Titus Awakes

19

Escape

AS TITUS LIFTED the wine to swallow at a gulp as much of it as possible, the flagon was knocked out of his hand with a complete lack of ceremony and it was not until he found himself lying flat on his back, wine splashed about him with the profligacy of blood, that he connected the sensation of another being, close to him, with the unexpected overthrow of his wine, his road to Lethe.

The face that looked at him from the ground by his bed was the one he had been hoping would reappear and, as their eyes met, a terrible yearning for his distant past, the true love that he had abandoned, almost suffocated Titus, until he remembered that he was living here and now, and that there was a great problem to be overcome.

The eyes were close together, that much he could vaguely distinguish. Their reflection of earlier eyes set close together discomforted him, until a humorous intelligence came into them, and he perceived gestures in the gloom. A pantomime was being enacted. Hands criss-crossed at speed in front of his face, then a falling back into a deep sleep, after the mimed quaffing of the contents of the flagon, and the figure lay prone on the ground as if dead.

Titus understood from this charade that the wine had indeed been drugged and he understood at the same time the reason why. The silence that reigned around him was the silence of an empty camp. Surely now was the time to take his leave of the place, but he did not believe that Rhino Eyes would have left the way so clear for him to escape, even if he had taken the drink that was to have immobilised him.

The figure in the tent stood up, and Titus recognised one of the white-robed men who had put food in front of him and whose eyes had registered the minimum of compassion. It was also he who had paid the silent visitation to his tent. But why? Was he also a captive? Useless to ask, as there was no common tongue, only the language of the hands, the eyes, the body.

Titus stood up and, for the first time since he had been brought to the tent, felt the potential strength of his twenty-six years. His muscles were slack from lack of use, but he felt an exhilaration that had been sadly absent over the last months, an urge for action, to be master of his own fate.

With a gesture that signified haste, speed-flight, the man beckoned to Titus and Dog to follow him. Titus feared there was danger and that he might be following him into a wily trap. But there was something in the man’s face which belied suspicion. He pushed the sleeve of his right arm up to his elbow, and deeply branded on the inside Titus saw a series of numbers and two letters. Was this a symbol of servitude? It was no good to stand asking questions that could not be answered, and Titus decided to follow. He had no possessions to hamper his departure, no love to leave, nothing familiar that would torment his going. He picked up the knife the man had left and stepped out into the dawning light, followed by Dog.

There was an uncanny silence, such as is felt in oppressive heat, when the sky darkens and a storm is awaited. No sounds of birds, or humans, no wind, no rain, no thing, nothing.

Titus saw what seemed to be a clearing in the darkness of a yew wood, where tents were pitched. This was where the camp was and where the voices, the laughter, the music and the expletives had come from, which he had heard when he had been lying in his tent. He had not imagined a yew wood. The silence added to its malignant darkness. The boles of the trees were deep red, gnarled and ancient, and the foliage black with age. This wood, these trees had seen the fortunes and the misfortunes of men over a thousand years, fugitives, violent death, fear, but very little love.

In the clearing, apart from the tents, was a house, incongruously neat, wooden and shuttered.

As the man gestured him to follow, Titus caught sight of a movement in the wood, and as he looked to see what else moved on this uncanny day, he saw a rat larger than any he had ever seen run into the darkness, followed by what must have been a family of rats on the move. Their tails were longer, he thought, than the one he could never forget, long ago, in another dark and sinister world.

These memories flashed by and were gone; it was not a time for brooding. With speed-man, Titus and Dog made for the clearing, and the house, passing the hut of Rhino Eyes. It could not have been inhabited, as Titus had thought. As they neared it, he saw that the shutters were hanging from their hinges, the windows were broken and there was a smell of dankness overall. Around the house was a veranda, with three steps leading up to it. A door was open and they went in. Broken furniture lay around, a table upside down, with the look of a dead horse lying on its back when rigor mortis has set in, only the stomach flat and empty. But another table had the remains of a meal on it, seemingly recent, for there was no mildew or smell of decay. A few rugs were scattered on the dust-laden floorboards, and in a cupboard with its doors ajar there hung what appeared to be military coats.

At the sight of the food Titus felt a sickness of hunger for he had almost forgotten what it was like not to feel hunger. There was bread, there was some kind of partly cooked meat and a jug.

With a courtesy that might seem surprising in a man who physically now resembled an emaciated brigand (during the weeks or months of his confinement his hair had grown to shoulder length and his beard straggled on to his chest) Titus offered the man, who was either his jailer or his deliverer, the plate of food.

Titus motioned to Dog to come forward. He placed on a plate some of the meat and put it on the floor, together with water from the jug. Then he helped himself to what remained, but found that his capacity for food was dulled, and what should have been a joyous consummation brought very little comfort to him. Dog ate his with a restraint that belied his canine ancestry, and finished when he saw that his master was no longer eating.

Titus knew that he was the most dominant of the three, that it was for him to assume command, but he felt hampered by the lack of a communal language. Then he decided that he would speak in his own, and that by the very intonation of words he would make himself understood, if at the same time his words were accompanied by gesture. He remembered an old mischievous woman that he had met on one of his peregrinations, who had told him how she had mistaught a foreigner her own native language. To say ‘good morning’ she had taught her pupil to say ‘broom-handle’ – when she pointed to eyes, nose, mouth, feet, etc., she substituted the words salt, pepper, mustard, cabbage, and yet that teacher and that learner communicated with each other in a language they mutually understood, but no one else could.

But it was by intonation alone that Titus decided to speak.

‘Come quick, we must go, while the camp is empty. Shall we see what clothes there are in the cupboard? Come on Dog and Man – quick.’

Still speaking, he went to the cupboard where soldiers’ coats were hanging and the man, understanding, followed Titus, who gestured that he try on whatever he wanted, to ensure some kind of disguise. He felt that time was too precious to waste, but that it was vital to make some change in their appearance, despite the fact that there was no possibility of disguising Dog. He also knew that his hair and beard must be shorn, and that he must trust to the dexterity of his companion’s use of a large sharp knife. He gestured to his hair and beard, with a cutting motion, and said in his own language, ‘But that must wait. Come, let’s put on our coats and hats.’ So Titus pushed as much of his matted hair as possible into his woollen cap.

It was getting lighter – in fact, almost full daylight – as they left the empty house and silently went down the three steps from the veranda on to the mossy grass, before again plunging into the black gloom of the yew wood.

The man, whom Titus now thought of both as a friend and fellow captive, obviously had some knowledge of the woods. Left to himself, Titus would not have known which of the many paths to take. Although they were not paths as such, they were tracks, each one leading to a different future, all of them unknown. As he followed, with Dog close behind, he noticed the man rubbing each tree on the outside of the route they were taking. He gestured to know what was being done, and at the next tree the man pointed to an almost infinitesimally small white chalk arrow, to show them the way out of the forbidding wood, but whose obliteration would diminish the likelihood of anyone following.

The only sounds were the rustling of leaves above and the alarm calls of birds whose territory was being invaded, and the quick rush of a rat, as it ran from one hole to another.

Titus felt that the gloom of the yew wood would never lift – that there was no other world outside it. He could not envisage a time or place that did not surround him in darkness or where he could exchange conversation with people who understood not only what he was saying, but why and how.

They seemed to have walked for hours, but it was almost as though they had stayed in the same place, so little did the ambience change. Each tree, taken alone, was unique and thick with character, but one after another assumed the anonymous sameness of faces in a crowd, and he longed for a yew tree that betrayed its brothers by bright green foliage and silver bark.

As these thoughts passed inconsequentially through his mind, Titus was slowly growing aware of his head becoming lighter. But it was not his head, it was a glimpse of sky, penetrating the roof of yew, and as he looked ahead, he could see a doorway of emerald grass, and a chance to enter another world. Seeing such an invitation to throw off the gloom and the nothingness of his last months of grey inactivity, he felt his legs moving faster and faster towards the door of light, until he was running so fast that he almost tripped on the uneven criss-crossed path of ancient roots. Dog followed close, scenting his master’s exuberance.

Titus stopped running for a moment, to see where their guide-man was and found that he was standing still, almost a fly in amber, dried white in the darkness, trapped. The man stood motionless, as Titus returned to him. He lifted the sleeve of his robe, and once more showed the numbers cut into his arm. He drew an imaginary knife across his throat, he spread his arms in what might have been hope or hopelessness and he turned back and ran as fleetingly as a leveret, back into the darkness from which the three of them had just emerged.

It was a moment of truth. Should Titus follow? What conscience he had told him it was what he should do; what reason he had told him of the pointlessness of such an action. Reason prevailed and, with Dog and an absence of guilt, he ran until he was out of the wood and sitting panting on the sunlit verge, where he fell into a deep sleep of nothingness. He only awoke on hearing in the distance what sounded like the baying of hounds, a pistol shot and a cry of pain.