The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

CHAPTER XI
AEROPOSTE

In Which September Discovers a Friend in the Circus, Reads a Number of Hands, Feet, and Faces, Tucks Into a Most Literate Lunch, and Hears a Perfectly Practiced Tale

A-Through-L swooped and soared down the gentle slopes of Almanack. September clung tight to his back. She had ridden him before-but then he’d walked, his bumpy, two-legged chicken-gait. His wings had been chained down horribly. And in Fairyland-Below she had flown as a Wyvern herself before turning back into a girl mid-flight. But this was the first time she and Ell had flown together. Laughter and tears and shouting got jumbled up on the way to her mouth and tried to come out all at once. A Wyvern was meant for flying-how clear that was now! She could feel delicate muscles under his skin moving gracefully, tipping into the air and dipping under it as if they were such good friends.

Down below, someone else was flying. Many someones-the lovely folded-paper trapeze artists and acrobats and elephants of the Stationary Circus, zooming and twirling and wheeling madly over their wide, boisterous ring. And in their midst, darting between them and leaping among them, was a someone with long black hair in a topknot and flowing tattoos on his back.

Someone blue.

Saturday had joined the circus.

September could not take her eyes away as they circled down. How could she not have seen him before? Saturday spun from the trapezes of the Stationary Circus, catching the slim arms of a newspaper girl, stretching out his long blue body in the rich peacock light of Almanack, his tattoos gleaming, his topknot fluttering behind him. An illustrated boy caught him by the ankles and tossed him up into a gorgeous arc; Saturday bent in half and touched his toes in the air, hanging perfectly still, longer than anyone should be able to hang. Where the tips of his fingers touched the tips of his feet, a blossom of dark seawater gurgled into life and then fell down to the ring below as rain. The Marid snapped flat, snatched the next bar as it came swinging toward him, and came to rest on a high platform, landing on one foot and balancing a sudden huge black pearl on his nose like a seal. He flipped his head back, caught the gem in his mouth, and blew a ball of glittering sea foam into the air like a smoke ring. The roustabouts down in the empty stands applauded with great, strong dictionary-hands. It was only a practice-but what a practice! The Marid smiled-and September had never seen a smile like that on the face of her shy, uncertain friend. His face blazed turquoise with exertion and excitement and exultation. He knew his own strength and it surged through him like a blue tide. He waved at the ringmaster, whose broad body was made of vivid postage stamps folded every which way. She blew Saturday a peony; he caught the deep orange flower with a quick blue hand. He wore long silken trousers the color of tarnished silver with whorls and loops of spangled writing running round his legs and no shirt at all. His muscles moved under that familiar blue skin, lean and long and lithe.

He was beautiful. He had always been beautiful, but now his beauty seemed to collide with September all at once and altogether. Her face burned suddenly. Had A-Through-L not borne her up, she might have staggered. He was beautiful and he was here.

“Just look at our boy,” Ell crowed. “It’s a new world-everyone flies!”

Then Saturday saw September; his hand went to his mouth in shock. His papery comrades followed his gaze; their faces opened up along creases and folds that said: Oh, the stories we’ve heard about this one round the old pulp-fire! But then Saturday was waving madly and September was calling his name and an overeager memorandum-lion opened his pink-paper mouth to roar, just to be a part of whatever was going on up there. But the roar did not last. The lion bit his tongue and yelped-a jet of indigo flame erupted joyously from Ell’s mouth once more, singeing the rooftops hanging down like green bats above them. The folk of the Stationary Circus suddenly creased and shot downward, away from the dripping flame and Ell’s apologies, coming as thick and fast as his fire. The mother-of-pearl boasted a wonderful resilience. A few furry, scaled faces popped out of windows to glare and holler, but they were whole and unburnt, and so was the newspaper girl and the illustrated boy, standing on a second, lower platform and looking up at them darkly.

The Wyverary squeezed in so quickly September fell a little as he shrunk beneath her. He scrunched up into a red body no bigger than a large and galumphing elephant. This was the second time in such a short space-worry racketed around September’s heart. But how can we keep him from getting delighted or scared? thought September desperately. Especially now we’re together again and stirring things are bound to happen? No one can do that! She found it quite easy to forget how hard she’d tried to do it herself in those last months, practicing her grown-up behaviors. But she could not hold on to her fear for Ell-finding Saturday blew all the worry from her mind like dust. They crowded together onto the platform-that the three of them could fit at all ought to have sounded alarms, but hardly anyone can measure spatial relationships when their farthest and dearest are close around.

“Oh, September!” Saturday cried, and lifted his arms to hug her-but he stopped, shyly, looking to her to see if it was all right. September finished the hug herself, throwing her arms around her Marid-hers, her very own, and not his shadow, who had done all sorts of things without asking before or after. Saturday was taller than she remembered, terribly lean and strong, but his smell was the same: the endless cold sea and dark stones. “I’m so glad I found you first!” he whispered.

“What do you mean?” September said into his shoulder. She pulled away and looked at him as though she meant to do a lifetime’s looking all in one long gaze.

But Saturday flushed dark with embarrassment and shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now,” he said with a careful laugh that he meant to sound careless. He turned to Ell instead, who hung his still-huge head in shame.

“Everyone’s all right, aren’t they?” Ell said bashfully. “Say it’s so! I couldn’t help it, I was so happy, to have you both in one place! The happiness gets so hot and big inside me these days it just comes out and I feel like all of me will blow apart! I don’t know how the Dragons do it, having this fire in your mouth all the time.”

“Perhaps you ought to get out into the open air where there’s no roof to blow off,” Saturday said with a sideways smile. “Everyone is fine, though I think the lion has lost a tooth to scorch.”

Ell could not meet the lion’s eye. He nudged them both with his head just exactly like a cat in need of petting. September and Saturday obliged, each talking over the other as though all the time in the world was not enough to say all they wished to. Of course, it was not and could never be. The three of them had not had more than a moment together since that day when Saturday had wished them all well and whole and into that lovely field of flowers where September had left Fairyland for the first time. She had known their shadows, in Fairyland-Below, but her friends, in the flesh and in the world-but so much time had passed. So much had happened. September’s heart puffed up like a kernel of corn, awfully full of excitement and memory and the peculiar jangly, jittery sort of contentment that comes when you suddenly get what you’ve wanted for so long that you forgot what it was like to think about anything but wanting it. And in the jangle and jitter it all came tumbling out: the Yeti, the inner edge of the moon, the Blue Wind and Aroostook and the Stethoscope and the moonquakes and where they were going, which was out and over, and would he come?

Of course he would come.

“But first come down,” Saturday said, holding September’s hands as tight as he could, though he was very careful not to crush her fingers. “Sit still a moment. There’s so much I want to show you! You must be so hungry, if you’ve only just gotten here. I know…” he flushed a little, blue against blue, “I know how hungry you get, when you are adventuring.”

In long, even circles, A-Though-L bore them down from the high trapeze platforms to the main ring. The ring, paved with thick, glossy postcards, gleamed up at them, showing a thatch of beach umbrellas and snowy peaks and the streets of Pandemonium and the whitewater rum rivers of Parthalia and the magicians’ cafes of Buyan and a thousand versions of the great crescent Moon of Fairyland, in every season and every sort of weather. Where the postcards creased together, words shouted and beckoned: VISIT! COME! WISH! HERE!

The ringmaster moved to meet them, but before she could get past the greeting-card horses tossing their confetti-manes in the air, a boy and a girl dashed toward them at full speed, hardly waiting until they’d climbed down from the Wyvern’s back to barrel into September and Saturday, wrapping them both up in their paper arms.

“Oh, forgive us, of course we don’t know you yet,” said the boy, whose long, tall body was covered in blocks of text, little birthmarks of fourteen lines each. He was made of sonnets, from head to toe. His hair was a flutter of motley ribbon marks. An intricate origami looked September in the eye, folded and smoothed and peaked into a friendly, narrow face.

“But we feel as though we do!” cried the girl, whose body was the warm, expensive gold of old letters, an elegant calligraphy covering every inch of her round, excited cheeks, her acrobat’s costume, her long, red, sealing-wax hair, the postmarks like freckles on her shoulders. September could make out a number of addresses and signatures, words like Dearest, Darling, Yours Forever, Heart of My Heart: love letters, woven together to make a girl. “I’m Valentine,” she said, holding out her angular hand.

“I’m Pentameter,” said the sonnet boy. “We’re them.” Both Valentine and Pentameter pointed their thumbs over their shoulders at a vivid sign, nailed to the pole that hoisted up the trapeze platforms. In deep scarlet it read: AEROPOSTE: WINGED WORDS AND FLIGHTS OF FANCY! Small golden wings flapped at the edges of the letters, the tail of the Y, the bar of the T.

Valentine pressed September’s hand to her heart, which read: My dearest Robert, henceforward I am yours for everything. “We feel as though we know you because Saturday talks about you whenever he’s not breathing, eating, or sleeping. And sometimes he’ll make an exception for all three!”

Pentameter grinned. Silky, blackly inked words formed his top lip: For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings. The cursive line of his bottom, smiling lip curved to finish the couplet: That then I scorn to change my state with kings. “The contortionists call him Saturday-When-September-Comes-Back!” he said with a laugh that was pleasant and prodding all at once.

The Marid stared at his feet as though he could burn a hole in the ground and be swallowed up by it. Poor Saturday. There is nothing like a friend to blurt out what we would most like to keep hidden.

September laughed a little. She tried to make it sound light and happy, as though it were all over now and how funny it was, when you think about it, that simply not having another person by you could hurt so. But it did not come out quite right; there was a heaviness in her laughing like ice at the bottom of a glass. She still missed Saturday, yet he was standing right beside her! Missing him had become a part of her, like a hard, dark bone, and she needed so much more than a few words to let it go. In all this while, she had spent more time missing Saturday than seeing him.

Valentine pressed on. “Though he certainly never mentioned you being a Criminal. How dashing!” September started to argue; she even pulled off her cap. All her dark hair came tumbling out and it did feel nice to take off some part of those black silks.

“Oh don’t worry,” said Pentameter with his rough, kind voice. “We’re a circus. We’re used to rogues and charlatans and hooligans and rascals! They’re our favorite sorts of people!”

In the midst of the ring, as though it were an act, part of the circus about to start, four Lunaphants busied their long trunks with setting up a banquet table. Now that September stood on the ground and could see them much more clearly than while hanging upside-down to the back of a Taxicrab, she was struck quiet by the creatures. As tall and strong and broad as a usual elephant, if a girl from Omaha could ever think of an elephant as usual, they gleamed silvery and white and twilit blue. Their bodies were costly stationary, letterheads from offices and writing paper meant for folk you wanted to impress most. Their trunks, which they used more gracefully than September could use her own hands, were twisted ropes of scratch paper, cluttered with crossed-out equations, bits of verse, telephone numbers, and the scribbles people make when testing a pen to see if it works. The glass inkwells of their eyes dripped, now and again, navy-colored tears onto the circus ring. They floated in the air without effort, nimble as sparrows-and so September could see, when she looked up, the bottoms of their feet, which each bore a miniature model of the Moon, every crater and mountain exact and exquisite.

When the Lunaphants finished with the furniture, they trumpeted all together. A shower of envelopes popped into the air between them, each sealed with a different thick wax blot. They drifted to the table and landed perfectly, one at each place set for September, Saturday, A-Through-L, Valentine, and Pentameter. Saturday and the acrobats fell to immediately, popping the seals on their post. Like lifting the silver dome on a dish in a fine restaurant, dishes appeared steaming and fragrant. September looked at her own plate. Her envelope looked up at her with an orange seal with a little wrench stamped in the circle of wax. She slid her finger under it and with a satisfyingly thick cracking noise her dish filled with a rich pie-whose crust was a riot of writing, crossed-out, rewritten, X’d out once more, written a third time, as if by a poet who could not quite get his verse to obey him, no matter how he tried, could not find the perfect phrase. The only line left unscratched was: Turn, Beatrice, O turn your holy eyes upon your faithful one… September’s stomach announced that it had no intention of turning down a meal just because someone had done their homework on it. She stuck her fork into the center of the O. Black, purple, and blue ink gurgled out, thick with pen-nibs, typewriter keys, and blocks of moveable type from some ancient printing press.

“I am sure to break my teeth!” she exclaimed. Saturday had already dug into his own pie. A-Through-L shrugged and bit off the whole crust of his, slurping up the filling with relish.

“Just try it,” he coaxed, licking a bit of ink-sauce off of his blue lip.

September did not take much comfort-she had seen the Marid chew seastones to dust. But all the same, she lifted a forkful of key and type into her mouth, an exclamation point and a Gothic letter H.

They burst against her teeth like soft grapes and summer cherries, savory and sweet, slippery and rich, the crust buttery and smooth, like a shepherd’s pie baked full of lamb and chocolate and nutmeggy apples. Without quite meaning to, September let out a little cry of deliciousness. She was so hungry! Aroostook had had her lunch, but September had eaten no more than a hard butterscotch since this morning-could it really be only this morning she had set out across the fields to mend the old fence? She felt Ballast Downbound’s orange fizz in her pocket and reached for it, for nothing could taste better with any sort of food than orange fizz, as far as she was concerned. But Saturday popped the top off of a squat little poster-tube and produced a pretty newsprint goblet of fine brown ink. This time, September did not hesitate, but drank deeply. The taste of walnuts and cream and cinnamon and-could it be? Yes! Moonkins! The lovely glowing fruits the Hreinn grew in the Glass Forest, distilled down into a thick brew. A little ribbon of something like the brandy her parents kept for special occasions wriggled through the other flavors. This must be what the Blue Wind meant when she waxed about the cocktails on the Moon! But it did not make September feel dizzy, no matter the ribbon of brandy, only full and strong and awake.

“Have you really joined the circus, Saturday?” she asked between wolfish, huge bites.

The Marid flushed with pride. Had she ever noticed how pretty he got when he did that? Like foam cresting on the deep sea.

“When I first came to the Moon I had no idea what to do with myself,” he said ruefully. “Ell had his Library and it kept him so busy. Some days I would sit very quietly in the empty half of the Lopside and read the lonely books on those shelves so they wouldn’t feel neglected. But, oh, September! I am a child of the sea! I cannot stay in one place for long without stretching and swelling and dancing and surging and crashing and rolling. I walked over all of Almanack, never taking the same path twice. It was very lonely.” Saturday lowered his eyes; he could not quite say it while September looked so intently at him. “How often I wished you were there so that I could point things out to you and hear what you thought of them. Who would you have bet on at the capricorn races? Would you have liked the rice cakes the giant rabbits whack out with their silver mallets? Would you laugh at the moonmummers in the amphitheater near my little house?”

“You have a little house?” Suddenly Saturday seemed so much older than she, though she knew he was not, not really. To have one’s own little house and walk alone every night through such a great city! But Saturday went on in a rush, hardly hearing her.

“And I would come and watch the Stationary Circus. Not the performances-I came to watch them practice. They do such beautiful shows, but what I liked was to see them working out their routines, making mistakes sometimes, trying different costumes, different combinations of players and animals, different steps and leaps and flips and grips. Practice seemed like a very alive thing to me. I thought often of how much I would like to practice something like that, to shape it bit by bit, every day, to be so good at moving and seeming that I could change just a tiny turn of my toe and have it become something new, from a comedic tumble to a tragic fall, from a leap of faith to a twist ending, from a nosedive to lifted spirits. Because you would take that with you, you know?” Saturday looked up to see if she understood him. “You couldn’t help it, if you’d practiced enough. Your body would remember, like how a piano player drums her fingers on her leg in the pattern of her favorite song without even noticing. You’d take it with you into everyday doing and walking and singing and reading in the Library and dreaming and sleeping. Every time you moved or seemed it would mean something, the way it means something in the circus, when you’re performing and everyone below you is gasping and clapping and covering their eyes but still peeking through their fingers. Even the littlest turn of your toe.” He took a deep breath. September had never seen him so excited.

Pentameter tweaked Saturday’s topknot gently. “He thought we wouldn’t want him because he’s flesh and bone.”

“But we’re open minded,” chirped Valentine, giving his knee a sisterly punch. September could not help reading her soft brown cheek, though she could not tell if this might be rude or not. Sweet and incomparable Josephine, what an extraordinary influence you have over my heart… “After all, he comes from the sea and the best ink comes from cuttlefish, so there’s a family connection.”

September marveled at how easy they were together. Saturday didn’t blush at all when they jostled him.

“I did have to practice awfully hard.”

“Rubbish!” said Valentine, chewing on a fat fountain pen that snapped off when she bit down, like a ripe carrot. “He did a Quad Folio Fold with a Double Dogear on his first day!”

Pentameter slid a second envelope toward A-Through-L, whose rumbling stomach, being so much bigger than any of theirs, announced a need for a second course. On his strong brown hand September read: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, when a new planet swims into his ken…the rest vanished around the curve of his thumb. “You are wickedly heavy, though, brother. We had to bench press the Gunpowder Ghouls-in full gear!-every night just to work up to catching your big blue dumbbells in mid-air!”

“I learned to make myself lighter,” Saturday laughed. “Seawater can be as light as spray and heavy as whales. And September, I did, I did find I was good at it. I practiced just the way I’d wanted to. Until then, the only thing…” he cleared his throat. It sounded like a wave breaking on sand. “…the only thing I’d practiced so much was what I’d say to you, when I saw you again.” The Marid hurried on. “Though in the end I am better at Dogearing than remembering speeches, no matter how many times I’ve said them to myself! And, well, the way you can look at a surging ocean and feel everything from deep sorrow to bubbling delight to a giggling urge to jump right in and splash about-when people look at me, they feel those things, and I practiced and practiced until I could change my smile by half a quirk and change one feeling to the other. When I am on the trapeze, in the air, people look at me and they see me, they really see me, and they cheer like I’ve done something specially for them.” The Marid looked up at the sparkling apparatus above them. “Up there, I am as far from a cage as it is possible to be.”

September’s eyes filled with tears. She remembered the first time she saw him, cramped and bent and broken in the Marquess’s cruel lobster cage, penned in and forgotten. She shook her head; her tears flew aside.

“I am happy for you,” she said as brightly as she could. And she was, it was not a lie. But even he, even poor beautiful Saturday knew what he could be and do in the world. Ell had his Library, the Sibyl had had her door, Ballast had her ships-and September, still, was only herself, in the audience watching Saturday moving and seeming. “Back home everyone is always asking ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ As if everyone is a Pooka and you can just change, from a girl or a boy into something else, a griffin or an armchair or a shark! But you have, you’ve changed into…into a flight of fancy, like the sign says. A circus man.” And it was the first time she had thought of the word man in connection to Saturday.

Saturday looked at her strangely. His dark eyes shone. “No, no, I haven’t. I’m still Saturday. A slightly more airborne Saturday is all! And I am going with you, of course I am going with you! That’s what understudies are for! September, I have waited and waited for you! If you say we must go and see about a Yeti, well, that is what I want most in the world.”

Valentine and Pentameter looked at each other. They grinned identical grins. Together, they leaned into Saturday and kissed him on each cheek, squeezed his arms, and dashed away as quickly as they’d come running over the ring to meet them. They scurried up the little footholds on the trapeze poles, nimble as cats. On one of Valentine’s bare feet the dedication My Dearest Pickle-flashed. One the other: My Own Boy-Pentameter’s heels announced joyfully: I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.

When they reached their positions, the two of them nodded to each other, and then down to Saturday and September. They swung out on their bars and as they did, their bodies opened up-but not into paper airplanes this time. Triangles of paper opened and closed along their limbs so that when Valentine and Pentameter met, grasping wrists or ankles or under the shoulders, when they somersaulted together or dropped so fast even Saturday gasped, new words formed from the fragments of letters and sonnets printed upon their bodies. As Aeroposte danced above them, September read the message they acrobaticked into being:

He missed you

like a fish in a bowl

misses the open sea.

As Ell flew toward the mouth of Almanack, Saturday holding onto her waist and Ell humming beneath them, September opened her mouth to talk. Several times she stopped herself. She had gotten so used to not saying what was important that she could not quite get the habit going again. The words would not come out. Perhaps she did not even know the words she wanted. I missed you, too, seemed such a little name to put on the bigness of the feeling inside her.

Saturday squeezed her hand. Blushing furiously, her heart battering at her bones, September leaned over and kissed him. It was a quick kiss, as though speeding through to the other side of it would make other kisses easier. When she pulled away, the Marid’s eyes shone.

Ell laughed a big, rumbling, beastly laugh. He started to turn a loop-de-loop, so joyful was he. Remembering his passengers, he haroomed instead. “Next stop: Orrery, City of Lenses! Traveling by Wyverary cannot be beat!”

September suddenly realized something. “But Ell, Orrery begins with O! How can you know so much about it?”

The Wyverary soared high, his neck stretching into a long red ribbon, full of words and pies and relief and flying.

“I’m growing up!” he cried.