China Miéville - King Rat

King Rat leaned back against the rubbish sacks, staring at the sky.

‘It occurs,’ he said presently, ‘that thee and me should scarper. Full?’

Saul nodded. ‘You’ve got a story to tell me,’ he said.

‘I know it,’ said King Rat. ‘But I can’t exercise myself on that particular just yet. I’ve to teach you to be rat. Your eyes aren’t even open yet; you’re still such a mewling little furless thing. So…’ He got to his feet. ‘What say we retire? Grab a bit of tucker for the underground.’ He pushed handfuls of leftover fruitcake into his pockets.

King Rat turned to face the wall behind the rubbish sacks. He moved to the right-angle of brick where the wall met one side of the narrow alley, wedged himself within it in his impossible way, and began to scale the wall. He teetered at the top, twenty feet up, his feet daintily picking between rusting coils of barbed wire as though they were flowers. He squatted between them and beckoned to Saul.

Saul approached the wall. He set his teeth and jutted out his lower jaw, confrontational. He pushed himself into the corner space, as hard as he could, feeling his flesh mould itself into the space. He reached up with his arms. Like a rat, he thought, squeeze and move and pull like a rat. His fingers gripped the spaces between bricks and he hauled himself up with a prodigious strength. His face ballooned with effort, his feet scrabbled, but he was progressing up the wall in his own undignified fashion. He let out a growl, and heard an admonitory hissing from above him. He pushed his right arm up again, the dank smell of rat-sweat more evident than ever beneath his arms. His legs failed him, he quivered and fell, was caught and pulled into the thicket of crumbling wire.

‘Not so bad, ratling boy. Isn’t it a marvel what you can do with a scrap of decent grub in your belly? You were right up near the top.’

And Saul felt pride at his climbing.

Below them was a little courtyard hemmed in on all sides by dirty walls and windows. To Saul’s new eyes the robust dirt of the enclosure was almost too vibrant to look at. Every corner teemed with the spreading stains of decay; this weak spot of the city had been convincingly annexed by the forces of filth. A disconcerting line of dolls gently mouldered where they had been placed, their backs to the wall, eyes on the pewter-coloured plug in the corner of the courtyard. A manhole.

King Rat exhaled through his nose triumphantly.

‘Home,’ he hissed. ‘Into the palace.’

He leapt from the top of the wall, landing in a crouch over the manhole, surrounding it. He made no sound as he came to rest on the concrete. His coat drifted down around him, surrounding him like oily puddle. He looked up and waited.

Saul looked down and felt the old fears. He steele himself, swallowed. He willed himself to jump, but his legs had locked into a fearful squat, and he grew exasperated as he readied himself to land beside uncle. He breathed in, once, twice, very deeply, to stood, swung his arms and launched himself at the shape waiting for him.

He saw greys and reds of bricks and concrete lurct around him in slow motion, he moved his body, prepared his landing, as he saw King Rat’s grin approached him at speed; then the world jolted hard, his eyes and teeth juddered in his face, and he was down. His knees pushed all the air out of his stomach, but he smile with exhilaration as he overcame his spasming belly and sucked air into his lungs. He had flown, had I landed ready. He was shedding his humanity like an old snakeskin, scratching it off in great swathes. It was so fast, this assumption of a new form inside.

‘You’re a good boy,’ said King Rat, and busied himself with the metal in the ground.

Saul looked up. He saw figures move behind the windows above, wondered if anyone could see them.

King Rat’s London snarl had assumed a didactic tone. ‘Pay attention, ratling. This here is the entrance to your ceremonial abode. The all of Rome-vill is yours by rights, you’re royalty. But there’s a special palace, the rat’s own hidey-hole, and you bing a waste there through these portholes.’ He indicated the metal cover. ‘Observe.’

King Rat’s fingers scuttled over the iron disc like a virtuoso typist’s, investigating its surface. He turned his head from side to side, cocked it briefly, then suddenly tensed his body and slipped his fingers into infinitesimal gaps between the seal and its shaft. It was like sleight of hand: Saul could not see what had happened, or how the fingers had fit, yet they were there, pulling, in the gaps.

The manhole cover twisted with a yelp of rust. There was a rush of dirty wind as King Rat pulled it free.

Saul stared into the pit. The swirling winds of the courtyard yanked at the rich-smelling wisps of vapour emerging from the hole. The sewer was gorged with darkness; it seemed to overflow, seeping out of the open concrete and obscuring the ground. The organic scent of compost billowed out. Just visible, a ladder driven into the subterranean brick plunged out of sight. Where it was riveted to the wall, metal had oxidized and leached out profusely, making the sewer bleed rust. The sound of a thin flow of water was amplified by the yawning tunnels, making for a bizarre booming trickle.

King Rat looked at Saul. He clenched his hand into a fist, extended a pointing index finger, and his hand described an elaborate twisting path through the air, playfully circling, till it spiralled down and came to rest pointing into the sewer. King Rat stood at the edge of the thin circle. He stepped out over the hole and dropped through the pavement. There was a tiny echoing damp sound.

King Rat’s voice emerged from underground.

‘Down you come.’

Saul squeezed his hips through the hole.

‘Tut a lid on it,’ said King Rat from below, and laughed briefly. Saul fumbled with the metal cover. He was half in, half out of the sewer. He sank under the weight of the metal. He held it above his head and descended. The light disappeared.

Saul shivered in the cold of the sewer. His feet clapped on the metal. He stumbled as his feet hit wetness. He backed away from the ladder and rubbed himself in the darkness. Air gusted and hissed; freezing water flooded his shoes.

‘Where are you?’ he whispered.

‘Watching,’ came King Rat’s voice. It moved around him. ‘Wait. You’ll see. You’ve never tried this, laddie, so hold your horses. The darkmans is nothing to you.’

Saul stood still. His hands were invisible before him.

Shapes moved in front of him. He thought they were real until the corridors themselves began to emerge from the darkness and he realized that those other fleeting, indistinct forms were born in his mind. They were dispelled as Saul began to see.

He saw the muck of the drains. He saw the energy it contained spilling out, a grey light that showed no colours but illuminated the damp tunnels. Before him a study in perspective, the shit-and algae-encrusted walls of the shaft meeting in the distance. Behind him and to his right more tunnels, and everywhere the smell, rot and faeces, and the pungent smell of piss, rat piss. He wrinkled his nose, his hackles rising.

‘No worries,’ said King Rat, a figure saturated in shadows, drenched in them, a mass of darkness. ‘Some cove’s staked a claim and made a mark, but we’re royalty. His territory doesn’t mean fuck to us.’

Saul looked about him. A thin rivulet of dirty water seeped by at his feet. His every movement seemed to set off an explosion of echoes. He stood in a twisting brick cylinder seven feet in diameter. From everywhere came the noises of streaming water and falling stones, and organic sounds of squeaks and scratches, peaking, dying out and being replaced, sounds far away being written over by those nearby, a palimpsest of noise.