The Toymakers(21)

Kaspar had got to his knees to sweep the battlefield clear, lining up Emil’s fallen soldiers with his own. Most had wound down; only one or two still kicked feebly in their death throes. ‘I’ll admit it. I’ve been being sore with him. But he takes his soldiers so seriously! You most likely think me frightful. And yet … he’s my little brother. He pains me, but it doesn’t mean I don’t …’

‘It was a rotten trick, Kaspar. The way you baited him back at the table. It wasn’t … honourable.’

‘No?’

‘It isn’t how a family treats itself.’

Kaspar appeared to find this sentiment intriguing. ‘Well, what about your family, Miss Wray? How did they treat you, that you should run away to live in our Emporium?’

‘I never said I ran away.’

‘Oh, Cathy, you say it every time you close your mouth. You say it every time you try so hard not to say it.’ He stopped. ‘You’ll tell me soon enough. I don’t see why you try so hard to keep a secret you’re so desperate to tell.’

But Cathy was practised at silences, and when this one went on too long, Kaspar had to find another way to fill it. ‘You think we’re fools, don’t you? To care so much about a game of soldiers?’

‘No,’ said Cathy, and something drew her eyes back to the pinecone figurines trapped behind the cabinet glass.

‘No?’

‘Because I think there’s something more to it than a game.’ She paused, as if willing Kaspar to enter the silence. ‘I’m right, aren’t I? With you and Emil, it isn’t just a game. It’s … life, of a sort.’

Kaspar breathed out, as if trying to form a word, but no word came. It was, Cathy decided, the first unrehearsed reaction she had seen in him since the moment they’d met.

‘You oughtn’t to grind your brother into the dirt like that.’

‘Miss Wray, you misunderstand. You might not believe it, but there was a time before all this, before the aisles and atriums, before any toys at all. You look at it now, and you imagine the Emporium our entire world. Well, before the Emporium, it was just us, the Brothers Godman, without even our papa to call our own. We were each other’s world back then. I’d do anything for Emil, and Emil for me too – though …’ And here Kaspar could not stop himself from smirking, for the joke was too perfect to resist. ‘… that was generally because I’d have told him to do it. When you see Emil get upset, it’s only because he cares so much about this … Long War of ours. It’s true what you say, Cathy. It isn’t just a game. It’s … who we are.’ He went to the door and peered out. When he was certain that the coast was clear, he looked back – and only then did he say, ‘The Long War has been going on since the very first day we met our papa. Back then, if you can picture it, we weren’t the sorts of boys who had toys. That came much later, once our papa started to teach us all of the things that he’d learned. No, don’t look at me like that. It’s you who wanted to know.’ He paused. ‘You do want to know, don’t you?’

Cathy nodded. It was a long story, he said, but he would tell it, if that was what she wanted. ‘And it started with these.’ He took her back to the cabinet, where the pinecone figurines had been watching, unmoved. ‘I was eight years old the day I first saw these. They came flurrying out of the backwoods, a thin column carried by the wind – and my papa walking behind them, like they were his guards. That was the first time I’d seen him, in anything other than a picture. That was the day the Emporium was born.’

Picture it, if you would: Kaspar Godman is eight years old, dishevelled as all the village children with whom he spends his days. Most of them are simple, certainly too simple for Kaspar, who has had an inkling, ever since he can remember, that he is more intelligent than them, a supposition borne out by the way he can ordinarily get them to do whatever he pleases, whether that be stealing hens’ eggs, raiding the rock pools for crabs, or else taking a beating more properly meant for Kaspar himself. Yes, Kaspar has had the village children trained since before most of them could talk. He runs rings around them like a sheepdog to its sheep, and the only one who ever resists is the one they call Emil. Which is a terrible shame, because Emil is Kaspar’s brother, and has been Kaspar’s to look after ever since the day he was born.

On this particular day, Kaspar has grown bored and is following one of the lesser trails to the headland overlooking the village. From here he can see every house in Carnikava, all of the trails that converge out of the woods, the way the river Gauja broadens and deepens in colour as it joins with the sea. As he comes between the trees, he hears noises in the roots around him. Determined that it can only be Emil following in his footfall, he finds a hiding place beneath an overhang of earth. There, squatting with the woodlice and worms, he waits. But it is not Emil who has been following him out of the undergrowth. Instead there come a procession of little figures, carried along on the wind. At first they are formless, but then he sees: the twigs as arms, the briars that bind them, ringlets of leaves and pinecones for heads. These are stick soldiers and the wind gives them the appearance of marching.

Temptation is a terrible thing for an eight-year-old boy. Before Kaspar has any thought to deny himself, he darts out to scoop up a soldier. And he is standing there, turning that bundle in his hands, when a heavier tread comes along the track. He looks up, into encroaching shadow, and sees a vagrant lurching toward him. In his fists, their nails like horns, are yet more soldiers. He is reaching into his pockets and casting them into the wind.