Shift. Look. Step.
In his mind JaRed saw the white sign on its rusting legs. He stood beneath it, looking down at a starving rat with eyes like empty wells.
“Tweener hungry,” the rat said. Fur jutted from his body in thick strands, like pieces of string.
“Eat something,” JaRed whispered.
The rat closed its eyes. “The Meatsies and the Dumpsters hates Tweener. Cruel they are!” He gave a long, shuddering moan that might have broken JaRed’s heart had there been anything left to break.
Shift. Look. Step.
“The Meatsies has plenty. The Dumpsters has plenty. Tweener has nothing.”
A voice spoke from the stream of time, from the vision, and it sounded like ice breaking to pieces on a swollen river: “They don’t understand you, do they?” Full of cold sympathy. Bursting with lifeless generosity.
“No,” Tweener said. “Dumpsters and Meatsies the same. No one helps Tweener. Tweener lives alone.”
“Ah,” said the Voice. “All alone in a terrible world.”
“Yes. And hungry. Always hungry, always small. No one ever—”
“Poor Tweener!” the voice cut in. It echoed in JaRed’s ears like a thunderclap. “Living between two gardens of plenty, yet always without. Do you know why some mice call themselves Meatsies and why others are Dumpsters? It is because they have plenty, Tweener. Plenty! Ah, yes. The Meatsies live in a world of hanging meat, always there for the teeth. The Dumpsters’ land is filled with the most lavish excesses of the earth! Over-ripe bananas and half-eaten sandwiches and berries and breads and delights Tweener cannot even imagine. But do the Dumpsters share?”
“No,” Tweener said miserably.
“Do the Meatsies?”
“No,” Tweener whispered.
Shift. Look. Step.
“But then,” said the voice, “that is the way of mice, isn’t it?”
Tweener moaned.
“Yes, that is the way of mice.” The voice sighed. “Without food, you will never grow. And if you never grow, how can you avenge yourself against the cruelty of mice?”
“You see!” Tweener exclaimed.
“I see. You want to hurt them.”
Tweener seemed to think for a moment. His eyes reflected in the light of the dying sun. “Tweener does,” he said at last. “Much much much.”
“You want to make them pay?”
“Yes!”
“For every cruel joke, every vicious bite, every damnable thing they’ve done to you?”
“All and more! Ten times more!”
“Ah, Tweener,” said the voice. “There is a way. If only I could trust you.”
Tweener licked his lips as though he sensed something wonderful about to slip through his grasp. “Trust Tweener! Tell the way to pay back the Meatsies and the Dumpsters!”
Shift. Look. Step.
“Very well,” the voice said softly, like a dying breath. “I will make you great and strong and terrible. I will give you an army of rats. And you will fill them with your hatred!”
Captain Blang watched JaRed’s struggle from his perch outside the West Gate, his teeth clenched, a quiet fury raging in his soul. The runt was so small. It seemed to take forever.
When at last JaRed had hauled LaRish’s body inside the Shade Gate, and Blang’s most trusted warriors had retreated into the hole behind him, he stood there a moment longer.
The honor of being last meant nothing now. Captain Blang had been at the wrong place at the wrong time. He had not been a part of the fighting today, and the sense of futility that gripped him was almost unbearable.
He dared the rats to attack him. Let the whole army descend on me here! He would show them what one mouse could do!
But the line of rats didn’t move.
And so, as the sun fell into the black web of the Dark Forest, Blang descended into the despair of the besieged city.
Chapter Ten
The Siege
Despite GoRec’s implied threat, the rats did not attack in force the next morning. A few half-hearted skirmishes broke out around the Tower and Seed Gates as GoRec tested Tira-Nor’s defenses, but the kingsguard refused to respond to these feints.
Stationed at their emergency posts throughout the city, the militia passed the day telling stories and speculating about the rat army. Females and kits huddled in their private quarters and waited for news.
In the afternoon, gate sentries reported no less than seven hawks circling the skies, drawn by the smorgasbord of rat flesh on the plain. GoRec’s army apparently could find no place above ground where they could all hide at once.
“I never thought I’d be grateful for hawks,” JoHanan said to JaRed as they sat in the blue-lit antechambers of the palace.
“This war won’t be won by hawks,” JaRed said.
“Well, it won’t be lost by them either. I pray they eat well tonight.”
JaRed shrugged. “It won’t make any difference. At this rate it would take months to whittle GoRec’s army down to a manageable size.“
“GoRec,” JoHanan said. “How come those hawks never pick him for a meal? They couldn’t ask for a bigger target.”
JaRed knew the answer, but he didn’t voice it. Because Lord Wroth is with him.
“I suppose they don’t want indigestion,” JoHanan said.
JaRed sensed JoHanan was trying to ease his pain, but he wasn’t in the mood for laughing.
“What do you think he’ll do now?” JoHanan asked. “Do you think he’ll try a frontal assault?”
“No,” Captain Blang said from the entry. “I expect he’ll try to starve us out. Or he may try to burrow new holes into the Commons by moonlight. How’s the shoulder, JaRed?”
“Fine,” JaRed answered, surprised at the coldness that had crept into his voice. The nightmare of dragging LaRish’s bleeding body inside the Shade Gate had changed him. He felt as though all emotion, all hope, had drained from his heart.
Captain Blang nodded grimly. “I am told GoRec himself is waiting at the West Gate for a parley. King SoSheth wants you to be there, JoHanan.”
The prince rose. “Come with me, JaRed. If you’re up to it.”
JaRed nodded. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
Outside the Shade Gate, GoRec stood alone, his Ur’Lugh warriors arrayed in a semicircle behind him. King SoSheth, Prince JoHanan, Captain Blang, and JaRed watched from the guard chambers just inside the hole.
Even though the ground on which GoRec stood sloped downward from the gate, he towered above their heads. But JaRed could tell by the way GoRec’s eyes moved that he could not see into the darkness of the hole.
King SoSheth edged closer to the shaft of light that speared the tunnel near the opening. “Speak, rat,” he commanded, his voice calm and clear, the sound of leadership.
GoRec grinned, revealing long and jagged teeth. “Are you the king of Tira-Nor?” The gravel in his voice rattled under the weight of the words.
“I am. What do you want?”
GoRec’s grin twisted his face, as though he were about to scream. “I have come to see the mighty Tira-Nor. My new home. ”
SoSheth’s face twitched. His eyes narrowed to slits. “You must have taken a wrong turn at the corn field, rat. Your home is the sewer.”
GoRec threw back his head and laughed, and inside the tunnel the earth shook. “It is easy to cast insults from the safety of your pretty tunnel, king. But it takes no courage.”
King SoSheth edged closer to the hole. “If that’s what’s bothering you, why not come inside, rat? I will insult you to your ugly face.”
GoRec laughed again. “I would, but you have narrowed the hole with caked mud, and as you can see, I will not fit. It appears, oh mighty mouse king, that I am not really welcome inside. I must change that.“
Behind him, the Ur’Lugh snickered.
“Must you cower in your tunnel?” GoRec growled, his voice lower, more hostile. “Why not come out and fight me, one on one, as a king should? You can see
my guard has drawn back. I promise it will be a fair fight.”
“Fair?” JoHanan blurted. “That monster is twice your size, Father! And faster than LaRish.”
Captain Blang nosed into the tunnel next to King SoSheth. “Let me have the honor of fighting him, Majesty.”
King SoSheth sighed. “Brave Captain Blang. You are too valuable to gamble on something as fragile as honor.”
Captain Blang frowned and looked away. “Then let him bluster. An owl will pluck him from the earth before the night has passed. Even a blind owl could not miss something that big.”
But no owl came, and the next morning GoRec stood outside the Shade Gate and issued his challenge to all of Tira-Nor as the kingsguard huddled in their fortified chambers, too humiliated to speak.
“Who will fight me? Is there not even one among you with the courage to die like a warrior?”
But Tira-Nor remained silent.
HaRed awoke in darkness. To make movement by the militia easier, SoSheth had ordered all glowstones in the Commons be moved from private chambers and gate defenses into the corridors. The family chambers had been black for three days now.
Morning still stood at a distance. So what was this noise in his ears? He strained at the air. Something almost too faint to be heard, and yet persistent, rattled in his sleeping chamber. His whiskers vibrated with the sound, and instinct screamed warnings that the sound could not be natural.
A scratching noise like claws dragging through sand came from the tunnel outside the ReDemec home.
He licked his lips.
No, not the tunnel. The sound came from behind him, from the earthen wall at his back.
He turned in the cozy sphere of emptiness that was his sleeping chamber and pressed one ear against the stone-smooth dirt of the wall.For a moment he hardly dared to breathe.
Then the noise came again, unmistakably louder.
Scratch. Scritch-scratch-scraaaaatch. Scratch. Scritchscratch-scraaaaatch.
He huddled there unmoving a moment longer, listening to different spots along the wall. He finally cupped a paw behind his ear to focus the sound.
Scratch. Scritch-scratch-scraaaaatch.
He understood suddenly, and fear gripped him.
He bolted into the entry to the family quarters and froze there a moment, thinking. Should he tell Father? No. He couldn’t. Father and KeeRed had drawn evening duty in the militia and weren’t home. He thought about waking Mother, but decided against that too. There was nothing for her to do, and she would only worry. And KahEesha was spending the night with a friend in the lower levels of the Lesser Families.
He padded to the hallway and sniffed the air.
West. He must go west.
He ran to the third intersection on the right and dove south along the familiar perimeter tunnel now only barely lit by glowstones every thirty lengths.
The militia expected GoRec to send his main attack into the center of the city, where it could not easily be contained. As a result, the perimeter tunnels were patrolled thinly by older mice who were considered too weak to be of much value in the main battle.
But now a feeling of impending doom twisted in HaRed’s gut. What if King SoSheth and the militia commanders were wrong? What if the attack came not in the center, but from the edge?
He stopped and put one ear to the tunnel wall and held his breath. In the near darkness it seemed the whole world had come to a sudden and desperate end.
Scratch. Scritch-Scratch-Scraaaaatch.
HaRed’s heart skipped a beat, quivered, then thudded like a stone in his chest.
They were coming. Now. Here.
GoRec’s rats were digging a borehole at the perimeter, and once it opened, it would disgorge rats into the soft underbelly of the Commons, and there would be nothing to stop them.
He stumbled backward in the darkness, his mouth as dry as sand.
He wheeled and flew back down the tunnel toward home.
King SoSheth could not sleep. He stalked the downy carpet of his private chambers with the calculated movements of a caged tiger, quietly fuming.
He had sent the servants away. Normally he did not like to be alone. Being alone reminded him of his terrible and secret inadequacies. A king, after all, is not really much different from his subjects, though he may pretend otherwise. But just now he felt too angry to notice his loneliness.
Fear and fury warred in his mind. Who did this overgrown hangnail—this GoRec—think he was? What harm had Tira-Nor done to the rats to provoke such spite? What right did GoRec have to wrest SoSheth’s city from him?
It had been half a day since GoRec had appeared at the West Gate with another challenge, but the words were branded white hot into SoSheth’s brain. Nothing, it seemed, would erase them. The more he fretted, the hotter they burned.
“Mouse king,” GoRec had shouted, the insolence in his voice palpable. “How long will you hide? Come. I will make you a new wager. Send me your best fighter. If he defeats me in fair battle, the rats of GoRec will leave Tira-Nor peacefully. If not, your vaunted kingsguard will fight us in the open for the prize of Tira-Nor!”
And what had King SoSheth done? Had he responded with dignity? With honor?
SoSheth scowled, his paws clenched into fists.
No. King SoSheth—renowned through the city as the ablest fighter in mouse history—had ordered Captain Blang to silence.
“Ignore the brute,” JoHanan had said. “He is just taunting you.”
Perhaps.
But how could SoSheth ignore the taunting of his own heart?
You abandoned ElShua. Now ElShua has abandoned you.
Truth was, he did fear GoRec. That admission— something he would never have confessed audibly— tormented him. Never mind that such fear made sense. GoRec was a monster, not a rat. Even the Ur’Lugh feared him.
The question was, Who didn’t fear GoRec?
“Your Majesty,” a voice said.
SoSheth turned, too startled to be angry.
A small mouse stood there, one of the kingsguard. He recognized the face. A shock of white fur drooped over one eye.
The tunnel-breaker. The serpent-killer. The one TaMir had anointed king over Tira-Nor. But this mouse certainly didn’t look like a king. He didn’t even look like one of the kingsguard. He was too small. Too young. Too humble.
“How did you get in here?” SoSheth demanded.
“Captain Blang gave his permission to the guards on duty. I told him I would wait until morning to speak to you, but then I heard you pacing, and I thought …”
“I can’t sleep. What of it?” SoSheth glared. After a moment he said more softly, “What do you want?”
“I …” The tunnel-breaker looked away. In anyone else SoSheth would have assumed the pause expressed nervousness or fear of invoking his wrath. But the little mouse didn’t seemed moved by either of these things.
“I don’t have all night.” A lie, of course. Who knew when he would sleep soundly again?
“Majesty,” the little mouse said, his gaze on the matted floor. “I want permission to fight GoRec.”
HaRed wasted precious seconds bolting for home. He caught himself halfway back. A shadowy plan of rousing Mother and getting her to safety had wavered in his mind, but as he ran he realized this was impractical. The rats had to be stopped at the point of entry, or no place in Tira-Nor would be safe.
He stopped abruptly, turned, and hesitated a moment longer. There was, after all, only one place to go.
Moments later he stood outside the southernmost barracks of the militia, where a guard stopped him in the entrance.
“What do you want?” the guard demanded.
“The rats are attacking.”
The guard’s eyes widened. “Where?”
“The southern perimeter.”
“Are you sure? We’ve had no report of—”
“Yes, I’m sure,” HaRed blurted. “How many reports do you need?”
To their credit, the militia—who
were not as well trained as the kingsguard—responded quickly, though to HaRed it seemed to take forever to rouse the sleeping soldiers and form three quick-response squads.
HaRed was surprised the militia commanders only sent fifteen mice. When an officer ordered him to lead the foremost of the three five-mouse squads to where he had heard the borehole being dug, his feeling of impending doom grew. Quick-response squads were used like corks in a breaking dam and were considered expendable.
The squad leader, a civil engineer named MarSihlu, ordered the squad into a loose line while the other two squads were being roused. The plan, apparently, was to wait for the rats to complete the borehole and attack them as they fell through.
“All right,” MarSihlu said. “It’s time to earn our pay, such as it is. Lieutenant HuJeq doesn’t think this is a serious threat. He thinks it’s a feint. And who am I to argue with an officer?”
The squad laughed nervously.
“Nevertheless,” MarSihlu continued, “if the rats get in, we could be in real trouble. Remember, they don’t know the tunnels of the Commons the way we do. We’re going to use that against them. Stay together. Watch your backs.”
HaRed saw the terrible truth in his eyes. These are not soldiers. They are common, ordinary mice. What chance do they have against trained rats? When he understood how frightened they were, he stopped looking any of them in the eye.
MarSihlu drew himself up and looked from face to face. “Cheer up!” He smiled as if in demonstration. “I expect we’ll all be back here before dawn, trying to sleep through FalKirq’s snoring.”
FalKirq grinned sheepishly, and again the mice laughed. MarSihlu’s relaxed demeanor was helping, if only a little.
We’re going to be too late, HaRed thought. King SoSheth had gambled everything on the assumption GoRec would attack the center, and now there were not enough defenders in position to save Tira-Nor. Not enough to save the Commons, anyway. The thought made him numb.
Runt the Brave: Bravery in the Midst of a Bully Society (Legends of Tira-Nor) Page 11