Chapter VII A Reward Bestowed
VII
A Reward Bestowed
Truss was fanning himself rather ineffectually with a bouquet of lemongrass when the man entered.
At least he seemed like a man at a distance.
And if he had kept his distance, Truss would have thought nothing more of it.
But as he approached in an awkward, loping gait, Truss came to realize that this creature was either more than a man or less.
He was something aberrant, something different, something peculiar, and this alone was enough to make Truss perk up with interest.
He scrambled from his cot into a sitting position and nudged Mordaunt sharply with his elbow. The other leech stirred, and Truss leaned close to his ear and whispered, “Look.”
Mordaunt blinked fiercely—he had been roused not from rest but from slumber. “At what?”
“That thing,” Truss answered. “Over there.”
The creature wore a ragged tunic, hem falling just above his knobby knees. He looked blankly about the room, his gaze filmy, as if still with the mucuses of sleep, and then gave two very loud, persuasive sniffs. He inhaled creakily. And then his eyes found Truss and Mordaunt.
“Hello, Your Scrupulousnesses,” he said, in a throaty voice, as he hobbled toward them. “Hello, My Superiornesses.”
Truss and Mordaunt exchanged glances. Mordaunt, irritable at being woken, tugged up the hood of his robe and asked, “Who are you? And what is your business in the leeches’ bay?”
“Business,” the thing repeated. “Business…I have performed my labors already. I am seeking the reward my master promised me. But this castle is a labyrinth and I cannot find the kitchen. Please, will you help me?”
Truss gave the man a once-over, from the balding, misshapen head to the bare toes with their blackened nails.
He was thin, painfully so, his collarbones jutting out like two sharp blades.
His waxy skin was more yellow than white, and even as he stood still before them, he was occasionally racked by full-body tremors that made his scrawny limbs jerk upward, as if attached to erratically tugged puppet strings.
Truss also noticed something peculiar about his hands—they were coated in a thick layer of dust.
“Your master,” Mordaunt repeated, and he got to his feet. “What master? The king?”
The creature scratched his belly. “No, no king.”
“Then who?”
He grimaced, making even more dramatic the sloped hollows of his cheeks. “I have been forbidden to say. Else I will lose my tongue for it, and how then would I enjoy my reward?”
Mordaunt frowned. He was displeased that this queer creature had interrupted his sleep, but Truss was now enthralled in this peculiar matter. It was the most exciting thing that had happened to him in years. It was like discovering a new species of animal. Or learning a new game of chance.
“What is your name, man?” Mordaunt demanded.
“I am the eater of offal and entrails, of pluck and spleen, of tripe and head cheese. Trotter and udder, suet and tongue—”
“Your name,” Mordaunt cut in.
“Offal-Eater, I am called.” Once again he scratched his belly, which, like his cheeks, sloped inward dramatically—as though, despite his name, he had not indulged himself in food or drink for weeks. Truss rose to his feet then, as well, beguiled and more beguiled by this strange beast.
“You eat all of that?” he asked. “Truly, and it is your most coveted feast?”
Offal-Eater’s gaze darted in a panicky way.
A tremor ran through him. He cleared his throat and said, “No, no…there is always the most forbidden delicacy. I have tasted a morsel of it but once. I fear I shall never taste it again, though it is the only thing that sustains me, that fills my belly, that grafts fat to these horrible bones…”
Offal-Eater carried on, but Truss’s mind was turning in another direction, like a carriage wheel loosed from its axle. He was thinking of another game that would enliven his dull and slow-passing hours. And he was thinking of how he would cajole Mordaunt into playing it with him.
His eyes flitted to the other leech, who was staring at Offal-Eater in undisguised revulsion.
He was difficult to look at for long intervals, Truss had to admit, and he had quite a bad smell.
But he was all the more entrancing for it.
What a creature! And what a world, which still had such alluring creatures in it!
“I will show you to the kitchens,” Truss said. “There you will have all the pluck and tripe you could wish to eat. Indeed, you will have more than any man could consume without bursting.”
“There is nothing that will overfill me,” Offal-Eater said. His voice was hoarse with excitement.
“Oh?” Truss arched a brow. He glanced over again at Mordaunt, who, this time, met his gaze and set his jaw. He understood. And Truss was overjoyed for it. “Well, let us see if that is true.”
The kitchen was not Mordaunt’s favorite place in the castle; it was, in fact, his least favorite place.
It stank of oil and grease and the dramatic amount of sweat that poured from the armpits of the chef, Gower.
It was ill lit and hot even in the coldest months of winter.
And now, with summer at its apex, the chamber was almost unbearably warm, the air suffocatingly heavy and cracked through with the sounds of slamming pots and jangling cookware. Mordaunt tried to hold his breath.
Their new companion, this Offal-Eater, only heightened the squalid, repellent aura of the kitchen. He scuttled behind them like a hermit crab, occasionally dropping onto all fours and then rising again, panting with exertion and arousal.
The kitchen was more crowded than Mordaunt had ever known it to be, preparations already under way for the wedding.
The din was deafening, spoons tapping against soup pots, knives thumping against cutting boards, and of course the incessant sizzling of butter and fat.
Gower was shouting over it all, nearly bawling out his instructions, as the lesser cooks chittered in panic and scurried about, chastened mice in stained aprons.
Truss, Mordaunt, and Offal-Eater passed through unnoticed.
Truss was leading the way, his footsteps jolly.
He even hummed a wordless tune under his breath.
Mordaunt had recognized at once the look in the other leech’s eye, the gleam of hideous excitement that meant he had found a new, crass way to amuse himself.
But Mordaunt had come along. What did it say about him that he had been unable to refuse the bright canary’s call of such novelty, such degenerate thrills?
A shiver went down his spine as they passed the larder, exuding its dank coldness, and then through the dim, narrow corridor to the outermost chamber of the kitchen. Here was Truss’s destination. The rubbish heap.
The stench was almost unbearable, even for Mordaunt who, in performing his leech’s duties, regularly attended to the vilest mechanisms and excretions of the human body.
But the corpses he worked upon were—by order of the Septinsular Covenant—always fresh, often still stiff with the rictus of death, not yet near to rot.
This, here, was a decidedly posthumous scent.
The scent of things left to putrefy, quicker and more odiously in the summer’s heat.
Here was a feast fit only for flies and maggots, yet, upon entering, Offal-Eater clapped his hands together in uninhibited joy. He squealed, a repugnant, piggish sound.
And then he fell upon the pile as a lover into crimson sheets.
He writhed; he clawed; he opened his mouth and tore at whatever he could with stained yellow teeth.
There were hunks of offal that he swallowed whole and others that he chewed, his cheeks expanding to grotesque proportions.
The paunch of his stomach stretched like a taut wineskin.
All the while he was groaning, moaning, taking part in a crazed but solitary ritual, a bacchanal for one.
Mordaunt looked on in silence. He really was a most deviant creature, this Offal-Eater.
The revulsion that Mordaunt felt as he watched him took on a joyous feel, almost erotic, as though his disgust was the smoke in a prophet’s pipe.
He was aroused by it, the sensation of himself as superior to this wretched thing, this thing that could not even be called a man.
He glanced over at his fellow leech. Truss was watching with rapt attention, one hand fisted in the front of his robe, twisting and twisting the fabric.
Mordaunt recognized the same arousal within Truss, the burning eyes, the slightly parted lips.
They were both so distracted by their own impassioned disgust that, for a moment, their original purpose there was forgotten.
But Truss was the first to break from this trance. He tore his gaze away from Offal-Eater and said, “I will bet you he can eat half the pile.”
Feeling rather gutsy, Mordaunt replied, “I will bet you he can eat the whole pile.”
Truss gaped at him; he was used to Mordaunt’s conservative bets. “No,” he protested. “It cannot be. His stomach would sooner burst.”
“I think the rubbish will be gone before his appetite is.”
And indeed, as the moments wore on, that seemed to be precisely the case.
Offal-Eater gnawed and nibbled; he chewed and swallowed, and yet each bite seemed not to sate his hunger but to augment it.
Mordaunt grew almost weary from watching it.
Even such a freakish spectacle could not hold his interest indefinitely.
But Truss—more imaginative in these matters—was speaking again.
“Offal-Eater,” he yelled, over the sound of this frenzied feasting, “would you eat a kitchen cat?”
Offal-Eater paused, a string of intestines hanging from his mouth. “Yes, yes,” he said, “and again, yes.”
This revived Mordaunt’s curiosity as well. “What about a lizard? A snake? A fetal puppy?”
“Yes,” he replied, “yes, and yes, and yes.”
So it went on like that, almost interminably.
Truss wrangled a kitchen cat and Offal-Eater ripped its abdomen open with his teeth.
He drank its blood and ate it, bones and all, before proceeding to vomit up its fur and skin.
A fetal puppy could not be procured so easily, but Mordaunt swore he would marshal one up before the day was through.
Having consumed every scrap and morsel of rubbish in the room, Offal-Eater then grew unerringly still.
He lay flat on his back, arms and legs splayed out to his sides, in the position of a man strapped to a rack.
His chest rose and fell faintly with his previous exertions, and he still exuded a smell that was fetid past all conception, but otherwise, he made no impression upon the world.
A hushed silence fell over Truss and Mordaunt as well.
After several moments passed, Offal-Eater lifted his head. In a hoarse, weary voice, he said, “Thank you, Rosencrantz. Thank you, Guildenstern.”
“That is not my name,” Mordaunt said.
“Nor mine.” Truss frowned.
But Offal-Eater said no more. He lay his head back down again on the dirt floor.
His eyes closed, and he sank immediately into what seemed, to Mordaunt, a perversely restful slumber.
That left only him and Truss to watch in stunned amazement, saying no more to each other, either, for what they had witnessed was beyond words.
In that silence, which was not even broken by the hum of blackflies—they had all fled with the vanishment of the rubbish—Mordaunt began to think. He was remembering that Offal-Eater had spoken, earlier, of a forbidden delicacy.
I have tasted a morsel of it but once. I fear I shall never taste it again, though it is the only thing that sustains me, that fills my belly, that grafts fat to these horrible bones.
And now, having seen Offal-Eater consume near everything that Mordaunt could possibly imagine, and understanding that there was nothing so vile that he would not consume, Mordaunt thought he knew what that forbidden delicacy was.