“I’m not from Fairyland. Never been there. But I’ve seen it through the shop window, you know? I go between, and I mind the Line. There was a bad break here a while back—a while back by my clock, not yours. And by here I don’t mean your farm or Nebraska, really. Just here. Here summed up by Pluto and inchworms and balloons that rise because of helium. People have been coming and going like they got shot out of a circus cannon. I do not like it, no ma’am. The Line’ll always be weak in these parts. Structural flaw. But it almost wore through completely last year—I think I’ve got that right. Time zones are my bedevilment and no lie. Last year we almost lost it, and now I’ve got to tend to the sag.”
“Last year! I was in Fairyland then! And my shadow was stealing magic! A minotaur told me the borders would have just melted into nothing if she’d had her way.”
“You should always listen to minotaurs. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality. The Line was all in tatters. It got so bad you could just trip over a wall and end up who knows where? And when the works go that wrong, you get bandits. Worse than mice. If you see one it’s too late. Beatrice does his best to rustle them good, but what can he do? It’s a foundational fact of the universe that everything leaks. What comes out when it springs, that’s the only question.” Boomer spat. A stream of red lightning glittered out of her mouth.
September looked down at her shoes. “Am I a bandit? I’ve been crossing the Line. Twice. Four times if you count the return trip.”
Boomer looked at her meaningfully. September stuck her hands in her pockets. But she looked up again and held the Lineman’s gaze. She wasn’t sorry. She wouldn’t pretend she was sorry. She supposed that made her a bandit for sure.
Beatrice’s eyes flashed like lightbulbs. He began to howl: a long, whistling, hollow note, just exactly like a steam engine.
“Here they come,” snarled Boomer, and heaved up, her metal body unfolding like a puzzle.
“Who?”
The prairie stood quiet and green, except for a loose and fitful wind blowing the long grain and the dark green tips of the birches.
“Weren’t you after a Wind? I hate Winds. Criminals and fugitives and psychopomps the whole stupid gasbagging lot of them. But for the Winds I could have retired with a nice spread out beyond the edge of time by now. Up, Beatrice! Speak!”
The greyhound rose up on his great haunches and barked once, twice, three times. His voice was no longer a steam engine but a terrible tolling bell. September clapped her hands over her ears—and a good thing, too. The wind whipped itself up so fierce and fast all the grain could do was stand straight up, stretched and taut almost to breaking. The air seemed to tip and totter and finally fall over, spilling out a throng of hollering, ululating, laughing, whooping creatures.
Puffins.
One by one they rolled up into fluffy cannonballs, flapped their tiny wings once or twice, and thudded back down onto their plump bellies, tumbling over one another like a wave breaking. Their round beaks gleamed bright orange and gold. Some were tiny, no bigger than jacks. Some were much bigger, the size of hunting hounds. Their eyes sparkled black and green and red and purple as they tumbled nearer—and at least some of those were not at all the right colors for birds’ eyes as far as September knew. One by one they heaved up into the air again, paddling their wide webbed feet against the sky like they were scrambling up a mountainside.
And dancing on top of them, leaping from puffin to puffin, twirled a grinning young lady all in blue. She wore indigo trousers with as much silk to them as a skirt, and when they rustled, ghostly pale blue stars peeked out from the folds. She had on turquoise opera gloves and sapphire-colored boots with crisscrossed icicle laces all the way to the knee. A long, beautiful sky-colored coat spun out like a dress from a heavy silver belt at her waist, swirling with aquamarine stitching, trimmed in wild, woolly fur from some impossible, blueberry-colored sheep. Her long, azure hair flew every which way under a cobalt cap rimmed in the same blue shag. The cap had an ice-spike on top of it, like old pictures of the Kaiser. She smoked a blue churchwarden pipe, blowing great squares and triangles and rhombuses of blue smoke for her puffins to dip and dive through.
A long honk broke up the caterwauling puffin songs. In the center of the flock, half bouncing on the ground and half hoisted, shoved, carried, and jostled by the birds, came Mr. Albert’s Model A Ford.
“But that’s my car!” September corrected herself, but she was quite indignant that someone else—even if they were puffins—was driving it. “I mean it’s Mr. Albert’s car! What are they doing with it? They’re going to break it to pieces, that’s what!”
“Horse thieves!” Boomer said with disgust. She brandished her hook like an ax. Beatrice growled. It sounded like the turning of gears deep in the earth.
The woman in blue sighted September. Her grin grew wider; her black eyes glittered. They barreled toward the fence. The air wriggled around the Lineman and her Cap, so hot it turned the back of September’s legs painfully red. She stood her ground.
“Girl, Ho!” the blue bandit yelled, in the manner of sailors sighting land. She saluted smartly.
September saluted back. A smile broke open on her face like a firecracker. Who could this be but the Blue Wind, a little late, but come for her at last? September forgave her immediately for her tardiness. Her heart hammered around inside her like it meant to get free.
“Wind, Ho!” she cried. Suddenly, all that talk of bandits and holding the Line seemed wholly, entirely unimportant. September laughed and waved giddily. She couldn’t help adding: “Have you come to take me to Fairyland?”
The Blue Wind cocked her head to one side and hooted. The puffins hooted back. Now they were nearly on top of her, September could see each little bird dressed in smart, shining armor of the sort you find in books about Spanish explorers. The armor was made of ice and caked in snow. Their own black feathers stuck out of their helms as plumes.
“Hadn’t planned on it,” shrugged the Blue Wind. “Fairyland’s a dreadful place. Why would you want to go there?” She laughed; her laughter rocketed into the forest, echoing and breaking apart against the trees.
Several things happened all on top of each other.
The bandits shot up into the sky: puffins, the Blue Wind, the Model A, and not a few birch trees yanked out of the ground by the fearful, shearing air.
Beatrice vaulted up to meet them, his long silver body arcing like a current, his sharp teeth glowing hot white.
Boomer dropped her hook and undid her hair. It was such a simple gesture September did not know what she was about until the whole mass of it came down and open: a net of wires sizzling with electricity, as wide and strong as the sail of a grand ship.
September cried out and she did not know who she meant to warn: the dog, the birds, Boomer, the Blue Wind? But it did not matter.
Beatrice snapped at the underbellies of the birds. They laughed chitteringly at him. He missed once, twice, three times; they could go higher than he. He fell back to the ground, his snout twitching, yelping frustration like a puppy. As soon as her hound had got clear, Boomer threw her net in the bandits’ path. September was certain they’d be cooked to death—but the Blue Wind only giggled. With a wink for September, she spun around like an ice-skater on the back of a particularly large puffin. The stream of birds narrowed and squirmed and shrunk and passed straight through the gaps in the electric net—and so did the Model A, honking tinily as it jumped.
The storm stopped abruptly. All was silent. Boomer stood stock-still, her flashing diamond fist clenched in anger around the wires of her electric hair. Beatrice howled his mournful train-whistle howl once more.
September tried to catch her breath. She looked at the Lineman. She looked at the Cap. She looked after the Blue Wind, vanished completely. A very certain thought came on in her mind. Boomer wouldn’t let her cross over. She knew it. It was her job to say no. To bar the way. Just like it was the Sibyl’s job to say yes and open th
e way. Just like it was her own job to record her father’s temperature and mind the pregnant Powell horse even when she bit. You do your job and you mind your work. That’s how the grown-up world gets along—and grown-up magic, too.
Before the Lineman could stop her, before Beatrice could get up on his haunches again, September clutched her jam jar to her side, darted forward, and leapt with all her might. She dove through the same gap in the net of crackling white-blue wires that had swallowed up the puffins, just wide enough for a girl. She shut her eyes at the last moment, blinded by the showers of glowing sparks and by a sudden sureness—she hadn’t jumped hard enough! The wires would catch her in a flash and turn her into smoke. Too late, too late!
September winked out of the world like a firefly.
Boomer sighed. She kicked the fence post, which shattered in terror before her great foot had a chance to touch it. The Lineman dropped the net of her hair like a curtain and promptly blinked out again. This time, Beatrice sizzled away, too, and the only thing left of any of them was a last, lingering wisp of the hound’s howl.
CHAPTER III
VISITORS OF LOW REPUTATION
In Which September Lands in a Familiar City, Argues With the Wind, Makes a Valiant Stab at Stoicism, and Faces Certain Facts About the Dissolution of Political and Economic Regimes
Of all the somersaults ever turned, only a few could be called sloppier than the head-over-heels half-flying cartwheel in which September tumbled out of the sky.
She did not have far to go. The Lineman’s net, without ceremony or dignity, dropped her onto a dry, dusty road from just enough height to let her know it was not at all happy with her. September landed on her knees; they jangled and buzzed all the way up to the top of her head. She winced, but did not make a sound. For a moment her eyes would not open, quite convinced she’d been crisped. But even when she could feel her rough trousers and the entirely unbarbecued skin of her hands, she still could not do it. What if she peeked and the world around her was not Fairyland—if it was the woods around Mr. Albert’s house or some awful abandoned, star-strewn depot on the Line?
One eye, then the other. September had to say it twice before she could get her eyelids to obey. One eye, then the other. Then see what you see and face up to it.
The sky shone neither blue nor black, day nor night, but a fiery, swirling twilight. Light blazed in scarlet, peacock, deep plum, and molten quicksilver, light so thick it seemed to drip from the air onto every surface. September knelt on a faded green-gray line etched, perhaps even sketched, into a long avenue. On either side, soft smoke-colored pillars soared up into the bright, twisted clouds. Pillars—but not pillars! Some were very tall and very rickety; some looked like cathedral towers but had no fine bricks, only clapboards and rusty nails. Some were made of lovely stone slabs, but great holes gaped in them, all the way up. And many, many had long silky ribbons tied round them and wax seals in black or white or red or gold. Tears and stains marred each of these. She could see drawings through the holes: lines, houses, funny little dragons with huge nostrils floating in carefully inked seas. They were great scrolls of ashen parchment, each crease and fold and rip tinged in ultramarine. The road, which rustled gently under her knees as she stood up, was paper as well, the lovely old thick and glossy sort of paper that only very beautiful or very important things got written on. Up at the top of the scrolls, September could see little church towers and villas and ranches and gardens. A wooly, horned sheep peered over the edge of one and bleated down; his bleat echoed fuzzily in the paper canyon. Rusted-out cupolas crowned towers here and there.
Just the sorts of buildings where wind howls hardest, whistles loudest, screams highest.
Up ahead, a great pearly-violet mountain range opened up like an infinite library. A stormcloud of squawking birds tumbled and danced toward those hills. Automobile exhaust puffed and sputtered out behind them.
September wanted to jump up and down on the road and shout at the molten-colored heavens. She wanted to turn a somersault, a real, proper somersault. She wanted to exult and sing nonsense at the clouds and kiss anyone who happened to be by, which was no one, but never you mind. But she did none of those things. September raised her hands to her mouth and wiggled in place like a dog wagging her tail. Her face turned red from the keeping in of all the noise and movement her body longed to make. At this moment, her head spoke louder, and what her head wanted was to be as cool and collected as a Wind. To be knowing and canny as they were. When you wear all your insides on your outside, people look at you very strangely. No one had ever told her that exulting and dancing and singing nonsense were childish things, but she felt sure that they were, somehow.
Shall I tell her? Shall I be a kind and merciful narrator and take our girl aside? Shall I touch her new, red heart and make her understand that she is no longer one of the tribe of heartless children, nor even the owner of the wild and infant heart of thirteen-year-old girls and boys? Oh, September! Hearts, once you have them locked up in your chest, are a fantastic heap of tender and terrible wonders—but they must be trained. Beatrice could have told her all about it. A heart can learn ever so many tricks, and what sort of beast it becomes depends greatly upon whether it has been taught to sit up or to lie down, to speak or to beg, to roll over or to sound alarms, to guard or to attack, to find or to stay. But the trick most folk are so awfully fond of learning, the absolute second they’ve got hold of a heart, is to pretend they don’t have one at all. It is the very first danger of the hearted. Shall I give fair warning, as neither you nor I was given?
By now, my dear friends, you know me better.
And so September tried to put an expression of a very proud, noble, solemn adultish sort of wonder on her face, because it was a trick she felt she ought to learn. But that is a lot to contain in two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, and she really only managed her own unhidable leaping, fizzing joy—yet this time the joy was a silent one. It jangled inside her but did not boil over. To be back in Fairyland. To be near magic and thrillingness again. To be in a place where she did not have to lie about the things she wanted most of all—because they were here, and she could touch them and talk with them and wrestle with them and ride upon them.
But there was no one to praise September for her restraint.
And where was here? It looked so terribly familiar, but September could be quite sure she had never run down a road of vellum or called up to the tip-tops of scroll-towers before. And run she did, to catch the puffins and the Blue Wind and Mr. Albert’s poor car who hadn’t asked to be bothered with any of this trouble! Her jar of coins rattled and jingled loudly in the canyon of pillars. But hadn’t she heard the wind whistling like that before? Hadn’t she smelled that dry, sweet smell on the breeze?
Fortunately, now that they’d jumped the Line, the flock of puffins didn’t seem to be in any great hurry. The glossy throng of them burst apart, save those hoisting up the stolen automobile on their ice-armored backs. A few shot ahead up toward the sun, cannonballs with orange beaks. Little birdy bullets of pearl and ink fired and spun out to land upon whatever they could find in that wild place. As September bolted up over a rise in the papery road, she found what they found: a little shantytown laid out among the pillars, every rooftop and chimney colonized by the squat, chattering birds.
The road ran smoothly, straight into the village, whose back bunched up against the mountains. The peaks beyond flowed up to impossible heights, traceries of text and compasses and old, old ink disappearing into the distance. A boardwalk ran from the main avenue into the town proper, each slat on the path the fold of a long, thick, heavy map, hanging the way they did in libraries, draped over strong bars so as not to crease or wrinkle. The slats showed the blue of strange oceans, every one. September scrambled to a stop before a ramp up onto the boardwalk: an atlas the size of a boat, open to its frontispiece, which read:
MERCATOR, TOWN OF.
FIRST EDITION PUBLISHED 1203.
EDITOR: KING CRUNCHCRAB
I.
LAYOUT AND DESIGN: CADASTRAL CROSSHATCH, ESQ.
ALL PERSONS, EVENTS, CRIMES AND CRIMINALS, MAGIC, MAYHEM, AND THREATS OF BODILY HARM USED BY PERMISSION.
VISITORS OF LOW REPUTATION REPORT TO THE WAY STATION IMMEDIATELY.
ALL OTHERS KEEP OUT.
“Well, I don’t think I have a low reputation!” opined September, catching her breath.
A wild, bouncing laugh prevented her from further defending her character. September startled: Up above her, crouching on the rim of a spindly, spirally chimney, the Blue Wind pointed at her and kept on laughing.
“Oh, my little sour blueberry, you are just adorable when you don’t know what you’re talking about!”
The Blue Wind sprang out from the chimney like a bat. She spread her arms for the briefest moment, then pirouetted down to the ground before September. She clapped her blue hands.
“Even if you hadn’t entirely deposed (and possibly killed) not one but two governments and destabilized all sorts of political regions you couldn’t even pronounce, let alone draft up constitutional monarchies for, even if you’d been far more careful about leaving your toys strewn about everywhere when you tire yourself out with anarchy and run on home, I’d say you really are the lowest sort.” The Blue Wind grinned wickedly. Her purple lips shone. “A hitchhiker.”
“I didn’t hitch!”
“Oh, come off yourself! You could never have got through without me! When have you ever gotten into Fairyland by your lonesome? Never, because you can’t, because you are a person and people are boring and boring means you.” The Blue Wind crossed her brocaded arms over her chest, quite satisfied with her logic.
This struck September like a slap. She remembered, suddenly, that the Blue Wind was not loved by her brothers and sisters. The Green Wind had said so, she was quite sure. “You’re teasing me. A Wind wouldn’t call such names. Winds are…well, not kind, but at least they aren’t cruel!”