Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 1. Whole No. 785, January 2007

Candy Cane Wars by James Powell

James Powell’s latest Christmas story for us is a tale of espionage behind enemy lines and the threat of biological warfare. As always, elements of the story can be traced to interesting bits of information the author has picked up over the years. For instance, “just before or during World War I,” he tells us, “there was an English music hall song about Gilbert the Filbert, the Kernel of the Nuts.” (This story’s Colonel De Filbert!)

Near midnight, with a light rain falling, the tall officer in military greatcoat and plumed shako entered the ruined village just behind the lines. Gilbert de Filbert, colonel of the Nutcrackers, quickly found the estaminet he was looking for in the cellar of a ruined cottage. A small horseless caravan with “Porcupine Brothers Circus” emblazoned across its canvas side stood near the steps down to the entrance.

The colonel paused for a moment to turn his weary, lantern-jawed face skyward, wondering again why it was always bad weather and Christmas Eve when the Mouse King’s gray minions and his Ratavian allies faced the soldiers of Toyland in the trenches. Then he went down into the smoky, low-ceilinged cellar.

A sharp-eyed, sharp-nosed, stubble-faced hedgehog behind the bar polished a questionable glass with a dubious rag.

Beyond the few empty tables a fire burned in the fireplace. A booth stood in either chimney corner. In one sat a solitary figure hidden in a hooded moleskin cape. In the other, five wooden soldiers whose faded and chipped paint marked them as veterans of the Candy Cane Wars laughed and drank with a jolly, if shopworn, nest of matryoshka dolls.

De Filbert slung his military greatcoat across the bar and set his shako on top of it. When he’d stroked the rain from his fierce moustache, he pointed to a bottle. Then he complained, “Landlord, this place stinks of mouse.”

“Well, now, it would have to, wouldn’t it, Colonel?” replied the hedgehog, bringing the bottle and a glass. “The Mouse King’s people occupied this sector for a long time, didn’t they?”

“Vermin,” said the nutcracker, downing his drink and making a face to match his moustache.

As the owner refilled his glass, the colonel nodded disapprovingly at the floor. “A bar floor without sawdust is like a Christmas tree without tinsel,” he complained again.

The hedgehog shrugged. “There’s a war on, in case you hadn’t heard.” He moved away to resume his dubious polishing.

The colonel grunted to himself. For some reason or another this year’s batch of war shortages included sawdust and kriskringlite, the rare ore Christmas tinsel was made from.

He planted his back against the bar and looked around the room again, noticing for the first time the table under the staircase where a fat porcupine in a thick quill overcoat with long coattails brooded into a mug of lager. A tall ringmaster’s hat lay on the table at one porcupine elbow and a heavy brass caravan key at the other. Horseless caravans were wind-up things based on music-box technology.

De Filbert guessed that Mr. Porcupine there had tired of the main roads with their bothersome military police checkpoints and heavy traffic of fresh wooden soldiers moving toward the Front and turned off here to refresh himself.

Yes, thanks to the switch to wooden soldiers and the assembly lines of Toyland, the army of the Rodent Alliance was now outnumbered in the field. Earlier toy soldiers had been lead, until they started dying off as if there was something in their drinking water or the pipes it came in. So the powers that be had gone to tin. Though steadfast enough, tin soldiers tended to come out of the molding process missing one limb or another, more suited to hook-and-peg work along pirate lines than soldiering.

So they turned to wood. And wood had worked out. Thank God, for the stakes were high. It would be a disaster for humankind if Toyland lost the war. The toy, as they say, is father to the man. Humans remember more of old playthings than they realize. Know it or not, poets hone a toy’s merest musings to craft their verse; novelists quarry toy dreams and adventures to plot their stories; philosophers turn toy platitudes into eternal verities.

Now for the business at hand. Tossing his greatcoat over his shoulder, De Filbert threw a bright play-money bill on the bar, picked up his shako and drink, and crossed the room.

The porcupine raised his head to peer at him through thick eyeglasses as he passed.

Sliding into the booth across from the hooded figure, the colonel murmured, “Herr von Rat, I presume.”

A high-pitched whisper corrected him. “Ratte, it rhymes with latte. Richthofen von Ratte.”

The nutcracker raised a wooden eyebrow. He’d been sent there by Toy Military Intelligence to make contact with its most valuable agent. He had expected a gruff Ratavian accent, not something you might hear from behind a baseboard. Still, what did it matter? The Rodent Alliance was doomed. Starvation stalked the Kingdom of Mouse and, to quote a New Toyland Times headline, “Rat Riots Roil Ratisbon.” No wonder rodents were deserting the sinking ship.

“You are late, Colonel de Filbert,” said Von Ratte.

Yes, he was late. The colonel might have answered that all ruined villages look alike. But he hated traitors even more than he hated rodents. So he said, “At night all cats are black.” Talk of cats always took the wind out of mice.

Von Ratte knew what he was up to. “I am not a mouse,” he squeaked, giving each word equal weight. “I am, in some fashion or other, supposed to be a rat.” Here he opened his cape and raised his hood, revealing a face more shimmer than substance, like moonlight slow-dancing across dark waters. Ratlike, yes, but with large roundish ears, blank disks for eyes through which he somehow saw. He wore lederhosen over a black body stocking.

Lederhosen made the colonel think of Switzerland. So he asked, “You some kind of wind-up cuckoo-clock Johnny? Or one of those fancy new marionettes, the what-do-you-call-’em, the Geppetto Wireless?”

“I’m a toy just like you,” Von Ratte squeaked.

The colonel thought his companion gave off a smell of warm celluloid mixed with buttered popcorn when out of temper.

Von Ratte continued, “Those jack-in-the-boxes at Military Intelligence wanted some kind of a magic-lantern thing who could pass for a rat. Well, R and D botched the job big time. So here I am. Oh, the rat recruiters signed me up all right. But they thought I looked so funny they made me entertainment officer.”

Here the face inside the hood winced as though in pain and then dimmed wearily. Von Ratte put a three-fingered glove to his temple. “R and D tried to correct the royal hash they’d made of things by hoisting me up into an electrical storm in a box kite with bolts attached to my neck,” he explained. “I am no stranger to headaches, Colonel.”

When De Filbert opened his mouth to sympathize, Von Ratte cut him off. “I don’t want your pity,” he said, adding an urgent, “Listen, I was not spawned willy-nilly in some dark corner like a mouse or a rat. I was designed by an intelligent hand and created for a purpose, just like you. I asked for this meeting so I could tell you, toy to toy, that we’ve got to call off the Big Push.” He pulled a map from inside his cloak and spread it open. “Something’s very wrong in Sector Five.”

As Von Ratte spoke, the colonel saw the porcupine get up, wave his hat at the bartender, and take the steps up to the open air with the big brass key under his arm.

De Filbert turned back to the map and shook his head. “We’ve finally got the Ratavians looking the wrong way. Daytime tin zeppelin overflights report all enemy troop movements have been out of Sector Five into Sectors Four and Six where we’ve massed our fresh troops. At dawn our seasoned units will break through their front line in Sector Five.” He shoved his hand across the map. “Nothing’ll stand in our way. Then we’ll outflank them, right and left. Why call off a perfect plan?”

“Because the Ratavians are up to something.”

The colonel waited.

“Even after the Ratavians started to pull out I heard stories of heavy night traffic along this road,” said Von Ratte, drawing a finger across the map on a line leading north from the Front through the middle of Sector Five. “Late yesterday I went for a little look-see. I found myself a good spot about here in a hedgerow beside the road and settled in. Just after nightfall along came these two closed wagons with a heavy rat dragoon escort. Now this stretch of road’s rutty as hell. One of the wagons must’ve popped a knothole. After they’d passed I found this narrow trail of sawdust on the road.”

“Sawdust?” The colonel frowned.

Von Ratte tapped the map. “The trail turned off here onto wagon tracks across a field. I followed, and just beyond some trees, there it was: a giant tent all fenced round with barbed wire and crawling with rat dragoons.”

The colonel looked over at the table where the porcupine had been sitting. “So let’s add things up. We’ve got a big tent. We’ve got sawdust. Sounds like a circus to me.”

“I’m entertainment officer,” Von Ratte reminded him. “If there was a circus in Sector Five, I’d be the first to know.”

“So what are we talking about?”

“You tell me,” said Von Ratte. “But the canvas would hide it from the air.”

The colonel cradled his massive jaw in a thumb and forefinger. His one big fear was germ warfare. He knew laboratory rat scientists were working on a spreadable form of the Dutch Elm disease to use against Toyland’s wooden soldiers. Had Von Ratte lucked onto some kind of biological-warfare facility?

The rats already had a perfect delivery system. The Christmas Eve before last they’d used their mortars to hurl glass shells filled with Greek fire into the trenches, causing havoc among the ranks. Today’s wooden soldiers were protected from Greek fire by a fire-retardant lacquer. But Dutch Elm was another kettle of fish.

The colonel stood up. “Come on. Let’s take a closer look at what you’ve found.”

Outside, a cold wind had driven the rain clouds away, leaving a sky decked out like a Christmas tree with starry constellations: there the Great Rocking Horse and there the Lesser.

The colonel had come by wind-up toy motorcycle and parked on the village outskirts. With Von Ratte in the sidecar directing the way, they sped off between hedgerows down a narrow country lane lit by the rising moon.

As he drove, the colonel reflected on how much he’d missed the snow. Last year on night patrol he’d stopped to let his men watch a woods fill up with the stuff. He remembered how peaceful it was with the snow coming down on little cat feet. As it happened, he knew the owner, a stuffed bear who used the property for a picnic ground. Not long afterwards, on furlough in town, he ran into the bear and mentioned stopping there. “Hey, be my guest,” came the reply. Stuffed animals were like that.

Later he told his wise old medical corps buddy Toby, by far the ugliest apothecary jar on the shelf, about that pleasant meeting. Toby understood. He said one of life’s small treasures was a toy village with a real stuffed animal in it.

Squeaking over the whir of the motorcycle, Von Ratte asked, “Ever wonder what the hell this is all about?” By “this” he clearly meant the war.

“The rodents are after the children’s candy canes and sugarplums under the Christmas tree,” replied the colonel.

Von Ratte gave a high-pitched laugh and started to reply. But a loud “sproy-oy-oy-ing!” interrupted him. This was followed by an even louder noise, like the lingering clatter of a tray of flatware being slowly spilled down onto a hard surface. (Noises had become considerably drawn out since 3StoogesRusco won Toyland’s sound-engineering contract.) The motorcycle came to a sudden stop with a huge mare’s-nest of metal spring billowing from its rear end.

Dismounting, the colonel gave the machine a healthy kick, muttering, “Had the damn thing in for a lube and a good wind-up just before I left headquarters.”

Their mission was urgent. Dawn was less than five hours away. They pushed the dead motorcycle into the bushes and hurried off on foot. When they’d walked for a bit, Von Ratte returned to what he’d been saying. “Let the rat bastards have the damn candy. What makes this our fight anyway?”

Raising his hand for silence, De Filbert looked back down the road behind them. In a moment, the Porcupine Brothers Circus caravan came trundling along. A lantern above the driver’s seat revealed Mr. Porcupine nodding behind the steering handle. He’d almost passed them when his head popped from his quilly chest. “Hey, need a lift?” he asked. “Going far?”

“To Bloques,” said Von Ratte, naming a village on the Toyland side of the Front just southeast of Sector Five.

“Kind of close to the action for me,” came the reply. “But I’ll get you to St. Golliwoq-les-Deux-Eglises.”

“That’ll do fine,” said the colonel, though he found it strange that Mr. Porcupine, who left the estaminet ahead of them, had ended up behind. They hadn’t passed him on the road.

“Climb on up, then,” said the circus owner.

The ample driver’s seat was none too big to hold the fat creature in his quill overcoat. But when they slid warily past him they found the cargo of gunnysacks in back made comfortable seating. Mr. Porcupine pulled a lever and the caravan rolled forward.

“You and your brother performing hereabouts?” asked the colonel.

The animal looked quizzically back over his shoulder. Then he understood and smiled. “I’m an only child, Colonel,” he said. “ ‘Brothers’ is just something we circus people call ourselves. To spread the blame.” He shook his head and returned to his driving. “No, wartime’s no place for circusing. First your clowns get sent off to officers’ training school. Next all your bandsmen get drafted.”

“And the sawdust shortage mustn’t help,” ventured Von Ratte.

“Tell me about it,” agreed the porcupine.

In a clatter of harness a brigade of toy cavalry dashed by looking smart astride their stick-and-horsehead mounts. Behind them marched a regiment of wooden soldiers whose cheeks still bore the red circles the toy medical corps painted there as certificates of good health.

“A fine-looking bunch,” said the colonel proudly. “They’ll give a good accounting of themselves. Hearts of oak.”

“Bodies of pine, though, eh?” said their driver.

Yes, the nutcracker had to admit the enlisted toy soldiers were pine. Only the officers were hardwood.

“Me, I like my pine a bit saltier,” added the porcupine as an afterthought.

Before his call-up to Christmas duty, the colonel had served in a toy box in rural Ontario amid walnut trees with shells so thick his jaws ached at the memory. Nighttime meant much gnawing from the direction of the outhouse. Porcupines, they told him, favored outhouse wood salty with urine.

“Tell you what a circus owner does in wartime,” said the porcupine. “First he restocks his supplies. Like those spangles you’re sitting on. Boy, do we go through spangles. I paid a little visit to the local spanglesmith back there in What-do-you-call-it where I first saw you gentlemen.

“Second, a circus owner searches out new acts for when the world comes to its senses again.” He laughed. “You two, for example, could be circus stars. You, Colonel, could be a rock eater, Billy the G., the Human Goat. And your friend there could be the Celluloid Man, a.k.a. the Human Shirt Collar.” For the rest of the journey Mr. Porcupine regaled them with stories of the circus life.

At St. Golliwoq they bid goodbye to the circus owner. As the caravan rolled away, Von Ratte said, “Funny how every time we got to a military checkpoint our friend Mr. Porcupine dropped his voice. What was that all about?”

“To make me put my head outside the wagon to catch what he was saying,” said the colonel. Seeing a nutcracker officer, the Toy Military Police invariably waved the caravan through. The colonel scratched his jaw, wondering if the creature had sabotaged his motorcycle for just that purpose.

The colonel and Von Ratte worked their way along the front-line trench north of Bloques, which was crowded with battle-scarred Toyland units catching what sleep they could with Zero Hour little more than four hours away.

At last they reached a long observation sap jutting out into no-thing’s-land. At the end of it an officer was waiting for them. He saluted, helped Von Ratte into a black rat dragoon greatcoat, and handed him his sword and kepi. The nutcracker’s spy companion buried his face in the coat’s broad lapels. Then he and the colonel slid over the sandbags and crawled out on knees and elbows onto the battlefield following the breach in the barbed wire Von Ratte had made on his way over.

The low moon lit their way across a morbid landscape of bloated, rotting rodents dead from the toxic cork shrapnel from the popguns, and the broken and well-chewed remains of wooden soldiers. When at last they stopped to rest in a shell crater, Von Ratte gestured around at the carnage. “I still say, why’s this our fight?” When no answer came he continued, “You know what I mean. You and I were designed. But the mice, the rats, and the children, yes, the children too, are animals spawned willy-nilly in dark corners.”

“You’ll have to try your regimental padre on that one,” said De Filbert. But he felt it did Von Ratte credit that he’d framed the question. No rodent would have, not even a church-mouse. Then he added, “Perhaps it’s a small price to pay for immortality. Toys who fall in the Battle for Christmas don’t die, you know. They live on in the dim of grownup memories.” Maybe he ventured a step too far when he added, “Like ‘Rosebud.’”

“ ‘Rosebud,’ my ass,” said Von Ratte bitterly and crawled off toward the rodent lines.

When they were within hailing distance, Von Ratte called out “Camembert,” the rodent password. Then they slid over the lip of the trench. As agreed, the colonel now raised his arms and became Von Ratte’s prisoner, captured on night reconnoiter. A few mouse foot soldiers came in their pink and gray uniforms to sniff De Filbert and make threatening squeaks. But they let Von Ratte march him back behind the lines to the prisoner pens.

The last of the mouse light infantry and rat dragoons crowded the roads now, heading into Sector Four and Sector Six. The colonel watched an anti-zeppelin artillery unit swing past complete with a makeshift searchlight made of a flashlight mounted on a roller skate. A brigade of rat lancers with bright pennants followed after them.

Rat cavalry were formidable and ingenious fighting units. A rat rode another rat until the mount tired. Then the mount became the rider and any rat guilty of leaning on the whip got a taste of his own medicine. This rat read on the Golden Rule gave them a primitive democracy. Where mice were all squeak, nibble, and mob, rats were disciplined and resourceful.

The colonel studied them as they passed. He marveled at the constantly churning noses, how each cupped ear moved independently this way and that to catch every sound and silence, the black unblinking eyes and sharp yellow teeth.

Oh, he’d heard all the atrocity stories, how rats killed pets and bit babies and ate all the cheese and soup and pickled sprats. He made a sour face. The pickled sprats part, now that was hard to swallow.

And here came a double column of leather-jacketed rat artillerymen transporting fragile glass mortar shells to their batteries the same way they looted eggs in peacetime. One rat lay on his back and cradled the precious cargo in his four legs while another threw the egg carrier’s tail over his shoulder and dragged it away. De Filbert looked hard and deep into the glass shells. What was it this time, more Greek fire, Dutch Elm, or some other concoction from hell?

Von Ratte and his prisoner marched deeper into Sector Five until they reached the quiet, rutty road the sawdust wagons had taken. Here the colonel lowered his arms, by now as numb as wooden dowels, and rubbed them vigorously. The moon peeped down on them just over the treetops as though standing on curious tiptoe. Von Ratte studied his map by its light.

Suddenly an approaching drum of rat feet sent them ducking into the hedgerow just as a dragoon patrol rushed by. After that they kept to the countryside behind the hedgerow where the going was slower but safer. This caution cost them time. Dawn was only three hours away when they got to the place where the sawdust wagons had turned off the road. When they reached the small stand of trees they crouched down. Ahead of them stood Von Ratte’s immense tent, its perimeter surrounded by barbed wire.

The colonel judged the place large enough for a biological-weapons facility. But how to get inside to find out for sure? Rat dragoons patrolled inside the compound and out. As he pondered, he heard a familiar hum. Working its way up the slope behind them came the circus caravan. A white sheet with a red cross now covered the Porcupine Brothers emblazonment. The driver wore a white medical duster over his spiny coat and had a Red Cross badge stuck in his hatband.

This explained everything. Mr. Porcupine was a spy. He would cross the front line disguised as a rodent doctor, part of the wounded exchange program, bound for the military hospital at St. Golliwoq. Once inside Toyland territory he’d throw off his disguise and travel about with a sharp eye out for troop movements and artillery batteries, calling himself a circus owner looking for new acts.

As the back of the caravan passed, the colonel clambered on, pulling Von Ratte up after him. When the caravan emerged from the trees, some rat dragoons came galloping up and, shouting for the gate to be opened, they escorted it inside.

The caravan trundled deeper into the compound and then came to a stop. De Filbert cut two peepholes in the canvas with his saber and they saw they were next to a long wooden trough which stood inside another barbed wire enclosure of considerable size. A line of bowlegged wrangler rats in ten-gallon hats and with barbed wire braided into their tails were passing buckets filled with a steamy slurry of sawdust gruel from hand to hand. As the colonel watched, a wrangler dumped the last of it and then banged on the trough with the empty bucket.

Out of the darkness at the far end of the enclosure rushed a good fifty beaver moving on all fours. Teenagers, judged the colonel. Beaver were notoriously nearsighted. These hadn’t yet taken the eye test for the glasses they’d need to qualify for licenses to walk on their hind legs.

Colonel de Filbert uttered a curse. Better Dutch Elm disease than beaver. The very name made pine forests tremble and moan like the night wind working at the windows of a nursery dollhouse where a lonely toy yearns for sleep.

He and Von Ratte exchange pale glances. Then they returned to the peepholes to watch the beaver shoulder and fight each other to get at the skimpy gruel until the trough was dry.

Now the circus owner stepped up on the driver’s seat of the caravan. He threw off his hat, duster, and long-tailed quill overcoat, revealing himself to be no porcupine but a beaver. And no mere beaver. The heavy gold chain now visible across his chest proclaimed him to be Big Beaver himself, Grand Master of All the Beaver Lodges.

As the beaver in the enclosure grunted loudly and unhappily around the empty trough, Big Beaver said, “My dear young friends, traditionally our people have held ourselves aloof from the Battle for Christmas, judging our rodent brothers effete city folk, delicate nibblers and noshers who scorned our lumberjack appetites. In its wisdom, our High Council has always asked this simple question: ‘What’s in it for yours truly? Candy canes? Sugarplums?’ ” Big Beaver shook his smiling head.

Here a young beaver stepped forward. “Please, sir,” he asked, nodding at the trough, “can I have some more?”

“More?” said Big Beaver. “More? Oh, Oliver, you shall have much more. This very dawn you and I will breakfast on whole regiments of wooden soldiers freshly cut from juicy pine.” He smacked his lips. “There’s richness for you. Yes, we beaver will grow fat beyond the dreams of gluttony. Just before dawn you will take up your positions.” Big Beaver mimicked Oliver’s tiny voice to ask, “ ‘But please, sir, how can we directionally deprived young beaver find our positions in the darkness?’ ”

Beaver, the colonel knew, had no sense of direction. Anything beyond upstream and downstream and they were lost.

“My fine young beaver,” continued Big Beaver, “if you’re serious about breakfast, let these be your bywords: Follow the Glitterati!” With this oratorical flourish he stepped down to the pounding beaver tail applause and went over to confer with a circle of rat brass.

“ ‘Glitterati’?” asked Von Ratte.

“It’s rodent for will-o’-the-wisps.”

“I don’t get it,” said Von Ratte.

“Neither do I,” said the colonel. But he was more concerned with the image he had of a horde of hungry young beaver chasing wooden soldiers from the battlefield like wide-eyed, terrified gingerbread men. “You were right,” he admitted. “We’ve got to warn our people to call off the Big Push.”

Von Ratte looked around hopelessly at the barbed wire and hostile garrison.

A moment later, a rat dragoon vaulted up into the driver’s seat, turned the caravan around, and drove out the compound gate. He parked it in a garage beside the entrance, took the brass wind-up key, and left, closing the doors behind him.

Astonished by their sudden luck, the colonel and Von Ratte stretched out among the sacks. They’d wait until the coast was clear, sneak outside, and run like hell back to the Toyland lines. The Jumping Jacks in Signals would semaphore back to the high command. Orders for a disciplined pull back of the wooden regiments would come down the chain of command. Maybe a concentration of tin armor and a sustained artillery barrage could fill in the gap in the line.

Suddenly the colonel sat up straight. Hadn’t he heard a click back there when the garage doors closed? He jumped down and checked. They were padlocked in.

They lit the caravan’s lantern and searched the garage without finding another way out. Two hours to dawn. “Let’s use our old noggins here,” urged the colonel. “Why lock the garage? What are they protecting?” He got up into the caravan. Von Ratte followed close behind with the lantern. The colonel thrust his saber into a gunnysack and watched as a stream of liquid silver poured out into his cupped hand. Then he poked at the puddle of silver with a finger. “Minced tinsel!” he exclaimed.

“Spanglesmith, my ass,” said Von Ratte. “When he left the estaminet our Mr. Porcupine-slash-Big Beaver paid a little visit to the local dealer in black-market tinsel.”

The colonel nodded. “They’re going to use the caravan like a tinsel spreader and make a trail the beaver can follow by moonlight.”

Von Ratte brightened. “Hey, that means they’ll have to come back for it.” Then he sagged. “By then it’ll be too late to warn anyone.” With a shrug he said, “Minced tinsel. Who’da thunk it. Awhile back I dreamed of these seven little Hi-Ho brothers who sang a lot and mined kriskringlite in Tinseltown. Funny, right?”

The colonel knew toy dreams often pre-shadow some human event. So what? The dreamer never sees it come to pass. He blew out the lantern and turned away from the glow behind Von Ratte’s lapels. His noggin worked better in the dark.

As the colonel explained his plan, they heard rat voices outside and a key in a padlock. The nutcracker surprised the two dragoons come for the caravan, holding them in armpit headlocks until they passed out from lack of air. They left them both, gagged and tied up back-to-back to one of the garage uprights.

Von Ratte, in his rat-dragoon greatcoat, backed the caravan out of the garage and waved to the guards at the gate. Beyond the compound barbed wire they could hear the wrangler rats snapping their fierce tails, trying to whip the beaver into a herd. Then the caravan was rolling down the trail toward the road with the colonel in back shoveling tinsel out in double handfuls and the moon above them sailing high and free.

When they reached the road, Von Ratte called, “Now where?”

“Make like we’re heading for the Front,” said De Filbert. With no time to warn the high command, maybe they could lead the beaver off on a long wild-goose chase.

After a few minutes, Von Ratte called back, “We’re coming to a fork in the road. Call it. Left or right?”

“Take the one that looks the less traveled.”

Von Ratte chose the right lane and that seemed to make all the difference. Before long the lane had turned and was running parallel to the Front.

They passed a ruined stone barn. “Hey,” shouted Von Ratte, “Now I know where we are. I scouted this area last year during the big Scandahoovian scare.” A chance sighting of picnicking rat senior citizens had sparked a rumor the Gray Norwegian breed had thrown in with the Rodent Alliance.

“So what?” asked the colonel.

“So up ahead a couple of miles there’s this pine grove. It’s well off the road to the north. Two toys carrying a couple of sacks of tinsel each could lay a trail back into it.”

Abruptly the caravan slowed and rolled to a stop atop a narrow stone bridge over a creek. The colonel cursed and leaped out the back. He was starting the first turn of the wind-up key when a rat cavalry patrol came galloping up. They must’ve found the rats in the garage and followed the tinsel trail.

When the six rat dragoons saw the nutcracker, they dismounted, becoming twelve. De Filbert drew his weapon. If they captured the caravan now, the rats would still have time to double back with it and get the beaver back on course. That mustn’t happen. He ran the first two rats through the body as they charged. Then he snapped off the head of a third with his terrible jaws and spat it into the road.

The nine rats remaining fell back, panting and wary, for nutcrackers had a formidable reputation among their enemies. The colonel shouted to Von Ratte for help. But his companion was hunched over in the driver’s seat, his fingers on his temples. Damn fine time to get a headache!

With a show of sharp yellow teeth, the rats charged again. De Filbert ran another through. A second rat wrapped his tail around the nutcracker’s leg like a whip and tried to pull him off balance. When that failed he buried his teeth in the nutcracker’s sword arm.

Tossing his weapon to his other hand, the Colonel severed the rat’s head and fought on encumbered for several minutes until the dead rat’s tail uncoiled from around his leg and the head released its grip on his sword arm.

Now a cheer went up from his attackers. A patrol of rat lancers arrived, the vanguard of the beaver herd. Behind them he heard the cries of the wranglers and the huff and puff of the beaver. Then he saw the herd itself, shapes moving beneath a tarpaulin of darkness.

About to be overwhelmed, the colonel pulled out the caravan’s brass wind-up key, put it between his jaws, and bit it in half. As the taste of brass filled his mouth he heard creaking timber and a loud snap. His jaw had broken. De Filbert stood there agape, with his lower jaw resting on his chest, sword in hand, ready for death and immortality.

Just then the beaver herd arrived in a great pile-up. Promised the tinsel trail would lead them to breakfast, they milled about in truculent confusion, knocking riders from their mounts as they searched for their food with feeble eyes.

Suddenly Oliver, the beaver who’d asked for more, saw a shimmering figure running down the road beyond the caravan. “Follow that Glitterati,” he shouted. In an unstoppable rush the beaver shouldered the rats aside and pushed their way between the caravan and the bridge rampart, setting the vehicle rocking back and forth on its wheels. As the last beaver passed, the caravan overturned, blocking the bridge.

The colonel knew the will-o’-the-wisp was his comrade-in-arms Von Ratte, running naked toward the distant grove of pine to draw the beaver after him.

As the herd disappeared up the road, De Filbert waved his saber at the rats, inviting death. But they had their hands full dragging the caravan out of the way. It was some time before the rat cavalry could ride off after the beaver.

The wranglers, being civilians, stayed behind. They ignored De Filbert, made a campfire on the spot, and hunkered down around it. An old toothless one with a guitar struck up a homesick lament about how he missed Pickled Flats. Or was it pickled sprats? The colonel wasn’t sure, for just then the cork artillery opened up from the Toyland lines. The Big Push had begun.

An hour later, his broken jaw bound up with a strip of gunny-sacking, the Colonel came trudging up the road. He imagined he looked much like the dead Jacob Marley in a dream he had once, come back to haunt his partner Ebenezer Scrooge into changing his skinflint ways. Crazy the names you find in sleep.

Distant toy trumpets were sounding another advance when he found the place by the roadside where the underbrush was heavily trampled down. Soon he came to a half-demolished stand of pine trees and a heap of snoring and sated young beaver. He searched on. Of course the rats had returned to their regiments. It was Von Ratte he was looking for.

Finally he saw a glow as faint as fireflies through the trees. Hurrying over, he found his companion, or what the rats had left of him, scattered across a clearing, slashed by saber blades and pierced by lance heads.

The colonel gathered the bits and pieces into a pile like a heap of faint embers. Then, as he watched, the glow dimmed and was gone. He spread his greatcoat over the dark remains and stood there.

Whether Von Ratte believed it or not, toys who fall in the Battle for Christmas never die. Someday some aspiring cartoonist in a dull day-job business meeting will look down to find he’s doodled Richthofen von Ratte’s face on his notepad, the big ears, the disks for eyes. He’ll smile and raise his pencil, meaning to hide what he’s done behind a graphite downpour before his supervisor sees it.

But then he’ll stop and smile again, half-remembering something, and he’ll draw the hero’s lederhosen shorts and add a buttoned front. Now the name Ricky von Rat will come to mind and be dismissed. No, not a rat. It doesn’t even look like a rat. Besides, mice are nicer. Ricky von Mouse? Maybe. But let’s lose the “von.” Milton Mouse? Manny? No. But he thought he was on to something. Resolving to work on the name, he’ll fold the drawing and put it in his pocket.

A line of wooden soldiers with fixed bayonets moved across the clearing. The colonel watched them disappear through the trees, knowing he himself would never see action again or have another chance at immortality. Oh, old Toby’s colleagues the glue doctors would give him back a profile as good as new. But his jaw would never be combat-worthy again.

No, Gilbert de Filbert, colonel of the Nutcrackers, would end his days an unsung commissariat desk jockey. Meanwhile, and you could bet on it, Richthofen von Ratte, a.k.a. Mr. Whatever, God bless him, would be a star with his name up there in lights.

Copyright ©2006 by James Powell