The Grimm Conclusion (18 page)

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.

Finally, one of the technicians called out, “Your majesty! We're ready!”

Herzlos nodded and spurred his horse. “AT ARMS!” he cried. “AT ARMS!”

Three thousand soldiers lifted their weapons to their shoulders and advanced to their places before the wooden wall. Catapult cranks whined loudly as they were turned.

“JORINDA! JORINGEL!” Herzlos cried. “THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO SURRENDER! THE CATAPULTS AWAIT!” He was answered with silence. So he leaned his head back and bellowed, “SURRENDER, OR DIE!”

Inside the walls, the children heard Herzlos. They had not prepared for battle. They still sat on the ground, half covered in blankets, listening to Jorinda and Joringel's mother as she instructed her children to keep telling their story. A shiver of panic ran through the group.

But the twins' mother stared steadily at her children. “Just tell us what happens next.”

“They're about to assault the fortress, Mama,” said Joringel.

“We should be getting ready,” added Jorinda, anxiety beginning to lace her voice. “We should have been getting ready hours ago.”

“Tell us what happens next,” their mother insisted. Her voice was firm.

“Why?” Joringel asked. The children around the campfire shifted nervously, eyes darting between Jorinda and Joringel on the one hand and their mother on the other.

“Tell us,” their mother repeated. “Tell us.”

Jorinda rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she snapped. “Another great piece of advice from our brilliant mother.” Her mother winced.

Once upon a time,
Jorinda began, her voice laced with angry sarcasm,
a kingdom of children sat on the ground behind a great wall. They were scared.

Beyond the wall was arrayed the largest army the Kingdom of Grimm had ever seen. At its head rode a tyrant bent on murdering kids. As dawn rose, that army had prepared for battle, while inside the walls, the children sat and listened to stories.

Shivers of anxiety ricocheted among the children of Grimm.

The soldiers lined up before the wooden wall, and the catapults were readied for the assault. Technicians turned huge iron cranks to tighten the coils of rope. Soldiers dressed the enormous boulders with cloth, soaked in oil. King Herzlos cried to the walls—

“SURRENDER, JORINDA! THIS IS YOUR LAST FLIPPING CHANCE.” A shiver ran through the children. “JORINGEL! SURRENDER!”

Jorinda faltered for a moment. Her face grew longer, paler.

But Herzlos's cry was not answered—because the children were telling a story.
So he raised his arm. Three thousand soldiers stood at attention. Three catapults strained at their great, wooden triggers. Three great boulders, covered in oiled cloth, were lit with flame. They hissed in their wooden cups. Herzlos dropped his arm. Three triggers were pulled. Three flaming boulders rose on high arcs into the sky—

Children began to scream. Joringel looked at them, and then up. Hanging in the air, tracing a high arc against the clear blue sky, were three orbs of fire—like three new suns. They seemed to move very slowly, gaining altitude. The screams of the children sounded far away. As the great fiery orbs reached the top of their parabola, they stopped and hung, just for an instant, in midair. And then they began to fall. Slowly at first. Then faster. And faster. And suddenly the screams of the children were very loud, and there was a rushing, roaring sound from the fire as it tore the air, followed by a horrific crash.

One of the stones hit the wall from directly above, shearing off the top five feet of the strong wooden structure and burying itself at the wall's base. Its flames licked the dry wood and lashed ropes. A second stone went sailing over the children's heads. It landed with a crash on the very edge of the quarry, where the trees were thin. It scattered them like ninepins, and then went caroming over the side of the cliff. The third stone landed with a sickening thud at the edge of the group of children and came to rest on a small girl's leg. She screamed horribly, and the children around her tried to yank her away from the stone and beat the flames from her clothes.

“Quickly,” Jorinda and Joringel's mother said. “Keep telling the story! Now!”

Jorinda's eyes were wide, staring at the horrible scene. She stammered. Joringel cut in.

Outside the wall, soldiers cheered.

As he said it, the children heard the sound rise up from beyond the wall.

Boulders were fetched from the oxcarts that stood waiting and were heaved onto the great wooden spoons. Herzlos shouted at his troops, “Don't attack until my word! Wait until the catapults have done their job!”

Jorinda went on:

The ropes coiled back around the catapults' crankshafts. The oiled cloth on the stones was set aflame. Herzlos raised his arm. He dropped it. Three burning boulders traced their high, silent arc into the air, and—

A horrible tearing sound ripped through the wood. The children saw the top of their great wall shorn clear off in three different places. The boulders went careening into the clearing. Children leaped to their feet and dove out of the way.

“Now what?” their mother cried. “What happens now?” Children were screaming and huddling together. Suddenly, the fire from one of the boulders caught the pine needles on the ground. Flame swept out from the rock in a great wave. The children's screams became shrill with panic.

Jorinda looked helplessly at Joringel.

“I don't know!” he cried, his voice practically drowned by the roar of the spreading fire and the screams of the children.

“
You're
telling the story!” their mother cried. “It's
your
story!”