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.