He leaned down. ‘Can… you… un-der-stand… me?’ he said, pronouncing each word very carefully.
‘Yes… be-cause… I’m… not… stu-pid,’ said Darktan.
‘Oh, er… the mayor wonders if he can see you in his private office,’ said the clerk. ‘The door over there. I could help you down, if you like.’
‘I could bite your finger, if you like,’ said Darktan. The mayor was already walking away from the table.
Darktan slid down and followed him. No-one paid any attention to either of them.
The mayor waited until Darktan’s tail was out of the way and carefully shut the door.
The room was small and untidy. Paper occupied most flat surfaces. Bookcases filled several of the walls; extra books and more paper were stuffed in between the tops of the books and any space in the shelves.
The mayor, moving with exaggerated delicacy, went and sat in a big, rather tatty swivel chair, and looked down at Darktan. ‘I’m going to get this wrong,’ he said. ‘I thought we should have a… a little talk. Can I pick you up? I mean, it’d be easier to talk to you if you were on my desk…’
‘No,’ said Darktan. ‘And it’d be easier to talk to you if you lay flat on the floor.’ He sighed. He was too tired for games. ‘If you put your hand flat on the floor I’ll stand on it and you can raise it up to the height of the desk,’
he said, ‘but if you try anything nasty I’ll bite your thumb off.’
The mayor lifted him up, with extreme caution. Darktan hopped off into the mass of papers, empty teacups and old pens that covered the battered leather top, and stood looking up at the embarrassed man.
‘Er… do you have to do much paperwork in your job?’ said the mayor.
‘Peaches writes things down,’ said Darktan, bluntly.
‘That’s the little female rat that coughs before she speaks, isn’t it?’ said the mayor.
‘That’s right.’
‘She’s very… definite, isn’t she?’ said the mayor, and
Darktan could see that he was sweating. ‘She’s rather frightening some of the councillors, ha ha.’
‘Ha ha,’ said Darktan.
The mayor looked miserable. He seemed to be searching for something to say. ‘You are, er, settling in well?’
he said.
‘I spent part of last night fighting a dog in a rat pit, and then I think I was stuck in a rat trap for a while,’ said Darktan, in a voice like ice. ‘And then there was a bit of a war. Apart from that, I can’t complain.’
The mayor gave him a worried look. For the first time he could remember, Darktan felt sorry for a human.
The stupid-looking kid had been different. The mayor seemed to be as tired as Darktan felt.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I think it might work, if that’s what you want to ask me.’
The mayor brightened up. ‘You do?’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of arguing.’
‘That’s why I think it might work,’ said Darktan. ‘Men and rats arguing. You’re not poisoning our cheese, and we’re not widdling in your jam. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s a start.’
‘But there’s something I have to know,’ said the mayor.
‘Yes?’
‘You could have poisoned our wells. You could have set fire to our houses. My daughter tells me you are very… advanced. You don’t owe us anything. Why didn’t you?’
‘What for? What would we have done afterwards?’ said Darktan. ‘Gone to another town? Gone through all this again? Would killing you have made anything better for us? Sooner or later we’d have to talk to humans. It might as well be you.’
‘I’m glad you like us!’ said the mayor.
Darktan opened his mouth to say: Like you? No, we just don’t hate you enough. We’re not friends.
But…
There would be no more rat pits. No more traps, no more poisons. True, he was going to have to explain to the Clan what a policeman was, and why rat watchmen might chase rats who broke the new Rules. They weren’t going to like that. They weren’t going to like that at all. Even a rat with the marks of the Bone Rat’s teeth on him was going to have difficulty with that. But as Maurice had said: they’ll do this, you’ll do that. No-one will lose very much and everyone will gain a lot. The town will prosper, everyone’s children will grow up, and suddenly, it’ll all be normal.
And everyone likes things to be normal. They don’t like to see normal things changed. It must be worth a try, thought Darktan.
‘Now I want to ask you a question,’ he said. ‘You’ve been the leader for… how long?’
‘Ten years,’ said the mayor.
‘Isn’t it hard?’
‘Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Everyone argues with me all the time,’ said the mayor. ‘Although I must say I’m expecting a little less arguing if all this works. But it’s not an easy job.’
‘It’s ridiculous to have to shout all the time just to get things done,’ said Darktan.
‘That’s right,’ said the mayor.
‘And everyone expects you to decide things,’ said Darktan.
‘True.’
‘The last leader gave me some advice just before he died, and do you know what it was? “Don’t eat the green wobbly bit”!’
‘Good advice?’ said the mayor.
‘Yes,’ said Darktan. ‘But all he had to do was be big and tough and fight all the other rats that wanted to be leader.’
‘It’s a bit like that with the council,’ said the mayor.
‘What?’ said Darktan. ‘You bite them in the neck?’
‘Not yet,’ said the mayor. ‘But it’s a thought, I must say.’
‘It’s just all a lot more complicated than I ever thought it would be!’ said Darktan, bewildered. ‘Because after you’ve learned to shout you have to learn not to!’
‘Right again,’ said the mayor. ‘That’s how it works.’ He put his hand down on the desk, palm up. ‘May I?’ he said.
Darktan stepped aboard, and kept his balance as the mayor carried him over to the window and set him down on the sill.
‘See the river?’ said the mayor. ‘See the houses? See the people in the streets? I have to make it all work.
Well, not the river, obviously, that works by itself. And every year it turns out that I haven’t upset enough people for them to choose anyone else as mayor. So I have to do it again. It’s a lot more complicated than I ever thought it would be.’
‘What, for you, too? But you’re a human!’ said Darktan in astonishment.
‘Hah! You think that makes it easier? I thought rats were wild and free!’
‘Hah!’ said Darktan.
They both stared out of the window. Down in the square below they could see Keith and Malicia walking along, deep in conversation.
‘If you like,’ said the mayor, after a while, ‘you could have a little desk here in my office—’
‘I’ll live underground, thank you all the same,’ said Darktan, pulling himself together. ‘Little desks are a bit too Mr Bunnsy.’
The mayor sighed. ‘I suppose so. Er…’ He looked as if he was about to share some guilty secret and, in a way, he was. ‘I did like those books when I was a boy, though. Of course I knew it was all nonsense but, all the same, it was nice to think that—’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Darktan. ‘But the rabbit was stupid. Whoever heard of a rabbit talking?’
‘Oh, yes. I never liked the rabbit. It was the minor characters everyone liked. Ratty Rupert and Phil the Pheasant and Olly the Snake—’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Darktan. ‘He had a collar and tie!’
‘Well?’
‘Well, how did it stay on? A snake is tube-shaped!’
‘Do you know, I never thought of it like that,’ said the mayor. ‘Silly, really. He’d wriggle out of it, wouldn’t he?’
‘And waistcoats on rats don’t work.’
‘No?’
‘No,’ said Darktan. ‘I tried it. Tool belts are fine, but waistcoats. Dangerous Beans got quite upset about that.
But I told him, you’ve got to be practical.’
‘It’s just like I always tell my daughter,’ said the man. ‘Stories are just stories. Life is complicated enough as it is. We have to plan for the real world. There’s no room for the fantastic.’
‘Exactly,’ said the rat.
And man and rat talked, as the long light faded into the evening.
A man was painting, very carefully, a little picture underneath the street sign that said ‘River Street’. It was a long way underneath, only just higher than the pavement, and he had to kneel down. He kept referring to a small piece of paper in his hand.
The picture looked like:
Keith laughed. ‘What’s funny?’ said Malicia.
‘It’s in the Rat alphabet,’ said Keith. ‘It says Water+Fast+Stones. The streets have got cobbles on, right? So rats see them as stones. It means River Street.’
‘Both languages on the street signs. Clause 193,’ said Malicia. ‘That’s fast. They only agreed that two hours ago. I suppose that means there will be tiny signs in human language in the rat tunnels?’