Part 8 of my series examining the elements and themes of the Rat Cook story as they appear across ASOIAF.

Back to usual, this is observational and you can read this part alone, but I've developed my analysis of these symbols across the entire series. You can find links to the full series here, or even just read part five, which contains most of the arguments I've built this series on.

To anyone who is reading this part first, "Revisiting the Rat Cook" is a series that is built on the understanding that GRRM's use of metadiegetic legends provide a "road map" of symbols and meaning, used in their abstract form, which we, as readers, can use to better understand the relationships between symbols, motifs, and themes as they reoccur throughout ASOAIF as a whole. The Rat Cook story is about a rat which eats rats, or a cook who serves kings; The Rat Cook story is about fathers and sons, about cannibalism, about trust, about vengeance, and about damning one's legacy.

Rats in the walls of the Red Keep

In previous parts, especially parts four and five, I argued that the rats symbolize a powerlessness that comes from low status on the hierarchy of rule in ASOIAF and also a desire for vengeance against that hierarchy, just as in the Rat Cook story, where the lowly cook becomes a "rat" as he kills the King's son.

However, what few insights we get into the plight of the smallfolk come from niche perspectives and experiences; otherwise, ASOIAF is written from the perspective of nobility. Even in settings like the Red Keep, though, where nearly all of the players are nobility, the symbol of the “rat” still maintains its associations, signifying other ways in which those without formal power are able to enact their vengeance.

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In chapters where the POV perspective is a person with formal power, the fear of “rats” manifests like paranoia, and the concern that, like with the Rat Cook, there may be people within the bounds of the keep who are quietly resisting that rule. In AGOT Eddard XI, where Ned, serving as Hand of the King, sees informers as rats:

From his vantage point atop the throne, he could see men slipping out the door at the far end of the hall. Hares going to ground, he supposed … or rats off to nibble the queen's cheese.

Although Cersei was certainly not the only one with rats running around the Red Keep, this is a moment of clarity which displays Ned’s developing understanding of court politics. As Ned has well learned, Cersei—or, at least, someone—is listening, and moving to act against him.

When it is Tyrion’s turn to be Hand of the King, he too imagines the agents of Cersei as “rats” in ACOK Tyrion X:

If Cersei has someone stalking me tonight, he must be disguised as a rat.

Interestingly, though, this moment is an early example of Varys’ abilities, as though Cersei stays ignorant of Tyrion’s behavior, Varys appears later in the chapter having followed Tyrion to Shae's manse. As Tyrion suspected, those stalking “rats” were there, in truth—and, appropriately for their rathood, they are overlooked, their provenance mistaken.

Later, Tyrion’s paranoia—and fear of rats—more appropriately extends to the entirety of the Red Keep in ASOS Tyrion I:

There were rats in the walls, and little birds who talked too much, and spiders.

These three phrases are often used in the Red Keep to describe the underside of these political machinations; many of these are interchangeable, and many serve double duty. “Little birds” might well refer to Varys’, whose spies are “little birds”, but also to Littlefinger, who is also “little” and bearing a bird for a sigil. If both the little birds and the “spiders” of Tyrion’s worries are the realm of Varys, “the Spider”, then one might wonder if Varys possesses an army of little “rats,” too, like the ones who stalked Tyrion to Shae’s manse.

Illyrio almost suggests this in ADWD Tyrion II:

We both grew rich, and richer still when Varys trained his mice."

"In King's Landing he kept little birds."

"Mice, we called them then.

Mice are not rats, though, and have a much less treacherous connotation. Perhaps these are more appropriate words, considering he was benefactor of their actions and not the betrayed.

As it happens, though, competing “little bird” Petyr Baelish offers a less polite interpretation to Sansa in ASOS Sansa V:

It had to be the godswood. No other place in the Red Keep is safe from the eunuch's little birds . . . or little rats, as I call them.

Both Ned’s assessment of the “rats” reporting on him and Tyrion’s concern that a “rat” might be following him were accurate, but misplaced. Littlefinger, by contrast, shows that he understands better than any other what is going on in the Red Keep. Baelish means to be derogatory, but the comparison reveals the truth of the association between Varys’ spiders, little birds, and the rats in the walls.

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Even Varys’ official role is ratlike, as is his person. As we saw in earlier parts, the “rats” accompany a lack of agency, but not a total powerlessness; the Rat Cook was still able to enact his vengeance, after all. Varys, too, excels in the space where lacking status and being overlooked makes certain powers available.

The Small Council understands Varys’ usefulness in being a man who commands the power of the metaphorical rat’s non-power. His title, Lord Varys, illustrates this allowance, as well as the power that his lack-of-power is able to afford him; he is no Lord, in truth, yet sits among the Lords as though he were. Varys wields the power of information rather than of swords, which is also a fitting role for a eunuch—a man lacking a “sword.”

Varys explains his understanding of that power to Ned in AGOT Eddard XV:

The master of whisperers must be sly and obsequious and without scruple. A courageous informer would be as useless as a cowardly knight.

Like the Rat Cook, Varys understands the important characteristics of this rat-role: to be deceitful even as one is servile, and—importantly—to be “without scruple.” The Rat Cook violated the Old God’s own laws in his search for vengeance, and if Varys were to be successful, he should be willing to stop at no less.

In the same conversation, Varys also makes this declaration:

I serve the realm, and the realm needs peace.

As Dany saw in the House of the Undying, the realm is a woman’s body, beset by the rat-faced kings. As I argued in an earlier part, the realm is Reek, a prisoner bitten by rats in his cell—and for whom there is no other choice, to eat or be eaten. In the event that the rat-bitten body of the realm might yet bite back in vengeance for the violence wrought upon it, Varys serves the realm.

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If we see Varys as a “rat” in the Red Keep, his words about the uselessness of “courageous informers” and “cowardly knights” also illustrate something essentially misguided in the Hound’s words from the last part. In ACOK Sansa IV The Hound announced to Sansa that:

A dog doesn't need courage to chase off rats.

As Varys points out, the “dog” and the “rat” are playing the game by entirely different rules altogether. A courageous informer would be useless, and in response to the Hound’s boast, Varys might have said: a dog might not need courage to kill rats, but a rat doesn’t need courage to kill Kings—a rat doesn’t need courage at all, actually.

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Fittingly, Varys acknowledges verbatim the symbol of “rats” as secretive betrayers when Tyrion misguidedly demands obedience in ASOS Tyrion II:

“You will bring Shae to me through the walls, hidden from all these eyes. As you have done before."

Varys wrung his hands. "Oh, my lord, nothing would please me more, but … King Maegor wanted no rats in his own walls, if you take my meaning.”

We, this far into this series, do take his meaning. Rats would kill the King, or his son, so of course King Maegor would want to keep them out of his Holdfast.

In this instance, Varys defends himself by saying that his inability—or unwillingness—to obey Tyrion is out of his control. However, this is just yet another example of Varys’ ability to use his apparent lack of agency to his advantage. Like in so many other instances, his “rat” command comes from pointing out how the King controls all, even down to the walls, even down to the kitchens. If we took that level of control at face value, it would totally obfuscate Varys’ own decisions.

In truth, though, that control may not be realized in practice—and, as in the Rat Cook story, when the cook ceased to believe in the power of the King over the kitchens, perhaps realizing the King never came into the kitchens himself, then he may have realized that practically, the cook is a king in his own domain, and free to take his revenge. Varys understands this, too, of course, as he tells Tyrion in ACOK Tyrion II:

“Power resides where men believe it resides. No more and no less."

Does the King have power over the cook? Not so much as he might like.

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However, Varys’ deference to Maegor’s command—and his own impotence by result—is doubly interesting knowing what Tyrion does not: that Varys is a “rat” in the Red Keep in more ways than one. The Small Council may understand that he commands “little birds,” but the reader is privy to the knowledge that Varys is playing a second game of his own, given as early as AGOT Arya III, and then later more completely in the ADWD Epilogue. Like all true rats, Varys' obedience—even his obedience to the throne in regards to his sneaking—is, in truth, defiance. Varys is the man who is no man in truth, a lord who is no lord in truth, the humble servant who is no servant in truth.

The Rat Cook story is one where sons pay for the sins of their fathers. The prince was killed in an act of vengeance against the king, and the Rat Cook is punished for his sins by being forced to hunt down his own children. All of Varys’ plotting, and the point of all these rats in the walls, is building to the reinstatement of Aegon VI, who is, notably, the prince who was supposedly killed for the sins of his grandfather, the Mad King. Thus, vengeance begets vengeance once again, and in a reshuffling of the Rat Cook motifs, our rat Varys seems to offer Kevan a version of the story where he claims that the prince survived the pie and has returned with a cook of his own.

After all, King Maegor may have wanted no “rats” in his walls, but what of the possibility that the dragons become the rats? “Rats,” like in the Rat Cook story, are those who quietly defy the King… but when the role of "King" changes, the status of “rats” changes too. Varys himself, master of all the little birds and rats in the walls, claims to support the Targaryen cause now that the Baratheons control the Red Keep.

The imagery of rats as allies of vengeful dragons in the context of the Baratheon-Lannister rule appears in AFFC Jaime I:

And all for naught. They found only darkness, dust, and rats. And dragons, lurking down below…

Jaime is searching for Tyrion here, but as we later learn, it is once again Varys instead who lurks in that darkness, waiting for a chance to install his “dragon.” As with Tyrion, the fear of rats is appropriate, only misplaced.

The association Jaime draws returns again to the transformational aspect of the Rat Cook story. Like the cook who became a rat, or like the “dogs” who became “rats” that I looked at in the last two parts, even the dragons have their turn finding allies in the dungeons. The dragon skulls, relegated to the dungeons, are a reminder that the “rat” status can be circumstantial, and those who lose their power and status might become rats themselves.

Though Dany and Varys are not entirely on the same side, we’ve already seen how Dany herself, another outcast dragon, has made the “rats” her allies as well, as she thinks in ASOS Daenerys VI:

Aegon the Conqueror had won Westeros with three dragons, but she had taken Meereen with sewer rats and a wooden cock, in less than a day.

Aegon may have had dragons, but Dany has her sewer rats by her side, just like the dragons Jaime finds, lurking beneath the keep in dust and darkness. As Dany points out, the “sewer rats” might be just as effective at overthrowing the rulers, just with different means.

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Dragons and dogs are not the only rulers that turn to rats for allies once they lose their power, lions may as well. Tyrion, once fearing the rats tailing him, becomes a rat, too, when he is disgraced at the end of ASOS.

Truly without agency for the first time ever, in ASOS Tyrion XI, “rats” appear in Tyrion’s mind, as he confides to Jaime:

“You'll have to help me with my last words, my wits have been running about like a rat in a root cellar.”

Not only do “rats” reappear here, but also the same words, “rats and roots,” like Stannis resisting the siege at Storm’s End, or the Blackwoods resisting the Brackens’ siege. Like those instances, this is a turning point where Tyrion’s mind is cellar-low and, like the Rat Cook, primed to consider his potential vengeance. Comparing his “wits” specifically to “rats” signals the change in his mentality.

Only then, after rats have run through his mind, does Varys aid him, as he notes ASOS Tyrion XI:

“I arrived here a King's Hand, riding through the gates at the head of my own sworn men, Tyrion reflected, and I leave like a rat scuttling through the dark, holding hands with a spider.”

In these new circumstances, he and Varys are now equals, both in their lack of direct power and—though Tyrion does not fully know it yet—their desire for vengeance against the ruling party. As Tyrion notes, and as we have seen, being “like a rat” comes from the exact lack of his former authority of office and name. Yet, true to the Rat Cook story, there are still avenues to vengeance, as Lord Tywin discovers later in the same chapter. Like in the Rat Cook story, this rat can still kill—rats may not wield swords, but perhaps they can wield crossbows.

Tyrion’s self-identification as a rat in the walls makes for a brilliant moment, because amidst the hilarious levels of paranoia that make up Cersei’s AFFC chapters, her fear of the “rats” in the walls is one of the few things she is right about. At the very moment that Tyrion is thinking of himself “like a rat”, Cersei is having the exact same thought, as we learn in AFFC Cersei I:

She imagined Tyrion creeping between the walls like some monstrous rat. No. You are being silly. The dwarf is in his cell.

Perfect irony. Being Cersei, she’s wrong every time—so the one time she was about a “rat” Lannister, she assumes she is mistaken.

—

Cersei spends the rest of the book obsessing about Tyrion’s presence in the Walls, as when she burns the Tower of the Hand in AFFC Cersei III:

“If the gods are good, the fire may smoke a few rats from the rubble."

Jaime rolled his eyes. "Tyrion, you mean."

Like Jaime and Tyrion before her, she’s misplaced the origin of this presence. There is someone lurking in the walls, but, as always, it’s Varys.

Even Kevan gets to very briefly make the same mistake in the ADWD Epilogue, wondering:

Could Cersei have been right all along?

What Kevan discovers in death, however, is how Varys really has been hiding in the walls, justifying Cersei’s paranoia but not her search for Tyrion.

With that too-late knowledge that Varys takes advantage of his “little birds”—or little rats, as Baelish calls them—to kill Kevan and Pyecelle, we can look back on the series of accidents from AFFC Cersei III:

They had found a thousand rats as well . . . but neither Tyrion nor Varys had been amongst them, and Jaime had finally insisted on putting an end to the search. One boy had gotten stuck in a narrow passage and had to be pulled out by his feet, shrieking. Another fell down a shaft and broke his legs. And two guardsmen vanished exploring a side tunnel.

The revelation from the Epilogue that Varys is able and willing to kill from his secret places in the walls, and that he has a small army of loyal children, makes this passage read differently. Knowing Kevan's fate, it’s easy to imagine how a guard falling down a shaft might have been subtly pushed, or that two guardsmen vanishing in a side tunnel might have run into the web of a Spider who didn’t want to be found. Jaime may have found “a thousand rats,” but it appears as though there's another thousand rats which Jaime didn’t find, rats which look like lost “little birds” and still creep around, acting on Varys’ commands.

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Of course, these rats have to remain hidden when Jaime searches for them, because “rats” operate without any courage. Rats aren’t fighters, they’re deceivers and disloyal servants.

Returning to Baelish’s words to Sansa from ASOS Sansa V, Baelish actually has more to say on that exact subject. Littlefinger displays a real understanding of the nature of the relationship between the sword-wielding men in power—the Andal Kings of the story, and their dogs—versus the rats underfoot.

“There are trees in the godswood instead of walls. Sky above instead of ceiling. Roots and dirt and rock in place of floor. The rats have no place to scurry. Rats need to hide, lest men skewer them with swords.”

Baelish shows that he has always understood the truth of what Ned, Tyrion, and Cersei have only suspected: the walls are full of rats, “scrabbling in the dark.” While being able to retreat into the hidden spots of the world is a weakness which they use to their advantage, it is still a weakness, for the rats will die if found.

His words echo the advice of Myles Toyne, which Jon Connington recalls in ADWD The Griffin Reborn:

“Lord Tywin would not have bothered with a search. He would have burned that town and every living creature in it. Men and boys, babes at the breast, noble knights and holy septons, pigs and whores, rats and rebels, he would have burned them all.”

Toyne, too, specifically links “rats and rebels,” an association that should be familiar by now. Varys explained how these rebels act on a paradigm entirely separate from courage, and Toyne tells us why the creeping is necessary from the other perspective, for he understands the Lords’ treatment of those same “rats.”

Rats are “burned”, like Toyne says Tywin would, or they are “skewered”, like Baelish says—which is strikingly consistent with the imagery alongside the earlier quotes from the smallfolk of King’s Landing. It’s the fate of the rats that Tyrion walks past in ACOK Tyrion I:

“One peddler was hawking rats roasted on a skewer.”

Or that Cersei walks past in ADWD Cersei II:

“A man just ahead was selling skewers of roast meat from a cart … The meat looked suspiciously like rat to Cersei's eyes”

If we see those smallfolk as “rats” themselves who would be skewered with swords and roasted if they rebelled, the act of eating “skewered” and “roasted” rats portends that oncoming punishment. This comparison adds new depth to the understanding that those smallfolk are eating themselves—not just eating themselves as rats, but as rats who have faced, and who will face, the full retribution of the Lords above them. These skewered and roasted rats simultaneously symbolize those seeking vengeance against the injustices of rulership, and also how those with direct power try—and often succeed—to kill them outright and squash the dissent.

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However, Jaime’s search of the Tower of the Hand reveals how difficult that task may be, far more difficult than Toyne or Baelish make it seem. Jaime may have found a “thousand rats,” but Kevan still dies to more rats, the ones that Jaime doesn’t find, just as Gregor Clegane searches everywhere for Beric Dondarrion, finding nothing but rat-smallfolk, but never the one that matters.

Even when he is caught, Beric Dondarrion, as a symbol of that resistance, is literally unkillable. Replacing him as the leader of those “rats” in a cave is the undead Lady Stoneheart, because, like with ratlike Reek and “ghost” Theon, what is dead may never die. The Rat Cook, too, is immortal—and the Rat Cook's children, that endless army of progeny succeeding their father like the splinter groups of rebels succeed Beric, reveal another element within the Rat Cook's story.

No matter how many rats they might find, there are still more hiding in the walls. Even if the rats are caught, lions or dogs might transform into rats to take their place. The Rat Cook himself, after his punishment, is able to eat and eat and eat his children, the rats of the Nightfort, yet never be sated, because his endless hunger is matched by an endless supply of rats. One simply cannot hunt them all and succeed. Or can you?

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In the next, final part, and also in my series epilogue, I’ll examine two different ways in which ASOIAF looks at this question. In the next part, I’ll examine the Lannister legacy that leads to Tyrion’s rat transformation, and Dany’s ruminations on the futility of hunting the sons, sons of the sons, and the sons of the sons of the sons.