver-black hair curling out from beneath a domed red cap festooned with copper stars and prongs. A crescent moon stuck out of the top on a slender spike. The creature was not young: wrinkles creased her skin like map-lines, little starbursts near her dark eyes, deep trenches on her brow. September realized she had not seen many old folk in Fairyland.
“You can call me Candlestick, if I can be in your argument,” she said, trotting closer. “I once argued with my fate until it clapped its hands over its ears and bellowed for peace—and that means I am very good at bickering. My fate behaved itself after that. It would tie itself up in a bow and walk to the sun barefoot if I looked at it crosswise, and that’s the sort of attitude you want in your fate if you ask me, which you should, because this is my jungle and you should defer to the sorts of people who run whole jungles.”
September’s head felt heavy and fuzzy. She had put so many things out of it to consider later. They crowded in at the edges, buzzing, insistent. But she would not let them in.
“Miss Candlestick, if you please, we do not mean to barge into your very nice jungle. We are on our way to Orrery. If there is a toll or something we might be able to pay it, but we must get through and on.” September twisted her hands.
Candlestick reared up, turned round, and trotted off, her peacock tail fanning darkly in the stormy light. For a moment September thought she had left them. But her thin, pointed face appeared again around the side of a lightning-yew.
“Come on then,” she said.
They followed the pale donkey through the winding paths of the Lightning Jungle. A-Through-L nudged Aroostook’s bumper with his snout, rolling her along behind September and Saturday, who felt it rude to drive while their host walked. Long shapes that might have been vines and might have been some brand of thundery snake coiled through the canopy overhead.
“How did you make your fate talk to you?” Saturday asked Candlestick. His voice sounded low and bruised. “I suspect a Marid’s fate is a very obstinate thing, and not at all social.”
Candlestick shook her gray hair. “In my younger days, I was the most cantankerous Buraq you should ever like to meet. If the sun came out in the summertime, when it had every right, I raged at it because I wanted snow. If the stars shone bright, I let forth with a diatribe on the virtues of darkness. My mother and father thought me wretched; my cousins said I was the most unhappy creature to walk the Moon and could, the next time I wanted to harangue them on the subject of their faults and their choices, go and soak my head. They did not understand me! Though it is true that no one understands other people. Other people are the puzzle that will not be solved, the argument that cannot be won, the safe that cannot be cracked. They just could imagine the truth: I was happiest when I was arguing! When you argue with verve in your saddlebags, you are extremely alive. That is why you yell and holler and shake your fist—could there be anything sweeter than convincing someone to see the world your way? What else is talking for, or jokes, or stories, or battles? The Loudest Magic, and how I loved it. They saw a jennet red in the face—they could not see me red in the heart, so full of knowing that I had to make them know it, too. Until I changed my mind, of course. There’s no fun in arguing if you never get shown up. Who plays a game if there’s no chance they’ll lose? I do so crave to be proven wrong. It is as sweet as proving yourself right, when done properly. The trouble is, most people only argue with their friends and their family, which a real sportsman knows is no way to practice. If no one you know can prove you wrong, you’re in peril and that’s the truth. Well, I do go on—the devil of a thesis is digression! When my herd could no longer get a word in edgewise—and that’s the best way to get a word in, where no one can see it coming—I flew off to find the Sajada, where all the things worth knowing are kept. There, someone would best me, I was sure. After all, growing up is nothing but an argument with your parents on the topic of whether or not you are grown. You scream am so am so am so from the moment you’re born, and they fire back are not are not are not from the moment they’ve got you, and on it goes until you can say it loudest. I won my argument by lighting out for parts unknown—it’s a good rejoinder, but a last resort.”
Is that what I’ve done? September thought. Lit out?
Candlestick pawed the brilliant earth and went on. “You know what a fate looks like, don’t you? It’s just a little toy version of yourself, made out of alabaster and emerald and a little bit of lapis lazuli and ambition and coincidence and regret and everyone else’s expectations and laziness and hope and where you’re born and who to and everything you’re afraid of plus everything that’s afraid of you. They’re all kept in the Sajada. And I went all the way to Pluto to find out where they keep the Sajada!”
“There’s a Pluto here? We have a Pluto in my world!” September exclaimed.
“Oh, every place has a Pluto! It’s where a universe keeps the polar bears and last year’s pickled entropy and the spare gravity. You need a Pluto or you’re hardly a universe at all. Plutos teach lessons. A lesson is like a time-traveling argument. Because, you see, you can’t argue until you’ve had the lesson or else you’re just squabbling with your own ignorance. But a lesson is really just the result of arguments other people had ages ago! You have to sit still and pay attention and pantomime their arguments over again until you’re so sick of their prattle that you pipe up to have your own. You can’t learn anything without arguing.”
“What does Fairyland’s Pluto teach?”
“That’s for it to teach and me not to step on its toes. I could tell you, but you won’t learn it, because you haven’t been to Pluto and you haven’t fought the ice-ostriches and you haven’t even ridden the Undercamel until he collapses in a heap of his own dreamsweat so it’ll be just words to you. They’ll only mean themselves.”
“But who knows if I’ll ever get to Pluto?” September countered. “I’d bet the state of Nebraska it’ll never happen in my world, and I don’t get much choosing in where I go in Fairyland!”
Candlestick stopped in her tracks, her hooves squishing into a crackling electric mud.
“That’s a fair point, girl. But it doesn’t sit right. The Undercamel would spit in my eye and I’d never stop weeping. I shall give you half of it—the other half you’ll have to race down proper. Very well! Here is the great lesson of Pluto: What others call you, you become.” The Buraq’s eyes danced with mirth. “Very helpful indeed! I hope you feel edified.”
They continued on through the trees. September thought on this as hard as she could, but without an ice-ostrich, she supposed, it was rather hopeless.
“You do love to distract me!” said Candlestick. “I was saying that I went to Pluto to find the Sajada, which is a secret place known only to that very Undercamel, an extremely ill-temper
ed individual with great heaps of black fur and frozen humps and eyes like a slot machine and big hooves made all of terrible iron nails that bleed him even though a fellow can hardly get away from his own feet. Also he spits. And not like you spit or I do. He spits sorrow. One glob and you’ll never get off your knees again. You’ll weep until there’s no water left in you, just another mummy blowing around the plains of Pluto like a tumbleweed.”
“That’s dreadful!” cried Saturday.
“That’s sort of the point of an Undercamel,” agreed the Buraq. Her peacock tail shimmered in the stormlight. “Well, I’m sworn not to tell you the trick of doing it but you have to ride him till he breaks. Only then will he spit out his secret. I’m hardly equipped for dressage, having no arms and far too many legs, but I drove him seven times around Pluto, pole to pole, chasing his miserable tufted tail and dodging his bubbling green spit until he fell down half-dead. And I bent down to his slavering undermouth and he told me this: The Sajada is a planet, too, all covered with a mosaic of every possible color and a few that got kicked out of the family for being too wild and unruly. The mosaic makes the most radiant pictures, so many you can never see them all. The Sajada rises up from the tiles, a thousand thousand domes stuck over with stars like pincushions. And under every little pebble of the mosaic is somebody’s fate. No place more holy in the heavens. And do you know what I did then?”
“No,” breathed A-Through-L, who had quite forgotten his own trouble in the Buraq’s tale.
“I laughed. I laughed like the whole world was a joke and I was the punchline. And the Undercamel did not appreciate my sense of humor, I can tell you. I laughed because I knew just where it was. I knew a planet with a mosaic exactly like that.”
“Where?” asked the Wyverary eagerly.
“Well, not to put too fine a point on it,” Candlestick said, “but here.”