A Week without Tuesday

by Angelica Banks

  Tuesday woke to shouts of ‘Tuesday! Tuesday!’ and the sound of rapid footsteps on the stairs outside her room. She lurched upright. Her strawberry blonde hair looked as if it had fought with a cat in the night.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ said Serendipity in relief, sweeping Tuesday into an almost violent hug.

  ‘What? What? I’m right here,’ Tuesday said.

  ‘I have never been so pleased to see you. Well, perhaps I have. When you were first born. And then, a little while ago, when you got back from being there. Well, I was very pleased then too, but I still think that …’

  ‘Mum, you’re blathering. Could you stop squashing me?’

  ‘Thank goodness you’re here!’ said Serendipity, letting go at last.

  ‘Where else would I be?’

  ‘Who knows, darling? Belize? Afghanistan? Darwin?’ said Serendipity, handing the newspaper to Tuesday.

  Tuesday pushed herself upright and rubbed her eyes.

  ‘Here, let me,’ said Denis impatiently, and he plucked the newspaper out of her hands and read aloud the headline and the text below. He turned the newspaper to Tuesday and showed her the photographs.

  A feeling of dread washed over Tuesday. This was not, she realised, only news about other people. This was news about people like her mother.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Tuesday asked. ‘Mum?’

  ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’

  ‘They weren’t abducted, were they?’

  ‘Not a bit, darling,’ Serendipity said. ‘But the fact that it’s a lie doesn’t make it any less worrying.’

  What Serendipity knew, Tuesday knew too, as did Denis, of course. The writers who had been found thousands of miles from home – some with broken bones, all with injuries – had not been kidnapped. Nor had they been asleep when they’d vanished, as they claimed. They had all been quite awake.

  ‘Something’s wrong there. Isn’t it, Mum?’

  There. It was the only word Tuesday could bring herself to use for the world of story that existed on the other end of a silvery thread of imagination – a magical place that was the collective secret of every writer who ever lived. Tuesday had been there. Serendipity went there all the time. And these writers on the front of the newspaper had been there. But instead of coming safely home again, as usual, to sit down at their desks and transcribe all the things they had seen and smelled and touched and tasted and lived and imagined, something had gone horribly wrong. Somehow, on their journey homeward, they had been knocked off course.

  But no writer would ever tell the police, let alone the media, exactly what they had been doing before they were discovered in Madrid or Melbourne or Minnesota. Everyone would think they were mad.

  ‘What do we do?’ Tuesday asked.

  ‘Well, I know what we don’t do,’ said Denis.

  Denis was at Tuesday’s desk, shoving pens and pencils and notepads and scraps of paper into his dressing-gown pockets. He tucked Tuesday’s little blue typewriter into its matching case and snapped the latch.

  ‘No, Dad! Not my typewriter,’ Tuesday begged, but her father was unmoved.

  ‘Until further notice,’ said Denis, ‘we do not write.’

  Tuesday and Serendipity looked at one another. He might has well have told them not to breathe.

  Chapter Three

  Vivienne Small could do many things. She could sail a boat, tie a knot, sharpen a knife, whistle a tune, solve a riddle, read a map, light a fire, hit a target with a speeding arrow, scale a cliff, swim through a wild sea, make an ice-cave, tap a cactus and survive a sandstorm. She could run fast and walk quietly. And with the help of her blue, leathery wings, she could leap small, dangerous distances.

  Vivienne could speak and write fluently in several languages, including Xunchillese, Formosan and Sandshuck, but she had never learned the tongue that might have helped her to talk with the great Winged Dog that lay on the forest floor at the base of her tree. She wanted to know where the dog had come from, and where it had been going, and whether or not it knew anything about the Mountains of Margalov and what had made them grow. And while Vivienne had some art as a healer, she knew that the cure of the Winged Dog’s terrible injuries was beyond her skill. Still, she was determined to do all she could to help.

  Leaping from branch to branch, Vivienne made a swift descent from the top branches of her tree to the ruins of her house. Gingerly, she entered what was left of her kitchen, stepping over broken beams. She saw that the tree house was now so unstable that what remained of it was likely to be blown out of the tree in the next high wind.

  Luckily, Vivienne kept her favourite weapons on the kitchen’s back wall, where they had not been harmed. Thinking of the unknown beast that had felled the Winged Dog, she slung her bow across her body, swiftly counted her turquoise-feathered arrows and secured her quiver neatly between her wings. Next, she tucked her blowpipe into her belt and gathered a pouch of poison darts.

  Then, from underneath her partly shattered kitchen bench, Vivienne extracted a wooden box. It was rather like a toolbox, with a top tray full of buttons and needles, a pair of small silver scissors and a thimble, a length of twine, a set of playing cards and a few scraps of leather. With a click, Vivienne released a hidden clasp at the side of the tray and lifted it away to reveal a compartment filled with small bottles of remedies that she herself had brewed and concocted from plants that grew all about her in the Peppermint Forest.

  ‘No, not that one. No, no, no,’ she muttered to herself, lifting out and then replacing small glass bottles with labels that read Zinnober Extract, Infusion of Jessamy, Incarnadine, Willowish Powder. At last Vivienne found what she was searching for.

  ‘Yes!’ she said, snatching up a small bottle labelled Tincture of Golden Rhodelia. The medicine was made from the stamens of tiny, glossy yellow flowers that bloomed for only a day or two each year. It had extraordinary healing properties and Vivienne hoped a dose might keep the dog alive long enough for her to seek help from somebody with greater healing powers. She held the bottle up to the light to check the level of the liquid and saw with dismay that it was only half full. A drop or two of the powerful medicine would be a sufficient dose for Vivienne herself, but would the amount she had be enough to help an animal the size of a Winged Dog? She didn’t know. Even so, the Golden Rhodelia was her best hope.

  Taking the branches two at a time, Vivienne dashed down to the forest floor where the dog lay, barely breathing.

  ‘Here you go, beauty,’ Vivienne whispered as she carefully dripped the Golden Rhodelia onto the dog’s tongue, one drop at a time. The pinkish flesh of the tongue glowed brightly as the potion was absorbed. Vivienne watched the stricken dog intently. It stirred, retracted its tongue into its mouth and twitched its gigantic paws. The dog tried to flex her upper wing, but – finding it still caught fast in the branches of the myrtle tree – gave a whimper of pain.

  ‘Easy, easy,’ Vivienne said. She lay a hand on the dog’s muzzle.

  Just then, Vivienne heard another noise. From high above her came a loud buzzing sound, and Vivienne looked up to see two creatures spiralling downwards through the column of tattered forest. She didn’t know what these creatures were; she had never seen their like, and they moved so fast that at first all she could see was the haze of whirring wings, and the long, insect-like shapes of their bodies. She took cover beside the dog’s face, whipped her bow off her shoulder and fitted an arrow, focusing her dead-eye gaze. As the creatures came closer, Vivienne saw no sign of the sharp claws or jagged teeth that might have injured the dog by her side. Her instincts told her that these otherworldly beings were gentle, not dangerous. When they landed on the forest floor, Vivienne lowered her bow. She realised that there were not two beings, as she had first thought, but four.

  The winged creatures were steeds, rather like immense dragonflies with bodies covered in close-cropped velvety fur that was mottled cream and white. Saddled upon their backs were people, and they, too, were of a kind that Vi
vienne had never encountered before. They were about her own size and dressed in tight-fitting suits made of a near-white leather or suede, with golden embroidery at the wrists and ankles. On their bare hands and feet, in place of skin, were small, pearlescent scales. Their heads were encased in large, creamy-white helmets that were ridged in the manner of seashells. The narrow openings in the front of these helmets showed only large eyes, gleaming darkly in the place where the whites ought to be, yet with irises of an intense, clear white.

  They stepped down from their saddles and removed their helmets revealing the fine fur that grew all over their faces. Their noses and mouths were small, their narrow lips shimmering and pale. The two were very like each other – their bodies exactly the same size and shape, and their long hair was identically fixed into neat snowy braids – but the fur on their faces was patterned quite differently. One was marked with irregular chequers of cream and white, while the other had darker stripes radiating out from the nose to the edges of the face.

  The pair held their helmets beneath their arms and bowed deeply to Vivienne, who gave a small, suspicious nod in return. The buzzing of the insects’ wings settled to a low hum as the creatures lowered their heads to the forest floor to graze on the moss. Vivienne raised herself up to her full height, slung her bow back across her body, and said, ‘I am Vivienne Small.’

  The one with the chequered face stepped forward and spoke in a clear and musical female voice.

  ‘I am Harlequin.’

  ‘And I am Tarquin,’ said her stripe-faced companion, his voice lower, though equally melodic.

  It took Vivienne a moment to register that when she heard their voices, it was both through her ears and right inside her mind.

  ‘My sister and I were chasing the vercaka who attacked this great beast,’ said Tarquin, gesturing to the dog.

  Vivienne shook her head, unaccustomed to this unusual way of hearing. She heard him clearly inside her head, even though he stood a distance from her. It felt like having a fly in her ear.

  ‘You saw what caused this?’ she asked. ‘What was it? I don’t know anything that could bring down a Winged Dog in this way.’

  ‘Dog?’ Tarquin enquired of Vivienne.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Dog,’ Harlequin repeated, as if committing the word deliberately to memory.

  ‘Yes, dog,’ said Vivienne, a little more impatiently than she meant to. ‘What did you say attacked it?’

  ‘Vercaka,’ Tarquin said bitterly.

  Harlequin looked into Vivienne’s face through large, pale eyes.

  ‘You know nothing of vercaka?’ Harlequin asked.

  ‘No. Nothing,’ Vivienne admitted, though it pained her to do so. There were few places she had not been, and – so she had thought – no creatures that were foreign to her. ‘What is this vercaka?’

  ‘Vercaka are monsters on the wing, both stupid and cruel. They have sharpness of claw, and of beak, and the way they speak their words poisons the heart,’ Harlequin explained. ‘This is how they brought down the dog. They have some way of seeing your greatest fears. Once they have this knowledge, they use words to stop your courage, to kill all your hopes.’

  ‘That sounds dreadful. Where are they from?’ demanded Vivienne. ‘I’ve never heard of such an animal before.’

  Harlequin turned to her brother and it seemed to Vivienne that the two spoke to each other within their own minds, so that she could not know what they were saying.

  Tarquin said, ‘The vercaka are the enemy of our people, and they prey on us and our farouche whenever they can.’ He gestured to the pale insect-like creatures nearby. ‘They come from our world, which we can no longer find.’

  The music in Tarquin’s voice changed to a minor key and Vivienne heard in it a great sadness.

  Harlequin went on, ‘We have flown, and flown, but can find nothing that is familiar. Our world has great sand plains, and for all time, they have been wide and flat and endless. But lately, and without warning, they have changed. Slopes rise up and fall away in places they have never been. Winds rush across these plains with terrible force. We were caught in such a storm. Instead of being buried by sand, we fell through into your sky. And the vercaka must have come through too, from our world to yours. It is a curse that we would not have wished upon you.’

  ‘Strange things are happening everywhere,’ Vivienne said. She thought again of the Mountains of Margalov, and felt deeply unsettled. If faced with the need to duel with a pirate or battle a fire-breathing pyronelle, Vivienne would know exactly what to do. She could outsmart a two-faced fortune teller, and tie a purple-banded sea snake in knots, and make a flying fox out of two lengths of Hartaxian poison ivy, but she didn’t know the first thing about how to fix a world that was suddenly and perilously unpredictable.

  ‘It’s not only your world,’ she said. ‘Winged Dogs such as this one have been gone from our skies for some time. And yet, one has returned.’

  ‘It is difficult to know what may be done,’ Tarquin said. ‘We have lost our weapons in our fall, and can only hope we find something here that will slay this creature and any others that may follow.’

  ‘What do you need?’ she asked. She indicated her bow.

  Tarquin shook his head. ‘Their bodies are tough. We have a poison that kills them. It runs in small rivers on our plains.’

  Vivienne then drew out her Lucretian blowpipe. ‘This has poison darts that can make any creature sleep,’ she said.

  ‘Sleep will not be enough,’ Harlequin said.

  ‘You might try Lucretia,’ Vivienne said. ‘It is far to the south, a group of islands, and they have many poisons …’

  The dog gave a low moan. One of its big amber eyes flickered open, then closed again.

  ‘The drops I have given the dog are having some effect,’ Vivienne explained, tossing the empty bottle to Harlequin. ‘This mixture works to soften the pain and begin the healing, but I doubt that the little I had will be enough to cure a creature so large, and so badly hurt. I must go for help.’

  ‘May we look to your dog? We know much about the vercaka, and we have ways of seeing,’ Harlequin said.

  Vivienne hesitated. She knew nothing of these people. But the dog needed help and it couldn’t wait. Besides, she thought, the dog was not hers to command or control. She stepped away to allow Tarquin and Harlequin to come closer.

  The two inspected the wounded dog, walking all around its great body. Vivienne observed the unusual way that the siblings moved: as if they had extra elbows in their arms and more than one knee in each leg. It was strange, yet graceful. From time to time Harlequin and Tarquin looked at each other and Vivienne knew they were again communicating in their silent, secret way. At length, Harlequin returned to where Vivienne stood waiting. Harlequin reached out and took Vivienne’s hands in her own and she was surprised that the pearly scales that covered them were warm and soft to the touch.

  ‘Vivienne Small, the dog is dying,’ said Harlequin. Her voice was as low as a lullaby, and its soothing notes echoed inside Vivienne’s mind.

  She pulled away crossly.

  ‘It can’t die. We need to heal it!’

  ‘It is beyond that,’ said Tarquin. ‘You must understand, Vivienne Small, that the wounds the vercaka inflict are not only to the body. There is also the damage that has been done to the dog’s mind.’

  Vivienne kicked at a tree root in frustration. ‘But the drops! I gave her all I had. It might work yet …’

  Tarquin said, ‘The time for healing had passed.’

  ‘There has to be something we can do!’ said Vivienne.

  ‘No,’ said Tarquin softly. ‘And you know, in your deepest heart, that this is so.’

  ‘Before she goes, Vivienne Small,’ Harlequin said, ‘we must learn what we can from her. Do you not think, as we do, it is possible she knows something of the strange events in your world, and in ours?’

  Vivienne looked searchingly at Harlequin and then at Tarquin. Their faces showe
d little expression, but their eyes were full of sorrow.

  ‘Will it cause her pain?’

  ‘None at all,’ said Tarquin. ‘Together, we are able to sense her thoughts, and her memories.’

  Vivienne nodded sadly, and Tarquin and Harlequin each placed a pearly hand upon the crescent moon between the dog’s closed eyes.

  Vivienne waited.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘Patience. When life is this close to death, it’s not easy to find a memory,’ Tarquin said.

  Vivienne waited a little longer.

  ‘Can you see anything yet?’

  ‘More patience, Vivienne Small,’ said Harlequin.

  Vivienne wandered over to where Tarquin and Harlequin’s farouche lay dozing at the base of her tree. Their long fluffy antennae trembled in time with the soft, sighing sounds they made in their sleep.

  ‘The dog carries something,’ said Tarquin, at last.

  ‘What?’ asked Vivienne.

  ‘Quiet,’ said Harlequin, a note of command in her voice.

  ‘Her destination is a place of stone and mist,’ Tarquin said.

  ‘The mist is thick, and the way is closed to all but some,’ Harlequin said.

  ‘There is a code, carved into the stone,’ Tarquin added. ‘It is written in runes that we do not know, but we will remember it.’

  ‘The way is guarded by beasts,’ Harlequin said. ‘With great heads …’

  And then she broke away, and brought her hand to her chest. The dog took a shallow, rattling breath and then sighed for the longest time. Vivienne, Harlequin and Tarquin all gazed at her, and despite the differences between them, each of them knew that sound. It was a last breath. A breath that carried away memory, smell, sound and thought.

  Tears filled Vivienne’s eyes.

  ‘Peace,’ said Harlequin.

  ‘Farewell,’ said Tarquin.

  For a time, the three stood in silence.

  And then Tarquin spoke. ‘Have you a tool for making runes?’