A Box of Nothing (7 page)

Chapter 13: General Weil

The camp was a horrible place. The only times it stopped being horrible were when James was asleep, too unhappy to dream, but even then the guards were likely to come and wake him up and make him stand by his mattress for an hour, for no reason at all. There was only the disgusting dry oatmeal stuff to eat and only the foul soapy water to drink.

None of the prisoners were rats. They were other creatures of the Dump—mice, voles, toads, and such—all grown large and clever in their own ways. Each sort lived in separate huts, the slow, sad toads in one block, the mice in another, and so on. James wasn't allowed near any of them, but from what he could see the voles were the best. There was something unbeatable about them. Though they were tottery with starvation, they would never give in to the bullying guards. Even at the most terrifying moments there would be a shrill mutter somewhere in the ranks, followed by a burst of scornful vole laughter. The mice tried to please the rats, cringing and creeping. It didn't do them any good. These were in the huts on either side of James. He didn't see enough of the toads and the others to know how they behaved.

He was in a tiny hut by himself. Next to it was a cage containing two of the great gulls. When James was allowed out for exercise he would look at their grey, bedraggled plumage and their yellow untamed eyes. For some reason they gave him a kind of hope.

The worst thing wasn't the food or the loneliness or the cruel guards or the big flies flocking around like pigeons—it was the ants. Red ants, a foot high. The rats used them as guard dogs. They could bite with their huge jaws and they could spit burning acid. A guard, on purpose, put a drop of the acid on James's skin to warn him how much it hurt. It hurt, all right. The ants lived in a great nest under the camp, which meant that there was no hope of tunnelling out.

No hope of escape, not by any ordinary means. No hope at all. Everything had gone wrong, just when it seemed to be going so right. James kept remembering the brilliant morning when the airship had floated over Rat City and he had looked down on this very camp, off on the expedition with the Burra to find what was wrong with the Dump. Sometimes he wondered if he hadn't in fact found what was wrong, here, this foul camp. That was wrong, wasn't it? In moods like this, when he was sure the guards weren't watching, he would take his box of nothing out and turn it over and over, looking for clues to how it opened. If he could only find the secret, then perhaps the nothing would come flooding out and swallow the whole terrible camp, and Rat City, and the Dump, and James would be back outside the fence with Mum shouting at him. But somehow he knew that wasn't the answer. The camp was wrong, yes, but it was only an effect, not a cause. The cause was somewhere else, and he had to get there. Then, perhaps, the box would be ready to open.

He made scratches in a secret place on the wall behind his mattress to help him count the days. On the twelfth morning, before it was light, there was a lot of squeaking and scurrying around, and the oatmeal stuff was shoved through the door earlier than usual, and then James's guards made him sweep his hut clean and fold his blanket into a neat square and then go and stand in the space between the gulls' cage and his hut.

He waited for hours in the icy dawn while all the other prisoners were brought out and made to stand in lines. It was a sort of parade. At last, when the sun was up and James was just beginning to stop shivering, he heard a shrill fanfare of rat trumpets. The rat anthem blared from the camp loudspeakers and the guards strutted up and down with truncheons, beating any prisoners they thought weren't standing properly at attention. Several hundred smart rat soldiers marched into the space opposite the prisoners, stood at attention, and presented arms. A big open car rolled into sight, driven by a chauffeur with an armed guard beside him. In the back seat lolled a small grey rat wearing an enormous cap covered with gold braid. It was General Weil.

The general got out of the car and inspected his soldiers. Senior officers walked respectfully behind him. He crossed the space and began to inspect the prisoners, not really bothering to look at them but chatting over his shoulder to the officers, who answered with smarmy rat snickers. Sometimes the general rubbed his paws together or smoothed his white whiskers. James guessed he was really enjoying himself, strolling around like this in front of his prisoners. A bit like Granddad taking people around his garden.

When the general reached the gull cage he stopped. This was what he had come for. He looked fiercely at the gulls and began to squeak. Soon he was jumping up and down in excitement, the way all the rats seemed to, only more so. He shrilled and spat until there was froth on his whiskers. He was terrifying, a mad little old rat who could do what he liked with everyone. With James.

At last he moved on. He was probably still in a bit of a daze after using all that energy yelling at the gulls, because he went straight past James without noticing him, but one of his officers caught up with him and said something very respectfully and he stopped, stared, and came back. His whiskers quivered. He squeaked a question and an officer answered. He came closer, wrinkling his nose. James could smell his ratty breath. His mean little eyes under the huge cap were as sharp as pins. He put out a paw and prodded James's chest. He snickered. Then his expression changed.

He snapped an order. James's guards seized his arms. An officer came forward and tried to open James's anorak. He didn't understand about the zipper, but he got it loose in the end and pulled the anorak open. General Weil darted in with a quick rat rush and put his paw into James's inside pocket, which was just where he had prodded the anorak from the outside. He must have felt that there was something there, then. The box of nothing. He snatched it out.

And it worked.

One moment there was the dreadful ruler of Rat City standing in the middle of his prison camp with his soldiers behind him, and the next there was nothing but a huge gold-braided cap lying on the ground, jiggling as the rat trapped under it tried to get out.

James knew exactly what to do without having to think about it. His guards had let go of his arms in their astonishment, so he pounced, grabbed both sides of the cap, squeezed them together till he could hold them in one hand, and then with his other hand pulled the wriggling creature out and held it up by the nape of its neck.

The camp seemed to go mad. The rat soldiers stood and stared, and so did the guards, but the ants came swarming out of their nest and ran about biting and spitting among the ranks. The voles rushed at the soldiers and wrestled their guns away. The rats were three times their size and outnumbered them, too, but they just let it happen. They could easily have jumped on James and rescued their leader, but it was as though the whole of Rat City depended so much on him that if he wasn't there to give the orders none of the others dared do anything.

The voles formed themselves into squads and rushed the main gates. The toads thumped off after them without saying thank-you to anyone. The mice stayed in their ranks, trembling, but after a while they crept away too. James was left alone with the rat that had been General Weil dangling from his right hand.

But not quite alone. There were still the gulls in their cage, watching everything with their wild haughty look as though it were no affair of theirs at all. James picked up his box of nothing, walked across to the cage, and pressed it against the lock. By the time he had put the box back in his pocket the whole cage had tinkled into rusty scraps, which the gulls shook from their backs. They strutted a few steps, stretched their wings, and folded them again.

“Go on,” said James. “They'll come to their senses any moment.”

One gull turned its head, stalked across, picked James up in its beak by the collar of his anorak, and dumped him on the other gull's back. He scrabbled for a hold as the great wings stretched again. He needed both hands, so he couldn't help letting go of the rat that had been General Weil. It leapt for the ground as the gull took off.

Soon they were skimming above the roofs of Rat City. The streets were in turmoil, with barricades blazing at every corner. Nobody bothered about a couple of gulls flying over.

Chapter 14: Gull Country

“We thought we might not see you again,” said the Burra.

“Were you worried?”

“Not really. We did not think any harm could come to you while you had your box, but we passed a motion expressing our regret.”

“Oh.”

The gulls had left James on a high cliff ledge with no way up or down. The Burra was there already, with some of the junk from the airship. The airship itself was moored at another ledge, a bit along the cliff. It looked decidedly floppy after all the gas it had lost, and was only just buoyant even without its load. On the other side of the vast, shadowy valley the peaks of a mountain glittered in the sunset. At this height the air was biting, so James found a blanket and wrapped it around his anorak. He'd been thrilled to see the Burra again, but now, after the excitement of the escape from the camp, he felt a bit of a let-down. And when the Burra said it hadn't even been worried! That wasn't fair. James knew he'd had a perfectly rotten time. The Burra didn't understand. Losing James was probably only like losing the leg the rat patrol had shot up—too bad, that's all.

James was brooding on the unfairness when he felt his blanket stir, rumple itself, and rub gently against his cheek like a purring cat. He realized the Burra did understand a little, in its own way.

At least it knew what it was like to be scared sick, because of its battle with the biplane.

“What about you?” he said. “Are you all right?”

“We are so-so. It was all something of a shock. We remember very little about it. We were all taken up with hanging together.”

“Was it the computer that did that?”

“Oh, no. It was us. All of us.”

“It practically blew itself up, fighting the biplane. I'm surprised it's still working.”

The computer, with the small portable TV that was its display screen now, lay on the ledge with the other oddments from the airship. Its case looked a bit wrecked, not quite straight anywhere any longer, but the “on” light was glowing and the pink heart shone as if it had just been painted.

“Working?” said the Burra. “Playing, more like it!”

“Space Invaders, you mean?”

“Not that either. It … what's up?”

The screen had lit up with a mass of figures and letters and symbols, line after line of them. The lines began to move, dancing around, and as they danced the figures and symbols changed and vanished, sometimes in pairs, sometimes several at a time, until there was only one line left.

“That is the computer's idea of a game,” said the Burra. “It does not mean a thing to the rest of us.”

“Nor me, neither,” said James. “But it's sort of neat, isn't it?”

(Maths was the part of school he liked best. Mrs. Last gave him maths problems of his own because he was way ahead of the rest of the class.)

“The universe came out of an equation like that, you know?” he said. “I saw it on TV, the night before … before all this started. And in the end it will go back into an equation. The universe, I mean.”

“That does not help us to get our knots retied.”

“Are they bad? Can't you do it just by guesswork?”

“We unravelled into some quite big holes. The trouble is that if we get one knot slightly wrong, it puts the others out and the net is the wrong shape. It must be a smooth curve or we will not fly straight. So we keep having to go back and try again. The computer could work it all out for us if it chose to, but it seems to think its game is more important.”

“Perhaps it is, only we don't know. When you finish mending yourself can we just go?”

“There are two problems. First, we must find a fresh supply of gas. Second, we will need the gulls' permission. We are their prisoner, you see. They have not yet worked out that we are all one creature. If we had more gas, the airship could join the rest of us and we might escape by night, but the gulls could easily overtake us the next day. Our force-field modulators are beyond repair, and in any case they depend on the computer to operate them.”

“Am I a prisoner, too, now?”

“We are afraid so.”

“I don't think that's fair, after what I did for them.”

“Perhaps they will take that into account. They seem to have a highly developed sense of honour. Overdeveloped, you might almost say.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, some of their behaviour is extremely ridiculous, but we strongly advise you not to laugh at them.”

It was a bore being a prisoner again, though at least the food was better and there was the Burra to talk to. But there seemed to be even less chance of getting away from this high, cold ledge than there had been from General Weil's camp, and all so far from home, and Floral Street, and the family. James was feeling pretty depressed when, halfway through the next morning, he heard a whoosh and a thump and there was one of the great gulls ruffling its feathers into place on the rim of the ledge.

The gull didn't do anything. It just stood there, facing out over the cliff edge. If you want to show how haughty you are, James thought, standing still is a good way. Ordinary seaside gulls do a lot of that, on flagpoles and statues and things, but they do quite a bit of quarrelling too. A quarrel between two of these monsters, with their big tearing beaks, would be something to see.

He was wondering about that when there was another whoosh as a gull swooped by and without landing plucked the Burra off the ledge by one ear. The first gull stalked over to James, pecked down, grabbed him by the scruff of his anorak, and launched itself out over the valley. No please or do-you-mind or anything like that, oh no. James could see the Burra dangling from the other gull's beak a hundred yards ahead. He only hoped the ear would stand the strain.

They swung out around a jut of the mountain and then in towards a great curve of cliff where hundreds of the huge gulls roosted on different ledges. James could see nests with fluffy young in them, and others where a parent sat on eggs, just like ordinary gulls. The only difference was that a place like this at the seaside in the real world would have been deafening with squawks and squabbles. Here it was almost silent.

They landed on a large ledge where a dozen other gulls were waiting. The birds who had brought them put James and the Burra down and stalked over to join their comrades. All the gulls stood quite still. James couldn't even guess whether they were watching him—a bird's eye is different from an animal's. You can tell where an animal is looking, you can't with a bird. He didn't think he liked the gulls much. They were beautiful, but dangerous. He'd hated the rats but he'd been able to understand them, guess what they were thinking and feeling. He hadn't a clue with the gulls.

“What's happening?” he whispered.

“We do not know. Stand still. Stare back at them. And whatever you do, do not laugh.”

“Fat chance.”

So James stood and stared. He tried to imagine what it was like to be a gull, to feel as haughty and fierce as that, Emperor James, ruler of the universe, terror of the skyways, et cetera, et cetera. The gulls didn't seem to notice but it made him feel better. At last they moved, closing into a ring with their beaks inward, and began a soft bubbling noise, gull talk, probably.

“Smell anything?” muttered the Burra.

James sniffed. There was a bad stink—just what you'd expect coming from beneath a cliff where gulls had been nesting for years.

“We could fractionate some gas out of there,” said the Burra.

“Wouldn't you need the computer?”

“Luckily the equipment has come along as a member of the expedition.”

“You've still got to persuade the gulls.”

“Shh. Something is happening.”

The circle of gulls was breaking apart to form an arc facing James and the Burra. The gull in the centre stepped forward. It was slightly larger than the others, and haughtier, and fiercer-looking. It bent its head, pecked something off the ledge, and came forward carrying in its beak what looked like a hairy caterpillar, very dead and floppy. Gull food? A peace offering? Were they going to have to eat … ?

The gull laid the offering at the Burra's feet.

“Why! It is our old leg!” said the Burra.

It was indeed—the camel leg that had been shot half to pieces by the rat patrol on James's first evening in the Dump, and then been stolen by a gull. The gulls must have realized it had something to do with the Burra and now they were giving it back.

At the sound of the Burra's voice the leg twitched. And James laughed.

Once he'd started he couldn't stop. Partly it was sheer relief at not having to eat a hairy caterpillar, partly it was pleasure at getting the leg back—he'd always worried about it slightly in the back of his mind—but mainly it was the sight of that great proud bird facing the idiotic-looking Burra and giving it its own leg as a present. James hadn't had much to laugh at for quite a long time, and now it felt as though two weeks' worth were coming out all at once.

Gulls have no sense of humour, none at all, which makes it hard to understand how this gull knew what the noise James was making meant, but it did. It turned slowly toward James, stared at him, and then stalked away. At the same time another gull walked over and picked the Burra up by its ear, carried it along the ledge, and dumped it in the middle of the circle of birds. James rushed to follow, but one of the gulls immediately grabbed him by his anorak and tossed him clear. Between the yellow legs James could see the Burra waving its arms around, trying to explain something in sign language. Nothing else happened for a long while, and then the circle broke up and the Burra came over.

“This is somewhat serious,” it said.

“I'm sorry. I couldn't help it.”

“No doubt.”

“What's going to happen?”

“Well, it is up to you, James. As far as we can make out, the gulls could not at first decide whether we counted as a rat or a gull. That is how they think. When you rescued two of them from the camp, they decided we must be gulls. But now that you have insulted them by laughing at one of their chieftains, they think we may be rats, after all. If we are gulls, they will help us on our way, but if we are rats, they will take us back into rat country and leave us there.”

“They can't! How can we show them?”

“You can show them by doing what one gull does when it has insulted another. You can, if you are willing, agree to fight a duel.”

“All right,” said James without even thinking.