The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In a Ship of Her Own Making (3 page)

The Gnome pulled a little green leather book and a polished ruby-handled stamp from behind the podium. She opened the book and began stamping with a vicious delight.

“Temporary Visa, Type: Pomegranate. Housing Allotment: None. Alien Registry, Category: Human, Ravished, Non-Changeling. Size: Medium. Age: Eleven. Privileges: None, or, As Many As You Can Catch. Anything to declare?”

September shook her head. Betsy rolled her red-rimmed eyes.

“Customs Declaration: One shoe: Black. One dress: Orange. One smoking jacket: Not Yours.” The Gnome peered down from her podium. “One kiss: Extremely Green,” she finished emphatically, stamping the book hard and handing it down to September. “Off you go now, don’t hold up the line!”

Betsy Basilstalk grasped September by her lapels and hauled her off her feet, past the podium, towards a rooty, moldy, wormy hole in the back wall of the closet between worlds. At the last moment she stopped, spat out a Fairy curse like a wad of tobacco, and pulled a little black box out of her pocket. She slid a red rod out of it and the lid snapped open. It was filled with a vaguely golden jelly.

“Pan’s hangover, kid,” Betsy cursed again. “Old habits die hard.” She dug her greasy finger into the stuff and flung it at September’s eyes. It dripped down her face like yolk.

The gnome looked profoundly embarrassed. “Well,” she mumbled, looking at her toes, “What if Rupert fell down on the job and you got there and all you could see was sticks and grasshoppers and a lot of long, empty desert? It’s a long way to go for desert. Anyway I don’t have to explain myself. On your way, then!”

Betsy Basilstalk gave the girl a hard shove into the soft, leafy wall of the closet. With a wriggle, a squeeze, and a pop, September slid, backward, through to the other side.

#

In which September Nearly Drowns, Meets Three Witches (One a Wairwulf), And Is Entrusted with the Quest for a Certain Spoon.

Salt water hit September like a wall. It roared foamily in her eyes, snatched at her hair, dragged at her feet with cold, purple-green hands. She gasped for air and got two lungs-ful of freezing, thick sea.

Now, September could swim quite well. She had even won second medal at a tournament in Lincoln. She had a trophy with a winged lady on it, though she had always wondered what use a flying girl would have for swimming. The lady should have had webbed feet, September was sure. But in all her after-school practices her coaches had never impressed upon her the importance of practicing her butterfly stroke while being dropped from a great height without any ceremony at all into an ocean. With Fairy ooze in one’s eyes.
Really
, September thought,
how could they leave something like that out?

She floundered and dipped beneath the giant waves, only to bob up again, spluttering, gulping air. She kicked hard, struggling to get her legs properly under her and orient towards the shore--if there was a shore--so that the waves would carry her towards land--if land there was--and not away from it. Riding the crest of a horrid wave sickeningly upward, she turned her head as fast as she could, and glimpsed through the last, stubborn streaks of ointment, a fuzzy, orangeish strand off to the west. Against the will of the water she hauled her body until she was more or less pointed at it and stroked as fast as she could on the swell of the next wave, letting it push her and punch at her and drag her, whatever it liked, as long as it was closer and closer to land. September’s arms and legs burned and her lungs were seriously considering giving the whole thing up, but on she went, and on and on--until, quite unexpectedly, her knees knocked on sand and she fell face first as the last waves slid up past her onto a rose-colored shore.

September coughed and shook. On her hands and knees, she threw up a fair bit of the Perverse and Perilous Sea onto the beach. She squeezed her eyes shut and shivered until her heart stopped beating quite so fast. When she opened her eyes, she was steadier, but elbow deep in the beach and sinking fast. Thick red rose petals, twigs, thorny leaves, yellowish chestnut husks, pine cones and rusty tin bells littered the shoreline as far as she could see. September scrambled and tripped and waded through the strange, sweet-smelling rubbish, trying to find some solid ground beneath the blackberry brambles and robins’ eggshells and wizened, dried toadstools. The land was not very much more solid than the sea, but at least she could breathe--in sharp, jerky gulps, as the brambles pricked at her and the twigs pulled at her hair.

I have not been in Fairyland nearly long enough to start crying
, September thought, and bit her tongue savagely. That was better, she could think, and the flotsam of the beach did seem to get shallower as she pushed through the wreckage. Finally, the wreckage was only knee deep, and she could trudge through it like so much heavy snow. At the far edge of the shore were tall silvery cliffs, spotted with brave, stubborn little trees that had found purchase on the rocks, and grew straight out sideways from the cliffside. At their tops, great birds wheeled and cried, their long necks glowing bright blue in the afternoon light. She was alone on the beach, breathing heavily. She rubbed her eyes to get the last of the gnome-ointment out, where it had hardened like sleep-dust. When September’s eyes were clean of salt and gnome, she looked back down the beach, in the direction she had come. Suddenly, it didn’t look like rose petals and sticks and eggshells at all. It glittered gold, real gold, all the way down to the violet-green water. Doubloons and necklaces and crowns, pieces of eight and plates and bricks and long, glittering sceptres. It shone so brightly September had to shade her eyes. No matter how she walked, to the left or right, the shore stayed firmly golden now.

September shivered. She was terribly hungry, and dripping rather dramatically. She wrung out her hair and the skirt of her orange dress onto a huge golden crown with crosses on it. The jacket, mortified that it had been so distracted from its duties by a mere momentary drowning, hurriedly puffed out, billowing in the sea wind until it was quite dry.
Well
, September thought,
it’s all certainly very strange, but the Green Wind is not here to explain it anymore, and I can’t stay on the beach all day like a sunbather. A girl in want of a Leopard still has feet.
She looked out at the rolling purple-green waves of the sea once more. A stirring fluttered in her that she could not name, something deep and strange, to do with the sea and the sky. But deeper than the stirring was her hunger, and her need to find something that bore fruit or sold meat or baked bread. She folded up the stirring very carefully and put it away at the bottom of her mind. Tearing her eyes from the glittering waves, she began to walk.

After a moment, she prudently knelt down and gathered up a particularly jewel-encrusted sceptre.
You never know
, she thought,
I might have to ransom things, or bribe folk, or even buy something
. September was not prone to stealing, but neither was she entirely stupid. She began to walk up the beach, using the sceptre as a walking stick.

The going was not easy. Gold is very slippery to walk on and insists on sliding all over the place. She found that her bare foot was actually a bit more suited to the task than the shod one, as she could grasp at the gleaming ground with her toes. Nevertheless, every step set off a little cascade of coins. By afternoon, September thought she had probably stepped on the collective national worth of Finland. Just as this rather grown-up thought crossed her mind, a long, peculiar shadow fell across her path.

In Omaha, signposts are bright green with white writing, or occasionally white with black writing. September understood those signs, and all the things they pointed to. But the signpost before her now was made of pale, wind-bleached wood, and towered above her: a beautiful carved woman with flowers in her hair, a long goat’s tail winding around her legs, and a solemn expression on her sea-worn face. The deep gold light of the Fairyland sun played on her carefully whittled hair. She had wide, flaring wings, like September’s swimming trophy. The wooden woman had four arms, each outstretched in a different direction, pointing with authority. On the inside of her easterly arm, pointing backward in the direction September had come, someone had carved in deep, elegant letters:

TO LOSE YOUR WAY

On the northerly arm, pointing up to the tops of the cliffs, it said:

TO LOSE YOUR LIFE

On the southerly arm, pointing out to sea, it said:

TO LOSE YOUR MIND

And on the westerly arm, pointing up to a little headland and a dwindling of the golden beach, it said:

TO LOSE YOUR HEART

September bit her lip. She certainly didn’t want to lose her life, so the cliffs were right out, even if she thought she could climb them. Losing her mind was not too much better, and besides, there was nothing about with which to fashion a seagoing vessel, unless she wanted to sink promptly on a raft of gold. She had already lost her way, walking for miles in that direction, and anyway, if one’s way is lost one cannot get anywhere and she definitely wanted to get
somewhere
, even if she didn’t know where
somewhere
was. Somewhere mainly involved food and a bed and a fireplace, whereas Here had only Fairy gold and a roaring, cold sea.

Only the heart was left.

You and I, being grown-up and having lost our hearts at least twice or thrice along the way, might shut our eyes and cry out:
Not that way, child!
But as we have said, September was Somewhat Heartless, and felt herself reasonably safe on that road. Children always do.

Besides, she could see smoke off in the distance, wafting upward in thin curlicues.

September ran off towards the spiraling smoke. Behind her, the beautiful, four-armed woman who pointed the way closed her eyes and shook her birchwood head, rueful and knowing.

“Hello!” called September as she ran, tripping over the last of the gold bricks and sceptres. “Hello!”

Three figures hunched blackly around a large pot, a cauldron really, huge and iron and rough. They were dressed very finely, two women in high-collared, old-fashioned dresses with bustles, hair drawn back in thick chignons, and a young man in a lovely black suit with tails. But what September chiefly noticed was their hats.

Any child knows what a witch looks like. The warts are important, yes, the hooked nose, the cruel smile. But it’s the hat that cinches it: pointy and black with a wide rim. Plenty of people have warts and hooked noses and cruel smiles, but are not witches at all. Hats change everything. September knew this with all her being, deep in the place where she knew her own name, and that her mother would still love her even though she hadn’t waved goodbye. For one day her father had put on a hat with golden things on it and suddenly he hadn’t been her father anymore, he had been a soldier, and he had left. Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.

These hats were not Halloween witch-hats, made out of thin satin or construction paper and spangled with cheap glitter. They were leather, heavy and old, creased all over, their points slumped to one side, being too majestic and massive to be expected to stand up straight. Old, knotted silver buckles gleamed malevolently on their sides. The brims jutted out, sagging a little, the kind of brims you might expect cowboys to have, the kind that isn’t for show, but to keep out wind and rain and sun. The witches hunched a little under the weight of their hats.

“Hello?” September said, a little more politely--but only a little.

“What?” snapped one of the women, looking up from her muttering. She held a beaten black book in one hand, heavily dog-eared.

“I said ‘hello!’”

“Yes, that’s me.”

“What?” said September, confused.

“Are you very dull or a very deaf?” said the other woman, flinging an alarmed lizard into the cauldron.

“Oh!” cried the young man. “A little deaf child! How sweet! We should adopt her and teach her to write symphonies. She’ll be all the rage in town. I’ll buy her a powdered wig and a tricorn!”

“I’m not deaf,” said September, who was very cross when she was hungry. “Or dull. I said
hello
, and you said nothing sensible at all.”

“Manners, child,” said the woman with the book, her cruel witch’s smile curling up the corners of her lips. “If you haven’t got your manners, you might as well toss it all and become a witch.” She peered at the cauldron and after a moment’s disapproving stare, spat into it. “My name is Hello,” she continued as if nothing had happened. “So you see the confusion. This is my sister, Goodbye, and our husband, Manythanks.”

“He’s married to both of you? How odd!” Suddenly their eyes narrowed and they stood very straight. September hurried to correct herself. “I mean--my name is September. How do you do?”

“We do perfectly well,” said Goodbye coldly, pinching off one of the black pearl buttons at her throat and tossing it into the brew. “It all works out very nicely, really. My sister and I are very close, and very efficient, and when we were young it seemed like a great waste of time for us both to go through the tiresome nonsense of courtship and blushing behind curtains and love potions and marriage. So we went through it once, together. We estimate that we saved each other two full years of living. And besides, all witches must keep up a certain level of deviance in their personal lives, or we should be expelled from the union.”

Hello smiled as demurely as a witch can manage. “We chose Manythanks for his many virtues, and because, besides being a wonderful cook and a superb mathematician, he is also a wairwulf.”

“Really? A real werewolf? And you turn into a wolf when the moon is full?”

Manythanks grinned.

“No, dear,” said Hello, “a
wairwulf
.” She rolled her
r
a little, otherwise it seemed quite the same word to September. “It’s quite different. Twenty-seven days a month my love is a fine wolf, with a great powerful jaw and a thumping tail. During the full moon he becomes human, as he is now. My husband is the wolf, hers is the man.”

“That doesn’t seem quite fair,” said September. “She gets a lot more husband.”

“Oh, we agreed upon it long ago. I don’t like men to talk too much, and she doesn’t like them too much underfoot,” laughed Hello. Goodbye smiled at her husband with a deep fondness.

“Aren’t you…afraid of the wolf?” asked September, who secretly felt she might get over such fear, if the wolf would love her and guard her and not get mud on the covers.

“I’m quite civilized, I promise,” smiled Manythanks. “Wairwulves are cultured. We have choirs and charity races and rotary clubs. It’s when we’re human that you must take care.”

“Now what is it you want, child? As you can see, we’re quite busy.” Goodbye sniffed deeply at the pot.

Be bold
, thought September.
An ill-tempered child should be bold.
“I…I hoped you might have something for me to eat. I’ve only just gotten here and…well, I’m not lost, because I haven’t any idea where to go that I might get lost on the way to.” Even to September that did not sound quite right. “I’d
like
to get lost, because then I’d know where I was going, you see. But the Green Wind wasn’t terribly clear about what to do once I got here, only what not to do, so getting lost would be making very good headway, all things considered. But I don’t know where I am and the beach was full of garbage and then it wasn’t--”