Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [24]
Then there followed rank upon rank of foot soldiers, and these weren’t even men at all! Shaped like men in only the crudest, most rudimentary way, they were huge, burly creatures with green warty skin, black animal eyes and long yellow tusks. They carried crude swords and axes and spears, some of which were still stained with the dried remains of something Max dared not contemplate. They wore armor of rough, undecorated iron, and it was the tramp, tramp, tramping of their iron boots, thousands of them marching all in unison, that Max had mistaken for thunder.
The ranks of green-skinned horrors came on and on, a never-ending column that appeared from around the same bend in the road that he’d run down, carrying his discovered arrowhead. They were divided into different groups. A company of spearmen was followed by a company of pikes and they were followed by a company of archers — all carrying quivers full of black-headed arrows on dark red shafts, Max intuited.
But it didn’t occur to Max just then to realize he’d been right all along about an incipient invasion, and that he was the only one who’d figured it out, that not even precious little Peter had understood what the arrowhead actually meant, while he had, and that everyone should have listened to him in the first place. That insight would come later. At the moment Max could do nothing but gape in astonishment, watching the invaders come on and on in their endless ranks, while he stood there with his nightshirt pulled up around his chest, miserably pissing into his chamber pot.
In an awful rush, Max dressed and ran downstairs to find the entire household engaged in a flurry of activity. One of the Peep daughters — he couldn’t tell which — flew by him, scampering up the same stairs that he’d descended. She was bawling loudly and trailing three or four frightened and worried household maids in her wake. Two of the hired hands, armed with pitchfork and hoe, were standing in the middle of the room, getting manure from their shoes all over one of the good rugs, loudly asking of nobody in particular, “Do we fight? Are we going to fight?” But no one answered them, or seemed to pay them any attention whatsoever. Other servants were quickly gathering silver candlesticks from off the mantle and silver serving trays from off a sideboard. Whether to hide them from the invaders, or steal them for themselves, Max couldn’t guess.
None of the other Peeps were present, nor any of his own family. Not knowing what else to do, Max grabbed one of the house servants by the sleeve as he tried to scurry by. It was someone he recognized, by the name of Kurt, if one of the adults or any of the Peep daughters spoke to him, but whom Max and Peter had to address as Mr. Morganslaughtern. He was fat, old and red faced and looked like he was about to burst something. He carried a small framed portrait painting of Mrs. Cresentia Peep in one hand and a paring knife in the other. What he planned to do with either of those items no one could tell, perhaps not even Morganslaughtern himself.
“Where is everyone?” Max shouted. He hadn’t intended to shout, but the army outside combined with the chaos inside made Max more frightened than he ever imagined he could be in a situation like this. He’d always pictured himself as cool and calm in an emergency, taking command, and of course he always had a sword in his hand. There was a set of decorative crossed swords mounted on the far wall, over an equally decorative console table, and he briefly wondered if he should go arm himself with one of them. Then Morganslaughtern’s insistent tugging at his hand — he still had hold of the man’s sleeve — reminded him of his original intent, to find someone in charge. “Where’s Squire Peep?”
“He’s in the kitchen, of course!” Morganslaughtern snapped. “Now kindly unhand me, young man!”
Why in the kitchen and why “of course”? Max knew nothing of the important matters of high men of status like the squire. Is the kitchen where all great men in