By dint of youth and strength they lifted him on to the stretcher, and a sigh that would have shattered more sensitive mortals vibrated against the undergrowth. The man among men raised his voice for the stretcher party to advance, and Dog yelped in thanksgiving for his master’s deliverance.
The flares were raised overhead and an uncanny light led the procession onwards and away and back. The return journey was slow and stumbling, interspersed by crude expletives, while Dog faithfully brought up the rear.
17
Back at Camp
DAWN WAS BREAKING as the party entered the clearing. The flares had been extinguished, as nature was well enough equipped to throw a dramatic light on the characters in the play. The players acted the parts assigned to them despite the almost unbearable fatigue felt. First their duty was to lay the foreigner in a bivouac and cover him with rugs, and let him sleep away the past and the present, until his stirring would lead him into a future. Dog lay exhausted at his feet.
The officer commanding had plans for this unknown captive. Titus knew nothing of these plans, but he was, as he hovered between dream and reality, tiring of forever being rescued, forever owing his being to others. He did not count Dog, for he was on the same side. He heard voices that spoke a language he could not fathom, but he was becoming used to belonging nowhere. ‘This is self-imposed,’ he thought hazily. ‘It always has been. I want no one. I need no one, and I shall neither give nor take, except when the giving and the taking are for mutual self-satisfaction. Why should I not leave Dog here, as I have wanted to leave him before in other places. Somewhere within me there must be a chink of what others might call humanity, or love or – or – or,’ and he sank again, dreaming of a world where he was beholden to no one, and where his physical strength was no longer warped by hunger and cold.
Titus awoke one morning with the eyes of a stranger upon him. Cold and hard eyes, small like a rhinoceros in a face of crinkled grey leather, that were so vicious and intelligent that the hardness Titus had thought he possessed evaporated as though it had never existed, and he put out his hand for comfort to touch Dog.
Words as harsh as the eyes were spat at him, then a gesture he interpreted as ‘Get up’, for they were followed by the unceremonious peeling of the bed coverings. The chill of contempt hit him as hard as the chill of the day, as his body lay semi-nude and defenceless in front of the iced-leather face. He made to cover himself, as had the many girls in the past covered their breasts in front of him. Fleetingly Titus understood that what he had always thought of as a coy and provocative gesture in them was actually a wish to belong to themselves, until they succumbed to a sensation of which they were no longer mistress.
He felt unclean and depraved and, as his temper rose, so did he attempt to rise and pull back the coverings, which the creature had wrested from the bed. Dog crouched, awaiting a word, but infected also by the tension that warped the air. A thin laugh, like the scraping of chalk on a blackboard, reached Titus and fed his irrational hatred towards the unpleasant character who looked down upon him.
Titus’s barely concealed arrogance broke through and he rose, defying his nakedness and his weakness, and leaned towards the malevolent eyes, hitting the leather face with a powerless fist, exhausting the small reserve of energy that he had been hoarding. He fell back, drained by the unexpected effort.
Titus knew what he had done was foolish, without stratagem and something for which he would certainly pay – but in what way?
Night came and the sounds of night with it. The human sounds of male voices, some raucous, some raised above the others in a rich baritone or a bass so deep that it all but merged with the darkness. Firelight flickered and the smell of roasting meat filled Titus with a hunger that betokened his early return to health.
He had been fed and cared for, and whereas before he had wished to recompense his saviours for their charity, he now wished to escape from what he feared might lead to an intrusion on his liberty. For he knew that he was in a military camp and he had a suspicion that he was to be used in some plot as yet to be revealed.
He did not wish it to be known that his strength was returning, yet his hunger became unbearable as it rampaged through his body, and the one and only thought in his mind was how it could be assuaged. It was too dangerous to show himself, but more than he could bear to stay confined and inert.
His problem was resolved more quickly than he might have hoped. ‘Old Rhino Eyes’, as Titus called him to himself, appeared with no ceremony and raised his voice to two figures outside who were waiting for a command, which was given to them by the peremptory clapping of two hands, as dry and hard as inflammable tinder.
The whiffs of roast meat glided in and through and over Titus, so that his mouth almost filled with its imaginary juices, and it took a self-control he hardly knew he possessed not to dribble the overflow down his beard, which had grown during his delirium.
A table was brought and laid by two men dressed in white, and a chair was placed on either side of the table. A gown was given to Titus of an ordinary dark brown wool and Old Rhino Eyes with mock bows and courtesy indicated that Titus should robe himself and be seated. With difficulty he pulled on the robe and with as little loss of dignity as possible he put his unused limbs to work. He felt the mean little eyes on his every movement, and the dilemma of wanting to appear both weaker than he felt and yet strong enough to eat was rather more than his intellectual resources could cope with. However he resolved it, the eyes were X-raying him whether he liked it or not, so that he decided to empty his mind, in order that it should not give him away in any degree.
Titus sat with relief on the chair and recoiled at the hospitality he was about to receive from one whom he had so recently but ineffectually struck.
One of the men dressed in white appeared, carrying a plate and a covered dish, which he placed on the table in front of Titus, who noticed that despite the two chairs there was only one place laid for eating. He immediately felt at a disadvantage – eating alone, under scrutiny, nullified the pangs of hunger that had recently surged through him. The distant past of his childhood, where ornate, almost architectural meals had been served and left to crumble untasted, flitted across his mind and then the sordid and mean meals that he had scrounged in his journeyings over the past ten years superimposed themselves, and he felt that he no longer wished to eat and give away that primitive part of his being to Rhino Eyes. He remembered, with disgust, a hyena he had seen fighting one of its own kind over the membrane of a newly born zebra, too frail to get away, which they had torn into, in all its bright pink rubberiness, and the unholy sound of their glutinous chewing.
‘Eat.’ His host appeared to gesture, as the lid of the dish was lifted by one of the white-robed men. Dog lay on the ground by Titus and, following his master’s restraint, lifted only his eyes to watch. Titus indicated that his canine companion should also be fed and with a clap of his hands the rhino-eyed autocrat ordered that this should be done. A plate was put in front of Dog, but he made no movement until Titus, with a supercilious gesture belying his hunger, lifted a fork and toyed with what he imagined to be a most tender suckling pig; then Dog, with his muzzle, almost like an echo, played with the food on his plate, which was of the same quality as his master’s.
This pantomime began to annoy the man, who sat opposite Titus, awaiting the weakness of his captive guest. Impatiently he urged him to eat. He plainly wished to see Titus in a subservient position, and when Titus merely played with the food in front of him, the creature indicated that there would be no more hospitality, the plates were removed and he left the table imperiously, followed by the two men in white.