ARC: The Corpse-Rat King

by Lee Battersby

  “Gerd,” he said, and that one syllable contained all the fury and violence of an avenging army.

  The noise was coming closer. The village men, courage fortified by whatever hooch they kept in their houses, and the logic that comes to any man when trying to explain the unbelievable to a sceptical wife. Marius had seen this kind of anger before – shameful anger; from men persuading themselves that it was not they who had cowered earlier, that they were protectors and fighters. They would be carrying mattocks and hammers, pitchforks and sickles. Deadly weapons, in the hands of the scared. Marius made for the door and risked a peek out into the street. The villagers were no more than a dozen feet away. Were he to make his exit that way, they would be on him before he could reach the corner of the building. Despite his appearance, Marius felt very much alive. He was in no mood to decide on which side of the divide his life force rested. He closed the door, and surveyed his surroundings.

  Apart from the sad wreckage of furniture, bar and shelves, the room was bare. Not even a wall hanging livened up the shit-and-mud decor. The fireplace was no more than a foot wide and constituted a shallow depression in the wall with a flue leading up and out. Marius leaned in, risking a burned face to see whether the flue might be wide enough to wriggle up, but it was no use. As far as he could tell, it was no wider than his doubled fists. For a moment he considered using a lit branch to set fire to the walls, but no more than a few flames licked the blackened coals. By the time it caught on, he’d be on the end of a pitchfork. A doorway on the other side of the room held more promise. Marius pushed through the simple bead curtain and stepped into the living quarters of the proprietress.

  “Business was booming,” he muttered, surveying the few items within the room. A bundle of cloths lay over a bed of hay in one corner, and next to it, side by side, two earthen pots saw duty as washbasin and piss pot. Another block of wood, fashioned in much the same way as the bar, served as table, strewn with the minutiae of a village woman: combs, daubs and pins abounded. Marius scanned them but found nothing useful.

  By now he could hear the crowd just outside the front door, shouting and rattling their weapons. It would not be long before they felt brave enough to open the door and confront him. Marius sighed in defeat. There was no escape. He collapsed onto the crude bed.

  “Fucking hell!”

  He sprang to his feet, hands clutching the base of his spine. There was something hard in that bed, and sharp as well. He squeezed his eyes shut, and shook his head to banish the pain. When he could trust himself to open his eyes without tearing up, he ventured more slowly onto the pile of cloth and lifted it to reveal the hay below. A thick wooden pole lay underneath, a knotted dowel sticking out at an odd angle. Marius swept aside the hay to get a closer look at it. When he saw what it was, he could not help but laugh out loud in relief.

  “Of course,” he shouted to the walls, smiling when his outburst caused the crowd outside to fall into momentary silence.

  The end of a pipe lay exposed, the dowel proving to be a spigot. It was that, Marius realised, upon which he had sat. The pipe disappeared under the hay towards the wall.

  “Of course, she would,” Marius muttered this time, grabbing handfuls of straw and flinging them aside to reveal more of the pipe. Alcohol was this woman’s trade, but nowhere, in his panic, had he seen the source of it. A village such as this would be too poor to trade with merchants, not for the finished product. A smart woman, a crafty woman, would have a still secreted, away from the prying eyes of the populace. And where better to hide it than in a place no man would seek to invite himself? He cleared the last of the straw and tracked the pipe up to the base of the wall.

  “Well, well.”

  He knocked against the wall, and was rewarded with the sound of a hollow space beyond. Marius smiled. No tired farmer would stop to measure the outer walls of a hovel against its inner dimensions. Nobody would come into this room and wonder why it seemed smaller than it should. If Marius had money to lay a bet, and someone to accept it, he would wager that the outer wall beyond this one held a door to freedom. All he had to do was find a way through.

  Outside, he heard the front door creak open. Marius turned quickly, and grasped the end of the pipe. He heaved, and two feet of hefty wood tore free. Alcohol poured out of the broken end, soaking the straw beneath and spreading out onto the dirt floor. Marius hefted his makeshift weapon.

  “Right,” he muttered, then ran through the beaded curtain, screaming and whirling the pipe around his head.

  Three villagers peeked through the open doorway. At Marius’ approach they departed, and he heard the sound of bodies falling over each other in panicked retreat. He laughed and dealt the door a massive blow, yelling gibberish at the top of his voice. The crowd outside withdrew in consternation. Marius smiled, and snuck back into the bedroom. His manic act would buy him some time – enough, perhaps, to break through the wall and into the space beyond. His foot came down upon the straw, and he grimaced as the wet grass squelched beneath his feet. Then his expression cleared, and he began to gather up great handfuls of it, dragging most of the bed into the main room and against the front door. When he was finished he rolled up one of the cloth blankets and dipped a corner into the pool of alcohol. He carried it into the main room and held it over the fire. Within moments the flame had caught the cloth and was racing up toward his arm. Marius flung the cloth towards the door. It hit the straw, and before he could track the movement, the entire pile was engulfed in flame.

  “That should do it,” he said, before racing back into the bedroom. The fire would hold off the villagers, but unless he could get through the wall before the flames ran round the room and found the pool of alcohol at his feet, it would only serve as his funeral pyre.

  He lunged at the wall, pipe raised above his head like an axe. He swung, and the pipe broke through with such ease that Marius fell forward, balance destroyed by the lack of resistance, and slammed his face into the wall. A piece the size of his head broke away, and smashed on the other side of the wall.

  “God damn it!”

  He sat backwards, losing his grip on his makeshift club. It fell the wrong side of the wall. Marius heard it clang against something in the darkened room. He rubbed his head and frowned.

  “What the hell?”

  Now that he was looking at it more closely, he realised that this wall was different in construction to the other three sides of the room. Whilst the others had the typical brushed look of traditional wattle and daub structures, and each wall was a single sheet of the stuff, this one was made up of more than a dozen sections, a criss-cross framework with only the lumpy runnels of thickened mud dried between them. The hole his head had made was smack-bang in the middle of one of these smaller frames, and Marius could see that the edges were thin and brittle, as if there was no internal structure holding the mud together. He gripped the edge of the hole and pulled. A sheet of daub the length of his forearm came away, shattering against the floor. Marius looked at it in amazement.

  “No wattle,” he said to himself. “No damn wattle! But how…?”

  He pulled another sheet from out of its frame, then another, kicking at the flimsy structure until his original hole was big enough to admit him. The flames from the other room grew louder, and smoke poured into the bedroom. Marius glanced towards them and covered his mouth and nose with his hand. He needed to get out of here now, otherwise the villagers would not need to find him to see his dead body. He pictured them, standing down the street, watching their only entertainment go to the flames. They would be angry, devastated. They would be looking for a corpse after all this was over. He had no intention of making it easy for them. There was enough flickering light from the conflagration for him to make out the dim outline of the room beyond, and in the middle, a vague, humped shape. He stepped through. He could make out almost nothing in the uncertain light – a broad lessening in the darkness signified the opposite wall, but he could see nothing to show the location of a doo
r to the outside. He took a step forward and reached out, satisfying himself that the opposite wall was there. His fingers found the rough surface, and he followed it round to the right until he came back towards his entrance hole. The room was little more than a closet, a couple of steps in either direction.

  There had to be an exit here. He just hoped it wasn’t out into the street. He could not recall seeing a door as he walked along the frontage of the building, but then, this room was proof of how well things could be hidden. He turned away, and stepped towards the back of the house. His shin struck something hard. Marius yelped. The still! He had forgotten it. He grimaced, then his eyes widened in sudden understanding.

  The still. The means by which the owner of the tiny bar made her alcohol. He stooped and ran fingers across it, defining its shape in the semi-darkness by touch. A wooden cask the width of a man’s chest, banded by iron hoops, and full of alcohol that even now dripped onto the floor in an invitation for the fire to drink. The rest of it was pouring out of the broken pipe in the bedroom. Any moment now, the front edge of the fire would meet the pool of alcohol on the floor and come racing across the ground faster than any man could move. All the way back to the source. The still. The one he was standing next to. Marius took a step away from the offending barrel, then checked himself. The heat from the fire was washing across him. There was no time to hide. There was nowhere to hide. Nothing to crouch behind. Nothing to raise in front of him as a shield. Moment by moment, the light from the approaching fire illuminated features of the room that he had not previously seen. He could now see, down at floor level, the flap by which the bar owner had slipped in and out from the bedroom. Marius stared at it in sudden comprehension. There was no need for an outside door. He was trapped. Marius glanced up. The fire had spread to the walls now, eating away at the dried daub faster than he could track it. The bedroom was engulfed in flame. He dropped to his knees. He should be coughing, shouldn’t he? The smoke that rolled around him should be choking him, forcing his eyes to weep as he squeezed them shut against the irritation. Instead, nothing. Marius bumped his head against the floor. Of course. He was dead, at least, his body bore all the signs. It would stay this way until he really was dead. Which meant that he would lack the blessed release of unconsciousness as the flames ate his up clothes, then his hair and flesh. Asphyxiation would provide no relief. He would feel every moment of his immolation. Marius covered his face with his hands. A dull whoompf washed over him as the fire caught the edge of the alcohol and the bedroom became an inferno. Flames licked at the edges of the hole. A wall of heat buffeted the room. Marius pushed away from the approaching fire, screaming as he fell against the barrel. The damn thing was red hot, and the bands of metal around its girth pressed against the skin of his back. The pain forced his attention away from the fire and back onto himself.

  The still.

  It was the only object in the room. Marius reached out a hand and pushed against it, wincing as the hot wood seared his palm. The heavy cask refused to move. Marius closed his eyes. That much liquid, in a barrel that solid, must weigh almost two hundred pounds. It was his only recourse. There was no time to think about it. Marius frowned, recalling the ease with which the dead warrior had lifted him from the ground. He must weigh nearly as much as the barrel, yet the soldier had hefted him without an ounce of effort. The dead had their own strengths, the soldier had said. And he was dead, was he not? At least, his body was. It bore all the hallmarks of being so. Perhaps it had the same strengths.

  Without thinking, he rose to his knees and drove his shoulder against the rough side of the cask. It gave not an inch. He wrapped his arms around it, ignoring the pain that seared his flesh, and heaved upwards, pushing one leg underneath him and the next. The still resisted, but slowly, as Marius screamed, it shuddered, just the merest of movements, but enough for him to rock back and drive his shoulder into it again. Somehow, from some combination of strength and the crazed energy of the desperate, it loosed its hold upon the floor. Marius drew it up onto his shoulder in one sweeping movement, alcohol spraying outwards as it tore free of the drainpipe. It fizzed out of the opening, and the fire roared in response. Marius staggered under the sudden weight, the iron band scorching a line of pain across his cheek. The air was full of the smell of burned flesh, and mud that bubbled and charred under the all-consuming flame. He locked his knees, screamed again, lumbered forward at the wall. Two steps, three, and then the pain and effort became too much and he half-fell into the fire-laced structure of the outer wall. The wattle and daub split apart under his assault and he collapsed forward onto blackened, fire-eaten grass. Sharp stubble tore at his face. He lost his grip on the still. It fell away from him, bounced once, and rolled back against the wall. Marius stared at it in dazed incomprehension. The fire reached towards it, licked at the edge of the barrel, and then leaped upon it. Marius blinked, then somehow found the strength to raise himself to his hands and knees and crawl five feet away, ten, every inch a victory through blackened earth that burned his skin as he touched it. A ditch ran across the back of the yard. He dipped his head over the edge. The combined effluent of the village trickled passed his eyes, a brown sludge barely held together by the dribbles of water that survived the journey past house, well and fields. Marius retched as the fumes rose up around him, a miasma that stank like a million years of broken privies. He slid into it face first, just as the fire ate its way through the heavy wood of the still and the alcohol inside exploded. Marius had been wrong on one count, at least: he happily lost consciousness, oblivious to the sounds of screaming villagers, and the crash of the bar finally falling in upon itself.

  SIX

  The sky was the deepest black a sky had ever been, and magical pixies flitted about – red and yellow and white – hopping and skipping this way and that in time to their own unknowable rhythms. Marius smiled as he watched them dance. They came close, only to disappear as he reached for them with a hand that wavered in and out of focus as he swung it. He giggled. The stars shone with white disapproval. One by one, a pixie floated up to cover them, until the whole sky twinkled with warm red stars, showering love and approval down upon him. Marius felt his skin bead with moisture. His very skin was crying with gratitude.

  “Thank you,” he sang. “Thank you thank you thang yew.”

  A pixie floated into his vision. Marius waved a finger in greeting. The pixie waved back, and came closer, closer, until it hung less than an inch from the bridge of his nose. Marius crossed his eyes as he tried to keep the beauteous creature in focus. Still it descended. Marius held his breath, hoping, hoping… land, little creature. Let my flesh join with yours. Just one touch… The pixie ended its descent, and touched down less than an inch from his eyes.

  “Fucking hell!”

  He leaped from the trench. The spark buried itself deeper into his flesh. He swatted at it, scraped with ineffectual fingernails, and finally, cross-eyed with the pain, flung himself back down, face first into the water. The pixie died with a hiss. Marius lay face down, hoping against hope that the soft thing gently bumping its way down the side of his face hadn’t been someone’s dinner twenty four hours ago. This was it, he decided. There could be no lower point in his life. Dead, face down in a ditch, with a suspicious by-product kissing his cheek. Nothing could make life worse.

  “Enjoying your drink?”

  Marius wasn’t proud of his scream, but at least he didn’t have time to feel ashamed. The scream was followed by an instinctive inhalation, drawing mud and water directly into his lungs. He reared up, choking, spraying gritty brown phlegm onto the grass, the speaker and himself. He lurched forward. His knees struck the edge of the trench and he pitched forward. His face struck the ground. His hands left his throat and clawed at the scraggly grass. Prickles sank into the soft flesh of his palms but he didn’t care. A ton of silt was caught in his throat, a great mass of riverbed balled up, an impassable dam, denying the passage of water, air, life…

  Something hard thumped
the middle of his back. Marius shuddered. His head snapped forward. Something loosened itself from his throat and hit the ground with a wet slap. Marius dragged in great lungfuls of air, heaving about the blackened grass like a surprised fish. When he had regained some semblance of control, he squinted past tears at the amused face leaning over him.

  “Forgotten that you don’t need to breathe, then?” Gerd asked, smiling. The smile disappeared as Marius drove a fist into his exposed groin. Gerd slid gently sidewise to lie in a foetal curl.

  “Forgotten,” Marius croaked, “that you don’t need your balls?”

  When both men were able to stand, they made their way to the edge of the smoking bar house, and peered around the corner at the main street.

  “Where are they?”

  “The lower edge of the village.” Gerd pointed the way Marius had first come. “There’s a grove down there, a little spring. It’s where they draw their water.”

  “Bit late now, isn’t it?”

  “There’s a patch of ground on the other side where they bury their dead.”

  Marius turned his stare onto his companion.

  “What?”

  “Look.”

  He pointed across the main lane of the village. At some point, while Marius had lain insensate in the trench, the fire had escaped the confines of the building and leaped the gap. There had been houses on that side of the village. Marius remembered sneering at them as he made his way towards the bar – rude structures, rough and basic, peasant dwellings of shit and sticks with patchy thatches for shelter. No glass in their windows, no symmetry in their designs, roundhouses in name but only because no name had been invented for the haphazard approximations of circles they described. Exactly the sort of hovels Marius expected from people who scratched sixteen hour days in the dirt, just to claw together enough grain and seeds to survive until morning.