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Napoleon was not finished with them. Bran scolded himself. He wouldn’t really have been Napoleon at all if one shot did him in. The sun fell on Old Boney’s awful naked skull as his voice echoed through the empty glass streets of Port Ruby:
“Give him up, you stupid matchsticks! Donnez-moi mon frère du coeur! I’ll have my Brunty or I’ll have your heads! Hand over the book and I shall let you toddle back home to Papa, non? So few of you, so much of me! Quelle tragique!”
“Did you hear that?” Bran cried.
“He ambushed the train, the rotter!” Emily said.
“All this for that fat old Magazine Man?” Charlotte wondered.
“I’d be very cross if I lost any of my books,” Anne shrugged. It made a good deal of sense to her.
“We’ve got a right tragique for you, Boney! Come and get it!” roared Captain Bravey, and knelt right down on top of the great book called Brunty as he primed his next shot.
Napoleon shrugged. “Is no matter to me! Either way I have what I want and I get to explode things!” He raised up the rifles of his arms as if to part the Red Sea. “Come to my side, my sweethearts! My strongtongues, my stoutlegs, my song in the twilight, my jumpkings, my greenskin glory!”
An army of mighty frogs leapt into the plaza from every corner, out of every fountain, down from every gutter. They twanged and bellowed and croaked mightily. They landed with crashes and clatters, for these bullfrogs were well-armored in plate and mail, like medieval knights. In fact, as Branwell peered closer, he saw that they were made all of greaves and breastplates and helmets and gauntlets, with no real fleshy frog inside, just like the rooster made of dishes and the Emperor made of bones and guns. Each of them was as tall as Emily and as burly as the old blacksmith back home in Haworth. They carried steel barrels on their broad backs, their fat arms bristling with poleaxes and swords and cruel, spiked maces, and they flew silken green flags with froggy crests blazing upon them. As one, the frog army whipped the air with fearful silver tongues and roared out the clanging tribal RIBBIT! RIBBIT! SNAPPANG! that was the song of their noble people.
“Well!” said Charlotte, and she meant to say something more, something clever, something brave, but she simply had not been prepared to stare down an army of frogs today. She opened her mouth and shut it again.
Just then, behind her lovely round head, the sun came up. Not a real sun, but an extraordinary golden-red-orange color wonderfully like sunrise, a molten smear of light surrounding Charlotte like a bonnet of lava.
“Oh, Charlotte,” Anne breathed. “Look!”
An iron boy rode into the red plaza on a gargantuan lion made all of blue water. But he was not any sort of ordinary iron, nor any sort of ordinary boy, for that matter. He sat in his spectacular curving, curling sea-foam saddle with such a straight back and noble bearing that they all knew right away he was there to save them from the vicious frogs, even though he could only have been a year or two older than Charlotte. His features were carved in dark, finely forged and gleaming iron, but his hair was dusty, rusty red, his hat slick, oily green, his coat and buttons dark and glinting blue, his trousers and riding boots a brilliant violet, even his hands and his teeth shone with stripes of black cast-iron and sleek pyrite, the hundred thousand colors iron can become, given enough dirt and rain and impurities and time. But most splendid of all were his wings, which opened up at his back like the fiercest of all angels, made of molten, dripping, fiery liquid iron, orange and scarlet and white-hot oozing feathers, iron poured fresh from a forge. Beneath him, blue and white and green seawater swirled and crashed and bubbled in the shape of a magnificent lion, with a mane like a waterfall, a whiskered muzzle as blue as the North Sea, and a tail held aloft like a gushing fountain. Whenever a globby burning feather fell from the man’s wings, it popped and sizzled and hissed against the lion’s skin, sending up great clouds of steam, so that a warm, mysterious mist announced their arrival anywhere th
ey went.
“Who is that?” gasped Emily behind the cart and Anne behind Sergeant Crashey, at the same moment.
“How should I know?” hissed Branwell.
But safe in her infantry ranks, Charlotte’s secret smile had come out again, so wide it hurt her cheeks. “I know. I know! Everything in this place is like a riddle but I can solve it, I can! Sometimes! If it’s not frogs! At least I can solve this one! That’s him! Wellington! Sir Arthur Wellesley! The Iron Duke! That’s what they called him, you know,” she finished somewhat lamely. “After the war. Because he was so strong.”
A platoon of very serious-looking soldiers marched into the plaza behind the Iron Duke. Rank after rank appeared through the roiling mist of his burning wings and watery horse. They carried long green muskets tipped with green bayonets and wore tall green helmets. Fierce green sabers hung at their sides. And as the wind picked up over the roaring red river, the children caught an incredible scent in their noses. Their nostrils flared in the breeze to catch it. Armies were meant to smell dreadful, like old sweat and old socks and old wounds. But the Iron Duke’s army smelled so wonderfully fresh and sharp and clean and sharp!
Branwell laughed. He didn’t mean to. He was trying so very hard to be good at hiding. But he laughed anyway.
“They’re made of limes!” The boy cackled. “Don’t you get it, Em? They’re limeys! Limeys and frogs! The English and the French!”
And Branwell was right. Their tall green helmets were rough, bumpy lime skins crowned with lime-pith plumes. Their rifles were long lime branches and their bayonets were made of pale ancient lime flesh, hardened and dried to a terrifying point. They wore fresh, wet, lime-flesh coats, lime-flower medals, and lime-leaf belts weighed down with vials of lime seeds, and lime juice where the wooden soldiers carried their Brown Bess bullets and powder. And beneath those dashing helmets they could see shadowy faces, faces carved out of whole limes like Greek statues out of marble.
“?’Cause Frenchies eat frog legs and we eat limes so’s not to get scurvy when we go to sea!” Branwell giggled. “Only I’ve never had a lime so no one ought to call me one of that. But they will anyway on account of how people are rotten. Glass Town isn’t a riddle like Charlotte said. It’s a joke! A marvelously weird, really drawn-out joke! The best one I ever heard!”
“Come, sourlads, come tarthearts, come ripetroops!” The Iron Duke shouted jovially, without the least worry in his voice. “My bitterboot berserkers, my jolly greencoats! Forward, MARCH!”
The limey lads stomped right up to the armored frogs and snapped to attention. As one, they saluted the exhausted squad of wooden soldiers, Crashey and Bravey and Rogue and the lot, relieving them of duty. The gang lifted poor Gravey from the field of battle and set him down behind the lines, near a bakery whose crimson windows had shattered all over its own steaming pies. They stood quite close to Bran and Emily, but didn’t seem to notice them in the slightest, not even Charlotte and Anne, who knelt lovingly beside their beloved fallen toy.
“How do you like that?” Bran said. “Hullo! We’re all right, if you were curious!”
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. He was right here, just waiting to protect them, just bursting at the gut to defend their honor and defeat their enemies, and this stupid old place hadn’t even given him a chance. Charlotte and Anne had hogged it all and Branwell had gotten nothing but a big leather sword and nothing to swing at. He’d have championed the blazes out of the girls; he would have!
Emily ignored her brother. She lowered her mace and ducked across the cobblestones to rejoin her sisters. She didn’t look behind her once, but she didn’t have to. She knew Bran would follow, furrowing his brow and dragging his feet and planning a cutting remark or two. He always had to plan them out well in advance.
“Prime and load!” thundered the Iron Duke, his molten wings flaring behind him. His oceanic lion roared to shake the sun from the sky.
“Ready tongues, my hoppers!” screeched Napoleon. His flaming rooster crowed green fire and green fury.
The limeys began shoving bullets and powder in while the frogs stamped their webbed steel feet and dipped their long, terrible tongues into the barrels of toadstones on their backs and coiled them back like catapults. Em scrambled into the shelter of the bakery awning just in time. Charlotte hugged her so hard she nearly strangled, even though it is very awkward to hug anyone holding a spiked mace while you’ve still got your rifle unslung.
