Titus Awakes

13

They Reach the Archipelagos and Forests

TITUS AND HIS dog ran away from the viciousness that nearly overcame them and lay hidden. An awareness of a more dulcet air grew. The ice was no longer present. A faint murmuration instilled itself; what were the voices they heard, what were the sounds? The shapes? Monkeys . . . parrots . . . birds of paradise . . . squirrels. Was it a dream? Was it paradise with hunger gnawing at their bellies? Was it freedom? Where were they? How had they reached this balm?

Titus felt the soft muzzle tickling his cheeks. Dawn, in all its ridiculous glory, began to show man to dog – and man to his surroundings. In their descent from the mountain and the icy cold they had reached a more comforting world. They were no longer frozen, and the great pale vermilion sun peered secretively (almost as though it would disappear if it disliked what it saw) over and into a world that Titus had forgotten existed. He saw the green of life, there was water, there was beauty in the strings of islands, which seemed to stretch to infinity. Each island was shaped differently; some like porpoises or dolphins as they surface, only to disappear again. Some islands were so elongated that you could not see where they ended; some squat and ugly; such mysterious dark shapes in the dawn, the sky sometimes aflame, sometimes so pale that the sea and itself were united.

To eat seemed imperative and as the light became more brilliant, Titus looked about him. He was reminded of his visit to Flay – poor banished Flay – so long ago. Flay had made a life for himself in his solitary existence. He had learned to hunt, to build fires, to feed himself, to clothe himself. ‘Dog, if Flay could learn, so can I, so can you. There are many arguments against killing, but now is not the time for debate. We need to eat if we want to live. What do you see, Dog, where is our prey? Alive now, and unaware of our presence. With your paws I thee follow. With my eyes and with my hands I thee feed, with my brain I will discover the dreadful means by which we will live. Such cruelty, Dog, is in us when survival is the key. An orchestra plays in our empty stomachs – rumble, rumble, drums, rumble on. How long and how far can we listen to the rumbling? As long as it takes our initiative to find a way of assuaging that rumbling and the drumming in our stomachs becomes muted. There must be fish in this water and we must fish for them. Some happy fish, swimming about, is going to die for us. Perhaps some bird, with all its plumage – its glorious feathers plucked for us, and its naked skin pocked from where the feathers made it into a bird – will feed us, tough or tender as may be. How close to primitive man are we when we desire to live?’

Titus, with his eyes sharp as pine needles, saw the trees – he would find bait and make a hook – the green trees, some twisted and some with fronds hanging from them as though eager to catch the fish. ‘Dog, help me to pull that frond which bends, then we must find one even more delicate.’

Titus pulled and pulled, but the frond clung to life as madly and with as much strength as the fish swimming unaware of its fate.

The dog had disappeared with the suddenness of a fog descending on an unsuspecting day, where the sun glowered.

A terrible sense of aloneness enveloped Titus and he suddenly foresaw, with an appalling intensity, the emptiness of a life led only to survive from day to day. Titus had felt that he had no need for patter, for parlance, for the rigmarole of society, but a life of only basic food, water, warmth without companionship would be meagre.

In the meantime the most urgent need was to survive. Even raw meat, raw fish, seemed palatable to Titus. But his thoughts raced back to his childhood. Dim, distant memories, of a boy, older than the rest, more knowledgeable in the lore of self-survival, who began to teach his companions the art of fire-making without which they might have frozen to the marrow. He almost forgot Dog’s absence as these remembrances surfaced.

He searched around him for a blunt stick, until he came upon one that seemed right enough to rub backwards and forwards on another piece of wood lying like a sacrifice upon the ground. He remembered his friend of long ago, issuing orders to his satellites, to rub and rub until their arms ached and the stick lying on the ground had a groove made in it. They didn’t really know how it suddenly happened when a spark, a little miracle of red heat, appeared at the tip of the mutilating stick, and their commander quickly took it and laid it under the neatly stacked wood already waiting to be ignited. It was cold in the forest, but gradually, gradually, a glow from underneath the pile began to warm them, and Titus remembered the screeches of joy that cleaved the air, from the throats of his young, frightened companions. Another memory that came to him was the command to keep a smouldering stick, so that the effort of lighting another fire would be eased, and to keep it smouldering, so that when the weather became damp, it would still be possible to light.

So Titus searched until he found, and built a small pyre – from branches, snapped briskly, because there was no rain – and he built, and he built, and he rubbed and rubbed, until once more, as years ago, the small red spark appeared and soon the pyre from sudden beginnings of rose colour began to crackle with sound. There was neither wind nor rain as the smoke mixed with the fire and spiralled upwards. Since leaving the hut of the lovers with his dog, he had not felt so warm, and now his anxiety, which had been quelled by his concentration in making the fire, became paramount. He missed his dog. If to no human being he could show the success of making fire, at least he should to Dog.

‘I am quite alone now.’

As Titus said this to himself there was a cry of pain and the undergrowth being parted, and Dog appeared carrying an animal in his mouth and laid it at Titus’s feet.