The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home (27 page)

“Salt!” she exclaimed. And then understood. “Oh … oh no. I thought we'd only been gone a few hours! But you said … you said we were under the sea all night and into the next afternoon. I didn't have my breakfast! I didn't eat my flapjacks or my cordial! This is the Greatvole of Black Salt Cavern and she's woken from her thousand-year slumber!”

“My name is Brunhilda,” the Greatvole rumbled, like continents crashing together. “If you wouldn't mind shifting, I've got a nerve just there, and you're pinching it.”

They scrambled to move out of their little shallow between two shoulder blades, farther up so they nestled against the nape of her neck. The ride was much rougher up there. September clung on desperately as the Greatvole stretched her long-sleepy muscles.

“Are you … are you going to devour the world and chew on its bones?” Ell asked carefully.

The Greatvole snorted. The roofs of Voleworld's taverns and inns fluttered with the force of her breath. “Not today, if that's all right by you. Worlds give me heartburn. They stick in the gullet something fierce. But thank you for assuming the worst, it's not at all painful to be wakened by ignorant prejudices!”

“I'm sorry! It's only that I read all about you when I was a hatchling. You start with
G
! And all the encyclopedias in my father's stacks agree that you nearly destroyed Fairyland with your terrible digging and chewing and tunneling, until the Rex Tyrannosaur hit you over the head with a mountain and sent the honeybees of Wallowdream to sting you to sleep.”

“Such a lot of fuss over a few earthquakes! Nobody talks about how beautiful my new mountain ranges looked, or the new ski resort opportunities I opened up every time I broke the surface and shoved up fresh slopes, or how nicely a bottomless chasm goes with any city, no matter the style. Or all the jewels and gold I spat out when I got done chewing through a desert! Or the absolute
fact
that without me, Fairyland would still be a big flat boring nix and naught full of crabgrass and dust, fit for nothing but lawn chairs! I tunneled out everything here! S'why they call it Voleworld and not Rabbitworld or Meerkatworld. Every time you relax in a lovely valley or tightrope between two towering crags, you ought to thank your lucky geography for Brunhilda the Greatvole! But no! Instead, they all whined and bawled like a bunch of babies because good design takes risks. Because I erased a few rough drafts when anyone could see farming villages just don't
go
with tundra ecosystems! Let me be a lesson to you, kiddies—keep your dreams small. Build your own house and they'll praise you staircase to windows. Build your own world and you'll get all the thanks a mouse gives a snake. So yes, then Thrum the Rex Tyrannosaur sent all those bees after me and I'm sure he had a grand old party with all his Uptop friends, telling vicious vole jokes and congratulating themselves on getting a spanking-new topography for the bargain price of a vole's pride. Maybe he's still lording it on his Cretaceous Throne, guzzling bone-beer and admiring the swanky cave I made for him.”

September frowned. All the while the Greatvole had been complaining, she'd been carefully, quietly fetching her flapjacks and cordial from their luggage. She paused with flask and plate in hand. “I don't think so,” she said slowly. Whatever Thrum was doing at that moment, she felt sure it had nothing to do with bone-beer. “You've been asleep for a thousand years.” It seemed safer on the whole not to mention to a resentful behemoth that Thrum had come back from the dead along with everyone else and was therefore huntable and findable, so long as he had not had any dueling mishaps yet.

“Perhaps,” September said, hoping to sound both polite and commanding, “you might take us to the Worsted Wood? We need to move quickly, or I wouldn't ask. You seem terribly fast and strong. If you took us under the ground instead of over it, we might make it in time to win the Cantankerous Derby.”

The Greatvole of Black Salt Cavern slowed and stopped. This took many miles, for anything as large as a Greatvole cannot go from top volespeed to zero in less than seven leagues.

“Oh,” Brunhilda said, her voice clogged up with sorrow. “A thousand years? Why didn't anyone wake me? I suppose erosion will have spoiled my best work by now. The sea and the wind and the heat and the snow will have taken the edges off my crags and the colors off my canyons. A thousand years is a long time to go without basic maintenance. I meant to keep it all tidy and fresh, once I'd finished. I meant to
finish
.”

September did not think. She acted, and thought about it later, and had a little quiver, because the Greatvole could have eaten her and everyone she loved and asked for dessert. She tapped Ell's knee. The Wyverary flew her gently down from the skull of the Greatvole, with Blunderbuss and Saturday following behind. She steadied her heart and strode up to the salt-jeweled beast's huge face.
You can stop up hurts, if you are Queen,
she thought, and her heart beat madly in her chest.

“Brunhilda, Greatvole of Black Salt Cavern, I am September, the Engineer. Which is to say, Queen of Fairyland and all Her Kingdoms. It is my duty as Queen to send you right back to sleep with no supper. In fact, I am the only ruler of Fairyland in a thousand years to fail to keep you conked out. And I have to get you back to bed, because otherwise you're going to start erasing villages again, and I daresay villages like to stay where they're put.”

The Greatvole started to growl again, but September held up her hands. Her eyes shone with the strange feeling of knowing the right thing to do. If she'd only known it, she looked very like a certain Changeling troll had done on a playground in Chicago, talking to a boy who wanted very much to hit him.

“Brunhilda,
thank you,
” September said, and into her voice she put all the warmth she'd ever heard from her mother and her father and Ell and Saturday and Aunt Margaret and Aubergine and the Whelk of the Moon. “Fairyland is the most beautiful place anyone could want. I love it awfully. I love the Candelabra Desert and the Worsted Wood and the Perverse and Perilous Sea and every island in it. I love the Barleybroom and Pandemonium and the way you can follow a mountain road all the way to the Moon. I came across the whole universe just to see it. Most of the time, it's so wonderful, it stops me missing my home and my family and everything I ever loved before I met Fairyland. Most of the time. “

“I made that mountain,” the Greatvole said shyly. “It was so hard to get the curls of her hair right.”

“I know you did.” September smiled, though she didn't know that mountain had curly hair, for she'd never seen it from far off, only from its peak. “You did so well. But just now, Fairyland is in the middle of a rather sprawling mess, and if you start fixing up your work like I know you want to, no one will understand that you're only trying to make it perfect. They'll send the bees after you again. Now, I don't want to put you to sleep. I hate the taste of these dry flapjacks anyhow. But I shall have to unless you do as I ask.”

The Greatvole gnawed on a bit of tunnel and waited.

“Let Fairyland stay. Brunhilda, it
is
finished. It's finished and wonderful and none of us want it any different. Even the bits that the sea and the wind and a lot of revolutions have worn off and broken off and blown off—Fairyland wouldn't be quite as lovely without her broken bits. So don't sleep—just rest. Enjoy some bone-beer of your own. And when this is all done I promise to call down to Voleworld and you can come up and start a new geography in some place that hasn't got a village yet. We'll pick it out together. No bees, no bears, no one to tell you what fjord to put where. And before you rest, take us where we need to go, so that I can keep my crown and my promise.”

The Greatvole gnawed some more.

“Fine. But I hate fjords. Snap off one of my whiskers—the smallest one you can find or you won't be able to fit your little hands around it. Take it and when you want me, when it's time for my triumphant new archipelago … or maybe a chain of volcanoes … well, just stick it in the ground and call my name.”

The whisker was as long as a black crystal sword in September's hand. She slid it into a sudden sheath in the Watchful Dress and looked at a clutch of dark tunnel entrances in the wall of Voleworld. The Greatvole bored happily through the earth up ahead of them, leaving them to their choice. Each had a neat wooden hatch with large, well-made words burned into it:

TO WIN THE DAY

TO WIN THE HAND

TO WIN AGAINST ODDS

TO WIN THE WAR

September did not have to think twice.

 

INTERLUDE

T
HE
H
OURGLASS
W
ASTE

In Which Lions Attack, Songs Are Sung in French, and Everyone Misses Something Deathly Important, Except for the Dog

It is always difficult to believe that while we are having our own adventures, others are behaving with just as much derring-do and flash and swashing of the buckles as we. It is especially hard for children to believe that their parents might be off performing their own astonishing feats of Grown-Upedness whilst their little ones are battling ferocious octopi under the sea. But it is true. The Land of Parents is strange and full of peril.

September's family sped through Fairyland on a sleigh drawn by six hippopotami named for her grandfather's liquor cabinet. Aunt Margaret's hippos were much faster than the kind you and I have seen in the zoo. They are much faster than cheetahs or hawks, and a bit slower than the newest and most modern of trains. They flew through the Inksop Marshes and the Candelabra Desert, through the Worsted Wood and the Springtime Quarter where the Marquess had slept for years. They spent a night in the shadow of the Peppercorn Pyramids. Susan Jane made a respectable campfire out of a few of the daggers from fallen redcroak branches, and a bit of black, crumbled pyramid. They sang one another songs and Fenris howled, for he longed to be included. Owen sang them a lovely French song he had learned at the front, though it made him sad and Susan Jane had to hold him tight until he fell asleep.

In the night, they were menaced by two blue lions, grown thin and rangy without anyone to feed them. September's father socked one in the jaw. September's mother flung one of the daggers she'd squirreled away from the dagger-tree at the other's shoulder. But when the lions saw Aunt Margaret, they whined and shook their heads and backed away, their blue tongues lolling.

“Madame Pearl,” they whispered in terror, and bolted back across the meadow.

“Is that what they call you here?” Susan Jane said as they tried to go back to sleep.

“Yes.
Margaret
means ‘Pearl' in Greek, you know. I thought it sounded very romantic. And at the time, I was living on the Moon, the great big Pearl in the sky.”

“It must be nice to give yourself a fancy new name,” September's mother yawned. “I always thought I could do with something grander than Susan.”

*   *   *

In the morning, the galloping liquor cabinet pulled them past Flegethon City where the ifrits live and burn. When the suburban flames died out, they found themselves in a vast, pale, barren wilderness. The land thirsted, the stones were tall and thin, the color of snow. The air grew hot and still and heavy all round. And everywhere they saw hourglasses filled with sands of darkest red and green and blue and violet—some tiny, wedged between boulders, some so huge that a mountaineer might think them a proper challenge. Greenwich Mean Time was born here, in the Hourglass Waste. Margaret seemed suddenly very sullen and sour. She begged her hippos to run faster.
Over the next hill there's water and glowerwheat, my loves, I promise!

Soon enough they did top the next hill and down into a valley full of wheat with little gas flames burning at their tips. The sun began to set, turning the sky a wild scarlet. Susan Jane and Owen looked up at Fairyland's Moons rising in the east.
One's so much smaller than the other,
September's father thought.
How strange!

As they left the Hourglass Waste behind them, a gust of wind billowed through two chalky crags. An hourglass sloshing with pomegranate-red sand lay snugly between them, half buried in the white dust of the Waste. The breeze blew the dust away from the glass and the wood and the crags, up and into the sunset and over the glowerwheat.

The hourglass had a brass plaque on it. Neither Margaret nor September's parents nor the hippopotami saw it. Fenris did, but he could not tell anyone, though he yipped valiantly. The plaque read:

SEPTEMBER MORNING BELL

And its sand had nearly run out.

 

CHAPTER XV

T
HE
B
RAVE
AND
THE
B
ONKERS