“She’s almost here.” Roz nudged Bri awake. Bri crawled out of her arctic-grade sleepbag, yawned and looked around. “Where? I don’t see anything.”
Sipping coffee, Roz pointed pole-ward into the glittering, frosted expanse. “Look for a tiny motion of red and black out there— that’s all we’ll see for a while, since the dogsled’s at trotting pace, more or less.”
“Good thing she’s got santa clothes on, or I’d never have spotted her.” Bri squinted a little. “What d’you make it — ten minutes out?”
“Ten or less.”
“Good! Only ten or less more in this frozen wilderness. Well, plus the time it takes to get outa here. Where’s my cuppa? Sister, but that was a long first watch.”
“Coffee-pot’s in the coals.” Roz nodded toward the sparky little circle of rocks from last night’s signal-fire.
“Bless you, my child,” Bri said fervently. “Oh, good, enough for the others, too. They’ll sure be glad of it. Hey, what kind of a name is Snowite, anyway?”
“Same kind as Manhattanite, I guess. They live there, she lives here.”
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“With her toymaker elves and their peppermint sugarcanes and the big fat front-man.”
“With her sled-dogs, reindeer herds, and family,” Roz said mildly. “That front-man nonsense is other people’s thinking, not hers. And don’t knock the candy-stripes until you’ve lost a plain shepherd’s crook or two in the snow yourself.”
“Okay, okay. I’m just mean until I get myself outside the morning brew.” As they sat sipping and watching the bobbing little patch of color across the miles of snow, Briar said, “How’s grandma Streganona these days? Still dating both guys?”
“Yeh. Sez why should she have to choose between a nice steady woodsman who’s always there when you want him or a thrilling wolf who pops home unexpectedly between tours, full of tales of the band and the road.”
“I’m guessing the family has some opinions about that.”
“Most of the time, Mom’s the romantic and favors Wolf, and Dad and Uncle Bob favor Woody because he’s reliable. But sometimes Dad and Bob envy Wolf’s road life, y’know? Then Mom points out how good Woody is with his hands, how he can make anything she blueprints for him, and fix everything the family needs, too.”
“What’s Nona say to that?”
“She sez they can mind their own business.”
“Grandma’s a pistol.”
“So true.”
A flurry of windswept shadows broke the sunshine at their backs.
“Hey, the gang’s all here,” Bri said, turning. Glinting with reflected winter sunlight, a distant shape far above dropped flowers that blossomed wide and floated down. Thud thud thud thud thud thud thudd, And then another three more — swinging from their chute-strings, CinderBlaq, TomoeTan, and Blu landed and rolled to take the impact of their meeting with earth amid the non-womanned supply-chutes already flattening around them like massive empty silk ball-gowns.
“Hi, Roz! Hi, Bri!” Cindy called over her shoulder, gathering up her silks and chasing down one of the supply-chutes of gear as it danced ponderously off with the tempting breeze as if intent upon escape. Tan and Blu fanned out for the rest. Roz and Bri got up to help.
A chorus of excited yelps swept by.
“Shalom, Blu! As salam aleykum, Cin! Nǐ hǎo, Tomi!” Sno shouted, swinging her team in a big curve out past them so she could lean down at speed and capture an escapee that was trying to waltz across the tundra. “Yá’át’ééh, Roz! Bonjour, Bri!”
“Hiya, Pinky.” Roz grinned.
“Don’t call me Pinky!” Sno hopped off the sled even before the dogs fully pulled to a panting, yipping stop. “Good to see you, little ma.” She pulled Roz into a hug.
“Good to see you, little sis. You made good time.”
“The woozles couldn’t wait to get here. Coffee?”
“Thermos.”
“Terrif. I’ll get the team watered and fed, then me.”
“Wow, these skids and wheels are compact!” Briar marveled at the sled. “Must get tremendous landspeed.”
“They do! And I heard from Nona she worked out a new, frictionless superlight alloy so everything flexes and flies better. Exciting as heck!”
“Chute-sails rig to masts same as usual?” Roz was asking Blu.
“Yup. And look! Sunboxes from Majd, Gaza’s gift to the universe, no more burning any more fuel than we absolutely have to.”
“Sun bless us every one,” Bri said. “Where’s yer coffee mugs, relatives?’
“Found em!” Triumphantly, Cin waved one aloft. They all converged on the camp, puffing their breaths into the frigid air as they hauled all the chutes and gear with them.
“Lemme at the woozles!” Tan got there first, and Sno’s team jumped and waggled around her for shares of the skritchies, and treats she had pocketed for them beforehand. “Now Dasher, good boy! Now Dancer, you sweetie. Here you go, Prancer girl. Yes, I missed you all, too. Oof, mighty as little miners, aren’t you, Bashful? Snowite, these pups are stronger than ever!”
“Guys’re still telling each other we’ve taken on more than we can chew,” Blu confided as Roz filled her mug. “As if Streganona hasn’t been engineering the equipages for millenia.”
“They always say that. Even though they always turn out … um … mistaken.” Roz grinned.
“The guys had their big chance.” Cin came over to fill a mug and pass the thermos along.
Sno nodded. “But they couldn’t keep it in their pants.”
Tan said, “Our turn to take a stance.”
Bri said, “Time we make some real advance.”
Said Roz, “The world’s a village, when you get down to it.”
Sno: “It’s scarey how nearly they almost blew it.”
Cinder: “A mess they left us to repair.”
Blu: “Good thing we’re here. We know to take care.”
“Well, that was truly … something.” Tan grinned. With a last sip, she stretched, stowed the cup away as the others were doing with theirs, too, and they all set to assembling the Čehrāzād landairsea sleigh.
“What’d PeaGreen say when she saw this?” Sno carolled excitedly as Streganona’s latest machine came together like magic under their deft hands, a gleaming swan of a ship stretching up and long and wide.
“You call Gaia after that princess-pea story and she’ll call you ‘Pinky’,” Tan warned Sno. “Even if it’s true she feels pain the rest of us don’t. She’s the best pilot among us, for all that.”
“Gaia can call me ‘Pinky” all she wants,” Sno said, climbing up the rising structure to raise it further. “Fair’s fair. But no one else. Even if I am the palest one and always with a sunburned nose. So, what’d she say about Čehrāzād?”
“Not a lot,” Blu answered. “She didn’t see it in final form.”
“None of us did,” Tan added.
“Wait, didn’t Gaia work the Čehrāzād’s test-runs before y’all loaded it on the Rapunzelsteelskin?” Bri asked. She, Roz and Sno all looked shocked, their assembly tools stilled in their hands, as they stared down from topside at the other three.
“Nope, no time for a final test-run,” Cin said without a pause in the work. “We really came down to the deadline, what with all the paperwork and committees the guys kept putting in the way.” Tan and Blu grimaced at the recollection. The three on topside shook off their surprise and got back to the job at hand.
“Hoo babies,” Roz said slowly after a minute, checking readouts here and there as she made her way around and down. “That means our first real flight of the Čehrāzād is gonna be the shake-down run, too.”
“Gaia said she really envied us and hated having to wait to join up ‘til later,” Cin replied to that. “She said Punzel’s strength is long distance all at a go, but Čehrāzād’s is multiple hovers and short hops, and she hasn’t had a chance to fly like that in centuries.”
“Not since Nona fired up The Punzel and retired The Broom,” Blu remembered.
“They’re both dynamite with timeless mid-air heavy cargo tranfer,” Tan reminded them. “Nona saw to that. The way she’d always had to snap the whole Broom through both space and time to pick up cargo thousands and thousands of times a global night really cut into the pleasure of the trip.”
“I do remember her grumbling about that,” RozRed said thoughtfully. “PeaGreen — I mean Gaia wasn’t entirely happy with The Punzel having to deliver all the packages carpet-bomb style, either, with ribbons and name-tags blowing every which way in the breeze.”
“To engineer is human, and fae,” Cinder summed it.
“And universal,” added Blu.
“Grandma Nona couldn’t leave it be until she’d solved it,” Bri concluded.
They gazed upon her creation as it drank energy in from the westering sun and began to shiver its billowing silky solar-sails with the urge to fly.
“Well, c’mon let’s load up the woozles,” Sno shouted from the center where her dogsled and The Broom formed the heart of the Čehrāzād, like a starship’s bridge. But even before anyone could call them, the sled team left off their playing around the Čehrāzād and leaped in, waggling madly. The crew ran to stow all the remaining gear on board and swung to their stations as the brief artic-edged day ended, and Čehrāzād quivered to life, sweeping across the frost and gliding upward, light as thistledown, and into the glittering dark.
Čehrāzād’s nav beams reached out to orient on Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Ursa Major, and the three magical wise-men sparkling in the distance, Vega, Deneb and Altair. Carrying her crew to Gaia, she sped aloft on this first of her thousand and one nights, for a thousand times thousand times thousand nights more.
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<small>Added 27Jul2022 — Key to characters:
▮Snowite — SnowWhite/SantaClaus with 7/12 dwarfs/reindeer sled dogs
▮RezRed - RidingHood — the Americas
▮ CinderBlaq — Cinderella — SubSaharan African
▮ BriarBron — SleepingBeauty — middle east
▮ TomoeTan — Tomoe Gozen /Mulan — Asia
▮ PunzelBlond — Rapunzel/& rumplestilskingirl — European
▮ GaiaPeaseGreen — Princess & the pea — Australian/Polynesian/Micronesian
▮Čehrāzād — Sheherezade — Persian/Indian
▮ Nona — Strega Nona ("Grandma Witch" in Italian, though it is actually spelled as nonna)
▮ Blu —Bluma, a WanderingJew.</small>
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