Chapter 5: In Which Rat Is Taught Linguistics

I was literarily thrown into someone's cellar. They led me into a rickety, musty-smelling house on the east side of the city. I recognised the neighbourhood even in the cold darkness. It was called Chicken Dale and we street people avoided it unless we were desperate enough to get mixed up with the people who lived there and the things they dealt in.

They steered me through an unlit square room. I noticed a small shadowy figure crouching in one corner before I was led away to the kitchen. A trapdoor in the dusty stone floor opened onto a patch of deeper darkness. They took off my shackles and just like that, I was thrown into the pit.

I landed on a pile of rubbish that softened the fall but didn't really make the landing soft. Old bruises from the alley were now joined by new ones. Before I could catch my breath, the trap door slammed shut, showering me with dust and spiders. I lay in absolute darkness.

I was always perfectly comfortable in darkness. Better darkness than light. Nevertheless, absolute darkness is a bit of a nuisance. I couldn't even tell if my eyes were open or closed. I lay there motionless for a while, certain that this time I had broken some important bone, like my neck.

The place smelled terrible, the worst smell I smelled in my life. I'm a street kid; I've been to some really malodorous places in my time and I'll have you know I didn't shower every year. But I'm telling you, this stench was something special, probably the masterful work of centuries. It was damp and cold in the cellar, and if the air in the house above was musty, here it was limited and lazy and more content with sitting still than flowing about. Then there was some smell that was like a rotting carcass but not quite. And it was mingled with urine and sweat and shit and vomit.

All human waste combined together creates a unique and awful effect in one's nasal passages. Worse than that was that I didn't know how long they were going to hold me there. It was clear to me that someone had been held here before me, maybe more than one person, and that they had been in here for a while. Maybe they hadn't ever been let out. Maybe they were still there.

"Hello?" I whispered.

Something moved. I tensed all over. Would a person locked in a cellar for years be hungry and mad enough to eat human flesh? I shuddered and hoped that that magician knew what he was talking about when he said I was a Wielder. The movement stopped, and everything was still again. I desperately wished I had just a little bit of light, just a shade or two of grey. Something, anything to help me find out the size of the cellar and its contents without forcing me to get up and grope about in the darkness.

Even though I was no stranger to cellars and slept in them when I could manage to sneak into one on particularly cold winter nights, I was too anxious to move.

Suddenly the real reason why I was opposed to inspecting the cellar sank in. I had been running for weeks. I was so tired, too tired even for grief. My eyelids closed, and exhaustion bit into my battered bones. I didn't have a thought left.

I fell asleep where I lay.

*

The trapdoor opened; I blinked, blinded by the sudden change between inky darkness to dazzling sunlight. Things were thrown in, two objects – I knew it was two because they both hit me – and the trapdoor was slammed shut. I managed in the brief shower of light to examine my surroundings, and then in the darkness I scrambled to my hands and knees and collected the two objects.

Now I had what felt like a heavy flask of water and half a loaf of stale bread, and I knew that the cellar was a small square room and that I was alone in it, except for a few rats that had scurried into the shadowed corners when the door had opened.

I uncorked the flask and drank deeply. My hunger wasn't as desperate as my thirst; I could not remember the last time I drank anything. The water tasted like armpits, but I felt it flow into my sludgy bloodstream. I had drunk some awful water in my life, out of muddy puddles left from the rain and out of horse troughs; I was immune to disgusting tastes. Suddenly I stopped drinking, realising that I did not know when they'd give me another flask. I had drunk nearly half of the water and needed to conserve it. I put the cork back and bit into the hard, dry bread.

I don't know how many people know what it feels like to be starving, actually starving. But it was nothing like I expected. I always figured starvation would be like hunger, only ten times stronger. It wasn't. It was like the part of me that consumed food had shrivelled up and died.

I was a street kid, and therefore I was always hungry, always eating what I could find but never satisfied. However, there's a vast difference between going on for years and years being unsatisfied and then going on for days and days without having even a morsel.

The bread was rock-hard and tasteless. Just chewing it required my full concentration, and then I had to swallow, which meant I had to squeeze all my muscles to force the bite down. I felt completely closed up and dry, and it was as if the bread was cutting into my throat and all the way down through my body. It got stuck somewhere around my chest and I had to drink a mouthful of my precious water to get it to complete the journey.

When the bread reached my stomach, it was a relief at first. My body started to come to life, and I eagerly bit another bite, chewed, and swallowed.

But relief turned to torment. My heart began to race, and my limbs felt like rubber. I tried to lift my hand to my mouth, but couldn't. My head started to spin and the bread slipped from my fingers and rolled onto my lap.

There was nothing I could do but lie on my side and wait for the feeling to pass.

I began to realise that the darkness inside the cellar wasn't as absolute as it had been the night before. A few rays of light filtered through the wooden planks of the trapdoor above my head. I saw a small grey thing watching me.

A rat.

I always felt comfortable in the presence of rats, I know people don't like them because they carry diseases and eat winter provisions and scare young women and such – but there is something determinedly intelligent about them, something I could always understand. Probably because we shared a name – and let's face it, we lived the same kind of life.

I curled up on my mat of rubbish and kept my gaze on the rat. I extended my hand, offering it the bread, but it scurried away.

"Wait. Don't leave me." I had never resorted to speaking to rats before, but up until that day I had always had someone with me, someone to talk to, and also, the bread or the water had made my head strange.

To my surprise, the rat returned. Maybe it was a different rat, but I was pretty sure it was the same one. I don't know what I expected it to do, I simply asked, "Want some bread?"

Then I heard, "Sure."

I was so startled that I forgot about the way my blood was bubbling from the bread and how my brain wanted to go to sleep. I sat up and tried to see in the dark greyness if anyone was about. I looked back at the rat, took the bread into my hand and broke off a piece, offering it over.

"It tastes like sawdust," I said, putting it on the floor and drawing my hand away. The rat watched my warily, making sure I wasn't planning on moving any time soon and ran up, snatching the bread from where I left it, and running back to the spot it deemed was a safe distance.

"Smells fine to me. Can't be too picky, I've got kids to feed."

The rat had a very peculiar voice, mostly, because it sounded a bit like my own voice, and because it didn't seem like I was hearing it with my ears at all. Maybe these were my own thoughts, maybe I was just lonely and insane and giving the rat words to speak. "You can talk?"

"I've got time to talk." It settled down and nibbled the bread.

It misunderstood my words, but I didn't mind. "I've never heard about a talking rat."

"So when we want to talk to each other we just, what? Communicate telepathically?"

I chuckled. This rat was a funny girl. "All rats talk?"

"Sure."

"Why have I never heard a rat talk before?"

"You're not very observant."

"Can everyone talk to rats?"

The rat tilted its head at me and sniffed, its whiskers dancing, I somehow knew it was laughing. "Only rats can talk to rats. You're strange. Human Rat. Never met one before. Which are you? This or that?"

I smirked, "This and that."

"Rats are better."

"I agree." I lay back down, feeling comforted by the presence of someone who wasn't an enemy. "You understand human speech?"

"Rats are clever."

"We are," I said sleepily, my eyelids shutting slowly. Rats were better and more clever than humans, but just as proud.