The Toymakers(97)
The soldiers gathered, and perhaps they saw themselves in the dried husks, in the same way a man might see himself in the skeletons of prehistoric apes strung together for a museum dais.
The edges of the room were growing indistinct. Papa Jack closed and then opened his eyes. Look around you, he thought. There is nothing in the history of the world, no aspect of life nor of death, that is not being charted here, in this workshop, tonight. Half of Papa Jack’s life had been lived alone; what might life have been like if he had had somebody at his side, somebody to wind him up when his heart began to slow?
In the air around him, memory and waking life merged. He was in his workshop and yet at the same time he was suckling at his mama’s breast. There was a bear he used to have, little more than a stitched-up fur, and he had carried it about the village where he grew up until it clean rotted away. He thought he would like to hold it now, to cuddle it or to play – but there was no need; toys didn’t need playing with any longer, for they were playing with themselves. And, ‘I would have liked to have seen what becomes of you,’ he said to the waiting host. ‘We have all come so very far.’
Every man was a child in the moment that he died. Jekabs Godman closed his eyes and, with a hundred wooden faces watching, he slipped slowly from this world.
THE LITTLE ACT OF A LONG GOODBYE
PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM AND HIGHGATE CEMETERY, 1924
Consider the Imperial Kapitan: born on a workshop lathe, given form by chisel and file; one Emporium soldier brought into this world to rule over them all. Tonight, if you had been wandering the deserted shopfloor, breathing in the dust and musk of the Emporium in summer, you would not have heard its screams, nor it pleading for mercy. Leave aside for a moment the fact that it has no voice. It is, after all, only a toy. (Or at least, keep telling yourself that, if you – like poor Emil Godman – still refuse to believe.) The Imperial Kapitan neither screams nor begs because it is not the way he was made. His pride is there in every groove etched into his face. Even if the mechanism that is his beating heart were designed to give him words, he would not scream, not for you and not for anyone else.
Imagine for a moment what the Kapitan thinks and feels (believe, now, that toys can think and feel) as he watches the workshop door open from behind the bars of his birdcage prison. His motor is almost winding down and, with it, comes a slowing of the world. He knows his death is near, but this is not the first time he has been wound down and it will not be the last. There is still a chance he can rise again. So he watches this figure, this behemoth, hove into view – and the last thing he sees, before the blackness of Wind Down comes (as it must come, in the end, for all of his People) is a vision of Creation: the daemon-god who chipped him from dead timber is stomping in his giant’s stride across this crucible, this Work Shop, where all life began, opening the birdcage door and taking him in his fist.
The last thing he feels are fingers, vast as the trunks of trees. The Imperial Kapitan thinks: how like us he is, and yet how different we are. The gods made us in their own image … But the thought is stamped out, for Wind Down is here and all things must end.
Life returns, with a feeling like his insides being wrenched. It is the bite that comes with Wind Up, so gentle at the hands of his brothers, so violent in the fist of a god. The world solidifies slowly. He would struggle if he thought it would do any good, but the god is holding him aloft, whirling him across the workshop, to where great Fires burn in the Hearthland.
The god sits back in a chair. He sobs, the great fat tears of a god.
‘You were mine,’ he says (and the Imperial Kapitan thinks: no, I am mine). ‘I made you here, right here …’ (And the Kapitan thinks: no, I was made with my first idea, my first thought; or I was made when the tree from which I was hewn sprouted; but not here, never here). ‘He thinks it’s a miracle, his miracle, and this the final insult. Everything that was mine, turned to his. He couldn’t let me have one moment, one moment to make my papa proud, one toy that might last so my children could look back and say: there, that was my father, how great he was. And now … Now Papa’s gone, and he thinks this place is his, his to do with as he wishes … And what he wishes is to cede it to YOU.’
The daemon-god grapples the Kapitan forward, until the heat of Fire starts to taint the colour of his wood. Paint and varnish run, the Kapitan’s lifeblood dripping on the god’s fat fingers.
‘Well, it isn’t going to be that way. Do you hear me? You’re toys. You’re not real. The Emporium is going to survive, and my sons are going to play here, safely, where they belong. And …’ He voices a fear; the Imperial Kapitan knows it for what it is by the tenor of his voice. ‘… my wife is going to stay. She won’t take my boys from me, not when you’re gone …’
Fire again. The Imperial Kapitan has been turned so that he must face it. And in the flames he believes he sees an image of the daemon rendered in red and orange. Daemon Lord who sent us out to fight the Long War. Daemon Lord who set us against each other, who forced us to kill our fellows. Daemon Lord who revelled in war, war without end … Wind Up and Fight, Wind Up and Fight again …
The feeling of wood turning to charcoal is not like Wind Down at all. This is the Always End of which their prophets sometimes speak. The Imperial Kapitan prepares himself but, at the last moment, the daemon stays its hand.