The world truly isn’t like Mr. Bunsy, alas (or thank goodness, depending).
Summary
The rats have freed Keith and Malicia, and Malicia admits that she has a hard time talking to the rats because it feels so “Mr. Bunsy,” going on about the stories and how terrible they are for the lack of narrative tension and quality. Peaches and Dangerous Beans hear her, are mortified (having thought the stories were true), and run away. Maurice hears that voice in his head again, calling itself Spider, saying it means to control him. The rat-catchers are thinking they should skip town before the fancy one shows up with the magical pipe, but Keith, Malicia, and Maurice show up to threaten them into spilling their whole scam on pain of dying from their own rat poison (that was in the sugar they put in the tea). Darktan is caught in an old rusted trap and Nourishing rescues him from it. The rat-catchers explain the gambit with the rat-coursing and selling goods they steal from the town, and Maurice eventually gets them to admit to what’s in the other cellar: a rat king, which has been made from all the rats they bred to make bigger rats for the coursing. They trap the rat-catchers in the cellar with enough antidote for one of them (they actually just dosed them with laxative). Darktan has the ability to kill all the humans in the barn when they rescue Hamnpork, but opts not to—being caught in the trap changed him.
Hamnpork is brought back to the clan, where his body finally gives out. Because Nourishing has been talking about Darktan’s brush with death, he’s made the new leader (though he doesn’t want the job). Dangerous Beans is nowhere to be found, but Maurice comes across his manifesto in a puddle. The rat king has tracked Maurice down and means to use rats as a army. Malicia tells Keith what rat king stories are about and Keith puts it into perspective why a member of a rat-catching guild would be required to make one (as their “masterpiece”). The rat king is in their heads too, though, and tells them to release the rats from their cages in the cellar. Darktan gives a pep talk to the rats left, telling them that the Dark Wood from the Mr. Bunsy story is theirs. Maurice comes upon Dangerous Beans and Peaches and the rat king, and who wants Dangerous Beans to join them. The blind rat asks what the rat king means to do, but learns quickly that it doesn’t care for the lives of rats, only for control and pain. Dangerous Beans defies the rat king, despite being terrified. Keith and Malicia realizes they’re being manipulated before they open the rat cage, but they’re set upon by a swarm of rats until Darktan’s forces show up to save them.
The rat king strips Maurice away, leaving only the cat behind, which allows Maurice to pounce and kill and rip the rat king’s tails apart, destroying it. Peaches drops her last match and it sets fire to hay, and Keith and Malicia arrive and begin looking for buckets to put the fire out. Maurice gets a dead Dangerous Beans out of the fire and also dies. Death arrives to take one of his lives, leaving him with three of his nine left, but Maurice tells Death to take two of his lives to bring Dangerous Beans back. Darktan and the rest of the clan go to clear out the tunnels below the town, and Keith, Malicia, and Maurice come up with a plan to deal with the rat piper, who’s coming tomorrow. The piper arrives in town, making all sorts of demands, and preparing to charge an outrageous price. Keith publicly claims the man is rubbish and challenges him. Keith is given a trombone, and when he plays, Sardines comes out and dances. When he piper plays nothing happens: the Clan has the keekees locked up and stuffed cotton in their ears. Keith takes the piper aside to find out how his scam works, then tells the man that they’ll both play the rats into the river (without using his trick note on the flute), and he’ll take a lower fee for the job. And when it’s over, Keith and Maurice introduce the town to the Clan, who have a wonderful proposition for them…
The town Watch goes and checks the rat-catcher cellar and finds the food and the rat-catchers, who will confess to everything. Maurice steps in on behalf of the rats to tell the humans a story about a lucky town—wherever the Clan happens to settle down—where the keekees are kept out, and no food gets ruined so long as you give the rats a little of it, and tourism starts around the town with the piper and the talking rats. The town begins to draw up a contract, everyone is arguing about how to proceed, but the mayor asks to speak to Darktan alone. As they converse, they find that they do have quite a bit in common, and wind up talking into the night. Keith and Malicia talk about what’s happened: Maurice has let the rats keep all the money, but doesn’t intend to stick around, Keith will stay as resident Rat-piper and wonders if one day he couldn’t become mayor, Maurice moves on to his next adventure, and the rats and humans do come to an arrangement that puts the town of Bad Blintz on the map, though it doesn’t prevent humans from going home and laying down rat traps all the same.
Commentary
I’ve got some questions about Malicia and her inability to read how people speak (or listen to them in general), being that this girl is neurodivergent as hell, right? I love how simply it’s put, and that it’s in no way an impediment to her involvement in the story or any heroism therein. Also I want her adventuring bag. And it’s hilarious that she starts the book by telling Keith that she’s got sisters, but it turns out that she’s an only child, being that Pratchett really can’t help himself with that one—even when you intimate a larger family structure, he’s going to revert back to the only child.
Also, I got caught on this bit where Darktan thinks of Dangerous Beans and how he’s a trap-hunter just like him: “He goes ahead of us and finds the dangerous idea and thinks about them and traps them in words and makes them safe and shows us the way through.” I just really like the idea of noting that similar work gets done through a variety of means, and appreciation for the people who are doing all the thought/brain work to that end, I dunno.
It occurs to me only this time around that, in many ways, the rat-king is the true pied piper of the story: a being the tempts others to their doom via otherworldly power. And from that vantage point it is extremely important that Dangerous Beans takes the position of the child in the earlier iteration of the story who doesn’t follow the piper due to being blind—because, of course, in this version of the story, being blind isn’t there to be this functional barrier that prevents him from following, merely a facet of how Dangerous Beans experiences the world and interacts within it. He doesn’t follow the piper, not because he’s blind and prevented from doing so, but because he’s wise enough to see the rat-king’s plan for what it really is. It benefits no one but the rat-king, who doesn’t think of any other being as anything but fodder.
What Pratchett has functionally done is take the story of The Pied Piper of Hamelin—a tale more often associated with cheating, cruelty, and trickery—and turned it into a tale about the essential nature of cooperation to ensure survival. The story begins with most people acting selfishly; Maurice wanting to steal money from an endless parade of towns, the rat-catchers letting an entire village go hungry, Hamnpork’s fear of being replaced, the rat-king willing to do anything to enact revenge. It ends with the acknowledgment that humans and rats could work together to achieve a better society that benefits everyone.
But the story also doesn’t pretend that doing this makes everything sunshine, daisies, and happiness. When Darktan acknowledges that poisoning the wells of Bad Blintz would have been pointless because it would create a cycle of warring against humans to no end, and the mayor replies “I’m glad you like us!”, Darktan is understandably aggravated by the obtuseness of that statement. The two of them find common ground by talking and sharing their experiences, but this deal is arrived at through an acknowledgment that no better options exist.
And the important part is that every side can acknowledge that fact and keep working toward common good. The “it’s not a story, it’s real life” aspect comes into things after all the action is served, where we see the tinkering, fighting, and toil that gets put into creating this new town. Nearly every story stops before that work is even mentioned, but not here. Even in writing a book for younger readers (perhaps especially when doing that) Pratchett wants us to remember that being a society is a communal contract that we must build, abide by, and believe in. Not because it’s all gorgeous harmony on the other side where Mr. Bunsy and his friends live—but because the alternative is so much worse.
Asides and little thoughts:
- I am a complete sucker for stories that use the device of “many years from now, when this person talks about this thing that is happening currently in the story, they will remember…” it pings the right spots, I should probably dig into my love of that some time.
- As much as I love the joke of there being a Colon and Nobby in every city on the Disc (as you get with Doppelpunkt and Knopf), the truth of the matter is that Colon is a dime a dozen, but Nobby is a true original. Even if the dynamic between the officers is the same or similar, you’ll never reach the same level of batshittery that you get by putting Nobby in a room…
- The exchange between Darktan and the mayor’s clerk (“Can… you… un-der-stand… me?” “Yes… be-cause… I’m… not… stu-pid”) reminds me a lot of a similar exchange in the Gene Wilder-Richard Pryor buddy comedy See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and I’d bet it was an intentional shoutout.
Pratchettisms:
Humans, eh? Think they’re lords of creation. Not like us cats. We know we are. Ever seen a cat feed a human? Case proven.
Swearing, moaning and, it had to be said, farting enormously, they made their way to the cellar.
And still Dangerous Beans stood there, small and wobbly, staring up into the dark.
Some tiny part hid behind some brain cell and cowered as the rest of Maurice was blown away.
Strictly speaking, there was a considerable lack of face about the face, too.
He was a sergeant, he told himself, which meant that he was paid more than a corporal, which meant that he thought more expensive thoughts.
Okay, we’re gonna take a break for two weeks! (Sorry about that, weird timing stuffs.) And then we’re back with Night Watch. I’ve been excited to get to this one, I cannot deny it. We’ll read up to:
“There’s ways. We’ll show him. Take him down a peg. Teach him how we do thing around here—”
