The Glass Town Game, Page 9

  “It’s my first day on the job,” said the turtle-snail-beast. When he opened his mouth, they could see a soft, black, wool stocking-tongue moving. “I wanted to do well.”

  NINE

  The Tragical Romance

  of Baggage and People, or the Romantical Tragedy of People and Grog

  Emily blushed and looked down at her kneecaps. She couldn’t meet the beast’s eyes. They were made out of two pence she had hidden away long ago, so that no matter what happened in the unguessable future of School and Governessing and Being Grown, she could cling to the reassuring idea that she had some money of her own, however little. She’d never breathed a word, and now they would all know she had hoarded something for herself and not for them all. But no one seemed to notice, so Emily quickly stopped noticing, too.

  “Noble luggage!” cried Leftenant Gravey to the turtley snail on the wall. “May all the blessings of the Genii be upon you!”

  The snail-turtle inclined his head politely, but did not reply.

  “Not even one word for old Gravey; how do you like that?” The Leftenant grumbled quietly to himself. “I will hold a grudge, I will. I’m going to hold it and feed it and water it and pet it and tell it it’s a good grudge. That’ll show the old bag.”

  “The Genii?” Branwell scrunched up his nose.

  Warrant Officer Goody grimaced. “It’s like I always say, no one’s got any respect for religion nowadays. The gods of Glass Town skip a few centuries between visits and suddenly everyone’s an Anglican having a little picnic of a Sunday instead of repentin’ like they ought. Now, me, I do six sets of repentin’ every morning before chow. Twenty push-ups, repent. Twenty more, repent again. And look at me! Handsome, eh? That’s the repentin’.”

  Crashey glared at Goody. He continued in a louder voice. “Most munificabulous bindles! We are most grateful for your . . . salvatervention? Intervupption?” Crashey was a brave sort, but he couldn’t manage to keep his vocabulary any tidier than his closet. Long words were such naughty little hoodlums, always running away from him instead of staying put and making him look good like they were supposed to. “For thou hast-ed save-ed our trousers and hem-ed our bacon! It’s a good job you did; the war will just ruin your afternoon, I tell you what.”

  “Why are you talking to it like that?” said Branwell, to paper over everything he wanted to say instead. “It’s only Charlotte’s and Em’s old knockabout suitcases, really.”

  “I sat on one and popped its hinges last year,” admitted Anne guiltily. She twisted her fingers together.

  Bran pressed on, feeling bolder now that Anne had backed him up. “I daresay anything that got itself to Glass Town would grow some sort of magic! But they’re just bags and you’re talking to Em’s underthings like they’re the King of Spain!”

  The wooden soldiers gasped and spluttered, covering their mouths and hearts and ears with their hands.

  “He doesn’t mean anything by it,” pleaded Quartermaster Hay Man, quite the stoutest of them round the belly.

  “Just a lad,” cried Naughty and Baddy together. “You know how lads can be! Terrible inventions, lads!”

  “The young’uns don’t learn their history nowadays, that’s the thing of it,” Warrant Officer Goody moaned.

  “Please don’t pack us!” wept the Privates Tracky and Boaster, covering their heads with their arms as though the ceiling were about to crumble down and crush them dead.

  Captain Bravey drew himself up to his full height. “My boy, a good soldier keeps both his wits and his powder dry at all times. A tongue is very like a gun, which is why they nearly rhyme. Both can be fired to devastating effect, for good or evil, and both can explode in your hands, wounding your comrades instead of your enemies.”

  Branwell flushed with a deep and burning shame. He never thought he could feel so poorly as he did just at that moment, under the oaken gaze of the brave Captain. All the wind of battle and whiskey and resurrection rushed out of him at once. He sat down with a heavy smack of trousers against sofa, and tried devilishly hard not to cry.

  Goody mumbled on under his breath, but Anne heard him all the same. “You can’t go blaming the youth for not studying! History’s depressing! And boring. Like winter. One storm after another. Brrr. Why not stay inside your own head where it’s cozy and tidy and the repentin’s nice and hot? Nothing out there but the war and mad science and Princesses going missing and Boney bashing up the place nine times a week.”

  “What Princess?” Anne whispered to him. Her almost-violet eyes shone at the word.

  “The Princess,” Goody said with confusion. “The!”

  “Can I say the story?” Crashey asked the snaily turtle. “If it please Your Excellejesties? Or is that meant to be Majellences . . . ?”

  “Please.” The head on the wall nodded. “One always likes to hear about oneself.”

  The Sergeant stood at attention, ramrod straight, arms stiff behind his back, and bellowed:

  “THE TRAGICAL ROMANCE OF BAGGAGE AND PEOPLE, BY SERGEANT CRASHEY! See, as long as there’s been people, there’s been luggage, because it’s practically the first thing you need besides fire and a cave and a mastopotamus to get rump steaks and trousers out of, on account of how you’ve just got to have something to carry all your other somethings in, right? So bags and people got right and proper civilized together, side by side. People got straight backs and high foreheads and agricusbandrilly inclined and . . .” Crashey felt his grip on his words loosening and hurried out in front of the mess he was making. “And we got jolly good at writing and building and inventeering stuff and goodsense, like moats and hats and pudding and the lot. But luggage got so fantavulously useful that we couldn’t do without. You see what they can do, yeah? Carry us any which way! A house, a carriage, a balloon, a ship, a racing stallionocerosupine! Is that a thing? It sounds like it ought to be, so let’s say it is! Plusly, a good Valise can feed you and bed you and tell you all about the local customs and points of interest and, furtherditionally, keep out anything but the end of the world, and pack down to the size of a wee dog at the end of it all. All they asked was right and fair payment for their services—a sock or a mustache comb or a nice shoe every so once in a while, which is why oftener and oftening, when you get to the place you’re going, you can’t find that nice velvet coat you just knew you packed, right? It was payday, that’s all, and your luggage took its salary; can’t blame ’em. Er. Cap’n, they like to be called Valises, now, yeah? I think I said luggage. Curse my acorn-head! So hard to break old habits, you know!”

  The turtle-snail interrupted Crashey’s story, penny-eyes blinking sleepily. “All was well in the world and the wash,” he said, and all the children thought his voice was wonderfully soothing and deep, like a big, soft pocket. “But you lot couldn’t keep up your end. Charlotte, Emily, you must understand that we did not break the contract!” the Valise insisted. “The souls of people have so little carrying capacity! They got so angry at having to pay our wages, cursing and storming about and slamming us viciously. And it hurt, you know. It did hurt. Then, they began to treat us carelessly, tossing us into closets like we were no more than, no more than . . .” The snail-turtle trailed off sorrowfully. “No more than boxes,” he finished. “No more than boxes, even though we’d spent weeks traveling together, talking, laughing, sharing meals and confidences, and us there with a hairbrush or a flask of wine or a bedtime story at the moment it was wanted! People dragged us through the mud, overstuffed us intolerably, bought new suitcases rather than caring for us in our old age, but, worst of all, they Lost us. Over and over, because they were drunk or sleepy or in a rush! Would you ever lose your dear aunt or your papa?”

  “No!” cried Anne.

  “Because you don’t Lose family! And when a Valise is Lost, she ends up in the Left Luggage Office, which is a very naughty word among our kind.” The luggage-beast shut its eyes in terror. “The LLO is a dreadful place.” He shivered, shedding a single rosewater tear. “Ruled by the Ha
ndler, eternally cold, full of shadows and dust!”

  Crashey, very put out by having had his thunder stolen by a couple of old bags, hollered: “SO! One day a hundrand years ago or summat, all the luggage—Valises!—everywhere went on strike together and that means on the count of three they all shut up tight with their people inside them and no one saw any of those citizenulation ever again, which is bloody horrifying, you know, and set civilizankind back an eon or nine, and this was called the Great Packing THE END.”

  He gave a little bow. The children clapped uncertainly. It wasn’t a very nice story, but it was a story, so they felt they should clap. Probably.

  “And that, my little man, is why we are unfailingly polite and kind and sweet to our baggage, and acknowledge their rights as free and intelligent creatures, because otherwise they might eat us, which sums up the whole of international politics,” Captain Bravey finished sternly.

  “Only we never did all that!” cried Charlotte’s and Emily’s luggage. “We’ve heard plenty about it, of course. Family gossip travels faster than any parcel. But we weren’t born! And anyway, we never grew big enough to carry anyone till just now. Till us two suitcases put latch and hinge together and stopped being Charlotte’s and Emily’s and started being ME. One is . . . we are . . . I am . . . quite new to it. Terribly sorry, the pronouns get confused. We grew up in a tannery in Leeds, had our education in a shop in Keighley, and then lived happily with Miss Maria and Miss Elizabeth, and then with Miss Charlotte and Miss Emily. Who never mistreated us even a little.” He cleared his boar-bristle throat. “Unlike Anne. But I’m not sore; you didn’t mean a thing by it, poor poppet, and we were just sitting about where anyone could squash us. It was Haul O’Ween, is all, the only holiday of the Lug Year. We’d a right to congregate. But, dear Charlotte and kind Emily have hardly ever so much as sat on us to get us to shut or packed knives and such that might cut us. The only wrong you’ve done is not to know we were alive, and who could blame you? We never spoke up! But however you fold it, it’s very pleasant to meet you properly at last.” The turtle-snail pursed his leathery beak and bowed his head slightly. He waggled his antennae in distress. “I am so awfully sorry about your sisters. We wept and wept, but no one could hear us. That is the curse of being born an Object outside Glass Town.”

  Charlotte squeezed Emily’s hand. Both of them looked under their lashes at Branwell, so strangely alive and sitting next to them.

  The baggage-beast stretched out his neck hopefully. “We would very much like to introduce ourselves. It seems like the thing to do. But I haven’t any names. Seeing as how we’re foreign.”

  Emily thought of all the times they put things into their suitcases and took them out again, how the School carriage must have jostled the poor things, how the Headmaster had locked them with all the others in a dark room until it was time to go home for summer. Charlotte knuckled a tear out of her eye, for the baggage, for all that had happened in the last hour or two, for Branwell, for her sister’s sleeping in the churchyard in Haworth. She felt suddenly quite tired and quite wretched.

  “You look terribly like Westminster Abbey when you’re all unpacked,” Emily said shyly. “Only I like you a great deal more than Westminster Abbey, and Westminster Abbey can’t do half of what you can do. So I shall call you Bestminster Abbey, if you don’t mind it.”

  “We . . . I like it very much!” said Bestminster, and smiled a turtley smile. “I shall put it on the mantel where everyone can see it and praise us.”

  A long, deep horn sounded somewhere out in the battlefield of Port Ruby. Even inside the safe, thick walls of Bestminster Abbey, they could hear it clearly. The wooden soldiers all snapped to attention. Little leaves fell from the brim of Gravey’s helmet.

  “That’s us, boys!” Captain Bravey said, with a twinge of sadness. “Now that the four of you are safe and sound inside your luggage, ah, Valise, I mean to say, we must report to the Duke and see to the washing up and the sweeping and the raising of the dead for tomorrow’s fight. Duty is such a bother.”

  Anne could hardly believe they could say such a thing so easily, as though they were saying they’d have to see to milking the cow or reading the newspaper. But she’d seen it done to Gravey, twice now, and to Branwell once! She held her tongue, but only because she meant to learn to do it herself as soon as possible, and people don’t give their toys to brats who beg and plead and moan. She hadn’t known she wanted it until just then, but once she did know, it seemed like the only possible thing to want. She would get the little vial of moonlight from Sergeant Crashey, the one he’d given to Gravey and Bran to wake them up again, even if she had to steal it. She would get it and take it home and go to the churchyard and everything would be all right again forever and ever. It would be as easy as milking the cow or reading the newspaper.

  “Cap’n,” Crashey fretted, kicking at the carpet with his boot, “I don’t mean to accusinag or nothing, but . . . well, I think you’ve forgotten about Brunty in all the hubbub and biscuits and suchlike. He’s got to get to the P-House on the toot and the double sweet.”

  The soldiers groaned and pressed their fists to their foreheads.

  Captain Bravey gritted his teeth. “Stuff it all to bits, Crash, but you’re right. I only did it because our Brunt is such a nasty little grump, of course. I try to forget things like Brunty so that I can stay happy and on the upbeat.”

  The Captain reached into his coat and drew out the great book that had, not so very long ago, been a fat man running through the Keighley moors toward a train station. It seemed far too big to fit in his breast-pocket, but Captain Bravey kept pulling and pulling until the book popped free. The Duke’s horn sounded again outside Bestminster, this time much louder, more urgent, and somehow, even a little annoyed.

  “Nothing for it,” said Sergeant Major Rogue, rubbing his wounded eye under the patch. “Brunt-o will have to wait, the stonking old tome.” He kicked the book roughly. “We’re wanted, and you know how the Duke is when we’re late, Captain. I don’t wanna bunk with Copenhagen tonight. Not again.”

  “Copenhagen?” Anne asked sweetly.

  “The lion,” answered all the men at once, in voices heavy with the knowledge of a lion’s snores.

  “They’re very close,” said Bombadier Cracky.

  “Just like Boney and his rooster Marengo,” Rogue sighed, rolling his eyes. “Great men and their pets, you know.”

  “Sir!” cried Branwell, snapping his hand to his brow in his best salute. “Private Branwell reporting for duty, sir!” He faltered then. He’d only gotten that far in his head, sure they’d shout him down for giving himself a rank. Anne got one. He didn’t see why he shouldn’t, having been killed in the line of duty and all. But they didn’t shush him, which made Bran think he should have picked a higher one. But before he could show how gallant and brave he really was, Charlotte stepped all over his glory, just like she always did.

  “We could deliver Mr. Brunty to his cell, if it would be a help to you,” she said graciously. “It’s the least we could do after all you’ve done for us.” And perhaps, just perhaps, if they did well, they might get to meet the Duke. Even if he wasn’t the Duke of Wellington, he was a Duke of Wellington, and the idea of shaking his hand shivered Charlotte down to her toes. And if they did really splendidly, unreasonably well, it was just possible that they’d rise high enough in the ranks to get a look at that moon-colored stuff that brought people back to life. A look or a swipe.

  Rogue and Bravey looked quizzically at them, sizing them up. “Are you quite sure? He’s a dangerous animal, our B, liable to bite and scratch and make you listen to his poetry at a moment’s notice. And it’s dash far to Ochreopolis.”

  “But we have Bestminster!” squealed Anne joyfully. The moment she’d heard the Valise could turn into a carriage or a balloon or a stallionocerosupine, whatever that was, she’d longed to try it out. “Only . . . will we be able to catch the Royal Express train home from Ocha . . . Ochi . . . ?”
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  “Ochreopolis,” Crashey said helpfully, for he was very sympathetic toward anyone who had difficulties with pronunciation. “Most certaintively. The Main Line connecticates all the cities of Glass Town—at least it did, before Gondal invaded. Now it’s only the GT hotspots on the big track. But you won’t be going to disputed areas, nohow, so that’s all right! Still, to leave a pack of breather children all alone with Brunty . . . Cap’n . . . is that wise or foolish? I can’t decide.”

  “We’re not children,” Emily said indignantly, straightening her ten-year-old back as proudly as any soldier. “We’re us! And we’re clever and strong and very good with books.” She longed to take the inexplicable mess of the story they were in and iron it all out neat and orderly, so that everything made as much sense as a pressed shirt, and the only way to do that was to keep moving through the thing.

  “It’s no trouble, sir.” Branwell hurried in to reclaim his place at the front of the squad. “They make us quite tough in Yorkshire.” It felt like something his father would say.

  “Very well, then! We are most indebted to you all!” Captain Bravey said. They could all see relief settle onto his wooden shoulders. “I shall have our Quartermaster deliver the appropriate maps to your Valise. Deposit Brunty with Mr. Bud at the P-House in Ochreopolis by sundown and he will reward you handsomely. Do not, under any circumstances, open him! He’s a dreadful read, I promise you. Full of tricky devices.”

  Anne took a deep breath. Now was her chance. She tried to sound as casual as she could, but her heart stuck in her throat. She was too afraid they would say no to ask. But, out of nothing and nowhere, Emily stole her words out from under her.

  “Perhaps,” said Em, tucking her hazelnut hair humbly behind her ears, “seeing how it is so far, and we are only four, you ought to let us have a bit of that medicine you used to make our Bran and the Leftenant unshot and unkilled.”