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

CHAPTER II
EXEUNT, PURSUING PUFFINS

In Which September Fails to Mend a Fence, Runs a Border, Misuses Prepositions, and Meets a Very Nice Dog Named Beatrice

The first day of July got out of bed hot and contrary. September woke early, so early that the sky still had a little pink and yellow in it when she shut the door softly behind her. She headed out to the neat line of trees at the far edge of their property. She was wearing her beloved green work-trousers, which, truth be told, had gotten both threadbare and too short for her, and a faded buttoned shirt with a pleasant red and orange checker on it. She carried a hammer hooked into her belt loops and, in her deep olive pockets, a little case of nails, two pieces of butterscotch candy as well as a paperback book concerning Norse mythology which she’d had to bend nearly in half in order to fit. Her jam jar of coins rested in the crook of her arm. September aimed to read about mistletoe and eight-legged horses for a while, then mend a space of fence that had blown down in the last rainstorm. The fence in question divided their property from Mr. Albert’s much bigger spread. Her father had mentioned it the night before, absently, sadly, as though there were no point in trying to fix it, what with the world going on the way it was and rains coming anytime they pleased. When September finished with the fence, she was to take the Model A into town and purchase a good number of things on a list her mother had made out. Mr. Albert had a list, too, and Mrs. Albert and Mrs. Powell and Mrs. Whitestone down the way as well. For herself, September had decided to spend some of her precious coins in order to buy a compass and perhaps some other provisions that might prove useful in Fairyland.

With all the lists neatly tucked into her back pocket, September looked out toward the ribbon of leafy birches in the far distance, their white trunks showing starkly like capital letters. Their shade beckoned gorgeously, black and deep and cool. It was a long walk and September could not whistle or anything of the sort. Instead, she took out her book to read as she walked, spying her path out of the corners of her eyes. September could do nearly anything while reading: walk, brush a horse, pull ragweed out of the herb-bed, scrub the teacups and gravy boats which by now had almost no paint on them at all. The writing was very dry, but it hardly mattered when Valkyries and goats with mead in their udders were afoot. A lady named Skadi was going about choosing a husband just by looking at the legs of all the gods when that rich, thick shade fell over the pages. Time to walk along the fence until the ruined bit spilled out its wire and wood all over the place. September took out one of her butterscotches and popped it into her mouth.

All those gods’ legs and butterscotch and hot morning sun might have kept September from ever seeing the rather large person and even larger dog walking along the other side of the fence. To be fair to our girl, the other person walked very quietly. In fact, she did not walk so much as sizzle silently into nothing and reappear again a little ways farther down the fence while her dog trotted to keep up. We can only thank the tangle of storm-battered fence for making its entrance just then and not a moment later. For when she saw the wreckage over the top of her book, September put Skadi and her gods-legs away and looked straight into the crackling, electric, blue eyes of an enormous woman and a tall, bored-looking greyhound.

September could not rightly tell whether the woman herself was enormous or if it was only her armor that made her seem so. But how fearfully strong and sturdy she must have been to bear up under it all! Metal closed up her tall, broad body like the grille of a train, twisted up in snarls of wires and bolts and incandescent knobs. In the center, where her heart should be, a great miner’s lamp shone with blistering electric light, throwing off the palest blue sparks. Her shoes were made of railroad tracks bent and buckled into shape. Huge black half-pipes prickled with rivets hunched over her shoulders. Her hands, half the size of all of September, sported rough gloves cut out of two single cloudy diamonds. Inside the facets, lights flickered on and off, cold-black and searing white. Even the woman’s hair was a tangled mass of electrical wires, bound up in a great knot. A few strands blew in the breeze, sending little sparks hissing down into the dirt. She held a huge, old-fashioned lantern in one hand with a ball of black burning where the flame ought to have been. In the other she brandished a great hook twisted up with intricate, beautiful metals like carvings on an ancient whalebone.

The greyhound, as tall as a lion and twice as lazy, stared with the same fiery blue eyes, but his fur rippled the flies away without armor, soft and gray and white with black speckles. His expression was the mournful, skittish one worn by all his breed.

September stared. The wire-woman stared back, much less alarmed, as September was rather small and not throwing off electricity like confetti.

Then she vanished.

The empty air where the woman stood popped and wriggled for a minute, and then all was still. The greyhound gave September another long, half-interested, houndly look which seemed to say: A dog’s work is never done and is that butterscotch I smell? He got up, arched his back into a quick stretch, and padded off down the fence line.

September bolted after him. She needn’t have; the electric lady crackled back into existence three or four long steps away. She lifted up her hook and seemed to catch an invisible something in the July air, yanking and twisting it against a frightful resistance. Beads of sparkling yellow sweat shot from her brow.

“Good morning!” said September, and felt foolish. Was this woman from Fairyland? She seemed Fairyish. She felt Fairyish. The air around her boiled with an intolerable heat and she smelled like scorched metal-but also, absurdly, like growing things, mushrooms and dandelion greens and pine sap. What else could she be? September had never seen anything like her. For certain she knew how to disappear.

The greyhound grabbed hold of the end of the long hook. He growled and hauled on it, and together with his mistress they worked free whatever had become stuck in the sky. The lady mopped light-sweat from her brow with a very plain checkered handkerchief. The pattern was nearly the same as September’s shirt.

“And a good morning to you, kid, though by my clock it’s midnight and by my mood it’s a nasty one.” She dug her massive diamond hand into her breastplate and tossed a bright bit of red light to her dog, who jumped to catch it and crunched happily away. “Too long before my shift’s done and too much Line left to spool. Isn’t that always the way?” She smiled a weary sort of smile. Her teeth flashed copper.

September simply could not think of anything to say. When that happened the thing she wanted to say but oughtn’t usually jumped out of her mouth and that’s just what it did.

“You’re not a Wind,” she said bluntly, and then felt rude and flushed.

“Got that right,” the lady said darkly, and guttered out again. September gritted her teeth with frustration. She looked around and scrambled back along the fence to where the electric lady was coming once more into focus. The hound gave a little yip and followed.

“What are you, then?” September said, not less bluntly. She took a deep breath and started again. “I do have manners, I promise. It’s only that when manners don’t let me say what I want to, I don’t have anything else. And what I want to say is, well, you are from Fairyland, aren’t you? You just have to be.”

The lady stuck her hook into the sky again, but this time, she hardly had to wriggle it twice before she seemed satisfied. She took out another lump of red light, put it into her own mouth like tobacco, and chewed thoughtfully. “Now, from’s a funny word for it. It’s a preposition and those are a jagged business. Am I from Fairyland? No, no, you couldn’t say it. You’d be wrong as a pen in a socket. Am I among Fairyland? That’s closer, but nope, still a bust. Am I out of Fairyland? Am I next to Fairyland? Am I regarding Fairyland? It’s no good! The trouble with prepositions is they want to stick pins in you. They want to say how you get on with things, where you are exactly in relation to this or that. Prepositions are the guardians of space and time-and if I use my manners, space and time and I had a row in school and we’re not what you’d call bosom buddies any longer. Prepositions want to put you in your place, the little sticklers. In my line of work-oh gracious, there’s me punning!-in my line of work you can’t let anything hold on to you, not even words. Words are the worst. Everything else runs on words. And there’s hordes of them, just running mad all over your business like ants. If you hold still long enough, they’ll get you good. So I don’t.”

She crackled blue and sizzled out again. The greyhound fixed his incandescent eyes on September.

“We are throughout Fairyland,” he said slowly. His voice was soft as falling ash.

The lady’s staticky voice returned before September could see the blue lamp of her heart blaze up in just the same place she’d left.

“You didn’t go anywhere!” September exclaimed.

“Well, sure I did,” the woman said. “I went a hundred thousand miles. Put a patch on the Line at the Spindle Substation. And now I’m putting a fuse in here at the Pomegranate Junction. Only it’s not here, see. I’m not here at all. S’what I mean about words. I’m on the other side of the rim. But the Line is so backed up here you can see bits of me coming through even though you shouldn’t.” Her blazing blue eyes narrowed and she bent down to September, shaking one gargantuan diamond finger at her. “Maybe you ought to just go to bed right now, young lady, without any supper. Spying on Heisenbergian mechanics through the keyhole. Kids today!” But then the electric lady laughed. “Don’t look so shocked. I’m just having my own little jokes. I don’t mind if you see me. Linemen don’t mind much.”

“What’s a Lineman?” breathed September, glad to have something in all of that to hold on to.

“I’m one. My name’s Boomer. My old boy there’s Beatrice. He’s a Cap. A Capacitor if you’re inviting him somewhere formal. Keeps me grounded, holds on to the Line while I work it.”

“That’s a girl’s name.”

Boomer shrugged. “He likes Beatrice. It’s not my business what a Cap wants to be called. Howdy, you are just bound and determined to make me talk, aren’t you? Use words like a person.” Boomer clattered and fizzed as she settled down onto the dirt beside the fence. “Well, I’ll try but I don’t have to like it. A Lineman works the Line. The line between the worlds. Like when you want to keep cows from wandering out and getting hamburgered by a train or busting ankles on oak roots. If there wasn’t a Line, anyone could just jump around between worlds like hopscotch. Toss their marker over the chalk and bounce right through, calling all her little friends after her in a row. Nothing but a mess and I’ve seen it happen, back when.”

“But people do jump,” said September shyly.

“Oh, they do! Boy, and how they do! That’s why I’ve got a job! The Line’s got weak spots. It’s old and I’ve got my suspicions about the morals of those what strung it in the first place. It has to be fixed nonstop. Just while I’ve been talking to you I’ve knit up fourteen frays, spackled a blown transformer, spooled up twenty slacks, replaced seven dark nodes, and netted a hole the size of Montana.” Boomer squinted one eye. “And I hope you’re smart enough to know those are just words, words you understand because you live in a world that has a Montana and transformers and capacitors. It’s not what they are.”

“Of course,” said September, who had not realized that at all.

“I’m not from Fairyland. Never been there. But I’ve seen it through the shop window, you know? I go between, and I mind the Line. There was a bad break here a while back-a while back by my clock, not yours. And by here I don’t mean your farm or Nebraska, really. Just here. Here summed up by Pluto and inchworms and balloons that rise because of helium. People have been coming and going like they got shot out of a circus cannon. I do not like it, no ma’am. The Line’ll always be weak in these parts. Structural flaw. But it almost wore through completely last year-I think I’ve got that right. Time zones are my bedevilment and no lie. Last year we almost lost it, and now I’ve got to tend to the sag.”

“Last year! I was in Fairyland then! And my shadow was stealing magic! A minotaur told me the borders would have just melted into nothing if she’d had her way.”

“You should always listen to minotaurs. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality. The Line was all in tatters. It got so bad you could just trip over a wall and end up who knows where? And when the works go that wrong, you get bandits. Worse than mice. If you see one it’s too late. Beatrice does his best to rustle them good, but what can he do? It’s a foundational fact of the universe that everything leaks. What comes out when it springs, that’s the only question.” Boomer spat. A stream of red lightning glittered out of her mouth.

September looked down at her shoes. “Am I a bandit? I’ve been crossing the Line. Twice. Four times if you count the return trip.”

Boomer looked at her meaningfully. September stuck her hands in her pockets. But she looked up again and held the Lineman’s gaze. She wasn’t sorry. She wouldn’t pretend she was sorry. She supposed that made her a bandit for sure.

Beatrice’s eyes flashed like lightbulbs. He began to howl: a long, whistling, hollow note, just exactly like a steam engine.

“Here they come,” snarled Boomer, and heaved up, her metal body unfolding like a puzzle.

“Who?”

The prairie stood quiet and green, except for a loose and fitful wind blowing the long grain and the dark green tips of the birches.

“Weren’t you after a Wind? I hate Winds. Criminals and fugitives and psychopomps the whole stupid gasbagging lot of them. But for the Winds I could have retired with a nice spread out beyond the edge of time by now. Up, Beatrice! Speak!”

The greyhound rose up on his great haunches and barked once, twice, three times. His voice was no longer a steam engine but a terrible tolling bell. September clapped her hands over her ears-and a good thing, too. The wind whipped itself up so fierce and fast all the grain could do was stand straight up, stretched and taut almost to breaking. The air seemed to tip and totter and finally fall over, spilling out a throng of hollering, ululating, laughing, whooping creatures.

Puffins.

One by one they rolled up into fluffy cannonballs, flapped their tiny wings once or twice, and thudded back down onto their plump bellies, tumbling over one another like a wave breaking. Their round beaks gleamed bright orange and gold. Some were tiny, no bigger than jacks. Some were much bigger, the size of hunting hounds. Their eyes sparkled black and green and red and purple as they tumbled nearer-and at least some of those were not at all the right colors for birds’ eyes as far as September knew. One by one they heaved up into the air again, paddling their wide webbed feet against the sky like they were scrambling up a mountainside.

And dancing on top of them, leaping from puffin to puffin, twirled a grinning young lady all in blue. She wore indigo trousers with as much silk to them as a skirt, and when they rustled, ghostly pale blue stars peeked out from the folds. She had on turquoise opera gloves and sapphire-colored boots with crisscrossed icicle laces all the way to the knee. A long, beautiful sky-colored coat spun out like a dress from a heavy silver belt at her waist, swirling with aquamarine stitching, trimmed in wild, woolly fur from some impossible, blueberry-colored sheep. Her long, azure hair flew every which way under a cobalt cap rimmed in the same blue shag. The cap had an ice-spike on top of it, like old pictures of the Kaiser. She smoked a blue churchwarden pipe, blowing great squares and triangles and rhombuses of blue smoke for her puffins to dip and dive through.

A long honk broke up the caterwauling puffin songs. In the center of the flock, half bouncing on the ground and half hoisted, shoved, carried, and jostled by the birds, came Mr. Albert’s Model A Ford.

“But that’s my car!” September corrected herself, but she was quite indignant that someone else-even if they were puffins-was driving it. “I mean it’s Mr. Albert’s car! What are they doing with it? They’re going to break it to pieces, that’s what!”

“Horse thieves!” Boomer said with disgust. She brandished her hook like an ax. Beatrice growled. It sounded like the turning of gears deep in the earth.

The woman in blue sighted September. Her grin grew wider; her black eyes glittered. They barreled toward the fence. The air wriggled around the Lineman and her Cap, so hot it turned the back of September’s legs painfully red. She stood her ground.

“Girl, Ho!” the blue bandit yelled, in the manner of sailors sighting land. She saluted smartly.

September saluted back. A smile broke open on her face like a firecracker. Who could this be but the Blue Wind, a little late, but come for her at last? September forgave her immediately for her tardiness. Her heart hammered around inside her like it meant to get free.

“Wind, Ho!” she cried. Suddenly, all that talk of bandits and holding the Line seemed wholly, entirely unimportant. September laughed and waved giddily. She couldn’t help adding: “Have you come to take me to Fairyland?”

The Blue Wind cocked her head to one side and hooted. The puffins hooted back. Now they were nearly on top of her, September could see each little bird dressed in smart, shining armor of the sort you find in books about Spanish explorers. The armor was made of ice and caked in snow. Their own black feathers stuck out of their helms as plumes.

“Hadn’t planned on it,” shrugged the Blue Wind. “Fairyland’s a dreadful place. Why would you want to go there?” She laughed; her laughter rocketed into the forest, echoing and breaking apart against the trees.

Several things happened all on top of each other.

The bandits shot up into the sky: puffins, the Blue Wind, the Model A, and not a few birch trees yanked out of the ground by the fearful, shearing air.

Beatrice vaulted up to meet them, his long silver body arcing like a current, his sharp teeth glowing hot white.

Boomer dropped her hook and undid her hair. It was such a simple gesture September did not know what she was about until the whole mass of it came down and open: a net of wires sizzling with electricity, as wide and strong as the sail of a grand ship.

September cried out and she did not know who she meant to warn: the dog, the birds, Boomer, the Blue Wind? But it did not matter.

Beatrice snapped at the underbellies of the birds. They laughed chitteringly at him. He missed once, twice, three times; they could go higher than he. He fell back to the ground, his snout twitching, yelping frustration like a puppy. As soon as her hound had got clear, Boomer threw her net in the bandits’ path. September was certain they’d be cooked to death-but the Blue Wind only giggled. With a wink for September, she spun around like an ice-skater on the back of a particularly large puffin. The stream of birds narrowed and squirmed and shrunk and passed straight through the gaps in the electric net-and so did the Model A, honking tinily as it jumped.

The storm stopped abruptly. All was silent. Boomer stood stock-still, her flashing diamond fist clenched in anger around the wires of her electric hair. Beatrice howled his mournful train-whistle howl once more.

September tried to catch her breath. She looked at the Lineman. She looked at the Cap. She looked after the Blue Wind, vanished completely. A very certain thought came on in her mind. Boomer wouldn’t let her cross over. She knew it. It was her job to say no. To bar the way. Just like it was the Sibyl’s job to say yes and open the way. Just like it was her own job to record her father’s temperature and mind the pregnant Powell horse even when she bit. You do your job and you mind your work. That’s how the grown-up world gets along-and grown-up magic, too.

Before the Lineman could stop her, before Beatrice could get up on his haunches again, September clutched her jam jar to her side, darted forward, and leapt with all her might. She dove through the same gap in the net of crackling white-blue wires that had swallowed up the puffins, just wide enough for a girl. She shut her eyes at the last moment, blinded by the showers of glowing sparks and by a sudden sureness-she hadn’t jumped hard enough! The wires would catch her in a flash and turn her into smoke. Too late, too late!

September winked out of the world like a firefly.

Boomer sighed. She kicked the fence post, which shattered in terror before her great foot had a chance to touch it. The Lineman dropped the net of her hair like a curtain and promptly blinked out again. This time, Beatrice sizzled away, too, and the only thing left of any of them was a last, lingering wisp of the hound’s howl.