Chapter XVIII An Immodest Proposal
XVIII
An Immodest Proposal
Corks. Stones. Twelve eggs, twelve apples.
A lamprey, swallowed without chewing, the bones crunched between his teeth.
Bull’s lungs and bull’s liver, the latter filched from the chef’s chopping table, for there were some others who hungered for these innards, someone else in the castle who had a formidable appetite.
Though none like him. There were no others like him.
He had been turned out of his house before he could grow the first hair on his chin, his mother beating him black and blue with her frying pan, for he had once again eaten all six of the pork pies meant for dinner, and the turnips, and the bread.
For years—how many, he did not know—he had roamed the Outer Wall, begging for coin on street corners.
His only honest work had been when he discovered that many would pay to watch him devour oddities and refuse.
He could consume a yowling alley cat in a matter of moments, ripping open its throat with his teeth.
He was especially fond of snake meat. It had a most sublime flavor.
He was forced to cease this act abruptly when a child went missing, but he did not like to think of that.
Now he sat slumped against the rubbish heap, a fish bone digging into the small of his back.
Unlike other creatures, he was not made weary by his hunger; instead it imbued him with an impossible strength.
It was a sort of transcendent power, one that allowed him to brawl with the stray dogs and make them cower and turn belly-up; one that allowed him to go many days without sleeping, kept awake by the keenness of his senses, gaze sharp as a kestrel’s, ears pricked like a bloodhound’s.
The scraping pain of his empty stomach seemed to him a gift bestowed by an unearthly force, akin to the future-sight of Madame Sosostris.
He had liked the wise woman, and now he missed her. Weeks he had spent shut up in the castle’s cold dark halls without so much as a glimpse of the sun. He even longed for the company of the street dogs. Lying with them in a greasy, flea-bitten pile, he could keep warm at night.
Listlessly, he plucked up the fish bone and ate it.
Then the rotten pit of a summer peach. He licked the sour juice from his fingers.
He scratched at one of his scabs, the one in the crook of his elbow, which scabbed and bled and scabbed again by the day, for he could never suppress the niggling urge to pick it.
He was opening up the cut again when two figures appeared in the threshold.
“Oh,” he said. “It is you.”
The short one, Rosencrantz, stepped forward, out of the shadows and into the pool of oily torchlight.
His familiar, Guildenstern, remained back a pace, nose wrinkling under the hood of his robe.
Symbiotes, they are, he thought, not two leeches but a leech and its host. Who was the host? And who the bloodsucking stooge?
“I see you continue to enjoy the profits of your labor,” said Rosencrantz. “A worthy reward for your services, yes?”
“Yes, oh yes.” He dug his nail into the scab. “There is never an end to the feasting here. Always morsels left behind. Always fed. Never deprived. No longer too hot or too cold. Starved only of sunlight, but what do I need of that? I can smell as well as I can see.”
“Indeed,” said Guildenstern dispassionately. “You must be quite grateful, then, to whoever plucked you from the Outer Wall.”
He nodded in an eager, fervent manner. “Grateful forever and ever. I do not forget a thing. Neither a compliment nor a slight. Neither a boon nor a burden.”
“That is good to hear,” Rosencrantz said. “It will make our task far easier.”
Guildenstern gave him a pointed look. “How many times did I tell you—a soft touch is to be employed here? You are too hasty always.”
“He will not understand a soft touch. He is half mad, listen. We must be forceful.”
“Too forceful and our cause will be miscarried. We were ordered to work in whispers.”
“Whispers need not be subtle. Only quiet.” Rosencrantz dovetailed his fingers and began to twist them restlessly, as if kneading dough. “I should not like to linger overlong here.”
“Very well,” said Guildenstern, with a revolted breath.
He turned away from his companion and cast his gaze over the rubbish heap.
“You are a loyal creature, that much I can see. One who does not easily forsake his oaths, too. That is why we do not come to you beseeching or threatening, with pleas or with demands. We come to you with promises.”
He had begun to grow impatient with this intercourse. His hunger was reasserting itself. He fished for a morsel in the pile and retrieved the soggy pink shell of a crustacean. It was rubbery on his tongue, and he savored the rotten tang as he chewed and then swallowed.
“I have been promised many things before,” he said, briefly serene as his hunger was, for a moment, sated. “Since I was but a mewling child. Their vows always wear thin when it is discovered that my appetite never does.”
“I can assure you that this is a vow that has never been sworn before.”
Just as quickly as the bite settled in his belly, he was hungry again. Hungry for food and for plainer speech. “What is it then, Guildenstern?”
“That is not my name, but perhaps it is best that you only know me under this false epithet.” He stepped forward into the light and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Rosencrantz.
“You spoke before of a forbidden delicacy. The only sustenance that truly sustains you. You despaired that you would never taste of it again. But put away this despair, creature. Do not mourn your belly’s emptiness any longer.
I swear to you here, in the dark and filth, that you will taste this delicacy again.
It will fill you as you have never been filled before.
You will be sated—that I can promise beyond all remission.
Loosen your tongue for me now, and you will be glutted, surfeited at last. This I swear to you, by the hands of the Most Esteemed Surgeon himself. ”
The words poured over him, as sweet as water from a mountain spring.
Drool began to gather at the corners of his mouth.
He parted his wanting, sucking, slavering lips, and then his own words fell from his tongue, like flesh from a rotted limb—wretched and yet so very, very easy.
In truth he had never been a loyal creature, at least not to the oaths and laws of men.
He was always and only loyal to his own hunger.