The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making - Catherynne M. Valente [26]
September stared open-mouthed as they slowly inched nearer to the gangplank. She tugged at the tip of A-Through-L’s wing.
“It’s a Fairy,” she whispered.
“Of course it is, girl! What did I just say?”
“No, not a ferry, a Fairy.”
The toll-man was ancient and hunched, his grey hair caught up in several wild pigtails around two barnacled goat-horns. He had rheumy eyes and glasses as thick as beer-mug bottoms and three gold hoops in one ear. He wore a thick Navy peacoat with brass buttons and sailcloth trousers--and two iridescent wings jutted out of the back of his tailored coat, rimmed in gold, glittering as the sunlight made spinning violet prisms inside them. They were bound with a delicate iron chain, thin, but enough to keep them flat and useless against the old ferryman’s back.
“Fare,” he growled as their turn came.
The Wyverary cleared his prodigious throat. September started. “Oh!” she cried. “I suppose I’m the one with the purse strings.” She pulled her sceptre from the links in Ell’s chain. I knew I might need such a thing! September was quite pleased with herself for displaying such excellent foresight. With the end of one of Ell’s claws, she chipped two rubies from the bulb of the sceptre and held them out proudly.
“‘’E’s too big,” sniffed the ferryman. “Have to pay double for Excessive Baggage.”
“I am not baggage,” gasped the Wyverary.
“Dunno. She keeps her shiny whatnot on ya. Might be Baggage. Sure and you’re Excessive. Double fare, anyhow.”
“It’s fine!” hushed September, and chipped a third gleaming red stone from the sceptre. All three glittered on her palm like pricks of blood. “Easy come, easy go. I certainly shan’t be going without you!”
“On with it,” gruffed the ferryman, waggling his caterpillary eyebrows and scooping up the gems.
The Wyverary gave one giant leap and settled gracefully on the top level of the great black ferry. September walked with her head straight, up the plank and around the spiral staircase to join him. Perhaps it was Lye’s bath, but she felt quite bold and intrepid, and having paid her own way, quite grown-up. This, inevitably, leads to disastrous decisions, but September could not know that, not then, when the sun was so very bright, and the river so blue. Let us allow her these new, strange pleasures.
No?
Very well, but I have tried to be a generous narrator, and care for my girl as best I could. I cannot help that readers will always insist on adventures, and though you can have grief without adventures, you cannot have adventures without grief.
Chaise longues in blue and gold dotted the sunny deck of the Fairy. Lithe blue women and great pale trolls lay out, bathing in the light. A-Through-L snorted happily along with the creaking and groaning sounds of the ferry uncoupling from the pier.
“Isn’t it lovely to be on our way,” he sighed, “to be near the City? The great City, where everyone has hope of becoming marvelous!”
September did not answer. A shadow fell over her, as she thought of how often she had heard older girls in her school bathrooms talk about how they would go one day to a place called Los Angeles and be stars, be beautiful and rich, marry the men from the movies. A few said they might chuck California and go to New York, where they would also be beautiful and rich, but instead of movie stars they would be dancers and photographers’ models and marry great writers. September had been dubious. She had not wanted to go to either city. They seemed awful and huge and too crammed with marriageable men. She did not want to think that Pandemonium could be like that. She did not want Fairyland to be full of older girls who wanted to be stars.
“Look sharp, girl,” grumbled the ferryman, who had come up to take his place at the pole. He did not take it up, however, and yet the ferry sailed smoothly through the water. He just leaned against it and squinted at the distant city. “Small’ns who daydream are like to fall off, and you’dn’t