There was so much laughing and singing and juggling that no one noticed as Roscuro crawled up a table leg and onto the table, and from there flung himself onto the lowest branch of the chandelier.
Hanging by one paw, he swung back and forth, admiring the spectacle below him: the smells of the food, the sound of the music, and the light, the light, the light. Amazing. Unbelievable. Roscuro smiled and shook his head.
Unfortunately, a rat can hang from a chandelier for only so long before he is discovered. This would be true at even the loudest party.
Reader, do you know who it was that spotted him?
You’re right.
The sharp-eyed Princess Pea.
“A rat!” she shouted. “A rat is hanging from the chandelier!”
The party, as I have noted, was loud. The minstrels were strumming and singing. The people were laughing and eating. The man with the jingle cap was juggling and jingling.
No one, in the midst of all this merriment, heard the Pea. No one except for Roscuro.
He had never before been aware of what an ugly word it was.
In the middle of all that beauty, it immediately became clear that it was an extremely distasteful syllable.
A curse, an insult, a word totally without light. And not until he heard it from the mouth of the princess did Roscuro realize that he did not like being a rat, that he did not want to be a rat. This revelation hit Roscuro with such force, that it made him lose his grip on the chandelier.
The rat, reader, fell.
And, alas, he fell right, directly, into the queen’s bowl of soup.
21
THE QUEEN LOVED SOUP. She loved soup more than anything in the world except for the Princess Pea and the king. And because the queen loved it, soup was served in the castle for every banquet, every lunch, and every dinner.
And what soup it was! Cook’s love and admiration for the queen and her palate moved the broth that she concocted from the level of mere food to a high art.
On this particular day, for this particular banquet, Cook had outdone herself. The soup was a masterwork, a delicate mingling of chicken, watercress, and garlic. Roscuro, as he surfaced from the bottom of the queen’s capacious bowl, could not help taking a few appreciative sips.
“Lovely,” he said, distracted for a moment from the misery of his existence, “delightful.”
“See?” shouted the Pea. “See!” She stood. She pointed her finger right at Roscuro. “It is a rat. I told you that it was a rat. He was hanging from the chandelier, and now he is in Mama’s soup!”
The musicians stopped playing their guitars. The juggler stopped juggling. The noble people stopped eating.
The queen looked at Roscuro.
Roscuro looked at the queen.
Reader, in the spirit of honesty, I must utter a difficult and unsavory truth: Rats are not beautiful creatures. They are not even cute. They are, really, rather nasty beasts, particularly if one happens to appear in your bowl of soup with pieces of watercress clinging to his whiskers.
There was a long moment of silence, and then Roscuro said to the queen, “I beg your pardon.”
In response, the queen flung her spoon in the air and made an incredible noise, a noise that was in no way worthy of a queen, a noise somewhere between the neigh of a horse and the squeal of a pig, a noise that sounded something like this:
And then she said, “There is a rat in my soup.”
The queen was really a simple soul and always, her whole life, had done nothing except state the overly obvious.
She died as she lived.
“There is a rat in my soup” were the last words she uttered. She clutched her chest and fell over backward. Her royal chair hit the floor with a thump, and the banquet hall exploded. Spoons were dropped. Chairs were flung back.
“Save her!” thundered the king. “You must save her!”
All the king’s men ran to try and rescue the queen.
Roscuro climbed out of the bowl of soup. He felt that, under the circumstances, it would be best if he left. As he crawled across the tablecloth, he remembered the words of the prisoner in the dungeon, his regret that he did not look back at his daughter as he left her. And so, Roscuro turned.
He looked back.
And he saw that the princess was glaring at him. Her eyes were filled with disgust and anger.
“Go back to the dungeon” was what the look she gave him said. “Go back into the darkness where you belong.”
This look, reader, broke Roscuro’s heart.
Did you think that rats do not have hearts? Wrong. All living things have a heart. And the heart of any living thing can be broken.
If the rat had not looked over his shoulder, perhaps his heart would not have broken. And it is possible, then, that I would not have a story to tell.
But, reader, he did look.
22
ROSCURO HURRIED from the banquet hall.
“A rat,” he said. He put a paw over his heart. “I am a rat. And there is no light for rats. There will be no light for me.”
The king’s men were still bent over the queen. The king was still shouting, “Save her! Save her!” And the queen was still dead, of course, when Roscuro encountered the queen’s royal soupspoon lying on the floor.
“I will have something beautiful,” he said aloud. “I am a rat, but I will have something beautiful. I will have a crown of my own.” He picked up the spoon. He put it on his head.
“Yes,” said Roscuro. “I will have something beautiful. And I will have revenge. Both things. Somehow.”
There are those hearts, reader, that never mend again once they are broken. Or if they do mend, they heal themselves in a crooked and lopsided way, as if sewn together by a careless craftsman. Such was the fate of Chiaroscuro. His heart was broken. Picking up the spoon and placing it on his head, speaking of revenge, these things helped him to put his heart together again. But it was, alas, put together wrong.
“Where is the rat?” shouted the king. “Find that rat!”
“If you want me,” muttered Roscuro as he left the banquet hall, “I will be in the dungeon, in the darkness.”
