Saturday took her hand. She had not heard him come round to her. His fingers shook a little in hers. She was glad of him then, so terribly glad. That she did not have to stand alone in that lonely lunar city, as she had stood with the Marquess, as she had stood with her shadow.
The black shape saw them first. It stopped, quivering with the effort of stopping, peering at them from behind the blood-colored curve of the dome-was it bigger than it had been? September could not tell. The black shape sniffed the air. It was a huge dog, wet of nose and long of ear, his curly fur lit strangely, tangled up with tiny white stars like burrs. The dog bounded out from behind the moon-blister, spraying dusty pale pearly soil from his hind legs. He was tall enough to look September in the eye and he did it then, both Saturday and September, one to the other and back again. He stared with depthless black eyes. His tail swept back and forth through the air.
“You can’t have it,” September whispered, for it is easier to speak to a dog with conviction than a Yeti.
“What’s that?” came a bassoon of a voice, a long blare of sound full of frosty echoes and windswept notes. Ciderskin turned toward them, his wrinkled face crowded with white wool, his horns glinting in the misty ruby light.
“The Moon,” said September, and tried to put into her voice all the bravery she did not feel. She had no paw, no weapons, no notion of what to do except to stand and say what must be said. “It’s not yours, or at least not only yours. I’m very sorry for what happened to you but you must know the Fairies are gone now. I know you must feel awfully sore about it.” September glanced at Ciderskin’s severed paw. Could it really have been this same Yeti, all those years ago? “But you’ll shake the place apart and it’ll rain Moon and fire and stone in Fairyland and I can’t let you.”
“Begging your pardon,” groused the Yeti, “but I believe you haven’t the first idea of what’s happened to me or the weather in Fairyland or the least fact about the least thing in the known universe. Just my opinion, of course.”
The black dog opened his mouth. His pink tongue flopped out, panting through a wide grin. September could see straight down his dark throat.
September cocked her head to one side. “Are you a Capacitor?” she asked the dog.
He yelped a little, the way a person would give the kind of short, sharp laugh that isn’t really a laugh but punctuation. “That’s not my name but it’s not a bad one. Not bad at all,” he barked.
Ciderskin crouched down and put his great blue-black paw on a swirling patch of the red and rising dome where it met the cracked, chalky lunar earth, slabs of stone and peat bursting and buckling wretchedly. As September and Saturday watched, paralyzed by fear and a large and attentive dog, the Yeti moved his fingers in strange circles, each fingertip tracing its own path. A wind picked up; the light of afternoon went out like a book snapping shut, gold to black in less than a gasp. Stars bustled quick and hurried over the arch of the sky. Gold returned and was gone again, whipping by like those little books where a little figure dances if you flip through the pages fast enough. September felt the terrible restlessness in her heart pick up speed and put on muscle. The Yeti glanced at them. His face rearranged itself into a craggy, weather-beaten smile. It looked out of place, like a volcano smiling.
“It works better when it’s attached,” he said with a bit of sheepishness hidden in his growl. He held up his good hand. “Better still if I had both, but I haven’t in a long while. You can beat time about the head with a hacked-off hunk of flesh, but my body is my own. No one can use it better than me. Time is no one’s friend-time has no social niceties and holds the door for nobody nowhere. But I hold the door for time, with my one good paw.” The stars slowed up above, and dark settled down over the open dust bowl of the Moon. “I was very young when I lost it. And I did lose it-I was careless. I know that now. I was meeting a mountain. I meant to kiss her in secret. I meant to wed her under the midnight dark. The prettiest mountain you ever saw, sparkling with snow in all the right places, rich with granite and tourmaline and silver, sturdy and sensible and weathered by the experience of eons. When she saw me, my mountain’s pine trees bristled and the wind in her heights whistled my name. When I saw her, I felt rivers break through the rock of my heart and carve me into a new shape.”
“Do all Yetis wed mountains?” asked Saturday softly.
Ciderskin smiled a private smile. “Only the lucky ones,” he said. “She agreed to meet me, to pick up her skirts and come to me away from her brothers and sisters who watched over each other with unclosing eyes. I came early. I was eager. I was young. I was lost in my dream of living quick and slow and quick and slow on her slopes, being near her every day, hearing the small mountain particulars of daily living: which foxes had kits and which had fallen off of cliff-faces, which avalanches wanted to come round for tea, what still meadows had business with alpine hypnodaisies, a thousand dropping pinecones. Some look at a mountain and see only the peak. I looked with a lover’s eyes and saw every tremble of every pebble. And so lost was I in contemplating the future happiness of my life with and on my mountain that I did not see the trap-the crude, stupid, idiot trap that would not have caught a bee-addled bear-until it crunched into my wrist. My mountain heard my screams of rage and pain and ran, the tremors of her going quaking me apart. I was angry at myself. A body is never so vicious as when it has only itself to blame for its trouble. And so much grief came bubbling up from my single thoughtless snap of a clock-hand.” Ciderskin pushed one of his fingers, as long and thick as a sapling, into the flesh of the blister with infinite slowness and patience. He dug inside like a lemur scratching for insects. A distant thundering, quivering sound bubbled up around them, from everywhere and nowhere. “Yetis are better than that. We have to be. We are the Moon’s children.”
“If you’re the Moon’s child,” September cried, “how can you hurt it so? What is that thing coming out of the ground? I should never crack my mother’s bones and shake her limbs the way you’ve done!”
As if to support her argument, the land gave a sickening lurch. Ciderskin scrabbled at the innards of the red dome. September nearly fell into the body of the black dog; she and Saturday clutched for each other as the moonquake tore through Patience.
Ciderskin laid his head to one side. “Do you know what the Moon is, little girl?”
“A Moon is a Moon. It orbits around an Earth.”
“Well, yes, that’s true. Just as it’s true that a girl is a girl and orbits around a life. But the Moon is many things. Nothing is only itself. The Moon is the Moon, forever and always. But she is also alive. And like anything alive, she ages and grows and has rebellious years and takes up with passing planets and has her moods and her stubborn ways. It is only that her ways are so big they become our ways. She changes her face over the course of a month, well, who doesn’t? Who is the same creature on the first as on the thirty-first? Anything might happen, in such a space. But when the Moon changes, she keeps the time for the world below. She pulls the tides up like a blanket when she is cold and pushes them down again when she is too warm and thus rolls out the hours of the day and night. I will tell you the truth: The heart of the Moon is a month. She is an Engine, and as she turns she spins out month after month, like the pages of a book flying free. And down below, folk pack them up into a calendar and understand the rhythm of the world. Full Moon to full Moon and twelve of those make a year. I hope you understand: The Moon makes time. All Moons make time. And a Yeti, born on the Moon, fed of the rocks of the Moon and the water of her snows, is like a clock full of blood and bone that walks and talks and sings rhyming songs at eternity. When the Fairies took my hand-and it is a hand, you know. A hand and not a paw. A hand that uses tools and manipulates objects and touches the face of a beloved and counts off the years until joy.”