User blog:Simu Cooper/Cluny the Scourge (Chapter 19)

Chapter 19

The high, warm sun shone down on Cluny the Scourge. Cluny was coming! He was big, and tough; an evil rat with ragged fur and curved, jagged teeth. He wore a black eyepatch; his eye had been torn out in battle with a pike. Cluny had lost an eye. The pike had lost its life! Some said that Cluny was a Portuguese rat. Others said he came from the jungles far across the wide oceans. Nobody knew for sure. Cluny was a bilge rat; the biggest, most savage rat that ever jumped from ship to shore. He was black, with grey and pink scars all over his huge sleek body, from the tip of his wet nose, up past his green and yellow slitted eye, across both his mean tattered ears, down the length of his heavy vermin-ridden back to the enormous whiplike tail which had earned him his title: Cluny the Scourge! Now he rode on the back of the hay wagon with his five hundred followers, a mighty army of rats: sewer rats, tavern rats, water rats, dockside rats. Cluny’s army – fearing, yet following him. Redtooth, his second-n-command, carried a long poll. This was Cluny’s personal standard. The skull of a ferret was fixed at its top. Cluny had killed the ferret. He feared no living thing.

Wild-eyed, with the terror of rat smell in its nostrils, the horse plunged ahead without any driver. Where the hay cart was taking him was of little concern to Cluny. Straight on the panicked horse galloped, past the milestone lodged in the earth at the roadside, heedless of the letters graven in the stone: “Redwall Abbey, fifteen miles.” Cluny spat over the edge of the cart at two young rabbits playing in a field. Tasty little things; a pity the cart hadn’t stopped yet, he thought. The high warm sun shone down on Cluny the Scourge.

Cluny was a God of War!

Cluny was coming nearer!