The Glas s Town Game

“Stop it right this instant!” the girl cried. “What are you blubbering about? Go back inside at once and get that moony stuff Crashey gave Leftenant Gravey that fixed him up and made him all alive again! What’s it called? Grog! I know one of you has some, you bunch of matchsticks! What are you waiting for?” Anne was crying now. Tears dripped off her chin and her nose was running and she felt quite silly and quite desperate. Through her tears, Captain Bravey’s body looked no different than Maria’s and Lizzie’s had before they buried them. The stillness of them, the ghastly stillness that meant nothing and everything. But this time, it would be different. It could be different. It had to be different. It would be different now and different forever. Yet through all her grief and bashed-up head, Anne had remembered the first rule of spying. Do Not Ask Plainly for What You Seek or Nobody Will Tell You Nothing. She’d pretended grog meant nothing to her, that she couldn’t remember its name. Why not give it to a poor defenseless little girl who couldn’t scheme against a dust-bunny, and certainly was not planning to do anything extra with it? What a funny thing it is that I can think so sensibly and feel so frantically at the same time, Anne thought. And then the feeling took over again. “What’s the matter with you?” she wept. “He’s your Captain! Do it and everything will be all right! Make everything all right! Please! This is the place where everything can be all right! Even if it can’t back home, it can here, and you’re just standing there!” The wooden soldiers looked at one another uncomfortably. They shuffled their heavy feet. Anne rubbed her eyes and glared up at them. Grief turned its cards face down inside her and a sneering rage dealt itself in. “Oh, I see how it is! You want to hold out and give it to him once the breathers have gone. Well, go and get splintered because my brother’s already drunk that mishmash! If Crashey and Bravey and Gravey and all the rest trusted us, I daresay you might get a bloody move on!” A chilly terror crept through Anne. It was only an inn in the woods, after all. What if no one had thought to bring any? It wasn’t too likely to die of singing bad drinking songs off-key or eating too many fried potatoes. What if there was nothing up there in that stone house but beer and memories?

What was left of Brunty gave a last strangled, bubbling sigh in the distance. The wooden soldiers knew that sound as well as a bugle. They saluted downfield. The enemy was dead, but that was no reason not to honor him. Branwell did not salute. He stared at Anne, impressed despite himself. Perhaps she was not so little and useless as all that. Perhaps she was not so harmless as all that.

“Orright, Orright,” the muttonchopped Quartermaster grumbled. “There’s no need to carry on like that, young lady. It ain’t about nobody breathing or nothing. We don’t like to break out the grog this close to the border. S’dangerous. Gondal’s got eyes and ears and noses and sticky fingers; I’d think you’d know that’n all. Loose stoppers will come a-cropper, that’s what the Duke says.”

Anne’s tears came roaring back, only this time she was just relieved, relieved to have been right, relieved for Captain Bravey, relieved that at least someone was prepared. She did wish she didn’t cry so easily. But she decided to forgive herself just now, since the circumstances were rather out of the ordinary.

“There, there,” said the Quartermaster awkwardly, and patted Anne’s hair as though she were a strange and irritable dog.

Muttonchops (whose real name was Quartermaster Stumps, as he was missing one leg at the knee and one arm at the elbow) reached round the back of h

is bandolier and pulled out a vial wrapped up with leather and bits of speckled fur. He knelt on his good knee, even though the cold pained all his parts frightfully. Stumps knocked his wooden head fondly against the skull of his dear Captain, with whom he’d served and supped all those many years. He worked at the stopper with old, creaky fingers.

“Don’t spill it, greasy-paws,” said one of the Sergeants. “That’s the lot. Boaster used up the rest wrestling bears. There won’t be time to send for more.”

Finally, the cork popped free with a happy little gasp.

“How dare you,” a flat, furious voice hissed.

Branwell, Anne, Quartermaster Stumps, and the raggedy regiment turned as one.

Brunty stood behind them.

The ruins of Brunty, at least. He was no longer a jolly fat villain. He looked as though all the air had gone out of him and left only a newsstand fluttering in a frigid wind. The pages of his face hung down in long rags, torn and smeared and streaked with brackish burns. His hair lay unrolled and unpinned down his back. His ribbon nose was full of tiny holes where sprays of acid had hit his face, and the glasses teetering there were shattered and twisted. His greatcoat was soaked in bat-tree acid and the ink that is the blood of a book, so sopping wet you couldn’t tell that it had ever been so finely sewn from copies of the Leeds Intelligencer. His belly hung open on its hinge. He had somehow managed to drag the machine back onto the shelf of his heart. Its saucers no longer burned green and blue. It just dripped sour water. No lightning howled out of him. The headlines on his waistcoat said nothing at all. But the foaming muck still bubbled behind his eyes, and he still had strength enough in him to kick the crutch out from beneath a hapless infantryman and crush his good leg beneath a heavy leather-bound foot. The rest of the men roared and lunged as one toward the Gondalier—but Brunty moved one broken hand back toward the bat-tree in his chest. The machine looked dead and drowned. But if it was not . . . if it was not all those wounded wooden boys would go up like kindling. They shrank away.

“You unbelievable cheats. I knew Glass Towners had no shame. But I never thought you’d do it right in front of me. Rubbing it in my face like a pack of rich boys in the schoolyard! Boney was right about you. All of you. Glass Town is a scourge. All you do is take and take and take and use and waste and laugh at the rest of us. You have no right. It’s not yours. You bloody villains. You horrid thieves.” Brunty leaned toward them. He smelled like rot and bile. “Give it to me. Give it to me now. It’s mine.”

“Well, it’s not yours, Brunt-o,” wheezed Quartermaster Stumps. “That’s sort of the whole point, my lad. Grog belongs to Glass Town. We invented it. We had to, didn’t we? Or else we’d all be speaking Gondalish and where would that get us?”

“You’d never have it if it weren’t for Gondal!” screeched Brunty. He reached out his scorched fingers toward the flask of grog, but didn’t take it. The Magazine Man seemed almost afraid to touch it at all.

“We’d never have needed it if it weren’t for Gondal!” Quartermaster Stumps bellowed.

Brunty turned to Bran and Anne as though they were judges on a high bench, and if he could convince them, the war might never have happened and no one might ever have died. “They make it out of stuff that only grows in Gondal,” he whined. “They’ve got a secret recipe we can’t crack, and we’ve sent more souls after it than you can possibly imagine. But Glass Town? They disassemble our best boys and then send raiding parties to do their bloody shopping in the Gondal wilds every month. If they didn’t, they’d all die when we shoot them, like they’re supposed to. Like we do. Grog is ours.” He dropped his head like whatever barely held him up had been cut in two. When Brunty raised it again, his eyes bulged with hate and agony and they were fixed on Quartermaster Stumps and his bandolier. “My mother died, you piece of blighted driftwood. My mother died and everything in the world went wrong and my sisters and me starved and I had to do such terrible things to live, just to live, until I could claw my way to my stepbrother and take back one tiny shred of a future for us, and if you Glassers weren’t such a ruddy pack of gangsters with rotten onions for souls, it never would have happened because I could have . . . I could have just made her a pretty cup of groggy tea and she’d have got up again right as a new edition, but I couldn’t, and she died. She was perfect and beautiful and kind and she died anyway, you horrors, you mockers, you wolves; she died and you just keep coming back.”

The creature collapsed sobbing on top of the ancient Quartermaster.

Anne covered her mouth with her hands. Poor, poor Brunty! she thought. Only he’s not poor Brunty, he’s awful! But poor, poor Brunty.

“Our mother died, too,” whispered Branwell. The softness was coming back, no matter how he told it to stay where it was and mind its own business.

Brunty growled into the soggy earth. Stumps tried to push him off, but Brunty weighed more than the moon. “Yeah? Jolly good thing for you! I don’t care! You’re with them. You don’t even know what death is.”

“Yes, we do,” Anne whispered. “It’s you who doesn’t know.”

“Death is a churchyard so full of people the earth towers over the street,” Branwell said softly. “Death is your mother and your sisters down there under all the others.”

Anne squeezed her brother’s hand. “Death is cold and blue and it doesn’t move and it doesn’t care about anything. But at least you live in a place where some people come back, sometimes. Only one person ever came back where we were born, and He didn’t get to stay. Our mother died and our sisters died and the only people who came back were us. We came back to the house and it was so quiet, so quiet . . . !”

The Magazine Man had enough shame left in him not to answer. He got up and jabbed the toe of his boot into the Quartermaster’s ribs. He straightened his ruined back. He latched his scroll-knob belly shut.

“Well. There it is, then. Something between us. Like a chain. Soon enough, Lady Sorrowful, no one will have to know what we know. Not in Glass Town, not in Gondal. It’s all their fault, don’t you see? If only they could share, the world would already be as it should!”

“You mean Old Boney would already have conquered the world and we’d already be kissing his boney feet.” The Quartermaster coughed. His men helped him up, gave him his crutch again.

“Even a child knows how to share!” Brunty shot back. He turned to Branwell and Anne. “You’re better off with me. I will share with you. Every good thing. Me and mine and Bonaparte. You can have everything you want. And when we are done, who will not call us heroes, while they live forever and a day?”

Branwell and Anne looked down at poor dead Captain Bravey, scorched as black as a gentle-hearted fly.