The Marble War

Wart and Buster were pretty young, in fact they had just started to read chapter books so any time they were at the edge of the valley they would be real careful, sort of like taking only one step at a time. Sometimes they might be brave and take two steps the first time into the valley but after that they were careful and only went one. Of course sometimes if there was a lost marble or a special rock on the ground they might go sideways to pick it up, but that usually ended up in a fight of some kind, which is what my story is going to be about. A King and a Queen lived in the castle with Wart. The King and the Queen were the father and the mother of Wart and his brothers, and they had blond hair too. Buster and his brothers had a King and Queen for a father and mother, too. They had black hair, and they all lived together in a castle. Kings and Queens are not like you and me. In fact they don’t really seem to be like anybody else because they get to do what they want to do and nobody else can tell them what to do. I guess that is because they are already grown up and don’t have mothers and fathers to boss them around. The thing that is so surprising about the parents of Wart and Buster is that they liked to do the same thing – the King fathers took their time and just went one step each time they moved. The mother Queens seemed to think that the world was theirs, and they would go this way and that, in any direction at all and any distance they wanted to! A castle is a big place and so there are a lot of rooms for other people, even if you already have a King and Queen and eight little boys called Wart or Buster. Wart had two uncles in his castle and these uncles were very wise, so wise that they wore very long robes, had tall hats and walked around pulling on their beards and saying very wonderful and interesting things like “I think that I shall have to think about that” or “I predict that when I am gone I will no longer be here”. It must have been wonderful to have been so wise.