House of Tribes

by Garry Kilworth

  Merciful hovered, dropped, struck again. This time Kellog’s throat was opened. The rat’s red thoughts mingled with his pain, until both drifted rapidly away, into oblivion.

  The last words he thought he heard were, ‘Fie, rat, fie – die, rat, die…’ but whether they came from a mouse’s tongue, or were merely formed in the mists of his fading brain he never knew.

  From his hiding place Goingdownfast could see that Kellog’s grip on the world was gone. The eyes stared, glassily. Merciful jabbed rapidly with her beak, opening Kellog’s underside to get at the soft lights. A rat was an unusually large kill and cause for triumph. She feasted for a while, the air reeking with the smell of warm gore. Goingdownfast remained part of the shadow, still, unseen. He was after all, an Invisible. When the owl had finished, the corpse was left, torn and bloody, for the maggots to colonize. Merciful flew out, through her hole, into the evening.

  Goingdownfast met with Timorous.

  ‘So much for the rat,’ said Goingdownfast. ‘Whispersoft’s plan worked well.’

  ‘The timing was delicate, but as you say, it worked.’

  The two mice spoke politely, but coldly to one another. They were not friends. They never could be friends. Their thinking was too much apart. Also, Goingdownfast had the mate Timorous had wanted. This was enough to make them enemies.

  The rat had made a mistake, however, in thinking that mice could betray one another. One mouse might hate another, but he would never side with a rat against that mouse. A mouse was a mouse, and a rat an outsider. I am against my cousin, but my cousin and I are against the stranger. Goingdownfast and Timorous had been brought together, after the death of Goingdownfast’s brother at the jaws of Kellog, in order to assassinate the rat. It was Whispersoft who had laid the plan before them. Gorm had been in on it too. They had each followed the scheme carefully and carried it out efficiently.

  Now the pact was at an end. When they left the corpse of Kellog, they went their different ways. Before he went back to his nest, Goingdownfast retrieved the red silk ribbon he had brought with him on his mission and ceremonially draped it over the rat’s corpse. It was difficult to see where the scarlet blood left off and the crimson ribbon began. ‘Red on red,’ whispered Goingdownfast to the lengthening shadows. ‘Blood on blood.’

  The avenger of Miserable returned to his mate who was waiting anxiously in their nest. Nonsensical came to him as soon as he entered the nest, now built in the bedroom of a doll’s house.

  ‘Well?’ she said, obviously relieved to see him.

  ‘It’s done,’ replied her mate.

  She saw the blood on his flank. ‘You’re hurt,’ she cried. ‘Here, let me lick it.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said Goingdownfast, allowing her to minister to him. ‘You should see Kellog’s wounds.’

  ‘Is he dead then?’

  ‘Dead as a lump of wood.’

  There was no more said of the matter after that.

  It was over.

  FRIESCHE KAAS

  After seven nights had passed some male nudniks emerged from an enormous vehicle and came up the path. They were large and muscular-looking. The mice watched them march up to the House, enter, and begin to remove the furniture from the rooms. The forest of wooden legs went from the parlour and the living-room. The carpets were taken up. The lamps disappeared. The pictures came down from the walls. The attics were emptied. The Headhunter’s jars containing mice floating in liquid, were shattered on the garden path at the back, their contents left to rot in the weather.

  A revered and familiar landmark disappeared when the Great Clock in the hall went too, and the mice lost all sense of time: the rhythms of their existence were turned upside down, inside out. They could be seen rushing to the window to find out if it was light or dark Outside, whether sun or moon. Having no sense of time put them out of sorts, made them moody and irritable, and changed individual personalities overnight.

  Not only was the House stripped of furniture, but most of what was left of the food was taken too. Some of it was cast into the dustbin, but a lot went inside the big vehicle. When the nudniks finally left, at the end of the day, the whole House was like the giant snail shell it had once been.

  The mice were stunned, but rallied very quickly, knowing that the munificent larder would never allow itself to remain empty for long.

  They didn’t care so much about the furniture, though they preferred things to run over and burrow through. In the attics, many nests had gone with the departed junk, but nests could be rebuilt. The bleakness of the atticscape, transformed from mountains to flatlands in a day, was a little difficult on the soul, gave mice a frightening feeling of vast emptiness, but that might be overcome with time. Even the departing of the Great Clock was a calamity that could be conquered with strength of will. The loss of the food would have been a catastrophe, if the copious larder were to remain bare, but of course that was not possible.

  Some secretly doubted the immediate renewal of contents: they believed in a waiting period.

  It was possible, they whispered, that the seven fat days might be followed by seven lean days.

  Astrid informed everyone openly that the days of plenty were over for ever and the days of want were nigh.

  ‘You watch,’ said Gorm, optimistically. ‘It won’t be long before the shelves fill up again.’

  They sat and mooched around the kitchen, watching the empty larder, waiting for the food to appear. There were knots of mice around the larder door. There were rings of mice on the shelves, staring at the emptiness, waiting for the miracle to happen. There were lone mice, who sent up prayers to the gods of cornucopia, or to the one great Creator, for the marvellous resurrection of the one true larder.

  GLUX

  Yellow-necks, being the largest mice in the House, needed more food than the wood or house mice. However, yellow-necks tend to be less demanding on the whole: they have a pleasant and amiable disposition. They are a species who have come to terms with life and its vagaries, and when things take a bad turn, they twitch their whiskers, flick their tails and set about making the best of it. This is probably why yellow-necks were more suited to a Deathshead existence. They had a sound philosophy to begin with, which could be built upon during their wandering priesthood hours.

  I-kucheng was a mouse respected by several other mice, here and there. Skrang, for one, and the odd one or two mice who were satisfied with the judgements he had handed out when they had taken their disputes to him. These tended to be few in number.

  However, amongst the Deathshead, he was revered. It was he who had refined the martial art of Ik-to, to pure, defensive combat. If Deathshead mice followed the techniques developed by I-kucheng, then no permanent injuries resulted. He was known also to practise the art of self-obliteration, the removal of self. His greatest sorrow was that his pupil, Iban, had decided to follow Yo, the god of Darkness and Ignorance, and the obliteration of memory, rather than self.

  Now I-kucheng was on his deathbed in the Rajang Hole; his faithful warrior-priestess and Deathshead in her own right, Skrang, sat by him and watched and regretted his fading from the world. Outside the hole, now no longer secret in a House without furniture to hide it, many mice kept vigil. Most of them were there to make sure he actually went.

  ‘Skrang,’ croaked I-kucheng, lying on his back in his last moments and staring at the ceiling. ‘This is a triumph, you understand. Death is a triumph, not a failure.’

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I know. Do you have anything to confess. Some sin perhaps, from your youth? You should get it out of the way now, before you begin the journey.’

  She herself could not think of anything: not since she had known him and become his guardian.

  ‘I hate the wallpaper in this room.’

  ‘Pardon?’ said Skrang, caught unawares.

  ‘The wallpaper – fussy little roses. I hate it,’ admitted I-kucheng. ‘There, I’ve made my deathbed confession.’

  ‘Is that it?’ said
Skrang.

  ‘Isn’t that terrible enough? To hate something that nudniks consider a work of art? I saw it go up, with nudniks all busy-busy, using brushes and paste – tasted awful that paste, and I’m allowed to say that because I wasn’t a Deathshead then. I’ve hated the wallpaper all this time, but I suppressed the feeling until now.’

  ‘Unn will forgive you your transgressions…’ droned Skrang.

  At that moment there was a cry from within the crowd around the hole, ‘Hurry up and get on with it!’ someone yelled.

  ‘What was that?’ whispered I-kucheng. ‘One of the faithful?’

  ‘Nothing,’ replied Skrang. ‘Someone – er – someone heard you say death was a triumph – and they yelled encouragement.’

  I-kucheng frowned. ‘Not a bawdy triumph – a solemn one…’

  ‘Right – I’ll stop any further cheers.’

  But, as it happened, she had no need to do so for I-kucheng had breathed his last and the last true Deathshead was gone.

  When Skrang duly informed the crowd there was a quick file-past the body, but little emotion except from a perceptive few who knew the end of an era when they saw one.

  Skrang herself was comforted by the thought that the dead mouse lived on through others, through the influences he or she had left behind in living mice. She believed that a bit of us rubs off on to everyone we come into contact with, even if it is just a single brief meeting, perhaps to ask the way to the nearest piece of cheese. That indefinable smudge of our personality, on each individual, is what is left behind of us when we go to the Otherworld. Sometimes the smudge is great, where the living mouse is a good friend or relative, sometimes it is minuscule. It doesn’t matter. The dead live on in the living: still part of the great, sprawling mass of mice that inhabit the world.

  VESTGÖTAÖST

  THERE WAS A GREAT FAMINE IN THE HOUSE.

  These were the worst hours in the history of the tribes. In fact the word ‘tribe’ meant nothing any more. There was no sense of unity, of brother and sisterhood: no sense of belonging to a particular group. There were still some couples who watched out for each other, but in most cases it was every mouse for him- or herself and starvation get the hindmost.

  Certainly no-one could remember a more desperate time from their own yesterhours. Not only was there not unlimited cheese, there was no cheese at all. Almost every mouse was on the edge of starvation and madness.

  The rhythms of the House had fallen into discord. The mice were out of tune with the House and the House had never been regulated by the Earth, so the spiral of disharmony became a vortex from which it seemed nothing could extract them.

  Astrid’s prediction had come true, but no-one felt much like congratulating her, and to her credit she never said ‘I told you so’.

  Even the larder had fallen from grace. It was no longer celestial, no longer divine, no longer bounteous: it was a neglected place, with no hallowed platters of meat, no breadbin choc-a-bloc with crusts, no full marble slabs, no crammed cooling slate. It was so empty it echoed. It was so empty that even the ants had gone. It was a failed temple, where miracles no longer happened.

  The mice slipped into a period of misery. There were fights for scraps. Some went out into the garden (much to the delight of Stone) and foraged for food there. However, they were in competition with the harvest mice, voles, shrews and other wildlife, and didn’t fare much better than those that remained in the House.

  Iago, who all his life had advocated the eating of books, was caught chewing electrical flex, not for sabotage because of course the Revolution was over, but for food.

  ‘You’ll kill yourself,’ remarked Whispersoft. ‘That rubber will clog your bowels and you’ll die in agony.’

  ‘I’m addicted to it,’ confessed Iago hollowly. ‘I gnawed so much of it during the Great Nudnik Drive, I got a taste for it. I can’t help it. All the books are gone. If there was some food in the larder I could probably break the habit, but…’

  Two hours later Iago was in a dreadful state, rolling on the floorboards in great pain. He managed by some miracle to survive the next twenty-four hours, however, and vowed he would never again touch electrical flex. Some time after that he was back at it, nibbling tiny pieces of rubber, making himself marginally ill every few hours. Thereafter he became a mouse who haunted dark corners, growing more sullen, ignoring attempts to steer him back to being the affable mouse he once was.

  Ferocious, always that fair-minded and most honest of fellows, found a hoard of nuts near the opening to Tunneller’s maze. Some squirrel had obviously cached and forgotten them. He told no-one of his discovery and it was only when Tunneller herself, after receiving his toll in nuts, revealed her suspicions to others in the House, that he was found out. Immediately there was a general descent and free-for-all which spread to the harvest mice in the garden and finally resulted in the complete sacking and pillaging of the nut store. Ferocious was savagely bitten, and savagely retaliated, in the scrummage.

  These incidents, and many others, were typical of the anarchy that had spread as a result of the Great Nudnik Drive.

  The House was like a great tomb, its larder an empty vault, echoing with the cries of hungry mice. They gnawed at the floorboards, they ate their own nests, and if they were fast eaters and finished first – they ate the nests of others too. There were stories of unspeakable acts, to do with the Headhunter’s shattered bottles and their preserved remains of mouse ancestors, which were too terrible even to enter the annals of mouse history. The tribes became drifting ghosts, their frames thin and wasted, their ribs prominent. The House seemed uncaring of their plight. It was a cold, dead thing.

  There was a sudden revival of the greeting, ‘Eight’, no longer used only by pretentious library mice. This was since whiskers (along with fur) had begun to fall out due to malnutrition. Proud mice wished others to know that they had their full set of whiskers and that even in their poverty they were still respectable creatures.

  Surprisingly, and suspiciously, Phart and Flegm still remained round-bellied. It was not just their corpulence that aroused suspicion however, but their lack of complaint. When challenged by Thorkils Threelegs, Phart cried, ‘We’ve distended stomicks, ain’t we? I mean, we’re as hungry as everyone else. Worse, in fact. ’Cept me and Flegm ’ere take things in our stride. We don’t sweat and whine. Stokes, that’s what we are…’

  ‘Stokes?’ growled Thorkils. ‘What the devil is that?’

  ‘We’re stoke-ical,’ explained Flegm. ‘Ain’t you never heard of that? Means we put up with things, don’t it?’

  ‘Is that a fact?’ snarled Thorkils. ‘Well, since you haven’t got two crumbs to rub together, we’ll just pay you a little visit in that cellar of yours, to see if we can help you out. I hate to think of two of our fellow mice on the verge of death.’

  ‘No, that’s not necessary,’ said Phart quickly, ‘we’ll just bear our burden, stoke-ically, and not bother you other mice with our troubles, eh?’

  ‘No trouble,’ promised Thorkils Threelegs. ‘No trouble at all.’

  The Savages and the 13-K searched the cellar systematically and discovered the sack of potatoes in an empty wine barrel. When Gorm and his wrecking crew found it, they approached Phart and Flegm who denied all knowledge.

  ‘Spuds in our very own cellar, and ’ere we are, starvin’ our guts out!’

  Pedlar was dispirited by such disintegration among mice. He contemplated abandoning the House and spoke to Treadlightly about it, but though she said she was tempted, she foresaw the winter coming on.

  ‘I’ve never lived out in the cold,’ she said. ‘I haven’t known a winter because I was born in the spring, but I can feel the coldness in the air. Even though the heating isn’t on any longer, the House is still warmer than Outside. I’m sorry, I know I sound a softy.’

  Pedlar said that was all right, he preferred to stay in the House anyway, which wasn’t true. In fact he yearned to be in his Hedgerow. He was now 290 nights o
ld – middle-aged – and he felt he wanted to get back to his roots. Having survived most of one winter in the Hedgerow, he knew he could get through another, especially since he was now worldly-wise. However, the idea of parting from Treadlightly at this time, leaving her to an unpleasant fate, was unthinkable. There were many mice who would have sneered at this, not being especially faithful to one mate, but one or two bucks like Pedlar preferred to stay with one doe. It was not a life-long commitment for mice are not pigeons, faithful to one partner unto death, but some did prefer a little steadiness.

  So Pedlar remained in the House, going hungry along with the rest of them, and was respected for it. He was an Outsider, yes, and would always be one, but he was an acceptable Outsider, one who was willing to go through thick and thin with the rest of the residents.

  During this period of darkness, Pedlar and Treadlightly did not only have themselves to feed – difficult enough – but also the creature they were hiding. Little Prince was not especially grateful for any food they brought him either, and in fact complained bitterly that he was having to put up with inferior nourishment and little of it. Neither Pedlar nor Treadlightly felt inclined to argue. They hadn’t the energy for it. Treadlightly was of the opinion that Little Prince would never change, though Pedlar hoped otherwise. For now, though, it seemed Little Prince had used up any reserves of finer feeling with one or two thank yous in the beginning. As time went on, he just became obstinate, sulky and completely thoughtless.

  There were times when discovery seemed to be unavoidable.

  One hour Treadlightly, Pedlar and Little Prince were gnawing on a piece of crab apple. Little Prince was grumbling as usual.

  ‘This tastes like wet cardboard. Horrible! After that lovely food Little Prince used to get. Not the flesh – Little Prince isn’t trying to upset anybody – but the nice titbits and sweeties I used to be given. Why did you save me? I’d have been better off being killed by the tribes.’