The Toymakers(94)

If nobody else would help him, he would have to do it himself.

That winter had been punishing, but they had made it through. What a sorry feeling it was, to be actively waiting for the first snowdrops to flower, to long for the big, empty days when the Emporium was closed so that, at least, it was done for another year. This Christmas the customers had still come, but how many came back when they were told to find their toy soldiers elsewhere? How many told their friends? How many remarked upon the ramshackle aisles, the places where the skirting boards had been levered up to reveal great holes in the walls, the constant sounds of chittering in unseen corners? And what of the boy who had come to the shop with his own toy soldiers in his pocket, only to discover them gone when the time came to leave? Where were they now, Emil wondered, if not patrolling the walls with the rest?

Well, Kaspar was not the only talented toymaker among them.

Emil shook his boys until they awoke and, rubbing blearily at their eyes, they clambered out of the bed where their mother still slept. ‘What are we doing, Papa?’ one of them asked. ‘It’s a midnight adventure!’ the other announced. But, ‘A midnight raid,’ Emil replied, ‘and I wouldn’t let you miss it for the world. We’re going to end this thing once and for all. Your papa has a plan …’

Nina would surely not approve, but Nina was still asleep, so Nina would never have to know. With his boys marching behind him, Emil made his way to the shopfloor. There, in the half-moon hall, a crate fastened with steel rivets was waiting where he had left it. Emil made his boys stand aside as he jimmied it open. Inside, wrapped in crêpe paper, were a hundred soldiers of his own design. ‘An elite guard,’ he announced. ‘Worthy to be generals, every one. Your uncle might have realised the wildest ideas, boys, but he never surpassed me with my soldiers – not when we were little, and not now …’

‘Is it going to be a battle, Papa?’ At four years old, the idea of a battle ought to have been the most thrilling thing of all, but since that night when the soldiers attacked all talk of battle had been banned by their mother.

‘My boys, it’s going to be a massacre. Your uncle has to learn that this Emporium isn’t his to do with as he pleases. It’s ours, it’s yours, and these soldiers of his have to be told. Wind them up, boys. I’ll prepare the way.’

The boys scurried to their task as Emil crowbarred a piece of skirting away from the wall. Then, at his command, the boys released the soldiers and stood back as they marched into the brickwork, dividing into two columns as they went. If Emil had calculated correctly, they would fan out into the cavities he had mapped – and somewhere, in the unseen crevices around them, battle would be joined.

‘It’s happening, Papa! Listen!’

In the walls around them, a thousand tiny footsteps could be heard. There came no battle cries, only the thud and crunch of wood against wood, the hollow pops of mahogany bullets letting fly. Emil whirled around, dancing on the spot. First, there was battle on his right; then, battle on his left; then, finally, pitched battle beneath the soles of his feet.

Eventually, all around him was silence. For some time, not a toy soldier moved. It was a joyous sound; Emil had not heard silence like it in many long months. Some of his own soldiers would have wound down by now – but that had always been their fate, to fulfil the decimation for which they had been made, and slowly grind to a halt, down there in the dark. They were warriors, and would have been proud. No matter what Kaspar would say, to die for one’s country was a sweet and glorious thing.

Emil counted slowly under his breath: one, two, three, four. Then, as he had planned, the footsteps started again.

‘Stand back, boys, it’s nearly time!’

The boys reeled as toy soldiers burst out of the wall. Emil’s elite guard, those who had survived, streamed on to the shopfloor – and there, pursuing them, came the self-winding host.

The trap was sprung. Emil reached out, pulled a cord at his side – and from a second silver crate sprang a patchwork wolf. The wolf was coiled so tightly it hurtled forward, skittling elite guard and self-winding soldier alike – but it had only one command. In the middle of the battlefield, the wolf wrapped its jaws around a soldier in glistening red and, when it came to deposit it in Emil’s hands, the jaws opened to reveal the Imperial Kapitan, his legs milling in wild panic.

Emil took the Kapitan in his fist, held him up so that the fleeing soldiers might see. Some of them stopped on their way back into the skirting. How did they perceive him then, through their wooden eyes, their general dangling up above? ‘He’s ours now. Come on, boys. I’ll show you how we’re to sleep safely in our own homes.’

The boys followed their father across the ravaged shopfloor, down the tapering aisle to the workshop at its end. Such a magical thing for the boys to come into their papa’s workshop. They held hands and gaped at the stars plastered across the ceiling, the nightjars on the shelf.

At the workshop’s end, a brass birdcage stood on its stand. The boys recognised it from last Christmas, for this was the roost Papa Jack’s phoenix kept on the nights he soared over the shopfloor. Its wires were tightly meshed; a padlock dangled from a door where there was no real need.

The Imperial Kapitan hung limp in Emil’s hand. Now, he wound him up and cast him inside. As he fumbled to lock the door, the Kapitan picked himself up. Perhaps Emil was only imagining the rush of feeling as life spread back through the Kapitan’s heart, along every piece of wire and catgut in his body. The toy soldier flexed his finger joints, threw a salute (was this mockery, or just confusion as his mind – if mind it truly was – came back into being?), and marched on the spot.