Lucas reached down, took hold of the key in the burnt soldier’s back and started to turn.
He remembers running. He remembers forcing himself through the bars of his birdcage prison. He remembers hurtling headlong through the heartland, the Skirting Board and Wall Cavities that belonged to his people since the gods gave them life. He remembers what he saw. After that, there is only the terror: the knowledge he must do something, a secret he must tell, if only he could keep the inevitable Wind Down at bay. He remembers climbing up, up and ever up, emerging to bright light, desperate to tell her, desperate to be seen.
Then only blackness, decades long.
Reaching out, tumbling, cursing himself for having no words, for not having the capacity to speak.
All of these things, even now.
The soldier picked itself up. It was, to Lucas’s mind, staggering as if drunk. Then, even when it righted, it marched in tiny circles, as if uncertain of its own feet. In the way it lurched there was none of the purpose, none of the bearing, that its expression implied. Probably it was broken. The burnt wood at its back must have stretched as far as its motors, disrupting the way it walked.
‘Is that all?’ Lucas muttered.
‘I think he’s priceless.’
‘I suppose he has a jaunty little strut, but I thought there’d be more. Why else would she have squirrelled him away like that? She’s such a strange old bird. However did we come from her?’
Lucas turned on his heel, already bored of the game, and as he did the soldier straightened. Bethany watched as it turned on its heel, as if taking in its surroundings. Its eyes met hers – she was not wrong, there was a moment of panic, of terrible realisation – and then it sprang forwards, legs clacking in a way wholly unlike the other solders around, and hurtled into the darkness beneath one of the sofas.
Bethany dropped to her knees, pressed her face to the carpet and peered into the dark.
‘It’s disappeared … Lucas! It’s disappeared!’
But Lucas was not in the least bit inclined to go hunting, not down there in the dust for anything so peculiarly old-fashioned as a wind-up soldier – and so nobody was there to witness the miracle of a sleeping mind awaking, and nobody heard the first scuttling in the walls.
In the Black Lands beneath the Sofa, in this strange new world of Carpet and Rug, a mind comes back into being. The fog in which it has been lost takes time to dissipate – but slowly the reefs of grey part and clear. For thirty years the mind of the Imperial Kapitan has been hemmed in. Thirty years of Wind Down. Thirty years: a mind, locked in place, unable to cry out, unable to get help. Thirty years of solitude – that was the real Long War. But now, here he is. He shakes himself out of his stupor, and at last he is alive.
A hand reaches in for him, a giant godly hand made out of blood and bone, and had he not had the instincts to skitter backwards, perhaps its unearthly fingers would have closed around him and dragged him out into the light. The hand comes again, but this time it does not come near – and when, some time after that, the great sonorous voices of the gods echo and fade, the Imperial Kapitan dares to believe he is safe.
He stumbles to the precipice, the edge of the Sofa, where the giant feet of his gods are looming. How the world has changed during his everlasting Wind Down! Out there he sees the children of gods grown, the grandchildren of gods newly cut from their own Workshop Lathe. He sees scores of his wooden brothers lying prone on the Carpet, this forest the gods have raised up to hide the true world of Floorboard underneath, but already he knows they are not like him; what minds reside in those carefully hewn heads have not yet been stirred to idea or imagination; probably these soldiers are yet to wind each other up, yet to march for any other reason than as playthings of the gods. He dares venture out further – and, curled up against the Skirting Board on the far side of the chamber, he sees Sirius, the patchwork dog. That is how he knows for certain that he remains in the same world in which his motors last died. Somehow he knows that Sirius is like him; Sirius understands.
Looming above him is the Lady, the one married to the Kaspar God. On seeing her, his wooden heart soars. He wants to run out and take her by the hand, for thirty years has not dulled the urgency of the one idea dominating his thoughts. But the key in his back is not wound to full, he knows that soon it will labour, soon it will slow … And if that happens there is a chance he must wait another thirty years before his chance comes around again. By then, what will the world be? It may already be too late.
There is, he decides, another way.
The gods are crossing the carpet, out into the kitchens beyond. The children of the gods follow after, until all that is left are the toy soldiers lying inert on the carpet fronds and the patchwork dog, lazily sleeping the day away. The Kapitan knows he has only one chance. He darts out of the darkness, grapples with the arms of the nearest toy soldier, and strains to heave him into the shelter from which he ran.
Too late, the patchwork dog sees him. It sets up its wet laundry howl and, seconds later, the grandchildren of the gods hurtle back into the room. But they see nothing – or, if they do, they cannot believe their eyes.
The Kapitan has mere minutes until Wind Down returns. On his knees, he turns over his brother. The contraption in his back is a basic design, sculpted by the daemon-lord himself. But the Kapitan remembers. He opens his brother up, presses his hands into the fine mesh of cogs and gears that drive him. A tweak here, a tweak there, and soon the soldier is up on his feet, his fingers and hands flexing in strange new ways. It is with some joy that the Kapitan feels himself being wound up, the rush of new energy and life to every corner of his frame.
Now that there are two, the work can truly begin. Together we stand; divided, we fall.
Toy soldiers cannot speak (remember, they are only toys). But if they could, the Imperial Kapitan would have taken his new comrade by the hands, turned him around, and shown him the battlefield where the rest of their brothers have been left to die. Look, he would have said. Look at what we are, look at what we were made to do – and look what we can do for ourselves. We have been appointed a task, one that, out of all the toy soldiers in the world, only we are fit to do.
But we are going to need some help.
That night, Cathy put the children to bed with another tale from THE TRUE HISTORY OF TOYS and, on turning out the lights, met Martha on the stair.
‘Mama,’ she said, ‘I was worried about you.’
Mindful that the children might hear, Cathy ushered Martha down the stairs. ‘Don’t be worried. Don’t be afraid. I’m a sturdy old thing, remember?’
‘For a moment I thought – what if they were real? Real in the way we’d understand it, Mama. But of course, they were only toy soldiers …’ She smiled. ‘The Emporium never leaves you, does it? I’ve been halfway around the world and back, but it doesn’t go. Sooner or later, bits of it start appearing.’
‘You might as well try and escape your own heart.’
For a time there was silence on the stairs.
‘It made me think of him,’ said Martha. ‘Oh, never a day goes by, of course, when he isn’t there – but sometimes he’s more there than others. Seeing his soldiers …’
‘Those weren’t your father’s soldiers, Martha, my love. They were Emil’s. Just plain, ordinary Emil’s, of the kind we used to rely on, once upon a time. A simpler time.’
Cathy drew close to plant a kiss on her daughter’s cheek. ‘Sleep tight, my little Martha.’
Martha said nothing until Cathy was halfway back up the stairs. Then, into the silence, she called out: ‘I miss him, Mama.’
Cathy stopped.