The Toymakers(10)



By the flick of a wrist, the deft twirl of a brush and a misting of lacquer, the faces of the soldiers became known. Emil worked by rote but he worked as if in a trance, his fingers crafting expressions that astonished him when he set each soldier down to dry. This first was of noble bearing; this second had waged too many battles before; this third carried the scars of some prior campaign and wore a look that revealed his innermost dream: to return to the sweetheart he had left behind. In this way, an hour passed in Emil’s workshop, then two and then three. Not a window here looked out upon the outside world but he knew when dawn was breaking by the rattling in the pipes, the echo of distant footsteps which told him the shop hands were up, about, and preparing for the chaos of the day.

His morning’s work would have to end here, with the final soldier in his hand. With a flurry of paint and varnish he crafted a face, dipped him in lacquer to create jackboots of sparkling green, adorned him with tiny brass medals and a sash of crimson red. It was only when he set the soldier down among the others that he realised what he had created – for this figurine was quite the most venerable of all. This soldier bore the many campaigns he had waged with a quiet dignity; this soldier had a single scar above his left eye, a line in the wood caused by some enemy soldier’s sabre; this soldier had known triumph and disaster and treated those impostors exactly the same. He was, Emil decided, quite extraordinary; any boy would be proud to have him among his collection.

A tingle he had not felt in many months was lighting up every nerve of his body. He would have to set the shop hands to replicating it soon. Their copies would be imperfect, but they would still be toys to shout about, toys to draw the customers back. Thinking of the stories his papa once told, he decided to give it a name like no other. This, he decided, would be the first: the Imperial Kapitan.

The great bell in the Emporium dome was tolling, bringing the rest of the shop hands out from their roosts. Emil hurried out of his workshop and on to the shop floor. While he had been sleeping, the night hands had transformed the displays. Theirs was a job coveted by all the rest: to come out after dark and work wonders along the atriums and aisles. This morning an Oriental dragon snaked from one end of the store to another. The atrium at the Emporium’s heart had become the wilderness lair of two enormous black bears.

The doors would not open for another two hours but the first-shift shop hands were already at work. Emil trod among them, eager to show the Imperial Kapitan to everyone he passed, but most were too engrossed in their tasks to stop. Kesey and Dunmore, who had first come to the Emporium as astonished customers and signed up as shop hands the winter they came of age, were corralling a herd of runnerless rocking horses, painted up as if they had cantered down from the Siberian steppes. Sally-Anne was repopulating the princess aisle, decimated in last night’s deluge, while John Horwood, the Emporium caretaker, was patching holes in the floorboards caused by some boys’ pitched battle. Even the new girl, the one who had arrived on opening night and barely spoken a word ever since, was emerging from the storerooms, heaving a sled spilling over with fresh stock.

Emil fingered the Imperial Kapitan in his pocket. It occurred to him that there was only one person he really wanted to show, and that was the one person who hadn’t even deigned to get out of bed.

Kaspar.

Emil took the short cut to the Godmans’ quarters, high in the Emporium eaves. Mrs Hornung was serving Papa Jack his salt fish for breakfast, but Emil’s brother Kaspar was nowhere to be found. His bed had the air of one that had not been slept in for days, its covers heaped high in a kind of vagabond’s nest (Mrs Hornung had long since forsaken cleaning the Godman boys’ rooms on account of the clockwork spiders she had once caught nesting there). Kaspar’s notebook was open at the side of his bed but Emil was proud enough to resist peeking inside; whatever designs had been scribbled here were Kaspar’s alone and he had no desire to betray him. When the Emporium one day belonged to Emil, he wanted the victory to be clean.

There was another place his brother would be – and sure enough, there he was, bent over the worktable in the attic workshop above their father’s own. Bigger than Emil’s only because they had once shared it (Emil had left three winters ago and built a workshop of his own, a private place where their secrets need not be shared), it was cluttered with more debris than Emil thought possible. A disorderly workshop, Emil knew, meant a disorderly mind. He allowed himself the slightest of all smiles.

Kaspar was at the hearth in the hourglass’s end, though no fire had been kindled in the grate. One year Emil’s senior, he had shed the puppy fat both boys had once had and which Emil’s body stubbornly refused to lose, and crouched over his work table with the same intensity with which Emil had worked on his soldiers. His hair was swept back in an ostentatious peak, revealing eyes more shrill and blue than Emil’s, and a nose that might have befitted a Roman legionnaire. Emil saw, with a sinking feeling, that the Imperial Kapitan had features almost wholly the same, and the thought brought him great displeasure.

Nevertheless, ‘Kaspar,’ he called out, ‘I’ve something to … Wait until you …’

‘One moment, little brother. I’ve something to show you.’

On the worktop in front of Kaspar sat a simple glass jar, etched in sygils and lines. Kaspar took a small candle from the mantel on top of the hearth, struck a match against the wick and dropped it into the jar. Moments later he screwed the lid shut – and reclined as the dark workshop walls turned into a theatre of shadows and lights.

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