Chapter Nineteen
light, light everywhere
IMAGINE, IF YOU WILL, having spent the whole of your life in a dungeon. Imagine
that late one spring day, you step out of the dark and into a world of bright
windows and polished floors, winking copper pots, shining suits of armor, and
tapestries sewn in gold.
Imagine. And while you are imagining things, imagine this, too. Imagine that at the
same time the rat steps from the dungeon and into the castle, a mouse is being born
upstairs, a mouse, reader, who is destined to meet the light-bedazzled rat.
But that meeting will occur much later, and for now,
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the rat is nothing but happy, delighted, amazed to find himself standing in so much
light.
“I,” said Roscuro, spinning dizzily from one bright thing to the next, “I will never leave.
No, never. I will never go back to the dungeon. Why would I? I will never torture
another prisoner. It is here that I belong.”
The rat waltzed happily from room to room until he found himself at the door to the
banquet hall. He looked inside and saw gathered there King Phillip, Queen
Rosemary the Princess Pea, twenty noble people, a juggler, four minstrels, and all
the king's men. This party, reader, was a sight for a rat's eyes. Roscuro had riever
seen happy people. He had known only the miserable ones. Gregory the jailer and
those who were consigned to his domain did not laugh or smile or clink glasses
with the person sitting next to them.
Roscuro was enchanted. Everything glittered. Everything. The gold spoons on the table
and the jingle bells on the juggler's cap, the strings on the minstrels' guitars and the
crowns on the king's and the queen's heads.
And the little princess! How lovely she was! How much like light itself. Her gown was
covered in sequins
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that winked and glimmered at the rat. And when she laughed, and she laughed often,
everything around her seemed to glow brighter.
“Oh, really” said Roscuro, “this is too extraordinary. This is too wonderful. I must tell
Botticelli that he was wrong. Suffering is not the answer. Light is the answer.”
And he made his way into the banquet hall. He lifted his tail off the ground and held it
an angle and marched in time to the music the minstrels were playing on their
guitars.
The rat, reader, invited himself to the party
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