Nicolas was sobbing again. I sighed. Poor man. Or whatever he was.
I set my hand upon his tousled head. His hair was slick with sweat. “Aw, Nicolas. Aw, now. Don’t worry. We’ll get ’em. There’s worse ways to punish people than setting fire to their houses. Hellfowl, we did it one way today, and by nightfall tomorrow, we’ll have done another! So smile! Everything’s going steamingly!”
Twin ponds of tears brimmed, spilled, blinked up at me.
“Don’t you mean swimmingly?” Nicolas gasped, sighing down his sobs.
“I will soon, you don’t quit your bawling. Hey, Nico, come on!” I clucked my tongue. “Dry up, will ya? You’re not supposed to drown me till dawn!”
I could always make Nicolas laugh.
* * *
In a career so checkered that two old men could’ve played board games on it, I’ve come near death four times. Count ’em, four. Now if we’re talking about coming within a cat-calling or even a spitting distance from death, I’d say the number’s more like “gazillions of times,” but I don’t number ’em as “near”-death experiences till I’m counting the coronal sutures on the Reaper of Rodents’s long-toothed skull.
The first time I almost died, it was my fault. It all had to do with being thirteen and drunk on despair and voluntarily wandering into a rat-baiting arena because life isn’t worth living if a Swan Princess won’t be your girlfriend. Embarrassing.
The second time was due to a frisky rat lass named Molly. She, uh, used a little too much teeth in the, you know, act. Bled a lot. Worth it, though.
Third? Peanut butter.
Fourth—one of the elder Cobblersawl boys and his brand-new birthday knife.
But I have never been so near death as that day Nicolas drowned me in the Drukkamag River.
He’d begged me not to hear him. That morning, just before dawn, he’d said, “Maurice, Maurice. Will you not stop up your ears and go to the Maze Wood and wait this day out?”
“No, Nicolas,” said I, affronted. “What, and give a bunch of poor fixed rats the glory of dying for Dora Rose? This is my end. My story. I’ve waited my whole life for a chance like this. My Folk will write a drama of this day, and the title of that play shall be Maurice the Incomparable!”
Nicolas ducked the grand sweep of my hand. “You cannot really mean to drown, Maurice. You’ll never know how the end of your drama plays out. What if we need you again, and you are dead and useless? What if...what if she needs you?”
I clapped his back. “She never did before, Nicolas my friend. That’s why I love the girl. Oh, and after I die today, do something for me, would you? You tell Dora Rose that she really missed out on the whole cross-species experimentation thing. You just tell her that. I want her to regret me the rest of her life. I want the last verse of her swan song to be my name. Maurice the Incomparable!”
Nicolas ducked again, looking dubious and promising nothing. But I knew he would try. That’s what friends did, and he was the best.
You may wonder—if you’re not Folk, that is—how I could so cavalierly condemn thousands of my lesser cousins, not to mention my own august person, of whom I have a high (you might even say “the highest”) regard—to a watery grave. Who died and made me arbiter of a whole pestilential population’s fate? How could I stand there, stroking my whiskers, and volunteer all those lives (and mine) to meet our soggy end at the Pied Piper’s playing?
I could sum it up in one word.
Drama.
I speak for all rats when I speak for myself. We’re alike in this. We’ll do just about anything for drama. Or comedy, I guess; we’re not particular. We’re not above chewing the scenery for posterity. We must make our territorial mark (as it were) on the arts. The Swan Folk have their ballet. We rats, we have theatre. We pride ourselves on our productions. All the cities, high and low, that span this wide, wide world are our stage.
“No point putting it off,” I told Nicolas, preparing to fur down. “Who’s to say that if you don’t drown me today, a huge storm won’t come along and cause floods enough to drown me tomorrow? If that happens, I’ll have died for nothing! Can any death be more boring?”
Nicolas frowned. “The weather augur under the Hill can predict the skies up to a month in exchange for one sip of your tears. She might be able to tell you if there will be rain...”
I cut him off. “What I’m saying is, you have to seize your death by the tail. Know it. Name it. My death,” I said, “is you.”
His laugh ghosted far above me as I disappeared into my other self.
“Hurricane Nicolas,” he said. “The storm with no center.”
* * *
Comes a song too high and sweet for dull human ears. Comes a song like the sound of a young kit tickled all to giggles. Like the sharp, lustful chirps of a doe in heat. Comes a song for rats to hear, and rats alone. A song that turns the wind to silver, a wind that brings along the tantalizing smell of cream.
Excuse me, make that “lots of cream.”
A river of cream. A river that is so rich and thick and pure you could swim in it. You bet your little rat babies there’s cream aplenty. Cream for you. Cream for your cousins, for your aunts and uncles, too. There’s even cream for that ex-best buddy of yours who stole your first girlfriend along with the hunk of stinky cheese you’d saved up for your birthday.
Comes a song that sings of a river of cream. Cream enough for all.
Once I get there, ooh, baby, you betcha...I’m gonna find that saucy little doe who’s chirping so shamelessly. I’m gonna find her, and then I’m gonna frisk the ever-living frolic out of her, nipping and mounting and slipping and licking the cream from her fur. Oh, yeah. Let’s all go down to that river.
Now. Let’s go now. I wanna swim.
* * *
Funny thing, drowning.
By the time I realized I didn’t want it anymore, there was nothing I could do. I was well past the flailing stage, just tumbling along head over tail, somewhere in the sea-hungry currents of the Drukkamag. The only compass I could go by indicated one direction.
Deathward.
Rats are known swimmers. We can tread water for days, hold our breath for a quarter of an hour, dive deeply, survive in open sea. Why? Because our instinct for survival is unparalleled in the animal kingdom, that’s why.
Once Nicolas’s song started, I’d no desire to survive anymore. Until I did. I never said rats were consistent. We’re entitled to an irregularity of opinion, just like mortals. Even waterlogged and tossed against Death’s very cheese grater, we’re allowed to change our minds.
And so, I did the only thing I had mind enough left to do. I fleshed back to man-shape.
The vigor of the transformation brought me, briefly, to the surface. I mouthed a lungful of air before the current sucked me back down into the river.
This is it, I thought. Damn it, damn it, da—
And then I slammed into a barrier both porous and implacable. Water rushed through it, yet I did not. I clung to it, finger and claw, and almost wept (which would have been entirely redundant at that point) when a great hook plunged at me from out of the blue, snagged me under the armpit, and hauled.
Air. Dazzle. Dry land.
I was deposited onto the stony slime of a riverbank. Someone hastily threw a blanket over my collapse. It smelled of sick dog and woodsmoke, but it was warm and dry. I think I heard my name, but I couldn’t answer, sprawled and gasping, moving from blackout to dazzle and back again while voices filtered through my waterlogged ears.
Children’s voices. Excited. Grim.
I considered opening my eyes. Got as far as blurred slittedness before my head started pounding.
We were under some sort of bridge. Nearby, nestled among boulders, a large fire burned. Over this there hung an enormous cauldron, redolent of boiling potatoes. A girl with a white rag tied over her eyes stirred it constantly. Miss Possum, or I missed my guess.
A bowl of her potato mash steamed near my elbow. I almost rolled
over and dove face-first into it, but common sense kicked in. Didn’t much fancy drowning on dry land so soon after my Drukkamag experience, so I lapped at the mash with more care, watching everything. Not far from Possum squatted Master Froggit, carefully separating a pile of dead rats from living as quickly as they came to him from the figure on the bridge. The dead he set aside on an enormous canvas. The living he consigned to blind Possum’s care. She dried them and tried to feed them. There weren’t many.
My slowly returning faculty for observation told me that our bold young recruits had strung a net across a narrowish neck of the Drukkamag, beneath one of the oldest footbridges of Amandale. They weighted the net with rocks. When the rats began to fetch up against it, Greenpea, seated on the edge of the bridge, leg stumps jutting out before her, fished them out again. She wielded the long pole that had hooked me out of the current.
For the first time since, oh, since I was about thirteen, I think, I started sobbing. Too much hanging out with Nicolas, I guess. Not eating properly. Overextending myself. That sort of thing. Prolonged close contact with Dora Rose had always had this effect on me.
I applied myself to my potatoes.
Once sated, making a toga of my dog blanket, I limped up to the bridge and gazed at the girl with the hooked pole.
“Mistress Greenpea.”
“Hey.” She glanced sidelong at me as I sat next to her. “Maurice the Incomparable, right?”
“Right-o.” I warmed with pleasure. “Hand that thing over, will ya? My arms feel like noodles, but I reckon they can put in a shift for the glory of my species.”
She grunted and handed her pole to me. “I don’t see any more live ones. Not since you.”
“Well, cheer up!” I adjured her. “We’ll rise again. We’re the hardiest thing since cockroaches, you know. Besides you humans, I mean. Roaches. Blech! An acquired taste, but they’ll do for lean times. We used to dare each other to bite ’em in half when we were kits.”
Greenpea, good girl, gagged only a bit, and didn’t spew. I flopped a couple of corpses over to Froggit’s canvas. “So. This whole net thing your idea, Miss Greenpea?”
She replied in a flat, unimpressed recitation, “Dora Rose said you’d try to drown yourself with the other rats. Said it would be just like you, and that we must save you if we could, because no way was she letting you stain her memory with your martyrdom.”
I chuckled. “Said that, did she?”
“Something like that.” Greenpea shrugged. Or maybe she was just rolling her stiff shoulders. “Before we...we hung her on that tree, I promised we’d do what we could for you. She seemed more comfortable, after.” She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “And then, when I saw all the other rats in the river, I tried to save them, too. Why should you be so special? But then…So long as the Pied Piper played, even though he’s still all the way back in Amandale, the rats I rescued wouldn’t stay rescued. No sooner did we fish them out of the Drukkamag but they jumped back in again.”
“Listen, kid.” I returned her hard glare with a hard-eyed look of my own. “That was always the plan. You agreed to it. We all did.”
The net bulged beneath us. Greenpea didn’t back down, but the bridge of her nose scrunched beneath her spectacles. Behind thick lenses, those big gray eyes of hers widened in an effort not to cry. How old was she, anyway? Eleven? Twelve? One of the older girls in Ulia Gol’s child army. Near Ocelot’s age, I thought. Old enough at any rate to dry her tears by fury’s fire. Which she did.
“It’s horrible,” Greenpea growled. “I hate that they had to die.”
“Horrible, yeah,” I agreed. “So’s your legs. And Possum’s eyes. And Froggit’s tongue. And twenty dead swans. We’re dealing with ogres here, not unicorns. Not the nicest monsters ever, ogres. Although, when you come right down to it, unicorns are nasty brutes. Total perverts. But anyway, don’t fret, Miss Greenpea. We’re gonna triumph, have no doubt. And even if we don’t”—I started laughing, and it felt good, good, good to be alive—“even if we don’t, it’ll make a great tragedy, won’t it? I love a play where all the characters die at the end.”
* * *
The Pied Piper stood on the steps of Brotquen Cathedral, facing the Mayor of Amandale, who paraded herself a few steps above him. Hans and his handpicked horde of henchman waited nearby at the ready. Displayed at their feet was Froggit’s macabre canvas of corpses. Most of the rats we’d simply let tumble free toward the sea when we cut the net, but we kept a few hundred back for a fly-flecked show-and-tell.
Nicolas’s face was gray and drawn. His shoulders drooped. New lines had appeared on his forehead apparently overnight, and his mouth bowed like a willow branch. The pipe he no longer played glowed against his ragged chest like a solid piece of moonlight.
“As you see,” he announced, “the rats of Amandale are drowned.”
“Mmn,” said Ulia Gol.
Most of the town—myself and my three comrades included—had gathered below the cathedral on Kirkja Street to gawk at the inconceivability of a thousand bright canaries stacked in a small leather chest right there in the open. The coins cast a golden glitter in that last lingering caress of sunset, and reflected onto the reverent faces of Amandale’s children, who wore flowers in their hair and garlands ’round their necks. All of Amandale had been feasting and carousing since the rats began their death march at dawn that morning. Many of the older citizens now bore the flushed, aggressive sneers of the pot-valiant. In the yellow light of all that dying sun and leaping gold, they, too, looked new-minted, harder and glintier than they’d been before.
Nicolas did not notice them. His gaze never left Ulia Gol’s shrewd face. She blocked his path to the gold. Hand over heart, he tried again.
“From the oldest albino to the nakedest newborn, Madame Mayor, the rats are drowned one and all. I have come for my payment.”
But she did not move. “Your payment,” she purred, “for what?”
Nicolas inhaled deeply. “I played my pipe, and I made them dance, and they danced themselves to drowning.”
“Master Piper...” Ulia Gol oozed closer to him. I could see Nicolas stiffen in an effort not to back away.
I must say, the Mayor of Amandale had really gussied herself up for this occasion. Her pink wig was caught up in a sort of birdcage, all sorts of bells and beads hanging off it. The bone-paneled brocade of her crimson dress was stiff enough to stand up by itself, and I imagined it’d require three professional grave robbers with shovels to exhume her from her maquillage. She smelled overpoweringly of rotten pears and sour grapes. Did I say so before? At the risk of repeating myself, then: a magnificent woman, Ulia Gol.
“I watched you all day, Master Piper,” she told Nicolas. “I strained my ears and listened closely. You put your pipe to your lips, all right, my pretty perjurer, and fabricated a haggard verisimilitude, but never a note did I hear you play.”
“No,” Nicolas agreed. “You would not have. I did not play for you, Ulia Gol.”
“Prove it.”
He pointed at the soggy canvas. “There is my proof.”
Ulia Gol shrugged. Her stiff lace collar barely moved. “I see dead rats, certainly. But they might have come from anywhere, drowned in any number of ways. The Drukkamag River runs clean and clear, and Amandale is much as it ever was. Yes, there were rats. Now there are none.” She opened her palms. “Who knows why? Perhaps they left us of their own accord.”
Most of the crowd rustled in agreement. Sure, you could tell a few wanted to mutter in protest, but pressed tight their lips instead. Fresh black bruises adorned the faces of many of these. What were the odds that Ulia Gol’s main detractors had been made an example of since last night’s town meeting in Orchestra Hall? Not long, I’d say. Not long at all.
Ulia Gol swelled with the approval of her smitten constituents. Their adoration engorged her. Magic coursed through her. There was no mistaking what she was if you knew to look out for it. She stank like an ogre and grinned like a giant, and all tha
t was missing was a beanstalk and a bone grinder and a basket for her bread. She loomed ever larger, swamping Nicolas in her shadow.
“Master Piper—if a Master indeed you are—you cannot prove that your alleged playing had aught to do with the rats’ disappearance. Perhaps they decamped due to instinct. Migration. After all, their onset was as sudden as their egress. Perhaps you knew this. Did you really come to Amandale to aid us, or were you merely here by happenstance? Seeing our dismay and our disarray, did you seek to take advantage of us, to ply your false trade, and cheat honest citizens of their hard-earned coin?”
The Mayor of Amandale was closer to the truth than she realized—ha! But that didn’t worry me. Ulia Gol, after all, wasn’t interested in truth. The only thing currently absorbing her was her intent to cheat the man who’d refused her bed the night before. It never occurred to her that the plague of rats was a misdirection of Amandale’s attention during the theft of the bone orchestra. Okay, and part of its punishment for the murdered swans.
“Look at the color of his face,” Greenpea whispered. “Is the piper all right?”
“Well…er.” I squirmed. “It’s Nicolas, right? He’s never all the way all right.”
But seeing his sick pallor, I wasn’t sure Nicolas remembered that all this was part of a bigger plan. He looked near to swooning. Not good. We needed him for this next bit.
“Please,” he whispered. “Please…just pay me and I’ll be on my way.”
“I am sorry, Master Piper.” Ulia Gol laughed at him, her loud and lovely laugh. “But I cannot pay you all this gold for an enterprise you cannot prove you didn’t engineer. In fact, you should consider yourself lucky if you leave Amandale in one piece.”
The crowd around us tittered and growled. The children drew closer together, far less easy with the atmosphere of ballooning tension than were their parents. It was the adults whose eyes narrowed, whose flushed faces had empurpled and perspired until they looked all but smaller models of their Mayor. Nicolas took a step nearer Ulia Gol, though what it cost him, I do not know. He was a smallish man, and had to look up to her. Nicolas only sometimes seemed tall because of his slender build.
Bone Swans: Stories Page 10