probably trying to creep up on us.’
So they stood there, sweating. Night was a hot breath about them, sampled inside a whale’s belly.
‘Give us the Litany, Priest,’ Wantage begged. His voice was shaking.
‘Not now, for gods ache,’ Fermour groaned.
‘The Litany! Give us the Litany!’ Wantage repeated.
They heard the priest flop down on to his knees. Wantage followed suit, wheezing in the thick gloom.
‘Get down, you two bastards!’ he hissed.
Marapper began monotonously on the General Belief. With an overpowering sense of futility, Complain thought, ‘Here we finish up in this dead end, and the priest prays; I don’t know why I ever mistook him for a man of action.’ He nursed the dazer, cocking an ear into the night, half-heartedly joining in the responses. Their voices rose and fell; by the end of it they all felt slightly better.
‘… and by so discharging our morbid impulses we may be freed from inner conflict,’ the priest intoned.
‘And live in psychosomatic purity,’ they repeated.
‘So that this unnatural life may be delivered down to Journey’s End.’
‘And sanity propagated,’ they replied.
‘And the ship brought home.’ The priest had the last word.
He crept round to each of them in the grubby dark, his confidence restored by his own performance, shaking their hands, wishing expansion to their egos. Complain pushed him roughly away.
‘Save that till we’re out of this predicament,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to work our way out of here. If we go quietly, we can hear anyone who approaches us.’
‘It’s no good, Roy,’ Marapper said. ‘We’re stuck here and I’m tired.’
‘Remember the power you were after?’
‘Let’s sit it out here!’ the priest begged. ‘The ponic’s too thick.’
‘What do you say, Fermour?’ Complain asked.
‘Listen!’
They listened, ears strained. The ponics creaked, relaxing without light, preparing to die. Midges pinged about their heads. Although vibrant with tiny noises, the air was almost unbreathable; the wall of diseased plants cut off the oxygen released by the healthy ones beyond.
With frightening suddenness, Wantage went mad. He flung himself on to Fermour, who cried out as he was bowled over. They were rolling about in the muck, struggling desperately. Soundlessly, Complain threw himself on to them. He felt Wantage’s wiry frame writhing on top of Fermour’s thick body; the latter was fighting to shake off the hands round his throat.
Complain wrenched Wantage away by the shoulders. Wantage threw a wild punch, missed, grabbed for his dazer. He brought it up, but Complain had his wrist. Twisting savagely, he forced Wantage slowly back and then hit out at his jaw. In the dark, the blow missed its target, striking Wantage’s chest instead. Wantage yelped and broke free, flailing his arms wildly about his body.
Again Complain had him. This time, his blow connected properly. Wantage went limp, tottered back into the ponics and fell heavily.
‘Thanks,’ Fermour said; it was all he could manage to say.
They had all been shouting. Now they were silent, again listening. Only the creak of the ponics, the noise that went with them all their lives, and continued when they had made the Long Journey.
Complain put out his hand and touched Fermour; he was shaking violently.
‘You should have used your dazer on the madman,’ Complain said.
‘He knocked it out of my hand,’ Fermour replied. ‘Now I’ve lost the bloody thing in the muck.’
He stooped down, feeling for it in a pulp of ponic stalks and miltex.
The priest was also stooping. He flashed a torch, which Complain at once knocked out of his hand. The priest found Wantage, who was groaning slightly, and got down on one knee beside him.
‘I’ve seen a good many go like this,’ Marapper whispered. ‘But the division between sanity and insanity was always narrow with poor Wantage. This is a case of what we priests term hyper-claustrophobia; I suppose we all have it in some degree. It causes a lot of deaths in the Greene tribe, although they aren’t all violent like this. Most of them just snap out like a torch.’ He clicked his fingers to demonstrate.
‘Never mind the case history, priest,’ Fermour said. ‘What in the name of sweet reason are we going to do with him?’
‘Leave him and clear out,’ Complain suggested.
‘You don’t see how interesting a case this is for me,’ said the priest reprovingly. ‘I’ve known Wantage since he was a small boy. Now he’s going to die, here in the darkness. It’s a wonderful, a humbling thing to look on a man’s life as a whole: the work of art’s completed, the composition’s rounded off. A man takes the Long Journey, but he leaves his history behind in the minds of other men.
‘When Wantage was born, his mother lived in the tangles of Deadways, an outcast from her own tribe. She had committed a double unfaith, and one of the men concerned went with her and hunted for her. She was a bad woman. He was killed hunting: she could not live in the tangle alone, so she sought refuge with us in Quarters.
‘Wantage was then a toddling infant — a small thing with his great deformity. His mother became — as unattached women frequently will — one of the guards’ harlots, and was killed in a drunken brawl before her son reached puberty.’
‘Whose nerves do you think this recitation steadies?’ Fermour asked.
‘In fear lies no expansion; our lives are only lent us,’ Marapper said. ‘See the shape of our poor Comrade’s life. As so often happens, his end echoes his beginning; the wheel turns one full revolution, then breaks off. When he was a child, Wantage endured nothing but torment from the other boys — taunts because his mother was a bad lot, taunts because of his face. He came to identify the two as one woe. So he walked with his bad side to the wall, and deliberately submerged the memory of his mother. But being back in the tangle brought back his infant recollections. He was swamped by the shame of her, his mother. He was overwhelmed by infantile fears of darkness and insecurity.’
‘Now that our little object lesson in the benefits of self-confession is over,’ Complain said heavily, ‘perhaps you will recollect, Marapper, that Wantage is
‘I’m just going to finish him,’ Marapper said. ‘Your torch a moment, dimly. We don’t want him squealing like a pig.’
Bending down gingerly, Complain fought a splitting headache as the blood flow into his skull increased. The impulse came to do just what Wantage had done: hurl away the discomforts of reason, and charge blindly into the ambushed thickets, screaming. It was only later that he questioned his blind obedience to the priest at this dangerous hour; for it was obvious on reflection that Marapper had found some sort of mental refuge from this crisis by turning to the routines of priesthood; his exhumation of Wantage’s childhood had been a camouflaged seeking for his own.
‘I think I’m going to sneeze again,’ Wantage remarked, in a reasonable voice, from the ground. He had regained consciousness without their knowing it.
His face, in the pencil of light squeezed between Complain’s fingers, was scarcely recognizable. Normally pale and thin, the countenance was now swollen and suffused with blood; it might have been a gorged vampire’s mask, had the eyes not been hot, rather than chill with death. And as the light of Complain’s torch fell upon him, Wantage jumped.
Unprepared, Complain went down under a frontal attack. But, arms and legs flailing, Wantage paused only to knock his previous assailant out of the way. Then he was off through the tangles, crashing away from the little party.
Marapper’s torch came on, picking at the greenery, settling dimly on Wantage’s retreating back.
‘Put it out, you crazy fool priest!’ Fermour bellowed.
‘I’m going to get him with my dazer,’ Marapper shouted.
But he did not. Wantage had burst only a short way into the tangle when he paused and swung about. Complain heard distinctly the curious whistling noise he made. For a second, everything was still. Then Wantage made the whistling noise again and staggered back into range of Marapper’s torch. He tripped, collapsed, tried to make his way to them on hands and knees.
