Well, I am back to apologize to her. And to you, dear reader, if you happen to find battles upsetting and gratuitous. If you’d like, you can skip right to where the children have been bloodied and the battle is lost. It’s here.
As for the rest of you—enjoy, if you can . . .
“Soldiers of Grimm! READY!” Herzlos screamed.
The second and third rows of soldiers drew bows from their backs and nocked arrows in their bowstrings.
Jorinda’s face went pale.
“AIM!”
“They wouldn’t,” Joringel whispered. “Would they fire on children?”
“LOOSE!”
Jorinda and Joringel ducked, and Eva screamed to the children inside the fort, “ARROWS!”
Two hundred arrows drew a high arc over the children’s fortifications. Some got lost in the foliage above. But most found a clear path, peaked just above Jorinda’s and Joringel’s heads, and then began to dive directly for the assembled children.
“COVER!” Eva screamed, and hundreds of makeshift shields rose to create a solid wall of wood above the children’s heads. Arrows hit the wood with thuds and plunks, and fell away, harmless. Except for one. One arrow found a small hole between two children’s shields, and buried itself in a small girl’s thigh.
Her shriek pierced the forest. Jorinda and Joringel scanned their force for her, and found her, gripping her leg and wailing. Their mother pushed through the children, bringing the bandages and warm water. Joringel turned and peered over the wall just in time to see the captain raise his arm and cry “LOOSE!” And a second batch of arrows were loosed over fortifications.
“COVER!” Eva screamed again, and shields were gripped. Plunk plunk thunk. Screams. A large boy had moved to help the little girl, and in so doing had dropped his shield. Now an arrow was lodged in his neck, and the children around him were screaming to see blood burbling up over his shirt.
“LOOSE!”
“COVER!”
The arrows rose, found the gap between the high fortress wall and the foliage above, and fell upon the children. Plunk plunk plunk. The shields held.
Jorinda cried, “Courage!”
“They’re coming!” Joringel shouted.
Jorinda spun and looked over the wall. The first row of soldiers were running right for them. They crossed the space in an instant, buried their feet in the high, red earthwork, and threw themselves onto the wall.
The soldiers climbed a foot or two up the slick, shorn tree trunks before sliding back down again. The logs of the wall were tightly lashed together at the top, leaving no gaps for footholds or handholds. Soldiers fell, ran at the wall again, leaped onto it, and then pathetically slid to the bottom again, like cats trying to climb a window. Jorinda cocked a crooked smile at Joringel.
But then Herzlos bellowed, “LADDERS! LOOSE!” And as another brace of arrows flew over the wall and Eva screamed, “COVER,” forty men ran forward with twenty huge ladders and laid them against the wooden wall.
“CLIMB!” the captain commanded. And the men started to climb the ladders.
“Incoming, Eva,” Joringel said, and Eva turned and screamed, “INCOMING!”
Joringel said to Jorinda, “I wish we could just push the ladders off.” But they could not. The platform only stood at one narrow place in the wall, and the ladders were far from it.
Jorinda said, “We’re ready.”
On the ground within the fort, a hundred children surged forward in pairs. One of each pair carried a shield. The other carried a sack. Eva directed the pairs to where the ladders were, while the little boy with the missing teeth watched from the shadow of the wall. The children waited.
When the first soldier climbed to the top of the wall and peered over the sharpened tree trunks, he was met with a rock directly in his face. It struck him in the temple, and he fell from the ladder and landed in a heap at the base of the wall. He did not move.
“Direct hit!” the little boy shouted. The children cheered. Those with the sacks drew out more rocks, while the children with the shields waited, lest another volley of arrows come over the wall.
Two more faces emerged above the stockade. Smack smack smack. Three stones were loosed at the two faces, and all three were thrown true. The two soldiers were both knocked off their ladders and fell to the ground, and the children could hear the snap of breaking bones. Another face emerged. Two stones were thrown at him, but the first missed, and the second glanced off his iron helmet. The soldier quickly threw his leg over the wall and leaped to the earth inside the fortress.
“INSIDE! INSIDE!” Eva screamed.
Jorinda and Joringel watched as ten of their largest boys and girls ran to the intruder. The soldier seemed to have hurt his leg leaping down from the wall. The children ran at him with clubs and swords and shovels and then pummeled him—while two kids with spears watched from a few feet off—until he was still. Two more soldiers were knocked off the wall, and one more made it inside, and another team of ten ran forward and beat him senseless.
Way up in a red pine sat three black forms. Birds, actually. Ravens, to be precise.
“Not bad! Not bad!” shouted the first raven.
“Not bad? Incredible!” cried the second.
“Kill him!” screamed the third, as the children pummeled the soldier. “Beat his brains in! Break his arms! Shatter his legs! Cut off his—”
“That’s enough,” said the first raven curtly.
Down below, Herzlos glowered at the fortifications as his men went toppling off of ladders or disappeared over the wall, never to be seen again. No one opened the gate, as they were instructed to do. There were no screams of frightened children. Nor of dying children. Dying children would have been all right with Herzlos, too. He ground his teeth in his head and barked curses at his men.
Inside the fortress, five men had made it over the wall, and the children were struggling to subdue them all at once. One of the soldiers had evaded the band of ten sent at him and had run right into the middle of the army of children.
“HOLD FAST!” Joringel bellowed at them. And, for the most part, they did. They used their weapons to bludgeon him from all sides. He struck back with the butt of his spear, reluctant to kill. Eventually, the children beat him to the ground.
“Hooray!” Joringel cried.
The battle continued like this. Five, ten, even twenty men at a time made it over the wall, only to be beaten into submission by a thousand children. Jorinda and Joringel’s mother, aided by a few older kids, tended to the wounded children.
An hour passed.
Two.
Three.
“Blast it!” Herzlos barked. He had lost two hundred men to injury or to whatever was happening behind the wall. Absolutely zero progress had been made. “Blast it, curse it, boil it!”
He didn’t actually say any of those things. He said words that I would never, ever print in a book.
Feel free to use your imagination.
The children were growing tired. But they had a burgeoning stack of unconscious men lined up along the bottom of the stockade. Occasionally, one would come to, and a kid would knock him out again with a frying pan.
The day wore on. The sun moved into the west.
Herzlos rode his black charger back and forth, back and forth before his men, cursing and scowling. And then, as the sun began to dip in the orange sky, Herzlos looked up at Jorinda and Joringel on the top of the wall at exactly the same moment as they looked down at him.
Their eyes locked.
The children smiled.
“That’s it!” Herzlos exploded. “Forget them all!” (He didn’t say “Forget them all.”) “All of them! Bring forth the machines of war!”
The call was repeated back along the lines of soldiers. “BRING FORTH THE MACHINES OF WAR!”
“BRING FORTH THE MACHINES OF WAR
!”
“BRING FORTH THE MACHINES OF WAR!”
Joringel frowned. “What are machines of war?”
Jorinda’s face had gone ashen. She gazed out over the armies and murmured, “You don’t want to know.”
The ladders were withdrawn from the wall. The soldiers trapped inside fought with the children.
At last, the final soldier inside the wall fell. The children all heaved and panted, sweat dripping down their faces. Among them lay the unconscious forms of hundreds of soldiers. Their bodies lay in heaps upon the dry pine needles, dappled with the golden afternoon sun.
“Huzzah!” cried the little boy with the gap between his teeth. Soon the cry was taken up by all the children. “Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!”
Jorinda said to Eva, “Go tell them to dump the unconscious soldiers in the ravine. With any luck, they’ll come to in the middle of the night and just wander home.”
“Shouldn’t we keep them as hostages?” Joringel asked.
But Jorinda replied, “Herzlos doesn’t care about hostages. He wants blood.”
Eva slipped down the ladder to deliver Jorinda’s orders. Soon, the bodies were being dragged away as Jorinda and Joringel’s mother directed the care for the injured children.
The sun began to dip in the sky. Outside the walls, soldiers started to set up camp. Jorinda and Joringel watched. “They may not attack again tonight,” Joringel speculated. Jorinda said nothing. She watched the horizon.
“They’re coming,” she said suddenly.
“What?”
Jorinda swallowed hard. “The machines of war.”
“How do you know?” Joringel peered into the distance.
“Listen.”
Joringel listened. Sure enough, he could just make out a faint rumbling through the trees.
“What are machines of war?”
Jorinda didn’t answer. Down below, soldiers were clearing a path. Smaller trees were being cut down.
“They must be huge,” Joringel murmured.
And then, from out of a close of cedar, two wooden wheels appeared, and then two more. They bore a platform. On the platform was a giant arm, with a cup at one end. In the cup was an enormous boulder.
Joringel stopped breathing. “What . . . what is it?”
Jorinda felt her fingers creep to her temples. She said, “It’s called a catapult.”
Rolling on four wheels, the giant wooden catapult moved into a space the archers made for it. Behind the catapult came oxcarts—one, two, three, four . . . Each one carried enormous boulders. Six men ran around the catapult, loosing ropes and checking springs.
Behind it, another catapult appeared through the trees.
And then one more.
Joringel stared at the war machines, trying to figure out what they were for. The six men who tended the first catapult were looking at the darkening sky and discussing something furiously. A captain rode his horse up to the group and dismounted. Jorinda and Joringel watched as the six men shook their heads and raised their hands.
“What going on?” Joringel asked. Jorinda did not know. They squinted to make out the men’s faces. Darkness was falling fast. Inside the fortress, the bonfire had been lit. Unconscious soldiers were being unceremoniously dumped in the ravine that ran along the side of the wood.
Outside the wall, Herzlos spurred his horse around and trotted up to his front lines. He called up to Jorinda and Joringel.
“Surrender, blast it!” he cried. “Surrender, or we’ll bring this wall down!”
Jorinda didn’t respond. Her fingers still worked at her temples.
“You know what these can do, girl! After all, you had them made!”
“You did?” Joringel hissed.
Jorinda pressed her lips together and nodded. The sky in the west was a mess of red and orange. In the east, it was nearly black. She took a deep breath. She cried, “You can’t fire on us. Not tonight. It’s too dark.”
Herzlos squinted up at the little girl. After a moment, he glanced angrily back at his catapults, and then up to Jorinda.
Joringel whispered, “Are you bluffing?”
Jorinda’s lips were white. Joringel looked back and forth from his sister to King Herzlos, who was glaring up at them through the gathering gloom.
At last, Herzlos cried, “Boil your head!” (Or something like it.) “You have until dawn to surrender! Then we unleash a rain of fiery death down upon you and your little brats. Once we begin, we will not stop. Not until every one of you is dead.” He jerked his horse’s head back toward his troops and rode away, framed by the crimson sunset.
Joringel gazed at the machines of war, all bristling with wooden levers and twining ropes, laden with their enormous, craggy boulders. “Can we stop them? The catapults?”
Slowly, Jorinda shook her head back and forth. “No,” she said quietly. “No, we can’t.”
* * *
The children sat around the great bonfire, their faces solemn in the dancing light. No one could sleep. Fear of the morning—of machines of war and soldiers bent on bloodshed—pricked at the children’s hearts and peeled their exhausted eyelids back from their eyes. Those who tried to lie down soon sat up in a panting sweat. Tomorrow was the day of judgment. Tomorrow, many of them would be dead.
Jorinda and Joringel’s mother gazed out at the troubled faces of the children. “They need something to take their minds off the morrow,” she said.
Jorinda shrugged. “So do I.”
“Well?” her mother asked. “I’ve been trying to hold off, but I suppose now might be the time. Will you tell me where you’ve been? What you’ve done over the last year?”
Joringel’s head had been buried in his arms. He looked up at his sister.
Jorinda said, “It’s kind of a long story.”
Eva, sitting nearby, said, “That’s my favorite kind.”
Joringel smiled, but shook his head. “We just told the whole thing . . .”
“To whom?” asked their mother.
Jorinda looked at Joringel. He shrugged. She smiled. “To the Devil. And his grandmother.”
Their mother furrowed her brow. “What?”
Eva leaned over. “What?”
The little boy with the gap in his teeth said, “Well, now we’ve got to hear it.”
Their mother said, quietly, “It might lift their morale.”
Jorinda looked out over the children. They were a despondent, desultory crew.
Jorinda’s and Joringel’s eyes met.
Jorinda half smiled.
And Joringel said, “Okay.”
He pulled himself up on the great log so he was sitting beside his sister, and the children by the fire pulled their thin blankets closer around their bodies. And Joringel began:
Once upon a time, in the days when fairy tales really happened, there lived a man and his wife . . .
“Whoa!” cried Eva. “How did your voice get like that?”
Joringel grinned and shrugged. “I don’t know. It tends to do that when I tell the story.”
“Weird,” whispered the little boy.
Their mother squinted curiously at her son.
Joringel went on, and indeed, his voice was so bold and clear that children a hundred yards away from the bonfire, tossing and turning under ragged blankets, sat up and listened.
More than anything else—more than their house, their garden, their tree—this couple wanted a child. But they did not have one . . .
All night, Jorinda and Joringel told their story. The children gasped and laughed and stared at Jorinda and Joringel in disbelief. Their mother bit her lip and hung on her children’s every word. The moon dipped down in the west just as the sky in the east grew gray with dawn. Birds started to sing in the branches above the children’s heads. The bonfire guttered and died, its rich, smoky
smell wafting over the little kingdom in the trees.
When Jorinda and Joringel got to the part of the story in the Märchenwald, their mother sat straight up. When they spoke, in their booming, bold voices, of meeting a man who claimed to be narrating stories from their world, their mother scratched her head. When he talked about telling his own story, and how it helped him, she started to smile.
Jorinda and Joringel told the tale through their time in Hell. Then their mother insisted on hearing what happened next.
“But you were there for it!” Joringel objected.
“Please,” his mother whispered. “I think it will help.”
So they told of returning to Grimm. Of gathering the children. Of making a life out here in the woods.
“Go on,” their mother urged them.
They told of the soldiers coming, and the battle that had raged through the day.
Finally, when they spoke of the machines of war rolling through the trees, their hearts began hammering in their chests, their breath grew short, and they could not go on.
At last, the clearing was silent in the gray dawn, save for the birds.
“What happens next?” their mother asked. The children of Grimm leaned forward to hear. Mist rose from the forest floor. A bullfrog croaked in the distance.
“Nothing,” said Jorinda. “That’s it. We told you a story. Now we’re here.”
“But what happens next?” their mother asked again.
Her children shrugged. “We don’t know. It hasn’t happened yet,” said Joringel.
“The catapults fire on us, and we all die?” Jorinda muttered.
Their mother’s eyes crinkled at the corners. “You’re telling your story, right?” Joringel nodded. Jorinda watched the glowing embers of the bonfire. “So? Keep telling it. What happens next?”
Jorinda and Joringel glanced at each other, confused.
* * *
In the rising dawn outside the walls, soldiers rushed back and forth across the great camp. Men and women donned their mail and sharpened their weapons. The teams of soldiers operating the catapults tightened ropes and shouted orders at one another. King Herzlos rode his black charger back and forth before his assembled troops.