Hercufleas

by Sam Gayton

  He pointed it at the house-hat instead.

  ‘Well?’ said Stickler. ‘Are you going to tell us or not?’

  ‘Go on,’ Ugor sniggered. ‘Tell them the truth.’ And there was something else the villain said, but only with his eyes: Tell them the truth, and your fleamily will die.

  ‘Hercufleas?’ said Min. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  Hercufleas gulped. His brain, the size of a poppy seed, was completely overwhelmed. What should he do? He looked at Greta. Looked at his fleamily. Looked at Ugor’s Bazuka. If he was a true, giant-slaying hero, he’d find a way to save the day.

  But he was a flea, and just one day old, and he was afraid.

  ‘I saw who murdered Prince Xin,’ he said. ‘It was… It was Greta.’

  Ugor nodded and grinned, his gun moving back towards Artifax. ‘See? Is just like Ugor tell you. She thief. She kidnapper. She murderer.’

  Greta shot Hercufleas a look of such venom he thought he might die from it. ‘I believed in you,’ she said.

  ‘It’s over,’ said Stickler curtly. ‘Employfleas, go back inside. I’ve no wish for you to see what happens next.’

  Min nodded at the fleamily. They hopped in through the windows and drew the black velvet curtains, but she stayed on the brim of the hat. The clearing was dark again, except for Greta’s tinderfly, crackling on its sugarstick.

  ‘Please,’ Min begged, ‘please give us Hercufleas back.’

  ‘You can have him.’ Greta scowled. ‘I don’t ever want to see him again.’

  Balling Hercufleas in her fist, she chucked him at Stickler. He was mid-air when her other hand untied the wick and freed the tinderfly. It flew into the sky like an ember from a bonfire, taking the light with it, plunging them into darkness.

  17

  Shouts and screams in the night. Grunts and squeals. Shrieks and then a BANG as Ugor fired his Bazuka. A tiny dynamite stick arced through the air, hissing like a firework.

  Then the hissing stopped.

  BOOM!

  Like a photographer’s flash, the fireball illuminated the woodn’t for an instant. The shock wave slammed into Hercufleas, cracking every joint in his armour, knocking the breath from his lungs. He saw Stickler blown off his feet, Ugor flung from his pig, and the trees beside them bursting into splinters. He hit the ground, sucking tiny sips of breath, the explosion ringing in his ears.

  ‘Did Ugor get her?’ the barbarian shouted, stomping around the burning trees. ‘Did Ugor get her?’

  Hercufleas’s night vision came back slowly, but Artifax and Greta had vanished from the clearing.

  I wanted to help you, he thought, wishing she could hear. But I couldn’t sacrifice my fleamily.

  ‘My employfleas!’ Stickler shrieked, hands prodding the top of his head.

  Where the house-hat had sat, there was now just a sizzled bald spot, gently smouldering. The blast had blown it clean off Stickler’s head.

  And now there was a second explosion, only this one happened inside Hercufleas’s heart. Where were Min and Pin? Where were Burp, Slurp, Speck, Fleck, Itch, Titch, Tittle, Dot and Jot? He had loved and left and longed for them – he had betrayed Greta to save them – had he now lost them forever?

  ‘I’m ruined!’ blubbed Stickler. ‘Happily Ever Afters is done for! Never mind about my reputation, who will type up my P23 hero forms now? Who will even know what a P23 form is?’

  ‘Stop crying,’ Ugor told Stickler, giving him a slap. ‘Fleas up there. Look.’ He pointed at a steep hill, the shape of a dome, that rose behind them. Hercufleas had not noticed it until now, but the pine trees that had obscured it from sight had been blown to matchsticks. One single tree stood on the top of the hill – the rest was a tangle of vines. The house-hat lay among them, its roof burning. Hercufleas squinted and could just make out the fleamily, passing thimbles of bathtub water to each other as they fought to douse the flames.

  Stickler let out a strangled sob. Rushing up to the hill, he gripped the vines and began to climb towards the house-hat. The leaves of the lonely tree on the summit shook. But there was no wind. The air was utterly still.

  And yet the tree rattled again. Louder, this time. Angrier.

  ‘STOP!’ Hercufleas yelled at Stickler. He leaped up and almost fainted. Pain screeched through him and his arm made a sound like two halves of a broken plate grating together. The impact of the explosion had cracked his armoured skin. But it didn’t matter. His fleamily had landed on the lair of a hibernating rattlesnoak, and Stickler was going to wake it up!

  The hero’s agent swatted at the flames until they fizzled out. Then he seized the house-hat and cuddled it to his chest, while at the top of the hill the rattling from the rattlesnoak seed pods reached a frenzy.

  ‘RUN!’ Hercufleas bounded forward, fighting dizziness and pain. ‘IT’S WAKING UP!’

  Finally Stickler looked down and immediately jumped. The vines around him were moving. They slithered over his feet. One coiled around his ankle. The tip ended in a wide, flat snake head, spade-shaped so it could dig its way up from the ground.

  ‘Ugor?’ called Stickler nervously. ‘Get this thing off my leg.’

  With a hiss, the rattleroot sank its fangs into his foot.

  Stickler screamed and kicked with his leg, trying to shake it off. ‘Ugor! Quick! Get it off!’ But the paralysing poison was already starting to work. ‘Gerrit oh me! Whash go-ee on, why my shpeeki lie this?’

  ‘HURRY UP!’ Hercufleas yelled at the barbarian, as Ugor fumbled another mini-dynamite stick into his Bazuka. It wasn’t Stickler he cared about. ‘JUMP OVER HERE!’ he yelled at his fleamily.

  Stickler finally reached down and ripped the rattleroot from his foot. Slurring nonsense, he shuffled up the hill to the rattlesnoak trunk. In his delirious state, he must have thought climbing the tree would give him safety. More rattleroots dug their way to the surface and began to swarm towards him. Hercufleas hopped up and down, screaming for Stickler to hurry and Ugor to fire, powerless to do anything but watch.

  Stickler dragged himself up the rattlesnoak trunk, using the boles and crevices in the bark for handholds. The poison had completely paralysed his left leg. He balanced the house-hat on the first branch and then clung there, his strength ebbing away, while the ground below him seethed with rattleroots.

  Then Ugor fired the Bazuka, and a fizzing stick of TNT struck the hill with an enormous BOOM! The rattleroots dug back under the earth for protection as the shock wave slammed into Hercufleas, making his cracked arm buzz in pain.

  The explosion rumbled on and on. Why wasn’t it stopping? The earth still trembled. All around the clearing, dry leaves and twigs and clods of mud and pebbles bounced up and down, as if everything was becoming a flea. Had Ugor’s dynamite started an earthquake?

  The rattlesnoak lurched up into the air – the hill was growing bigger. The earth under Hercufleas split and he almost fell into the crack. It was as if the world was turning inside out. Earth and rocks split and tilted. Tree stumps lurched over.

  Four enormous things burst from the ground over by Onk-Onk, then a fifth. The pig squealed and ran away from the fingers as they wriggled in the air. The rest of the giant hand worked its way up from the earth. The rattlesnoak hill was not a hill at all. It was the top of a head, with two rotten yellow swamps of eyes and fat pupils sitting in the middle of each one like toads and a mouth spitting out mud and roots.

  ‘Giant!’ Ugor roared, frantically reloading his Bazuka. ‘Giant!’

  Hercufleas gazed at Yuk rising and rising until he was high as a mountain. This must be where he went each month to sleep – he buried himself below the woodn’t.

  Ugor’s dynamite had woken him up early.

  And he looked very, very angry.

  ‘YUK GUZZLE.’

  18

  Without thinking, Hercufleas attacked.

  ‘Whatever size his enemies, the winner’s always HERCUFLEAS!’ he screamed.

  His next leap brought him down on the crag of
Yuk’s knee. The giant’s flesh was bark and mud and rock, held together by white roots running through his body like veins. He bounded up the body – from knee to thigh to hip. His broken arm throbbed; he could barely breathe. After a few jumps, his legs were so tired and stretched they felt like old elastic underpants, ready to fall off his bottom. But he kept going. He had to. His fleamily were on the rattlesnoak that sprouted from the giant’s head.

  Words tumbled down from Yuk’s lips like a mudslide.

  ‘WHAT ITCH YUK’S HEAD?’

  A giant hand flew up past Hercufleas to grope around the rattlesnoak branches.

  ‘HEY!’ Hercufleas bellowed from Yuk’s waist, try to distract him. ‘DOWN HERE!’

  His voice faded into the cool night air. He had to try something else. Leaping sideways, he landed in the cave of Yuk’s bellybutton. It was choked with bramble-strangle. Bats roosted in nooks above his head, swooping and shrieking. He ignored them, frantically searching the floor, sensing tender nerve clusters just under the skin like landmines. All fleas instinctively avoid biting the most sensitive parts of their host. But now Hercufleas went for the tenderest spot in Yuk’s bellybutton.

  And chomped down as hard as he possibly, possibly could.

  ‘OOOOOH!’ A roar echoed around the bellybutton. ‘WHAT ITCH YUK’S BELLY?’

  Hercufleas had one brief moment of triumph. He’d done it! He’d bought his fleamily some time—

  Suddenly bats were all around him – a black cloud of panic, fighting to get outside. Hercufleas dodged their flurry of wings and jaws and claws. What had spooked them?

  Too late, he saw.

  Yuk’s giant finger was rushing up the bellybutton towards him. Of course: he’d bitten, now Yuk would scratch the itch.

  Right where he stood.

  The finger slammed down on him. Crushing. Pulverising. Hercufleas felt his armoured skin crack and pop under the pressure. He tensed his whole body as hard as he could. Trying to stay strong. Trying to survive. He couldn’t get squished.

  At last he felt the pressure lift, but he was lifted up too. Out of the bellybutton. He was wedged in the gunk and sludge under Yuk’s nail. Glued to the end of the giant’s fingertip. A crushed and broken bug.

  With his last ounce of strength, Hercufleas kicked out with his legs. He wrenched himself free, the gunk stretching like a bungee cord. Snap! He tumbled down into the clearing, smearing down a tree trunk until he came to a stop. Stuck.

  The giant went back to rummaging around his head. His fingertips brushed the branch where the house-hat sat. Hercufleas watched from below, whispering The Plea of the Flea, praying for a miracle. In Avalonian fairy tales, this was the moment when the knight in shining armour appeared and saved the day…

  Yuk’s fingers plucked up Stickler first. ‘YUM YUM.’ He spoke like Ugor: slow and stupid and cruel. ‘YUK NOT NEED TO GUZZLE TOWN FOR TASTY SNACK. TASTY SNACK COME TO YUK.’

  Yuk smiled at Stickler, wriggling like a worm in his grip, then tossed the hero-seller onto his tongue. Stickler sloshed around the giant’s mouth, trying desperately to paddle away from the gnashing stone teeth, clinging to Yuk’s tonsils…

  Then something flew up from the woodn’t like a firework, punching into Yuk’s chest. BOOM!

  In the burning clearing stood the silhouette of Ugor and his Bazuka.

  Yuk toppled – it seemed to take hours – and slammed down into the woodn’t. The impact made the giant choke and cough up into the air a shining glob of spit. Floating inside it, like a pickled egg in brine, was Mr Stickler. He rose up, slowed, stopped – and fell straight down again into Yuk’s mouth. The giant swallowed him with a gulp.

  ‘Onk-Onk, now you fire too!’ Ugor bellowed.

  As Yuk lurched to his feet, the pig charged, snout belching fire and flames. Two cannonballs hit Yuk with a thud. The giant staggered back, but didn’t fall. Not this time. He lunged forward to snatch the barbarian and his pig, cramming them into his mouth.

  ‘TASTE LIKE CHICKEN,’ he said.

  Hercufleas scanned Yuk’s mohican tree for the house-hat… There! The impact of the giant’s fall had wedged it between two branches. A few of the windows still shone faintly, like a cluster of fallen stars.

  Hercufleas cried out for Min and Pin and all the others. Jump, jump, they had to jump now, before it was too late! But his shouts were too small, and came from too far away.

  Yuk patted his belly. A burp erupted from his lips, sending the leaves around Hercufleas trembling.

  ‘THAT GOOD GUZZLE,’ he said. ‘YUK FULL. NOW YUK NEED SLEEP. SOMEWHERE HE NOT GET WOKEN UP BY BIG BOOM-BOOM.’

  Hercufleas watched him stomp away. To the horizon and beyond. Carrying the tiny winking lights of the house-hat with him.

  19

  Hercufleas woke in a matchbox padded with cotton wool. He turned his head and found himself on a windowsill, lying in a sunbeam. Outside was a road strewn with rubble. A wonky sign said ‘Merit Street’.

  He didn’t know where Merit Street was. This wasn’t the woodn’t, or Avalon, this was somewhere he’d never been. How long had he been asleep? Grimacing, he sat up. Dull pain shot through his broken arm. Someone had sewn up his cracked skin with cotton thread, fixing it back in place. He was mending. Some parts of him, anyway.

  There was nothing else to see on the street, so he turned his gaze inwards to the room. It had been a school once. Now half the roof was gone and the desks had rotted in the rain. Old books, swollen with damp, sprouted on the sill beside him like fungi. A faded display lined the far wall – pictures painted in bright colours by little children. Names were printed below them. Ilsa. Ivan. Greta.

  This must be Tumber.

  Greta’s painting was of a small girl, a man, a lady, a donkey and a goat. She’d painted smiley faces on everyone, even the sun.

  Hercufleas noticed her then. She was asleep on the floor, curled up by the blackboard, cuddling her axe the way other children cuddle dolls. Hercufleas watched her for a long time. She was having a good dream, he could tell. She was smiling, ever so slightly.

  Why hadn’t she abandoned him, the way he’d abandoned her?

  Down the corridor came the echo of footsteps. An orange glow grew brighter in the doorway. Quickly Hercufleas lay back down in his matchbox and pretended to snore. He kept one eye open. Into the classroom came an old babushka with hair like chicken wire and a tiny copper earring in the shape of a bell. She’d dusted her cheeks with flour and drawn her eyebrows on with charcoal in an attempt to look glamorous. One hand held a walking stick with a brass tip and a carved fox-head handle. In the other, a fat orange tinderfly burned on the stub of a sugarstick.

  The babushka looked from Greta to Hercufleas, shaking her head. She muttered something in a language Hercufleas didn’t know, setting the tinderfly down. She gave Greta a gentle poke with her stick.

  ‘Five more minutes, Mama,’ Greta mumbled.

  The babushka sighed and brought her stick down on the floorboards with a sharp crack. Greta groaned. ‘Mama, Wuff is barking again.’

  The babushka went over to the blackboard and raked her long nails down it. They screeched like broken violins. Greta sat bolt upright, awake and scowling again. She had feathers in her hair from the pillow propped beneath her.

  ‘Wake him,’ said the babushka, plucking the feathers out. ‘I must tell you what will happen.’

  Greta yawned. ‘Can’t it wait another hour?’

  The babushka tsked. ‘Greta Stump. Even in class you were always with the questions and not with the listening. Less than a month now until Yuk comes back to Tumber, and you wish to sleep? Those he guzzled in the woodn’t will not sate his hunger forever.’

  ‘Yeah, Stickler was all greasy and bony,’ said Greta. ‘Onk-Onk and Ugor were meaty though.’

  ‘Even so. When he returns, this flea is the only hope we have.’

  Hercufleas lay still, but his mind raced. This flea? Why was the old babushka talking about him?

  Greta scowled. ‘I
still say you’re wrong about him.’

  The babushka tsked again and drew her lips into a pencil-thin frown. ‘And did you lose your manners when you left for Avalon, along with Tumber’s last florins?’

  Greta blushed, lowering her head. ‘Sorry, Miss Witz.’

  Miss Witz put bony hands on bony hips and stared at Hercufleas. He shut his eye quick and made mumbling sounds.

  ‘I wonder,’ he heard her mutter. ‘I wonder if he really is the one.’ She sniffed. ‘Let me know when he wakes, child.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Witz.’

  Hercufleas heard her leave.

  ‘You know,’ said Greta in the silence after Miss Witz had gone, ‘I was pretending to be asleep before you were pretending to be asleep.’

  Hercufleas opened his eyes. He sat up sheepishly.

  ‘You’re hungry, I bet,’ she said.

  His belly gave a hollow growl. He was ravenous!

  ‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ she said, running her thumb across the blade of her axe. Without wincing, she squeezed a bright bead of red blood into a thimble and plonked it angrily down on the sill beside him.

  ‘Don’t choke,’ she said sweetly.

  Hercufleas glugged the thimble down, trying not to gag. Greta’s bitterness was worse than ever – the taste of her anger made his throat raw. He waited for the sweet aftertaste, but it never came.

  Greta’s hope was gone. She no longer believed in him. It wasn’t a surprise, after what he’d done. What surprised him was how painful that was. It hurt worse than being crushed by Yuk.

  ‘It wasn’t my idea to bring you here,’ Greta said in the silence. ‘I wanted to leave you behind. Like you left me.’

  She bowed her head, tears pattering on the floorboards.

  ‘I’m sorry, Greta. Please don’t cry.’

  She smiled at that. ‘But I’m so good at it,’ she said. ‘I’ve had so much practice. We all have. Tumber’s other name is the Town of Tears. And I thought you could dry our eyes. I was wrong.’