The Bread We Eat in Dreams

by Catherynne M. Valente

  —Charlotte Brontë

  There was every possibility of taking a walk that day. Great dollops of sunshine melted on the moors; clouds and shadows cut the bare winter-sleeping land into a checkerboard. The servant Tabitha had gotten a whole egg, a wedge of bread, and a bit of her damson jam into each of the four children, bundled them in bonnet and gloves and extra stockings, and set them out of doors into a blue Yorkshire morning so cold it seemed ready to snap in half at the slightest touch. She thought absolutely nothing of turning them loose on the moor that day of all days—they needed a helping of the out of doors, such children as these, with their canny tongues and stubborn tempers. Judgment Day would come and go before those four would look up from their pens and papers otherwise.

  Stiff gorse tangle burst underfoot as they took to the day. Charlotte, the oldest, a serious child with thick hair parted through the center of her skull like a dark sea, a round, pallid face, and a fearsome scowl, trudged resentfully up a worn purple path through the bruised February hills. “I do not see in the least why we must leave Our Work just to satisfy Tabby’s obsession with fresh air,” she sniffed to none of her siblings in particular but all of them generally, her nose beginning to run in the hard crystal air.

  Branwell quickened his pace to keep up with her, his long curls whipping across the bridge of his great arched nose, his brow furrowed and fuming, frowning as if to reflect Charlotte’s expression as perfectly as possible though he could only see the back of her, her woolen dress prickled with bits of twig and old, withered heather.

  “I had intended to explode the castle on Ascension Island today, with Crashey and Ross and Bravey and Stumps and Buonaparte and all the rest trapped inside!” he groused, his breath puffing ellipses ahead of him. “With much splendid blood and fire and leaping out of windows and dashing brains out on the earth! The heavens would have wept at my slaughter! Now Tabby has sabotaged me with her eat your eggs, there’s a lad and fasten up your coat good and tight; they’ll be safe and sound for ages yet. Until evening, anyway.”

  Emily and Anne hung back from the older children, holding hands and picking their path carefully, so as not to crush any sweet plant that might erupt in spring with blossoms to cheer them. Emily looked up at the frozen sun, her brown ringlets crowding a narrow, sharp face that looked already quite grown, though she had only nine years. “We would have made them alive again by supper, Bran,” she snapped, tired of her brother’s thirst for the blood of their favorite toys, a set of twelve fine wooden soldiers their father had given as a present to his only son—but the girls had made a quick end to that. No sooner had Branwell got them but his sisters had colonized the kingdom of the soldiers, named them and claimed their favorites. The Young Men ever after ruled their hearts and idle hours.

  Little Anne, the youngest, laughed. The prettiest child in Haworth, her hair almost reaching the blonde shades of girls in lovely paintings, she watched everyone with her wide violet eyes as though spying upon them, with the necessity of making future reports to some unseen master. “It’s a wonder Crashey doesn’t get dizzy, with his forever falling down dead and getting up again!”

  Charlotte stopped short at the flat top of a little hill that kept watch over a low leafless valley full of the starving prongs of black yews and thorn trees and tumbling colorless grasses, thistle and old ivy, worn stones near as high as Anne. Every branch and blade was limned with glassy golden light, which gave the scene a strange affect, as though the children were seeing it from much further away than they really stood, and through a frosted pane besides. Charlotte put out her arms and her young sisters huddled into them, for the wind bit at their cheeks and made rosettes of their dimples. Branwell did not partake of their cup of affection, though he wanted to. But he felt Crashey would not, and certainly Buonaparte would have the head of any lad of his who behaved in such babylike fashion. Branwell had of late begun to feel his sisters were not quite serious about the game. They had romantic notions and did not submit to his pronouncements of death and disaster by flood or spectral conflagration, but went about healing everyone with phials until all his fun was spoilt.

  “There’s nothing to be done,” Emily said. “Unless we should sneak back. Let us see if we can’t find the mushroom patch again and make believe there are fairies there. I’m sure you can explode the fairies if you like, Branwell, though since they have the power of flight you won’t get quite so many brains dashed on the earth, but perhaps you can arrange a duel to make up the difference. Duels are superior to battles anyway.”

  “I shall have a duel with Tabitha if she puts us to bed without our writing hours this evening,” Branwell said, kicking the hardened black earth with the toe of his boot. “I shall whack her with a biscuit.”

  “If there are to be fairies,” said Charlotte imperiously, “the Duke of Wellington will have to be their King.” Anne ventured that her own favorites, Ross and Parry, the great polar explorers and namesakes of two of the smaller wooden soldiers, might be fairy lieutenants, perhaps wed to sensible fairy maids. But her sister, chief of the tale and engine of the game, did not hear her. The Duke stood always at the center of their pretended worlds, for Charlotte adored him as fiercely as Branwell worshipped Buonaparte. They had called their favorite wooden soldiers after the mortal enemies, and insisted on their inclusion in every adventure. And what a dashing crystal image it was that rose in Charlotte’s heart then—Sir Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington and King of the Fairies, with long black wings and a crown of lightning, astride, not a white horse this time but a white rhinoceros, his sword a blue, lamplit flame! The beauty of the dream expanded like a silk balloon in her chest, almost painful in its familiar sweetness, the pricks of a tale, and as ever, she felt as though she could never be big enough for even one of the stories that stormed inside her. It would drown her entirely and or burn her up from within and leave no part of Charlotte behind. She could see him in ruby clarity, really see her Duke, putting a lance of rose-colored ice through the forehead of the pig-footed, ram-headed, lizard-mounted Emperor of France.

  A cracking, rustling thump down in the wintry hollow broke Charlotte’s vision into pieces. The sun dug down into a trench of clouds, casting the vale into shadow, sending a brute wind to rattle the thistle-heads. Something moved between the long, sharp trees.

  “Look,” Emily whispered, her breath strangled and squeaking.

  “I don’t see anything,” said Branwell, peering through the shade.

  “Look.”

  And they did see something—a man, a hugely fat man, in fact, tottering just below them, his collar turned up to the cold. But his collar was not a collar: it was a fine, illuminated page from some strange manuscript, folded crisply. His waistcoat was fashioned from a coppery book spread out along the spine; his cravat a penny dreadful folded over many times. But queerest of all, the enormous belly that protruded from beneath his coat of printed pages was the carved ebony knob of an ancient scroll, his legs were dark hymnals, and his enormous head was an open book longer than the Bible itself, glasses perched upon the decorated capitals of the pages: two handsome Os which served for eyes. The lower parts of the pages formed a mustache, and his nose crowned it all: a long, blood-scarlet ribbonmark.

  After a moment of shock in which no one breathed and everyone clutched hands as tight as murder, all four children burst out of their stillness and tumbled down the hill after the book-man, calling out to him and demanding his name, his family, his business. He began to run from them, his breath whistling fearfully through the hundred thousand pages of his body.

  “Go away!” he shouted finally as they ran together, leaping over frozen puddles and knotted roots. “If Captain Tree hears of this I’ll be remaindered for certain!”

  “We’re dreaming!” cried Anne. “It’s all right, it’s a dream and we’re dreaming!”

  “You can run forever in dreams,” panted Branwell, “and I think if I don’t stop soon I shall throw up!”

  But finally the ma
n of books did stop, skidding to a halt before two tall soldiers, their rifles leaning on their shoulders, their gazes clear and bold, made entirely of rich brown wood.

  The fat man looked back at them in terror, then folded up his face, his collar, his cravat, his waistcoat, and his long hymnal legs. He folded up so completely that between the children and the soldiers no longer stood a man at all, but a great fat book firmly shut, lying on the moorland. One soldier with painted black trousers, bent and retrieved it, tucking the volume under his strong arm.

  “Hullo,” said the other soldier. This one had a wood-knot over his heart as though he had been shot there long ago. His mahogany mouth turned up in a sad little smile that seemed to say: well, we had better make the best of things. “My name is Captain Tree, and this is my comrade Sergeant Bud. But you may call us Crashey and Bravey.”

  Long afterward, Charlotte would try to remember how it happened, but her mind could not quite clamp down upon it. It had already had to struggle mightily with a man made out of books, and was not at all prepared to record how one managed to lift a foot off the ground in Yorkshire and put it down in somewhere else altogether. They did not pass through a door, of that she was sure, nor was there a mystic ring or pool. Yet Crashey and Bravey—their own stalwart soldiers, their miniature toys!—had taken them up and now the sun battered down hot and sultry through viridescent fronds and great pink hothouse flowers as tall as streetlamps, bobbing over a long glass road which lead to a palace of such grandeur it burned their eyes. All along the boulevard strange obelisks rose, tipped with fire or ice or balls of blue lightning, and between them great birds of marvelous size and countenance, like peacocks given the gift of flight, bobbed and darted, crying out like mournful loons.

  “What is that place,” said Emily, her voice trembling. “That place you are taking us? It is too dazzling! I fear it will catch fire, the sun dances upon it so.”

  “That is the Parsonage,” said Crashey. His voice was deep and pleasant. “It is where the Chief Genii of Glass Town live, and many other wonderful fine folk besides.”

  “That is not the Parsonage!” protested Anne, who could bear very much fancy, being so young, but could not abide a lie. “We live in the Parsonage, with Papa and Aunt Elizabeth and Tabitha! It looks nothing like that!”

  Indeed, this Parsonage was an edifice all of diamonds, its stately pillars sparkling emerald and ruby illuminated with lamps like stars. A sapphire hall opened up like a blue mouth in its exquisite face, and the light of the warm Glass Town day filtered through all these gems as through water, throwing up fountains of fitful reflections. A little churchyard lay just beside it, just as it did at home, but here the gravestones were perfect alabaster stippled with black pearls.

  “Sir, I must insist you admit this all a dream,” Branwell said crossly. “If you are my Crashey indeed you must do as I say. I have had quite enough silliness!”

  Crashey and Bravey stopped and turned smartly to them, saluting. They stood on the porch of the bright Parsonage, and Charlotte heard her heels click on the diamond floor. That click, somehow, sounded deep in her and convinced her of the reality of this summer country as the birds and pillars and heat could not. The floor beneath her was real, and its facets yawned below her like mirrors. She drew her sisters in close and her heart battered madly at her ribs.

  “I am your Crashey,” said the solemn soldier. “And so I must obey you, but I wish you would not compel me in this way. I will say it is a dream, if your will is set. But I am an honest nut, and I do not like to lie. I will show you my wounds if you require evidence—you may already see the place where the Marquis of Douro put his musket-ball during the African campaign, but here,” and Captain Tree showed his thigh, which had a scorch mark upon it, “you may find proof of the explosion of the citadel of Acroofcroomb. Witness also my flank, whereupon Buonaparte stuck me with his knife, and my throat, slashed in the battle of Wehglon. If it will not make the ladies too faint, I can show you the scar over my liver, where the cannibal tribes made a lunch of Cheeky, Gravey, Cracky and my humble self.”

  Branwell at last relented and drew into the protective circle of his sisters. Charlotte held him tight about the waist and warmth spread through him as he put his hand upon little Anne’s shoulder as he had seen their father do when their Aunt suffered a spell of grief.

  “Those are our battles,” whispered Emily, utterly ashen. “We sent the Young Men to Acroofcroomb. We set the cannibal hordes upon them. We invented Glass Town, and Gondal, and the Marquis. He is talking about Our Work.”

  “Indeed, fair Emily, you did send us into service,” spoke up Bravey for the first time. “Well do I recall our suffering and many deaths—but also I remember gentle hands which restored us to life, fit and hale to strive again for the sake of our nation.” Handsome Bravey put his hand over his heart and bowed. Branwell flushed, remembering his own plans for the afternoon, which had included dropping Bravey from a great height onto sharp rocks.

  Charlotte shook her head. “It is not possible. Fiction counts no casualties! The Young Men are playthings, made by a gentleman in Leeds and purchased fairly—they cannot simply become real.”

  “I believe you will find all this easier on your stomachs if you join us within,” said Bravey uncomfortably. “For the whole of reality is not easily explained by a couple of old veterans with splinters still stuck in their bones.”

  The children allowed themselves to be lead into the long blue hall. They seemed to pass underwater, through green and turquoise shadows pierced by pins of sunlight. The hall opened into a great room with a floor like midnight, full of still more jeweled pillars of rose and silver and white. Four golden thrones arrayed themselves at the north end, and upon them sat four figures. Three ladies there were, two dark and one light, their glossy hair gathered at their necks, their pale faces calm and perhaps amused. They wore long, gauzy dresses of spectacular colors: crimson, blue so bright it seemed to crackle, and glinting garnet-black. Beside them a young man sat with one leg crossed over one knee, his face craggy and not unhandsome, his brow furrowed, his lanky hair coal-colored and loose. The four bore a similarity of feature, of seriousness and of long familiarity.

  Of all of them, little Anne, hardly turned seven, understood and ran toward the thrones.

  “She is myself!” Anne cried. “All grown, and beautiful, and that is you, Charlotte, and you, Emily, and you Branwell, your very scowl! Oh!” Anne put her hands to her face. “So that is what I will be. I have wanted to be grown-up all my life.”

  “How small I once was,” marveled the older Anne. A lock of her bright hair came loose as she put her own hand to her cheek.

  “Welcome,” said the older Charlotte. “We are the Chief Genii of Glass Town. You may call me Tallii, and they Annii, Emmii, and Brannii.” The great lady dropped her formal demeanor like a fan. “You’ve caught us quite off guard! We are in the midst of our annual rite, and to be perfectly frank we did not think we should meet you here, or ever.”

  The younger Charlotte approached the throne shyly. She extended her hand, still gloved from the distant, cold moorland, marveling at this woman who was herself but not herself, herself older and wise and somewhat sad, herself whole and complete. The Chief Genii Tallii laced her fingers through the child’s and smiled.

  “How strange,” she said.

  “You must explain!” cried Branwell fearfully. “Or I will call the Young Men! Crashey said he would obey me!”

  The older Branwell glowered, his dark eyes flaring red and smoky—and then his face smoothed over and grew kind again. “They are my Young Men as well, my boy. But they will serve as a lesson. You call that one Crashey, but also Captain Tree and Hunter and John Bull depending on the tale that possesses you. And that is Bravey, but also Sergeant Bud and Boaster and Mr. Lockhart.”

  “We have only twelve,” said Charlotte. “They must stand in for whomever we need.”

  “Indeed,” nodded Brannii. “And likewise, a soul must stand i
n wherever it is needed. In the universe, there is no such thing as a single soul. Where there is one in Yorkshire, there is a copy in Glass Town, where there is a maid in Angria, there is a copy in Paris. Where Wellington sheaths his sword, so do the many Wellesleys in many cities in many Englands in many worlds, all folded together like the pages of a book. You exist in Haworth, and we exist here, connected but not the same. Nothing happens merely once. The world repeats, like a stutter.”

  “But the Young Men are not souls, they are not alive!” protested Emily.

  The Chief Genii Emmii folded her hands. “But you gave them stories and histories, names and marriages. You loved them and gave them breath. In your world that is not enough to do anything at all except eventually break them to pieces from use. But here, they stood up out of some distant forest and began to live. Glass Town does not obey the rules that Yorkshire must.”

  All along Chief Genii Emmii’s skin, a golden crackle seared and then vanished.

  “Then Wellington is here?” said Charlotte wonderingly, and Anne laughed at her, a little cruelly, for she had tired of the Duke’s primacy in her sister’s affections long ago.

  “Of course,” said Chief Genii Annii. “And Buonaparte too, I’m afraid. Everyone you have known and heard of has a copy here, and I daresay more and others in places we know not of. Wellesley and his sons with their wings of onyx and loyal rhinoceri defend us against the depredations of the ram-faced French genius with his saddled lizard and his terrible army of fire-breathing assassins, a clan of dastardly ebony ninepins.”

  Branwell considered that a ninepin who was also a fire-breathing assassin was quite the most marvelous thing he could think of. He had pressed their Aunt’s ninepins into service as enemy battalions many times, but never thought to give them power over the fiery elements. Even Wellington would certainly fall to such warriors—though it disturbed him that his Buonaparte should live still, and yet the real one had died lonely on a rock in the sea.