He looked them up and down, and smiled. He was proud of these rats. ‘OK, people, you know it all by now,’
he said. ‘You don’t need a long lecture from me. Just remember that this is a new town so we don’t know what we’re going to find. There’re bound to be plenty of new types of traps, but we learn fast, don’t we? Poisons, too.
They might be using stuff we’ve never run across before, so be careful. Never rush, never run. We don’t want to be like the first mouse, eh?’
‘No, Darktan,’ the rats chorused dutifully.
‘I said, what mouse don’t we want to be like?’ Darktan demanded.
‘We don’t want to be like the first mouse!’ shouted the rats.
‘Right! What mouse do we want to be like?’
‘The second mouse, Darktan!’ said the rats, who’d had this lesson dinned into them many times.
‘Right! And why do we want to be like the second mouse?’
‘Because the second mouse gets the cheese, Darktan!’
‘Good!’ said Darktan. ‘Inbrine will take squad two… Bestbefore? You’re promoted, you take squad three, and I hope you’re as good as old Farmhouse was right up until the time she forgot how to disengage the trip-catch on a Snippet and Poison Ratsnapper Number 5. Over-confidence is our enemy! So if you see anything suspicious, any little trays you don’t recognize, anything with wires and springs and stuff, you mark it and send a runner to me—yes?’
A young rat was holding up its paw.
‘Yes? What’s your name… miss?’
‘Er… Nourishing, sir,’ said the rat. ‘Er… can I ask a question, sir?’
‘Are you new in this platoon, Nourishing?’ said Darktan.
‘Yes, sir! Transferred out of the Light Widdlers, sir!’
‘Ah, they thought you’d be good at trap disposal, did they?’
Nourishing looked uneasy, but there was no going back now. ‘Er… not really, sir. They said I couldn’t be any worse than I am at widdling, sir.’
There was general laughter from the ranks.
‘How can a rat not be good at that?’ said Darktan.
‘It’s just so… so… so embarrassing, sir,’ said Nourishing.
Darktan sighed to himself. All this new thinking was producing some strange things. He personally approved of the idea of the Right Place, but some of the ideas the kids were coming up with were… odd.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘What was your question, Nourishing?’
‘Er… you said the second mouse gets the cheese, sir?’
‘That’s right! That’s the squad motto, Nourishing. Remember it! It is your friend!’
‘Yes, sir. I will, sir. But… doesn’t the first mouse get something, sir?’
Darktan stared at the young rat. He was slightly impressed that she stared back, instead of cringing. ‘I can see you’re going to be a valuable addition to the squad, Nourishing,’ he said. He raised his voice. ‘Squad! What does the first mouse get?’
The roar of voices made dust fall down from the ceiling. ‘The Trap!’
‘And don’t you forget it,’ said Darktan. ‘Take ’em out, Specialoffer. I’ll be with you in a minute.’
A younger rat stepped forward, and faced the squads. ‘Let’s go, rats! Hut, hut, hut…’
The trap squads trotted away. Darktan walked over to Dangerous Beans.
‘That’s got us started,’ he said. ‘If we can’t get the humans looking for a good rat-catcher by tomorrow, we don’t know our business.’
‘We need to stay longer than that,’ said Peaches. ‘Some of the ladies are going to have their babies.’
‘I said we don’t know it’s safe here yet,’ said Darktan.
‘Do you want to be the one to tell Big Savings?’ said Peaches, sweetly. Big Savings was the old head female, widely agreed to have a bite like a pick-axe and muscles like rock. She also had a short temper with males. Even Hamnpork kept out of her way when she was in a bad mood.
‘Nature has to take its course, obviously,’ said Darktan, quickly. ‘But we haven’t explored. There must be other rats here.’
‘Oh, the keekees all keep out of the way of us,’ said Peaches.
That was true, Darktan had to agree. Ordinary rats did keep out of the way of the Changelings. Oh, there was some trouble sometimes, but the Changelings were big and healthy and could think their way through a fight.
Dangerous Beans was unhappy about this but, as Hamnpork said, it was either us or them and when you got right down to it, it was a rat-eat-rat world…
‘I’m going to go and join my squad,’ said Darktan, still unnerved at the thought of confronting Big Savings.
He moved closer. ‘What’s up with Hamnpork?’
‘He’s… thinking about things,’ said Peaches.
‘Thinking,’ said Darktan, blankly. ‘Oh. Right. Well, I’ve got traps to see to. Smell you later!’
‘What is the matter with Hamnpork?’ said Dangerous Beans, when he and Peaches were alone again.
‘He’s getting old,’ said Peaches. ‘He needs to rest a lot. And I think he’s worried that Darktan or one of the others is going to challenge him.’
‘Will they, do you think?’
‘Darktan’s more wrapped up in breaking traps and testing poisons. There’s more interesting things to do now than bite one another.’
‘Or do rllk, from what I hear,’ said Dangerous Beans.
Peaches looked down, demurely. If rats could blush, she would have done. It was amazing how pink eyes that could hardly see you could look straight through you at the same time. ‘The ladies are a lot more choosy,’ she said. ‘They want to find fathers who can think.’
‘Good,’ said Dangerous Beans. ‘We must be careful. We don’t need to breed like rats. We don’t have to rely on numbers. We are the Changelings.’
Peaches watched him anxiously. When Dangerous Beans was thinking, he seemed to be staring into a world only he could see. ‘What is it this time?’ she asked.
‘I have been thinking that we shouldn’t kill other rats. No rat should kill another rat.’
‘Even keekees?’ she queried.
‘They are rats too.’
Peaches shrugged. ‘Well, we’ve tried talking to them and that didn’t work. Anyway, they mostly stay away these days.’
Dangerous Beans was still staring at the unseen world. ‘Even so,’ he said quietly, ‘I should like you to write it down.’
Peaches sighed, but went off anyway to one of the packs the rats had carried in and pulled out her bag. It was no more than a roll of cloth with a handle made from a scrap of string, but it was big enough to hold a few matches, some pieces of pencil lead, a tiny sliver of a broken knife blade for sharpening the leads, and a grubby piece of paper. All the important things.
She was also the official carrier of Mr Bunnsy. ‘Carrier’ wasn’t quite correct;’dragger’ was mostly more accurate. But Dangerous Beans always liked to know where it was and seemed to think better when it was around, and it gave him some comfort, and that was good enough for Peaches.
She smoothed out the paper on an ancient brick, picked up a piece of lead and looked down the list.
The first Thought had been: In the Clan is Strength.
This had been quite a hard one to translate, but she had made an effort. Most rats couldn’t read human. It was just too hard to make the lines and squiggles turn into any sense. So Peaches had worked very hard on making a language that rats could read.
She’d tried to draw a big rat made up of little rats:
The writing had led to trouble with Hamnpork. New ideas needed a running jump to get into the old rat’s head. Dangerous Beans had explained in his strange calm voice that writing things down would mean that a rat’s knowledge would go on existing even when the rat had died. He said that all the rats could learn the knowledge of Hamnpork. Hamnpork had said: not likely! It’d had taken him years to learn some of the tricks he’d learned!
Why should he give it all away? That’d mean any young rat would know as much as him!
Dangerous Beans had said: We co-operate, or we die.
That had become the next Thought. ‘Co-operate’ had been difficult, but even keekees would sometimes lead a blind or wounded comrade, and that was certainly cooperation. The thick line, where she’d pressed heavily, had to mean ‘no’. The trap sign could mean’die’ or ‘bad’ or ‘avoid’.
The last Thought on the paper was: Not to Widdle where you Eat. That one was quite simple.
She grasped the piece of lead in both paws and carefully drew: No Rat to Kill Another Rat.
She sat back. Yes… not bad…’trap’ was a good sign for death, and she’d added the dead rat to make it all more serious.
‘But supposing you have to?’ she said, still staring at the drawings.
‘Then you have to,’ said Dangerous Beans. ‘But you shouldn’t.’
Peaches shook her head sadly. She supported Dangerous Beans because there was… well, something about him. He wasn’t big or fast and he was almost blind and quite weak and sometimes he forgot to eat because he came up with thoughts that nobody—at least, nobody who was a rat—had thought before. Most of them had annoyed Hamnpork no end, like the time when Dangerous Beans had said, ‘What is a rat?’ and Hamnpork had replied, Teeth. Claws. Tail. Run. Hide. Eat. That’s what a rat is.’