House of Tribes

by Garry Kilworth

  ‘Nice sugar mice,’ crooned a voice from one of the bedrooms. ‘Little Prince can smell your fleshy-flesh. Sweet honey mice…’

  Kellog went and hunched in the middle of the doorway, glaring at the cage containing the white mouse.

  ‘…lovely – ulp – er – rat?’

  Kellog flexed his broad back and showed his teeth.

  The white mouse stared at him with wide eyes for a few moments then it said, ‘Time for sleepy-byes, Little Prince,’ and lay down on its sawdust nest and closed its eyes tightly.

  Kellog stared for a while, then strode off along the landing. He plopped his way down the stairs to the hall below, intending to use the Gwenllian Hole to get back into the safety of the walls and between-floors. It was all very well being reckless, but there was a limit. He had made his point to himself: he was no longer worried about nudniks.

  Suddenly, from the living-room, appeared a rheumy-eyed ancient spaniel. It stood in the doorway for a moment, blinking, regarding Kellog with amazement on its hairy face. Its floppy silken ears came forward and its grey-gold curls fluffed.

  Kellog’s instinct was to run. Then he remembered that this was Old Witless, about whom the mice talked. He had heard them say that Witless was the slowest creature on earth, that he had never in all his hours caught a mouse, and that the teeth in his mouth were probably blunt and useless.

  ‘Go stick your head in a bucket, dog,’ snarled Kellog.

  Those few words seemed to be the only sounds necessary to put a tremendous amount of explosive power and energy behind the hound. Witless came off the hallway rug as if he had been fired from a gun. His mouth was open and there was a look of absolute delight on his face. His eyes were suddenly clear and sparkling. His joints were no longer arthritic. His nostrils flared wide with sheer joy. He was two years old again.

  Kellog streaked up the stairs with Witless right behind him, snapping at his tail. The rat’s heart was rattling away at a tremendous rate. Kellog’s legs were a blur of movement as he flashed over each stair, hardly touching the carpet. His eyes were bugging out of his head. Kellog knew he had made a terrible error of judgement. The dog had a hidden reservoir of power which the mere sight of a rat had unleashed. The hound was like a thing from hell! Its eyes blazed, its jaws snapped, its legs were full of vigour. There was no thought process behind its pursuit: it moved on pure instinct, the edge of which had been honed by many years of ratting as a youngster.

  Glorious past hours were responsible for Witless’s litheness and vitality: hours in the ditches, his master urging him on, kill, kill, kill. In those times he had killed rats by the dozen. He was a brilliant ratter, a supreme champion ratter, and the mere word uttered into his ear still made him go berserk with excitement. A nudnik only had to breath the sound for Witless to dash around sniffing in every corner of the room, overturning furniture in his eagerness.

  Kellog flashed along the hall, found himself in a corner, panicked and dashed forward through the dog’s legs. Witless did a beautiful somersault in mid-air, worthy of a puppy a tenth of his age. He gave an ecstatic yelp and continued the chase, his claws skidding on lino as he ran.

  Witless was not especially interested in mice, as mice went, though he would put up a half-hearted chase. But tell him there were rats in the vicinity, show him a rat, and all his cares and aches were cast aside, and the dynamo of old spun to life within him.

  Witless had been trained by being thrown into an empty barrel with a rat and the lid being jammed on. It was a case of either emerging the victor from that barrel, or being bitten to death by the rat. He had won that first battle and had never looked back since.

  Gasping for breath, Kellog retraced his run to the stairs, with Witless still snapping at his back legs. He took the flight of stairs in one, landing at the bottom with a thud. Witless hurled himself down too, but Kellog managed to recover before dog hit mat. His hair on end with fear, Kellog flew along the hallway and into the Gwenllian Hole. He hardly touched the sides though anyone watching would have said he was much too big for such a small knothole.

  Once down below the floorboards Kellog wheezed for breath, lying on his stomach listening to the dog scratching and whining at the Gwenllian Hole. A mouse came by and stared with enquiring eyes at Kellog’s heaving body as it passed.

  The mouse hurried on, wondering what kind of creature it could have been to cause Kellog such distress. One of the cats surely? Or a fox? For clearly the rat had undergone a very harrowing experience.

  Kellog made his way slowly back to his nest, vowing to himself that he would never, ever again, leave the sanctuary of the walls and between-floors, until the nudniks were well out of the House and that hound from hell with them. The House proper had nearly done for him this time.

  The House actually seemed very receptive to the efforts of the tribes to drive out the nudniks. Some of the mice were saying it was as if the House itself were on their side, allowing itself to be operated on by their surgery. It poured forth water from its wounds, it sparkled electricity from its cuts, it hissed gas from its holes. There were parts of the House that had rotted on their own, over the years, without any help from the mice, and these were now crumbling and sagging, making the place unsafe for anything heavier of foot than a medium-sized rodent. Slates began to slip on the roof, wastepipes clogged with hair, cisterns were bunged up with gunge.

  ‘Predestination!’ shrieked Frych-the-freckled. ‘It was meant to be!’

  In the first few hours of full-scale Revolution two mice were killed – one of them by Eyeball, who played with the body until the Headhunter stole it from her for his own nefarious purposes. The second was skewered by the kitchen nudnik with the breadknife. The nudnik threw the body in the wastebin, where Spitz found it. Much to the disgust and horror of hidden onlookers, the torn cat swallowed the still-contorting mouse whole, and was promptly sick on the kitchen floor. Witless came and sniffed the lump in the puddle with obvious interest until chased away.

  ‘Nobody said it wouldn’t be dangerous,’ growled Gorm, at an emergency Allthing in the cupboard-under. ‘Nobody said it wouldn’t involve a great deal of courage.’

  ‘But,’ whispered Tostig, ‘two mice already.’

  ‘You gutless lump of lard!’ Gorm shouted at him. ‘What are you? I won’t have anybody in my tribe whining about numbers. One, two, three – what’s that to the Savages? But I’m not going to browbeat you. I’ll leave it to your conscience. We’ll vote on whether to continue with the Drive. All those in favour of going on with the Drive, leave the Allthing now…’

  There was a short pause, during which a scuffle ensued, and then silence.

  Gorm screeched, ‘What, you still here, Tostig? Get out, before I bite your backside.’

  ‘But you said—’

  ‘What I said and what I mean are two different things,’ snarled Gorm. ‘We’re the only two left – I suppose you noticed how swiftly everyone else went through the exit hole? They got jammed in the opening before the sentence was even out of my mouth. Why was that, Tostig? Was it just because they were eager to continue with the Drive?’

  ‘N-no Gorm – because they’re scared of you.’

  ‘Remarkably astute for a mouse with a brain the size of a mote. And you’re not scared of me, I take it?’

  ‘I’m leaving n-now, Gorm,’ came the whimper.

  Gorm grunted, ‘I knew I could rely on you, brother.’

  Scenes like these were quite usual for the first few hours of the assault, but soon mice settled down to gnawing at electric wiring, letting the stuffing out of cushions, burrowing through mattresses, chomping away on clothes in the wardrobes and drawers, eating rugs and mats, nibbling through wood and plaster, upholstery and wickerwork, cardboard and cloth. All over the House, new holes began to appear and old holes were rediscovered. In the bathroom, the cork tiles were devastated. In the living-room the tablecloth was eaten into strips of rag. In the bedrooms, the curtains were gnawed from their hooks.

  T
here were extraordinary feats of bravery and sacrifice. A female Deathshead went on a suicide mission, climbing up a waste-pipe to stick there and block it. Her body was her contribution to the cause: her reward presumably obtained in Deathshead heaven. Straighteyes, an Invisible, got trapped in the springs of a mattress and had to remain there a whole eight hours, while a nudnik slept and did unspeakable things (unspoken of, that is, by everyone except Phart and Flegm) above him. When he finally got free, he needed another eight hours to recover the full use of his lungs.

  A warrior of the Savage Tribe attempted to lure Eyeball into the boiler fire, an incredible act of courage inspired by an order from Gorm-the-old, and which succeeded in getting Eyeball’s fur singed.

  On the second night of the Drive, Cadwallon of the library mice met his death. He was the fourth victim of the Great Nudnik Drive. Cadwallon had fine, strong teeth, honed to penetrating sharpness by many nights of eating books. He was the first of the mice to bite through an electric cable and actually sever it completely.

  Onlookers spoke of vivid blue flashes and raining sparks, of Cadwallon’s limbs stiffening to twigs, of his fur crackling and smoking and, finally, of a charred smell which reeked through the rafters for hours afterwards. A new mousehole was gnawed in his honour.

  No-one knew who actually started the fire, but it began in one of the bedrooms, and destroyed both that room and one of the bathrooms, as well as part of the landing. Some said it was Hywel-the-bad, chewing through an electrical flex, but Iago claimed to have been biting holes in a bed sheet at the time and it was his contention that he was nibbling so fast the friction was responsible for the ignition of the fire.

  Whoever it was, the blaze was both terrifying and magnificent. The flames ate away like mad crackling monsters at everything in their path. It was all red heat and smoke and stink. Mice had to admit to each other that they were absolutely scared stiff.

  The smell of the smoke triggered some deeply ingrained terror within them. There were racial memory-caches of fires throughout the history of the mouse, from the first great plains fires which destroyed vast areas of grasslands full of mice, to the later forest fires and the more recent infernos that had enveloped and laid waste to whole cities of houses – houses from a time when the giant snails fashioned their shells of wood.

  These memory-caches were opened up and their contents poured forth into the minds of mice. What came out were horrors: of running madly in no particular direction, of eyes blinded by smoke, of nostrils and lungs burning with the hot air, of smouldering fur and flesh, of being devoured by pain.

  But this fire, the House fire, was started by the mice themselves, getting their own back on the nudniks.

  The nudniks were all of a twitter about it, of course. They turned on the taps to get buckets of water and after a while a kind of smelly, green sludge oozed out. Kellog’s work. It stank the House out from top to bottom.

  Yet more nudniks came, this time in shiny metal hats. They hosed the fire to a standstill, causing a great deal of damage. The bedroom was first blackened and charred, and then had water and foam sloshed into it. Since there were no mouse nests in the bedrooms the mice suffered relatively little harm. The stairs became flooded and water poured into the cupboard-under; the living-room directly below the fire was also drenched and plaster fell from its ceiling. Apart from a few between-floors passageways being flooded, none of this affected the mice a great deal either and they were quite satisfied.

  Pedlar went about the sabotage as enthusiastically as others. He was in part responsible for the devastation to the aspidistra in the parlour, its leaves gnawed through and the roots urinated on and left for dead. There was a wonderful feeling of mice pride throughout the whole House. For the first time in living memory the tribes were at peace with each other, bonded together by a common cause. Brother nodded to brother and sister to sister. Cousins met and rubbed noses.

  Even the Stinkhorns were treated with a modicum of respect, especially when they managed to gnaw through a seal on one of the wine barrels and flood the cellar.

  ‘Front-line stuff, eh yer honour?’ said Phart to Gorm. ‘You’ll be invitin’ me to join the Savage Tribe soon, I expect?’

  ‘Over my dead body,’ growled Gorm, which Phart took to be an encouraging statement from someone who could not hope to live a great deal longer.

  ‘Thanks chief,’ he said, humbly. ‘Knew I’d done good.’

  All in all, everyone seemed to be performing his or her part, with the 13-K the most enthusiastic of all, happy that they were accepted dissidents and could join in the guerrilla warfare.

  RUTLAND

  Pedlar went flying across the floor, landing painfully on his back. He lay there stunned for a moment, his heart banging in his chest, then he managed to regain his feet. There was dust everywhere. The attic was choked with clouds of it. Mice were emerging from their nests and holes, from the places where they had been quietly gnawing on household supports, their whiskers twitching in fright, their tails swishing.

  ‘What’s happening?’ one cried.

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ cried another. ‘Is anyone hurt? Where are my young ones?’

  Pedlar’s ears were still ringing, but once his head had cleared, he went looking for Treadlightly. The Invisible had become his nest-mate and they’d tailor-built their own quarters in a nice little cavity below the roof slates. He found her lying near the water tank. For a moment he thought she was dead, but then he saw her stir. He nudged her with his nose and she opened her eyes.

  ‘Where am I?’ she asked.

  ‘You were stunned,’ he said. ‘Any bones broken?’

  She rolled over on to her front and lay trembling. ‘I don’t think so,’ she murmured.

  ‘No-one seems to know what’s happened. Maybe it’s something to do with the Drive? I find it hard to imagine that Gorm would have such power at his command though. That was some bang! You stay here and rest for a while. I’m going to have a look.’

  Pedlar left her then, running towards an attic exit hole. He went along various tunnels until he felt a strong draught. When he emerged through the Gwenllian Hole into the hallway, he saw a scene of devastation. The hallway was full of dirt and debris – chunks of splintered wood and other rubbish. A nudnik was standing, pale-faced, staring at the gap that used to be the cupboard under the stairs.

  The triangular door was missing from the cupboard-under. No doubt what was left of it was lying around the hallway in small pieces. There was a strong smell of coal gas in the air and some nudnik had opened the front door to let it waft out into the garden. It seemed that the gas meter had exploded.

  The house nudniks stared at the mouse nerve-centre and twittered to each other. A short time later more outsider nudniks arrived and made straight for the cupboard. They carried metal things in their hands. Pedlar listened to them making a noise inside the cupboard for a while, fixing the damaged pipe, and returned to the attic.

  When he arrived back at the place where he had left Treadlightly, he found her fully recovered. He began explaining to her what he had seen downstairs and soon found he was surrounded by other interested mice. Kellog, too, was sitting on the other side of his water tank, staring across as Pedlar talked. Merciful had flown out of the attic the instant the explosion occurred and everyone kept a wary eye on her doorway to the outside world, in case she suddenly returned. The crowd listened to Pedlar’s description of the scene below, then all went off to their nests to discuss it.

  For the next few hours the whole House was quivering with excitement. Messengers ran back and forth between tribes, with news of what was happening below the stairs, Gorm was predicting an early victory for the mice.

  During the Great Nudnik Drive, the Headhunter and his cannibal pet had been having a high old time with mouse corpses. The silky tones of Little Prince could often be heard coming from the middle bedroom, with his, ‘Delicious mousey-meat, oh lovely, lovely! Cook it up nice and soft, nice and sweet.’ And va
rious other nauseating phrases. Pedlar wondered whether it was all going to be worth it: the vanquishing of the nudniks against the loss of life amongst the mouse population.

  Still, the electric wiring had suffered great damage; the water system had been penetrated in several places causing floods and chaos; the gas had done its work all right – and the furnishings had suffered a great deal. One of the old nudniks had already left the House – taken away in a big white boxy vehicle. The other nudniks had gone into overdrive with snap-wire traps and poison, but the mice weren’t that stupid. They were used to the traps and the poison, well, sometimes you could eat it and only feel a bit sick. It rarely killed.

  Several times Kellog had called across the waters of the tank to the effect that he thought the plan was going well.

  ‘You might just do it, you crazy mice,’ he growled.

  One visiting Bookeater, standing on the corner of a trunk stared across at Kellog and said, ‘Crazy? That’s rich, coming from a brooding paranoid psychotic with sociopathic tendencies.’

  Kellog liked the way things were going. He had always got enough to eat, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want more. And he knew that once the nudniks had gone, taking their rat-responsive spaniel with them, he would reign supreme over the whole House. He could come and go as he pleased, eat mouse babies without worrying about tribute, kill one or two if there was a need, without cutting off his food supply. The dark lord could come down from his castle and lay waste to the territory of the poor, damned peasants. There would be no nudniks around to check him.

  And Merciful? Well, who knew what Merciful thought about it all? The mind of an owl is a strange and surreal thing and quite out of reach of the understanding of mice. Who could comprehend what vast icy wastes lay behind the inscrutable eyes of such as Merciful? Who could understand the inner meaning behind swiftness of hooked beak and needle claw, that came out of nowhere and brought instant death?