The Last of the Gullivers

by Carter Crocker

  “Yes, but—” “No buts!” “Yes, but—” “No buts!”

  Half the town sided with Evet, half with Hoggish, and these camps came to be called Yesbutzers and Nobutzers.

  “Friends, let’s look at this calmly,” the G.P. pleaded. “Let’s talk it through like rational folk.”

  “You are not rational folk,” screamed Hoggish. “At best you pretend to be rational and some”—a sharp glance at his brother here—“SOME pretend better than others.”

  “We can’t let emotions rule,” said the Grand Panjandrum. “That will split us in two and leave us half as strong as we were.” But his words were lost in a sea of ugly anger.

  Hoggish and Knitbone worked through the night at the old printing press, setting each word of each scandalous sentence. With morning, a new truth spread through the streets of Lesser Lilliput: “NATION IN CIVIL WAR!”

  By the time Michael reached the Garden City, the simmering anger had boiled to blistering rage. The Yesbutzers and Nobutzers had stopped talking and fights were breaking out. The boy had no idea how to stop them and only stood there, helpless, hopeless, and watched.

  When the first issue of the MWC Newsletter appeared on Mallery’s desk, he thought it was junk that had slipped past the No Free Newspapers sticker on his letterbox. He was about to throw it in a bin when he noticed the screaming headline—STREET GANGS TAKING OVER MOSS-ON-STONE! He put aside his work and sat to read. He read about break-ins, into cars, houses, the church, the tagging, he read the names of the suspects, and he read the name Michael Pine.

  Jane’s father kept his calm as he walked into the Chief Magistrate’s office.

  “Good morning, Mr. Mallery.”

  “Tell me, Horace, is it true you knew that Michael Pine was part of the break-in at my house?”

  “No, no!” Ackerby assured him. “There no evidence he was involved in that.”

  “But he’s in a gang,” Mallery went on, “and his gang was responsible?”

  “Well. Yes. I suppose. The boy was once part of the—”

  “Once? And the other crimes—car break-ins, church vandalism—you let him off for those things?” Mr. Mallery wasn’t calm anymore.

  “Well, no, you see, he—” Ackerby began.

  “No wonder!” The blood was darkening Mallery’s face now. “No wonder we’ve got such crime, when you let criminals go scot-free!” He was yelling and courthouse workers paused at the door to peer in. “I’m not safe in my own house, because of you! If something isn’t done, Ackerby, you’ll be off the bench, I’ll make sure of it!”

  And he left, still mumbling his anger.

  Here was Ackerby’s great fear, come true. The voice of the people, rising against him. If things didn’t change, he’d be out of a job.

  The Lesser Lilliputians didn’t want Civil War, but the pamphlets said there was one, so there had to be. The Farmer’s followers gathered in a fresh field of wheat, a hundred pair of feet grinding the seedlings to pulp. The other army met outside the bakery where Hoggish was picking up battlefield supplies.

  The first shot was fired by the Nobutz Army at 1:07 PM and the second went un-fired for another two hours. There was only one cannon and they had to take turns shooting at each other. A swab-pole soaked in water had to be run down the bronze bore to dampen the barrel. Gunpowder, from Mr. Phlopp’s fireworks, was shoveled in and a plug of cloth and straw was ramrodded over it. The cannonball was loaded and pushed tight against the wadding.

  Evet Butz set a match to the touchhole and the missile went flying, entirely off-target, smashing a hole through the wall of his own farmhouse, wrecking a jigsaw puzzle he’d been working on for months.

  “Ahhh, rattletraps.”

  The Yesbutzers had no better luck: the cannonfire gave Hoggish a Tension Headache—“Great Ghost of BOLGOLAM!”—and he ordered his soldiers to use half the gunpowder. And so the next shot made it halfway to the Nobutzer line.

  And the battle went on, slowly, for day after day. And each day, the armies fought to a draw. No one was hurt, no one was helped, and it seemed the war might go on without end.

  Nick Bottoms found himself in a doldrums. Gordy and Peter and Phil were gone, locked away at the YOI, and Lyall Murphy’s Gang had taken over Moss-on-Stone. One afternoon, Nick went to see Robby.

  “We’re going to call out Lyall Murphy.”

  “Who, why?” Robby was sure he hadn’t heard right.

  “You and me. We’ll fight ’em, we’ll run ’em off.”

  “Have you lost it, Nick?” Robby asked him. “You and me are going to fight seven guys?”

  “We have to do something.”

  Robby was quiet for a second, then he said, “Listen, Nick. I’ve been meanin’ to tell you. Lyall’s Gang asked me to join ’em.”

  “And you said no.” Nick couldn’t believe things had gotten so bad, so fast.

  “Told ’em I’d think about it,” said Robby.

  “You flat-out fool!”

  “C’mon, Nick, I got to do somethin’ with my life. Let’s be real. The Boys are done with. You should talk to ’em, too.”

  “My gang’s had a setback,” Nick grumbled, “that’s all.”

  “You call this a setback? You can’t have a gang with nobody in it. You and me. That’s not a gang. That’s a couple of guys talking.”

  “We’ll get Michael back with us,” said Nick. “We’ll start over.”

  “Who? Pine? He’s useless! You think you can count on him for anything?”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  AND THE WATERS PREVAILED

  When Michael showed Jane what the Lesser Lilliputians had done—when she saw their battle-torn Nation, the scarred land, the shattered buildings—her heart dropped inside her. “Why are they doing this?” she wanted to know. “Why are they acting this way?”

  “I wish I knew,” was all the answer he had.

  The fighting was flaring again, right under their noses, a skirmish in the Farmer’s barley field.

  “We could give them a time-out,” Jane finally said. “Dad used to do that to me when I was little.”

  “We could give it a try, I guess,” said Michael.

  And they tried it. The Yesbutzers and Nobutzers were told to sit quietly for ten minutes, on either side of the country, and think about what they’d done.

  With the armies in time-out, Michael and Jane started cleaning up the little town. They swept away the broken glass and splintered wood.

  “Taking care of them,” said Michael, “is more work than I figured.”

  “We can do it,” Jane told him.

  The little clock tower struck four and the time-out was over and the fighting started once more.

  “We can’t give up,” said Jane. “That’s not a choice we have.”

  In Moss-on-Stone, Mr. Mallery was running up the stairs and into his office to reach the ringing phone.

  “Is Jane there?” A child’s voice. Her school friend.

  “Who is this?”

  “Me. Do you know where she is? I only tried her like two million times.”

  “Who is this?” Mr. Mallery asked again.

  “Nicole. I’ve called so many times you wouldn’t believe. Where is she?”

  “I’ll tell her to call you,” said Mallery.

  “Right, tell her call Nicole. Mannnn, she’s never around anymore, is she?”

  And he hung up.

  When she came in that night, Jane found her father in a very dark mood.

  “Where’ve you been?” he asked.

  “I was—” But he already knew, she could tell that. “Was with Michael,” she told him. “He needed me to help him. It was important.”

  The fact was this. Julien Mallery hadn’t got on well with his parents. The fact was, they were childish peo
ple who never grew up. He had wanted to get along with Jane, had wanted it very much. It hurt him that she lied.

  She waited, wordless, until he said, “You’re a little old for time-outs.”

  She nodded. “And they don’t really work.”

  “Let’s say you’re grounded. For a month, I think. Yeah. A month.”

  Without Jane’s help, Michael lost all control of the Lesser Lilliputians. The Civil War raged on and grew worse with each day. Its damage was awful and everlasting. The Grand Panjandrum could have done more, should have done more to stop the fighting. But he didn’t.

  The war might not have ended, but for what happened early on a Summer morning. Michael had been working hard, too hard, between his job at the Market and the Little Ones and their bickering. He woke with a fever, sweating, shaking, miserable, and couldn’t get out of bed.

  Billowing black clouds covered the whole county. By mid-day, thunder was rumbling in like an army on the march, promising a long ugly storm. Ice-white veins of lightning pulsed in the darkening sky. And in Lesser Lilliput, a wind began to blow across the city, for the very first time.

  Rain fell through that day and the next, and for a full week, without pause. Before long, the drains of the Garden City were filling with leaves and sticks and every kind of rubbish. With Michael sick at home and Jane grounded, no one had kept the grates cleared. The Lesser Lilliputians might have done it themselves, but they were too busy fighting. The drains were useless now and a flood was rising.

  The low meadows were first to vanish: the Farmer’s fields of wheat and barley turned to marsh, then lake. Evet moved his grazing livestock through the hard rain to higher, drier ground. By the next nightfall, water lapped at his piggery and some outbuildings were half-underwater. Mr. Butz herded his animals to town and into the Great Hall, making a loud smelly barn of it.

  With dawn, the People found water at the outskirts of their own neighborhoods, squeezing tighter like a giant noose. Whole houses were sinking into the flood, chairs, tables, clothes, art, books, fortunes, memories, all washing away and nothing spared. A sailboat from the once-little lake drifted in the street outside Philament Phlopp’s workshop. More and still more of the Little Ones fled to the safety of the Great Hall, packed alongside cows, sheep, horses, geese and pigs.

  And the Civil War was forgotten.

  None of them had ever seen a storm like this. It struck hard at the little city, merciless and endless, breaking roof tiles and ripping wood siding from houses. Each street was a river now. Everyone looked to the Grand Panjandrum for answers, but he had none to give.

  He told his wife, Docksey, not to worry, these were a resilient People and they would take care of themselves. But the Lesser Lilliputians had panicked, completely, and needed someone to guide them.

  It was the moment Hoggish Butz had been waiting for and he didn’t even know it. Ethickless Knitbone hurried to tell him and found him eating his second lunch of the day.

  “Hoggish!” she hissed. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I think I am eating, dear Dr. Knitbone,” he said around a lump of suet pudding.

  “But my plan! Our plan!”

  “Oh, what’s the point,” Hoggish grunted and waved a sausage toward the storm. “This weather has ended our lovely little WAR. Really, dear, what’s the point anymore?”

  Knitbone had no time for this. Topgallant’s inaction, she said, was a greater gift than they could have hoped for.

  “What are you talking about?” asked Hoggish. “And pass me one of those spicy buns while you’re explaining.”

  “Burton Topgallant has done nothing to stop the flood,” she hissed. “He has given us a serious crisis and we cannot let it go to waste!”

  She grabbed him by his fleshy arm and he squealed like a colicky baby. She ignored the cries and pulled him through the rain to her office. They had to make sure that every man, woman, and child knew how useless the Grand Panjandrum really was.

  At this same time, across town, two of the Little Ones, Chizzom Bannut and Gulkin Afterclap, found the drifting sailboat and went rowing out to look at the drains. They passed chimney pots and treetops and guessed where the first grate was. The rain was cold and the floodwater colder, but Bannut dove and tried clearing the drains by hand. He found them blocked with a tight weave of branches, leaves and dirt, and held by the weight of a fast-rising sea. The men started rowing back to share the grim news.

  Floodwaters encircled the town square, once the highest point in Lesser Lilliput, now a fast-shrinking island. Most of the population had gathered in the Great Hall; Topgallant’s own house was gone.

  When Bannut and Afterclap told what they’d seen, the rowdy room went silent: they understood that their city was doomed, another Atlantis lost to the world forever. And they would go under with it.

  But Philament Phlopp wasn’t so sure. An idea was taking root, somewhere deep in his brain. For an hour or more, he kept it to himself and let it grow. As the waters prevailed over their Nation, he began to believe, to know that his scheme was their one best chance.

  “We must tear down the Wall,” he said suddenly, unexpectedly, and a still-greater hush took the Hall.

  There were some coughs, some clearing of throats, but the People were too stunned to do more. The Grand Panjandrum said, at long last, “Um. Ah. What was that again, Brother Phlopp? The wall? Which wall are we talking about?”

  “Flestrin’s Wall,” he said. “We have to break through it, so the flood can drain out.”

  No one, not in three hundred long years, had dared think a thought like this. The Wall was the Wall and beyond it lay every peril.

  “Great Ghost of Bolgolam . . . !” It was Hoggish, with an armload of freshly printed pamphlets. Dr. Knitbone was at his side. “This man’s mad, mad, mad! Without the Wall, we DIE!”

  For once, most of them agreed with Hoggish Butz.

  “We may die because of the Wall,” Phlopp went on. “It’s holding the floodwater in, making an ocean that will drown us all.”

  “But, Brother Phlopp,” the Grand Panjandrum began again, uncertain, unsure, “what if there’s an even-greater ocean beyond? If we break through the Wall, more water might pour in . . .”

  There were scattered mutterings from the crowd. “Topgallant’s right.” “We don’t know what’s out there.” “The Wall’s been there since the days of my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather.”

  “Quinbus Ninneter comes from beyond the Wall,” said Phlopp, “and Quinbus Ooman, too. It can’t all be ocean out there.”

  There was a long silence then.

  “But the monsters,” said Evet at last. “You open a path to the Land of Naught and Nil, you’ll let ’em in to eat us!”

  “All we know,” said Mr. Phlopp, “is we have to do something, or there’ll be nothing left of us.”

  The Grand Panjandrum walked to a window and looked out, long and hard, on the storm. “This rain isn’t stopping,” he finally said, “and the water’s getting higher. If no one has a better idea, I say we try Phlopp’s way.”

  There was another long dismal silence and they considered the bad options left to them. Hoggish and Evet Butz and a few others were set against it.

  “We couldn’t do it if we wanted to,” said Evet. “The Wall was built to keep us safe, it was made to be forever.”

  And that, they all knew, was also true.

  “We could do it,” a new voice now, Burra Dryth’s voice, “if we worked with each other, instead of against each other.” She laid out a plan and it was this:

  They would float a raft out to a section of wall where the stones were small and had plenty of cement between them. Using picks and chisels, hammers, drills, they would weaken the old grout and the force of the flood would bring the wall down.

  This was her plan and they voted to tr
y it.

  And Michael? He was still in bed, sweating through another fever spike. Freddie was in the next room, playing cards with some mates. Jane was at home, still grounded, painting a picture of the Garden City as she remembered it.

  The Little Ones worked as fast as they could and built five rafts—huge, by their scale—from trees they found floating, from the timbers of wrecked buildings, the wood siding of houses. Others scavenged the flooded city for tools, picks, sledgehammers, all else. By mid-day, the armada was ready to sail. Each raft held a dozen or so, and twice that number had volunteered. With makeshift oars and poles, they set off down the river-streets and into the still-rising sea.

  Phlopp and Dryth found a place where the Wall was weather-worn and built of smaller stones. The rafts were anchored here and they set to work. With picks and hammers and shovels, they attacked the aged mortar. Even in the ruthless rain, the tools sent sparks flying and filled the air with a sour smell.

  They worked for hour after hour, but made little progress. A few stones chipped, some cement broke away, but the Wall remained. The Lesser Lilliputians kept at it, even as they understood—silently and all at once—that the whole thing was futile.

  But Burra Dryth knew it wasn’t. She could see that the Wall was weakening. She told Phlopp that a well-aimed cannon blast might bring the whole thing down.

  A few of them rowed back to the Great Hall and loaded the cannon on a smaller raft and strapped it tight. Topgallant called for the workers to abandon their work and return to the city square.

  With the cannon-raft anchored a few feet from the Wall, Phlopp fashioned as long a fuse as he could. “I’ll wait till everyone’s cleared away,” he told them, “in case something goes wrong.”

  “No offense, Brother Phlopp,” from Thudd Ickens. “But you better let me, in case. I’m the better swimmer.”

  “He’s right,” said the Grand Panjandrum. “No one swims like Mr. Ickens.”

  And they all knew it.

  Phlopp left the raft and Ickens climbed aboard and the others rowed off into the flood. He waited until they were a good distance away, then tried to light the fuse. But his hands shook from nerves and cold, and the flint was rain-damp. Ickens tried to calm himself, tried to shake off the sense that something just wasn’t right. He struck at the flint again, and a spark jumped to the primed fuse.