by Mervyn Peake
What was the death of a few hierophants at Steerpike’s hand compared with the stabbing of the castle’s very heart. The heart of Gormenghast was not its garrison – its transient denizens, but that invisible thing that had been wounded in their sight. As the cries rose and the swollen clouds pressed down, Titus, the last to move, turned his eyes to his mother’s with a sidelong sweep. Sick with excitement he rose gradually to his feet.
He alone, of all who had been so fundamentally affected by the profane insult to tradition, was affected for a reason of his own. The shock he had suffered was unique. He had not been drawn into the maelstrom of the general shock. He was alone in his unique excitement. At the first sight of that mercurial creature he was transported in a flash to an earlier day, a day which he had no longer believed in, and had relegated to the world of dreams: to a day when among the spectral oakwoods he had seen, or had thought he had seen, an air-borne figure with its small head turned away. It was so long ago. It had become no more than a fume of his mind – a vapour.
But it was she. There was no doubting that it had all been true. He had seen her before, when lost among the oakwood she had floated past like a leaf. And now again! Taller, of course, as he was taller. But no less fleet, no less uncanny.
He remembered how the momentary sight of her had awakened in him an awareness of liberty. But now! How much more so! The heat was terrible in the air, but his spine was icy with excitement.
He looked about him again, with an air of cunning quite out of character. Everything was as it was. His mother was still beside him, her big hands on the balustrade. The bonfire roared and spat red embers into the dark and stifling air. Someone in the crowd was shouting, ‘The Thing! The Thing!’ and another voice with dreadful regularity cried ‘Stone her! stone her!’ But Titus heard nothing of this. Moving gradually backwards step by step, he turned at last and in a few quick paces was in the room behind the balcony.
Then he began to run, his every step a crime. Through midnight corridors in any one of which the skewbald Steerpike might well have been lurking, he sped. His jaw ached with fear and excitement. His clothes stuck to his back and thighs. Turning and turning, sometimes losing himself, and sometimes colliding with the rough walls, he came at last to a flight of broad shallow steps that ran out into the open. A mile away to his right the light of the bonfire was reflected on the bulging clouds that hung above it like the ghostly bolsters of some beldam’s bed.
Ahead of him, Gormenghast Mountain and the widespread slopes of Gormenghast forest were hidden from his vision in the night, but he ran to them as a migratory bird flies blindly through the darkness to the country that it needs.
SIXTY-FIVE
His sense of supreme disobedience, rather than retarding his progress through the night, gave it impetus. He could feel the angry breath of retribution on the nape of his neck as he stumbled on. There was yet time for him to return but in spite of his hammering heart it never occurred to him to do so. He was propelled forward by his imagination having been stirred to its depths by the sight of her. He had not seen her face. He had not heard her speak. But that which over the years had become a fantasy, a fantasy of dreaming trees and moss, of golden acorns and a sprig in flight, was fantasy no longer. It was here. It was now. He was running through heat and darkness towards it; to the verity of it all.
But his body was profoundly tired. The sickening heat was something to be fought against and at last when within a mile of the foothills he fell to his knees and then onto his side, where he lay soaked in perspiration, his flushed face in his arms.
But his mind did not rest. His mind was still running and stumbling along. A thousand times as he lay with his eyes closed, he saw her take the ivy-covered wall with that maddening beauty of flight; effortless, and overweeningly arrogant, her small bragging head, turned away from him, and perched so exquisitely upon the neck – the whole thing floating in his mind with a kind of aerial ease.
A hundred times he saw her as he lay and a hundred times he turned restlessly from side to side, while the sprite flew on and on and its legs like water-reeds appeared to trail in the body’s wake rather than cause the earthless speed of it.
And then he heard the hoarse voice of a cannon and before the heavy, tumbling echoes that followed it had ended he was on his feet again and running dangerously through the darkness, to where the high masses of Gormenghast Mountain arose in the sightless night. It was the single explosion that was the traditional warning of danger. He knew it meant that his disappearance had not only been discovered, but that his defiance of Gormenghast had been suspected by his mother.
When the time came for the three chosen carvings to be drawn up to the balcony and to be flourished before the crowd, he was no longer there. On top of the sickening heat and the terror of the swollen sky; on top of the fear of the beast of Gormenghast and of his roving catapult – on top of the unprecedented snatching of a carving from the flames, and the sight of the ‘Thing’ in their midst, there was now this unimaginable offence to the castle’s honour, to gall not only the hierophants but the carvers.
At first they had imagined that the young earl had fainted in the heat. This had occurred to the Poet, who with the permission of the Countess disappeared into the room at the rear of the balcony. But he found no sign of the boy. As the minutes passed the anger grew, and only the heaviness of the stifling night and the resulting weariness of the crowds prevented the indiscriminate violence that might easily have developed.
The acid of this dreadful night bit deep. Something fundamental to the life of Gormenghast had been affected and weakened.
At a time when a devil was loose and the whole energy of the place was concentrated upon his capture it was stupefying to find that the castle had been stabbed to the heart by the perfidy of its brightest symbol, the heir himself to the sacred masonry, the seventy-seventh earl.
This child of fate was climbing through the gloom; stumbling among the roots of trees, forcing his way through undergrowth, pressing fanatically onwards.
How he would find her when the sun rose over the mazes of the forest and played across the trackless expanses of Gormenghast Mountain, he had no idea. He simply believed that the power that drew him could not fail to show itself.
But a time came when he was so benighted that further progress was impossible. He was sufficiently far from the castle, sufficiently lost, to evade immediate capture. He knew that search parties were even now being organized and that the vanguard of those levies was probably already on its way. He knew also that the sending forth of a single searcher redounded in Steerpike’s favour. This would not be forgiven him.
Whether his absence would be associated with the sudden appearance of the ‘Thing’ he could not tell. Perhaps the coincidence was all too apparent. What he did know was that the sin to cap all sins would be for any member of the castle, let alone its rightful sovereign, to have the remotest association with an Outer Dweller – for the earl of Gormenghast to go in search of a daughter of that squalid cantonment and a bastard child at that. He knew from his mother downwards to the most obscure of her menials the conception of any such happening would be equally revolting. It would be worse than shameless treachery. It would be at the same time a defilement of the blood line.
He knew all this. But he could do nothing. He could only pretend, if ever he were caught, that the impending storm had affected his brain. But he could not alter anything. Something more fundamental than tradition had him in its grip. If he was caught he was caught. If they imprisoned him, or held him up for public contumely then that was what he deserved. If he was disinherited he had only himself to blame. He had slapped a god across its age-old face. It was so … it was so … but as the night-heat swaddled him in a near-sleep his thoughts were not of his mother’s mortification, of the castle’s peril, of his treachery or of his sister’s anxiety, but of a thing of fierce and shameless insolence – of a rebel like himself who gloried in it: of a rebel like a lyric in green flig
ht.
SIXTY-SIX
He awoke to the first crash of thunder. There was a shadowy light in the dark air that could only have come from some remote and cloud-choked sunrise. And as the thunder spoke the first of the great rain came.
The danger of it was at once apparent. This was no ordinary downpour. Even the first streaks from the sky were things that lashed and kicked the dust out of the ground with a vicious deliberation.
The air was like the air in an oven. Titus had leapt to his feet as though he had been prodded with a stick. The sky seethed and rumbled. The clouds yawned like hippopotami; deep holes or funnels, opening and closing, mouthlike, now here, now there.
He began to run again, climbing all the while through a kind of half-light. The forms of trees and rocks suddenly looming over him, forced him to turn to left and right in a sudden and jerky way, for it was not until he was upon them that they made themselves known.
His immediate object was to strike the fringe of the close-set trees of Gormenghast forest, for only beneath their boughs could he hope to shield himself from the rain. It hissed in the loose foliage about him which was no kind of shelter, even for this first flurry of the storm.
For all its initial violence there was yet no sense of hurry about the rain. It gave the impression of an endless reserve of sky-wide energy.
And as he stumbled on through the rain that spilled itself from the canopies of leaf above, a streak of lightning, like an outrider, lit up the terrain so that for a moment the world was made of nothing but wet steel.
And in that moment his eyes fled over the glittering landscape, and before the enormous gloom had settled again he had seen a pair of solitary pines on a hill of boulders, and he at once recognized the place, for one of the pines had been broken by the wind and was caught in the upper arms of its brother.
He had never climbed these pines nor stood in their shade nor heard the rustle of their needles; but they were more than familiar to him, for years ago he had stared at them every time he had emerged from the long tunnel – the tunnel that led from the Hollow Halls to within a mile of Mr Flay’s cave.
When he saw the pines in the lightning-flash his heart leapt. But the darkness came down again and it was at once apparent how difficult it would be not only to arrive at the pines but to strike off from them, with confidence, towards the tunnel mouth. To arrive at the pines would yet not be to come to any place where he had stood before. In the moment that he had recognized those trees he had also realized that the rest of the dazzling panorama was unknown to him. He had taken some strange path in the darkness.
But though it might well be difficult, even with the increasing light, to know exactly in which direction to move, when at last he should come to the pines (for it would of course be impossible to see the caveward mouth of the tunnel) yet it was useless to dwell upon the difficulties, and Titus, altering his direction, struck out across the wilderness of coarse grasses that were already under water. The churned ‘lake’ reached upwards to his ankles. It spouted all about him. What had been fierce streaks of rain were now no longer streaks. Nor even ropes. Each one was like pump-water or a tap turned to its full. And yet there was still the dreadful closeness in the air; although the tepid water, hammering him and streaming over his body mitigated the heat.
Beyond the soaking grasslands, and the alder copses, beyond the stony and grassless foothills where the big ponds were forming; beyond the old silver-mines and the gravel quarries; beyond all these in a district of harsher country than he had so far encountered, he came at last to a group of giant rocks.
By now the light had to some extent percolated through the clouds of black water and when he climbed upon the back of the largest of the rocks he was able to see the two pines, not away to his right, as he suspected they would be, but immediately ahead of him.
But there was no need for him to approach them further. He could not have found a better look-out station than the rock on which he stood. Nor was there any need for him to strain his eyes to find features in the landscape by which he could determine the position of the tunnel’s mouth. For there to the east, not a mile away, was that high line of trees that overhung the shelving masses of green-gravel, which, overgrown with every kind of vegetable life, descended step-like, to where among the valley rocks the small stream chattered, the stream which Flay had dammed, and which ran within a stone’s throw of what had been the exile’s cave.
With the dusky light of morning strengthening, the rain, through which it had been difficult to recognize any object, so solidly had it descended, began to lessen. There was no question of the rain wishing to rest itself; far less that the sky were running out of water. No, it was only that the clouds withdrew their claws into the black pads of the storm as a wild beast might draw in its talons for no other reason than to savour the contraction.
But still the rain came down. A body of water had been held in check, but there was no stopping the overflow. Titus no longer felt the rain. It was as though he had always lived in water.
He sat down on the rock, and like a fly in amber, was a prisoner of the morning. All about him on the flat head of the rock the rebounding rain threw up its short fierce fountains, and the hard slopes seethed with it. What was he doing here, soaked to the skin, far from his home? Why was he not frightened? Why was he not repentant and ashamed?
He sat there alone, his knees drawn up to his chin, his arms clasping his legs, how small a thing beneath those continents of gushing cloud.
He knew that it was no dream, but he had no power to override the dreamlike nature of it all. The reality was in himself – in his longing to experience the terror of what he already thought of as love.
He had heard of love: he had guessed at love: he had no knowledge of love but he knew all about it. What, if not love, was the cause of all this?
The head had been turned away. The limbs had floated. But it was not the beauty. It was the sin against the world of his fathers. It was the arrogance! It was the wicked swagger of it all! It was the effrontery! It was that Gormenghast meant nothing to this elastic switch of a girl!
But it was not only that she was so much the outward expression of all he meant by the word ‘Freedom’, or that the physical she and what she symbolized had become fused into one thing – it was not only this that intoxicated Titus – it was more than an abstract excitement that set his limbs trembling when he thought of her. He lusted to touch those floating limbs. She was romance to him. She was freedom. But she was more than these. She was a thing that breathed the same air and trod the same ground, though she might have been a faun or a tigress or a moth or a fish or a hawk or a martin. Had she been any of these she would have been no more dissimilar from him than she was now. He trembled at the thought of this disparity. It was not closeness or a sameness, or any affinity or hope of it, that thrilled him. It was the difference, the difference that mattered; the difference that cried aloud.
And still the rain came down, rapid and warm from the hot air it passed through. Titus’ eyes were on those trees that crowned the long hill in whose shadow was the cave. A few miles to the west, a huge blur showed where Gormenghast Mountain brooded. It was streaked with the vertical bars of the rain as though it were a beast in prison.
Titus got to his feet and made his way down the rock and all at once he felt frightened. Too much had happened to him in too short a time. It was the thought of the cave, and thence the thought of Flay and from the thought of Flay as he had first seen him in his cave then sprang the image of that faithful servant with a knife in his heart and the vile room where his Aunts lay side by side. And so the face of Steerpike swam across the lines of the rain, the terrible pattern of red and white, like the mask of some horror-dance, expanding and contracting, the shoulders very spare, very high, and for a hundred paces Titus was all but sick as he ran, and more than once he turned his head over his shoulder, and peered into the rain on either hand.
It was a long journey to the cave. Even had th
ere been no deluge he would have made for it. He thought of it as a centre from which he could move in the wilderness and to which he could return.
But when he reached it he was hesitant to enter. The old stone mouth gaped emptily. It was no longer as he remembered it. It was a deserted place.
Above the cave the hill arose tier upon streaming tier of shelving rock, the broken ledges thick with ferns and shrubs, and even trees that leaned out fantastically into space.
Titus stared up to where the upper heights were lost in the clouds but his eyes were almost at once drawn back to the cave mouth.
His head was a little lowered and thrust forward from his shoulders in a characteristic position that suggested that he was ready to butt whatever enemy might appear. His nondescript hair was black with the rain and clung across his face in streaks and rats’-tails.
The melancholy look of the entrance had for a moment dulled his excitement at seeing the place again. He stood about a dozen feet away from the mouth, and could see through the streaks of the rain the dark, dry tunnel that led to the spacious interior.
As he stood there, hesitant, his head forwards, his rain-heavy clothes clinging to his body like seaweed, it could be seen how much the last few months had changed him. His eyes were still as clear as spring water, with that glitter of wilfulness, but a frown had made a permanent groove above them. A nest of faint and shallow lines had formed between his eyes. The boyish proportions of his face were clear evidence that he was no more than his seventeen years, but the sombre expression which had become ever more typical of him was more to be expected in a person twice his age.
This darkness in his face was by no means the outcome of sad or tragic experience. He had had his times of loneliness, of fear, of frustration, and of late, of horror, but equally like any other child, he had had his carefree golden days, his laughter and his excitements. He was no cowed and mournful child of misfortune. He was, if anything, too much alive. Too much aware. It was that that had forced him, in the end, to wear a mask. To scowl at his school-friends, while at the same moment his heart would be beating wildly, and his imagination racing. To scowl because, by scowling he was left alone. And when he was alone he was able to brood by the hour upon his lot, to whip himself into unhealthy and self-indulgent fits of rebellion against his heritage and against the ritual that so hampered him, and conversely he was able to sit undisturbed at his desk while his thoughts flickered to and fro across the realm of Gormenghast, marvelling, as he did so, at all that it was, and how it was his mammoth legacy.