“We ought to talk to them,” September whispered. “Surely, they’d know where to look for Fairyland’s Heart.”
Fizzwilliam laughed. When a Bathysphere laughs, it sounds like water trickling down through a golden drain. He would not explain what he found so funny, but I shall tell you. The idea that a Monkfish would answer any question put to it is quite, quite absurd. They speak only in riddles—well, that’s fine enough! Most monks do. But a Monkfish speaks only in the answers to riddles, and this makes them intolerably annoying. All wise fish avoid them.
The cuttlefish lived in a dark, pitted corner of Mumkeep Reef. Dragon-eye coral twisted up into sloping, pointed shapes very much like a certain opera house in Australia that would not be built for many years yet. (All coral in every world think of Australia the way that you and I think of Mesopotamia—it is the ancestral paradise of their civilization and they send it Valentines each February.) Orange cup corals held little scraps of light like lime peels. Peach-colored staghorn corals snaked out into shelves, ladders, and baskets full of glass pots of green-blue cuttlefish ink. Inside the coral opera house rested a gargantuan cuttlefish, her great sad W-shaped eyes rimmed with incandescent ultramarine like spectacular eyeliner. But cuttlefish eyes only look sad. It’s the shape that does it. But they are secretly the happiest of all cephalopods—only no one believes it, for they always look as though they were about to burst into tears from the weight of all the sorrow in the world. But truthfully, they were probably just thinking of an especially rude joke.
Unless you are a sushi chef or a marine biologist, you have probably never seen a cuttlefish. September certainly hadn’t. Up till then, she had thought orca whales or perhaps the Portuguese man-of-war she had seen in one of her father’s books were the prettiest things that lived in the sea. In one second, on the far north cropping of Mumkeep Reef, she changed her mind.
A cuttlefish has a head like a particularly soft, glum, toothless crocodile. Really, they’ve got a great lot of short tentacles for a face, but that frightens people and puts them off their dinner, so they hold them all together to look friendlier when company happens by. A cuttlefish has a body like a lovely colorful teardrop-shaped blanket with graceful veils running all round the border. They’ve got stripes like zebras, three hearts, and best of all, they can be any color they like at any time. The skin of a cuttlefish is like a screen in a cinema, and they can show anything they please on their big, silky backs. (In fact, it’s on account of an encounter with a cuttlefish that the Marquess acquired her kaleidoscope hair—though it was terribly embarrassing for her and she made me swear not to tell.)
We have cuttlefish in our world, of course. But they all came from Fairyland, just the way your restless narrator came from the west coast of her country, but made her house on the east coast of it. Nothing like cuttlefish can happen without magic. Cuttlefish are extremely intrepid explorers, and they came to our oceans seeking newer, ruder jokes and found they liked it quite well. September thought something that handsome ought to have a fancy name, like the Reef and the brass ball in Meridian and even she herself did. But a cuttlefish is such an astonishing thing that giving them a frilly title would be as silly as a peacock wearing a ball gown.
A Monkfish with a face colored like candy canes walked peacefully among the coral. You’ll notice I did not say he swam. He used his brawny tail to walk in a shuffling fashion, the way human monks sometimes do. He had once been told by a fisherman that it was much holier to move that way. Honestly, that fisherman had gone a bit mad. But if you squint, you can see it his way: Whatever is hardest is often holiest.
“Hello,” September said shyly. Radiant things made her shy in the same way that selfish things made her cross. Probably the cuttlefish couldn’t even hear her inside Fizzwilliam.
The cuttlefish answered by rearranging the lights on her lovely striped skin into a glimmering image, all fuzzy at the edges: an ultraviolet child running up to a neon yellow child and leaping into their arms so hard they both fell over into an absinthe-colored puddle. Hello.
Saturday smoothed his topknot without quite knowing he’d done it. Everyone wants to impress cuttlefish, which is perfectly all right because cuttlefish love to be impressed. She turned her glittering, mournful eyes to the Marid. He longed to stroke the creature and tell it all was well, really it was. “I want you to meet my wife, September,” he said in a voice too soft to bruise the sensitive creature any further.