Pay the Piper

by Jane Yolen

  Gringras must have heard her gasp, for he took the flute from his lips and started to laugh, a hollow sound not unlike Alabas’ laugh, and it sent a cold chill down her spine.

  The rats dropped paws, went down on all fours, and scattered, their little claws making a scritching sound as they fled.

  For a long moment Callie couldn’t move. It was as if she had lead weights on her arms and legs. As if she were encased in a cement body suit. And then, suddenly, she was released and she ran straight past the fire escape and Gringras’ awful laughter, into a side street that led around to the front of the theater.

  There she saw her parents.

  “Mom!” she cried. “Dad!”

  They gathered her up in comforting arms. “Got the rest of the story?” they asked in one voice, as they often did.

  She didn’t even have the strength to nod.

  10 · Souls

  The rats scattered, the girl gone, Gringras’ laughter died in his throat. He put his flute to his lips and blew one high, petulant note.

  But for men like Garner … he began but let the thought die unfinished. Time to get to work. For a tithe of this scope, there were preparations to be made. And only a night and a day to make ready.

  Gringras sighed and got to his feet. He gazed down the alley where the girl had disappeared. No need to chase her, he thought, she will be gathered up with the rest of the children soon enough.

  “Silver, gold, or souls,” his father, the king, had cursed him so many years ago. And all to be earned by the sweat of his brow—a cruel joke that. His father had never considered whether that was going to be enough for him to earn the exorbitant cost of the teind every seven years in the human world. Gringras stuck out his lower lip, turning his handsome face into a mask. He knew he had a small talent for music. And he was clever. He still had some of the powers of an exiled prince of Faerie. But those hadn’t been enough. Not even at the beginning. By the end of the first six years of exile, he had found himself broke.

  For the first time.

  And not the last.

  He remembered that awful year, A.D. 1212 by mortal count. He had been living in Germany with Alabas, for Alabas had refused to let him go into the human world alone.

  “I am yours, my prince,” Alabas had said, kneeling and taking the blood oath to bind them, and doing so in front of the king.

  Gringras remembered laughing. He had been so confident then. “Then you will sweat along with me, my best of friends?”

  Alabas had smiled.

  Predictably, the king had been furious, but the oath was already sworn. And the curse. He could undo neither. That was the trouble with oaths and curses. Each had to run its course.

  Gringras and Alabas went into exile, though nobody really wished it, and all of Faerie mourned.

  However, the “sweat of his brow” had barely been enough to earn them food and lodgings. When that first seventh year was fast approaching, they were making music and a meager living in Germany. Looking into their pockets, they realized with horror that they had not enough silver. Not enough gold. It was time then to look into the third option.

  Souls.

  The souls had to be alive, not dead, of course. Dead they went elsewhere, where even Gringras could not follow. No, the souls they collected had to be alive and kept happy all the way down the long, twisting trail, across the river of blood, and into Faerie where they would live forever, dancing attendance on the king.

  That first attempt was a huge failure. It seemed that adults were resistant to the lure of faerie music … and they were generally armed as well. The men Gringras and Alabas tried to enchant for the long walk into Faerie had turned on them with knives and pitchforks, cudgels and stakes. Despite the popular belief of the day, cold iron didn’t kill his kind, but it certainly left Alabas half-dead, and Gringras incapacitated for some time.

  And time was another thing they had very little of.

  Gringras knew that if he missed the teind—so his father’s curse went—he would never be allowed back into Faerie and would eventually die the true death in the human world. As would Alabas, his sworn blood brother.

  “We must leave Germany and try France,” Gringras had told Alabas, thinking: The French are great music lovers. We will find the souls we need there. They stumbled away from the field where the Germans had left them to die.

  Gringras remembered walking the road, Alabas at his side, the two of them hungry and thirsty—and quarreling. Under the Hill they had never quarreled. But on the roads of earth, Alabas had learned regret early—and spite.

  Near Marseilles, they met towheaded Nicolas of Germany and pockmarked Stephen of France, two boys with a grand plan. They were leading a ragtag band of children to the Holy Land.

  “The Children’s Crusade,” Stephen called it, his voice high as a girl’s for it had not broken yet.

  “These will do,” Alabas had said under his breath.

  “Not children,” Gringras answered him plaintively, though he knew they were his only hope. “Not children.” Regret first. Spite came after.

  With the help of Gringras’ pipe and Alabas’ hand drum—and not a few spells spoken in the guise of Christian prayers—the small band of children grew to thousands. And if some number of the children disappeared with Gringras and Alabas before ever reaching Jerusalem, well, they were probably better off then those who took Hugh the Iron’s offer of transportation.

  Hugh sold those poor, deluded children into slavery.

  Death in life.

  Whereas the children Under the Hill were still alive centuries later.

  Life in death.

  11 · Homework

  Callie barely slept that night, but in her dreams she danced Ratter up one alley and down the next followed by a group of kids dressed in leather and calling themselves Brown Norways.

  Getting up early, she determined to go right to school. There was a lot of research that still needed doing before she could get her story down. Since her parents had child protection wards on their computer, that ruled out a lot of the really helpful sites. Rock and roll was not for babies!

  She was still going to write that article for the school paper, all right. But not the one everyone was expecting. Not a puff piece about the great band, or whether Gringras had a wife or not.

  This one was going to be about rats—the real biting kind.

  It was going to be about mirk, mire, gyres, and blood guilt.

  It was going to be about Under the Hill, wherever that was.

  And the teind, whatever that was.

  It was going to rock her school and, possibly, win her an award. And all this was good—if only she could forget the rats.

  Callie raced downstairs and was just gulping down a glass of milk and snarfing down a Pop-Tart when Nick came into the kitchen.

  “That was brill, last night, didn’t you think so, Cal?” His eyes were wide open, though the left still had a bit of sleep sand there and he rubbed at it with his fist.

  “It was … something all right,” she mumbled, grabbing up her backpack and heading for the door. Shouting over her shoulder, she said, “Let Mom know I’ve gone to school already. That should surprise her.”

  Nick stood in the doorway in his Batman jammies, waving. He seemed small, vulnerable, unprotected from the wind. Callie looked at him with affection. She always liked him a lot better when she got away from his side. For a moment she wondered if Mars had felt the same about her.

  School was strangely silent because only a few homeroom teachers and the janitor—a surly man named Jamsie—were there so early. Callie smiled. Who would have believed it? Without the buzz, the bells, the yells, the clanging of locker doors, school was actually a place where a person could think.

  Heading toward the journalism room, she thought about where she would start working on her article. The word teind was unfamiliar to her. Perhaps that was what she needed to know first.

  But how to spell it?

  Signing in on
the computer’s dictionary, she brought up tined and tinned. She tried tiend, but there was nothing between Tien Shan—which was a mountain range in Central Asia—and tiepin.

  Biting her lip, she went on to Google.

  Even Google was puzzled.

  Finally she stood up and walked over to the bookshelf where the dictionaries stood stiffly like unhappy siblings in a row on the top.

  The American dictionaries said nothing helpful, but when she took out the Oxford English Dictionary—what her journalism teacher liked to call “the last port in a storm”—she found by accident that the word was spelled teind.

  “That just plain looks wrong!” she said aloud, mouthing I before e except after c.…

  It seemed that teind meant a “tithe,” which was something they did in Callie’s church, so at least she knew the meaning without having to look that up as well. In church to tithe meant “to give a part of one’s income, a kind of tax, for good causes.” She remembered how Alabas had said something about paying a blood guilt. So maybe they were talking about some kind of payment that involved guilt. Blood guilt. That seemed to fit. She still didn’t like the way the word looked, though: e before i. Shrugging, she closed the dictionary and turned back to the computer.

  “What looks wrong?” It was Josee, hand twisting her hair, a black curl around a finger looking like a dark ring. “And why are you here so early? Nobody in their right mind gets here this early, middle of the night, before dawn’s early light.”

  “You’re here and I bet you’re in your right mind,” Callie retorted. “As for me, I’m left-brained and writing that article about the concert.”

  “Mom had to go to work early and dropped me.” Josee’s mother was a nurse. “Last time she had an early shift, I slept through the alarm. She said it wasn’t going to happen again. Therefore, I am zonked, out of it, in the zzzz place, without a top floor. Like I said, nobody in their right mind…” She slung her backpack on top of Callie’s. “So what looks wrong?”

  “This word.” Callie typed it onto the computer.

  “I before e except after c,” Josee recited. “An eternal truth, according to V. Louise.” Their English teacher.

  “I know, I know. But that’s how it’s spelled.”

  “What’s it mean when it’s home on its own? Give me something, Callifunny.”

  Callie made a face. “A tithe, a payment of some sort.”

  “A payment? For what?” Josee leaned over, her nose almost touching the monitor. She was tremendously nearsighted and hated to wear her glasses. Her mother had vetoed lenses till she was sixteen. And pierced ears. Both of which Josee felt were tremendously unfair.

  “For blood guilt, is what I heard.”

  Josee laughed. “And what’s that mean, Calli-bean?”

  “What’s what mean?” It was Alison. She was usually the first of them at school, catching up on homework she forgot to do the night before, so neither of them were surprised to see her.

  “Blood guilt,” said Josee just as Callie said, “Teind.”

  “Oh, I know that one!” Alison said.

  “Which one?” they asked together.

  “Teind. It’s in a song Daddy sings.” Her father was a folksinger, only modestly successful, or so Callie’s parents said, meaning he was known best in Western Massachusetts and played at bars and clubs around the area. Alison quoted him all the time. “A real dote-head instead of a daughter,” is what Josee called her, out of Alison’s hearing. But then Alison didn’t have a mother, so Callie always cut her a lot of slack.

  “What song?

  “It’s called ‘Tam Lin.’” Alison began to sing in a quavery voice:

  “All pleasant is the fairy land

  For those that in it dwell,

  But at the end of seven years

  They pay a teind to hell;

  And I’m so fair and full of flesh,

  I’m feared twill be mysel’.”

  Callie’s heart seemed to stutter. Seven years! That was exactly what Scott had said. This thing is sounding more and more like one of Granny’s stories, with magic and elves and …

  “But what about blood guilt?” Josee was asking. “Sounds extremely yucky, not to mention unsanitary, unappetizing, unappealing, and certainly unsafe.”

  “Dunno anything about that,” Alison said. “What do you think?”

  “I’d feel guilty about spilling blood, I guess. Not to mention grossed out, finger-down-the-throat gagged, and totally incapacitated with the mewling poos!”

  They kept nattering on, but Callie barely heard them. Her mind was suddenly filled with questions: What had she stumbled into? Was it the Mafia? Or gang payments? Or a drug cartel? Or … Suddenly she remembered the rats dancing.

  “Rats!” she said aloud.

  Just then a bell rang.

  School had started and her friends had been hardly any help at all.

  * * *

  CALLIE HAD TROUBLE CONCENTRATING IN algebra. The logarithms she’d understood only the week before now made no sense. In her Earth Science class, she kept confusing the Jurassic with the Mesozoic, much to her teacher’s annoyance. And in her English class—usually her best subject—she was well behind the class reading of A Day No Pigs Would Die, which she thought was a stupid book anyway. When she said so aloud, V. Louise looked daggers at her and she could feel her grade sinking with each word.

  In fact, the entire day, all she could think about was the band and the odd things Alabas had been saying to Scott. Visions of the dancing rats kept coming back to her. Each time she saw Alison and Josee, they asked her questions about the “blood guilt” which she couldn’t answer.

  “Maybe it’s blood gilt,” Josee said at lunch, “like gilding the lily, adding gold, painting by the numbers.”

  “That makes no sense at all,” remarked Alison, which was the first sensible thing anyone had said about it all day.

  Callie picked up her tray and walked away from the table, pointedly ignoring them both. After all, they hadn’t heard Alabas, hadn’t seen the dancing rats.

  Rats! She grew obsessed with them. By the last period, the three rats in the alley had grown in her mind to several thousands, much as they had in Gringras’ silly story. And Josee and Alison were no longer speaking to her.

  Which, Callie told herself, is just as well as they aren’t saying anything of interest.

  Her last class was Spanish.

  Señora Bastanada had asked something simple, but Callie’s mind wandered back again to last night. She could almost hear the piping of Gringras’ flute, could smell the dark, close, garbage-strewn alley, could feel the shiver of cold along her spine.

  “Señorita McCallan,” the teacher was saying, but Callie didn’t hear her until the third time. “¿Callie McCallan, dónde esta usted?”

  Callie looked up to see everyone staring at her, and said the first thing that came into her head. “Rats! Dirty rats!”

  “En Español, por favor.”

  She thought a minute. “¿Ratons con manos negres?”

  Everyone laughed. Even Señora Bastanada.

  The bell saved her from a detention, and she hurried back to the journalism room, determined to write the story—rats and all.

  Suddenly she remembered an old poem about the Pied Piper of Hamelin which her mother used to recite: “Rats! They fought the dogs and killed the cats, and bit the babies in the cradles, and ate the cheeses out of the vats.…” Not a fairy tale after all.

  “That’s it!” she said aloud. Now she knew where the story would start. Not just with the band, but with the rats.

  Lots of rats.

  She signed in on the computer, put her name at the top, and began.

  Calcephony McCallan

  HAMELIN COMES AGAIN

  Last night, the Pied Piper came to the Valley. His name is Peter Gringras. But who will pay the piper this time?

  It may seem strange, impossible even, but what if Peter Gringras, that rock-and-roll legend, is really the Pied
Piper? Not of Northampton, but of Hamelin.

  That’s right, Hamelin. Remember the rats?

  She printed out what she had, read it over, and sighed. “I’ve lost my stupid mind,” she whispered, crumpling up the paper and two-pointing it into the waste basket. It gave her no pleasure. “How can I be so gullible?” she said knowing that the dictionary would say that gullible meant “easily fooled.” It was one of Mars’ favorite words.

  Then she put her head in her hands. The memory of the three little brown rats made her sit up again. She turned back to the computer, got onto Google again, and this time looked up Hamelin. There was stuff about the legend and stuff about the real place. Those articles sent her to sites about the Children’s Crusade, the little princes in the tower, about other kinds of missing children, faces on milk bottles, the Atlanta child murders, and lots about child abuse. None of it was pleasant reading. She was sorry she’d gotten involved.

  Erasing the two paragraphs she’d already written, she started again.

  Last night, a Pied Piper came to the Valley. His name is Peter Gringras. He and his band, Brass Rat, played their hearts out for over 5,000 appreciative fans.

  Then rock legend Gringras found himself stiffed by the concert promoter after the gig. He was not paid what his contract called for. So will he, like the Pied Piper in the old story, take out his anger not on the rats but on the children of Northampton …

  She couldn’t figure out where to go from there. It certainly wasn’t journalism, but a kind of bizarre fiction. No one would put it in the school paper this way. Nor did she think it belonged there. It made no sense, no proper sense. It was about mystery, magic, and leaps of faith. Journalism had to be about real things, about facts.

  So, she printed out what she had, including all the bits of research she’d gleaned from the Google search, closed her eyes, and tried to think.

  But all she could think was: My parents are going to kill me if I write this and get a D for Dumb and Dumber.

  “I’ll call Mars,” she told herself. Even when her parents ignored her, or got on her case, Mars could be counted on. “He’ll know what to do.”