Then she remembered the fight with the rats in the barn, and her confidence ebbed as she pictured the hordes of evil creatures who had poured out from their hiding places with only one thought in their narrow skulls: Kill cats! Her breath choked in her throat as she recalled the horror of being overwhelmed in a tide of brown bodies, drowning in their reek and their stifling fur. She had barely fought her way out then.
Are there enough of us here? Maybe I should have brought the daylight-warriors, too.
She hadn’t included them, because the attack had started too early for them to arrive from their Twoleg nests. Now she wondered whether it would have been better to wait.
But Sharpclaw didn’t include them in the practices, so maybe he didn’t think they’d have the strength to tackle the rats.
Shaking her head to clear it, Leafstar told herself that it was far too late to call up reinforcements. She halted and gazed up at the mound.
Great StarClan, it’s big!
She had checked out the waste pile several times before, but she had never come as close as this. The towering heap seemed to fill the whole sky, and its reek was all around her. It looked far more difficult to climb than the pile of sticks they had used for practice in the gorge. Rustling and scraping and the high-pitched squeaks of rats came from deep inside it, and Leafstar suppressed a shudder.
Beside her, Petalnose, Patchfoot, and Tinycloud were collecting sticks and lumps of wood and stone to block the three exits on this side. Cora padded up to her.
“Should we be climbing up now?” she murmured. “We need to be ready.”
Leafstar nodded. She beckoned to Mintpaw and Shrewtooth, who were waiting a few tail-lengths away, and began to claw her way up the pile.
The stench grew stronger and flies buzzed around Leafstar’s head as she climbed. Every hair on her pelt stood on end. Sometimes the heap felt sticky underpaw, and she tried not to imagine what might be clinging to her fur. I don’t look forward to licking that off, whatever it is! Sometimes the pile gave under her weight, and she imagined it collapsing altogether, pitching her down into the rat-filled darkness. She could still hear the tiny rat noises; to her relief their enemies hadn’t yet realized that they were under attack.
Leafstar had nearly reached the top of the pile when she heard the beginning of a yowl of alarm, quickly cut off. Glancing over her shoulder, she spotted Mintpaw a tail-length below her, clinging by her forepaws to a jutting piece of wood while her hind paws dangled in the air, her tail waving wildly.
“Sorry!” the apprentice squeaked, meeting Leafstar’s gaze. “I slipped.”
Scrabbling with her hind paws, she managed to haul herself up again. Leafstar tensed, all her senses alert for the rats to start pouring out before they were ready, but there was no change in the busy scratching and squeaking just beneath her paws.
“It’s okay,” she murmured, with a nod to Mintpaw. “They didn’t hear you. Try to be more careful.”
A fox-length below Mintpaw, Shrewtooth had frozen with his paws splayed out across one of the squashy Twoleg pelts and his eyes glazed with terror. Before Leafstar could speak, Cora scrambled up beside him.
“Come on,” she whispered. “You’re doing fine.”
As Shrewtooth managed to put one quivering paw in front of the next, Leafstar felt grateful for the Twolegplace cat’s level head and steady courage. This would be a lot harder without Cora and her friends, she admitted to herself.
At last Leafstar found a firm paw hold on a squared-off piece of stone, and let her gaze travel around the clearing. At the bottom of the pile, just below her, she could see Patchfoot, Tinycloud, and Petalnose, each braced against the blocked exits. Farther around, Bouncefire was in position; she couldn’t see Cherrytail on the far side. The curve of the mound cut off her view of Sharpclaw and his patrol, but she had to assume that they were ready.
The SkyClan leader let her gaze sweep around one last time. Then she threw back her head and yowled, “SkyClan, attack!”
Her voice echoed through the forest, and the mound came alive beneath her paws. The rats’ voices rose in squeals of mingled panic and fury. Leafstar could hear their frantic scrambling underneath her paws, and felt the stone she was standing on shift.
A rat’s head popped out of the hole that Tinycloud had blocked, trying to force its way past the barrier of sticks and brambles. The small white warrior slashed it twice across its nose with one forepaw, and the rat vanished again.
“Well done!” Leafstar called out as Tinycloud shoved the sticks back into place. “Force them back! Sharpclaw and his cats will do the killing.”
Petalnose was hissing furiously at two rats who were trying to escape through her exit, and Patchfoot darted across to help her. The sight of two enraged cats terrified the rats, who slid back into the mound without a blow being struck.
Reassured that her warriors knew what to do, Leafstar scrambled up to the very top of the heap, digging in her claws and yowling to frighten the rats out of the mound and into the claws of the waiting fighters. She caught glimpses of Cora and Mintpaw doing the same, while Shrewtooth perched on a spiky and battered Twoleg object with his pelt bristling and his jaws gaping in a spine-chilling shriek. The mound lurched under Leafstar’s paws; new gaps were starting to open up. A wiry rat body broke into the open a couple of mouse-lengths from her nose, fleeing down the side of the heap before she could swipe at it. A sharp squeal from below, abruptly cut off, told her that another cat had been waiting for it.
Mintpaw appeared, clawing her way over the top of a Twoleg chair, her lips drawn back in a threatening snarl. Suddenly the chair gave way, sinking deeper into the waste, carrying the apprentice down with it into a gaping hole. Mintpaw let out a terrified screech, scrabbling vainly at loose debris as she sank into the depths of the mound.
Leafstar leaped forward and grabbed the she-cat’s scruff before she disappeared altogether. Digging in her hind claws, she hauled Mintpaw upward. Two or three rats followed; one of them snapped at Mintpaw’s tail. Leafstar, with her teeth still sunk in the apprentice’s scruff, had no way of attacking, but the apprentice kicked out with her hind paws and caught the rat across the side of its head. It toppled off the mound in a flurry of waving paws and tail and vanished.
“Thanks,” Mintpaw gasped as her Clan leader set her down on a more solid part of the heap.
“You did well with that rat,” Leafstar panted.
From where she stood now, Leafstar could look down and see the battle at the front of the mound where the exits had been left open. Horror cramped her belly when she saw Sharpclaw and his patrol surrounded by a surging mass of rats. Every cat was spattered with blood.
StarClan, please let it be the rats’ blood and not their own!
Stick’s plan had been for two warriors to attack each rat, but the rats were too many, and too fast, for that. They squealed and scrabbled as the SkyClan warriors pounced on them, but there were always more to replace them. Leafstar spotted Rockshade just below her, struggling with a massive rat. His paws slashed at the rat’s flanks, but the creature had its teeth fastened in his shoulder, and Rockshade couldn’t throw it off.
With a yowl of rage, Leafstar launched herself down the heap, her paws barely touching the side. With one swipe of her paw she tore the rat’s throat open and it sagged to the ground, releasing its grip on Rockshade.
Leafstar flinched as blood came welling out of the wound she had made. This is wrong; we should kill only to eat. But she knew too well that if she and her Clan didn’t succeed in wiping out the rats, they would become prey themselves.
“Thanks!” Rockshade grunted, whirling to block another rat as it fled from the heap toward the safety of the trees.
Leafstar reared up on her hind paws as she felt tiny claws fastening in her back fur. The rat fell off and scrambled away, squealing in terror, only to run straight into Sparrowpelt’s paws.
A huge female rat crashed into Leafstar’s haunches, with Shorty hard on its tail. Th
e two cats battled side by side; still reluctant to kill, Leafstar found herself sheathing her claws as she gave the rat a blow on the side of the head.
“No!” a furious voice yowled from behind her.
Glancing back, Leafstar saw Sharpclaw; her deputy’s dark ginger fur was soaked with blood, and there was a wild light in his eyes.
“Show no mercy!” he snarled. “Kill or be killed!”
He’s right, Leafstar thought. Her claws slid out again, and she snatched at the she-rat’s throat, while Shorty bit down on its neck from the other side. The rat squeaked and died, while Leafstar shared a brief glance of satisfaction with the Twolegplace cat.
The battle surged around her in a wave of fur and teeth. She winced with disgust as her paws slipped on blood-soaked grass. The air was filled with the reek of blood and the shrieking of cats and rats. Leafstar leaped and twisted and struck out instinctively, fighting to escape from her nightmare of glittering eyes and sharp fangs. She wasn’t aware of her Clanmates any longer, only the wiry brown bodies that fell beneath her claws.
The rat under her paws stopped struggling. Leafstar spun around to face the next enemy and saw Cora standing in front of her. The Twolegplace cat’s ear was ripped and there were toothmarks along her jaw; she stood still, her chest heaving. Beyond her, more cats were standing like islands in a lake of dead rats.
“It’s over,” Cora panted.
“No more rats.” Sharpclaw made his way to Leafstar’s side, his paws shoving aside rat bodies as he approached.
Leafstar looked around. Heaps of dead rats lay around her, and blood-smeared trails through the bracken and long grass at the edge of the clearing showed where a few of the rats had dragged themselves into the trees to die. The waste heap was torn apart into smaller piles, with separate bits of debris scattered all over the clearing.
The rats won’t be able to use that as a refuge anymore.
The shrieking had given way to heavy silence, broken only by the wheezing breath of Waspwhisker, who lay on his side a few fox-lengths away. Mintpaw was heading toward him, scrambling over the bodies of rats to reach her mentor’s side.
“He’s hurt!” she wailed.
Leafstar picked her way through the dead rats to reach her injured Clanmate. Waspwhisker was bleeding from a deep scratch down his flank; the wound stretched under his belly almost to his tail.
The gray-and-white tom lifted his head and blinked pain-filled eyes. “I’m fine,” he rasped. “Just give me a couple of heartbeats to rest.”
“You need more than that,” Leafstar meowed, dipping her head to give Waspwhisker’s ear a lick. “We’ll help you back to camp and let Echosong take a look at you.”
“I finished off the rat that did it,” Waspwhisker murmured, lying down again and closing his eyes.
The rest of the cats gathered around him. All of them had some sort of injury—scratches, torn claws, nicked ears—though none as bad as Waspwhisker’s or Cora’s. Leafstar felt the sting of a scratch on her shoulder; she had never even noticed the rat who gave it to her.
“We won,” she announced.
None of the cats responded; Leafstar met Sharpclaw’s gaze, both cats acknowledging silently that this was not the time for celebration.
“Let’s go back to camp,” she meowed.
CHAPTER 11
“Waspwhisker, lie down here in the sun,” Echosong directed. “You too, Cora. The rest of you, go and wash yourselves in the pool below the Rockpile. Come back here when you’re clean.”
By the time the Clan returned to camp the sun was peering up over the top of the rocks, though patches of deep shade still lay in the bottom of the gorge. Leafstar and Cherrytail had helped Waspwhisker down the trail to the medicine cat’s den; though the warrior kept insisting he was fine, he was exhausted by the time he collapsed in the patch of warmth just outside Echosong’s cave.
Cora sat beside him and started licking his pelt to clear up the blood around the wound.
“Wash ourselves?” Patchfoot echoed disbelievingly as Echosong gave her last order. “In the pool?”
Murmurs of protest came from the cats behind him.
“I don’t like getting into water,” Petalnose complained. “Can’t I just lick myself clean?”
“And it’s dangerous,” Shrewtooth added, casting a nervous glance to where the water surged into the pool from beneath the rocks. “Some cat might drown.”
“I can’t believe you expect us to get wet all over,” Sparrowpelt grumbled.
“But that’s what I said.” Confronted with so many injuries, Echosong was trying to work efficiently, but Leafstar could hear a slight edge to her voice as she faced the protesting warriors. “I can’t treat a wound if I can’t see it, and you need to get rid of the stench of rat.”
Sharpclaw flicked his ears irritably. “Come on. We’d better get on with it.”
He led the way toward the pool and slowly lowered himself into the water, looking as if it felt worse than a rat bite. Reluctantly, the rest of the cats followed him.
Sagepaw limped out of Echosong’s den, halting with a squeak of dismay at the sight of so many injuries. “You’re all hurt!” he mewed, his eyes stretching wide.
“Yes, but you should have seen the rats,” his littermate, Mintpaw, replied with grim satisfaction. “They won’t bother us anymore.”
More agitated squeaking filled the air as Fallowfern’s kits tumbled down the trail, followed by their mother and Clovertail.
“Come back!” Fallowfern called, as the kits pelted toward Waspwhisker. “Don’t get in Echosong’s way.”
The kits ignored her, climbing all over their father, who by now was barely conscious. He gave a grunt of pain, and Cora tried to thrust the kits back with one paw. “Don’t do that,” she told them. “You’re hurting him.”
“But we want to help!” Nettlekit protested.
Leafstar was heading over to intervene, when she spotted Shorty returning from the pool, shaking water from his pelt. He snaked his tail over Waspwhisker’s back and gathered in the four kits. “Come with me, and I’ll tell you all about the battle,” he promised.
Instantly the kits bounced off their father and crowded around him.
“Did you kill lots of rats?”
“Was there lots of blood?”
“Will you show us your battle moves?”
Fallowfern padded up with concern in her blue eyes. “Be careful; you might frighten them,” she murmured to Shorty.
The Twolegplace cat touched her shoulder reassuringly with the tip of his tail. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell them anything too scary.”
Fallowfern gazed after Shorty as he herded the kits toward a flat rock near the water’s edge, then followed Clovertail, who was speaking to Echosong.
“Tell us what we can do to help,” the light brown she-cat meowed.
“Thanks, Clovertail. You could take over from Cora and get Waspwhisker cleaned up. Cora’s wounded, too, and she needs to rest. And it would be a big help if you could fetch them both some water.”
“I’ll do that,” Fallowfern mewed instantly, darting off toward the river.
Leafstar let her gaze travel around the gorge, making sure that all the injured cats were ready to be treated. Tinycloud, who had only a few shallow scratches on one side, was slipping in and out of Echosong’s den, fetching her the herbs she asked for, no longer reluctant to help the medicine cat. Sharpclaw had washed off the blood from his own pelt and was making sure that the rest of the Clan did the same, firmly dunking Shrewtooth in the pool as the black tom shivered on the edge, then hauling him out again.
Reassured that no cat needed her help, Leafstar padded down to the pool and slid into the water. After the first cold shock she enjoyed the lap of the waves against her scratches, and the sight of rat blood streaming away from her fur. Relaxing, she looked up and saw three cats appear at the top of the gorge and begin scrambling down the trail: Billystorm, Ebonyclaw, and Frecklepaw. They picked up the pace when they
spotted their injured Clanmates, and skidded to a halt among the cats waiting for Echosong.
“What happened?” Billystorm demanded. “Did you fight the rats?”
Frecklepaw’s eyes stretched wide in horror at the sight of Waspwhisker, now lying on his side with his eyes closed. “Is he dead?” she whispered.
“Yes, we fought the rats,” Patchfoot meowed proudly. “We set off before dawn this morning, and we ripped their pelts off. And no cat is dead. Waspwhisker will be just fine.”
“Why didn’t you let us know when the attack would be?” Ebonyclaw hissed with a lash of her tail. “We could have been useful!”
At the sound of anger in the black she-cat’s voice, Leafstar hauled herself out of the pool and padded over to her. “We didn’t leave you out because we don’t value your help,” she mewed, touching her nose to Ebonyclaw’s ear.
Ebonyclaw twitched away from her. “Then why weren’t we told?”
“We needed to use cats who were ready to leave at any moment,” Sharpclaw put in, thrusting his way through the cats to Leafstar’s side. “Including during the night.”
“We could have been here if we’d been warned.” Billystorm didn’t sound as angry as Ebonyclaw, but he was clearly offended. Turning to Leafstar, he added, “Are you hurt?”
“Er, I’m fine, thanks,” Leafstar replied, startled by the change of focus. “Just a scratch on my shoulder.”
Billystorm leaned closer to give the wound a sniff. “That’s more than ‘a scratch,’” he commented. “You need some herbs. I’ll fetch them for you—what should I look for?”
“Marigold!” Frecklepaw chirped. “I know what it looks like. I’ll get it,” she offered, racing toward the medicine cat’s den. A moment later she returned with a mouthful of leaves, chewed them up carefully, and plastered the pulp onto Leafstar’s injury.