The Toymaker's Apprentice

by Sherri L. Smith

  He turned to King Almande and chittered. The king nodded gravely and chattered back in a close approximation of the squirrel’s language. After a moment, the Pater turned his keen brown eyes on Stefan.

  “Herr Drosselmeyer,” the squirrel said in flawless German. “Is it true, Christian Drosselmeyer is dead?”

  Stefan blinked, taken aback both by the novelty of a squirrel speaking German, and by the question. He would never get used to talking animals. “It’s true, sir.” The aching hollow in his stomach returned. Saying it out loud gave Christian’s death more weight.

  “A pity. Life was always interesting with that one.”

  “So I’ve heard,” Stefan replied.

  “He will be missed, most certainly,” the Pater soothed. “In no small part because where Christian went, the dramatic was sure to follow.”

  “I can’t deny that,” Stefan agreed. “I was a toymaker’s apprentice when I met my cousin, and now I sit here with Paters and kings.”

  The Pater laughed, a chittering sound not unlike the squirrels Stefan was used to hearing before all of this began.

  The Pater wiped his eyes with the back of a paw. “Even when the storm has stopped, it does not mean the leaf has landed. For better or worse, we will all feel the effects of Christian Drosselmeyer, perhaps for years to come. Unless things can be set right.”

  The Pater gave Stefan a curious look. “You have a krakatook. But what do you intend to do with it? Eat it yourself? Your years would be greatly extended. Or perhaps you intend to barter with it? What do I have that is worth such a price?”

  Stefan cleared his throat.

  “The nut is for the Boldavian princess, but I need your help to administer it.”

  The Pater’s shrewd eyes shone in the lamplight. “What cures the child does not cure the nation, young Drosselmeyer. Give the girl the nut, and what is to prevent the Queen from biting her again? You must not think so small,” he admonished with a pointed claw.

  “Cure the princess, and we’ll weaken the Queen’s hold on Boldavia,” Stefan said. “King Pirlipat hasn’t fought back because he’s afraid a second bite will kill his daughter. If we cure her, maybe even get her away from Boldavia, he’ll turn his army against the mice. He has to!”

  “You give the old king too much credit,” the Pater said. “Had he been a wise man, he would have seen the threat to his nation long ago.”

  Stefan stumbled. He’d forgotten that he’d had a similar impression of King Pirliwig from Christian’s story. The man couldn’t rock his child to sleep; how could he save an entire kingdom?

  But he wouldn’t worry about that now. Stefan needed to open the nut. He needed the king’s help. Which meant he needed the squirrel. Think, Stefan, think!

  The Pater clapped his paws and a red squirrel appeared with a tray of tiny clay cups resembling acorns. The ancient squirrel accepted one, removed the cap-like lid, and a scent like sun-dried oak leaves rose to tickle Stefan’s nose.

  The old squirrel drank deeply, then offered the tray to his guests. Stefan carefully took a cup between two fingers. It was no larger than a thimble, the tea inside barely more than a splash on his tongue, but it tasted of autumn and he was glad when the Pater offered him more. If nothing else, it gave him time to think.

  Then the obvious solution came to him.

  “Come with us,” Stefan said excitedly. “You could open the nut and save the princess.”

  The Pater shook his head sadly. “If I were to open it, I would eat it. It is a compulsion no squirrel can ignore.” For a moment, the old squirrel’s eyes shimmered. “Two krakatooks in one lifetime! Such power is not meant to be.” He shuddered, and Stefan finally realized what a huge chance he had taken in coming here. King Almande and Samir had been right. He only kept the nut now because the Pater allowed it.

  “I did not realize,” he admitted.

  The old squirrel sighed. “One cannot balance the world by throwing another kingdom out of place. I could never show myself to the king—what would happen if more men learned of talking squirrels? How safe would we be in our trees if they believed we were hoarding krakatooks?”

  Stefan’s shoulders slumped. He could only imagine the treasure hunt that would ensue—men seeking the mythical cure for everything.

  “If the mice found out we squirrels had interfered, the battle would not end, but shift. It might leave the realm of Men for a time, but believe me, you do not wish to see all of Rodentia at war. To put it in terms you might understand, you must learn to see the whole clock and not just the cog,” the ancient squirrel explained.

  “But they have my father,” Stefan said, his voice catching in his throat.

  The Pater clucked his tongue, a very squirrel-like sound. “All the more reason to take my advice,” he said sorrowfully. “They will not stop, and if they already know you exist, nothing you hold dear is safe.”

  But Stefan had nothing left that death or the mice hadn’t already taken. Then he thought of Clara and her amused smile. His father’s workshop, the streets of Nuremberg after a rain. His mother’s grave. He imagined it all overrun by mice in a plague of the blackest proportions.

  “But if the mice take over, what would happen to squirrels?” Stefan asked. “When men hunt vermin in earnest, they will not care about the shape of their tails. Too many mice means famine for man and beast alike, doesn’t it? Or having eaten a krakatook, do you no longer require food?”

  “Stefan, I must protest—” King Almande began.

  But the Pater had not taken offense. He raised a paw for silence.

  Stefan held his glittering gaze.

  The Pater nodded. While he didn’t smile, he did appear to be amused.

  “Another Drosselmeyer, indeed. The krakatook is a fulcrum. Let us see if we can use it to shift the balance of the world back into place. How may I help?”

  Stefan should have been relieved. He was lucky the Pater hadn’t already taken the nut, let alone put up with his insolence. But an idea had taken root.

  “Squirrels can’t smile,” he observed.

  Samir’s patience broke. “Stefan, what nonsense is this?”

  “Why can’t you smile?” He directed the question to the Pater.

  The old squirrel shrugged, his face an inscrutable blank of gray fur and piercing eyes. “Perhaps it does not seem like it to you, but I am smiling even now.”

  Samir looked astonished. King Almande was clearly confused.

  Stefan took out his notebook. “Do you have any nuts?” he asked.

  Samir coughed nervously. The Pater blinked. “Certainly.” He signaled for the little red squirrel, and a bowl was brought out, full of hazelnuts, acorns, walnuts, and almonds.

  Stefan popped a walnut into his mouth and squeezed his jaws tight.

  The nut wobbled between his teeth. A thin trickle of drool ran down his chin. He wiped his mouth with Clara’s handkerchief and spat the mess out.

  He turned to the Pater. “Would you please open one?” he asked.

  “Surely this is not necessary,” Samir protested.

  “I wouldn’t do it to waste his time,” Stefan said, and immediately winced. He sounded so sure of himself. So much like Christian. “That is, I think this is important.” He turned back to the Pater. “You see, we have been unable to open the nut, and I suspect it has something to do with our not being squirrels. Our mouths are not built the same.”

  The Pater chittered in amusement and selected a walnut. “Do you propose to watch me crack the whole bowl?”

  “And sketch your movements—if I may?” he said, producing a pencil.

  The Pater nodded and opened his jaws, placing the golden nut squarely between his small teeth. With barely a shudder, he closed his mouth a fraction, and the nut’s halves fell neatly into his lap.

  Stefan produced a pencil. “Again, please.”

>   The Pater obliged. Eventually, all of the nuts were open. Their meats lay cleanly in the bowl, so unlike the pasty messes they’d made pounding test nuts on the Gray Goose.

  “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 t
he 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.