Chapter 6 Sewer Rats

The Lower Weir is where Harrowgate keeps everything it doesn't want to look at.

It sits on the flats at the bottom of the hill, inside the grey wall but only just, where the river bends and the ground goes soft. Every spring the river comes up into the streets, Pip says, and every spring the people who live there move upstairs and wait. You could see the flood line on the houses, a brown stain about as high as my chest, and above it the doors and windows had been painted bright colours, as if that would help.

It smelled like the rest of the city, only more so. Tanneries and fish and wet rope, and under all of it the sewers.

The sewer men's hut was on a little square by the river wall, a lean-to of tarred boards with a brazier out the front and four men sitting round it. None of them got up when I came over. One of them, an old fellow with a face like a walnut and no hair on his head at all, looked at the job sheet in my hand and then at me.

"Guild?" he said.

"That's right. Tobin Marsh."

"Fitch." He didn't offer his hand. "You're here for Four."

"I am."

The other three men looked at each other and didn't say anything, which said plenty.

"They sent two lads last month," Fitch said. "Copper, like you. Came back up white as milk, and one of them pissed himself on the ladder. Told the Guild it was rats. Rats, they wrote down." He spat in the brazier. "My nephew Wat went down three days ago to check the outflow gate and he hasn't come up."

That changed things.

"Three days," I said.

"Three days." His voice didn't change but his hands did. They'd been loose on his knees, and now they weren't. "I been down to the second ladder twice. Couldn't make myself go further. You hear things. I've done forty years in them tunnels and I couldn't make myself go further."

"Which way's the ladder?"

He chewed on that a while. Then he got up, slowly, and fetched two lamps from inside the hut, the big kind with thick glass and a hook on top, and filled them both and lit one.

"Two lamps," he said, and gave me both. "One goes out, you've got the other. Down the ladder, follow the big tunnel east, keep the water on your left. Junction's about a quarter mile. You'll know it."

"Right."

"Lad." He took hold of my sleeve. "If Wat's down there. If he's. Bring him up anyway. His mum'll want to bury him."

"I'll bring him up," I said.

* * *

The ladder went down about four times my height into the dark. The cold came up to meet me, wet cold, the kind that gets into your joints, and the smell came with it.

I won't describe the smell. You know what's in a sewer.

The big tunnel was brick, old brick, curved overhead like the inside of a barrel, with a channel down the middle where the water ran black and slow. There was a ledge on either side wide enough to walk on. I kept the water on my left like Fitch said, held one lamp up and hooked the other on my belt, and walked.

It was quiet except for the water. Every so often something plopped. Every so often a pipe in the wall dribbled into the channel. The light from the lamp went about twenty paces ahead and then gave up.

About halfway along, I found a collar.

It was a dog collar, red leather with a brass bell, lying on the ledge. A bit further on there was another one, plain leather this time, and then a few bones I didn't look at closely. Then a boot, a man's boot, old and patched. I picked it up and looked inside it. It was empty. I put it back down.

The itch between my shoulders had come back on the ladder, and it was getting worse. I reached up and touched the cleaver handle as I walked, and that helped.

Then I heard them.

It was a scratching noise, at first. A lot of small claws on brick. Then a squealing, high and thin, from a lot of throats at once, echoing down the tunnel so you couldn't tell where it started. Then the smell changed, and I knew what it was, because there's not a farmer alive who doesn't know the smell of a rat's nest.

"Righto," I said, and unslung the cleaver.

They came out of the dark ahead of me all at once, a tide of them, running along both ledges and swimming in the channel. They were rats, real rats, grey and brown, with long naked tails and yellow teeth. They were also the size of sheepdogs.

City rats, I thought. Well, they eat better than ours.

The first one came at my legs and I put the cleaver through it and it went into the water in two pieces. The second one jumped for my throat and I caught it by the scruff in my left hand, the lamp hand, which was a mistake because the lamp swung and nearly went out, and I threw it back into the ones behind. The third and fourth came together. I took them both in one swing.

After that it was just work.

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You find a rhythm with rats. They come in waves, and every wave is a bit less sure of itself than the last, because rats aren't stupid. You keep your back to the wall and your feet planted and you don't chase. You let them come to you. There were a lot of them. I stopped counting at about thirty.

When it was done the ledge was a mess, and the channel was worse, and I was breathing hard. I'd been bitten once on the forearm, through Hal's coat. It hadn't gone deep. I wiped the blade on the dry bit of my trousers, rehooked the lamp, and went on.

* * *

The junction was a big round chamber where four tunnels met, with a domed roof and a deep pool in the middle where all four channels emptied in. It was bigger than our barn. There was a ledge all round it, and a stone platform on the far side with an iron gate behind it, which I took to be the outflow gate Fitch had mentioned.

The platform was covered in a nest.

It was piled waist-high with rags and straw and bits of wood and things I didn't want to look at, and it stank so bad my eyes ran. Up on top of it, curled round on itself, was the mother.

She was the size of a draught horse.

Grey, mostly bald, with patches of wiry fur left on her back and scabs everywhere else. Her tail went round her twice and trailed off into the pool. Her front feet had fingers on them, long and pink, almost like hands. When the lamplight hit her she lifted her head, and her eyes were small and red and very clever, and she looked at me the way Haddie looks at a hide she's deciding whether to buy.

Behind her, high up on a ledge above the outflow gate, something moved.

"Help," it said, in a cracked little voice. "Oh, please. Please help."

It was a boy, sixteen or so, filthy, curled up on a ledge about the width of a shelf, with his arms round his knees. He had no boots on. He'd climbed up there out of reach, three days ago, and he'd been sitting there ever since, while she waited underneath.

"Wat?" I said.

"Yes. Yes, that's me. Please."

"Your uncle sent me. Stay there a minute."

The mother came off the nest.

She was fast. Not as fast as a big rat, not near, but she came off that platform and across the ledge at me like a bull through a gate, and she screamed while she did it. It was a noise like a saw on a nail. Wat screamed too. I don't blame him.

I didn't have room. The ledge was narrow and the pool was behind me and there was nowhere to go left or right. So I did what you do when there's nowhere to go, and went forward.

She reared to come down on me. They all do it, it turns out, big rats and little rats and everything in between. I went in under her front feet and put the cleaver into her throat, and she screamed again, differently, and came down on top of me anyway.

That hurt.

She was heavy and she was thrashing, and her back claws got me in the ribs and opened Hal's coat from armpit to hip. I got an arm free and put the cleaver in again, under the jaw this time, up into the skull, and leaned on it until she stopped.

Then I lay there under her for a bit, breathing.

She'd been slow, for her size. That was what I kept thinking, lying there with her weight on my legs and the stink of her in my nose. A big rat at home would have had me twice over in the time she'd taken to rear. City living, I reckoned. Plenty of food coming down the pipes and nobody to fight for it, three generations of that and anything goes soft. Same as people.

Still. I'd been sloppy, coming straight in under her like that with no room to get out, and I'd paid for it in coat. Dad would have had something to say. Dad would have said it once, quietly, and then not spoken to me for the rest of the afternoon, which was worse.

"Are you dead?" Wat called down. "Mister? Are you dead?"

"No," I said. "Hang on."

I got out from under her eventually. She weighed about what a draught horse weighs, and I had to roll her into the pool to manage it. I checked my ribs. Two long scratches, bleeding but shallow. The coat was the worst of it. Mag was going to kill me.

* * *

Wat couldn't climb down. His legs had gone stiff from three days of sitting, and he hadn't eaten, and he'd been drinking the water, which I wouldn't wish on anybody. So I climbed up, got him over my shoulder like a sack of chaff, and climbed back down. He weighed about as much as a sack of chaff, too.

He cried most of the way. I let him.

Before we left, I went back to the mother.

I'd had a feeling, the way you do. At the base of her skull, where the neck joined, there was a pretty rock. It was smaller than the ones I got at home, about the size of a hen's egg, and reddish instead of gold, but it was warm in my hand and had the same slow light inside. I hadn't known city rats had them. I put it in my pocket, cut off her ear for the Guild, since the job sheet said proof of completion, and carried Wat out.

Fitch was at the bottom of the ladder.

He'd come down after all. He was standing there with a third lamp and a boathook and a face like grey paper, and when he saw Wat over my shoulder he dropped the boathook in the water and didn't notice.

He didn't say anything. He just took the boy off me and held him, the way you'd hold something you'd already said goodbye to. Wat kept saying sorry. Fitch kept saying shut up, you stupid little bugger, shut up, and not letting go.

I went up the ladder first to give them a minute.

* * *

The other three sewer men were still round the brazier. They stood up when I came out of the hole. They looked at the blood on me, and the coat, and then at the ear I was carrying, which was as big as a shovel blade.

"What," one of them said, "is that?"

"Rat's ear," I said. "Proof of completion."

"That's not a rat's ear."

"It's a sewer rat. There's a nest of them down there. Well, there was." I thought about it. "The big one was a bit big."

Fitch came up the ladder with Wat behind him. He walked over to me and stood there without a word. Then he stuck his hand out, and I shook it.

"You come down the Weir," he said, "you never pay for a drink. Not ever. You hear me?"

"I don't drink much."

"Then you never pay for a meal," said Fitch. "I'll sort it."

* * *

On the walk back up the hill I passed a rag-and-bone man with a barrow, stopped at the corner of a market. His barrow had a bit of everything on it, buttons and old keys and a stuffed owl, and there was a tray at the front with a sign that said CURIOS AND ODDMENTS. There were some shells on it, and some coloured glass, and a couple of polished stones.

I got the pretty rock out of my pocket and showed him.

"Give you three copper," he said. "Kids like a glowy rock."

That was three more coppers than it was worth to me. I said yes. He gave me the coins and dropped the rock in the tray without looking at it.

At the Guild I put the ear on the counter in front of the spectacled clerk with the cold.

He stared at it. He looked up at me, at the blood and the torn coat, and down at the ear again. He went a strange colour.

"Old Sewer Junction Four," I said. "Rats. There's a lot more ear down there if you need it. The sewer men can show you."

He didn't say anything. He got a form out of a drawer, filled it in with a hand that wasn't quite steady, stamped it, and counted out six silver onto the counter. He pushed it across with one finger, like he didn't want to get any closer to the ear than he had to.

The hall had gone quiet again. It was going to be a habit, I could see that.

I put the six silver in my purse with the three coppers. About twenty gold and six silver, all up. A hundred and seventy-nine to go, near enough.

It wasn't much. But it was honest money for honest work, and I'd got Fitch's boy out, and that was worth more than the silver.

I went home to Ostry's and borrowed a needle and thread from the widow, who looked at the coat and said nothing at all, which from her was a great deal. I sat on my short bed under the window and sewed Hal's coat back together until it was too dark to see.