The Twyning (33 page)

For a moment, we listen to the thumps and yells.

Bill frowns, as if he were a little embarrassed by how easy the job has been. Then he closes the case and hands it to me.

“Let’s find the girl,” he says.

Taking two steps at a time, he goes up the narrow stairs. It must have been a maid’s room, because by the time we reach the closed door at the top, Bill is crouching beneath the slope of the roof.

He pushes the door open. From the light of a single small window, we can see a dingy little room, bare of furniture but for a narrow bed, a chair, a table, and a washstand in one corner.

“Caz?” Even to me, my voice sounds despairing. “Are you here?”

Silence.

Bill walks to the bed and pulls back the sheet.

“Someone’s been here, that’s for sure,” he mutters.

He checks the window. The latch is off the hook. Standing on the chair, he pokes his head through it.

“Roof’s flat enough,” he says. “Maybe your little bird has flown.”

“No.” I look under the bed. There is a pot there, unused.

I stand up and look around, a growing sense of desperation within me.

This room is different from the rest of the house — cleaner and with less clutter. And yet, in its center, and with no chairs nearby, there is a small table.

Underneath, there is a rug, of almost the same measurements of the bed. Something about the way it is arranged seems out of place.

I pull the table aside, then tug at the carpet.

A long crack in the floorboards is revealed. When I look closer, I realize that I am looking at some kind of secret hiding place.

“Bill! ” I shout. “There’s a trapdoor here.”

Bill hurries over. Half the trapdoor is under the bed, so we have to heave it aside. Now we can see the door clearly. To one side of it there are two holes. Bill pokes his fingers through them and lifts.

She is dead. Those are my first thoughts as I look down into the space beneath the floor. In the same nightdress in which I had seen her dancing, she lies motionless, her arms wrapped around her knees. She is held in a sort of crate, which fits perfectly between the floor joists.

I kneel down, sick with foreboding. I move the hair away from her face.

Her eyes are wide open, and she blinks rapidly.

“She’s alive!” I say the words out loud.

Around her mouth, I see now, is a gag. Her wrists have been bound to her legs with silken curtain ties.

“Caz!” With trembling hands I untie the knot of the gag at the back of her head.

“Peter.” It is a weak, terrified whisper.

The ropes around her wrists and legs are tied tightly. I reach for the knife in my back pocket. But the rope is thick, and my knife blunter than I had thought. Bill, with an urgency in him I have never seen before, pushes me aside and takes the knife.

He manages to cut through Caz’s bonds until her body, within the crate, begins to relax. Caz is looking upward, her eyes darting around the room as if expecting Knightley to appear at any moment.

“Can you move?” Bill whispers.

Caz shakes her head. Leaning down, Bill reaches beneath her arms and lifts her out. With difficulty she straightens her limbs, looking around her like a princess in a fairy tale, awoken after a long sleep.

She looks fearfully at Bill.

“Have you got shoes?” he asks. “A coat?”

She stares at him, saying nothing, almost as if she is unable to understand the question. We hear a thump from downstairs, and she starts.

It’s no time for conversation. Bill pulls a blanket from the bed and puts it around Caz’s shoulders.

“Time to go, children,” he says. “Follow me.”

He goes down the stairs slowly, carrying Caz. When we reach the landing below, it is surprisingly still, with not a sound issuing from the closet where we left Knightley in the company of a hundred or so rats.

“Had we better check he’s all right?” I ask.

“Don’t be soft, boy.” Bill continues his way downstairs.

I put my ear to the closet door. It seems to me that I can hear a low moan. Without making a sound, I gently slide the walking stick that is holding the door firm through the ring latch. At least, when we have gone, and when he dares, Knightley will be able to free himself from his prison.

We descend to the next floor, and Bill puts Caz down. She looks around her. Then, slowly, like someone in a dream, she walks toward a closed door. She opens it.

I see the piano, the candle, the little stage. It is the room where she danced for Champagne Charlie.

Caz’s shoulders are shaking. I look at her and see the tears on her cheeks.

“Dogboy!” Bill has gone ahead of us and is downstairs. His voice is urgent. “Let’s go!”

I take Caz’s hand. I shut the door to the room and we make our way downstairs.

. . . and a stirring in the blood, which every rat understood.

The kingdom was coming to life again.

I remained in the Great Hollow. The time for revelation was past. It was not for me to search for citizens and bring them to this place. They must come here under their own will. Each would decide in his or her heart whether to be part of the kingdom or to seek a future elsewhere.

Yet ours was a kingdom without a king. Citizens looked up at me, alone on the Rock of State, and there was often a furtive questioning in the air around them.

Who was this citizen who had appeared from the world above? Was he king now? There had been no fights, no ceremonies, no great gatherings of citizens. It seemed if not wrong, then unusual.

I gazed at them with what I hoped seemed like calmness. King Efren? I had no wish for that. I was a citizen, one who had seen what the enemy could do to our kingdom. I knew that the kingdom must survive and that, just possibly, I could help it to grow stronger. There was part of me that longed to be among them, just another citizen doing his duty, but I knew now that I had no choice.

Someone had to be there on that Rock of State, and I knew in my heart that that someone could only be me. I, too, would need help. I looked down to the citizens who were gathering in the hollow. There were, I knew, leaders and fighters among them. But how was I to find them?

A ratling from the Court of Translation brought some food, a morsel of meat found in the world above, but, having laid it at my feet, he scurried away before I could thank him.

It was the end of the night when I stepped down from the Rock of State and moved through the hollow. As I went, citizens moved aside. Some looked at me suspiciously. Once they had trusted leaders. Jeniel and Swylar had changed all that.

— We need courtiers.

My revelation was quiet. It took in one group at a time. There was no reply.

— The last Court of Governance has died. No one knows where they have scattered to. Who wishes to be a courtier?

They avoided my eyes. I heard a snicker sometimes. An older rat, a historian, revealed quietly as I passed.

— And who, tell us, shall they be following?

I turned to him.

— My name is Efren. If you wish for another leader, then say so.

He skulked away, teeth chattering mutinously.

I left the hollow, climbed toward the world above. I took the trail to the network of runs below an ancient tree where the Court of Tasting used to stay. The touch-path was familiar, yet now everything was different. There was a scent of tell, but it led away from the runs and paths. I listened for the woodnote, the sound of all nature that reveals danger or safety. It was quiet. Citizens everywhere were lying low, looking after themselves.

I stood in the place that I knew from my younger days. Now it was deserted. I waited there for a moment. Citizens are more at ease when surrounded by others, but my stay in the world above had changed me. I liked to be alone, and other citizens sensed that within me. It set me apart.

Everything here, I knew now, had changed. Fear was at every turn. No one was trusted. I wondered what hope there was to unite citizens again after the terrible events in the world above. The strongest had surely been killed in the battle. Some warriors had survived — I had seen their mighty leap to freedom — but I had no idea where they were now, or whether they would have the stomach for another fight.

It was while I waited there that I sensed the presence of another rat. It shuffled slowly across the hollow. She: I smelled, while she was several lengths away from me, that it was a doe; still young, but a mother.

She approached me, with neither fear nor curiosity. When I greeted her, she looked at me for a moment, then revealed.

— Efren?

She moved closer, whiffling as she approached. A rat’s instinct is to assert itself, but I let her smell me. She revealed again.

— It is Efren. We thought you were dead.

— I was trapped in the world above. I didn’t fight. I saw the battle.

The doe looked at me, as if to decide whether she was in the company of a coward.

Let her decide. It was no time to tell my story. Instead, I asked her where her ratlings were.

She sniffed sharply, and the sour smell of grief was in the air.

— They were taken. By other rats. They were my first. Staying with them saved my life. Now they’re gone.

— It is not citizens who are to blame.

— The enemy did this?

— In a way, it did.

— We must fight.

I sensed defiance in her now. I asked her name.

— Driva.

— I remember you now, from the days when Alpa was captain.

— Poor Alpa.

— The kingdom is not finished, Driva. We can bring it back, the true, good kingdom.

There was no hesitation from her.

— Of course we must. For my ratlings, and those of the future.

— You and me? Then we find others.

— We should start now. — She nudged me with her nose, and I felt stronger, less alone. — You and me, Efren.

So it was that Driva became the first member of the new Court of Governance.

. . . even though Bill offers to look after us. I can see from Caz’s eyes that she needs to be alone and safe with me and Malaika.

The next day I talk a lot. Caz sits, Malaika slumbering in her lap, her eyes empty. Maybe she is listening; probably she is not. I tell her about how Bill helped me, about the hunt by the river, about the war on rats. I decide not to ask anything about Champagne Charlie.

We have no money, and Caz seems hungrier than before. I have no choice but to go back to work, leaving her in the company of her pet rat.

The doctor is excited when I arrive. It is the day of the public meeting. Another battle in the great war is being planned. He is a man who sees his great mission in life happening before his eyes.

As we make our way by carriage to the meeting, he gazes out the window. Then, as if the thought has just occurred to him, he says casually, “Your job will be to take charge of the rats’ tails.”

I must have looked puzzled or displeased, because he speaks impatiently.

“I know, Mr. Smith,” he says. “It’s not a wonderful job, but it’s necessary. The war on rats”— he drops his voice, as if a rat hiding in the carriage might overhear him — “is about to enter a new phase.”

“Dr. Henry Ross-Gibbon,” he says to the clerk behind the desk when we arrive at the town hall. “I am to see Mr. Woodcock of the Public Health Department. My colleague here will be collecting an item from the basement.”

The clerk smiles at the doctor. “Of course, sir.” Without so much as a glance in my direction, he walks to a small door at the back of the hall and opens it.

“Down the stairs, follow the corridor to the end. You’ll see them,” he says.

I look down the dark stairs.

“I’ll need a candle.”

Sighing like a man forever having to deal with unnecessary requests, the man goes to a cupboard behind his desk and takes out a lantern. He lights it and gives it to me with a hard look in his eye.

I hesitate. “How long shall I wait there, Doctor?” I ask.

The doctor is gazing out the window across the hall. “Someone will collect you when you are needed,” he says.

I descend the wooden stairs, the lamp before me, and reach a stone-floored corridor. Along the entire length of one wall there are piles of ledgers and boxes of papers. It is chilly, damp, and moldy down here, and a trace of something rotting and unpleasant hangs in the air. At the end of the corridor, I see a door. I push it open and walk in. The foul smell of putrefying flesh makes me cough and gag. I am in a large cavernous basement, which seems at first to be empty.