‘It’s amazing, the stuff I know,’ said Maurice, blinking slowly at him. ‘Anyway, it’s a nice-looking town.
Looks rich to me. Now, what we’ll do is—’
‘Ahem…’
Maurice hated that sound. If there was a sound worse than Dangerous Beans asking one of his odd little questions, it was Peaches clearing her throat. It meant she was going to say something, very quietly, which was going to upset him.
‘Yes?’ he said sharply.
‘Do we really need to keep on doing this?’ she said.
‘Well, of course, no,’ said Maurice. ‘I don’t have to be here at all. I’m a cat, right? A cat with my talents? Hah!
I could’ve got myself a really cushy job with a conjurer. Or a ventrilosqwist, maybe. There’s no end to the things I could be doing, right, ‘cos people like cats. But, owing to being incredibly, you know, stupid and kind-hearted, I decided to help a bunch of rodents who are, and let’s be frank here, not exactly number one favourites with humans. Now some of you,’ and here he cast a yellow eye towards Dangerous Beans, ‘have some idea of going to some island somewhere and starting up a kind of rat civilization of your very own, which I think is very, you know, admirable, but for that you need… what did I tell you that you need?’
‘Money, Maurice,’ said Dangerous Beans, ‘but—’
‘Money. That’s right, ‘cos what can you get with money?’ He looked around at the rats. ‘Begins with a B,’ he prompted.
‘Boats, Maurice, but—’
‘And then there’s all the tools you’ll need, and food, of course—’
‘There’s coconuts,’ said the stupid-looking kid, who was polishing his flute.
‘Oh, did someone speak?’ said Maurice. ‘What do you know about it, kid?’
‘You get coconuts,’ said the kid. ‘On desert islands. A man selling them told me.’
‘How?’ said Maurice. He wasn’t too sure about coconuts.
‘I don’t know. You just get them.’
‘Oh, I suppose they just grow on trees, do they?’ said Maurice sarcastically. ‘Sheesh, I just don’t know what you lot would do without… anyone?’ He glared at the group. ‘Begins with an M.’
‘You, Maurice,’ said Dangerous Beans. ‘But, you see, what we think is, really—’
‘Yes?’ said Maurice,
‘Ahem,’ said Peaches. Maurice groaned. ‘What Dangerous Beans means,’ said the female rat, ‘is that all this stealing grains and cheese and gnawing holes in walls is, well…’ She looked up into Maurice’s yellow eyes. ‘Is not morally right.’
‘But it’s what rats do!’ said Maurice.
‘But we feel we shouldn’t,’ said Dangerous Beans. ‘We should be making our own way in the world!’
‘Oh dear oh dear oh dear,’ said Maurice, shaking his head. ‘Ho for the island, eh? The Kingdom of the Rats!
Not that I’m laughing at your dream,’ he added hastily. ‘Everyone needs their little dreams.’ Maurice truly that, too. If you knew what it was that people really, really wanted, you very nearly controlled them.
Sometimes he wondered what the stupid-looking kid wanted. Nothing, as far as Maurice could tell, but to be allowed to play his flute and be left alone. But… well, it was like that thing with the coconuts. Every so often the kid would come out with something that suggested he’d been listening all along. People like that are hard to steer.
But cats are good at steering people. A miaow here, a purr there, a little gentle pressure with a claw… and Maurice had never had to think about it before. Cats didn’t have to think. They just had to know what they wanted. Humans had to do the thinking. That’s what they were for.
Maurice thought about the good old days before his brain had started whizzing like a firework. He’d turn up at the door of the University kitchens and look sweet, and then the cooks would try to work out what he wanted.
It was amazing! They’d say things like ‘Does oo want a bowl of milk, den? Does oo want a biscuit? Does oo want dese nice scraps, den?’ And all Maurice would have to do was wait patiently until they got to a sound he recognized, like ‘turkey legs’ or ‘minced lamb’.
But he was sure he’d never eaten anything magical. There was no such thing as enchanted chicken giblets, was there?
It was the rats who’d eaten the magical stuff. The dump they called ‘home’ and also called ‘lunch’ was round the back of the University, and it was a university for wizards, after all. The old Maurice hadn’t paid much attention to people who weren’t holding bowls, but he was aware that the big men in pointy hats made strange things happen.
And now he knew what happened to the stuff they used, too. It got tossed over the wall when they’d finished with it. All the old worn-out spell-books and the stubs of the dribbly candles and the remains of the green bubbly stuff in the cauldrons all ended up on the big dump, along with the tin cans and old boxes and the kitchen waste.
Oh, the wizards had put up signs saying ‘Dangerous’ and ‘Toxic’, but the rats hadn’t been able to read in those days and they liked dribbly candle ends.
Maurice had never eaten anything off the dump. A good motto in life, he’d reckoned, was: don’t eat anything that glows.
But he’d become intelligent, too, at about the same time as the rats. It was a mystery.
Since then he’d done what cats always did. He steered people. Now some of the rats counted as people too, of course. But people were people, even if they had four legs and had called themselves names like Dangerous Beans, which is the kind of name you give yourself if you learn to read before you understand what all the words actually mean, and read the notices and the labels off the old rusty cans and give yourself names you like the sound of.
The trouble with thinking was that, once you started, you went on doing it. And as far as Maurice was concerned, the rats were thinking a good deal too much. Dangerous Beans was bad enough, but he was so busy thinking stupid thoughts about how rats could actually build their own country somewhere that Maurice could deal with him. It was Peaches who was the worst. Maurice’s usual trick of just talking fast until people got confused didn’t work on her at all.
‘Ahem,’ she began again, ‘we think that this should be the last time.’
Maurice stared. The other rats backed away slightly, but Peaches just stared back.
‘This must be the very last time we do the silly “plague of rats” trick,’ said Peaches. ‘And that’s final.’
‘And what does Hamnpork think about this?’ said Maurice. He turned to the head rat, who had been watching them. It was always a good idea appealing to Hamnpork when Peaches was giving trouble, because he didn’t like her very much.
‘What d’you mean, think?’ said Hamnpork.
‘I… sir, I think we should stop doing this trick,’ said Peaches, dipping her head nervously.
‘Oh, you think too, do you?’ said Hamnpork. ‘Everyone’s thinking these days. I think there’s a good deal too much of this thinking, that’s what I think. We never thought about thinking when I was a lad. We’d never get anything done if we thought first.’
He gave Maurice a glare, too. Hamnpork didn’t like Maurice. He didn’t like most things that had happened since the Change. In fact Maurice wondered how long Hamnpork was going to last as leader. He didn’t like thinking. He belonged to the days when a rat leader just had to be big and stroppy. The world was moving far too fast for him now, which made him angry.
He wasn’t so much leading now as being pushed.
‘I… Dangerous Beans, sir, believes that we should be thinking of settling down, sir,’ said Peaches.
Maurice scowled. Hamnpork wouldn’t listen to Peaches, and she knew it, but Dangerous Beans was the
nearest thing the rats had to a wizard and even big rats listened to him.
‘I thought we were going to get on a boat and find an island somewhere,’ said Hamnpork. ‘Very ratty places, boats,’ he added, approvingly. Then he went on, with a slightly nervous and slightly annoyed look at Dangerous Beans, ‘And people tell me that we need this money stuff because now we can do all this thinking we’ve got to be eff… efit…’
‘Ethical, sir,’ said Dangerous Beans.
‘Which sounds unratty to me. Not that my opinion counts for anything, it seems,’ said Hamnpork.
‘We’ve got enough money, sir,’ said Peaches. ‘We’ve already got a lot of money. We have got a lot of money, haven’t we, Maurice.’ It wasn’t a question; it was a kind of accusation.
‘Well, when you say a lot—’ Maurice began.
‘And in fact we’ve got more money than we thought,’ said Peaches, still in the same tone of voice. It was very polite, but it just kept going and it asked all the wrong questions. A wrong question for Maurice was one that he