The Corpse-Rat King

by Lee Battersby

  “We’d best be quick,” he said, glancing up at the hulk, gauging the correct direction from its alignment. “The, uh, the enemy won’t be long. Once they discover your escape they’ll be in pursuit.” He made a great show of glancing around. “This way, Your Majesty.” He regained his alignment and stepped away from the ship, then stopped. Nandus was shaking his head.

  “I think not, soldier.” The King said. “Look at my ship.”

  Marius looked. “Yes?”

  “Look what they have done to it. Those devils. Those unutterable fiends.” He raised a fist and shook it at the hulk. “My pride and joy. My greatest work. I cannot let such an insult go unpunished.” He turned upon Marius, and Marius was taken aback at how quickly the King’s skull was inches from his face. “What better time to strike? Strike, while the Ocean Gods slumber, secure in the misplaced knowledge that their tormentor, their divine revenger, lies shackled and helpless before their demonic ministrations! Let them sleep, let them snore in their watery beds. Nandus, destroyer of oceans, is free. Let their resting places become their graves!” He reared upwards, and Marius could not help but picture statues he had seen of great war heroes on their steeds, rising up on their hind legs to herald some endless stone-cut charge. Again, just underneath the King’s words, he could have sworn he heard a whinny.

  “No… Your Majesty. No.” Marius made a grab for Nandus as the King settled back into a more normal position. He missed, and almost tumbled over. Nandus stepped forward, his hand raised into a fist.

  “Once more into the breach, servile minions,” he shouted. “Once more, or close up this ship with our Scorban dead!”

  “What?” Marius bunched his fists, and pressed them against his forehead. “What breach? What minions?” He jumped aside as Nandus took a step forward. “Wait. Stop. There’s nobody… Woah!” he shouted in desperation, as Nandus reached out an arm to haul himself back onto the top deck. To his amazement, the King stopped. This time, Marius was under no illusion as to the snort of air and low, breathy rumble he heard. He reached out, and patted the Nandus on the rump.

  “Good boy,” he said uncertainly. “There’s a good fellow.”

  “You’d better have a damn good reason for this impertinence,” Nandus said, his voice low with repressed anger. Unconsciously, his left foot pawed at the ground. His jaw dropped open, and Marius tried not to imagine a giant tongue lolling from the side of his mouth.

  “You need to resign this field, Your Majesty.” He stepped forward, placed a hand on the ship. “We are alone, in a land of enemies. Ask yourself: what glory have they claimed from imprisoning their greatest foe, and what more would be theirs for seeing him killed and held aloft as proof of their might? Think, Your Majesty. How better to diminish them, and to raise your own value, than an escape from under their watery noses, to return with yet greater numbers, and conquer the entire sea in the name of the great and eternal Nandus, King of Scorby, the world, and all the oceans?” Gods, he thought in that isolated part of his brain. If an eatery served me a pudding this over-egged, I’d send it back. Nandus considered his words for several moments, staring out into the depths at his immortal glory.

  Then, “No,” he said. “It is well said, loyal servant, but now is the time. We strike now.” He raised his voice once more into a shout. “For Nandy-poos, Scorby, and the god of my choice!” He pushed off and made the deck in one swift movement, disappearing between decks before Marius could react. In quick succession, a series of massive thuds emerged from the bowels of the ship. Marius could hear, quite clearly, a cry of victory each time Nandus’ tortured imagination conjured up another foe to vanquish. Marius tilted his head, following the King’s progress through the empty vessel.

  “Right, then,” he said after fifteen minutes, as Nandus’ assault showed no sign of abating. “I’ll… I’ll just go and wait over here, shall I?” He refused to consider the chances of getting this lunatic back to the shore. He simply refused.

  Instead, he stepped away from the hull and found a small rise where he could lay back and knit his hands behind his head, and pretend he was lying in a field somewhere to rest off a particularly good drink, instead of waiting at the bottom of the ocean for an insane centaur with delusions of grandeur to finish beating up a ship full of nothing. His father had often told him that life was a funny old thing, which was certainly true when you were a successful merchant with a string of mistresses long enough to tire out three healthy country boys. But when it came to sheer comic potential, Marius thought, life had nothing on being dead. I’d laugh right now, if not for the fact that I have no idea how I’d stop.

  Eventually, the rate of violence within the ship slowed down, and then all that was left was the sound of Nandus’ climbing back up to the deck. Marius stopped his contemplation of the tiny krill swirling before his eyes and padded over to his former place at the side of the hull. Nandus appeared at the railing.

  “Victory!” he cried, leaping over the edge and landing before Marius. He spread his arms, and deposited a pile of small, black objects on the ground. Marius knelt, and picked one up.

  “Barnacles?”

  “Spoils of war!” Nandus leaned down and, without any sign that such a thing might be considered unusual, began packing his chest cavity with the tiny shellfish. “Stolen from the very heart of Oceanus’ empire. Oh, how he’ll shake his fist when he finds out what I’ve done. How the name of Nandus will stick in his throat!”

  “Yes, he’ll certainly be miffed when he realises how many, uh, spoils you’ve got,” Marius agreed. Absently, he patted Nandus on the rump. “Good boy.” A proud neigh rumbled through him. Great, he thought. He likes me. “May I suggest we make haste, sire, before Oceanus and his cronies return and… drown us or something?”

  “Good thinking, man. Yes. Let us proceed, post-haste.” Nandus galloped a few steps away. “This way, I think.”

  Marius sighed. “Woah!” he shouted, and watched in amusement as Nandus’ stopped in his tracks. Marius raised two fingers to his lips, and projected the sound of a short, sharp whistle at the stationary King. Nandus turned in a wide-arsed loop, and came trotting back to him. He lowered his head, and bumped against Marius’ shoulder.

  “What is the meaning of this?” he said, rubbing his head against Marius’ arm. “How dare you speak to me in such a manner?”

  “Not you, Your Majesty” Marius said, quickly turning his head left and right to take in the ocean floor. “Our steeds. We need transport for our escape.”

  “Transport? Where?”

  “Here, sire.” Marius indicated an empty spot next to him. “Who else, sire, but your favourite, Littleboots?”

  “Littleboots?” Oh, my poor baby,” Nandus’ hand snuck into his chest and began to stroke the horse’s skull down the length of its forehead, between its eyes. “Daddy’s missed you, you brave Senator. Did you miss Daddy? Oh, I thought you did–”

  “Yes, well…” Marius bit his lip. Oh, he though, I can’t believe I’m going to try this. If I’m not right about this… “Are you ready to mount, Your Majesty?”

  “To your own mount be, sirrah.”

  “Okay, then.” He laid one hand on Nandus’ bony shoulder, lodged his foot between two ribs, and hoisted himself up and onto his broad, bent back.

  “Are you ready?” he shouted. Nandus brayed his assent.

  Stifling a giggle, Marius reached back, and slapped the King on the haunch.

  “Giddy up!”

  EIGHTEEN

  Nandus galloped across the ocean floor, elongated legs tirelessly chewing through the miles as Marius tucked his hands and feet around protruding bones and held on for dear life. Fish scattered before them, silver flashes of light zigzagging away in panic to return in a more stately fashion once they had passed. They crested an outcropping in a bound, dislodging a small cuttlefish and sending it tumbling across the floor. Marius glanced back at it as they passed, and laughed at how its waving tentacle appeared very much like an extended middle digit.
With every step, fistfuls of barnacles fell from Nandus’ chest cavity and scattered across the ocean floor. The redistribution of wealth begins at the top, Marius thought, and stifled a giggle. Miraculously, with the thought implanted in him that they rode side by side, Nandus had not the slightest objection to Marius seating himself upon his back. He simply turned his elongated neck towards him as they spoke, and Marius steered him as he would a horse, at least, a horse made entirely of bones. He simply grabbed whichever collarbone corresponded to the desired direction and pulled until Nandus turned appropriately. Very quickly they left the hull in the distance, and were soon pushing into shallower waters. Marius noted the rise in the ocean floor, and slowed his mount. He did not want to reach landfall before he was certain as to where he was likely to land, although how he was going to do that from his current position he wasn’t sure. They proceeded at a walk through shoals of brightly coloured fish. Coral beds stretched away on either side. Life abounded here, unlike the colder depths through which they had been travelling. Clouds of tiny rainbow-coloured fish darted hither and thither, pursued by darker shapes as long as Marius’ arm. Serpentine heads slunk out of gaps in the reef and perused them as they passed, jaws dropping open to reveals rows of dagger-like teeth that made Marius wince as he imagined them tearing flesh away from his bones. An octopus slithered out of a hole in the rocks and moved like sentient liquid up the face of the coral bed, legs slipping out and back in hypnotic patterns as it stalked some tiny creature visible only to its eyes. Marius stopped to watch, fascinated by the alien movement. He was so absorbed that, when he first felt the bump against his upper arm, he waved it away without concentrating.

  “In a minute,” he said absent-mindedly. “I want to watch.”

  “Sorry?” Nandus neighed. “I didn’t say anything.”

  Marius frowned down at the line of gold circling the rear of Nandus’ skull.

  “Didn’t you just… didn’t you just bump me?”

  “No.”

  “Then what…?” Marius glanced around just as a sleek, finned shape swum up from behind and thumped against his back with its rough skin. Marius spun around in time to see a double row of triangular teeth pass inches from his face, followed by six feet of grey-white skin and a high, whip-like tail.

  “Shark,” he muttered, and then, in a sudden explosion of fear he dove from Nandus’ back and squeezed himself into a gap where bottom row of coral left sand. Nandus looked down at him, his skull tilted in surprise.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Shark!” Marius pointed behind the King’s shoulder. “Shark!”

  “And what is that, then?”

  Marius stared up at the King for long seconds. Then he buried his face into the sand, counted to three, and tried again. “Big fish. Lots of teeth. Eats meat. Loves people.” Nandus shrugged. Marius stared at him despairingly. Quite slowly, he realised just how much of the ocean he could see through his compatriot. He could see the shark quite clearly, for example, closing in towards the King’s exposed back. This time, it was moving at speed. Marius knew that this was not just another pass. This was a proper attack.

  “Oceanus’ pet attack dog,” he gasped, reaching forward and pulling at Nandus’ leg. “If he sees us now, all will be lost. We must escape his surveillance. Get down!” He yanked as hard as he could. Nandus stumbled, then sat down on the sand as the shark sped across the spot where his neck had been, open mouth snapping on empty water. It spun impossibly fast, its elastic body bending in two as it kicked over and dove again. Marius reared up, threw his arms around Nandus’ neck, and sent them both crashing to the floor just as the shark’s body thudded against his shoulder. Marius tumbled away, fetching up hard against the razor-sharp coral. It scoured his back, and for a moment, he felt a thousand shards of glass rub across his nerves. Then he was face up on the sand, Nandus long, bony arm across his chest, his skull inches from his ear.

  “Steady, man,” the King whispered. “Let not fear command you. The moment shall pass, and the dog be on his way, neigh.”

  Above them, the shark circled, long slow flicks of its tail sending it back and forth across Marius’ field of vision as it searched them out. After several timeless minutes, he noticed that it took longer and longer for the shark to appear in his peripheral vision. Then, eventually, it moved away and did not return. Slowly he removed Nandus’ arm from across his chest, and raised his head to look about them. The ocean bed, which had grown still and silent during the shark’s attack, was slowly returning to life. He rose to his knees.

  “I think we’re safe,” he said. “It’s moved on.”

  Nandus stood, and reached up to adjust his crown where it had slipped down across his skull. “Let us not tarry. If Oceanus can track us so far from his centre of power, he must be fearful indeed of our escape.”

  “Yes. That’ll be it.” Marius resisted the temptation to wipe sand from his knees. He peered around in sudden alarm. “Oh, hell.”

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve got turned around. During the fight… I don’t know which way we should be heading.”

  “Have no fear.” Nandus clapped him on the shoulder and stepped away. “It is this way.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  Nandus stared down at him from his lofty height. “I am King,” he said simply, as if this could explain everything. And for him, Marius thought, it probably can. With no better option, he stood at his shoulder.

  “Well, then. I guess we should crack on, hey?”

  Together, they stepped around the coral outcropping and out into an open part of the ocean bed. Marius could not help but notice a sudden lack of urgency in their pace, and a much greater interest in their surroundings than either man had shown previously. Well, he decided. Sometimes it’s nice to stop and smell the kelp. Nandus must have felt the same thing, because he waved a hand at their surroundings as they walked.

  “It must be said,” his neck craned around so that his skull rotated through a full circle, “Some of Oceanus’ lands are quite extraordinary.”

  “Yes. I was just thinking that. Extraordinary.” Marius peeked around a bed of seaweed, waving gently in the current. Pleased at how extraordinary the empty space beyond seemed, he stepped into it.

  “It would be a shame, would it not, to spurn this opportunity to learn all one can about one’s enemy. Given this opportunity?”

  “Oh, yes. A shame. Indeed.”

  “Indeed.”

  Side by side, the two escapees strolled across their enemy’s seabed, taking particular care to learn as much as possible about the distances between them and anything that might resemble a returning shark. Eventually, however, as it became increasingly clear that the shark had gone on its way, and would not be returning, they relaxed. With nothing else to do, and lulled by the sedate nature of their journey, they began to talk, not as King and perceived subject, or con artist and unwitting stooge, but simply as two travellers, marvelling at the unique nature of their surroundings. Marius even managed to forget the mutated state of the King’s anatomy, and accepted the occasional snort or neigh as no more than a slight peccadillo of speech, no more harmful or annoying than a stutter or reliance on a particularly favourite swear word. Twice, he was forced to stop and wait as Nandus gave in to the need to roll around in a particularly sandy part of the floor, bony rump twitching as an imaginary tail flicked sand over his flanks. And he quickly grew accustomed to watching with amusement as the King broke off mid-conversation to romp across the sea floor in pursuit of some brightly coloured fish that had strayed too close to his sphere of attention. He even picked up the crown when it spilled unnoticed onto the ground, and held on to it, not with the intent to spirit it away, but simply with the idea of returning it. The truth was, he realised, he was beginning to like the man. Sure, there was no denying that he was as insane as a spider-web salesman, and it was hard to ignore the fact that he had a couple of, well, equine habits. But once you looked past all that – and if he w
ere honest with himself, Marius could list at least half a dozen perfectly sane and upstanding members of society with habits far more disturbing than the need to occasionally take a quick gallop around the nearby area – it became obvious that whatever garbled thought process might overcome Nandus’ attention span, and however disastrous results might have been in the past, it had invariably been done for what he had thought was the good of his people.

  Nandus had been four years old when soldiers had burst into the sleeping quarters of the unpopular King, his father, and brutally murdered him while the young prince watched from his bed in the corner of the room. There had been no such thing as a consort or guardian in Scorban law. Nandus was proclaimed King, and whilst still not yet old enough to sleep through the night without wetting, became the focal point of a government reeling from years of tyranny and abuse. His word was inviolate law, and if his word was that today was Pirate Day, then so be it. Any wonder, then, that he grew up with no concept of the complexities that came with living in the adult world? He had declared war on the ocean, yes, but it was his response to a year of bad fishing crops, and fleet losses that had cost the lives of over a hundred of his subjects. And Marius remembered the summer of hopping, when Nandus responded to an illness that decimated cows around the local countryside by ordering everyone to wear only one shoe at a time. It made sense, damn it, but you had to be exposed to Nandus in too personal a way in order to understand his reasoning. Marius watched the former King frolic across the ocean floor, and felt a sudden weight of sadness settle about him.

  Then he remembered the autumn of his tenth year, when Nandus had ordered that the forests along the Borghan peninsula be set on fire so the squirrels wouldn’t get cold, and seven thousand peasants had died in the winter snows. A slow, rolling rage spread outwards from his throat, not at Nandus but towards those men who knew the childish insensibility of his commands and slavishly followed them anyway. The men of power, with access to money, and lands and all that Borgho could provide, and who put into place whatever demand the King made with no care for others as long as it increased their money, or power, or both. Men like my father, he thought, and then checked the thought. No, he corrected himself, recalling all the times he had stood before such men, all the schemes and illusions and confidence tricks. Men like me. Something swirled in the pit of his stomach, and he swallowed to rid himself of the feeling of sickness.