The Corpse-Rat King

by Lee Battersby

  He quickly changed the subject. Things were not quite that bleak. He knew how to contact the dead – his conversations with Nandus and Vun had shown him that – and any motion was better than none. And right now, motion meant getting his dead backside to the main road to intercept the trader. He increased his pace. Do the job in front of you – another of his father’s aphorisms, but one that held water in his present circumstance.

  He arrived at the track within a few minutes, and turned down it, away from the village. A passer-by would not have noticed anything more than the tiniest gap in the undergrowth. It was only used to bring the revered dead down to their resting place, and four times a year by those carrying hides to the road. Any path the villagers beat through the branches quickly became overgrown again. Nature plays a longer waiting game than man. But Marius had spent half his life hiding from one person or another, and his experienced eye picked out the multitude of tiny clearances and footfalls that denoted the correct passage. He stole forward, senses alert for the first sign of approaching villagers. Having to explain his presence, not to mention his choice of clothing, was not something he relished. He made the road in short order, and waited, crouched behind a bush that offered a ready hiding place with a good view of both the roadway and the track.

  For the rest of the day, he was alone with his thoughts. The sun reached its apex, paused to survey its domain, and beat a hasty retreat towards evening. Marius shrunk back into the undergrowth in time with the shadows, reaching a level of stillness uninterrupted by the insects that came out to feast upon him and the little lizards that came to feed upon them. The world hung still within the universe. Then, some time towards the latter part of the day, voices came to him from down the track. Marius hunkered down, laying on his side and peering through two fronds. Several villagers approached, carrying a long, low-slung stretcher between them. A heap of hides sat upon it. Marius counted thirty, and was even able to identify some of them as rabbits and martens, as well as one large one that must have belonged to some unwary traveller’s horse. He watched as the villagers laid the pelts in a tidy pile by the junction of the track and road. Then they left, bar one, a tall, gangly youth with a skinning knife strapped to his hip, who settled his back against them and stared down the track past Marius’ hiding place, his arms folded behind his head.

  Less than an hour later, a cart bumped and rumbled its way down the track to stop in front of the young villager. A burly man in a travel-worn cloak jumped down from the driving bench and offered his hand in greeting. The young man took it, and began to show the newcomer his wares. Marius listened as they haggled, shaking his head at the way the young villager allowed himself to be conned out of a fair price. Nobody came back to villages like this, he remembered, which meant nobody passed on knowledge of big city practices, and big city prices. Generation after generation of rubes, dying young in conditions only slightly better than subsistence farming. By the time the two men had finished, and shaken hands on the deal, the villagers had given away eighty percent of the price the un-worked hides would fetch in the markets of Borgho. Somebody should show them how to cut and sew, Marius thought. Surely, even this far from civilisation, people must understand that finished articles fetch a higher price than raw stock. Somebody should show them how to negotiate. Somebody should give them all a clip across the ear-hole. For half a second, he was ready to jump to his feet and intrude, and show the young fool how to deal with a merchant. Then he caught sight of the loose grey flesh on the back of his hands, and stilled the impulse. The merchant rounded his cart and pulled three hessian sacks from the back, presenting them to the youth. Vegetables, undoubtedly bartered from villages further down the merchant’s route. He placed them at the youth’s feet, and clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Open them,” Marius muttered, “Get your hand into them. Pull the bottom up, for God’s sake.” The oldest trick in the book – hide a small bag of rotten produce in the middle of the sack as you fill it, then remove the smaller bag as you reach the top, just before you tie up. Everything round the edges feels like good stock. It’s only if you plunge your hand into the middle that you discover the softness, the rot that will overtake the rest of your purchase. Nobody in a city would buy a sack of food without giving it a good stir. These villagers probably just accepted the fact that a certain proportion of their hard-won goods would be spoiled. Sure enough, the young man simply hefted the sacks on to his back, nodded his thanks to the merchant, and turned back up the track. Marius realised he was gripping his thighs with suppressed fury, and frowned in surprise. The smart take advantage of the naive. It was the way of his world, the code by which he’d made his living for twenty years. Why should he be surprised to see it in action here, never mind angry? He let go the ground, flexed his fingers. He knew why. He was not the same Marius who had made his living that way. Death changes a man. He raised his eyes once more to the merchant as he threw the first armful of hides into the back of his cart. He could do something. But what?

  In the end, he did nothing. The merchant loaded the last of the hides, climbed up behind his oxen, and cracked the reins against their rumps, while Marius lay behind his bush and watched. Only when the cart had disappeared around a bend did he rise and step out into the ruts before him, staring after the merchant with his hands on his hips, a frown creasing his features. Like it or not, and Marius didn’t, the fellow was only making his living. Marius couldn’t bring himself to deny him that. He’d already done that once, he realised. The old man on the mountain track, just after he had escaped from Gerd. He’d taken his cart, his mule, even his hat, and not thought twice about the old man’s fate. He stared at the empty road. As soon as he was free of this curse, he decided. As soon as he was human again. He would come back to this village, and show them the true value of their labours. Next trade, or the one after, would be more fair. It was a childish dream, but it was the best he could offer. He turned his back on them, and strode down the road towards distant Scorby.

  Within a few hundred feet he found himself breaking into a trot, and then the slow lope he had learned while in the Emir’s armies. The Emir’s soldiers could cover fifteen miles a day utilising the long, energy-saving rhythm, and still be in a condition to fight at the end of the journey. Marius had been a fitter man in his youth, but dead muscles do not fatigue, and dead men do not need to stop and rest just because it is night, or because they need to eat, drink or shit. The miles disappeared as he ran onwards. Day slowed towards evening, and fell into the dark. Marius did not stop. He planned as he ran, mind turned inwards to circle his task, picking at it like a crow at a dead man’s body. The road upon which he ran met another; then another; widening, smoothing out, becoming more formalised until, eventually, his feet left compacted dirt and stepped onto the cobbled surface of the highway between Borgho and Frems, the capital of Bollus, the tiny nation to the north. He crossed the highway without pausing, plunged into the fields beyond, and kept running. Few travellers would be abroad at night. Those who had not found rest in a tavern or lodge would be pulled over to the side of the road, tucked into the backs of carts or curled up beneath a tree with a cloak wrapped around them for warmth. Still, Marius was not prepared to take the chance of an unexpected greeting. He could travel faster in a straight line, and avoid confrontation by sticking to the wilderness. Borgho was two hundred miles to his left, and he had another hundred beyond that to get to Scorby City. Even covering fifteen miles between dawns, it was a long way. He ran on, as the sky lightened and became day, as the sun rose and fell, as night reclaimed the world, across the open fields along the highway’s edge, into the woods beyond, up and down the spider-web of animal tracks and clearings, keeping the hulking presence of the Spinal Ranges to his right.

  After two days he began to angle left, away from the mountains. He burst out of the trees and entered the massive plains that swept across the central area of Scorby. A pride of leitts kept pace with him for a while, snapping at his heels in the hope of bringin
g him down, but he maintained his pace, outstripping the heavy-legged predators. They wheeled away, went back to the long grasses to wait for slower, more easily ambushed prey.

  By the evening of the third day the land began to rise. The isolated trees began to bunch together. The going became heavier, the ground more uneven. Marius slogged his way up the rise, turning with the hills as they swung round to a more southerly aspect. From here they would swing down to pass thirty miles east of Scorby City, providing the city’s natural defences with their high passes and deep ravines. Here the hills were more gradual: lower; rubbed down by time and, depending on how many legends you were prepared to believe, the arcane sexual practices of giants. Marius changed his stride, swapping the distance-eating lope of the army for a combination of climbing and sheer graft. It took him a further day to crest the hills, and only then, when he was at their peak, did he stop and take stock of his surroundings.

  He sat on a high, flat rock and stared down at the valleys below, mouth pursed in disappointment at the knowledge that five days of solid running had left him without the need to draw a single breath, or wipe even a lone bead of sweat from his forehead. He knew this place. He had been here before, seen the world from this angle. He blanked his mind, took in the view: the massive bluffs falling down in helter-skelter order to the green floor below; the few wide-winged hunting birds hanging on the breezes above; the broken rocks scattered across the landscape like the rotting bones of long dead Gods. Something important had happened here, if he could only remember what. Somehow, he knew that knowledge was crucial to what was to come. Further down the slope, beyond the next peak, something was tucked into the long, flat valley floor. Marius stared along the broken path that led from his seat to the next high point along the range, as if by some dint of concentration he could stare through the body of the mountain to what lay beyond. He conjured up a vision of the valley, populated it from memory and, at last, raised a hand to his forehead in surprise.

  “Good Gods.”

  Just over the rise, and down the split valley on the other side, lay a few acres of relatively flat and rock-free land. A thin mud track bisected the huddle of half a dozen huts providing the miserable farming village with its only connection to the wider world. Three mangy dogs, owned by nobody and everybody at once, ran between those huts, chased by the few children owned by exactly the same people, or not, as the dogs. The fields held squash and other wizened, barely-identifiable marrows, and if the summer were particularly dry and followed by a particularly temperate autumn, cabbages sprang up without anyone’s attempt to tend them. At the far end of the village someone had erected a loose collection of wood walls that served as sty, barn and shelter for the motley collection of pigs and the single horse the village owned. And several feet behind that, on the path down to the plain beyond, wherein the single most important battle of the last twenty years had taken the life of Scorby’s King only a few weeks ago, was the spot where a stupid young swineherd had persuaded Marius that he really did, after all, need an apprentice to help him in his endeavours. Marius rose from his perch and took a few slow steps towards the nearby peak. If there was a spot on this Earth more accursed in his life, it certainly wasn’t closer than this one. And even if this miserable stain of a village was the only place on Earth he could find what he needed, well, he was still going to look everywhere else first. He wouldn’t step foot in that village for a king’s fortune, for all the concubines in Tal, hell, if it meant the restoration of his life itself.

  Within half an hour he began his descent towards the huts a hundred or so metres below.

  He was skirting the village by sunrise, treading carefully through the rocks and runnels that marked the edge of the village lands and the beginning of the drop-off towards the valley floor. The villagers would not rise for another half hour or so, until the upper rim of the sun was showing across the horizon. To Marius’ enhanced eyesight it was already day. All was silent. Only the normal pre-dawn sounds of animals at rest disturbed the peace. As he neared the sty, however, the grunting of the pigs was underpinned by something more rhythmic – the scraping of metal across the ground, and the tuneless humming of a voice he recognised. He stepped out from behind the pen’s wall. Someone had been busy since he was last here – at the far side of the enclosure, a rough plot had been laid out and fenced in with gnarled wooden posts and rusting wire. A dozen scrawny chickens rooted around in the dust, skittering out of the way of the hunched figure that moved from end to end, turning over the floor of the run with a rake. As it passed, the chickens returned to peck without hope at the turned-over ground. Marius watched the lone workman for a moment, shaking his head in disbelief. Then he stepped out of the shadow of the sty and leaned gingerly against the fence.

  “Grubbing in the dirt,” he said. “It suits you.”

  The figure made no response. Marius watched in silence as he finished his slow, methodical coverage of the run, then made his way back through a small gate. He leant the rake against a wall and picked up a hoe, bending his attention to the piles of mud and dung churned up by the pigs.

  “Ah,” Marius said in amusement. “I was mistaken. Now, now you’ve found your level.”

  Again he was ignored. He sighed.

  “Come on, Gerd. You know it’s me. At least say something.”

  Gerd flicked a glance at him, then bent his head back over his task. Marius stepped forward to peer over his shoulder, stepping carefully between the mounds of pig droppings that Gerd was collecting.

  “Nope,” he said. “It must be fascinating for you, I’m sure, but I can’t see it.”

  “It’s honest work,” Gerd replied. “Good work.”

  “It speaks!” Marius clapped a hand on his shoulder. Gerd neither acknowledged it nor shrugged it off. It lay there, like a dead fish, until Marius coughed and removed it. “So why are you here, then? I thought you’d be tracking me to the ends of the Earth like a little dead bloodhound.”

  “Grandma needs me.” Gerd swung the hoe towards another pile of shit, spraying wet refuse against Marius’ legs. “Sty needs maintaining, chores need doing. She’s getting old.”

  “And she’s blind as a judge and crazy as a banana skin. It’s a tragic tale.” He leaned in, so that his mouth was less than a foot from Gerd’s ear. “I recommend a pillow, placed over the face.” He straightened. “Where are all your dead chums, then?”

  “We had a difference of opinion.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “They wanted to hunt you down, no matter where on the globe you ran to, and tear you limb from limb and scatter you to the four corners of the wind, so that every moment of your afterlife was spent in torturous agony, never to be reconstituted and find peace.”

  “I see. And you?”

  Gerd swung the hoe upwards and brandished it like a pike.

  “I wanted to do it myself.”

  “Oh, you have to be kidding.”

  Gerd wasn’t kidding. Without so much as a change in expression, he swung at Marius’ head.

  Marius ducked, and skipped backwards, out of reach. The hoe is not a graceful weapon, and Gerd was a less than graceful wielder. Compared to him, Marius was a dancer, a prize fighter, a light-footed professional fencer. Then, just as quickly, compared to Gerd he was a man lying on his back in a slippery pile of pig shit. He rolled over and drew his hands underneath his chest, ready to push himself up. A cold weight pressed against the back of his neck, and pushed him down until he lay with his face deep in the warm, stinking manure. He squirmed until he could tilt part of his face out of the mess – an eye, and the corner of his mouth – and squinted upwards. Gerd stood above him, his weight pressing the hoe down onto Marius. Marius spat his lips free of dung.

  “What are you going to do?” he managed to ask. “Kill me?”

  Gerd reached for something just out of his field of vision. A moment later, a broad, heavy-bladed axe struck the dirt an inch from his free eye and sank an inch into the hard ground.

&
nbsp; “Chop you up,” Gerd said. “into different pieces. Feed your limbs to the pigs, throw your torso down the cliff face. Give your head to the dead.”

  The pigs squealed in excitement, as if the sound of the axe heralded a new meal. They butted against the wooden fence, giving Marius a new memory of fear to block in later days. He was fleetingly glad that his bowels had nothing to add to the already-covered ground.

  “And what will that do?” Marius eyed the nicked and stained axe head. He had no doubt it would be capable of the task. “They won’t get their king that way.”

  “It’ll make me feel better.” Gerd pulled the axe up, out of Marius’ view. He braced, waiting for the first heavy impact. Instead, the pressure against his neck lessened. He rolled over, conscious of the wet, sticky, mess across his face and hair. Gerd had replaced the axe on its mount, just inside the sty door. Now he did the same with the hoe.

  “Get up,” he said without looking at Marius. “Wash yourself off. You stink.”

  Marius sat up. “So?”

  “You’re not meeting my grandmother smelling like pig shit.” He stepped over to a barrel in the lee of the shed, plunged his hands into the top, and splashed water on his face and upper body. “Hurry up.”

  Marius stood. He edged over to the barrel and washed himself down, keeping one wary eye on Gerd.

  “What makes you think I want to meet your grandmother again?” he asked. The last time he was in the village, he had met the old woman to explain why Gerd was leaving, and how he would look after the boy and see him safe. All the while he had been forced to swallow down the lumpiest, indigestible cabbage soups he had ever eaten. There were parts of it that still hadn’t digested properly. Two more minutes with the axe and the pigs would have been pulling bits out of his intestines like truffles.