The Glas s Town Game

The Scurrilous Yet Stupendous

(but Primarily Scurrilous)

Chronicle of Brunty the Worst,

Who in Gondal Is Called Brunty the Best

TEN

Ochreopolis by Air

If you had been on holiday in Port Ruby on this particular day, and gone out for an excursion after the morning’s excitement, you might have had the unique pleasure of seeing a towering leather stallionocerosupine canter gracefully down the Rubicund Road. His long, thin, splendid horse legs lifted up and clopped down with the perfect, practiced rhythm of dressage, and it had an extremely respectable tail, held at an angle any equestrian judge would admire. But his gigantic, rectangular-ish body rocked precariously from side to side, as though it might careen right off those legs at any moment. The towers that looked so very like Westminster Abbey still tottered on his back like the plates of a stegosaurus. His rhinoceros head was an enormous origami of folded black cloth, brass nameplates, and brown and white leather-and-handkerchief horns. The beast nodded at passersby in such a way that you simply knew that, if he had a hat and a hand, he would tip his brim at every Lady and gentleman. And all over, the stallionocerosupine called Bestminster bristled with long defensive silver spikes, the points of overgrown pins and sewing needles glittering in the magenta Port Ruby sun. As he pranced down the Rubicund Road, the traveling Valise threw out muffled giggles and low voices like a normal horse and carriage throws out clods of mud.

Ochreopolis lay some twenty miles from Port Ruby. But the Rubicund Road, which led out of the city and through the fashionable suburbs, ended where the red ended, in a pool of mucky water. Bestminster Abbey pulled up short, leaping back to keep his copper hooves dry. Charlotte, Anne, Emily, and Branwell peered out a porthole in his belly made from an embroidery hoop. They itched in their muddy, grubby, sweaty clothes and longed to change. But, having used nearly everything to make itself, Bestminster had nothing left of Charlotte’s and Emily’s wardrobe to share. They didn’t say a word, so as not to hurt the suitcase’s feelings. Instead, they stared out the window at a great, wide swamp with no roads leading through it, only acres and acres of rolling wet black and white fur, dappled and mottled and spotted and streaked like fawns’ pelts, dog-skins, cat-fuzz, badger-backs. Leafless, zebra-striped trees and tartan hedges crisscrossed with shades of gray rose up against a splotchy, cloudy sky. It smelled like puppies let in from the rain.

“?’Tis the Plaidlands,” said the turtley-snail head over the mantle of Bestminster Abbey. “They surround the cities of the world like a great furry sea. If folks aren’t careful and tidy with their borders and trim the walls every Sunday, the Plaidlands will creep up and cover a town in moss and fur and wildness as fast as you can say mother nature. Thus, you must cross them to get anywhere at all.”

Branwell squinted at the fields of sopping pelts. “It looks dreadful open. Nothing to hide behind out there. Which . . . which side are they on? Are we likely to get attacked out there? Not that I’m afraid of another battle, mind you!”

“Gondal and Glass Town both claim the Plaidlands, but they have no castles here and collect no taxes,” Bestminster answered thoughtfully. “Just try to collect taxes from the Bluestockings! More likely to collect a thrashing.”

Charlotte and Emily turned away from the porthole, startled by the word. “But . . . but we have Bluestockings! They’re . . . clever ladies who gather together to . . . do literature instead of needlework,” said Charlotte, who admired them terribly.

Bestminster Abbey shook its head. The suitcase scoffed: “Bluestockings are a race of one-legged, indigo silk-imps who rule the Plaidlands with a wild and rollicking hand, answering to no man, chanting their feelings in pentameter, and knitting fine new children whenever and if ever they want them. They average two and a half meters tall. Their capital is Montagu, and the current Queen of the Blues is called Wollstonecraft, aged seventeen and two-fifths. And she is three meters tall. Perhaps we shall see some as we make our way through the swamp. The proper collective noun is a protest of Bluestockings. Proper language is dreadfully important in these parts, you understand.”

“I should say so!” Branwell cried. “All the words here think very much of themselves! Back home, a word just sits in a book and behaves. It doesn’t mean anything like it does here. It doesn’t do anything.”

“We know,” moaned Bestminster Abbey. “Wasn’t it dreadful?”

“Bestminster,” Emily said hesitantly, as she watched the world race by below them. “You seem to know an awful lot about everything.”

“It is a suitcase’s job to carry anything a traveler needs to foreign lands,” answered the turtle’s head. “And no one’s very careful with what they say around us. Who would ever think a bag was listening?”

Emily picked at her fingernails. Charlotte squeezed her hand. “It’s all right, Em. Bestminster is more like us than them, really. He’s a Yorkshireman just as much as we are.”

Emily bounded down the staircase and stood on the footstool made from her bloomers so that she could whisper into the turtle’s ear. She looked sideways at Brunty to make sure he wasn’t spying, but it’s very hard to tell if a book is listening to you, for they are very sneaky beasts. She took a quick, deep breath and whispered:

“Do you know why our toys have all come to life? Do you know how we can have come all the way to ano

ther world only to find Bluestockings and Brown Besses and a Napoleon and a Wellington our own age, still battling it out like there never was any such thing as Waterloo? Do you know what’s happened to us? Do you know what Glass Town is? Did we invent it? Or did we just find it? Did we do something to make all this happen?”

The sun sunk unhappily through wispy clouds, descending into the golden glow of Ochreopolis with a dejected sigh.

“We know a lot,” Bestminster whimpered, crestfallen. “But not that.”

“Don’t cry, Bestminster!” said Anne, who could never bear anyone being sad if she could help it. “Just remember your Bees! Buck up!”

But the others weren’t paying any attention, and they didn’t run through the Bees for Bestminster. Across the black and white and green and tartan Plaidlands, they could see a dim golden glow: the lights of Ochreopolis, miles and miles away, but as bright as a second sun.

“Oh, but how shall we get there?” Anne sighed, disappointed. Once the Bees got started, she felt quite achey in the stomach if they didn’t finish. “All that fur looks so sopping wet I’m sure we’ll sink right in.”

Bestminster coughed indignantly. “Young lady, do you mean to shame us? After all, no matter where you need to go, your luggage always arrives when you do.”

It was a peculiar thing to be inside a suitcase while it changed shape. None of the children thought they would ever get used to it, even though they’d already suffered through the transformation from house to stallionocerosupine. The ceiling screeched, squeezed, and groaned with a terrible racket like workmen hammering away on iron scaffolding. The walls and sofas and tables and chairs and paintings and the snailey-turtle head crushed in on them at ghastly angles. Emily screamed, though she didn’t want to, for she felt quite positive none of the wooden soldiers nor the regiment of limes nor any Bluestocking would have screamed. For a moment, they all thought of how awful the Great Packing must have been for the poor souls caught inside their cases, and then the racket shut off like an interrupted conversation. Everything in the lounge room and the upper floors stood much the same as they had before, if much more cramped and cozy. But now, halfway up from the floors and halfway down from the ceiling, the safe, thick leather bricks had disappeared, replaced by long, gauzy curtains made of Emily’s and Charlotte’s petticoats, billowing in the wind, showing slabs of sky through the spaces between them. Anne and Branwell raced to the left-hand petticoat, Emily and Charlotte to the right. They stuck their heads out into the open, twisting round to see what their suitcase had done now.

Bestminster Abbey began, smoothly, gently, almost lazily, to drift into the air. He had become a hot air balloon, and was trying valiantly not to let slip how proud he was of himself.

The balloon was still shaped like a grand old cathedral, all rose windows and gargoyles and spires. But the rich lounge room now hung down as a basket, secured by petticoats, looking out and down as the vast swamps and marshes of the Plaidlands raced by beneath them.