“Car begins with C, so I shall be thrilled to meet it!” And then he lowered his head like a puppy playing, smiling a secret smile of I know something you don’t know. “But September,” he purred, “don’t you think we ought to go and collect Saturday first?”
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?