With no pebbles left Steerpike tossed his catapult away and following it with his body was all at once deep in the water and swimming beneath the keels of the boats. He had dived steeply and was quite certain that he could not be seen from above, for he had noticed how although there were reflections upon the water there was no sign of anything tangible
The only one in the first boat who was in a condition to shout, lost no time about informing the world. In a voice that sounded more relieved than anything else, although the man had tried to hide his emotions, ‘He’s dived!’ he shouted. ‘He’s under the boats! Watch the window, there, third boat! Watch the window!’
Steerpike slithered rapidly through the inky darkness. He knew that he must get as far as he could before rising to the air for breath. But like Titus he was deadly tired.
When he reached the window, the air was half gone from his lungs. He could feel the stone support with his left hand. The keel of the third boat was just above his head and to the right. For a moment he rested and lifted his head to it, and then shoving himself away he passed through the lower half of the window, grazing its rough stone sill, and then turning sharply to his left slid along the wall. Six feet above the darkness in which he swam, the sheen of the surface water lapped the wall beneath the Countess’ window.
He remembered, of course, that one of the two barges was immediately above him. He was swimming beneath a wooden monster, its catwalks bristling with torches – its blunt nose crowded with men.
What he did not know as he rose to draw breath, his lungs all but bursting, was whether between the side of the long barge and the wall that towered above it, there would be room for his head to rise above the surface.
He had never seen these castle barges before and had no idea whether their sides rose vertically out of the water, or whether they swelled slightly outwards. If the latter, there was a chance of his being able to be hidden by the convexity, which, reaching out as far as the wall, would leave a long roofed-in ditch where for a little while at least he could breathe and be hidden.
As he rose he felt for the wall. His fingers were spread out and ready for the touch of the rough stones; and it was with a shock that they made contact, not with stone but with a matted, fibrous, tough subaqueous blanket of that luxuriant wall-ivy which covered so great an area of the castle’s face. He had forgotten how, as he had skimmed to the fateful flood-room in the stolen canoe he had noticed this ivy with its long tentacles, and how the face of the castle had appeared not only mutilated and pocked with sockets of where once the glass eyes glittered, but was covered with these climbing rashes of black growth.
As he clawed at the underwater branches he continued to rise, and all at once his head struck upon the hull of the barge where it bulged out to the wall.
It was then that he knew that he was nearer death than he had ever been. Nearer than when he was caught in the burning arms of the dead Barquentine. Nearer than when he had climbed to Fuchsia’s secret attic. For he had no more breath than for a few excruciating seconds. His way was blocked above him. The side of the barge, in swelling outwards made contact with the wall below the surface and blocked his upward path. There was no pocket of air. It was solid water. But even as a great hammer of desperation beat at his temples he turned to the ivy. To drag himself up by its outer branches would simply take him to the long narrow water-filled roof. But how deep was it, this labyrinthine under-water shuffle of saturated midnight; of endless leaves, of hairy arms and fingers?
With what remained of his strength he fought it. He fought the ivy. He tore at the scales of its throat. He pulled himself
But neither had he reached the air – and then at a moment when unable to hold his breath any longer, he took his first inevitable draught of water.
The world had gone black, but with a kind of reflex, his arms and legs fought onwards for a few seconds longer, and then with his head thrown back he collapsed, his body supported by the network of the ivy boughs about him.
It was some while before he opened his eyes to find that only the mask of his face was above water. He was in a kind of vertical forest – an undergrowth that stood upon its end. He found that he was doing nothing to support himself. He was cradled. He was a fly in a drowned web. But the last spasms of his upward straining body had taken his face above the water.
