The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There(43)

September and her friends did not so much fall into the book as crash.

The black space was not an endless empty hole, but a tunnel full of rustling, of pages ripping and turning, of heavy leather spines thunking hard against feathers and scales and skin. Blind, September tumbled and rolled and stumbled, pointing downward in a general sort of way, tasting strange ink as pages flew at her face. The roaring sound of it all sounded like nothing so much as a great, angry tide surging in, wave upon papery wave breaking over her poor head.

Slowly, ahead of her in the dark, a clanking, bonging, metallic sound grew. The papers thinned and finally blew aside like gauzy curtains. September followed the sound of metal being struck and scraped until, groping blindly, her hands fell upon a wooden frame and a hard, cold doorknob. The door wedged shut somewhat below her, and the papers crushed in behind, pushing on her shoulders with little wordy kisses. September put her shoulder against it and shoved. It came free far more easily than she expected, and with a little cry, she fell down through the door inside the book and tumbled out onto an earthen floor. Bits of paper still clung to her hair and the ruff of the wine-colored coat, which bristled and shook them off.

Avogadra had told the truth—the black path through the book ended in a mine. All around her, sharp rocks and dark bluish boulders bulged. A wooden track ran through the great cavern, and on it rickety cars raced by, some empty, some topful of sparkling gems. Now that September’s eyes adjusted to the dimness of the mine, she could see that the light came from the walls. Rich, looping, twisting veins of crystalline stuff shone as though a fire lived inside them, brighter than any jewel September had ever seen—though in truth this was not too many. The harlequin colors mingled and cast a cool reddish purplish greenish bluish goldenish radiance on the bustle of the miners, none of whom noticed that a girl had fallen out of the ceiling.

September stared at the miners: furry turquoise kangaroos with large, inquisitive eyes and powerful tails. They hopped from one cart to another, with pearly lamps on their heads and beautiful long necklaces around their silky throats. They wore brown leather straps in an X over their chests, the better to hold pickaxes and shovels on their backs. They carried gold-pans like little shields on their brown belts. But their chief mining tool was clearly their tails, which they whacked against the rock walls with whoops and trills, knocking loose little falls of rubble, which they panned through and picked through and poked through. One hopped over to the wall nearest September and planted his feet to give it a good thrashing.

“Halloo!” the kangaroo barked, startled by the sudden presence of a girl in a ball gown sprawled in the way of a nice thick vein of peridot. “You came out of the wall.” He looked very flummoxed by this, his gentle face scrunching up with worry. Something was not right, not right at all.

“Yes.” September did not know what else to say. She realized all at once that she was alone—A-Through-L and Saturday and Aubergine had not made it through with her. Her skin prickled with cold.

“Are you a ruby? Or a tourmaline?” The kangaroo did not seem hopeful.

“Certainly not,” September said, and peeled herself up off the floor, brushing pebbles and torn bits of paper from her skirt. She pulled the wine-colored coat close around her, shivering a little. She felt safer with its thick sash tied tight.

“Well, if it’s work you want, I’m sure we could find you an ax and a shovel and a pan. But this is my seam, see, and you … well, you can’t have it. I don’t mean to be rude. It’s only that I’ve forgotten my mother, and peridot—that’s the pretty green spangly stuff you’re, er, sitting on—is frightfully good for motherly memories.”

“However could you forget your mother?” September asked.

The kangaroo adjusted the brown straps of his harness. His gold-pan reflected the pale green-yellow seam flowing fiery around them. “I’m a J?rlhopp,” he said proudly. “We’re born without memories. They say all babies are innocent, but no one holds a candle to a wee J?rlhopp. If not for my Clutch, I wouldn’t even remember my own name. Which is Gneiss, if you wondered.” Gneiss lifted up the pendant of his long necklace. Dozens of hundred candy-colored stones clung together in a spiky, glittering globe.

September smiled shyly. “But I know about J?rlhoppes!” she said. “Mr. Map told me that they keep their memories on a chain around their necks. One called Leef taught him to make maps when they were in prison together. It seems so long ago now!”

“I don’t know a Leef, but that’s no shock. I might have known her, and forgotten all about it, if I didn’t have a bit of seam nearby to remember her for me.” Gneiss nodded his azure head toward the wall. “That’s a seam, there. A thick thread of peridot running through the black earth. It’s what keeps the world together, you know. That’s why they’re called seams. Stitches in stone, hemming up the underside of everything. Without them, everything would just fall apart. But down here, in the deep, the jewels are more than the pretty baubles you find near the surface. They’re memories—the memories of the earth, hardened and polished by centuries of brooding and dreaming and worrying. A J?rlhopp’s memories are so small next to the memory of all the whole earth! Ours fill up only the tiniest cracks and flaws in the crystal. See, this here’s full of earthy memories of continental drift and megafauna—but the flaw there? That’s the first boomer who broke my heart, M?rl.” The J?rlhopp pointed to a sharp dark-red shard in his Clutch. It had a creamy pale flaw in its center. “He ran off with a centaur and threw away the girasol stone that meant me and all his family in the mines, our mushroom and sorrowgrass suppers on stone tables, under stone lanterns. So he’d never even think to come back, see. If you said my name to him he wouldn’t even know the G was silent. But I remember how to say his name. If I press his shard to my heart I can live it again as often as I like. But you have to have the right sort of stone. Peridot for mothers, girasol for lovers, sapphire for sadness, and garnet for joy.”