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“Fine. But I hate fjords. Snap off one of my whiskers—the smallest one you can find or you won’t be able to fit your little hands around it. Take it and when you want me, when it’s time for my triumphant new archipelago … or maybe a chain of volcanoes … well, just stick it in the ground and call my name.”
The whisker was as long as a black crystal sword in September’s hand. She slid it into a sudden sheath in the Watchful Dress and looked at a clutch of dark tunnel entrances in the wall of Voleworld. The Greatvole bored happily through the earth up ahead of them, leaving them to their choice. Each had a neat wooden hatch with large, well-made words burned into it:
TO WIN THE DAY
TO WIN THE HAND
TO WIN AGAINST ODDS
TO WIN THE WAR
September did not have to think twice.
INTERLUDE
THE HOURGLASS WASTE
In Which Lions Attack, Songs Are Sung in French, and Everyone Misses Something Deathly Important, Except for the Dog
It is always difficult to believe that while we are having our own adventures, others are behaving with just as much derring-do and flash and swashing of the buckles as we. It is especially hard for children to believe that their parents might be off performing their own astonishing feats of Grown-Upedness whilst their little ones are battling ferocious octopi under the sea. But it is true. The Land of Parents is strange and full of peril.
September’s family sped through Fairyland on a sleigh drawn by six hippopotami named for her grandfather’s liquor cabinet. Aunt Margaret’s hippos were much faster than the kind you and I have seen in the zoo. They are much faster than cheetahs or hawks, and a bit slower than the newest and most modern of trains. They flew through the Inksop Marshes and the Candelabra Desert, through the Worsted Wood and the Springtime Quarter where the Marquess had slept for years. They spent a night in the shadow of the Peppercorn Pyramids. Susan Jane made a respectable campfire out of a few of the daggers from fallen redcroak branches, and a bit of black, crumbled pyramid. They sang one another songs and Fenris howled, for he longed to be included. Owen sang them a lovely French song he had learned at the front, though it made him sad and Susan Jane had to hold him tight until he fell asleep.
In the night, they were menaced by two blue lions, grown thin and rangy without anyone to feed them. September’s father socked one in the jaw. September’s mother flung one of the daggers she’d squirreled away from the dagger-tree at the other’s shoulder. But when the lions saw Aunt Margaret, they whined and shook their heads and backed away, their blue tongues lolling.
“Madame Pearl,” they whispered in terror, and bolted back across the meadow.
“Is that what they call you here?” Susan Jane said as they tried to go back to sleep.
“Yes. Margaret means ‘Pearl’ in Greek, you know. I thought it sounded very romantic. And at the time, I was living on the Moon, the great big Pearl in the sky.”
“It must be nice to give yourself a fancy new name,” September’s mother yawned. “I always thought I could do with something grander than Susan.”
* * *
In the morning, the galloping liquor cabinet pulled them past Flegethon City where the ifrits live and burn. When the suburban flames died out, they found themselves in a vast, pale, barren wilderness. The land thirsted, the stones were tall and thin, the color of snow. The air grew ho
t and still and heavy all round. And everywhere they saw hourglasses filled with sands of darkest red and green and blue and violet—some tiny, wedged between boulders, some so huge that a mountaineer might think them a proper challenge. Greenwich Mean Time was born here, in the Hourglass Waste. Margaret seemed suddenly very sullen and sour. She begged her hippos to run faster. Over the next hill there’s water and glowerwheat, my loves, I promise!
Soon enough they did top the next hill and down into a valley full of wheat with little gas flames burning at their tips. The sun began to set, turning the sky a wild scarlet. Susan Jane and Owen looked up at Fairyland’s Moons rising in the east. One’s so much smaller than the other, September’s father thought. How strange!
As they left the Hourglass Waste behind them, a gust of wind billowed through two chalky crags. An hourglass sloshing with pomegranate-red sand lay snugly between them, half buried in the white dust of the Waste. The breeze blew the dust away from the glass and the wood and the crags, up and into the sunset and over the glowerwheat.
The hourglass had a brass plaque on it. Neither Margaret nor September’s parents nor the hippopotami saw it. Fenris did, but he could not tell anyone, though he yipped valiantly. The plaque read:
SEPTEMBER MORNING BELL
And its sand had nearly run out.
CHAPTER XV
THE BRAVE AND THE BONKERS
In Which Blunderbuss Goes Home, Everyone Eats and Yells a Great Deal, and September Jousts a Dinosaur on Wombat-Back
They climbed out of the earth into a hot, tangled, green-golden valley. The sun crackled and popped on the oddest plants: fire-colored flowers shaped like great thick stacks of ice cream scoops, whippy vines heavy with ripe, black-skinned passionfruit oozing seeds, long, hot pink blossoms hanging like tongues from the branches of macadamia trees, big glossy quandong fruits dropping softly now and then from ashy, squat trees, skinny orange yams pushing up half out of the ground. September and Saturday put their hands over their noses.
“But this isn’t the Worsted Wood at all!” cried September. Her frustration felt like a bellyful of boulders. Would they never get on the right track? She reached back for Saturday’s hand.
