The Glass Town Game, Page 7

  “ ’Cause Frenchies eat frog legs and we eat limes so’s not to get scurvy when we go to sea!” Branwell giggled. “Only I’ve never had a lime so no one ought to call me one of that. But they will anyway on account of how people are rotten. Glass Town isn’t a riddle like Charlotte said. It’s a joke! A marvelously weird, really drawn-out joke! The best one I ever heard!”

  “Come, sourlads, come tarthearts, come ripetroops!” The Iron Duke shouted jovially, without the least worry in his voice. “My bitterboot berserkers, my jolly greencoats! Forward, MARCH!”

  The limey lads stomped right up to the armored frogs and snapped to attention. As one, they saluted the exhausted squad of wooden soldiers, Crashey and Bravey and Rogue and the lot, relieving them of duty. The gang lifted poor Gravey from the field of battle and set him down behind the lines, near a bakery whose crimson windows had shattered all over its own steaming pies. They stood quite close to Bran and Emily, but didn’t seem to notice them in the slightest, not even Charlotte and Anne, who knelt lovingly beside their beloved fallen toy.

  “How do you like that?” Bran said. “Hullo! We’re all right, if you were curious!”

  It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. He was right here, just waiting to protect them, just bursting at the gut to defend their honor and defeat their enemies, and this stupid old place hadn’t even given him a chance. Charlotte and Anne had hogged it all and Branwell had gotten nothing but a big leather sword and nothing to swing at. He’d have championed the blazes out of the girls; he would have!

  Emily ignored her brother. She lowered her mace and ducked across the cobblestones to rejoin her sisters. She didn’t look behind her once, but she didn’t have to. She knew Bran would follow, furrowing his brow and dragging his feet and planning a cutting remark or two. He always had to plan them out well in advance.

  “Prime and load!” thundered the Iron Duke, his molten wings flaring behind him. His oceanic lion roared to shake the sun from the sky.

  “Ready tongues, my hoppers!” screeched Napoleon. His flaming rooster crowed green fire and green fury.

  The limeys began shoving bullets and powder in while the frogs stamped their webbed steel feet and dipped their long, terrible tongues into the barrels of toadstones on their backs and coiled them back like catapults. Em scrambled into the shelter of the bakery awning just in time. Charlotte hugged her so hard she nearly strangled, even though it is very awkward to hug anyone holding a spiked mace while you’ve still got your rifle unslung.

  “Where’s Bran?” Anne asked.

  “Oh, he’ll be along,” Emily said with confidence. She pretended to check an invisible pocket watch. “Right about . . . just precisely . . . now.”

  “Make ready!” Napoleon and Wellington screamed at the same instant, and Charlotte did wonder if they got tired of screaming every little thing, because her ears were certainly tired of it.

  The sisters looked back over the little scarlet alley where Emily had come to see Branwell frowning furiously and stomping toward them, just as they knew he would be. It was wonderfully comforting to know a person so well.

  “Oh, hurry up, Mr. Snail!” Anne called to him. Bran glared back at her—but he picked up his pace, trying to jog while hanging on to the massive sword. He needed both hands to carry the beast. It wasn’t easy.

  “FIRE!” howled Napoleon and Wellington together.

  The air in Port Ruby detonated into a mist of red glass and lime skins and frog-tongues and gun smoke. The earth itself shook. Anne fell against Emily, clawing at her throbbing ears. Charlotte stepped instinctively in front of them, even though her rifle wasn’t half done with all that ridiculous loading and all she could have done was slap a frog with it. Emily stopped breathing. She shut her eyes. If she shut her eyes, she couldn’t see it, and if she couldn’t see it it, it wouldn’t have happened.

  Branwell stood stock still between the pastry cart and the bakery it belonged to. He didn’t cry out. He didn’t drop his sword. He looked down at his chest and said, very quietly: “Buck up.” Blood tumbled out of his heart where the toadstone had struck him. The stain looked so beautiful, so perfect, like a rose growing out of him. Bran thought he would have to try drawing that someday. A lovely feeling spread over him. For once, he felt that he belonged just where he was, for his blood was as red as the glass cobblestones, as red as the claret river, as red as the roofs and gables and windows, as red as anything in Port Ruby could ever hope to be. But no one heard him, so no one could tell him to be brave.

  Branwell collapsed into a heap of black woolen boy on the crimson ground, quite, quite dead.

  SEVEN

  Such a Little Thing

  What’s the matter with you?” snarled Sergeant Major Rogue.

  Emily, Anne, and Charlotte stood frozen. They stared at their brother’s body as though it was a puzzle they could work out, and once they had it worked out, he would get up and laugh and pinch them and everything would be all right again.

  “You said!” Anne burst out sobbing. “You said we couldn’t be hurt! You said! You promised!”

  Horror seeped up from Charlotte’s stomach. A black, wet horror that would never leave her. She could see Bran’s pale face lying against the glass road and it was Maria’s face. It was Lizzie’s face. It was her mother’s face. “I was wrong,” she whispered.

  “No, no, you’re never ever wrong, you always say you’re never wrong and if you’re never wrong you couldn’t be wrong about being wrong and you can’t be wrong now!” Anne lurched toward Bran’s body. Crashey caught her roughly and pushed her back against the bakery wall as the volley went on and on and on. Frogs bellowed and lime-boys beat their drums.

  “What d’ya think you’re doing, young sir?” snapped the Sergeant.

  “Are you quite mad?” hissed Captain Bravey.

  Tears ran down Emily’s face, one after the other, helplessly, uselessly. There’s three of us now, some awful grown-up, unfeeling voice said in her mind. Only three.

  “I said he was rubbish,” she said softly. “That was the last thing he heard in this world. You really ought never to call a person rubbish, and I did it all the time. Oh, Bran, Bran, I’m so sorry. I’m rubbish, I am, not you at all.”

  “You see this?” stormed Sergeant Major Rogue, pointing at the walls of the bakery. “This is shelter, you idiots! You’re supposed to stay put when you hear the call to make ready, not run out into the ruddy street like a lost ball!”

  “Bloody breathers,” muttered the others, whose names they did not yet know, but could guess. “Haven’t got the sense the Genii gave squirrels.”

  “Excuse me,” Emily cried suddenly, turning on the soldiers. “We followed you! This is your fault! We’re only a parson’s children! You’re soldiers; you’re meant to keep people safe! That’s your entire job!”

  No, thought Charlotte. It was my job. My entire job. And I was wrong. And everything is over. She thought she would certainly be sick.

  “We are not mad,” Emily kept on, shaking her finger directly in the Captain’s wooden face. “It’s very rude of you to say that to us when we’ve only just finished being shot at and our brother is dead! There is nothing the matter with any of the four of us, sir, and if we knew the rules, we’d have made a run for it at the proper time, but we didn’t, and he . . . he . . . couldn’t, so here we ‘bloody’ are, with cake stuck in our ears and frogs everywhere and Branwell is gone! If anything around here is mad, that is!”

  “Em! Don’t let’s get into the habit of swearing just because we’re not at home,” scolded Charlotte automatically, and a scolding from Charlotte, however mild her words, would wilt the heart of a wild rhinoceros and cause him to devote the rest of his life to keeping his horns sharp and his back straight. But her voice failed on the word home. What right had she to scold when she’d failed poor Branwell so? She wasn’t ever the oldest to begin with. That was why it had all happened. Maria would have saved him. She was an imposter, and now everyone knew it. She had no ri
ght to tell anyone what to do anymore.

  “What’s Papa going to say?” Anne whispered.

  “I don’t know why you’re making such a grand fuss over it,” mumbled Sergeant Major Rogue sheepishly.

  “Yes, you’re being very dramatic,” Crashey said. He rubbed his forehead under his helmet. “Very over-the-topsified.”

  “Embarrassing,” agreed one of the soldiers they hadn’t been introduced to yet.

  “Our brother is DEAD! Of course we’re being dramatic! Wouldn’t you be?”

  Captain Bravey and Sergeant Crashey looked at each other, then down at the corpse of Leftenant Gravey, then back to the girls.

  “Nope,” shrugged Crashey.

  “Stiff upper and all that,” Bravey said kindly. “Why trouble yourself over such a little thing?”

  “It’s not little, it’s not,” wept Anne. “It’s Bran.”

  The gunfire went quiet at last with a rattle of armor and hammers falling on empty chambers. The girls tore away from the squad and stumbled out onto the road toward their brother. Charlotte and Emily got their hands up under him, slick with blood.

  “I’m sorry, Bran,” Charlotte said to his dear, sweet face. “I shouldn’t have called you a donkey. I should have let you have the sword.”

  “A little help, Anne?” Emily groaned. But Anne did not answer, and when they got Branwell under the shelter of the stained glass walls, when they’d laid him out beside Leftenant Gravey and looked for her, the youngest of them was nowhere to be seen.

  “FORM RANKS!” Napoleon and Wellington hollered again. “HANDLE CARTRIDGE!”

  “Anne! Anne! Where’s she gone?” Charlotte spun round, panicked. Her heart threatened to give the whole thing up and run off without her.

  “PRIME AND LOAD!” came the cry from the English and the French.

  Lime juice sprayed from a thousand rifle barrels. It stung their eyes, their skin, their teeth like acid. Emily rubbed at her eyes, her fingers covered in blood and the sour, vicious lime. She spied her sister first. Anne was creeping across the plaza toward one of the smaller bullfrogs. It had a catapult on its green back and a sleepy, friendly look in its eye—but then, all frogs have that look, and it doesn’t mean they are sleepy or friendly.

  “Pssst,” Anne coaxed the frog, holding out her hand to it like it was a shy pony. “Nice frog. Brave frog. Handsome frog. Who’s a nice, brave, handsome frog?”

  The frog noticed Anne. It stared at her hand in disbelief.

  “Er,” the frog said uncertainly. “I suppose that I am, mademoiselle?”

  “Anne!” hissed Emily. “Get back here this instant! What are you doing?” Two, two, the grown-up voice in her protested. There can’t be only two. We’ll never make it on just two of us.

  “MAKE READY!” yelled the Duke and the Emperor.

  “I’m going after her,” Charlotte said firmly. “Hold my rifle, Em. I’ll only be a moment.”

  “Hell on a plate, you ruddy fools!” screamed Rogue. “What did I clearly say about hearing anybody belch out make ready? Get inside, you unfathomably stupid breathers!”

  Charlotte and Emily looked round the ruined red plaza. Not a single building still held roof and window together. Under the onslaught of Old Boney, everything that was once inside was now firmly outside, and mostly lying on the street in pieces.

  “WHERE?” They shouted together as the armies bellowed commands they now knew too well, handle cartridge and draw ramrods and ram down! “HOW?”

  “Yes you are a nice, brave, handsome frog!” Anne exclaimed warmly. She smiled the same smile she used on Rainbow and Diamond and Jasper back home, whenever a thunderstorm had made them nervous of eating from her hand.

  The frog’s whole body seemed to relax. He crouched down near her. “Thank you! You know, it feels so good to hear someone say all that. I always thought I was rather good-looking, and I do try to be kind to others whenever I can, and I have never shirked my duty to roi ou pays, king or country, don’t you know, but no one ever seems to notice. I’m just one frog in a million, no matter what I do!”

  “Oh, not to me!” Anne said winningly. “To me you are simply One Frog. One Perfect Frog!”

  “Is that a bit of bacon you’ve got there?” Napoleon’s foot soldier said hungrily. “We don’t get meat rations anymore.”

  “Fresh from my breakfast,” Anne nodded, for there never was a breakfast she didn’t half-smuggle away for her animals. “All for you.”

  Sergeant Major Rogue rolled his good eye and made a disgusted sound. “Stupid tourists,” he sighed. “You could be sitting on a mountain of books and still ask where’s the library? Well, it’s not my entire job to point the way to you splitwits, as I am neither a signpost nor a traffic police, but as you are about to get your adorable little meat sacks roasted and fried, I suppose I’ve got to go ahead and do every-bleeding-thing for you!”

  The wooden soldier reached them in two short, businesslike steps. He snatched Charlotte’s sword from Bran’s cold, stiffening fingers and Emily’s mace right out of her hand. He tossed them up onto the glittering scarlet pavement between a haberdashery and a redgrocer, whose beets and radishes and raspberries and rhubarb and grapes had already been half devoured by hungry warriors on both sides. Once away from their owners, the weapons shuddered and trembled and became suitcases again. Rogue yanked a little balsam-bound notebook from one breast pocket, a twiggy pencil from the other, and scribbled something down. He shoved the paper at Charlotte.

  “Go say this to your luggage and say it NICELY, mind you. You’ve only got about ninety seconds before nothing you say will matter and we’ll all be having tea together in Hades. Go on!”

  Charlotte’s bravery was starting to wilt. She looked down at the notebook uncertainly. What lovely writing Rogue had! Perhaps they could be friends one day, for Charlotte admired good handwriting almost as much as she admired good deeds and good intentions. She caught herself again, thinking of the future, of friendship, when Bran was dead and nothing did matter anymore. Take charge, she told herself. You’ve still got to look after everyone that’s left and keep them safe. You’re still the oldest, for all the good it does. It is, as Em says, your entire job. Charlotte gave the little notebook a squeeze against her chest and dashed over to their suitcases, trying to keep an eye on Anne inching toward her frog, feeling extremely silly and not at all sure what in the world this would accomplish.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Charlotte saw her youngest sister do something awful. And wonderful. And awful. As the frog bent its great, wide head to nibble at the rind of bacon, Anne gave out a bloodcurdling savage war cry and leapt up on his back. She kicked his ribs brutally with her little feet and hauled back on the rope of his catapult with both arms. The frog burbled in pain and charged off wildly toward his own King, cursing Anne, cursing himself, cursing bacon and fate and the agony of war.

  “For Branwell!” Anne shrieked. “For Bran and England and Bran all over again and forever!”

  “Hurry up!” shouted the squad of wooden soldiers.

  “You can’t save her out here!” Bravey pleaded.

  “O, Glorious Baggage!” Charlotte read out in her sweetest voice. “Blessed Childe of the Great Trunk! Scion of the Ancient House of Lug! I, while acknowledging Your Individual Right to Free Will, Self-Determination, Parliamentary Representation, and Bodily Autonomy, do Most Humbly Beg of You to stop mucking about and show me what you’ve got!” Charlotte glanced over her shoulder. “I say, this is long!” she whispered at the soldiers and her siblings.

  Anne pointed the frog at Napoleon and slashed at the catapult’s rope with the bayonet of her gun. It sprang; she dropped her rifle; she ducked as the basket hurled a beaten iron ball into the air.

  “You’re a rotten little goblin,” the frog sighed as it flew.

  “Keep going, for pine’s sake!” Crashey hissed.

  Charlotte tore her eyes away from Anne. A nimble frog-sniper was galloping clumsily toward her on webbed feet, lashing out
with his tongue, trying to snatch at the handles of the suitcases with it. Charlotte cried out miserably, tears coming in earnest now. It wasn’t supposed to be this way; it was supposed to be an adventure, a game, a joy! She cringed as she swung out the rifle’s butt. Shooting was one thing, but to harm a poor creature right to its face was too horrid. A sickening crack echoed out over the plaza as she connected and the beast flopped flat. Charlotte’s hands and her voice shook horribly as she held up the paper again and read.

  “Carry me as I have Carried You, and in exchange, I solemnly swear never to Forget You in a Train Station and Condemn you to the Fiery Depths of the Left Luggage Office, nor Bash You Roughly when Lifting You into the Overhead Rack or forget to Pack My Toiletries Carefully and thereby Spill Unpleasant Unguents Upon, Throughout, and All Over You. You are the very Best and Prettiest and Strongest and Hardiest and Most Spacious of all Luggage, and I am awfully lucky to have purchased You, and not any of the Other Assorted Valises from the Shop. Valesium in excelsis, keep me safe!”

  The two suitcases instantly unsnapped their lids and smacked them twice like teeth gnashing. Then, something began to happen. Something astonishing. Something enormous.

  Anne’s shot crashed directly into Napoleon’s rooster. It stove in his wing, the one made out of an old dented teapot that looked so very like the one Aunt Elizabeth polished every month despite the dent. The chicken crooned pitifully and turned its blazing eyes toward its master, begging silently for help, for love, for forgiveness. Then, the rooster toppled over, clucking in misery and trying to reach the wound with his beak while Napoleon struggled to get out from under its fiery bulk. Anne cackled in vengeful delight. She turned the frog back toward her sisters and kicked and kicked his ribs until he was running at daredevil speed.