The Grimm Conclusion (16 page)

“To cover it with mattresses,” Jorinda said.

“To stamp out the weeds,” Joringel added.

“To choke back the tears,” Jorinda concluded.

Their mother winced. “Where did you learn that?”

“You, Mama,” Jorinda said.

Their mother sighed sharply. “No matter how many mattresses I threw on that stone, I still felt it.”

The children stared up at their mother, watching her think.

“No matter how I stamped on the weeds, they still grew back.” She paused. “And I killed the good plants, too.”

The children waited, not breathing.

“Choking back the tears just felt like choking.”

The children smiled sadly.

“Will you forgive me for being so stupid?” their mother asked them. They laughed. But the mother folded her children in her arms again and held them—held them as tightly as she had always wanted to.

Okay, I suppose there is one benefit to going home.

It's true that home is the quarry, the wild field, and the wellspring.

But until you plumb the quarry, you will not know its depths; until you run through the field, you will not bask in its sunshine; until you bathe at the source of the tears, you will never be clean.

Then, from the road that led toward their house, they heard the stamping of feet. It came in unison, like distant drums. A cloud of dust billowed over the hill.

“Quick!” their mother said. “Get inside!”

Jorinda and Joringel were on their feet in a flash, across the green yard, and into their little house. Their mother followed close behind.

“Soldiers,” she said, watching at the window.

“Are they coming here?” Jorinda demanded.

After a silent minute, her mother said, “No. Just passing.”

Jorinda exhaled.

“Mama, we saw the strangest thing,” Joringel said. “A little girl had a chain around her ankle, like she was a wild beast. She seemed surprised that we didn't have one.”

“The new laws,” she said. She moved the children away from the windows. They sat down at the kitchen table, and she explained the new laws to Jorinda and Joringel. The children listened in horror.

“The prince did all this?” Jorinda asked, incredulous.

“Not the prince. The new king. Herzlos.” And their mother described how Herzlos had imprisoned the prince—for the good of the kingdom, supposedly—and taken the throne himself.

Jorinda, Joringel, and their mother sat in the kitchen, looking at their hands.

“We have to do something,” Jorinda announced. “This is my fault.”

“Our fault,” Joringel corrected her. “The laws against bad parents were my idea.” After a moment, he said, “I could just turn myself in. Then they wouldn't be afraid of me coming back to rally the children and rebel. This might all end.”

Jorinda shook her head. “You don't believe that. It wouldn't end.”

“No,” said their mother. “It wouldn't.”

“We need to free the children,” Joringel asserted.

“They need a safe place to go,” said Jorinda.

“Okay,” Joringel said. “Let's find a safe place for them to go. Then we free them.”

Their mother smiled sadly. “My dears, you'd surely be caught. And even if you did free them, would they come with you? Where would they go?”

“What about the forest next to Malchizedek's house?” Jorinda suggested. “No one ever goes out there.”

Joringel nodded vigorously. “We could all live out in the woods, there by the quarry!”

“It would be like a kingdom!” Jorinda agreed, warming to the idea. “A kingdom of children.”

Joringel repeated that. “The Kingdom of Children. I like the sound of that.”

Their mother was looking at Jorinda and Joringel wistfully. “Let's not get carried away, my dears. This is a very sweet idea, but it isn't realistic. We've got to get you two away from here as soon as we can. Freeing the other children won't be possible.”

Jorinda and Joringel bowed their heads. The kitchen was heavy with silence.

Jorinda stood up from the kitchen table. “Mother, have you ever ruled a kingdom?”

Her mother blinked up at her. “Well, no . . .”

Joringel stood up beside his sister. “Have you rescued a castle from an eternal sleep?”

“Of course not, but . . .”

“Have you survived a corpse trying to choke you to death?”

“What?!”

“Or scaled the walls of a castle at night?”

Their mother gaped.

“Have you ridden a unicorn?”

“Or turned into a bird?”

“Have you gone to Hell?”

“And come back alive?”

The mother stared wonderingly at her two children. “You . . . you did all that?”

Jorinda and Joringel nodded solemnly.

A smile of awe spread across their mother's face.

“Okay,” she said slowly. “Okay. Let's get started.”

O
nce upon a time, two children owned the night. They slithered through fields. They tapped at windows. They whispered under doors. They led sleepy and bewildered kids out of their houses and into a redwood forest.

At dawn the next morning, twelve dazed children sat around a little fire under towering pines. Soft ferns grew up from the pine needles that lined the ground. Birds dove and zipped between the enormous trees. The twins' mother prepared warm milk in a pot over a fire. She served it in cracked mugs to each of the shivering children. Jorinda and Joringel stood, surveying their work.

“How many kids are there in Grimm?” Joringel asked.

“I think about a thousand,” Jorinda replied.

“How many do we have here?”

“Twelve.”

Joringel scratched his head. “Huh. Not quite a majority.”

“No.”

“How are we going to get the rest?”

Jorinda crouched before the other children. “Two kids freed twelve,” she said. “Now we're fourteen. So fourteen could free . . .”

Across the fire, a small boy's eyes lit up. “Eighty-four!” he cried.

“Wow!” Jorinda exclaimed. “That was impressive.”

The boy was missing his two front teeth. He spoke very quickly. “You just assume a constant rate of six children per rescuer, and then you multiply—”

Joringel interrupted him. “How many kids could eighty-four free?”

“It'd be ninety-eight, including us,” the gap-toothed boy reported. “And ninety-eight could free five hundred and eighty-eight!”

“So in three days, we could have all the kids in Grimm here,” Jorinda said.

“Easily!”

“Not easily,” their mother objected, pouring more milk into a child's cup. “But it is, theoretically, possible.”

A little girl with curly black hair and freckles and a cut on her chin stood up. “What are we going to do out here? Once they're all freed?”

“We're going to start our own kingdom. A kingdom of children,” Jorinda replied.

A smile slowly stretched across little Eva's face. “Then we'll help.”

Their calculations were wrong. Fourteen children did not free eighty-four. They freed a hundred and fifty-eight—for each pair focused on their friends and relatives, who needed far less convincing than strangers did. And, the next night, in one of the most astounding covert operations since the horse at Troy, a hundred and fifty-eight kids, plus the original fourteen, guided every remaining child in Grimm—all nine hundred seventy-seven of them—to the red-wooded forest on the farthest edge of the kingdom. There, before an enormous bonfire of pine needles and fallen branches, the entire population of Grimm between the ages of four and sixteen spread out on the ground (they'd had to leave the toddlers—for sake of speed and stealth; toddlers aren't very good at either). The children talked animatedly, finding friends and hugging them, rubbing their ankles or their wrists where the shackles had dug into their skin.

Jorinda climbed up onto an enormous fallen log. “Attention!” she cried. She was inaudible over the thrum of a thousand children's voices. “ATTENTION!” she cried again. No good.

“Shhhhhhhhhh . . .” Joringel whispered. Children love nothing more than to shush other children. So the syllable was taken up first by those in the front, and then spread, like a blanket, all the way to the rear of the group. But then the children took to shushing the shushes, until a veritable shush-war had broken out. Jorinda put her hands on her hips. “This is going to be harder than I thought,” she whispered. “Adults are much better at following directions than kids.”

“That's why adults stink,” Joringel replied.

Their mother, sitting beside them on the large log, said, “May I?”

Her children shrugged.

She stood up beside them. The children of Grimm continued to shush each other lustily.

Very quietly, she said, “The first one who's quiet gets cake.” The shushes died away.

Jorinda's mouth hung open. “Thanks,” she muttered.

Her mother nodded and got down, muttering, “Now I've got to find some cake . . .”

Jorinda gazed out over the thousand-plus heads staring back at her through the night. She took a deep breath, and then bellowed, “I AM JORINDA.”

A wave of whispers rushed through the group. “You're dead!” someone shouted.

“Clearly, I'm not!” Jorinda cried.

Children leaned forward, straining their eyes against the darkness to see the little girl who stood in the dancing light of the great fire.

“The king lied to you!” she shouted. (He hadn't, of course, lied to them. She had indeed been dead. But that was too hard to explain right now.) “I have returned! With Joringel!” She gripped her brother's hand and raised it.

Disbelief gave way to a sudden wave of tension. The children's faces no longer looked happy and free. They were concerned. Was this not what the adults had predicted? Was this not the reason for the laws in the first place? The children began to shift uncomfortably.

“We are not here to rule over you again,” Jorinda announced.

Strained murmurs echoed in the firelit night.

“We were really bad at that.”

Some of the children chuckled. Others murmured.

“Terrible.”

More chuckles than murmurs.

“Joringel and I have brought you here to free you. To resist the rule of the king. To start a kingdom of no kings or queens at all. To create a kingdom of children.”

In all the dark pine forest, there was not a single sound save the hot roar of the bonfire and the breaking of pine needles under hundreds of shifting, nervous children.

“Some of you will watch while some sleep. Some will gather food and cook while some care for the smaller ones. We will stay here as long as we have to. As long as the adults are crazy.”

Murmurs and scattered laughter.

“What if they find us?” someone cried out. “What if they send the soldiers to get us?”

“We will build a fortress!” Joringel cut in. “We will defend ourselves!”

“We are just children!” the voice cried.

The forest grew deathly still. They were, indeed, just children.

But then Jorinda said, “There is a power in children. There is a belief. A strength. A joy that makes just about anything possible.”

I don't know if you know it, dear reader. But this, without any doubt, is true.

Indeed, something hummed among the children of Grimm. No one said a word, and yet there it was. Belief. Strength. Excitement. Joy. Humming and thrumming through the darkness.

“Will you stay?”

Some heads nodded. Many hesitated.

“Will you?” Joringel cried.

And some children, quietly, said, “Yes.”

“Will you?” Jorinda cried.

And now some children shouted, “Yes!”

“Will you?” Joringel cried.

More answered, “Yes!”

“WILL YOU?” they both shouted together. And the children realized that they were being called, they were being trusted, they were being freed—freed to free themselves. It would be up to them. Together. To free themselves, and their brothers, and their sisters, and their friends.

And a roar answered Jorinda and Joringel. A roar of yes.

And so began perhaps the most amazing few weeks in the history of the Kingdom of Grimm. Out there in the forest, on the edge of the granite quarry, a thousand children began to build a life for themselves.

On the first day, Jorinda and Joringel assigned tasks. Every child was divided into one of two groups, Seekers and Makers. The Seekers were the small, swift, crafty children. They were to sneak back into the towns and houses they'd come from and steal as much as they could. No money, of course, for that was no good in the forest. Only food and blankets, tools and weapons.

Yes. Weapons. For Jorinda and Joringel did not know when the adults would find them. But they would. And when they did, they would be angry. And, perhaps, violent.

The Makers stayed in camp. They prepared the food and gathered moss for beds and built canopies of leaves and branches for when it rained.

Jorinda and Joringel's mother had never been much of a mother at home. But here, under the towering red cedars, she watched over the littlest ones, hustling them from here to there, telling them stories, feeding them when they were hungry, comforting them when they grew homesick. Jorinda and Joringel watched her and felt a strange mixture of emotions that they could not describe. Still, they were grateful to her.

Finally, under the direct supervision of Joringel and a small boy who lacked his two front teeth, the largest, strongest, most inventive Makers built an earthworks and stockade.

Half a mile from the clearing where the children would sleep, these Makers took stolen axes and began to cut down a ring of great red pine trees. They stacked them to one side, and then, around the roots of their stumps they dug with stolen shovels, until they had piled up earth twelve feet high. They moved in a wide semicircle, directed by the brilliant little boy with a mind for figures and shapes. Each day, they strained against the heat and the soft red wood and the hard red dirt. Each day, the earthwork grew a hundred feet or more in length as two hundred strong boys and girls chopped and heaved and dug and heaved some more. Each night, they returned to camp covered in red dirt, stinking with sweat, smiling widely. At last, the earthwork stretched in a wide band between a ravine that ran down into the quarry on the right side of the forest, and a deep and swift river a quarter mile distant. Then the children hewed the ends of the felled trees into sharp points. Finally, they buried them deep in the earthwork and lashed them together with ropes.

Each night, the children would gather before the cliff that overlooked the quarry, and by the light of the raging bonfire, the children would sing, or teach each other games, or tell stories. And they were happy.

And if this seems strange to you—that, under these difficult, frightening, and outlandish circumstances, children might be happy . . . well, then you don't know all that much about children.

On the twentieth day since the children had arrived in the forest, the wall and earthwork were complete. Jorinda and Joringel gathered all the Seekers and all the Makers before it, and there was much whooping and laughing and pointing and marveling. The little boy with the gap in his teeth strutted back and forth like a rooster before the structure, grinning comically. As much as sixty feet high in places, six feet thick all around, and a quarter mile long, this was not just a wall. The children had built a fortress. And, in the process, a kingdom.

That was the twentieth day.

On the twenty-first day, the soldiers arrived.

It is hard to hide a wall that size. It is also hard to hide a thousand children. Perhaps it was a woodcutter, come out to gather fardels. Perhaps it was a hunter, chasing game. Perhaps it was truffle farmer, loosing his pigs among the roots.

Whoever it was, someone saw the great wall in the midst of the forest. The stockade that had not been there before. The fortress that had just appeared. That person told someone else, who told someone else. Word soon reached King Herzlos.

The morning on the twenty-first day was clear, and cool. Birds sang and chattered in the swaying trees, and the fallen pine needles swept across the dry red earth like the straw of a broom.

It was not the sort of day one would expect so many people to die.

Up the long red road that led from the Castle Grimm to that forest along the quarry came a company of soldiers. The steel tips of their spears flashed in the rising sun, and the dull iron of their helmets rose and fell like an undulating metal quilt.

From the top of the fortress wall, a cry was raised. Jorinda and Joringel were called, and they came, clambering up the ladder to the small platform that served as a lookout.

“Here they come,” Jorinda whispered. She turned. Little Eva waited at the bottom of the ladder. “This is it,” Jorinda told her. “Get 'em ready.”

Joringel was peering into the distance. “It isn't many. Maybe a hundred.”

Jorinda pursed her lips. “There's more coming. Trust me.”

Indeed, another company of soldiers followed the first. In the distance, the children could hear the drums that accompanied the army as it marched.

“Now I see three groups of soldiers,” Joringel said, straining his eyes through the blue morning haze.

Jorinda said, “And I'll bet you there's a fourth behind that one. And a fifth behind that. And a sixth behind that.”

Joringel asked, “How many soldiers do you think Herzlos would send?”

“Well, I think the army of Grimm has about three thousand men and women.”

“Right . . .” said Joringel.

“So I'd expect about three thousand.”

Joringel murmured, “They wouldn't—”

Eva's head poked up onto the platform. She had climbed a ladder that lay against the stockade. “Three thousand what?” she asked.