Where was her Saturday? What had happened to him? They should never have gone to Mumkeep Reef, September thought, and that was the truth.
They walked down the wide wombat road, past star-spattered signs that told them all about Dog’s Breakfast Bakery, the Happy Shovel Tool Repair (A Happy Shovel Is a Dirty Shovel!), and Bustnose’s Fine Joolery, a cozy moonlit inn called The Courageous Quokka attached to a less cozy but much larger pub called The Querulous Quokka (known jointly as the Brave and the Bonkers, for no one had time to say all that mess together), Tugboat’s Terrific Tobaccos and Constitutional Law Shoppe, and dozens of little sturdy black and blue houses gleaming with constellations. The great glittering barn at the end of the road opened up invitingly, full of shade and the bustle of wombats. Long garlands of macadamia flowers hung on the walls, fine cool dirt covered the floor, and the stars on the rafters lit it all in soft silver. As she stepped through the door frame, September touched the barn-boards with her bare hand—and snatched her hand away as though it had scalded her. The Night-Barn had no wood in it at all. The slats were slick and hard and blisteringly cold. She could feel the frozen winds of space howling through them, the winds she had felt tearing at her on the Moon. She almost thought, if she leaned too hard, she would fall into the ragged, beaten boards and tumble into the naked black sky.
The wombats had built their town out of the night itself.
“Are Chicago wombats nocturnal?” Conker asked politely. “We figured a ways back it made no sense to confine your loafing, feasting, digging, and dancing to the nighttime! You lose fifty percent of your fossicking time that way! S’why we built our little town of Nightgown, so we could have our comfortable dark all round anytime we liked and not lose a moment of puttering and prattling. Best village in Wom, no competition! Plus, when you think about it, if you’re nocturnal, you can only have supper, dinner, a nightcap, and a midnight snack. Really limits your gorging options, yeah? Stick around in the daytime and you get breakfast, lunch, tea, and afternoon nibblies as well!”
“But when do you sleep?” asked Blunderbuss, who had never heard that she was meant to be nocturnal in the first place.
“We wombatnap now. Screamingly efficient. Fifteen minutes an hour will keep you sharp!” Conker hopped up, grabbed a rope hanging from a big, dented bell, and swung back and forth, ringing the thing within an inch of its life. Wombats banged open their doors all over town, wriggling their soft noses in the wind and trotting on down toward the barn, laughing roughly and growling and biting one another as they came.
“Here we go! Here’s our mob! Blunderbuss—and what a great big chomp of a name that is!—this is Shilling, she’s our candle maker, and here’s Meatpie and Snagger, our glassblowing brothers, Bluestocking, my wife, the mudbrained buffoon of my heart, Oatmeal, our tinker, Banjo, the town poet, Chicory, our dressmaker, Fair Dinkum, the town beauty, Watchpot, our soup maker, Gregory, well, Wom only knows what you do around here…”
And on and on they came, each large and bright-furred and loud, each terrified for a moment of Blunderbuss and A-Through-L, then rambunctiously affectionate once all had been explained. September and Saturday and Ell said more Hellos and How Do You Dos in a quarter of an hour than they thought they’d said yet in their life.
Conker crooned in delight as a particularly robust wombat wearing a powdered judge’s wig made her entrance. “And this, Blunderbuss, this is Tugboat, our Tobacconist and leader of all the nations of Wom! We’ll show you how we do our governmenting after tea.”
As the scrap-yarn wombat was busy impressing everyone by telling them she already knew of the Fair and Just Tugboat and how she chewed up the laws suggested by the wombattery at large and spit them at the wall, keeping what stuck and chucking the rest, Conker and Meatpie and a bright yellow wombat named Lollygag made the tea. They stuffed pawfuls of tea leaves into tin buckets, filled them with hot water from an enormous simmering pot at the back of the barn, and holding their waistcoats out of the way with one paw, swung the pails around their heads frightfully fast to get it all steeping.
“How do you choose a Tobacconist?” Saturday asked. He popped a gooseberry into his blue mouth.
“Only because in Fairyland proper they apparently do it by running all over the place like a madwoman’s laundry,” Blunderbuss said with a giggle, munching on a heap of golden wattle-flowers.