The Toymaker's Apprentice (22 page)

“Anything else?” the Pater asked.

Stefan regarded the gray squirrel's jaws. Like the mechanics of the wooden dove, he strove to see the clockwork beneath the skin. His hands twitched. “May I . . .” He flushed. “May I touch your jaw, and ask you to open your mouth?”

The attendant squirrel squealed in dismay. “Sire, this is beyond the pale, surely,” he chittered in German, so Stefan would understand.

“Stefan, we have taken enough of our host's time. Let us find another way,” Samir pleaded.

“No
!
” Stefan said urgently. “This is the only way. I've thought of little else since Christian fell. We must crack this nut. And the answer is here, Samir. Only a man can cure the princess, but only a squirrel can open the nut. Unless . . . unless we make the world different than it is.” He turned to the Pater. “If not you, then maybe one of the others? I merely need a model—” He stopped in midsentence. The Pater was looking at his notebook where it lay open in his lap.

“Do I truly look like this?” he asked.

It was a fair likeness of the hoary-furred creature, except his cheeks were removed in the drawings, showing the inner workings of tooth and tongue. Stefan had already begun sketching a second study, laying in the gears and levers that would replace bone and sinew, but it was guesswork unless the squirrel would give him a closer look.

“I imagine so,” he replied. “But we need more than my imagination if we're going to succeed.”

The squirrel rose from his cushions and came around to Stefan's side. Studying the images before him, he tilted his head for the best light, and opened his pink mouth wide.

“Thank you, thank you,” Stefan murmured. His pencil flew across the page. The little red squirrel buried his face in his paws.

Stefan might have been rude and uncouth—he was clearly breaking protocol according to the squirrels—but an idea was taking shape in his head and he was sure it would succeed.

If a squirrel's mouth was best suited to opening nuts, then he would make himself a new set of teeth. He would become a squirrel.

THE TOY SOLDIER
was finished. Zacharias examined it in the dull glow of his lantern. The smell of paint still hung in the air. Blue, black, white, and gold, the soldier's uniform gleamed wetly in the light. He sat down at the desk and put his head in his hands.

“Herr Drosselmeyer?”

Like clockwork, the boy had returned.

Zacharais rubbed his eyes and tried to sound jolly. “Ah
!
There you are, my boy.”

“How is the work today?”

Zacharias was glad Arthur could not see his haggard face. “Do you know the story of Ulysses?”

“The Greek myth?” Arthur asked.

Not for the first time, Zacharias marveled at the depth of education given to this jailer's son. “Yes. Ulysses set sail for Troy and fought a ten-year war. It took him another ten years to find his way back home. In the meantime, his wife, Penelope, stayed true to him.”

“She knew he was alive?”

“No, but she had hope. There were suitors lining up to marry her, but she put them off. She told the men she was weaving a marriage blanket, and only when it was finished would she choose a new husband. But, secretly, each night, she would unravel some of the work she had done during the day, and so she
wove for ten long years without finish, and thus held off her fate until her husband returned.”

Arthur was not like other boys his age, demanding to hear the heroic adventures of Ulysses and his men. Instead he said, “And you are Penelope?”

Zacharias chuckled. “I'm not so clever, my boy. The soldier is done. I fear my fate must soon arrive. And Ulysses is still lost at sea.”

“HOW IS IT COMING ALONG?”
Samir asked one morning.

Three days ago they'd left the miraculous Pagoda Tree with the Pater's blessing and ridden south for Boldavia. Necessity and nightmares drove Stefan in equal measure. Something was haunting his sleep. In daylight, he could recall nothing. But at night, his dreams swallowed him whole. And so he concentrated on the problem of the nut.

In another four days, they'd be at the enemy stronghold. Stefan had set his horse at a smooth gait that allowed him to work on his new invention as they traveled.

Squirrel teeth, he called them, or
dentata
. Samir called them a nutcracker.

Stefan held up the teeth, carved from a piece of ash tree that he'd hardened with fire. They were oversized, two U-shaped plates with channels inside to make room for Stefan's own teeth. Once fitted to the upper and lower jaw, the sharp incisors carved into the front appeared close to natural—for a squirrel, at least. The two long teeth acted as both vise and tiny chisel to pry the seam of the nut open.

He pulled out his handkerchief and opened his mouth, popping the false teeth in. There were small gears inside that he had culled from the clockmaking kit he found in Christian's bag. Each time he opened his mouth, a piston would shift, clicking over into a new gear, increasing the pressure of his bite.
The “teeth” had additional pads carved into them that lined up along the seam of the test walnuts (a gift from the Pater), to place added pressure on the nut's weak spot.

Stefan had learned from his session with the Pater that a squirrel jaw was much narrower than a human's and exerted more than fifty times the pressure in each bite. To achieve the same power, Stefan gnashed his “teeth” five or six times, as if he were priming a pump to bring water to the surface.

He grinned at Samir, gnashing his teeth.

“A ghastly sight,” the astrologer said. “But quite clever. Christian, himself, might never have thought of such a thing.”

Stefan pulled the teeth out with the help of the handkerchief—it was very slobbery work—and allowed himself a real smile.

“I left the nuts in the bottom of my saddlebag. We'll have another test run tonight.”

“Very good. You are handling this quite well, Stefan. I daresay your family would be proud.”

Stefan shook his head as he folded away the teeth and his tools into a convenient pocket. “To tell the truth, Samir, I wouldn't know what else to do anyway.”

They rode in silence for a while.

At last, Samir spoke. “It seems like something is troubling you. Beyond . . .”

Stefan laughed. “Beyond everything? I'm not troubled, I'm curious. There's so much I don't know about the world.”

“Such as?”

“If mice and squirrels are self-aware, what about the other animal kingdoms?”

Samir shrugged. “We are all God's creatures. In these ways we are the same.”

“But, we ride horses and we use oxen for field work. And we hunt deer—rabbits, too. Why don't they rebel?”

Samir shrugged again. “The best and worst answer is simply: that is the way of the natural world. Humans and horses have a good working relationship, food and shelter in exchange for transportation. And the deer and rabbits . . . well, to them, Man is just another predator, like the fox or the wolf.”

Stefan frowned, less sure on this point. “But—”

Samir interrupted him. “I had many of the same questions when I first came to understand the trouble in Boldavia. It was Christian who told me, ‘Consider the life of a rodent, and you will see why they hate us.' They are dependent on our crops and stores for food, but we set traps and poison them. In fact, most nations set out to kill rodents brutally. It is solely in India that they are treated with any reverence. And then, only in one corner of the country. Rodents owe us no love.”

Stefan recalled the way some boys back home would trap rats in sacks and drown them in the river. “But then what about the squirrels—” Before he finished asking the question, he knew the answer—old women in the parks making kissing noises and scattering nuts. Rats were vermin, but squirrels were beloved like pets.

“Squirrels are a more philosophical species,” Samir said. “They are scholars, thinkers. Their only concern with the world is food and study.”

“But, what are they studying?” Stefan wanted to know.

“The mysteries of this world and the next. Secrets guarded
as closely as those of your own guild, no doubt. A squirrel may scrabble for nuts for many years before he is called to study at the Pagoda Tree. But once there, that is where they remain. Two goals in an entire lifetime make for a peaceful life.”

A peaceful life.
That was what Stefan had once had in Nuremberg—his toys and his family were all that had mattered. Now, his mother was dead, and his father was missing. Stefan wondered if there would ever be such a thing as peace in his life again.

• • •

ON THE FOURTH DAY,
Stefan noticed a change in the countryside. The steppes gave way to farmlands and ran out toward the sea. Around them, gardens lay fallow, vines bare where there should have been squash and pumpkins, bushes stripped raw of autumn berries.

“What happened here?” he asked.

Samir grimaced. “Mice.”

The farms were reduced to fields of stubble where oats and wheat once grew. On the last cliff overlooking the sea, the golden stalks were gnawed to the ground. The stiff, coarse grass that remained was rustling. But there was no wind.

Mice. The broken fields writhed with unseen vermin stretching along the bluff in all directions.

“There she is.” Samir pointed south, past the cliffs, along a man-made causeway that stretched out to sea. A city rose up, carved from the bedrock of the island, like a castle made from a mountain, emerging from the sea. Stefan's breath caught in his throat.

Boldavia.

NEWS OF THE
siege engine's completion spread quickly. It had been taken from the Drosselmeyer's cell while he slept, and moved into the chamber that housed the diabolical cat. The Queen even rose from her bed to see it for herself. Decked in their finest, the entire royal court turned out for the unveiling.

Ernst wore a particularly fetching coat of midnight blue. It set off the gray of his fur quite nicely, bringing out the silver highlights. As ludicrous as the circumstances were, he was still a fan of pomp.

Having lingered in front of his mirror, he was among the last of the subjects to crowd into the great chamber, where the Breathless stood poised in awful memoriam. If the Queen had given a speech, he had missed it. Instead, he was greeted by the jubilant roar of the crowd. Alongside the mechanical cat towered a scaffold built around the thing the Drosselmeyer had created. Ernst's back prickled at the sight. It was easily five feet tall.

A toy soldier. Of the sort he used to see in the shop windows of Vienna in wintertime. Glossy black cap, blue coat, white breeches, a sword sheathed at its side. The flat black eyes stared blindly into space, far above the heads of the mice congregating below. Even so, the face was incredibly human.

“Magnificent
!
” a noblemouse standing next to Ernst said. He used a monocle—clearly an affectation—to peer up at
the towering manikin, and patted his own plump belly in self-congratulation. “We'll surely rout those devils from over our heads now
!
”

Ernst doubted that. “Undoubtedly,” he lied.

He waited for a demonstration, a sign of movement, or evidence of martial skill. The toy soldier merely stood, not even at attention. Ernst wondered if the scaffolding was the only thing keeping it from tipping over.

On a grandstand built knee-high to the soldier, the Queen observed her engine of war. What she saw in it, Ernst couldn't imagine. How a toy—even a very large one—could hope to defeat a living man was beyond him. But the Queen seemed pleased.

Indeed, the sight seemed to invigorate her. She rose from the chair she had been carried in on and bestowed seven kisses on the foreheads of her monstrous sons.

Even from here, Ernst could see Arthur's nose twitch in delight. The boy deserved to be fêted for his work in persuading the Drosselmeyer to complete the task. Ernst had accepted his share of the accolades (in the form of his new coat, a gift from the Queen) for teaching the boys diplomacy and the art of persuasion. But, in truth, the rat knew he had nothing to do with it. Arthur had a fascination with the captive toymaker that Ernst did not understand.

They were all mad, these Boldavian mice. From the Queen on down. Still, the toy soldier was very large. And that was impressive. Ernst had built a career with that talent alone. Perhaps an impression was all the royal mouse army needed to make.