The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making - Catherynne M. Valente [72]
“Of course, one may have a number of other halves,” Nor grinned. “We have always felt sorry for those who are forced to be only one person, forever and ever until they die. My brother and I are Neither/Nor, my sister and I are Not/Nor, and on and on the combinations go, sharing dreams and labor and life. We are halves, but we make an infinite whole.”
“I’m…not like that,” whispered September. She could not say why they frightened her, but the Nasnas lady and her many siblings made her feel more unsure and unsettled than even Death had. “Why are you like that?”
“Why do you have two legs? Why is your hair brown?”
September remembered Charlie Crunchcrab. “Evolution, I guess.”
“Well, we guess, too.”
“But don’t you have stories? About yourself. About why the world is the way it is.”
“You mean folklore?”
September shrugged uncertainly.
Not/Nor scratched her chin. “I think we had a folklore, once. I seem to remember. We locked it up in a vault to keep it safe. Or a library. Terribly similar. But bandits, you know. Bandits, bandits, always about! Wearing masks and carrying sacks. I’m afraid there was a break-in. They left a few crumbs--bandits are slovenly. I think I recall something about Cosmic Scissors, and Entropy, and Where Love Comes From. But no one remembers more, and the police don’t visit the hinterlands much.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“And I for yours! I was born half, but to lose yourself in the prime of life! What a trauma!”
“Honestly, I hadn’t really thought about it much. It hurt while the Glashtyn cut it away, but I’m not sick or anything.”
“What do you suppose your shadow is doing without you? She might be ill with pining!”
September thought back to her shadow’s vicious smile, dancing on the shoulders of the horse-headed Glashtyn. “I don’t think so,” she said, and for the first time felt it had been a bit shabby of her to have cast of her shadow so quickly, and not to have written to it, or asked after it at all.
“I have to go to work now, little girl. Not’s shift is already done, and I’m keeping her from nap and roast fish.”
“What sort of shift do you have?” said September curiously. “And mightn’t there be some water there?” She knew about shifts, of course, because her mother had them. Shifts were the suns and moons of her old world, dividing everything into times when her mother was there, and times when she was not.
“I work at the shoe factory, girl! We all do, it’s what we do. Why, before the Marquess came, we just lay about on beaches and ate mangoes and drank coconut milk and knew nothing about industry whatever! How gladsome we are now, that she has shown us our laziness! Now we know the satisfaction of a full day’s labor, of punchcards and taxable income.”
September bit her lip. She wondered if the Marquess had happened by around the time their folklore had been stolen. “I like mangoes,” she said glumly.
“We make the changelings’ shoes,” continued Not/Nor, striding towards the silver half-palace that September now understood was a factory.
“That’s all? No shoes for anyone else?”
“Well, there are rather a lot of changelings. Bandits, again. Always about. Besides, it’s quite hard, to make the sorts of shoes changelings wear.”
September waited. She long ago learned that if she waited and blinked and behaved like a pupil, eventually someone would lecture her on something.
“It’s why we’re best suited, you know. Being this far southerly. It’s all magnetized, see. If we didn’t make the shoes, why, changelings would just float away back to their own world, and where would that leave all the honest folk who stole them fair and square?”
“I haven’t floated away.”
“You’re not a changeling! There’s no poppet or goblin in your bed, taking your place at supper. There’s more than one way between your world and ours. There’s the changeling road, and there’s Ravishing, and there’s those that Stumble, through a gap in the hedgerows or a mushroom ring