The Toymakers(98)
‘Did you think it would be that easy? One terrible moment, and then gone? No, you’re not to be destroyed. You’re to be paraded. Paraded so that the rest of them know. Paraded so that they know who I am and what they are. I’m the Toymaker. This is my Emporium.’ Then his voice breaks and, with a lilting sadness he says, ‘It didn’t have to be this way. You were mine, once. We used to play together.’
The Imperial Kapitan finds himself cast back into his birdcage prison. There he picks himself up and, as he watches the behemoth retreat into the Outer Dark, thinks: but where is the other of which the daemon speaks, the Angel who saved us? The god-of-light who put the Long War to an end. Who saw the slaughter and thought: NO MORE! Why is he not here to take me in his hand and deliver me back to Skirting Board and Ward Robe?
It is only as he starts to feel the dull ache of Wind Down once more that the Imperial Kapitan remembers: the one they call Kaspar, the brother god of the daemon, he did not set us free by his own hand. He gave us, instead, the power to wind ourselves and, in so doing, make decisions for ourselves. These decisions, they are the magic we call Life. He did not speak commandments, nor ordain from on high. It is the daemon who seeks to direct us with Rules of Engagement and forbids us from laying down our weapons. The Kaspar God helped us only until we could help ourselves.
He did not say THOU WILL! He said THOU MAY …
The spark of revelation is bright inside the Imperial Kapitan’s wooden mind. Had you been inside there, trapped in the swirling grain of sandalwood and teak, you might have seen connections springing together, the wood fusing in strange new patterns. This is the magic as thoughts coalesce.
He has to save himself.
But there isn’t much time. Wind Down grows closer each second and, here in his prison, only the daemon lord could help. So the Imperial Kapitan waits for his moment, reaches for the birdcage bars, and begins to strain. He has already seen a knot in the floorboards, and perhaps this is a way back home.
The morning of Papa Jack’s funeral dawned crisp and white. Cathy gazed into the open skies above Iron Duke Mews and wondered: how white were the skies, in that faraway world where Jekabs Godman had become Papa Jack? Last night, she had crept into his workshop and lifted his toy from the trunk with a thousand legs – but when she wound it up, and though the cams drove the prisoners onwards with their march, the walls of the room did not dissolve away, winter did not come howling in, and no phantom Jekabs Godman was waiting to accompany her on the ride. Papa Jack’s story was finished, and the Emporium behind her suddenly seemed a shade more drab, a shade more grey.
She had been up before dawn to help Mrs Hornung in the kitchens, but now she waited in the frigid morning air. Seven dawns had passed since the morning they found him sitting in his workshop chair, and she had spent so long wondering what Kaspar thought, what form his grief was taking behind those sad, vacant eyes, that only now did she ask what she herself was feeling. It had been Papa Jack who welcomed her to his world. She remembered the way he had intoned those questions, so weighted with understanding: are you lost? Are you afraid? And she thought, suddenly, that she would write to her father soon, or visit them out on the estuary sands.
At the end of Iron Duke Mews the first carriage, bearing the coffin, was already manoeuvring to leave. Martha was helping Kaspar up into the second carriage, Nina corralling her boys with stern words and promises of sweet treats to come. Cathy was preparing to join them when the tradesman’s door flew open behind her and out barrelled Emil, his head tucked down like a scalded child. She could see he had been in his workshop by the soot and flecks of woodchip that still coloured his hands. He had been painting too, for his fingernails were rimed a deep and dirty red, the colour of the Imperial Kapitan.
‘For your papa,’ said Cathy.
‘For my children,’ said Emil and, ignoring her further, took his place aboard the carriage.
How strange it was to venture out of the Emporium together. The procession took them north from Iron Duke Mews. Rounding the rails at King’s Cross, they followed the York Road, past the empty granaries and canalside wharves, through the tumbledown redbricks where soot-stained faces ogled them from the terrace – until, finally, they rolled through the green fields of Highgate. Here the cemetery yawned open.
As the funeral procession ground to a halt, Cathy saw the well-wishers already lining the spaces between the graves.
‘Who are they all, Mama?’
Cathy stared. In spite of Kaspar’s whispered protestations, Emil had taken out an announcement in The Times and, accordingly, the grounds were filled with customers past and present. Shop hands from seasons past had come to show their respects. The wives and daughters of those who had been lost along the way had come to catch a glimpse, again, of the gilded world their husbands and fathers once left behind. Beneath hanging hawthorn, Frances Kesey was dressed in funereal grey; Sally-Anne (who later declared that Papa Jack’s was a life of colour and he did not deserve to see only sadness on this, his final day) had come in vaudeville black with lurid sapphire and emerald brocade.
‘Are you ready?’
Wordlessly, Kaspar nodded.
Together, they emerged on to the cold hard ground between the graves. Martha, dressed in one of Nina’s black gowns, cringed from the wind. Cathy took her hand, thinking her still a little girl, but Martha did not resist. In turn, she took Kaspar’s – and, to Cathy’s astonishment, he did not resist either. Cathy looked up. Sally-Anne was right. There ought to have been patchwork horses drawing chariots of fire. The pegasi ought to have been set loose to cavort in the open skies, and to hell with the damage they caused when their motors stopped whirring and they came crashing back down. Ballerinas ought to have twirled en pointe while every tree in Highgate Cemetery was smothered in the tendrils of spreading paper vines. The trees, the sky, the world seemed so ordinary today.