On an unremarkable Tuesday morning beside a body of water too small to appear on any map, two creatures meet at the edge of a pond. The frog king speaks at length about the sacred geometry of the reed-bed. The mouse says: past the second lily pad, the bottom drops away. Go left, not right.
The frog king does not listen.
Midway across the channel, a snake breaks the surface. The frog dives - instinct, no malice, the abrupt competence of an animal returning to the element it understands. The mouse goes under. The outrage begins before anyone asks what actually happened, which means the question is no longer being asked. The council of the Eastern Bank convenes. The council of the High Bank convenes. The obvious peaceful solution is proposed by a very small mouse named Bubble-Quiet, who has been managing the grain stores for thirty years and who has been right seventeen times and changed nothing. The drums begin.
Of Mice and Amphibians is a dark satirical retelling of the ancient Greek mock-epic Batrachomyomachia - the war between frogs and mice - narrated by an Official Chronicler, Third Tier, Unclassified, who starts with full epic protocol (the Muse, the invocation, the grand framing of the trivial as the universal) and ends staring at a list of names in a margin he can't stop writing in, and a flask that is empty, and a marsh that is still exactly what it is.
The epic machinery runs in full: the diplomatic breakdown, the mobilisation, the arms made from walnut shells and fire-hardened thorns, the first battle that is briefly, terribly funny, and then isn't. The catalog of the fallen, which the chronicler tries to execute with full genealogical rigour and cannot. The divine debate - gods arguing about their bets while, below, a mouse named Reed-Holder drowns in the quiet, fast way that drowning actually happens. The final battle, interrupted by a heron with no interest in either army's military calendar.
Underneath the comedy is something that accumulates and doesn't leave: the cost of knowing what started a war and starting it anyway. The cost of being Bubble-Quiet. The cost of being the one who asked and was shushed.
The two kings declare victory. The chronicler writes *no* in the margin in very small letters, crosses it out, writes it again.
Of Mice and Amphibians: Troy, but wetter, and more honest about what Troy was.
