The astronomer watched them gather around the gallows: Pistachio People filled with vitriol, roaring with savage anticipation, weighing rotten vegetables in their hands. Longtail’s influence was no longer even thinly hidden. Each member of the crowd bore a whispering rodent on his shoulder.
“Might I smoke my pipe as I die?” he asked. The executioner was not a bad fellow, and in fact a foreigner himself. He even used a pinch of his own tobacco.
“Ah, would that I were at home in Nuremberg!” puffed the astronomer, and closed his eyes–just as a great shadow fell over the city square.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
The queen heard, and was furious.
“It’s missing a note!” she snapped, and indeed–though the clock rang with bells like roaring lions, chirping frogs, howling coyotes and crying men–something was absent. “He’s made a mocking jingle of our royal clock’s melody. Drag him out to answer!”
The guards marched into the clock tower. They paced the catwalks, poked spears into crannies, and checked that they had missed no secret exit. Drosselmeier was gone.
The astronomer was laughing when they brought him to the throne room. “He’s escaped you, rodents!”
“And left you behind,” said the Pistachio Queen, “to hang.”
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Now you already know that in the course of their efforts to save the cursed Princess Pirlipat, the royal clockmaker named Drosselmeier (and his friend the royal astronomer) traveled all through the known world searching high and low for the nut Krakatuk. In the end, of course, they would find it in the place they had left, their home city of Nuremberg; and his nephew would crack it in his teeth and be cursed in turn to become the Nutcracker.
But do you know what Drosselmeier was doing on the tenth Christmas of his long quest?
Well, then, I’ll tell you.
Monday, December 22, 2008