The Grimm Conclusion (17 page)

“Soldiers,” answered Jorinda. “Is everyone set?”

Eva nodded. Jorinda and Joringel turned and surveyed their force. They were arrayed behind the wall. The little boy with the gap in his teeth ran back and forth, barking orders at the bigger children. Jorinda and Joringel's mother stood near the cliff overlooking the quarry with bandages and buckets of warm water.

Little Eva had clambered up onto the platform. Her chin was resting between two sharp points of the stockade. She gazed out at the approaching army. Very quietly, she asked, “Are we going to die?”

Joringel turned to her. “I don't think so, Eva. I don't think so.”

Suddenly, Jorinda was shouting, “At arms! At ARMS!”

A thousand children gripped makeshift shields with one hand—broken chairs, or, between a few children, tables and even the wooden tops of wells—and in the other, each lifted a weapon. There were a few swords, a few spears, but mostly there were kitchen knives and shovels and broomsticks.

“My friends!” Jorinda cried. “Listen now!”

The children's frightened, determined eyes were on Jorinda. Weapons shifted, sweaty hands gripped the handles of the makeshift shields. No other sound was made.

“We have lived here for three weeks. We have lived with no parents. No kings or queens. No adults at all, save one. And we did pretty well, didn't we?”

Some of the children cheered. Others raised their weapons high.

“We journeyed into the wood to escape the prisons of our lives, and here we built and grew and learned. We have made lives here, in the forest. It's the oldest story: A child flees his broken home. He comes to the forest, where he faces his gravest fears and realizes his greatest hopes. But always there comes a time to leave. When the child must take what he has learned in the wood and return to that broken home. To mend it. To save it.”

The army of children was silent. Trees creaked in the gentle wind.

“Today, if we triumph, may be that day. Today, if we resist, if we succeed, if we survive, the adults might see how they have hurt us. How they have betrayed us. How they have neglected us. We may win without shedding a drop of blood. That, anyway, is the plan.”

Behind Jorinda, the sound of marching grew louder. The sky overhead was clear and blue.

“So stand firm! Stick to the plan! And—”

“JORINGEL!”

The shout came from the other side of the wall.

“JORINGEL!”

Jorinda and Joringel turned. There, before the wall, Herzlos sat astride an enormous black steed. The scars on his face looked dark and deep with fury. He looked up and saw, above the sharp points of the stockade, two heads: Joringel's and Jorinda's.

Herzlos started. “How—” he stammered. “How are you still alive?”

Behind him was arrayed a line of a hundred men. Behind that was another line, and another, and another, ten deep. And behind that, more divisions marched into the forest.

“Oh, who cares?” he snapped. “SURRENDER!”

Jorinda spat back, “We won't!”

Herzlos gritted his teeth and smiled. “I have assembled the greatest military force in the history of Grimm.”

“And you would use it to attack children?” Jorinda asked.

Herzlos smiled. “Oh, I will.”

“And your soldiers?” Joringel demanded.

Herzlos's face was grim. “They will do as I tell them. Surrender now!”

And Jorinda cried back, “Never!”

Behind her, a thousand children roared. It was an eerie sound, the roar of children. High and fierce and wild. The soldiers shivered.

“Then you will be taken,” Herzlos bellowed up at the walls. “Alive or dead.” His eyes narrowed. “Preferably the latter.”

Jorinda and Joringel both swallowed hard.

Sorry. I need to say something.

In my first book,
A Tale Dark & Grimm
,
there was a battle scene. Many people enjoyed it. But some did not. One person in particular did not. My wife.

I told her, “I can't help it! There
was
a great battle! What do you want me to do? Summarize it?”

Well, she told me she wasn't happy about it, but if I was
sure
that was
really
how the story went, she guessed she would deal with it.

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.”