“Oy! Bilge-rat!” he shouted. The Night Wagon came about sharply, pointing its sea horse nose at the cause of this new ruckus. “Yes, you! Bilge-rat! You scurrilous scurvy-sore! You preening putrid princess! Why don’t you come out of that gloomy-two-shoes merry-go-round pony and scrub our bricks like the filthy chimney brush you are?”
Cutty Soames, Captain of the Coblynows, fixed the boy with a stare like a walked plank. Shall I tell you what lay smoldering behind that stare? Duel or no duel, he meant to murder that child. The worst lashings come from a truthful whip: Thousands of years ago, the Coblynows had indeed been born from chimneys, bound to them like a dryad to her tree, forced to keep house for people with no personal hygiene at all. When Cutty took the helm of Fairyland, he and his boys smashed every chimney in the kingdom, broke every brush over their knees, rubbed every slovenly Fairy’s nose in soot until they promised to clean their chimneys twice a year as they’d repeatedly been told. It was the greatest day in Coblynow history. Cutty forbade anyone to speak of the Brick and Mortar Years forever after, and the Coblynows took to the high seas, where they could live in the open air and never let the fires of their plundering go out and never pick up after themselves or anyone else again. And no one had spoken of those dark days since. They hadn’t dared. Until this miserable brine shrimp of a lad.
“You heard me!” the little blue guttersnipe brayed again. “Who’s a fussy ’fraidy-crab who won’t get his toesies wet? It’s you, sir!”
But not the same guttersnipe. This one was seven or eight. The one who’d called Cutty a bilge-rat was still thumbing his nose over the top of their pathetic brick wall. The one calling him a ’fraidy-crab was flashing in and out of the arches of Mumkeep Reef like a tropical fish.
“Boiler-brained grog-for-guts!” giggled another child, much older, nearly twelve.
“Spoiled spaniel of the seven seas!” hooted a fourth, a bouncing three-year-old Saturday with seaweed in his long hair. He didn’t even have a topknot yet.
“Lime-loving lackspine buccane’er-do-well!” howled yet a fifth tittering, mocking blue nine-year-old Marid backstroking casually through the current. Cutty found that one particularly unnecessary. He had to love limes or else lose his teeth to scurvy! How was he to help the plain facts of naval life?
September crowed delight. They were surrounded by a school of Saturdays, darting, flashing, firing through the brine like blue arrows. Some were younger than the first Little S, hardly more than babies, some were old enough to have grown their topknots long, though none older than twelve, the age when Saturday met his mother and gave her a daisy. All the Saturdays her Marid had ever been, all coming out of time to help her like an army of love.
Words came on in September’s head like cinema lights. She’d heard them as she was falling asleep at a play her mother took her to see long ago. A girl wore a boy’s clothes and spent most of her time running around a forest not knowing anything about anything. She’d not thought of the words in years. She’d liked them because they had thou in them, which she thought the fanciest word anyone could wear, and still did. And with all the Saturdays wheeling about, spitting gobs of derision at the pirate king, they shook themselves awake in her head.
September climbed up to the top of the wall and yelled: “Thou art like a toad; ugly and venomous!”