‘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.
When he sees Kaspar, he stops. Carnikava is used to wayfarers. They tramp the roads of the coast, living off forage and the kindness of strangers. But this wayfarer is more brutish than most. His face is a lattice of scars, his nose misshapen, what teeth he has are rotted to pits – and all of that is hidden behind a beard so matted he might be part of the undergrowth itself.
Kaspar turns tail and flees – out of the trees, down the escarpments toward the coast, holding the little pinecone soldier all the way. Intermittently, he looks back. The vagrant is following after, but he has not changed the pace of his tread. He lumbers like a man who has come too far already, who would be happy to find a ditch and lie down until sleep takes him away.
Kaspar reaches home, that succession of wooden shacks, and scrambles inside to find his brother Emil leafing through the pages of a book – though neither Godman brother has ever learned to read.
‘What is it?’
‘There’s a wild man, coming out of the woods.’
The door flies open, and there stands the very same vagrant. Emil leaps to his feet, cowers behind Kaspar (among all of the many things he is, Kaspar is first of all Emil’s big brother and would do anything to defend him).
‘Which one of you is Kaspar?’
This is not a man used to talking; his voice is of whispers and wind.
‘I am,’ Kaspar says, defiant.
‘Where is your mama?’
‘My mama is dead,’ he declares, ‘two winters gone.’
Only this gives the vagrant pause. Behind his mask of filth he is quivering, and the only sign of his tears are the patches of pink skin that emerge out of the dark. ‘Then who looks after you boys?’
‘We look after each other,’ declares Kaspar, ‘and we don’t need nobody else.’
‘Well,’ says the vagrant, and his voice is different now, less bestial somehow, though equally deranged, ‘you have me now. I’m your papa, and I need to sleep.’
Somehow, he knows where the old bedroom is, the one where Kaspar and Emil’s mama had lain down to die. He crosses the shack and closes the door behind him, leaving only that coat of badly butchered hide behind. Seconds later, and for long hours to come, the sounds of his snoring reverberate in the house.
‘What now?’ whispers Emil.
‘I think we sleep in the hen hut tonight, little brother.’
And that was exactly what they did, though there was precious little sleep to come. For that was the night that Kaspar and Emil waged the opening battle of the Long War. After dark, they stole back into the shack where this man who claimed to be their blood was sleeping, and found the interloper’s overcoat pockets stuffed full with pinecone soldiers, ballerinas of bark, warhorses the size of thimbles. Kaspar took a handful, Emil took a handful, and out back, where the yard dog barked and the hens clucked anxiously at the suggestion of every fox, they played out the first skirmish in the campaign Cathy had just watched.
‘It wasn’t long after that that we left,’ said Kaspar, taking care as he balanced one of the pinecone figurines upon Cathy’s palm. ‘Papa spent a few days scrubbing himself clean. He butchered every hen in our hen hut, ate every egg in the nests, quartered the piglets and smoked hard sausages on a pyre. We didn’t know it then, we thought he was just an animal, but he was fattening himself up. Until then, he’d been skin and bone. It had taken him two years to walk home. He’d crossed all the Russias, but he wasn’t stopping now. He wanted to carry on west, and he wanted us to come with him …’
‘And you went, just like that?’
Kaspar nodded. ‘It wasn’t just because he told us to. And it wasn’t just because of those soldiers he made! But, Miss Wray, he could have led all the village children away, if that was what he wanted. No, it was something in his eyes. Somebody needed to look after him. Emil and me, we decided that was us.’
‘What about your dog, the one in the yard?’
‘Left to go feral. It took us an age to forgive Papa for that, but he made it up to us, once we’d reached London. You’ve already seen Sirius, the first of all the Emporium patchwork dogs, tramping up and down on its cotton wad paws. It was a long voyage. I must have held Emil’s hand halfway around the world. Then we were in London, and our papa showing us how to make toys. But that,’ he smiled, ‘is another story. I’ll tell you it some time, but first … isn’t there something you want to tell me?’