SIXTEEN

Without waiting for any orders from the brain a demon in his feet had already carried Titus deep into the flanking trees, and through the great park-like forest he ran and ran and ran, turning now this way and now that way until one would say he was irrevocably lost, were it not that he was always so.

But when, having fallen exhausted, he got to his knees and parted some branches, he found himself gazing at the very road from which he had fled. But there was no one there and after some while he walked out boldly and stood in the centre of the road as though to say, ‘Do your worst.’ But nothing happened except that what Titus had taken to be an old thorn bush got to its feet and shambled its way towards him, its shadow like a crab on the white stone highway. When it had come so close to Titus that he could have touched it with an outstretched foot the thorn bush spoke.

‘I am a beggar,’ it said, and the soft grit of its dreadful voice sent Titus’ heart into his mouth. ‘That is why I am stretching out my withered arm. Do you see it? Eh? Would you call it beautiful with that claw at the end of it – can you see it?’

The beggar stared at Titus through the red circles of his eyelids, and alternately shook his old knuckly fist and opened it out with the palm upwards.

The palm of that hand was like the delta of some foul dried-up river. At its centre was a kind of callus or horny disc, a telltale shape that argued the receipt and passage of many coins.

‘What do you want?’ said Titus. ‘I have no money for you. I thought you were a thorn bush.’

‘I’ll thorn you!’ said the beggar. ‘How dare you refuse me! Me! An emperor! Dog! Whelp! Cur! Empty your gold into my sacred throat.’

‘Sacred throat! What does he mean by that?’ thought Titus, but only for a moment, for suddenly the beggar was no longer there but was twenty feet away and was staring down the white highway looking more like a thorn bush than ever. One of his arms, like a branch, was crook’d so that the claw at the end of it was conveniently cupped at the ear.

Then Titus heard it – the distant whirring sound of a fast machine, and a moment later a yellow car the shape of a shark sped from the south.

It seemed that the cantankerous old mendicant was about to be run down, for he stood on the crown of the road with his arms out like a scarecrow, but the yellow shark swerved past him, and as it did so a coin was tossed into the air by the driver, or by the shape that could only be the driver, for there was nothing else at the wheel but something in a sheet.

It was gone as quietly as it had arrived and Titus turned his face to the beggar, who had retrieved the coin. Seeing that he was being scrutinized the beggar leered at Titus and threw out his tongue like the mildewed tongue of a boot. Then to Titus’ amazement the foul old man swung back his head and, dropping the silver coin into his mouth, swallowed it at a gulp.

‘Tell me, you dirty old man,’ said Titus softly, for a kind of hot anger filled him and a desire to squash the creature beneath his feet, ‘why do you eat money?’ And Titus picked up a rock from beside the road.

‘Whelp!’ said the beggar at last. ‘Do you think I’d waste my wealth? Coins are too big, you dog, to sidle through me. Too small to kill me. Too heavy to be lost! I am a beggar.’

‘You are a travesty,’ said Titus, ‘and when you die the earth will breathe again.’

Titus dropped the heavy stone he had lifted in anger, and with not a backward glance made for the right-hand fork where, with a prodigious sigh, an avenue of cedars inhaled him, as though he were a gnat.