The Ammonite Violin & Others

by Kiernan, Caitlín R

  3.

  The night that the God of all Rats comes to see her, the moon is only an ashen sliver, and the night is not so cold that she can’t keep warm with the yellow fleece blanket she found hanging in a tree the summer before. She is dreaming about a delicious stew she’s made from crayfish and bullfrogs and fat white grubs, onions and ground-fall apples. And then something wakes her, but there’s only the thin slice of moon and the distant twinkling stars and the sky right outside her window, only the disappointment that she won’t likely be getting a second bowl of the stew. She doesn’t notice him at first, doesn’t realize that it was the God of all Rats who woke her from the dream. Then he says her name, which she hears so infrequently that there are times when she almost forgets she has one. The God of all Rats says her name, and she rolls over on her blanket to find him standing nearby, watching her with his intense black rat eyes. He is very tall, this god, and she doesn’t know if he always looks this way, like a tall man covered in the dark pelt of a rat, a man with the head and tail and sharp claws of a rat, or if this is just how he wants her to see him.

  “Have I done something wrong?” she asks him, startled by the sound of her own voice, which she hears almost as infrequently as her name.

  “Why would you ask me that?” the God of all Rats replies. “You have kept the pennywhistle safe, and ever have you been a friend to my people.”

  “I know who you are,” she says and rubs at her eyes; the rat god nods his head and takes a step nearer the mattress.

  “I thought perhaps you would. I did not think I would need to explain myself to you. You have played the pennywhistle, and you know the true stories. You are not like other human women, and you are not like human men, either.”

  “Do you want to hear me play?” she asks. “Is that why you’re here?”

  “I have heard you play a hundred times. You play so beautifully, but that is not why I have come to you tonight.”

  “Do you want me to tell you a story?”

  “Perhaps, daughter, I have come here to tell you a story, one you do not yet begin to suspect.”

  At that, she sits up and yawns and rubs her eyes again. The God of all Rats sits down cross-legged on the floor next to her mattress and stares at her.

  “But I already know so many stories,” she tells him. “Are you hungry? I have a little food and—”

  “I am not hungry,” replies the God of all Rats. “I have sharp teeth and sharp claws and can find my own food when I am hungry.”

  “You want to tell me a story,” she says, confused, still smelling the bubbling dream stew, still only just half awake and beginning to wonder if she even wants to know the sort of story a god might have for her.

  “I want to teach you something and give you a gift, to show my gratitude and the gratitude of all my people for keeping the pennywhistle safe from the serpent who lives below the bridge. It will seem like a story to you.”

  “I know the difference,” she says. “I can tell what is a story and what isn’t. I’m not a child. I hope you don’t think I’m a child, or that I’m insane, like the men from the city.” And she pulls the yellow blanket up tight about her arms and shoulders, because there’s something about the black, unblinking gaze of the God of all Rats that makes the night seem much colder than it actually is.

  “No, you are not like them,” the rat god agrees. “But neither are you entirely sane. If you were, I doubt we would be able to speak like this, you and I. If you were sane, you would have never found the pennywhistle in the cemetery, and I would never have come to you.”

  “I’m not crazy,” she says, pressing herself flat against the wall beneath the window, frightened now and wishing this were only a dream she could wake from, only a story she could stop telling herself. She looks away, no longer wanting to see the eyes of the God of all Rats, not wanting to feel them on her. “If someone told you I’m crazy, they were lying.”

  Somewhere in the wild tangle of branches and vines that has grown up all around the redbrick building, an owl cries out—boo, hoo-ooy hoo, hoo—and now she feels like a hunted thing, like whatever it is the owl must be stalking through the tall grass and ragweed, only a trembling rabbit or a vole, a mouse... or a rat.

  “Please do not be afraid of me,” the God of all Rats says and sniffs at the air. “I did not come all this way to frighten you.”

  “You might not mean to,” she says, keeping her eyes on the loose floorboard, trying to think about the pennywhistle and not the owl prowling outside her window. “You might not mean to hurt me, either, but things don’t always happen the way we want them to.”

  “I will not hurt you,” he says again, and again he says her name, speaking those two familiar, half-forgotten syllables, and it seems like music on his tongue. “You have my word I will not harm you, ever. Nor will I ever allow another to harm you, if I can prevent it. I am in your debt, daughter.”

  “I am not your daughter,” she says, wanting to believe him, wishing the owl would fly far, far away, all the way down to the sea, and not spend the night perched outside her window.

  “Will you accept my gift?” the God of all Rats asks, and she can tell that he’s growing impatient with her.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “You do. Otherwise, I would not call it a gift.”

  Slowly, she turns back to face the god, who is kneeling now before her, down on his knees and his head bowed, and suddenly she wants to cry, even though she can’t remember ever having cried before. The owl calls out again, and she wonders what sort of god the owls and hawks and ravens pray to.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have said those things. I should know better.”

  “Then will you accept my gift?” he asks her once more, and she tells him yes, she will. And so the God of all Rats takes her in his velvet arms and presses his wet nose to her right ear and whispers new secrets and shows her new worlds, and before the sun rises again, he slips himself in between her legs, and she shuts her eyes and thinks this must be the most wonderful night of her life. While the God of all Rats makes love to her, the room fills with his children—two hundred pairs of twitching whiskers, four hundred dewy eyes—and they watch and wait and wonder what will happen next.

  4.

  And in the weeks that follow, there do not seem to be quite as many hours when she feels alone or afraid, and it is easier to sleep without telling herself stories. She often climbs the stairwell up to the roof of the redbrick building so she has the best view of the river, and she sits there and plays the pennywhistle and hopes that the God of all Rats is somewhere nearby, listening. An emptiness inside her has gone away, some terrible hollow that she only ever half suspected and then understood not as an absence, but simply an intrinsic, inescapable part of being alive. The snows come, but they do not seem to bring with them as much cold or as much desolation as in all the years past. She uses the pennywhistle to find a new song in which she and the God of all Rats go down to his underground kingdom miles below the redbrick building, where there is always enough food, and never any ice or frost or freezing winds, and never the need to hide. She becomes his queen, the lost queen for whom he has spent half an eternity searching, and she spends her days in great caverns playing the pennywhistle for all their assembled court, all the creatures who live in the world’s deep, dark spaces—the moles and fat pink earthworms, the beetles and the bats and such a gathering of rats that their numbers are beyond counting. The Cod of all Rats gives her a ring spun from the blackness before creation so that she will never have to die, and she gives him a litter of beautiful children with eager grey eyes and restless pink noses. This is the best song I have ever found, she tells herself and wishes that he would come back to her, even though he said that he never would. She watches the comforting river and the blue sky and the bare, craggy branches of the trees and hopes that maybe he was mistaken or that he’ll change his mind, because even gods can change their minds, and one night she’ll be dreaming about a
bubbling pot of stew or a summer day or maybe finding a new blanket, and there will be a sudden, unexpected sound that breaks the dream and wakes her. And it will be him, standing there in the room, and the only thing she will miss about this place is the sight of the river. But she knows that these are only fancies, and that they cannot be more than that does not lessen the peace that the God of all Rats has given her in exchange for keeping his pennywhistle safe from the snake sleeping beneath the bridge.

  5.

  The plague finds the city in the raw, dead heart of winter, in a bleak month, a grim and disheartening month when dawn and twilight seem to come with nothing in between, nothing there to divide night from day but half-light and clouds. There are only fleeting glimpses of a pale and indifferent sun, and when she asks the pennywhistle if the sun will ever be warm again, it won’t answer her. She rarely leaves the redbrick building anymore, because of the things she hears in the night and the madness of the dying men and women and their children, all lost in fever and turned out to roam the streets by those in the city who have not yet fallen ill. She stops going up to the roof and must make do with what she can see of the river from her window. And then she stops looking at the river altogether, too frightened by all the frail and raggedy people clustered along its icy banks or drowning themselves in waters that have gone the color of a very bad bruise. The pennywhistle knows a song about the plague, and it tells her that the sick people believe the river can cool them and drive away the fever. But they’ve forgotten about the snake below the bridge, and they do not know that it waits there to pull them down, one by one by one, feasting and stoking its infernal belly with the very same fever they pray the river will relieve. She cannot help them. She can only huddle beneath her blankets and think of the God of all Rats, who surely has not forgotten her. There is very little food, and most of what there is has gone over, so she tries not to eat. She nibbles snow from the windowsill to quench her thirst. And then one night the city begins to burn, staining the undersides of the clouds with angry, flickering shades of red and orange, and she starts to think that this must be the end of everything, and soon the rats will ask her to return their pennywhistle so they can begin to play the backwards song that will undo the universe they created. She doesn’t know if the serpent has crawled out of the river and started the fire, or if the people have started it themselves. It hardly seems to make much difference, one way or another. Fire is fire. Maybe, she thinks, the fire is another part of the plague, that, in the grip of their fevers, the men and women of the city have begun to sweat these flames. She takes out the wooden box from its place beneath the loose floorboard and unwraps the pennywhistle from the swatch of denim and plays a desperate, keening song that is only Come back for me, come back for me over and over again. But if the God of all Rats hears her, he does not answer, and he does not come back for her. By morning—that lighter shade of night that has come to pass for morning—the sky is consumed by billowing clouds of charcoal smoke and heavy rains of black ash and soot that ruin the white snow. The wind blowing in through her window stinks of everything that is burning, and she drags her mattress across the room and out into the fourth-floor hallway, as far from the window as she dares to go. It must be the end of time, when men sweat fire and even the sky falls, and she almost breaks the penny whistle so the backwards song can never be played upon it and the snake will have to sleep forever in its nest beneath the bridge. She squeezes her eyes tightly shut and holds it in her hands, meaning to snap it in half, meaning to make of it something twisted and ruined and ugly, a thing that can never play another note for anyone or anything or tell another story. But she is not that brave, even if she has been a god’s lover, and if she destroys the whistle she will be utterly alone forever, for all her life, and there will only be the stories that words can make. If she destroys the pennywhistle, she’ll have betrayed the rats’ trust and there will be no hope that the God of all Rats will ever come back for her. So she sits there shivering in the hallway, wrapped in her yellow blanket and humming a tuneless story about the river, unable to keep her eyes off the drab smudge of daylight, and the low winter clouds, and the smoke filling up her window, and the place where the sky used to be.

  6.

  Three nights after the beginning of the fire, she’s dozing in the hallway, not really sleeping, and certainly not dreaming, only dozing, because she’s too scared and hungry to truly sleep. And then she hears stomping feet and drums, people shouting and singing, all their many voices joined and singing the same song together—more or less together—which is something she’s never heard before. It must be a sort of celebration, she thinks, because there’s something triumphant in the song they’re singing. And if it’s a celebration, maybe that means the plague is over, or the fire consuming the city has finally burnt itself out, so it’s not the end of the world after all. But when she looks from the hallway across her wide, empty room to the window, tire night sky is still smeared with the colors of burning. She gets to her feet, wrapped in the yellow blanket, and goes to the window to find out what has happened. Through the bare branches of the trees growing beside the redbrick building, she can see that the street is filled with people. Never before has she seen so great a congregation of them, all in one place and at one time. Many of them are carrying torches, and so she guesses that maybe they’re trying to empty the city of fire by hauling it away at the ends of these long guttering brands. Some of the people have drums and some flattened pieces of metal that they’re banging with sticks or hammers or spoons or just their bare hands. Their song fills the night, though she’d have thought there was no room left anywhere for anything else, what with all the cold and the smoke and the falling ash, the light from the burning city, the wind, the filthy snow, and the low, glowing clouds pushing down from above. It’s not a song she’s ever heard before, not a pennywhistle song, and it seems to be built mostly of words and the banging, thumping, clanging sounds the people are making. Help me, O Lord, My strength and rock; Lo, at the door I hear death’s knock. Uplift thine arm, once pierced for me, that conquered death. And she’s delighted at this commotion, so much noise and movement, delighted at these strange new lyrics and the mystery of their meaning, and so she does not see everything there is to see, or remember how dangerous the city people are. She leans a little farther out, bracing herself against the snow and ice and soot-encrusted windowsill, trying to catch all the words and catch their meanings, too. And set me free. Yet, if thy voice, in life’s midday, recalls my soul, then I obey. In faith and hope Earth I resign, secure of heaven, for I am thine. My pains increase; haste to console; for fear and woe seize body and sod. Death is at hand. But then she sees that the men and women ire carrying something besides their drums and torches. There are tall poles strung with the limp bodies of dead rats. There are huge reed baskets filled with dead rats. There are wheelbarrows, and a metal cart drawn by an old mule, and bulging burlap sacks, all filled to overflowing with the corpses of rats. There are children, and they gaily dance in and out of the procession, swinging dead rats by their tails. And even as she comprehends what she sees, she also understands why they are doing this awful thing, that this must be the sacrifice that the snake beneath the bridge has demanded of them, and in return he has promised that there will be an end to the fire and the plague. For a moment, there’s only silent horror at what they’ve done, at this senseless massacre and the desecration of all the murdered rats, so many of them that she wonders if any are left alive in all the world. Perhaps they’ve even managed to slay the God of all Hats. Perhaps they found the way down to his palace underground, and his beautiful body has been carved up and tossed into one of those burlap sacks or the pieces strung from a pole. They dance and sing that strange song and whack at their drums and sheets of corrugated tin, and when at last she finds her voice it is barely even a hoarse whisper above the noise of the mob. Nothing they will ever hear, no way she can ever stop them and whatever it is they’ve marched all this way to do. No way that sh
e can fight something so cruel and clever as the snake, and now it is too late to even try. The rats are already dead. They died while she dozed on her mattress in the hallway, oblivious to the slaughter. Caught in steel traps or bludgeoned with mallets, crushed beneath bricks and stones or poisoned with arsenic or lye or anything else that was handy, at least a thousand easy ways for a man to kill a rat, and watching the delirious, torch-lit spectacle, she imagines all of them. Even over the noise, she can hear their dying screams and squeals, can see the blood-flecked jaws and the sea of shattered bodies, the scrabbling paws and broken bones caught between the merciless teeth of cats and dogs, those feckless, mercenary servants of man. And now the people at the front of the procession have reached the bridge, and they begin setting the dead rats afire and tossing them over the side into the river, flinging them down into her comforting river, her river that has been spoiled forever now. The swirling, traitorous waters open wide, accepting the dead and dragging them all straight down to the waiting snake, who must surely be watching this all from somewhere far below, smiling his wicked, scaly smile, pleased that they have done exactly as he has asked. Smiling that men may be bent to his will with so simple a thing as fear, with such a common thing as death, and smiling, too, because after countless millennia he’s been avenged, the tables turned, and his old enemy has been laid low. She knows all these things, and she closes her eyes because she cannot stand the sight of it any longer. She sinks to the floor beneath the window, whispering futile prayers to a dead god, and she wonders how long it will be until the snake sends them to find hex and take the pennywhistle. Not long, not long at all. Just as soon as the feast is done. She covers her ears, trying not to hear their wicked, wicked song of adulation, their hymn to the serpent below the bridge, but it slips in between her fingers: My God! My Lord!Healed by the hand. Upon the earth once more I stand. Let sin no more rule over me; my mouth shall sing alone to thee. Though now delayed, my hour will come. And then the room seems to sway and tilt beneath her, and there’s only a moment of nausea before there’s merciful silence and blackness and nothing more.