The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen - Delia Sherman [63]
I wandered away from the water to the foot of Grand Street, where peddlers hawked pickles and potato knishes and old clothes from pushcarts. A fiddler perched on a roof played a lively mazurka. I’d just bought a bag of roasted chestnuts when I heard a terrified shout.
“Help! A sea demon! Gevalt!”
I bet I knew that sea demon.
Everybody in earshot rushed to the end of the pier. I elbowed and shoved and wiggled my way through the crowd. When I finally made it to the front, I saw two giant longshoremen advancing threateningly on a small, scrawny, dripping black figure with a many-pocketed Harness strapped across its chest.
“Stop!” I yelled. “Hert oyf!He’s not a demon! He’s a mortal changeling, like me.”
The longshoreman eyed me doubtfully. “He don’t look like you, maidele.”
“We’re in school together,” I said. “Miss Van Loon’s. We’re on a quest.”
The longshoreman shook his head stubbornly. “Mortals have hair. He don’t have hair. And how come he don’t say the Words?”
Airboy yanked off his merrow cap and recited the Words of Protection proper to the Lower East Side. The crowd laughed and agreed that anybody who spoke Yiddish that badly was probably harmless. An old alte-zachin hendler popped a bright blue sweater from her pushcart over Airboy’s head. It hung down past his knees and hid his hands.
“So the boychik shouldn’t freeze,” she said. “You want I should find you some shoes? It’s not so healthy to walk borves on the city street.”
“I have shoes.” Airboy snaked his hands inside the sweater. The alte-zachin hendler and I watched as the sweater bulged and wriggled like a sackful of gremlins. When the hands reappeared, flourishing sneakers and the glamourist’s magic map of New York, the peddler applauded.
Airboy flushed and handed me the map. “Figure out where we’re going, will you?”
I studied the map while the alte-zachin hendler watched, probably to see if we’d do something else amusing. Unfamiliar names and buildings popped out at me. “Krimhild’s Garden,” I read. “The Oompa-pa Music Garden. Woden’s Flophouse. CBGB. Do you know what any of this means?”
“Nope.” Airboy stood up. “What now?”
I refolded the map. “We walk to the Bowery.”
The alte-zachin hendler tsked. “Such a long way, you’ll walk your feet to the bones. Better you should take a cab.”
A cab? “What’s that?”
“Some city girl, doesn’t even know what a cab is! Never mind, I’ll tell you. Any carriage or coach or cart you see yellow like a canary, that’s a cab. Stick your hand out and it’ll stop, take you where you need to go. For a price, but nothing comes for free. You understand?”
I thanked the alte-zachin hendler, then herded a reluctant Airboy to the street to look for a cab. I didn’t see anything yellow—anything with wheels, anyway—but I stuck my hand out just in case.
A scarlet kirin with neat golden hooves and a stormy golden mane stopped in front of us. It was pulling a two-wheeled sulky, painted bright yellow.
“Where to?” it asked as we climbed onto the bench.
“Bowery,” I said.
The kirin tossed its horn. “Bums in the Bowery. No pay, no ride. One mackerel. Fresh.”
Airboy produced the mackerel from his Harness and the kirin trotted off—slowly, because of the crowds. Everywhere I looked, unfamiliar Folk argued and bargained and leaned out the windows of the low brick tenement buildings. In the Canal, fat little tugs chugged companionably beside triangle-sailed junks. Then I saw a fox girl in a padded silk coat, bright as a flower among the Lower East Siders’ gray and brown, and suddenly we were in Chinatown, where the buildings were roofed in green tile and the Canal was lined with flat-bottomed barges manned by shinseën with wispy beards selling knobby fruit and bright silk and strange spices.
The kirin stopped. “Bowery,” it said. “Another mackerel, maybe?”
I looked up a wide street lined with tumbledown buildings. It looked cold and dark and unfriendly. “Can’t you take us inside?”
The kirin shivered head to tail. “Bad place. Bums.”
“No more mackerel, then,” I said. “Come on, Airboy. Let’s go find