‘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.
‘See, boys?’ Emil whispered, drawing them near. ‘He’s here now, and he’s here at our mercy. Without us, he’ll wind down. Without us, he’ll cease to exist. And if those other soldiers know what’s good for them …’ He took a broom handle and beat out a rhythm on the skirting, up and down the walls. ‘They’ll do as I tell them.’ He opened his mouth to roar out. ‘Go back to your walls! Live your doll’s-house lives! But stay away from the shopfloor or …’ He rounded on the birdcage again, and the Imperial Kapitan who had once been his friend. ‘Wind Down. Wind Down for you all!’
How to explain what was happening in the walls? Days passed. Weeks and months. Sometimes the soldiers were quelled, but sometimes they grew confident, determined to win back their Kapitan – and that was when the workshop walls came alive with the tramping of a thousand wooden feet. Emil ran sorties when he discovered a build-up behind his workshop door. He built patchwork ferrets and sent them into the skirting to hunt; when they came back at all, it was with their backs pierced by wooden lances, their stuffing ripped out. So long did he spend conniving ways to stop the soldiers proliferating, blocking up holes in the skirting and cementing up the burrows his boys kept discovering, that for long months he made no new toys for the winter to come. All the while, Papa Jack worked long into the nights, so that the aisles might be full again by the time first frost came. And because he was locked away, with only his toys to confide in, nobody noticed the new cough that was wracking his chest, nor the way his fingers were finally – after decades of intricate work – beginning to seize up. They did not notice the first time his memory failed him, because he recovered of his own accord and continued to make stitches in the hides of his seaside serpents. They only went about their business, and he about his, and the only ones who truly knew were the soldiers standing dumbly in the walls.
In Martha’s quarters that summer, when Mr Atlee came to give her lessons, the wind-up host gathered to listen. She took to opening the skirting board so that they could hear her teacher drone on about arithmetic and parables, kings and countries and the Proverbs of the Bible. Sometimes, she came back to her bedroom at night to find that they had scaled to the top of her reading desk and were marching up and down her thesaurus, as if trying to understand the mysteries written within. At night, she read to them from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – but of armies and soldiers, no matter what the sort, they didn’t want to hear. Instead, she read them Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, stories from the Arabian Nights. She read them Jules Verne and HG Wells. And when Cathy came to wish her goodnight, she was shocked (but not surprised) to see the soldiers perched on every shelf around the bedstead, the sounds of their constant motors turning all around.
Stories, Martha thought. It was stories that could help them think …