“You want to rescue Mycroft?” the Major repeated in a flat, tired tone, neither approving nor criticizing, just listing one more fact in a world which has too many facts in it.
“Yes,” the boy declared. “Mycroft’s always rescuing everybody else, it’s time somebody rescued them.”
Some of these scenes are hard for me to re-create from interviews and stale research, but not this one. The safe house Saladin chose to hide the child from Dominic would be warm and snug, walls stacked high with the sorts of games and entertainments a thug would want when forced to lie low. Mommadoll would have set to work stripping the room of ‘inappropriate’ materials, while Boo nested in the cushions, and the army men pitched cautious camp on the bedside table, ready to leap to instant cover should my Saladin return. I’m happy to say the hostages were free once more; Privates Pointer and Nostand and Lieutenant Aimer, who were captured when Dominic had stolen Bridger’s clothes and backpack from the cave, had been successfully snatched back from that circle of Hell which is Dominic’s desk drawer. Operation Ariadne, as the Major called it, had been planned for three careful hours and executed in forty-seven seconds, a six-man extraction team guided by Looker scrying through the crystal ball, with Bridger at the teleport controls. Success. Medic was now treating the captives’ wounds with Bridger’s potions, their hands and feet where Dominic had pinned them to a slab of cork like butterflies. They bore it bravely, Lieutenant Aimer especially, determined not to cry out with the Major watching. The others ringed them, cheering on the rescued, hailing their endurance in the face of monster Dominic, a heroes’ praise from all except paranoid Croucher, who glared up from a bunker he had built from loose puzzle pieces on the far side of the table, and muttered to the walls.
“You’ve searched it through and through?” the Major asked, nodding to the pocket of Bridger’s recovered wrap, where the lump of the Iliad showed through fabric long since warped to fit its corners.
“Yup,” the boy answered, “it’s all there, no missing pages. The bad sensayer cracked the spine a bit, but nothing’s gone. And they didn’t bug it or anything, I used the crystal ball and everything. I know you’re mad I let it get stolen, and I know it’s really, really important, but it’s safe now, so it’s time to work on Mycroft. You can lecture me after we have them back, okay?” An unsettling resolution tensed the child’s tender brows, as when sculptors give Hermes or Dionysus a child’s face but a man’s expression. When Providence and the Major first granted me the undeserved blessing of Bridger’s friendship he was not yet six years old, that recipe of tiny hands and games and tantrums which awakens the instincts to protect and nurture, even in Mycroft Canner. At first the sheer wonder of helping a child grow was enough for me, but soon moments started cropping up, after a fight over clipping his nails, or when I stumbled reciting a favored bedtime story, when he would glare, and show me for an instant, not infancy, but personality, a flash of the person he would be when he grew up. With time, I began to see him less as a blossom swelling to its proper shape than as a buried statue, waiting for the sand around to fall away. I loved the child, but was waiting for the man to come and wield his power with this kind of confidence. We all were.
The veteran shook his head. “Spiriting Mycroft away is no simple matter. Only Dominic will notice we took Aimer and the others, but Mycroft is part of a larger world, connected, watched. Many will notice if they vanish to the far side of the Earth.”
The boy’s blond brows stayed locked. “But they do it all the time. If Mycroft disappears everyone’ll assume they did a clever Mycroft thing and got away. All we have to do is wait until no one’s looking.”
“No.” The Major sighed, as ships sigh strained by tides too huge for eyes to spot beneath the petty waves. “If it were that simple, he would do a clever Mycroft thing and get away. You’ve seen it. Mycroft’s not trapped there by a cell, or a chain, he’s trapped by choice, his choice, something that’s keeping him from trying to leave.”
“I know,” Bridger answered, though I suspect he did not like knowing. “Mycroft disappears a lot. That’s where they go isn’t it? That house in Paris where the bad sensayer took the others?”
“‘Mycroft disappears a lot…’” the Major repeated. “They must say that in Paris, too, whenever he’s here with us.”
“Unless they know exactly where he goes.” Croucher’s voice rose cold and thin, like the glitter of his teeth, the only part of his face visible beneath his helmet’s shadow as he peeked out from his puzzle-fort. “Mycroft Canner, he knows who all these enemies are, what they want, but will he tell us anything about them? No. He’s scheming behind our backs, I’ve always said that, and now the trap is springing shut. You know it, you just don’t want to admit you were wrong.”
“Enough.”
“The great hero duped for eight years by a clever slave!”
The Major stretched back across the dominos that served him as a bench. “Don’t tempt me, Croucher! As for you, Bridger, Mycroft would take on every monster Hercules faced to get to you, but they won’t leave that house. That means whatever’s there is worse than monsters. It’s not somewhere you should even think about going. Leave it to Mycroft’s killer friend who dresses like Apollo.”
Bridger leaned on his elbows, gazing down at the tiny soldiers like some Egyptian monolith. “Mycroft’s scary friend has been gone a long time.”
The Major frowned. “It’s only been a few hours. Paris is an ocean away, and travel like that takes time, even today. Wait here and stay safe, that’s what Mycroft would want.”
“Sometimes what Mycroft wants isn’t what’s best for Mycroft.”
“True. Mycroft wants what’s best for the entire world, and most of all for you.”
The boy breathed deep. “You and Mycroft always say you have to keep me away from people until I’m big enough to decide for myself how to use my power. Well, I’ve decided. I want to do this. I should do this. You always say someday I’ll be able to use my power to save everybody in the world. Right now I want to use it to save Mycroft.”
I can see clearly in my mind the expressions of the others, Nostand, Medic, Lieutenant Aimer putting on a brave face after his ordeal. They watch raptly, hanging on every syllable of this quarrel between their absolute commander and their young creator. It is enough to make these brave men shake. But you are braver still, reader. Yes, you, who trust your life to distant leaders whom you cannot watch firsthand, and whose Creator decides your fate invisibly, without warning, explanation, or apology—and yet you rise to face each morning, head held high. Brave reader, these happy army men are here to hear their maker’s argument themselves, and will hear the verdict firsthand, instead of having to deduce it from a thousand years of experiment and guesswork. And, best of all, they know that both these beings, Bridger and the Major, love them. Benevolence, real, before their eyes. Do you not envy them? Does it not make you call This Universe’s God a little cruel? These are the sorts of questions ?ναξ Jehovah calls me to His rooms to ask, that He was asking me at that very moment as I sat beside His desk, forgetting Carlyle downstairs, forgetting the investigation, forgetting even Bridger as His questions made the present seem just a drop of history. I rarely manage to offer Him any answer, but it is a comfort to Him that at least I understand.
The Major shook his head. “Mycroft does not want to be saved. I know him, Bridger. If he lingers on as someone’s captive, it is because of some relationship he has to that someone, awe, honor, fear, something.”