Dwelling by the Hill, Nicolas had lived as near neighbor to Amandale for I don’t know how many years. But he was so often gone on his tours, in cities under the Hill that made even the Queen’s City seem a hermit’s hovel, that he wandered now through Amandale’s busy gates with widening and wonder-bright eyes. His head swiveled like it sat on an owl’s neck. The woebegone down-bend of his lips began a slow, gladdening, upward trend that was heartbreaking to watch. So I stole only backward glances, sidelong like.
“Maurice.” He hurried to my side as we passed a haberdashery.
“Yes, Nicolas?”
“You really live here?”
“All my life.”
“Does it,” he stooped to speak directly in my ear, “does it ever stop singing?”
I grinned over at Dora Rose, who turned her face away to smile. “If by singing you mean stinking, then no. This is a typical day in Amandale, my friend. A symphony of odors!” He looked so puzzled that I took pity and explained, “According to the princess over there, I’m one who can only ever hear music through my nose.”
“Ah!” Nicolas’s black eyes beamed. “I see. Yes! You’re a synesthete!”
Before I could reply, a fire-spinner out front of Cobblersawl’s Cakes and Comfits caught his eye, and Nicolas stopped walking to burst into wild applause. The fire-spinner grinned and embarked upon a particularly intricate pattern of choreography.
No one was exempt, I realized. Not me, and not the pretty fire-spinner. Not even Dora Rose. Plainly it was impossible to keep from smiling at Nicolas when Nicolas was pleased about something. I nudged Dora Rose.
“Hear that, Ladybird? I’m a synesthete!”
“Maurice, if you ever met a synesthete, you’d probably try to eat it.”
“Probably. Would it look anything like you?”
Dora Rose did not dignify this with a response but whacked the back of my head, and her tiny smile twisted into something perilously close to a grin. We ducked into the bakery, pulling Nicolas after us so he wouldn’t start piping along to the fire-spinner’s sequences, sending her off to an early death by flaming poi.
One of the elder Cobblersawl children—Ilse, her name was—stood at the bread counter, looking bored but dutiful. A softhearted lass, our Ilse. Good for a scrap of cheese on occasion. Not above saving a poor rodent if said rodent happened to be trapped under her big brother’s boot. She’d not recognize me in this shape, of course, but she might have a friendly feeling for me if I swaggered up to her with a sparkle in my beady little eyes and greeted her with a wheedling, “Hallo, Miss...”
She frowned. “No handouts. Store policy.”
“No, you misunderstand. We’re looking for...for Froggit? Young Master Froggit Cobblersawl? We have business with him.” Dora Rose poked me between my shoulder blades. Her nails were as sharp as mine. “If you please?” I squeaked.
Ilse’s frown deepened to a scowl. “Froggit’s sick.”
I bet he was. I’d be sick too if I’d swallowed half my tongue.
“Sick of...politics maybe?” I waggled my eyebrows.
A smell came off the girl like vaporized cheddar. Fear. Sweaty, stinky, delicious fear.
“If you’re from the Mayor,” Ilse whispered, “tell her that Mama spanked Froggit for not behaving as he ought. We know we’re beholden. We know we owe the fancy new shop to her. And—and our arrangement to provide daily bread to the houses on Merchant Prince Row is entirely due her benevolence. Please, Papa cried so hard when he heard how Froggit failed us. We were so proud when his name came up in the Swan Hunter lottery. Really, it’s such an honor, we know it’s an honor, to work for the Mayor on our very own orchestra, but—it’s just he’s so young. He didn’t understand. Didn’t know, didn’t know better. But I’m to take his place next hunt. I will be the twentieth hunter. I will do what he couldn’t. I promise.” She unfisted her hands and opened both palms in supplication. “Please don’t take him to prison. Don’t disappear him like you did...”
She swallowed whatever she was about to say when Dora Rose stepped forward. Removing my cap, she shook out that uncanny hair of hers and held Ilse’s gaze. Silence swamped the bakery as Ilse realized we weren’t Ulia Gol’s not-so-secret police.
“I want to thank him,” Dora Rose said. “That is all. The last swan they killed was my sister.”
“Oh,” Ilse whimpered. “Oh, you shouldn’t be here. You really shouldn’t be here.”
“Please,” said Dora Rose.
Her shaking fingers glimmering by the light pouring off the swan girl’s hair, Ilse pointed out a back door. We left the bakery as quickly as we could, not wanting to discomfit her further, or incite her to rouse the alarm.
The exit led into a private courtyard behind the bakery. Froggit was back by the whitewashed outhouse, idly sketching cartoons upon it with a stubby bit of charcoal. Most of these involved the Mayor and Hans in various states of decay, although in quite a few of them, the Swan Huntress Ocelot played a putrescent role. Froggit’s shoulder blades scrunched when our shadows fell over him, but he did not turn around.
I opened my mouth to speak, but it was Nicolas who dropped to the ground at Froggit’s side, crossing his legs like a fortune-teller and studying the outhouse wall with rapt interest.
“But this is extraordinary! It must be preserved! They will have to remove this entire apparatus to a museum. What, in the meantime, is to be done about waterproofing?” Nicolas examined the art in minute detail, his nose almost touching the graffitied boards. “What to do, what to do,” he muttered.
Taking his charcoal stub, Froggit scrawled, “BURN IT!” in childish writing over his latest cartoon. Then he scowled at Nicolas, who widened his eyes at him. Nicolas began nodding, at first slowly, then with increasing vigor.
“Oh, yes! Indeed! Yes, of course! Art is best when ephemeral, don’t you think? How your admirers will mourn its destruction. How they will paint their faces with the ashes of your art. And you will stand so”—Nicolas hopped up to demonstrate—“arms crossed, with your glare that is like the glare of a tiger, and they will sob and wail and beg you to draw again—just once more please, Master Froggit—but you shall break your charcoal and their hearts in one snap. Yes! You will take all this beauty from them, as they have taken your tongue. I see. It is stunning. I salute you.”
So saying, Nicolas drew out his pipe and began a dirge.
When he finished many minutes later, me and Dora Rose collapsed on the ground, sweating from the excruciatingly stately waltz we’d endured together. Well, she’d endured. I rather enjoyed it, despite never having waltzed in my life, least of all in a minor key.
Froggit himself, who much to his consternation had started waltzing with an old rake, let it fall against the outhouse wall and eyeballed the lot of us with keen curiosity and not a little apprehension. What did he see when he looked at us, this little boy without a tongue?
Nicolas sat in the mud again. This made Froggit, still standing, the taller of the two, and Nicolas gazed up at him with childlike eyes.
“Don’t be afraid. It’s my silver pipe. Magic, you see. Given me by Her Gracious Majesty, Empress of Faerie, Queen of the Realms Beneath the Hill. It imparts upon me power over the creatures of land, sea, air, and fire. Folk and fixed, and everything between. But when I pass into the Hill, my pipe has no power. Under the Hill it is not silver but bone that sings to the wild blood of the Faerieborn. Had I a bone pipe, I might dance them all to their deaths, those Shining Ones who cannot die. But I have no pipe of bone. Just this.”
Nicolas’s face took on a taut look. Almost, I thought, one of unbearable longing. His knuckles whitened on his pipe. Then he shook himself and dredged up a smile from unfathomable depths, though it was a remote, pathetic, tremulous thread of a thing.
“But here, above the Hill,” he continued as if he’d never paused, “it is silver that ensorcels. Silver that enspells. I could pipe my friend the rat Maurice into the Drukkamag River and drown him. See that Swan Princess
over there? Her I could pirouette right off a cliff, and not even her swanskin wings could save her. You, little boy, I could jig you up onto a rooftop and thence into the sky, whence you’d fall, fall, fall. But I will not!” Nicolas added as Froggit’s round brown eyes flashed wider. “Destroy an artist such as yourself? Shame on me! How could I even think it? I have the greatest respect for you, Master Froggit!”
But Froggit, after that momentary alarm, seemed unafraid. In fact, he began to look envious. He pointed first to the silver pipe, then to his charcoal caricature of Mayor Ulia Gol, dripping gore and missing a few key limbs.
His wide mouth once more woebegone, Nicolas burst out, “Oh, but she is wicked! Wicked! She has an ogre’s heart and a giant’s greed. She is a monster, and we must rid this world of monsters. For what she did to the juniper tree, that alone deserves a pair of iron shoes baked oven-bright, and four and twenty blackbirds to pluck out her eyes. But for what she has done to you...and to the swans and the foxes and the trout. Oh! I would break my pipe upon her throat if I...But.”
Drawing a shaky breath, Nicolas hid his thin face in rigid hands.
“No. I shall not be called upon for that. Not this time. Not today. No. No, Nicolas, you may stay your hand and keep to your music for now. Maurice the Incomparable has a plan. The role of Nicolas promises to be quite small this time. Just a song. Just the right little song. Or the wrong one. The wrongest song of all.”
Froggit sat beside Nicolas and touched a trembling hand to his shoulder. Nicolas didn’t take his hands from his face, but suddenly bright black eyes peeped between his fingers.
“Your part is bigger than mine, Master Froggit. If you’ll play it. Throw in with us. You have no tongue to speak, but you have hands to help, and we’d be proud to have your help.”
Froggit stared. At the huddled Piper. At proud Dora Rose standing like a silver statue in the small courtyard. At my grin that had the promise of carnage behind it. Back to Nicolas, whose hands fell away to reveal an expression so careworn and sorrowful and resolute that it terrified me, who knew what it meant. I rubbed my hands together, licking my lips. The boy took up his charcoal stub and wrote two words on the outhouse boards.
One was “Greenpea.” The other “Possum.”
I stepped in, before Nicolas asked if this were a recipe for the boy’s favorite stew and spun off on another tangent about the virtues of Faerie spices versus mortal.
“Of course your friends are invited, Master Froggit!” I said. “Couldn’t do it without ’em! You three and we three, all together now.” I hooked Dora Rose’s elbow and drew her nearer. She complied, but not without a light kick to my ankle. “Your job today, Master Froggit, is to take our resident Swan Princess around to meet Miss Greenpea and Miss Possum. They’ve sacrificed a pair of legs and eyes between them, haven’t they, by refusing to help murder swans?”
Froggit nodded, his soft jaw clenching. What with the swelling of his truncated tongue, that must’ve meant a whopping mouthful of pain. Boy should’ve been born a rat!
“You’re just what we need. Old enough to know the town, young enough to be ignored. Embittered, battle-scarred, ready for war. Listen up, Master Froggit. You and your friends and Dora Rose are gonna be the ones to, uh, liberate those pretty bone instruments from Orchestra Hall. You must do this, and you must return them to the Maze Wood tonight. It all has to be timed perfectly. Dora Rose will tell you why. Can you do this thing?”
Dora Rose put her hand on Froggit’s shoulder when his panicked glance streaked to her. “Fear not, princeling,” she said, as though soothing a cygnet. “Have not we wings and wits enough between us?”
Before the kid could lose his nerve, I sped on, “Me and Nicolas will be the distraction. We’re gonna set Amandale hopping, starting this afternoon. No one will have time to sniff you out, I promise—no matter what shenanigans you four get up to. We’ll meet you back in the Maze Wood in three nights’ time, with the rest of...of what we need. You know where. The juniper tree.”
Froggit nodded. His brown eyes filled with tears, but they did not fall. I looked at Dora Rose, who was twisting her hair back up under my wharf boy’s cap and refreshing the dirt on her face.
“Help her,” I told the kid, too quietly for Dora Rose to overhear. “She’ll need you. Tonight most of all.”
Froggit watched my face a moment more, then nodded with firm decision. His excitement smelled like ozone. He shoved his charcoal stub into his pocket and stood up, wiping his palms on his cutoff trousers. Solemnly, he offered his hand to Nicolas, who clasped it in both of his, then transferred it over to Dora Rose. She smiled down, and Froggit’s gaze on her became worshipful, if worship could hold such bitter regret. I knew that look.
Stupid to be jealous of a tongueless, tousled, char-smudged bed wetter. Bah.
“Take care of each other,” Nicolas admonished them.
And so, that Cobblersawl kid and my friend the Swan Princess-in-disguise made their way down a dark alley that teemed with the sort of refuse I relished. Until they disappeared from my sight.
“Shall we?” Nicolas’s voice was soft and very dreadful behind me.
“Play on, Pied Piper,” said I.
Nicolas set silver lip to scarlet mouth and commenced the next phase of our plan.
* * *
Have you ever seen a rat in a waste heap? The rustle of him, the nibble, the nestle, the scrabble and scrape. How he leaps, leaps straight up as if jerked by a string from the fathoms of that stinking stuff should a clamor startle him? How swift he is. How slinking sly. Faster than a city hawk who makes her aerie in the clock towers and her dinner of diseased pigeons. A brief bolt of furry black lightning he is, with onyx for eyes and tiny red rubies for pupils.
Now imagine this natty rat, this rattiest of rats, with his broken tail, his chewed-looking fur, imagine him as he often is, with a scrap of something vile in his mouth, imagine him right in front of you, sitting on your pillow and watching you unblinkingly as you yawn yourself awake in the morning.
Imagine him.
Then multiply him.
There is a reason more than one of us is called a swarm.
* * *
Amandale, there will be no Swan Hunt for you today.
Nor will bread be baked, nor cakes be made, nor cookies, biscuits, doughnuts, nor pies. The smell arising from your ovens, Amandale, is singed fur and seared rodent meat, and all your dainty and delectable desserts bear teeth marks.
No schools remain in session. What teacher can pontificate on topics lofty and low when rats sit upon her erasers, scratch inside the stiff desks, run to and from the windowsills, and chew through whole textbooks in their hunger for equations, for history, for language and binding glue and that lovely woody wood pulp as soft and sweet as rose petals?
The blacksmith’s hand is swollen from the bite he received last night as he reached for the bellows to stoke his fire. The apple seller has fled from fear of what he found in his apple barrels. The basket maker burns in his bed with fever from an infected breakfast he bolted without noticing it had been shared already by the fine fellows squatting in his larder. I’m afraid the poor chimney sweep is scarred for life. And no, I don’t mean that metaphorically.
The Wheelbarrow Mollys and the Guild of Bricklayers are out in the streets with their traps and their terriers. Poor fools, the futility! They might get a few dozen of us, maybe a few hundred. They might celebrate their catch that night with ales all around. But what’s a few? We are thousands. Tens of thousands. Millions. The masses. We have come from our hidey-holes and haystacks. We are out in force.
So what if the local butcher flaunts his heap of fresh sausage stuffing, product of today’s rat-catching frenzy? We’re not above eating our own when we taste as good as sausages! And we’re not above petty vengeance, either. You, smug butcher, you won’t sleep cold tonight. No, sir. You’ll sleep enfolded in the living fur of my family, Folk and fixed alike, united, yellow of tooth and spry of whisker. Resolved.
Music.
It is the Pied Piper, and he plays for us.
He’s there in a corner, one rat on his boot-top, two in his pocket. That’s me right there, scurrying and jiving all up and down his arms and shoulders, like a nervous mama backstage of her darling’s first ballet recital. Oh, this is first-rate. This is drama! And I am the director.
Amandale, you do not see Nicolas, the red in his black hair smoldering like live embers in a bed of coal, his black eyes downcast and dreamy, his one rat-free boot tapping time. He’s keeping us busy, keeping us brave, making us hop and heave to.
Amandale, you do not see Nicolas, playing his song, doing his best to destroy you for a day.
Or even for three.
* * *
On the second Night of the Rats (as the citizens of Amandale called our little display), Mayor Ulia Gol summoned a town meeting in Orchestra Hall.
Sometime after lunch that day, I’d fleshed back into man-shape, with two big plugs of cotton batting in my ears. This made me effectively deaf, but at least I wasn’t dancing. The point was to stick as close to Ulia Gol as possible without ending up in a rat catcher’s burlap bag. To that end I entrenched myself in the growing mob outside the mayoral mansion and slouched there for hours till my shadow stretched like a giant from the skylands. As reward for my patience, I witnessed the moment Henchman Hans brought Ulia Gol news that the rat infestation had destroyed her bone orchestra.
Bone Swans: Stories Page 8
