The moment the fire started, Yuqiu County Jail became a pig thrown into boiling oil.
Piggy dumped a whole barrel of lard on the straw, then poured in all his private hooch. WHOOSH—flames shot thirty feet high, roasting half the night sky red.
He roared back at Liu Rong:
"Your Highness! Run! Wait any longer and I'm leaving your ass!"
Liu Rong, wrapped in Piggy's stinking padded jacket, staggered after him in straw sandals.
After twenty days of starvation his legs were noodles; he nearly fell into the fire.
Piggy grabbed the back of his neck like a chicken:
"Ancestral Majesty, easy! Fall and die and all my work's wasted!"
They crawled through the dog hole at the back wall—Piggy's private cured-pork smuggling route. Liu Rong, skin and bones, slipped through easy; Piggy got stuck halfway, sweating bullets:
"Fuck, too much bacon!"
Finally out, a broken-down ox cart waited under rotten reed mats hiding Old Black and a collapsible skiff.
Piggy threw Liu Rong aboard, jumped on the shaft, cracked the whip:
"Giddyup, Old Yellow! Ten extra jin of beans tonight!"
Twenty li later the ox was foaming. Piggy shouldered the boat planks and the pig:
"Change rides!"
Snap-snap-snap—he assembled the skiff like dismantling pig bones.
Both men and pig jumped in; one push of the pole and they shot into the reeds.
Moon broke through the clouds, silver on water.
Piggy rowed shirtless, straw in mouth, singing the dirtiest boatman ditty:
"Hey-ho-hey, row to granny's bridge~ Granny feeds me trotters, I'll root her good~"
That night they drifted through the marsh, roasted cured pork over a tiny fire, drank rotgut until faces were red.
Liu Rong laughed for the first time since becoming a prince—ugly, snotty, but alive.
At dawn Piggy handed him greasy butcher clothes and a pig-killing knife:
"From today, you're my new apprentice—Liu Two-Dog."
The Crown Prince died.
The pig-butcher Liu Two-Dog was born.