House of Tribes

by Garry Kilworth

  While he was eating, the nudnik who had been there in the morning came into the library carrying a glass of milk and some biscuits. Then it seemed to become too absorbed in its book to eat, though it did drink some of the milk. Rhodri said that they would go down and eat the biscuits once the nudnik had left the room.

  ‘It’s every mouse for him or herself I’m afraid,’ said Ethil, ‘so you have to keep a sharp eye out. No-one’s going to save you any crumbs. We get so little suitable provender in here and books become excruciatingly boring after a while. Sometimes we even manage to get a piece of cheese – though,’ she added wistfully, ‘it’s not very often, I have to admit.’

  ‘This cheese business makes me curious,’ replied Pedlar. ‘Why are you all so dead set on cheese?’

  ‘Oh, lordy, don’t you know it’s the food of the gods – listen while I tell you a story…’

  HERVÉ

  The Quest for the Hallowed Cheese

  There was once a great chieftain who lived in a house near to a nudnik docks. The chieftain’s name was Rigolet and he was served by many Companions. The Companions were encouraged by Rigolet to consider themselves equal to each other in debate and thus the council meetings or Allthings were circular affairs, with no mouse setting itself up above his or her fellows. Rigolet, however, always placed himself in the centre of the circle, for he was the lord.

  The House was a fortress against cats, who were unable to penetrate its interior. Rigolet’s tribe grew strong and fat and was considered the most powerful in the area. It was Rigolet’s intention to unite all the mouse tribes into one huge nation. Rigolet’s sorcerer, Frolics-with-fleas had prophesied that Rigolet would one hour be transformed into a deity, a living god. Thus the great ruler would become unimpeachable, a divinity who could not be approached by mortals without they trembled in awe.

  Frolics-with-fleas told him, There is only one way for you to become a living god and that is to taste of the hallowed cheese, the cheese of cheeses.

  What, asked Rigolet of his sorcerer, is the name of this wonderful cheese?

  It has no name, replied Frolics-with-fleas, but it is twice as rotten as blue vein, three times as runny as Brie, and seven times as smelly as the most terrible stink you’ve ever had the fortune to sniff.

  As good as that? cried Rigolet. Then I must send out my Companions to search the docks for this cheese.

  So Rigolet’s Companions went forth, each on his own separate mission, to seek the hallowed cheese. They went with the promise that whoever returned with the cheese of cheeses would share in ruling the great mouse nation. They went south and north, east and west, and various other fragments of the compass. The tales of their adventures are too many to recount in this story, for they fought with rats and snakes, weasels and stoats, hawks and eagles. They forged rivers, climbed mountains, explored new valleys, new jungles. They crossed lakes and oceans, deserts and badlands, swamps and concrete wastelands.

  One by one they returned, disheartened and dishevelled, their failure a burden hardly bearable.

  Only one Companion, Desirée, the most trusted of all Rigolet’s Companions and his right-hand mouse, continued undaunted to seek the cheese of cheeses.

  One hour, when the owl was still and the weasel slept, Desirée came upon a great building, a warehouse, where cheeses wrapped in damp muslin were stacked high and wide in vast numbers, too many to count, as far as the eye could see and further. Desirée squeezed through a small hole and walked among the high columns and mounds of cheese, her nose overwhelmed by the multifarious aromas exuded by these wonders.

  Surely here must be stored the cheese of cheeses?

  There were indeed many great cheeses stacked in the warehouse, from Pont l’Évêque to Sage Derby to Pfeffer Kranz, and Desirée tasted of them all. Seventy nights the mouse stayed in that warehouse and in that time tasted of seventy cheeses. Finally Desirée came upon a tiny fragment of cheese set on a cool platter of slate. The mouse knew instantly by its smell and texture that this was the heavenly cheese of the gods which she had been sent to find.

  Now, this Companion to Rigolet knew that she had grown too fat to squeeze through the exit hole, so she had to starve herself for the next seven nights in order to be lean enough to escape from the warehouse. During that time she just sat by the precious cheese of cheeses and drank in its deep redolence.

  When the mouse was finally slim enough to get through the hole she took the piece of cheese gently between her jaws, to take it back to the chieftain Rigolet. She went through the hole and out into the night, set on a course for the House wherein Rigolet and the other Companions eagerly awaited the return of the most honourable and courageous of their number. It is true that Desirée had no wish to become a living god, for the Companions had their chieftain’s promise that whoever returned with the hallowed cheese would share in ruling the land. However, after having starved herself for so long, and with the wonderful cheese only a swallow away from her craving stomach, Desirée’s journey was a most harrowing one fraught with the possibility that the fragment might accidentally slip down her throat.

  Eventually and without mishap however, Desirée reached the House and entered, requesting an audience with Rigolet. The chieftain eagerly went to greet his long-lost friend, and heaped praises on the head of his most faithful Companion.

  The hallowed cheese was presented to the lord, who ate it with relish.

  Rigolet was instantly transformed into a cat.

  Desirée was caught and devoured, while the rest of the tribe scattered throughout the House, the sorcerer among them.

  Thus did the prophecy come true. Rigolet was indeed a living god and for ever more his tribe went in awe of him. Desirée shared in the cat’s rule of the House, for that loyal mouse was indeed part of the cat. There was no mouse nation however, nor would there ever be, for it is not the natural state of mice to grow into a nation, but to work in small tribes, for that is what makes them a successful and prolific group of mammals.

  BRIE

  ETHIL WAS RIGHT, WHEN THE TIME CAME FOR THE white-whiskered nudnik to leave it was every mouse for itself. As the great old creature stood up from its desk, stretched and yawned, and left the library there was literally a riot. Young were abandoned on their nest, the nipples of their mothers torn from their mouths in mid-suck. The chewing of midnight snacks ceased abruptly and the pulp of half-gnawed books was spat across space with contempt. Scrapping stopped immediately, along with arguments and disagreements, even among those at the height of a quarrel. Mating couples parted instantly, leaving their passion floating somewhere in the air above the dust.

  Dozens of house mice scrambled, jumped, clawed, raced and pushed, to get to the milk and biscuits, hoping against hope that they were cheese biscuits, or that a cheese sandwich had been prepared on the same plate, leaving tiny traces of the precious food. Open hostilities began on the desk between families and individuals, all determined to get some of the food. Mice were tossed and knocked bodily to the floor from the desk top, only to scramble up the drawers of the desk again, to throw themselves into the fray. Frych-the-freckled was in there, battling with Gruffydd Green-tooth for a bite of biscuit. Mefyn and Nesta fought off Hywel-the-bad when he tried to force his body between them, to steal a crumb from under their noses. Even Ethil and Rhodri were in the struggling horde somewhere. The whole writhing mass of bodies around the food made Pedlar wary. He had never seen such lack of restraint in mice before, and he did not want to get involved in the furore, for fear of injury.

  A reckless mouse called Cadwallon jumped from a top shelf directly into the nudnik’s abandoned milk, causing a mighty splash to shower those on the outside. There were yells of alarm as the glass rocked under the impact. Then there were a few moments when Cadwallon was in serious danger of drowning, but luckily the great seething and surging finally knocked over the glass. Cadwallon spilled out, along with the milk, and was washed over the edge of the desk. Pedlar saw him regain his feet in an instant and beg
in lapping the white fluid that dripped from the edge of the desk.

  Such a riot for such a small amount of food was outside Pedlar’s experience and he could only look on in disbelief.

  When the food had all gone and calm had been restored once more, Pedlar spoke to Ethil again.

  ‘That was a strange display,’ Pedlar told her, not wishing to antagonize his new friends by saying what he really thought: that it was a disgusting exhibition of greed.

  ‘Oh,’ said Ethil, proudly, ‘that’s nothing. You should be here when the cream cakes are going. It’s a fundamental massacre.’

  ‘Does that go on every time there’s a bit of food going?’ asked Pedlar.

  Ethil stared him in the eyes.

  ‘Listen, my yellow-necked friend, when you’ve been masticating tomes here as long as we have, you’ll realize that book-chewing can become very, very boring.’

  For the moment, this statement meant nothing to Pedlar, but he would come to remember it once he had been in the library for a few hours. In the meantime, he found a nice thick stack of ledgers on a corner shelf, and he began to nibble at their pages to satisfy his hunger. However, the second and third experience of eating books was not as satisfying as the first had been. It seemed that even though his stomach felt full afterwards, he was left with a feeling of hunger.

  On the whole, the Bookeater Tribe was a peaceful group, only brought to violence when attacked by another tribe, or when there was real food to fight for. They tended to be very grand mice, parading about a lot, promenading along the bookshelves, gesturing and speaking in lofty tones, but Pedlar was never accosted in any way. In fact he found them quite a likeable bunch. When night came they were inclined to partake in some unusual ceremonies.

  He discovered this when he had a little nap after his snack on the ledgers and woke to find the room in near darkness. It was the evening hours. The sound that had woken him – a kind of low chanting – seemed to be coming from the side of the library where the French doors were situated. Pedlar made his way along the shelves and found half a dozen mice engaged in a peculiar dance in the moonlight that streamed through the glass. As they moved back and forth, swaying in tune to some inaudible rhythm, their eyeballs swivelled up into their skulls revealing just the blind whites. Pedlar saw Ethil on the edge of the group, not participating, but transfixed by the weird ceremony.

  Pedlar went to her and said, ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Shhsssh!’ said a mouse, standing next to Ethil. ‘You’ll interrupt the magic rituals.’

  Ethil whispered very quietly into his ear.

  ‘They’re trying to invoke the spirit of Megator-Megator, the giant mouse who roamed the House before the nudniks came.’

  Pedlar had never heard of Megator-Megator.

  ‘Why?’ he asked quietly. ‘What for?’

  ‘Umm, umm, umm, umm, umm, umm, umm,’ chanted the dancers, as they weaved their mystical patterns on the library floor.

  ‘So that he can annihilate the Savage Tribe for us – then we can move into the kitchen.’

  Pedlar was disturbed by this. ‘But if he’s a giant mouse, why would he want to help mice decimate other mice?’

  Rhodri, overhearing this question, looked at Pedlar and said, ‘Decimate? What book have you been gnawing at recently? Decimate doesn’t mean annihilate – it means to kill every tenth mouse…’

  Pedlar hadn’t known the meaning of decimate anyway – it just came out – and he had surprised himself by using it.

  ‘Umm, umm, umm, umm,’ went the dancers.

  Ethil said, ‘To answer your question, it’s because we’re good at magic, that’s why. Even if Megator-Megator doesn’t want to destroy other mice, he will do so because we’ll make him into a zombie. His spirit will be our slave. We can do that, you know. This is a den of sorcery and witchcraft. The Savage Tribe have strength and fierceness, but we have our magic.’

  One of the chanting dancers broke away from the main group, her eyeballs swivelling violently. She held her ears in her paws, staggered three paces into a convenient shaft of moonlight, and then stood stock still. The other dancers ceased their swaying and chanting, and turned their attention to the deserter from their number.

  When she was sure she had her audience’s undiluted attention, the solitary mouse opened her eyes, and shrieked, ‘THE HOUSE WILL COME TO AN END IN THE HOUR FIVE MILLION AND TEN!’

  ‘A prophecy! A prophecy!’ screamed the others.

  Ethil, however, groaned. ‘Not again. That’s the seventh end-of-the-House prediction we’ve had in eighteen hours. You’d think they’d know better. They go into a trance, you see,’ she explained to Pedlar, ‘and while they’re in the catalepsy they see visions. I just wish they’d see something a little more original than the end-of-the-House.’

  To Pedlar, who had never heard a prophecy before, it was quite a dramatic moment. It chilled him right down his spine to the end of his tail. He wondered if it might have something to do with his own role as the one who was destined to walk with the many. The prophetess had sounded quite genuine and he was willing to believe that something was going to happen in the hour 5,000,010. He said as much to Ethil.

  She grimaced and shook her head.

  ‘For a start, no one knows when the hour five million and ten will be reached, since the age of the House is questionable. If nothing happens, then they just shift the timing, and say, “Oh, the House must be younger than we thought it was”, or something like that. You wait and see.’

  Pedlar still thought the scene very moving. He had never really come across magic before and it seemed to exert a powerful influence over the Bookeater Tribe, although there was nothing actually there, little tangible evidence, little proof of sorcery. Except… was it simply an atmosphere, which pervaded the whole library, and made it seem a place that was dormant in some way? Hidden knowledge, forbidden knowledge, lurked in the corners of the room, amongst the dusty books, between the yellowed pages of the leatherbound volumes. There were strange words in the air; dark, unfathomable words which sounded like no foreign tongue Pedlar had ever heard.

  He was not sure whether he liked books: neither the eating of them nor their contents. Around the library were several volumes which had been picked up and opened by nudniks, then put down and forgotten. Mostly these books just contained the usual strange symbols, like clawmarks in the dust, but occasionally there were pictures. In one of the open books Pedlar had been shocked to see a picture of two mice dressed in nudnik clothes. Were they – Pedlar thought, horrified – mice trying to look like, trying to become nudniks, or nudniks who had somehow changed themselves into mice? Looking at this bizarre picture sent more shivers down Pedlar’s back, making his fur stand on end. This was the most potent evidence he had seen of magic, this picture in the open book. Something ugly and disturbing was going on here.

  After the dance ceremony, which had its impressive finale in some poor demented mouse working herself up into a frenzy and then falling on the floor, gibbering in an unrecognizable language, Pedlar left to look for some food. It seemed he was always hungry in the library. Being a yellow-neck, he was a bigger mouse than the house mice that made up the Bookeater Tribe, with a much longer (and of course, more elegant) tail. He needed richer sustenance than the pages of books had to offer. It seemed he was going to have to leave the sanctuary of the library, to seek out better nourishment elsewhere in the House.

  Pedlar left the library through one of the guarded holes in the wall. He told the sentry he would be back within an hour and the sentry looked as if he couldn’t care less. Then Pedlar went between the walls and under the floorboards, to come out at the Gwenllian Hole and into the hallway.

  He was beginning to understand the geography of the House now, and he stayed well clear of the living-room, where the cats were most likely to be found. He also kept away from the kitchen door, knowing that a meeting with the Savage Tribe was almost as dangerous as coming up against a cat. Instead, he decided to look upsta
irs, in the bedrooms. He had heard that nudniks often left scraps of food in the places where they slept.

  Pedlar ran up the skirting-board alongside the stairs, to the landing above. Not knowing what to expect from any of the rooms, he entered the first one with an open door. Inside, he stopped and sniffed. It smelled musty. The light was poor too, but he went across some rugs to where the legs of the great nudnik nest seemed to grow from the floor. Here Pedlar found some small crumbs, barely digestible, scattered on the floorboards. He ate them quickly, keeping a fearful watch on the doorway at all times. They did not satisfy completely.

  He went under the bed-nest itself, to search amongst the fluff and dust underneath, finding only a dead spider. The corpse was so old it was crumbling. Then Pedlar emerged on the far side. Evening light, soft and roseate, was coming through the leaded window. He climbed up on to a carved wooden chest, to look at the world outside, needing its familiar perspectives.

  Once on the windowsill, he stared out through the panes. The sun was going down in a cardinal pond. House martins were slicing through the air outside, weaving bladed patterns around the eves. The unkempt garden seemed quite small now. Beyond it lay the fields, some brown, some green, falling away to a distant haziness where trees rose and shook their heads.

  Out there the world abounded with chattering, field-happy life, whether predator or prey. In this musty, dusty inside world, where there was no fresh wind, no sweet rain, no bright warm sun on his fur, the heart was rarely light and life was too deadly serious all the time.

  Pedlar sighed heavily, thinking of his old nest, with its warm hay and dry blackthorn leaves. Its hollow was made to fit his body exactly. Every strand smelled of Pedlar: every leaf too.