by Mervyn Peake
‘Silence!’ shouted The Fly, interrupting Crust, who had not realized he had been sitting so close to a colleague until he heard Cutflower’s affected accents beside him. Everyone knew that Crust had no wife in exile, ill or otherwise. They also knew that his endless requests were not so much because he was poverty-stricken but were made in the desire to cut a dashing figure. To have a wife in exile who was dying in unthinkable pain appeared to Crust to give him a kind of romantic status. It was not sympathy he wanted but envy. Without an exiled and guttering mate what was he? Just Crust. That was all. Crust to his colleagues and Crust to himself. Something of five letters that walked on two legs.
But Cutflower, taking advantage of the smoke, had slipped from the table. He took a few dainty steps to his left and tripped over Mulefire’s outstretched leg.
‘May Satan thrash you purple!’ roared an ugly voice from the floor. ‘Curse your stinking feet, whoever you bloody are!’
‘Poor old Mulefire! Poor old hog!’ It was yet another voice, a more familiar one; and then there was the sense of something rocking uncontrollably, but there was no accompanying sound.
Flannelcat was biting at his underlip. He was overdue for his class. They were all overdue. But none save Flannelcat was perturbed on that score. Flannel knew that by now the classroom ceiling would be blue with ink: that the small bow-legged boy, Smattering, would be rolling beneath his desk in a convulsion of excited ribaldry: that catapults would be twanging freely from every wooden ambush, and stink-bombs making of his room a nauseous hell. He knew all this and he could do nothing. The rest of the staff knew all this also, but had no desire to do anything.
A voice out of the pall cried: ‘Silence, gentlemen, for Mr Bellgrove!’ and another … ‘Oh, hell, my teeth! my teeth!’ … and another … ‘If only he didn’t dream of stoats!’ … and another: ‘Where’s my gold watch gone to?’ and then The Fly again: ‘Silence, gentlemen! Silence for Bellgrove! Are you ready, sir?’ The Fly peered into Deadyawn’s vacant face.
In reply Deadyawn answered: ‘Why … not?’ with a peculiarly long interval between the ‘Why’ and the ‘not’.
Bellgrove read:
Edict 1597577361544329621707193
To Deadyawn, Headmaster, and to the Gentlemen of the Professorial Staff: to all Ushers, Curators and others in authority –
This – day of the –th month in the eighth year of the Seventy-seventh Earl, to wit: Titus, Lord of Gormenghast – notice and warning is given in regard to their attitude, treatment and methods of behaviour and approach in respect of the aforementioned Earl, who now at the threshold of the age of reason, may impress Headmaster, gentlemen of the professorial staff, ushers, curators, and the like, with the implications of his lineage to the extent of diverting these persons from their duty in regard to the immemorial law which governs the attitude which Deadyawn, etc., are strictly bound to show, inasmuch that they treat the seventy-seventh Earl in every particular and on every occasion as they would treat any other minor in their hands without let or favour: that a sense of the customs, traditions and observances – and above all, a sense of the duties attached to every branch of the Castle’s life – be instilled and an indelible sense of the responsibilities which will become his when he attains his majority, at which time, with his formative years spent among the riff-raff of the Castle’s youth, it is to be supposed that the 77th Earl will not only have developed an adroitness of mind, a knowledge of human nature, a certain stamina, but in addition a degree of learning dependent upon the exertions which you, Sir, Headmaster, and you, Sir, gentlemen of the professorial staff, bring to bear, which is your bounden duty, to say nothing of the privilege and honour which it represents.
All this, Sirs, is, or should be common knowledge to you, but the 77th Earl now being in his eighth year, I have seen fit to reawaken you to your responsibilities, in my capacity as Master of Ritual, etc., in which capacity I have the authority to make appearances at any moment in any classroom I choose in order to acquaint myself with the way in which your various knowledge is inculcated, and with particular regard to its effect upon the progress of the young Earl.
Deadyawn, Sir, I would have you impress your Staff with the magnitude of their office, and in particular …
But Bellgrove, his jaw suddenly hammering away as upon a white-hot anvil, flung the parchment from him and sank to his knees with a howl of pain which awoke Deadyawn to such a degree that he opened both his eyes.
‘What was that?’ said Deadyawn to The Fly.
‘Bellgrove in pain,’ said the midget. ‘Shall I finish the notice?’
‘Why not?’ said Deadyawn.
The paper was passed up to The Fly by Flannelcat, who had scrambled nervously out of the ashes, and was already imagining Barquentine in his classroom and the dirty liquid eyes of that one-legged creature fixed upon the ink that was even now trickling down the leather walls.
The Fly plucked the paper from Flannelcat’s hand and continued after a preparatory whistle effected through a collusion of the knuckles, lips and windpipe. So shrill was the sound of it that the recumbent staff were jolted upright on their haunches as one man.
The Fly read quickly, one word running into the next, and finished Barquentine’s edict almost at a single breath.
… would have you impress your Staff with the magnitude of their office, and in particular those members who confuse the ritual of their calling with mere habit, making of themselves obnoxious limpets upon the living rock; or, like vile bindweed round a breathing stem, stifle the Castle’s breath.
Signed (as for) Barquentine, Master of Ritual, Keeper of the Observances, and hereditary overlord of the manuscripts by
Steerpike (Amanuensis).
Someone had lit a lantern. It did very little, as it stood on the table, but illumine with a dusky glow the breast of the stuffed cormorant. There was something disgraceful about its necessity at noon in summer-time.
‘If ever there was an obnoxious limpet swaddled in bindweed you are that limpet, my friend,’ said Perch-Prism to Bellgrove. ‘Do you realize that the whole thing was addressed to you? You’ve gone too far for an old man. Far too far. What will you do when they remove you, friend? Where will you go? Have you anyone that loves you?’
‘Oh, rotten hell!’ shouted Bellgrove, in so loud and uncontrolled a voice that even Deadyawn smiled. It was perhaps the faintest, wannest smile that ever agitated for a moment the lower half of a human face. The eyes took no part in it. They were as vacant as saucers of milk; but one end of the mouth lifted as might the cold lip of a trout.
‘Mr … Fly …’ said the Headmaster in a voice as far away as the ghost of his vanished smile. ‘Mr … Fly … you … virus, where … are … you?’
‘Sir?’ said The Fly.
‘Was … that … Bellgrove?’
‘It was, sir,’ said The Fly.
‘And … how … is … he … these … days?’
‘He is in pain,’ said The Fly.
‘Deep … pain …?’
‘Shall I inquire, sir?’ said The Fly.
‘Why … not …?’
‘Bellgrove!’ shouted The Fly.
‘What is it, damn you?’ said Bellgrove.
‘The Head is inquiring about your health.’
‘About mine?’ said Bellgrove.
‘About yours,’ said The Fly.
‘Sir?’ queried Bellgrove, peering in the direction of the voice.
‘Come … nearer …’ said Deadyawn. ‘I … can’t … see … you … my … poor … friend.’
‘Nor I you, sir.’
‘Put … out … your … hand, … Bellgrove. Can … you … feel … anything?’
‘Is this your foot, sir?’
‘It … is … indeed, … my … poor … friend.’
‘Quite so, sir,’ said Bellgrove.
‘Now … tell … me … Bellgrove, … tell … me …’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Are … you … unwell … my … poor …
friend?’
‘Localized pain, sir.’
‘Would … it … be … the … mandibles …?’
‘That is so, sir.’
‘As … in … the … old … days … when … you … were … ambitious … When … you … had … ideals, … Bellgrove…. We … all … had … hopes … of … you, … I … seem … to … remember.’ (There was a horrible sound of laughter like porridge.)
‘Indeed, sir.’
‘Does … anyone … still … believe … in … you, … my … poor … poor … friend?’
There was no answer.
‘Come … come. It is not for you to resent your destiny. To … cavil … at … the … sere … and … yellow … leaf. Oh … no, … my … poor … Bellgrove, … you … have … ripened. Perhaps … you … have … over-ripened. Who … knows? We … all … go … bad … in … time. Do … you … look … about … the … same, … my … friend?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Bellgrove.
‘I … am … tired,’ said Deadyawn. ‘What … am … I … doing … here? Where’s … that … virus … Mr … Fly?’
‘Sir!’ came the musket shot.
‘Get … me … out … of … this. Wheel … me … out … of … it … into stillness … Mr … Fly…. Wheel … me … into … the … soft … darkness …’ (His voice lifted into a ghastly treble, which though it was still empty and flat had in it the seeds of life.) ‘Wheel … me …’ (it cried) ‘into … the … golden … void.’
‘Right away, sir,’ said The Fly.
All at once it seemed as though the Professors’ Common-Room was full of ravenous seagulls, but the screaming came from the unoiled wheels of the high chair, which were slowly turning. The door handle was located by Flannelcat after a few moments’ fumbling and the door was pushed wide. A glow of light could be seen in the passage outside. Against this light the smoke-wreaths coiled, and a little later the high, fantastic silhouette of Deadyawn, like a sack at the apex of the rickety high chair made its creaking departure from the room like some high, black form of scaffolding with a life of its own.
The scream of the wheels grew fainter and fainter.
It was some while before the silence was broken. None present had heard that high note in the Headmaster’s voice before. It had chilled them. Nor had they ever heard him at such length, or in so mystical a vein. It was horrible to think that there was more to him than the nullity which they had so long accepted. However, a voice did at last break the pensive silence.
‘A very dry “do” indeed,’ said Crust.
‘Some kind of light, for grief’s sake!’ shouted Perch-Prism.
‘What can the time be?’ whimpered Flannelcat.
Someone had started a fire in the grate, using for tinder a number of Flannelcat’s copybooks, which he had been unable to collect from the floor. The globe of the world was put on top, which, being of some light wood, gave within a few minutes an excellent light, great continents peeling off and oceans bubbling. The memorandum that Slypate was to be caned, which had been chalked across the coloured face, was purged away and with it the boy’s punishment, for Mulefire never remembered and Slypate never reminded him.
‘My, my!’ said Cutflower, ‘if the Head’s subconscious ain’t self-conscious call me purblind, la! … call me purblind! What goings-on, la!’
‘What is the time, gentlemen? What can it be, if you please?’ said Flannelcat, groping for his exercise-books on the floor. The scene had unnerved him, and what books he had recovered from the floor kept falling out of his arms.
Mr Shrivell pulled one of them out of the fire and, holding it by a flameless corner, waved it for a moment before the clock.
‘Forty minutes to go,’ he said. ‘Hardly worth it … or is it? Personally, I think I’ll just …’
‘So will I, la!’ cried Cutflower. ‘If my class isn’t either on fire by now or flooded out, call me witless, la!’
The same idea must have been at the back of most of their minds, for there was a general movement towards the door, only Opus Fluke remaining in his decrepit arm-chair, his loaf-like chin directed at the ceiling, his eyes closed and his leathery mouth describing a line as fatuous as it was indolent. A few moments later the husky, whispering sound of a score of flying gowns as they whisked along the walls of corridors presaged the turning of a score of door handles and the entry into their respective class-rooms of the professors of Gormenghast.
TWELVE
A roof of cloud stretching to every horizon held the air motionless beneath it, as though the earth and sky, pressing towards one another, had squeezed away its breath. Below the cruddled underside of the unbroken cloud-roof, the air, through some peculiar trick of light, which had something of an underwater feeling about it, reflected enough of itself from the gaunt back of Gormenghast to make the herons restive as they stood and shivered on a long-abandoned pavement half in and half out of the clouds.
The stone stairway which led up to this pavement was lost beneath a hundred seasons of obliterating ivy, creepers and strangling weeds. No one alive had ever struck their heels into the great cushions of black moss that pranked the pavement or wandered along its turreted verge, where the herons were and the jackdaws fought, and the sun’s rays, and the rain, the frost, the snow and the winds took their despoiling turns.
There had once been a great casement facing upon this terrace. It was gone. Neither broken glass nor iron nor rotten wood was anywhere to be seen. Beneath the moss and ground creepers it may be that there were other and deeper layers, rotten with antiquity; but where the long window had stood the hollow darkness of a hall remained. It opened its unprotected mouth midway along the pavement’s inner verge. On either side of this cavernous opening, widely separated, were the raw holes in the stonework that were once the supporting windows. The hall itself was solemn with herons. It was there they bred and tended their young. Preponderately a heronry, yet there were recesses and niches in which by sacredness of custom the egrets and bitterns congregated.
This hall, where once the lovers of a bygone time paced and paused and turned one about another in forgotten measures to the sound of forgotten music, this hall was carpeted with lime-white sticks. Sometimes the setting sun as it neared the horizon slanted its rays into the hall, and as they skimmed the rough nests the white network of the branches flared on the floor like leprous corals, and here and there (if it were spring) a pale blue-green egg shone like a precious stone, or a nest of young, craning their long necks towards the window, their thin bodies covered with powder-down, seemed stage-lit in the beams of the westering sun.
The late sunbeams shifted across the ragged floor and picked out the long, lustrous feathers that hung from the throat of a heron that stood by a rotten mantelpiece; and then a whiteness once more as the forehead of an adjacent bird flamed in the shadows … and then, as the light traversed the hall, an alcove was suddenly dancing with the varied bars and blotches and the reddish-yellow of the bitterns.
As dusk fell, the greenish light intensified in the masonry. Far away, over the roofs, over the outer wall of Gormenghast, over the marshes, the wasteland, the river and the foothills with their woods and spinneys, and over the distant hazes of indeterminate terrain, the claw-shaped head of Gormenghast Mountain shone like a jade carving. In the green air the herons awoke from their trances and from within the hall there came the peculiar chattering and clanking sound of the young as they saw the darkness deepening and knew that it would soon be time for their parents to go hunting.
Crowded as they had been in their heronry with its domed roof, once golden and green with a painting, but now a dark, disintegrating surface where flakes of paint hung like the wings of moths – yet each bird appeared as a solitary figure as it stepped from the hall to the terrace: each heron, each bittern, a recluse, pacing solemnly forwards on its thin, stiltlike legs.
Of a sudden in the dusk, knocking as it were a certain hollow note to which their sweet ribs echoed, they were in air
– a group of herons, their necks arched back, their ample and rounded wings rising and falling in leisurely flight: and then another and another: and then a night-heron with a ghastly and hair-raising croak, more terrible than the unearthly booming note of a pair of bitterns, who soaring and spiralling upwards and through the clouds to great heights above Gormenghast, boomed like bulls as they ascended.
The pavement stretched away in greenish darkness. The windows gaped, but nothing moved that was not feathered. And nothing had moved there, save the winds, the hailstones, the clouds, the rain-water and the birds for a hundred years.
Under the high green clawhead of Gormenghast Mountain the wide stretches of marshland had suddenly become stretches of tension, of watchfulness.
Each in its own hereditary tract of water the birds stood motionless, with glistening eyes and heads drawn back for the fatal stroke of the dagger-like beak. Suddenly and all in a breath, a beak was plunged and withdrawn from the dark water, and at its lethal point there struggled a fish. In another moment the heron was mounted aloft in august and solemn flight.
From time to time during the long night these birds returned, sometimes with frogs or water-mice in their beaks or newts or lily buds.
But now the terrace was empty. On the marshlands every heron was in its place, immobile, ready to plunge its knife. In the hall the nestlings were, for the moment, strangely still.
The dead quality of the air between the clouds and the earth was strangely portentous. The green, penumbral light played over all things. It had crept into the open mouth of the hall where the silence was.