In Solitary Read Free Page B

knees in a particularly soft patch of the grey-black sludge. It had begun to drizzle with rain from above the temperature controlled zone. I wrenched a foot clear, but left a mudshoe beneath the mire and had to reach an arm’s length down into it to retrieve the shoe. The other foot came up more easily. As long as I took it slowly the sucking actionof the mud was not powerful enough to hinder my progress.
    However, I was now covered in filth and the rain was becoming heavier by the minute. I began to feel very, very miserable. Suddenly there was a new danger. If the rain became too dense, I should not be able to see the needle towers and the first flood of water from the incoming tide would slow my progress.
    I picked out a tower through the drizzle and began to quicken my steps towards it, but it was slow and difficult work across the sludge. I tried to remember certain points Lintar had mentioned on our walk; if you begin to sink in deep mud, do not struggle; lie flat and stretch out all four limbs. How he knew the correct procedure in deep mud was conjectural. I doubted he had ever been beyond the sea wall on foot, although I knew that he had been hunting sea birds with a crossbow from a mudskate vehicle. Perhaps the Soal learned a few safety rules before embarking on an expedition?
    The black ooze crept up my body by degrees and the shoes flicked dollops of the stuff up my back and into my long hair. I trudged on for the next two hours while dusk came down, realizing, all too late, that I had left an easy, soft life behind me. My bungled attempt to find some incriminating evidence with which to enact revenge on Endrod had been a poor failure, and the reverse of what I hoped to achieve had come about: I was the one who had been banished.
    Night was coming on and I had only a few minutes in which to find the tower. It had been directly ahead. Perhaps I had missed it? I turned and looked through the rain, which was running in rivulets down my face, neck and chest. It was silt-laden and uncomfortable. No tower. I stumbled on, and then, suddenly there it was, almost at my nose. I grabbed the inset rungs of the ladder and began to climb: I still had to get to a segment and the first was several metres above my head. I hoped I could find a segment with no other human inside.
    I had gone barely a metre when the water began swilling around the base of the needle. It was now a race against the tide. With the blanket containing the crossbow tied sling-fashion over one shoulder I began to climb for my life – and the water rose with every scrambling step. It whirled with angry white-flecked mouths below me. I had visions ofdisappearing down one of the throats of eddying foam.
    With my arms aching and my chest heaving I made the first ledge and entered the segment gasping and pulling on the air with my lungs. It was dark in the segment and I lay on the cold floor and cherished my agony, listening to the waves throwing shoulders at the flexible, swaying tower.
    Over the next few days I made my way from needle to needle, the soiling of my belaboured body becoming a continuing process, for although I could wash in the tower there was nothing to shift the obstinate patches.
    I carefully avoided any humans I saw, of course. I had no desire to be caught breaking the one law for which there was no reprieve from death, no matter who or what one’s friends were. The far coast was reached but the sea wall was as high and as well guarded as the one I had left. There was to be no escape in that direction.
    My rations had run out and I was now living on shellfish grubbed from the mud. Hair had grown over my face, I was constantly hungry and exhausted and I began to view the world with a hard and bitter eye. After my visit to the Hessian wall I was determined to obtain a full night’s rest and I climbed the nearest needle, curled up in a corner of a segment and fell instantly asleep.
    It was still dark when I awoke and nagging pains in my