The Glass Town Game

by Catherynne M. Valente

  But Brunty paid no attention to the ramshackle squadron taking a knee and pouring powder into barrels, all for him. He reached into his waistcoat just as Bran and Anne knew he would. He yanked out his dreadful device, still oozing green acid over its strange stack of saucers and spitting blue lightning. But this time, the two of them did not watch in horror with their toes frozen to the ground. They leapt at him, tearing and pulling at his paper limbs, tearing at his parchment hair, biting wherever they could get their teeth in, screaming and scratching at their captor. Anne, in particular, said some very ungraceful words Branwell hadn’t even known she knew. Brunty could do all he liked to them, but not Captain Bravey! Not their dear wooden soldier! He had only just come to life; they would not let him go now! But the Magazine Man paid them no mind. He was so ferociously strong. He flung Anne aside like she weighed no more than a hat. She slammed into a twisted black yew tree and slumped to the chilly earth with her eyes shut, just as Lord Brunty Errata-Huntingdon struck Branwell hard across the face with his thick, illustrated fist.

  Bran dropped to the ground. His blood burned bright in the white air. He was too surprised to cry. The pain soaked his mind like spilled paint and turned him the color of being alive. It was too big a feeling for Bran. He didn’t know what to do with it any more than he’d know what to do with a dragon. The feeling bound him to the grass as well as any rope. He’d been angry before. He’d been ashamed. He’d been hurt and he’d wanted to get his own back plenty of times. But the sharpness of the pain and the brightness of the blood and the coldness of the wind and the desperation of the danger he was in made everything shine in a way it had never done when he was sitting at home studying French. The edges of everything shimmered brilliantly. The shadows and light were suddenly so astonishingly vivid. His jellied mind thought wildly that if only he could paint this, he would be the greatest artist who ever lived. And over and under all of it came the indignant fury that had always been his closest friend, closer even than Charlotte. Branwell had never wanted to utterly erase someone he’d felt so soft toward only a moment before. Brunty had betrayed his softness, even though he’d never known it existed. Never again, Bran swore to the blood pouring out of his nose. Never soft again. But even as he thought it, he knew that he liked this new, big feeling, liked it better than anything.

  Brunty raised his painted eyes to heaven—was he praying? Was he laughing? Was he looking for help on its way? Captain Bravey called for ramrods to be drawn and cartridges to be rammed down. The Magazine Man just reached round to the left side of the carved ebony scroll-knob that was his belly and flicked a brass latch hidden under his ribs. His stomach creaked open like a rusty, round door. Bran thought he was going to be sick. Then, quick as a page turning, he was fascinated. I’m going to see what’s inside them. What’s inside all these people made of things! Or at least, what’s inside Brunty.

  Inside Brunty was a dark, empty bookshelf. It was very clean, with no cobwebs or dust or spiders.

  The Master Spy of Gondal placed his oozing, spitting machine on the shelf within him, shut his gut, and locked it fast. He looked triumphantly at Branwell, his only audience.

  “What is it, young master Nobody? You wanted to know, didn’t you?”

  Bran nodded mutely, helplessly. Brunty waved his device in the frosted air.

  “It’s a Voltaic Pyle! I stole it from Mr. Volta’s laboratory in Switzerland. Just swiped it—right out of your world and into mine. I think he called it a battery when I broke his fingers getting it free. Very stubborn, your Swiss. That’s what your wooden friends are so cross about. Not supposed to go hopping the fence into Breathertown. But why not, I say? You can trip on your own faces and get up in Glass Town. Why shouldn’t I see Switzerland?”

  Branwell blinked. He shrugged uncertainly. “What’s a bat-tree?” he asked.

  “It’s what’ll make Glass Town and Gondal equal at last, that’s what it is!” the Magazine Man snapped. He seemed very put out that Branwell had not gasped or shown other signs of awe. “It gives me power.”

  Suddenly, the capital O’s of Brunty’s eyes looked terribly young and afraid.

  “I . . . I actually don’t know exactly what’s going to happen next,” Brunty whispered. “If it all goes pear-shaped, tell my sisters I tried—”

  But Branwell never heard what the poor man wanted his sisters to know. Brunty the Inking Liar, Brunty the Godforsaken Gondalier, Can’t-Take-Him-Anywhere Brunty, Brunty the Spying Sack of Slime, Brunty the Miserable Fat Folio, went rigid as a streetlamp. His arms shot straight up to the cloudy sky. His jaw hung slack. Inside his mouth, his wood-pulp teeth began to glow green and smoke.

  “Make ready!” cried Captain Bravey.

  His raggedy regiment thumped their oaken chests in the jumbled joy and terror and regret and blind red rapture all soldiers feel in the moment before the fight begins. Whatever happened next, they would have a new story to tell round the hearth of Bravey’s Inn. Some of them would, anyhow.

  “Fire!” roared the Captain, and they did, but so did Brunty.

  The volley of loyal Glass Town musket balls banged across the frosted meadow in an arc so perfect military historians would have fallen to their knees in awe. Anne moaned and began to stir against her knotty yew tree. She only just managed to convince her eyes to open as the bullets began to unfurl into the stout Brown Besses they’d seen in Port Ruby, with their brown aprons and brown rolling pins and their stout brown hearts. Anne’s vision blurred and wriggled and through a groggy silver film of pain she saw the musket girls explode in gouts of ultramarine flame. She tried to scream for them, but nothing came out. Her head lolled round, trying to find someone she knew in the smoke.

  Brunty was gone. Or, at least, he wasn’t Brunty anymore. The thick, soapy green acid of his machine foamed out of his mouth. It rimmed the scrolls of his perfectly arranged hair. It seeped through the joints of his elbows and knees. It overflowed the capital O’s of his eyes like moss climbing out of two broken windows. The blue lightning no longer snapped or spit or crackled. It exploded from the tips of his fingers and boomed out of the middle of his chest and even dribbled horribly out of his nostrils. Wherever the lightning hit a musket ball, it detonated, and the half-uncurled little warrior inside vanished into half a thimble full of ash. The headlines on Brunty’s waistcoat shivered. They broke open into new print: HEAR YE HEAR YE, READ ALL ABOUT IT! THE TRIUMPH OF BRUNTY’S AMAZING BATTERY! VICTORY ASSURED! V-GT DAY HAS COME AT LAST! The lightning kept coming and coming, firing at crazy angles, seeming to suck more strength from the heavy clouds above. Bravey’s men scattered and took cover behind stumps, woodpiles, inside the thick wooden door of the pub. Someone inside began passing buckets of water out down the line, to put out the flames before they could creep toward the inn with its thatched and naked roof and its rooms full of wooden men.

  The Captain did not flinch. He just shouted:

  “Form ranks, lads, form ranks! Prime and load! He’s just one man! Not even a man, he’s just Brunty! Naughty. Little. Pupper!”

  The air smelled of old coins and ozone and lamp oil and a house still burning to the ground. Anne tried to stand, but she was so dizzy. The tree felt real and true against her back. Everything in front of her felt mad and gruesome and wrong and she wanted it to turn right back around and go back where it came from.

  Brunty began to laugh. Then, his laughter boiled into a scream. A howl, really. And once he started, he couldn’t stop. Green smoke hissed up from his body. Burning holes opened up in the text that covered his clothes and his face and his hair and his hands, the text that was Brunty. The block-print headlines on his waistcoat sizzled together into a wet black mass of nothing. Acid ate up whole chapters of him as Bran and Anne watched, wanting it to stop, wanting to be free of him, wanting no one else to get hurt. Under all that great pile of wanting they could not twitch the smallest muscle. The Magazine Man groaned and screeched and wept. And slowly, slowly, while his fingers flung lightning at the world, he dr
agged his hand toward the latch on the side of his scroll-knob belly. The hand did not want to obey. It wanted to keep living the life electric. Brunty the Godforsaken Gondalier lifted his eyes to Anne. Green foam poured like moldy tears out of the once-elegant printed O’s of his eyes.

  “Please,” he rasped through dissolving teeth. “I can’t turn it off. I don’t know how. It hurts. Wasn’t supposed to hurt.”

  Anne found her feet. Her head throbbed and her spine ached, but she stood up all the same. She stood and looked at the sorry man writhing in pain and reaching out to her for help, reaching out for Anne, who could not even bear for one solitary field mouse to go hungry in the garden if she could help it. She stood, and watched him burn, and did nothing.

  “Poor bugger,” Anne said, and the smile on her face was cold and cruel.

  Branwell took a step away from his sister. She was only eight years old. She wasn’t supposed to know how to be cold yet. Had they taught her that, the three of them? He remembered suddenly a night years ago, when Anne had been so small and so quiet. It had been deep night, and the fire burned in the parlor, and they had still been six, then. Maria and Elizabeth had been tatting lace by candlelight. Papa had asked Anne what she wanted most in all the world. Just a silly thing papas ask sometimes. But Anne had looked at him with huge, serious, willful eyes and said: age and experience. What kind of girl said that, and not: I’d very much like a pony, thank you. It had made him shudder then and it made him shudder now. And in that eerie winter light all shadowed with acid flames, Anne looked quite, quite grown.

  Branwell ran. He ran up the hill, toward Bravey’s Inn, away from that old, knowing look on his little sister’s face, away from the book burning to death on the grass. He felt as though his heart were crying and his eyes were beating. He snatched one of the fire-buckets from a retired corporal’s hands and dashed back down the hill, trying not to slosh all the water out as his legs thumped against the half-frozen ground. Finally, Bran stopped, his breath hitching with sobs and hiccups and misery and the brightness of battle.

  “Everyone mucks up sometimes!” he screamed at Brunty. The Magazine Man looked at him like Branwell had just turned into a camel. A sputtering bolt of sickly flame shot past Bran’s head, missing him by the space of a fly’s wing. Branwell scowled. Well, of course it made no sense now, but it had seemed just the perfect thing to say ten minutes ago, when the Gondalier had looked so beaten. Branwell sighed and dumped out the bucket of water onto Brunty’s smoking, boiling chest. The beastly ultramarine light went out of Brunty and he crumpled to the ground, his burnt fingers still working, grasping, twitching.

  “If you’d have stopped hollering so loud, I might have gotten a word before now,” Branwell complained.

  Anne’s heart sank down into the icy pit of her stomach as a horrible cry bashed through the woods behind her. The spine that had hardened into diamond in her went wobbly as water. The cold, cruel expression vanished from her dear face. Anne knew that cry. She’d made it herself enough times when they were playing soldiers and Bran killed Captain Bravey again and forced Anne to act out a noble death for him and give him a state funeral in the butter dish. She turned and bolted up the hill.

  Branwell was already running at a dead sprint across the hoarfrost to the fallen warrior in the grass.

  Please don’t let it be Bravey, he thought, and Anne did, too. Please don’t let it be Bravey. Let it be someone we don’t know, someone we never named and slept with and made to march across the parlor in formation.

  But it was. It was Bravey. Half his body was charred black where the last fork of Brunty’s unnatural lightning had struck him. Bran had not thought a wooden eye would look any different dead than alive, but Captain Bravey’s did. They had been such a nice walnut-wood color before. Now they were white as birch-bark. Anne flung herself onto Bravey’s scorched, stiff chest. Branwell let her. She was a girl, after all, and girls could fling themselves and cry and that. Sometimes he envied them, but not often. He wiped dried blood off his upper lip. The danger past, Bravey’s loyal men crowded round. They took off their caps and held them to their hearts. One old Quartermaster, with splendid muttonchops carved into his rowan-wood face and a long bandolier full of vials and capsules and cartridges round his barrel-chest, began to weep golden sap onto the Captain’s gentle forehead.

  “Stop it!” snapped Anne.

  Branwell recoiled. His lips curled up into a snarl as he got ready to scold her stupid for being so callous in the face of tragedy. What was wrong with her?

  “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.