The Glass Town Game

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Grog,” Sergeant Major Rogue said uncertainly. His brow furrowed. He reached up under his eye patch to rub at the empty wooden socket there. “You mean grog.”

  “Why’dya have to call it that, Roguey,” complained Crashey. “It has got a nice proper Latin name, you know. Scientific as bloody bromide in a bloody beaker.”

  “Everyone calls it that.” Quartermaster Hay-Man shrugged. “Latin’s too many syllables. And the syllables are murder on the mouth!”

  “Latin is the boiled jelly left over at the end of supper!” Corporal Cheeky laughed at his own joke before he’d finished it. “Yeah, it still looks nice, but that’s only because no one wanted any!”

  Private Tracky thumped his knee in agreement. “Here, here! Who has time to say rhodinus secundi vitae? I don’t even know if that’s right! It’s GROG, man!”

  “Grog, then,” Emily said peaceably. Charlotte might have only just become the oldest, but Emily had been a middle child for ages, and she knew very well how to mend everyone else’s tempers. “I only mean to say that it might be very nice and useful to have a bit of it in our back pockets. Just in case. Nice things are often useful, and useful things are the nicest to have.”

  Sergeant Crashey raised his eyebrow at her. He pursed his lips, shrugged, and reached for his belt—then thought better of it. “I . . . think perhapsbe no. It’s powerful stuff, girl. State secret. Can’t just go handing it out like ice crustard. Enemy’s everywhere and all that.”

  Emily accepted her temporary defeat with grace. Anne squeezed her fists till they turned red. There was still plenty of time before the evening train, she told herself. They would have another chance. And with Emily on her side, stealing life in a bottle would be as easy as stealing seedcake for the birds in the garden.

  “Oh, of course, sir!” Emily laughed as though it didn’t matter at all. “It was nothing really, only a thought. I’m sure we won’t need it.”

  “You’re a gang of right toughies!” Leftenant Gravey assured them. “You’ll be there and back before you can say ‘Old Boney sucks eggs.’ You have Bestminster, as you say!”

  “We’ll do you proud, sir!” Branwell crowed. “You’ll be pinning medals on us like darts on a board, I swear!”

  Charlotte and Emily set about securing the single-volume Brunty tightly against the sofa. It was easy, really, since the sofa was made out of their Sunday boots. All they had to do was pull the laces out and tie them down again in fast double-knots. Done and dusted. Now they could see Brunty up close, they could read his rather overwrought title, plain as postage, printed on the cover in little blue agate beads:

  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.

  “We’re flying,” shouted Emily. Tears welled up in her eyes, and not only from the whipping wind.

  Charlotte’s stomach felt like it meant to float up through her chest and out through her mouth. She held her hands to her reddening cheeks. The sound of the wind was so loud and fierce! The cold on her skin felt so bright and sharp! “How many people do you think have flown, ever, in the history of everything?” she marveled. “Mr. de Rozier and Mr. Laurent in Paris, they were the first . . . ”

  “Then Mr. Blanchard . . .” Branwell said softly, staring out into the clouds, down to the furry earth. He felt dizzy. “I can’t think, I can’t think. Where do we fall on the list of first humans to beat the birds at their own game? I’d bet we must be in the top ten! And to think, an hour ago I was stone dead!”

  “I’m an owl,” whispered Anne, stricken by the word dead bouncing around the room like an awful black ball. She hated being up too high. It made her dizzy and sick. And this was higher than anyone had any right to be. She tried to look out the way her brother and sisters did. Intrepid, like them. Brilliant, like them. Out, but not down. “A little baby owl like Diamond in the tree outside our playroom. And . . . and . . .”

  “And I’m Snowflake, our poor raven,” Bran said softly. “And . . . and . . .”

  “And Em’s Rainbow.” Charlotte took up their game. All the birds and the tree and the playroom seemed so impossibly far away now. “The sparrow hawk with one leg. And . . . and . . .”

  The sun fell on Emily’s face, turning her hazel eyes to gold. “And Charlotte’s Jasper the pheasant, who sneaks into the kitchen garden every night for bread and beans.”

  Anne finished the round for them, clutching her cold cheeks in her hands. “And we’re all birds together in the clouds and nothing will ever be like this again, even if I live to be a hundred and eight.”

  And then, for a long while, they just flew, and stared, trying not to blink and miss a flock of passing loons or a shaft of cold sunlight, thinking each to themselves that no one would ever believe a word of this in Haworth, and how that didn’t really matter to them one bit.

  Branwell broke their thrilled silence, as he usually did.

  “Can we talk about it now? We’re finally alone, just the four of us! Can we finally talk about the soldiers? I can practically feel it burning me up! I’ve got blisters on the inside of my mouth from not saying anything! Did you hear them say Gondal on the train? And the Battle of Wehglon? And Acroofcroomb! I thought we were playing all that time, but it couldn’t have been only pretend, it just couldn’t have, because here we are! Only it’s not exactly like we played it, really. It’s all jumbled up and upside down, thrown in with a lot of other stuff and nonsense I never thought of. But we must have known somehow. Known this place existed. Heard about it . . . someway . . . and then forgot? Or do you think we’re secretly magicians and we were casting spells but nobody ever guessed it all this time? But . . . but don’t you have to mean to do magic? Doesn’t it have to be on purpose, with a wand and that? Wouldn’t you have to know you were doing it?”

  “Wouldn’t you feel it happening, if you made a whole world?” Emily said softly.

  Branwell ended feeling a bit confused, for it didn’t seem they could ever forget such a thing. But it was just as impossible that a battle they’d waged in the sitting room on Boxing Day and given a silly name, with teapots for cannons and magazines for barricades and overturned soup bowls and napkins for command tents, could turn into something so real that poor Leftenant Gravey had died there. But on the other hand, they’d never imagined a place called Port Ruby, and all that red glass, or the Iron Duke being really and truly actual iron. Bran did know he couldn’t leave off sounding wobbly on the subject, so he tried again.

  “Did you see the burn on Cheeky’s face where I scorched him? It looks jolly good in real life! I did that! That’s mine! I wonder what else is mine round here?”

  “Grog,” said Anne, without looking up.

  “I don’t think so,” Bran said, rubbing the spot between his eyebrows. “I don’t remember inventing anything that good.”

  Anne rolled her eyes. “I meant that we made grog, not you. If you think about it, it makes heaps of sense! Didn’t we always bring everyone back to life once the game was over? Can’t play again tomorrow with a heap of dead toys. So of course everyone here pops right back up! No one dies in a game. Not really. Not forever.”

  The four of them were very quiet for a moment.

  “I think it’s time for a Thump Parliament,” Emily said. “Because if it worked on Bran, it might . . . it might . . .” She could not finish, the idea of it was so big and so awful and so wonderful and so impossible all at once.

  “We need to get some,” Anne said. She clenched her fists so hard they went pale. “If we could take it home with us, everything would be as it was! Everyone would be as they were! And Mummy would hold me so tight and I would know her so well and bring her tea and nobody would have to miss her or Maria or Lizzie . .
. nobody would have to be sad anymore . . . ” Anne’s half-violet eyes filled up with tears.

  “It couldn’t work, Annie,” Charlotte said gently. “It just couldn’t. Any more than you could eat a pot of fire back home. If such a thing were possible, cleverer and crueler fellows than us would have dragged it back home to England long ago, like coffee or tomatoes or chocolate.”

  Anne went pink. “It worked on Bran! It does work on people! On breathers! On us!”

  “Just the chance of it . . .” Emily whispered. “It’s worth anything. Anything, if the house could be full again. If we could be six again.” Even going back. Even School. Even a lifetime of nothing but School.

  Branwell wiped his palm on his trouser leg. He reached out and stroked Emily’s hair, even though he felt rather stupid doing it, and Emily looked at him like he’d thrown a fish in her lap. Papa stroked their hair. Touching people was part of protecting them. He had to learn how. Below Bestminster’s balloon, something dark and blue bolted across the spotted streams and islands: a protest of Bluestockings, riding mares made of iron gates and silk banners and turquoise fire.

  “I feel completely fine,” he said finally. “I was dead. I was deader than most people, even, because I was bleeding all over everywhere and not just very still and cold in a bed. You saw it. You screamed, even if you won’t tell me how. And I feel completely fine now. It does work, somehow. Maybe, just maybe . . .” Branwell bit the inside of his cheek savagely so he would not cry. He missed his mother so much it sometimes felt as though he were missing his own head. And he missed the way his father had been before Mummy died. He missed everything the way it had been before Mummy died.

  “Maybe indeed,” a low, thrilling, secretive, seductive voice said.

  It was not Bestminster. It was not Branwell. It was not a wild Bluestocking far below.