The Glass Town Game

by Catherynne M. Valente

  But Victoria would not listen to him.

  An old, sour, awful, familiar feeling rose up inside Branwell. The nagging, terrible sense that no one really saw him or thought of him at all. Charlotte was always running ahead of him, further and further ahead, and Emily and Anne would catch her but he could not. They were not like him, they did not see how silly their stories became when they did not have deaths by stabbing and massacres and horror in them, when they bore no hint of war, but thought he was ridiculous, that he was the odd one, when he was meant to be the one they all looked up to. When the wooden soldiers had been his, his, his, all along.

  He shouted wordlessly in disgust. At Victoria, at Anne, at Charlotte, at Emily, at all of them. But Victoria especially. Anne would replace them all with this piece of stuffed nothing! He had to show her that Victoria wasn’t real, she wasn’t important, her stories were just stories but they had done all this together! The little brat hadn’t any right to make him die just so she could pack her stupid scratchings. The stupid scratchings of a stupid scratching!

  Why wouldn’t they ever listen? Why did she care so much about that wretched story? It wasn’t anything. Half of it was still lying in drifts on the floor. They didn’t have time for this nonsense. They had to leave. Now. Branwell snatched Victoria’s papers. But the wedding dress girl would not let go.

  “Stop it, stop it!” wept Victoria.

  “Just leave it!” shouted Branwell.

  They struggled. She was stronger than she seemed. The pages began to tear.

  “Oh, no, no, please!” Victoria sobbed. “You’re spoiling it, you’re spoiling everything!”

  Finally, Branwell gave up. He seized the silver inkpot on the desk and dumped its contents onto the papers, onto the floor, onto Victoria’s pure white satin hands. Victoria went slack. Black ink dripped off her chin. Her pages flew and crumpled and slid to the floor. The pale girl sunk to her knees.

  “Bran! What have you done, you brute?” Anne snarled. She rushed to hold little Victoria by the shoulders. “Why must you always do the awfulest thing?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said stonily. But his heart shivered and trembled. It wasn’t his fault. It was the right thing to do. They could go now. They could go and live and be safe. If she’d only listened to him in the first place. If only they all would.

  “It’s all broken up now,” Victoria whispered, two heavy tears rolling down her face. She ran her hands over the ruined pages. “My darling Albert is all black and sopping and ruined. It’s all bled out and mixed together.” She grasped at a miserable soggy heap of story. “My children! All my little Kings and Queens! Now there’s nothing but a horrid scrubby black space in the middle of them all, a black trench where half my perfect world will fall and choke and break my kingdom of forever into nothing. I wanted it so beautiful, I wanted it to be a kingdom without pain, and now it is drowned.” Victoria held out up a few bedraggled pages. “Even the part I had written for you, look how it’s spoiled. Look how dark it’s gone.” Victoria ran her fingers over a black page, her tears puddling as they fell on it.

  “Don’t worry,” Branwell said helplessly to Anne as she glared hatefully at him. “It’s not our world. It’s not us. Even if it were like Glass Town, even if it were real, it’s somewhere else, somewhere far away that’s nothing to do with us! I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have shouted. I won’t, ever again, I swear it. But it’s not us, it’s another place, another Branwell and Charlotte and Emily and Anne, if it’s any real place at all. No harm done. No harm.”

  Victoria pressed her forehead to the inky floor and wrapped her arms around her belly, weeping as if it were the end of the world.

  “Get out,” the Princess hissed. “Get out, get out, get out!”

  Charlotte ducked beneath a collapsed doorway as a sizzling spike of lightning shot so near to her it burned her hair. She could hardly see for smoke. We’re losing, she thought. It’s not supposed to happen this way. Welly wins, he always wins, we always win. But the bullfrogs were leaping everywhere, with such delight, with such ease, twanging out their victory songs in their huge green throats. Napoleon and Wellington wrangled in the center of the courtyard, their breath fogging in the air.

  Suddenly, Charlotte heard a voice. From nowhere, and belonging to no one in Verdopolis. The feeling was not like an electric shock, but it was quite as sharp, as strange, as startling. They saw nothing, but they heard a voice somewhere cry—

  “Oh, my babies, where are you?”

  “Oh God! What is it?” Charlotte gasped.

  “Charlotte! Emily! Annie! Branwell!”—then nothing more.

  It did not seem to be in the courtyard—nor in the castle—nor in the garden; it did not come out of the air—nor from under the earth—nor from overhead. And it was the voice of a human being. A known, loved, well-remembered voice.

  It was Aunt Elizabeth. And her cries were full of pain and woe, wild, eerie, and urgent.

  She was not the only one who heard it. The whole battle froze and listened, straining their ears. No one moved. No one breathed. In the midst of all that silence, Napoleon rolled his eyes and shot Wellington through the heart.

  “Ah ha!” Old Boney shouted. “I am triumphant! Look at me! I am GOOD!”

  Charlotte cried out, but her cries were lost as the battle began again, more furious than before. But now, it was only the clang of swords and the bang of muskets. The horrible acid lightning had stopped, somehow. The bolt that nearly took her head off had been the last. Of course, Charlotte couldn’t know what Emily had done. She expected the next bolt of electric death at any moment. And yet Charlotte ran toward the fallen Duke in a blind rage. She hardly knew what she meant to do before she’d already mounted Copenhagen and pulled the watery lion round.

  “Byron!” she yelled from lionback. “Find Emily, now! And Crashey, get the Duke some grog right this second, this second, hear me?”

  “What?” bellowed Lord Byron as a musket ball slammed into the stone wall behind him.

  “Just find her! Run! Find her or you never deserved a single dance!”

  Charlotte had only a little sword they’d scrounged up for her out of the Quartermaster’s trunks. It was rather pitiful when guns fired all around her. They hadn’t meant to fight. They’d meant to run right into the prison to Branwell and Anne. She didn’t care. It was something. She kicked Copenhagen’s ribs and they were off, galloping down the field toward the dancing, exulting Napoleon, dodging muskets and frogs and lime-men, her sword and voice and soul drawn out and pointed at the tyrant’s heart. He turned just as she was upon him and laughed in her face.

  “You are a very bad kitten,” Charlotte told the Emperor of France.

  Copenhagen heard and understood. The lion snatched Napoleon by the collar and bit hard. He dragged him off his rooster backward through the fighting. Boney spluttered and shouted, but everyone was far too busy trying not to get themselves killed.

  Charlotte and Copenhagen bore down on the far end of the courtyard. A great cage waited there, stashed in the back. When Bonaparte saw, all his cursing and yelping stopped. Copenhagen kept on growling. Then, he flung him at Josephine. The bone-man landed in a heap against the barred door. It groaned inward and sprang open. The rose-lady wrapped her love in her arms and spit out a stream of French so quick and fierce Charlotte couldn’t follow.

  “It’s her!” Charlotte cried. “It’s her. Her roses. It’s always been her. Take her and go somewhere else, somewhere far away. A rocky island in the middle of nowhere. Just take her and go be happy away from everyone else!”

  “I’m happy here!” Bonaparte bellowed. “I will fight on forever! I will fight and I will win until everyone is tired of winning and then I will win again! You think you can tell me what to do? You are nothing! I am Napoleon! I am no one’s toy!”

  “You will NOT!” Charlotte roared.

  Napoleon and Josephine flinched. Bonaparte’s face fell. His jaw dropped low.

  “The Genii!” he whispered.
>
  A crown of lightning flickered faintly around Charlotte’s head. Not the vicious lightning of the bat-tree men. The lightning of a storm that brings rain and turns the world green. She didn’t notice. She didn’t notice one thing different about herself. She hadn’t changed at all. It had always been true.

  They had made this world. They were its gods.

  “If I am to be a governess,” she bellowed, “then I will GOVERN. The game ends when all the players are called in for the night and IT IS TIME FOR BED. What do you do with broken toys? You put them on the shelf and forget about them! You throw them AWAY.”

  “I am the Emperor! The Genii should bow before me!” squeaked Napoleon, shocked at his own daring. But he was frightened. He trembled from head to toe.

  “You put them in a BOX marked OLD RUBBISH and you leave them in the attic!” Charlotte shouted back.

  Her armor fell off.

  More exactly, Bestminster unfolded and unlatched and undid itself until it wasn’t armor anymore. Until it was the same scuffed, worn suitcase it had been when Charlotte had packed it for Cowan Bridge School.

  Then Bestminster opened its lid impossibly wide and ate Napoleon and Josephine. It packed them, as its ancestors had done all the rude and rough owners of yesteryear. It burped slightly and settled down on the cold ground, as pleased as a cat.

  “What did you do, Charlotte?”

  Charlotte whirled around. Branwell and Anne stood there among all the screaming chaos of the battle, staring at her.

  “I won! I think I won. Didn’t I? What are you doing here? How are you here?”

  Anne started to tell it honestly, that a Princess made out of a wedding dress had kicked them out of the Parsonage because Branwell had been such a vicious little snot to her like he always was, and so they’d had nowhere else to go, really, but down into the courtyard to find their sisters and try not to get blown to bits in the process. But the look on Bran’s face stopped her. She’d never seen him look like that. He’d gone so pale he seemed to have no blood at all in him. And the way Charlotte had looked a moment ago . . . Anne felt terribly small between the two of them.

  “But you killed them,” Branwell said, dumbfounded. He felt a shiver of terrible responsibility at the numerous wars he had sent his wooden soldiers to with glee, designing each of their deaths like suits.

  Anne’s lip trembled. She was afraid of her sister. How could anyone be afraid of their sister? But then . . . had anyone ever seen their sister crowned with lightning and riding a lion before? “Charlotte, you killed somebody. Two somebodies! And only one of them was bad. Josephine was just a pretty lady with magic roses in her hair!”

  “You know about the magic roses?”

  “What magic roses?” said Branwell.

  Anne shrugged. “I saw her in the portrait in our cell. The roses in her hair. They’re just the same color as the stuff in Crashey’s flask. The oddest color, really. And they all said the ingredients only grow in Gondal. I didn’t know. But I thought. I had a long time to think up there.” Anne the spy had solved the mystery of two kingdoms from a locked room, and there was no one who had enough of their senses about them to applaud.

  Branwell stared at Bestminster, sunning himself in his victory. “No,” he whispered, and began to cry a little. “No. It’s my fault.”

  Anne turned her head on one side. She narrowed her eyes.

  “Why would you say that, Bran?” she whispered. “Why would you even think it?”

  Charlotte coughed and rubbed her cheeks with her hands. She was still shaking. She yelled over the din. “Don’t be ridiculous, Bran. It’s my fault. And I’m not sorry! Why should I be sorry? Napoleon always dies at the end.”

  A terrific BOOM shattered the air and Charlotte died.

  At least, she thought she had. It felt like dying. One moment she was Charlotte and the next all she could see was blackness and all she could hear was nothing and she was lying flat on the ground with no feeling in any part of her. It was over. It hadn’t hurt too badly, she supposed. It could have been worse. At least she’d gone first, protecting them, as she should have. They would forget her in time.

  “Charlotte!”

  A loud, whiny voice was ruining her death. She wished it would stop and let her be.

  “Charlotte!”

  Charlotte opened her eyes. Black smoke trailed through the sky above her. Branwell was lying on top of her, crying and shaking and slapping her over and over. But he didn’t look like he was enjoying it as much as she’d thought he would. Anne was reaching for something in her dressing gown. She pulled out a flask wrapped in leather and spotted fur. A flask they’d seen on the belts of so many soldiers. Oh, clever, clever Anne!

  “Hullo, Bran,” she wheezed.

  Charlotte turned her head. A cannonball glowed red in the rubble. Bran had pushed her out of the way and onto the lonely pile of rock where Napoleon had ended.

  “I saved you,” Branwell sobbed. “I saved you. I really did. All by myself.”

  Charlotte reached up and stroked his dark hair.

  “We’ve got to save them, too,” Anne cried. Anne would never allow any creature to suffer, no matter how small or pathetic or wicked or ugly, no matter how many times it bit her, no matter how little it would do for her if she were in its place and it in hers. Not right in front of her. Not while Anne from Haworth could still put two words and a flying leap together. The girl who stood over Brunty and would not take one step was buried deep in her heart now. She was thoroughly Anne again.

  “Oh, Old Boney can go hang but poor Josephine? I can’t bear it! What if they didn’t get eaten really? Luggage doesn’t just sit still. It goes places. What if Napoleon and Josephine didn’t die in the suitcase after all, but were transported to an island in the sea, and . . . and . . .”

  Charlotte smiled as Branwell let her up and took up the Game of And. “And the island was so far from everyone that they couldn’t ever escape and start conquering again, but there was plenty of elk to hunt and clams to dig and the soil was very good for potatoes, with a little house for Josephine and none for Napoleon . . .”

  Branwell hugged his elbows to his sides. “And they lived there until they got old and never caused any more trouble because the island was surrounded by wormsharks and at least one leviathan who kept guard and kept them safe, and for a little while, Old Boney didn’t have to be Old Boney anymore.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The Door in the Wall

  Charlotte knelt quietly near a little mound of crushed green glass and spent cannonballs. She was wearing her old dress again, long and black and dusty. Her traveling dress.

  It was over. A few of the soldiers were still skirmishing in the halls of the Parsonage, but it was over, really. The bat-trees lay uselessly on the streets of Verdopolis like broken beer bottles on Sunday morning. The evening sun turned everything to dazzling emerald prisms. Emily, Branwell, and Anne stood a little ways behind, with the soldiers. They stared at the green glass mound. They all felt sick, but they knew without asking that this was specially Charlotte’s sadness.

  “It’s not possible,” she whispered.

  Crashey rubbed the back of his wooden neck and adjusted his bandages. “We had to use so much, don’t you know. In the battle. To keep everyone on their feet. And we hadn’t enough to begin with, since we sent the . . . er . . . lion’s share to Calabar. On account of the trickeryfeint. Remember? S’why we brought Josey along.”

  Leftenant Gravey wept drops of sticky amber sap all over the rows of medals on his chest. “I had three portions! If only I’d known! Oh, I’m a miserable selfish monster, I am.”

  “By the time he took his bullet,” said Sergeant Crashey mournfully, “every medical man on the field was dry as . . . well . . . as . . . er. An old bone. And with Josephine off and vanished—you did say vanished, yeah?—we won’t be whipping up a new batch any day soon.”

  “What difference does that make?” A tear slipped down Charlotte’s cheek. “Go get
some more! Send to Calabar! Send to anywhere! Glass Town must still be full of grog. Open up some cabinets! Tip out the milk bottles! Scrape out the mixing bowls!”

  Anne opened her mouth and closed it several times. She wanted to say something, she truly did, but she couldn’t make herself. Not for a Duke she barely knew. Gravey and Crashey exchanged looks.

  “It’s been hours and hours, miss,” Gravey whispered miserably. “He’s already rusting, poor chap.”

  Charlotte leaned over the man lying on the mound of glass and shot. She put her hand on the Duke of Wellington’s cold iron cheek. She folded his hands on his chest so that they covered the hole in his heart, arranging them in a noble sort of way. The way kings’ hands got folded in Westminster Abbey. Gravey was right. His fingernails had a fine sheen of red rust on them already.

  Branwell watched Charlotte’s thin little back heave in grief. He hated it. He wanted to feel triumphant. Napoleon was safe on an island and Wellington was dead. Boney never won when they played back home. Charlotte wouldn’t let it happen because it wasn’t historical. He had a right to be pleased! But Charlotte just would not get up from that green glass grave. The game was over. They were supposed to be happy and ravenous and tumble downstairs to stuff themselves with mutton and bread. Everyone always came back to life at the end of the game. Back to life and put away in their boxes for another day. That was why it was fun. That was why it was a game. Because in a game, death didn’t matter. He controlled it. He doled it out and he took it back. If dying really meant anything, then it wasn’t a game at all. It was just life. And in life he didn’t control anything. Come on, Welly, he pleaded silently. You old scrap-heap. Get up. Get up and it’s still a game. Get up and Charlotte will laugh. Please! You’re ruining it.

  “But it’s all wrong,” she said helplessly. “Wellington doesn’t die fighting Napoleon. He gets to go home. He gets to be Prime Minister! He gets to drink brandy and pick out a grand old chair to put by the fire and smoke pipes and be alive.”