‘This will do,’ Marapper repeated. ‘We will eat and then you will draw lots for guard duty.’
They ate frugally from the supplies in their packs, wrangling over the meal as to whether or not a guard was necessary. Since Complain and Fermour held it was necessary and Roffery and Wantage held it was not, the sides were equally balanced, and the priest did not find himself bound to join the disagreement. He ate in silence, wiped his hands delicately on a rag, and then said, from a still full mouth, ‘Roffery, you will guard first, then Wantage, so that you two will have the earliest opportunity of proving yourselves right. Next sleep, Fermour and Complain will guard.’
‘You said we should draw lots,’ Wantage said angrily.
‘I changed my mind.’
He said it so bluntly that Roffery instinctively abandoned that line of attack and remarked, ‘You, I suppose, father, never guard?’
Marapper spread his hands and edged a look of childlike innocence on to his face. ‘My dear friends, your priest guards you all the time, awake or asleep.’
Rapidly, he pulled a round object from under his cloak and continued, changing the subject, ‘With this instrument, which I had the forethought to relieve Zilliac of, we can scientifically regulate our spells of guard so that no man does more than another. You see that it has on this side a circle of numbers and three hands or pointers. It is called a watch, so called after a period of guard, which is — as you know — also a watch. The Giants made it for this purpose, which shows that they too had Outsiders and madmen to deal with.’
Complain, Fermour and Wantage inspected the watch with interest; Roffery, who had handled such things in his job as valuer, sat back superciliously. The priest retrieved his possession and began to press a small stud on its side.
‘I do this to make it work,’ he explained grandly. ‘Of the three pointers, the little one goes very rapidly; that we can disregard. The two big ones go at different speeds, but we need only bother with the slower one. You see it is now touching the figure eight. Ern, you will stay awake until it touches the figure nine; then you will rouse Wantage. Wantage, when the pointer points to ten, you will rouse us all, and we will begin our journey. Clear?’
‘Where are we going?’ Wantage inquired sullenly.
‘We will go into all that when we have slept,’ Marapper said, in a tone of finality. ‘Sleep comes first. Wake me if you hear anybody moving outside — and don’t wake me for false alarms. I am apt to be irritable if my dreams are disturbed.’
He rolled over into a corner, kicked a shattered office stool away and composed himself for sleep. Without much hesitation, the others did likewise, except Roffery, who watched them unlovingly.
They were all lying on the floor when Wantage spoke hesitantly. ‘Father, Father Marapper,’ he called, with a note of pleading in his voice. ‘Will you not give us a prayer for the safety of our skins?’
‘I’m too tired to intercede for anyone’s skin,’ Marapper replied.
‘A short prayer, father.’
‘As you wish. Children, expansion to our egos, let us pray.’ He commenced to pray as he lay hunched on the dirty floor, his words coming indifferently at first, and then gaining power as he drew interest from his train of thought.
‘O Consciousness, we gathered here are doubly unworthy to be thy vessels, for we know we have imperfections and do not seek to purge them as we ought to do. We are a poor lot, in a poor way of life; yet as we contain thee there is hope for us. O Consciousness, direct particularly these five of the poor vessels here, for there is more hope for us than for those we left behind, and therefore there is more room for thee in us. We know that when thou art not here there is only the adversary, Subconscious, in us; make our thoughts to swim solely in thee. Make our hands quicker, our arms stronger, our eyes sharper, and our tempers fiercer: that we may overcome and kill all who oppose us. May we smite and sunder them! May we scatter their entrails through the length of the ship! So that we come in the end to a position of power, in full possession of thee, and in thy full possession. And may thy spark breathe in us until that last dread moment when the adversary claims us, and we too take the Long Journey.’
As he had intoned, the priest had risen to his knees and stretched his hands above his head. Now he, with all the others copying the movement, drew his outstretched right index finger symbolically, ritualistically, across his throat.
‘Now shut up, the lot of you,’ he said, in his normal tone, and settled again in his corner.
Complain lay with his back to a wall and his head on his pack; he slept usually like an animal, lightly, and with no dozing stages between sleep and waking. But in these strange surroundings he lay for some while with his eyes half-shut, trying to think. He thought only in generalized pictures: Gwenny’s empty bunk; Marapper standing triumphant over Zilliac; Meller, with the jumping animal growing under his fingers; a greasy broth bubbling out Ozbert Bergass’s life; the tensed muscles on Wantage’s neck, ready to twitch his head away from prying eyes; the Guard, Twemmer, tumbling tiredly into Marapper’s arms. And behind the pictures lay the significant fact that they concerned only what had passed, and that for what was to come he could find no pictures, for he was following into unknown realms: he was moving into the other darkness his mother had spoken of and feared.
He drew no conclusions, wasted no time in worry; indeed, he felt a kind of hope, for, as a village saying had it, the devil you don’t know may conquer the one you do.
He could see, before he slept, the desolate room lit by the light percolating from the corridor and, through the outer door, a section of the everlasting tangle. In the changeless, draughtless heat, the ponics rustled ceaselessly; occasionally, a click sounded near at hand as a seed was flicked into the room. The plants grew so rapidly that, when Complain woke, the younger ones would be inches taller and the older ones wilting against the restriction of the bulkheads; then, choking and choked would alike be nipped by the next dark. But he failed to see in this ceaseless jostling a parallel with the human lives about him.
II
‘You snore, priest,’ Roffery said pleasantly, as they ate together at the beginning of the next wake.
The relationship between them had subtly changed, as if some occult power had been active during the sleep. The feeling that they were five rivals snatched almost casually from Quarters had vanished; they were still rivals, in the sense that all men were rivals, but now there was a mute acknowledgement of union against the forces about them. The period of watch had undoubtedly been good for Roffery’s soul, and he seemed almost submissive. Of the five of them, Wantage alone appeared to be in no way altered. His character had been eroded by constant loneliness and mortification, as the flow of water wears away a wooden post, and he no longer had anything in him amenable to change; he could only be broken or killed.
‘We must move as far as possible this wake,’ Marapper said. ‘The coming sleep-wake is a dark, as you know, and it may not be advisable to travel then, when our torches will give us away to any watchers. Before we go, however, I will condescend to tell you something of our plans; and for that it is necessary to say something about the ship.’
He looked round at them, grinning and eating extravagantly as he spoke.
‘And the first point is, that we are in a ship. All agreed there?’
His gaze forced some sort of a reply from each of them; an ‘Of course’ from Fermour; an impatient grunt from Wantage, as if he found the question irrelevant; an airy wave of the hand, meaningless, from Roffery; and from Complain ‘No’.
To the latter, Marapper immediately turned his full attention.
‘Then you’d better understand quickly, Roy,’ he said. ‘Firstly, the proofs. Listen hard — I feel strongly on this question, and a show of determined stupidity might make me regrettably angry.’
He walked round the shattered furniture as he spoke, very emphatic and solid, his face heavy with seriousness.
