King Rat

by China Miéville

  He lowered his lips to these webs and spoke in a voice he knew sounded removed and intimate, like King Rat’s. The spiders were quite still.

  “I need you to do what I say, now,” he whispered. “I need you to find Anansi, find your boss. Tell him I’m waiting for him. Tell him I need to see him.”

  The little creatures were still for a long time. They seemed to hesitate. Saul lowered himself again.

  “Go on,” he said, “spread the word.”

  There was another moment’s hesitation, then the spiders, six or seven of them, tiny and fierce, took off at the same moment. They left their webs together, on long threads, little abseiling special forces, disappearing down the side of the building.

  Fabian drifted on waves.

  He was stuck very deep in his own head. His body made itself felt occasionally, with a fart or a pain or an itch, but for the most part he could forget it was even there. He was conscious of almost nothing except perpetual motion, a tireless pitch and yaw. He was not sure if it was his body or only his mind which was lulled by the liquid movement.

  There was a Drum and Bass backdrop to the hypnagogic rolling. The soundtrack never stopped, the same bleak, washed-out track that he had heard from Natasha’s stairs.

  Sometimes he saw her face. She would lean over him, nodding gently in time to the beat, her eyes unfocused. Sometimes it was Pete’s face. He felt soup trickle down his throat and around his mouth, and he swallowed obligingly.

  Most of the time he lay back and surrendered to the rocking motion in his skull. He could see almost anything when he just lay back and listened to the Jungle filtering from somewhere close by, twisting around him in a tiny dark room, oppressive, stinking of rot.

  He spent a lot of time looking at his artwork in progress. He was not always sure it was there, but when he thought of it and relaxed into the beat, it invariably appeared, and then he would make plans, scribble charcoal additions in each corner. Changing this canvas was so easy. He could never quite remember the moment when he drew, but the changes appeared, bright and perfect.

  He became more and more ambitious in his changes, going over old ground, rewriting the text at the centre of his piece. In no time at all it was changed beyond recognition, as smooth and perfect as computer graphics, and he stared at the legend he could not quite remember choosing. Wind City, it said.

  Fabian swallowed the food he found in his mouth and listened to the music.

  Natasha spent most of her time with her eyes closed. She didn’t need to open them at all. Her fingers knew every inch of her keyboard, and she spent her time playing Wind City, tweaking it, changing it in slight and subtle ways, to fit the exigencies of her mood.

  Occasionally she would open her eyes and see with surprise that she stood in unfamiliar environs, that she was in the centre of a dim, stinking space, that Fabian danced horizontally, lying down nearby, food drying on his face, and that her keyboard was not in front of her after all. But when she tweaked Wind City, it changed anyway, it did what she wanted, so she closed her eyes and continued, her fingers flying over the keys.

  Sometimes Pete would come and feed her, and she would play him what she had done, still with her eyes closed.

  The rats had given up in fear and confusion. The great cadres that had set out earlier in the night had dried up, had slunk home to the sewers, but here and there the braver souls continued the search, as Saul had hoped they would.

  In the streets of Camberwell they searched the catacombs of old churches. On the Isle of Dogs they ran past Blackwall Basin and scoured the decrepit business park. The rats worked their way along the great slit of the Jubilee Line extension, past vast hulking machines that tunnelled through the earth.

  Their numbers dwindled. As the night wound on, more and more gave in to hunger and fear and forgetfulness. They could not work out why they were running so hard. They could no longer remember what their quarries looked like. One by one they slipped back into the sewers. Some fell prey to dogs and cars.

  Soon there were only a very few rats left searching.

  “Lickle bird tell me you want talk to me, bwoy.”

  Saul looked up.

  Anansi descended from the bough of a tree above him. He moved elegantly, belying his size and weight, slipping smoothly down one of his ropes, utterly controlled.

  Saul leaned back. He felt the cold weight of the gravestone behind him.

  He was sitting quietly in a small cemetery in Acton. It was a tiny space that straddled the overland train line, tucked behind a small industrial estate. It was overlooked on all sides by ugly functionality, a set of grotesque flattened factories and suburban warehouses, uncomfortable in this residential zone.

  Saul had wandered West London for a time and entered the graveyard to eat and rest, here amid the crammed urban dead.

  The stones were nondescript, apologetic.

  Anansi came to the ground silently a few feet from him, stalked past the low gray markers and crouched beside him.

  Saul glanced at him, nodded in greeting. He did not offer Anansi any of the old fruit he had scavenged. He knew he would not take it.

  Saul sat and ate. “Now was it really a little bird, ’Nansi?” he asked mildly. “How is Loplop?”

  Anansi jerked his head.

  “Him still screaming angry, bwoy. Him mad, too. Them can’t understand him, the birds dem. Him have lost a kingdom again, think you take it from him.” Anansi shrugged. “So we no have no birds. Just my little spiders and the rats, and you and me.”

  Saul bit into his bruised apple.

  “And Loplop?” he asked, and paused. “And King Rat? They going to be there with us? They going to be there when we take him?”

  Anansi shrugged again. “Loplop is nothing, whether him there or not. King Rat? You tell me, bwoy. He’s your daddy…”

  “He’ll be there,” said Saul quietly.

  The two sat for a while. Anansi rose presently and walked to the railing in front of them, looked over at the train-line below.

  “I’ve sent the rats to find the Piper,” said Saul, “but they’ll fail. They’re probably all sitting stuffing their bellies right now. They’ve probably forgotten what it is I wanted them to do…” He smiled humorlessly. “We’re going to face him on his terms.”

  Anansi said nothing. Saul knew what he was thinking.

  Anansi had to come to the Junglist Terror, because Saul would be there. Saul was the only chance he had to defeat the Piper, but he knew it was a tiny chance; he knew that he was walking into a trap, that by being there he was doing exactly what the Piper wanted. But he had no choice. Because if he were not there, Saul’s chances of defeating the Piper were even smaller, and if Saul failed, the Piper would have them all, the Piper would hunt Anansi down and kill him.

  It was paradoxical. Anansi, King Rat, they were animals. Preserve yourself, that was the whole of their law. And that law would compel them to go to Junglist Terror. To their almost certain death. Because Saul had to go, because of his human friends, because Saul was refusing to act as an animal.

  Saul was going to kill Anansi.

  They both knew it. Saul was going to kill Anansi and Loplop and King Rat, and Saul was going to die, all in an effort to prove that he was not his rat-father’s son.

  Anansi looked back at Saul and shook his head slightly.

  Saul returned his gaze.

  “Let’s talk about what we’re going to do, ’Nansi,” he said. “Let’s make a few plans…let’s not let everything go this fucker’s way.”

  They had spiders, they had rats…they had Saul. The Piper would have to make a choice. One of the armies would be defeated as soon as they all entered the fray, but the Piper had to make a choice. Anansi and his troops had half a chance of remaining free from the Piper’s thrall. And so did the rats.

  A handful of rats still scoured London for…something…

  They could not remember exactly what.

  These were the pride of the nation. These we
re the bravest, the fattest and strongest and sleekest, the leaders of the pack.

  As smooth as seals through the water they roamed.

  One raced like a chubby bullet along the Albert Embankment.

  It had come up from the kitchens of St Thomas’s Hospital, next to Waterloo, there on the South Bank of the river. It had snatched food to fortify itself, had searched the attic spaces and cellars. It had run like a ghost through the hospital, leaving its footprints in thick dust, dirtying obscure and forgotten diagnostic machinery.

  It had passed through others territories, but it was a great big animal, and it was on royal business. They did not challenge it.

  It had found nothing. It made its way out of the building.

  In the open space it scampered along the bank of the river towards the medical school.

  The Thames glinted balefully beside it, oozing fatly through the city. On the opposite bank stood Westminster Palace, London’s absurdly crenellated seat of power. Its many lights flickered on the river’s skin.

  The rat stopped.

  Lambeth Bridge loomed up over the water before it, darkening the muck of the Thames.

  An indistinct shape bobbed sullenly in the water beside it. An ancient barge, one of the various hulks that littered the river, untended and ignored. It heaved gently to and fro in the current, little waves slapping its greasy boards like petulant children. The corpse of a boat, its black wood leprous and decaying, a vast tarpaulin slung across it like a shroud.

  The rat moved forward nervously, stopped, uncertain.

  It strained its ears. It could hear something, faint and sinister. Sounds emanating from under the heavy waterproof cloth.

  The barge rocked back and forth. The water was digesting it. But in the meantime, before the wood splintered and dissolved into the Thames, someone was on the vessel, desecrating it, interrupting its long death.

  Two old ropes still tethered it to the bank. One dipped in an elegant curve below the surface of the water, but the other was nearly taut. Tentative, the rat stepped onto the mooring. Like a tightrope walker it scurried over the water.

  It slowed as it approached the boat. Foreboding flooded its tiny brain, and it would have turned to run if it could, but the rope was too narrow. The rat was stuck with its choice, its impetuous courage.

  The rope was strung like a necklace, with huge lumpy beads designed to impede a rat’s progress. But unable to turn back, and dreading the water, the rat was tenacious. It hauled itself over the impediments until only a few feet of rope remained.

  Stealthy now, silent, the rat continued. The sound from the barge was clearer now, a low repeated thump, a thin, plaintive wailing, the creaking of wood under moving bodies.

  With the lightest of touches the rat set foot on the barge.

  It crept around to the side, seeking a gap in the tarpaulin. It could feel vibrations in the wood that were nothing to do with the water.

  Slinking below the boat’s lip, the rat found a place where the material was rucked up, where it could creep through tunnels left between folds in the heavy canvas.

  It made its way through this maze until it could hear soft murmurings. It could feel the tarpaulin opening up around it.

  With a nose twitching maniacally, the rat crept forward, peered furtively up into the barge.

  There was an incredible stink. A mixture of decay, food, bodies and old, old tar. The tarpaulin was stretched out on a frame to make the barge a floating tent. The rat could see by the weak light of a torch suspended from the frame. It pointed directly down and its ambient light was poor, so everything in the room was glimpsed, half-seen, noticed briefly as the motion of the boat swung the torch one way, then lost as its oscillations took it away again.

  A low, very quiet bass thump pervaded the tiny space.

  In one corner a man lay on the floor. He looked feverish, moved his arms and legs as if he were dancing, his face thrashing uneasily from side to side.

  A woman stood nearby, facing away from him. Her eyes were closed. She nodded her head and moved her hands in abstract, exact patterns in front of her, her fingers flying, tracing intricate motions.

  Their clothes were dirty. Their faces were thin.

  The rat stared at them briefly. Saul’s descriptions were muddled in its mind, but it knew that these two were important, it knew that it had to tell Saul what it had found. It turned to run.

  A foot slammed down on its escape route, closing off the way through the cloth.

  The rat bolted in terror.

  It ran around and around the room, everything a dark blur, between the legs of the standing woman, under the arms of the lying man, scratching madly at the cloth all around in a frenzy of fear.

  Then suddenly it heard a quick whistling, a jaunty marching tune, and it stopped running, filled with wonder and amazement. The whistling segued gently into the sounds of sex, and the slopping of rich, fatty food falling to the ground, and the rat turned and marched in the direction of the sound, eager to find all these good things.

  Then the whistling stopped.

  The rat was staring into a man’s eyes. Its body was held fast. Frantic, it bit down, drew blood, savaged the fingers which gripped it, but they did not relax.

  The eyes gazed at it with a lunatic intensity. The rat began to scream in terror.

  There was a brief and sudden motion.

  The Piper slammed the rat’s head against the wooden floor again and again, until it had lost its definition, become just a flaccid, indistinct appendage.

  He held the little corpse up to his face, pursed his lips.

  He reached down for the small ghetto-blaster on the floor, and lowered the volume still further. Wind City could still be heard, but now it was almost subliminal.

  Fabian and Natasha turned simultaneously, looked at him in confusion and surprise.

  “I know, I know,” he said, mollifying. “You’ll have to listen really hard. I have to turn it down a bit. We’re attracting attention. We don’t want to do that yet, right?” He smiled. “Save that for the club. Right?”

  He moved the ghetto-blaster closer with his foot. Spent batteries lay all around it, moving uneasily with the current.

  Natasha and Fabian subsided into their previous poses.

  Fabian sank back and began to paint.

  Natasha continued to play Wind City. They both strained their ears a little, and heard what they were looking for.

  Warily, the Piper lifted a corner of the cloth. His pale eyes scanned the darkness around the boat.

  No one was passing by on Albert Embankment; Pete saw by the lights of the Houses of Parliament.

  He reached out and dropped the rat’s body into the Thames.

  It circled, one speck of dirty darkness among many in the water. The current pulled it slowly, tugging it beyond Westminster, carrying the little cadaver way out to the east.

  P

  A

  R

  T

  S

  I

  X

  JUNGLIST

  TERROR

  T

  W

  E

  N

  T

  Y

  -

  S

  I

  X

  Jungle night.

  It was in the air. The sharp-dressed youth who congregated on the Elephant and Castle could taste it.

  The clouds were low and moving very fast, ruddy with street lamp light, billowing up from behind the skyline. London looked like a city on fire.

  Police cars swirled ephemeral through the streets, streaking past those other cars that prowled towards Lambeth, stereos pumping. The strains of Dancehall and Rap, blunted and languorous, and everywhere Drum and Bass, febrile and poised, savage and impenetrable.

  The drivers leaned their arms out of open windows, nodded lazily in time to the music. These cars were full, bursting with designer clothes and basslines. For the cruisers, the evening kicked in at the zebra crossings and red li
ghts, when they could stop, engine idling, beats pounding, visible in all their finery. They drove from junction to junction, searching for places to be still.

  A hundred slogans boomed out of a hundred car windows, the samples and shouted declarations of the classic tracks being played, a hundred preludes to the evening.

  Mr. Loverman, came the shouts, and Check yo’self. Gangsta. Jump. Fight the Power. There is a Darkside.

  I could just kill a man.

  Six million ways to die.

  They only had eyes for each other that night. They drove and walked the streets like conquistadors in Karl Kani, Calvin Klein and Kangols. In wafts of cologne the homeboys and rudegirls, the posses and massives claimed the streets south of Waterloo, striding past the intimidated natives as though they were shades.

  Touching fists and kissing their teeth, the massed ranks moved in on the venue. Irish boys and Caribbean girls, smooth Pakistani kids, gangstas in huge coats muttering into mobile phones, DJs with record bags, precocious kids aping the studied nonchalance of the elders…

  They made their way into the Jungle.

  Here and there the police lurked in corners. Sometimes they were judged worthy of a contemptuous glance, a sneer, before the lights changed and the drivers moved on. The police watched them, whispered to their radios in garbled code. The air teemed with their electronic hisses, warnings and prophecies, unheard by the gathering, swamped by urban breakbeats.

  The night was fraught, full of looks held too long.

  In the dark streets the warehouse shone. Light spilled from its crevices as if it were a church.

  Lines stretched out before the entrance. The bouncers, vast men in bomber jackets, stood with arms folded like grotesque gargoyles. Feudal hierarchies asserted themselves: the serfs in line, clamoring at the gates, staring enviously at the DJs and the hangers-on, the movers and shakers of the Drum and Bass scene, who sauntered casually past them and murmured to the guards. For the noblest of them, even checking the guest list was unnecessary.

  Roy Kray and DJ Boom, Nuttah and Deep Cover, familiar from a hundred CD covers and posters, were waved in without demur. Even the preposterously proportioned bouncers showed their obeisance, as their impassivity became momentarily more studied. Droit de seigneur was alive and kicking in the Elephant and Castle that night.