by Mervyn Peake
The feverish months of hauling up the stairways of Gormenghast all that was now congesting the upper storeys would be nothing to this regenerative labour that lay before the hierophants.
The fact that at some remote date the castle was likely to be cleaner than it had been for a millennium held little attraction for those who had never thought of the place in terms of cleanliness – had never imagined it could be anything but what it was.
That the flood had once threatened their very existence was forgotten. It was the labour that lay ahead that was appalling. And yet, the calm that had settled over Gormenghast had soothed away the rawness. Time lay ahead – soft and immeasurable. The work would be endless but it would not be frantic. The flood was descending. It had caused havoc, ruin, death, but it was descending. It was leaving behind it rooms full of mud and a thousand miscellaneous objects, sogged and broken; but it was descending.
Steerpike was dead. The fear of his whistling pebbles was no more. The multitudes moved without fear across the flat roof. The kitchen boys and the urchins of the castle dived from the windows and sported across the water, climbing the outcrops as they appeared above the surface, a hundred battling at a time to gain some island tower – new-risen from the blue.
Titus had become a legend; a living symbol of revenge. The long scar across his face was the envy of the castle’s youth, the pride of his mother – and his own secret glory.
The doctor had kept him in his bed for a month. His fever had mounted dangerously. For a week of high delirium the doctor fought for his life and hardly left his bedside. His mother sat in a corner of the room, motionless as a mountain. When at last he became conscious of what was happening around him and his forehead was cool again his mother withdrew. She had no idea what to say to him.
The descent of the waters continued at its own unhurried pace. The rooftops had become the castle’s habitat. The long flat summit of the western massives had now, after three centuries of neglect become a favourite promenade. There, the crowds would wander after sundown when their work was over, or lean upon the turrets to watch the sun sink over the flood. The roofs had come into their own. There, throughout the day, the traditional life of the place was, as far as possible, continued. The great Tomes of Procedure had been saved from the wreckage, and the Poet, now Master of Ceremonies, was ceaselessly at work. Extensive areas had been covered with shanties and huts of every description. The various strata of Gormenghast had been gradually drawn to such quarters as best suited their rank and occupation.
More and more of Gormenghast Mountain became visible. The high and jagged cone grew bigger every day. At sunrise with the thin beam slanting across it and lighting the trees and rocks and ferns, it was an island mad with birdsong. Noon brought the silence: the sun slid gently over the blue sky and was reflected in the water.
It was as though all that had happened over the last decade, all the violence, the intrigue, the passion, the love, the hate and the fear had need of rest and that now, with Steerpike dead, the castle was able at last to close its eyes for a while and enjoy the listlessness of convalescence.
EIGHTY
Day after day, night after night, this strange tranquillity swam through the realm. But it was the spirit that rested; not the body. There was no end to the coming and going, to the sheer manual labour and to all the innumerable activities that hinged upon the re-conditioning of the castle.
The tops of trees had begun to appear with all but their strongest branches broken. Fresh shapes of masonry lifted their heads above the surface. Expeditions were made to Gormenghast Mountain from whose slopes the castle could be seen to be recovering its familiar shape.
There, on the rocky slopes, not more than three hundred feet from the claw-like summit, Fuchsia had been buried on the day following Steerpike’s death.
She had been rowed by six men across the motionless flood in the most magnificent of the Carvers’ boats, a massive construction, with a sculptured prow.
The traditional catacomb of the Groan family, with its effigies of local stone had been fathoms under water and there had been no alternative but to bury the daughter of the Line, with all pomp, in the only earth available.
The Doctor, who had not dared to leave the young earl in his illness, had been unable to attend the ceremony.
The grave had been hacked out of the stony earth upon a sloping site, chosen by the Countess. She had battled her way to and fro across the dangerous ground in search of a place worthy to be her daughter’s resting place.
From this location the castle could be seen heaving across the skyline like the sheer sea-wall of a continent; a seaboard nibbled with countless coves and bitten deep with shadowy embayments. A continent, off whose shores the crowding islands lay; islands of every shape that towers can be; and archipelagos; and isthmuses and bluffs; and stark peninsulas of wandering stone – an inexhaustible panorama whose every detail was mirrored in the breathless flood below.
By the time that Titus had to a great extent recovered not only from the horror of the night, but from the effects of the nervous exhaustion that followed, a year had passed and Gormenghast was once again visible from top to bottom.
But it was dank and foul. It was no place to live in. After dark there was illness in every breath. Animals had been drowned in its corridors; a thousand things had decayed. The place was noxious. Only by day the swarms of the workmen, toiling indefatigably, kept the place inhabited.
The roofs had by now been deserted, and a gigantic encampment was spread abroad across the grounds and escarpments that surrounded the castle; a kind of shanty town had arisen, where huts, cabins, shacks and improvised constructions of great ingenuity made from mud, branches, strips of canvas, and all kinds of odd pieces of iron and stone from the castle, shouldered one another in a fantastic conglomeration.
And there, while the work proceeded, ever towards one end, that part of Gormenghast that was made of flesh and blood lived cheek by jowl.
The weather was almost monotonously beautiful. The winter was mild. A little rain came every few weeks, in the spring corn was grown on the higher and less water-logged slopes. Above the encircling encampments the great masonry wasted.
But while the ‘drying out’ of its myriad compartments and interstices proceeded and while this sense of peace lay over the scene, Titus, in contradiction to the prevailing atmosphere, grew, as his recovery became more complete, more and more restless.
What did he want with all this softness of gold light? This sense of peace? Why was he waking every day to the monotony of the eternal encampment; the eternal castle and the eternal ritual?
For the Poet was taking his work to heart. His high order of intelligence which had up till now been concentrated upon the creation of dazzling, if incomprehensible, structures of verbiage, was now able to deploy itself in a way which, if almost as incomprehensible, was at the same time of more value to the castle. The Poetry of Ritual had gripped him and his long wedge-shaped face was never without a speculative twist of the muscles – as though he were for ever turning over some fresh and absorbing variant of the problem of Ceremony and the human element.
This was as it should be. The Master of Ritual was, after all, the keystone of the castle’s life. But as the months passed Titus realized that he must choose between being a symbol, for ever toeing the immemorial line, or turn traitor in his mother’s eyes and in the eyes of the castle. His days were full of meaningless ceremonies whose sacredness appeared to be in inverse ratio to their comprehensibility or usefulness.
And all the time he was the apple of the castle’s eye. He could do no wrong – and there was honey to be tasted on the tongue, when the hierophants drew back from the rocky paths to let him pass and the children screamed his name excitedly from their shacks, or stared in big-eyed wonder at the avenger.
Steerpike had become an almost legendary monster – but here, alive and breathing, was the young earl who had fought him in the ivy. Here was the dragon-slayer.
She had risen to an occasion. The uprooting of Steerpike and the salvaging of the flooded castle.
Now she drew back into herself.
Her brain began to go to sleep again. She had lost interest in it and the things that it could do. It had been brought forth like a machine from the darkness and set in motion – and it had proved itself to be measured and powerful, like the progress of an army on the march. But it now chose to halt. It chose to sleep again. Her white cats and her wild birds had taken the place of the abstract values. She no longer reasoned. She no longer believed that Titus had meant what he had said. She connected it with his delirium. It was impossible to believe that he could have known that his words were heresy. He had craved for a kind of freedom disconnected from the life of his ancient home – his heritage – his birthright. What could that mean? She relapsed into a state of self-imposed darkness, lit only by green eyes and the bright backs of birds.
But Titus could no longer bear to think of the life that lay ahead of him with its dead repetitions, its moribund ceremonies. With every day that passed he grew more restless. He was like something caged. Some animal that longs to test itself; to try its own strength.
For Titus had discovered himself. The ‘Thing’, when she had died in the storm had killed his boyhood. The death of Flay had seasoned him. The drowning of Fuchsia had left a crater beneath his ribs. His victory over Steerpike had given him a kind of touchstone to his own courage.
The world that he pictured beyond the secret skyline – the world of nowhere and everywhere was necessarily based upon Gormenghast. But he knew that there would be a difference; and that there could be no other place exactly like his home. It was this difference that he longed for. There would be other rivers; and other mountains; other forests and other skies.
He was hungry for all this. He was hungry to test himself. To travel, not as an Earl but as a stranger with no more shelter than his naked name.
And he would be free. Free of his loyalties. Free of his home. Free of the maddening forms and ceremonies. Free to become something more than the last of the great Line. His longing to escape had been fanned by his passion for the ‘Thing’. Without her he would have never dared to do more than dream of insurrection. She had shown him by her independence how it was only fear that held people together. The fear of being alone and the fear of being different. Her unearthly arrogance and self-sufficiency had exploded at the very centre of his conventions. From the moment when he knew for certain that she was no figment of his fancy, but a creature of Gormenghast Forest, he had been haunted. He was still haunted. Haunted by the thought of this other kind of world which was able to exist without Gormenghast.
One evening, in the late spring, he climbed the slopes of Gormenghast Mountain and stood by his sister’s grave. But he did not remain there for long. gazing down at the small silent mound. He could only think what all men would have thought; that it was pitiful that one so vivid and full of love and breath should be rotting in darkness. To brood upon it would only be to call up horrors.
A light wind was blowing and the green hair of the grass was combed out all one way from the brow of the mound. A faint coral-coloured light filled the evening, and, like the rocks and the ferns about his feet, his face was lit with it.
His somewhat lank, pale brown hair was blown across his eyes which, when he lifted them from the mound and fixed them upon the towered massings of the castle, began to glitter with a strange excitement.
Fuchsia had left. She had finished with Gormenghast. She was in some other climate. The ‘Thing’ was dead. She also had taught him, by the least twist of her body in mid-air, that the castle was not all. Had he not been shown how wide was life? He was ready.
He stood there quite silently, but his fists were clenched and he pressed them against one another, knuckle to knuckle, as though to fight down the excitement that was accumulating in his breast.
His broad, rather pallid face was not that of any romantic youth. It was, in a way, very ordinary. He had no perfect feature. Everything seemed a little too big and subtly uneven. His lower lip was thrust a fraction forward of the upper and they were parted so that his teeth were just visible. His pale eyes, a stoneish blue with a hint of dim and sullen purple, were alone peculiar and even striking in their present animation.
His loose-limbed body, rather heavy, but strong and agile, was bent a little forward at the shoulders, with a kind of shrug. As a storm gathers its clouds together, so in his chest he felt a gathering as his thoughts fell into place and led one way, and his pulse-beat, as though underlining his will to rebel, throbbed at his wrists.
And all the while the sweet air swam about him, innocent, delicate, and a single cloud, like a slender hand floated over the castle as though to bless the towers. A rabbit emerged from the shadows of a fern and sat quite still upon a rock. Some insects sang thinly in the air, and suddenly close at hand a cricket scraped away on a single bowstring.
It seemed a strangely gentle atmosphere to surround the turmoil in Titus’ heart and mind.
He knew now that to postpone his act of treachery would make it no easier. What was he waiting for? No time would ever come when an atmosphere of sympathy, welling as it were out of the castle, would help him on his way, would say ‘Now is the Time to go’. Not a stone of the castle would own him from the moment he turned his back.
He descended the slopes, threading the trees of the foothills and came at last to the marshland paths and then after crossing the escarpment, approached the gate in the outer walls.
It was when he saw the great walls looming above him that he began to run.
He ran as though to obey an order. And this was so, though he knew nothing of it. He ran in the acknowledgement of a law as old as the laws of his home. The law of flesh and blood. The law of longing. The law of change. The law of youth. The law that separates the generations, that draws the child from his mother, the boy from his father, the youth from both.
And it was the law of quest. The law that few obey for lack of valour. The craving of the young for the unknown and all that lies beyond the tenuous skyline.
He ran, in the simple faith that in his disobedience was his inmost proof. He was no callow novice; no flighty child of some romance of sugar. He had no sweet tooth. He had killed and had felt the wide world rustle open from the ribs and the touch of death had set his hair on end.
He ran because his decision had been made. It had been made for him by the convergence of half-forgotten motives, of desires and reasons, of varied yet congruous impulses. And the convergence of all these to a focus point of action.
It was this that made him run as though to keep pace with his brain and his excitement.
He knew that he could not now turn back save in the very teeth of his integrity. His breath came quick and fast, and all at once he was among the shacks.
The sun was now upon the rim of the skyline. The rose-red light had deepened. The great encampment wore a strange beauty. A populace meandered through the wandering lanes and turned at his approach and made a path for him. The ragged children cried out his name, and ran to tell their mothers that they had seen the scar. Titus, drawn back suddenly into the world of reality, came to a halt. For some time he remained with his hands on his knees and his head dropped forward and then when he had regained his breath and had wiped the sweat from his brow, he walked rapidly to that part of the cantonment where a stockade had been built to surround the long shanty where the Countess lived.
Before he entered the stockade through the clumsy iron gate he motioned to some passing youths.
‘You will find the Master of the Stables,’ he
said, in his mother’s peremptory manner. ‘He should be with the horses in the west enclosure. Tell him to saddle the mare. He will know her. The grey mare with a white foot. He will bring her to the Tower of Flints. I will be there shortly.’
The youths touched their brows and disappeared into the gathering dusk. The moon was beginning to float up and from behind a broken tower.
As Titus was about to push open the iron gate he paused, turned on his heel, and set off into the heart of a town of looted floorboards. But he had no need to advance as far as the Professors’ quarters nor to turn east to where the Doctor’s hospital lifted its raw woodwork to the rising moon. For there ahead of him, and walking in his direction along the foot-worn track was the Headmaster, his wife and his brother-in-law, the Doctor.
They did not see him until he was close upon them. He knew they would wish to talk to him, but he knew he would not be able to make conversation, or even listen to them. He was out of key with normality. And so, before they knew what had happened, he reached out and simultaneously gripped the Doctor and the old Professor by their hands, and then releasing them he bowed a little awkwardly to Irma, before he turned on his heel and, to their amazement, began to walk rapidly away until he was lost to their sight in the thick of the dusk.
When he reached the stockade he made no pause but entered and told the man who stood outside the door of the long shanty to announce him.
He saw her at once as he entered. She was sitting at a table, a candle before her, and was gazing expressionlessly at a picture book.
‘Mother.’
She looked up slowly.
‘Well?’ she said.
‘I am going.’
She said nothing.
‘Good-bye.’
She got heavily to her feet and raising the candle and bringing it towards him she held it close to his face and fixed her eyes on his – and then, lifting her other hand, she traced the line of his scar very gently with her forefinger.