Titus Awakes

14

Lagoons – Fires

SO FIRE HAD been learned – skinning had been learned – the barbaric acts of survival had been learned. No longer did the plucking or the skinning of the beautiful nauseate. So close is barbarity to civilisation.

Titus and his hound rested themselves, in the knowledge that they could now both survive where they were, until impetuosity, necessity, or the sheer desire to move bade them take to other shores, or other lands or peoples, for whom Titus was beginning increasingly to find a need. He had forgotten the physical desire for a woman, while he lay by the waning fire he felt he was no longer a man. When he thought of a woman, he could hardly envisage one. He took a stick and, oppressed by loneliness, drew upon the earth a woman.

No skill, no subtlety – breasts to suckle and breasts for suckling, round, pink-nippled, he made with tiny pink stones; a waist, and then that most urgent of all womanhood, plundered by man. Frustrated, he ceased drawing and lay face down on the coral-coloured earth, wept until all feelings ceased. His dog, who sensed every deprivation of his master, would lie at his feet after his morning’s hunting and remain silent, until Titus was stirred by physical hunger of another kind.

‘We have been gradually moving, Dog, and that water we see ahead of us has the tang of salt in it. Our diet will be saved. Salt is as much a part of my diet as a woman. It savours, it flavours, it adds desire to the beauty of this coral land. Even so, I want other company and when it comes I shall want it to go. I shall want to flee from it. I am no longer, or perhaps never was, a part of the human race.’

During the days Titus searched for a tree, blown down by the elements, that with rough hand-hewn tools he could fashion into a boat, which could negotiate the lagoons to which they had unwittingly drifted.

He made one and with long poles for oars he sat in it and glided with the grace of a swan on the water, and his one and only companion howled with despair, thinking that he was to be left alone.

‘Oh, how cruel I am.Where has that desire come from that wishes to hurt?’

Titus drifted back and Dog, as the tree trunk edged itself to the shore, put one paw tentatively, and then his other fearingly, then gently lowered his two back legs into the boat, until he attained his position as sentinel.

The sun, along with so many other things, made its gleaming way on to Titus’s face and his hands, and poured solace over man and beast. They drifted in and out of waters, close to coral reefs, hunting, fishing, making fires. Titus sang, and Dog howled with the abandon that comes but seldom, with an awareness of the glories that life can hold but manifests with solemn rarity.

They drifted, and the beauty surrounding them became almost commonplace. Titus’s hair began to burnish, and his face to tan – his body emanated a sensuousness to which there was no woman to respond. In the heat of the afternoon he pulled in, stripped off the remnants of what few clothes he had left and lay in the sun, and then with the dog he sought the shade, and they lay with arms and legs and paws outstretched, with their own respective dreams and the sounds that come from sleep – the heavy breathing, the calling from a distant subconscious and the balm of sleep – names from the past, sights, the illness of the past, and sometimes an echo that might be an intimation of the future.

Only hunger roused them.

The boat lilted up and down, with the ease of a craftsman. Titus awoke as the sun cooled, and he searched for his remnants of clothing. It took less time for his dog to position himself on the craft than for Titus to pull on his rags, and their drift in the dusk began again.

* * * * *

‘I AM COLD.’

Ahead was the sinister vermilion. Fire. No longer did the sun warm them. They were cold, yet felt the heat. The flames performed the most skilled permutations of movement that could be imagined. The flames tore upwards to the sky, raging, tormented, tormenting, and the sound of heat coming through the air was terrifying; it was the crackling of ancient tribes, the scream of a hare torn to pieces, the violence inflicted by religion on its heretics. It was far away and it was beautiful. Its colour, unknown, unlearned by any artist. It was a distant sight and distant sound, yet where they were anchored Titus and his dog lay in silence, terrified.

Because the fire was far enough away Titus could afford to philosophise. Any closer he and his companion might well have been reduced to charcoal. ‘Is all beauty hurtful?’ he wondered, remembering the damage done to the walls of Gormenghast by the creeper in all its red and gold glory.

‘Oh, Dog, let us go in another direction, away, away from it all. We might chance upon something we recognise.’