The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In a Ship of Her Own Making (13 page)

Into the silver-spangled night, two great bicycles rolled silently, bearing them all into the dark, so swift the moon never saw them go. A-Through-L ran beside them, his tongue clamped between his teeth, willing his legs to pump faster.

“Calpurnia,” said September, when they had left the last ruddy light of the campfire behind them, “I thought fairies danced in reels together, and had big families.”

“Ayup, we do.”

“Then why are you alone? And Charlie Crunchcrab, too? Where has everyone gone?”

Calpurnia turned her face away. Her wings fluttered weakly under their iron chain, and September could see where red hives had boiled up under the metal.
It’s the iron
, she though,
fairies are allergic.

When Calpurnia Farthing, Queen of the Velocipedes, looked out across the flats again, her face was streaked with silent, stubborn tears.

#

In Which September Finally Eats Fairy Food, Very Nearly Matriculates, and Discovers the Nature of Autumn.

I suppose you think you know what autumn looks like. Even if you live in the Los Angeles dreamed of by September’s schoolmates, you have surely seen postcards and photographs of the kind of autumn I mean. The trees go all red and blazing orange and gold, and wood-fires burn at night so that everything smells of crisp branches. The world rolls about delightedly in a heap of cider and candy and apples and pumpkins and cold stars rush by through wispy, ragged clouds, past a moon like a bony knee. You have, no doubt, experienced a Halloween or two.

Autumn in Fairyland is all of that, of course. You would never feel cheated by the colors of a Fairyland forest, or the morbidity of the Fairyland moon. And the Halloween masks! Oh, how they glitter, how they curl, how their beaks and jaws hook and barb! But to wander through autumn in Fairyland is to look into a murky pool, seeing only a hazy reflection of the Autumn Provinces’ eternal fall. And human autumn is but a cast-off photograph of that reflecting pool, half-burnt and drifting through the space between us and Fairyland.

And so I may tell you that the leaves began to turn red as September and her friends rushed through the suddenly-cold air on their snorting, roaring highwheels, and you might believe me. But no red you have ever seen could touch the crimson bleed of the trees in that place. No oak gone gnarled and orange with October is half as bright as the boughs that bent over September’s head, dropping their hard, sweet acorns into her spinning spokes. But you must try as hard as you can. Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful brightness of Fairy colors. Try to smell the hard, pale wood sending up sharp, green smoke into the afternoon. To feel the mellow, golden sun on your skin, more gentle and cozier and more golden than even the light of your favorite reading nook at the close of the day.

September’s orange dress seemed suddenly drab; the Wyverary’s scarlet skin seemed a bit brown and dull. They could not compete--but they laughed all the same, as leaves drifted slowly from trees and fell into their hair. Penny balanced expertly on her highwheel seat and reached up to catch them out of the air, whooping and giggling.

“Ah, Penny, we’ll not go in, though,” sighed Calpurnia Farthing, raising her goggles to drink in the colors of the forest ahead of them, its shady paths, its mournful brown birds.

“Oh, why not, Cal? They’re sure to have flapjacks! I’m hungry!”

“We have to bring in the herd, love. The highwheels' home is off further towards the sea, in the oil-tides and the nickel-pools. We’ll camp, and I’ll sing you
The Nobell Lay of the Unicycle and the One-Legged Gyrl
--you like that one! The rest of the velos will catch up and we’ll take them down to the water’s edge and I’ll let you have a puff of my pipe.”

“Can’t we just stay one night?” Penny pleaded, pulling her pigtails in earnestness.

Calpurnia shuddered. “It’s best…not to go in if you don’t have doings there. Autumn has a hungry heart--September is the beginning of death.” The Fairy looked at the earnest girl in the orange dress and laughed shortly, realizing what she had said. “Well. Pan forgive all puns. Be glad autumn is brief, Penny, in our familiars. As for you, September, I feel a powerful urge to tell you to be careful, but I think you’ve lead ears for such advice. Just remember that autumn is also called
fall
, and some falling places are so deep there’s no climbing out.”

“Goodbye dragon!” chirped Penny, and A-Through-L, still panting from his great exertion across the plains, three days’ running with barely a break for napping, did not argue with her, but tolerated her smacking a kiss on his toes. “Goodbye Saturday!”

Calpurnia Farthing brusquely extended her hand to Saturday, but when he moved to shake it, she grabbed it up and kissed his fingers like a lord kissing a lady’s hand. She crouched down to look the boy in the eye.

“I have a thing to tell you, Marid.”

Saturday waited patiently.

“We’re not kin, but fey to fey, you’ll hark?”

He nodded. She leaned in, to whisper in his ear, so that September could not hear.

But we have special privileges. I shall tell you what Calpurnia Farthing said:

“The riddle of the Ravished,” she whispered, “is that they must always go down into the black naked and lonesome. But they cannot come back up into the light alone.”

The light in the Autumn Provinces is always late afternoon light, the golden, perfect kind that slants and sighs, that casts gentle shadows on the earth.

Of course, September had no shadow.

But the shadows of the others walked long and thin through the forest of bloody-bright trees. They were disturbed by their missing compatriot, and pulled away from the place where September’s shadow was not. Shadows have a kind of camaraderie. As folk become friends and have adventures, so too do their shadows frolick and quaver in fear and emerge triumphant from battles with enemies’ shadows, all unknown to us, who think we are the movers of our tales. And so the shadow of the Wyverary mourned the loss of his companion, and the shadow of the Marid caught its black mood.

And yet, none among them could keep from delight as many paths opened up wide and even before them, a bed of crisp brown leaves blowing up in little dervishes and settling again. A few mournful birds sang out. The wind smelled of smoke, and baking bread, and apples. Saturday closed his eyes and breathed through his mouth, like a cat, to take it all in. A-Through-L fairly skipped.

“Truly, Autumn is my season,” the scarlet beast chorted. “Spring and Summer and Winter all begin with such late letters! But Autumn and Fall, I have loved best, because they are best to love.”

The three of them might have taken any path through the forest and come upon little but toadstools and acorns. However, on account of the tendencies of Fairy towns to get quite firmly in one’s way, they did not. They found themselves striding into in the herald’s square of a place called Mercurio before they could discuss whether it was nightingales or sparrows who sang so prettily in the wood. That September’s shoes were dark and crafty and most certainly knew their way around the world can have had nothing to do with it, I am sure.

I wonder if every city in Fairyland is made of some strange thing?
Thought September. For some made baker had built the town of Mercurio from loaves of thick, moist bread shingled with sugar and mortared with butter. Heavy eaves of brown crust shaded sweet little dinner-bun doors. Many of the houses were small. September could reach up her hand and tear off a piece of their roofs to eat, if she had had a mind. But many more were enormous, towering up high, cakes piled upon cakes, baked dark and fragrant, up past the tops of the trees. The cobbles of the square were muffin-tops, and all the fountains gushed fresh, sweet milk. It was as though the witch who built the gingerbread house in the story had a great number of friends, and had decided to start up a collective.

In the center of the square stood a statue of a lady September knew well by now, patted together from cream-colored crumpets. Below her benevolent gaze a long table groaned with food: apple dumplings and apple tartlets and candied apples and apple chutney in big crystal bowls, huge roasted geese glistening brown and gold, huge potatoes and turnips split and steaming, rum cakes and blackberry pies, sheafs of toffee bundled together like wheat, squash soup in tureens shaped like stars, golden pancakes, slabs of gingerbread, piles of hazelnuts and walnuts, butter domes carved like pine cones, a huge and broiled boar with a pear in his mouth and parsley in his hoofs. And pumpkin, pumpkin everywhere: orange pumpkin soup bubbling in hollowed-out gourds, pumpkin bread, pumpkin muffins, frothy pumpkin milk, pumpkin trifles piled up with whipped cream, pumpkin-stuffed quail, and pumpkin pies of every size, cooling on the clean tablecloth.

No one ate at the table, or guarded the feast. The Wyverary, the Marid, and the human stared in naked hunger, having had nothing but tire-jerky and axle-whiskey for days. Ell stepped forward, but hesitated.

“Surely it belongs to someone,” he fretted.

“Surely,” agreed Saturday.

“I oughtn’t to have any, anyway,” said September mournfully. “A feast out of nowhere and no one here who might have cooked it, or had it cooked for them? That’s Fairy food, to be sure.”

A little man stepped deftly out from behind the pig, as if he had been there all along, though surely they had seen no feet under the table. His nose curved down: long, skinny, hooked like a bird’s beak, the kind meant for fishing beetles out of logs. A pair of square spectacles perched on it, showing large, orange, red-rimmed eyes, as if tired from too much reading. His rubbed his little hands together--they each had only three fingers, long and hooked like his nose. His skin was all over deep, baked brown, like good bread. Most odd of all, however, were his clothes--he wore a tweed jacket with velvet elbow patched, a caramel-colored waistcoat, toast-brown plaid trousers, and an ascot: an oak leaf fading from green to brown, full of wispy holes, pinned with an acorn button. Over all this, a white laboratory jacket, gone yellow with age, draped over his hunched shoulders.

“Of course it’s Fairy food,” he chuckled. “Where do you think you are?”

“Well,” September answered, “I’m not to eat Fairy food. I’ve been very careful, and only eaten witch food, dragon food, dryad food, that sort of thing.”

The little man laughed so loudly a few folk like him poked their heads out of the bread-house windows in curiosity. He held his small paunch and kept giggling.

“Oh, you were being serious!” He tried to look solemn. “This is
Fairyland
, girl! There is no dragon food or witch food or dryad food. There is only Fairy food--it’s all Fairy food. This is Fairy earth that bears it, Fairy hands that carve it and cook it and serve it. I daresay you have quite the belly full of the stuff. If there’s damage to be got from it, I promise it’s quite done by now.”

September’s mouth dropped open. Her eyes filled up with tears, and now, finally, they spilled over and dropped onto the muffin-stone square. Saturday put his hand on her arm, but did not know what to do to comfort her beyond that. This may seem like a silly thing to cry over, but September had suffered so very much in such a very short time, and she was so certain that she had been circumspect with regards to food. She
had
been careful! Even if the Marquess was frightening and Saturday so dear and broken and Ell so devoted--at least, she had thought, she had not eaten Fairy food! At least she had managed better than most little girls in stories who are
repeatedly
told not to eat the food and do it anyway, being extravagantly silly and stupid!

“What will happen to me?” she wept.

A-Through-L waved his tail in distress. “We can’t say, September. We’re not Ravished.”

“But look on the bright side!” cried the little man. “Eat your fill and have no fear of it now. Fairy food is the best kind--or else no one would have to warn children off it. I think it’s very dear of you to have tried to be so…abstinent! My name is Doctor Fallow, and I am the Satrap of Autumn. We had word that guests were careening our way. ” He bowed at the waist, and caught his jacket in the act of slipping off. “This is a wedding feast for my graduate assistants, and you are most invited.”

September bowed as well. “These are my friends A-Through-L, who is a wyvern and not a dragon, and Saturday. My name is September.”

Doctor Fallow beamed. “What an
excellent
name,” he breathed.

A great, jubilant noise rose up from the southern end of the village, and it became clear in a moment why they had found the square so empty. Everyone who was anyone had been at the party. A throng of creatures like Doctor Fallow, with long skinny noses and dear little clothes came dancing in with crowns of leaves in their hair--for the leaves of the Autumn Provinces are brighter than any flower. Many wore glittery masks in black and gold and red and silver. Some played delicate twig pipes, some sang rude songs that greatly featured the words
swelling, growing,
and
stretching
in complicated puns.

“I…I think they must be spriggans,” said Ell, embarrassed. Naturally, he could offer no further illumination on anything that so rudely insisted on beginning with S.

At the head of the host came a pair of spriggans, looking at each other under the lashes of their eyes, blushing, smiling, laughing. One, a young man, was red from the tips of his hair to the tips of his feet, his skin glowing like an apple, his evening suit crimson from cuff to cufflink. The other, a young girl, was golden from lash to leg, her hair just the exact color of a yellow leaf, her gown butter-bright.

“The red fellow is Rubedo,” Doctor Fallow said jovially, “he specializes in the Gross Matter, quite a promising lad, a bit iffy on the mathematics, of course. The doe is Citrinitas, my star pupil. She’s at work on the highest alchemical mysteries, all of which must be solved, like a detective solves a dastardly crime. I’m so pleased for them both I could sprout!” He drew a faded orange kerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his eyes.

“Please,” called Citrinitas, her voice ringing out bright and clear as sunlight through the deepening evening, “Eat! We shall all have bad luck if a single soul goes hungry!”