Slowly he turned his eyes. He was but a few inches above the level of the barge’s catwalk. He could see nothing of the barge itself, but through gaps in the ivy the torches shone like jewels, and so he lay in the arms of the giant creeper and heard a voice from above:
‘All boats will stand out from the cave-mouth. A line will be formed across the bay immediately. Light every torch aboard, every lantern, every stick! Ropes will be passed beneath the keel of every boat! This man could hide in a rudder. By the powers, he has more life in him than the lot of you …’
Her voice, in the complete silence that had followed the withdrawal of the squall, sounded like cannon fire.
‘Great hell, he is no merman! He has no tail or fins! He must breathe! He must breathe!’
The boats moved out with much splashing of oars and paddles, and the two barges wallowing in the still water were shoved away from the wall. But while the various craft moved into the open bay and began to form a line sufficiently far out as to be beyond the range of any under-water swimmer, Titus, standing beside his mother at the window, hardly knowing that she was there or that the boats had moved, for all the commotion and for all the violence and volume of his mother’s orders, had his eyes focused, fanatically, upon something almost immediately below him. What his eyes were fixed upon seemed innocent enough, and no one but Titus in his febrile state would have continued to scrutinize a small area of ivy a foot above the surface of the water. It was no different from any other section that might be chosen at random from the great blanket of leaves. But Titus, who, before his mother’s arrival at the window beside him, had been rocking in a kind of dizzy sickness to and fro had, as the accumulated effect of his rising fever and physical exhaustion began to reach a final stage, seen a movement that he could not understand – a movement that was not a part of his dizziness.
It was a sharp and emphatic commotion among the ivy leaves. The water and the boats and the world were swaying. Everything was swaying. But this disturbance of the ivy was not a part of this great drift of illness. It was not inside his head. It was taking place in the world below him – a world that had become as silent and motionless as a sheet of glass.
His heartbeat quickened with a leaping guess.
And out of his guess, out of his weakness, a kind of power climbed through him like sap. Not the power of Gormenghast, or the pride of lineage. These were but dead-sea fruit. But the power of the imagination’s pride. He, Titus, the traitor, was about to prove his existence, spurred by his anger, spurred by the romanticism of his nature which cried not now for paper boats, or marbles, or the monsters on their stilts, or the mountain cave, or the Thing afloat among the golden oaks, or anything but vengeance and sudden death and the knowledge that he was not watching any more, but living at the core of drama.
His mother stood at his shoulder. Behind her a group of officers obtained the best view that they could of the scene without. He must make no mistake. At a slip or a sign a dozen hands would grab him.
He slipped his knife into his belt, his hand shaking as though it were blue with cold. Then he rested his hands upon the window-sill again and as he did so he stole a glance over his shoulder. His mother stood with her arms folded. She stared at the scene before her with a merciless intensity. The men behind him were dangerously close but were gazing past him to where the boats were forming a single line.
And then, almost before he had decided to do so, he gathered his strength together and half vaulting, half tumbling himself over the sill, fell the first half dozen feet through the loose outer fringes of the ivy, before he snatched at the stems and, checking the momentum of his descent, found that he was at last hanging from branches that had ceased to break.
He had noted that the small, suspicious area of ivy for which he was making was directly below the window from which he had vaulted (and which was now filled with startled faces), directly below, and at water level. He could hear his name being called and orders being shouted across the ‘bay’ for a boat to be brought up immediately, but they were sounds from another world.
And yet, while this sense of being far removed from what he was doing held him suspended in a world of dreams he was, at the same time, drawn down the ivy-wall as though by a magnet. Within the blur of weakness and remoteness was a core of vivid impulse, an immediate purpose.
He hardly knew what his body was doing. His arms and legs and hands seemed to be making their own decisions. He followed them downwards through the leaves.
