endless day. Exiled from all effective community, he began to hallucinate. The stones mumbled to him. His ears sang with high, distant voices. He watched the sky twist into yellow flame then bleed with purple. Trees stirred and shifted at the periphery of his field of vision, though he was never able to actually catch them in the act of walking.
The days hardened into ice. The storms died away, giving him brittle, frosty mornings of absolute silence. He worked hard on those days, for it became a pleasure to see the swift, passionate flames leaping to the sky, to hear the wing-beating roar of the burning as incendiary passions consumed his tangled ivy, and to warm himself by that energy treasured up from the long-gone sun.
Yet, though he worked to the best of his ability, he did not get all that terribly much done. The food was meagre now. He realised that he was very weak. He had boils and chilblains; his gums bled. He feared scurvy.
Once, in a thaw, he inspected his reflection in the waters of the swamp, and did not recognise what he saw. Was this Togura Poulaan, this thing with long hair, dull sunken eyes, a notched nose and vast birds' nest escrescences? How could these thin legs, these cold aching hands, these clog-clad feet, belong to the son of the strong, powerful and well-fleshed Baron Poulaan, that brave, stout-hearted fighting man who commanded all the Warguild?
'I am Togura Poulaan,' he said.
But his words carried no conviction. He was no longer certain of his own identity. Who was he then? And what? He was something cold and hungry which lived in a cold, unsmiling place where the people spoke like birds and wind and water. He examined the livid purple scar where the wound on his leg had healed. He tried to remember Cromarty's steel cutting home, but could not focus on his memories. His recollections of people and places seemed blurred, dim, unreal.
Perhaps he had always lived here amidst these ruins in the swamp. Perhaps the whole world without and beyond was nothing more than an idle half-formed fantasy he had conjured into being to give himself some solace in his misery. He tried to dismiss the thought, believing himself, apart from anything else, to be incapable of inventing the language he used to think in, which was certainly not the tongue of the community he now endured.
Nevertheless, his hold on his own identity grew steadily weaker and weaker until, on a day which was suddenly warm, and which startled him with the sight of fresh green growth, he saw one of the old men wearing his jacket.
'Hey, grandad!' cried Togura, without thinking. 'What are you doing with my jacket?'
And he approached the ancient. Who looked at him with a gaze of such implacable contempt and disdain that Togura, frightened, retreated.
That evening, Togura became aware of a number of old men regarding him from a distance. He had the impression that they were discussing him. And now, frightened, he could no longer suppress his knowledge of the full gravity of his situation. He was trapped in an alien city ruled – he was sure of it now – by a coven of evil old men who exercised sufficient terror and power to keep every man, woman and child from ever smiling or laughing.
He could only guess at the cause of the noticeable dearth of young men of his own age. He knew nothing of what happened inside the beehive where the old men held court; any conclusions he came to regarding the nameless abominations practiced within must be pure speculation. He could not say who impregnated the young women of the community. He could not say for sure why no women survived their youth.
Yet, while all his knowledge was based on guesswork and speculation, lacking any hard evidence, and lacking all possibility of conclusive proof, he was, nevertheless, certain of one thing – if he wanted to live to be much older, then he had to escape.
That spring, he dedicated himself to the pursuit of life and liberty. His life and his liberty.
It proved very difficult.
He did not know where he was and he did not know how he had come to be there. Possibly he had walked in over the hills; alternatively, he might have been salvaged from the wilderness and carried here while his mind was still blurred with fever. His memories of his wanderings were vague and fragmentary; some, indeed, were frankly hallucinatory.
His memories could not help him escape, so what he needed to do was explore. This, unfortunately, was easier said than done.
Now that spring was here, and the poison ivy was spreading its brisk fresh green over the buildings he had cleared during the winter, he was taken off his incendiary detail and made to turn his hand to many different kinds of work. He worked all through the day with the women, who instructed him by example.
In the swamps of the half-sunken city, which was ringed round by steep, forest-covered hills, he drew water, cleared fish-traps and used a dull, stone-bladed axe to fell lean, stringy swamp-trees for firewood. He helped make tools, grinding away at bits of the city stone with powdered grit. He worked on the fragile punts used for getting round the swamps. He helped repair bridges, and was taught how to weave ropes and cordage from human hair.
When he found a little free time in the evenings, he never managed to go far. Whichever direction he took led him to despairing bogs and quicksands, swamps deeper than drowning, or dry ground hopelessly infected with poison ivy and barbarian thorn.
In the end, he decided that the only way to escape would be to steal a punt and set out by water.
Chapter 13
Spring performed its ritual poetry. Flowers budded and bloomed. Eggs hatched in hidden nests. Togura Poulaan, in the manner of the young, lusted hopelessly after a certain set of thighs; rebuffed and forced to retreat – at knifepoint – he celebrated the allure of that flesh by secret acts of onanism in musty corners of the darkness.
He was very lonely.
Once, Togura caught a duck-billed fledgeling with webbed feet. It had been running on the loose, skittering through the undergrowth with an urgent peep-peep-peep. Once in his hands, it struggled at first, then lay still. He stroked its yellow-brown plumage. He wished that he could keep it to be his friend, but he did not know what he could feed it on. Besides, other people would probably think of it as food, and act accordingly.
He kissed the little bird and then released it. The earnest little creature ran off, once more going peep-peep- peep; he watched it until it was out of sight, hopling it knew where it was going. For days afterwards, he wondered just what had become of it.
The flowers aged, curled into senescence, withered and died. The birds, growing to maturity, left their nests. The swamps hummed with a delirium of insects. Togura Poulaan cut a wisdom tooth, which made a slow painful passage through the gum. He invented fantasies in which he saved Day Suet from the odex, and lived with her in splendour. With great care, he designed her undressing and conjured her in heat.
As day followed day, his fantasies became more and more elaborate, dulling the reality of the world he lived in. He still thought he was diligently planning his escape, but in face he was doing nothing of the sort. Stealing away in the evenings, after work, he would make tentative little forays into the wilderness, but would always retreat when he got muddy, or when some insect stung him, or when he found the way barred by open water or poison ivy, or by impenetrable screed-growths of swamp-plants reminiscent of bulrushes but much taller.
Thwarted by the swamp, he concentrated on the preliminaries necessary for escape. He would need a store of food. He explored as many of the city's buildings as he could, finding spiderweb passages and darkened stairs which led him to the silent chambers within, and, sometimes, to the roof tops. He found places where he could cache food, but there was never any food to cache; on the rare occasions when he had a surplus, he ate it regardless, finding himself unwilling to leave good food in the dark, where scavenging rats might claim it.
Escape, then, was no more than a hobby which complemented his idle fantasies. Settling into the routines of his working days, he had become slow, idle, lethargic, complacent. His diet, which was poor, undermined his ambitions; he had no conspirators to support and encourage his hopes of escape; he was not entirely certain that the outside world existed to escape to. It would have taken a real shock to his system to overcome his inertia and finally force him to decamp.
At the height of summer, he got such a shock when the community tortured a child to death.
Togura Poulaan was so appalled that he refused to believe what he was seeing. Because he did not believe it
