by Mervyn Peake
‘No, boy.’
‘Have I slept?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Then I saw it.’
‘Saw what, lordship? Lie quiet now – lie quiet.’
‘That thing in the oakwoods, that flying thing.’
Mr Flay’s body tautened and there was an absolute silence in the cave.
‘What kind of a thing?’ he muttered at last.
‘A thing of the air, a flying thing … sort of … delicate … but I couldn’t see its face … it floated, you know, across the trees. Was it real? Have you seen it, Mr Flay? What was it, Mr Flay? Tell me, please because … because …’
But there was no need for an answer to the boy’s question, for he had fallen into a deep sleep and Mr Flay rose to his feet, and, moving across the cave where the light was dying as the fire smouldered into ashes, made his way to the entrance of his cavern. Then he leaned against the outer wall. There was no moon but a sprinkling of stars were reflected dimly in the dammed-up lake of water. Faint as an echo in the silence of the night came the bark of a fox from Gormenghast forest.
TWENTY-ONE
I
Titus was to be kept in the Lichen Fort for a week. It was a round, squat edifice, its rough square stones obliterated by the unbroken blanket of the parasitic lichen which gave it its name. This covering was so thick that a variety of birds were able to make their nests in the pale green fur. The two chambers, one above the other of this fort, were kept comparatively clean by a caretaker who slept there and kept the key.
Titus had been held prisoner in this fort on two previous occasions for flagrant offences against the hierarch – although he never knew exactly what he had done wrong. But this time it was for a longer period. He did not particularly mind. It was a relief to know what his punishment was, for when Flay had left him at the hem of the woods that showed them the castle but a couple of miles away, his anxiety had grown to such a pitch that he had visions of the most frightful punishments ahead. He had arrived in the early morning and found three fresh search parties marshalled in the red-stone yard and about to set out. Horses were drawn up at the stables and their riders were being given instructions. He had taken a deep breath and entered the yard, and staring straight ahead of him all the time, had marched across it, his heart beating wildly, his face perspiring, his shirt and trousers torn almost to shreds. At that moment he was glad he was heir to the mountainous bulks of masonry that rose above him, of the towers, and of the tracts he had crossed that morning in the low rays of the sun. He held his head up and clenched his hands, but when within a dozen yards of the cloisters, he ran, the tears gathering in his eyes, until he came to Fuchsia’s room into which he rushed, his eyes burning, a dishevelled urchin, and falling upon his startled sister, clung to her like a child.
She returned his embrace, and for the first time in her life, kissed, and held him passionately in her arms; loved him as she had never loved a soul, and was so filled with pride to have been the one to whom he had fled, that she lifted her young, strident voice and shouted in barbaric triumph, and then breaking away from him, jumped to her window and spat into the morning sun. ‘That’s what I think of them, Titus,’ she shouted, and he ran after her, and spat himself, and then they both began to laugh until they were weak and fell upon the floor where they fought in a dizzy ecstasy until, exhausted, they lay side by side, their hands joined, and sobbed with the love they had found in one another.
Hungry for affection, yet not knowing what it was that made them restless, not even knowing that they were restless, the truth had sprung upon them at the same instant with a shock which found no outlet for its expression save in this physical tumult. In a flash they had found faith in one another. They dared, simultaneously, to uncover their hearts. A truth had come, empiric, irrational and appallingly exciting. The truth that she, this extraordinary girl, ridiculously immature for all her twenty years, yet rich as harvest, and he, a boy on the brink of wild discoveries, were bound by more than their blood, and the loneliness of their hereditary status, and the lack of a mother in any ordinary sense, yes, more than this – were bound all at once in the cocoon of a compassion and an integration one with another as deep, it seemed, as the line of their ancestors; as inchoate, imponderable, and uncharted as the realms that were their darkened legacy.
For Fuchsia to have, not just a brother, but a boy who had run to her in tears because she, she out of all Gormenghast, was the one he trusted – oh, that made up for everything. Let the world do what it might, she would dare death to protect him. She would tell lies for him! Giant lies! She would steal for him! She would kill for him! She rose to her knees and lifted her strong rounded arms, and as she sent forth a loud, incoherent shout of defiance, the door opened, and Mrs Slagg stood there. Her hand which was still on the door handle above her head trembled, as with amazement she stared at the kneeling girl and heard the unrestrained cry.
Behind her stood a man, with raised eyebrows, a lantern, jawed figure, in grey livery with a kind of seaweed belt which by some obscure edict of many a decade ago, it was his business, holding the position he did, to wear. A festoon of the golden weed trailed down his right leg to the region of his knee. The weather being dry, it crackled as he moved.
Titus was the first to see them and jumped to his feet. But it was Mrs Slagg who spoke first –
‘Look at your hands!’ she panted. ‘Your legs, your face! Oh, my weak heart! Look at the grime, and the cuts and bruises, and, and, oh my wicked, wicked lordship, look at the rags of you! Oh, I could smack you I could when I think of all I’ve mended, and washed and ironed and bandaged. Oh yes, I could, I could smack you and hurt you, you cruel, dirty, lordship-thing. How could you. How could you? And me with my heart almost stopped – but you wouldn’t care, oh no, not though …’
Her pitiful tirade was broken into by the man with the lantern jaw.
‘I have to take you to Barquentine,’ he said simply, to Titus. ‘Get washed, my lord, and don’t be long.’
‘What does he want?’ said Fuchsia in a low voice.
‘I know nothing of that, your ladyship,’ said lantern-jaw. ‘But for your brother’s sake, get him clean, and help him with a good excuse. Perhaps he has one. I don’t know. I know nothing.’ His seaweed rattled dryly as he turned away from the door with his tongue in his cheek and his eyes on the ceiling.
II
The week that followed was the longest Titus ever spent, in spite of Fuchsia’s illicit visits to the Lichen Fort. She had found an obscure and narrow window through which she passed what cakes and fruit she could, to vary the adequate but uninteresting diet which the warder, luckily a deaf old man, prepared for his fledgeling-prisoner. Through this opening she was able to whisper to her brother.
Barquentine had lectured him at length: had stressed the responsibility that would become his; but as Titus held to the story that he had, from the outset, lost himself and could not find his way home, the only crime was in having set out on the expedition in the first place. For such a misdemeanour several heavy tomes were fetched down from high shelves, the dust was blown and shaken from their leaves and eventually the appropriate verses were found which gave precedent for the sentence of seven days in the Lichen Fort.
During that week the wrinkled and altogether beastly face of Barquentine, the ‘Lord of the Documents’, came before him in the darkness of the night. No fewer than four times he dreamed of the wet-eyed, harsh-mouthed cripple, pursuing him with his greasy crutch; of how it struck the flagstones like a hammer; and of the crimson rags of his high office that streamed behind the pursuer, as they hurried down unending corridors.
And when he awoke he remembered Steerpike who had stood behind Barquentine’s chair, or climbed the ladder to find the relevant tomes, and how the pale man, for so he was to Titus, had winked at him.
Beyond his knowledge, beyond his power of reason, a revulsion took hold of him and he recoiled from that wink like flesh from the touch of a toad.
&nb
sp; One afternoon of his imprisonment he was interrupted at his hundredth attempt at impaling his jack-knife in the wooden door, at which he flung the weapon in what he imagined was a method peculiar to brigands. He had cried himself to a stop during the morning, for the sun shone through the narrow window-slits and he longed for the wild woods that were so fresh in his mind and for Mr Flay and for Fuchsia.
He was interrupted by a low whistle at one of the narrow windows, and then as he reached it, Fuchsia’s husky whisper:
‘Titus.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s me.’
‘O, good!’
‘I can’t stay.’
‘Can’t you?’
‘No.’
‘Not for a little, Fuchsia?’
‘No. Got to take your place. Beastly tradition business. Dragging the moat for the Lost Pearls or something. I should be there now.’
‘Oh!’
‘But I’ll come after dark.’
‘O, good!’
‘Can’t you see my hand? I’m reaching as far as I can.’
Titus thrust his arm as far as he could through the window slit of the five-foot wall, and could just touch the tip of her fingers.
‘I must go.’
‘Oh!’
‘You’ll soon be out, Titus.’
The silence of the Lichen Fort was about them like deep water, and their fingers touching might have been the prows of foundered vessels which grazed one another in the subaqueous depths, so huge and vivid and yet unreal was the contact that they made with one another.
‘Fuchsia.’
‘Yes?’
‘I have things to tell you.’
‘Have you?’
‘Yes. Secrets.’
‘Secrets?’
‘Yes, and adventure.’
‘I won’t tell! I won’t ever tell. Nothing you tell me I’ll tell. When I come tonight, or if you like when you’re free, tell me then. It won’t be long.’
Her fingertips left his. He was alone in space.
‘Don’t take your hand away,’ she said after a moment’s pause. ‘Can you feel anything?’
He worked his fingers even further into the darkness and touched a paper object which with difficulty he tipped over towards himself and then withdrew. It was a paper bag of barley sugar.
‘Fuchsia,’ he whispered. But there was no reply. She had gone.
III
On the last day but one he had an official visitor. The caretaker of the Lichen Fort had unbolted the heavy door and the grotesquely broad, flat feet of the Headmaster, Bellgrove, complete in his zodiac gown, and dog-eared mortar-board, entered with a slow and ponderous tread. He took five or more paces across the weed-scattered earthen floor before he noticed the boy sitting at a table in a corner of the fort.
‘Ah. There you are. There you are, indeed. How are you, my friend?’
‘All right. Thank you, sir.’
‘H’m. Not much light in here, eh, young man? What have you been doing to pass the time away?’
Bellgrove approached the table behind which Titus was standing. His noble, leonine head was weak with sympathy for the child, but he was doing his best to play the rôle of headmaster. He had to inspire confidence. That was one of the things that headmasters had to do. He must be Dignified and Strong. He must evoke Respect. What else had he to be? He couldn’t remember.
‘Give me your chair, young fellow,’ he said in a deep and solemn voice. ‘You can sit on the table, can’t you? Of course you can. I seem to remember being able to do things like that when I was a boy!’
Had he been at all amusing? He gave Titus a sidelong glance in the faint hope that he had been, but the boy’s face showed no sign of a smile, as he placed the chair for his headmaster and then sat with his knees crossed on the table. Yet his expression was anything but sullen.
Bellgrove, holding his gown at the height of his shoulders and at the same time both leaning backwards from the hips and thrusting his head forward and downwards so that the blunt end of his long chin rested in the capacious pit of his neck like an egg in an egg-cup, raised his eyes to the ceiling.
‘As your headmaster,’ he said, ‘I felt it my bounden duty, in loco parentis, to have a word with you, my boy.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And to see how you were getting along. H’m.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Titus.
‘H’m,’ said Bellgrove. There were a few moments of rather awkward silence and then the headmaster, finding that the attitude which he had struck was putting too great a strain upon those muscles employed for its maintenance, sat down upon the chair and began unconsciously to work his long, proud jawbone to and fro, as though to test it for the toothache that had been so strangely absent for over five hours. Perhaps it was the unwonted relief of his long spell of normal health that caused a sudden relaxing of Bellgrove’s body and brain. Or perhaps it was Bellgrove’s innate simplicity, which sensed that in this particular situation (where a boy and a Headmaster equally ill at ease with the Adult Mind, sat opposite one another in the stillness) there was a reality, a world apart, a secret place to which they alone had access. Whatever it was, a sudden relaxing of the tension he had felt made itself manifest in a long, wheezing, horse-like sigh, and he stared across at Titus contemplatively, without wondering in the least whether his relaxed, almost slumped position in the chair, was of the kind that headmasters adopt. But when he spoke, he had, of course, to frame his sentences in that threadbare, empty way to which he was now a slave. Whatever is felt in the heart or the pit of the stomach, the old habits remain rooted. Words and gestures obey their own dictatorial, unimaginative laws; the ghastly ritual, that denies the spirit.
‘So your old headmaster has come to see you, my boy …’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Titus.
‘… Leaving his classes and his duties to cast his eye on a rebellious pupil. A very naughty pupil. A terrible child who, from what I can remember of his scholastic progress, has little cause to absent himself from the seats of learning.’
Bellgrove scratched his long chin ruminatively.
‘As your headmaster, Titus, I can only say that you make things a little difficult. What am I to do with you? H’m. What indeed? You have been punished. You are being punished: so I am glad to say that there is no need for us to trouble any more about that side of it; but what am I to say to you in loco parentis. I am an old man, you would say, wouldn’t you, my small friend? You would say I was an old man, wouldn’t you?’
‘I suppose so, sir.’
‘And as an old man, I should by now be very wise and deep, shouldn’t I, my boy? After all I have long white hair and a long black gown, and that’s a good start, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘Oh, well it is, my, boy. You can take it from me. The first thing you must procure if you are anxious to be wise and sagacious is a long black gown, and long white hair, and if possible a long jaw-bone, like your old headmaster’s.’
Titus didn’t think that the Professor was being very funny, but he threw his head back and laughed very loudly indeed, and thumped his hands on the side of his table.
A flush of light illumined the old man’s face. His anxiety fled from his eyes and hid itself where the deep creases and pits that honeycomb the skin of ancient men provided caves and gullies for its withdrawal.
It was so long since anyone had really laughed at anything he had said, and laughed honestly and spontaneously. He turned his big lion head away from the boy so that he could relax his old face in a wide and gentle smile. His lips were drawn apart in the most tender of snarls, and it was some while before he could turn his head about and return his gaze to the boy.
But at once the habit returned, unconsciously, and his decades of school-mastering drew his hands behind his back, beneath his gown, as though there were a magnet in the small of his back: his long chin couched itself in the pit of his neck; the irises of his eyes floated up to the top of t
he whites, so that in his expression there was something both of the drug-addict and the caricature of a sanctimonious bishop – a peculiar combination and one which generations of urchins had mimicked as the seasons moved through Gormenghast, so that there was hardly a spot in dormitory, corridor, classroom, hall or yard where at one time or another some child had not stood for a moment with his inky hands behind his back, his chin lowered, his eyes cast up to the sky, and, perhaps, an exercise book on top of his head by way of mortar-board.
Titus watched his headmaster. He had no fear of him. But he had no love for him either. That was the sad thing. Bellgrove, eminently lovable, because of his individual weakness, his incompetence, his failure as a man, a scholar, a leader or even as a companion, was nevertheless utterly alone. For the weak, above all, have their friends. Yet his gentleness, his pretence at authority, his palpable humanity were unable, for some reason or other, to function. He was demonstrably the type of venerable and absent-minded professor about whom all the sharp-beaked boys of the world should swarm like starlings in wheeling murmurations – loving him all unconsciously, while they twitted and cried their primordial jests, flung their honey-centred, prickle-covered verbiage to and fro, pulled at the long black thunder-coloured gown, undid with fingers as quick as adders’ tongues the buttons of his braces; pleaded to hear the ticking of his enormous watch of brass and rust red iron, with the verdigris like lichen on the chain; fought between those legs like the trousered stilts of the father of all storks; while the great, corded, limpish hands of the fallen monarch flapped out from time to time, to clip the ears of some more than venturesome child, while far above, the long, pale lion’s head turned its eyes to and fro in a slow, ceremonious rhythm, as though he were a lighthouse whose slowly swivelling beams were diffused and deadened in the sea-mists; and all the while, with the tassel of the mortar-board swinging high above them like the tail of a mule, with the trousers loosening at the venerable haunches, with the cat-calls and the thousand quirks and oddities that grow like brilliant weeds from the no-man’s-land of urchins’ brains – all the while there would be this love like a sub-soil, showing itself in the very fact that they trusted his lovable weakness, wished to be with him because he was like them irresponsible, magnificent with his locks of hair as white as the first page of a new copy-book, and with his neglected teeth, his jaw of pain, his completeness, ripeness, false-nobility, childish temper and childish patience; in a word, that he belonged to them; to tease and adore, to hurt and to worship for his very weakness’ sake. For what is more lovable than failure?