LaRish clapped his front paws together. “That is the word. And now you know what is the problem with the king, you know what is the problem with LaRish too. I do not have good control of the tongue. When the king says something stupid, I say, ‘Hey, king, that was stupid!’ And then the king gets mad and tells me he is going to keel me and make me a corporale and I have to sleep in the guard room. But when the other king comes back and remembers I am a good friend to the king and to Tira-Nor, the good king says, ‘Why are you sleeping in the guard room? Come back into the palace.’ And he promotes me to generale again. So that is my problem. I never know where I will be sleeping.”
LaRish poked his head into the Great Hall and looked back to JaRed. “I think the king is almost done blabbing to Master TaMir. This is a good time to go in.”
JaRed followed LaRish into the vast hall of the king, which was second in size only to the Great Hall that stood like a vast black void between the endless chambers of the Commons and the tight quarters of the kingsguard.
As LaRish approached, King SoSheth stopped speaking. TaMir, standing to king’s left, drew back into the shadows.
LaRish stood at attention. “The king has sent for JaRed son of ReDemec, the one who is called Runt.”
“Yes, yes, I’ll see him.” The king waved dismissively. “What is it, mouse?”
JaRed looked around, bewildered. “You sent for me, Majesty.”
King SoSheth scowled. “Captain Blang has informed me that you met two rat spies yesterday. Tell me what happened.”
JaRed sighed, relieved that this summons had nothing to do with TaMir’s visit. He poured out his story. The words flowed in a long stream, without interruption.
Afterward, King SoSheth nodded. “Another sighting. They have crossed our borders in daylight.”
TaMir stepped forward. “It is an act of war, my king. It cannot be long before they attack.”
“How many times must I say it? We cannot afford a war with the rats!”
“Which is undoubtedly why they talk as though the city is already theirs. We must prepare for a siege, Majesty.”
SoSheth shook his head. “We haven’t the strength for a prolonged conflict. The kingsguard was depleted by last year’s plague, and the militia will hardly be capable of mounting a prolonged defense. And after this drought, what will we do for water?”
“We have no other choice.”
“No?” SoSheth stared into the darkness at the edge of the chamber. “What about the long hall?”
TaMir scowled. “The escape tunnel? You must not even consider it, Majesty.” His voice echoed ominously in the silence that followed.
JaRed agreed, though he didn’t say so. The Dark Forest was no place for females and kits.
“Why not?” SoSheth’s teeth ground together, as though to crush the word not into powder.
“We haven’t the strength to guard the helpless once we are out in the open. We will lose too many. With the defenses of Tira-Nor intact, we can force the rats to fight in unfamiliar territory, in our territory.”
“Enough!” King SoSheth slammed one paw against the dirt floor of the hall. “I will hear no more about it.”
TaMir limped forward. “As you wish. But there is a defense you haven’t considered.”
“Pray, enlighten me.”
“ElShua will not abandon us in a time of dire need. He will send help.”
“ElShua,” SoSheth growled. “What will he do? Cause the rats to fall over dead outside our gates? Kill them in their sleep? Or will he stuff our storage chambers with fresh berries and wild seed while we teach our kits about TyMin and the Ancients? If ElShua wanted to help us, he could start by making it rain. I need real help, not fantasies.”
“Fantasies?” TaMir repeated softly.
“Hoping for help from ElShua is like hoping for rain. The more you need it, the less you will get.”
JaRed stepped forward. “Your Highness,” he blurted. “ElShua is not a liar.” Even as the words spilled out, he understood his great foolishness. One did not speak freely with the king as one spoke to a commoner.
LaRish cleared his throat.
The king turned, his eyes filled with fire. “Why are you still here?” He pointed toward the entryway and snarled. “Get out!”
I have made another enemy, JaRed thought as he retreated from the palace. But even the king should not speak against ElShua. Especially the king. For no Elshua meant no hope.
They say the voice of Wroth stopped as abruptly as a spring rain.
They also say the Mice of the Curse did not notice at first. And when they did notice, they pretended not to. For what if hope should be shattered? What if the voice returned?
But two days passed, and someone gathered courage. A mouse peered into Wroth’s chamber.
Wroth was not there. The nuts, seeds, and moldering berries still stood in random piles. The room still reeked of oil. And in the center, a round dimple cratered the dirt where his body had curled in its restless inactivity. In the center of the dimple lay a single, ripe strawberry.
But no body. No hairless tail. No withering gaze.
The Inland Mice understood this only much later. The Mice of the Curse never understood it.
Wroth the Twisted had eaten one strawberry, that first offering of the Mice. And in return the strawberry’s poison had eaten him.
Wroth had taken what he pleased from ElShua’s gardens for so long, the obvious never occurred to him. He had not realized that Earth’s fruit might be different, that it was not made for him, just as he had not been made for it.
The strawberry destroyed him. Its ripe juices ate away at his organs like an acid, burning within him night and day, hour after hour. It scoured his belly and devoured his bones.
Within moments of swallowing it, his body began to spasm. By the second day he could not move at all. He lay curled into a tight husk of rotting flesh, his eyes popping out even as his skin drew inward.
And yet his voice never failed.
The Inland Mice understood this, too. Wroth’s voice issued not from mouth, lungs, and vocal chords, but from a tormented soul, from a disembodied spirit condemned to walk between—yet never in—the realms of heaven and Earth.
When the voice at last did stop, the Mice of the Curse stood in a group outside Wroth’s chamber, their eyes darting from floor to ceiling to center. Could it be true? Freedom? Sunshine? Silence?
Hope, dazzling in its newness, appeared among them. At last, Wroth was gone.
There was a moment. A time between possibilities. A pause long enough for a hundred conflicting thoughts, until even the most timid gathered the nerve to chirrup a sigh of relief and open the door of longing in a mouse’s heart.
Somehow Wroth knew. This was the perfect moment.
He spoke again, his voice cracking like the ice of a mighty river under thaw.
“You’ll regret this!”
Then came the bodiless laughter, high and sudden and furious, crashing outward like a gale from the very center of the dimple.
JaRed stood alone at the opening of the Wind Gate and stared west into the brown stalks of tall prairie grass that whispered and shook in the face of a dry, stiff breeze.
He had come to this place to think, to put together all that had happened in the last two days. And to escape the jealousy of his brothers.
His audience with the king had shaken him. Did King SoSheth not believe?
Then why all the pretense, the extravagant offerings, the annual fasts and long prayers? Why repeat the old stories about the Ancients and their legendary miracles? Why teach youngsters something he thought untrue?
Stranger still, why didn’t the king believe? What did SoSheth know that he hid from his people?
JaRed stared motionless into the cloudy gloom of dusk. The world seemed a cold and lonely place, as though life itself had become, in an afternoon, meaningless.
But the world was not empty.
A shadow swept into the plains of Tira-Nor like some mythical be
ast. Something worse than drought. Worse than predators.
Something to shake one’s convictions to the very core.
JaRed felt the presence of an evil larger than anything he could imagine lurking just beyond the grass. He wondered what face it would wear when it finally showed itself.
Perhaps it stood as close as Round Top, and was even now staring back at him with hungry, blood-filled eyes.
Perhaps, he thought, it is Lord Wroth himself.
Chapter Four
Black in the Tunnel
In the black of night a great serpent slid into Tira-Nor, its movements as silent as death.
JaRed saw the thing gliding like a dark ghost through the murky tunnels of his imagination. In his dream he understood the snake hunted not him alone, but all of Tira-Nor.
He sat under the vaporous canopy of the Royal Hall. TaMir knelt there, as did Father, Red, Horrid, and KahEesha. They were kneeling to him.
He looked for Mother, but she was not there. He felt like a kit again, unabashedly seeking her comfort, and disappointed that she was not there to see him crowned.
Then, in an instant, they were all gone, and the serpent hovered in the blackness above him. “You? A king?” It laughed. “You are a runt! More a morsel than a meal. Hold still while I eat you. Hold still while I eat your people.”
JaRed’s skin trembled. Fear and anger battled within his soul.
Something else slid into the room. Something good, but also terrifying. Though he could not see it, he felt it as surely as he felt the beads of sweat coursing through his fur.
Outside, high above the still, silent earth, a dark silhouette blotted the half-disk of the moon. JaRed recognized the shape at once. It was the Great Owl, vast and dark and ominous, sweeping the sky with outstretched wings, descending in a soundless spiral to the plain of Tira-Nor.
Down and down the Owl came until it was a shadow on the corn, stretching long and thin and deadly on the grass. At the eastern edge of the plain it swooped into the bottle-shaped rock and was swallowed into the crevice concealed there.
The things JaRed saw seemed both real and unreal. He watched himself rise and move from his sleeping hole into the family chamber, and from there into the tunnel outside. He padded east, toward the escape tunnel at the perimeter of Tira-Nor.
For a moment after he came fully awake, he didn’t understand how far he had walked. Then he saw the dark hole into the escape tunnel, and he stood there in the dim light of a glowstone, marveling.
Had it, after all, been anything but a strange dream? Had he walked all this way in his sleep?
He ought to go back. He had foraging duty tomorrow. He would need his rest.
His skin trembled. The something he had felt when TaMir touched him filled the tunnel with its unseen presence, turning JaRed’s stomach to water. He had to go on. Something terrible would happen if he didn’t.
He was not sure that something terrible wouldn’t happen anyway. But there was no way around it. The presence compelled him.
He stepped into the circle of darkness. Though he grew more terrified with each step, part of him actually liked the feeling. He felt as though he had found a purpose, something for which he was created. Not merely to survive such paralyzing fear, but to go beyond it— to feel the horror and take those impossible steps into darkness anyway.
He came to the guard chamber that marked the underground gate of Tira-Nor. A fading glowstone cast ghostly shadows limed in a green haze down the length of the hollow labyrinth ahead. The tunnel stretched out before him like an open mouth.
The old sentry at the guard chamber lay asleep at his post, but sputtered awake as JaRed nosed into the room. “Eh? Who is it? Well, speak up!”
“Hello, GrouSer,” JaRed said, relieved to see a familiar face. He had known GrouSer since childhood.
“That you, little JaRed? Eyesight ain’t what it used to be, bless my soul.” GrouSer’s drooping gray whiskers sprouted from his nose in wiry hoops, like straw shagging the end of an old broom. One of these had twisted around itself like a coiled spring and stuck fast in the end of GrouSer’s nose. GrouSer smoothed it back with one paw, his eyebrows stitched into a semi-permanent scowl. The order that resulted from his smoothing lasted perhaps three seconds before the offending whisker recoiled stubbornly back into his nose.
“Confound it!” GrouSer muttered, smoothing the whisker back again. “I’ve a mind to gnaw it off. What are you doing down here at this infernal hour?”
“I had a ... well, a nightmare, I guess. Just walking it off.”
“Well, don’t go too far. I don’t fancy coming after you.”
The tunnel wound deep into the earth. At its belly a shallow pool of cold water had collected. Jared would have to wade through it in order to go on. He paused and sniffed. The water smelled of clay and algae. He lapped a mouthful, but spat it out again. The bitter aftertaste of sulfur clung to his teeth.
This would be Tira-Nor’s last hope of moisture in the event of attack. Enough water for perhaps a hundred mice. Enough for a few days at most, and they would be desperate indeed before they drank it.
He shoved the thought aside and stepped into the cool water.
When he reached the end of the pool, he shook out his fur and trudged on. The tunnel rose and twisted, and JaRed passed the numerous switchbacks, doubleturns, pits, hooks, and fool’s errands that ensured the route’s safety. He knew by heart the way through the tunnel, whispered to him by his mother from the day of his birth in the sing-song poetry of tradition.
Quick is the hunter, and quick the prey.
Quick is the sun at end of day.
Quick to hear and slow to say,
Slower still when you’ve lost your way.
Better to wait in long delay
Than end in stillness, death, decay.
JaRed knew the meaning, of course. The first tunnel was the hunter, the second prey. The fourth tunnel led to a maze of confusing, almost unending, identical passages and fool’s errands. The last ended in a sudden deep pit studded with spikes. JaRed took the third tunnel on the right.
At last he came to the end hall, the hall of the Rock and Pillar. It was also called by an even older name, but that name sent a shiver of fear down his spine. A glowstone illuminated the chamber.
He shuffled forward and stood in the center of the yawning space that had once been called the Chamber of Wroth.
Built by the ancient prairie dogs as a hall of worship, the room was floored and roofed by two enormous slabs of limestone.
Long ago, the roof rock had begun to settle inward, and the Ancients had placed a supporting pillar at the north end to keep the rock from collapsing. When the mice of Tira-Nor decided to use the tunnel as an escape route, they gnawed through the pillar until only a narrow portion remained in the center. Now the pillar was shaped like an hourglass.
The mice of Tira-Nor may have lacked other qualities, but they were magnificent architects of dirt and wood. They knew when to stop gnawing. The roof rock balanced on little more than a bare twig now, yet it was said the roof had not moved a hair since the dedication of the tunnel.
On the north side of the chamber and extending from the beam itself, the mice had erected a thin wall of caked mud that joined the exit on the east side. The wall created the illusion of continuing tunnel to anyone coming from the other direction. In retreat, one brave mouse could stay behind and collapse the tunnel by gnawing through the beam. But an enemy coming from the opposite side would not know the beam was even there.
All this JaRed knew, for many stories were woven around this ancient bloody chamber. But now JaRed saw something more. He understood why the Ancients had been driven out of this place so long ago. He saw the thing that had brought an anger so large the ground trembled with it.
In the pillar the Ancients had carved a wild and terrifying statue of Lord Wroth. The tunnel mice had plastered over the pillar with mud, but the mud had caked and fallen away, revealing Wroth’s sneering face like
something out of a nightmare.
Wroth’s wooden mouth hung open. Between his teeth the mutilated body of a mouse dangled lifelessly.
JaRed stared.
Wroth seemed to stare back.
Why, JaRed wondered, would anyone worship such a malevolent god, a god of double-dealings and lies, a god of hunger and pain?
Every mouse knew that story.
Wroth owned the mice afterward, yet his lust for vengeance knew no bounds.
The Mice of the Curse had suffered mightily, for the Voice had stolen both work and work’s rewards. It had stolen their play and the fruit of playing.
Under this torment their bodies changed. They slouched. They looked always down, never up. They muttered and licked their lips, as though to glean crumbs from a past meal.
They hungered.
Now Wroth used new words. He allowed a faint promise of goodness to edge his voice. He spoke of a bright and promising future. A not-too-distant Might Be. Days of Much.
He summoned a council on the night of a full moon and commanded a mouse be chosen by lot.
The mice obeyed. A mouse was chosen.
It huddled before the dimple in the cave, trembling.
Wroth offered the others a bargain. In exchange for one tiny, eensy-weensy little favor, he would make them great. He would give them tremendous size and strength to crush their enemies. He promised they would never hunger again. He promised them a glorious future!
And all he asked was this one insignificant nothing. A trifling hardly worth the breath of mention.
“Kill this mouse!” Wroth said quietly.
The chosen mouse shivered.
The others huddled in silence. The air in the cave grew heavy. Not so much as a nose twitched.
It was said that this was the turning point of the beginning of the world. If the mice were to become good and free again, this would have been the time and place to have done it. But the brave ones had already fled.
And so there was only silence. Until at last one mouse found the courage to ask, “What does kill mean?”
Afterward, when the deed was done and blood stained their paws, the Earth trembled so violently the sea rose up against the cliffs nearly to the mouth of the caves. The sun hid its face. The stars blinked into darkness for grief.
Runt the Brave: Bravery in the Midst of a Bully Society (Legends of Tira-Nor) Page 4