Chapter 1 Tuesday Pests

The chooks went quiet a bit after four.

That's always the first sign. Chooks will grumble all night if there's a fox about. They complain about the cold and the rain and each other, and old Bastard the rooster will crow at the moon if it's bright enough to annoy him. But when something comes up through the barn floor, the whole shed shuts up like somebody's dropped a blanket over it. Thirty-one hens and one rooster, and not a sound.

I lay there and listened to that quiet for a bit. Then I got up, pulled my boots on without lacing them, and took the cleaver off its hook beside the flue.

It was a Tuesday. They mostly come up late in the week, so I was a bit put out. I'd planned to do the back fence.

* * *

Outside it was black as the inside of a boot, no moon, and a cold that hadn't made up its mind to be frost yet. Duchess was bellowing in the home paddock. She's nine and she's seen all this before, but she has never once been quiet about it. She was jammed into the far corner by the creek gate with her backside to the barn, which is where she goes on bad nights.

"I know," I told her. "I'm going."

The barn sits forty paces from the house, downhill, so the rain runs away from the kitchen. The big doors were shut, the way I'd left them, but the left one was bowed out at the middle like it had been leaned on from inside. The smell coming through the gap was wet copper and rotten eggs, with something sharp underneath that made my eyes water.

I took the lantern off its nail, lit it, and went in by the side door. I wasn't keen to stand in front of the big ones.

It was in the hay.

The big rats run about three cart-lengths, nose to tail, and this one was no runt. It had grey armour plates down its back, each one the size of a shovel blade, overlapping like roof slates. It had shoved itself into the winter stack at the back of the barn and was chewing, or doing whatever passes for chewing when your head's mostly mouth. The teeth go in backwards, pointing down the throat, so whatever goes in doesn't come out again. Round the top of the head there's a ring of eyes, eight or nine depending on the rat, milky yellow. They don't blink together. One goes, then another, then three at once.

The hay was smoking where the drool hit it.

"Ah, come on," I said. "That's the good hay."

Every one of those eyes swung round at once. That bit they do manage together.

I put the lantern on the feed bin and stepped out into the open, because the one thing you don't want with a big rat is to be stuck in a corner. It came out of the hay fast, faster than anything that size has a right to, and I went left. The tail came round behind it like a chain swung on a rope. It took the good bucket off the wall and cracked it clean in half, then hit the left door hard enough to split a board top to bottom.

That door had taken Dad and me two days to hang.

The rat turned. They're quick in a straight line but slow to come about, all that length to bring round, so I had time to shift the cleaver into my right hand and set my feet. Its mouth opened. Drool spattered the floor and hissed through the boards.

The trick with a big rat, and Dad showed me this when I was ten, is that they rear before they bite. They lift the front third of themselves off the ground, the way a snake does, so they can come down on you. When they rear there's a seam under the jaw where the plates don't meet. It's soft there, about the width of my hand, and it runs back towards the throat.

It reared.

I stepped in under it, put the cleaver into the seam and pulled down hard, the way you'd open a sack of chaff. The blade went in to the handle and came out the far end in a long hot rush. I got out of the way of what followed.

It thrashed a while, the way they do. One of the plates caught the corner post and the whole barn shivered. Then it stopped, and all those eyes went dull, one after another, still out of time.

I stood there breathing hard and dripping. My hands weren't shaking. They gave that up when I was about fourteen.

"Right," I said to nobody.

* * *

At the back of the barn, behind where the hay had been, is the drain.

That's what Dad called it. It's a crack in the floor that runs crooked from the back wall about four strides towards the middle, and at its widest it's a bit more than my arm's length across. Warm air comes up out of it even in winter, and if you hold a lantern over it you can't see the bottom. On bad nights you can hear something down there breathing, slow and a long way off, like a bellows in another valley.

Dad's story was that it was an old mine shaft. Before the Marshes came out here, he said, hill folk dug for tin under this whole valley, and the workings are still down there, miles of them, flooded and rotten. Things live in old mines. Things get big in the dark with nobody to bother them. Every so often one wanders up the shaft looking for a feed, smells the chooks, and comes up through our floor.

"Mine rats," he called them. "Nothing to get excited about."

I've never seen a tin mine in this district, or a hill person, or a single bit of tin. Then again, I've never seen the sea either, and I'm told that's there.

I stood over the crack and stamped twice on the boards beside it, hard, the way Dad always did. He never said why. My guess is it lets whatever's down there know the place is taken.

The warm air kept coming up. Nothing else did.

* * *

By the time the sky went grey I had the rat in pieces on the barn floor.

Grandad Wendel was the butcher in Thornfell for thirty years before he sold the shop and came out to live with us, and he taught me everything he knew about taking an animal apart, which was nearly everything there was to know. The cleaver was his. He used it on pigs and sheep and the odd bullock. When I was nine I used it on the first thing that ever came through our fence, and I cut my palm open on the handle doing it. I've still got the scar. Grandad wrapped my hand and sat me by the fire and told me I'd done well, and then he didn't say anything for a long time.

It's been my cleaver since. It hangs by the flue every night and comes off the hook every morning. It's a fair bit bigger than a kitchen cleaver these days, with a blade about the length of my forearm, but it's an old tool and old tools wear in funny ways.

The plates come off a big rat easy if you get the blade under the edge and lean. The hide underneath is grey and tough as a boot sole, and the meat's pale. I took the hide off in four big pieces and rolled them, because Haddie in Thornfell pays for hide even though she complains about it. The head I cut off and set on the chopping block outside the door to drain. The skull plates make good scrapers once you've boiled them clean.

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At the base of the skull, where the neck joins, there's always a pretty rock.

That's what I called them when I was a kid and I never stopped. It's a lump of crystal about the size of my fist, warm in the hand, with a slow light inside that moves like honey being stirred. Dad said they were like the stones you sometimes find in an old cow's gut, something the body makes when it goes sour. Worth nothing, he said. You can't burn them and you can't eat them, and the light never gets bright enough to read by.

I carried it over to the chook shed and dropped it in the sack by the door. The sack props the door open in summer, and it's getting heavy. There's forty-odd rocks in there, maybe more, and every one of them glows a little, so on dark nights the shed looks like somebody's left a lamp burning low. The chooks don't mind. They were already starting up again by the time I got there, muttering and shoving each other, so I knew it was done.

Then I cut off the tail.

* * *

The tail's the best bit of a big rat. Nobody believes me about that, but there's nobody out here to believe me anyway. The meat is white and comes away in flakes, and it tastes like a chook that grew up in a river. I cut a slab off the thick end, rubbed it with salt, fried it in dripping with four eggs, and took the pan out to the back step to eat straight off the iron.

The sun came up over the Greywild while I ate. It's a long dark run of forest past the creek and the back paddocks,. The light came through the tops of the trees, then across the paddocks, then across Mum's apple tree out the front. She planted it the year I was born. I don't remember her much. I remember her hands, and that she sang off key, and that she used to say the apple tree and I would grow up together. It's done all right. It gave nearly three bushels this year.

Dad's chimney was smoking behind me and the kitchen was warm. He rebuilt that chimney himself the summer after Mum died, stone by stone, because the old one drew badly and the smoke used to make her cough. He was like that. He didn't say much about anything, but he fixed things.

He's been gone three years. His heart, the healer from Thornfell said, though he'd been crook a lot longer than he let on. I buried him under the apple tree because I couldn't think of anywhere better.

There was one thing he said more than any other. If I ever got proud of myself, if I did something well and came in grinning, he'd look at me over his pipe and say it.

"You're nothing special, son. Just stubborn. And stubborn's enough."

I used to hate that. Now I reckon it's about the most useful thing anyone ever told me. You don't need to be special to run a farm. You need to get up every day and do what needs doing, and keep doing it after it stops being fun, and that's all stubborn means.

I finished the eggs, wiped the pan with bread, and went to see about the hay.

The hay was buggered. Half the winter stack was black and smoking where the drool had got in, and the rest smelled so bad Duchess wouldn't go near it. I'd have to buy more, and hay before winter isn't cheap. The left door needed new hinges as well as a new board, because the old ones had torn half out of the frame. I stood there and added it all up and didn't like the total.

That was the worst of the morning, I thought.

* * *

The Crown rider came up the track a bit after midday.

I heard him a long way off. Nobody comes up our track who isn't lost, and a horse at a trot carries in the quiet out here. I was splitting a new board for the door, so I put the axe down, wiped my hands, and walked to the front gate to meet him.

He was young, nineteen maybe, with a wispy go at a moustache and a blue coat with silver piping that was far too good for the road. He had a leather message case on a strap across his chest. His horse was a big glossy bay, a lovely animal, right up until it got within fifty paces of the barn.

Then it stopped.

It didn't shy. It planted all four feet and stood there trembling, ears flat, eyes rolling white. The lad kicked it. It backed up three steps. He kicked it again and it went sideways into the ditch and stood there, and no amount of kicking was going to bring it out.

"Sorry," I called. "It's the smell, probably. I've been butchering."

"Butchering what?" He was hauling on the reins.

I pointed at the chopping block.

The head of a big rat is about the size of a wheelbarrow, and it was sitting where I'd left it, mouth open, backwards teeth showing, all those yellow eyes staring off in different directions. From the road, I suppose, it did look a bit much.

The lad went the colour of whey.

"What," he said. Then he swallowed and tried again. "Sir. What is that?"

"Big rat."

He looked at me. He looked at the head. He looked at me again.

"They come up out of the old mine workings," I said. "Under the barn. It's dead," I added, because he didn't look sure. "They twitch a bit after."

The jaw gave a little twitch right then. I hadn't arranged it.

The lad made a noise like a kettle coming to the boil. He fumbled the message case open, pulled out a rolled paper with a black seal hanging off it, and threw it at me. It went about half the distance and landed in the ditch. Then he dragged the horse round, which it was very happy about, and went back down the track at a flat gallop with his coat flapping.

He didn't wait for me to sign for it. I was fairly sure I was meant to sign for it.

I fished the paper out of the ditch and wiped the mud off on my trousers.

* * *

I read it at the kitchen table. Then I read it again, slower, in case I'd got it wrong. Then I read it a third time out loud to the empty kitchen, because sometimes a thing makes more sense when you hear it.

It didn't.

The notice said that following a review of frontier holdings, the annual land tax on the property known as Marsh Hold, in the district of Thornfell, was revised from six gold crowns to two hundred gold crowns. Payment was due in full at the Crown office in Thornfell by first frost. Failure to pay would see the holding forfeit to the Crown, with all buildings, stock and fixtures.

At the bottom, over a lump of black wax with a tower pressed into it, it said BY AUTHORITY OF THE LORD CHANCELLOR.

"Two hundred," I said.

The kitchen didn't say anything back.

"Two hundred gold. For this." I looked round. It's a good kitchen. It's got a solid table and Dad's chimney and Mum's dresser with the blue plates on it. But two hundred gold would buy you a house in Thornfell with a slate roof, and change left over for a horse that'd stand still.

"Well," I said. "That's fucked."

I don't swear much. Dad didn't like it in the house. There are times, though.

The tin lives under the loose stone at the left of the hearth. Dad kept it there, and his dad before him, and it's where the farm money goes when there is any. I got it out, tipped it onto the table and counted it twice.

Eleven gold crowns. Four silver. Nineteen copper, one of them bent where Dad had bitten it once to see if it was real.

Eleven gold, four silver and nineteen copper, against two hundred gold by first frost.

First frost out here comes about the middle of autumn. We were in the early part of it now, the apples in and the nights drawing in. Six weeks, maybe. Eight if the weather was kind, and the weather out here has never been kind in my lifetime.

The farm clears about four gold in a good year, after seed and salt and hay and whatever else breaks. That's a good year. This one wasn't shaping up as a good year, what with the hay.

I put the money back in the tin and the tin back under the stone, and sat there for a bit.

Then I went out and fixed the door, because I think better with a hammer.

* * *

It took the rest of the afternoon. I pulled the split board, cut a new one, planed it to fit, and hung the door back on the torn hinges with longer screws to hold it until I could get proper ones in Thornfell. The light was going orange by the time I swung it shut. It closed true.

There are only so many ways a man makes money out here. You can sell what you grow, but everybody grows the same things, so nobody pays much. You can borrow, but nobody in Thornfell has two hundred gold to lend, and if they did they wouldn't lend it to a bloke whose farm the Crown was about to take.

So I thought about what I could do that other people couldn't, or wouldn't. The honest answer, the only one, was that I could kill pests.

That's not bragging. Any farmer out this way can kill a fox or a snake or a wild dog. I've just got bigger pests than most, because of the drain, and I've had a lot of practice. Seventeen years of it.

And there was only one place I'd ever heard of where people paid you to kill things.

Grandad used to tell stories about it. He'd been to the capital once, as a young man, to buy a breeding boar. He said there was a hall on a hill in Harrowgate with a green roof, and people went in there and signed their names, and the hall sent them out to deal with whatever was bothering folk and paid them in good coin. Adventurers, they were called. Grandad said most of them were idiots who got themselves eaten, but the ones who didn't did very well.

I hung the hammer back on its peg. The barn door was shut and square. The rat's head on the chopping block was starting to draw flies.

The only people I knew of paying for pest-killing were in Harrowgate.

So that's where I'd have to go.