King Rat

by China Miéville

  He had lost Fabian. He put his head in his hands.

  “Him gone, bwoy. Him with the Badman now.”

  Anansi’s voice was soft and very near.

  Saul rubbed his eyes without opening them. He breathed deeply. Finally he looked up.

  Anansi’s face hovered just in front of his, suspended before him upside-down. His strange eyes were very close, staring right into Saul’s.

  Saul looked at him calmly, held his gaze. Then he let his eyes slide casually up, investigating Anansi’s position.

  Anansi was hanging from one of his ropes, suspended from the roof. He grasped it with both hands, effortlessly suspended his weight, his naked feet intertwined with the thin white rope. As Saul watched, Anansi’s legs uncoupled from the fibers and swivelled slowly and soundlessly through the air. His eyes held Saul’s, even as his face turned one hundred and eighty degrees.

  His feet touched the concrete with a tiny pat.

  “You damn good now, you know, pickney. Not easy keep track of you, these days.”

  “Why did you bother? Daddy send you?” Saul’s voice was withering.

  Anansi laughed without sound. He smiled lazily, predatory—the big spider-man.

  “Come now. Me want fe talk.” Anansi pointed with a long finger, straight up. Then hand over hand he seemed to fall up the rope, which was tugged peremptorily from view.

  Saul slid silently to the corner of the building and gripped it on both sides. He hauled himself away from the earth.

  Anansi was waiting. He sat cross-legged on the flat roof. His mouth worked as if he were preparing to say something unpleasant. He nodded a greeting to Saul and indicated with a nod that he should sit opposite him.

  Instead, Saul interlaced his fingers behind his head and turned away. He looked out over Brixton.

  There were noises all around them from the streets.

  “Mr. Rattymon going crazy waiting for you now.” Anansi spoke quietly.

  “Motherfucker shouldn’t have used me as bait, then,” said Saul evenly. “Rapist motherfucker shouldn’t have killed my dad.”

  “Rattymon you dad.”

  Saul did not answer. He waited.

  Anansi spoke again.

  “Loplop come back and him crazy mad at you. Him want you dead fe true.”

  Saul turned, incredulous.

  “What the fuck has he got to be angry with me for?”

  “You make him deaf, you know, and you done also make him mad again, mad in him head.”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake,” spat Saul. “We were both about to be killed. He was about to kill me and get fucking taken apart himself. I think the fucking Piper’s done playing with us, you know? I think he just wants us all dead now, all the kings. Loplop would’ve fucking died, I saved his life…”

  “Yeah, man, but him save you. Could’ve watch while the Piperman done kill you, but him try to save you, and you fuck up him ear…”

  “That’s a load of crap, Anansi. Loplop tried to save me because you all…you all…know the Piper can’t hold me, and you all know I’m the only thing that can stop him.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Well, Loplop him mad, anyway. Don’t be getting too close to him now.”

  “Fine,” said Saul.

  Again, a long pause.

  “What do you want, Anansi? And what do you know about Fabian?”

  Anansi sucked his teeth in disgust.

  “You still green, bwoy, fe true. You sure got all the rats dem upon you side, but you don’t know what fe do with them. Rats everywhere, bwoy. Spiders everywhere. Them you eyes, the rats. My lickle spiders tell me what the Badman do with you friends. You ain’t never ask. You not care till now.”

  “Friends?”

  Anansi screwed up his face and looked at Saul disdainfully.

  “Him have kill the fat bwoy.” Saul’s hands fluttered about his face. His mouth stayed shut, but it quivered. “Him have take the black bwoy and the lickle DJ woman.”

  “Natasha,” breathed Saul. “What does he want with her…? How does he know who they are…? How is he getting inside me?” Saul grabbed his head with both hands, began to thump himself in despair. Kay, he thought, Natasha, he hit himself more, what was happening?

  Anansi was on him. Strong hands gripped his wrists.

  “Stop now!” Anansi was horrified.

  Animals do not hurt themselves, Saul realized. There was still human inside him, then. He shook himself and stopped.

  “We have to get them back. We have to find them”

  “How, bwoy? Be real.”

  Saul’s head spun.

  “What did he do to Kay?”

  Anansi pursed his lips.

  “Him took the bwoy apart.”

  They ran for a while, then there was a short scurrying climb, and they stood on Brixton Rec, the sports centre. They could hear the faint thump of MTV from the weights room below. Saul stood at the very edge of the roof, a little way forward from Anansi. He pushed his hands in his pockets.

  “You could have told me, you know…” he said. He heard himself, and hated his plaintive tone. He half turned, glanced at Anansi, who stood quite still, his arms folded over his bare chest.

  Anansi sucked his teeth in contempt.

  “Cha, bwoy, you still full to the brim with rubbish. You talk about how the Rattymon him you father? What for me want tell you that?”

  Saul looked at him. Anansi was insistent.

  “What for me want tell you? Hmmm? Listen, bwoy, pickney, hear me now. Me one bigass spider, understand? The Rattymon, him a rat. Loplop him the bird, the Bird Superior. Now you, you some strange half ting, fe true, but what for we gwan tell you ting like that? Me tell you just what me want you fe know. Always, there you have a promise. No more hypocrisy now, you see, bwoy? No need. Animal like me no need for such ting. You leave that behind. You can trust me to be just so trustworthy, never no more, but never no less. Y’understand?”

  Saul said nothing. He watched a train arrive at Brixton station and trundle away again.

  “Was Loplop going to tell the Piper where I was? Were you all going to come for him when he tried to take me?” he asked finally.

  Anansi shrugged, almost imperceptibly.

  They sidled along the side of the railway, the British Rail line which rose above the market and the streets. They slid along without speaking, heading for Camberwell. Saul appreciated the company, he realized, though it was hardly what he had hoped for when setting out this evening.

  “How could he find my friends?” said Saul. They sat on the climbing frame in a nondescript schoolyard.

  “Him search all you books an tings. Him find some address tings fe sure.”

  Of course, thought Saul. My fault.

  He was numbed. If he was still human, he realized, he would be in shock. But he was not, not any more; he was half rat, and he felt inured.

  Anansi was very silent. He made no attempt to persuade Saul to return to King Rat, or to do anything, for that matter.

  Saul looked at him curiously.

  “Does King Rat know you’re here?” he asked.

  Anansi nodded.

  “Has he asked you to say anything? Get me back?”

  Anansi shrugged. “Him want you back, sure. You useful, y’know? But him know you can’t be told nothing you don’t want. You know what him want. If you want come back, you will come.”

  “Do you…do you understand why I won’t come back to him?”

  Anansi looked at his eyes. Gently, he shook his head.

  “No, bwoy, not at all. You can survive better with him, with us, fe true. And you are rat. You should go back. But I know you don’t think like that. I don’t know what you are, bwoy. You can’t be rat, you can’t be man. I don’t understand you at all, but that’s alright, because I know now that I will never understand you, nor will you me. We are not the same.”

  In the small hours, after they had eaten, they stood together at an entrance to the sewers. Anansi loo
ked behind him, planning his route up the side of the warehouse beside them. He looked back at Saul.

  Saul stuck out his hand. Anansi grasped it.

  “You are the only hope, bwoy. Come back to us.”

  Saul shook his head, twisted, uncomfortable before the sudden intensity.

  Anansi nodded and dropped his hand.

  “See you around.”

  He turned and slung one of his ropes over an overhang, disappeared at speed over the vertical bricks.

  Saul watched him go. He turned and examined where he was. The grille in a yard littered with hulking pieces of machinery. They loomed solemnly in the dark, looking vaguely pathetic. There were no roads visible from here, and Saul enjoyed the moment of solitude. Then he reached down without looking and pulled the grille from the earth.

  He hesitated.

  He knew there was little point searching for Natasha and Fabian. The city was so large, the Piper’s powers so prodigious, it would not be hard for him to hide two humans. But he knew also that he could not bear to leave them in his power. He knew he had to search, if only to prove that he was still half human. Because he was disquieted by his passivity, his acceptance, the speed with which he had conceptualized their absence as inevitable, as done, as a done thing. He was becoming dulled. Kay’s death was utterly unreal to him, but that was a human reaction. More disturbing to him was his reaction to the Piper’s abduction of his two closest friends.

  The acceptance of the unacceptable was a kind of reactionary stoicism, a dynamic that dulled his feelings for these others. He could feel it within him, a growing cunning, a hyper-real focus on the here and now. It frightened him. He could not battle it head on, he could not decide what to feel and what not to feel, but he could challenge it with his actions. He could change it by refusing to behave as if it were how he felt. He abhorred his own reaction, his own feeling.

  It was an animal trait.

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  Saul could tell something was wrong as soon as he stepped into the sewers.

  The sounds, the sounds he had become accustomed to walking into, were absent. As his feet hit the trickling water, he dropped into a crouch, suddenly full of feral energy. His ears twitched. He knew what was missing. He should walk into the sewers into a barely audible network of scratching and skittering, the noises of his people. He should hear them at the very edge of his rat-hearing, and subsume them within him, make them part of him, use them to define his time in the darkness.

  The sounds were missing. There were no rats around him.

  He lowered himself effortlessly, sliding into the organic muck. He was utterly silent, his ears twitching. He was trembling.

  He could hear the constant soft drip of the tunnels, the thick trickle of viscous water, the mournful soughing of warm subterranean winds, but his people were gone.

  Saul closed his eyes, stilled himself from his toes up. His joints ceased to work over each other; he banished the sound of his blood, slowed his heart, dispensed with all the tiny noises of his body. He became part of the sewer floor, and he listened.

  The quiet of the tunnels appalled him.

  He rested one ear gently against the floor. He could feel vibrations from all around the city.

  A long way off, something sounded.

  A high-pitched sound.

  Saul snapped to his feet. He was sweating and trembling violently.

  The Piper had come here? Was he in the sewers?

  Saul raced through the tunnels. He did not know where he was running. He ran to kill the shuddering of his legs, the terror he felt.

  What was he doing here?

  He sped past a ladder. Maybe he should leave, maybe it was time he left the sewers and ran for it through the streets above, he thought, but damn it, this was his space, his safe haven…he could not have it taken from him.

  He stopped still suddenly and cocked his head, listening again.

  The sound of the flute was a little closer now, and he could hear a scratching around it, the sound of claws on brick.

  The flute slid violently up and down the scale, a cacophony of quavers chasing each other in mad directions. The flute and the claws were strangely static. They did not grow nearer or further away.

  There was something strange, Saul realized, about the sound. He listened. Unconsciously he braced himself against the tunnel walls, spread his arms, one above him, one to his side, his legs slightly parted, each climbing the gentle incline of the cylindrical tunnel. He was framed by the passageway.

  The flute trilled on, and now Saul could hear something else, a voice raised in anguish.

  Loplop. Squawking, emitting meaningless, despairing cries.

  Saul moved forward, tracking the sounds through the labyrinth. They remained where they were. He wound his way through the dark towards them. Loplop still shrieked intermittently, but his cries were not pained, not tortured, but miserable. Loplop’s voice rose above the scrabbling—an orderly scrabbling, Saul realized, an unearthly timed scratching.

  The sounds were separated from him now only by thin walls, and he knew he was there, around the corner from the congregation. The tremors had returned to Saul’s body. He fought to control himself. Terror held him hard. He remembered the numbing speed with which the Piper moved, the power of his blows. The pain in his body, the pain he had managed to forget, to ignore, reawakened and coursed through him.

  Saul did not want to die.

  But there was something not right about this sound.

  Saul pressed himself hard against the wall and swallowed several times. He edged forward, to the junction with the tunnel which contained the sounds. He was very afraid. The mad piping, Loplop’s random cries, and above all the constant, orderly scrabbling against brick—everything continued as it had for minutes. It was loud, and so close it appalled him.

  He looked around. He did not know where he was. Deep somewhere, buried in the vastness of the sewer system.

  He steeled himself, drew his head slowly, silently around the edge of the brick.

  At first, all he could discern were the rats.

  A field of rats, millions of rats; a mass that started a few feet from the entrance to the tunnel and multiplied, bodies piling upon bodies, rat upon rat, a sharp gradient of hot little bellies and chests and legs. A moving mountain, replacing those that fell with new blood, defeating the urge of gravity to level its impossibly steep sides. The rats boiled over each other.

  They moved in time, they moved together.

  All together they pushed down with their right forefoot, then all together with their left. Then the back legs, again in time. They clawed each other, ripped each other’s skin, trampled on the young and dying—but they were one unit. They moved together, in time to the hideous music.

  The Piper was nowhere. On the other side of the rat mountain Saul could see King Rat. Saul could not see his face. But his body moved on the same beat as those of his rebellious people, and he danced with the same disinterested intensity, his body stiff and spasming in perfect time.

  Loplop cried again and again, and Saul glimpsed him, a desperate figure before King Rat, his fists flailing against King Rat’s chest. He pushed King Rat, tried to move him back, but King Rat continued with his stiff zombie dance.

  And behind them all, something hanging from the ceiling…something emerging, Saul saw, from a shaft to the pavements above. A black box, dangling at a ridiculous angle, its handle tied to a dirty rope…

  A ghetto-blaster.

  Saul’s eyes widened in astonishment.

  The fucker doesn’t even have to be here, he thought.

  He stumbled into the tunnel and approached the seething mass. The flute was ghastly, loud and fast and insane like an Irish jig played in Hell. Saul edged forward. He began to pass straggling rats. The ghetto-blaster swaye
d slightly. Saul waded into the mass of rats. So many already, all around him, and he had at least six feet to walk. It seemed as if every rat in the sewer had found its way here; monstrous foot-long beasts and mewling babies, dark and brown, crushing each other, killing each other in their eagerness to reach the music. Saul pushed forward, feeling the bodies squirm around him. A thousand claws ripped at him, never in antagonism, only in the ecstasy of the dance. Under the rats he could see were layers that moved sluggishly, tired and dying; and below them were rats who did not move at all. Saul walked knee deep in the dead.

  King Rat did not turn, stayed where he was, dancing at the head of his people once again. Loplop saw Saul. He shrieked and pushed past King Rat, launched himself through the living wall towards Saul.

  He was ruined. His suit was filthy, and in tatters. His face contorted, rage and confusion fleeting across it.

  He waded forward two, three steps, then stumbled under the weight of enthralled bodies. He went under, drowning in the seething mass. Saul ignored him, contemptuous of him, disgusted.

  But he too found it difficult to move; he pushed through the rats, killing, he was sure, with each step, unwillingly but inevitably. He swayed, regained his balance. The cacophonous flute was utterly deafening. Saul went down suddenly on one knee and the rats used him as a springboard, leapt from him, tried to fly to the dangling stereo.

  Saul swore, struggled to regain his feet, went under again. He became enraged, surged to his feet, spilling rats as he rose. A few feet away he could see the pitiful sight of Loplop’s body bobbing below the surface of the rats, trying and failing to stand.

  Saul shook himself and brown bodies spun through the air. He could not reach the boombox. He tugged hard with his feet, which seemed stuck as firmly as in quicksand. He roared, suddenly livid, pulled inexorably through the mass of rats, stumbled again, yanked and forced his way through, past King Rat, to the point where the rats thinned out and the stereo hung six feet from the floor.