Sometime, Never by G. Williams; Sir William Golding

Author:G. Williams; Sir William Golding
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780345224286
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1971-10-12T10:00:00+00:00

The Dream

BOY IN DARKNESS

by

Mervyn Peake

The ceremonies were over for the day. The Boy was tired out. Ritual, like a senseless chariot, had rolled its wheels — and the natural life of the day was bruised and crushed.

Lord of a tower'd tract, he had no option but to be at the beck and call of those officials whose duty it was to advise and guide him. To lead him hither to thither through the mazes of his adumbrate home. To celebrate, from day to day, in remote ceremonies the meaning of which had long been forgotten.

The traditional birthday gifts had been proffered him on the traditional gold tray by the master of the Ritual. Long lines of servants, knee-deep in water, passed before him as he sat hour after hour by the margin of the gnat-haunted lake. The whole occasion had been one to try the patience of an equable adult and for a child it was hell.

This, the Boy's birthday, was the second of the two most arduous days of the whole year. On the previous day he had been involved in a long march up the steep flanks of a hill to a plantation where it had been necessary for him to plant the fourteenth of a group of ash trees, for to-day he was fourteen years old. It was no mere formality, for he had no one to help him as he worked, in a long grey cloak and a hat rather like a dunce's cap. On his return journey down the steep hill he had stumbled and fallen, bruising his knee and cutting his hand so that, by the time he was at last alone in his small room overlooking the red-stone square, he was in a frame of mind quite savage in its resentment.

But now, on the evening of his second day, his birthday, the day of so many idiotic ceremonies that his brain throbbed with incongruous images and his body with fatigue, he lay upon his bed with his eyes closed.

After resting for some while he opened one of his eyes at what sounded like a moth fluttering against the window. He could see nothing, however, and was about to close his eyes again when he caught sight of that ochre-coloured and familiar patch of mildew that stretched across the ceiling like an island.

He had stared many times at this same mildew-island with its inlets and its bays; its coves and the long curious isthmus that joined the southern to the northern masses. He knew by heart the tapering peninsula that ended in a narrowing chain of islets like a string of discoloured beads: He knew the lakes and the rivers and he had many a time brought imaginary ships to anchor in hazardous harbours, or stood them off when the seas ran high where they rocked in his mind and set new courses for yet other lands.

But to-day he was too irritable to make-believe and the only thing he stared at was a fly that was moving slowly across the island.

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