“There’s a Pluto here? We have a Pluto in my world!” September exclaimed.
“Oh, every place has a Pluto! It’s where a universe keeps the polar bears and last year’s pickled entropy and the spare gravity. You need a Pluto or you’re hardly a universe at all. Plutos teach lessons. A lesson is like a time-traveling argument. Because, you see, you can’t argue until you’ve had the lesson or else you’re just squabbling with your own ignorance. But a lesson is really just the result of arguments other people had ages ago! You have to sit still and pay attention and pantomime their arguments over again until you’re so sick of their prattle that you pipe up to have your own. You can’t learn anything without arguing.”
“What does Fairyland’s Pluto teach?”
“That’s for it to teach and me not to step on its toes. I could tell you, but you won’t learn it, because you haven’t been to Pluto and you haven’t fought the ice-ostriches and you haven’t even ridden the Undercamel until he collapses in a heap of his own dreamsweat so it’ll be just words to you. They’ll only mean themselves.”
“But who knows if I’ll ever get to Pluto?” September countered. “I’d bet the state of Nebraska it’ll never happen in my world, and I don’t get much choosing in where I go in Fairyland!”
Candlestick stopped in her tracks, her hooves squishing into a crackling electric mud.
“That’s a fair point, girl. But it doesn’t sit right. The Undercamel would spit in my eye and I’d never stop weeping. I shall give you half of it-the other half you’ll have to race down proper. Very well! Here is the great lesson of Pluto: What others call you, you become.” The Buraq’s eyes danced with mirth. “Very helpful indeed! I hope you feel edified.”
They continued on through the trees. September thought on this as hard as she could, but without an ice-ostrich, she supposed, it was rather hopeless.
“You do love to distract me!” said Candlestick. “I was saying that I went to Pluto to find the Sajada, which is a secret place known only to that very Undercamel, an extremely ill-tempered individual with great heaps of black fur and frozen humps and eyes like a slot machine and big hooves made all of terrible iron nails that bleed him even though a fellow can hardly get away from his own feet. Also he spits. And not like you spit or I do. He spits sorrow. One glob and you’ll never get off your knees again. You’ll weep until there’s no water left in you, just another mummy blowing around the plains of Pluto like a tumbleweed.”
“That’s dreadful!” cried Saturday.
“That’s sort of the point of an Undercamel,” agreed the Buraq. Her peacock tail shimmered in the stormlight. “Well, I’m sworn not to tell you the trick of doing it but you have to ride him till he breaks. Only then will he spit out his secret. I’m hardly equipped for dressage, having no arms and far too many legs, but I drove him seven times around Pluto, pole to pole, chasing his miserable tufted tail and dodging his bubbling green spit until he fell down half-dead. And I bent down to his slavering undermouth and he told me this: The Sajada is a planet, too, all covered with a mosaic of every possible color and a few that got kicked out of the family for being too wild and unruly. The mosaic makes the most radiant pictures, so many you can never see them all. The Sajada rises up from the tiles, a thousand thousand domes stuck over with stars like pincushions. And under every little pebble of the mosaic is somebody’s fate. No place more holy in the heavens. And do you know what I did then?”
“No,” breathed A-Through-L, who had quite forgotten his own trouble in the Buraq’s tale.
“I laughed. I laughed like the whole world was a joke and I was the punchline. And the Undercamel did not appreciate my sense of humor, I can tell you. I laughed because I knew just where it was. I knew a planet with a mosaic exactly like that.”
“Where?” asked the Wyverary eagerly.
“Well, not to put too fine a point on it,” Candlestick said, “but here.”
They stumbled out into a clearing in the Lightning Jungle. The sharp whip of ozone snapped at their noses. Lightning sprouts buzzed and tingled all in a ring round a thousand thousand domes like a pincushion-and quite the size of a pincushion, too. The Sajada spread out before them, the domes gorgeous and ornate and no bigger than toadstools. Crescent moons pronged up from their tips just like the one on Candlestick’s diadem. Little courtyards and fountains and walkways dotted the meadow between the domes. The fountains made a tiny trickling sound like the lightest rain. The domes flashed in cascading patterns, flickering pale colors, bright and dark, bright and dark.
Candlestick looked over it with pride. “I grew up on the Moon. If I don’t know my own mother I don’t know anything.” She kicked at a tuft of charcoal sod with her pale hoof, digging deep into it, pushing down and in and scrabbling against the soil. It popped and steamed like boiling cake. The Buraq finally flipped up the divot-and underneath it gleamed a mosaic pattern of gems. “Oh, it’s thin here. You’d have to dig down ages most everywhere else. Scientists used to come up here all the time trying to suss out the secrets of the Moon, but I kept them away. The Fairies never cared. Fairies don’t have fates, you know. I’ve heard it told that they stripped them off, eons and eons ago, like winter jackets. No one tells a Fairy what to do! Held a bonfire in the place that became Pandemonium, and if you looked too close at the pyre, you could catch one of them, one of the fey fates. What a dangerous day that was! A glow worm became Queen of Fairyland, though she died within the week, poor, short-lived creatures. One of the hillside towns caught the reflection of the flames in the windows of their houses and their baths and their chocolate shops and their water mills and their museums and the buildings revolted, hauling off to the long plains to live together and love each other and dance at the full moon with their foundations hitched up like skirts and have heaps of little baby amphitheaters and post offices. But everyone else, everybody else’s fates are here, under the skin of the Moon.”
September stared at the mosaic. Is mine in there? What does everybody mean, in Fairyland? Candlestick noted her gaze.
“In the old days it used to take the patience of a planet to find your own. Most everyone gave right up. But not me. I’m stubborn as the last word. When I found my fate, under the smoky stone eyeball of a caladrius posing rampant near the equator, we sat down for a long jaw, the longest I’ve ever had. I sweat so much I soaked right through to my bones. Finally, when that little Candlestick had had enough, well, we agreed to disagree, and I returned triumphant. No, I would not die young quarreling with the heart of Fairyland! What a load of bunk! Dying is a very poor way to end a conversation. No sportsmanship at all. Instead, I went on a Grand Rhetorical Tour, had a foal or two, wrangled with the Woodwoses’s anxieties, mediated the theologicals between the Manticore and the Ant-Lion, and galloped for a decade in the Centaur Rodeo-before coming home and here. To mind the storms and to mind the Sajada. Lightning is the only thing quick enough to trip me up. Such clean, brilliant logic a lightning-tree has! Reveals folly in a flash. It was just crumbling, no one to look after it but the Weathercock Elks, and if their arrows are in a tizzy there’s no getting them on task. So I rinsed the place with static electricity and soaped it up with hailstone lather and hung it up to dry with the sheet lightning. Now it shines. The Sajada is how the Moon remembers all those thousands and millions of fates. It is a sacred place. It keeps a record. Every dome you see is a catalogue, every sparkling crescent a Dewy Destiny System, organizing our fortunes so that one, out of all, can be called up and hollered at.”