The Twyning (7 page)

. . . and we should be proud.”

The doctor is talking to me as we walk down a street of great buildings. He is wearing a suit smarter than I have ever seen him wear. His housekeeper has given me a clean white shirt.

It is a great occasion. The doctor is to talk to the institute about rats. Hanging from my hand, and weighing heavily, is a cage containing the giant rat we captured by the river. It is still just alive.

“By tomorrow, I shall be famous.” The doctor continues to talk without looking in my direction as he climbs the steps of a large house. “And the rat, of course.”

He pushes open a double door. We are in a large entrance hall, and for a moment, the doctor seems uncertain as to where to go.

He mutters to me, “You’ll probably have to wait in the servants’ quarters with our friend, Mr. Smith.” He nods in the direction of the cage I am carrying. “The institute likes to think of itself as a gentlemen’s club for scientists.”

A man of great age, stooped and with long silver locks, is sitting behind a desk in the far corner. He does not yet seem to have noticed our presence.

“Not that one will find many gentlemen here.” The doctor raises his voice. “Deliver one disappointing lecture at the institute and you are quickly forgotten. Wallace, the bird-migration man, has never recovered from the mauling he received here.” He clears his throat loudly. “At the institute.”

The old man behind the desk looks up from his papers.

“Can I help you?” he asks.

The doctor crosses the hall, and I follow. As I approach, the man behind the desk casts a look of distaste in my direction. He stares first at me, then at the rat I am carrying, and shudders.

“Dr. Henry Ross-Gibbon at your service.” The doctor is speaking in the clipped accent of an army officer. His voice is different when he is in the company of adults, I have noticed. “I am to deliver the lecture tonight.”

“Ah, yes.” The old man is not thrilled by the news. “That will be Dr. Ross-Gibbon, the rat man.”

The doctor squares his shoulders. “Understand the rat, sir, and you understand the world. There are five billion of them on earth, and they are breeding more quickly than even science can imagine. In many ways, they are similar to ourselves. They mate all the year round, for example.”

The man behind the desk raises his eyebrows. “I would ask you to remember that you are in the institute,” he murmurs, glancing in my direction. “We do not welcome that sort of language.”

“I was being . . . scientific.” The doctor seems embarrassed. It is unusual for him.

“Your animal and the boy will not be allowed to enter the institute for the lecture, of course.”

“I need my assistant,” says the doctor. “I am a scientist. I do not carry my specimens around with me.”

The man from the institute stands up and, without looking at me, mutters, “Follow me.”

He opens a small door at the side of the hall and stands aside to let me pass.

There are steps, leading to a dark cellar. Before I have even found somewhere to sit, the door behind me has closed, leaving me in darkness.

. . . across a wide expanse of ground where the human traffic of horses, dogs, and mighty, clattering carriages was passing to and fro.

We walked the road where the buildings met the ground.

— Fang is hurt.

The revelation from Floke was calm. Even young warriors are not easily distracted from their task by injury.

I looked at Fang’s leg. What I had thought at first had been the dog’s blood I now saw was a gash revealing the white of exposed bone.

Fang shifted uncomfortably.

— It is the dog who is hurting. We vanquished the dog!

His revelation was strong enough. He sniffed as if the wound were nothing.

— We must move.

I knew he was right. It was not time for hesitation. The pulse leading me on was growing weaker.

I waited for my moment, then dashed forward. During the seconds when I crossed the open ground, I was aware of the sharp scent of danger, the sound of horses’ hooves, an enemy voice, as, belly to the ground and ignoring the searing pain in my paws, I took the road, then the pavement, and crammed my body below a stone by the house.

Floke arrived, seconds later, bundling onto me so violently that he knocked the wind out of me. Then, moving slowly, Fang eased his way beside us.

The throb within me shook my whole body. We were close. Emerging from the bolt-hole, I galloped along the pavement until I reached stone steps that led down toward a basement. I took them, half running and half falling, coming to rest in the damp and musty shadows beside a wooden door. The other two blundered down seconds later.

I sniffed at the base of the door. The wood was rotten. I turned to the others.

— How long would it take you to get through that?

Fang looked at Floke. They gnashed their teeth noisily, then set to work.

I listened to the pulse within me. I could tell now that it was different from my own. Older, slower, weaker.

Floke and Fang made short work of the door, stepping back moments later. A hole, small but good enough, was in the ancient timber.

When I revealed, it was in a tone that I hardly recognized as my own. I sounded like a leader.

— Wait here. I can do this alone. If I am not back by sundown, find your way back to the kingdom and report what has happened.

— Can we . . . ?

— Why shouldn’t we . . . ?

I heard them, but already I was through the hole, into the house, and on my way.

. . . just out of sight of most of the audience in the large lecture hall on the third floor of the institute.

Through a crack in the screen in front of me I can see the audience — men in frock coats, some of them smoking cigarettes.

The scientists. The doctor has spoken much of them in the past. “The so-called men of science,” he calls them.

They seem more amused than interested as, from the other side of the stage, the doctor appears and takes his place behind a lectern.

There is something unusual about him as he stands there. He has a smile stuck on his face like some sort of mask. It doesn’t seem to be convincing the so-called men of science.

“They call me the Rat Man, I am told.” The doctor speaks up, and the buzz of conversation in the hall slowly dies down. “It is for you to judge.”

He looks around the lecture theater and I notice now that his hands, resting on the lectern in front of him, are trembling.

“It is true that I have studied our friend
Rattus norvegicus
— the brown rat, of course — more than any other scientist in the world. From this knowledge, I have reached the conclusion that when it comes to the future of our species — mankind — it is the rat that holds the key.”

One of the gentlemen at the back of the hall says something at this point that causes those around him to laugh, but the doctor seems not to notice.

“In many ways, the rat is, of all the mammals in the world, that which is most similar to us,” he says. “Like us, it is omnivorous and can eat a huge variety of food. Like us, it has been known to eat its own kind. Like us, it is able to reproduce throughout the year. Like us, it has had its own wars. The black rat, or ship rat —
Rattus ratt
u
s
— was present in Europe from, we believe, a time after the Crusades, playing its part in the plagues and epidemics. Then, in the early eighteenth century, the great brown rat invasion from Asia occurred — caused, we think, by a powerful earthquake. They swam in their millions across the River Volga and advanced toward Europe. There followed a bitter war between the brown and the black rat. It was
Rattus norvegicus
who proved the stronger and more ruthless.”

The scientists listen, half interested. I have heard every part of this story many times before in the form of mutters at the laboratory as the doctor does his work, or at night as we are out searching for beasts.

“Like us, the brown rat covers the globe — it has the widest range of any mammal in the world.” The doctor raises a finger. “Like us, it never has quite enough. Gentlemen, we should beware of its savagery and ambition.”

The hall is quiet now. One or two of the men have produced notebooks into which they scribble occasionally.

“Rats are a magnificent example of God’s work,” the doctor is saying. “They can mate five hundred times a day. They can fall sixty feet and survive. They can swim proficiently. They can tell which food is poison. There are stories of rats foretelling the future — moving before an earthquake, leaving a market days before it is moved to another place. This, gentlemen, is a superb species.”

He looks around the hall, now all solemnity, making the most of his dramatic pause.

“So superb, in fact, that it is our mortal enemy. It could destroy us.”

As if someone in the audience has protested against what he is saying, the doctor raises a hand.

“The rat is ruthless. It has become the undisputed ruler of the animal kingdom. Already it eats our crops. It destroys the fabric of our lives — books, clothes, houses, pipes. It has caused floods by gnawing through dams. But it wants more. There is only one species that stands in its way.”

“Us.” A member of the audience says it out loud.

“Yes.” The doctor allows a chilly smile to flicker briefly across his face. “Us. I believe that we are already under attack. From Sweden to Spain, there are stories of packs of rats behaving in an entirely new way. Infants have been killed in their cribs. A beggar on the streets of Amsterdam was found with his throat torn out. In France, couples have been attacked in their beds.”

He has the audience now. There is silence as he delivers his warning.

“We are entering the Rat Age. They are beginning to attack us, their greatest enemy. They are multiplying in number. For centuries, they have eaten our food. Now they are killing our children.”

He glances toward me. My moment is approaching.

“I believe that it is no longer enough for us, as scientists, to study the rat. To survive, we need to defend ourselves. We have a brilliant and dangerous enemy who is even more ruthless and deadly than mankind. We must destroy him before he destroys us. Above all, we must show no fear before the rat. Gentlemen, I believe it can actually smell the terror of other creatures.”

The doctor reaches under the lectern for a pair of heavy leather gloves, which he puts on his hands, watched in silence by his audience. He nods in my direction.

I walk, carrying the cage before me onto the brightly lit stage. There is a stirring and a muttering around the lecture hall.

I lay the cage before the doctor. I release the latch.

The doctor pauses, glances with a little smile. “No fear, please, gentlemen.”

He half opens the top of the cage. When he withdraws his hand, he holds the giant rat, dangling by its tail. Over its screams, the doctor cries, “Behold the enemy!”

. . . through the timbers, along the pipes, behind the panels of the old building, when a terrible sound caused me to stop.

It was the scream of death, a sound that has no meaning beyond itself. With it, a last desperate pulse racked my body.

My king needed me.