Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Spiregrain, Throd and Splint
Chapter Fourteen
Irma Wants a Party
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Chapter Eighty



ONE



I


Titus is seven. His confines, Gormenghast. Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it
were, on webs of ritual: for his ears, echoes, for his eyes, a labyrinth of
stone: and yet within his body something other--other than this umbrageous
legacy. For first and ever foremost he is child. A ritual, more compelling
than ever man devised, is fighting anchored darkness. A ritual of the blood;
of the jumping blood. These quicks of sentience owe nothing to his forbears,
but to those feckless hosts, a trillion deep, of the globe's childhood.

The gift of the bright blood. Of blood that laughs when the tenets mutter
"Weep'. Of blood that mourns when the sere laws croak "Rejoice!" O little
revolution in great shades!


Titus the seventy-seventh. Heir to a crumbling summit: to a sea of nettles:
to an empire of red rust: to rituals' footprints ankle-deep in stone.

Gormenghast.

Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers,
the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats;
a bird whistles; a freshet bears away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of
stone a doll's hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow
shifts its length. A spider stirs...

And darkness winds between the characters.


II


Who are the characters? And what has he learned of them and of his home since
that far day when he was born to the Countess of Groan in a room alive with
birds?

He has learned an alphabet of arch and aisle: the language of dim stairs and
moth-hung rafters. Great halls are his dim playgrounds: his fields are quad-
rangles: his trees are pillars.

And he has learned that there are always eyes. Eyes that watch. Feet that fol-
low, and hands to hold him when he struggles, to lift him when he falls. Upon
his feet again he stares unsmiling. Tall figures bow. Some in jewellery; some
in rags.

The characters.

The quick and the dead. The shapes, the voices that throng his mind, for there
are days when the living have no substance and the dead are active.

Who are these dead--these victims of violence who no longer influence the tenor
of Gormenghast save by a deathless repercussion? For ripples are still widening
in dark rings and a movement runs over the gooseflesh waters though the drowned
stones lie still. The characters who are but names to Titus, though one of them
his father, and all of them alive when he was born. Who are they? For the child
will hear of them.


III


Let them appear for a quick, earthless moment, as ghosts, separate, dissimilar
and complete. They are even now moving, as before death, on their own ground.
Is Time's cold scroll recoiling on itself until the dead years speak, or is it
in the throb of now that the spectres wake and wander through the walls?

There was a library and it is ashes. Let its long length assemble. Than its
stone walls its paper walls are thicker; armoured with learning, with philoso-
phy, with poetry that drifts or dances clamped though it is in midnight. Shield-
ed with flax and calfskin and a cold weight of ink, there broods the ghost of
Sepulchrave, the melancholy Earl, seventy-sixth lord of half-light.

It is five years ago. Witless of how his death by owls approaches he mourns
through each languid gesture, each fine-stoned feature, as though his body were
glass and at its centre a converted heart like a pendant tear.

His every breath a kind of ebb that leaves him further from himself, he floats
rather than steers to the island of the mad--beyond all trade-routes, in a dol-
drum sea, its high crags burning.


Of how he died Titus has no idea. For as yet he has not so much as seen, let
alone spoken to the long Man of the Woods, Flay, who was his father's servant
and the only witness of Sepulchrave's death when, climbing demented into the
Tower of Flints, the Earl gave himself up to the hunger of the owls.

Flay, the cadaverous and taciturn, his knee joints reporting his progress at
every spider-like step, he alone among these marshalled ghosts is still alive,
though banished from the castle. But so inextricably has Flay been woven into
the skein of the castle's central life, that if ever a man was destined to
fill in the gap of his own absence with his own ghost it is he.

For excommunication is a kind of death, and it is a different man who moves in
the woods from the Earl's first servant of seven years ago. Simultaneously,
then, as ragged and bearded he lays his rabbit snares in a gully of ferns, his
ghost is sitting in the high corridor, beardless, and long ago, outside his
master's door. How can he know that it will not be long before he adds, by his
own hand, a name to the roll of the murdered? All that he knows is that his
life is in immediate peril: that he is crying with every nerve in his long,
tense, awkward body for an end to this insufferable rivalry, hatred and ap-
prehension. And he knows that this cannot be unless either he or the gross
and pendulous horror in question be destroyed.


* * *


And so it happened. The pendulous horror, the chef of Gormenghast, floating
like a moon-bathed sea-cow, a long sword bristling like a mast from his huge
breast, had been struck down but an hour before the death of the earl. And
here he comes again in a province he has made peculiarly his own in soft and
ruthless ways. Of all ponderous volumes, surely the most illusory, if there's
no weight or substance in a ghost, is Abiatha Swelter, who wades in a slug-
like illness of fat through the humid ground mists of the Great Kitchen. From
hazy progs and flesh-pots half afloat, from bowls as big as baths, there
rises and drifts like a miasmic tide the all but palpable odour of the day's
belly-timber. Sailing, his canvas stretched and spread, through the hot mists
the ghost of Swelter is still further rarefied by the veiling fumes; he has
become the ghost of a ghost, only his swede-like head retaining the solidity
of nature. The arrogance of this fat head exudes itself like an evil sweat.


Vicious and vain as it is, the enormous ghost retreats a step to make way for
the phantom Sourdust on a tour of inspection. Master of Ritual, perhaps the
most indispensable figure of all, corner-stone and guardian of the Groan law,
his weak and horny hands are working at the knots of his tangled beard.As he
shambles forward, the red rags of his office fall about his bleak old body in
dirty festoons. He is in the worst of health, even for a ghost, coughing in-
cessantly in a dry, horrible manner, the black-and-white strands of his beard
jerking to and fro. Theoretically he is rejoicing that in Titus an heir has
been born to the House, but his responsibilities have become too heavy to
allow him any lightness of heart, even supposing he could ever have lured
into that stuttering organ so trivial a sensation. Shuffling from ceremony
to ceremony, his sere head raised against its natural desire to drop forward
on his chest and covered with as many pits and fissures as a cracked cheese,
he personifies the ancientry of his high office.

It was for his real body to die in the same fated library which now, in spec-
tre form, is housing the wraith of Sepulchrave. As the old master of Ritual
moves away and fades through the feverish air of Swelter's kitchen, he cannot
foresee or remember (for who can tell in which direction the minds of phantoms
move?) that filled to his wrinkled mouth with acrid smoke he shall die, or has
already died, by fire and suffocation, the great flames licking at his wrink-
led hide with red and golden tongues.

He cannot know that Steerpike burned him up: that his lordship's sisters, Cora
and Clarice, lit the fuse, and that from that hour on, his overlord, the sac-
rosanct earl, should find the road to lunacy so clear before him.


And lastly, Keda, Titus' foster-mother, moving quietly along a dappled corr-
idor of light and pearl-grey shadow. That she should be a ghost seems natural,
for even when alive there was something intangible, distant and occult about
her. To have died leaping into a great well of twilight air was pitiless e-
nough, but less horrible than the last moments of the Earl, the chef and the
decrepit master of ritual--and a swifter ending to life's gall than the ban-
ishment of the long man of the woods. As in those days, before she fled from
the castle to her death, she is caring for Titus as though all the mothers
who have ever lived advise her through her blood. Dark, almost lambent like a
topaz, she is still young, her sole disfigurement the universal bane of the
Outer Dwellers, the premature erosion of an exceptional beauty -- a deterio-
ration that follows with merciless speed upon an adolescence almost spectral.
She alone among these fate-struck figures is of that poverty-stricken and
intolerable realm of the ostracized, whose drear cantonment, like a growth
of mud and limpets, clamps itself to Gormenghast's outer wall.


The sun's rays searing a skein of cloud, burn with unhampered radiance
through a hundred windows of the Southern walls. It is a light too violent
for ghosts, and Keda, Sourdust, Flay, Swelter and Sepulchrave dissolve in
sunbeams.

These, then, in thumbnail, the Lost Characters. The initial few, who, dying,
deserted the hub of the castle's life before Titus was three. The future
hung on their activities. Titus himself is meaningless without them, for in
his infancy he fed on footsteps, on the patterns that figures made against
high ceilings, their hazy outlines, their slow or rapid movements, their
varying odours and voices.

Nothing that stirs but has its repercussions, and it may well be that Titus
will hear the echoes, when a man, of what was whispered then. For it was
no static assembly of personalities into which Titus was launched--no
mere pattern, but an arabesque in motion whose thoughts were actions, or
if not, hung like bats from an attic rafter or veered between towers on leaf-
like wings.



TWO



What of the living?

His mother, half asleep and half aware: with the awareness of anger, the de-
tachment of trance. She saw him seven times in seven years. Then she forgot
the halls that harboured him. But now she watches him from hidden windows.
Her love for him is as heavy and as formless as loam. A furlong of white cats
trails after her. A bullfinch has a nest in her red hair. She is the Countess
Gertrude of huge clay.

Less formidable, yet sullen as her mother and as incalculable, is Titus' sis-
ter. Sensitive as was her father without his intellect, Fuchsia tosses her
black flag of hair, bites at her childish underlip, scowls, laughs, broods,
is tender, is intemperate, suspicious, and credulous all in a day. Her crim-
son dress inflames grey corridors, or flaring in a sunshaft through high
branches makes of the deep green shadows a greenness darker yet, and a dark-
ness greener.

Who else is there of the direct blood-line? Only the vacant Aunts, Cora and
Clarice, the identical twins and sisters of Sepulchrave. So limp of brain
that for them to conceive an idea is to risk a haemorrhage. So limp of body
that their purple dresses appear no more indicative of housing nerves and
sinews than when they hang suspended from their hooks.

Of the others? The lesser breed? In order of social precedence, possibly the
Prunesquallors first, that is, the Doctor and his closely-swathed and bone-
protruding sister. The doctor with his hyena laugh, his bizarre and elegant
body, his celluloid face. His main defects? The unsufferable pitch of his
voice; his maddening laughter and his affected gestures. His cardinal vir-
tue? An undamaged brain.

His sister Irma. Vain as a child; thin as a stork's leg, and, in her black
glasses, as blind as an owl in daylight. She misses her footing on the so-
cial ladder at least three times a week, only to start climbing again, wrig-
gling her pelvis the while. She clasps her dead, white hands beneath her
chin in the high hope of hiding the flatness of her chest.

Who next? Socially, there is no one else. That is to say no one who, dur-
ing the first few years of Titus' life, plays any part that bears upon the
child's future: unless it be the poet, a wedge-headed and uncomfortable
figure little known to the hierophants of Gormenghast, though reputed to
be the only man capable of holding the earl's attention in conversation.
An all-but-forgotten figure in his room above a precipice of stone. No one
reads his poems, but he holds a remote status--a gentleman, as it were, by
rumour.

Blue blood aside, however, and a shoal of names floats forward. The lynch-
pin son of the dead Sourdust, by name Barquentine, Master of Ritual, is a
stunted and cantankerous pedant of seventy, who stepped into his father's
shoes (or, to be exact, into his shoe, for this Barquentine is a one-leg-
ged thing who smites his way through ill-lit corridors on a grim and echo-
ing crutch).

Flay, who has already appeared as his own ghost, is very much alive in
Gormenghast forest. Taciturn and cadaverous, he is no less than Barquen-
tine a traditionalist of the old school. But, unlike Barquentine, his
angers when the Law is flouted are uprisings of a hot loyalty that blinds
him, and not the merciless and stony intolerance of the cripple.


To speak of Mrs Slagg at this late juncture seems unfair. That Titus him-
self, heir to Gormenghast, is her charge, as was Fuchsia in her childhood,
is surely enough to place her at the head of any register. But she is so
minute, so frightened, so old, so querulous, she neither could, nor would,
head any procession, even on paper. Her peevish cry goes out: "Oh, my weak
heart! how could they?" and she hurries to Fuchsia either to smack the ab-
stracted girl in order to ease herself, or to bury the wrinkled prune of
her face in Fuchsia's side. Alone in her small room again, she lies upon
her bed and bites her minute knuckles.

There is nothing frightened or querulous about young Steerpike. If ever he
had harboured a conscience in his tough narrow breast he had by now dug out
and flung away the awkward thing--flung it so far away that were he ever
to need it again he could never find it.

The day of Titus' birth had seen the commencement of his climb across the
roofs of Gormenghast and the end of his servitude in Swelter's kitchen--that
steaming province which was both too unpleasant and too small to allow for
his flexuous talents and expanding ambition.

High-shouldered to a degree little short of malformation, slender and adroit
of limb and frame, his eyes close-set and the colour of dried blood, he is
still climbing, not now across the back of Gormenghast but up the spiral
staircase of its soul, bound for some pinnacle of the itching fancy--some
wild, invulnerable eyrie best known to himself; where he can watch the world
spread out below him, and shake exultantly his clotted wings.


Rottcodd is fast asleep in his hammock at the far end of the hall of the
Bright Carvings, that long attic room that houses the finest examples of the
Mud Dwellers' art. It is seven years since he watched from the attic window
the procession far below him wind back from Gormenghast lake, where Titus
had come into his Earldom, but nothing has happened to him during the long
years apart from the annual arrival of fresh works to be added to the col-
oured carvings in the long room.

His small cannon-ball of a head is asleep on his arm and the hammock is
swaying gently to the drone of a vinegar-fly.



THREE



About the rough margins of the castle life--margins irregular as the coast-
line of a squall-rent island, there were characters that stood or moved grad-
ually to the central hub. They were wading out of the tides of limitless neg-
ation--the timeless, opaque waters. Yet what are these that set foot on the
cold beach? Surely so portentous an expanse should unburden itself of gods
at least; scaled kings, or creatures whose outstretched wings might darken
two horizons. Or dappled Satan with his brow of brass.

But no. There were no scales or wings at all.

It was too dark to see them where they waded; although a blotch of shadow,
too big for a single figure, augured the approach of that hoary band of Pro-
fessors, through whose hands for a while Titus will have to wriggle.

But there was no veil of half-light over the high-shouldered young man who
was entering a small room rather like a cell that opened from a passageway
of stones as dry and grey and rough as an elephant's hide. As he turned at
the doorway to glance back along the corridor, the cold light shone on the
high white lump of his brow.

As soon as entered he closed the door behind him and slid the bolt. Sur-
rounded by the whiteness of the walls he appeared, as he moved across the
room, weirdly detached from the small world surrounding him. It was more
like the shadow of a young man, a shadow with high shoulders, that moved
across whiteness, than an actual body moving in space.

In the centre of the room was a simple stone table. Upon it, and grouped
roughly at its centre, were a whorl-necked decanter of wine, a few sheafs
of paper, a pen, a few books, a moth pinned to a cork, and half an apple.

As he moved past the table he removed the apple, took a bite and replaced
it without slackening his pace, and then suddenly looked for all the world
as though his legs were shrinking from the ground up, but the floor of the
room sloped curiously and he was on his way down a decline in the floor
that sank to a curtain-hung opening in the wall.

He was through this in a moment, and the darkness that lay beyond took him,
as it were, to herself, muffling the edges of his sharp body.

He had entered a disused chimney at the ground level. It was very dark, and
this darkness was not so much mitigated as intensified by a series of little
shining mirrors that held the terminal reflections of what was going on in
those rooms which, one above the other, flanked the high chimney-like funnel
that rose from where the young man stood in the darkness to where the high
air meandered over the weather-broken roofs, which, rough and cracked as
stale bread, blushed horribly in the prying rays of sundown.

Over the course of the last year, he had managed to gain entrance to these
particular rooms and halls, one above the other, which flanked the chimney,
and had drilled holes through the stone-work, wood and plaster--no easy work
when the knees and back are strained against the opposite walls of a light-
less funnel--so that the light pierced through to him in his funnel'd dark-
ness from apertures no wider than coins. These drilling operations had, of
course, to be carried out at carefully chosen times, so that no suspicion
should be aroused. Moreover, the holes had as nearly as possible to be
drilled at selected points, so as to coincide with whatever natural advan-
tages the rooms might hold.

Not only had he carefully selected the rooms which he felt it would be worth
his while watching from time to time either for the mere amusement of eaves-
dropping for its own sake--or for the furtherance of his own designs.

His methods of disguising the holes which might so easily have been detected
if badly positioned, were varied and ingenious, as for example in the chamber
of the ancient Barquentine, Master of Ritual. This room, filthy as a fox's
earth, had upon its right-hand wall a blistered portrait in oils of a rider
on a piebald horse, and the young man had not only cut a couple of holes in
the canvas immediately beneath the frame where its shadow lay like a long
black ruler, but he had cut away the rider's buttons, the pupils of his eyes
as well as those of the horse's. These circular openings at their various
heights and latitudes afforded him alternative views of the room according
to where Barquentine chose to propel his miserable body on that dreaded
crutch of his. The horse's eye, the most frequently used of the apertures,
offered a magnificent view of a mattress on the floor on which Barquentine
spent most of his leisure moments, knotting and re-knotting his beard, or
sending up clouds of dust every time he raised and let fall his only leg,
a withered one at that, in bouts of irritation. In the chimney itself, and
immediately behind the holes, a complicated series of wires and mirrors
reflected the occupants of the de-privatized rooms and sent them down the
black funnel, mirror glancing to mirror, and carrying the secrets of each
action that fell within their deadly orbit--passing them from one to anot-
her, until at the base a constellation of glass provided the young man with
constant entertainment and information.

In the darkness he would turn his eyes, for instance, from Craggmire, the
acrobat, who crossing his apartment upon his hands might frequently be seen
tossing from the sole of one foot to the sole of the other a small pig in
a green nightdress--would turn his eyes from this diversion to the next
mirror which might disclose the Poet, tearing at a loaf of bread with his
small mouth, his long wedge of a head tilted at an angle, and flushed with
the exertion, for he could not use both hands--one being engaged in writ-
ing; while his eyes (so completely out of focus that they looked as though
they'd never get in again) were more spirit than anything corporeal.

But from the young man's point of view there were bigger fish than these--
which were, with the exception of Barquentine, no more than the shrimps of
Gormenghast--and he turned to mirrors more deadly, more thrilling: mirrors
that reflected the daughter of the Groans herself--the strange raven-haired
Fuchsia and her mother, the Countess, her shoulders thronged with birds.



FOUR


I


One summer morning of bland air, the huge, corroding bell-like heart of
Gormenghast was half asleep and there appeared to be no reverberation from
its muffled thudding. In a hall of plaster walls the silence yawned.

Nailed above a doorway of this hall a helmet or casque, red with rust, gave
forth into the stillness a sandy and fluttering sound, and a moment later
the beak of a jackdaw was thrust through an eye-slit and withdrawn. The
plaster walls arose on every side into a dusky and apparently ceilingless
gloom, lit only by a high, solitary window. The warm light that found its
way through the web-choked glass of this window gave hint of galleries yet
further above but no suggestion of doors beyond, nor any indication of how
these galleries could be reached. From this high window a few rays of sun-
light, like copper wires, were strung steeply and diagonally across the
hall, each one terminating in its amber pool of dust on the floorboards.
A spider lowered itself, fathom by fathom, on a perilous length of thread
and was suddenly transfixed in the path of a sunbeam and, for an instant,
was a thing of radiant gold.

There was no sound, and then--as though timed to break the tension, the
high window was swung open and the sunbeams were blotted out, for a hand
was thrust through and a bell was shaken. Almost at once there was a sound
of footsteps, and moment later a dozen doors were opening and shutting,
and the hall was thronged with the criss-crossing of figures.

The bell ceased clanging. The hand was withdrawn and the figures were
gone. There was no sign that any living thing had ever moved or breathed
between the plaster walls, or that the many doors had ever opened, save
that a small whitish flower lay in the dust beneath the rusting helmet,
and that a door was swinging gently to and fro.


II


As it swung, broken glimpses were obtained of a whitewashed corridor that
wound in so slow and ample a curve that by the time the right-hand wall
had disappeared from view the roof of the passageway appeared no more
than the height of an ankle from the ground.

This long, narrowing, ash-white perspective, curving with the effortless
ease of a gull in air, was suddenly the setting for action. For something,
hardly distinguishable as a horse and rider until it had cantered a full
third of the long curve to the deserted hall, was rapidly approaching.
The sharp clacking of hooves was all at once immediately behind the swing-
ing door, which was pushed wide by the nose of a small grey pony.

Titus sat astride.

He was dressed in the coarse, loosely fitting garments that were worn by
the castle children. For the first nine years of his life the heir to the
Earldom was made to mix with, and attempt to understand the ways of, the
lower orders. On his fifteenth birthday such friendships as he had struck
would have to cease. His demeanour would have to change and a more aus-
tere and selective relationship with the personnel of the castle would
take its place. But it was a tradition that in the early years, the child
of the Family must, for certain hours, at least, of every day, be as the
less exalted children, feed with them, sleep in their dormitories, at-
tend with them the classes of the Professors, and join in the various
time-honoured games and observances like any other minor. Yet for all
that, Titus was conscious of always being watched: of a discrepancy in
the attitude of the officials and even at times of the boys. He was too
young to understand the implications of his status, but old enough to
sense his uniqueness.

Once a week, before the morning classes, he was allowed to ride his grey
horse for an hour beneath the high southern walls, where the early sun
would send his fantastic shadow careering along the tall stones at his
side. And when he waved his arm, his shadowself on a shadow-horse would
wave its huge shadow-arm as they galloped together.

But today, instead of trotting away to his beloved southern wall he had,
in a moment of devilment, turned his horse through a mossblack arch and
into the castle itself. In the still silence his heart beat rapidly as he clat-
tered along stone corridors he had never seen before.

He knew that it would not be worth his while to take French leave of the
morning classes, for he had been locked up more than once during the
long summer evenings for such acts of disobedience. But he tasted the
sharp fruits of the quick bridle-wrench which had freed him from the
ostler. It was only for a few minutes that he was alone, but when he
came to a halt in the high plaster-walled hall, with the rusting helmet
above him, and far above the helmet the dim mysterious balconies, he
had already dulled his sudden itch for rebellion.

Small though he looked on the grey, there was something commanding in
the confident air with which he sat the saddle--something impressive
in his childish frame, as though there was a kind of weight there, or
strength--a compound of spirit and matter; something solid that under-
lay the whims, terrors, tears and laughter and vitality of his seven
+years.

By no means good-looking, he had, nevertheless, this presence. Like his
mother, there was a certain scale about him, as though his height and
breadth bore no relation to the logic of feet and inches.

The ostler entered the hall, slow, shuffling, hissing gently, a perpe-
tual habit of his whether grooming a horse or not, and the grey pony
was at once led away in the direction of the school-rooms to the west.

Titus watched the back of the ostler's head as he was led along but said
nothing. It was as though what had just occurred was something they had
rehearsed many times before, and that there was no need for comment. The
child had known this man and his hissing, which were as inseparable as a
rough sea from the sound that it makes, for little more than a year, when
the grey was given him at a ceremony known as "The Pony Giving', a cere-
mony that took place without fail on the third Friday after the sixth
birthday of any son of the Line who was also, by reason of his father's
death, an earl in his minority. But for all this length of time--and fif-
teen months was a considerable span for a child who could only remember
with any distinctness his last four years--the ostler and Titus had ex-
changed not more than a dozen sentences. It was not that they disliked
one another, the ostler merely preferring to give the boy pieces of stolen
seed-cake to making any effort at conversation, and Titus quite content to
have it so, for the ostler was to him simply the shuffling figure who took
care of his pony, and it was enough to know his mannerisms, the way his
feet shuffled, the white scar above his eye, and to hear him hissing.

Within an hour the morning classes were under way. At an ink-stained desk,
with his chin cupped in his hands, Titus was contemplating, as in a dream,
the chalk marks on the blackboard. They represented a sum in short division,
but might as well have been some hieroglyphic message from a moonstruck
prophet to his lost tribe a thousand years ago. His mind, and the minds of
his small companions in that leather-walled school-room, was far away, but
in a world, not of prophets, but of swopped marbles, birds' eggs, wooden
daggers, secrets and catapults, midnight feasts, heroes, deadly rivalries
and desperate friendships.



FIVE



Fuchsia was leaning on her window-sill and staring out over the rough roofs
below her. Her crimson dress burned with the peculiar red more often found
in paintings than in Nature. The window-frame, surrounding not only her but
the impalpable dusk behind her, enclosed a masterpiece. Her stillness accen-
tuated the hallucinatory effect, but even if she were to have moved it would
have seemed that a picture had come to life rather than that a movement had
taken place in Nature. But the pattern did not alter. The inky black of her
hair fell motionlessly and gave infinite subtlety to the porous shadow-land
beyond her, showing it for what it was, not so much a darkness in itself as
something starved for sunbeams. Her face, throat and arms were warm and tawny,
yet seemed pale against her red dress. She stared down, out of this picture,
at the world below her--at the north cloisters, at Barquentine, heaving his
miserable and vicious body forwards on his crutch, and cursing the flies that
followed him as he passed across a gap between two roofs and disappeared from
sight.

Then she moved, suddenly turning about at a sound behind her and found Mrs
Slagg looking up at her. In her hands the midget held a tray weighted with a
tumbler of milk and a bunch of grapes.

She was peeved and irritable, for she had spent the last hour searching for
Titus, who had outgrown the fussings of her love. "Where is he? Oh, where is
he?" she had whimpered, her face puckered up with anxiety and her weak legs,
like twigs, that were forever tottering from one duty to another, aching.
"Where is his wickedness, that naughty Earl of mine? God help my poor weak
heart! Where can he be?"

Her peevish voice raised thin echoes far above her as though, in hall after
hall, she had awakened nests of fledgelings from their sleep.

"Oh, it's you," said Fuchsia, throwing a lock of hair from her face with a
quick jerk of her hand. "I didn't know who it was."

"Of course, it's me! Who else could it be, you stupid? Who else ever comes in
your room? You ought to know that by now, oughtn't you? Oughtn't you?"

"I didn't see you," said Fuchsia.

"But I saw you--leaning out of the window like a great heavy thing--and never
listening though I called you and called you and called you to open the door.
Oh, my weak heart!--it's always the same--call, call, call, with no one to an-
swer. Why do I trouble to live?" She peered at Fuchsia. "Why should I live for
you? Perhaps I'll die tonight," she added maliciously, squinting at Fuchsia a-
gain. "Why don't you take your milk?"

"Put it on the chair," said Fuchsia, "I'll have it later--and the grapes. Thank
you. Goodbye."

At Fuchsia's peremptory dismissal, which had not been meant unkindly, abrupt as
it had sounded, Mrs Slagg's eyes filled with tears. But ancient, tiny and hurt
though she was, her anger rose again like a miniature tempest, and instead of
her usual peevish cry of "Oh, my weak heart! how could you?" she caught hold of
Fuchsia's hand and tried to bend back the girl's fingers and, failing, was about
to try and bite her ladyship's arm when she found herself being carried to the
bed. Denied of her little revenge, she closed her eyes for a few moments, her
chicken bosom rising and falling with fantastic rapidity. When she opened her
eyes, the first thing she saw was Fuchsia's hand spread out before her and, ris-
ing on one elbow, she smacked at it again and again until exhausted, when she
buried her wrinkled face in Fuchsia's side.

"I'm sorry," said the girl. "I didn't mean Goodbye in that way. I only meant
that I wanted to be left alone."

"Why?" (Mrs Slagg's voice was hardly audible, so closely was her face pressed
into Fuchsia's dress.) "Why? why? why? Anyone would think I got in your way.
Anyone would think I didn't know you inside out. Haven't I taught you everything
since you were a baby? Didn't I rock you to sleep, you beastly thing? Didn't I?"
She raised her old tearful face to Fuchsia. "Didn't I?"

"You did," said Fuchsia.

"Well, then!" said Nanny' Slagg. "Well, then!" And she crawled off the bed and
made her descent to the ground.

"Get off the counterpane at once, you thing, and don't stare at me! Perhaps I'll
come and see you tonight. Perhaps. I don't know. Perhaps I don't want to." She
made for the door, reached for the handle and was within a few moments alone once
more in her small room, where with her red-rimmed eyes wide open, she lay upon her
bed like a discarded doll.

Fuchsia, with the room to herself, sat down in front of a mirror that had smallpox
so badly at its centre that in order to see herself properly she was forced to peer
into a comparatively unblemished corner. Her comb, with a number of its teeth miss-
ing, was eventually found in a drawer below the mirror when, just as she was about
to start combing her hair--a performance she had but lately taken to--the room dark-
ened, for half the light from her window was suddenly obscured by the miraculous a-
ppearance of the young man with high shoulders.

Before Fuchsia had had a moment to ponder how any human being could appear on her
window-sill a hundred feet above the ground--let alone recognize the silhouette--
she snatched a hair brush from the table before her and brandished it behind her
head in readiness for she knew not what. At a moment when others might have scream-
ed or shrunk away, she had showed fight--with what at that startling moment might
have been a bat-winged monster for all she knew. But in the instant before she
flung the brush she recognized Steerpike.

He knocked with his knuckle on the lintel of the window.

"Good afternoon, madam," he said. "May I present my card?" And he handed Fuchsia a
slip of paper bearing the words:

"His Infernal Slyness, the Arch-fluke Steerpike."

But before Fuchsia had read it she had begun to laugh in her short, breathless way,
at the mock-solemn tone of his "Good afternoon,
madam." It had been so perfectly ponderous.

But until she had motioned him to descend to the floor of the room--and she had no
alternative--he had not moved an inch in that direction, but stood, with his hands
clasped and his head cocked on one side. At her gesture he suddenly came to life a-
gain, as though a trigger had been touched, and within a moment had unknotted a rope
from his belt and flung the loose end out of the window, where it dangled. Fuchsia,
leaning out of the window, gazed upwards and saw the rest of the rope ascending the
seven remaining storeys to a ragged roof, where presumably it was attached to some
turret or chimney.

"All ready for my return," said Steerpike. "Nothing like rope, madam. Better than a
horse. Climbs down a wall whenever you ask it, and never needs feeding."

"You can leave off “Madaming” me," said Fuchsia, somewhat loudly, and to Steer-
pike's surprise. "You know my name."

Steerpike, rapidly swallowing, digesting and purging his irritation, for he never
wasted his time by mouthing his set-backs, seated himself on a chair in the reverse
direction and placed his chin on the chair back.

"I will never forget," he said, "to always call you by your proper name, and in a
very proper tone of voice, Lady Fuchsia."

Fuchsia smiled vaguely, but she was thinking of something else.

"You are certainly one for climbing," she said at last. "You climbed to my attic--do
you remember?"

Steerpike nodded.

"And you climbed up the library wall when it was burning. It seems very long ago."

"And the time, if I may say so, Lady Fuchsia, when I climbed through the thunderstorm
and over the rocks with you in my arms."

It was as though all the air had been suddenly drawn from the room, so deathly silent
and thin had the atmosphere become. Steerpike thought he could detect the faintest
tinge of colour on Fuchsia's cheekbones.

At last he said: "One day, Lady Fuchsia, will you explore with me the roofs of this
great house of yours? I would like to show you what I have found, away to the south,
your Ladyship, where the granite domes are elbow-deep in moss."

"Yes," she replied, "yes...' His sharp, pallid face repelled her, but she was attract-
ed by his vitality and air of secrecy. She was about to ask him to leave, but he was
on his feet before she could speak and had jumped through the window without touching
its frame, and was swinging to and fro on the jerking rope before he started swarming
it, hand over hand, on his long, upward climb to the ragged roof above.


When Fuchsia turned from the window she found upon her rough dressing-table a single
rosebud.


As he climbed Steerpike remembered how the day of Titus' birth seven years previously
had seen the commencement of his climb across the roofs of Gormenghast and the end of
his servitude in Swelter's kitchen. The muscular effort required accentuated the hunch-
ing of his shoulders. But he was preternaturally nimble and revelled no less in physi-
cal than in mental tenacity and daring. His penetrating close-set eyes were fixed upon
that point to which his rope was knotted as though it were the zenith of his fancy.

The sky had darkened, and with the rising of a swift wind came the driven rain. It hiss-
ed and spouted in the masonry. It found a hundred natural conduits where it slid. Air-
shafts, flues and blowholes coughed with echoes, and huge flumes muttered. Lakes formed
among the roofs, where they reflected the sky as though they had been there forever like
waters in the mountains.

With the rope neatly coiled about his waist, Steerpike ran like a shadow across an acre
of sloping slates. His collar was turned up. His white face was bearded with the rain.

High, sinister walls, like the walls of wharves, or dungeons for the damned, lifted into
the watery air or swept in prodigious arcs of ruthless stone. Lost in the flying clouds
the craggy summits of Gormenghast were wild with straining hair--the hanks of the drenc-
hed rock-weed. Buttresses and outcrops of unrecognizable masonry loomed over Steerpike's
head like the hulks of mouldering ships, or stranded monsters whose streaming mouths and
brows were the sardonic work of a thousand tempests. Roof after roof of every gradient
rose or slid away before his eyes; terrace after terrace shone dimly below him through
the rain, their long-forgotten flagstones dancing and hissing with the downpour.

A world of shapes fled past him, for he was as fleet as a cat and he ran without pause,
turning now this way, now that, and only slackening his pace when some more than normal-
ly hazardous cat-walk compelled. From time to time as he ran he leaped into the air as
though from excess of vitality. Suddenly, as he rounded a chimney-stack, black with drip-
ping ivy, he dropped to walking-pace and then, ducking his head beneath an arch, he fell
to his knees and hauled up, with a grating of hinges, a long-forgotten skylight. In a
moment he was through and had dropped into a small empty room twelve feet beneath. It was
very dark. Steerpike uncoiled himself of the rope and looped it over a nail in the wall.
Then he glanced around the dark room. The walls were covered with glass-fronted show-
cases, filled with every kind of moth. Long thin pins impaled these insects to the cork
lining of each box, but careful as the original collector must have been in his handling
and mounting of the delicate things, yet time had told, and there was not a case without
its damaged moth, and the floors of most of the little boxes smouldered with fallen wings.

Steerpike turned to the door, listening a moment, and then opened it. He had before him
a dusty landing, and immediately on his left a ladder leading down to yet another empty
room, as forlorn as the one he had just left. There was nothing in it except a great
pyramidal stack of nibbled books, its dark interstices alive with the nests of mice.
There was no door to this room, but a length of sacking hung limply over a fissure in
the wall, which was broad enough for Steerpike to negotiate, moving sideways. Again
there were stairs, and again there was a room, but longer this time, a kind of gal-
lery. At its far end stood a stuffed stag, its shoulders white with dust.

As he crossed the room he saw through the corner of his eye, and framed by a glass-
less window, the sinister outline of Gormenghast Mountain, its high crags gleaming a-
gainst a flying sky. The rain streamed through the window and splashed on the boards,
so that little beads of dust ran to and fro on the floor like globules of mercury.

Reaching the double door, he ran his hands through his dripping hair and turned down
the collar of his coat; and then, passing through and veering to the left, followed
a corridor for some way before he reached a stairhead.

No sooner had he peered over the banisters than he started back, for the Countess of
Groan was passing through the lamp-lit room below. She seemed to be wading in white
froth, and the hollow rooms behind Steerpike reverberated with a dull throbbing, a
multitudinous sound, the echo of the genuine ululation which he could not hear, the
droning of the cats. They passed from the hall below like the ebbing of a white tide
through the mouth of a cave, at its centre, a rock that moved with them, crowned
with red seaweed.

The echoes died. The silence was like a stretched sheet. Steerpike descended rapidly
to the room below and made to the east.

The Countess walked with her head bowed a little and her arms akimbo. There was a
frown on her brow. She was not satisfied that the immemorial sense of duty and obser-
vance was universally held sacrosanct in the wide network of the castle. Heavy and
abstracted as she seemed, yet she was as quick as a snake to detect danger, and though
she could not put a finger, as it were, on the exact area of her doubt, she was nev-
ertheless suspicious, wary and revengeful of she knew not exactly what.

She was turning over all the fragments of knowledge which might relate to the myster-
ious burning of her late husband's library, to his disappearance and to the disap-
pearance of his chef. She was using almost for the first time, a naturally powerful
brain--a brain that had been purred to sleep for so long by her white cats that it
was difficult at first for her to awaken it.

She was on her way to the Doctor's house. She had not visited him for several years,
and on the last occasion it was only to have him attend to the broken wing of a wild
swan. He had always irritated her, but against her own inclination she had always
felt a certain peculiar confidence in him.

As she descended a long flight of stone stairs, the undulating tide at her feet had
become a cascade in slow motion. At the foot of the stairs she stopped.

"Keep... close... keep... close... together," she said aloud, using her words like stepping-
stones--a noticeable gap between each, which in spite of the depth and huskiness of
her voice had something childlike in its effect.

The cats were gone. She stood on solid earth again. The rain thrummed outside a lead-
ed window. She walked slowly to the door that opened upon a line of cloisters. Through
the arches she saw the Doctor's house on the far side of a quadrangle. Walking out
into the rain as though it were not there, she moved through the downpour with a mon-
umental and unhurried measure, her big head lifted.



SIX


I


Prunesquallor was in his study. He called it his "study'. To his sister, Irma, it was
a room in which her brother barricaded himself whenever she wished to talk to him about
anything important. Once within and the door locked, the chain up and the windows bolt
-ed, there was very little she could do save beat upon the door.

This evening Irma had been more tiresome than ever. What was it, she had inquired,
over and over again, which prevented her from meeting someone who could appreciate
and admire her? She did not want him, this hypothetical admirer, necessarily to dedi-
cate his whole life to her, for a man must have his work--(as long as it didn't take
too long)--mustn't he? But if he was wealthy and wished to dedicate his life to her--
well, she wouldn't make promises, but would give the proposal a fair hearing. She had
her long, unblemished neck. Her bosom was flat, it was true, and so were her feet, but
after all a woman can't have everything. "I move well, don't I, Alfred?" she had cried
in a sudden passion. "I say, I move well?"

Her brother, whose long pink face had been propped on his long white hand, raised his
eyes from the tablecloth on which he had been drawing the skeleton of an ostrich. His
mouth opened automatically into something that had more of a yawn than a smile about it,
but a great many teeth were flashed. His smooth jaws came together again, and as he look-
ed at his sister he pondered for the thousandth time upon the maddening coincidence of
being saddled with such a sister. It being the thousandth time, he was well practised,
and his ponder lasted no more than a couple of rueful seconds. But in those seconds he
saw again the stark idiocy of her thin, lipless mouth, the twitching fatuity of the skin
under her eyes, the roaring repression that could do no more than bleat through her voice;
the smooth, blank forehead (from which the coarse, luxuriant masses of her iron-grey hair
were strained back over her cranium, to meet in the compact huddle of a bun as hard as a
boulder)--that forehead which was like the smoothly plastered front of an empty house,
deserted save by the ghost of a birdlike tenant which hopped about in the dust and preen-
ed its feathers in front of tarnished mirrors.

"Lord! Lord!" he thought, "why, out of all the globe's creatures, should I, innocent of
murder, be punished in this way?"

He grinned again. This time there was nothing of the yawn left in the process. His jaws
opened out like a crocodile's. How could any human head contain such terrible and dazzl-
ing teeth? It was a brand-new graveyard. But oh! how anonymous it was. Not a headstone
chiselled with the owner's name. Had they died in battle, these nameless, dateless, den-
tal dead, whose memorials, when the jaws opened, gleamed in the sunlight, and when the
jaws met again rubbed shoulders in the night, scraping an ever closer acquaintance as
the years rolled by? Prunesquallor had smiled. For he had found relief in the notion
that there were several worse things imaginable than being saddled with his sister met-
aphorically, and one of them was that he should have been saddled with her in all its
literal horror. For his imagination had caught a startlingly vivid glimpse of her upon
his back, her flat feet in the stirrups, her heels digging into his flanks as, career-
ing round the table on all fours with the bit in his mouth and with his haunches being
cross-hatched with the flicks of her whip, he galloped his miserable life away.

"When I ask you a question, Alfred--I say when I ask you a question, Alfred, I like
to think that you can be civil enough, even if you are my brother, to answer me in-
stead of smirking to yourself."

Now if there was one thing that the doctor could never do it was to smirk. His face
was the wrong shape. His muscles moved in another way altogether.

"Sister mine," he said, "since thus you are, forgive, if you can, your brother. He
waits breathlessly your answer to his question. It is this, my turtle-dove. What did
you say to him? For he has forgotten so utterly that were his death dependent on it,
he would be forced to live--with you, his fruit-drop, with you alone."

Irma never listened beyond the first five words of her brother's somewhat involved
periods, and so a great many insults passed over her head. Insults, not vicious in
themselves, they provided the Doctor with a form of verbal self-amusement without
which he would have to remain locked in his study the entire time. And, in any case,
it wasn't a study, for although its walls were lined with books, it held nothing else
beyond a very comfortable arm-chair and a very beautiful carpet. There was no
writing-desk. No paper or ink. Not even a waste-paper basket.

"What was it you asked me, flesh of my flesh? I will do what I can for you."

"I have been saying, Alfred, that I am not without charm. Nor without grace, or in-
tellect. Why is it I am never approached? Why do I never have advances made to me?"

"Are you speaking financially?" asked the doctor.

"I am speaking spiritually, Alfred, and you know it. What have others got that I
haven't?"

"Or conversely," said Prunesquallor, "what haven't they got that you already have?"

"I don't follow you, Alfred. I said I don't follow you."

"That's just what you do do," said her brother, reaching out his arms and flutter-
ing his fingers. "And I wish you'd stop it."

"But my deportment, Alfred. Haven't you noticed it? What's wrong with your sex--
can't they see I move well?"

"Perhaps we're too spiritual," said Doctor Prunesquallor.

"But my carriage! Alfred, my carriage!"

"Too powerful, sweet white-of-egg, far too powerful; you lurch from side to side of
life's drear highway: those hips of yours rotating as you go. Oh, no, my dear one,
your carriage scares them off, that's what it does. You terrify them, Irma."

This was too much for her.

"You've never believed in me!" she cried, rising from the table, and a dreadful
blush suffusing her perfect skin. "But I can tell you' -- her voice rose to a shrill
scream--"that I'm a lady! What do you think I want with men? The beasts! I hate them.
Blind, stupid, clumsy, horrible, heavy, vulgar things they are. And you're one of
them!" she screamed, pointing at her brother, who, with his eyebrows raised a little,
was continuing with his drawing of the ostrich from where he had left off. "And you
are one of them! Do you hear me, Alfred, one of them!"

The pitch of her voice had brought a servant to the door. Unwisely, he had opened it,
ostensibly to ask whether she had rung for him, but in reality to see what was going
on.

Irma's throat was quivering like a bowstring.

"What have ladies to do with men?" she screamed; and then, catching sight of the face
of the servant at the door, she plucked a knife from the table and flung it at the
face. But her aim was not all it might have been, possibly because she was so involv-
ed in being a lady, and the knife impaled itself on the ceiling immediately above her
own head, where it gave a perfect imitation of the shuddering of her throat.

The doctor, adding with deliberation the last vertebra to the tail of the skeleton os-
trich, turned his face firstly to the door, where the servant, his mouth hanging open,
was gazing spellbound at the shuddering knife.

"Would you be so kind as to remove your redundant carcass from the door of this room,
my man," he said, in his high, abstracted voice; "and keep it in the kitchen, where it
is paid to do this and that among the saucepans, I believe... would you? No one rang
for you. Your mistress' voice, though high, is nothing like the ringing of a bell...
nothing at all."

The face withdrew.

"And what's more," came a desperate cry from immediately below the knife, "he never
comes to see me any more! Never! Never!"

The doctor rose from the table. He knew she was referring to Steerpike, but for whom
she would probably never have experienced the recrudescence of this thwarted passion
which had grown upon her since the youth had first dispatched his flattering arrows at
her all too sensitive heart.

Her brother wiped his mouth with a napkin, brushed a crumb from his trousers, and
straightened his long, narrow back.

"I'll sing you a little song," he said. "I made it up in the bath last night, ha! ha!
ha! ha!--a whimsy little jangle, I tell myself--a whimsy little jangle."

He began to move round the table, his elegant white hands folded about one another.
"It went like this, I fancy...' But as he knew she would probably be deaf to what he
recited, he took her glass from beside her plate and--"A little wine is just what you
need, Irma dear, before you go to bed--for you are going straight away, aren't you, my
spasmic one, to Dreamland--ha, ha, ha! where you can be a lady all night long."

With the speed of a professional conjurer he whipped a small packet from his pocket
and, extracting a tablet, dropped it into Irma's glass. He decanted a little wine into
the glass and handed it to her with the exaggerated graciousness which seldom left him.
"And I will take some myself," he said, "and we will drink to each other."

Irma had collapsed into a chair, and her long marmoreal face was buried in her hands.
Her black glasses, which she wore to protect her eyes from the light, were at a rakish
slant across her cheek.

"Come, come, I am forgetting my promise!" cried the doctor, standing before her, very
tall, slender and upright, with that celluloid head of his, all sentience and nervous
intelligence, tilted to one side like a bird's.

"First a quaff of this delicious wine from a vineyard beneath a brooding hill--I can
see it so clearly--and you, O Irma, can you see it, too? The peasants toiling and
sweating in the sun--and why? Because they have no option, Irma. They are desperately
poor, and their bowed necks are wry. And the husbandmen, like every good husband, tend-
ing his love--stroking the vines with his horny hand, whispering to them, coaxing them,
O little grapes,” he whispers, “give up your wine. Irma is waiting.” And here it is;
here it is, ha, ha,ha, ha! Delicious and cold and white, in a cut-glass goblet. Toss
back your coif and quaff, my querulous queen!"

Irma roused herself a little. She had not heard a word. She had been in her own pri-
vate hell of humiliation. Her eyes turned to the knife in the ceiling. The thin line
of her mouth twitched, but she took the glass from her brother's outstretched hand.

Her brother clinked his glass against hers and, duplicating the movement of his arm,
she raised her own automatically and drank.

"And now for the little jingle which I threw off in that nonchalant way of mine. How
did it go? How did it go?"

Prunesquallor knew that by the third verse the strong, tasteless soporific which had
dissolved in her wine would begin to take effect. He sat on the floor at her knees
and, quelling a revulsion, he patted her hand.

"Queen bee," he said, "look at me, if you can. Through your midnight spectacles. It
shouldn't be too dreadful--for one who had fed on horrors. Now, listen..." Irma's
eyes were already beginning to close.

"It goes like this, I think. I called it The Osseous 'Orse."

　　　　　　Come, flick the ulna juggler-wise
　　　　　　And twang the tibia for me!
　　　　　　O Osseous 'orse, the future lies
　　　　　　Like serum on the sea.

　　　　　　Green fields and buttercups no more
　　　　　　Regale you with delight, no, no!
　　　　　　The tonic tempests leap and pour
　　　　　　Through your white pelvis ever so.

"Are you enjoying it, Irma?" She nodded sleepily.

　　　　　　Come, clap your scapulae and twitch
　　　　　　The pale pagoda of your spine,
　　　　　　Removed from life's eternal itch
　　　　　　What need for iodine?

　　　　　　The Osseous 'orse sat up at once
　　　　　　And clanged his ribs in biblic pride.
　　　　　　I fear I looked at him askance
　　　　　　Though he had naught to hide...

　　　　　　No hide at all... just...

At this point the doctor, having forgotten what came next, turned his eyes once
more to his sister Irma; she was fast asleep. The doctor rang the bell.

"Your mistress's maid; a stretcher; and a couple of men to handle it." (A face
had appeared in the doorway.) "And be rapid." The face withdrew.

When Irma had been put to bed and her lamp had been turned low and silence swam
through the house, the doctor unlocked the door of his study, entered and sank back
into his arm-chair. His friable-looking elbows rested upon the padded arms. His
fingers were twined together into a delicate bunch, and on this bunch he supported
his long and sunken jaw. After a few moments he removed his glasses and laid them
on the arm of his chair. Then, with his fingers clasped together once again beneath
his chin, he shut his eyes and sighed gently.



SEVEN



But he was not destined to more than a few moments of relaxation, for feet were
soon to be heard outside his window. Only two of them, it was true, but there was
something in the weight and deliberation of the tread that reminded him of an army
moving in perfect unison, a dread and measured sound. The rain had quietened and
the sound of each foot as it struck the ground was alarmingly clear.

Prunesquallor could recognize that portentous gait among a million. But in the sil-
ence of the evening his mind flew to the phantom army it awakened in his leap-frog-
ging brain. What was there in the clockwork stepping of an upright host to contract
the throat and bring, as does the thought of a sliced lemon, that sharp astringency
to throat and jaw? Why do the tears begin to gather? And the heart to thud?

He had no time to ponder the matter now, so at one and the same time he tossed a mop
of grey thatch from his brow and anarmy-on-the-march from his mind.

Reaching the door before his bell could clang the servants into redundance he opened
it, and to the massive figure who was about to whack the door with her fist --

"I welcome your Ladyship," he said. His body inclined itself a little from the hips
and his teeth flashed, while he wondered what, in the name of all that was heterodox,
the Countess thought she was doing in visiting her physician at this time of night.
She visited nobody, by day or night. That was one of the things about her. Neverthe-
less, here she was.

"Hold your horses." Her voice was heavy, but not loud.

One of Doctor Prunesquallor's eyebrows shot to the top of his forehead. It was a
peculiar remark to be greeted with. It might have been supposed that he was about
to embrace her. The very notion appalled him.

But when she said: "You can come in now," not only did his other eyebrow fly up his
forehead, but it set its counterpart a-tremble with the speed of its uprush.

To be told he could "come in now' when he was already inside was weird enough; but
the idea of being given permission to enter his own house by a guest was grotesque.

The slow, heavy, quiet authority in the voice made the situation even more embar-
rassing. She had entered his hall. "I wish to see you," she said, but her eyes were
on the door which Prunesquallor was closing. When it had barely six inches to go
before the night was locked out and the latch had clicked--"Hold!" she said, in a
rather deeper tone, "hold hard!" And then, with her big lips pursed like a child's,
she gave breath to a long whistle of peculiar sweetness. A tender and forlorn note
to escape from so ponderous a being.

The doctor, as he turned to her, was a picture of perplexed inquiry, though his teeth
were still shining gaily. But as he turned something caught the corner of his eye.
Something white. Something that moved.

Between the space left by the all-but-closed door, and very close to the ground,
Doctor Prunesquallor saw a face as round as a hunter's moon, as soft as fur. And
this was no wonder, for it was a face of fur, peculiarly blanched in the dim light
of the hall. No sooner had the Doctor reacted to this face than another took its
place, and close upon it, silent as death, came a third, a fourth, a fifth...In
single file there slid into the hall, so close upon each other's tails that they
might have been a continuous entity, her ladyship's white clowder.

Prunesquallor, feeling a little dizzy, watched the undulating stream flow past his
feet as he stood with his hand on the doorknob. Would they never end? He had watched
them for over two minutes.

He turned to the Countess. She stood in coiling froth like a lighthouse. By the
dim glow of the hall lamp her red hair threw out a sullen light.

Prunesquallor was perfectly happy again. For what had irked him was not the cats,
but the obscure commands of the Countess. Their meaning was now self-evident. And
yet, how peculiar to have enjoined a swarm of cats to hold their horses!

The very thought of it got hold of his eyebrows again, which had lowered themselves
reluctantly while he waited for his chance to close the door, and they had leapt up
his forehead as though a pistol had been cracked and a prize awaited the fastest.

"We're... all... here," said the Countess. Prunesquallor turned to the door and
saw that the stream had, indeed, run dry. He shut the door.

"Well, well, well, well!" he trilled, standing on his toes and fluttering his hands,
as though he were about to take off like a fairy. "How delightful! how very, very
delightful that you should call, your Ladyship. God bless my ascetic soul! if you
haven't whipped the old hermit out of his introspection. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! And
here, as you put it, you all are. There's no doubt about that, is there? What a
party we will have! Mewsical chairs and all! ha ha ha ha ha ha ha."

The almost unbearable pitch of his laughter created an absolute stillness in the
hall. The cats, sitting bolt upright, had their round eyes fixed on him.

"But I keep you waiting!" he cried, "Waiting in my outer rooms! Are you a mere val-
etudinarian, my dear Ladyship, or some prolific mendicant whose bewitched off-
spring she hopes I can return to human shape? Of course you are not, by all that's
evident, so why should you be left in this cold--this damp--this obnoxious hell
of a hall, with the rain pouring off you in positive waterfalls... and so... and
so, if you'll allow me to lead on...'--he waved a long, thin, delicate arm with
as white a hand on the end of it, which fluttered like a silk flag -- "... I'll
throw a few doors open, Light a lamp or two, flick away a few crumbs in readi-
ness for... What wine shall it be?"

He began to tread his way to the sitting-room with a curious flicking movement
of the feet.

The Countess followed him. The servants had cleared the table of the supper dish-
es and the room had been left with so serene a composure about it that it was
hard to believe that it was but a short while ago in this same room that Irma
had disgraced herself.

Prunesquallor flung wide the door of the sitting-room for the Countess to pass
through. He flung it with a spectacular abandon: it seemed to imply that if
the door broke, or the hinges snapped, or a picture was jerked off the wall,
what of it? This was his house; he could do what he liked with it. If he chose
to jeopardize his belongings, that was his affair. This was an occasion when
such meagre considerations would only enter the minds of the vulgar.

The Countess advanced down the centre of the room and then stopped. She star-
ed about her abstractedly--at the long lemonyellow curtain, the carved furni-
ture, the deep green rug, the silver, the ceramics, the pale grey-and-white
stripes of the wallpaper. Perhaps her mind reverted to her own candle-smell-
ing, bird-filled, half-lit chaos of a bedroom, but there was no expression on
her face.

"Are... all... your... rooms... like... this...?" she muttered. She had just
seated herself in a chair.

"Well, let me see," said Prunesquallor. "No, not exactly, your Ladyship...
not exactly."

"I... suppose... they're... spotless. Is... that it... eh?"

"I believe they are; yes, yes, I quite believe they are. Not that I see more
than five or six of them during the course of a year; but what with the ser-
vants flitting here and there with dusters and brooms, and clanking their
buckets and wringing things out--and what with my sister Irma flitting after
them to see that the right things are wrung and the wrung things are right,
I have no doubt that we are all but sterilized to extinction: no tartar on
the banisters: not a microbe left to live its life in peace."

"I see," said the Countess. It was extraordinary how damning those two words
sounded. "But I have come to talk to you."

For a moment she stared about her ruminatively. The cats, with not a whisker
moving, were everywhere in the room. The mantelpiece was heraldic with them.
The table was a solid block of whiteness. The couch was a snowdrift. The car-
pet was sewn with eyes.

Her ladyship's head, which always seemed far bigger than any human head had
a right to be, was turned away from the doctor and down a little, so that her
powerful throat was tautened: yet ample along the near side. Her profile was
nearly hidden by her cheek. Her hair was built up, for the most part, into
a series of red nests and for the rest smouldered as it fell in snakelike
coils to her shoulders, where it all but hissed.

The doctor twirled about on his narrow feet and flung open a silkwood cabinet
door with a grandiose flourish, bringing his long white hands together be-
neath his chin and tossing a mop of grey hair from his forehead. He flashed
his brilliant teeth at the Countess (who was still presenting him with her
shoulder and about an eighth of her face), and then with eyebrows raised --

"Your Ladyship," he said, "that you should decide to visit me, and to discuss
some subject with me, is an honour. But first what will you drink?"

The doctor in flinging open the door of his cabinet had revealed as rare
and delicately chosen a group of wines as he had ever selected from his cel-
lar.

The Countess moved her great head through the air.

"A jug of goat's milk, Prunesquallor, if you please," she said.

What there was in the doctor that loved beauty, selectivity, delicacy and ex-
cellence--and there was a good deal in him that responded to these abstract-
ions--shrank up like the horn of a snail and all but died. But his hand,
which was poised in the air and was halfway to the trapped sunlight of a
long-lost vineyard, merely fluttered to and fro as though it was conducting
some gnomic orchestra, while he turned about, apparently in full control
of himself. He bowed, and his teeth flashed. Then he rang the bell, and
when a face appeared at the door --

"Have we a goat?" he said. "Come, come, my man--yes or no. Have we, or have-
n't we, a goat?"

The man was positive that they had no such thing.

"Then you will find one, if you please. You will find one immediately. It is
wanted. That will do."

The Countess had seated herself. Her feet were planted apart and her heavy
freckled arms were along the sides of her chair. In the silence that follow-
ed even Prunesquallor could think of nothing to say. The stillness was even-
tually broken by the voice of the Countess.

"Why do you have knives sticking in your ceiling?"

The doctor recrossed his legs and followed her impassive gaze which was fix-
ed on the long bread-knife that suddenly appeared to fill the room. A knife
in the fender, on a pillow, or under a chair is one thing, but a knife sur-
rounded by the blank white wasteland of a ceiling has no shred of covering--
is as naked and blatant as a pig in a cathedral.

But any subject was fruitful to the doctor. It was only a lack of material,
a rare enough contingency in him, that he found appalling. "That knife,
your ladyship," he said, giving the implement a glance of the deepest res-
pect, "bread-knife though it be, has a history. A history, madam! It has
indeed."

He turned his eyes to his guest. She waited impassively.

"Humble, unromantic, ill-proportioned, crude as it looks, yet it means much
to me. Indeed, madam, it is so, and I am no sentimentalist. And why? you
will be asking yourself. Why? Let me tell you all."

He clasped his hands together and raised his narrow and elegant shoulders.

"It was with that knife, your ladyship, that I performed my first success-
ful operation. I was among mountains. Huge tufted things. Full of character;
but no charm. I was alone with my faithful mule. We were lost. A meteor flew
overhead. What use was that to us? No use at all. It merely irritated us.
For a moment it showed a track through the fever-dripping ferns. It was ob-
viously the wrong one. It would only have taken us back to a morass we had
just spent half a day struggling out of. What a sentence! What a vile sen-
tence, your Ladyship, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! Where was I? Ah, yes! Plunged in
darkness. Miles from anywhere. What happened next? The strangest thing. Prod-
ding my mule forward with my walking-cane--I was riding the brute at the
time--it suddenly gave a cry like a child and began to collapse under me.
As it subsided it turned its huge hairy head and what little light there
was showed me its eyes were positively imploring me to free it from some a-
gony or other. Now agony is an agonizing thing to happen to anyone, your La-
dyship, but to locate the seat of the agony in a mule in the darkness of a
mountainous and fever-dripping night is--er... not easy (Lytotis), ha, ha,
ha! But do something I must. It was already upon its side in the darkness--
the great thing. I had leapt from its collapsing spine and at once my fac-
ulties began to do their damndest. The brute's eyes, still fixed on mine,
were like lamps that were running out of oil. I put a couple of questions
to myself--pertinent ones, I felt at the time--and still do; and the first
was: IS the agony spiritual or physical? If the former, the darkness wouldn't
matter, but the treatment would be tricky. If the latter, the darkness
would be hell: but the problem was in my province -- or very nearly. I
plumped for the latter, and more by good fortune or that curious sixth sense
one has when alone with a mule, among tufted mountains, I found almost at
once it to have been a happy guess: for directly I had decided to work on a
carnal basis I got hold of the mule's head, heaved it up, and swivelled it
to such an angle that by the glow of its eyes I was able to illumine--faint-
ly, of course, but to illumine, none the less--with a dull glow, the rest
of its body. At once I was rewarded. It was a pure case of "foreign body".
Coiled -- I couldn't tell you how many times--round the beast's hind leg,
was a python! Even at that ghastly and critical moment I could see what
a beautiful thing it was. Far more beautiful than my old brute of a mule.
But did it enter my head that I should transfer my allegiance to the rep-
tile? No. After all, there is such a thing as loyalty as well as beauty.
Besides, I hate walking, and the python would have taken some riding, your
Ladyship: the very saddling would tax a man's patience. And besides..."

The doctor glanced at his guest and immediately wished he hadn't. Taking
out his silk handkerchief, he wiped his brow. Then he flashed his teeth,
and with somewhat less ebullience in his voice... "It was then that I
thought of my bread-knife," he added. For a moment there was silence.
And then, as the doctor filled his lungs and was ready to continue --

"How old are you?" said the Countess. But before Doctor Prunesquallor
could readjust himself there was a knock at the door and the servant
entered with a goat .

"Wrong sex, you idiot!" As the Countess spoke she rose heavily from her
chair and, approaching the goat, she fondled its head with her big hands.
It strained towards her on the rope leash and licked her arm.

"You amaze me," said the doctor to the servant. "No wonder you cook
badly. Away, my man, away! Unearth yet another, and get the gender
right, for the love of mammals! Sometimes one wonders what kind of a
world one is living in--by all things fundamental, one really does."

The servant disappeared.

"Prunesquallor," said the Countess, who had moved to the window and was
staring out across the quadrangle.

"Madam?" queried the doctor.

"I am not easy in my heart, Prunesquallor."

"Your heart, madam?"

"My heart and my mind."

She returned to her chair, where she seated herself again and laid her
arms along the padded sides as before.

"In what way, your Ladyship?" Prunesquallor's voice had lost its face-
tious vapidity.

"There is mischief in the castle," she replied. "Where it is I do not
know. But there is mischief." She stared at the doctor.

"Mischief?" he said at last. "Some influence, do you mean--some bad in-
fluence, madam?"

"I do not know for sure. But something has changed. My bones know it.
There is someone."

"Someone?"

"An enemy. Whether ghost or human I do not know. But an enemy. Do you
understand?"

"I understand," said the doctor. Every vestige of his waggery had dis-
appeared. He leaned forward. "It is not a ghost," he said. "Ghosts have
no itch for rebellion."

"Rebellion!" said the Countess loudly. "By whom?"

"I do not know. But what else can it be you sense, as you say, in your
bones, madam?"

"Who would dare to rebel?" she whispered, as though to herself. "Who
would dare?...' And then, after a pause: "Have you your suspicions?"

"I have no proof. But I will watch for you. For, by the holy angels,
since you have brought the matter up there is evil abroad and
no mistake."

"Worse," she replied, "worse than that. There is perfidy."

She drew a deep breath and then, very, slowly: "... and I will crush
its life out: I will break it: not only for Titus' sake and for his
dead father's, but more--for Gormenghast."

"You speak of your late husband, madam, the revered Lord Sepulchrave.
Where are his remains, madam, if he is truly dead?"

"And more than that, man, more than that! What of the fire that warped
his brilliant brain? What of that fire in which, but for that youth
Steerpike...' She lapsed into a thick silence.

"And what of the suicide of his sisters; and the disappearance of the
chef on the same night as his Lordship your husband--and all within a
year, or little more: and since then a hundred irregularities and
strange affairs? What lies at the back of all this? By all that's
visionary, madam, your heart has reason to be uneasy."

"And there is Titus," said the Countess.

"There is Titus," the doctor repeated as quick as an echo.

"How old is he now?"

"He is nearly eight." Prunesquallor raised his eyebrows. "Have you not
seen him?"

"From my window," said the Countess, "when he rides along the South
Wall."

"You should be with him, your Ladyship, now and then," said the doctor.
"By all that's maternal, you really should see more of your son."

The Countess stared at the doctor, but what she might have replied
was stunned for ever by a rap at the door and the reappearance of the
servant with a nannygoat.

"Let her go!" said the Countess.

The little white goat ran to her as though she were a magnet. She turn-
ed to Prunesquallor. "Have you a jug?"

The doctor turned his head to the door. "Fetch a jug," he said to the
disappearing face.

"Prunesquallor," she said, as she knelt down, a prodigious bulk in the
lamplight, and stroked the sleek ears of the goat, "I will not ask you
on whom your suspicions lie. No. Not yet. But I expect you to watch,
Prunesquallor--to watch everything, as I do. You must be all aware,
Prunesquallor, every moment of the day. I expect to be informed of het-
erodoxy, wherever it may be found. I have a kind of faith in you, man.
A kind of faith in you. I don't know why...' she added.

"Madam," said Prunesquallor, "I will be on tip-toe."

The servant came in with a jug, and retired.

The elegant curtains fluttered a little in the night air. The light of
the lamp was golden in the room, glimmering on the porcelain bowls, on
the squat cut-glass vases and the tall cloisonne ware: on the vellum
backs of books and the glazed drawings that hung upon the walls. But
its light was reflected most vividly from the countless small white
faces of the motionless cats. Their whiteness blanched the room and
chilled the mellow light. It was a scene that Prunesquallor never for-
got. The Countess on her knees by the dying fire: the goat standing
quietly while she milked it with an authority in the deft movement of
her fingers that affected him strangely. Was this heavy, brusque, un-
compromising Countess, whose maternal instincts were so shockingly ab-
sent: who had not spoken to Titus for a year: who was held in awe, and
even in fear, by the populace: who was more a legend than a woman--was
this indeed she, with the half-smile of extraordinary tenderness on her
wide lips?

And then he remembered her voice again, when she had whispered: "Who
would dare to rebel? Who would dare?" and then the full, ruthless organ-
chord of her throat: "And I will crush its life out! I will break it! Not only
for Titus' sake...'



EIGHT



Cora and Clarice, although they did not know it, were imprisoned in their
apartments. Steerpike had nailed and bolted from the outside all their
means of exit. They had been incarcerated for two years, their tongues
having loosened to the brink of Steerpike's undoing. Cunning and patient
as he was with them, the young man could find no other foolproof way of
ensuring their permanent silence on the subject of the library fire. No
other way--but one. They believed that they alone among the inhabitants
of the castle were free of a hideous disease of Steerpike's invention,
and which he referred to as "Weasel plague'.

The twins were like water. He could turn on or off at will the taps of
their terror. They were pathetically grateful that through his superior
wisdom they were able to remain in relative health. If a flat refusal to
die in the face of a hundred reasons why they should, could be called
health. They were obsessed by the fear of coming into contact with the
carriers. He brought them daily news of the dead and dying.

Their quarters were no longer those spacious apartments where Steerpike
first paid them his respects seven years ago. Far from them having a Room
of Roots and a great tree leaning over space hundreds of feet above the
earth, they were now on the ground level in an obscure precinct of the
castle, a dead end, a promontory of dank stone, removed from even the
less frequented routes. Not only was there no way through it, but it
was shunned also for reason of its evil reputation. Unhealthy with nox-
ious moisture, its very breath was double pneumonia.

Ironically enough, it was in such a place as this that the aunts rejoic-
ed in the erroneous belief that they alone could escape the virulent and
ghastly disease that was in their imaginations prostrating Gormenghast.
They had by now become so self-centred under Steerpike's guidance as to
be looking forward to the day when they, as sole survivors, would be able
(after due precautions) to pace forth and be at last, after all these
long years of frustration, the unopposed claimants to the Groan crown,
that massive and lofty symbol of sovereignty, with its central sapphire
the size of a hen's egg.

It was one of their hottest topics: whether the crown should be sawn in
half and the sapphire split, so that they could always be wearing at
least part of it, or whether it should be left intact and they should
wear it on alternate days.

Hot and contested though this subject was, it stirred no visible anima-
tion. Not even their lips were seen to move, for they had acquired the
habit of keeping them slightly parted and projecting their toneless voic-
es without a tremor of the mouth. But for most of the time their long,
solitary days were passed in silence. Steerpike's spasmodic appearances--
and they had become less and less frequent -- were, apart from their
wild, bizarre and paranoiac glimpses of a future of thrones and crowns,
their sole excitement.

How was it that their Ladyships Cora and Clarice could be hidden away
in this manner and the iniquity condoned?

It was not condoned; for two years previously they had been as far as
Gormenghast was concerned buried with a wealth of symbolism in the tombs
of the Groans, a couple of wax replicas having been modelled by Steer-
pike for the dread occasion. A week before these effigies were lowered
into the sarcophagus, a letter, as from the twins, but in reality forged
by the youth, had been discovered in their apartments. It divulged the
dreadful information that the sisters of the seventy-sixth Earl, who had
himself disappeared from the castle without a trace, bent upon their self-
destruction, had stolen by night from the castle grounds to make an end
of themselves among the ravines of Gormenghast Mountain.

Search parties, organized by Steerpike, had found no trace.

On the night previous to the discovery of the note, Steerpike had convey-
ed the Twins to the rooms which they now occupied upon some pretext con-
nected with an inspection of a couple of sceptres he had found and regild-
ed.

All this seemed a long time ago. Titus had been a mere infant. Flay but
lately banished. Sepulchrave and Swelter had melted into air. Like teeth
missing from the jaw of Gormenghast, the disappearance of the Twins, add-
ed to those others, gave to the Castle for a time an unfamiliar visage
and an aching bone. To some extent the wounds had healed and the change
of face had been accepted. Titus was, after all, alive and well--and the
continuation of the Family assured.

The Twins were sitting in their room, after a day of more than usual sil-
ence. A lamp, set on an iron table (it burnt all day), gave them sufficient
light to do their embroidery; but for some while neither of them applied
herself to her work.

"What a long time life takes!" said Clarice at last. "Sometimes I think
it's hardly worthy encroaching on."

"I don't know anything about encroaching," replied Cora; "but since you
have spoken I might as well tell you that you've forgotten something, as
usual."

"What have I forgotten?"

"You've forgotten that I did it yesterday and it is your turn today--thus."

"My turn to what?"

"To comfort me," said Cora, looking hard at a leg of the iron table. "You
can go on doing it until half-past seven, and then it will be your turn
to be depressed."

"Very well," said Clarice: and she began at once to stroke her sister's
arm.

"No, no, no!" said Cora, "don't be so obvious. Do things without any men-
tion--like getting tea, for instance, and laying it quietly before me."

"All right," answered Clarice, rather sullenly. "But you've spoilt it
now--haven't you? Telling me what to do. It won't be so thoughtful of
me, will it? But perhaps I could get coffee instead."

"Never mind all that," Cora replied, "you talk too much. I don't want to
suddenly find it's your turn."

"What! For my depression?"

"Yes, yes," her sister said irritably: and she scratched the back of her
round head.

"Not that I think you deserve one."

Their conversation was disturbed, for a curtain parted behind them and
Steerpike approached, a swordstick in his hand.

The Twins rose together and faced him, their shoulders touching.

"How are my lovebirds?" he said. He lifted his slender stick and, with
ghastly impudence, tickled their ladyships' ribs with its narrow ferruled
end. No expression appeared on their faces, but they went through the
slow, wriggling motions of Eastern dancers. A clock chimed from above the
mantelpiece, and as it ceased the monotonous sound of the rain appeared
to redouble its volume. The light had become very bad.

"You haven't been here for a long while," said Cora.

"How true," said Steerpike.

"Had you forgotten us?"

"Not a bit of it," he said, "not a bit of it."

"What happened, then?" asked Clarice.

"Sit down!" said Steerpike harshly, "and listen to me." He stared them
out of countenance until their heads dropped, abashed, and they found
themselves staring at their own clavicles. "Do you think it is easy for
me to keep the plague from your door and to be at your beck and call at
the same time? Do you?"

They shook their heads slowly like pendulums.

"Then have the grace not to interrogate me!" he cried in mock anger. "How
dare you snap at the hand that feeds you! How dare you!"

The Twins, acting together, rose from their chairs and started moving a-
cross the room. They paused a moment and turned their eyes to Steerpike
in order to make sure that they were doing what was expected of them.
Yes. The stern finger of the young man was pointing to the heavy damp
carpet that covered the floor of the room.

Steerpike derived as much pleasure in watching these anile and pitiful
creatures, dressed in their purple finery, as they crawled beneath the
carpet as he got from anything. He had led them gradually, and by easy
and cunning steps, from humiliation to humiliation, until the distorted
satisfaction he experienced in this way had become little short of a
necessity to him. Were it not that he found this grotesque pleasure in
the exercise of his power over them, it is to be doubted whether he
would have gone to all the trouble which was involved in keeping them
alive.

As he stared at the twin hummocks under the carpet he did not realize
that something very peculiar and unprecedented was happening. Cora, in
her warren-like seclusion, crouched in the ignominious darkness, had
conceived an idea. Where it came from she did not trouble to inquire of
herself, nor why it should have come, for Steerpike, their benefactor,
was a kind of god to her, as he was to Clarice. But the idea had sudden-
ly flowered in her brain unbidden. It was that she would very much like
to kill him. Directly she had conceived the idea she felt frightened,
and her fear was hardly lessened by a flat voice in the darkness saying
with empty deliberation: "So... would...I. We could do it together,
couldn't we? We could do it together."



NINE



There was an all but forgotten landing high in the southern wing, a land-
ing taken over for many a decade by succeeding generations of dove-grey
mice, peculiarly small creatures, little larger than the joint of a finger
and indigenous to this southern wing, for they were never seen elsewhere.

In years gone by this unfrequented stretch of floor, walled off on one side
with high banisters, must have been of lively interest to some person or
persons; for though the colours had to a large extent faded, yet the floor-
boards must once have been a deep and glowing crimson, and the three walls
the most brilliant of yellows. The banisters were alternately apple-green
and azure, the frames of the doorless doorways being also this last colour.
The corridors that led away in dwindling perspective, continued the crimson
of the floor and the yellow of the walls, but were cast in a deep shade.

The balcony banisters were on the southern side, and, in the sloping roof
above them, a window let in the light and, sometimes, the sun itself, whose
beams made of this silent, forgotten landing a cosmos, a firmament of mov-
ing motes, brilliantly illumined, an astral and at the same time a solar pro-
vince; for the sun would come through with its long rays and the rays
would be dancing with stars. Where the sunbeams struck, the floor would
flower like a rose, a wall break out in crocus-light, and the banisters
would flame like rings of coloured snakes.

But even on the most cloudless of summer days, with the sunlight striking
through, the colours had in their brilliance the pigment of decay. It was
a red that had lost its flame that smouldered from the floorboards.

And across this old circus-ground of bygone colours the families of the
grey mice moved.

When Titus first came upon the coloured banisters of the staircase it was
at a point two floors below the yellow-walled balcony. He had been explor-
ing on that lower floor, and finding himself lost he had taken fright, for
room after room was cavernous with shadow or vacant and afloat with sun-
light that lit the dust on the wide floors--somehow more frightening to the
child in its golden dereliction than the deepest shadow's. Had he not
clenched his hands he would have screamed, for the very lack of ghosts in
the deserted halls and chambers was in itself unnerving; for there was a
sense that something had either just left each corridor, or each hall as
he came upon it, or else that the stages were set and ready for its appear-
ance.

It was with his imagination dilated and his heart hammering aloud that Ti-
tus, suddenly turning a corner, came upon a section of the staircase two
floors below the haunt of the grey mice.

Directly Titus saw the stairway he ran to it, as though every banister were
a friend. Even in the access of his relief, and even while the hollow echo
of his footsteps was in his ears, his eyes widened at the apple-green--the
azure of the banisters, each one a tall plinth of defiance. Only the rail
which these bright things supported was hueless, being of a smooth, hand-
worn ivory whiteness. Titus gripped the banisters and then peered through
them and downward. There seemed little life in the fathoms beneath him. A
bird flew slowly past a far landing; a section of plaster fell from a shad-
owy wall three floors below the bird, but that was all.

Titus glanced above him and saw how close he stood to the head of the stair-
way. Anxious as he was to escape from the atmosphere of these upper regions,
yet he could not resist running to the top of the stairs, where he could see
the colours burning. The small grey mice squeaked and scampered away down
the passageways or into their holes. A few remained against the walls and
watched Titus for a short while before returning to their sleeping or nibbl-
ing.

The atmosphere was indescribably golden and friendly to the boy: so friendly
that his proximity to the hollow room below him did little to disturb his delight.
He sat down, his back against a yellow wall, and watched the white motes
manoeuvring in the long sunbeams.

"This is mine! mine!" he said aloud. "I found it."



TEN



Through the vile subterranean light that filled the Professors' Common-room
three figures appeared to float as the brown billows shifted. Tobacco smoke
had made of the place a kind of umber tomb. These three were the vanguard of
a daily foregathering, as sacrosanct and inevitable as the elm-top meeting
place of rooks in March. But how much less healthy! A foregathering of the
Professors, for it was eleven o'clock and the short recreation had begun.

Their pupils--the sparrows, as it were--of Gormenghast were racing to the vast
red-sandstone yard--a yard surrounded on all sides by high ivy-covered walls
of the same stone. Innumerable knife blades had snapped upon its harsh surface,
for there must surely be a thousand spidery initials scored into the stone! A
hundred painfully incised valedictions and observations whose significance had
long since lost its edges. Deeper incisions into the red stone had mapped out
patterns for some or other game of local invention. Many a boy had sobbed a-
gainst these walls; many a knuckle been bruised as a head flicked sideways
from the blow. Many a child had fought his way back into the open yard with
bloody mouth, and a thousand swaying pyramids of boys had tottered and col-
lapsed as the topmost clung to the ivy.

The yard was approached by a tunnel which commenced immediately beneath the
long south classroom, where steps led down through a trapdoor. The tunnel,
old and thick with ferns, was at this moment echoing barbarically to the cat-
calls of a horde of boys as they made pell-mell for the red-stone yard, their
immemorial playground.

But in the Professors' Common-room the three gentlemen were finding relaxa-
tion through an abatement rather than an increase of energy.

To enter the room from the Professors' corridor was to suffer an extraordi-
nary change of atmosphere, no less sudden than if a swimmer in clear white
water were suddenly to find himself struggling to keep afloat in a bay of
soup. Not only was the air fuscous with a mixture of smells, including stale
tobacco, dry chalk, rotten wood, ink, alcohol and, above all, imperfectly
cured leather, but the general colour of the room was a transcription of
the smells, for the walls were of horsehide, the dreariest of browns, rel-
ieved only by the scattered and dully twinkling heads of drawing-pins.

On the right of the door hung the black gowns of office in various stages
of decomposition.

Of the three Professors, the first to have reached the room that morning in
order to establish himself securely in the only armchair (it was his habit
to leave the class he was teaching--or pretending to teach--at least twenty
minutes before its official conclusion, in order to be certain that the chair
was free) was Opus Fluke. He lay rather than sat in what was known among the
staff as "Fluke's Cradle'. Indeed he had worn that piece of furniture--or
symbol of bone-laziness--into such a shape as made the descent of any other
body than his own into that crater of undulating horsehair a hazardous ent-
erprise.

Those daily indulgences before the mid-morning break and their renewal before
the dinner-bell were much prized by Mr Opus Fluke, who during these periods
augmented the pall of tobacco smoke already obscuring the ceiling of the Com-
mon-room with enough of his own exhaling to argue not only that the floor-
boards were alight, but also that the core of the conflagration was Mr Fluke
himself, lying, as he was, at an angle of five degrees with the floor, in a
position that might, in any case, argue asphyxiation. But there was nothing
on fire except the tobacco in his pipe and as he lay supine, the white wreaths
billowing from his wide, muscular and lipless mouth (rather like the mouth of
a huge and friendly lizard), he evinced so brutal a disregard for his own and
other people's windpipes as made one wonder how this man could share the self-
same world with hyacinths and damsels.

His head was well back. His long, bulging chin pointed to the ceiling like a
loaf of bread. His eyes followed lugubriously the wavering ascent of a fresh
smoke-ring until it was absorbed into the upper billows. There was a kind of
ripeness in his indolence, in his dreadful equability.

Of Opus Fluke's two companions in the Common-room the younger, Perch-
Prism, was squatting jauntily on the edge of a long inkstained table. This anc-
ient span of furniture was littered with textbooks, blue pencils, pipes filled to
various depths with white ash and dottle, pieces of chalk, a sock, several
bottles of ink, a bamboo walking-cane, a pool of white glue, a chart of the
solar system, burned away over a large portion of its surface through some
past accident with a bottle of acid, a stuffed cormorant with tin-tacks through
its feet, which had no effect in keeping the bird upright; a faded globe,
with the words "Cane Slypate Thursday' scrawled in yellow chalk across it
from just below the equator to well into the Arctic Circle; any number of
lists, notices, instructions; a novel called "The Amazing Adventures of Cupid
Catt', and at least a dozen high ragged pagodas of buff-coloured copybooks.

Perch-Prism had cleared a small space at the far end of this table, and there
he squatted, his arms folded. He was a smallish, plumpish man, with self-as-
sertion redolent in every movement he made, every word he uttered. His nose
was pig-like, his eyes buttonblack and horribly alert, with enough rings a-
bout them to lasso and strangle at birth any idea that he was under fifty.
But his nose, which appeared to be no more than a few hours of age, did a
great deal in its own porcine way to offset the effect of the rings around
the eyes, and to give Perch-Prism, on the balance, an air of youth.

Opus Fluke in his favourite chair: Perch-Prism perched on the table's edge:
but the third of these gentlemen in the Common-room, in contrast to his col-
leagues, appeared to have something to do. Gazing into a small shaving-mir-
ror on the mantelpiece, with his head on one side to catch what light could
force its way through the smoke, Bellgrove was examining his teeth.

He was a fine-looking man in his way. Big of head, his brow and the bridge
of his nose descended in a single line of undeniable nobility. His jaw was
as long as his brow and nose together and lay exactly parallel in profile
to those features. With his leonine shock of snow-white hair there was some-
thing of the major prophet about him. But his eyes were disappointing. They
made no effort to bear out the promise of the other features, which would
have formed the ideal setting for the kind of eye that flashes with vision-
ary fire. Mr Bellgrove's eyes didn't flash at all. They were rather small,
a dreary grey-green in colour, and were quite expressionless. Having seen
them it was difficult not to bear a grudge against his splendid profile as
something fraudulent. His teeth were both carious and uneven and were his
worst feature.

With great rapidity Perch-Prism stretched out his arms and legs simultane-
ously and then withdrew them. At the same time he closed his bright black
eyes and yawned as widely as his small, rather prim mouth could manage.
Then he clapped his hands beside him on the table, as much as to say: "One
can't sit here dreaming all day!" Puckering his brow, he took out a small,
elegant and well-kept pipe (he had long since discovered it as his only
defence against the smoke of others) and filled it with quick, deft fingers.
He half-closed his eyes as he lit up, his pig-like nose catching the flare
of the light on its underside. With his black and cerebral eyes hidden for
a moment behind his eyelids, he was less like a man than a ravaged suckling.

He drew quickly three or four times at his pipe. Then, after removing it
from his neat little mouth --

"Must you?" he said, his eyebrows raised.

Opus Fluke, lying along his chair like a stretcher-case, moved nothing ex-
cept his lazy eyes, which he turned slowly until they were semi-focusing
bemusedly upon Perch-Prism's interrogatory face. But he saw that Perch-
Prism had evidently addressed himself to someone else, and Mr Fluke, roll-
ing his eyes languidly back, was able to obtain an indistinct view of Bell-
grove behind him. That august gentleman, who had been examining his teeth
with such minute care, frowned magnificently and turned his head.

"Must I what? Explain yourself, dear boy. If there's anything I abominate
it's sentences of two words. You talk like a fall of crockery, dear boy."

"You're a damned old pedant, Bellgrove, and much overdue for burial,"
said Perch-Prism, "and as quick off the mark as a pregnant turtle. For
pity's sake stop playing with your teeth!"

Opus Fluke in his battered chair, dropped his eyes and, by parting his
long leather-lipped mouth in a slight upward curve, might have been sup-
posed to be registering a certain sardonic amusement had not a formidable
volume of smoke arisen from his lungs and lifted itself out of his mouth
and into the air in the shape of a snow-white elm.

Bellgrove turned his back to the mirror and lost sight of himself and his
troublesome teeth.

"Perch-Prism," he said, "you're an insufferable upstart. What the hell
have my teeth got to do with you? Be good enough to leave them to me, sir."

"Gladly," said Perch-Prism.

"I happen to be in pain, my dear fellow." There was something weaker in
Bellgrove's tone.

"You're a hoarder," said Perch-Prism. "You cling to bygone things. They
don't suit you, anyway. Get them extracted." Bellgrove rose into the pon-
derous prophet category once more. "Never!" he cried, but ruined the maj-
esty of his utterance by clasping at his jaw and moaning pathetically.

"I've no sympathy at all," said Perch-Prism, swinging his legs. "You're
a stupid old man, and if you were in my class I would cane you twice a day
until you had conquered (one) your crass neglect, (two) your morbid grasp
upon putrefaction. I have no sympathy with
you."
This time as Opus Fluke threw out his acrid cloud there was an unmistak-
able grin.

"Poor old bloody Bellgrove," he said. "Poor old Fangs!" And then he began
to laugh in a peculiar way of his own which was both violent and soundless.
His heavy reclining body, draped in its black gown, heaved to and fro. His
knees drew themselves up to his chin. His arms dangled over the sides of
the chair and were helpless. His head rolled from side to side. It was as
though he were in the last stages of strychnine poisoning. But no sound
came, nor did his mouth even open. Gradually the spasm grew weaker, and
when the natural sand colour of his face had returned (for his corked-up
laughter had turned it dark red) he began his smoking again in earnest.
Bellgrove took a dignified and ponderous step into the centre of the room.

"So I am "Bloody Bellgrove" to you, am I, Mr Fluke? That is what you think
of me, is it? That is how your crude thoughts run. Aha!... aha!...' (His
attempt to sound as though he were musing philosophically upon Fluke's cha-
racter was a pathetic failure. He shook his venerable head.) "What a coarse
type you are, my friend. You are like an animal--or even a vegetable. Per-
haps you have forgotten that as long as fifteen years ago I was considered
for Headship. Yes, Mr Fluke, "considered". It was then, I believe, that the
tragic mistake was made of your appointment to the staff. H'm... Since then
you have been a disgrace, sir--a disgrace for fifteen years -- a disgrace
to our calling. As for me, unworthy as I am, yet I would have you know that
I have more experience behind me than I would care to mention. You're a
slacker, sir, a damned slacker! And by your lack of respect for an old
scholar you only...' But a fresh twinge of pain caused Bellgrove to grab
at his jaw.

"Oh, my teeth!" he moaned.

During this harangue Mr Opus Fluke's mind had wandered. Had he been asked
he would have been unable to repeat a single word of what had been addres-
sed to him.

But Perch-Prism's voice cut a path through the thick of his reverie.

"My dear Fluke," it said, "did you, or didn't you, on one of those rare oc-
casions when you saw fit to put in an appearance in a classroom--on this
occasion with the gamma Fifth, I believe--refer to me as a "bladder-headed
cock"? It has come to my hearing that you referred to me as exactly that.
Do tell me: it sounds so like you."

Opus Fluke stroked his long, bulging chin with his hand.

"Probably," he said at last, "but I wouldn't know. I never listen." The ex-
traordinary paroxysm began again--the heaving, rolling, helpless, noiseless
body-laughter.

"A convenient memory," said Perch-Prism, with a trace of irritability in his
clipped, incisive voice. "But what's that?"

He had heard something in the corridor outside. It was like the high, thin,
mewing note of a gull. Opus Fluke raised himself on one elbow. The high-pitch-
ed noise grew louder. All at once the door was flung open from without and
there before them, framed in the doorway, was the Headmaster.



ELEVEN



If ever there was a primogenital figure-head or cipher, that archetype had
been resurrected in the shape of Deadyawn. He was pure symbol. By comparison,
even Mr Fluke was a busy man. It was thought that he had genius, if only be-
cause he had been able to delegate his duties in so intricate a way that
there was never any need for him to do anything at all. His signature, which
was necessary from time to time at the end of long notices which no one read,
was always faked, and even the ingenious system of delegation whereon his
greatness rested was itself worked out by another.

Entering the room immediately behind the Head a tiny freckled man was seen
to be propelling Deadyawn forward in a high rickety chair, with wheels at-
tached to its legs. This piece of furniture, which had rather the propor-
tions of an infant's high chair, and was similarly fitted with a tray above
which Deadyawn's head could partially be seen, gave fair warning to the
scholars and staff of its approach, being in sore need of lubrication. Its
wheels screamed.

Deadyawn and the freckled man formed a compelling contrast. There was no
reason why they should both be human beings. There seemed no common
denominator. It was true that they had two legs each, two eyes each, one
mouth apiece, and so on, but this did not seem to argue any similarity of kind,
or if it did only in the way that giraffes and stoats are classified for conven-
ience sake under the commodious head of "fauna'.

Wrapped up like an untidy parcel in a gun-grey gown emblazoned with the
signs of the zodiac in two shades of green, none of which signs could be
seen very clearly for reason of the folds and creases, save for Cancer the
crab on his left shoulder, was Deadyawn himself, and all but asleep. His
feet were tucked beneath him. In his lap was a hot-water bottle.

His face wore the resigned expression of one who knew that the only dif-
ference between one day and the next lies in the pages of a calendar.

His hands rested limply on the tray in front of him at the height of his
chin. As he entered the room he opened one eye and gazed absently into
the smoke. He did not hurry his vision and was quite content when, after
several minutes, he made out the three indistinct shapes below him. Those
three shapes--Opus Fluke, Perch-Prism and Bellgrove--were standing in
a line, Opus Fluke having fought himself free of his cradle as though
struggling against suction. The three gazed up at Deadyawn in his chair.

His face was as soft and round as a dumpling. There seemed to be no struct-
ure in it: no indication of a skull beneath the skin. This unpleasant effect
might have argued an equally unpleasant temperament. Luckily this was not
so. But it exemplified a parallel bonelessness of outlook. There was no
fibre to be found in him, and yet no weakness as such; only a negation of
character. For his flaccidity was not a positive thing, unless jelly-fish
are consciously indolent.

This extreme air of abstraction, of empty and bland removedness, was al-
most terrifying. It was that kind of unconcern that humbled the ardent,
the passionate of nature, and made them wonder why they were expending
so much energy of body and spirit when every day but led them to the worms.
Deadyawn, by temperament or lack of it, achieved unwittingly what wise men
crave: equipoise. In his case an equipoise between two poles which did not
exist: but nevertheless there he was, balanced on an imaginary fulcrum.

The freckled man had rolled the high chair to the centre of the room. His
skin stretched so tightly over his small bony and rather insect-like face
that the freckles were twice the size they would normally have been. He was
minute, and as he peered perkily from behind the legs of the high chair,
his carrot-coloured hair shone with hair-oil. It was brushed flat across
the top of his little bony insect-head. On all sides the walls of horsehide
rose into the smoke and smelt perceptibly. A few drawing-pins glimmered
against the murky brown leather.

Deadyawn dropped one of his arms over the side of the high chair and wrig-
gled a languid forefinger. "The Fly" (as the freckled midget was called)
pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket, but instead of passing it up
to the Headmaster he climbed, with extraordinary agility, up a dozen rungs
of the chair and cried into Deadyawn's ear: "Not yet! not yet! Only three
of them here!"

"What's that?" said Deadyawn, in a voice of emptiness.

"Only three of them here!"

"Which ones," said Deadyawn, after a long silence.

"Bellgrove, Perch-Prism and Fluke," said The Fly in his penetrating, fly-
like voice. He winked at the three gentlemen through the smoke.

"Won't they do?" murmured Deadyawn, his eyes shut. "They're on my staff,
aren't...they...?"

"Very much so," said The Fly, "very much so. But your Edict, sir, is
addressed to the whole staff."

"I've forgotten what it's all about. Remind...me...'

"It's all written down," said The Fly. "I have it here, sir. All you have
to do is to read it, sir." And again the small red-headed man honoured
the three masters with a particularly intimate wink. There was something
lewd in the way the wax-coloured petal of his eyelid dropped suggestively
over his bright eye and lifted itself again without a flutter.

"You can give it to Bellgrove. He will read it when the time comes," said
Deadyawn, lifting his hanging hand on to the tray before him and languid-
ly stroking the hot-water bottle..."Find out what's keeping them."

The Fly pattered down the rungs of the chair and emerged from its shadow.
He crossed the room with quick, impudent steps, his head and rump well
back. But before he reached the door it had opened and two Professors en-
tered--one of them, Flannelcat, with his arms full of exercise-books
and his mouth full of seedcake, and his companion, Shred, with nothing in
his arms, but with his head full of theories about everyone's subconscious
except his own. He had a friend, by name Shrivell, due to arrive at any
moment, who, in contrast to Shred, was stiff with theories about his own
subconscious and no one else's.

Flannelcat took his work seriously and was always worried. He had a poor
time from the boys and a poor time from his colleagues. A high proportion
of the work he did was never noticed, but do it he must. He had a sense
of duty that was rapidly turning him into a sick man. The pitiful ex-
pression of reproach which never left his face testified to his zeal. He
was always too late to find a vacant chair in the Common-room, and always
too early to find his class assembled. He was continually finding the
arms of his gown tied into knots when he was in a hurry, and that pieces
of soap were substituted for his cheese at the masters' table. He had no
idea who did these things, nor any idea how they could be circumvented.
Today, as he entered the Common-room, with his arms full of books and the
seedcake in his mouth, he was in as much of a fluster as usual. His state
of mind was not improved by finding the Headmaster looming above him like
Jove among the clouds. In his confusion the seedcake got into his windpipe,
the concertina of school books in his arms began to slip and, with a loud
crash, cascaded to the floor. In the silence that followed there was a
moan of pain, but it was only Bellgrove with his hands at his jaw. His
noble head was rolling from side to side.

Shred ambled forward from the door and, after bowing slightly in Dead-
yawn's direction, he buttonholed Bellgrove.

"In pain, my dear Bellgrove? In pain?" he inquired, but in a hard, irri-
tating, inquisitive voice--with as much sympathy in it as might be
found in a vampire's breast.

Bellgrove bridled up his lordly head, but did not deign to reply.

"Let us take it that you are in pain," continued Shred. "Let us work on
that hypothesis as a basis: that Bellgrove, a man of somewhere between
sixty and eighty, is in pain. Or rather, that he thinks he is. One must
be exact. As a man of science, I insist on exactitude. Well, then, what
next? Why, to take into account that Bellgrove, supposedly in pain, also
thinks that the pain has something to do with his teeth. This is absurd,
of course, but must, I say, be taken into account. For what reason? Be-
cause they are symbolic. Everything is symbolic. There is no such thing
as a “thing” per se. It is only a symbol of something else that is itself,
and so on. To my way of thinking his teeth, though apparently rotten, are
merely the symbol of a diseased mind."

Bellgrove snarled.

"And why is the mind diseased?" He took hold of Bellgrove's gown just
below that gentleman's left shoulder and, with his face raised, scrut-
inized the big head above him.

"Your mouth is twitching," he said. "Interesting...very...interesting.
You probably do not know it, but there was bad blood in your mother.
Very bad blood. Or alternatively, you dream of stoats. But no matter,
no matter. To return. Where were we? Yes, yes, your teeth--the sym-
bols, we have said--haven't we? of a diseased mind. Now what kind of
disease? That is the point. What kind of disease of the mind would af-
fect your teeth like this? Open your mouth, sir...'

But Bellgrove, a fresh twinge undermining his scant reserves of pati-
ence and decorum, lifted his huge boot the size of a tray and brought
it down with a blind relish upon Mr Shred's feet. It covered them both
and must have been excruciatingly painful, for Mr Shred's brow colour-
ed and contracted; but he made no sound save to remark, "Interesting,
very interesting...probably your mother."

Opus Fluke's body-laughter did everything except break him in half or
find vent in a sound.

By now several other Professors had infiltrated through the smoke from
the direction of the door. There was Shrivell, Shred's friend, or fol-
lower, for he held all Shred's opinions in the reverse direction. But
for sheer discipleship Mr Shrivell was a rebel compared to the three
gentlemen who, moving in a solid huddle, their three mortar-boards form-
ing between them a practically unbroken surface, had seated themselves
in a far corner, like conspirators. They owed allegiance, those three,
to no member of the staff, or to any such abstraction as the "staff'
itself, but to an ancient savant, a bearded figure of no specific oc-
cupation but whose view of Death, Eternity, Pain (and its non-exist-
ence), Truth, or, indeed, anything of a philosophic nature, was like
fire in their ears.

In holding the views of their Master on such enormous themes they had
developed a fear of their colleagues and a prickliness of disposition
which, as Perch-Prism had cruelly pointed out to them more than once,
was inconsistent with their theory of non-existence. "Why are you so
prickly," he used to say, "when there ain't no pain or prickles?" At
which the three, Spiregrain, Splint and Throd, would all at once be-
come a single black tent as they shot into conference with the speed
of suction. How they longed at times for their bearded Leader to be
with them! He knew all the answers to impertinent questions.

They were unhappy men, these three. Not with native melancholy, but
in views of their theories. And there they sat: the smoke wreaths coil-
ing round them, their eyes moving suspiciously from one face to anoth-
er of their heretic brethren, in jealous fear of a challenge to their
faith.

Who else had entered? Only Cutflower, the dandy; Crust, the sponger;
and the choleric Mulefire.

Meanwhile The Fly had been standing in the corridor with his knuckles
between his teeth, and had been emitting the shrillest of whistles.
Whether they caused the sudden appearance of the few stragglers at the
end of the corridor or whether these characters were in any case on
their way to the Common-room, there was no doubt that The Fly's shrill
music added speed to their steps.

Smoke hung above them as they approached the door, for they had no de-
sire to enter Fluke's fug, as they called it, with virgin lungs.

"The “Yawner's” here," said The Fly as the Professors came abreast,
their gowns fluttering. A dozen eyebrows were raised. It was seldom
that they saw the Headmaster.

When the door was closed upon the last of them the leather room was,
indeed, no place for anyone with asthma. No flowers could flourish
there unless, indeed, some gaunt and horny thing--some cactus long
inured to dust and thirst. No singing birds could thrive--no, not
the raven, even; for smoke would fill their thin, sweet windpipes. It
knew nothing, this atmosphere, of fragrant pastures--of dawn among
the dew-bright hazel woods--or rivulets or starlight. It was a lea-
ther cave of sepia fog.

The Fly, his sharp insect face hardly visible through the smoke, swarm-
ed up the high chair, hand over hand, and found Deadyawn asleep and
his water-bottle stone cold. He prodded the Headmaster in the ribs
with his little bony thumb just where Taurus and Scorpio were overlap-
ping. Deadyawn's head had sunk even lower during his sleep and was bare-
ly above the tray. His feet were still tucked under him. He was like
some creature that had lost its shell, for his face was disgustingly
naked. Naked not only physically, but naked in its vacancy.

At The Fly's prod he did not wake with a start, as is the normal thing:
that would have been tantamount to a kind of interest in life. He mere-
ly opened one eye. Moving it from The Fly's face, he let it wander over
the miscellany of gownsmen below him.

He closed his eye again. "What...are...all...these...people...for?" His voice
floated out of his soft head like a paper streamer. "And why am I' he added.

"It's all very necessary," answered The Fly. "Shall I remind you, sir,
yet again of Barquentine's Notice?"

"Why not?" said Deadyawn. "But not too loudly."

"Or shall Bellgrove read it out, sir?"

"Why not?" said the Headmaster. "But get my bottle filled first."

The Fly climbed down the chair-rungs with the cold bottle and threaded
his perky way through the group of masters to the door. Before he reach-
ed it he had, aided by the poor visibility in the room but mainly by
the exceptional agility of his small thin fingers, relieved Flannelcat
of an old gold watch and chain, Mr Shred of several coins, and Cutflower
of an embroidered handkerchief.

When he returned with the hot-water bottle, Deadyawn was asleep again,
but The Fly handed Bellgrove a roll of paper before he climbed up the
wheeled chair to waken the Headmaster.

"Read it," said The Fly. "It's from Barquentine."

"Why me?" said Bellgrove, his hand at his jaw. "Damn Barquentine with
his notices! Damn him, I say!"

He untied the roll of paper and took a few heavy paces to the window,
where he held it up to what light there was.

The Professors were by then sitting on the floor, in groups or singly,
like Flannelcat among the cold ashes under the mantelpiece. But for a
lack of wigwam, squaws, feathers and tomahawks there might have been a
tribe encamped beneath the hanging smoke.

"Come along, Bellgrove! Come along, man!" said Perch-Prism. "Get those
teeth of yours into it."

"For a classical scholar," said the irritating Shred, "for a classical
scholar, I have always felt that Bellgrove must be handicapped, griev-
ously handicapped, firstly by the difficulty he finds in understanding
sentences of more than seven words, and secondly by the stultifying ef-
fect on his mind of a frustrated-power complex."

A snarl was heard through the smoke.

"Is that what it is? Is that what it is? La!"

This was Cutflower's voice. It came from the near end of the long table
on which he sat, dangling his thin, elegant legs. There was so high a pol-
ish upon his narrow, pointed shoes that the high-lights of the toecaps
were visible through the smoke, like torches through a fog. No other sign
of feet had been seen in the room for half an hour.

"Bellgrove," he continued, taking up where Perch-Prism had left off,
"stab away, man! Stab away! Give us the gist of it, la! Give
us the gist of it. Can't he read, la, the old fraud?"

"Is that you, Cutflower?" said another voice. "I've been looking for you
all morning. Bless my heart! what a fine polish on your shoes, Cutflower!
I wondered what the devil those lights were! But seriously, I'm very em-
barrassed, Cutflower. Indeed I am. It's my wife in exile, you know--
ragingly ill. But what can I do, spendthrift that I am, with my bar of
chocolate once a week? You see how it is, my dear chap; it's the end:
or almost: unless...I half wondered--er--could you...? Something
until Tuesday...Confidential, you know, ha...ha...ha...! How one hates
asking...squalor, and so on...But seriously, Cutflower (what a dazzling
pair of hoofs, old man!) but seriously, if you could manage...'

"Silence!" shouted The Fly, interrupting Crust, who had not realized he
had been sitting so close to a colleague until he heard Cutflower's af-
fected 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 out-
stretched 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 inter-
val 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 lin-
eage 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 indel-
ible 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 ner-
vously 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 rav-
enous 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 horri-
ble 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 Flan-
nelcat'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 with-
in 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 goingson, 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 feel-
ing 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 sea-
sons 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 pave-
ment or wandered along its turreted verge, where the herons were and the jack-
daws 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. Nei-
ther 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, rot-
ten 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 sacred-
ness 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 near-
ed 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 cor-
als, 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, lus-
trous feathers that hung from the throat of a heron that stood by a rotten man-
telpiece; 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 arch-
ed 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 bit-
terns, 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 no-
thing 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.

It was then that a child appeared. Whether a boy or a girl or an elf there
was not time to tell. But the delicate proportions were a child's and the
vitality was a child's alone. For one short moment it had stood on a turret
at the far end of the terrace and then it was gone, leaving only the impres-
sion of something overcharged with life--of something slight as a hazel switch.
It had hopped (for the movement was more a hop than a leap or a step) from
the turret into the darkness beyond and was gone almost as soon as it had
appeared, but at the same moment that the phantom child appeared, a zephyr
had broken through the wall of moribund air and run like a gay and tameless
thing over the gaunt, harsh spine of Gormenghast's body. It played with sere
flags, dodged through arches, spiralled with impish whistles up hollow towers
and chimneys, until, diving down a saw-toothed fissure in a pentagonal roof,
it found itself surrounded by stern portraits--a hundred sepia faces cracked
with spiders' webs; found itself being drawn towards a grid in the stone
floor and, giving way to itself, to the law of gravity and to the blue thrill
of a down-draught, it sang its way past seven storeys and was, all at once,
in a hall of dove-grey light and was clasping Titus in a noose of air.



THIRTEEN



The old, old man in whose metaphysical net the three disciples, Spiregrain,
Throd and Splint were so irrevocably tangled, leaned forward in space as though
weighing on the phantom handle of an invisible stick. It was a wonder he did
not fall on his face.

"Always draughty in this reach of the corridor," he said, his white hair hang-
ing forward over his shoulders. He struck his thighs with his hands before
replacing them at a point in space where a stick would have been. "Breaks a
man up--wrecks him--makes a shadow of him--throws him to the wolves and
screws his coffin down."

Reaching down with his long arms he drew his thick socks over the ends of his
trousers and then stamped his feet, straightened his back, doubled it forward
again, and then threw a look of antagonism along the corridor.

"A dirty, draughty reach. No reason for it. Scuppers a man," he said. "And yet"
--he shook his white locks--"it isn't true, you know. I don't believe in draughts.
I don't believe I'm cold. I don't believe in anything! ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! I
can't agree with you, for instance."

His companion, a younger man, with long, hollow cheeks, cocked his head as
though it were the breech of a gun. Then he raised his eyebrow as much as to
say, "Carry on...' but the old man remained silent. Then the young man raised
his voice as though he were raising the dead, for it was a singularly flat and
colourless affair...

"How do you mean, sir, that you can't agree?"

"I just can't," said the old man, bending forward, his hands gripped before
him, "that's all."

The young man righted his head and dropped his eyebrow.

"But I haven't said anything yet: we've only just met, you know."

"You may be right," replied the old man, stroking his beard. "You may very well
be right; I can't say."

"But I tell you I haven't spoken!" The colourless voice was raised, and the young
man's eyes made a tremendous effort to flash; but either the tinder was wet or
the updraught insufficient, for they remained peculiarly sparkless.

"I haven't spoken," he repeated.

"Oh, that!" said the old man. "I don't need to depend on that." He gave a low,
horribly knowledgeable laugh. "I can't agree, that's all. With your face, for
instance. It's wrong--like everything else. Life is so simple when you see it
that way--ha, ha, ha, ha!" The low, intestinal enjoyment which he got out of
his attitude to life was frightful to the young man, who, ignoring his own na-
ture, his melancholy, ineffectual face, his white voice, his lightless eyes,
became angry.

"And I don't agree with you!" he shouted. "I don't agree with the way you bend
your ghastly old knacker's-yard of a body at such an absurd angle. I don't a-
gree with the way your white beard hangs from your chin like dirty seaweed...I
don't agree with your broken teeth...I...'

The old man was delighted; his stomach laughter cackled on and on..."But nor do
I, young man," he wheezed..."nor do I. I don't agree with it, either. You see,
I don't even agree that I'm here; and even if I did I wouldn't agree that I
ought to be. The whole thing is ridiculously simple."

"You're being cynical!" cried the young man; "So you are!"

"Oh no," said the old man with short legs, "I don't believe in being anything.
If only people would stop trying to be things! What can they be, after all,
beyond what they already are--or would be if I believed that they were anything?"

"Vile! vile! VILE!" shouted the young man with hollow cheeks. His thwarted pas-
sions had found vent after thirty years of indecision. "Surely we have long
enough in the grave, you old beast, in which to be nothing--in which to be
cold and finished with! Must life be like that, too? No, no! let us burn!" he
cried. "Let us burn our blood away in life's high bonfire!"

But the old philosopher replied: "The grave, young man, is not what you ima-
gine. You insult the dead, young man. With every reckless word, you smirch a
tomb, deface a sepulchre, disturb with clumsy boots the humble death-mound.
For death is life. It is only living that is lifeless. Have you not seen them
coming over the hills at dusk, the angels of eternity? Have you not?"

"No," said the young man, "I haven't!"

The bearded figure leaned even further forward and fixed the young man with
his gaze.

"What! you have never seen the angels of eternity, with their wings as big
as blankets?"

"No," said the young man. "And I don't want to."

"To the ignorant nothing is profound," said the bearded ancient. "You called
me a cynic. How can I be? I am nothing. The greater contains the less. But
this I will tell you: though the Castle is a barren image--though green trees,
bursting with life, are in reality bursting for lack of it--when the April
lamb is realized to be nothing more nor less than a lamb in April--when these
things are known and accepted, then, oh, it is then'--he was stroking his
beard very fast by this time--"that you are on the borderland of Death's a-
mazing kingdom, where everything moves twice as fast, and the colours are
twice as bright, and love is twice as gorgeous, and sin is twice as spicy.
Who but the doubly purblind can fail to see that it is only on the Other
Side that one can begin to Agree? But here, here...' he motioned with his
hands as though to dismiss the terrestrial world--"what is there to agree
with? There is no sensation here, no sensation at all."

"There is joy and pain," said the young man.

"No, no, no. Pure illusion," said the ancient. "But in Death's amazing kingdom
Joy is unconfined. It will be nothing to dance for a month on end in the cel-
estial pastures...nothing at all. Or to sing as one flies astride a burning
eagle...to sing out of the gladness of one's breast."

"And what of pain?" said the youth.

"We have invented the idea of pain in order to indulge ourselves in self-pity,"
was the reply. "But Real Pain, as we have it on the Other Side, that will be
worth having. It will be an experience to burn one's finger in the Kingdom."

"What if I set fire to your white beard, you old fraud!" shouted the young man,
who had stubbed his toes during the day and knew the validity of the earthly
discomforts.

"What if you did, my child?"

"It would sting your jaw, and you know it!" cried the youth.

The supercilious smile which played across the lips of the theorist was un-
bearable, and his companion had no strength to stop himself as he stretched
out his arm for the nearest candle and lit the beard that hung there like a
challenge. It flared up quickly and gave to the horrified and astonished ex-
pression of the old man an unreal and theatrical quality which belied the
very real pain, terrestrial though it was, which he felt, first of all, a-
gainst his jaw and then along the sides of his head.

A shrill and terrible scream from his old throat, and the corridor was at
once filled with figures, as though they had been awaiting their entrance
cues. Coats were thrown over his head and shoulders and the flames stifled,
but not before the excited youth with the hollow cheeks had made his escape,
never to be heard of again.


SPIREGRAIN, THROD AND SPLINT


The old man was carried to his room, a small dark-red box of a place, with
no carpet on the floor, but a picture over the mantelpiece of a fairy sit-
ting in a buttercup against a very blue sky. After three days he recovered
consciousness only to die of shock a moment later when he remembered what
had happened.

Among those present at the death-bed in the small red room were the three
friends of the old fire-blackened pedagogue.

They stood in a line, stooping a little, for the room was very low. They
were standing unnecessarily close to one another for, with the slightest
movement of their heads, their old black leather mortar-boards struck a-
gainst one another and were tilted indecorously. And yet it was a moving
moment. They could feel the exodus of a great source of inspiration. Their
master lay dying below them.

Disciples to the end, they believed in the absence of physical emotion so
implicitly, that when the master died what could they do but weep that the
origin of their faith was gone for ever from them?

Under their black leather mortar-boards their heads dislodged the innocent
air, remorselessly as though their brows, noses and jaws, like the features
of a figurehead, were cleaving paths for them through viewless water. Only
in their hanging gowns, their flat leather mortar-boards and the tassels
that hung like the grizzly spilths that swing from turkeys' beaks, had they
anything in common.

Flanking the death-bed was a low table. On it stood a small prism and a bran-
dy bottle which held a lighted candle. This was the only illumination in the
room, yet the red walls burned with a sombre effulgence. The three heads
of the Professors, which were roughly at the same height from the ground,
were so different as to make one wonder whether they were of the same
genus. In running the eye from one face to the next, a similar sensation
was experienced as when the hand is run from glass to sandpaper, from
sandpaper to porridge. The sandpaper face was neither more nor less int-
eresting than the glass one, but the eyes were forced to move slowly over
a surface so roughened with undergrowth, so dangerous with its potholes
and bony outcrops, its silted gullies and thorny wastes, that it was a wonder
that any eye ever reached the other side.

Conversely, with the glassy face, it was all that an eye could do to keep
from sliding off it.

As for the third visage, it was neither maddeningly slippery, nor rough
with broken ravines and clinging ground weed. To traverse it with a sweep
of the eye was as impossible as to move gradually across the glazed face.

It was a case of slow wading. The face was wet. It was always wet. It was
a face seen under water. And so for an eye to take an innocent run across
these three, there lay ahead this strange ordeal, by rock and undergrowth,
by slippery ice and by a patient paddling.

Behind them on the red wall their shadows lay, about half as big again as
the professors themselves.

The glassy one (Professor Spiregrain) bent his head over the body of his
dead master. His face seemed to be lit from within by a murky light. There
was nothing spiritual about its lambency. The hard glass nose was long and
exceptionally sharp. To have said he was well shaved would give no idea of
a surface that no hair could penetrate, any more than a glacier could sprout
grass.

Following his example, Professor Throd lowered his head likewise: its fea-
tures were blurred into the main mass of the head. Eyes, nose and mouth were
mere irregularities beneath the moisture.

As for the third professor, Splint, when he, following the example of his
colleagues, bent his head over the candle-lit corpse, it was as though a
rocky and barbarous landscape had suddenly changed its angle in space. Had
a cloud of snakes and parrots been flung out thereby on to the candle-bright
sheets of the death-bed, it would have seemed natural enough.

It was not long before Spiregrain, Throd and the jungle-headed Mr Splint be-
came tried of bending mutely over their master, who was, in any case, no
pleasant sight even for the most zealous of disciples, and they straighten-
ed themselves.

The small red room had become oppressive. The candle was getting very low
in the brandy bottle. The fairy in the buttercup over the mantelpiece smirk-
ed in the flickering light, and it was time to go.

There was nothing they could do. Their master was dead.

Said Throd of the wet face: "It is grief's gravy, Spiregrain."

Said Spiregrain of the slippery head: "You are too crude, my friend. Have
you no poetry in you? It is Death's icicle impales him now."

"Nonsense," whispered Splint, in a fierce, surly voice. He was really very
gentle, in spite of his tropical face--but he became angry when he felt his
more brilliant colleagues were simply indulging themselves. "Nonsense. Nei-
ther icicle nor gravy it was. Straightforward fire, it was. Cruel enough,
in all faith. But...' and his eyes became wild with a kind of sudden excite-
ment more in keeping with his visage than they had been for years..."but
look you! He's the one who wouldn't believe in pain, you know--he didn't
acknowledge fire. And now he's dead I'll tell you something...(He is dead,
isn't he?)'...

Splint turned his eyes quickly to the stiff figure below him. It would be
a dreadful thing if the old man was listening all the time. The other two
bent over also. There could be no doubt about it, although the candlelight
flickering over the fire-bitten face gave an uncanny semblance of movement
to the features. Professor Splint pulled a sheet over the corpse's head
before he turned to his companions.

"What is it?" said Spiregrain. "Be quick!" His glass nose sliced the gloomy
air as he turned his head quickly to the rugged Splint.

"It's this, Spiregrain. It's this," said Splint, his eyes still on fire. He scratched
at his jaw with a gravelly sound and took a step back from the bed. Then he
held up his arms. "Listen, my friends. When I fell down those nine steps three
weeks ago, and pretended that I felt no pain, I confess to you now that I was
in agony. And now! And now that he is dead I glory in my confession, for I am
afraid of him no more; and I tell you--I tell you both, openly and with pride,
that I look forward to my next accident, however serious it may be, because
I will have nothing to hide. I will cry out to all Gormenghast, “I am in a-
gony!”--and when my eyes fill with tears, they will be tears of joy and re-
lief and not of pain. Oh, brothers! colleagues! do you not understand?"

Mr Splint took a step forward in his excitement, dropping his hands, which
he had kept raised all this time (and at once they were gripped on either
side). Oh, what friendship, what an access of honest friendship, rushed like
electricity through their six hands.

There was no need to talk. They had turned their backs on their faith. Pro-
fessor Splint had spoken for the three of them. Their cowardice (for they
had never dared to express a doubt when the old man was alive) was some-
thing that bound them together now more tightly than a common valour could
ever have done.

"Grief's gravy was an overstatement," said Throd. "I only said it because,
after all, he is dead, and we did admire him in a way--and I like saying the
right thing at the right time. I always have. But it was excessive."

"So was “Death's icicle” I suppose," said Spiregrain, rather loftily; "but
it was a neat phrase."

"Not when he was burned to death," said Throd, who saw no reason why Spire-
grain should not recant as fully as himself.

"Nevertheless," said Splint, who found himself the centre of the stage,
which was usually monopolized by Spiregrain, "we are free. Our ideals are
gone. We believe in pain. In life. In all those things which he told us
didn't exist."

Spiregrain, with the guttering candle reflected on his glassy nose, drew
himself up and, in a haughty tone, inquired of the others whether they
didn't think it would be more tactful to discuss their dismissal of their
dead master's Beliefs somewhat further from his relics. Though he was
doubtless out of earshot he certainly didn't look it.

They left at once, and directly the door had shut behind them the candle
flame, after a short, abortive leap into the red air, grovelled for a moment
in its cup of liquid wax and expired. The little red box of a room had be-
come, according to one's fancy, either a little black box or a tract of
dread, imponderable space.

Once away from the death-chamber and a peculiar lightness sang in their
bones.

"You were right, Splint, my dear fellow...quite right. We are free, and no
mistake." Spiregrain's voice, thin, sharp, academic, had a buoyancy in it
that caused his confederates to turn to him.

"I knew you had a heart under it all," wheezed Throd. "I feel the same."

"No more Angels to look forward to!" yelled Splint, in a great voice.

"No more longing for Life's End," boomed Throd.

"Come, friends," screamed the glass-faced Spiregrain, forgetting his dig-
nity, "let us begin to live again!" and catching hold of their shoulders,
he walked them rapidly along the corridor, his head held high, his mortar-
board at a rakish angle. Their three gowns streamed behind them, the tas-
sels of their headgear also, as they increased their pace. Turning this
way and that, almost skimming the ground as they went, they threaded the
arteries of cold stone until, suddenly, bursting out into the sunshine on
the southern side of Gormenghast, they found ahead of them the wide sun-
washed spaces, the tall trees fringing the foothills, and the mountain it-
self shining against the deep blue sky. For a moment the memory of the
picture in their late master's room flashed through their minds.

"Oh, lush!" they cried. "Oh, lush it is, for ever!" And, breaking into a
run and then a gallop, the three enfranchised professors, hand in hand,
their black gowns floating on the air, bounded across the golden land-
scape, their shadows leaping beside them.



FOURTEEN



It was in Bellgrove's class, one late afternoon, that Titus first thought
consciously about the idea of colour: of things having colours: of every-
thing having its own particular colour, and of the way in which every par-
ticular colour kept changing according to where it was, what the light
was like, and what it was next to.

Bellgrove was half asleep, and so were most of the boys. The room was hot
and full of golden motes. A great clock ticked away monotonously. A blue-
bottle buzzed slowly over the surfaces of the hot window-panes or from
time to time zithered its languid way from desk to desk. Every time it
passed certain desks, small inky hands would grab at it, or rulers would
smack out through the tired air. Sometimes it would perch, for a moment,
on an inkpot or on the back of a boy's collar and scythe its front legs
together, and then its back legs, rubbing them, scything them, honing
them, or as though it were a lady dressing for a ball drawing on a pair
of long, invisible gloves.

Oh, bluebottle, you would fare ill at a ball! There would be none who
could dance better than you; but you would be shunned: you would be
too original: you would be before your time. They would not know your
steps, the other ladies. None would throw out that indigo light from brow
or flank--but, bluebottle, they wouldn't want to. There lies the agony.
Their buzz of converse is not yours, bluebottle. You know no scandal,
no small talk, no flattery, no jargon: you would be hopeless, for all that
you can pull the long gloves on. After all, your splendour is a kind of
horror-splendour. Keep to your inkpots and the hot glass panes of school-
rooms and buzz your way through the long summer terms. Let the great
clock-ticks play counterpoint. Let the swish of a birch, the detonation
of a paper pellet, the whispered conspiracy be your everlasting pards.

Down generations of boys, buzz, bluebottle, buzz in the summer prisons--
for the boys are bored. Tick, clock, tick! Young Scarabee's on edge to
fight the "Slogger'--young Dogseye hankers for his silkworms' weaving--
Jupiter minor knows a plover's nest. Tick, clock, tick!

Sixty seconds in a minute; sixty minutes in an hour; sixty times sixty.

Multiply the sixes and add how many noughts? Two. I suppose. Six sixes
are thirty-six. Thirty-six and two noughts is 3,600. Three thousand and
six hundred seconds in an hour. Quarter of an hour is left before the
silkworms--before the "Slogger'--before the plover's nest. Buzz-fly, buzz!
Tick, clock, tick! Divide 3,600 by four and then subtract a bit because
of the time taken to work it all out. Nine hundred seconds! Oh, marvel-
lous! marvellous! Seconds are so small. One--two--three--four--seconds
are so huge.

The inky fingers scrubble through the forelock--the blackboard is a grey
smear. The last three lessons can be seen faintly one behind the other--
like aerial perspective. A fog of forgotten figures--forgotten maps--for-
gotten languages.


But while Bellgrove was sleeping--while Dogseye was carving--while the
clock ticked--while the fly buzzed--while the room swam in a honey-col-
oured milky-way of motes--young Titus (inky as the rest, sleepy as the
rest, leaning his head against the warm wall, for his desk was flush
with the leather) had begun to follow a train of thought, at first laz-
ily, abstractedly, without undue interest--for it was the first train of
thought that he had ever troubled to follow very far. How lazily the
images separated themselves from one another or adhered for a moment to
the tissue of his mind!

Titus became dreamily interested, not in their sequence but in the fact
that thoughts and pictures could follow one upon the other so effortless-
ly. And it had been the colour of the ink, the peculiar dark and musty
blue of the ink in its sunken bowl in the corner of his desk, which had
induced his eyes to wander over the few objects grouped below him. The
ink was blue, dark, musty, dirtyish, deep as cruel water at night: what
were the other colours? Titus was surprised at the richness, the variety.
He had only seen his thumb-marked books as things to read or to avoid
reading: as things that got lost: things full of figures or maps. Now
he saw them as coloured rectangles of pale, washed-out blue or laurel
green, with the small windows cut out of them where, on the naked white-
ness of the first page, he had scripted his name.

The lid of the desk itself was sepia, with golden browns and even yell-
ows where the surface had been cut or broken. His pen, with its end chew-
ed into a subdividing tail of wet fronds, shimmered like a fish, the in-
digo ink creeping up the handle from the nib, the green paint that was
once so pristine blurred with the blue of the ink at the pen's belly,
and then the whitish mutilated tail.

He even saw his own hand as a coloured thing before he realized it was
part of him; the ochre colour of his wrist, the black of his sleeve; and
then...and then he saw the marble, the glass marble beside the inkpot,
with its swirling spirals of rainbow colours twisted within the clear,
cold white glass: it was wealth. Titus fingered it and counted the col-
oured threads that spiralled within--red, yellow, green, violet, blue...
and their white and crystal world, so perfect, all about them, clear
and cold and smooth, heavy and slippery. How it could clink and crack
like a gunshot when it struck another! When it skidded the floor and
struck! Crack like a gunshot on the round and brilliant forehead of its
foe! Oh, beautiful marbles! Oh, blood-alleys! Oh, clouded ones, a-swim
in blood and milk! Oh, crystal worlds, that make the pockets jangle--
that make the pockets heavy!

How pleasant it was to hold that cold and glittering grape on a hot sum-
mer afternoon, with the Professor asleep at his high carved desk! How
lovely it was to feel the cold slipping thing in the hot palm of his
sticky hand! Titus clenched it and then held it against the light. As
he rolled it between his thumb and forefinger the coloured threads be-
gan to circle each other: to spiral themselves round and round and in
and out in endless convolutions. Red: yellow: green: violet: blue...
Red--yellow--green--red...yellow...red...red. Alone in his mind the
red became a thought--a colour-thought--and Titus slipped away into an
earlier afternoon. The ceiling, the walls, the floor of his thought
were red: he was enveloped in it; but soon the walls contracted and all
the surfaces dwindled together and came at last to a focus; the blur,
the abstraction had gone, and in its place was a small drop of blood,
warm and wet. The light caught it as it shone. It was on his knuckle,
for he had fought a boy in this same classroom a year ago--in that ear-
lier afternoon. A melancholy anger crept over Titus at this memory.
This image that shone out so redly, this small brilliant drop of blood
--and other sensations, flitted across this underlying anger and brought
on a sense of exhilaration, of self-confidence, and fear also at having
spilled this red liquid--this stream of legendary yet so real crimson.
And the bead of blood lost focus, became blurred, and then, changing
its hazy contour, became a heart...a heart. Titus put his hands a-
gainst his small chest. At first he could feel nothing, but moving his
fingertips he felt the double-thud, and the drumming rushed in from
another region of his memory: the sound of the river on a night when
he had been alone by the high bulrushes and had seen between their
inky, rope-thick columns a sky like a battle.

And the battle-clouds changed their shapes momently, now crawling a-
cross the firmament of his imagination like redskins, now whipping
like red fish over the mountains, their heads like the heads of the
ancient carp in Gormenghast moat, but their bodies trailing behind in
festoons like rags or autumn foliage. And the sky, through which these
creatures swam, endlessly, in multitudes, became the ocean and the
mountains below them were under-water corals, and the red sun became
the eye of a subaqueous god, glowering across the sea bed. But the
great eye lost its menace, for it became no bigger than the marble in
Titus' hand: for, wading towards him hip deep through the waters, dil-
ating as they neared until they pressed out and broke the frame of
fancy, was a posse of pirates.

They were as tall as towers, their great brows beetling over their
sunken eyes, like shelves of overhanging rocks. In their ears were
hoops of red gold, and in their mouths scythe-edged cutlasses a-drip.
Out of the red darkness they emerged, their eyes half closed against
the sun, the water at their waists circling and bubbling with the hot
light reflected from their bodies, their dimensions blotted out all
else: and still they came on, until their wire-glinting breasts and
rocky heads filled out the boy's brain. And still they came on, until
there was only room enough for the smouldering head of the central
buccaneer, a great salt-water lord, every inch of whose face was scab-
bed and scarred like a boy's knee, whose teeth were carved into the
shapes of skulls, whose throat was circled by the tattooing of a scaled
snake. And as the head enlarged, an eye became visible in the darkness
of its sockets, and in a moment nothing else but this wild and sinister
organ could be seen. For a short while it stayed there, motionless.
There was nothing else in the great world but this--globe. It was the
world, and suddenly like the world it rolled. And as it rolled it grew
yet again, until there was nothing but the pupil, filling the conscious-
ness; and in that midnight pupil Titus saw the reflection of himself
peering forward. And someone approached him out of the darkness of the
pirate's pupil, and a rust-red pinpoint of light above the figure's brow
became the coiled locks of his mother's wealth of hair. But before she
could reach him her face and body had faded and in the place of the hair
was Fuchsia's ruby; and the ruby danced about in the darkness, as though
it were being jerked on the end of a string. And then it, also, was gone
and the marble shone in his hand with all its spiralled colours--yellow,
green, violet, blue, red...yellow...green...violet...blue...yellow...
green...violet...yellow...green...yellow...yellow.

And Titus saw quite clearly not only the great sunflower with its tired,
prickly neck which he had seen Fuchsia carrying about for the last two
days, but a hand holding it, a hand that was not Fuchsia's. It held the
heavy plant aloft between the thumb and forefinger as though it was the
most delicate thing in the world. Every finger of the hand was aflame
with gold rings, so that it looked like a gauntlet of flaming metal--an
armoured thing.

And then, all at once, blotting it out, a swarm of leaves were swirling
through him, a host of yellow leaves, coiling, diving, rising, as they
swept forward across a treeless desert, while overhead, like a bonfire
in the sky, the sun shone down on the rushing leaves. It was a yellow
world: a restless, yellow world: and Titus was beginning to drift into a
yet deeper maw of the colour when Bellgrove wakened with a jerk, gathered
his gown about him like God gathering a whirlwind, and brought his hand
down with a dull, impotent thud on the lid of his desk. His absurdly no-
ble head raised itself. His proud and vacant gaze settled at last on
young Dogseye.

"Would it be too much to ask you," he said at last, with a yawn which ex-
posed his carious teeth, "whether a young man--a not very studious young
man, by name Dogseye--lies behind that mask of dirt and ink? Whether there
is a human body within that sordid bunch of rags, and whether that body
is Dogseye's, also." He yawned again. One of his eyes was on the clock,
the other remained bemusedly on the young pupil. "I will put it more sim-
ply: Is that really you, Dogseye? Are you sitting in the second row from
the front? Are you occupying the third desk from the left? And were you--
if, indeed, it is you, behind that dark-blue muzzle--were you carving
something indescribably fascinating on to the lid of your desk? Did I
wake to catch you at it, young man?"

Dogseye, a nondescript little figure, wriggled.

"Answer me, Dogseye. Were you carving away when you thought your old mas-
ter was asleep?"

"Yes, sir," said Dogseye, surprisingly loudly; so loudly that he startled
himself and glanced about him as though for the voice.

"What were you carving, my boy?"

"My name, sir."

"What, the whole thing, my boy?"

"I'd only done the first three letters, sir."

Bellgrove rose swathed. He moved, a benign, august figure, down the dusty
aisle between the desks until he reached Dogseye.

"You haven't finished the “G”', he said in a far-away, lugubrious voice.
"Finish the “G” and leave it at that. And leave the “EYE” for other
things...'--an inane smirk began to flit across the lower part of his face
--"such as your grammar-book," he said brightly, his voice horribly out of
character. He began to laugh in such a way as might develop into something
beyond control, but he was brought up short with a twinge of pain and he
clutched at his jaw, where his teeth cried out for extraction.

After a few moments--"Get up," he said. Seating himself at Dogseye's desk
he picked up the penknife before him and worked away at the "G' of "DOG'
until a bell rang and the room was transformed into a stampeding torrent
of boys making for the classroom door as though they expected to find upon
the other side the embodiment of their separate dreams--the talons of ad-
venture, the antlers of romance.


IRMA WANTS A PARTY


"Very well, then, and so you shall!" cried Alfred Prunesquallor. "So you
shall, indeed."

There was a wild and happy desperation in his voice. Happy, in that a de-
cision had been made at all, however unwisely.

Desperate, because life with Irma was a desperate affair in any case; but
especially in regard to this passion of hers to have a party.

"Alfred! Alfred! are you serious? Will you pull your weight, Alfred? I say,
will you pull your weight?"

"What weight I have I'll pull to pieces for you, Irma."

"You are resolved, Alfred--I say, you are resolved," she asked breathlessly.

"It is you who are resolved, sweet Perturbation. It is I who have submitted.
But there it is. I am weak. I am ductile. You will have your way--a way, I
fear, that is fraught with the possibility of monstrous repercussions--but
your own, Irma, your own. And a party we will throw. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,
ha, ha!"

There was something that did not altogether ring true in his shrill laugh-
ter. Was there a touch of bitterness in it somewhere? "After all," he con-
tinued, perching himself on the back of a chair (and with his feet on the
seat and his chin on his knees he looked remarkably like a grasshopper)...
"After all, you have waited a long time. A long time. But, as you know, I
would never advise such a thing. You're not the type to give a party.
You're not even the type to go to a party. You have nothing of the flip-
pancy about you that makes a party go, sister mine; but you are determined."

"Unutterably," said Irma.

"And have you confidence in your brother as a host?"

"Oh, Alfred, I could have!" she whispered grimly. "I would have, if you
wouldn't try to make everything sound clever. I get so tired of the way you
say things. And I don't really like the things you say."

"Irma," said her brother, "nor do I. They always sound stale by the time I
hear them. The brain and the tongue are so far apart."

"That's the sort of nonsense I loathe!" cried Irma, suddenly becoming pass-
ionate. "Are we going to talk about the party, or are we going to listen to
your silly souffles? Answer me, Alfred. Answer me at once."

"I will talk like bread and water. What shall I say?"

He descended from the chairback and sat on the seat. Then he leant forward
a little and, with his hands folded between his knees, he gazed expectantly
at Irma through the magnifying lenses of his spectacles. Staring back at
him through the darkened glass of her own lenses, the enlargement of his
eyes was hardly noticeable.

Irma felt that for the moment she had a certain moral ascendancy over her
brother. The air of submission which he had about him gave her strength to
divulge to him the real reason for her hankering for this party she had in
mind...for she needed his help.

"Did you know, Alfred," she said, that I am thinking of getting married?"

"Irma!" cried her brother. "You aren't!"

"Oh, yes, I am," muttered Irma. "Oh yes, I am."

Prunesquallor was about to inquire who the lucky man was when a peculiar
twinge of sympathy for her, poor white thing that she was, sitting so up-
right in the chair before him, caught at his heart. He knew how few her
chances of meeting men had been in the past: he knew that she knew nothing
of love's gambits save what she had read in books. He knew that she would
lose her head. He also knew that she had no one in view. So he said:

"We will find just the man for you. You deserve a thoroughbred: something
that can cock his ears and whisk his tail. By all that's unimpeachable,
you do indeed. Why...'

The Doctor stopped himself: he had been about to take verbal flight when
he remembered his promise: so he leant forward again to hear what his sis-
ter had to say.

"I don't know about cocking his ears and frisking his tail," said Irma,
with the suggestion of a twitch at one corner of her thin mouth; "but I
would like you to know, Alfred--I said I would like you to know, that I
am glad you understand the position. I am being wasted, Alfred. You real-
ize that, don't you--don't you?"

"I do, indeed."

"My skin is the whitest in Gormenghast."

"And your feet are the flattest," thought her brother: but he said:

"Yes, yes, but what we must do, sweet huntress--(O virgin through wild
sex's thickets prowling)' (he could not resist this image of his sister)
"what we must do is to decide whom to ask. To the Party, I mean. That is
fundamental."

"Yes, yes!" said Irma.

"And when we will ask them."

"That's easier," said Irma.

"And at what time of the day."

"The evening, of course," said Irma.

"And what they shall wear."

"Oh, their evening clothes, obviously," said Irma.

"It depends on whom we ask, don't you think? What ladies, my dear, have
dresses as resplendent as yours, for instance? There's a certain cruelty
about evening dress."

"Oh, that is of no avail."

"Do you mean “of no account”?"

"Yes, yes," said Irma.

"But how embarrassing! Won't they feel it keenly, my dear--or will you
put on rags, in an overflow of love and sympathy?"

"There will be no women."

"No women!" cried her brother, genuinely startled.

"I must be alone," his sister murmured, pushing her black glasses further
up the bridge of her long, pointed nose..."with them--the males."

"But what of the entertainment for your guests?"

"I shall be there," said Irma.

"Yes, yes; and no doubt you will prove ravishing and ubiquitous; but, my
love, my love, think again."

"Alfred," said Irma, standing up and lowering one of her iliac crests and
raising its counterpart so high that her pelvis looked thoroughly danger-
ous--"Alfred," she said, "how can you be so perverse? What use could women
be? You haven't forgotten what we have in mind, have you? Have you?"

Her brother was beginning to admire her. Had she all this long while been
hiding beneath her neuroticism, her vanity, her childishness, an iron will?

He rose and, cupping his hands over her hips, corrected their angle with
the quick jerk of a bonesetter. Then, sitting back in his chair and fast-
idiously crossing his long, elegant, cranelike legs while going through the
movements of washing his hands: "Irma, my revelation, tell me but this...'
he raised his eyes quizzically--"who are these males--these stags--these
rams--these torn cats--these cocks, stoats and ganders that you have in
mind? And on what scale is this carousal to be?"

"You know very well, Alfred, that we have no choice. Among the gentry, who
are there? I ask you, Alfred, who are there?"

"Who, indeed?" mused the Doctor, who could think of no one. The idea of a
party in his house was so novel that the effort of trying to people it was
beyond him. It was as though he were trying to assemble a cast for an un-
written drama.

"As for the size of the party, Alfred--are you listening? I have in mind a
gathering of some forty men."

"No! no!" shouted her brother, clutching at the arms of his chair, "not in
this room, surely? It would be worse than the white cats. It would be a dog
fight."

Was that a blush that stole across his sister's face?

"Alfred," she said after a while, "it is my last chance. In a year my gla-
mour may be tarnished. Is it a time to think of your own personal comfort?"

"Listen to me." Prunesquallor spoke very slowly. His high voice was strange-
ly meditative. "I will be as concise as I can. Only you must listen, Irma."

She nodded.

"You will have more success if your party is not too large. At a large party
the hostess has to flutter from guest to guest and can never enjoy a pro-
tracted conversation with anyone. What is more, the guests continually flut-
ter towards the hostess in a manner calculated to show her how much they
are enjoying themselves.

"But at a smaller party where everyone can easily be seen the introductions
and general posturing can be speedily completed. You will then have time to
size up the persons present and decide on those worth giving your attention
to."

"I see," said Irma. "I am going to have lanterns hanging in the garden, too,
so that I can lure those whom I think fit out into the apple orchard."

"Good heavens!" said Prunesquallor, half to himself. "Well, I hope it won't
be raining."

"It won't," said Irma.

He had never known her like this. There was something frightening in seeing
a second side of a sister whom he had always assumed had only one.

"Well, some of them must be left out, then."

"But who are they? Who are they?" he cried. "I can't bear this frightful ten-
sion. What are these males that you seem to think of en bloc? This doglike
horde who at, as it were, a whistle will be ready to stream across the quad-
rangle and through the hall, through this door and to take up a score of mas-
culine postures? In the name of fundamental mercy, Irma, tell me who they are."

"The Professors."

As Irma uttered the words her hands grappled with one another behind her back.
Her flat bosom heaved. Her sharp nose twitched and a terrible smile came over
her face.

"They are gentlemen!" she cried in a loud voice. "Gentlemen! And worthy of my
love."

"What! All forty of them." Her brother was on his feet again. He was shocked.

But at the same time he could see the logic of Irma's choice. Who else was
there for a party with this hidden end in view? As for their being "gentlemen'
--perhaps they were. But only just. If their blood was bluish, so for the most
part were their jaws and fingernails. If their backgrounds bore scrutiny, the
same could hardly be said for their foregrounds.

"What a vista opens out before us! How old are you, Irma?"

"You know very well, Alfred."

"Not without thinking," said the Doctor. "But leave it. It's what you look
like that matters. God knows you're clean! It's a good start. I am trying to
put myself in your place. It takes an effort--ha ha!--I can't do it."

"Alfred."

"My love?"

"How many do you think would be ideal?"

"If we chose well, Irma, I should say a dozen."

"No, no, Alfred, it's a party! It's a party! Things happen at parties--not at
friends' gatherings. I've read about it. Twenty, at least, to make the atmos-
phere pregnant."

"Very well, my dear. Very well. Not that we will include a mildewed and wheezy
beast with broken antlers because he comes twentieth on the list when the other
nineteen are stags, are virile and eligible. But come, let us go into this mat-
ter more closely. Let us say, for sake of argument, that we have whittled the
probable down to fifteen. Now, of this fifteen, Irma, my sweet co-strategist,
surely we could not hope for more than six as possible husbands for you.--No,
no, do not wince; let us be honest, though it is brutal work. The whole thing
is very subtle, for the six you might prefer are not necessarily the six that
would care to share the rest of their lives with you; oh no. It might be an-
other six altogether whom you don't care about one little bit. And over and
above these interchangeables we must have the floating background of those
whom I have no doubt you would spurn with your elegantly cloven hooves were
they to make the least advance. You would bridle up, Irma: I'm sure you would.
But nevertheless they are needful, these untouchables, for we must have a hin-
terland. They are the ones who will make the party florid, the atmosphere po-
tential."

"Do you think we could call it a soiree, Alfred?"

"There is no law against it that I know of," answered Prunesquallor, a little
irritably perhaps, for she had obviously not been listening. "But the Profes-
sors, as I remember them, are hardly the types I would associate with the term.
Who, by the way, do comprise the Staff these latter days? It is a long time
since I last saw the flapping of a gown."

"I know that you are cynical, Alfred, BUT I would have you know that they are
my choice. I have always wished for a man of learning to be my own. I would
understand him. I would administer to him. I would protect him and darn his
socks."

"And a more dexterous darner never protected the tendo achilles with a
double skein!"

"Alfred!"

"Forgive me, my own. By all that's unforeseeable I am getting to like the idea.
For my part, Irma, I will see to the wines and liqueurs, the barrels and the
punchbowl. For your part the eatables, the invitations, the schooling of the
staff--our staff, not the luminaries'. And now, my dear, when? This is the
question--when?"

"My gown of a thousand frills, with its corsage of hand-painted parrots will
be ready within ten days, and...'

"Parrots!" cried the Doctor in consternation.

"Why not?" said Irma, sharply.

"But," wavered her brother, "how many of them?"

"What on earth does it matter to you, Alfred? They are brightly coloured birds."

"But will they chime in with the frills, my sweet one? I would have thought
if you must have hand-painted creatures on your corsage, as you call it--that
something calculated to turn the thoughts of the Professors to your feminin-
ity, your desirability, something less aggressive than parrots might be wise
...Mind you, Irma, I'm only...'

"Alfred!" Her voice jerked him back to his chair.

"My, province, I think," she said, with heavy sarcasm. "I imagine when it
comes to parrots you can leave them to me."

"I will," said her brother.

"Will ten days give us time, Alfred?" she said, as she rose from her chair and
approached her brother, smoothing back her iron-grey hair with her long, pale
fingers. Her tone had softened. To the Doctor's horror she sat on the arm of
his chair.

Then, with a sudden kittenish abandon, she flung back her head so that her over-
long yet pearl-white neck was tautened in a backward curve and her chignon tap-
ped her between her shoulder-blades in so peremptory a way as to make her cough.
But directly she had ascertained that it was not her brother being wilful, the
ecstatic and kittenish expression came back to her powdered face, and she
clapped her hands together at her breast.

Prunesquallor, staring up, horrified at yet another facet of her character com-
ing to light, noticed that one of her molars needed filling, but decided it was
not the moment to mention it.

"Oh Alfred! Alfred!" she cried. "I am a woman, aren't I?" The hands were shaking
with excitement as they gripped one another. "I'll show them I am!" she screamed,
her voice losing all control. And then, calming herself with a visible effort, she
turned to her brother and, smiling at him with a coyness that was worse than any
scream--"I'll send their cards to them tomorrow, Alfred," she whispered.



FIFTEEN



Three shafts of the rising sun, splintering through the murk, appeared to set
fire to the earth where they struck it. The bright impact of the nearest beam
exposed a tangle of branches which clawed in a craze of radiance, microscopical-
ly perfect and adrift in darkness.

The second of these floodlit islands appeared to float immediately above the
first, for the sky and the earth were a single curtain of darkness. In reality
it was as far away again, but hanging as it did gave no sense of distance.

At its northern extremity there grew from the wasp-gold earth certain forms
like eruptions of masonry rather than spires and buttresses of natural rock.
The sunshaft had uncovered a mere finger of some habitation which, widening as
it entered the surrounding darkness to the North, became a fist of stones,
which, in its turn, heaving through wrist and forearm to an elbow like a smash-
ed honeycomb, climbed through darkness to a gaunt, time-eaten shoulder only to
expand again and again into a mountainous body of timeless towers.

But of all this nothing was visible but the bright and splintered tip of a
stone finger.

The third "island' was the shape of a heart. A coruscating heart of tares on
fire.

To the dark edge of this third light a horse was moving. It appeared no bigger
than a fly. Astride its back was Titus.

As he entered the curtain of darkness which divided him from his citylike home
he frowned. One of his hands gripped the mane of his mount. His heart beat loudly,
in the absolute hush. But the horse moved without hesitation, and he was quieten-
ed by the regular movement beneath him.

All at once a new "island' of light, undulating as it ran from the east, en-
larging its mercurial margins all the while as though to push away the darkness,
created in the gloom a fantastic kaleidoscope of fleeting rocks and trees and
valleys and ridges--the fluctuating "coastline" flaring in sharp and minute
tracery. This flow of radiance was followed by another and another. Great saf-
fron gaps had appeared in the sky--and then, from skyline to skyline, the world
was naked light.

Titus shouted. The horse shook its head; and then, over the land of his ances-
tors, he galloped for home.

But in the excitement of the gallop Titus turned his head from the castle tow-
ers, which lifted themselves momently higher above the horizon, turned it to
where, away in the cold haze of the dawn Gormenghast Mountain with its claw-
like peak threw out its challenge across the thrilling air--"Do you dare?" it
seemed to cry. "Do you dare?"

Titus leaned back in the stirrups and tugged his horse to a standstill, for a
rare confusion of voices and images had made a cockpit of his panting body.
Forests as wet and green as romance itself heaved their thorned branches
through him as he sat there shuddering, half turned on the saddle. Swathes of
wet foliage shuffled beneath his ribs. In his mouth he tasted the bitterness
of leaves. The smell of the forest earth, black with rotted ferns and pungent
with fermentation, burned for a moment in his nostrils.

His eyes had travelled down from the high, bare summit of Gormenghast Mountain
to the shadowy woods, and then again had turned to the sky. He stared at the
sun as it climbed. He felt the day beginning. He turned his horse about. His
back was towards Gormenghast.

The mountain's head shone in a great vacancy of light. It held within its ugly
contour either everything or nothing at all. It awakened the imagination by
its peculiar emptiness.

And from it came the voice again.

"Do you dare? Do you dare?"

And a host of voices joined. Voices from the sun-blotched glades. From the
marshes and the gravel beds. From the birds of the green river reaches. From
where the squirrels are and the foxes move and the woodpeckers thicken the
drowsy stillness of the day with their far arcadian tapping: from where the
rotten hollow of some tree, mellow with richness, glows as though lit from
within by the sweet and secret cache of the wild bees.


Titus had risen an hour before the bell. He had hurried into his clothes with-
out a sound, and had then tip-toed through silent halls to a southern gateway;
and then, running across a walled-in courtyard, had arrived at the Castle stabl-
es. The morning was black and murky, but he was restless for a world without
Walls. He had paused at Fuchsia's door on his way and had tapped at it.

"Who's there?" Her voice had sounded strangely husky from the other side.

"It's me," said Titus.

"What do you want?"

"Nothing," said Titus. "I'm going for a ride."

"It's beastly weather," said Fuchsia. "Good-bye."

"Good-bye," said Titus; and had resumed his tip-toeing along the corridor when
he heard the sound of a handle being rattled. He turned and saw, not only Fuch-
sia disappearing back into her bedroom, but at the same moment something which
was travelling very fast through the air and at his head. To protect his face
he threw up his arm and, more by accident than adroitness, found he had caught
in his hand a large and sticky slice of cake.

Titus knew that he was not allowed out of the Castle before breakfast. He knew
that it was doubly disobedient to venture beyond the Outer Walls. As the only
survivor of a famous line he had to take more than ordinary care of himself.
It was for him to give particulars of when and where he was going, so that
should he be late in returning it would be known at once. But, dark as was the
day, it had no power to suppress the craving which had been mounting for weeks--
the craving to ride and ride when the rest of the world lay in bed: to drink
the spring air in giant gulps as his horse galloped beneath him over the April
fields, beyond the Outer Dwellings. To pretend, as he galloped, that he was
free.

Free...!

What could such a conception mean to Titus, who hardly knew what it was to move
from one part of his home to another without being watched, guided or followed
and who had never known the matchless privacy of the obscure? To be without a
famous name? To have no lineage? To be something of no interest to the veiled
eye of the grown-up world? To be a creature that grew, as a redskin creeps:
through childhood and youth, from one year to the next, as though from thicket
to thicket, from ambush to ambush, peering from Youth's tree-top vantages?

Because of the wild vista that surrounded Gormenghast and spread to every hor-
izon as though the castle were an island of maroons set in desolate water be-
yond all trade-routes: because of this sense of space, how could Titus know
that the vague, unfocused dissatisfaction which he had begun to feel from time
to time was the fretting of something caged?

He knew no other world. Here all about him the raw material burned: the prop-
erties and settings of romance. Romance that is passionate; obscure and sex-
less: that is dangerous and arrogant.

The future lay before him with its endless ritual and pedantry, but something
beat in his throat and he rebelled.

To be a truant! A Truant! It was like being a Conqueror--or a Demon.

And so he had saddled his small grey horse and ridden out into the dark April
morning. No sooner had he passed through one of the arches in the Outer Wall
and cantered in the direction of Gormenghast forest than he became suddenly,
hopelessly lost. All in a moment the clouds seemed to have cut out all poss-
ible light from the sky, and he had found himself among branches which switch-
ed back and struck him in the darkness. At another time, his horse had found
itself up to the knees in a cold and sucking mire. It had shuddered beneath
him as it backed with difficulty to find firmer purchase for its hooves. As
the sun had climbed, Titus was able to make out where he was. And then, sud-
denly, the long sunshafts had broken through the gloom and he had seen away
in the distance--far further than he would ever have guessed possible--the
shining stone of one of the Castle's western capes.

And then the flooding of the sun, until not a rag was left in the sky, and
the thrill of fear became the thrill of anticipation--of adventure.

Titus knew that already he would be missed. Breakfast would be over; but
long before breakfast an alarm must have been raised in the dormitory. Titus
could see the raised eyebrow of his professor in the schoolroom as he eyed
the empty desk, and could hear the chatter and speculation of the pupils.
And then he felt something more thrilling than the warm kiss of the sun on
the back of his neck: it was a reedy flight of cold April air across his
face--something perilous and horribly exciting--something very shrill, that
whistled through his qualmy stomach and down his thighs. It was as though
it was the herald of adventure that whistled to him to turn his horse's
head, while the soft gold sunlight murmured the same message in a drowsier
voice.

For a moment so huge a sense of himself swam inside Titus as to make the
figures in the castle like puppets in his imagination. He would pull them
up in one hand and drop them into the moat when he returned--if he returned.
He would not be their slave any more! Who was he to be told to go to school:
to attend this and to attend that? He was not only the 77th Earl of Gormen-
ghast, he was Titus Groan in his own right.

"All right, then!" he shouted to himself, "I'll show them!" And, digging
his heels into his horse's flanks, he headed for the Mountain.

But the cold drift of spring air across his face was not only a prelude to
Titus' truancy. It foretold yet another alternation in the weather, as rapid
and as unexpected as the coming of the sun. For although there were no
clouds in the upper air, yet the sun seemed now to have a haze upon it and
the warmth on his neck was weaker.

It was not until he had covered over three miles of his rebellious expedition
and was in the hazel woods that led to the foothills of Gormenghast Mountain,
that he positively noticed a mistiness in the atmosphere. From then onwards a
whiteness seemed to grow above him, to arise out of the earth and gather to-
gether on every side. The sun ceased to be more than a pale disc, and then,
was gone altogether.

There was no turning back now: Titus knew that he would be lost immediately
if he turned his horse about. As it was, he could see nothing but a lambent
glow, gradually growing dimmer--a glow immediately before and above him. It
was the upper half of Gormenghast Mountain shining through the thickening
mists.

To climb out of the white vapour was his only hope and, jogging the horse
into a dangerous trot, for visibility was but a yard or two, he made (with
the pale shimmer above him for a guide) for the high slopes; and at last he
found the air begin to thin. When the sun shone down again unhindered and
the highest wisps of the mist were coiling some distance below, Titus real-
ized in full what it was to be alone. The solitude was of a kind he had
never experienced before. The silence of a motionless altitude with a world
of fantastic vapour spread below.

Away to the west the roofscape of his heavy home floated, as lightly as
though every stone were a petal. Strung across the capstone jaws of its great
head a hundred windows, the size of teeth, reflected the dawn. There was
less the nature of glass about them than of bone, or of the stones which
locked them in. In contrast to the torpor of these glazes, punctuating the
remote masonry with so cold a catenation, acres of ivy spread themselves
like dark water over the roofs and appeared restless, the millions of heart-
shaped eyelids winking wetly.

The mountain's head shone above him. Was there no living thing on those
stark slopes but the truant child? It seemed that the heart of the world
had ceased to beat.

The ivy leaves fluttered a little and a flag here and there stirred against
its pole, but there was no vitality in these movements, no purpose, any more
than the long hair of some corpse, tossing this way and that in a wind, can
deny the death of the body it flatters. Not a head appeared at any of those
topmost, teeth-like windows that ran along the castle's brow. Had anyone
stood there he might have seen the sun hanging a hand's-breath above the
margins of the ground mist.

From horizon to horizon it spread, this mist, supporting the massives of
the mountains on its foaming back, like a floating load of ugly crags and
shale. It laid its fumes along the flanks of the mountain. It laid them a-
long the walls of the castle, fold upon baleful fold, a great tide. Sound-
less, motionless, beneath some exorcism more potent than the moons, it had
no power to ebb.

Not a breath from the mountain. Not a sigh from the swathed Castle, nor
from the hollow hush of the mists. Was there no pulse beneath the vapour?
Not a heart beating? For surely the weakest heart would reverberate in such
white silence and thud its double drumnote in far gullies.

The sunlight gave no stain to the chalky pall. It was a white sun, as
though reflecting the mists below it--brittle as a disc of glass.

Was it that Nature was restless and was experimenting with her various el-
ements? For no sooner had the white mist settled itself as though for ever,
lying heavily in the ravine like a river of cold smoke--lying over the flats
like a quilt, feeling into every rabbit burrow with its cold fingers--than
a chill and scouring wind shipped out of the north, and sweeping the land
bare again, dropped as suddenly as it had risen, as though it had been sent
specifically to clear the mist away. And the sun was a globe of gold again.
The wind was gone and the mists were gone and the clouds were gone and the
day was warm and young, and Titus was on the slopes of Gormenghast Mountain.



SIXTEEN



Far below Titus, like a gathering of people, stood a dozen spinneys. Between
them the rough land glittered here and there where threads of water reflected
the sky.

Out of this confusion of glinting water, brambles and squat thorn bushes, the
clumps of trees arose with a peculiar authority.

To Titus they seemed curiously alive, these copses. For each copse appeared
singularly unlike any other one, though they were about equal in size and
were exclusively a blend of ash and sycamore.

But it was plain to see that whereas the nearest of these groups to Titus was
in an irritable state, not one of the trees having anything to do with his
neighbour, their heads turned away from one another, their shoulders shrugged,
yet not a hundred feet away another spinney was in a condition of suspended
excitement, as with the heads of its trees bowed together above some green
and susurrous secret. Only one of the trees had raised its head a little. It
was tilted on one side as though loth to miss any of the fluttering conver-
sation at its shoulder. Titus shifted his gaze and noticed a copse where,
drawn back, and turned away a little on their hips, twelve trees looked side-
ways at one who stood aloof. Its back was to them. There could be no doubt
that, with its gaze directed from them it despised the group behind it.

There were the trees that huddled together as though they were cold or in
fear. There were trees that gesticulated. There were those that seemed to
support one of their number who appeared wounded. There were the arrogant
groups, and the mournful, with their heads bowed: the exultant copses and
those where every tree appeared to be asleep.

The landscape was alive, but so was Titus. They were only trees, after all:
branches, roots and leaves. This was his day; there was no time to waste.

He had given the slip to that grey line of towers. Here about him were the
rocks and ferns of the mountain, with the morning sunbeams dancing over
them in hazes of ground-light.

A dragonfly hovered above a rock face at his elbow, and at the same moment
he became aware of a great shouting of birds from beyond the copses.

To the north of the copses lay the shining flats, but it was from further
to the west, and closer to the foot of the mountain where he stood, that
the voices of the birds floated, so thinly and clearly; it was there that
the wide forests lay basking. Fold after green fold, clump after clump of
foliage undulating to the notched skyline.

His yearnings became focused. His truancy no longer nagged him. His curi-
osity burned.

What brooded within those high and leafy walls? Those green and sunny walls?
What of the inner shadows? What of the acorn'd terraces, and the hollow
aisles of leaves? His truant conscience lay stunned beneath the hammers of
his excitement.

He wanted to gallop, but the slopes of shale and loose stone were too dan-
gerous. But as he picked his way to lower levels the ground became corre-
spondingly easier, and he was able to move more rapidly over considerable
stretches.

The green wall of the forest rose higher into the sunny sky as he neared,
until he had to raise his head to see the highest branches. Gormenghast was
hidden behind a rise in the ground to the west. To the east and behind him
the slopes of the mountain climbed in ugly shelves. He drew in the reins
and slid from the horse's back.

The ground about him was of silky and rather ashen grass, which shone with
a peculiar white light. Rough rocks lay scattered about, in the shadow of
whose hot brows and thrust-out jaws a variety of ferns grew luxuriously.

Lizards ran across the hot upper surfaces, and with Titus' first step to-
wards the forest wall a snake slid down a rock face like a stream of water
and whipped across his path with a rattling of its loosely-jointed tail.

What was this shock of love? A rattle-snake; a dell of silky grass; some
great rocks with lizards and ferns, and the green forest wall. Why should
these add up to so thrilling, so breathtaking a total?

He knotted the reins loosely about the pony's neck and gave it a long push
in the direction of Gormenghast. "Go home," he said. The pony turned her
head to him at once and then, tossing it to and fro, began to move away.
In a few moments she had disappeared over the rise in the ground, and Ti-
tus was truly alone.



SEVENTEEN



The morning classes had begun. In the schoolrooms a hundred things were
happening at the same time. But beyond their doors there was drama of an-
other kind: a drama of scholastic silence, for in the deserted halls and
corridors that divided the classes it surged like a palpable thing and
lapped against the very doors of the classrooms.

In an hour's time the usher would rattle the brass bell in the Central
Hall and the silence would be shaken to bits as, erupting from their var-
ious prisons, a world of boys poured through the halls like locusts.

In the classrooms of Gormenghast, as in the Masters' Common-room, the
walls were of horsehide. But this was the only thing they had in common,
for the moods of the various rooms and their shapes could not be more
various.

Fluke's room, for instance, was long, narrow and badly lit from a small
top-window at the far end. Opus Fluke lay in an arm-chair, draped with
a red rug. He was in almost total shadow. Although he could hardly make
out the boys in front of him, he was in a better position than they were,
for they could not see him at all. He had no desk in front of him, but
sat there, as it were, in the open darkness. One or two text-books were
littered about the floor beneath his chair for the sake of form. The dust
lay over them so thickly that they were like grey swellings. Mr Fluke had
not yet discovered that they had been nailed into the floorboards for o-
ver a year.

Perch-Prism's room was deadly square and far too well lit to please the
neophytes. Only the leather walls were musty and ancient, and even they
were scrubbed and oiled from time to time. The desks, the benches and
the floor-boards were scoured with soda and boiling water every morning,
so that apart from the walls there was a naked whiteness about the room
which made it quite the most unpopular. Cribbing was almost impossible
in that cruel light.

Flannelcat's room was a short tunnel with a semi-circular glass window
which filled in the whole of the near end. In contrast to Fluke, sitting
in the shadows, Mr Flannelcat perched aloft at a very high desk presented
a different picture. As the only light in the room poured in from behind
him, Mr Flannelcat might as well, in the eyes of his pupils, have been
cut out of black paper. There he sat against the bright semi-circular win-
dow at the end of the tunnel, his silhouetted gestures jerking to and fro
against the light. Through the window could be seen the top of Gormenghast
Mountain, and this morning, floating lazily, over its shining head, were
three small clouds like dandelion seeds.

But of the numerous classrooms of Gormenghast, each one with its unique
character, there was, that morning, one in particular. It lay upon one of
the upper floors, a great, dreamy hall of a place with far more desks than
were ever used and far more space than was ever (academically) needed.
Great strips of its horse-hide hung away from the walls.

The window of the classroom faced to the south, so that the floor which
had never been stained was bleached, and the ink that had been spilt, term
after term, had faded to so beautiful and wan a blue that the floorboards
had an almost faery colouring. Certainly there was nothing else particu-
larly faery about the place.

What, for instance, was that sacklike monster, that snoring hummock, that
deadweight of disjointed horror? Vile and brutish it looked as it lay curl-
ed like a black dog on the Professor's desk; but what was it? One would
say it was dead, for it was as heavy as death and as motionless; but there
was a sound of stifled snoring coming from it, with an occasional whistle
as of wind through jagged glass.

Whatever it was it held no terror, nor even interest for the score or so of
boys who, in that dreaming and timeless hall in the almost forgotten regions
of the Upper School, appeared to have something very different to think
about. The sunbeams poured through the high window. The room was in a haze
of motes. But there was nothing dreamy about the pupils.

What was happening? There was hardly any noise, but the tension in the air
had a loudness of its own.

For there was in progress a game of high and dangerous hazards. It was pecu-
liar to this classroom. The air was breathless. Those not taking part in the
peculiar battle squatted on desks or cupboards. A fresh phase was about to
begin. Their ingenuous faces were turned to the window. Seasoned creatures
they looked, these wiry children of chance. The veterans moved into position.

Everything was ready. The two loose floorboards had been taken up and the
first of them was propped against the window-sill so that it slanted across
and towards the floor of the classroom at a shallow angle. Its secret under-
side had been scraped and waxed with candle-stubs for as long as could be
remembered, and it was that underside which was facing the ceiling. The sec-
ond of the long floorboards, equally polished, was placed end to end with the
first, so that a stretch of narrow and slippery wood extended some thirty
feet across the schoolroom from the window to the opposite wall.

The team which was standing close by the open window was the first to make
a move, and one of its number--a black-haired boy with a birthmark on his
forehead--jumped on to the window-sill, apparently without giving a thought
to the hundred-foot drop on the other side.

At this movement, members of the enemy team who were crouching behind a
row of desks at the back of the schoolroom, marshalled their paper pellets, as
hard as walnuts, which they proposed to let loose from small naked catapults,
worn to a silky finish by ceaseless handling. There has been a time when clay
--and even glass marbles were used; but after the third death and a deal of
confusion in the hiding of the bodies, it was decided to be content with pa-
per bullets. Those were by no means gentle substitutes, the paper having been
chewed, kneaded, mixed with white gum, and then compressed between the hinges
of desks. Travelling as they did with deadly speed, they struck like the lash
of a whip.

But what were they to fire at? Their enemies stood by the window and were
obviously not expecting anything to fly in their direction. The firing party
were not even looking at them--they stared fixedly ahead, but at the same
time were beginning to close their left eyes and stretch their strands of
grim elastic. And then, suddenly, the significance of the game unfolded it-
self in a sharp and rhythmic whirl. Too rapid, too vital, too dangerous for
any dance or ballet. Yet as traditional and as filled with subtleties. What
was happening?

The black-haired boy with the birthmark had flexed his knees, hollowed his
back, clapped his inky hands and leaped from the window-sill out into the
morning sunlight, where the branches of a giant plane tree were like lattice-
work against the sun. For a moment he was a creature of the air, his head
thrown back, his teeth bared, his fingers outstretched, his eyes fixed upon
a white branch of the tree. A hundred feet below him the dusty quadrangle
shone in the morning sun. From the schoolroom it looked as though the boy
was gone for ever. But his pards by the window had flattened themselves a-
gainst the flanking wall, and their enemies, crouched behind the desks,
had their eyes fixed on the slippery floorboards that ran across the class-
room like a strip of ice.

The boy in mid-air had clawed at the branch, had gripped its end, and was
swinging out on a long and breath-taking curve through the foliaged air.
At the extremity and height of this outward-going arc, he wriggled himself
in a peculiar manner which gave an added downlash to the branch and swung
him high on the up-swing of his return journey--high into the air and out
of the leaves, so that for a moment he was well above the level of the win-
dow from which he had leapt. And it was now that his nerves must be like
iron--now, with but a fraction of time to spare before his volition failed
him, that he let go the branch. He was in mid-air again. He was falling --
falling at speed, and at such an angle as to both clear the lintel of the
window and the sill below it--and to land on his small tense buttocks--to
land like a bolt from heaven on the slanting floorboard; and a fraction of
a second later to thump into the leather wall at the far end of the school-
room, having whirled down the boards with the speed of a slung stone.

But he had not reached the wall unscathed for all the suddenness of his re-
appearance and velocity of flight. His ear buzzed like a nest of wasps. A
withering crossfire from the six catapults had resulted in one superlative
hit, three blows on the body and two misses. But there had been no cessa-
tion in the game, for even as he crashed into the dented leather wall an-
other of his team was already in midair, his hands stretched for the branch
and his eyes bright with excitement, while the firing party, no less on the
move, were recharging their weapons with fresh ammunition and were begin-
ning to close their left eyes again and stretch the elastic.

By the time the birthmark boy had trotted back to the window, with his ear
on fire, another apparition had fallen from the sunny sky, had whizzed down
the sloping board and skidded across the schoolroom to crash into the wall
where the leather was grimed and torn with years of collision. There was a
schoolroom silence over everything--a silence filled with the pale sunshine.
The floor was patterned with the golden shadow of the desks, of the benches,
of the enormous broken blackboard. It was the stillness of a summer term--
self-absorbed, unhurried, dreamlike, punctuated by the quick, inky handclap
of each boy as he leapt into space, the whizz of the pellets through the air,
the caught breath of the victim, the thud of a body as it collided with the
leather wall, and then the scuffling sound of catapults being recharged; and
then again the clap of the boy at the window, and the far rustle of leaves
as he swung through a green ark above the quadrangle. The teams changed.
The swingers took out their catapults. The firing party moved to the window.
It had a rhythm of its own, this hazardous, barbaric, yet ceremonial game--
a ritual as unquestioned and sacrosanct as anything could be in the soul of
a boy.

Devilry and stoicism bound them together. Their secrets were blacker, deeper,
more terrible or more hilarious through mutual knowledge of the throat-con-
tracting thrill of a lightning skid across a mellow schoolroom: through mu-
tual knowledge of the long leafshrouded flights through space: of their know-
ledge of the sound as the stinging bullet spins past the head or the pain as
it strikes.

But what of all this? This rhythm of stung boys? Or boys as filled with life
as fish or birds. Only that it was taking place that morning.

What of the ghastly black huddle on the Professor's desk? The sunlight
streaming through the leaves of the plane tree had begun to dapple it with
shimmering lozenges of light. It snored--a disgraceful sound to hear during
the first lesson of a summer morning.

But the moments of its indulgence were numbered, for there was, all of a sud-
den, a cry from near the ceiling and above the schoolroom door. It was the
voice of an urchin, a freckled wisp of a thing, who was perched on a high cu-
pboard. The glass of the fanlight above the door was at his shoulder. It was
dark with grime, but a small circle the size of a coin was kept transparent
and through this spy-hole he could command a view of the corridor outside.
He could thus give warning not only to the whole class but to the Professor,
at the first sign of danger.

It was rarely that either Barquentine or Deadyawn made a tour of the school-
room, but it was as well to have the freckled urchin stationed on the cupb-
oard from first thing in the morning onwards, for there was nothing more ir-
ritating than for the class to be disturbed.

That morning, lying there like a toy on the cupboard top, he had become so
intrigued by the changing fortunes of the "game' below him that it had been
over a minute since he had last put his eye to the spy-hole. When he did so
it was to see, not twenty feet from the door, a solid phalanx of Professors,
like a black tide, with Deadyawn himself at the fore, out-topping the others,
in his high chair on wheels.

Deadyawn, who headed the phalanx, was head and shoulders above the
rest of the staff, although he was by no means sitting up straight in his
high, narrow chair. With its small wheels squeaking at the feet of the four
legs, it rocked to and fro as it was propelled rapidly forwards by the usher,
who was as yet invisible to the wisp at the spy-hole, being hidden by the
high, ugly piece of furniture--ugly beyond belief--with its disproportionate
feeding-tray at the height of Deadyawn's heart and the raw little shelf for
his feet.

What was visible of Deadyawn's face above the tray appeared to be awake--
a sure sign that something of particular urgency was in the air.

Behind him the rustling darkness was solid with the professors. What had
happened to their various classes, and what on earth they could want on
this lazy floor of the castle at any time, let alone at the beginning of
the day, was unguessable. But here, nevertheless, they were, their gowns
whisking and whispering along the walls on either side. There was an in-
tentness in their gait, a kind of mass seriousness, quite frightening.

The midget boy on the cupboard-top cried his warning with a shriller note
in his voice than his schoolfellows had ever heard before.

"The 'Yawner'!" he screamed. "Quick! quick! quick! The Yawner'n all of
'em! Let me down! let me down!"

The rhythm of the hazardous game was broken. Not a single pellet whizzed
past the head of the last boy to burst out of the sunlight and crash into
the leather wall. In a moment the room was suspiciously quiet. Four rows
of boys sat half turned at their desks, their heads cocked on one side,
as they listened to the squeaking of Deadyawn's chair on its small wheels
as it rolled towards them through the silence.

The wisp had been caught, having dropped from what must have seemed to
him a great height into the arms of a big strawheaded youth.

The two floorboards had been grabbed and shot back into their long, nar-
row cavities immediately below the professor's desk. But a mistake had
been made, and when it was noticed it was too late for anything to be
done about it. One of the boards in the whirl of the moment had been put
back upside down.

On the desk itself the heavy black dog-like weight was still snoring.
Even the shrill cry of the "look-out' had done no more than send a twitch
through the jointed huddle.

Any boy in the first row, had he thought it possible to reach the prof-
essor's desk and get back to his own place before the entry of Deadyawn
and the staff, would have thrown the folds of Bellgrove's gown off Bell-
grove's sleeping head, where it lay sunk between his arms on the desk
top, and would have shaken Bellgrove into some sort of awareness; for
the black and shapeless thing was indeed the old master himself, lost
beneath the awning of his gown. For his pupils had draped it over his
reverend head, as they always did when he fell asleep.

But there was no time. The squeaking of the wheels had stopped. There
was a great trampling and scuffling of feet as the professors closed
their ranks behind their chief. The door handle was beginning to turn.

As the door opened, thirty or so boys, doubled over their desks, could
be seen scribbling furiously, their brows knit in concentration. There
was for the moment an unholy silence.

And then the voice of the usher, Mr Fly, cried out from behind Deadyawn's
chair:

"The Headmaster!" And the classroom scrambled to its feet. All except
Bellgrove.

The wheels began to squeak again as the high chair was steered up one of
the ink-stained aisles between the rows of desks. By this time the mortar
-boards had followed the Headmaster into the room, and under these mortar-
boards the faces of Opus Fluke, Spiregrain, Perch-Prism, Throd, Flannelcat,
Shred and Shimmer, Cutflower and the rest were easily recognizable. Dead-
yawn, who was on a tour of the classrooms, had, after inspecting each in
turn, sent the boys to their red-stone yard and kept their masters with
him--so that he now had practically the whole staff at his heels. The boys
would shortly be spread out in great fans and sent off on a day-long hunt
for Titus. For it was his disappearance which was causing this unprece-
dented activity.

How merciful a thing is man's ignorance of his immediate future! What a
ghastly, paralysing thing it would have been if all those present could
have known what was about to happen within a matter of seconds! For nothing
short of pre-knowledge could have stopped the occurrence, so suddenly it
sprang upon them.

The scholars were still standing, and Mr Fly, the usher, who had reached
the end of the passage between the desks, was about to turn the high chair
to the left and to run it up under Bellgrove's desk where Deadyawn could
speak to his oldest professor, when the calamity occurred, and even the
dreadful fact of Titus' disappearance was forgotten. For The Fly had slip-
ped! His feet had fled from under his perky body. His cocky little walk
was suddenly a splayed confusion of legs. They shot to and fro like a
frog's. But for all their lashing they could get no grip on the slippery
floor, for he had trodden on that deadly board which had been returned--
upside down--to its place below Bellgrove's desk.

The Fly had no time to let go his grip of the High Chair. It swayed above
him like a tower--and then while the long line of the staff peered over
one another's shoulders and the boys stood at their desks transfixed,
something more appalling than they had ever contemplated took place be-
fore them.

For as The Fly came down in a crash on the boards, the wheels of the high
chair whirled like tops and gave their final screech and the rickety piece
of furniture leapt like a mad thing and from its summit something was hurl-
ed high into the air! It was Deadyawn!

He descended from somewhere near the ceiling like a visitor from another
planet, or from the cosmic realms of Outer Space, as with all the signs of
the Zodiac fluttering about him he plunged earthwards.

Had he but had a long brass trumpet at his lips and the power of arching
his back and curling upwards as he neared the floorboards, and of swooping
across the room over the heads of the scholars in a riot of draperies, to
float away and out through the leaves of the plane tree and over the back
of Gormenghast, to disappear for ever from the rational world--then, if
only he had had the power to do this, that dreadful sound would have been
avoided: that most dreadful and sickening sound which not a single boy or
professor who heard it that morning was ever able to forget. It darkened
the heart and brain. It darkened the very sunlight itself in that summer
classroom.

But it was not enough that their hearing was appalled by the sound of a
skull being crushed like an egg--for, as though everything was working
together to produce the maximum horror, Fate had it that the Headmaster,
in descending absolutely vertically, struck the floor with the top of
his cranium, and remained upside down, in a horrible state of balance,
having stiffened with a form of premature rigor mortis.

The soft, imponderable, flaccid Deadyawn, that arch-symbol of delegated
duties, of negation and apathy, appeared now that he was upside down to
have more life in him than he had ever had before. His limbs, stiffened
in the death-spasm, were positively muscular. His crushed skull appeared
to balance a body that had suddenly perceived its reason for living.

The first movement, after the gasp of horror that ran across the sunny
schoolroom, came from among the debris of what was once the high chair.

The usher emerged, his red hair ruffled, quick eyes bulging, his teeth
chattering with terror. At the sight of his master upside down he made
for the window, all trace of cockiness gone from his carriage, his sense
of propriety so outraged that there was nothing he wanted so much as to
make a quick end to himself. Climbing on the window-sill, The Fly swung
his legs over and then dropped to the quadrangle a hundred feet below.

Perch-Prism stepped forward from the ranks of the professors.

"All boys will make their way immediately to the red-stone yard," he said
in a crisp, high staccato. "All boys will wait there quietly until they
are given instructions. Parsley!"

A youth, with his jaw hanging wide and his eyes glazed, started as though
he had been struck. He wrenched his eyes from the inverted Deadyawn, but
could not find his voice.

"Parsley," said Perch-Prism again, "you will lead the class out--and,
Chives, you will take up the rear. Hurry now! hurry! Turn your heads to
the door, there. You! yes, you, Sage Minor! And you there, Mint or what-
ever your name is--wake your ideas up. Hustle! hustle! hustle!"

Stupefied, the scholars began to file out of the door, their heads still
turned over their shoulders at their late Headmaster.

Three or four other professors had to some extent recovered from the first
horrible shock and were helping Perch-Prism to hustle the remnants of the
class from the room.

At last the place was clear of boys. The sunlight played across the empty
desks: it lit up the faces of the professors, but seemed to leave their
gowns and mortarboards as black as though they alone were in shadow. It
lit the soles of Deadyawn's boots as they pointed stiffly to the ceiling.

Perch-Prism, glancing at the professors, saw that it was up to him to make
the next move. His beady black eyes shone. What he had of a jaw he thrust
forward. His round, babyish, pig-like face was set for action.

He opened his prim, rather savage little mouth and was about to call for
help in righting the corpse, when a muffled voice came from an unexpected
quarter. It sounded both near and far. It was difficult to make out a word,
but for a moment or two the voice became less blurred. "No, I don't think
so, l'l man," it said, "for 't's love long lost, my queen, while Bellgrove
guards you...' (the drowsy voice continued in its sleep) "....when lion...
sprowl I'll tear their manes...awf...yoo. When serpents hiss at you I'll
tread on dem...probably...and scatter birds of prey to left an' right."

A long whistle from under the draperies and then, all of a sudden, with a
shudder, the invertebrate mass began to uncoil itself as Bellgrove's
shrouded head raised itself slowly from his arms. Before he freed himself
of the last layer of gown he sat back in his tutorial chair, and while he
worked with his hands to free his head, his voice came out of the cloth
darkness: "...Name an isthmus!" it boomed. "Tinepott?...Quagfire?...Spar-
rowmarsh?...Hagg?...Dankle?...What! Can no one tell his old master the
name of an isthmus?"

With a wrench he unravelled his head of the last vestment of gown, and
there was his long, weak, noble face as naked and venerable as any deep
sea monster's.

It was a few moments before his pale-blue eyes had accustomed themselves
to the light. He lifted his sculptured brow and blinked. "Name an isthmus,"
he repeated, but in a less interested voice, for he was beginning to be
conscious of the silence in the room.

"Name...an...isthmus!"

His eyes had accustomed themselves sufficiently for him to see, immediate-
ly ahead of him, the body of the Headmaster balanced upon his head.

In the peculiar silence his attention was so riveted upon the apparition
in front of him that he hardly realized the absence of his class.

He got to his feet and bit at his knuckle, his head thrust forward. He
withdrew his head and shook himself like a great dog; and then he leaned
forward and stared once more. He had prayed that he was still asleep. But
no, this was no dream. He had no idea that the Headmaster was dead, and so,
with a great effort (thinking that a fundamental change had taken in Dead-
yawn's psyche, and that he was showing Bellgrove this balancing feat in an
access of self-revelation) he (Bellgrove) began to clap his big, finely-
constructed hands together in a succession of deferential thuds, and to wear
upon his face an expression of someone both intrigued and surprised, his
shoulders drawn back, his head at a slant, his eyebrows raised, and the big
forefinger of his right hand at his lips. The line of his mouth rose at
either end, but his upward curve might as well have been downwards for all
the power it had to disguise his consternation.

The heavy thuds of his hand-clapping sounded solitary. They echoed fully
about the room. He turned his eyes to his class as though for support or
explanation. He found neither. Only the infinite emptiness of deserted
desks, with the broad, hazy shafts of the sun slanting across them.

He put his hand to his head and sat down suddenly.

"Bellgrove!" A crisp, sharp voice from behind him caused him to swing a-
round. There, in a double line, silent as Deadyawn or the empty desks,
stood the Professors of Gormenghast, like a male chorus or a travesty of
Judgement Day.

Bellgrove stumbled to his feet and passed his hand across his brow.

"Life itself is an isthmus," said a voice beside him.

Bellgrove turned his head. His mouth was ajar. His carious teeth were
bared in a nervous smile.

"What's that?" he said, catching hold of the speaker's gown near the
shoulder and pulling it forwards.

"Get a grip on yourself," said the voice, and it was Shred's. "This is
a new gown. Thank you. Life is an isthmus, I said."

"Why?" said Bellgrove, but with one eye still on Deadyawn. He was not
really listening.

"You ask me why!" said Shred. "Only think! Our Headmaster there," he said
(bowing slightly to the corpse) "is even now in the second continent.
Death's continent. But long before he was even..."

Mr Shred was interrupted by Perch-Prism. "Mr Fluke," he shouted, "will
you give me a hand?" But for all their efforts they could do little with
Deadyawn except reverse him. To seat him in Bellgrove's chair, prior to
his removal to the Professor's mortuary, was in a way accomplished, though
it was more a case of leaning the headmaster against the chair than seat-
ing him in it, for he was as stiff as a starfish.

But his gown was draped carefully about him. His face was covered with the
blackboard duster, and when at last his mortarboard had been found under
the debris of the high chair, it was placed with due decorum on his head.

"Gentlemen," said Perch-Prism, when they had returned to the Common-room
after a junior member had been dispatched to the doctor's, the undertaker's
and to the red-stone yard to inform the scholars that the rest of the day
was to be spent in an organized search for their school-fellow Titus--"Gen-
tlemen," said Perch-Prism, "two things are paramount. One, that the search
for the young Earl shall be pushed forward immediately in spite of inter-
ruption; and two, the appointment of the new Headmaster must be immediately
made, to avoid anarchy. In my opinion," said Perch-Prism, his hands grasp-
ing the shoulder-tags of his gown while he rocked to and fro on his heels,
"in my opinion the choice should fall, as usual, upon the senior member of
the staff, whatever his qualifications."

There was immediate agreement about this. Like one man they saw an even
lazier future open out its indolent vistas before them. Bellgrove alone was
irritated. For, mixed with his pride, was resentment at Perch-Prism's hand-
ling of the subject. As probable headmaster he should already have been
taking the initiative.

"What d'you mean by 'whatever his qualifications'...damn you, 'Prism?"
he snarled.

A terrible convulsion in the centre of the room, where Mr Opus Fluke lay
sprawled over one of the desks, revealed how that gentleman was fighting
for breath.

He was yelling with laughter, yelling like a hundred hounds; but he could
make no sound. He shook and rocked, the tears pouring down his crude, male
face, his chin like a long loaf shuddering as it pointed to the ceiling.

Bellgrove, turning from Perch-Prism, surveyed Mr Fluke. His noble head had
coloured, but suddenly the blood was driven from it. For a flashing moment
Bellgrove saw his destiny. Was he, or was he not, to be a leader of men?
Was this, or was this not, one of those crucial moments when authority must
be exercised--or withheld for ever? Here they were, in full conclave. Here
was he--Bellgrove--within his feet of clay, standing in all his weakness
before his colleagues. But there was something in him which was not consis-
tent with the proud cast of his face.

At that moment he knew himself to be of finer marl. He had known what ambi-
tion was. True, it was long ago and he was no longer worried by such ideas,
but he had known of it.

Quite deliberately, realizing that if he did not act at once he would never
act again, he lifted a large stone bottle of red ink from the table at his
side and, on reaching Mr Fluke and finding his head thrown back, his eyes
closed, and his strong jaws wide open in a paroxysm of seismic laughter, Mr
Bellgrove poured the entire contents down the funnel of Fluke's throat in
one movement of the wrist. Turning to the staff, "Perch-Prism," he said, in
a voice of such patriarchal authority as startled the professors almost as
much as the ink-pouring, "you will set about organizing the search for his
Lordship. Take the staff with you to the red-stone yard. Flannelcat, you
will get Mr Fluke removed to the sick-room. Fetch the doctor for him. Report
progress this evening. I shall be found in the Headmaster's study. Good
morning, Gentlemen."

As he swept out of the room with a bellying sweep of his gown and a toss of
his silver hair, his old heart was beating madly. Oh, the joy of giving or-
ders! Oh, the joy of it! Once he had closed the door behind him, he ran,
with high monstrous bounds, to the Headmaster's study and collapsed into the
Headmaster's chair--his chair from now onwards. He hugged his knees against
his chin, flopped over on his side, and wept with the first real sense of
happiness he had known for many years.



EIGHTEEN



Like rooks hovering in a black cloud over their nests, a posse of professors
in a whirl of gowns and a shuffling roofage of mortar-boards, flapped and
sidled their individual way towards, and eventually, through, a narrow open-
ing in a flank of the Masters' Hall.

This opening was less like a doorway than a fissure, though the remains of a
lintel were visible and a few boards swung aimlessly near the head of the
opening to show that there had once been a door. Faintly discernible on these
upper boards were these words: To the Professorial Quarters: Strictly Pri-
vate--and above them some irreverent hand had sketched the lively outline
of a stoat in gown and mortar-board. Whether or not the professors had ever
noticed this drawing, it is certain that it held no interest for them today.
It was enough for them to work their way through the fissure in the wall
where the darkness engulfed them, one by one.

Doorless as the opening was, yet there was no question about the Professors'
Quarters being "strictly private'. What lay beyond that cleft in the heavy
wall had been a secret for many generations, a secret known only to the suc-
ceeding staff--those hoary and impossible bands with whom, by ancient trad-
ition, there was no interference. There had once been talk of progress by
a young member of a bygone staff, but he had been instantly banished.

It was for the professors to suffer no change. To eye the scaling paint,
the rusting pen-nib, the sculpted desk lid, with understanding and approval.

They had by now, one and all, negotiated the narrow opening. Not a soul was
left in the Masters' Hall. It was as though no one had been there. A wasp
zoomed across the empty floorboards with a roar; and then the silence filled
the hall once again, as though with a substance.

Where were the professors now? What were they doing? They were halfway along
the third curve of a domed passageway which ended in a descending flight of
steps at the base of which stood an enormous turnstile.

As the professors moved like a black, hydra-headed dragon with a hundred
flapping wings, it might have been noticed that for all the sinister qual-
ity of the monster's upper half, yet in its numerous legs there was a cer-
tain gaiety. The little legs of blackness almost twinkled, almost hopped.
The great legs let fall their echoing feet in a jocular and carefree fash-
ion as though they were smacking a friend on the back.

And yet it was not wholly gay, this great composite dragon. For there were
two of its feet which moved less happily than the others. They belonged to
Bellgrove.

Delighted as he was to be the Headmaster, yet the alteration which this was
making in his way of life was beginning to gall him. And yet was there not
something about him more imposing than before? Had he taken some kind of
grip on himself? His face was stern and melancholy. He led his staff like
a prophet to their quarters. Their quarters, for they were no longer his.
With his accession to Headmasterdom he had forfeited his room above the
Professors' Quadrangle which he had occupied for three-quarters of his
life. Alone among the professors it was for him to turn back after he had
escorted his staff a certain distance of the way, and to return alone to
the headmaster's bedroom above the Masters' Hall.

It had been a difficult time for him since he first put on the Zodiac gown
of high office. Was he winning or losing his fight for authority? He long-
ed for respect, but he loved indolence also. Time would tell whether the
nobility of his august head could become the symbol of his leadership. To
tread the corridors of Gormenghast the acknowledged master of staff and
pupil alike! He must be wise, stern, yet generous. He must be revered.
That was it...revered. But did this mean that he would be involved in ex-
tra work...? Surely, at his age...?

The excitement in the multiform legs of the dragon had only begun to op-
erate since the professors had left the Masters' Hall behind them, and
with the Hall their duties also. For their day in the classrooms of Gor-
menghast was over, and if there was one thing above others that the pro-
fessors looked forward to, it was this thrill, this five o'clock thrill
of returning to their quarters.

They breathed in the secret air of their demesne. Over their faces a ser-
ies of private smiles began to play. They were nearing a world they un-
derstood--not with their brains, but with the dumb, happy, ancestral
understanding of their marrow bones.

The long evening was ahead. Not one ink-faced boy would they see for fif-
teen hours.

Taking deep breaths into its many lungs the hydra-headed dragon approach-
ed the stone flight of steps. In its wake, along the domed ceiling of the
long corridor, an impalpable serpent of exhaled pipe-smoke hovered and
coiled.

An almost imperceptible widening of the corridor was now apparent. The
professors became less cramped in their movements as the dragon began
to come to bits. The widening of the corridor had become something quite
unique, for a great vista of wooden floorboards was spread before them
until the walls (now about forty feet apart) turned abruptly away on ei-
ther side to flank the wide wooden terrace which overlooked the flight
of stairs. Although this flight was exceptionally broad and the profess-
ors as they descended had plenty of space in which to indulge themselves
(if the whim should take them) in a general loosening of their deport-
ment, a more vigorous smacking or a fiercer twinkling of their feet--yet
at the base of the stairs there was, once again, a bottleneck; for al-
though there was plenty of room on each side of the ancient turnstile
for them to stream past and into the great crumbling chamber beyond,
yet the custom was that the turnstile should be the only means of ac-
cess to the chamber.

Above the stone flight the sloping roof was in so advanced a state of
disintegration that a great deal of light found its way through the
holes in the roof, to lie in golden pools all over the great flight
of stairs, with their low treads and wide terrace, like shelves of
shallow stone.

As with their difficult egress from the Masters' Hall, the professors
were now being held up at the Great Turnstile.

But here it was a more leisurely affair. There was neither the scuf-
fling nor the agitation. They were in their own realms again.

Their apartments that surrounded the small quadrangle would be waiting
for them. What did it matter if they waited a little longer than they
could have wished? The long, bland, archaic, nostalgic, almond-smell-
ing evening lay ahead of them, and then the long, sequestered night
before the clanging bell aroused them, and a day of ink-and thumb-
marks, cribbing and broken spectacles, flies and figures, coastlines,
prepositions, isthmuses and essays, paper darts, test tubes, cata-
pults, chemicals and prisms, dates, battles and tame white mice, and
hundred half-formed, ingenious and quizzical faces, with their chapp-
ed red ears that never listened, renewed itself.

Deliberately, almost augustly, the gowned and mortar-boarded figures
followed one another through the great red turnstile and filed into
the chamber beyond.

But for the most part, the professors stood in groups, or were seated
on the lower steps of the stone flights, where they waited to take
their turn at the "stile'. They were in no hurry. Here and there a
savant could be seen lying stretched at full length along one of the
steps or shelves of the stone stairs. Here and there a group would be
squatting like aboriginals upon their haunches, their gowns gathered
about them. Some were in shadow, and very dark they looked--like ban-
dits in a bad light; some were silhouetted against the hazy, golden
swathes of the sun shafts; and some stood transfixed in the last rays
as they streamed through the honeycombed roof.

A small muscular gentleman with a spade-shaped beard was balancing
himself upside down and was working his way down the wide steps on
his hands. His head was, for the most part, hidden because his gown
fell over and obliterated it, so that, apart from balancing, he had
to feel for the edge of each step with his hidden hands. But occa-
sionally his head would appear out of the folds of his gown and the
beard could be seen for a quick moment, its harsh black spade a few
inches from the ground.

Of the few who watched him bemusedly there were none who had not
seen it all a hundred times before. A long-limbed figure, with his
knees drawn up to his blue jaw, which they supported, stared abstract-
edly at a group which stood out in silhouette against a swarm of gol-
den motes. Had he been a little closer and a little less abstracted
he might have heard some very peculiar ejaculations.

But he could see quite clearly that at the centre of this distant group
a short, precise figure was handing out to his colleagues what looked
like small stiff pieces of paper.

And so it was. The sprightly Perch-Prism was dispensing the invita-
tion cards which he had received that same afternoon by special mes-
senger:

IRMA and ALFRED PRUNESQUALLOR
hope to have the
pleasure of................................................'s company
on
…...........................................(etc.)

One by one the invited parties were handed their invitations, and
there was not a single professor who could withhold either a gasp
or grunt of surprise or a twitch of the eyebrow.

Some were so stupefied that they were forced to sit down on the steps
for a short while until their pulse rate slackened. Shred and Shrivell
tapped their teeth with the gilded edges of their cards, and were al-
ready making guesses at the psychological implications.

Fluke, his wide lipless mouth disgorging endless formations of dense
and cumulous smoke, was gradually allowing a giant grin to spread it-
self across his gaunt face.

Flannelcat was embarrassingly excited, and was already trying to rub
a thumb-mark from the corner of his card, which he had every intention
of framing.

Bellgrove had his great prophet's jaw hanging wide.

There were sixteen invitations altogether. The entire staff of the
Leather Room had been invited.

They had arrived, these invitation cards, at a time when Perch-Prism
had been the only master present in the Common-room and he had taken
over the responsibility of delivering them personally to the others.

Suddenly Opus Fluke's long leather mouth opened like a horse's and a
howl of insensitive laughter reverberated through the sunblotched
place.

A score of mortar-boards swivelled.

"Really!" said the sharp, precise voice of Perch-Prism. "Really, my
dear Fluke! What a way to receive an invitation from a lady! Come,
come."

But Fluke could hear nothing. The idea of being invited to a party
by Irma Prunesquallor had somehow broken through to the most sensi-
tized area of his diaphragm, and he yelled and yelled again until
he was breathless. As he panted hoarsely to a standstill, he did
not even look about him: he was still in his own world of amuse-
ment; but he did hold the Invitation Card up before his wet and
pebbly eyes once more, only to open his wide mouth again in a fresh
spasm; but there was no laughter left in him.

Perch-Prism's pug-baby features expressed a certain condescension,
as though he understood how Mr Fluke felt, but was nevertheless
surprised and mildly irritated by the coarseness in his colleague's
make-up.

It was Perch-Prism's saving grace that in spite of his old-maidish-
ness, his clipped and irritatingly academic delivery and his general
aura of omniscience, yet he had a strongly developed sense of the
ridiculous and was often forced to laugh when his brain and pride
wished otherwise.

"And the Headmaster," he said, turning to the noble figure at his
side, whose jaw still hung open like the mouth of a sepulchre,
"what does he think, I wonder? What does our Headmaster think about
it all?"

Bellgrove came to with a start. He looked about him with the mel-
ancholy grandeur of a sick lion. Then he found his mouth was
open, so he closed it gradually, for he would not have them think
that he would hurry himself for anyone.

He turned his vacant lion's eye to Perch-Prism, who stood there
perkily looking up at him and tapping his shiny invitation card
against his polished thumbnail.

"My dear Perch-Prism," said Bellgrove, "why on earth should you
be interested in my reaction to what is, after all, not a very
extraordinary thing in my life? It is possible, you know," he
continued laboriously, "it is just possible that when I was a
younger man I received more invitations to various kinds of fun-
ctions than you have ever received, or can ever hope to receive,
during the course of your life."

"But exactly!" said Perch-Prism. "And that is why we want his
opinion. That is why our Headmaster alone can help us. What
could be more enlightening than to have it straight from the
horse's mouth?"

For neatness' sake he could not help wishing that he were ad-
dressing Opus Fluke, for Bellgrove's mouth, though hardly hy-
perhuman, was nothing like a horse's.

"Prism," he said, "compared with me you are a young man. But
you are not so young as to be ignorant of the elements of decent
conduct. Be good enough in your puff-adder attitude to life to
find room for one delicacy at least; and that is to address me,
if you must, in a manner less calculated to offend. I will not
be talked across. My staff must realize this from the outset.
I will not be the third person singular. I am old, I admit it.
But I am nevertheless here. Here," he roared; "and standing on
the selfsame pavement with you, Master 'Prism; and I exist, by
hell! in my full conversational and vocative rights."

He coughed and shook his leonine head. "Change your idiom, my
young friend, or change your tense, and lend me a handkerchief
to put over my head--these sunbeams are giving me a headache."

Perch-Prism produced a blue silk handkerchief at once and draped
it over the peeved and noble head.

"Poor old 'prickles' Bellgrove, poor old fangs," he mused, whis-
pering the words into the old man's ears as he tied the corners of
the blue handkerchief into little knots, where it hung over the el-
der's head. "It'll be just the thing for him, so it will--a wild
party at the Doctor's, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!"

Bellgrove opened his rather weak mouth and grinned. He could never
keep his sham dignity up for long; but then he remembered his posi-
tion again and in a voice of sepulchral authority --

"Watch your step, sir," he said. "You have twisted my tail for long
enough."

"What a peculiar business this Prunesquallor affair is, my dear Flan-
nelcat," said Mr Crust. "I rather doubt whether I can afford to go.
I wonder whether you could possibly--er--lend me...'

But Flannelcat interrupted. "They've asked me, too," he said, his in-
vitation card shaking in his hand. "It is a long time since...' "It
is a long time since our evenings were disturbed from the Outside like
this," interrupted Perch-Prism. "You gentlemen will have to brush your-
selves up a bit. How long is it since you have seen a lady, Mr Fluke?"

"Not half long enough," said Opus Fluke, drawing noisily at his pipe.
"Never care for hens. Irritated me. May be wrong--quite possible--that's
another point. But for me--no. Spoilt the day completely."

"But you will accept, of course, won't you, my dear fellow?" said Perch-
Prism, inclining his shiny round head to one side. Opus Fluke yawned
and then stretched himself before he replied.

"When is it, friend?" he asked (as though it made any difference to him
when his every evening was an identical yawn). "Next Friday evening,
at seven o'clock--R.S.V.P. it is," panted Flannelcat.

"If dear old bloody Bellgrove goes," said Mr Fluke, after a long pause,
"I couldn't stay away--not if I was paid. It'll be as good as a play
to watch him."

Bellgrove bared his irregular teeth in a leonine snarl and then he took
out a small notebook, with his eyes on Mr Fluke, made a note. Approach-
ing his taunter, "Red Ink," he whispered, and then began to laugh un-
controllably. Mr Fluke was stupefied.

"Well...well...well...' he said at last.

"It is far from “well”, Mr Fluke," said Bellgrove, recovering his
composure; "and it will not be well until you learn to speak to your
Headmaster like a gentleman."

Said Shrivell to Shred: "As for Irma Prunesquallor, it's a plain case
of mirror-madness, brought on by enlargement of the terror-duct -- but
not altogether."

Said Shred to Shrivell: "I disagree. It is the Doctor's shadow cast
upon the shorn and naked soul of his sister, which shadow she takes to
be destiny--and here I agree with you that the terror-duct comes into
play, for the length of her neck and the general frustration have driv-
en her subconscious into a general craving for males--a substitute, of
course, for gollywogs."

Said Shrivell to Shred: "Perhaps we are both right in our different
ways." He beamed at his friend. "Let us leave it at that, shall we? We
will know more when we see her."

"Oh, shut up! you bloody old woman," said Mulefire, with a deadly scowl.

"Oh come, come, la!" said Cutflower. "Let us be terribly gay, la! My,
my! If it isn't getting chilly, la--call me feverish."

It was true, for looking up they found they were plunged in deep shade,
the sun-blotch having moved on; and they saw also, as they raised their
heads, that they were the last of the professors to be left on the stone
steps.

Motioning the others to follow, Bellgrove led them through the red
turnstile, where a moment or two after, they had all passed through
its creaking arms and into the dark and crumbling hall beyond; he
turned and climbed the staircase alone and eventually found himself
in the Masters' Hall once more.

But the staff, after passing through the crumbling chamber, indian-
filed its way along a peculiarly high and narrow passage; and at
last, after descending yet another flight of stairs--this time of an-
cient walnut--they passed through a doorway on the far side of which
lay their quadrangle.

It was here, in the communal privacy of their quarters, that the ex-
citement which they had felt mounting within them once they had passed
out of the Masters' Hall, lessened; but another kind of excitement
quickened. On reaching their quadrangle they had digested the fact
that they were free for another evening. The sense of "escape' had
gone, but an even lighter sensation freed their hearts and feet. Their
bowels felt like water. Great lumps arose in their throats. There
were tears in the corners of their eyes.

All about their quadrangle the pillars of the cloisters glowed (al-
though they were in shadow) with the dark rose-gold of the brick.
Above the arches of the cloisters a terrace of rose-coloured brick-
work circumscribed the quadrangle at about twenty feet above the
ground; and punctuating the wall at the rear of this high terrace
were the doors of the Professors' apartment. On each door, accord-
ing to custom, the owner's name was added to the long list of for-
mer occupants. These names were carefully printed on the black wood
of each door, their vertical columns of small and exact lettering
all but filling the available space. The rooms themselves were small
and uniform in shape, but were as various in character as their oc-
cupants.

The first thing that the professors did on returning to their quar-
ters was to go to their several rooms and change their black gowns
of office for the dark-red variety issued for their evening hours.

Their mortar-boards were hung up behind their doors or sent skimming
across their rooms to some convenient ledge or corner.

The dog's-eared condition of most of their boards was due to this
"skimming'. When thrown in the right way, out of doors and against a
slight breeze, they could be made to climb into the air, the black
cup uppermost, the tassels floating below like the black tails of
donkeys. When thirty at a time soared at the sun above the quadrang-
le, then was a schoolboy's nightmare made palpable.

Once in their wine-red gowns it was the usual custom to step out of
their rooms on to the terrace of rose-red brick, where, leaning
on its balustrade, the professors would spend one of the pleasantest
hours of the day, conversing or ruminating until the sound of the
supper-gong called them to the refectory.

To the old Quadman, sweeping the leaves from the mellow brickwork of
the quadrangle floor, it was a sight that never failed to please as,
surrounded on every side by the glowing cloisters and above them by
the long wine-red line of the professors as they leaned with their
elbows on the terrace wall, he shepherded the fluttering leaves to-
gether with his ragged broom.

On this particular night, although not a single mortar-board was sent
skimming, the staff became very flighty indeed towards the end of
their evening meal in the Long Hall, when innumerable suggestions
were propounded as to the inner reason for the Prunesquallors' invita-
tions. The most fantastic of all was put forward by Cutflower, to wit
that Irma, in need of a husband, was turning to them as a possible
source. At this suggestion the crude Opus Fluke, in an excess of ri-
bald mirth, crashed his great, raw ham of a hand down on the long table
so heavily as to cause a corps de ballet of knives, forks and spoons
to sail into the air and for a pair of table legs to do the splits;
so that the nine professors at his table found the remains of their
supper lying at every angle below the level of their knees. Those who
were holding their glasses in their hands were happy enough; but for
those whose wine was spilt among the debris, a moment or two of re-
flection was occasioned before they could regain the spirit of the
evening.

The idea that any one of them should get married seemed to them ludi-
crously funny. It was not that they felt themselves unworthy, far from
it. It was that such a thing belonged to another world.

"But yes, but yes, indeed. Cutflower, you are right," said Shrivell a
t the first opportunity of making himself heard. "Shred and I were say-
ing much the same thing."

"Quite so," said Shred.

"In my case," said Shrivell, "sublimation is simple enough, for what
with the crags and eagles that find their way into every confounded
dream I have--and I dream every night, not to speak of my automatic
writing, which puts my absurd love for Nature in its place--for in
reading what I have written, as it were in a trance, I can see how
foolish it is to give a thought to natural phenomena, which are, af-
ter all, nothing but an accretion of accidents...er...where was I?"

"It doesn't matter," said Perch-Prism. "The point is that we have
been invited: that we shall be guests, and that above all we shall
do the right thing. Good grief!" he said, looking about him at the
faces of the staff, "I wish I was going alone."

A bell rang.

The Professors rose at once to their feet. A moment of traditional
observance had arrived. Turning the long tables upside down --
and there were twelve of them--they seated themselves, one behind
another, within the upturned table tops as though they were boats
and were about to oar their way into some fabulous ocean.

For a moment there was a pause, and then the bell rang again. Before
its echo had died in the long refectory, the twelve crews of the mo-
tionless flotilla had raised their voices in an obscure chant of for-
mer days when, presumably, it held some kind of significance. Tonight
it was bayed forth into the half-light with a slow, knocking rhythm,
but there was no disguising the boredom in their voices. They had
intoned those lines, night after night, for as long as they had been
professors, and it might well have been taken for a dirge so empty
were their voices:

Hold fast
To the law
Of the last
Cold tome,
Where the earth
Of the truth
Lies thick
On the page,
And the loam
Of faith
In the ink
Long fled
From the drone
Of the nib
Flows on
Through the breath
Of the bone
Reborn
In a dawn
Of doom
Where blooms
The rose
For the winds
The Child
For the tomb
The thrush.
For the hush
Of song,
The corn
For the scythe
And the thorn
In wait
For the heart
Till the last
Of the first
Depart,
And the least
Of the past
Is dust
And the dust
Is lost.
Hold fast!



NINETEEN



The margin of the forest under whose high branches Titus was standing
was an interwoven screen of foliage, more like a green wall constructed
for some histrionic purpose than a natural growth. Was it to hide away
some drama that it arose there, so sheer and so thick? Or was it the
backcloth of some immortal mime? Which was the stage and which the au-
dience? There was not a sound.

Titus, wrenching two boughs apart, thrust himself forward and wriggled
into the green darkness; thrust again, prising his feet against a great
lateral root. The leaves and the moss were cold with the dew. Working
forwards on his elbows, he found his way almost completely barred by a
tough network of boughs; but the edge of his eagerness to break his way
through was whetted, for a branch had swung back and switched him across
his cheek, and in the pain of the moment he fought the muscled branches,
until the upper part of his body had forced a gap which he kept from re-
closing with his aching shoulders. His arms were forward of his body and
he was able to free his face of the leaves, and, as he panted to regain
his breath, to see ahead of him, spreading into the clear distances, the
forest floor like a sea of golden moss. From its heaving expanses, arose,
as through the chimera of a daydream, a phantasmic gathering of ancient
oaks. Like dappled gods they stood, each in his own preserve, the wide
glades of moss flowing between them in swathes of gold and green and away
into the clear, dwindling distances.

When his breath came more easily, Titus realized the silence of the pic-
ture that hung there before him. Like a canvas of gold with its hundreds
of majestic oaks, their winding branches dividing and sub-divinding into
gilded fingertips--the solid acorns and the deep clusters of the legend-
ary leaves.

His heart beat loudly as the warm breath of the silence flowed about him
and drew him in.

In his last wrench and thrust to escape from the marginal boughs, his coat
was torn off bodily by a thorn-tree with a hand of hideous fingers. He left
it there, hanging from the branch, the long thorns of the tree impaling it
like the fingernails of a ghoul.

Once the noise of his fight with the branches had subsided and the warm
everlasting silence had come down again, he stepped forward upon the moss.
It was resilient and springy, its golden surface exquisitely compact. He moved
again with a higher tread and found that on landing it was the easiest thing
in the world to float off into the next movement. The ground was made for
running on, for every step lifted the body into the next. Titus leapt to his
right and began to lope off down the dark-green verge of the forest in giant
bounds. The exhilaration of these "flights" through the air were for some
while all-absorbing, but as their novelty staled so there came a mounting
terror, for the thick screen of the forest's verge on his right appeared end-
less, stretching away, as it did, to the limit of his vision; and the motionless,
soundless glow of the oaks and the great spaces of moss on his left seemed
never to change, though tree after tree swam by him as he fled.

Not a bird called. Not a squirrel moved among the branches. Not a leaf fell.
Even his feet when they struck the moss were soundless; only a faint sigh
passed his ears as he floated, reminding him that there was such a thing as
sound.

And now, what he had loved he loathed. He loathed this deathly, terrible si-
lence. He loathed the gold light among the trees, the endless vistas of the
moss--even the gliding flight from footmark to footmark. For it was as though
he were being drawn towards some dangerous place or person, and that he had
no power to hold himself back. The mid-air thrill was now the thrill of Fear.

He had been afraid of leaving the dark margin on his right, for it was his
only hold upon his location; but now he felt it as part of some devilish plan,
and that to cling to its tangled skirt would be to deliver himself to some
ambushed horror; and so he turned suddenly to his left and, although the vis-
tas of oakland were now a sickening and phantom land, he bounded into its
gold heart with all the speed he could.

Fear grew upon him as he careered. He had become more an antelope than
a boy, but for all his speed he must have been a novice in the art of travel--
through moss-leaping--for suddenly, while he was in mid-air, his arms held
out on either side for balance, he caught sight, for the merest fraction of
an instant, of a living creature.

Like himself, it was in mid-air, but there was no other resemblance. Titus
was heavily if sparsely built. This creature was exquisitely slender. It
floated through the golden air like a feather, the slender arms along the
sides of the gracile body, the head turned slightly away and inclined a lit-
tle as though on a pillow of air.

Titus was by now convinced that he was asleep: that he was running through
the deep of a dream: that his fear was nightmare: that what he had just seen
was no more than an apparition, and that though it haunted him he knew the
hopeless absurdity of following so fleeting a wisp of the night.

Had he thought himself awake he must surely have pursued, however faint his
hope of overtaking the slender creature. For the conscious mind can be set
aside and subdued by the emotions, but in a dream world all is logic. And so,
in fear of the gold oakwood of his dream, he continued in his loping, effort-
less, soundless, dream-like bounds, deeper and deeper into the forest and o-
ver the elastic velvet of the moss.

For all his conviction that he was asleep, and in spite of the resilience
and apparent ease of his flight-running, he had become very tired. The gild-
ed and encrusted trunks of the great oak trees swam by him one after another.
The emptiness seemed even more complete and terrible since that will-o'-the-
wisp had floated across his path.

All of a sudden he became sharply aware of his fatigue and of hunger, and at
the same time a weakening of his conviction that he was dreaming. "If I am
dreaming," he thought, "then why should I need to spring from the ground?
Why shouldn't I just be carried along?" And to test his idea he made no fur-
ther effort, merely keeping his balance in the air each time his drop to
earth lifted him again into those long and fantastic cruises; but the impe-
tus weakened with every dwindling flight and the volitant boy came gradually
to a standstill. With the rhythm of his progress broken, his belief that he
was in a state of dream was finally dispelled. For his hunger had become
insistent.

He looked about him. The same scene enclosed him with its mellow cyclo-
rama--its hateful dream of gold.

But for all this horror (it had laid hold of him again now that he no longer
believed himself asleep), his fear was in some way lessened by a peculiar
thrill which seemed to grow in intensity rather than quieten until it had
become a trembling globe of ice under his ribs. Something for which he had
unconsciously pined had shown either itself or its emblem in the gold oak
woods. Realizing that he had been wide awake ever since he had crept (how
long ago!) to the stables of Gormenghast, he knew that slender spectre--
that reed-like, feather-like thing with its head turned halfway as it rose
in slanting volitation across a glade as wide as a lawn, was true, was
here in the oak forest with him at that very moment: was perhaps watching
him.

It was not only the uncanniness of such a phasma which haunted him now. It
was his craving to see again that essence so far removed from what was
Gormenghast.

And yet, what had he seen? Nothing that he could describe. It had been so
rapid--that flight across his vision: gone, as it were, before his eyes
were ready. The head turned away...turned away. What was it that cried to
him? What was it that this shred, this floating shred of life, expressed?
For in the air with which it had moved through space was a quality for
which Titus unknowingly hungered. On the long glissade of the wasp-gold
flight, like a figment from a rarer and more curious climate than Titus
had ever breathed, it had expressed as it rose across the glade the quin-
tessence of detachment: the sense of something intrinsically tameless,
and of a distilled and thin-air beauty.

All this in a flash. All this, a confusion in Titus' heart and brain.

What he had felt when he had halted his horse that same morning and heard
the voices of the mountain and the woods crying, "Do you dare!" was re-
doubled within him. He had seen something which lived a life of its own:
which had no respect for the ancient lords of Gormenghast, for ritual a-
mong the foot-worn flagstones: for the sacredness of the immemorial House.
Something that would no more think of bowing to the seventy-seventh Earl
than would a bird, or the branch of a tree.

He beat his fist into the palm of his other hand. He was frightened. He
was excited. His teeth chattered. The glimpse of a world, of an unformu-
lated world, where human life could be lived by other rules than those
of Gormenghast, had shaken him; but for all the newness, all the vague
hugeness of the mutinous sensations that were thronging in him, yet under
the pain of his hunger, even they began to give way to the consuming need
for food.

Was there a slightly different feeling about the light as it slanted
through the oak leaves and lay along the glades? Was there a less
deathly stillness in the air? For a moment Titus thought he heard a sigh
among the leaves above him. Was there a quickening in the torpor of the
midday stillness?

There was no way for Titus to know which way to turn. He only knew that
he could not return in the direction from which he had come. And so he
began to walk as quickly, yet as lightly, as he could (to avoid the night-
mare sensation that those loping and unbridled flights through the air
had bred in him) in the direction in which the mysterious and floating
creature had disappeared.

It was not long before the peerless lawns of moss that stretched between
the oaks became pranked by clumps of ferns which, ignoring the sun's rays,
appeared silhouetted, so dark was the viridian of their hanging fronds,
so luminous their golden background. The relief to the boy's spirit was
instantaneous, and when the sumptuous floor gave place to coarse grasses
and the rank profusion of flowering weeds, and when, most refreshing of
all to Titus' eyes, the oaks no longer cast their ancestral spell across
the vistas, but were challenged by a variety of trees and shrubs, until
the last of those gnarled monarchs had withdrawn and Titus found himself
in a fresher atmosphere, then, at last he was clear of the nightmare and,
with his hunger for redundant proof, was once again in the clear, sharp,
actual world that he knew. The ground began to drop away before him at a
lively gradient. As on the far side of the oak forest, here also were
scattered rocks and groups of ferns; and then all of a sudden Titus gave
a shout of happiness to see a living thing after the emptiness and nerve-
lessness of the golden glades--a dog fox that, disturbed by his footsteps,
had woken out of its midday sleep in a quiet nest of ferns, had got to
its feet with extraordinary self-possession and trotted away at an even
pace across the slant of the falling ground.

At the base of the slope a hazel wood began. Here and there a silver birch
lifted its feathery head above the thicker foliage; or a dark-green ilex
seemed like a green shadow in the sunlight. Titus began to hear the voices
of birds. How could he quieten his hunger? It was too early in the year
for wild fruit or berries. He was utterly lost, and the exhilaration he
had felt at escaping from the oak woods was beginning to dwindle and to
turn into depression when, after threading his way for little more than a
quarter of a mile through the hazel trees he heard the sound of water;
faint but distinct, away to the west. At once he began to run in the dir-
ection of the cool sound, but was forced to relapse into a walking pace,
for his legs were heavy and tired, and the ground was uneven and patched
with ground ivies. But as the sound of the water grew momently louder, so
the ilex trees began to grow more thickly among the hazels, so that there
was a rich, dark, blackish greenness about the shadows of the trees both
overhead and at Titus' feet. The water now sounded loud in his ears, but
so dense had the trees become that it was with a sudden shock that the
dazzling breadth of a fast foam-streaked river appeared before him, and
at that very instant, from out of the shadows of the wood on the opposite
bank, there stepped a figure.

He was a gaunt and marcid creature, very tall and thin; his high, scrawny
shoulders twisted forwards, his cadaverous head lowered, with the thinly
bearded jaw protruding as though in defiance. He was clothed in what had
once been a suit of black material, but was now so bleached by sun and
soaked in a hundred dews that it had become a threadbare blotchwork of o-
live-and-grey rags indistinguishable among the leaves of the forest.

As this gaunt figure stepped down to the water's edge a sound of clicking
that Titus could in no way account for floated over the bright waters. It
appeared to break out at his every step like a distant musket shot or the
breaking of a dry twig, and to cease whenever he stopped moving. But Titus
soon forgot about this peculiar noise, for the man on the opposite bank
had reached the river and waded out to where a flat, sun-baked rock the
size of a table basked in the midstream.

As he extracted from among his rags a length of line and a hook, and as
he began to fix the bait, he glanced about him, comparatively carelessly
at first and then with a dawning apprehension, until finally he dropped
his line upon the rock beside him and, sweeping the opposite shore with
his eyes, he focused them on Titus.

Partially shielded behind a heavy branch of leaves, Titus, who had made
no sound, was horrified at being so suddenly discovered and the blood
rushed into his face. But he could not take his eyes from those of the
emaciated man. He was now crouching on the rock. His small eyes, which
had burned beneath his rock-like brows, now glittered with a peculiar
light and all at once his hoarse voice sounded across the river:

"My Lord!" It was a sharp, rough cry, with a catch in the throat as
though the voice had not been sounded for a long while. Titus, whose
instincts had been torn between flying from those hot wild eyes and his
excitement at finding another human being, however emaciated and uncouth,
stepped forward into the sunlight at the river's edge. He was frightened
and his heart beat loudly, but he was famished also and deadly weary.

"Who are you?" he cried. The figure stood up on the hot rock. His head
was thrust forward towards Titus; his tall body trembled.

"Flay," he said at last, his voice hardly audible.

"Flay!" cried Titus. "I've heard of you."

"Aye," said Flay, his hands gripped together..."likely enough, my lord."

"They told me you were dead, Mr Flay."

"No doubt of it." (He looked about him again, taking his eyes from Titus
for the first time.) "Alone?" His interrogation sounded hoarsely across
the water.

"Yes," said Titus. "Are you ill?"

Titus had never seen so gaunt a man before.

"Ill, lordship? No, boy, no...but banished."

"Banished!" cried Titus.

"Banished, boy. When you were only a...when your father...my lord...'
He ended suddenly. "Your sister Fuchsia?"

"She's all right."

"Ah!" said the thin man, "no doubt of it." (There was a note almost of
happiness in his voice, but then, with a new note): "You're done, my lord,
'n windless. What brought you?"

"I escaped, Mr Flay--ran away. I'm hungry, Mr Flay."

"Escaped!" whispered the long man to himself with horror; but he gathered
and pocketed his hook and line and withheld a hundred burning questions.

"Water's too deep--too fast here. Made crossing--boulders--half mile up
stream--not far, lordship, not far. Follow your edge with me, follow your
river edge, boy--we'll have a rabbit'; (he seemed to be talking to himself
as he waded back to the bank on his side of the river) "rabbit and pigeon
and a long cabin-sleep...Blown he is...son of Lord Sepulchrave...ready
to drop...Tell him anywhere...eyes like her ladyship's...Escaped from
the Castle!...No...no...mustn't do that...No, no...must send him back,
seventy-seventh Earl.... Had him in my pocket...size of a monkey...long
ago...'

And so Flay rambled on as he strode along the bank, with Titus following
him on the opposite shore, until after what seemed an endless journey by
the water's edge they came to the crossing of boulders. The river ran
shallowly at this point, but it had been no easy work for Flay to shift
and set the heavy boulders in place. For five years they had stood firm
in the rushing water. Flay had made a perfect ford, and Titus crossed at
once to him. For a moment or two they stood awkwardly staring at each
other; and then, all of a sudden, the cumulative effects of his physical
excitement, the shocks and privations of the day, told upon Titus and he
collapsed at the knees. The gaunt man caught him up in an instant and,
putting the boy carefully over his shoulder, set off through the trees.
For all his apparent emaciation there was no question as to Mr Flay's
stamina. The river was soon left far behind. His long, sinewy arms held
Titus firmly in place across his shoulder; his lank legs covered the
ground with a long, thin, muscular stride and, save for the clicking of
his knee-joints, with peculiar silence. He had learned during his exile
among the woods and rocks the value of silence, and it was second nature
for him to pick his way over the ground like a man born to the woods.

The pace and certainty of his progress testified to his intimate know-
ledge of every twist and turn of the terrain.

Now he was waist deep in a valley of bracken. Now he was climbing a
slope of reddish sandstone; now he was skirting a rock face whose crown
overhung its base and whose extensive surface was knuckly with the day
nests of innumerable martins; now he had below him a drop into a sunless
valley; and now the walnut-covered slopes from where, each evening, with
hideous regularity a horde of owls set sail on bloody missions.

When Flay, topping the brow of a sandy hill, stood for a moment breathing
heavily and stared down into the little valley, Titus, who had insisted
upon walking by himself for some while past--for even Flay had not been
able to sustain his weight during the uphill climbs--stopped also, and
with his hands on his knees, his tired legs rigid, he leaned forward in
a position of rest.

The little valley, or dell, beneath them was shut in by tree-covered
slopes, save to the south where walls of rock overgrown with lichen and
mosses shone brightly in the rays of the declining sun.

At the far end of this grey-green wall were three deep holes in the rock
--two of them several feet above the ground and one at the level of the
valley's sandy floor.

Along the valley ran a small stream, broadening out into an extensive
pool of clear water in the centre, for at the far end of the lake where
it had narrowed to a tongue was a rough dam. Long evenings had been spent
in its making, simple as it was. Flay had hauled a couple of the heaviest
logs he could manage and laid them close to one another across the stream.
Titus could see them plainly from where he stood, and the thin stream of
the overflow at the dam's centre. The sound of this overflow trilled and
splashed in the silence of the evening light, and the little valley was
filled with its glass-like voice.

They descended to the patchwork valley of grass and sand and skirted the
stream until they reached the dam and the broad expanse of the trapped
water. Not a breath of air disturbed the tender blue of its glass-like
surface in which the hillside trees were minutely reflected. Rows of
stakes had been driven into and against the inner sides of the logs to
form a crib. This space had been filled with mud and stones until a wall
had risen and the lake had formed, and a new sound had come to the valley
--the tinkling sound of the glittering overflow.

A few moments later they were at the mouth of the lowest of the openings
into the rock. It was but a cleft, about the width of an ordinary door,
but it widened into a cave, a spacious and fern-hung place. This inner
cave was lit by the reflected light thrown from the sides of the wide
natural chimneys whose vents were those mouth-like openings in the rock
face a dozen feet above the entrance. Titus followed Flay through this
fissure-like doorway and when he had reached the cool and roughly circ-
ular floor of the inner cave he marvelled at its lightness, although it
was not possible for a single ray of the sun to pierce unhindered, for
the wide rocky chimneys wound this way and that before they reached the
sunlight. Yet the sunbeams reflected from the sides of the winding chim-
neys flooded the floor with cool light. It was a high domed place, this
cave, with several massive shelves of rock and a number of natural ledges
and niches. On the left-hand side the most impressive of these natural
outcrops stood out from the wall in the form of a five-sided table with
a smooth shelving top.

These few things Titus was able to take in automatically, but he was too
exhausted and sick with hunger to do more than nod his head and smile
faintly at the long man, who had lowered his tilted head at Titus as
though to see whether the boy was pleased. A moment later Titus was ly-
ing on a rough couch of deep dry ferns. He closed his eyes and, in spite
of his hunger, fell asleep.



TWENTY



When Titus awoke the walls of the cave were leaping to and fro in a red
light, their outcrops and shelves of stone flinging out their dispropor-
tionate shadows and withdrawing them with a concertina motion. The ferns,
like tongues of fire, burned as they hung from the darkness of the dome-
ing roof, and the stones of the crude oven in which an hour or more ago
Flay had lit a great fire of wood and fircones, glowed like liquid gold.

Titus raised himself on his elbow and saw the scarecrow silhouette of
the almost legendary Mr Flay (for Titus had heard many stories of his
father's servant) as he knelt against the glow with his twelve-foot sha-
dow reaching along the gleaming floor and climbing the wall of the cave.

"I am in the middle of an adventure," Titus repeated to himself, several
times, as though the words themselves were significant.

His mind raced over the happenings of the day which had just ended. He
had no sense of confusion when he woke. He recollected everything instant-
aneously. But his recollections were interrupted by the sudden teasing
excitement of the rich odour of something being roasted--it may have been
this that had awakened him. The long man was twisting something round and
round, slowly, on the flames. The ache of his hunger became unbearable,
and Titus got to his feet, and as he did so Mr Flay said, "It's ready,
lordship--stay where you are."

Breaking pieces from the flesh of the pheasant, and pouring over them a
rich gravy, he brought them over to Titus on a wooden plate which he had
made himself. It was the cross section of what had been a dead tree, four
inches thick, its centre scooped into a shallow basin. In his other hand,
as he approached the boy, was a mug of spring water.

Titus lay down again on the bracken bed, resting himself on one elbow. He
was too ravenous to speak but gave the straggling figure that towered over
him a gesture of the hand--as though of recognition--and then, without a
moment wasted, he devoured the rich meal like a young animal.

Flay had returned to the stone oven, where he busied himself with various
tasks, feeding himself intermittently as he proceeded. Then he sat down
on a ledge of rock near the fire on which he fixed his eyes. Titus had
been too pre occupied to watch him, but now, with his wooden plate scraped
to the grain, he drank deeply of the cold spring water and glanced over
the lip of the mug at the old exile, the man whom his mother had banish-
ed--the faithful servant of his dead father.

"Mr Flay," he said.

"Lordship?"

"How far away am I?"

"Twelve miles, lordship."

"And it's very late. It's night-time, isn't it?"

"Aye. Take you at dawn. Time for sleep. Time for sleep."

"It's like a dream, Mr Flay. This cave. You. The fire. Is it true?"

"Aye."

"I like it," said Titus. "But I'm afraid, I think."

"Not proper, lordship--you being here--in my south cave."

"Have you other caves?"

"Yes, two others--to the west."

"I will come and see them--if I can escape, one day, eh, Mr Flay?"

"Not proper, lordship."

"I don't care," said Titus. "What else have you got?"

"A shanty."

"Where?"

"Gormenghast forest--river-bank--salmon--sometimes."

Titus got up and walked to the fire where he sat down, his legs crossed.
The flames lit his young face.

"I'm a bit frightened, you know," he said. "It's my first night away from
the castle. I suppose they are all looking for me...I expect."

"Ah...' said Flay. "Mostly likely."

"Do you ever get frightened, all on your own?"

"Not frightened, boy--exiled."

"What does it mean--exiled?"

Flay shifted himself on the ledge of rock, and shrugged his high, bony
shoulders up to his ears; like a vulture. There was a kind of tickling in
his throat. He turned his small, sunken eyes at last to the young Earl as
he sat by the flames, his head raised, a puzzled frown on his brows. Then
the tall man lowered himself to the floor, as though he were a kind of
mechanism, his knee joints cracking like musket shots as he bent and then
straightened his legs.

"Exiled?" he repeated at last, in a curiously low and husky voice. "Banish-
ed, it means. Forbidden, lordship, forbidden service, sacred service. To have
your heart dug out; to have it dug out with its long roots, lordship--that's
what exiled means. It means, this cave and emptiness while I am needed. Need-
ed," he repeated hotly. "What watchmen are there now?"

"Watchmen?"

"How do I know? How do I know?" he continued, ignoring Titus' query. Years of
silence were finding vent. "How do I know what devilry goes on? Is all well,
lordship. Is the castle well?"

"I don't know," said Titus. "I suppose so."

"You wouldn't know, would you, boy," he muttered. "Not yet."

"Is it true that my mother sent you away?" asked Titus.

"Aye. The Countess of Groan. She exiled me. How is she, my lordship?"

"I don't know," said Titus. "I don't see her very often."

"Ah...' said Flay. "A fine, proud woman, boy. She understands the evil and
the glory. Follow her, my lord, and Gormenghast will be well; and you will
do your ancient duty, as your father did."

"But I want to be free, Mr Flay. I don't want any duties."

Mr Flay jerked himself forward. His head was lowered. In the deep shadows of
their sockets his eyes glowed. His hand that supported his weight shook on
the ground below him.

"A wicked thing to say, my lord, a wicked thing," he said at last. "You are
a Groan of the blood--and the last of the line. You must not fail the Stones.
No, though the nettles hide them, and the blackweeds, my lord--you must not
fail them."

Titus stared up at him, surprised at this outburst in the taciturn man; but
even as he stared his eyes began to droop for he was weary.

Flay arose to his feet, and as he did so a hare loped through the entrance
of the cave where it was lit up against the intense darkness like a thing of
gold. It stopped for a moment sitting bolt upright and stared at Titus, and
then leapt upon a fern-hung shelf of moss and lay as still as a carving, its
long ears laid like sheaths along its back.

Flay lifted Titus and laid him along the bracken-bed. But something had hap-
pened, suddenly, in the boy's brain. He sat bolt upright the moment after his
head had touched the floor, and his eyes had closed, as it seemed in that
quick moment, in a long sleep. "Mr Flay," he whispered with a passionate u-
rgency. "O, Mr Flay."

The man of the woods knelt down at once.

"Lordship? What is it?"

"Am I dreaming?"

"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 edi-
fice, its rough square stones obliterated by the unbroken blanket of the para-
sitic 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 fla-
grant 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 particul-
arly 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 in-
structions. 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 burn-
ing, 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, ir-
rational 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 pro-
tect 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 wea-
ther 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 bro-
ther'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 a-
way 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 pre-
cedent 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 few-
er 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.

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 to-
night, 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 any-
thing?"

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, leo-
nine head was weak with sympathy for the child, but he was doing his best to
play the role 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 e-
voke 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 down-
wards 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 Bell-
grove'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 whe-
ther 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 sen-
tences 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 ghast-
ly 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 dif-
ficult. 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 head-
master'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 the 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, class-
room, 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, be-
cause 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 pre-
tence 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 ven-
turesome 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 light-
house 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 be-
longed to them; to tease and adore, to hurt and to worship for his very
weakness' sake. For what is more lovable than failure?

But no. None of this happened. None of it. Bellgrove was all this. There
was no gap in the long tally of his spineless faults. He was constructed
as though expressly for the starlings of Gormenghast. There he was, but
no one approached him. His hair was white as snow, but it might as well
have been grey or brown or have moulted in the dank of faithless seasons.
There seemed to be a blind spot in the mass-vision of the swarming youths.

They looked this great gift-lion in the mouth. It snarled in its weakness,
for its teeth were aching. It trod the immemorial corridors. It dozed fit-
fully at its desk through the terms of sun and ice. And now, it was a Head-
master and lonelier than ever. But there was pride. The claws were blunt,
but they were ready. But not so, now. For at the moment his vulnerable
heart was swollen with love.

"My young friend," he said, his eyes still on the ceiling of the fort and
his chin tucked into the pit of his neck. "I propose to talk to you as
man to man. Now the thing is...' (he lingered over the last word)..."the
thing...is...what shall we talk about?" He lowered his rather dull eyes
and saw that Titus was frowning at him thoughtfully.

"We could, you see, young man, talk of so many things, could we not, as
man to man. Or even as boy to boy. H'm. Quite so. But what? That is the
paramount consideration--isn't it?"

"Yes, sir. I suppose so," said Titus.

"Now, if you are twelve, my boy, and I am eighty-six, let us say, for I
think that ought to cover me, then let us take twelve from eighty-six
and halve the result. No, no. I won't make you do it because that would
be most unfair. Ah yes, indeed it would--for what's the good of being a
prisoner and then being made to do lessons too? Eh? Eh? Might as well
not be punished, eh?...Let me see, where were we, where were we? Yes,
yes, yes, twelve from eighty-six, that's about seventy-four, isn't it?
Well, what is half seventy-four? I wonder...h'm, yes, twice three are
six, carry one, and twice seven are fourteen...thirty-seven, I do be-
lieve. Thirty-seven. And what is thirty-seven? Why, it's just exactly
the halfway age between us. So if I tried to be thirty-seven years
young--and you tried to be thirtyseven years old--but that would be
very difficult, wouldn't it? Because you've never been thirty-seven,
have you? But then, although your old headmaster has been thirty-seven,
long ago, he can't remember a thing about it except that it was some-
where about that time that he bought a bag of glass marbles. O yes he
did. And why? Because he became tired of teaching grammar and spelling
and arithmetic. O yes, and because he saw how much happier the people
were who played marbles than the people were who didn't. That's a bad
sentence, my boy. So I used to play in the dark after the other young
professors were asleep. We had one of the old Gormenghast tapestry-car-
pets in the room and I used to light a candle and place my marbles on
the corners of patterns in the carpet, and in the middle of crimson and
yellow flowers. I can remember the carpet perfectly as though it was
here in this old fort, and there, every night by the glow of a candle,
I would practise until I could flick a marble along the floor so that
when it struck another it spun round and round but stayed exactly where
it was, my boy, while the one it had struck shot off like a rocket to
land at the other end of the room in the centre of a crimson carpet
flower (if I was successful), or if not, near enough to couch itself
at the next flick. And the sounds of the glass marbles in the still of
the night when they struck was like the sound of tiny crystal vases
breaking on stone floors--but I am getting too poetic, my boy, aren't
I? And boys don't like poetry, do they?"

Bellgrove took off his mortar-board, placed it on the floor and wiped
his brow with the biggest and grubbiest handkerchief Titus had ever
seen come out of a grown-up's pocket.

"Ah me, my young friend, the sound of those marbles...the sound of
those silly marbles. Forlorn, it is, my, boy, to remember the little
glass notes--forlorn as the tapping of a woodpecker in a summer forest."

"I've got some marbles, sir," said Titus, sliding off the table and
diving his hand into his trouser pocket.

Bellgrove dropped his hands to his sides where they hung like dead
weights. It was as though his joy at finding his little plan maturing
so successfully was so all-absorbing that he had no faculties left o-
ver to control his limbs. His wide, uneven mouth was ajar with delight.
He rose to his feet and turning his back on Titus made his way to the
far end of the small fort. He was sure that his joy was written all
over his face and that it was not for headmasters to show that sort
of thing to any but their wives, and he had no wife...no wife at all.

Titus watched him. What a funny way he put his big flat feet on the
ground, as though he were smacking it slowly with the soles of his
boots--not so much to hurt it, as to wake it up.

"My boy," said Bellgrove at last when he had returned to Titus, hav-
ing fought the smile away from his face--"this is an extraordinary
coincidence, you know. Not only do you like marbles, but I...' and
he drew from the decaying darkness of a pocket like a raw-lipped
gulch, exactly six globes.

"O sir!" said Titus. "I never thought you'd have marbles."

"My boy," said Bellgrove. "Let it be a lesson to you. Now where shall
we play. Eh? Eh? Good grief, my young friend, what a long way down
it is to the floor and how my poor old muscles creak..."

Bellgrove was lowering himself by degrees to the dusty ground.

"We must examine the terrain for irregularities, h'm, yes, that's
what we must do, isn't it, my boy? Examine the terrain, like gener-
als, eh? And find our battle ground."

"Yes, sir," said Titus, dropping to the knees and crawling alongside
the old, pale lion. "But it looks flat enough to me, sir, I'll make
one of the squares here, and...'

But at this moment the door of the fort opened again and Doctor
Prunesquallor stepped out of the sunlight and into the grey gloom
of the small fort.

"Well! well! well! well! well!" he trilled, peering into the shadows.
"Well, well, well! What a dreadful place to gaol an earl in, by all
that's merciless. And where is he, this fabulous little wrong-doer--
this breaker of bounds, this flouter of unwritten laws, this thorough-
ly naughty boy? God bless my shocked spirit if I don't see two of
them--and one much bigger than the other--or is there someone with
you, Titus, and if so, who can it be, and what in the name of dust
and ashes can you find so absorbing on the earth's bosom, that you
must crawl about on it, belly to stubble, like beasts that stalk
their prey?"

Bellgrove rose, creaking, to his knees and then catching his feet in
the swathes of his gown, tore a great rent in its threadbare material
as he struggled into an upright position. He straightened his back
and struck the attitude of a headmaster, but his old face had col-
oured.

"Hullo, Doctor Prune," said Titus. "We were just going to play mar-
bles."

"Marbles! eh? By all that's erudite, and a very fine invention too,
God bless my spherical soul," cried the physician. "But, if your
accomplice isn't Professor Bellgrove, your headmaster, then my eyes
are behaving in a very peculiar manner."

"My dear Doctor," said Bellgrove, his hands clasping his gown near the
shoulders, its torn portion trailing the floor at his feet like a fall-
en sail--"It is indeed I. My pupil, the young earl, having misbehaved
himself, I felt it my bounden duty, in loco parentis, to bring what
wisdom I have at my command to bear upon his predicament. To help him,
if I can, for, who knows, even the old may have experience; to succour
him, for, who knows, even the old may have mercy in their bones; and
to lead him back into the current of wise living--for, who knows, even
the old may..."

"I don't like “current of wise living”, Bellgrove--a beastly phrase
for a headmaster, if I may make so damnably bold," said Prunesquallor.
"But I see what you mean. By all that smacks of insight, I most probab-
ly do. But what a place for incarcerating a child! Let's have a look
at you, Titus. How are you, my little bantam?"

"All right, thank you, sir," said Titus. "I'll be free tomorrow."

"Oh God, it breaks my heart," cried Prunesquallor. "“I'll be free to-
morrow” indeed! Come here, boy."

There was a catch in the Doctor's voice. Free tomorrow, he thought.
Free tomorrow. Would the child ever be free tomorrow?

"So your headmaster has come to see you and is going to play marbles
with you," he said. "Do you know that you are greatly honoured? Have
you thanked him for coming to see you?"

"Not yet, sir," said Titus.

"Well, you must, you know, before he leaves you."

"He's a good boy," said Bellgrove. "A very good boy." After a pause he
added, as though to get back to firm, authoritarian ground again, "and
a very wicked one at that."

"But I'm delaying the game--by all that's thoughtless, I am indeed!"
cried the Doctor, giving Titus a pat on the back of the head.

"Why don't you play, too, Doctor Prune?" inquired Titus. "Then we could
have 'threecorners'."

"And how do you play “threecorners”?" said Prunesquallor, hitching
up his elegant trousers and squattirig on the floor, his pink, ingeni-
ous face directed at the tousle-haired child. "Do you know, my friend?"
he enquired, turning to Bellgrove.

"Indeed, indeed," said Bellgrove, his face lighting up. "It is a noble
game." He lowered himself to the ground again.

"By the way," said the Doctor, turning his head quickly to the Profes-
sor, "you're coming to our party, aren't you? You will be our
chief guest, as you know, sir."

Bellgrove, with a great grinding and creaking of joints and fibres,
got all the way to his feet again, stood for a moment magnificently
and precariously upright and bowed to the squatting doctor, a lock of
white hair falling across his blank blue eyes as he did so.

"Sir," he said, "I am, sir--and my staff with me. We are deeply honour-
ed." Then he sank to his knees again with extraordinary rapidity.

For the next hour, the old prison warder, peering through a keyhole
the size of a table-spoon, in the inner door, was astounded to see the
three figures crawling to and fro across the floor of the prison fort,
to hear the high trill of the Doctor develop and strengthen into the
cry of a hyena, the deep and wavering voice of the Professor bell forth
like an old and happy hound, as his inhibitions waned, and the shrill
cries of the child reverberate abut the room, splintering like glass on
the stone walls while the marbles crashed against one another, spun in
their tracks, lodged shuddering in their squares, or skimmed the prison
floor like shooting stars.



TWENTY-TWO



There was no sound in all Gormenghast that could strike so chill against
the heart as the sound of that small and greasy crutch on which Barquen-
tine propelled his dwarfish body.

The harsh and rapid impact of its iron-like stub upon the hollow stones
was, at each stroke, like a whip-crack, an oath, a slash across the face
of mercy.

Not a hierophant but had heard at one time or another the sound of that
sinister shaft mounting in loudness as the Master of Ritual thrust himself
forwards, his withered leg and his crutch between them negotiating the
tortuous corridors of stone, at a pace that it was difficult to believe.

There were few who had not, on hearing the crack of that stub of a crutch
on distant flag-stones, altered their directions to avoid the small smoul-
dering symbol of the law, as, in its crimson rags, it stamped its brim-
stone path along the centre of every corridor, altering its course for no
man.

Something of the wasp, and something of the scraggy bird of prey, there
was, about this Barquentine. There was something of the gale-twisted thorn
tree also, and something of the gnome in his blistered face. The eyes,
horribly liquid, shot their malice through veils of water. They seemed to
be brimming, those eyes of his, as though old, cracked, sandy saucers
were filled so full of topaz-coloured tea as to be swollen at their cen-
tres.

Endless, interwoven and numberless as were the halls and corridors of
the castle, yet even in the remotest of these, in the obscure fastnesses,
where, infinitely removed from the main arteries, the dank and mouldering
silence was broken only by the occasional fall of rotten wood or the hoot
of an owl--even in such tracts as these a wanderer would be haunted and
apprehensive for fear of those ubiquitous tappings--faint it may be, as
faint as the clicking of fingernails, but a sound for all its faintness
that brought with it a sense of horror. There seemed no refuge from the
sound. For the crutch, ancient, filthy and hard as iron, was the man him-
self. There was no good blood, no good red blood in Barquentine any more
than there was in his support, that ghastly fulcrum. It grew from him
like a diseased and nerveless limb--an extra limb. When it struck the
stones or the hollow floorboards below him it was more eloquent of
spleen than any word, than any language.

The fanaticism of his loyalty to the House of Groan had far outstripped
his interest or concern for the living--the members of the Line itself.
The Countess, Fuchsia and Titus were mere links to him in the blood-red,
the imperial chain--nothing more. It was the chain that mattered, not
the links. It was not the living metal, but the immeasurable iron with
its patina of sacred dust. It was the Idea that obsessed him and not
the embodiment. He moved in a hot sea of vindication, a lust of loyalty.

He had risen as usual this morning, at dawn. Through the window of his
filthy room he had peered across the dark flats to Gormenghast Mountain,
not because it shone in a haze of amber and seemed translucent but in
order to get some indication of the kind of day to expect. The ritual of
the hours ahead was to some extent modified by the weather. Not that a
ceremony could be cancelled because of adverse weather, but by reason
of the sacred Alternatives, equally valid, which had been prescribed by
leaders of the faith in centuries gone by. If, for example, there was
a thunderstorm in the afternoon and the moat was churned and spattered
with the rain, then the ceremony needed qualifying in which Titus, wear-
ing a necklace of plaited grass was to stand upon the weedy verge and,
with the reflection of a particular tower below him in the water, so
sling a golden coil that, skimming the surface and bounding into the air
as it struck the water, it sailed over the reflection of a particular
tower in one leap to sink in the watery image of a yawning window, where,
reflected, his mother stood. There could be no movement and no sound
from Titus or the spectators until the last of the sparkling ripples
had crept from the moat, and the subaqueous head of the Countess no
longer trembled against the hollow darkness of the cave-like window,
but was motionless in the moat, with birds of water on her shoulders
like chips of coloured glass and all about her the infinite, tower-
filled depths.

All this would necessitate a windless day and a glass surface to the
moat, and in the Tomes of Ceremony there would, were the day stormy,
be an alternative rendering, an equally honourable way of enriching
the afternoon to the glory of the House and the fulfilment of the
participants.

And so, it was Barquentine's habit to push open his window at dawn
and stare out across the roofs and the marshes beyond, to where the
Mountain, blurred, or edged like a knife gave indication of the day
ahead.

Leaning forward, thus, on his crutch, in the cold light of yet another
day, Barquentine scratched savagely at his ribs, at his belly, under
his arms, here, there, everywhere with his claw of a hand.

There was no need for him to dress. He slept in his clothes on a lice-
infested mattress. There was no bed; just the crawling mattress on
the carpetless floor-boards where cockroaches and beetles burrowed
and insects of all kinds lived, bred and died, and where the midnight
rat sat upright in the silver dust and bared its long teeth to the
pale beams, when in its fullness the moon filled up the midnight win-
dow like an abstract of itself in a picture frame.

It was in such a hovel as this that the Master of Ritual had woken e-
very morning for the last sixty years. Swivelling about on his crutch,
he stumped his way from the window and was almost immediately at the
rough wall by the doorway. Turning his back to this irregular wall he
leaned against it and worked his ancient shoulder-blades to and fro,
disturbing in the process a colony of ants which (having just received
news from its scouts that the rival colony near the ceiling was on
the march and was even now constructing bridges across the plaster
crack) was busily preparing its defences.

Barquentine had no notion that in easing the itch between his blades
he was incapacitating an army. He worked his back against the rough
wall, to and fro, to and fro in a way quite horrible in so old and
stunted a man. High above him the door rose, like the door of a
barn.

Then, at last, he leaned forward on his crutch and hopped across the
room to where a rusted iron ring protruded from the floor. It was like
the mouth of a funnel, and indeed a metal pipe led down from this ter-
minal opening to where, several stories below, it ended in a similar
metal ring, or mouthpiece, which protruded several inches from the
ceiling of an eating-room. Immediately beneath this termination and a
score of feet below it, a hollow, disused cauldron awaited the heavy
stone which morning after morning rumbled its way down the winding
pipe to end its journey with a wild clang in the belly of the rever-
berating bowl, murmuring to itself in an undertone for minutes on end
with the boulder in its maw.

Every evening it was taken up and placed outside Barquentine's door,
this boulder, and every morning the old man lifted it up above the
iron ring in the floorboards of his room, spat on it, and sent it
hurtling down the crooked funnel, its hoarse clanging growing faint-
er and fainter as it approached the eating-room. It was a warning to
the servants that he was on his way down, that his breakfast and a
number of other preliminaries were to be ready.

To the clank of the boulder a score of hearts made echo. On this par-
ticular morning as Barquentine spat upon the heavy stone, the size of
a melon, and sent it netherward on its resounding journey past many
a darkened floor of bedded inmates (who, waking as it leapt behind
their couches in the hollow of the walls, cursed him, the dawn and
this cock-crow of a boulder)--on this particular morning there was
more than the normal light of lust for ritual in the wreckage of the
ancient's face--there was something more, as though his greed for the
observances to take place in the shadow of his aegis was filling him
with a passion hardly bearable in so sere a frame.

There was one picture on the wall of his verminous hovel; an engraving,
yellow with age and smirched with dust, for it had no glass across it,
save the small ice-like splinter at one corner that was all that re-
mained of the original glazing. This engraving, a large and meticulous
affair, was of the Tower of Flints. The artist must have stood to the
south of the tower as he worked or as he studied the edifice, for be-
yond the irregularity of turrets and buttresses that backed it and
spread almost to the sky like a seascape of stormy roofage, could be
seen the lower slopes of Gormenghast Mountain, mottled with clumps of
shrub and conifer.

What Barquentine had not noticed was that the doorway of the Tower of
Flints had been cut away. A small area of paper, the size of a stamp
was missing. Behind this hole the wall had been laboriously pierced so
that a little tunnel of empty darkness ran laterally from Barquentine's
chamber to the hollow and capacious shaft of a vertical chimney, whose
extremity was blocked from the light by a landslide of fallen slates
long sealed and cushioned with gold moss, and whose round base, like
the base of a well of black air, gave upon the small cell-like room so
favoured by Steerpike that even at this early and chilly hour he was
sitting there, at the base of the shaft. All about him were mirrors of
his own construction, placed to a nicety, each at its peculiar angle,
while above him, punctuating the tubular darkness, a constellation of
mirrors twinkled with points of light one above the other.

Every now and again Barquentine would be reflected immediately behind
the hollow mouthway of the engraved Tower of Flints where an angled
mirror in the shaft sent down his image to another and then another--
mirror glancing to mirror--until Steerpike, reclining at the base of
the chimney, with a magnifying glass in his hands peered amusedly at
the terminal reflection and saw in miniature the crimson rags of the
dwarfish pedant as he raised the boulder in his hands and flung it
through the ring.

If Barquentine rose early from his hideous couch, Steerpike in a se-
cret room of his own choosing, a room as spotless and bright as a new
pin, arose earlier. This was not a habit with him. He had no habits in
that sort of way. He did what he wanted to do. He did what furthered
his plans. If getting up at five in the morning would lead to something
he coveted, then it was the most natural thing in the world for him to
rise at that hour. If there was no necessity for action he would lie
in bed all morning reading, practising knots with the cord he kept by
his bedside, making paper darts of complicated design which he would
float across his bedroom, or polishing the steel of the razor-edged
blade of his swordstick.

At the moment it was to his advantage to impress Barquentine with his
efficiency, indispensability and dispatch. Not that he had not already
worked his way beneath the cantankerous crust of the old man's misan-
thropy. He was in fact the only living creature who had ever gained
Barquentine's confidence and grudging approval.

Without fully realizing it, Barquentine, during his daily administra-
tions, was pouring out a hoard of irreplaceable knowledge, pouring
it into the predatory and capacious brain of a young man whose ambi-
tion it was, when he had gained sufficient knowledge of the observ-
ances, to take over the ceremonial side of the castle's life, and, in
being the only authority in the minutiae of the law (for Barquentine
was to be liquidated), to alter to his own ends such tenets as held
him back from ultimate power and to forge such fresh, though apparent-
ly archaic documents, as might best serve his evil purposes as the
years went by.

Barquentine spoke little. In the pouring out of his knowledge there
was no verbal expansiveness. It was largely through action and through
access to the Documents that Steerpike learned his "trade'. The old
man had no idea that day after day the accumulating growth of Steer-
pike's cognizance and the approach of his own death moved towards
one another through time, at the same pace. He had no wish to instruct
the young man beyond the point of self-advantage. The pale creature
was useful to him and that was all, and were he to have known how
much had been divulged of Gormenghast's inner secrets through the
seemingly casual exchanges and periodical researches in the library,
he would have done all in his power to eliminate from the castle's life
this upstart, this dangerous, unprecedented upstart, whose pursuit of
the doctrines was propelled by a greed for personal power as cold as
it was tameless.

The time was almost ripe in Steerpike's judgement for the Master of
Ritual to be dispatched. Apart from other motives the wiping out of
so ugly a thing as Barquentine seemed to Steerpike, upon aesthetic
considerations alone, an act long overdue. Why should such a bundle
of hideousness be allowed to crutch its way about, year after year?

Steerpike admired beauty. It did not absorb him. It did not affect
him. But he admired it. He was neat, adroit, slick as his own sword-
stick, sharp as its edge, polished as its blade. Dirt offended him.
Untidiness offended him. Barquentine, old, filthy, his face cracked
and pitted like stale bread, his beard tangled, dirty and knotted,
sickened the young man. It was time for the dirty core of ritual to
be plucked out of the enormous mouldering body of the castle's life
and for him to take its place, and from that hidden centre--who knew
how far his tangent wits might lead him?

It was a wonder to Barquentine how Steerpike was able to meet him with
such uncanny precision and punctuality sunrise after sunrise. It was
not as though his lieutenant sat there waiting outside the Master's
door, or at some landing on the stairs by which Barquentine made his
way to the small eating-room. O no. Steerpike, his straw-coloured hair
smoothed down across his high globular forehead, his pale face shin-
ing, his dark red eyes disconcertingly alive beneath his sandy eye-
brows, would walk rapidly out of the shadows and, coming to a smart
halt at the old man's side, would incline himself at a slight angle
from the hips.

There was no change this morning in the dumb show. Barquentine won-
dered, for the hundredth time, how Steerpike should coincide so exact-
ly with his arrival at the top of the walnut stairs, and as usual
drew his brows down over his eyes and peered suspiciously through the
veils of unpleasant moisture that smouldered there, at the pale young
man.

"Good morning to you, sir," said Steerpike.

Barquentine, whose head was on a level with the banisters, put out a
tongue like the tongue of a boot and ran it along the wreckage of his
dry and wrinkled lips. Then he took a grotesque hop forwards on his
withered leg and brought his crutch to his side with a sharp report.

Whether his face was made of age, as though age were a stuff, or whe-
ther age was the abstract of that face of his, that bearded fossil of
a thing that smouldered and decayed upon his shoulders--there was no
doubt that archaism was there, as though something had shifted from
the past into the current moment where it burned darkly as though
through blackened glass in defiance of its own anachronism and the
callow present.

He turned this head of his to Steerpike.

"To hell fire with your “good morning”, you peeled switch," he
said. "You shine like a bloody land-eel! What d'you do to yourself,
eh? Every poxy sunrise of the year, eh, that you burst out of the
decent darkness in that plucked way?"

"I suppose it's this habit of washing I seem to have got into, sir."

"Washing," hissed Barquentine, as though he was mentioning some-
thing pestilent. "Washing, you wire-worm. What do you think you
are, Mister Steerpike? A lily?"

"I'd hardly say that, sir," said the young man.

"Nor would I," barked the old man." Just skin and bones and hair?
That's all you bloody are and nothing more. Dull yourself down.
Get the shine off you--and no more of this oiled-paper nonsense,
every dawn."

"Quite so, sir. I am too visible."

"Not when you're wanted!" snapped Barquentine, as he began to hob-
ble downstairs. "You can be invisible enough when you want to be,
eh? Hags-hell, boy, you can be nowhere when it suits you, eh? By
the guts of the great auk! I see through you--my pretty whelp!
I see through you!"

"What, when I'm invisible, sir?" asked Steerpike, raising his eye-
brows as he trod lightly behind the cripple who was raising echoes
on all sides with the stamping of his crutch on the wooden stairs.

"By the piss of Satan, pug, your sauce is dangerous!" shouted Bar-
quentine hoarsely, turning precariously in his tracks, with his
withered leg two steps above his crutch.

"Are the north-cloisters done?" He shot the question at Steerpike,
in a changed tone of voice--a tone no less vicious, cantankerous,
but pleasanter to the young man's ear, being less personally vitu-
perative.

"They were completed last night, sir."

"Under your guidance, for what it's worth?"

"Under my guidance."

They were approaching the first landing of the walnut stairs.
Steerpike, as he trod behind Barquentine, took a pair of dividers
from his pocket, and using them as though they were tongs, lifted
up a hank of the old man's hair from the back of his head, to re-
veal a neck as wry as a turtle's. Amused by his success at being
able to raise so thick a bunch of dirty grey hair without the crip-
ple's knowledge, he repeated the performance while the harsh voice
continued and the crutch clack-clack-clacked down the long flight.

"I shall inspect them immediately after breakfast."

"Quite so," said Steerpike.

"Has it occurred to your suckling-brain that this day is hallowed
by the very dirt of the castle. Eh? Eh? That it is only once a
year, boy, once a year, that the Poet is honoured? Eh? Why, the
lice in my beard alone know, but there it is, by the black souls
of the unbelievers, there it is, a law of laws, a rite of the first
water, dear child. The cloisters are ready, you say; by the sores
on my withered leg, you'll pay for it if they're coloured the wrong
red. Eh? Was it the darkest red of all? Eh--the darkest of all the
reds?"

"Quite the darkest," said Steerpike. "Any darker and it would have
been black."

"By hell, it had better be," said Barquentine. "And the rostrum?"
he continued after crossing the gnarled landing of black walnut
with its handrail missing from the banisters and the banisters
themselves leaning in all directions and capped with dust as pal-
ings are capped with snow in wintertime.

"And the rostrum?"

"It is set and garnished," said Steerpike. "The throne for the
Countess has been cleaned and mended, and the high chairs for the
gentry, polished. The long forms are in place and fill the quad-
rangle."

"And the Poet," cried Barquentine. "Have you instructed him, as
I ordered you? Does he know what is expected of him?"

"His rhetoric is ready, sir."

"Rhetoric? Cat's teeth! Poetry, you bastard, Poetry."

"It has been prepared, sir!" Steerpike had re-pocketed his divid-
ers and was now holding a pair of scissors (he seemed to have
endless things in his pockets without disturbing the hang of his
clothes) and was clipping off strands of Barquentine's hair where
it hung below his collar, and was whispering to himself in an ab-
surd undertone, "Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor' as the matted
wisps fell upon the stairs.

They had reached another landing. Barquentine stopped for a moment
to scratch himself. "He may have prepared his poem," he said turn-
ing his time-wasted visage to the slender, high shouldered young
man, "but have you told him about the magpie? Eh?"

"I told him that he must rise to his feet and declaim within twelve
seconds of the magpie's release from the wire cage. That while
declaiming his left hand must be clasping the beaker of moat-water
in which the Countess has previously placed the blue pebble from
Gormenghast river."

"That is so, boy. And that he shall be wearing the Poet's Gown,
that his feet shall be bare, did you tell him that?"

"I did," said Steerpike.

"And the yellow benches for the Professors. Were they found?"

"They were. In the south stables. I have had them re-painted."

"And the seventy-seventh earl, Lord Titus, does the pup know that
he is to stand when the rest are seated, and seat himself when the
rest are standing? Does the child know that--eh--eh--he is a scat-
terbrained thing--have you instructed him, you skinned candle?
By the gripes of my seventy years, your forehead shines like a
bloody iceberg!"

"He has been instructed," said Steerpike.

Barquentine set out again on his descent to the eating-room. Once
the walnut stairs had been negotiated, the Master of Ritual stut-
tered his way down the level corridors like something possessed.
As the dust rose from the floor at each bang of the crutch, Steer-
pike, following immediately behind his master, amused himself by
the invention of a peculiar dance, a kind of counterpoint to
Barquentine's jerking progress--a silent and elaborate improvisa-
tion, laced, as it were, with lewd and ingenious gestures.



TWENTY-THREE



The long summer minutes dragged by for Titus as he sat at his desk
in the schoolroom where Professor Cutflower (who had once made a
point of being at least one mental hour ahead of his class in what-
ever subject he happened to be taking, but who had long since decided
to pursue knowledge on an equal footing with his pupils) was, with
the lid of his high desk raised to hide his activity, taking a long
pull at a villainous looking bottle with a blue label. The morning
seemed endless...

But, for Barquentine with a score of preparations still to be com-
pleted, and with his rough tongue victimizing the workmen in the
south quadrangle, the hours sped by with the speed of minutes.

And so, after what seemed an infinity to Titus and a whisk of time's
skirt to Barquentine, the morning that was both fleet and tardy,
fructified and like a grape of air, in whose lucent body the earth
was for that moment suspended--that phantom ripeness throbbed, that
thing called noon.

Before it had awoke to die on the instant of its waking, a score of
bells and clocks had shouted midday and for a minute after its death,
from near and far the clappers in their tents of rusted iron clanged
across Gormenghast. It was as though no mechanism on earth could
strike or chain that ghost of time. The clocks and the bells stutter-
ed, boomed and rang. They trod with their iron imprint. They beat with
their ancient fists and shouted with archaic voices--but the ghost
was older.

Noon, ripe as thunder and silent as thought, had fled unfingered.

When every echo had died from even those clocks in the western out-
crops, whose posthumous tolling was proverbial, so that the phrase,
"late as a western chime" was common in the castle--when every echo
had died, Titus became aware of another sound.

After the languid threnody of the chimes, this fresh sound, so close
upon the soft heels of the pendulums, appeared hideously rapid,
merciless and impatient.

It had the almost dream-like insistence, for all its actuality, of
some hound with feet of stone or iron; or some coursing beast, that,
rattling its rapacious and unalterable way in the wake of its prey,
was momently closing the gap between evil and innocence.

Titus heard the sound, as though its cause were alongside. Yet the
corridor down which he was moving was empty, and the tapping of the
crutch was in reality coming from a parallel passageway, and Barqu-
entine, although only a few yards from him, was separated from the
boy by a solid wall of stone.

As Titus came to a halt, his heart beating, his eyes narrowed and an
expression of hatred came over his childish features--an expression
hardly credible in so young a face. To him, Barquentine was the sym-
bol of tyranny, of age, of all that held him back from summer days
among the woods, from diving in the moat with his friends, from all
he longed for.

As he stood shuddering with his hot uprising of fear and detestation,
he listened intently. In which direction, behind that wall of stone,
was the crutch travelling?

At either end of Barquentine's corridor subsidiary passages led into
the corridor in which Titus now stood. It seemed to him that the Mas-
ter of Ritual was moving rapidly in a parallel direction to his own.
He turned and began to retrace his steps, but the corridor was sudden-
ly darkened by a solid block of Professors who bore down upon him with
a fluttering of ethiop draperies and a fleet of mortarboards. His only
hope was to run in the original direction and cross the communicating
passage, and away, before Barquentine's possible arrival at that junc-
ture.

He began to run. It was not because of any particular misdeed or rat-
ional fear that he ran. It was a compulsion, a necessity for with-
drawal. A revolt against anything that was old. Anything that had
power. A nebula of terror possessed him and he ran.

Along the right-hand side of the corridor a phalanx of dusty statues
loomed in the dim light that gave them the colour of ash. Set, for
the most part, on massive plinths they towered above Titus, their
silent limbs sawing the dark air, or stabbing it bluntly with broken
arms. The heads were almost invisible, matted as they were with cob-
webs, and shrouded in perpetual twilight.

He had known these monuments since childhood. But he no more no-
ticed them or remembered them than another child would notice the
monotonous pattern of some nursery wallpaper.

But Titus was brought again to a standstill by the tiny yet unmistak-
able silhouette of the cripple as it rounded the far corner and
proceeded towards him out of the distance.

Before Titus had realized what he was doing he had leapt sideways
quick as a squirrel, and was all at once in an almost complete
darkness that brooded behind the ponderous and muscled carving of a
figure without head or arms. The plinth on which this great trunk
of stone stood balanced was itself above the level of his head.

Titus stood there trembling as the noise of many feet approached from
the west, and a crutch from the east. He fought away the knowledge
that he must have been seen by the professors. He clung to the empty
hope that they had all had their eyes cast to the ground and had nev-
er seen him running ahead of them; had never seen him dive behind the
statue and, more fervent still, the passionate hope that Barquentine
had been too far away to notice any movement in the corridor. But
even as he trembled he knew his hope was based on his fear and that
it was madness for him to stay where he was.

The noise was all about him, the heavy feet, the whisking of the
gowns, the clanging of the iron-like crutch on the slabs And then
the voice of Barquentine brought everything to a standstill. "Hold!"
it cried. "Hold there, headmaster! By the pox, you have the whole
spavined staff with you, hell crap me!"

"My very good colleagues are at my back," said the old and fruity
voice of Bellgrove. And then he added, "My very good colleagues,"
as though to test his own courage in the face of the thing in red
rags that glared up at him.

But Barquentine's mind was elsewhere. "Which was it?" he barked,
taking a fresh hop in Bellgrove's direction. "Which was it,
man?"

Bellgrove drew himself up and struck his favourite position as a
headmaster, but his old heart was beating painfully.

"I have no idea," he said. "No idea whatsoever, as to what it can be
to which you are referring." His words could not have sounded heavier
or less honest. He must have felt this himself, for he added, "Not
an inkling, I assure you."

"Not an inkling! Not an inkling!" Barquentine cried. "Black blood on
your inklings!" With another hop and a grind of the crutch he brought
himself immediately below the headmaster.

"By the reek of your lights, there was a boy in this corridor. There
was a boy just now. What? What? There was a slippery pup just now. Do
you deny it?"

"I saw no child," said Bellgrove. "Slippery or otherwise." He lifted
the ends of his mouth in a smirk, where they froze upon his own little
joke.

Barquentine stared at him and if Bellgrove's sight had been better the
malice in that stare might have unnerved the old headmaster to the
brink of his undoing. As it was, he clenched his hands under his gown,
and with a picture of Titus in his mind--Titus whose eyes had shone at
the sight of the marbles in the fort--he held on to the lies he was
telling with the grip of a Saint.

Barquentine turned to the staff who were clustered behind their head-
master like a black chorus. His wet, ruthless eyes moved from face to
face.

For a moment the idea crossed his brain that his sight had played him
false. That he had seen a shadow. He turned his head and stared along
the line of silent monuments.

Suddenly his spleen and frustration found vent and he thrashed out
with his stick at the stone torso at his side. It was a wonder that his
crutch was not broken.

"There was a whelp!" he screamed. "But enough of that! Time runs away.
Is all prepared, what? What? Is all in readiness? You know your time
of arrival? You know your orders. By hell, there must be no slips
this afternoon."

"We have the details," said Bellgrove in so quick and relieved a voice,
that it was no wonder that Barquentine darted at him suspiciously.

"And what's your bloody joy in that?" he hissed. "By hell, there's per-
fidy somewhere!"

"My joy," said Bellgrove twice as slowly and ponderously, "springs from
the knowledge which my staff must share with me, as men of culture, that
a considerable poem is in store for them this afternoon."

Barquentine made a noise in his throat.

"And the boy, Titus," he snapped. "Does he know what is expected of him?"

"The seventy-seventh earl will do his duty," said Bellgrove.

This last retort of the headmaster's had not been heard by Titus for the
boy had found behind him in that darkness that, where he had thought the
wall of the corridor would support him as he leaned back in a sudden
tiredness--there was no wall at all. In breathless silence he had got to
his hands and knees and crawled into emptiness, through a narrow opening,
and when he had come to a damp barrier of stones, had found that a tunnel
led to his right, a tunnel that descended in a series of shallow stairs.
He did not know that a few minutes later, Barquentine was to strike his
way down the centre of the corridor of statues, the staff dividing to
let him pass, nor that after the staff had disappeared in their original
direction, that Bellgrove had returned alone, and had whispered thickly,
"Come out, Titus, come out at once and report to your headmaster," and
receiving no response had himself worked his way behind the stone only
to find himself baffled and defeated in the empty darkness.



TWENTY-FOUR



The floor of the quadrangle was of a pale whitish-yellow brick, a plea-
sant mellow colour, soothing to the eye. The bricks had been laid so
that their narrow surfaces faced upwards, a device which must have call-
ed for twice as many as would otherwise have been necessary. But what
gave the floor of the quadrangle its peculiar character was the herring-
bone pattern which the artificers had followed many hundred years ago.

Blurred, and worn as the yellow bricks had become, yet there was a vita-
lity about the surface of the quadrangle, as though the notion of the man
who had once, long ago, given orders that the bricks were to be laid in
such and such a way, was still alive. The bricks had breath in them. To
walk across this quadrangle was to walk across an idea.

The pillars of the cloisters had been painted, a dreadful idea, for the dove
grey stone of which they were constructed could not have harmonized
more subtly with the pale yellow brickwork from which they seemed to grow.
They had, nevertheless, been painted a deep and most oppressive red.

It is true, that on the following day, an army of boys would be set to
work in scraping the colour off again, but on the one day of the year
when the quadrangle came into its own as the setting for the poet's de-
clamation, it seemed doubly outrageous to smother up the soft grey stone.

The Poet's Rostrum set against the red pillars glowed and darkened only
to glow again in the afternoon sunlight. The branch of a tree fluttered
across the face of the sun, so that the quadrangle which was filled with
benches appeared on the move, for the flickering shadows of the leaves
swam to and fro as the high branch swayed in the breeze.

The silent congregation, seated solemnly on their benches, stared over
their shoulders at the gate through which the Poet would, at any moment,
make his entrance. It was a year since anyone present had caught sight
of that tall and awkward man, and then it was at this same ceremony,
which, on that previous occasion, had taken place in a thin and depress-
ing drizzle.

The Countess was seated in advance of the front row. Fuchsia's chair was
to her mother's left. Standing beside them, with the sweat of irritable
anxiety pouring down his face, was Barquentine with his eyes fixed (as
were the eyes of the Countess and Fuchsia) not upon the Poet's gate, but
upon a small door in the south wall of the quadrangle through which Ti-
tus, who was over twenty minutes late, should long ago have come running.

Behind them in a long row, as though their yellow bench was a perch for
black turkeys, sat the professors. Bellgrove, at their centre, in his
zodiac gown was also staring at the small door in the wall. He took out
a big grubby handkerchief and mopped his brow. At that moment the door
was pulled open and three boys ran through and came panting up to Bar-
quentine.

"Well?" hissed the old man. "Well? Have you found him?"

"No, sir!" they panted. "We can't find him anywhere, sir."

Barquentine ground the foot of his crutch against the pale bricks as
though to ease his anger. Suddenly Steerpike appeared at his side as
though out of the mellow ground. He bowed to the Countess while a sha-
dow undulated across the irregular terrain of the scores of heads that
filled the quadrangle. The Countess made no response. Steerpike straight-
ened himself.

"I can find no trace of the seventy-seventh earl," he said, addressing
Barquentine.

"Black blood!" The voice of the cripple forced its way between his teeth.
"This is the fourth time that the..."

"That...the...what?" The Countess launched the three short words as
though they were made of lead. They fell heavily through the afternoon
air.

Barquentine gathered his red rags of office about his stunted body, and
turned his irritable head to the Countess who stared at him with ice in
her eyes. The old man bowed, sucking at his teeth as he did so.

"My lady," he said. "This is the fourth time in six months that the seventy-
seventh earl has absented himself from a sacred..."

"By the least hair of the child's head," said the Countess, interrupting,
in a voice of deadly deliberation--"if he should absent himself a hundred
times an hour I will not have his misdemeanours bandied about in public.
I will not have you mouth and blurt his faults. You will keep your obser-
vations in your own throat. My son is no chattel that you can discuss,
Barquentine, with your pale lieutenant. Leave me. The occasion will pro-
ceed. Find a substitute for the boy from the tyros' benches. You will retire."

At that moment a murmur was heard from the populace behind them, for the
Poet, preceded by a man in the skin of a horse, and with that animal's tail
trailing the bricks behind him as he paced slowly forwards, was to be seen
emerging from the Gate. The Poet in his gown, with a beaker of moat water
in his left hand and his manuscript in his right, followed the figure in
the horse's hide, with long awkward paces. His face was like a wedge. His
small eyes flickered restlessly. He was pale with embarrassment and appre-
hension.

Steerpike had found a boy of about Titus' age and height and instructed him
in his role, which was simple enough. He was to stand when the rest were
seated, and to sit when the rest were standing, and that was all, as seventy-
seventh earl, by proxy, he had to remember.

When the Countess had placed the pebble from Gormenghast river in the bea-
ker of moat water, and when the populace had seated themselves again and
none save the Poet and the substitute for Titus were left on their feet,
then an absolute hush descended over the quadrangle, and the Poet, holding
his poem in his hand and raising his head, lifted his hollow voice...

"To her ladyship, Gertrude Countess of Groan and to her children, Titus
the seventy-seventh lord of the tracts, and Fuchsia sole vessel of the
Blood on the distaff side: to all ladies and gentlemen present and to all
hereditary officials: to all of varying duties whose observance of the
tenets justify their presence at this ceremony, I dedicate this poem which
as the laws decree shall be addressed to as many as are here present in
all the variance of their receptivity, status and acumen, in so much as
poetry is a ritual of the heart, the voice of faith, the core of Gormen-
ghast, the moon when it is red, the trumpet of the Groans."

The Poet paused to breathe. The words he had just used were invariably de-
claimed before the poem, and there was nothing left for the Poet to do but
to open the door of the wire cage, which Barquentine had passed up to him,
and to let loose the magpie as a symbol of something the significance of
which had long been lost to the records.

The magpie which was supposed to flap away into the afternoon sunlight,
until it was a mere dot in the sky, did no such thing. It hopped from the
cage and stood for a moment on the rim of the rostrum before flying with
a loud rattle of its wings to the Countess, on whose shoulder it perched
for the rest of the proceedings, pecking from time to time at its black
wings.

The Poet, raising his manuscript before his eyes, took a deep and shud-
dering breath, opened his small mouth, took a step backwards, and, losing
his balance, all but fell down the steps that descended steeply from his
narrow rostrum to the ground seven feet below. An uncontrollable shriek
of laughter from the tyros' benches stabbed into the warm afternoon like
a needle into a cushion.

The offending youth was led away by an official. The drowsy silence came
down again, drowning the shadow-dappled quadrangle as though with an e-
lement.

The Poet moved forward on the rostrum, his skin prickly with shame. He
raised his manuscript again to read; and as he read the shadows length-
ened across the quadrangle. A cloud of starlings moved like migraine a-
cross the upper air. The small boys on the tyros' benches, imitating the
Poet and nudging one another, fell, one by one, asleep. The Countess
yawned. The summer afternoon melted into evening. Steerpike's eyes moved
to and fro. Barquentine sucked his teeth irritably.

The voice of the Poet droned on and on. A star came out. And then anoth-
er. The earth swam on through space. The Countess yawned again and turned
her eyes to the west doorway.

Where was Titus?



TWENTY-FIVE



The glade had been in darkness since the dawn. A strand of almost horizon-
tal light had slid at cockcrow through a multitude of trees and inflamed
for a moment an obscure corner of the glade where a herd of giant ferns
arched their spines (the long fronds falling like the manes of horses).
They had shone with a cold, green, angry radiance. They had been exposed.
The long ray had withdrawn as though it had not found what it was looking
for.

As the sun climbed, the glade appeared to darken rather than to absorb the
strengthening light. The air was domed with foliage; layer after voluminous
layer hanging in darkened swathes!

All day long the darkness sat there, muffling the boles of the trees, a ter-
rible day-time dusk, as thick as night.

But all the while the uppermost branches of these same trees and the topmost
layers of leaf shone in the cloudless sunlight.

When evening came and the sun was hanging over the western skyline the drown-
ed glade began to lighten. The level beams streamed from the west; the glade
shuddered, and then, silent and motionless as a picture of itself, it gave up
all its secrets.

Of the trees that grew from this sunken circle of ground there was one which
claimed immediate attention. Its girth was such that the trees that surrounded
it, though tall and powerful, were made to look like saplings. It was the king.
Yet it alone was dead.

And yet its very deadness had given it a life. A life that had no need for the
April sap. Its tower-like bulk of a bole mounted into the arboured gloom, and
as the light from the west struck it, it shone with the hard, smooth quality of
marble, or ivory for it was the colour of a tusk.

It rose out of a sward, sepia in colour, a treacherous basin. This sick and
rotting ground was dappled with gold where it was struck by the direct rays,
the lozenges of light elongating as the sun sank.

Sixty feet from the ground the trunk of the dead giant was pocked with cavi-
ties. They were like entrances, it seemed, or like the portholes of a ship,
their raised rims smooth as silk and hard as bone.

And it was here, in these mouths of the great tree, sixty feet above the
ground where the girth of the bole was still as ponderous as its sward-lap-
ped base--it was here that the life of the dead tree was centred.

There was no cavern of that high and silky cliff but had its occupant. Save
for the bees whose porthole dripped with sweetness, and the birds, there were
few of the denizens of this dead-tree-settlement that could get any kind of
grip upon the surface of the bole. But there were branches, which swept from
the surrounding trees to within leaping range for the wild cat, the flying
squirrel, the opossum and for that creature, not always to be found in the
moss-lined darkness of its ivory couch, who, separated by a mere membrane of
honey-soaked wood from the multitudinous murmur of a hive, was asleep as the
evening light stole through the small round opening so high above the ground.
As the light quickened the creature moved in its sleep. The eyes opened. They
were as clear and green as sea stones and were set in a face that was coloured
and freckled like a robin's egg.

The creature slid from its retreat, and paused for a moment as it crouched at
the lip of its dizzy cave, and then leaping outwards into space it swung it-
self from branch to branch like something without weight or substance, while
the foliage of the evening forest closed about it, and the far away sound of
a bell rang faintly from the distant castle.



TWENTY-SIX



Like a child lost in the chasmic mazes of a darkening forest, so was Titus
lost in the uncharted wilderness of a region long forgotten. As a child might
stare in wonder and apprehension along an avenue of dusk and silence, and then,
turning his head along another, and another, each as empty and breathless, so
Titus stared in apprehension and with a hammering heart along the rides and
avenues of stone.

But here, unlike the child lost in the forest, Titus was surrounded by a fas-
tness without sentience. There was no growth, and no movement. There was no
sense here that a sluggish sap was sleeping somewhere; was waiting in the stony
tracts for an adamantine April. There was no presence here that shared the mo-
ment with him, the exquisitely frightening long-drawn, terror-edged moment of
his apprehension. Would nothing stir? Was there no pulse in all these mocking
tracts? Nothing that breathed? Nothing among the adumbrate vistas and perspect-
ives of stone that struggled to survive? Empty, silent, forbidding as a lunar
landscape, and as uncharted, a tract of Gormenghast lay all about him.

There was no sound, no call of a bird or screech of an insect to break the si-
lence of the stone. No rivulet slid lisping across the flagstones of Great
Halls.

He was quite lost. All the sounds of the Castle's life--the clanging of bells;
the footsteps striking on the hollow stones; the voices and the echoes of
voices; all were gone.

Was this what it was to be an explorer? An adventurer? To gulp this sleeping
silence. To be so unutterably alone with it, to wade in it, to find it rising
like a tide from the floors, lowering itself from the mouldering caverns of
high domes, filling the corridors as though with something palpable?

To feel the lips go dry; the tongue like a leather in the mouth; to feel the
knees weaken.

To feel the heart struggling as though to be allowed its freedom, hammering
at the walls of his small ribs, hammering for release.

Why had he scrambled through that midnight gap, where his hands had felt
and found nothing and then nothing and then again nothing as he edged his
way into the gloom? Why had he descended that flight of rusty iron to the
deserted corridor and seen how it stretched into how strange a murk of weeds?
Why had he not turned back, before it was too late? Turned back and climbed
those iron stairs again and waited behind the giant torso for the last echo to
disappear from the corridor of carvings. The Headmaster had been on his side
--had told lies for him. Had he been ungrateful to steal away? And now he
was lost for ever; for ever, and evermore.

Clenching his hands he cried aloud in the hollow wilderness for help. Immedi-
ately a score of voices answered him, from the four quarters. "Help, help,"
they cried, again and again, a clamour of voices that were all his own and
the last faint echo of his cry, thin, wan, frightened and infinitely far,
languished and died and the thick silence crowded back from every side and
he was drowned again.

There was nowhere to go and there was everywhere to go. His sense of direct-
ion, of where he had come from, had been wiped away by what seemed an age of
vacillation.

The silence filled his ears until they ached. He tried to remember what he
had read about explorers, but he could recall no story of heroes lost in
such a tract as this.

He brought his clenched fist to his mouth and bit his knuckles. For a moment
the pain seemed to help him. It gave him a sense of his own reality, and as
the pain weakened he bit again; and, in the vain hope of gaining help from
yet another scrutiny of the surrounding istas and avenues of masonry, for he
was at a juncture of many ways, he braced himself. His muscles tautened; his
head was thrust forward; he peered along the dwindling perspectives. But no-
thing helped him. Nothing that he saw suggested a course of action, a clue
for freedom. There was no ray of light to indicate that there was any outer
world. What luminosity there was was uniform, a kind of dusk that had nothing
to do with daylight. A self-contained thing, bred in the halls and corridors,
something that seeped forth from the walls and floors and ceilings.

Titus moved his dry tongue across his lips and sat down on the flagged floor,
but a sense of terror jerked him to his feet again. It seemed that he had be-
gun to be absorbed into the stone. He must be on his feet. He must keep moving.
He tip-toed to a wall like the wall of a wharf. For a moment he leaned his
small sweating cheek against the mortarless stone. "I must think...think...
think...' He formed the words with his dry tongue. "Have lost my way. My way?
What does that mean?" He began to whisper the words so that he could hear them,
but not the castle. There was no echo to this little husky sound. "It means I
don't know where to go. What do I know then? I know that there is a north,
south, east and west. But I don't know which is which. Aren't there any other
directions?"

His heart gave a leap "Yes!" he cried and a hundred affirmatives shouted from
throats of stone. He stiffened at the leaping cries, his eyes flickering to
left and right, his head motionless. Surely so great a clamour must blast
from their retreats the dire ghosts of the place. The centre of his thin
chest was sick and bruised with his heart beats.

But nothing appeared and the silence thickened again. What was it he had dis-
covered, that it should have caught him unawares? Another direction? Something
that was neither north, south, east or west. What was it? It was skywards. It
was roofwards.

It was the direction that led to the air. It was a mere spark, this hope that
had ignited. He mouthed his words again. "There must be stairways," he said.
"And floor above floor, until I reach the roof. If I climb long enough I must
reach the roof, and then I can see where I am."

The relief which he felt at having an idea to grip was convulsive, and the
tears poured down his face. Then he began to walk, as steadily as he could,
along the widest of the grey stone channels. For a considerable distance, it
continued in a straight line and then began to take slow curves. The walls on
either side were featureless, the ceiling also. Not so much as a cobweb gave
interest to the barren surfaces. All at once, after a sharper curve than us-
ual the passage sub-divided into five narrow fingers, and all the child's
terrors returned. Was he to return to the hollow silences from which he had
come? He could not turn back. He could not.

In desperation he leaned against the wall and closed his eyes and it was then
that he heard the first sound--that was not of his own making. The first sound
since he had slid into the darkness behind the remote statue. He did not jerk
at the shock of it but became rigid so that he was unobserved by the raven
when it appeared from the darkness of one of the narrow passageways. It walk-
ed with a sedate and self-absorbed air to within a few feet of Titus, when it
lowered its big head and let fall from its beak a silver bracelet. But only
for a moment, for directly it had pecked at the feathers of its breast it lift-
ed up the bracelet and continued for a few paces before hopping, rather clum-
sily, upon an outcrop of the wall and thence to a larger shelf. Very gradually
Titus altered the direction of his head so that he could observe it, this living
thing. But at the first movement of his head, tentative as it had been, the
bird, with a loud and throaty cry and a rattle of black wings, was, all in a
moment, in the air, and a fraction of a second later had disappeared down
the dark and narrow corridor from which it had so recently paced forth.

Titus at once decided to follow it: not because he wished to see more of the
raven, but because the bird was to him a sign of the outer world. There was
more than a chance that in returning to this inhospitable corridor, the raven
was returning, indirectly, to the open air, and the woods and the wide sky.

As Titus followed, the darkness grew more profound with every step and he be-
gan to realize that he was moving under the earth, for the roots of trees grew
through the roof and the loam of the walls, and the smell of decay was thick
in the air.

Had his fear and horror of the silent halls from which he had so recently es-
caped been less real he would even now have turned about in the constricted
space and made his way back to the hollow nightmare from which he had come.
For there seemed no end to this black and stifling tunnel.

At first he had been able to walk upright, but that was long ago. He was now
forced, for long periods at a time, to crawl, the smell of the bad earth thick
in his face. But for equally long stretches of time the tunnel would widen,
and he was able to stumble forwards, his body comparatively upright, until the
roof would lower itself again and he would be filled with the fear of suffoca-
tion.

There was no light at all. He had all but lost hope that he would ever come
out of this horrible experience alive. Had it not been that to keep moving was
less frightening than to remain crouched in the darkness Titus would have been
tempted to cease forcing his tired body onwards hour after hour, for he had
little strength and spirit left.

But at long last when he had no longer the vitality to feel any excitement or
relief, so sick he was with fear and exhaustion, he saw ahead of him, as in
a dream, a dim, rough-margined opening of light, darkly fringed with coarse
weeds and grasses, and he knew, in a flat and colourless way that he would
not die in the dark tunnel; that the hollow halls were a nightmare of the
past and that the most he had to fear was the punishment he would receive on
returning to the castle.

When he had dragged himself from the tunnel's weedy mouth and had climbed the
bank in which the opening gaped, he saw far away to the north and to the west
the tower'd outline of his ancient home.



TWENTY-SEVEN



If the success of a hostess is in any way dependent upon the lavishness of
her preparation for the soiree she proposes; upon her outlook, on the almost
insane attention which she gives to detail and upon a wealth of forethought,
then, theoretically at least, Irma Prunesquallor could look ahead to some-
thing that would correspond to those glimpses that came to her in the dark-
ness, when she lay half asleep and saw herself surrounded by a riotous throng
of males battling for her hand, which she, the cynosure, swayed coquettishly
upon her silkswaddled pelvis.

If the microscopic overhaul to which she was subjecting her person, her skin,
her hair, her dresses and her jewellery gave ground for the belief that so
much passionate industry must necessarily wake and rescue a kind of beauty
from where it had for so long been immured in her; wake it by a kind of sur-
prise attack; a bombardment of her tall angular day -- then, there was no
need for Irma to have any fears upon the score of her attraction. She would
be ravishing. She would set a new kind of standard in magnetism. After all
she had worked for it.

Having tried on seventeen necklaces and decided upon no necklace at all, so
that the full length of her white throat might dip, bridle and sway like a
swan's in an absolute freedom of movement, she crossed to the door of her
dressing room and, hearing a footstep in the hall below, she could not re-
sist crying out "Alfred! Alfred! Only three days more, my dear. Only three
days more! Alfred! Are you there?"

But there was no reply.

The step she had heard was Steerpike's, who, knowing that the doctor was
attending a case in the south kitchen where a rotier had slipped on a piece
of lard and splintered his shoulder-blade, had taken the opportunity which
he had for some time been waiting for and climbed through the Doctor's dis-
pensary window, filled a bottle with poison, and, having stowed it away in
a deep pocket, decided to leave by the front door with an assortment of
explanations in his hand from which to choose were he to be discovered in
the hall. Why had there been no answer to his knocking? he would say. Why
did they leave the front door open? Where was Dr Prunesquallor? and so on.

But he met no one and took no notice of Irma's cry.

When he got back to his room he poured the poison into a beautiful little
cut-glass vessel, placed it against the light of the window where it shone.
Then he stood back from it with his head on one side, stepped forward again
to move it a little to the left, in the interest of symmetry, and then re-
turning to the centre of the room ran his tongue along his thin lips as he
peered with his eyebrows at the little flask of death. Suddenly he stretch-
ed his arms out on either side, the fingers splayed like starfish as though
he were wakening them to a kind of hypersentience of tingling life.

Then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, he lowered
his hands to the ground, threw up his slender legs and began to perambu-
late the room on the palms of his hands with the peculiarly stilted, roll-
ing and predatory gait of a starling.



TWENTY-EIGHT



It was on the following afternoon that Mrs Slagg died. She was found ly-
ing upon her bed, towards evening, like a little grubby doll. The black
dress was awry as though she had struggled. Her hands were clasped at her
shrunken breast. It was hard to imagine that the broken thing had once
been new; that those withered, waxen cheeks had been fresh and tinted.
That her eyes had long ago glinted with laughter. For she had been
sprightly once. A vivacious pert little creature. Bright as a bird.

And here she lay. It was as though the doll-sized body had been thrown a-
side as too old and decrepit to be of any further use.

Fuchsia, directly she had been told, rushed to the small room that she
knew so well.

But the doll on the bed was no longer her nurse. It was not Nannie Slagg,
that little motionless bundle. It was something else. Fuchsia closed her
eyes and the poignantly familiar image of her old nurse who had been the
nearest thing to a mother that Fuchsia had ever known, swam through her
mind in a gush of memory.

It was in her to turn again to the bed and to take the beloved relic in
her arms in a passion of love, but she could not. She could not. And
she did not cry. Something, for all the vividness of her memory, had
gone dead in her. She stared again at the shell of all that had nursed
her, adored her, smacked her and maddened her.

In her ears, the peevish voice kept crying -- "Oh my weak heart, how
could they? How could they? Anyone would think I didn't know my place."

Turning suddenly from the bed Fuchsia saw for the first time that she
had not been alone in the room. Dr Prunesquallor was standing by the
door. Involuntarily she turned to him, raising her eyes to his odd yet
strangely compassionate features.

He took a step towards her. "Fuchsia, my dearest child," he said. "Let
us go together."

"O doctor," she said. "I don't feel anything. Am I wicked, Doctor
Prune? I don't understand."

The door was suddenly filled by the figure of the Countess who, al-
though she stared at her daughter and at the doctor, did not appear
to realize who they were, for no expression appeared on her big pale
face. She was carrying over her arm a shawl of rare lace. She moved
forward treading heavily on the bare boards. When she reached the bed
she gazed for a moment as though transfixed, at the pathetic sight be-
low her, and then, spreading the beautiful black shawl over the body,
she turned and left the room.

Prunesquallor, taking Fuchsia's hands, led her through the door which
he closed behind them.

"Fuchsia dear," he said as they began to move together down the corri-
dor, "have you heard anything of Titus?"

She stopped dead and let go the doctor's hand. "No," she said, "and
if nobody finds him I will kill myself."

"Tut, tut, tut, my little threatener," said Prunesquallor. "Wha/t a
tedious thing to say. And you such an original girl. As though Titus
won't reappear like a jack-in-the-box, by all that's typical so he
will!"

"He must! He must!" cried Fuchsia, and then she began to weep uncon-
trollably while the Doctor held her against his side and dabbed her
flushed cheeks with his immaculate handkerchief.



TWENTY-NINE



Nannie Slagg's funeral was so simple as to appear almost off-hand; but
this seemingly casual dispatch of the old lady's relics bore no relation
to the inherent pathos of the occasion. The gathering at the graveside
was out of all proportion to the number of friends on whom, in her
lifetime, she would ever have dared to count. For she had become, in
her old age, a kind of legend. No one had troubled to see her. She
had been deserted in her declining years. But it had been tacitly
assumed that she would live for ever. That she would no more pass out
of the castle's life than that the Tower of Flints would pass from
Gormenghast to leave a gap in the skyline, a gap never again to be
filled.

And so, at her funeral, the majority of the mourners were gathered
there, to pay their respects to the memory not so much of Mrs Slagg,
as to the legend which the tiny creature had, all unwittingly, allow-
ed to grow about her.

It had been impossible for the two bearers to carry the small coffin
across their shoulders, for this necessitated so close a formation
one behind the other, that they could not walk without tripping one
another up. The little box was eventually carried in one hand by the
leading mute, while his colleague, with a finger placed on the lid,
to prevent it from swaying, walked to one side and a little to the
rear.

The bearer, as he strode along, might have been carrying a bird-cage
as he paced his way to the Retainers' Graveyard. From time to time the
man would turn his eyes with a childish, puzzled expression to the box
he carried as though to reassure himself that he was doing what was
expected of him. He could not help feeling that something was missing.

The mourners led by Barquentine came behind, followed by the Countess,
at some distance. She made no effort to keep pace with the rapid, jerk-
ing progress of the cripple. She moved ponderously, her eyes on the
ground. Fuchsia and Titus followed, Titus having been released from
the Fort for the funeral.

With the nightmare memory of his recent adventure filling his mind he
moved in a trance, waking from time to time to wonder at this new man-
ifestation of life's incalculable strangeness -- the little box ahead
of him, the sunshine playing over the head of Gormenghast Mountain,
where it rose, with unbelievable solidity, ahead, like a challenge,
on the skyline.

It crowned a region that had become a part of his imaginative being,
a region where an exile moved like a stick-insect, through a wilder-
ness of trees, and where, phantom or human, he knew not which, some-
thing else was, at this moment, floating again, as he had seen it
float before, like a leaf, in the shape of a girl. A girl. Suddenly
he broke from his trance at Fuchsia's side.

The word and the idea had fused into something fire-like. Suddenly
the slight and floating enigma of the glade had taken on a sex, had
become particularized, had woken in him a sensation of excitement
that was new to him. Wide awake, all at once, he was at the same time
plunged even deeper into a cloudland of symbols to which he had no
key. And she was there -- there, ahead of him. He could see, far
away, the very forest roof that rustled above her.

The figures that moved ahead of him, Barquentine, his mother, and the
men with the little box, were less real than the startling confusion
of his heart.

He had come to a halt in a valley filled with mounds. Fuchsia was
holding his hand. The crowd was all about him. A figure in a hood
was scattering red dust into a little trench. A voice was intoning.
The words meant nothing to him. He was adrift.

That same evening, Titus lay wide-eyed in the darkness and stared
with unseeing eyes at the enormous shadows of two boys as they fought
a mock battle of grotesque dimensions upon an oblong of light cast
upon the dormitory wall. And while he gazed abstractedly at the cut
and thrust of the shadow-monsters, his sister Fuchsia was crossing
to the Doctor's house.

"Can I talk to you, Doctor?" she asked as he opened the door to her.
"I know it isn't long since you had to bear with me, and..." but Prune-
squallor, putting his finger to his lips, silenced her and then drew her
back into a shadow of the hall, for Irma was opening the door of the
sitting-room.

"Alfred," came the cry, "what is it, Alfred? I said what is it?"

"The merest nothing, my love," trilled the Doctor. "I must get that
hank of ivy torn up by its very roots in the morning."

"What ivy -- I said what ivy, you irritating thing," she answered.
"I sometimes wish that you could call a spade a spade, I really do."

"Have we one, sweet nicotine?"

"Have we what?"

"A spade, for the ivy, my love, the ivy that will keep tapping at our
front door. By all that's symbolic, it will go on doing it!"

"Is that what it was?"

Irma relaxed. "I don't remember any ivy," she added. "But what are
you cowering in that corner for? It's not like you, Alfred, to lurk
about in the corner like that. Really, if I didn't know it was you,
well really, I'd be quite..."

"But you're not, are you, my sweet nerve-ending? Of course you're
not. So upstairs with you. By all that moves in rapid circles,
I've had a seismic sister these last few days, haven't I?"

"O Alfred. It will be worth it, won't it? There's so much to think
of and I'm so excited. And so soon now. Our party! Our party!"

"And that's why you must go to bed and fill yourself right up with
sleep. That is what my sister needs, isn't it? Of course it is.

Sleep...O, the very treacle of it, Irma! So run away my dear. Away
with you! Away with you! A...w...a...y!" He fluttered his hand
like a silk handkerchief.

"Good night, Alfred."

"Good night, O thicker-than-water."

Irma disappeared into the upper darkness.

"And now," said the Doctor, placing his immaculate hands on his brit-
tle and elegant knees, and rising at the same time on his toes,
so that Fuchsia had the strongest impression that he was about to
fall forwards on his speculative and smiling face..."and now, my
Fuchsia, I think we've had enough of the hall, don't you?" and he
led the girl into his study.

"Now if you'll draw the blinds and if I pull up that green arm-chair,
we will be comfortable, affable, incredible and almost insufferable
in two shakes of a lamb's tail, won't we?" he said. "By all that's
unanswerable, we will!"

Fuchsia, pulling at the curtain, felt something give way and a loose
sail of velvet hung across the glass.

"O Doctor Prune I'm sorry -- I'm sorry," she said, almost in tears.

"Sorry! Sorry!" cried the Doctor. "How dare you pity me! How dare
you humiliate me! You know very well that I can do that sort of
thing better than you. I'm an old man; I admit it. Nearly fifty sum-
mers have seeped through me. But there's life in me yet. But you
don't think so. No! By all that's cruel, you don't. But I'll show
you. Watch me." And the Doctor striding like a heron to a further
window ripped the long curtain from its runner, and whirling it
round himself stood swathed before her like a long green chrysalis,
with the pale sharp eager features of his bright face emerging at
the top like something from another life.

"There!" he said.

A year ago Fuchsia would have laughed until her sides were sore.
Even at the moment it was wonderfully funny. But she couldn't
laugh. She knew that he loved doing such a thing. She knew he loved
to put her at her ease -- and she had been put at her ease, for she
no longer felt embarrassed, but she also knew that she should be
laughing, and she couldn't feel the humour, she could only know it.
For within the last year she had developed, not naturally, but on a
zig-zag course. The emotions and the tags of half-knowledge which
came to her, fought and jostled, upsetting one another, so that what
was natural to her appeared un-natural, and she lived from minute to
minute, grappling with each like a lost explorer in a dream who is
now in the arctic, now on the equator, now upon rapids, and now alone
on endless tracts of sand.

"O Doctor," she said, "thank you. That is very, very kind and funny."

She had turned her head away, but now she looked up and found he had
already disengaged himself of the curtain and was pushing a chair to-
wards her.

"What is worrying you, Fuchsia?" he said. They were both sitting down.
The dark night stared in at them through the curtainless windows.

She leant forwards and as she did so she suddenly looked older. It was
as though she had taken a grip of her mind -- to have, in a way, grown
up to the span of her nineteen years.

"Several important things, Doctor Prune," she said. "I want to ask you
about them...if I may."

Prunesquallor looked up sharply. This was a new Fuchsia. Her tone had
been perfectly level. Perfectly adult.

"Of course you may, Fuchsia. What are they?"

"The first thing is, what happened to my father, Dr Prune?"

The Doctor leaned back in his chair, as she stared at him he put his
hand to his forehead.

"Fuchsia," he said. "Whatever you ask I will try to answer. I won't e-
vade your questions. And you must believe me. What happened to your
father, I do not know. I only know that he was very ill -- and you re-
member that as well as I do -- just as you remember his disappearance.
If anyone alive knows what happened to him, I do not know who that man
might be unless it is either Flay, or Swelter who also disappeared at
the same time."

"Mr Flay is alive, Dr Prune."

"No!" said the Doctor. "Why do you say that?"

"Titus has seen him, Doctor. More than once."

"Titus!"

"Yes, Doctor, in the woods. But it's a secret. You won't..."

"Is he well? Is he able to keep well? What did Titus say about him?"

"He lives in a cave and hunts for his food. He asked after me. He is
very loyal."

"Poor old Flay!" said the Doctor. "Poor old faithful Flay. But you
mustn't see him, Fuchsia. It would do nothing but harm. I cannot
have you getting into trouble."

"But my father," cried Fuchsia. "You said he might know about my fa-
ther! He may be alive, Dr Prune. He may be alive!"

"No. No. I don't believe he is," said the Doctor. "I don't believe so,
Fuchsia."

"But Doctor. Doctor! I must see Flay. He loved me. I want to take him
something."

"No Fuchsia. You mustn't go. Perhaps you will see him again -- but you
will become distressed -- more distressed than you are now, if you start
escaping from the castle. And Titus also. This is all very wrong. He
is not old enough to be so wild and secret. God bless me -- what else
does he say?"

"This is all in secret. Doctor."

"Yes -- yes, Fuchsia. Of course it is."

"He has seen something."

"Seen something? What sort of thing?"

"A flying thing."

The Doctor froze into a carving of ice.

"A flying thing," repeated Fuchsia. "I don't know what he means." She
leaned back in her chair and clasped her hands. "Before Nannie Slagg
died," she said -- her voice falling to a whisper -- "she talked to me.
It was only a few days before she died -- and she didn't seem as nervy
as usual, because she talked like she used to talk when she wasn't wor-
ried. She told me about when Titus was born, and when Keda came to nurse
him, which I remember myself, and how when Keda went away again to the
Outer Dwellings, one of the Carvers made love to her and she had a baby
and how the baby wasn't really like other babies, because of Keda not
being married, I mean, but different apart from that, and how there were
various rumours about it. The Outer Dwellers wouldn't have it, she said,
because it wasn't legitimate, and when Keda killed herself the baby was
brought up differently as though it was her fault, and when she was a
child she lived in a way that made them all hate her and never talked to
the other children, but frightened them sometimes and ran across the roofs
and down the Mud chimneys and began to spend all her time in the woods.
And how the Mud Dwellers hated her and were frightened of her because
she was so rapid and kept disappearing and bared her teeth. And Nannie
Slagg told me that she left them altogether and they didn't know where
she had gone for a long time, only sometimes they heard her laughing at
them at night, and they called her the “Thing”, and Nannie Slagg told
me all this and said she is still alive and how she is Titus' foster sis-
ter and when Titus told her of the flying thing in the air I wondered,
Dr Prune, whether..."

Fuchsia lifted her eyes and found that the Doctor had risen from his
chair and was staring through the window into the darkness where a
shooting star was trailing down the sky.

"If Titus knew I had told you," she said in a loud voice, rising to her
feet, "I would never be forgiven. But I am frightened for him. I don't
want anything to happen to him. He is always staring at nothing and
doesn't hear half I say. And I love him, Dr Prune. That's what I wanted
to tell you."

"Fuchsia," said the Doctor. "It's very late. I will think about all you
have told me. A little at a time, you know. If you tell me everything at
once I'll lose my place, won't I? But a little at a time. I know there
are other things you want to tell me, about this and that and very impor-
tant things too -- but you must wait a day or two and I will try and help
you. Don't be frightened. I will do all I can. What with Flay and Titus
and the “Thing” I must do some thinking, so run along to bed and come
and see me very soon again. Why bless my wits if it isn't hours after
your bedtime. Away with you!"

"Good night Doctor."

"Good night my dear child."



THIRTY



A few days later when Steerpike saw Fuchsia emerge from a door in the
west wing and make her way across the stubble of what had once been a
great lawn, he eased himself out of the shadows of an arch where he
had been lurking for over an hour, and taking a roundabout route began
to run with his body half doubled, towards the object of Fuchsia's
evening journey. Across his back, as he ran, was slung a wreath of
roses from Pentecost's flower garden. Arriving, unseen, at the ser-
vants' burial ground a minute or two before Fuchsia, he had time to
strike an attitude of grief as he knelt on one knee, his right hand
still on the wreath which he was placing on the little weedy grave.

So Fuchsia came upon him.

"What are you doing here?" Her voice was hardly audible. "You never
loved her."

Fuchsia turned her eyes to the great wreath of red and yellow roses
and then at the few wild flowers which were clasped in her hand.

Steerpike rose to his feet and bowed. The evening was green about them.

"I did not know her as you did, your ladyship," he said. "But it struck
me as so mean a grave for an old lady to be buried in. I was able to
get these roses...and...well..." (his simulation of embarrassment
was exact).

"But your wildflowers!" he said, removing the wreath from the head of
the little mound and placing it at the dusty foot--"they are the
ones that will please her spirit most--wherever she is."

"I don't know anything about that," said Fuchsia. She turned from him
and flung her flowers away. "It's all nonsense anyway." She turned a-
gain and faced him. "But you," she blurted. "I didn't think you were
sentimental."

Steerpike had never expected this. He had imagined that she would feel
she had found an ally in the graveyard. But a new idea presented itself.
Perhaps he had found an ally in her. How far was her phrase "it's all
nonsense anyway' indicative of her nature? "I have my moods," he said
and with a single action plucked the great wreath of roses from the
foot of the grave and hurled it from him. For a moment the rich roses
glowed as they careered through the dark green evening to disappear in
the darkness of the surrounding mounds.

For a moment she stood motionless, the blood drained from her face, and
then she sprang at the young man and buried the nails of her hands in
his high cheekbones.

He made no move. Dropping her arms and backing away from him with slow,
exhausted steps, she saw him standing perfectly quietly, his face abso-
lutely white save the bright blood on his cheeks that were red like a
clown's.

Her heart beat as she saw him. Behind him the green porous evening was
hung like a setting for his thin body, his whiteness, and the hectic wounds
on his cheeks.

For a moment she forgot her sudden, inconsistent hatred of his act; for-
got his high shoulders; forgot her station as a daughter of the Line--
forgot everything and saw only a human whom she had hurt, and a tide of
remorse filled her, and half blind with confusion she stumbled towards
him her arms outstretched. Quick as an adder he was in her arms--but
even at that moment they fell, tripping each other up on the rough ground
--fell, their arms about one another. Steerpike could feel her heart
pounding against his ribs, her cheek against his mouth but he made no
movement with his lips. His mind was racing ahead. For a few moments
they lay. He waited for her limbs and body to relax, but she was taut
as a bowstring in his arms. Not a move did he make, nor she, until
lifting her head from his she saw, not the blood on his cheeks but the
dark red colour of his eyes, the high bulge of his shining forehead.
It was unreal. It was a dream. There was a kind of horrible novelty a-
bout it. Her gush of tenderness had ended, and there she was in the
arms of the high-shouldered man. She turned her head again and real-
ized with a start of horror that they were using for their pillow the
narrow grassy grave-mound of her old nurse.

"Oh horrible!" she screamed. "Horrible! horrible!" and forcing him a-
side as she scrambled to her feet she bounded like a wild thing into
the darkness.



THIRTY-ONE



Sitting at her bedroom window, Irma Prunesquallor awaited the daybreak
as though a clandestine meeting of the most hushed and secret kind had
been agreed upon between herself and the first morning ray. And suddenly
it came--the dawn--a flush of swallow light above a rim of masonry. The
day had arrived. The day of the Party, or of what she now called her
Soiree.

In spite of her brother's advice, she had passed a very poor night, her
speculative excitement breaking through her sleep over and over again.
At last she had lit the long green candles on the table by her bed, and
frowning at each in turn had begun to polish yet again the ten long and
perfect fingernails, her mouth pursed, her muscles tensed. Then she had
clipped on her dressing gown and drawing a chair to the window had wait-
ed for the sunrise.

Below her window the quadrangle, as yet untouched by the pale light in
the east, was spread like a lake of black water. There was no sound, no
movement anywhere. Irma sat motionless, bolt upright, her hands clasped
in her lap. Her eyes were fixed upon the sunrise. The candle flames in
the room behind her stood balanced upon their wicks like yellow leaves
upon tiny black stalks. Not a tremor disturbed their perfect lines--and
then, suddenly a cock crew--a barbarous, an imperious sound; primal and
unashamed it split the darkness, lifting Irma to her feet as it were on
the updraught of its clarion. Her pulses raced. She sprang for the bath-
room and within a few moments the hissing, steaming water had filled the
bath and Irma, standing in an attitude of excruciating coyness was toss-
ing handfuls of emerald and lilac crystals into the sumptuous depths.

Alfred Prunesquallor, his head thrown back across his pillow, was only
half asleep. His brows were drawn together and a strange frown gave to
his face an unexpected quality. Had any of his acquaintances seen him
lying there they would have wondered whether, after all, they had the
slightest inkling as to his real nature. Was this the gay, irrepressible
and facetious physician?

He had passed a restless and unhappy night. Confused dreams had kept him
turning on his bed, dreams that from time to time gathered themselves
into vivid images of terrible clarity.

Struggling for breath and strength, he beat his way through the black
moat-water to a drowning Fuchsia no bigger than a child's doll. But e-
very time he reached her and stretched out his hand she sank beneath the
surface, and there in her place were floating bottles half filled with
coloured poison. And then he would see her again, calling for help, tiny,
dark desperate, and he would flounder after her, his heart hammering and
he would waken.

At various moments through the night he could see Steerpike running
through the air, his body bent forward, his feet a few inches above the
ground but never touching it. And keeping pace with him and immediately
below him as though it were his shadow a swarm of rats with their fangs
bared ran in a compact body like one thing, veering as he veered, pausing
as he paused, most horrible and intent, filling the landscape of his mid-
night brain.

He saw the Countess on a great iron tray far out at sea. The moon shone
down like a blue lamp, as she fished, with Flay as her frozen rod, atten-
uate and stiff beyond belief. Between the teeth of the petrified mouth he
held a strand of the Countess's dark red hair which shone like a thread
of fire in the blue light.

Effortlessly she held him aloft, her big hand gripping him about both an-
kles. His clothes were tight about him and he appeared mummified, the thin
rigid length of him reaching up stiffly into the stars. With hideous reg-
ularity she would pluck at the line and swing aboard another and yet an-
other of her white and sea-drowned cats, and place it tenderly upon the
mounting heap of whiteness on the tray.

And then he saw Bellgrove galloping like a horse on all fours with Titus
on his back. Through the ravine of terrible darkness and up the slopes of
pine-covered mountains he galloped, his white mane blowing out behind his
head while Titus, plucking arrow after arrow from an unfailing quiver, let
fly at everything in view until, the image dwindling in the Doctor's brain,
he lost them in the dire shade of the night.

And the dead, he saw. Mrs Slagg clutching at her heart as she pattered a-
long a tight rope, and the tears that coursed down her cheeks and fell to
the earth far below, sounded like gunshots as they struck the ground.

And Swelter, for an instant, filled the darkness, so that even in his sleep,
the Doctor retched to see so vile a volume forcing its boneless way, inch
by inch, through a keyhole.

And Sepulchrave and Sourdust danced together upon a bed, leaping and turn-
ing in the air, their hands joined, and over their heads were great crude
paper masks, so that over Sourdust's wizened shoulders the flapping face
of a painted kitten put out its tongue at the cardboard sunflower through
the great black centre of which the eyes of the seventy-sixth earl of Gor-
menghast glittered like broken glass.

Picture after moving picture all night long until, as dawn approached, the
doctor fell into a dreamless though shallow sleep through which he could
hear the dreamland crowing of a cock and the water roaring into Irma's bath.



THIRTY-TWO



In a score of schoolrooms all through the day innumerable urchins wondered
what it was that made their masters even less interested than usual in their
existence. Familiar as they were with being neglected over long periods and
with the disinterest that descends on those who juggle through long decades
with sow's ears, yet there was something very different about the kind of
listlessness that made itself so evident at every master's desk.

Not a clock in all the various classrooms but had been stared at at least
sixty times an hour: not by the bewildered boys, but by their masters.

The secret had been well kept. Not a child knew of the evening party, and
when eventually, with the lessons over for the day, the professors arrived
back at their private quadrangle, there was a certain smug and furtive air
about the way they moved.

There was no particular reason why the invitation to the Prunesquallors
should have been kept secret, but a tacit understanding between the masters
had been rigidly honoured. There was a sense, perhaps, unformulated for the
most part, in their minds, that there was something rather ridiculous about
their having all been invited. A sense that the whole thing was somewhat over-
simplified. A trifle un-selective. They saw nothing absurd in themselves, in-
dividually, and why should they? But a few of them, Perch-Prism in particular,
could not visualize his colleagues en masse, himself among them, waiting their
entrance at the Prunesquallors' door, without a shudder. There is something
about a swarm that is damaging to the pride of its individual members.

As was their habit, they leaned this evening over the balustrade of the ver-
andah that surrounded the Masters' Quadrangle. Below them, the small faraway
figure of the quadman was sweeping the ground from end to end, leaving behind
him the thin strokes of his broom in the fine dust.

They were all there, the evening light upon them; all except Bellgrove, who,
leaning back in the headmaster's chair in his room above the distant class-
rooms was cogitating the extraordinary suggestions which had been made to
him during the day. These suggestions, which had been put forward by Perch-
Prism, Opus Fluke, Shred, Swivell and other members, were to the effect that
they, for one reason or another and on one occasion or another had heard from
friends of friends or had half-heard through hollow panels, or in the dark-
ness below stairs, at such times when Irma was talking to herself aloud (a
habit which they assured Bellgrove she had no power to master) that she (Irma)
had got the very devil of a passion for him, their reverend headmaster--and
that although it was not their affair, they felt he would not be offended to
be faced with the reality of the situation--for what could be more obvious
than that the party was merely a way for Irma to be near him? It was obvious,
was it not, that she could never ask him alone. It would be too blatant, too
indelicate, but there it was...there it was. They had frowned at him in sym-
pathy and left.

Now Bellgrove was well used to having his leg pulled. He had had it pulled for
as long as he had possessed one. He was thus, for all this weakness and vague-
ness, no simpleton when it came to banter and the kindred arts. He had list-
ened to all they had said, and now as he sat alone he pondered the whole ques-
tion for the twentieth time. And his conclusions and speculations came forth
from him, heavily like this.

1 The whole thing was poppycock.
2 The purpose of the fabrication was no more than that he should provide, un-
knowingly, an added zest to the party. These wags on his staff looked forward
no doubt to seeing him in constant flight with Irma on his tail.
3 As he had not questioned the story, they could have no idea that he had seen
through it.
4 So far, very excellent.
5 How were the tables to be turned …?
6 What was wrong with Irma Prunesquallor anyway?

A fine, upright woman with a long sharp nose. But what about it? Noses had to
be some shape or other. It had character. It wasn't negative. Nor was she. She
had no bosom to speak of: that was true enough. But he was rather too old for
bosoms anyway. And there was nothing to touch the cool of white pillows in
summertime--("Bless my soul," he said aloud, "what am I thinking?")...

As headmaster he was far more alone than he had ever been before. Bad mixer as
he was he preferred to be "out of it' in a crowd than out of it altogether.

He disliked the sense of isolation, when his staff departed every evening. He
had pictured himself as a thwarted hermit--one who could find tranquillity, a-
lone with a profound volume on his knee, and a room about him spare, ascetic,
the hard chair, the empty grate. But this was not so. He loathed it and bared
his teeth at the mean furniture and the dirty muddle of his belongings. This
was no way for a headmaster's study to be! He thought of cushions and bedroom
slippers. He thought of socks of long ago with heels to their name. He even
thought of flowers in a vase.

Then he thought of Irma again. Yes, there was no denying it, a fine young wo-
man. Well set up. Vivacious. Rather silly, perhaps, but an old man couldn't
expect all the qualities.

He rose to his feet and plodding to a mirror wiped the dust from its face with
his elbow. Then he peered at himself. A slow childish smile spread over his
features as though he were pleased with what he saw. Then with his head on one
side, he bared his teeth, and frowned for they were terrible. "I must keep my
mouth shut more than I usually do," he mused, and he began to practise talking
with closed lips but could not make out what he was saying. The novelty of the
whole situation and the fantastic project that was now consuming him set his
old heart beating as he grasped for the first time its tremendous significance.
Not less than the personal triumph with which it would fill him, and the innu-
merable practical advantages that would surely result from such a union, was
the delight he was prematurely tasting of hoisting the staff with its own pe-
tard. He began to see himself sailing past the miserable bachelors, Irma on his
arm, an unquestioned patriarch, a symbol of success and married stability with
something of the gay dog about him too--of the light beneath the bushel, the
dark horse, the man with an ace up his sleeve. So they thought that they could
fool him. That Irma was infatuated with him. He began to laugh in a sick and
exaggerated way, but stopped suddenly. Could she be? No. They had made the
whole thing up. But could she be, all the same? Coincidentally, as it were.
No! no! no! Impossible. Why should she be? "God bless me!" he muttered "I
must be going mad!"

But the adventure was there. His secret plan was there. It was up to him. A
sensation that he imagined was one of youth flooded him. He began to hop la-
boriously up and down on the floor as though over an invisible skipping rope.
He made a jump for the table as though to land on the top, but failed to
reach the necessary height, bruised his old leg below the knee.

"Bloody hell!" he muttered and sat down heavily in his chair again.



THIRTY-THREE



As the Professors were changing into their evening gowns, stabbing at start-
led hanks of hair with broken combs, maligning one another, finding in one
another's rooms long lost towels, studs and even major garments that had
disappeared in mysterious ways--while this was happening to the accompaniment
of much swearing and muttering; and while the coarse jests rumbled along the
verandah, and Flannelcat, half sick with excitement, was sitting on the floor
of his room with his head between his knees as the heavy hand of Opus Fluke
reached hairily through his doorway to steal a towel from a rack--while this
and a hundred things were going on around the Masters' Quadrangle, Irma was
perambulating the long white room which had been re-opened for the occasion.

It had once been the original salon; a room which the Prunesquallors had nev-
er used, being too vast for their requirements. It had been locked up for
years, but now, after many days of cleaning and repainting, dusting and pol-
ishing, it shone with a terrible newness. A group of skilled men had been
kept busy, under Irma's watchful eye. She had a delicate taste, had Irma.
She could not bear vulgar colours, or coarse furniture. What she lacked was
the power to combine and make a harmony out of the various parts that, though
exquisite in themselves, bore no relationship either in style, period, grain,
colour or fabric to one another.

Each thing was seen on its own. The walls had to be a most tender shade of
washed out coral. And the carpet had to be the kind of green that is almost
grey, the flowers were arranged bowl by bowl, vase by vase, and though each
was lovely in itself, there was no general beauty in the room.

Unknown to her the "bittiness' that resulted gave to the salon a certain
informality far from her intentions. This was to prove a lubricating thing,
for the professors might well have been frozen into a herd of lock-jawed
spectres had Irma made of the place the realm of chill perfection that was
at the back of her mind. Peering at everything in turn she moved about this
long room like something that had spent all its life in planning to count-
eract the sharpness of its nose, with such a flaunting splendour of silk
and jewellery, powder and scent, as set the teeth on edge like coloured
icing.

About three quarters of the way along the southern wall of the salon a very
fine double window opened upon a walled-in garden where rockeries, crazy
pavement, sun-dials, a small fountain (now playing after a two-day struggle
with a gardener), trellis work, arbours, statuettes and a fish pond made of
the place something so terrifying to the sensitive eye of the Doctor, that
he never crossed the garden with his eyes open. Much practice had given him
confidence and he could move across it blindly at high speed. It was Irma's
territory; a place of ferns and mosses and little flowers that opened at
odd hours during the night. Little miniature grottoes had been made for
them to twinkle in.

Only at the far end of the garden was there any sense of nature, and even
there it was made manifest by no more than a dozen fine trees whose limbs
had grown in roughly the direction they had found most natural. But the
grass about their stems was closely mown, and under their boughs a rustic
chair or two was artlessly positioned.

On this particular evening there was a hunter's moon. No wonder. Irma had
seen to it.

When she reached the french windows she was delighted with the scene be-
fore her, the goblin-garden, silver and mysterious, the moonbeams glimmer-
ing on the fountain, the sun-dial, the trellis work and the moon itself
reflected in the fish pond. It was all a bit blurred to her, and that was
a pity, but she could not have it both ways. Either she was to wear her
dark glasses and look less attractive, or she must put up with finding
everything about her out of focus. It didn't matter much how out of focus
a garden by moonlight was--in fact in the adding of this supercharge of
mystery it became a kind of emotional haze, which was something which Irma,
as a spinster, could never have enough of--but how would it be when she
had to disengage one professor from another? Would she be able to apprec-
iate the subtlety of their advances, if they made any; those little twitc-
hes and twists of the lips, those narrowings and rollings of the eye,
those wrinklings of the speculative temple, that shrugging of an eye-brow
at play? Would all this be lost to her?

When she had told her brother of her intention to dispense with her glass-
es, he had advised her, in that case, to leave them off an hour before the
guests were due. And he had been right. She was quite sure he had been.
For the pain in her forehead had gone and she was moving faster on her
swathed legs than she had dared to do at first. But it was all a little
confusing, and though her heart beat at the sight of her moon-blur of a
garden, yet she clenched her hands at the same time in a gay little temper
that she should have been born with bad eyes.

She rang a bell. A head appeared at the door.

"Is that Mollocks?"

"Yes, Madam."

"Have you got your soft shoes on?"

"Yes, Madam."

"You may enter."

Mollocks entered.

"Cast your eye around, Mollocks--I said cast your eye around. No, no! Get
the feather duster. No, no. Wait a minute--I said wait a minute." (Mollocks
had made no move.) "I will ring." (She rang.) Another head appeared. "Is
that Canvas?" "Yes, Madam, it is Canvas." "Yes Madam is quite enough,
Canvas. Quite enough. Your exact name is not so enormously important.
Is it? Is it? To the larder with you and fetch a feather brush for Mollocks.
Away with you. Where are you, Mollocks?"

"Beside you, Madam."

"Ah yes. Ah yes. Have you shaved?"

"Definitely, Madam."

"Quite so. Mollocks. It must be my eyes. You look so dark across the face.
Now you are to leave no stone unturned--not one--do you understand me? Move
from place to place all over this room, backwards and forwards restlessly
do you understand me, with Canvas at your side--searching for those specks
of dust that have escaped me--did you say you had your soft shoes on?"

"Yes, Madam."

"Good. Very good. Is that Canvas who has just come in? Is it? Good. Very
good. He is to travel with you. Four eyes are better than two. But you can
use the brush--whoever finds the specks. I don't want anything spoilt or
knocked over and Canvas can be very clumsy, can't you, Canvas?"

The old man Canvas who had been sent running about the house since dawn,
and who did not feel that as an old retainer he was being appreciated,
said that he "didn't know about that'. It was his only line of defence,
a repetitive, stubborn attitude beyond which one could not go.

"Oh yes you are," repeated Irma. "Quite clumsy. Run along now. You are
slow, Canvas, slow."

Again the old man said he "didn't know about that' and having said so,
turned in a puny fury of temper from his mistress and tripping over his
own feet as he turned, grabbed at a small table. A tall alabaster vase
swayed on its narrow base like a pendulum while Mollocks and Canvas
watched it, their mouths open, their limbs paralysed.

But Irma had surged away from them and was practising a certain slow and
languid mode of progress which she felt might be effective. Up and down
a little strip of the soft grey carpet she swayed, stopping every now
and again to raise a limp hand before her, presumably to be touched by
the lips of one or other of the professors.

Her head would be tilted away at these moments of formal intimacy, and
there was only a segment of her sidelong glance as it grazed her cheek-
bones, to reward the imaginary gallant as he mouthed her knuckles.

Knowing Irma's vision to be faulty and that they could not be seen, with
the length of the salon between them, Canvas and Mollocks watched her
from under their gathered brows, marking time, like soldiers the while,
to simulate the sounds of activity.

They had not long, however, in which to watch their mistress for the
door opened and the doctor came in. He was in full evening dress and
looked more elegant than ever. Across his immaculate breast was the
pick of the few decorations with which Gormenghast had honoured him.
The crimson Order of the Vanquished Plague, and the Thirty-fifth Order
of the Floating Rib lay side by side upon his narrow, snow-white shirt,
and were suspended from wide ribbons. In his buttonhole was an orchid.

"O Alfred," cried Irma. "How do I seem to you? How do I seem to you?"

The Doctor glanced over his shoulder and motioned the retainers out of
the room with a flick of his hand.

He had hidden himself away all afternoon and sleeping dreamlessly had
to a great extent recovered from the nightmares he had suffered. As he
stood before his sister he appeared as fresh as a daisy, if less pasto-
ral.

"Now I tell you what," he cried, moving round her, his head cocked on
one side, "I tell you what, Irma. You've made something out of yourself,
and if it ain't a work of art, it's as near as makes no matter. By all
that emanates, you've brought it off. Great grief! I hardly know you.
Turn round, my dear, on one heel! La! La! Significant form, that's what
she is! And to think the same blood batters in our veins! It's quite
embarrassing."

"What do you mean, Alfred? I thought you were praising me." (There was
a catch in her voice.)

"And so I was, and so I was!--but tell me sister, what is it, apart from
your luminous, un-sheltered eyes--and your general dalliance--what is it
that's altered you--that has, as it were... aha... aha... H'm... I've got
it--O dear me... quite so, by all that's pneumatic, how silly of me--
you've got a bosom, my love, or haven't you?"

"Alfred! It is not for you to prove."

"God forbid, my love."

"But if you must know..."

"No, no, Irma, no no! I am content to leave everything to your judgement."

"So you won't listen to me..." (Irma was almost in tears).

"O but I will. Tell me all."

"Alfred dear--you liked the look of me. You said you did."

"And I still do. Enormously. It was only that, well, I've known you a long
time and..."

"I'm told," said Irma, breaking in breathlessly, "that busts are...well..."

"… that busts are what you make them?" queried her brother standing on
his toes.

"Exactly! Exactly!" his sister shouted. "And I've made one, Alfred, and it
gives me pride of bearing. It's a hot water bottle, Alfred; an expensive
one."

There was a long and deathly silence. When at last Prunesquallor had rea-
ssembled the fragments of his shattered poise he opened his eyes.

"When do you expect them, my love?"

"You know as well as I do. At nine o'clock, Alfred. Shall we call in the
Chef."

"What for?"

"For final instructions, of course."

"What again?"

"One can't be too final, dear."

"Irma," said the Doctor, "perhaps you have stumbled on a truth of the first
water. And talking of water--is the fountain playing?"

"Darling!" said Irma, fingering her brother's arm. "It's playing its heart
out," and she gave him a pinch.

The doctor felt the blushes spreading all over his body, in little rushes
like red Indians leaping from ambush, to ambush, now here, now there.

"And now, Alfred, since it's nearly nine o'clock, I am going to give you a
surprise. You haven't seen anything yet. This sumptuous dress. Those jewels
at my ears, these flashing stones about my white throat --' (her brother
winced) "… and the fancy knotwork of my silvery coiff--all this is but a
setting, Alfred, a mere setting. Can you bear to wait, Alfred, or shall I
tell you? Or still more better--O yes! Yes, still more better, dear, I'll
show you NOW --'

And away she went. The Doctor had no idea she could travel so fast. A swish
of "nightmare blue' and she was gone, leaving behind her the faint smell of
almond icing.

"I wonder if I'm getting old?" thought the doctor, and he put his hand to
his forehead and shut his eyes. When he opened them she was there again--
but O creeping hell! what had she done.

What faced him was not merely the fantastically upholstered and bedizened
image of his sister to whose temperament and posturing he had long been
immune, but something else, which turned her from a vain, nervous, frus-
trated, outlandish, excitable and prickly spinster which was bearable enough,
into an exhibit. The crude inner workings of her mind were thrust nakedly
before him by reason of the long flower-trimmed veil that she now wore over
her face. Only her eyes were to be seen, above the thick black netting, very
weak, and rather small. She turned them to left and right to show her brother
the principle of the thing. Her nose was hidden, and in itself that was ex-
cellent, but in no way could it offset the blatancy, the terrible soul-re-
vealing blatancy of the underlying idea.

For the second time that evening Prunesquallor blushed. He had never seen
anything so openly, ridiculously, predatory in his life. Heaven knew she
would say the wrong thing at the wrong time, but above all she must not be
allowed to expose her intention in that palpable way.

But what he said was Aha! H'm. What a flair you have. Irma! What a consu-
mmate flair. Who else would have thought of it?"

"O Alfred, I knew you'd love it..." she swivelled her eyes again, but her
attempt at roguery was heart-breaking.

"Now what is it I keep thinking of as I stand and admire you," her brother
trilled, tapping his forehead with his finger--"tut... tut...tut, what is
it... something I read in one of your journals, I do believe--ah yes, I've
almost got it--there... it's slipped away again...how irritating... wait
... wait... here it comes like a fish to the bait of my poor old memory...
ah, I almost had it... I've got it, O yes indeed... but, oh dear me, No...
that wouldn't do at all... I mustn't tell you that..."

"What is it, Alfred?... what are you frowning about? How irritating you are
just when you were studying me--I said how irritating you are."

"You would be most unhappy if I told you, my dear. It affects you deeply."

"Affects me! How do you mean?"

"It was the merest snippet, Irma, which I happened to read. What has re-
minded me of it is that it was all about veils and the modern woman. Now I,
as a man, have always responded to the mysterious and provocative wherever
it may be found. And if these qualities are evoked by anything on earth
they are evoked by a woman's veil. But O dear me, do you know what this
creature in the Women's column wrote?"

"What did she write?" said Irma.

"She wrote that “although there may be those who will continue to wear
their veils, just as there are those who still crawl through the jungle on
all fours because no one has ever told them that it is the custom these
days to walk upright, yet she (the writer) would know full well in what
grade of society to place any woman who was continuing to wear a veil, af-
ter the twenty-second of the month. After all,” the writer continued,
'some things are "done' and some things are not done, and as far as the
sartorial aristocracy was concerned, veils might as well never have been
invented'."

"But what nonsense it all is," cried the Doctor. "As though women are so
weak that they have to follow one another so closely as all that." And he
gave a high-pitched laugh as though to imply that a mere male could see
through all that kind of nonsense.

"Did you say the twenty-second of this month?" said Irma, after a few mo-
ments of thick silence.

"That is so," said her brother.

"And today is the..."

"The thirtieth," said her brother--"but surely, surely, you wouldn't..."

"Alfred," said Irma. "Be quiet, please. There are some things which you do
not understand and one of them is a woman's mind."

With a deft movement of her hand she freed her face of the veil and there
was her nose again as sharp as ever.

"Now I wonder if you'd do something for me, dear."

"What is it, Irma, my love?"

"I wondered if you'd do something for me, dear?"

"What is it, Irma, my love?"

"I wondered if you'd take--O no, I'll have to do it myself--and you might
be shocked--but perhaps if you would shut your eyes, Alfred, I could..."

"What in the name of darkness are you driving at?"

"I wondered, dear, at first, whether you would take my bust to the bedroom
and fill it with hot water. It has got very cold, Alfred, and I don't want
to catch a chill--or perhaps if you'd rather not do that for me, you could
bring the kettle downstairs to my little writing room and I'll do it myself
--will you, dear will you?"

"Irma," said her brother. "I will not do it for you. I have done and will
continue to do a lot of things for you, pleasant and unpleasant, but I will
not start running around, looking for water bottles to fill for my sister's
bosom. I will not even bring down the kettle for you. Have you no kind of
modesty, my love? I know you are very excited, and really don't know what
you are doing or saying, but I must have it quite clear from the start that
as far as your rubber bust is concerned, I am unable to help you. If you
catch a chill, then I will dose you--but until then, I would be grateful
if you would leave the subject alone. But enough of that! Enough of that!
The magic hour approaches. Come, come! my tiger lily!"

"Sometimes I despise you, Alfred," said Irma. "Who would have thought that
you were such a prude."

"Ah no! my dear, you're far too hard on me. Have mercy. Do you think it is
easy to bear your scorn when you are looking so radiant?"

"Am I, Alfred! O, am I? Am I?"



THIRTY-FOUR



It had been arranged that the staff should gather in the quadrangle outside
the Doctor's house at a few minutes past nine and wait for Bellgrove, who,
as headmaster, had ignored the suggestion that he should be first on the
spot and wait for them. Perch-Prism's argument that it was a good deal more
ludicrous for a horde of men to hang about as though they were hatching some
kind of conspiracy than it would be for Bellgrove, even though he was head-
master, cut no ice with the old lion.

Bellgrove, in his present mood, was peculiarly dogged. He had glowered over
his shoulder at them as though he were at bay.

"Never let it be said in future years..." he had ended, "that a headmaster
of Gormenghast had once to wait the pleasure of his staff's arrival--by night,
in the South Quadrangle. Never let it be said that so responsible an office
had sunk into such disrespect."

And so it was that a few minutes after nine a great blot formed in the dark-
ness of the quadrangle as though a section of the dusk had coagulated. Bell-
grove, who had been hiding behind a pillar of the cloisters, had decided to
keep his staff waiting for at least five minutes. But he was unable to con-
tain his impatience. Not three minutes had passed since their arrival before
his excitement propelled him forwards into the open gloom. When he was half-
way across the quadrangle, and could hear the muttering of their voices,
quite plainly, the moon slid out from behind a cloud. In the cold light that
now laid bare the rendezvous, the red gowns of the professors burned darkly,
the colour of wine. Not so Bellgrove's. His ceremonial gown was of the finest
white silk, embroidered across the back with a large "G'. It was a magnificent,
voluminous affair, this gown, but the effect was a little startling by moon-
light, and more than one of the waiting professors gave a start to see what
appeared to be a ghost bearing down upon them.

The Professors had forgotten the ceremonial robe of leadership. Deadyawn had
never worn it. For the smaller-minded of the staff there was something irri-
tating about this sartorial discrepancy of their gowns which gave the old man
so unique an advantage, both decoratively and socially. They had all been se-
cretly rather pleased to have the opportunity of wearing their red robes in
public, although the public consisted solely of the Doctor and his sister
(for they didn't count each other)--and now, Bellgrove, of all people, Bell-
grove, their decrepit head had stolen with a single peal, as it were, the
wealth of their red thunder.

He could feel their discontent, short-lived though it was, and the effect of
this recognition was to excite him still further. He tossed his white mane
of hair in the moonlight and gathered his arctic gown about him in a great
sculptural swathe.

"Gentlemen," he said. "Silence if you please. I thank you."

He dropped his head so that with his face in deep shadow he could relax his
features in a smile of delight at finding himself obeyed. When he raised his
face it was as solemn and as noble as before.

"Are all who are here gathered present?"

"What the hell does that mean?" said a coarse voice, out of the red gloom of
the gowns, and immediately on top of Mulefire's voice, the staccato of Cut-
flower's laughter broke out in little clanks of sound--"Oh La! la! la! if
that isn't ripeness, la! “Are all who are here gathered present?” La!...
What a tease the old man is, lord help my lungs!"

"Quite so! Quite so!" broke out a crisper voice. "What he was trying to ask,
presumably' (it was Shrivell speaking) "was whether everyone here was really
here, or whether it was only those who thought themselves here when they
weren't really here at all who were here? You see it's quite simple, really,
once you have mastered the syntax."

Somewhere close behind the headmaster there was a sense of strangled body-
laughter, a horrible inaudible affair and then the sound of a deep bucketful
of breath being drawn out of a well--and then Opus Fluke's mid-stomach voice.
"Poor old Bellgrove," it said. "Poor old bloody Bellgrove!" and then the rum-
bling again, and a chorus of dark and stupid laughter.

Bellgrove was in no mood for this. His old face was flushed and his legs
trembled. Fluke's voice had sounded very close. Just behind his left shoulder.
Bellgrove took a step to the rear and then turning suddenly with a whirl of
his white gown he swung his long arm and at once he was startled at what he
at first imagined was a complete triumph. His gnarled old fist had struck a
human jaw. A quick, wild, and bitter sense of mastery possessed him and the
intoxicating notion that he had been under-rating himself for seventy odd
years and that all unwittingly he had discovered in himself the "man of act-
ion'. But his exhilaration was short lived for the figure who lay moaning
at his feet was not Opus Fluke at all, but the weedy and dyspeptic Flannel-
cat, the only member of his staff who held him in any kind of respect.

But Bellgrove's prompt action had a sobering effect.

"Flannelcat!" he said. "Let that be a warning to them. Get up, my man. You
have done nobly. Nobly." At that moment something whisked through the air
and struck an obscure member of the staff on the wrist. At his cry, for he
was in real pain, Flannelcat was at once forgotten. A small round stone was
found at the feet of the obscure member, and every head was turned at once
to the dusky quadrangle, but nothing could be seen.

High up on a northern wall, where the windows appeared no larger than key-
holes, Steerpike, sitting with his legs dangling over one of the window-
sills, raised his eyebrows at the sound of the cry so far below him, and
piously closing his eyes he kissed his catapult.

"Whatever the hell that was, or wherever it came from, it does at least
remind us that we are late, my friend," said Shrivell.

"True enough," muttered Shred, who almost always trod heavily on the tail
of his friend's remarks. "True enough."

"Bellgrove," said Perch-Prism, "wake your ideas up, old friend, and lead
the way in. I see that every light is blazing in the homestead of the Prunes.
Lord, what a lot we are!" he moved his small pig-like eyes across the faces
of his colleagues--"what a hideous lot we are--but there it is--there it
is."

"You're not much of a silk-purse yourself," said a voice.

"In we go, la! In we go!" cried Cutflower. "Terribly gay now! Terribly gay!
We must all be terribly gay!"

Perch-Prism slid up under Bellgrove's shoulder. "My old friend," he said.
"You haven't forgotten what I said about Irma, have you? It may be difficult
for you. I have even more recent information. She's dead nuts on you, old man.
Dead nuts. Watch your steps, chief. Watch 'em carefully."

"I--will--watch--my--steps, Perch-Prism, have no fear," said Bellgrove with
a leer that his colleagues could in no way interpret. Spiregrain, Throd and
Splint stood hand in hand. Their spiritual master was dead. They were enor-
mously glad of it. They winked at each other and dug one another in the ribs
and then joined hands again in the darkness.

A mass movement towards the gate of the Prunesquallors began. Within this
gate there was nothing that could be called a front garden, merely an area
of dark red gravel which had been raked by the gardener. The parallel lines
formed by his rake were quite visible in the moonlight. He might have saved
himself the trouble for within a few moments the neat striated effect was a
thing of the past. Not a square red inch escaped the shuffling and stamping
of the Professors' feet. Hundreds of footprints of all shapes and sizes,
crossing and recrossing, toes and heels superimposed with such freaks of
placing that it seemed as though among the professors there were some who
boasted feet as long as an arm, and others who must have found it difficult
to balance upon shoes that a monkey might have found too tight.

After the bottleneck of the garden gate had been negotiated and the wine-
red horde, with Bellgrove at its van, like an oriflamme, were before the front
door, the headmaster turned with his hand hovering at the height of the bell
pull, and raising his lion-like head, was about to remind his staff that as the
guests of Irma Prunesquallor he hoped to find in their deportment and gen-
eral behaviour that sense of decorum which he had so far had no reason to
suppose they possessed or could even simulate, when a butler, dressed up
like a Christmas cracker, flung the front door open with a flourish which
was obviously the result of many years' experience. The speed of the door
as it swung on its hinges was extraordinary, but what was just as dramatic
was the silence--a silence so complete that Bellgrove, with his head turned
towards his staff and his hand still groping in the air for the bell-pull,
could not grasp the reason for the peculiar behaviour of his colleagues.
When a man is about to make a speech, however modest, he is glad to have
the attention of his audience. To see on every face that stared in his dir-
ection an expression of intense interest, but an interest that obviously
had nothing to do with him, was more than disturbing. What had happened to
them? Why were all those eyes so out of focus--or if they were in focus why
should they skim his own as though there were something absorbing about the
woodwork of the high green door behind him? And why was Throd standing on
tip-toe in order to look through him?

Bellgrove was about to turn--not because he thought there could be anything
to see but because he was experiencing that sensation that causes men to turn
their heads on deserted roads in order to make sure they are alone. But be-
fore he could turn of his own free will he received two sharp yet deferential
knuckle-taps on his left shoulder-blade--and leaping about as though at the
touch of a ghost he found himself face to face with the tall Christmas-cracker
of a butler.

"You will pardon me, sir, for making free with my knuckle, I am sure, sir,"
said the glittering figure in the hall. "But you are impatiently awaited, sir,
and no wonder if I may say so."

"If you insist," said Bellgrove. "So be it."

His remark meant nothing at all but it was the only thing he could think of
to say.

"And now, sir," continued the butler, lifting his voice into a higher register
which gave quite a new expression to his face--"if you will be so gracious as
to follow me, I will lead the way to madam."

He moved to one side and cried out into the darkness.

"Forward, gentlemen! if you please," and turning smartly on his heel he began
to lead Bellgrove through the hall and down a number of short passageways un-
til a wider space, at the foot of a flight of stairs, brought him and his fol
lowers to a halt.

"I have no doubt, sir," the butler said, inclining himself reverentially as he
spoke--and to Bellgrove's way of thinking the man was speaking overmuch--"I
have no doubt, sir, that you are familiar with the customary procedure."

"Of course, my man. Of course," said Bellgrove. "What is it?"

"O sir!" said the butler. "You are very humorous," and he began to titter--an
unpleasant sound to come from the top of a cracker.

"There are many “procedures”, my man. Which one were you referring to?"

"To the one, sir, that pertains to the order in which the guests are announced
--by name, of course, as they file through the doorway of the salon. It is all
very cut and dried, sir."

"What is the order, my dear fellow, if it is not the order of seniority?"

"And so it is, sir, in all respects, save that it is customary for the head-
master, which would be you, sir, to bring up the rear."

"The rear?"

"Quite so sir. As a kind of shepherd, I suppose sir, driving his flock before
him, as it were."

There was a short silence during which Bellgrove began to realize that to be
the last to present himself to his hostess, he would be the first to hold any
kind of conversation with her.

"Very well," he said. "The tradition must, of course, remain inviolate. Ridi-
culous as it seems in the face of it, I shall, as you put it, bring up the rear.
Meanwhile, it is getting late. There is no time to sort out the staff into
age-groups, and so on. None of them are chickens. Come along now, gentlemen,
come along; and if you will be so kind as to stop combing your hair before the
door is opened, Cutflower, I would, as one who is responsible for his staff,
be grateful. Thank you."

Just then, the door which faced the staircase opened and a long rectangle of
gold light fell across a section of the embattled masters. Their gowns flamed.
Their faces shone like spectres. Turning almost simultaneously after a few min-
utes of dazzling blankness they shuffled into the surrounding shadow. Around
the corner of the open door through which the light was pouring a large face
peered out at them.

"Name?" it whispered thickly. An arm crept around the door and drew the nearest
figure forwards and into the light by a fistful of wine-red linen.

"Name?" it whispered again.

"The name is Cutflower, la!" hissed the gentleman, "but take your great joint
of clod's fist off me, you stupid bastard." Cutflower, whose gusts of temper
were rare and short-lived, was really angry at being pulled forward by his
gown and in having it clenched so clumsily into a web of creases. "Let go!" he
repeated hotly. "By hell, I'll have you whipped, la!"

The crude footman bent down and brought his lip to Cutflower's ear. "I... will
...kill... you..." he whispered, but in such an abstracted way as to give Cut-
flower quite a turn. It was as though the fellow was passing on a scrap of in-
side information--casually (like a spy) but in confidence. Before Cutflower
had recovered he found himself pushed forward, and he was suddenly alone in
the long room. Alone, except for a line of servants along the right-hand wall,
and away ahead of him, his host and hostess, very still, very upright in the
glow of many candles.

Had Bellgrove worked out beforehand the order in which to have his staff an-
nounced, it is unlikely that he would have hit upon so happy an idea as that
of choosing Cutflower from his pack, and leading off, as it were, with a card
so lacking in the solid virtues.

But chance had seen to it that of all the gowns it was Cutflower's that should
have been within range of the groping hand. And Cutflower, the volatile and
fatuous Cutflower, as he stepped lightly like a wagtail across the grey-green
roods of carpet was, in spite of the shocking start he had been given, inject-
ing the air, the cold expectant air, with something no other member of the
staff possessed in the same way--a warmth or a gaiety of a kind, but not a hu-
man gaiety; rather, it was glass-like; a sparkling, twinkling quality.

It was as though Cutflower was so glad to be alive that he had never lived.
Every moment was vivid, a coloured thing, a trill or a crackle of words in the
air. Who could imagine, while Cutflower was around, that there were such vulgar
monsters as death, birth, love, art and pain around the corner? It was too em-
barrassing to contemplate. If Cutflower knew of them he kept it secret. Over
their gaping and sepulchral deeps he skimmed now here, now there, in his pri-
vate canoe, changing his course with a flick of his paddle when death's black
whale, or the red squid of passion, lifted for a moment its body from the brine.

He was not more than a third of the way to his hosts, and the echo of the sten-
torian voice, which had flung his name across the room, was hardly dead, and
yet (with his wagtail walk, his spruceness, his perky ductile features so ready
to be amused and so ready to amuse as long as no one took life seriously) he
had already broken the ice for the Prunesquallors. There was a certain charm in
his fatuity, his perkiness. His toecaps shone like mirrors. His feet came down
tap-tap-tap-tap in a way all their own.

The Professors craning their necks as they watched his progress breathed more
freely. They knew now that they could never accomplish that long carpet-journey
with anything like Cutflower's air, but he reminded them at every footstep, e-
very inclination of the head, that the whole point of life was to be happy.

And O, the charm of it! The artless charm of it! When Cutflower, with but a few
feet to go, broke into a little dancing run, and putting forward both his hands
cupped them over the limp white fingers which Irma had extended.

"O, la! la!" he had cried, his voice running all the way back down the salon.
"This is, my dear Miss Prunesquallor, this positively is …' and turning to the
Doctor, "Isn't it?" he added as he clasped the outstretched hand, squaring his
shoulders and shaking his head happily as he did so.

"Well, I hope it will become so, my friend," cried Prunesquallor. "How good to
see you! And bye the bye, Cutflower, you give me heart you do... by all that
re-vivifies I thank you from its bottom. Don't disappear now, for the whole eve-
ning, will you?"

Irma leaned across her brother and drew her lips apart in a dead, wide and cal-
culated smile.

It was meant to express many things, and among them the sense of how uncon-
ditionally she associated herself with her brother's sentiment. It also tried to
imply that for all her qualities as a femme fatale, she was little more than a
wide-eyed girl at heart and terribly vulnerable. But it was early in the evening
and she knew she must make many mistakes before her smiles came out right.

Cutflower, whose eyes were still on the doctor, was fortunate enough to be una-
ware of Irma's blandishment. He was about to say something, when the loud and
common voice from the other end of the room brayed forth, "Professor Mulefire',
and Cutflower turned his head gaily from his hosts and shielded his eyes in im-
itation of a look-out man scanning some distant horizon. With a quick, delighted
smile and a twirl of his dapper body, he was away to the side tables, where with
his elbows raised very high, he worked his ten fingers together into a knot, as
he passed his eye along the wines and delicacies. Self-absorbed, he rocked to
and fro on the sides of his shoes.

How different was Mulefire with his long clumsy irritable strides! And indeed
how disparate were all who followed one another that evening with only the col-
our of their gowns in common.

Flannelcat, like a lost soul for whom the journey was a mile at least; the hea-
vy, sloppy, untidy Fluke, who looked as though, for all his strength and for
all the forward thrust of his loaf-like jaw, he might at any moment fold up at
the knees and go to sleep on the carpet. Perch-Prism, horribly alert, his por-
cine features shining white in the glow of the candles, his button-black eyes
darting to and fro as he moved crisply with short aggressive steps.

With this shape and that shape, with this walk and that walk, they emerged from
the hall to the tocsin-bray of their names, until Bellgrove found himself alone
in the semi-darkness.

As one after another of the professional guests had made their carpet-journey
towards her, Irma had had a world of time in which to ruminate on the vulnera-
bility of each to the charm she would so soon be unleashing. Some, of course,
were quite impossible--but even as she dismissed them she began to brood with
favour upon such phrases as "rough diamond', "heart of gold', "still waters'...

While the sides of the room filled with those who had presented themselves and
their conversation became louder and louder as their numbers increased, Irma,
standing rigid by her brother, speculating upon the pros and cons of those she
had received, was wakened out of a more than usually sanguine speculation by
her brother's voice.

"And how is Irma, that sister of mine, that sweet throb? Is she cooing? Is she
weary of the flesh--or isn't she? Great spearheads, Irma! How determined, how
martial you look! Relax a little, melt within yourself. Think of milk and honey.
Think of jellyfish."

"Be quiet," she hissed out of the corner of a smile she was concocting, a smile
more ambitious than she had so far dared to invent. Every muscle in her face was
pulling its weight. Not all of them knew in which direction to pull, but their com-
mon enthusiasm was formidable. It was as though all her previous contortions were
mere rehearsals. Something in white was approaching.

The "something in white' was moving slowly but with more purpose than for over
forty years. While he had waited, sitting quietly by himself on the lowest step
of the Prunesquallors' staircase, Bellgrove had repeated to himself, his lips
moving to the slow rhythm of his thoughts, those conclusions he had come to.

He had decided, intellectually, that Irma Prunesquallor, dwarfed by lack of
outlet for her feminine instincts, could find fruition in a life devoted to
his comforts. That not only he, but she, in years to come would bless the day
when he, Bellgrove, was man enough, was sapient enough, to lift her from stag-
nation and set her marching through matrimony towards that equipoise of spirit
that only wives can know. There were a hundred rational reasons why she should
leap at the chance in spite of his advanced years. But what weight had all
these arguments for a fine and haughty lady, sensitive as a blood horse and
gowned like a queen, if at the same time there was no love? And Bellgrove re-
membered as he had crossed the quadrangle an hour ago how it was this point
that irked him. But now, it was not the tightness of his reasoning that set
his old knees trembling, it was something more. For, from a wise and practical
project the whole conception had been shifted into another light. His ideas
had suddenly been overlaid with stars. What was precise was now enormous,
unsubstant, diaphanous, for he had seen her. And tonight it was not merely
the Doctor's sister that awaited him, but a daughter of Eve, a living focus,
a cosmos, a pulse of the great abstraction. Woman. Was her name Irma? Her name
was Irma. But what was the name Irma but four absurd little letters in a cer-
tain order? To hell with symbols, cried Bellgrove to himself. She is there, by
God, from head to foot and matchless!

It was true that he had only seen her from a distance and it is possible that
the distance lent an enchantment self-engendered. No doubt, his sight was not
as sharp as it used to be--and the fact that he could not remember having seen
any other woman for many years gave Irma a flying start.

But he had obtained a general picture, as he peered through a narrow chasm of
light that shone between Throd's and Spiregrain's bodies.

And he had seen how proudly she held herself. Stiff as a soldier, and yet how
feminine! That is what he would like to have about him in the evening. A state-
ly type. He could imagine her, sitting bolt upright, at his side, her face
twitching a little from gentle breeding, her snow-white hands darning away at
his socks while he pondered on this and that, turning his eyes from time to
time to see whether it was really true, that she was really there, his wife,
his wife, on the chocolate-coloured couch.

And then suddenly he had found himself alone. The big face was peering for
him from the door. "Name?" it whispered hoarsely, for its voice was almost
gone.

"I'm the headmaster, you idiot," barked Bellgrove. He was in no mood for fools.
Something was in his blood. Whether it was love or not he must find out soon.
There was an impatient streak in him--and this was no moment in which to suffer
the man gladly.

The creature with the big face, seeing that Bellgrove was the last to be an-
nounced, took a deep breath and to get rid of his pent-up irritability (for he
was an hour late for his appointment with a blacksmith's wife) gathered all
the forces of his throat together and yelled -- but his voice collapsed after
the first syllable and only Bellgrove heard the guttering sound that was in-
tended for "master'.

But there was something rather fine, rather impressive in the abbreviation.
Something less formal, it is true, but more penetrating in the first simple
syllable.

"The Head --!"

The short hammer blow of the monosyllable reverberated along the room like a
challenge.

It struck like a drumstick on the membranes of Irma's ear and Bellgrove, peer-
ing forward as he took his first paces into the room, had the impression of
his hostess rearing herself up on her hips, tossing her head before it froze
into a motionless carving.

His heart, that was already beating wildly, had leapt at the sight. Her atten-
tion was riveted upon him. Of that there was no doubt.

Not only her attention, but the attention of all those present. He became aware
of a lethal hush. Soft as the carpet was, his feet could be heard as they low-
ered themselves one after another into the grey-green of the pile.

For a moment, as he moved with that fantastic solemnity which the urchins of
Gormenghast were so fond of mimicking, he gave his eyes the run of his staff.
There they stood, three deep, a solid wine-red phalanx that completely obs-
cured the side-tables. Yes, he could see Perch-Prism, his eyebrows raised,
and Opus Fluke with his horse's mouth half open in a grin so inane that for
a moment it was difficult for Bellgrove to regain that composure necessary to
the advancement of his immediate interests. So they were waiting to see in
what way he would try to evade the "predatory' Irma, were they? So they ex-
pected him to back away from her immediately after he had received his formal
reception, did they? So they looked for an evening of hide and seek between
their hostess and their headmaster, the low curs! By the light of a militant
heaven, he would show the dogs! He would show them. And, by the powers, he
would surprise them too.

By now he was about halfway along the carpet, already trodden into a recogni-
zable highway, the pile of the carpet throwing out a greener sheen than else-
where, the pile pressed forward by a hundred feet.

Irma, her eyes weak with peering, could just see him. As he approached and
the blurred edges of his swan white gown, and the contours of his leonine
head, grew sharper, she marvelled at his god-like quality. She had received
so many half-men that she had tired, not of numbers, but of waiting for the
kind of male she could reverence. There had been the perky ones, and the sto-
lid ones and the sharp ones and the blunt ones--all males she supposed, but
although she had a few of them at the back of her mind for further consider-
ation, yet she had been sadly disappointed. There had been that irritating
bachelor quality about them, a kind of dead selfsufficiency, a terrible thing
in a man, who is, as every woman knows, a mere tag-end of a thing before the
distaff side has stitched him together.

But here was something different. Something old it is true, but something no-
ble. She manoeuvred with her mouth. It had had a good deal of practice by
this time and the smile she prepared for Bellgrove reflected to a great ex-
tent what she had in mind for it. Above all, it was winsome, devastatingly
winsome. For a pretty face to be winsome is normal enough and very winsome
it can be, but it is a tepid thing, a negative thing compared with the win-
someness to which Irma could subject her features. With her it was as start-
ling as any foreground symbol set against an incongruous background. Irma's
weak and eager eyes, Irma's pinnacle of a nose, Irma's length of powdered
face; these were the incongruous background on which the smile deployed its
artful self. She played with it for a moment or two, as an angler with a
fish, and then she let it set like concrete.

Her body had simultaneously rhythmed itself into a stance both statuesque
and snake-like, her thorax, amplified with its hot-water bottle bosom, po-
sitioned in air so far to the left of her pelvis as to have no visible
means of support. Her snow-white hands were clasped at her throat where
her jewellery sparkled.

Bellgrove was almost upon her. "This," he said to himself, breathing deep-
ly, "is one of those moments in a man's life when valour is tested."

The years ahead hung on his every move. His staff had shaken hands with
her as though a woman was merely another kind of man. Fools! The seeds
of Eve were in this radiant creature. The lullabyes of half a million
years throbbed in her throat. Had they no sense of wonder, no reverence,
no pride? He, an old man (but a not unhandsome one), would show the dogs
the way of it--and there she was, before him, the maddeningly feminine
bouquet of her pineapple perfume swimming about his head. He inhaled.
He trembled, and then, lion-like, he tossed his venerable mane from his
eyes, and raising his shoulders as he took her hand in his, he bowed his
head above their milky limpness and planted in the damp of her palms,
the first two kisses he had given for over fifty years.

To say that the frozen silence contracted itself into a yet higher globe
of ice were to under-rate the exquisite tension and to shroud it in words.
The atmosphere had become a physical sensation. As when, before a mast-
erpiece, the acid throat contracts, and words are millstones, so when the
supernaturally outlandish happens and a masterpiece is launched through
the medium of human gesture, then all human volition is withered at the
source and the heart of action stops beating.

Such a moment was this. Irma, a stalagmite of crimson stone, knew, for
all the riot of her veins that a page had turned over. At chapter forty?
O no! At chapter one, for she had never lived before save in a pulseless
preface.

How long did they remain thus? How many times had the earth moved round
the sun? How many times had the great blue whales of the northern waters
risen to spurt their fountains at the sky? How many reed-bucks had fall-
en to the claws of how many leopards, while that sublime unit of two-
figure statuary remained motionless? It is fruitless to ask. The clocks
of the world stood still or should have done.

But at last the arctic stillness broke. A professor at the side tables
gave forth a sharp scream, whether of laughter or nerves was never est-
ablished.

The Doctor glanced across at the wine red gowns, his eyebrows raised,
his teeth glinting. There were a few beads of moisture on his forehead.
He was going through a lot.

Irma had not consciously heard the sharp cry of laughter nor knew what
had broken her from a trance, but she found herself inclining her head
graciously above the white locks of the headmaster's reverential poll.

This was it. Something within her was laughing wildly, like cowbells.

It was a pity that the headmaster could not appreciate the amplitude of
her graciousness as she hung above him--but, there it was -- she couldn't
have it both ways--but wait--what was this?

O sweetest mercy! And the wild thorn-throbs of it! What was he doing,
the great, gentle, august, brilliant lion? He was raising his eyes to
hers with his lips still pressed against her fingers. It was as though
he had divined her most secret thoughts.

She lowered her lids and found that his dead-pebble eyes were upon hers.
With their gaze directed upwards and through the white tangle of the
eyebrows they appeared to be caged.

She knew the moment to be enormous--enormous in its implications--in its
future--but she knew also as a woman that she must draw her hand away.
As the first suspicion of a movement crept through her flaccid fingers,
Bellgrove lifted his head, withdrew his big hands from hers and at that
moment Irma's bosom began to slip. In the complex arrangement of strings,
safety pins and tape which held the hot water bottle in place. Time had
found a weakness.

But Irma, tingling with excitement, was in so elevated a frame of body
and mind that, beyond her capacity as it were, her brain was planning
for her in advance, those things she should do, and say, in or out of
any emergency. And this was one of those moments when the cells of Ir-
ma's brain marched in solid ranks to her rescue.

Her bosom was slipping. She clasped her hands together at her throat so
that her forearms might keep the hot water bottle in place, and then
with every eye upon her she lifted her head high and began to pace to-
wards the doorway at the far end of the salon. She had not even glanced
at her brother, but with a quite overweening confidence had started a-
way, the folds of her evening gown trailing behind her.

The bottle had become horribly cold across her chest. But she revelled
in its cruel temperature. Why should she care about such little things?
Something on an altogether vaster scale was bearing her on its flood.

The barb had struck. She was naked. She was proud. Had love's arrow not
been metaphorical she would have held it high in the air for all to see.
And all this she was making plain, by the very movement of her pacing
body, and by the volcanic blush which had turned her marmoreal head in-
to something that might have been found among the blood-red ruins of
some remote civilization. Her jewellery took on another tint. Her blush
burned through it.

But her expression bore no relation to the blush. It was strangely art-
iculate, and thus, frighteningly simple. There was no need for words.
Her face was saying, "I am in his power; he has awakened me; I, a mere
woman, have been blasted into sentience. Whatever the future holds it
will not be through me that love goes hungry. I am aware; not only that
history is being made, but of my duty, even at this pinnacled moment,
and so, I am leaving the room, to re-adjust myself--to compose myself,
and to bring back into the salon the kind of woman that the headmaster
may admire--no quivering lovestruck damsel, but a dame in all the high
sensuousness of her sex, a dame, composed and glorious!"

Irma, directly she had reached the door and had swept out into the hall,
flew, a silken spinster, up the flight of stairs to her room. Slamming
the door behind her she gave vent to the primeval jungle in her veins
and screamed like a macaw, and then, prancing forward towards the bed,
tripped over a small embroidered foot-stool and fell spreadeagled a-
cross the carpet.

What did it matter? What did anything ridiculous or shaming matter so
long as he was not there to see it?



THIRTY-FIVE



There are times when the emotions are so clamorous and the rational work-
ing of the mind so perfunctory that there is no telling where the actual
leaves off and the images of fantasy begin.

Irma, in her room, could picture Bellgrove at her side as though he were
there, but she could also see clean through him, so that his body was
pranked with the pattern of the wallpaper beyond. She could see a great
host of professors, thousands of them, and all the size of hatpins. They
stood upon her bed, a massed and solemn congregation, and bowed to her;
but she also saw that her pillow-slip needed changing. She looked out
of the window, her eyes wide and un-focused. The moonlight lay in a haze
upon the high foliage of an elm, and the elm became Mr Bellgrove again
with his distinguished and lordly mane. She saw a figure, no doubt some
figment, as it slid over the wall of her grotto'd garden and ran like a
shadow to beneath the window of the dispensary. Far away at the back of
her mind, there was something that said "you have seen that movement be-
fore; crouching, rapid movement'--yet she had, in her transport, no clue
as to what was real and what was fantasy.

And so, when she saw a figure steal across the garden below her she had
no conception that it was a real, breathing creature, far less that it
was Steerpike. The young man who had forced open the window in the room
below that in which Irma was standing moonstruck, had, by the light of
a candle, wasted no time in finding the drug for which he was looking.
The bottles on the packed shelves shone blue and crimson and deadly
green as the small flame moved. Within a few moments he had decanted a
few thimblefuls of a sluggish liquid into the flask he carried, and re-
turned the doctor's bottle to the shelf. He corked his own container
and within a moment was halfway out of the window.

Above the walls of the garden the upper massives of Gormenghast castle
shone in the baleful moonlight. As he paused for a moment before drop-
ping from the window-sill to the ground, he shuddered. The night was
warm and there was no cause to shudder save that a twinge of joy, of
dark joy can shake the body, when a man is alone, under the moon, on
a secret mission, with hunger in his heart and ice in his brain.



THIRTY-SIX



When Irma returned to her guests she paused before she opened the doors
of the salon, for a loud and confused noise came from within. It was of
a kind that she had never heard before, so happy it was, so multitudi-
nous, so abandoned--the sound of voices at play. She had, of course, in
her small way, at gatherings, heard, from time to time, the play of many
voices. But what she was hearing now was not the play of voices; it was
voices at play; and as such it was novel and peculiar to her ears, in
the way that shadow at play (as against the play of shadows) would have
been to her eyes. She had, on rare occasions, enjoyed the play of her
brother's brain--but in her salon there was something very different
going on and from the few remarks that she could distinguish through
the panels of the door it was obvious that here there was no play of
language, no play of thought, but language playing on its own; enfran-
chised notions playing by themselves, the truants of the brain.

Gathering the long wreaths of her gown about her she crouched for a mo-
ment with her eyes to the keyhole but could see no more than the smoky
midnight of the gowns.

What had happened, she wondered, while she had been upstairs? When she
had left, in the motionless silence, like a queen, the room had throb-
bed with her single personality, the silence, the flattering and sig-
nificant silence, had been her setting, as the great sky is the setting
for the white flight of a gull. But now, the stretched drum-skin of the
atmosphere had split--and the professors, exultant that this was so,
had, each in his own way, erected within himself the romantic image of
what he fondly imagined himself to be. For the long lost glories, that
never in fact existed save in the wishfulness of their brains, were be-
ing remembered with a reality as vivid, if not more so, as truth itself.
False memories flowered within them. The days of brilliance when their
lances shone, when they leapt into the gold saddle quick as thought and
galloped through the white rays of the dawn; when they ran like stags,
swam like fish and, laughing like thunder, woke the swaddled towers. Ah
Lord, the callow days; the cocky days, the days of sinew and the madcap
evenings--the darkness at their elbows, co-conspirator, muffling their
firetipped follies.

That but few of the Professors had ever tasted the heady mead of youth
in no way dulled the contours of their self-portraits which they were
now painting of themselves. And it had all happened so rapidly, this re-
surgence; this hark-back. It was as though some bell had been struck,
some mountain-bell to which their guts responded. They had for so long
a time made their evening way to their sacred, musty, airless quadrangle,
that to be, for a whole evening in a new atmosphere was like sunrise.
True, there was only Irma on the female side, but she was a symbol of
all femininity, she was Eve, she was Medusa, she was terrible and she
was peerless; she was hideous and she was the lily of the prairies; she
was that alien thing from another world--that thing called woman.

Directly she had left the room a thousand imaginary memories had beset
them of women they had never known. Their tongues loosened, and their
limbs also, and the Doctor found there was no need to launch the eve-
ning. For the flame was alight and the professorial torpor had been
burned away, and they were back, all at once in a time when they were
brilliant, omniscient and devastating and as dazzlingly attractive as
the Devil himself.

With their brains illumined by these spurious and flattering images,
the swarming gownsmen trod on air, and bridled up their hot and mon-
strous heads, flashed their teeth, or if toothless, grinned darkly,
their mouths slung across their faces like hammocks.

As Irma turned the handle, taking a deep breath which all but des-
troyed her bust, she straightened herself and stood for a moment
motionless, yet vibrant. As she opened the door and the gay thunder
of their voices doubled its volume--she raised an eyebrow. Why, she
wondered, should such potent happiness coincide with her absence?
It was almost as though she had been forgotten, or worse, that her
departure from the room had been welcomed.

She opened the door a little wider and peered around the corner, but
in doing so her powdered head created all unknowingly so graphic a
representation of something detached that a professor who happened
to be staring in the direction of the door, let fall his lower jaw
with a clank, and dropped the plate of delicacies to his feet.

"Ah no, no!" he whispered, the colours draining from his face..."not
now, dire Death, not now...I am not ready...I..."

"Ready for what, sweet trout," said a voice beside him. "By hell,
these peacock-hearts are excellent. A little pepper, please!"

Irma entered. The man who had dropped his jaw swallowed hard and a
sick grin appeared on his face. He had cheated death.

As Irma took her first few paces into the room her fear that the gra-
cious authority of her presence had been undermined during her short
absence was dispelled, for a score of professors, ceasing their chat-
ter, and whipping their mortar-boards from their heads, cupped them
over their hearts.

Swaying slightly as she proceeded towards the centre of the room,
she, in her turn, bowed with a superb and icy grandeur now to
left, now to right, as the dark festooning draperies of the profes-
sorial jungle opened, at her every step, its musty avenues. Veering
to east and west in gradual curves like a ship that has no precise
idea as to which port it is making for, she found all about her,
wherever she was, a hush, most gratifying. But the avenues closed
behind her, and the conversation was resumed with an enthusiasm.

And then, all of a sudden, there was Bellgrove, not a dozen feet away.
A long glass of wine was in his hand. He was in profile; and what a
profile--"grandeur' she hissed excitedly! "That's what it is--grand-
eur." And it was then, at her third convulsive stride in the head-
master's direction that something happened which was not only embar-
rassing but heart-rending in its simplicity, for a hoarse cry, out-
topping the general cacophony, silenced the room and brought Irma to
a standstill.

It was not the kind of cry that one expects to hear at a party. It
had passion in it--and urgency. The very tone and timbre was a smack
in the face of propriety, and broke on the instant all those unwrit-
ten laws of social behaviour that are the result--the fine flower--
of centuries.

As every head was turned in the direction of the sound a movement be-
came apparent in the same quarter where, from a group of professors,
something appeared to be making its way towards its rigid hostess.
Its face was flushed and its gestures were so convulsive that it was
not easy to realize that it was Professor Throd.

On sighting Irma, he had deserted his companions Splint and Spire-
grain, and on obtaining a better view of his hostess had suffered
a sensation that was in every way too violent, too fundamental, too
electric for his small brain and body. A million volts ran through
him, a million volts of stark infatuation.

He had seen no woman for thirty-seven years. He gulped her through
his eyes as at some green oasis the thirst-tormented nomad gulps the
wellhead. Unable to remember any female face, he took Irma's strange
proportions and the cast of her features to be characteristic of fem-
ininity. And so, his conscious mind blotted out by the intensity of
his reaction, he committed the unforgivable crime. He made his feel-
ings public. He lost control. The blood rushed to his head; he cried
out hoarsely, and then, little knowing what he was doing, he stumbled
forwards, elbowing his colleagues from his path, and fell upon his
knees before the lady, and finally, as though in a paroxysm, he col-
lapsed upon his face, his arms and legs spread-eagled like a starfish.

The temperature of the room dropped to zero, and then, as suddenly it
rose to an equatorial and burning heat. Five long seconds went by. It
would not have been strange in that intense temperature to have found
a python hanging from the ceiling--nor, when the icy spell returned
again, at the lapse of the third second, to find the carpet white
with arctic foxes.

Would no one make a move to crack the glass; the great transparent
sheet that spread unbroken from corner to corner of the long room?

And then a stride took place, a stride that brought Bellgrove's gaunt
body to within four feet of Irma. With his next step he had halved
the distances between himself and her--and then, all at once, he was
above her and had found himself gazing down into eyes that pleaded.
It was as though he had been injected with lion's blood. Power rushed
into him as though from a tap.

"Most dear Madam," he said. "Have no fear, I pray you. That one of my
staff should be lying below you is shameful, yes, shameful, madam, but
lo! is it not a symbol of what we all feel? What shame there is lies
in his weakness, madam, not in his passion. Some, dear lady, would have
his name expunged from all registers--but no. But no. For he has warmth,
madam; warmth above all! In this case it has led to something distaste-
ful, dammit' (he relapsed into his common tongue) "and so, dear hostess,
allow me, as headmaster, to have him removed from your presence. Yet
forgive him, I implore you, for he recognized quality when he saw it,
and his only sin is that in recognizing it too violently he had not the
strength to hold his passion captive."

Bellgrove paused and wiped his forearm across his wet forehead and toss-
ed back his white mane. He had spoken with his eyes shut. A sense of
dreamlike strength had filled him. He knew in the self-imposed darkness
that Irma's eyes were upon him; he could feel the intensity of her close
presence. He could hear the feet of his staff, as his words continued,
shuffling away in tactful pairs, and he could even hear himself talking
as though the voice was another's.

What a deep and resonant organ the man has, he thought to himself, pre-
tending for the moment that it was not his own voice he was hearing, for
there was something humble in his nature which, every once in a while,
found outlet.

But such thoughts were no more than momentary. What was paramount in him
was the realization that here he was again, within a few inches of the
lady whom he now intended to pursue with all the cunning of old age and
all the steeple-swarming, torrent-leaping, barn-storming impetus of re-
captured youth.

"By the Lord!" he cried, voicelessly, and to himself yet very loud it
sounded, in his own brains--"by the Lord, if I don't show 'em how it's
done! Two arms, two legs, two eyes, one mouth, ears, trunk and buttocks,
belly and skeleton, lungs, tripes and backbone, feet and hands, brains,
eyes and testicles. I've got 'em all--so help me, rightside up."

His eyes had remained closed, but now he lifted the heavy lids and, peer-
ing between his pale eyelashes, he found in the eyes of his hostess so
hot and wet a succubus of love as threatened to undermine her marble
temple and send its structure toppling.

He glanced about him. His staff, tactful to the point of tactlessness,
were gathered in groups and were talking together like those gentlemen
of the stage who, in an effort to appear normal, yet with nothing to
say, repeat in simulated languor or animation--"one...two … three...
four' and so on. But in the case of the professors they mouthed their
fatuities with all the over-emphasis of un-rehearsal. In a far corner
of the room a scrum of gownsmen were becoming restive.

"Talk about a wax giraffe, Cor slice me edgeways!" muttered Mulefire
between his teeth.

"Certainly not, you hulk of flesh unhallowed," said Perch-Prism. "I'm
ashamed of you!"

"And so indeed, la! Am I a beetroot? What it is, la, to have known bet-
ter days and better ways, Heaven shrive me--Am I a beetroot?" It was
the gay Cutflower talking, but there was something ruffled about his
tone.

"As Theoreticus says in his diatribe against the use of the vernacu-
lar," whispered Flannelcat, who had waited for a long while for the
moment when by coincidence he would both have the courage to say some-
thing and have something to say.

"Well, what did the old bleeder say?" said Opus Fluke.

But no one was interested and Flannelcat knew that his opportunity was
gone, for several voices broke in and cut across his nervous reply.

"Tell me, Cutflower, is the Head still staring at her and why can't you
pass the wine, by the clay of which we're made, it's given me the thirst
of cactusland," said Perch-Prism, his flat nose turned to the ceiling.
"But for my breeding I'd turn round and see for myself."

"Not a twitch," said Cutflower. "Statues, la! Most uncanny."

"Once upon a time," broke in the mournful voice of Flannelcat, "I used
to collect butterflies. It was long ago--in a swallow country full of
dry river-beds. Well, one damp afternoon when..."

"Another time, Flannelcat," said Cutflower. "You may sit down."

Flannelcat, saddened, moved away from the group in search of a chair.

Meanwhile Bellgrove had been savouring love's rare aperitif, the age-
less language of the eyes.

Pulling himself together with the air of one who is master of every
situation, he swept his gown across one shoulder as though it were a
toga and stepping back, surveyed the spread-eagled figure at their
feet.

In stepping back, however, he had all but trodden upon Doctor Prune-
squallor's feet and would have done so but for the agile sidestep
of his host.

The Doctor had been out of the room for a few minutes and had only
just been told of the immobile figure on the floor. He was about to
have examined the body when Bellgrove had taken his backward step,
and now he was delayed still further by the sound of Bellgrove's
voice.

"My dearest lady," said the old lion-headed man, who had begun to
repeat himself, "warmth is everything. Yet no...not everything
… but a good deal. That you should be caused embarrassment by one
of my staff, shall I say one of my colleagues, yea, for so he is,
shall always be to me like coals of fire. And why? Because, dearest
lady, it was for me to have groomed him, to have schooled him in
the niceties or more simply, dammit, to have left him behind. And
that is what I must do now. I must have him removed," and he lifted
his voice.

"Gentlemen," he cried. "I shall be glad if two of you would remove
your colleague and return with him to his quarters. Perhaps Profes-
sors...Flannelcat..."

"But no! but no! I will not have it!"

It was Irma's voice. She took a step forward and brought her hands
up to her long chin where she interlocked her fingers.

"Mr Headmaster," she whispered, "I have heard what you have had to
say. And it was splendid. I said splendid. When you spoke of 'warmth',
I understood. I, a mere woman, I said a mere woman." She glared about
her, darkly, nervously, as though she had gone too far.

"But when, Mr Headmaster, I found you were, in spite of your belief,
determined to have this gentleman removed' (she glanced down at the
spread-eagled figure at her feet) "then I knew it was for me, as your
hostess, to ask you, as my guest, to think again. I would not have it
said, sir, that one of your staff was shamed in my salon--that he was
taken away. Let him be put in a chair in a dim corner. Let him be giv-
en wine and pasties, whatever he chooses, and when he is well enough,
let him join his friends. He has honoured me, I say he has honoured
me..."

It was then that she saw her brother. In a moment she was at his side.
"O Alfred, I am right, aren't I? Warmth is everything, isn't it?"

Prunesquallor gazed at his sister's twitching face. It was naked with
anxiety, naked with excitement and also, to make her expression almost
too subtle for credulity, it was naked with the lucence of love's dawn.
Pray God it is not a false one, thought Prunesquallor. It would kill
her. For a moment, the conception of how much simpler life would be
without her, flashed through his mind, but he pushed the ugly notion
away and rising on his toes he clasped his hands so firmly behind his
back that his narrow and immaculate chest came forward like a pigeon's.

"Whether warmth is everything or not, my very dear sister, it is nev-
ertheless a comforting and a cosy thing to have about--although mark
you, it can be very stuffy, by all that's oxidized, so it can, but
Irma, my sweet one--let that be as it may--for as a physician it has
struck me that it is about time that something were done for the war-
rior at your feet; we must see to him, mustn't we, we must see to him,
eh, Mr Bellgrove? By all that's sacred to my weird profession, we most
certainly must..."

"But he's not to leave the room, Alfred--he's not to leave the room.
He's our guest, Alfred, remember that."

Bellgrove broke in before the Doctor could reply.

"You have humbled me, lady," he said simply, and bowed his lion's head.

"And you," whispered Irma, a deep blush raddling her neck, "have eleva-
ted me."

"No, madam...ah no!" muttered Bellgrove. "You are over-kind' and then,
taking a plunge, "who can hope to elevate a heart, madam, a heart that
is already dancing in the milky way?"

"Why milky?" said Irma, who, with no desire to drop the level of con-
versation, had a habit of breaking out with forthright queries. However
engulfed she might be in the major mysteries, yet her brain, detached
as it were from the business of the soul, took little flights on its
own, like a gnat, asked little questions, played little tricks, only to
be jerked back into place and subdued for a while as the voices of
her deeper self took over.

Luckily for Bellgrove there was no need for him to reply, for the Doc-
tor had signalled a couple of gownsmen over and the seemingly prostrate
suppliant was lifted from the carpet, and carried, like a wooden effigy,
to a candle-lit corner, where a comfortable chair with plump green cush-
ions stood ready.

"Seat him in the chair, gentlemen, if you will be so good, and I will
have a look at him."

The two gownsmen lowered the rigid body. It lay straight as a board,
supported by no more than its head on the chair-back, and its heels on
the ground. Between these extremities were thrust the plump green cush-
ions so that they might, as it were, prop the plank--to take the little
man's weight, but no weight descended and the cushions remained as plump
as ever.

There was something frightful about it all and this frightfulness was in
no way mitigated by the radiant smile that was frozen on the face. With
a magnificent gesture, the Doctor stripped himself of his beautiful vel-
vet jacket and flung it away as though he had no further use for it.

Then he began to roll up his silk sleeves like a conjurer.

Irma and Bellgrove were close behind him. By this time the reservoirs of
tact on which the professors had been drawing were wellnigh dry and a
horde stood watching in absolute silence.

The Doctor was fully conscious of this, but by not so much as a flicker
did he reveal his awareness, let alone his delight in being watched.

The incident had changed the whole mood of the party. The hilarity and
sense of freedom that had been so spontaneous had received an all but
mortal blow. For some while, although certain jests were made, and glass-
es were filled and emptied, there was a darkness on the spirit of the
room, and the jests were forced and the wine was swallowed mechanically.

But now that the first red blush of communal shame had died out of the
staff; now that the embarrassment was merely cerebral and now that there
was something to absorb them (for there was no resisting such an occasion
as was now presented by Prunesquallor as he stood upright in his silken
shirt sleeves, as slender as a stork, his skin as pink as a girl's, his
glasses gleaming in the light of the candles)--now that there was all
this, their equipoise began to return and with it a sense of hope; hope
that the evening had not been ruined, that it held in store, once the
Doctor had dealt with their seemingly paralysed colleague, a modicum at
least of that rare abandon which had begun to set their tongues on fire,
and their blood a-jigging--for it was once in a score of years, they
told themselves that they could break the endless rhythm of Gormenghast,
the rhythm that steered their feet each evening westward--westward to
their quadrangle.

They were absolutely silent as they watched the Doctor's every movement.

Prunesquallor spoke. It seemed that he was talking to himself, although
his voice, in reaching those gownsmen who were at the rear of the audi-
ence, was certainly a little louder than one would have thought neces-
sary. He took a pace forwards and at the same time raised his hands be-
fore him to the height of his shoulders where he worked his fingers to
and fro in the air with the speed of a professional pianist.

Then he brought his hands together and began to draw them to and fro one
across the other, palm to palm. His eyes were closed.

"Rarer than Bluggs Disease," he mused, "or the spiral spine! No doubt
of it...by all that's convulsive...no doubt of it at all. There was a case,
quite fascinating--now where was it and when was it...very similar--a
man if I remember rightly had seen a ghost...yes, yes...and the shock
had all but finished him..."

Irma shifted her feet...

"Now shock is the operative word," went on the Doctor rocking himself
gently on his heels, his eyes still closed--"and shock must be answered
with shock. But how, and where...how and where...Let me see...let me
see..."

Irma could wait no longer. "Alfred," she cried. "do something! Do some-
thing!"

The Doctor did not seem to hear her, so deep was he in his reverie.

"Now, perhaps, if one knew the nature of the shock, its scale, the area
of the brain that received it--the kind of unpleasantness..."

"Unpleasantness!" came Irma's voice again. "Unpleasantness! How dare you,
Alfred! You know that it was I who turned his head, poor creature, that
it was for me he fell headlong, for me that he is rigid and dreadful."

"Aha!" cried the Doctor. It was obvious he had not heard a word that his
sister had said. "Aha!" If he had appeared animated and vital before, he
was trebly so now. His every gesture was as rapid and fluid as mercury.
He took a prancing step towards his patient.

"By all that's pragmatical, it's this or nothing." He slid his hand into
one of his waistcoat pockets and withdrew a small silver hammer. This he
swivelled between his thumb and index finger for a few moments, his eye-
brows raised.

In the meanwhile Bellgrove had begun to grow impatient. The situation had
taken a queer turn. It was not in circumstances like these that he had
hoped to present himself to Irma nor was this the kind of atmosphere in
which his tenderness could flourish. For one thing he was no longer the
centre of attraction. His immediate desire was to be alone with her. The
very words "alone with her' made him blush. His hair shone more whitely
than ever against his dark red brow. He glanced at her and immediately
knew what to do. It was crystal clear that she was uncomfortable. The
figure on the chair was not a pleasant sight for anyone, let alone a
lady of distinction, a lady of delicate tastes.

He tossed the shaggy splendour of his mane. "Madam," he said. "This is
no place for you." He drew himself up to his full height, forcing back
his shoulders and drawing his long chin into his throat. "No place at
all, madam," and then apprehensive that Irma might interpret him wrong-
ly and find in his remark some slight upon her party, he shot a glance
at her through his eyelashes. But she had found nothing amiss. On the
contrary, there was gratitude in her small weak eyes; gratitude in the
gleaming incline of her bosom, and in the nervous clasping of her hands.

She no longer heard her brother's voice. She no longer felt the presence
of the robed males. Someone had been thoughtful. Someone had realized
that she was a woman, and that it was not proper for her to stand with
the rest as though there was no difference between herself and her guests.
And this someone, this noble and solicitous being was no other than the
headmaster--O how splendid it was that there should still be a gentleman
on the face of the earth: youth had fled from him, ah yes, but not rom-
ance.

"Mr Headmaster," she said, pursing her lips and lifting her eyes to his
craggy face with an archness hardly credible, "it is for you to say. It
is for me to hearken. Speak on. I am listening...I said, I am listening."

Bellgrove turned his head away from her. The wide, weak smile that had
spread itself across his face was not the kind of thing that he would
wish Irma to see. A year or so ago, he had once, with no warning, caught
sight of himself in a mirror when a smile (an antecedent of the uncon-
trollable expression that was even now undermining the spurious grandeur
of his face) had shocked him. It was to his credit that he had recogniz-
ed the danger of allowing such a thing to become public--for he was, not
without cause, proud of his features. And so he turned his face away.
How could he help giving vent to some kind of demonstration of his feel-
ings. For at Irma's words "It is for you to say' the wide rich panorama
of married life suddenly appeared before him, stretched out, it seemed,
to the horizon with its vistas of pale gold, its gentle meads. He saw
himself as an immemorial oak, its branches spreading godlike, with Irma,
a sapling poplar, whose leaves like heartthrobs twinkled in his shade.
He saw himself as the proud eagle, landing with a sigh of his wings upon
a solitary crag. He saw Irma, waiting for him in the nest, but curiously
enough, she was sitting there in a nightdress. And then, suddenly, he
saw himself as a very old man, with a toothache, and his memory caught
sight of an ancient face in the mirrors of a thousand shaving-rooms.

He crushed this most unwelcome glimpse beneath the heel of his imme-
diate sensations.

He turned back to Irma.

"I offer you my arm, dear madam--such as it is."

"I will accompany you, Mr Headmaster."

Irma lowered her little eyelids and then flicked a sideways glance at Mr
Bellgrove, who having crooked out his elbow somewhat extravagantly paused
a moment before dropping it with a sense of defeat that was quite intoxi-
cating.

"By hell!" he murmured passionately to himself--"I am not so old that I
miss the subtleties."

"Forgive my precipitation, dear madam," he said, bowing his head. "But
perhaps...perhaps you understand..."

Clasping her hands together at her bosom Irma turned from the throng, and
swaying strangely, began to pace into the empty regions of the room. The
carpet lit by a hundred candles had lost something of its glow. It was e-
ven brighter but it was not so warm, for the chilly rays of the moon were
now streaming through the open windows.

Bellgrove glanced about him as he turned to follow her. No one appeared
to be interested in their departure. Every eye was fixed upon the Doctor.
For a moment, Bellgrove felt disappointed that he could not stay, for
there was drama in the air. The Doctor was evidently making an exhaustive
overhaul of the stiffened figure whose clothes were being removed, one
by one; no easy work; for the joints were quite inflexible. Mollocks and
Canvas, the Prunesquallors' servants, had, however, a pair of scissors
each and, when necessary, were, under the Doctor's supervision, using
them to free the patient.

The Doctor still had the little silver hammer in one hand. With the other
he was running his pianist-fingers over the rigid gentleman as though he
were a keyboard--his eyebrows raised, his head cocked on one side like a
tuner.

Bellgrove could see at a glance that in following Irma he was about to
miss the climax of a considerable drama, but turning on his heel, and see-
ing her again he knew that a drama even more considerable was his for the
making.

With his beautiful white gown rippling behind him, he strode in her wake,
and on the eleventh stride he came within the orbit of her perfume.

Without pausing in the swaying movement of her gait she turned her head on
its swan-white neck. Her emerald ear-ring flashed with light. Her long, sharp
nose, immaculately powdered would have put most suitors off, but to Bell-
grove it had the proportions of a beak on the proud head of a bird, exqui-
sitely dangerous and sharp. Something to admire rather than love. It was
almost a weapon, but a weapon which he felt confident would never be used
against him. However that might be, it was hers--and in that simple fact
lay its justification.

As they approached the bay window that was open to the night, Bellgrove
inclined his head to her.

"This," he said, "is our first walk together."

She stopped as they reached the open window. What he had said had obviou-
sly touched her.

"Mr Bellgrove," she whispered, "you mustn't say things like that. We hardly
know one another."

"Quite so, dear lady, quite so," said Bellgrove. He took out a large grey-
ish handkerchief and blew his nose. This is going to be a long business,
he thought--unless he were to take some kind of a short cut--some secret
path through love's enchanted glades.

Before them, shining balefully in the moonlight lay the walled-in garden.
The upper foliage of the trees shone as white as foam. The underside was
black as well-water. The whole garden was a lithograph of richest blacks
and staring whites. The fishpool with its surrounding carvings appeared
to blaze with a kind of lunar vulgarity. A fountain shot its white jets
at the night. Under the livid pergolas, under the stone arches, under
the garden tubs, under the great rockery, under the fruit trees, under
each moon-white thing the shadows lay as black sea-drenched seals. There
were no greys at all. There was no transition. It was a picture, terri-
fyingly simple.

They stared at it together.

"You said just now, Miss Prunesquallor, that we hardly knew each other.
And how true this is--when we measure our mutual recognition by the hands
of the clock. But can we, madam, can we measure our knowledge thus? Is
there not something in both of us which contradicts so mean a measure?
Or am I flattering myself? Am I laying myself open to your scorn? Am I
baring my heart too soon?"

"Your heart, sir?"

"My heart."

Irma struggled with herself.

"What were you saying about it, Mr Headmaster?"

Bellgrove could not quite remember, so he joined his big hands together
at the height of the organ in question, and waited a moment or two for
inspiration. He seemed to have proceeded rather faster than he had meant
and then it struck him that his silence, rather than weakening his posi-
tion, was enhancing it. It seemed to give an added profundity to the pro-
ceedings and to himself. He would keep her waiting. O the magic of it!
The power of it! He could feel his throat contracting as though he were
biting into a lemon.

This time as he angled his arm he knew she would take it. She did. Her
fingers on his forearm set his old heart pounding and then, without a
word they stepped forward together into the moonlit garden.


It was not easy for Bellgrove to know in which direction to escort his
hostess. Little did he know that it was he who was being steered.
And this was natural, for Irma knew every inch of the hideous place.

For some while they stood by the fishpond in which the reflection of the
moon shone with a fatuous vacancy. They stared at it.

Then they looked up at the original. It was no more interesting than its
watery ghost, but they both knew that to ignore the moon on such an eve-
ning would be an insensitive, almost a brutish thing to do.

That Irma knew of an arbour in the garden was not her fault. And it was
not her fault that Bellgrove knew it not. Yet she blushed inwardly, as
casually turning to left and right at the corners of paths, or under
flower-loaded trellises, she guided the headmaster circuitously yet
firmly in its direction.

Bellgrove, who had in his mind's eye just such a place as he was now un-
wittingly approaching, had felt it better that they should perambulate
together in silence, so that when he had a chance to sit and rest his
feet, his deep voice, when he brought it forth again from the depths
of his chest, should have its full value.

On rounding a great moon-capped lilac bush and coming suddenly upon the
arbour, Irma started, and drew back. Bellgrove came to a halt beside her.
Finding her face was turned away from him, he gazed absently at the hard
boulder-like bun of iron-grey hair which, with not a hair out of place,
shone in the moonlight. It was nothing, however, for a man to dwell upon,
and turning from her to the arbour which had caused her trepidation, he
straightened himself, and turning his right foot out at a rather more ag-
gressive angle, he struck an attitude, which he knew nothing about, for
it was the unconscious equivalent of what was going on in his mind.

He saw himself as the type of man who would never take advantage of a de-
fenceless woman, greathearted, and understanding. Someone a damsel might
trust in a lonely wood. But he also saw himself as a buck. His youth had
been so long ago that he could remember nothing of it but he presumed,
erroneously, that he had tasted the purple fruit, had broken hearts and
hymens, had tossed flowers to ladies on balconies, had drunk champagne
out of their shoes and generally been irresistible.

He allowed her fingers to fall from his arm. It was at moments like this
that he must give her a sense of freedom only to draw her further into
the rich purdah of his benevolence.

He held the tabs of his white gown near the shoulders.

"Can you not smell the lilac, madam," he said--"the moon-lit lilac?"

Irma turned.

"I must be honest with you, mustn't I, Mr Bellgrove?" she said. "If I
said I could smell it, when I couldn't, I would be false to you, and
false to myself. Let us not start that way. No, Mr Bellgrove, I cannot
smell it. I have a bit of a cold."

Bellgrove had the sense of having to start life all over again.

"You women are delicate creatures," he said after a long pause. "You
must take care of yourselves."

"Why are you talking in the plural, Mr Bellgrove?"

"My dear madam," he replied slowly, and then, after a pause, "my...dear
...madam," he said again. As he heard his voice repeat the three words
for the second time, it struck him that to leave them as they were--in-
consequent, rudderless, without preface or parenthesis, was by far the
best thing he could do. He lapsed into silence and the silence was
thrilling--the silence which to break with an answer to her question
would be to make a commonplace out of what was magic.

He would not answer her. He would play with her with his venerable
brain. She must realize from the first that she could not always ex-
pect replies to her questions--that his thoughts might be elsewhere,
in regions where it would be impossible for her to follow him--or that
her questions were (for all his love for her and her for him) not
worth answering.

The night poured in upon them from every side--a million million cubic
miles of it. O, the glory of standing with one's love, naked, as it
were, on a spinning marble, while the spheres ran flaming through the
universe!

Involuntarily they moved together into the arbour and sat down on a
bench which they found in the darkness. This darkness was intensely
rich and velvety. It was as though they were in a cavern, save that
the depths were dramatized by a number of small and brilliant pools of
moonlight. Pranked for the most part to the rear of the arbour these
livid pools were at first a little disturbing, for portions of them-
selves were lit up with blatant emphasis. This arbitrary illumination
had to be accepted, however, for Bellgrove, raising his eyes to where
the vents in the roof let through the moonlight, could think of no
way by which he could seal them.

From Irma's point of view the dappled condition of the cavernous ar-
bour was both calming and irritating at the same time.

Calming, in that to enter a cave of clotted midnight, with not so much
as a flicker of light to gauge her distance from her partner would
have been terrifying even with her knowledge of, and confidence in,
so reliable and courteous a gentleman as her escort. This dappled ar-
bour was not so fell a place. The pranked lights, more livid, it is
true, than gay, removed, nevertheless, that sense of terror only
known to fugitives or those benighted in a shire of ghouls.

Strong as was her feeling of gratification that the dark was broken,
yet a sense of irritation as strong as her relief fought in her flat
bosom for sovereignty. This irritation, hardly understandable to any-
one who has neither Irma's figure, nor a vivid picture of the arbour
in mind, was caused by the maddening way in which the lozenges of
radiance fell upon her body.

She had taken out a small mirror in the darkness, more from nervous-
ness than anything else and in holding it up, saw nothing in the
dark air before her but a long sharp segment of light. The mirror it-
self was quite invisible, as was the hand and arm that held it, but
the detached and luminous reflection of her nose hovered before her
in the darkness. At first she did not know what it was. She moved her
head a little and saw in front of her one of her small weak eyes glit-
tering like quicksilver, a startling thing to observe under any con-
ditions, but infinitely more so when the organ is one's own.

The rest of her was indistinguishable midnight save for a pair of
large and spectral feet. She shuffled them, but this blotch of moon-
light was the largest in the arbour and to evade it involved a musc-
ular strain quite insufferable.

Bellgrove's entire head was luminous. He was, more than ever before,
a major prophet. His white hair positively blossomed.

Irma, knowing that this wonderful and searching light which was trans-
figuring the head was something that must not be missed--something
in fact that she should pore upon--made a great effort to forget her-
self as a true lover should--but something in her rebelled against so
exclusive a concentration upon her admirer, for she knew that it was
she who should be stared at; she who should be poured upon.

Had she spent the best part of a day in titivating herself in order
that she might sit plunged in darkness, with nothing but her feet
and her nose revealed?

It was insufferable. The visual relationship was wrong; quite, quite
wrong.

Bellgrove had suffered a shock when for a moment he had seen ahead
of him, in quick succession, a moonlit nose and then a moonlit eye.
They were obviously Irma's. There was no other nose in all Gormen-
ghast so knifelike--and no eye so weak and worried--except its col-
league. To have seen these features ahead of him when the lady to
whom they belonged sat shrouded yet most palpable upon his right
hand, unnerved the old man, and it was some while after he had
caught sight of the mirror glinting on its return to Irma's reticule
that he realized what had happened.

The darkness was as deep and black as water.

"Mr Bellgrove," said Irma, "can you hear me, Mr Bellgrove?"

"Perfectly, my dear lady. Your voice is high and clear."

"I would have you sit upon my right, Mr Headmaster--I would have
you exchange places with me."

"Whatever you would have I am here to have it given," said Bell-
grove. For a moment he winced as the grammatical chaos of his
reply wounded what was left of the scholar in him.

"Shall we rise together, Mr Headmaster?"

"Dear lady', he replied, "let that be so."

"I can hardly see you, Mr Headmaster."

"Nevertheless, dear lady, I am at your side. Would my arm assist
you at our interchange? It is an arm that, in earlier days..."

"I am quite able to get to my own feet. Mr Bellgrove--quite able,
thank you."

Bellgrove rose, but in rising his gown was caught in some rustic
contortion of the garden seat, and he found himself squatting in
mid-air. "Hell!" he muttered savagely, and jerking at his gown,
tore it badly. A nasty whiff of temper ran through him. His face
felt hot and prickly.

"What did you say?" said Irma. "I said, what did you say?"

For a moment Bellgrove, in the confusion of his irritation, had
unknowingly projected himself back into the Masters' Common-
Room, or into a classroom, or into the life he had led for scores
of years...

His old lips curled back from his neglected teeth. "Silence!" he
said. "Am I your headmaster for nothing!"

Directly he had spoken, and had taken in what he had said, his neck
and forehead burned.

Irma, transfixed with excitement, could make no move. Had Bellgrove
possessed any kind of telepathic instinct he must have known that
he had beside him a fruit which, at a touch, might have fallen into
his hands, so ripe it was. He had no knowledge of this, but luckily
for him, his embarrassment precluded any power on his part to utter
a word. And the silence was on his side.

It was Irma who was the first to speak.

"You have mastered me," she said. Her words, simple and sincere,
were more proud than humble. They were proud with surrender.

Bellgrove's brain was not quick--but it was by no means moribund.
His mood was now trembling at the opposite pole of his temperament.

This by no means helped to clarify his brain. But he sensed the need
for extreme caution. He sensed that his position though delicate was
lofty. To find that his act of rudeness in demanding silence from his
hostess had raised him rather than lowered him in her eyes, appealed
to something in him quite shameless--a kind of glee. Yet this glee,
though shameless, was yet innocent. It was the glee of the child who
had not been found out.

They were both standing. This time he did not offer Irma his arm. He
groped in the darkness and found hers. He found it at the elbow. El-
bows are not romantic, but Bellgrove's hand shook as he held the joint,
and the joint shook in his grasp. For a moment they stood together.
Her pineapple perfume was thick and powerful.

"Be seated," he said. He spoke a little louder than before. He spoke
as one in authority. He had no need to look stern, magnetic or mascu-
line. The blessed darkness precluded any exertion in that direction.
He made faces in the safety of the night. Putting out his tongue;
blowing out his cheeks--there was so much glee in him.

He took a deep breath. It steadied him.

"Are you seated, Miss Prunesquallor?"

"O yes...O yes indeed," came the answering whisper.

"In comfort, madam?"

"In comfort, Mr Headmaster, and in peace."

"Peace, my dear lady? What kind of peace?"

"The peace, Mr Headmaster, of one who has no fear. Of one who has faith
in the strong arm of her loved one. The peace of heart and mind and spi-
rit that belong to those who have found what it is to offer themselves
without reserve to something august and tender."

There was a break in Irma's voice, and then as though to prove what she
had said, she cried out into the night, "Tender! that's what I said. Tender
and Unattached!"

Bellgrove shifted himself; they were all but touching.

"Tell me, my dearest lady, is it of me that you speak. If it is not,
then humble me--be merciless and break an old man's heart with one small
syllable. If you say “no” then, without a word I will leave you and
this pregnant arbour, walk out into the night, walk out of your life,
and may be, who knows, out of mine also..."

Whether or not he was gulling himself it is certain that he was living
the very essence of his words. Perhaps the very use of words themselves
was as much a stimulus as Irma's presence and his own designs; but that
is not to say that the total effect was not sincere. He was infatuated
with all that pertained to love. He trod breast-deep through banks of
thorn-crazed roses. He breathed the odours of a magic isle. His brain
swam on a sea of spices. But he had his own thought too.

"It was of you I spoke," said Irma. "You, Mr Bellgrove. Do not touch me.
Do not tempt me. Do nothing to me. Just be there beside me. I would not
have us desecrate this moment."

"By no means. By no means." Bellgrove's voice was deep and subterranean.
He heard it with pleasure. But he was sensitive enough to know that for
all its sepulchral beauty, the phrase he had just used was pathetically
inept--and so he added, "By no means whatsoever..." as though he were
beginning a sentence.

"By no means whatsoever, ah, definitely not, for who can tell, when,
unawares, love's dagger..." but he stopped. He was getting nowhere. He
must start again.

He must say things that would drive his former remarks out of her mind.
He must sweep her along.

"Dear one," he said, plunging into the rank and feverish margin of
love's forest. "Dear one!"

"Mr Bellgrove--O, Mr Bellgrove," came the hardly audible reply.

"It is the headmaster of Gormenghast, your suitor, who is speaking to
you, my dear. It is a man, mature and tender--yet a disciplinarian, fear-
ed by the wicked, who is sitting beside you in the darkness. I would have
you concentrate upon this. When I say to you that I shall call you Irma,
I am not asking for permission from my love-light--I am telling her what
I shall do."

"Say it, my male!" cried Irma, forgetting herself. Her strident voice,
quite out of key with the secret and muted atmosphere of an arbour'd woo-
ing, splintered the darkness.

Bellgrove shuddered. Her voice had been a shock to him. At a more appro-
priate moment he would teach her not to do things of that kind.

As he settled again against the rustic back of the seat he found that
their shoulders were touching.

"I will say it. Indeed I will say it, my dear. Not as a crude statement
with no beginning or ending. Not as a mere reiteration of the most love-
ly, the most provocative name in Gormenghast, but threaded into my sen-
tences, an integral part of our conversation, Irma, for see, already it
has left my tongue."

"I have no power, Mr Bellgrove, to remove my shoulder from yours."

"And I have no inclination, my dove." He lifted his big hand and tapped
her on the shoulder she had referred to.

They had been so long in darkness that he had forgotten that she was in
evening dress. In touching her naked shoulder he received a sensation
that set his heart careering. For a moment he was deeply afraid. What
was this creature at his side? and he cried out to some unknown God for
delivery from the Unknown, the Serpentine, from all that was shameless,
from flesh and the devil.

The tremendous gulf between the sexes yawned--and an abyss, terrifying
and thrilling, sheer and black as the arbour in which they sat; a dark-
ness wide, dangerous, imponderable and littered with the wrecks of bro-
ken bridges.

But his hand stayed where it was. The muscle of her shoulder was tense
as a bowstring, but the skin was like satin. And then his terror fled.
Something masterful and even dashing began to possess him.

"Irma," he whispered huskily. "Is this a desecration. Are we blotting
the whitest of all love's copybooks? It is for you to say. For myself
I am walking among rainbows--for myself I..." But he had to stop speak-
ing for he wished, more than anything else to lie on his back and to
kick his old legs about and to crow like a barn-cook. As he could not
do this he had no option but to put his tongue out in the darkness, to
squint with his eyes, to make extravagant grimaces of every kind. Ex-
cruciating shivers swarmed his spine.

And Irma could not reply. She was weeping with joy. Her only answer was
to place her hand upon the headmaster's. They drew together--involun-
tarily. For a while there was that kind of silence all lovers know. The
silence that it is sin to break until of its own volition, the moment
comes, and the arms relax and the cramped limbs can stretch themselves
again, and it is no longer an insensitive thing to inquire what the
time might be or to speak of other matters that have no place in Para-
dise.

At last Irma broke the hush.

"How happy I am," she said very quietly. "How very happy, Mister Bell-
grove."

"Ah...my dear...ah," said the Headmaster very slowly, very soothingly...
"that is as it should be...that is as it should be."

"My wildest, my very wildest dreams have become real, have become some-
thing I can touch' (she pressed his hand). "My little fancies, my little
visions--they are no longer so, dear master, they are substance, they
are you...they are You."

Bellgrove was not sure that he liked being one of Irma's "little fancies,
little visions' but his sense of the inappropriate was swamped in his
excitement.

"Irma!" He drew her to him. There was less "give' in her body than in a
cake-stand. But he could hear her quick excited breathing.

"You are not the only one whose dreams have become a reality, my dear.
We are holding one another's dreams in our very arms."

"Do you mean it, Mr Bellgrove?"

"Surely, ah, surely," he said.

Dark as it was Irma could picture him at her side, could see him in de-
tail. She had an excellent memory. She was enjoying what she saw. Her
mind's eye had suddenly become a most powerful organ. It was, in point
of fact, stronger, clearer and healthier than those real eyes of hers
which gave her so much trouble.

And so, as she spoke to him she had no sense of communing with an invi-
sible presence. The darkness was forgotten.

"Mr Bellgrove?"

"My dear lady?"

"Somehow, I knew..."

"So did I...so did I."

"It is more than I dare dwell upon--this strange and beautiful fact--
that words can be so unnecessary--that when I start a sentence, there
is no need to finish it--and all this, so very suddenly. I said, so
very suddenly."

"What would be sudden to the young is leisurely for us. What would be
foolhardy in them is child's-play itself, for you, my dear, and for me.
We are mature, my dear. We are ripe. The golden glaze, that patina of
time, these are upon us. Hence we are sure and have no callow qualms.
Let us admit the length of our teeth, lady. Time, it is true, had flat-
tened our feet, ah yes, but with what purpose? To steady us, to give
us balance, to take us safely along the mountain tracks. God bless me
...ah. God bless me. Do you think that I could have wooed and won you
as a youth? Not in a hundred years! And why...ah...and why? Inexperi-
ence. That is the answer. But now, in half an hour or less, I have
stormed you; stormed you. But am I breathless? No. I have brought my
guns to bear upon you, and yet my dear, have scores of roundshot left
...ah yes, yes, Irma my ripe one...and you can see it all?...you can
see it all?...dammit, we have equipoise and that is what it is."

Irma's mental sight was frighteningly clear. His voice had sharpened
the edges of his image.

"But I'm not very old, Mr Bellgrove, am I," said Irma, after a pause.
To be sure she felt as young as a fledgeling.

"What is age? What is time!" said Bellgrove--and then answering himself
in a darker voice. "They're hell!" he said. "I hate 'em."

"No, no. I won't have it," said Irma. "I won't, Mr Bellgrove. Age and
time are what you make them. Let us not speak of them again."

Bellgrove sat forward on his old buttocks. "Lady!" he said suddenly,
"I have thought of something that I think you will agree is more than
comic."

"Have you, Mr Bellgrove?"

"Pertaining to what you said about Age and Time. Are you listening, my
dear?"

"Yes, Mr Bellgrove...eagerly...eagerly!"

"What I think would be rather droll would be to say, in a gathering,
when the moment became opportune--perhaps during some conversation a-
bout clocks--one could work round to it--to say, quite airily...“Time
is what you make it.”'

He turned his head to her in the darkness. He waited.

There was no response from Irma. She was thinking feverishly. She began
to panic. Her face was prickling with anxiety. She could make no sound.
Then she had an idea. She pressed herself against him a little more
closely.

"How delicious!" she said at last, but her voice was very strained.

The silence that followed was no more than a few seconds, but to Irma
it was as long as that ghastly hush that awaits all sinners when, at
the judgement seat, they wait the Verdict. Her body trembled, for there
was so much at stake. Had she said something so stupid, that no head-
master, worthy of his office, could ever consider accepting her? Had
she unwittingly lifted some hatchway of her brain and revealed to this
brilliant man how cold, black, humourless and sterile was the region
that lay within?

No. Ah no! For his voice, rolling from the gloom, had, if possible,
even more tenderness in it than she would have dared to hope for in
a man.

"You are cold, my love. You are chilly. The night is not for delicate
skins. By hell, it isn't. And I? And what of me? Your suitor? Is he
cold also, my dear? Your old gallant? He is. He is indeed. And what
is more he is becoming sick of darkness. Darkness that shrouds. That
clogs the living lineaments of beauty. That swathes you, Irma. By
hell it's maddening and pointless stuff..." Bellgrove began to rise
… "it's damnable, I tell you, my own, this arbour's damnable."

He felt the pressure of fingers on his forearm.

"Ah no...no...I will not have you swear. I will not have strong lan-
guage in our arbour...our sacred arbour."

For a moment Bellgrove was tempted to play the gay dog. His moods
flitted across the basic excitement of the wooing. It was so delic-
ious to be chided by a woman. He wondered whether to shock her--to
shock her out of the surplus of his love, would be worth the candle.
To taste again the sweetness of being reprimanded, the never-before-
experienced gushes of sham remorse--would this be worth the lowering
of his moral status. No! He would stick to his pinnacle.

"This arbour," he said, "is forever ours. It is the darkness it holds
captive; this pitchy stuff that hides your face from me--it is this
darkness that I called damnable--and damnable it is. It is your face,
Irma, your proud face that I am thirsting for. Can you not understand?
By the great moonlight! my love; by the tremendous moonlight! Is it
not natural that a man should wish to brood upon his darling's brow?"

The word "darling' affected Irma as might a bullet wound. She clasped
her hands at her breast and pressing them inwards the tepid water in
her false bosom gurgled in the darkness.

For a moment Bellgrove, thinking she was laughing at what he had said,
stiffened at her side. But the terrible blush of humiliation that was
about to climb his neck was quenched by Irma's voice. The gurgle must
have been a sign of love, of some strange and aqueous love that was
beyond his sounding, for "O master," she said, "take me to where the
moon can show you me."

"Show-you-me?" for a short while Bellgrove was quite unable to decipher
what sounded to him like a foreign language. But he did not stand still,
as lesser men would have done while pondering, but answering the first
part of her command he escorted her from the arbour. Instantaneously,
they were floodlit--and at the same instant Irma's syntax clarified in
the headmaster's mind.

They moved together, like spectres, like mobile carvings casting their
long inky shadows across the little paths, down the slopes of rockeries,
up the sides of trellises.

At last they stopped for a little while where a stone cherub squatted
upon the rim of a granite bird-bath. To their left they could see the
lighted windows of the long reception room. But they could not see that
in the midst of a rapt audience the Doctor was raising his silver ham-
mer as though to put all to the test. They could not know that by a sup-
ernatural effort of the will, and the martialling of all his deductive
faculties, and the freeing of an irrational flair, the Doctor had come
to the kind of decision more usually associated with composers than
with scientists--and was now on the brink of success or failure.

The "body' had, to aid the physician in his exhaustive search for the
cause of the paralysis, been stripped of all clothing save the mortar-
board.

What happened next was something which, however much the stories varied
afterwards--for it seemed that every professor present was able to note
some minor detail hidden from the rest--was yet consistent in the main.
The speed at which it happened was phenomenal, and it must be assumed
that the microscopic elaborations of the incident which were to be the
main subject of conversation for so long a while afterwards, were no
more or less than inventions which were supposed to redound to the ad-
vantage of the teller, in some way or other--possibly through the re-
flected glory which they all felt at having been there at all. However
this may be, what was agreed upon by all was that the Doctor, his shirt
sleeves rolled well back, rose suddenly on his toes, and lifting his
silver hammer into the air, where it flashed with candle-light, let it
fall, as it were with a kind of controlled, yet effortless downstroke,
upon the nether regions of the spinal column. As the hammer struck, the
Doctor leapt back and stood with his arms spread out to his sides, his
fingers rigid as he saw before him the instantaneous convulsion of the
patient. This gentleman writhing like an expiring eel leapt suddenly
high into the air, and on landing upon his feet, was seen to streak
across the room and out of the bay windows and over the moonlit lawn
at a speed that challenged the credulity of all witnesses.

And those who, standing grouped about the Doctor, had seen the trans-
formation and the remarkable athleticism that followed so swiftly u-
pon it, were not the only ones to be startled by the spectacle.

In the garden, among the livid blotches and the cold wells of shadow
a voice was saying...

"It is not meet, Irma my dearest, that on this night, this first night,
we should tire our hearts...no, no, it is not meet, sweet bride."

"Bride?" cried Irma, flashing her teeth and tossing her head. "O Mas-
ter, not yet...surely!"

Bellgrove frowned like God considering the state of the world on the
Third Day. A knowing smile played across his old mouth but it appear-
ed to have lost its way among the wrinkles.

"Quite so, my delicious helm. Once more you keep me on my course, and
for that I revere you, Irma...not bride, it is true, but..."

The old man had jerked like a recoiling firearm, and Irma with him,
for she was in his gown-swathed arms. Turning her startled eyes from
his she followed his gaze and on the instant clung to him in a despe-
rate embrace, for all at once they saw before them, naked in the daz-
zling rays of the moon, a flying figure which for all the shortness
of the legs, was covering the ground with the speed of a hare. The
tassel of the inky mortar-board, sole claim to decency, streamed away
behind like a donkey's tail.

No sooner had Irma and the headmaster caught sight of the apparition,
than it had reached the high orchard wall of the garden.

How it ever climbed the wall was never discovered. It simply went up
it, its shadow swarming alongside, and the last that was ever seen
of Mr Throd, the one-time member of Mr Bellgrove's staff, was a lunar
flash of buttocks where the high wall propped the sky.



THIRTY-SEVEN



There were at least three hours to be burned. It was unusual for Steer-
pike to have to think in such terms. There was always something afoot.
There were always, in the wide and sinister pattern of his scheduled
future, those irregular pieces to find and to fit into the great jig-
saw puzzle of his predatory life, and of Gormenghast, on whose body he
fed.

But on this particular day, when the clocks had all struck two, and
the steel of his swordstick which he had been sharpening was as keen
as a razor and as pointed as a needle, he wrinkled his high shining
forehead as he returned the blade to the stick. At the end of the
three hours that lay before him he had something very important to
do.

It would be very simple and it would be absorbing, but it would be
very important also; so important that for the first time in his life
he was at a loss for a few moments as to how to fill in the hours that
remained before the business that lay ahead, for he knew that he could
not concentrate upon anything very serious. While he pondered, he moved
to the window of his room and looked out across the vistas of roofs
and broken towers.

It was a breathless day, a frail mist tempering the warmth. The few
flags that could be seen above various turrets hung limply from their
mastheads.

This prospect never failed to please the pale young man. His eye ran
over it with shrewdity.

Then he turned from the scene, for he had had an idea. Pouncing upon
the floor, his arms outstretched, he stood upside down upon the palms
of his hands and began to perambulate the room, one eyebrow raised.
His idea was to pay a quick call upon the Twins. He had not visited
them for some while. Away across the roofscape he had seen the out-
skirts of that deserted tract, in one of whose forgotten corridors an
archway led to a grey world of empty rooms, in one of which their la-
dyships Cora and Clarice sat immured. Their presence and the presence
of their few belongings seemed to have no effect upon the sense of
emptiness. Rather, their presence seemed to reinforce the vacancy of
their solitude.

It would take him the best part of an hour's sharp walking to reach
that forgotten region, but he was in a restless mood, and the idea
appealed to him. Flexing his elbows--for he was still moving about
the room on his hands--he pressed, of a sudden, away from the
floor and, like an acrobat, was all at once on his feet again.

Within a few moments he was on his way, his room carefully locked be-
hind him. He walked rapidly, his shoulders drawn up and forward a
little in that characteristic way that gave to his every movement a
quality both purposeful and devilish.

The short cuts he took through the labyrinthian network of the castle
led him into strange quarters. There were times when walls would tow-
er above him, sheer and windowless. At other times, naked acres, pav-
ed in brick or stone would spread themselves out, wastelands vast and
dusty where weeds of all kinds forced their way from between the inter-
stices of the paving stones.

As he moved rapidly from domain to domain, from a world of sunless al-
leys to the panoramic ruins where the rats held undisputed tenure--from
the ruins to that peculiar district where the passageways were all but
blocked with undergrowth and the carved facades were cold with sea-
green ivy--he exulted. He exulted in it all. In the fact that it was
only he who had the initiative to explore these wildernesses. He ex-
ulted in his restlessness, in his intelligence, in his passion to hold
within his own hands the reins, despotic or otherwise, of supreme au-
thority.

Far above him and to the east the sunlight burned upon a long oval win-
dow of blue glass. It blazed like lazuli--like a gem hung aloft against
the grey walls. Without changing the speed of his walk he drew from his
pocket a small smooth beautifully made catapult, into the pouch of
which he fitted a bullet, and then, as though with a single action the
elastic was stretched and released and Steerpike returned his catapult
to his pocket.

He kept walking, but as he walked his face was turned up to those high
grey walls where the blue window blazed.

He saw the small gap in the glass and the momentary impression of a blue
powder falling before he heard the distant sound, as of a far gunshot.

A head had appeared at the gap in that splintered window away in the
high east.

It was very pale. The body beneath it was swathed in sacking. On the
shoulder sat perched a blood red parrot--but Steerpike knew nothing of
this and was entering another district and was for a long while in the
shadows, moving beneath a continuous roofscape of lichened slates.

When at last he approached the archway which led to the Twins' quar-
ters, he paused and gazed back along the grey perspectives. The air
was chill and unhealthy; a smell of rotten wood, of dank masonry fill-
ed his lungs. He moved in a climate as of decay--of a decay rank with
its own evil authority, a richer, more inexorable quality than fresh-
ness; it smothered and drained all vibrancy, all hope.

Where another would have shuddered, the young man merely ran his tongue
across his lips. "This is a place," he said to himself. "Without any doubt,
this is somewhere."

But the hands of the clock kept moving and he had little time for spec-
ulation, and so he turned his back on the cold perspectives where the
long walls bulged and sagged, where plaster hung and sweated with cold
and inanimate fevers, with sicknesses of umber, and illnesses of olive.

When he reached the door behind which the Twins were incarcerated he
took a bunch of keys from his pocket and selecting one, which he had
cut himself, he turned the lock.

The door opened to his pressure with a stiff and grating sound.

Stiff as were the hinges, it had not taken Steerpike more than a sec-
ond to throw it wide open. Had he been forced to fight against the swol-
len wood for an entrance, to struggle with the lock, or to put his shoul-
der to the damp panelling--or even had his rapid entrance been heralded
by the sound of his footsteps, then the spectacle that awaited him, for
all its strangeness, would not have had that uncanny and dreamlike hor-
ror that now lay hold of him.

He had made no sound. He had given no warning of his visit--but there
before him stood the Twins, hand in hand, their faces white as lard.
They were positioned immediately before the door; at which they must
have been staring. They were like figures of wax, or alabaster or like
motionless animals, upright upon their quarters, their gaze fixed, it
would seem, upon the face of their master, their mouths half open as
though awaiting some tit-bit--some familiar signal.

No expression at all came into their eyes, nor would there have been
room for any, for they were separately filled, each one of them, with
a foreign body, for in each of the four glazed pupils the image of the
young man was exquisitely reflected. Let those who have tried to pass
love letters through the eyes of needles or to have written poems on
the heads of pins take heart. Crude and heavy handed as they found
themselves, yet they will never appreciate the extent of their clumsi-
ness for they will never know how Steerpike's head and shoulders lean-
ed forward through circles the size of beads, whose very equidistance
from one another (the Twins were cheek to cheek) was as though to
prove by ghastly repetition the nightmare of it all. Minute and exquisite in
the microcosm of the pupils, these four worlds, identical and terrible,
gleamed between the lids. It would seem they had been painted--these
images of Steerpike--with a single hair or with the proboscis of a bee
--for the very whites of his eyes were crystalline. And when Steerpike
at the door drew back his head--drew it back on a sudden impulse, then
the four heads, no bigger than seeds, were drawn back at that same in-
stant, and the eight eyes narrowed as they stared back from the four
microscopic mirrors--stared back at their origin, the youth, mountain
high in the doorway, the youth on whom their quick and pulseless lives
depended--the youth with his eyes narrowed, and whose least movement
was theirs.

That the eyes of the Twins should be ignorant of that they reflected
was natural enough but it was not natural that in carrying the image
of Steerpike to their identical brains, there should be, by not so
much as the merest shade, a clue to the excitement in their breasts.
For it seemed that they felt nothing, that they saw nothing, that they
were dead, and stood upon their feet by some miracle.

Steerpike knew at once that yet another chapter was over in his rela-
tionship with Cora and Clarice. They had become clay in his hands,
but they were clay no more, unless there is in clay not only something
imponderable but something sinister also. Not only this, but something
adamantine. From now on he knew that they were no longer ductile--they
had changed into another medium--a sister medium--but a harsher one--
they were stone.

All this could be seen at a glance. But now, suddenly, there was some-
thing which escaped his vigilance. It was this. His reflections were
no longer in their eyes. Their ladyships had unwittingly expelled him.
Something else had taken place--and as he was unaware that he had ever
been reflected so he was equally unaware that he was no longer so--and
that in the lenses of their eyes he had exchanged places with the head
of an axe.

But what Steerpike could see was that they were no longer staring at
him--that their gaze was fixed upon something above his head. They had
not tilted their heads back although it would have been the normal
thing to do for whatever they were looking at was all but out of their
line of vision. Their upturned eyes shone white. Save for this movement
of their eyeballs they had not so much as stirred.

Fighting down his fear that were he to move his eyes from them, even
for a second, he would fall in a peculiar way into some trap, he swung
himself about and in a moment had seen a great axe dangling a dozen
feet above him, and the complex network of cords and strings which,
like a spider's web in the darkness of the upper air, held in position the
cold and grizzly weight of the steel head.

With a backward leap the young man was through the doorway. Without
a pause he slammed the door and before he had turned the key in the
lock he had heard the thud as the head of the axe buried itself in that
part of the floor where he had been standing.



THIRTY-EIGHT



Steerpike's return to the castle's heart was rapid and purposeful. A
pale sun like a ball of pollen was hung aloft an empty and faded sky,
and as he sped below it his shadow sped with him, rippling over the cob-
bles of great squares, or cruising alongside, upright, where at his el-
bow the lit and attenuate walls threw back the pallid light. For all that
within its boundaries, this shadow held nothing but the uniform blankness
of its tone, yet it seemed every whit as predatory and meaningful as the
body that cast it--the body, that with so many aids to expressiveness
within the moving outline, from the pallor of the young man and the dark
red colour of his eyes, to the indefinable expressions of lip and eye,
was drawing nearer at every step to a tryst of his own making.

The sun was blocked away. For a few minutes the shadow disappeared like
the evil dream of some sleeper who on waking finds the substance of his
nightmare standing beside his bed--for Steerpike was there, turning the
corners, threading the mazes, gliding down slopes of stone or flights of
rotten wood. And yet it was strange that with all the vibrancy that lay
packed within the margins of his frame, yet his shadow when it reappeared
reaffirmed its self-sufficiency and richness as a scabbard for malignity.
Why should this be--why with certain slender proportions and certain tricks
of movement should a sense of darkness be evoked? Shadows more terrible and
grotesque than Steerpike's gave no such feeling. They moved across their
walls bloated or spidery with a comparative innocence. It was as though a
shadow had a heart--a heart where blood was drawn from the margins of a
world of less substance than air. A world of darkness whose very existence
depended upon its enemy, the light.

And there it was; there it slid, this particular shadow--from wall to wall,
from floor to floor, the shoulders a little high, but not unduly, the head
cocked, not to one or other side, but forward. In an open space it paled as
it moved over dried earth, for the sun weakened--and then it fainted away
altogether as the fringe of a cloud half the size of the sky moved over the
sun.

Almost at once the rain began to fall, and the air yet further darkened. Nor
was this darkening enough, for beneath the expanse of the cloud that moved
inexorably to the north, dragging behind it miles and miles of what looked
like filthy linen, beneath this expanse, yet another, of similar hugeness,
but swifter, began to overtake it from beneath, and when this lower continent
of cloud began to pass over that part of the sky where the sun had lately
been shining, then something very strange made itself felt at once.

A darkness almost unprecedented had closed down over Gormenghast. Steerpike
glancing left and right could see the lights begin to burn in scores of win-
dows. It was too dark to see what was happening above, but judging from a
still deepening of the pall, yet further clouds, thick and rain-charged, must
have slid across the sky to form the lowest of three viewless and enormous
layers.

By now the rain was loud on the roofs, was flooding along the gutterings, gur-
gling in crannies and brimming the thousand irregular cavities that the cen-
turies had formed among the crumbling stones. The advance of these weltering
clouds had been so rapid that Steerpike had not entirely escaped the downpour,
but it was not for more than a few moments that the rain beat on his head and
shoulders, for, running through the unnatural darkness to the nearest of the
lighted windows, he found himself in a part of the castle that he remembered.
From here he could make the rest of the journey under cover.

The premature darkness was peculiarly oppressive. As Steerpike made his way
through the lighted corridors he noticed how at the main windows there were
groups gathered, and how the faces that peered out into the false night wore
expressions of perplexity and apprehension. It was a freak of nature, and no
more, that the world had been swathed away from the westering sun as though
with bandages, layer upon layer, until the air was stifled. Yet it seemed as
though the sense of oppression which the darkness had ushered in had more
than a material explanation.

As though to fight back against the circumscribing darkness the hierophants
had lighted every available lantern, burner, candle and lamp, and had even
improvised an extraordinary variety of reflectors, of tin and glass, and even
trays of gold and plates of burnished copper. Long before any message could
have been couriered across the body of Gormenghast, there was not a limb, not
a digit that had not responded to the universal sense of suffocation, not the
merest finger joint of stone that had not set itself alight.

Countless candles dribbled with hot wax, and their flames, like little flags,
fluttered in the uncharted currents of air. Thousands of lamps, naked, or shut-
tered behind coloured glass, burned with their glows of purple, amber, grass-
green, blue, blood red and every grey. The walls of Gormenghast were like the
walls of paradise or the walls of an inferno. The colours were devilish or an-
gelical according to the colour of the mind that watched them. They swam, those
walls, with the hues of hell, with the tints of Zion. The breasts of the plumag-
ed seraphim; the scales of Satan.

And Steerpike, moving rapidly through these varying flushes, could hear the loud-
ening of the rain. He had come to something very like an isthmus--a corridor with
circular windows on either side that gave upon the outer darkness. This arcade,
or cover-way--this isthmus that joined together one great mass of sprawling ma-
sonry to another, was illumined along its considerable length at three more or
less regular intervals by firstly a great age-green oil lamp with an enormous
wick as wide as a sheep's tongue. The glass globe that fitted over it was ap-
pallingly ugly; a fluted thing, a piece missing from its lower lip. But its col-
our was something apart--or rather the colour of the glass when lit from behind,
as it now was. To say it was indigo gives no idea of its depth and richness, nor
of the underwater or cavernous glow that filled that part of the arcade with its
aura.

In their different ways the other two lamps, with their globe of sullen crimson
and iceberg green, made within the orbits of their influence, arenas no less
theatrical. The glazed and circular windows, dark as jet, were yet not feature-
less. Across the blind blackness of those flanking eyes the strands of rain which
appeared not to move but to be stretched across the inky portholes like harp
strings--these strands, these strings of water burned blue, beyond the glass,
burned crimson, burned green, for the lamplight stained them. And in the stain
was something serpentine--something poisonous, exotic, feverish and merciless;
the colours were the colours of the sea-snake, and beyond the windows on either
hand, was the long-drawn hiss of the reptilian rain.

And while Steerpike sped along this covered-way, the shadow that he cast changed
colour. Sometimes it was before him as though eager to arrive at some rendezvous
before the body of its caster; and sometimes it followed him, sliding at his heels,
dogging him, changing its dark colour as it flowed.

With the isthmus behind him, and a continent of stone once more about him, a con-
tinent into whose fastnesses he moved the deeper with every step and with every
breath he took, Steerpike banished from his mind every thought of the Twins and
of their behaviour. His mind had been largely taken up with conjecture as to the
cause of their insurrection, and with tentative plans for their disposal. But
there were matters more pressing and one matter in particular. With enviable ease
he emptied his mind of their ladyships and filled it with Barquentine.

His shadow moved upon his right hand. It was climbing a staircase. It crossed a
landing. It descended three steps. It followed for a short while at its maker's
heels and then overtook him. It was at his elbow when it suddenly deepened its
tone and grew up the side of the wall until the shadow-head twelve feet above
the ground, pursued its lofty way, the profile undulating from time to time,
when it was forced to float across the murky webs that choked the junction of
wall and ceiling.

And then the giant shade began to shrivel, and as it descended it moved a lit-
tle forward of its caster, until finally it was a thick and stunted thing--a
malformation, intangible, terrible, that led the way towards those rooms where
its immediate journey could, for a little while, be ended.



THIRTY-NINE



Barquentine in his room sat with his withered leg drawn up to his chin. His
hair, dirty as a fly-blown web, hung about his face, dry and lifeless. His
skin, equally filthy, with its silted fissures, its cheese-like cracks and
discolorations, was dry also--an arid terrain, dead it seemed, and waterless
as the moon, and yet, at its centre those malignant lakes, his vile and brim-
ming eyes.

Outside the broken window at the far end of the room lay stretched the stag-
nant waters of the moat.

He had been sitting there, his only leg drawn up to his face, his crutch lean-
ing against the back of his chair, his hands clasped about his knee, a hank
of his beard between his teeth--he had been sitting there, for over an hour.
On the table before him at least a dozen books lay spread; books of ritual
and precedence, books of cross-reference, ciphers and secret papers. But his
eyes were not on them. No less ruthless for being out of focus and gleaming
wetly in their dry sockets, they could not see that a shadow had entered the
room--that intangible as air, yet graphic to a degree, it had reared itself
against high tiers of books--books of all shapes and in every stage of dil-
apidation, that glimmered in the bad light save where this shadow lay athwart
them, black as a shade from hell.

And while he sat there, what was he thinking of, this wrinkled and filthy
dwarf?

He was thinking of how a change had come over the workings of Gormenghast--
over the workings of its heart and the temper of its brain. Something so
subtle that he could in no way fix upon it. Something that was not to be
located in the normal way of his thinking yet something which, neverthe-
less, was filling his nostrils with its odour. He knew it to be evil, and
what was evil in the eyes of Barquentine was anything that smelt of insur-
rection, anything that challenged, or worked to undo the ancient procedures.

Gormenghast was not what it was. He knew it. There was devilry somewhere
among these cold stones. And yet he could not put his finger upon the spot.
He could not say what it was that was now so different. It was not that he
was an old man. He was not sentimental about the days of his youth. They
had been dark and loveless. But he had no pity for himself. He had only
this blind, passionate and cruel love for the dead letter of the castle's
law. He loved it with a love as hot as his hate. For the members of the
Groan line itself he had less regard than for the meanest and drearest of
the rituals that it was their destiny to perform. Only in so far as they
were symbols did he bow his ragged head. He had no love for Titus--only
for his significance as the last of the links in the great chain. There
was something about the way the boy moved... a restlessness, an independ-
ence, that galled him. It was almost as though this heir to a world of
towers had learned of other climes, of warm, clandestine lands, and that
the febrile and erratic movements of the child's limbs were the reflec-
tion of what lived and throve in his imagination. It was as though his
brain, in regions remote and seductive, was sending its unsettling mes-
sages to the small bones, to the tissues of the boy, so that there was,
in his movements, something remote and ominous.

But Barquentine, knowing that the seventy-seventh earl had never moved
as far as a day's journey from his birthplace, spat, as it were, these
reflections from his puzzled brain. And yet the taste lingered. The taste
of something acid; something rebellious. The young earl was too much him-
self. It was as though the child imagined he had a life of his own apart
from the life of Gormenghast.

And he was not the only one. There was this Steerpike youth. A quick,
useful disciple no doubt, but a danger, for that very reason. What was
to be done about him? He had learned too much. He had opened books that
were not for him to open and found his way about too rapidly. There was
something about him that set him apart from the life of the place--some-
thing subtly foreign--something ulterior.

Barquentine shifted his body on the chair, growling with irritation both
at the twinge which the altering of his position gave to his withered
leg, and at the frustration of being unable to do more than gnaw at the
fringe of his suspicions. He longed, as master of the Groan law, to take
action, to stamp out, if necessary, a score of malcontents, but there was
nothing clear--no tangible target--nothing definable upon which he could
direct his fire. He only knew that were he to discover that Steerpike had
in the smallest degree abused the grudging trust he had placed in him,
then, bringing all his authority to bear, he would have the pallid snipe
from the Tower of Flints--he would strike with the merciless venom of the
fanatic for whom the world holds no gradations--only the blind extremes
of black and white. To sin was to sin against Gormenghast. Evil and doubt
were one. To doubt the sacred stones was to profane the godhead. And there
was this evil somewhere--close but invisible. His sense caught a whiff of
it--but as soon as he turned his brain as it were over the shoulder of his
mind--it was gone--and there was nothing palpable--nothing but the hier-
ophants--moving here and there, upon this business or that, and seemingly
absorbed.

Was there no way for him either to snare this wandering evil and turn its
face to the light or to quell his suspicions? For they were harmful, keep-
ing him awake through the long night hours, nagging at him, as though the
castle's illness were his own.

"By the blood of hell," he whispered, and his whisper was like grit--"I
will search it out, though it hide like a bat in the vaults or a rat in
the southern lofts."

He scratched himself disgustingly, rumps and crutch, and again he shifted
himself on the high chair.

It was then that the shadow that lay across the bookshelves moved a little.
The shoulders appeared to rise as the whole silhouette shifted itself fur-
ther from the door and the impalpable body of the thing rippled across a
hundred leather spines.

Barquentine's eyes took focus for a moment or two as they strayed over the
documents on the table before him, and, unsolicited at the moment, the re-
collection of having once been married returned to him. What had happened
to his wife he could not remember. He assumed that she had died.

He had no recollection of her face, but could remember--and perhaps it was
the sight of the papers before him that had brought back the unwelcome mem-
ory--how, as she wept, she would, hardly knowing that she was doing so,
make paper boats, which, wet with her tears and grimed from her cracked
hands, she sailed across the harbour of her lap or left stranded about the
floor or on the rope matting of her bed, in throngs like fallen leaves, wet,
grimed and delicate, in scattered squadrons, a navy of grief and madness.

And then, with a start he remembered that she had borne him a son. Or was
it she? It was over forty years since he had spoken to his child. He would
be hard to find; but found he must be. All he remembered was that a birth-
mark took up most of the face and that the eyes were crossed.

With his mind cast back to earlier days, a number of pictures floated hes-
itantly before his eyes, and in all of them he saw himself as someone with
his head perpetually raised--as someone on a level with men's knees--as a
target for jibes and scorn. He could see in the mind's eye the growth of
hatred; he could feel again his crutch being kicked from beneath him, and
of the urchins hooting in his wake, "Rotten leg! rotten spine!" "Ya! Ya!
Barquentine!"

All that was over. He was feared now. Feared and hated.

With his back to the door and to the bookshelves he could not see that the
shadow had moved again. He lifted his head and spat. Picking up a piece of
paper he began to make a boat but he did not know what he was doing.

"It has gone on long enough," he said to himself,--"too long, by the blood
of hags. He must go. He is finished. Dead. Over. Done with. I must be alone,
or the cock of the great Ape, I'll jeopardize the Inner Secrets. He'll have
the keys off me with his bloody efficiency."

And while he muttered in his own throat the shadow of the youth of whom he
was speaking slid inexorably over the spines, and came to a stop a dozen
feet from Barquentine, but the body of Steerpike was at the same moment im-
mediately behind the cripple's chair.

It had not been easy for the young man to decide in what way he would kill
his master. He had many means at his disposal. His nocturnal visits to the
Doctor's dispensary had furnished him with a sinister array of poisons.
His swordstick was almost too obviously efficacious. His catapult was no
toy, but something lethal as a gun and silent as a sword. He knew of ways
to break the neck with the edge of the palm, and he knew how to send a pen
knife through the air with extraordinary precision. He had not, for nothing,
spent an allotted number of minutes every morning and for several years in
throwing his knife at the dummy in his bedroom.

But he was not interested merely in dispatching the old man.

He had to kill him in some way which left no trace: to dispose of the body
and at the same time to mix pleasure and business in such a compound that
neither was the weaker for the union. He had old scores to pay off. He had
been spat upon and reviled by the withered cripple. To merely stop his
life in the quickest way would be an empty climax--something to be ashamed
of.

But what really happened and how Barquentine really died in Steerpike's pre-
sence bore no relation to the plan which the young man had made.

For, as he stood immediately behind his victim's chair the old man leaned
forward across his books and papers and pulled towards himself a rusty,
three-armed candlestick, and after a great deal of scrabbling about among
his rags, eventually set a light to the wicks. This had the double effect
of sending Steerpike's shadow sidling across the book-filled wall and suck-
ing the strength out of it.

From where Steerpike stood he could see over Barquentine's shoulder the ho-
ney-coloured flames of the three candles. They were the shapes of bamboo
leaves, attenuate and slender and they trembled against the darkness. Bar-
quentine himself was silhouetted against the glow of the candlelight, and
suddenly, as his body shifted, and Steerpike obtained an even clearer view
of the candleflame an idea occurred to the young man which made all his
carefully prepared plans for the death and disposal of the ancient's body
appear amateurish: amateurish through lack of that deceptive simplicity
which is the hallmark of all great art; amateurish, for all their ingenu-
ity, and for the very reason of it.

But here--here before him, ready made was a candlestick with three gold
flames that licked at the sullen air. And, here within his reach was the
old man he wished to kill, but not too quickly; an old man whose rags and
skin and beard were as dry and inflammable as the most exacting of fire-
raisers could wish. What would be easier than for a man as ancient as Bar-
quentine to lean forward accidentally at his work and for his beard to
catch light from the candles? What would be more diverting than to watch
the irritable and filthy tyrant caught among flames, his rags blazing, his
skin smoking, his beard leaping like a crimson fish. It would only remain,
at a later date, for Steerpike to discover the charred corpse and arouse
the castle.

The young man glanced about him. The door through which he had entered the
room was closed. It was an hour when there was small chance of their being
disturbed. The silence in the room was only intensified by the thin grating
of Barquentine's breathing.

No sooner had Steerpike realized the advantages of setting fire to the rag-
ged silhouette which squatted like a black gnome immediately before him, than
he drew the blade from his swordstick and raised it so that the steel point
hovered within an inch of Barquentine's neck, and immediately below his left
ear.

Now that Steerpike was so close upon the heels of the gross and bloody deed,
a kind of cold and poisonous rage filled him. Perhaps the dry root of some
long deadened conscience stirred for a moment in his breast. Perhaps, for
that sharp second, he remembered in spite of himself that to kill a man in-
volved a sense of guilt: and perhaps it was because of the momentary distract-
ion of purpose that hatred swept his face, as though a frozen sea were whip-
ped of a sudden into a living riot of tameless water. But the waves subsided
as quickly as they had risen. Once again his face was white with a deadly e-
quipoise. The point of his blade had trembled beneath the age-bitten ear. But
now it was motionless.

It was then that there was a knock at the door. The old head twisted to the
sound, but away from the blade so that Steerpike and his weapon were still
invisible.

"To black hell with you whoever you are! I will see no son of a bitch today!"

"Very well, sir," said a door-blocked voice, and then the faint sound of foot-
steps could be heard, and then silence again. Barquentine turned his head back,
and then scratched himself across the belly.

"Saucy bullprong," he muttered aloud. "I'll have his face off him. I'll have
his white face off! I'll have the shine off it! By the gall of the great mule
he's over-shiny. “Very well, sir” he says, does he? What's well about it?
What's well about it? The upstart piss-worm!"

Again Barquentine began to scratch, loins, buttocks, belly and ribs.

"O sucking fire!" he cried, "it gripes my heart! No earl but a brat. The Count-
ess, cat-mad. And for me, no tyro but this upstart of a Steerpike bastard."

The young man, his swordstick beautifully poised, its cold tip sharp as a need-
le, pursed his thin lips and clicked his tongue. This time Barquentine turned
his head over his left shoulder so that he received half an inch of steel be-
neath his ear. His body stiffened horribly while his throat swelled into the
semblance of a scream, but no scream came. When Steerpike withdrew the blade,
and while a trickle of dark blood made its way over the wrinkled terrain of
his turtle-neck, the whole frame became all of a sudden convulsively active,
each part of him seeming to contort itself without relation to what was happen-
ing to the rest of the body. It was a miracle that he remained balanced on the
high chair. But these convulsions suddenly ended and Steerpike, standing back
with his chin cupped in his hands, was chilled, in spite of the half-smile on
his face, by the direst expression of mortal hatred that had ever turned an
old man's face into a nest of snakes. The eyes grew, of a sudden, congested,
their vile waters taking on, it seemed, the flush of a dangerous sunrise. The
mouth and the lines about it appeared to seethe. The dirty brow and neck were
wet with venom.

But there was a brain behind it all. A brain which, while Steerpike stood by
and smiled, was in spite of the young man's initial advantage, a step ahead
of the youth. For the one thing without which he would indeed have been help-
less was still in his power to capture. Steerpike had made a mistake at the
outset. And he was taken completely by surprise when Barquentine, thrusting
himself off the high chair, fell to the floor in a heap. The old man landed
upon the object which was his only hope. It had fallen to the ground when he
had stiffened at the sword-prick--and now in a flash he had grasped his crutch,
prised himself upright, and hopped to the rear of his chair through the bars
of which he directed his red gaze upon the face of his armed and agile enemy.

But the spirit in the old tyrant was something so intense that Steerpike in
spite of his two legs, his youth and his weapons was taken aback by the real-
ization that so much passion could be housed in so dry and stunted a thing.
He was also taken aback at having been outwitted. It was true that even now
the duel was ludicrously one-sided--an ancient cripple with a crutch--an ath-
lete with a sword -- but nevertheless, had his first action been to remove
the crutch he would now have the old man in as helpless a position as a tor-
toise upon its back.

For a few moments they faced one another, Barquentine expressing everything
in his face, Steerpike nothing. Then the young man began to walk slowly back-
wards to the door, his eyes all the while on his quarry. He was taking no
chances. Barquentine had shown how quick he could be.

When he reached the door he opened it and took a rapid glance along the atten-
uate corridor. It was enough to show him that there was no one in the neigh-
bourhood. He closed the door behind him and then began to advance towards the
chair through the bars of which the dwarf was peering.

As Steerpike advanced with his slender steel in his hand, his eyes were upon
his prey but his thoughts were centred upon the candlestick.

His foe could have no idea of how he was within reach of what would burn him
up. The three little flames trembled above the melting wax. He had brought
them to life, those three dead lumps of tallow. And they were to turn upon
him. But not yet. Steerpike continued his lethal advance. What was there that
the cripple could do? For the moment he was partially shielded by the back of
the chair. And then, in a voice strangely at variance with the demoniac aspect
of his face, for it was as cold as ice, he uttered the one word "Traitor."

It was not merely his life he was fighting for. That single word, freezing the
air, had revealed what Steerpike had forgotten: that in his adversary he was
pitting himself against Gormenghast. Before him he had a living pulse of the
immemorial castle.

But what of all this? It merely meant that Steerpike must be careful. That he
must keep his distance until the moment in which to make his attack. He cont-
inued to advance and then, when another step would have taken him within range
of Barquentine's crutch, he side-stepped to the right and speeding to the far
end of the table, placed his rapier before him across the littered books and
taking his knife from his pocket opened it with a single action and then, as
Barquentine turned about in his tracks in order to face his assailant, he sent
the sharp thing whipping through the candlelight. As Steerpike had intended it
pinned the old man's right hand to the shaft of his crutch. In the moment of
Barquentine's surprise and pain, Steerpike leapt on the table and sprang along
it. Immediately below him the dwarf plucked at the knife in his blind fury. As
he did so, Steerpike, all in a breath, had snatched up the candlestick, and
lunging forward, swept the tiny flame across the upturned face. In a moment,
the lifeless beard had shone out in sizzling fire and it was but a moment
before the rotten rags about the shoulders of the old man were ablaze also.

But again, and this time while in the throes of mortal agony, Barquentine's
brain had risen instantaneously to the call which was made upon it. He had no
moment to lose. The knife was still in his hand though the crutch had fallen
away--but all that was forgotten, as with a superhuman effort, one-legged
though he was, he flexed his knee and in a spring caught hold of some portion
of Steerpike's clothing. No sooner had he made his first grip, than, with his
arms straining themselves to breaking point, and his old heart pounding, he
made good his purchase and began to swarm the youth like an ape on fire. By
now he had a grip of Steerpike's waist and the flames were beginning to catch
the clothing of his young enemy. The searing pain across his face and chest
but made him cling the tighter. That he must die, he knew. But the traitor
must die with him, and in his agony there was something of joy; joy in the
"rightness' of his revenge.

At the same time, Steerpike was fighting to free himself, clawing at the
burning leech, striking upwards with his knees, his face transparent with a
deadly mixture of rage, astonishment and desperation.

His clothes, less inflammable than Barquentine's threadbare sacking, were nev-
ertheless alight by now, and across his cheek and throat a flame had scorched
his skin to crimson. But the more he struggled to wrench himself away the fier-
cer seemed the arms that gripped his waist.

Had anyone opened the door they would have seen, at that moment, a young man
luminous against the darkness, his feet striking and trampling among the sacred
books that littered the table, the body writhing and straining as though dement-
ed and they would have seen that his vibrating hands were locked upon the turtle
throat of a dwarf on fire: and they would have seen the paroxysm that toppled
the combatants off the table's edge so that they fell in a smoking heap to the
floor.

Even now in his pain and danger there was room in him for the bitter shame of
his failure. Steerpike the arch contriver, the cold and perfect organizer, had
bungled the affair. He had been out-generalled by a verminous septuagenarian.
But his shame took the form of desperate anger. It whipped him to a feverpitch.

In a kind of spasm, quite diabolical in the access of its ferocity and purpose,
he struggled to his knees, and then with a jerk, to his feet. He had let go the
throat and he stood swaying a moment, his hands free at his sides, and the pain
of his burns so intense that, although he did not know it, he was moaning like
something lost. It had nothing to do with his merciless nature, this moaning. It
was something quite physical. It was his body crying. His brain knew nothing a-
bout it.

The Master of Ritual clung, like a vampire, at his breast. The old arms were
clasped about him. Mixed with the pain in the agonized face, there was an unholy
glee. He was burning the traitor with his own flame. He was burning an unbeliever.

But the unbeliever was, for all the fiery hugging of his master, by no means ready
for sacrifice however right or deserving his death might be. He had paused only to
regain strength. He had dropped his arms only through an abnormal degree of control.
He knew that he could not free himself from the clutch of the fanatic. And so for a
moment he stood there, upright, his coat half burned away, his head thrust back to
keep as great a distance as he could between his face and the flames that rose from
the blackening creature that clung like a growth. To be able to stand for a moment
under so horrific a duress--to be able to stand, to take a deep breath, and to re-
lax the muscles of his arms demanded an almost inhuman control of the will and the
passions.

The circumstances having gone so far beyond his control there was no longer any ques-
tion of choice. It was no longer a case of killing Barquentine. It was a case of sav-
ing himself. His plans had gone so wildly astray that there was no recovery. He was
ablaze.

There was only one thing he could do. Saddled as he was, his limbs were disencum-
bered. He knew that he had only a few moments in which to act. His head swam and a
darkness filled him, but he began to run, his burned hands spread out like starfish
at his sides, to run in a dizzy curve of weakness to the far end of the room--to
where the night was a square of darkness. For a moment they were there, against the
starless sky, lit like demons with their own conflagration, and then, suddenly they
were gone. Steerpike had hurdled the window-sill and had fallen with his virulent
burden into the black waters of the moat below. There were no stars but the moon
like a nail-paring floated unsubstantially in the low north. It cast no light upon
the earth.

Deep in the horrible waters of the moat the protagonists, their consciousness hav-
ing left them, still moved together as one thing like some foul subaqueous beast
of allegory. Above them the surface water through which they had fallen was sizzl-
ing and steam drifted up invisible through the darkness.

When after what he could only recall as his death, Steerpike, his head having at
last risen above the surface, found that he was not alone but that something clung
to him below the water, he vomited and of a sudden, howled. But the nightmare con-
tinued and there was no answer to his howl. He did not waken. And then the excru-
ciating pains of his burns racked him, and he knew it was no dream.

And then he realized what he must do. He must keep that charred and hairless
head which kept bobbing against his breast, he must keep it below the water. But
it was not easy for him to fasten upon the wrinkled throat. The mud had been
churned up about them, and the burden he carried was, like his own hands, coated
with slime. The vile arms clung about him with the tenacity of tentacles. That he
did not sink like a stone was a wonder; perhaps it was the thickness of the water,
or the violent stamping of his feet in the stagnant depth which helped him to keep
afloat for long enough.

But gradually, inexorably, he fought the old head backwards, his fierce hands
clenched on the gullet strings--he fought it downwards, down into the black
water, while bubbles rose and the thick and slapping sound of the agitated wat-
er filled up the hollow of the listening night.

There was no knowing how long the old man's face remained under water before
Steerpike could feel any loosening of the grip at his waist. To the murderer
the act of death was endless. But by degrees the lungs had filled with water
and the heart had ceased to beat, and the Hereditary Keeper of the Groan lore
and Master of Ritual had slid away into the muddy depths of the ancient moat.

The moon was higher in the sky, was surrounded by a sprinkling of stars. It
could not be said that they gave light to the walls and towers that flanked
the moat, but a kind of dusk was inlaid upon the inky darkness, a dusk in the
shape of walls and towers.

Exhausted and in terrible pain, Steerpike had yet to swim on through the scum
and duckweed--to swim on until the slimy walls of the moat gave way on the
northern side to a muddy bank. It seemed that the walls on his either side were
endless. The foul water got into his throat. The vile weeds clung to his face. It
was difficult to see more than a few yards ahead; but all at once he realized that
the wall upon his right had given way to a steep and muddy bank.

The water had drawn away what clothes the fire had left. He was naked, cov-
ered with burns, half drowned, his body shaking with an icy cold, his brow
burning with a feverish heat.

Crawling up the bank, not knowing what he was doing, save that he must find
some place of neither fire nor water, he came at last to a patch of level
mud where a few rank ferns and mudplants flourished, and there, as though
(now that his affairs were concluded) he could afford to faint, he collaps-
ed into darkness. And there he lay motionless, very small and naked on the
mud, like something lifeless that had been discarded, or like a fish thrown
up by the sea over whose minute and stranded body the great cliffs tower,
for the walls of Gormenghast rose high above the moat, soaring like cliffs
themselves into the upper darkness.



FORTY



While the dust that lay upon the gaunt back of the castle became warm in the
sun, and the birds grew drowsy in the shadows of the towers, and while there
was little to hear but the droning of the bees as they hovered over the wastes
of ivy--at the same time, in the green hush of noon, the spirit of Gormenghast
forest held its breath like a diver. There was no sound. Hour followed hour
and all things were asleep or in a state of trance. The trunks of the great
oaks were blotched with honey-coloured shadows and the prodigious boughs
were stretched like the arms of bygone kings and appeared to be heavy with
the weight of their gold bangles, the bracelets of the sun. There seemed to
be no end to the gold afternoon and then something fell from a high branch,
and the faint swish of the leaves through which it passed awoke the region.
The stillness had been for the moment punctured, but the wound healed over
almost at once.

What was it that had fallen through the silence? Even the tree-cat would have
hesitated to drop so far through the green gloom. But it was no cat, but some-
thing human that stood dappled with leaf-shaped shadows, a child, with its thick
hair hacked off close to its head and the face freckled like a bird's egg. The
body, slender, indeed thin, appeared, when the child began to move, to be with-
out weight.

The features of her face were quite nondescript--in fact, empty. It was as
though she wore a kind of mask, neither pleasant nor unpleasant--something
that hid rather than revealed her mind. And yet, at the same time, although
by feature there was nothing to remember, nothing distinctive, yet the whole
head was so set upon the neck, the neck so perfectly adjusted upon the slender
shoulders, and the movements of those three so expressive in their relation-
ship that it seemed that there was not only nothing lacking, but that for the
face to have had a life of its own would have ruined the detached and unearth-
ly quality she possessed.

She stood there for a moment, entirely alone in the dreaming oakwoods and be-
gan, with strangely rapid movements of her fingers, to pluck the feathers from
a missel-thrush which, during her long fall through the foliage, she had snatc-
hed from its branch and throttled in her small fierce hand.



FORTY-ONE



Surrounding the outer walls of Gormenghast castle the mud city of the Outer
Dwellers lay sprawled in the sun, its thousands of hovels hummocking the earth
like molehills. These Dwellers, or Bright Carvers as they were sometimes call-
ed, had rituals of their own as sacrosanct as those of the castle itself.

Bitter with poverty and prone to those diseases that thrive on squalor, they
were yet a proud though bigoted people. Proud of their traditions, of their
power of carving--proud of their very misery, it seemed. For one of their
number to have left them and to have become wealthy and famous would have
been to them a cause for shame and humiliation. But such a possibility was
unthinkable. In their obscurity, their anonymity lay their pride. All else was
something lower--saving only the family of the Groans to whom they owed
allegiance and under whose patronage they were allowed their hold upon the
Outer Walls. When the great sacks of crusts were lowered by ropes from the
summit of those Walls, over a thousand at a time making their simultaneous
descents, they were received (this time-honoured gesture on the part of the
castle) with a kind of derision. It was they, the Bright Carvers, who were
honouring the castle; it was they who condescended to unhook the ropes every
morning of the year, so that the empty sacks might be hoisted up again. And
with every mouthful of these dry crusts (which with the jarl-root of the
neighbouring forest composed the beginning and end of their diet) they knew
themselves to be conferring an honour upon the castle bakeries.

It was perhaps the pride of the subjugated--a compensatory thing--but it was
very real to them. Nor was it built on nothing, for in their carvings alone
they showed a genius for colour and for ornament that had no kind of counter-
part in the life of the Castle.

Taciturn and bitter as they were in their ancient antipathies yet their hottest
enmity was directed, not against any that lived within the outer walls, but against
those of their own kind who in any way made light of their own customs. At the
heart of their ragged and unconventional life there was an orthodoxy as hard as
iron. Their conventions were ice-bound. To move among them for a day without
forewarning of their innumerable conventions would be to invite disaster. Side
by side with an outrageous lack of the normal physical decencies was an in-
grained prudery, vicious and unswervingly cruel.

For a child to be illegitimate was for that child to be loathed, as though it
were a diseased thing. Not only this. A bastard babe was feared. There was a
strong belief that in some way a love-child was evil. The mother would invar-
iably be ostracized but it was only the babe who was to be feared--it was,
in fact, a witch in embryo.

But it was never killed. For to kill, it would be only to kill the body. Its
ghost would haunt the killer.

In a lane of flies that wound beneath a curve of the Outer Walls, the dusk
began to settle down like pollen. It thickened by degrees until the lane and
the irregular roofs of reeds and mud were drowned in it.

Along the wall of the lane or alleyway a line of beggars squatted. It seemed
that they were growing out of the dust they sat in. It covered their ankles
and their haunches. It was like a dead, grey sea. It was as though the tide
were in--a tide of soft dust. It was voluptuously fine and feathery.

And in this common dove-coloured dust, they sat, their backs to the clay
walls of a sun-warmed hovel. They had these luxuries, the soft dust and the
warm fly-filled air.

As they sat there silently, while the night descended, their eyes were fixed
upon those few figures on the other side of the alley, who, their carving over
for the day, were gathering up their chisels, rasps and mallets and returning
with them to their various huts. Until a year ago there had been no need for
the Bright Carvers to return their sculpture to the safety of their homes. It
had remained all night in the open. It was never touched. No, not the meanest
vandal of them all would dare to touch or move by an inch the work of another.

But now there was a difference. The carvings were no longer safe. Something
horrible had happened. And so the beggars by the wall continued to stare as
the removal of the wood sculpture proceeded. It had been going on now for
twelve months, evening after evening, but they were not yet used to it. They
could not grasp it. All their lives they had known the moonlight on the des-
erted lanes, and, flanking these lanes the wooden carvings like sentinels at
every door. But now, after dark, the heart had gone out of the streets--a
vibrancy, a beauty had departed from the alleys.

And so they still watched, at dusk, with a kind of hapless wonder, the young-
er men as they struggled to return the often massive and weighty horses with
their manes like clusters of frozen sea foam--or the dappled gods of Gormen-
ghast forest with their heads so strangely tilted. They watched all this and
knew that a blight had come upon the one activity for which the Dwellers lived.
They said nothing, these beggars, but as they sat in the soft dust, there was,
at back of each one's mind, the image of a child. Of an illegitimate child, a
pariah, a thing of not yet twelve years old, but a raven, a snake, witch, all
the same, a menace to them all and to their carvings.

It had happened first about a year ago, that first midnight attack, secret,
silent and of a maliciousness quite terrible.

A great piece of sculpture had been found at dawn, its face in the dust, its
body scarred with long jagged knife wounds, and a number of small carvings
had been stolen. Since that first evil and silent assault a score of works
had been defaced and a hundred carvings stolen, carvings no bigger than a hand,
but of a rare craftsmanship, rhythm and colour. There was no doubt as to who
it was. It was the Thing. Shunned as a bastard ever since the day of her moth-
er's suicide, this child had been a thorn in the flesh of the Dwellers.
Running wild, like an animal, and as untameable; a thief as though by nature,
she was, even before she ran away, a legend, a thing of evil.

She was always alone. It seemed unthinkable that she could be companioned.
There was no soft spot in her self-sufficiency. She stole for her food, mov-
ing shadowlike in the night, her face utterly expressionless, her limbs as
light and rapid as a switch of hazel. Or she would disappear completely for
months on end, but then, suddenly return and darting from roof to roof, blist-
er the evening air with sharp cries of derision.

The dwellers cursed the day when the Thing was born; the Thing that could not
speak but could run, it was rumoured, up the stem of a branchless tree; could
float for a score of yards at a time on the wings of a high wind.

They cursed the mother that bore her--Keda, the dark girl, who had been sum-
moned to the castle and who had fed the infant Titus from her breast. They
cursed the mother, they cursed the child--but they were afraid--afraid of the
super-natural and were oppressed with a sense of awe--that the tameless Thing
should be the foster sister of the Earl, Lord Groan of Gormenghast, Titus the
Seventy-seventh.



FORTY-TWO



When Steerpike had come out of his faint and when his consciousness of the
horrors through which he had passed returned to him, as they did in a flash
of pain, for he was raw with the searings of the fire, he got to his feet
like a cripple and staggered through the night until he came at last to the
Doctor's doorway. There, after beating at the door with his feverish fore-
head, for his hands were scalded, he fainted again where he stood and knew
no more until three days later when he found himself staring at the ceiling
of a small room with green walls.

For a long while he could recall nothing, but bit by bit the fragments of
that violent evening pieced themselves together until he had the whole pic-
ture.

He turned his head with difficulty and saw that the door was to his left. To
his right was a fireplace, and ahead of him and near the ceiling was a fair
sized window over which the blinds were partially drawn. By the dusky look
in the sky he guessed it to be either dawn or evening. Part of a tower could
be seen through the gap of the curtains, but he could not recognize it. He
had no idea in what part of the castle he was lying.

He dropped his eyes and noticed that he was bandaged from head to foot, and
as though he needed this reminder, the pain of his burns became more acute.
He shut his eyes and tried to breathe evenly.

Barquentine was dead. He had killed him. But now, at the moment when he,
Steerpike, should have been indispensable, being the sole confidant of the
old custodian of the law, he was lying here inert, helpless, useless. This
must be offset, this derangement of his plans, by quick and authoritative
action. His body could do little but his brains were active and resourceful.

But there was a difference. His mind was as acute as ever, it is true, but,
unknown to himself, there was something that had been added to his tempera-
ment, or perhaps it was that something had left him.

His poise had been so shattered that a change had come about--a change that
he knew nothing of, for his logical mind was able to reassure him that what-
ever the magnitude of his blunder in Barquentine's room, yet the shame was
his alone, the mortification was private--he had only lost face to himself
for no one had seen the old man's quickness.

To have been so burned was too high a price to pay for glory. But glory
would assuredly be his. The graver his condition the rarer his bravery in
attempting to save the old man's life from the flames. His prestige had suf-
fered nothing, for Barquentine's mouth was filled with the mud of the moat
and could bear no witness.

But there was a change all the same, and when he was woken an hour later by
a sound in the room, and when on opening his eyes he saw a flame in the fire-
place, he started upright with a cry, the sweat pouring down his face, and
his bandaged hands trembled at his sides.

For a long while he lay shuddering. A sensation such as he had never experi-
enced before, a kind of fear was near him, if not on him. He fought it away
with all his reserves of undoubted courage. At last he fell again into a fit-
ful sleep, and when some while later he awoke he knew before he opened his
eyes that he was not alone.

Dr Prunesquallor was standing at the end of his bed. His back was to Steerpike,
his head was tilted up and he was staring through the window at the tower that
was now mottled with sunlight and the shadows of flying clouds. The morning had
come.

Steerpike opened his eyes and on seeing the Doctor, closed them again. In a mo-
ment or two he had decided what to do and turning his head to and fro slowly
on the pillow, as though in restless sleep --

"I tried to save you," he whispered, "O Master, I tried to save you," and then
he moaned.

Prunesquallor turned around on his heel. His bizarre and chiselled face was with-
out that drollery of expression which was so typical of him. His lips were set.

"You tried to save who?" said Prunesquallor very sharply as though to elicit
some involuntary reply from the sleeping figure. But Steerpike made a confused
sound in his throat, and then in a stronger voice...

"I tried... I tried."

He turned again on the pillow and then as though this had awakened him he open-
ed his eyes.

For a few moments he stared quite blankly and then--

"Doctor," he said, "I couldn't hold him."

Prunesquallor made no immediate reply but took the swathed creature's pulse--lis-
tened to the heart and then after a while--"You will tell me about it tomorrow,"
he said.

"Doctor," said Steerpike, "I would rather tell you now. I am weak and I can only
whisper, but I know where Barquentine is. He lies dead in the mud outside the win-
dow of his room."

"And how did he get there, Master Steerpike?"

"I will tell you." Steerpike lifted his eyes, loathing the bland physician--
loathing him with an irrational intensity. It was as though his power of hatred
had drawn fresh fuel from the death of Barquentine. But his voice was meek enough.

"I will tell you, Doctor," he whispered. "I will tell you all I know." His head
fell back on the pillow and he closed his eyes.

"Yesterday, or last week, or a month ago, for I do not know how long I have been
lying here insensible--I entered Barquentine's room about eight o'clock, which was
my habit every evening. It was at that hour that he would give me my orders for
the next day. He was sitting on his high chair and as I entered he was lighting a
candlestick. I do not know why but he started at my entrance, as though I had sur-
prised him, but when he turned his head back again, after cursing me--but he meant
no harm to me for all his irritability--he misjudged his distance from the flame,
his beard swept across it and a moment later was alight. I rushed to him but his
hair and clothing had already caught. There were no rugs or curtains in the room
with which to smother the fire. There was no water. But I beat the flames with my
hands. But the fire grew fiercer and in his pain and panic he caught hold of me
and I began to burn."

The pupils of the young man's dark eyes dilated as he recounted the partial fabri-
cation, for Barquentine's grip upon him had been no dream, and his brow began to
sweat again, and a terrible authenticity appeared to give weight to his words.

"I could not escape, Doctor; I was caught and held against his burning body. Every
moment the fire grew fiercer--and my burns more terrible. There was only one thing
I could do to get away. I knew I must reach the water that lay below his window.
And so I ran. I ran with his arm gripping me. I ran to the window and jumped into
the moat--and there in the cold black water, his hands at last gave way. I could
not hold him up. It was all I could do to reach the side of the moat, and there,
I think I fainted--and when I came round, I found I was naked and I came to your
door... but the moat must be dragged and the old man must be found... in the name
of decency he must be found and given a true burial. It is for me to carry on his
work. I... I... cannot tell... you more... I am... not..."

He turned his head on the pillow, and in spite of his pains fell asleep. He had
played his card and could afford to rest.



FORTY-THREE



"My dear," said Bellgrove, "it is surely not for your betrothed to be kept waiting
quite so long even though he is only the Headmaster of Gormenghast. Why on earth
must you always be so late? Good grief, Irma, it isn't as though I'm a green youth
who finds it romantic to be drizzled on by the stinking sky. Where have you been
for pity's sake?"

"I am inclined not to answer you!" cried Irma. "The humiliation of it! Is it no-
thing to you that I should take a pride in my appearance--that I should make myself
beautiful for you? You man, you. It breaks one's heart."

"I do not complain lightly, my love," replied Bellgrove. "As I say, I cannot stand
bad weather like a younger man. This was your idea of a place of rendezvous. It
could hardly have been worse chosen, with not so much as a shrub to squat under.
Rheumatism is on its way. My feet are soaked. And why? Because my fiancee, Irma
Prunesquallor, a lady of quite exceptional talents in other directions--they al-
ways are in other directions--who has the entire day in which to pluck at her eye-
brows, harvest her sheaves of long grey hair, and so on, cannot organize herself-
-or else has grown shall we say casual in regard to her suitor? Shall we say cas-
ual, my dear?"

"Never!" cried Irma. "O never! my dear one. It is only my longing that you should
find me worthy that keeps me at my toilet. O my dearest, you must forgive me. You
must forgive me."

Bellgrove gathered his gown about him in great swathes. He had been staring into
the gloomy sky while he had spoken but now, at last he turned his noble face to
her. The landscape all about them was hazy with rain. The nearest tree was a grey
blur two fields away.

"You ask me to forgive you," said Bellgrove. He closed his eyes. "And so I do, and
so I do. But remember, Irma, that a punctual wife would please me. Perhaps you
could practise a little so that when the time comes I will have nothing to complain
of. And now, we will forget about it, shall we?"

He turned his head from her, for he had not yet learned to admonish her without
grinning weakly with the joy of it. And so, with his face averted, he bared his
rotten teeth at a distant hedgerow.

She took his arm and they began to walk.

"My dear one," she said.

"My love?" said Bellgrove.

"It is my turn to complain, is it not?"

"It is your turn, my love!" (He lifted his leonine head and shook the rain happ-
ily from his mane.)

"You won't be cross, dear?"

He raised his eyebrows and closed his eyes.

"I will not be cross, Irma. What is it that you wish to say?"

"It's your neck, dearest."

"My neck? What of it!"

"It is very dirty, dear one. It has been for weeks... do you think..."

But Bellgrove had stiffened at her side. He bared his teeth in a snarl of impo-
tence.

"O stinking hell," he muttered. "O stinking, rotten hell."



FORTY-FOUR



Mr Flay had been sitting for over an hour at the entrance to his cave. The air
was breathless and the three small clouds in the soft grey sky had been there
all day.

His beard had grown very long and his hair that was once cropped close to the
skull was now upon his shoulders. His skin had darkened with the sun and the
last few years of hardship had brought new lines to his face.

He was by now a part of the woods, his eyesight sharp as a bird's, and his hear-
ing as quick. His footsteps had become noiseless. The cracking of his knee joints
had disappeared. Perhaps the heat of the summer had baked the trouble out of
them for his clothes being as ragged as foliage his knees were for the most
part bare to the sun.

He must surely have been made for the woods, so congruously had he become dis-
solved into a world of branches, ferns and streams. And yet for all his mastery
of the woods, for all that he had been absorbed into the wilderness of the end-
less trees, as though he were but another branch--for all this, his thoughts
were never far from that gaunt pile of masonry that, ruinous and forbidding as
it was, was nevertheless, the only home he had ever known.

But Flay, for all his longing to return to his birthplace was no sentimentalist
in exile. His thoughts when they turned to the castle were by no means in the
nature of reveries. They were hard, uneasy, speculative thoughts which far from
returning to his early memories of the place were concerned with the nature of
things as they were. No less than Barquentine he was a traditionalist to his
marrow. He knew in his heart that things were going wrong.

What chance had he had of taking the pulse of the halls and towers? Apart from
the marshlight of his intuition and the native gloom of his temperament, on what
else was he basing his suspicions? Was it merely his ingrained pessimism and the
fear which had understandably grown stronger since his banishment, that, with
himself away, the castle was the weaker?

It was this, and very little more. And yet had his fears been mere speculations
he would never have made, during the last twenty days, his three unlawful jour-
neys. For he had moved through the midnight corridors of the place--and although
as yet he had made no concrete discoveries, he had become aware almost at once
of a change. Something had happened, or something was happening which was evil
and subversive.

He knew full well that the risks involved in his being found in the castle after
his banishment were acute, and that his chances of discovering in the darkness
of sleeping halls and corridors, the cause of his apprehension, was remote indeed.
Yet he had dared to flaunt the letter of the Groan law in order, in his solitary
way, to find whether or not its spirit, as he feared, was sickening.

And now, as he sat half hidden among the ferns that grew at the door of his cave,
turning over in his mind those incidents that had in one way or another, over
the past years, caused his suspicions of foul play to fructify, he was suddenly
aware that he was being watched.

He had heard no sound, but the extra sense he had developed in the woods gave
warning. It was as though something had tapped him between his shoulder-blades.

Instantly his eyes swept the scene before him and he saw them at once, standing
motionlessly at the edge of a wood away to his right. He recognized them in-
stantaneously although the girl had grown almost out of recognition. Was it pos-
sible that they did not recognize him? There was no doubt that they were star-
ing at him. He had forgotten how different he must look, especially to Fuchsia,
with his long hair, his beard and ragged clothes.

But now, as they began to run in his direction, he stood up and began to make
his way towards them over the rocks.

It was Fuchsia who first recognized the gaunt exile. Just over twenty years old,
she stood there before him, a swarthy, strangely melancholy girl, full of love
and fear and courage and anger and tenderness. These things were so raw in her
breast that it seemed unfair that anyone should be so hotly charged.

To Flay, she was a revelation. Whenever he had thought of her it had always been
as a child, and here suddenly she stood before him, a woman, flushed, excited,
her eyes upon his face, her hands upon her hips, as she regained her breath.

Mr Flay lowered his head in deference to his visitor.

"Ladyship," he said--but before Fuchsia could answer Titus came up, his hair in
his eyes.

"I told you!" he panted. "I told you I'd find him! I told you he had a beard
and there's the dam he made and there's his cave over there and that's where I
slept and where we cooked and..." he paused for breath, and then... "Hullo, Mr
Flay. You look wonderful and wild!"

"Ah!" said Flay. "Most likely, lordship, ragged life and no doubt of it. More
days than dinners, lordship."

"Oh, Mr Flay," said Fuchsia. "I am so happy to see you again--you were always
so kind to me. Are you all right out here, all alone?"

"Of course he's all right!" said Titus. "He's a sort of savage. Aren't you Mr
Flay?"

"Like enough, lordship," said Flay.

"O, you were too small and you can't remember, Titus," said Fuchsia. "I remember
it all. Mr Flay was father's first servant--above them all, weren't you, Mr Flay
--until he disappeared..."

"I know," said Titus. "I've heard it all in Bellgrove's class--they told me all
about it."

"They don't know anything," said Flay. "They don't know anything, ladyship." He
had turned to Fuchsia and then, dropping his head forward again, "Humbly invite
you to my cave," he said, "for rest, for shade and fresh water."

Mr Flay led the way to his cave, and when they had passed through the entrance
and Fuchsia had been shown the double chimney and they had drunk deeply from
the spring, for they were hot and thirsty, Titus lay down under the ferny wall
of the inner cave and their ragged host sat a little way apart. His arms were
folded about his shanks; his bearded chin was on his knees--while his gaze was
fixed upon Fuchsia.

She, on her side, while noticing his childlike scrutiny, gave him no cause to
feel embarrassed, for she smiled when their eyes met, but kept her gaze wander-
ing about the walls and ceiling, or turning to Titus asked him whether he had
noticed this or that on his last visit.

But a time came when a silence fell upon the cave. It was the kind of silence
that becomes hard to break. But it was broken in the end, and, strangely enough,
by Mr Flay himself, the least forthcoming of the three.

"Ladyship... Lordship," he said.

"Yes, Mr Flay?" said Fuchsia.

"Been away, banished, many years, ladyship," he opened his hard-lipped mouth
as though to continue, but had to close it again for the lack of a phrase. But
after a while he commenced again. "Lost touch, Lady Fuchsia, but forgive me--
must ask you questions."

"Of course, Mr Flay, what sort of questions?"

"I know the sort," said Titus--"about what's happened since I was last here
and what's been discovered, isn't it, Mr Flay? And about Barquentine's being
dead and..."

"Barquentine dead?" Flay's voice was sudden and hard.

"Oh yes," said Titus. "He was burned to death, you know, wasn't he, Fuchsia?"

"Yes, Mr Flay. Steerpike tried to save him."

"Steerpike?" muttered the long, ragged, motionless figure.

"Yes," said Fuchsia. "He is very ill. I've been to see him."

"You haven't!" said Titus.

"I certainly have and I shall go again. His burns are terrible."

"I don't want you to see him," said Titus.

"Why not?" the blood was beginning to mount to her cheeks.

"Because he's..."

But Fuchsia interrupted him.

"What... do... you... know... about... him?" she said very softly and slowly,
but with a shake in her voice--"Is it a crime for him to be more brilliant than
we could ever be? Is it his fault that he is disfigured?" And then in a rush--"
or that he's so brave?"

She turned her eyes to her brother and seeing there, in his features something
infinitely close to her, something that seemed to be a reflection of her own
heart, or as though she was looking into her own eyes--

"I'm sorry," she said, "but don't let's talk about him."

But this is just what Flay wanted to do. "Ladyship," he said. "Barquentine's son--
does he understand--has he been trained--Warden of the Documents--Keeper
of the Groan law--is all well?"

"No one can find his son, or whether he ever had a son," said Fuchsia. "But
all is well. For several years now Barquentine has been training Steerpike."

Flay rose suddenly to his feet as though some invisible cord had plucked at
him from above, and as he rose he turned his head to hide his anger.

"No! No!" he cried to himself, but there was no sound. Then he spoke over his
shoulder.

"But Steerpike is ill, ladyship?"

Fuchsia stared up at him. Neither she nor Titus could understand why he had sud-
denly got to his feet.

"Yes," said Fuchsia. "He was burned when he tried to save Barquentine who was on
fire--and he's been in bed for months."

"How much longer, ladyship?"

"The doctor says he can get up in a week."

"But the Ritual! The instructions; who has given them? Who has directed the Pro-
cedure--day by day--interpreted the Documents--O God!" said Flay, suddenly unable
to control himself any longer. "Who has made the symbols come to life? Who has
turned the wheels of Gormenghast?"

"It is all right, Mr Flay. It's all right. He does not spare himself. He was not
trained for nothing. He is covered in bandages but he directs everything. And all
from his sickbed. Every morning. Thirty or forty men are there at a time. He in-
terviews them all. Hundreds of books are at his side--and the walls are covered
with maps and diagrams. There is no one else who can do it. He is working all the
time, while he lies there. He is working with his brain."

But Flay struck his hand against the wall of the cave as though to let out his
anger.

"No! No!" he said. "He's no Master of Ritual, ladyship, not for always. No love,
ladyship, no love for Gormenghast."

"I wish there wasn't any Master of Ritual," said Titus.

"Lordship," said Flay after a pause, "you are only a boy. No knowledge. But you
will learn from Gormenghast. Sourdust and Barquentine, both burned up," he con-
tinued, hardly knowing that he spoke aloud... "father and son... father and son..."

"Maybe I'm only a boy," said Titus hotly, "but if you know how we've come here
today, by the secret passage under the ground (which I found by myself, didn't
I, Fuchsia?) then..." but Titus had to stop for the sentence was too involved
for him.

"But do you know," he continued, starting afresh, "we've been in the dark, with
candles, sometimes crawling but mostly walking all the way from the castle, ex-
cept for the last mile where the tunnel comes out, only you'd never know it,
under a bank, like the mouth of a badger's set--not too far from here on the
other side of the wood where you first saw us, so it was difficult to find your
cave, Mr Flay, because last time I came was mostly on horseback and then through
the oakwood--and, O Mr Flay, was it a dream or did I really see a flying thing
and did I tell you about it? I sometimes think it was a dream."

"So it was," said Flay. "Nightmare; and no doubt of it." He seemed to have no
desire to talk to Titus about the "flying thing'.

"Secret tunnel to the castle, lordship?"

"Yes," said Titus, "secret and black and smelling of earth and sometimes there
are beams of wood to keep the roof up and ants everywhere."

Flay turned his eyes to Fuchsia as though for confirmation.

"It's true," said Fuchsia.

"And close by, ladyship?"

"Yes," said Fuchsia. "In the woods across the near valley. That's where the tun-
nel comes out."

Flay stared at them both in turn. The news of the underground passage seemed to
have had a great effect on him, although they could not think why--for although
to them it had been a very real and forbidding adventure, yet from bitter exper-
ience they knew that what was wonderful to them was usually of little interest
to the adult world.

But Mr Flay was hungry for every detail.

"Where did the passage start from within the castle? Had they been seen in the
corridor of statues? Could they find their way back to this corridor when the
tunnel opened out into that silent and lifeless world of halls and passageways?
Could they take him to the bank in the wood where the tunnel ended?"

Of course they could. At once--and thrilled that a grownup, for Fuchsia never
thought of herself as one, could be as excited by their discovery as they were
themselves--they were soon on their way to the wood.

Flay had almost at once seen more in their discovery than Fuchsia and Titus
could have guessed. If it were so, that within a few minutes of his cave, there
was, as it were, for Flay, an open door that led into the heart of his ancient
home a road which he could tread, if he wished, when the broad daylight lay
upon the woods and fields five feet above his head, then surely his power to
root out whatever evil was lurking in Gormenghast, to trace it to its source,
was enormously increased. For it had been no easy thing to enter the castle
unobserved and to make, sometimes by moonlight, those long journeys above
ground from his cave to the Outer Walls, and from them across the quadrangles
and open spaces to the inner buildings and the particular rooms and passage-
ways he had in mind.

But if what they said was true, he would, at any time of the day or night, be
able to emerge from behind that statue in the corridor of carvings, to find
the gaunt anatomy of the place laid bare about him.



FORTY-FIVE



The days flowed on, and the walls of Gormenghast grew chill to the touch as
the summer gave way to autumn, and autumn to a winter both dark and icy. For
long periods of time the winds blew night and day, smashing the glass of win-
dows, dislodging masonry, whistling and roaring between towers and chimneys
and over the castle's back.

And then, no less awesome, the wind would suddenly drop and silence would grip
the domain. A silence that was unbreakable, for the bark of a dog, or the sud-
den clang of a pail, or the far cry of a boy seemed only real in that they ac-
centuated the universal stillness through which, for a moment, they rose, like
the heads of fish, from freezing water--only to sink again and to leave no
trace.

In January the snow came down in such a way that those who watched it from be-
hind countless windows could no longer believe in the sharper shapes that lay
under the blurred pall, or the colours that were sunk in the darkness of that
whiteness. The air itself was smothered with flakes the size of a child's fist,
and the terrain bulged with the submerged features of a landscape half-remem-
bered.

In the wide, white fields that surrounded the castle, the birds lay dead or
leaned sideways stiffening for death. Here and there was the movement of a bird
limping, or the last frantic fluttering of a small ice-gummed wing.

From the castle windows it seemed that the dazzling snow had been scattered
with small coals, or that the fields had become smallpox'd with the winter-mur-
der'd hosts. There was no clear stretch of snow untriturated by this widespread
death; no drift without its graveyard.

Against the blind brilliance of their background, the birds, whatever their
natural plumage, appeared as black as jet, and differed only in their silho-
uette, whose meticulous contours might have been scored with a needle so ex-
quisite was the drawing of their beaks, like thorns, the hairs of their feath-
ers, their delicate claws and heads.

It seemed that, upon the vast funeral linen of the snowscape, each bird of all
these hosts had signed, with an exquisite and tragic artistry, the proof of
its own death, had signed it in a language at once undecipherable and eloquent
--a hieroglyphic of fantastic beauty.

And the snow that had killed them, covered them; covered them with a touch
that was the more terrible for its very tenderness. But for all its layer on layer
of blinding powder, there were always birds upon the point of death--always this
scattered, jet-black multitude. And on every side there were still those that
limped, or stood shivering, or pushed their agonizing way, breast deep through
the voluminous and lethal pall, leaving behind them their little trenches in the
snow to show where they had been.

And yet, for all this mortality, the castle was full of birds. The Countess,
her heart heavy in the knowledge of so much thirst and pain, had taken every
opportunity to encourage the wildfowl to enter. No sooner had the ice formed
in the hundreds of baths and basins set about the castle than it was broken a-
gain. Meat, bread crumbs and grain were laid in trails to encourage the birds
to enter the warmer air within the castle. And yet, in spite of these entice-
ments (and, fearless with hunger, thousands of birds, including owls, heron
and even birds of prey were to be found within the walls), the castle was yet
surrounded with the dead and dying. The severity of the weather had made of
the castle a focal point. Not only had the bird-life of the immediate region
been drawn to Gormenghast, but the forests and moors of far distant places had
become empty. The sheer numbers of these migratory birds, descending snow-blind,
famished and deadly weary upon the castle--descending hourly, out of the snow-
thick sky, was sufficient for so great a death-roll, even though Gormenghast
was open sanctuary.

The Countess had proclaimed (to the great inconvenience of those concerned) the
dining-hall to be their hospital. There, huge, redhaired and solitary, she moved
among them, nursing them back to strength. Branches of trees were brought in
and propped against the walls. The tables were turned upside down so that those
birds that cared to, could perch upon the upturned legs. After some while the
place was loud with birdsong, with the strident shouting of crows and jackdaws,
and with a hundred various thin or mellow voices.

What birds could be saved from the snow were saved, but it lay too deep and soft
for it to be possible for any rescuing beyond the reach of an outstretched hand
from a low window.

For a month or more the castle was snowbound. A number of the doors that opened
on the outside world had been broken by the piled up weight. Of those that stood
the strain, none were usable. Lights burned everywhere within the walls of Gor-
menghast, for every window was either boarded up or heavily coated.

What Mr Flay would have done had the underground tunnel never been discovered,
or had Titus never told him of it, it is hard to say. The drifts about his cave
were of such dangerous and voluminous dimensions, that it is doubtful whether
he could have escaped being drawn sooner or later out of his depth. Apart from
this, his chances of surviving the cruel cold, and of keeping himself from
starving, would have been slender, for all his knowledge.

But all these problems were solved by the existence of the tunnel. It was now a
commonplace for him to make his way, a candle in his hand, along its earth-smell-
ing length, with its miles of roots and its floor littered with the skulls and
bones of small animals. For many parts of the tunnel had been the retreat of
foxes, rodents and vermin of all kinds. It had been used both as a refuge from
such weather as they were now experiencing and from their foes. His candle, held
at arm's length before him, would light up familiar root formations that told
him of a spinney overhead, or would disclose the secret cities of the ants.

Free of snow and invaluable as it was as a means of gaining access to the castle,
yet the darkness was foul with death and decay, and there was no cause for Flay
to linger on those long and friendless journeys below ground.

On the first occasion that he had emerged at the castle end of the tunnel and
had followed the passageway and had come upon the outskirts of that region of
lifeless halls and corridors, and when he had moved further into the silence,
as Titus had done, he had felt something of the awe that had so terrified the
boy and he had lifted his bony shoulders up to his ears and thrust his jaw for-
ward as his eyes turned this way and that as though he were being threatened
by some invisible foe.

But when after a dozen daylight journeys he had explored a section of the des-
erted tract to his satisfaction, he retained no vestigeof the apprehension that
first affected him.

On the contrary, he began to make the silent halls peculiarly his own, in the
way that he had unconsciously identified himself with the mood of Gormenghast
forest.

It was not in his nature to proceed hot-foot upon his quest for the castle's e-
vil. These things could not be hurried. He must establish his position as he
went along.

And so (after he had found the few steps that led up to the rear of the monument
in the corridors of carvings), he confined his midnight journeys, for the first
few weeks, to discovering what changes had taken place since he was last in Gor-
menghast, in the nocturnal habits of the populace. His life in the woods had
taught him patience and had made even more remarkable that power, which he had
always had, of losing himself against his background. Saving for broad daylight
he had no need to hide; he had only to stand still and he was absorbed into a
wall, into a shadow or into rotten wood-work. When he lowered his head, his hair
and beard were but another cobweb in the gloom, and his rags the sunless hart's-
tongue that flourished in the dank grey corridors.

It was a strange experience for him to watch, from one point of vantage or an-
other, the familiar faces he had once known so well.

Sometimes they would pass within a few feet of him, some a little older, some a
little younger, some a little different from what he remembered; others, who were
youths or boys when he was exiled, now hardly recognizable.

But for all his ability to conceal himself, he took no risks, and it was a long
time before he made his long midnight journeys of reconnaissance and began to
discover where almost everyone of interest to him was likely to be found at var-
ious hours of the day or night.

His late master's room had never been opened since his death. Flay had noticed
this with grim approval. He had gazed down at the floor outside Sepulchrave's
door, where, for over twenty years, he stretched himself for sleep. And he had
looked along the corridor and the dreadful night returned to his mind--the night
when the earl had walked in his sleep, and had later given himself up to the owls --
and the night when he, Flay, had fought the chef of Gormenghast and put him to
the sword.

And Flay was forced to turn himself into both a thief and a hoarder. This gave
him little pleasure, but was necessary in order that he should keep alive at all.
Within a short time he had discovered how to enter the cat-room through the door
of a loft, and to arrive at the kitchen by way of the Stone Lanes.

It had become an absurdity for him to make his return journey every morning along
the tunnel and to spend the day in his cave. There was little he could do at the
cave surrounded as it was with the deep snow-drifts. He could neither hunt for
food nor gather enough fuel with which to warm himself. But in the Lifeless Halls
there was all that he needed.

He had come across a small room, voluptuously soft with dust; a small, square
place with a carved mantelpiece and an open grate. There were several chairs, a
bookcase and a walnut table on which, beneath the dust, the silver, glass and
crockery were laid out for two.

It was here that Flay established himself. His larder consisted of little more
than bread and meat, fresh supplies of which were always plentiful in the Great
Kitchen.

He took no advantage of the ample opportunities he had to vary his diet. As for
his drinking water, it was only necessary for him to make his way at any hour af-
ter midnight and dip his iron can into the rain-water of a near-by cistern.

Judging by the distances he had to cover during his journeys to and fro among the
empty halls, and judging in particular by the distance between the room with the
fireplace and the opening in the corridor of carvings (the only entrance he had
found to the world he had previously known), he knew that lighting fires in his
room involved no risk. Had smoke, for sake of argument been seen to rise into
the air above a forgotten tract of the castle and were it to have caused any in-
terest, it would have been as easy for the hypothetical observer to have found
the chimney and then to have found a way into the compartment, fathoms below, as
for a frog to play the fiddle. There, on the bitter winter evenings, Mr Flay en-
joyed a comfort he had never experienced before. Had his exile in the woods not
inured him to loneliness, then he must surely have found these long days insup-
portable. But isolation was now a part of him.

The silence of the Lifeless Halls, like the silence of the snow-bound world out-
side, was limitless. It was a kind of death. The very extent of the hollow ex-
panses, the uncharted labyrinth that made, as it were, the silence visible, was
something to raise the hairs upon the neck of any but those long used to loneli-
ness. And Mr Flay, in spite of his numerous expeditions through this dead world,
this forgotten realm of Gormenghast, was nevertheless unable to locate its boun-
daries. It is true that after a long search, guided to some extent by Titus' in-
structions, he had found the steps that led up the corridor of carvings, but save
for this and the few locked doors through which he had heard voices, he had found
no other frontier points between his world and theirs.

But in the small hours of one morning, as he returned to his room after a raid
upon the kitchen, something happened which turned the rest of his winter into
something less isolated but more terrible. He had left the corridor of carvings
a mile or more behind, and was deep in his own realm, when he decided that in-
stead of taking his usual path along the narrow and extended passageway to the
east, he would explore an alternative corridor which, he imagined, would in its
own good time lead to his own district.

As he proceeded he made, upon the wall, following his usual custom, the rough
marks with white chalk which had more than once helped him to find his way back
to familiar ground.

After about an hour of twisting and turning, of crossing the open junctions of
radiating alleyways, of making a hundred arbitrary choices between this entrance
and that, this winding descent and that cold incline to a wider passageway--he
began to sweat with fear at the very thought of having taken no precautions for
his return journey. He knew that he would never have found his way back without
the chalk marks. Suddenly he began to feel hungry. At the same time, noticing
that his candle was burning low, he drew another from the half-dozen or more
that were always in his belt, and sitting down on the floor, placed his freshly
lit candle carefully on the ground before him, and opening a long, narrow-bladed
knife, began to cut himself a slice of bread.

To his right and left the darkness was as thick as ink. He sat illumined within
the aura of candle flame, his face and rags and hands and hair dramatically lit.
Behind him on the wall his shadow hovered heavily. He had stretched out his legs
before him and was about to sink his teeth for the second time into the bread
when he heard the peal of laughter.

Had it not been for its terrible strength and for the fact that it came from behind
him--from the other side of the wall against which he leaned--he would have
had no option but to recognize it as a cry of madness in his own brain--something
that he had heard with the ears of his mind.

But there was no question of this. It had nothing to do with him, or his imagi-
nation; he was not mad. But he knew that he was in the presence of madness. For
the demoniacal cry or howl was something that brought Flay to his feet as though
he were drawn upwards on a fish-hook--something that took him, without his know-
ing that he had moved, to the opposite side of the passage where, flattened
against the wall as though at bay, and with his head lowered he stared at the
cold bricks against which he had been leaning, as though the wall itself were a-
ffected by the lunacy it was hiding and was watching him, its every brick de-
ranged.

Mr Flay could hear his sweat splashing on the stones at his feet. His mouth was
leather-dry. His heart was thumping like a drum. And he had nothing to see. Only
the candlelight shining steadily at the base of the opposite wall.

And then it came again, with a kind of double note--almost as though, whatever
throat it was that was giving vent to this ghastly laughter, was curiously form-
ed--as though it were able to throw out two voices at once.

There was no question of an echo for there was no repetition and no overlapping--
but a kind of duplex horror.

This time, the high pealing note tailed off into a thin whine, but even in this
ghostly termination there was the two-fold quality, the terrible, petrifying
sense of double madness.

For some while after silence had returned, Mr Flay could not move. He had been
struck. His sense of privacy had been shattered; his inability to rationalize and
make sense out of the small hours was like an insult, an insult hurled against his
narrow but proud mind. And his fear, his naked fear of something he could not see,
but something which was within a few yards of him--it was this that froze his limbs.

But the silence continued and there was no repetition, and at last he picked the
candle from the floor, and with more than one glance behind him, he moved rap-
idly back the way he had come, following the chalk marks until at last he ar-
rived at the fateful parting of the ways. Thereafter he was on his own ground
and he strode it without hesitation until he arrived at his room.

It was, of course, impossible to let the matter rest. The enigmatic horror of
that laughter was with him all the time, and no sooner had the sun risen on the
following day than the grim place drew him. It was not that he wished to in-
dulge himself with the vile thrill of a repetition, but rather that the mystery
should be brought forward into the rational daylight, and that whatever it was,
beast or human, it must stand revealed, for his deepest interests were those of
the onetime first servant of Gormenghast--of a loyalist who could not bear to
think that in the ancient castle there were forces or elements at work, happen-
ings that were apart from the ceremonial life, secrets and practices that, for
all he knew, were deadly poison in the castle's body.

It was his intention to explore further along the terrifying passage and if pos-
sible to double back down some parallel artery when opportunity offered, and so
discover if he could, some clue to what lay on the other side of the wall.

And this is what he did but with no success. Day after day he threaded his way
through the cold brick lanes crossing and recrossing his own tracks, losing him-
self a score of times a day--returning over and over again to the original cor-
ridor for reference--unable to comprehend the tortuous character of the architect-
ure. Every now and again, on returning to the place where he had heard the wild
laughter he listened, but there was never any sound but the beating of his own
heart.

There seemed no other way for him but to come again to that dread place, not in
the daylight, but at the selfsame time as before, when the small hours of the
morning sucked the courage from heart and limb. If he should hear it again, that
crazed laughter, and if it was repeated and repeated, then with that sound to
guide him it was possible that he could run to earth, in the darkness, what had
foiled him by day.

And so, fighting down his terror, he set out in the icy blackness of the early
hours. He came eventually to the brick corridor; and when he was still some dis-
tance away he heard a sound of crying and shouting. And when he was nearer still,
a loud calling to and fro, as if something was calling to itself for it seemed
to be the same voice that was answering.

But there was fear in the voice, or voices, and what struck Mr Flay most, as he
listened with his ear to the wall, was that the cries were weaker than before.
Whatever it was that cried had lost a lot of strength. But it was in vain that
he tried to trace the sounds to their source. His questings through those same
mazes of masonry that he had searched by daylight were fruitless. Directly he
had left the corridor, the silence came down like an impalpable weight and the
sharpness of his hearing was of no avail.

Again and again he did all in his power to locate the suffering creature, for
Flay had begun to realize that it was nearing the end of its strength. It was
not so much terror that he now felt as a blind pity. A pity that drew him to
the place night after night. It was as though he had this nameless tragedy u-
pon his conscience; as though his being there to listen to the weakening voice,
was in some way helpful. He knew that this was not so, but he could not keep
away.

The night came when for all his listening there was no sound, and from that
time onwards the silence remained unbroken.

He knew that in some way the end had come to some demented thing. What it was
that had laughed with that double note, that had cried out and answered itself
with the same flat and terrible voice, he never knew. He never knew that he was
the last to hear the voices of their ladyships Cora and Clarice, nor that he
had been within a few feet of those apartments into which they had once been
lured. He never knew that behind the locked doors of this place of incarcera-
tion the Twins had languished, their brains losing what grip they had, their
madness mounting, until, when their provisions began to fail them, and Steer-
pike no longer came, they knew that death was on his way.

When weakness overpowered them they lay down side by side and staring at the
ceiling, they died at the same moment, on the other side of the wall.



FORTY-SIX



While Flay, in his wilderness of hollow halls, was brooding upon the shock he
had sustained, and fretting at its insoluble nature, Steerpike, now up and about
once more, was losing no time in establishing his position as Master of Ritual.
He was under no illusions as to what the reaction of the castle would be, when
it became borne in upon them that he was performing no stop-gap office. To nei-
ther be old, nor to be the son of Barquentine, nor one of the accepted school
of hierophants, nor indeed to have any claim upon the title, save that of being
the only disciple of the drowned cripple's, and of having the brains to perform
the onerous office, was an anything but encouraging inception.

Nor was he, physically, any longer personable. His hunched shoulders, his pal-
lor, his dark-red eyes had never encouraged intimacy even supposing he had ever
courted it. But now, how much the more so was he likely to be shunned, even in
a society that laid no claim to beauty.

The burns upon his face and neck and hands were there to stay. Only the worms
could put an end to them. The effect of the face was of something skewbald; the
taut crimson tissue, forming fiery patterns against the wax-like pallor of his
skin. His hands were bloodred and silky; their creases and wrinkles like those
on the hand of a monkey.

And yet he knew, that although he created a natural revulsion among those about
him, the reason for his disfigurement stood in his favour. It was he who had (as
far as the castle knew) risked his life to save the hereditary Master. It was he
who had suffered delirium and excruciating pain because he had had the courage
to try and wrest from death's grip a keystone of the Gormenghast tradition. How,
in that case, could his diabolical appearance be held against him?

And what is more he knew, however prejudiced his opponents might be, that in the
end they had no option but to accept him, in spite of his burns, his background,
and the unproven rumours which he knew were in constant circulation--to accept
him, for the simple reason that there was no one else with the necessary know-
ledge at his fingertips. Barquentine had divulged his secrets to no one else.
The very tomes of cross-reference would have been beyond the powers of even the
most intelligent of men to comprehend, unless, as a preliminary, he were school-
ed to the symbols involved. The principle upon which the arrangement of the li-
brary was based was, in itself, something which had taken Steerpike a year to
unravel, even with Barquentine's irritable guidance.

But cunningly and by slow degrees, as he went about his work, he evoked a grudg-
ing acceptance and even a kind of bitter admiration. By not so much as a hair's
breadth did he deviate from those thousand letters of the Groan law, that day by
day in one form of ritual or another, were made manifest. With every evening he
knew himself more deeply entrenched.

His miscalculation over Barquentine's murder had been unforgivable and he did
not forgive himself. It was not so much what had happened to his body that gall-
ed him, but that he should ever have blundered. His mind, always compassionless,
was now an icicle--sharp, lucent and frigid. From now onwards he had no other
purpose than to hold the castle ever more tightly in the scalded palm of his
hand. He knew that his every step must be taken with the utmost precaution. That
although, on the face of it, the life of Gormenghast was, in spite of its rigid
tradition, a dark and shambling affair, yet there was always this consciousness
beneath the surface; there were those that watched and there were those that
listened. He knew that in order to fulfil his dreams he must devote, if neces-
sary, the next ten years to the consolidation of his position, taking no risk,
learning all the while, and building up a reputation not only as an authority
on all that pertained to the traditions of the place, but as someone who, inde-
fatigable in his zeal, was nevertheless difficult to approach. This would both
leave what free time he had for his own purposes, and help to create for himself
the legend of a saint, someone removed, someone beyond questioning, for whom,
in his early days, the tests of fire and water had not been too terrible to en-
dure when the soul of Gormenghast was in jeopardy.

The years lay spread before him. To the younger generation he would be a kind
of god. But it was now in the diligence and exactness of his offices that he
must carve for himself the throne that he would one day occupy.

For all the evil of his early years he knew that, though from time to time he
had been suspected of insurrection and worse, yet now with his feet well set
upon the gold road of advancement, he was (with the darkest of his deeds but
a week or two behind him) as free as ever he had been from any question of be-
ing unmasked.

He was now close upon twenty-five years old. The fire that had mottled his face
had taken no lasting toll of his strength. He was now as wiry and tireless as
before the catastrophe. He whistled to himself, between his teeth, tunelessly
as he stood at the window of his room and stared out across the snow.

It was mid-day. Against a dark sky, Gormenghast Mountain, for all its rugged-
ness, was swathed as white as wool. Steerpike stared through it. In a quarter
of an hour he would be on his way to the stables, where the horses would be
lined up for his inspection. It being the anniversary of the death of a ne-
phew of the fifty-third Countess of Groan, in his day a daring horseman, he
would see that the grooms were in mourning and that the traditional equine
masks were being worn at the correct angle of dejection.

He held up his hands and placed them before him against the window pane. Then
he spread them out like starfish, and examined his nails. Between the scarlet
fingers and all about them was the white of the distant snow. It was as though
he had placed his hand upon white paper. Then he turned and crossed the room
to where his cape was folded over the back of a chair. When he had left the
room and had turned the key and was on his way down the stairway, his mind
turned for a moment to the Twins. It had been an untidy business in many ways,
but perhaps it was as well that circumstances beyond his control had forced
the solution. Even at the time of his burns, the re-stocking of their larder
had been long overdue. By now they could no longer be alive.

He had gone through his papers, and had refreshed his memory as to exactly
what provisions they were likely to have had left on the day of his burning,
and from his none too simple calculations, he deduced that they must have
died from starvation on about that day when, swathed like a lagged pipe in
frosty weather, he first rose from his sick bed. In point of fact they died
two days later.



FORTY-SEVEN


I


As the days went by, Titus was becoming more and more difficult to control.
In the long dormitories where after dark the boys of his own age would light
their shielded candles, squat in groups, perform strange rites or eat their
pilfered cakes, Titus was no watcher of the scene. He was no mere watcher
from the safety of his bed, when, in fierce and secret grapple, old scores
were settled in deathly silence while, in his cubicle by the dormitory door,
the formidable janitor slept like a crocodile upon his back. The erratic
breathing of this man, his tossings and turnings, his very wheezings and
mutterings were an open book to Titus and his confederates. They all con-
veyed a certain depth of sleep, which at its deepest was shallow enough. But
it was silence that they feared, for silence meant that his eyes were open
in the darkness.

As sacred as the fact that there had always been an Earl of Gormenghast and
always would be, and that when the time came he would be virtually unapproach-
able, a man out of range both socially and for reason of his intrinsic dif-
ference--as sacred as all this, was the tradition that as a boy the Earl of
Gormenghast must be in no way treated as something apart. It was the pride
of the Groans that their childhood was no time of cotton-wool.

As for the boys themselves, they found little difficulty in putting this into
practice. They knew that there was no difference between themselves and Ti-
tus. It was only later that they would think otherwise. And in any case what
a child may become in his later years is of little interest to his friends
or his foes. It is the world of here and now that matters most. And so Titus
fought with the rest in the breathless dormitory--and from time to time was
caught out of his bed and was caned by the janitor.

He took the risk and he took the punishment. But he hated it. He hated the
ambiguity of it all. Was he a lord or an urchin? He resented a world in which
he was neither one thing nor another. That his early trials would fit him for
his responsibilities in later life, made no appeal to him. He was not inter-
ested in his later life and he was not interested in having responsibilities.
Somehow or other the whole thing was unfair.

And so he said to himself: "All right! So I'm the same as anyone else, am I?
Then why do I have to report to Steerpike every evening, in case I'm lost?
Why do I have to do extra things after classes--when none of the others have
to? Turning keys in rotten old locks. Pouring wine all over turrets--walking
here and there until I'm tired! Why should I do all this extra if I'm not
any different? It's a rotten trick!"

The professors found him difficult, wayward, and on occasions, insolent. All
except Bellgrove, for whom Titus had a fondness and an inexplicable respect.


II


"Are you thinking of doing any work this afternoon, or were you planning to
spend it in chewing that end of your pen, dear boy?" asked Bellgrove leaning
forward over his desk and addressing Titus.

"Yes, sir!" said Titus with a jerk. He had been far away, in a day dream.

"Do you mean, “Yes, sir, I'm going to work” or “Yes, sir, I'm going to
chew my pen”, dear boy?"

"O work, sir."

Bellgrove flicked a lock of his mane back over his shoulder with the end of
his ruler.

"I am so pleased," he said. "You know, my young friend, that one day when I
was about your age, I was suddenly taken with the idea of concentrating upon
the paper which my old schoolteacher had set me. I don't know what gave me
the idea. I had never thought of doing such a thing before. I had heard of
people who had tried it, you know--of paying attention, of putting their
minds to the work in hand--but I had never thought of doing it myself. But--
and here you must listen, my dear boy--what happened? I will tell you. I
found that the paper which my dear master had set me was quite, quite simple.
It was almost an insult. I concentrated more than ever. When I had finished
I asked for more. And then more again. All my answers were quite perfect.
And what happened? I became so fascinated at finding I was so clever, that
I did too much and became ill. And so I warn you--and I warn the whole class.
Take care of your health. Don't overdo it. Go slow--or you may have a break-
down just as I had, long ago, when I was young, dear boys, and ugly, just as
you are, and just as dirty, too, and if you haven't got your work finished
by four o'clock, Master Groan, my dear child, I shall be forced to keep
you in until five."

"Yes sir," said Titus and at that moment he felt a dig in the back. Turning
he found that the boy behind him was passing him a note. He could not have
chosen a much worse moment for it, but Bellgrove had closed his eyes in a
resigned and lordly way. When Titus unfolded the scrap of paper, he found it
was no message but a crude caricature of Bellgrove chasing Miss Irma Prune-
squallor with a long lasso in his hand. It was very feebly drawn and not
particularly funny, and Titus, who was in no mood for it, felt suddenly ang-
ry, and screwing it up threw it back over his shoulder. This time Bellgrove's
attention was caught by the pellet.

"What was that, dear boy?"

"Just a screwed up bit of paper, sir."

"Bring it up here, to your old master. It will give him something to do,"
said Bellgrove. "He can work away at it with his old fingers, you know.
After all there is nothing much he can do until the class ends." And then
musing aloud, "O babes and sucklings... babes and sucklings... how tired
of you your old headmaster gets."

The pellet was retrieved and passed to Titus who got up from his desk. And
then suddenly when he had approached to within a few feet of the headmaster's
desk he put the screwed-up drawing into his mouth, and with a gulp, swallowed
it.

"I've swallowed it, sir."

Bellgrove frowned, and an expression of pain flitted across his noble face.

"You will stand on your desk," he said. "I am ashamed of you, Titus Groan.
You will have to be punished."

When Titus had been standing on his desk for a few minutes he received an-
other tap upon the back. He had already been in trouble through the stupid-
ity of the boy behind and in a flash of anger "Shut up!" he cried, and swing-
ing around at the same instant found himself staring at Steerpike.

The young Master of Ritual had come silently through the door of the school-
room. It was his duty to make a periodic round of the classes, and it was an
understood thing that in this official capacity it was not for him to knock
before he entered--only a few boys had noticed Steerpike's arrival--but the
whole class turned at the sound of Titus' voice.

Gradually it dawned upon the class that the reason for the stiff, frozen pos-
ition that Titus was in, his head turned sharply over his shoulder, his body
swivelled around on the narrow pivot of his hips, his hands clenched, his head
lowered angrily--that the reason for his tenseness was that his "shut-up' must
have been addressed to none other than the man with the skewbald face, Steer-
pike himself.

Standing upon the lid of his desk Titus was in the unusual position of looking
down at the face of this authority who had suddenly appeared as though out of
the floor, like an apparition. The face looked up at him, a wry smile upon the
lips, the eyebrows raised a little, and a certain expectancy in the features,
as though denoting that although Steerpike realized that it was impossible for
the boy to have guessed who it was that had tapped him on the back, and was
therefore guiltless of insolence, yet, an apology was called for. It was
unthinkable that the Master of Ritual should be spoken to in this way by any-
one--let alone a small boy--whatever his lineage.

But no apology came. For Titus, directly he realized what had happened--that
he had cried "shut-up' to the arch-symbol of all the authority and repression
which he loathed--knew instinctively that this was a moment in which to dare
the blackest hell.

To apologize would be to submit.

He knew in the darkness of his heart's blood that he must not climb down. In
the face of peril, in the presence of officialdom, ageold and vile, with its
scarlet hands, and its hunched shoulders, he must not climb down. He must cling
to his dizzy crag until, trembling but triumphant in the enormous knowledge of
his victory, he stood once more upon solid ground, secure in the knowledge that
as a creature of different clay he had not sold his birthright out of terror.

But he could not move. His face had gone white as the paper on the desk. His
brow was sticky with sweat and he was heavy with a ghastly tiredness. To cling
to his crag was enough. He had not the courage to stare into the dark red eyes
that, with the lids narrowed across them, were fixed upon his face. He had not
the courage to do this. He stared over the man's shoulder, and then he closed
his eyes. To refuse to say he was sorry was all that his courage could stand.

And then, all at once he felt himself to be standing at a strange angle, and
opening his eyes he saw the rows of desks begin to circle in formation through
the air and then a far voice shouted as though from miles away as he fell hea-
vily to the floor in a dead faint.



FORTY-EIGHT



"I am having the most moving time, Alfred. I said I am having the most moving
time--are you listening or not? O it's too galling the way a woman can be court-
ed so splendidly, so nobly by her lover, only to find that her own brother is
about as interested as a fly upon the wall. Alfred, I said a fly upon a wall!"

"Flesh of my flesh," said the Doctor after a pause (he had been lost in rumi-
nation) "what is it that you want to know?"

"Know," answered Irma, with superb scorn. "Why should I want to know anything?"

Her fingers smoothed the back of her iron-grey hair, and then of a sudden, pounc-
ed upon the bun at the nape of her neck where they fiddled with an uncanny dex-
terity. It might have been supposed that her long nervous fingers had an eye
apiece so effortlessly did they flicker to and fro across the contours of the
hirsute knob.

"I was not asking you a question, Alfred. I sometimes have thoughts of my own.
I sometimes make statements. I know you think very little of my intellect. But
not everyone is like you--I can assure you. You can have no idea, Alfred, of
what is being done to me. I am being drawn out. I am finding treasures in my-
self. I am like a rich mine, Alfred. I know it, I know it. And I have brains
I haven't even used yet."

"Conversation with you, Irma', said her brother, "is peculiarly difficult. You
leave no loops, dear one, at the end of your sentences, nothing to help your
loving brother, nothing for his ever willing, ever eager, ever shining hook.
I always have to start afresh, sweet trout. I have to work my passage. But I
will try again. Now, you were saying...?"

"O Alfred. Just for one moment, do something to please me. Talk normally. I am
so tired of your way of saying things with all its figures of eight."

"Figures of speech! speech! speech!" cried the Doctor, rising to his feet and
wringing his hands, "why do you always say figure of eight? O bless my soul,
what is the matter with my nerves? Yes, of course I'll do something to please
you. What shall it be?"

But Irma was in tears, her head buried in a soft grey cushion. At last she
raised it and taking off her dark glasses, "It's too much," she sobbed. "When
even one's brother snaps one up. I did trust you!" she shouted, "and now you're
letting me down too. I only wanted your advice."

"Who has let you down?" said the Doctor sharply. "Not the Headmaster...?"

Irma dabbed her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief the size of a playing
card.

"It's because I told him his neck was dirty, the dear, sweet lord..."

"Lord!" cried Prunesquallor, "you don't call him that, do you?"

"Of course not, Alfred... only to myself... after all he is my lord, isn't
he?"

"If you say so," said her brother, passing his hand across his brow. "I sup-
pose he could be anything."

"O he is. He is. He's anything--or rather, Alfred, he's everything."

"But you have shamed him, and he feels wounded--proud and wounded, is that
it, Irma, my dear?"

"Yes, O yes. It is that exactly. But what can I do? What can I do?"

The doctor placed the tips of his fingers together.

"You are experiencing already, my dear Irma," he said, "the stuff of marri-
age. And so is he. Be patient, sweet flower. Learn all you can. Use what
tact God gave you, and remember your mistakes and what led up to them. Say
nothing about his neck. You can only make things worse. His resentment will
fade. His wound will heal in time. If you love him, then simply love him and
never fuss about what's dead and gone. After all you love him in spite of
all your faults, not his. Other people's faults can be fascinating. One's
own are dreary. Be quiet for a bit. Don't talk too much and can't you walk
a little less like a buoy in a swell?"

Irma got up from her chair and moved to the door.

"Thank you, Alfred," she said and disappeared.

Doctor Prunesquallor sank back on the couch by the window, and with an ease,
quite astonishing, dismissed his sister's problem from his mind and was once
more in the cogitative reverie from which she had interrupted him.

He had been thinking of Steerpike's accession to the key position that he now
occupied. He had also been reflecting upon the way he had behaved as a patient.
His fortitude had been matchless and his will to live quite savage. But for
the most part, the Doctor was turning over in his mind something that was quite
different. It was a phrase, which, at the height of Steerpike's delirium, had
broken loose from the chaos of his ravings--"And the Twins will make it five,"
the young man had shouted--"and the Twins will make it five."


FORTY-NINE

I

One dark winter morning, Titus and his sister sat together on the wide window-
seat of one of Fuchsia's three rooms that overlooked the South Spinneys. Soon
after Nannie Slagg had died Fuchsia had moved, not without much arguing and a
sense of dire uprooting, to a more handsome district--and to a set of rooms
which, in comparison with her old untidy bedroom of many memories, were full
of light and space.

Outside the window the last of the snow lay in patches across the countryside.
Fuchsia, with her chin on her hands and her elbows on the window-sill, was
watching the swaying motion of the thin stream of steel-grey water as it fell
a hundred feet from the gutter of a nearby building--for a small, restless
wind was blowing erratically and sometimes the stream of melted snow as it
fell from the high gutter would descend in a straight and motionless line to
a tank in the quadrangle below, and sometimes it would swing to the north and
stay outstretched when a gust blew angrily, and sometimes the cascade would
fan out in a spray of innumerable leaden drops and fall like rain. And then
the wind would drop again and the steady tubular overflow would fall once
more vertically, like a stretched cable, and the water would spurt and thud
within the tank.

Titus, who had been turning over the pages of a book, got to his feet.

"I'm glad there's no school today, Few," he said--it was a name he had start-
ed giving her--"it would have been Perch-Prism with his foul chemistry and
Cutflower this afternoon."

"What's the holiday for?" said Fuchsia with her eyes still on the water which
was now swaying to and fro across the tank.

"I'm not sure," said Titus. "Something to do with Mother, I think. Birthday
or something."

"Oh," said Fuchsia and then after a pause, "it's funny how one has to be told
everything. I don't remember her having birthdays before. It's all so inhuman."

"I don't know what you mean," said Titus.

"No," said Fuchsia. "You wouldn't, I suppose. It's not your fault and you're
lucky in a way. But I've read quite a lot and I know that most children see
a good deal of their parents--more than we do anyway."

"Well, I don't remember father at all," said Titus.

"I do," said Fuchsia. "But he was difficult too. I hardly ever spoke to him.
I think he wanted me to be a boy."

"Did he?"

"Yes."

"Oh... I wonder why."

"To be the next Earl of course."

"Oh... but I am... so it's all right, I suppose."

"But he didn't know you were going to be born, when I was a child, did he? He
couldn't have. I was about fourteen when you were born."

"Were you really..."

"Of course I was. And for all that time he wished I was you, I suppose."

"That's funny, isn't it?" said Titus.

"It wasn't funny at all--and it isn't funny now--is it? Not that it's your
fault..."

At that moment there was a knock at the door and a messenger entered.

"What do you want?" said Fuchsia.

"I have a message, my lady."

"What is it?"

"Her ladyship, the Countess, your mother, wishes Lord Titus to accompany me
back to her room. She is going to take him for a walk."

Titus and Fuchsia stared at the messenger and then at one another. Several
times they opened their mouths to speak but closed them again. Then Fuchsia
turned her eyes back to the melting snow--and Titus walked out through the
half open door, the messenger following him closely.


II


The Countess was waiting for them on the landing. She gestured the messenger
to be gone with a single, lazy movement to her head.

She gazed at Titus with a curious lack of expression. It was as though what
she saw interested her, but in the way that a stone would interest a geologist,
or a plant, a botanist. Her expression was neither kindly nor unkindly. It was
simply absent. She appeared to be unconscious of having a face at all. Her
features made no effort to communicate anything.

"I am taking them for a walk," she said in her heavy, abstracted, millstone
voice.

"Yes, mother," said Titus. He supposed she was talking of her cats.

A shadow settled for a moment on her broad brow. The word mother had perplexed
her. But the boy was quite right, of course.

Her massive bulk had always impressed Titus. The hanging draperies and scollop'd
shadows, the swathes of musty darkness--all this he found most awesome.

He was fascinated by her but he had no point of contact. When she spoke it was
in order to make a statement. She had no conversation.

She turned her head and, pursing her lips, she whistled with a peculiar ulu-
lation. Titus gazed up at the sartorial mass above him. Why had she wanted him
to accompany her? he wondered. Did she want him to tell her anything? Had she
anything to tell him? Was it just a whim?

But she had started to descend the stairs and Titus followed her.

From a hundred dim recesses, from favourite ledges, from shelves and draught-
proof corners, from among the tattered entrails of old sofas, from the scar-
red plush of chairs, from under clock-stands, from immemorial sun-traps, and
from nests of claw-torn paper--from the inside of lost hats, from among raft-
ers, from rusty casques, and from drawers half-open, the cats poured forth,
converged, foamed, and with a rapid pattering of their milk-white feet filled
up the corridors, and a few moments later had reached the landing and were on
their way, in the wake of their great mistress, down the stairway they obscur-
ed.

When they were in the open and had passed through an archway in the outer wall
and were able to see Gormenghast Mountain clear before them, with dark grey
snow on its cruel heights, the Countess waved her ponderous arm, as though she
were scattering grain, and the cats on the instant, fanning out, sped in every
direction, and leapt, twisting in the air, curvetting for the very joy of their
only release from the castle since first the snow came down. And though a number
of them sported together, rolling over one another, or sitting up straight with
their heads bridled back, tapped at each other sparring like fighters, only to
lose all interest of a sudden, their eyes unfocusing, their thoughts turning--
yet for the main the white creatures behaved as though each one were utterly
alone, utterly content to be alone, conscious only of its own behaviour, its
own leap into the air, its own agility, self-possessed, solitary, enviable and
legendary in a beauty both heraldic and fluent as water.

Titus walked by his mother's side. For all the interest in the scene before him
he could not help turning his eyes to his mother's face. Its vague, almost mask-
like character was something which he was beginning to suspect of being no index
to her state of mind. For more than once she had gripped his shoulder in her
big hand and led him from the path and without a word she had shown him, all but
shrouded by the ivy on a tree stem, a cushion of black star-moss. She had turned
off a rough track, and then pointed down a small snowfilled gully to where a fox
had rested. Every now and again she would pause and gaze at the ground, or into
the branches of a tree, but Titus, stare as he would, could see nothing remark-
able.

For all that the birds had died in their thousands, yet as Titus and his mother
drew near to a strip of woodland where the snow had melted from the boughs, and
small streams were running over the stones and snow-flattened grass, they could
see that the trees were far from empty.

The Countess paused, and holding Titus by his elbow, they stood motionless. A
bird whistled and then another, and then suddenly the small kingfisher, like a
blue legend, streaked along a stream.

The cats were leagues away. They breathed the sharp air into their lungs. They
roamed to the four quarters. They powdered the horizons.

The Countess whistled with a shrill sweet note, and first one bird and then an-
other flew to her. She examined them, holding them cupped in her hands. They were
very thin and weak. She whistled their various calls and they responded as they
hopped about her or sat perched upon her shoulders, and then, all at once a fresh
voice from the wood silenced the birds. At every whistle of the Countess, this
new answer came, quick as an echo.

Its effect on the Countess seemed out of all reason.

She turned her head. She whistled again and her whistle was answered, quick as
an echo. She gave the calls of a dozen birds and a dozen voices echoed her with
an insolent precision. The birds about her feet and on her shoulders had stiff-
ened.

Her hand was gripping Titus' shoulder like an iron clamp. It was all he could do
not to cry out. He turned his head with difficulty and saw his mother's face--
the face that had been so calm as the snow itself. It had darkened.

It was no bird that was answering her; that much she knew. Clever as it was, the
mimicry could not deceive her. Nor did it seem that whatever gave vent to the
varying calls was anxious to deceive. There had been something taunting about
the rapidity with which each whistle of the Countess had been flung back from
the wood.

What was it all about? Why was his arm being gripped? Titus, who had been fasci-
nated by his mother's power over the birds, could not understand why the calls
from the wood should have so angered her. For she trembled as she held him. It
seemed as though she were holding him back from something, as though the wood
was hiding something that might hurt him--or draw him away from her.

And then she lifted her face to the tree tops, her eyes blazing.

"Beware!" she cried and a strange voice answered her.

"Beware!" it called and the silence came down again.

From a dizzy perch in a tall pine, the Thing peered through the cold needles and
watched the big woman and the boy as they returned to the distant castle.



FIFTY


I


It was not until close upon the Day, that Titus learned how something quite un-
usual was being prepared for his Tenth birthday. He was by now so used to cere-
monies of one kind or another that the idea of having to spend his birthday
either performing or watching others perform some time-hardened ritual made no
appeal to his imagination. But Fuchsia had told him that there was something
quite different about what happened when a child of the line reached the age of
ten. She knew, for it had happened to her, although in her case the festivities
had been rather spoiled by the rain.

"I won't tell you, Titus," she had said, "it will spoil it if I do. O it's so lovely."

"What kind of lovely?" said Titus, suspiciously.

"Wait and see," said Fuchsia. "You'll be glad I haven't told you when the time
comes. If only things were always like that."

When the Day arrived Titus learned to his surprise that he was to be confined
for the entire twelve hours in a great playroom quite unknown to him.

The custodian of the Outer Keys, a surly old man with a cast of the left eye,
had opened up the room as soon as dawn had broken over the towers. Apart from
the occasion of Fuchsia's tenth birthday, the door had been locked since her
father, Sepulchrave, was a child. But now, again, the key had turned with a
grinding of rust and iron, and the hinges had creaked, and the great playroom
opened up again its dusty glories.

This was a strange way to treat a boy on his tenth anniversary; to immure him
for the entire day in a strange land, however full of marvels it might be. It
was true that there were toys of weird and ingenious mechanism; ropes on which
he would swing from wall to wall, and ladders leading to dizzy balconies--but
what of all this, if the door was locked and the only window was high in the
wall?

And yet, long as the day seemed, Titus was buoyed up by the knowledge that he
was there not only because of some obsolete tradition but for the very good
reason that he must not be allowed to see what was going on. Had he been abroad
he could not fail to have gained some inkling, if not of what lay in store for
him that evening, at least of the scale on which the preparations were being
conducted.

And the activity of the castle was fantastic. For Titus to have seen a tenth
of it must have taken the edge, not off his wonder or speculation, but off the
shock of pleasure that he was finally to receive when evening came. For he had
no idea what kind of activities were taking place. Fuchsia had refused to be
drawn. She remembered her own pleasure too keenly to jeopardize a hundredth part
of his.

And so he spent the day alone and save for those times when his meals were brought
in on the golden trays of the occasion, he saw no one until an hour before sunset.
At that hour four men came in. One of them carried a box, which when it was opened
revealed a few garments which Titus was invited to put on. Another carried a light
basketwork palanquin, or mountain-chair that rested on two long poles. Of the other
two, one carried a long green scarf, and the other a few cakes and glass of water
on a tray.

They retired while Titus got into his ceremonial clothes. They were very simple. A
small red velvet skull-cap and a seamless robe of some grey material that reached
to his ankles. A fine chain of gold links clasped the garment at his waist. These,
with a pair of sandals, were all that had been brought and while he strapped the
sandals he called to the men to re-enter.

They came in at once and one of them approached Titus with the scarf in his hand.

"Your lordship," he said.

"What's that for?" said Titus, eyeing the scarf.

"It's part of the ceremony, lordship. You have to be blindfolded."

"No!" shouted Titus. "Why should I be?"

"It's nothing to do with me," said the man. "It's the law."

"The law! the law! the law--how I hate the law," cried the boy. "Why does it want
me blindfolded--after keeping me in prison all day? Where are you going to take
me? What's it all about? Can't you talk? Can't you talk?"

"Nothing to do with me," said the man; it was his favourite phrase. "You see," he
added, "if we don't blindfold you it won't be such a surprise when you get there
and when we undo the scarf. And you see' (he continued as though he had suddenly
become interested in what he was talking about) "you see--with your eyes blind-
folded you won't have any idea of where you are going--and then, you know,
the crowds are going to be deathly silent and..."

"Quiet!" said another voice--it was the man who had the mountain-chair. "You have
overreached yourself! Enough sir, for me to say' (he continued, turning to the boy)
"that it will be for your pleasure and your good."

"It had better be," said Titus, "after all this!"

His longing to get out of the playroom mitigated his distaste for the blindfolding,
and after taking a drink of water and cramming a small cake in his mouth, he took
a step forward.

"All right," he said and standing before the scarf-man, he suffered himself to be
bandaged. At the second turn of the scarf he was in total blackness. After the fourth
he felt the cloth being knotted at the base of his head.

"We are going to lift you into the chair, your lordship."

"All right," said Titus.

Almost immediately after he was seated in the basket-work chair he found himself ris-
ing from the ground, and then after a word from one of the men, he felt himself mov-
ing forward through black space and the slight swaying of the men beneath him. Without
a word, or a pause, each man with an end of the long bamboo poles resting upon his
shoulder, they began to move ever more rapidly.

Titus had had no sensation of their leaving the room, although he knew that by now
they must have left it far behind. It was obvious that they were still within the
walls of the castle for he could both feel the frequent changes of direction which
the tortuous corridors made necessary, and also he could hear the hollow echoing of
the bearers' feet--an echoing which seemed so loud to Titus in his blindness that
he could not help feeling that the castle was empty. There was not a sound, not a
whisper in the whole labyrinthine place to compete with the hollow footfalls of the
men, with the sound of their breathing or with the regular creaking of the bamboo
poles.

It seemed that it would never end--this darkness, and these sounds, but suddenly a
breath of fresh air against his face told him that he was in the open. At the same
time he could feel that he was being borne down a flight of steps, and when they had
reached the level ground he felt for the first time that airborne jogging, as the
four men began to trot through an empty landscape.

And it was as utterly deserted as the castle. All the feverish activity of the day
had been brought to a close. The gentry, the dignitaries, the officials, the workmen,
the performers, the populace, man, woman and child--there was not one who had not
arrived at his appointed station.

And the bearers ran on over the darkening ground. Above their heads and reaching
down into the west was a great tongue of yellow light.

But with every movement that passed the lustre faded and the moon began to slide up
through the darkness of the east so that the light on Titus' upturned face grew sharp-
er and colder.

And the bearers ran on, over the dark ground.

There were no echoes now. Only the isolated sounds of the night--the scurry of some
small animal through the undergrowth, or the distant barking of a fox. From time to
time Titus could feel the cool sweet gusts of a night breeze blowing across his fore-
head, lifting the strands of his hair.

"How much further?" he called. It seemed that he had been floating in the basket chair
for ever.

"How much further? how much further?" he called again, but there was no reply.

It was impossible to carry so rare a burden as the seventy-seventh earl--to carry
him shoulder-high along forest tracks, across precarious fords and over stony slopes
of mountains and to have at the same time, while they kept running, any room in their
minds for anything else besides. All their awareness was focused upon his safety and
the measured smoothness of their rhythmic running. Had he called to them ten times
as loudly they would not have heard him.

But Titus was near to the end of his blind journey. He did not know it but the four
bearers who had, for the last mile or more, been loping through pinewoods, had come
suddenly upon an open shoulder of land. The ground swept downwards and away before
them in swathes of moon-chilled ferns and at the base of this slope lay what seemed
like a natural amphitheatre, for the land rose on all sides. The floor of this gigantic ba-
sin appeared at first sight to be entirely forested and yet the eyes of the bearers had
already caught sight of innumerable and microscopic points of light no bigger than pin-
pricks, that flashed, now here, now there among the branches of the distant trees. And
they saw more than this. They saw that in the air above the basin'd forest there was a
change of hue. In the darkness that brooded over the branches there was a subtle
warmth, a kind of smouldering dusk that in contrast to the cold moon, or to the glints
of light among the trees, was almost roseate.

But Titus knew nothing of this swarthy light. Nor that he was being taken down a steep
track through the ferns to a district where the great chestnuts far from forming a
solid forest, as it falsely appeared from the surrounding slopes, were marshalled a
furlong deep about the margin of a wide expanse of water. The points of light that
had caught the bearers' attention were all that they had been able to see of the moon-
lit lake when for a moment they had paused on a high open shoulder.

But what of the glow? It was not long before Titus knew all about it. He was by now
among the deep moon-dappled chestnut groves. His exhausted bearers, the sweat pour-
ing down their bodies and running into their eyes, were turning into a ride of an-
cient trees that led to the centre of the southern bank.

Had his vision been free he would have seen upon his left, and tethered to the low
branches of the nearby trees, a hundred or more horses. Their harnessings, bridles,
halters and saddles were slung across the higher branches. Here and there the moon-
light penetrating the upper foliage set a stirrup dazzling in the gloom or gloated
upon the leather of long traces. And then, a little further along the track where
the trees were not so numerous, there stood ranged in lines, as though for inspect-
ion, a great variety of carriages, carts and traps. Here where there was less cov-
ering, the moonlight shone almost unimpeded, and was by now so high and was casting
so strong a light that the varying colours of the carriages could be distinguished
one from another. The wheels of each were decorated with foliage of young trees
whose branches were threaded through the spokes, and with sunflowers also; in the
long horse-drawn cavalcade which a few hours previously had made its overland jour-
ney to the chestnut woods, there had not been one wheel out of the many hundreds,
that, in turning had not set the foliage revolving and the heads of sunflowers
circling in the dusk.

All this had been lost to the boy--all this and many another flight of fancy which
from hour to hour during the day had been set in motion or enacted according to old
customs whose origin or significance was long forgotten.

But the bearers were for the first time slackening their pace. Once again he leaned
forward, his hands grasping the basket-work rim of his chair. "Where are we?" he
shouted. "How much longer will it be? Can't you answer me?"

The silence about him was like something that hummed against his eardrums. This was
another kind of silence. This was not the silence of nothing happening--of empti-
ness, or negation--but was a positive thing--a silence that knew of itself--that
was charged, conscious and wide awake.

And now the bearers stopped altogether, and almost at once, across the stillness,
Titus heard the sound of approaching footsteps, and then--

"My lord Titus," said a voice, "I am here to bid you welcome and to offer you on
behalf of your mother, your sister and all who are here gathered, our felicita-
tions on your tenth birthday.

"It is our desire that what has been prepared for your amusement will give you
pleasure; and that you will find the tedium of the long and solitary day that now
lies at your back has been worth the suffering; in short, my Lord Titus, your mo-
ther the Countess Gertrude of Gormenghast, Lady Fuchsia and every one of your
subjects are hoping that what is left of your birthday will be very happy."

"Thank you," said Titus. "I would like to get down."

"At once, your lordship," said the same voice.

"And I'd like this scarf off my eyes."

"In one moment. Your sister is on her way to you. She will remove it when she has
taken you to the south platform."

"Fuchsia!" his voice was sharp and strained. "Fuchsia! Where are you?"

"I'm coming," she shouted. "Hold his arm, you man, there! How do you think he can
stand in the dark like that--give him to me, give him to me. Oh Titus," she panted,
holding her blind brother tightly in her arms, "it won't be long now--and O, it's
wonderful! wonderful! As wonderful as it was when it was all for me, years ago,
and it's a better night than I had, and absolutely calm with a great white moon
on top."

She led him along as she talked, and all at once the marginal trees were behind
them and Fuchsia knew that every step they took and every movement they made
was watched by a multitude.

As Titus stumbled at her side he tried to imagine in what kind of place he could
be. He could form no picture from Fuchsia's disjointed comments. That he was to
be taken to a platform of some kind, that there was a moon, and that the whole
castle seemed resolved to make amends for the long prefatory day he had spent
alone was all that he could gather.

"Twelve steps up," said Fuchsia, and he felt her placing his foot upon the first
of the rough treads. They climbed together, hand in hand, and when they reached
the platform she guided him to where a large horse-hair chair bloated with moon-
light, an ugly thing if ever there was one--a heavy beast with a purple skin that
had tired out the two cart horses by the time they had covered half the journey.

"Sit down," said Fuchsia, and he sat down gingerly in the darkness, upon the edge
of the ugly couch.

Fuchsia stood back from him. Then she raised both her arms above her head. In re-
ply to her signal a voice called out of the darkness. "It is time! Let the scarf
be unwound from his eyes!"

And another voice--quick as an echo--

"It is time! Let his birthday begin!"

And another--

"For his Lordship is ten."

Titus felt Fuchsia's fingers undoing the knot and then the freeing of the cloth
about his eyes. For a moment he remained with his lids closed, and then he slowly
opened them and as he did so he rose involuntarily to his feet with a gasp of won-
der.

Before him, as he stood, one hand at his mouth, his eyes round as coins, there was
stretched, as it were, across the area of his vision, a canvas--a canvas hushed and
unearthly. A canvas of great depth; of width that spread from east to the west and
of a height that wandered way above the moon. It was painted with fire and moonlight
--upon a dark impalpable surface. The lunar rhythms rose and moved through darkness.
A counterpoint of bonfires burned like anchors--anchors that held the sliding woods
in check.

And the glaze! The earthless glaze of that midnight lake! And the multitude across
the water, motionless in the shadow of the sculptured chestnut trees. And the bon-
fires burning!

And then a voice out of the paint cried "Fire!" and a cannon roared, recoiled and
smoked upon the bank. "Fire!" cried the voice again, and then again, until the gun
had bellowed ten times over.

It was the sign, and suddenly the picture, as though at the stroke of a warlock's
wand, came suddenly to life. The canvas shuddered. Fragments detached themselves
and fragments came together. From the height to the depths it was that that Titus
saw.

Firstly the moon, by now immediately overhead; a thing as big as a dinner plate and
as white, save where the shadows of its mountains lay. The moon whose lustre was
over everything like a veil of snow.

And all about the moon, the midnight sky. It came down, this sky, like a curtain,
expansive as nemesis and under the sky the hilltops in a haze of ferns that over-
lapping one another with their fronds, descended the hill, fold after fold until
the chestnut forest, luxuriant in its foliage, its upper canopies shining, stretch-
ed on Titus' eye-level in a great curve. And under these trees, along the water's
edge, as thick upon the ground as nettles in wasteland, was the life of the distant
castle, the teeming populace. A hundred at a time would be contained in the cast-
shadow of a single tree; a hundred more be lit in a lozenge of moonlight. And then
the swarms of faces, thick as bees, illumined and flushed in the red light of the
lakeside bonfires. Now that the gun had fired its salute, this long strip of the
canvas had begun to seethe. Across the lake it was too far for Titus to be able to
make out any single creature, but movements ran through these crowds as a ripple
of wind over a field of tares. But this was not all. For these ripples, these trem-
bling blotches of shadow and moonlight, these movements on the shore, were being
simultaneously repeated in the lakes. Not the least motion of a head beneath the
trees but its ghost had moved beneath it in the water. Not the flicker of a fire
was lost in the reflecting water.

And it was this nocturnal glass in whose depths shone the moon-bathed foliage of
the chestnut trees that held the eye the longest. For it was nothingness, a sheet
of death; and it was everything. Nothing it held was its own although the least
leaf was reflected with microscopic accuracy--and, as though to light these aqueous
forms with a luminary of their own, a phantom moon lay on the water, as big as a
plate and as white, save where the shadow of its mountains lay.


II


And yet this visual richness gave less a sense of satisfaction than of expectancy.
This was a setting if ever there were one--but a setting for what? The stage was
set, the audience was gathered--what next? Titus turned his eyes for the first
time to where his sister had been standing, but she was no longer there. He was
alone on the platform with the horse-hair chair.

And then he saw her seated on a log with her mother beside her. From their feet
the land dipped gradually to the water and on this decline was gathered what was
pleased to think itself the upper stratum of Gormenghast society. To right and
left the ground swarmed with officials of every kind--and over Titus, and over
them all were the spreading terraces of the trees.

Finding himself alone, Titus sat down on the purple chair and then, to make him-
self more comfortable, curled his feet under him, and rested his arm on the bol-
ster-like arm. He lifted his eyes to the lake with its upside down picture of all
that was spread above it. Fuchsia trembled as she sat beside her mother. She re-
membered how the chestnut woods had held back their secret until this moment,
years ago, and how they would now throw out their startling characters. She turn-
ed her head to see whether she could catch her brother's eye, but he was staring
straight ahead, and as she watched him his hand went to his mouth again and she
saw him sit forward on the couch as rigidly as though he had been turned to stone.

For immediately ahead of him, across the unblemished lake, figures as tall as the
chestnut trees themselves were straddling out of the shadows, and to the verge of
the opposite bank, where they stood, unbelievably. Before them, their liquescent
stage lay spread. The reflections of their fantastically elongated bodies were
already deep in the lake.

There were four of them, and they came out one after another from various parts
of the forest. They appeared to take no noticeof one another although they turned
their heads to right and left. The movements of their bodies appeared stiff and ex-
aggerated, but extraordinarily eloquent.

From the high masks that topped them, to the grass on which they balanced could
not have measured less than thirty feet.

They were beings of another realm and the crowds that stared up at them from
below had not only been shrivelled up into midgets, but were also made to appear
grey and prosaic. For these four giants were in every way most beautiful and ex-
traordinary. The woods behind them seemed darker than ever now, for these lofty
spectres were tinted under the moon's rays with colours as sharp and barbaric as
the plumage of tropical birds.

From one to another, Titus turned his gaze, unable to resist the movements of
his eyes, although he longed to dwell on each one separately.

Upon their lofty shoulders they carried their heads like kings--abstracted and
inscrutable. Their dignity was something that infused their slightest movement.
In the stiff and measured raising of an arm the very humus appeared to be drawn
out of the soil below. The tilting of their faces to the sky made the sky naked
--made the moon guilty.

The group had stalked out of that part of the forest that faced Titus across the
lake. Their four heads were very different. That of the most northerly was crown-
ed with a high conical hat like a dunce's, under which a great white head resem-
bling a lion's turned slowly to left and right, upon the shoulders that supported
it. The eyes, perfectly circular, were painted the purest emerald green and when
the head was raised they shone to the moon.

But its mane was its glory. From close above the eyes, and from the sides and
back of the head it billowed forth luxuriantly and fell as far as the waist in
undulations of imperial purple. From the waist downwards--a twenty foot drop to
the feet of the stilts--a prodigious skirt descended like a cascade, weighted
down by its own length of material. It was quite black, as were those of the other
three. This mutual darkness of the lower two thirds of their bodies gave an illu-
sory effect to their upper parts. The skirts could be seen, and their reflections
could be seen, but with nothing like the same clarity. It was, at times, almost as
though their coloured "heights' were floating. The arms emerged from halfway down
the mane. In either hand the Lion held a dagger.

Next to this figure with its purple mane, stood one as far removed as the Lion from
the natural, but more sinister in that the wolfish character of the head was not
redeemed by either a noble cast of feature, or lightened by the charade-like nature
of the long white dunce's hat.

This vulpine monster was undeniably wicked--but so decoratively wicked! The head was
crimson, and the cocked and pointed ears were deepest azure. This azure was repeated
in the circles that were scattered over the grey hide of the upper body. In either
hand was an enormous cardboard bottle of poison. As with the Lion the black skirt
fell like a wall of darkness.

Even now as it stood in what might be thought of as the "wings' for they had not set
foot in the watery stage, their every movement was something awesome. For the Wolf
to lift its poison-bottle was for a shudder to run through the swarming populace;
for the Lion to shake its mane was for the lake to be circled with gooseflesh.

Next to the Wolf, and separated by half an acre of upturned heads was the Horse--a
horse unlike any other travesty of that noble animal that had ever been concocted--
and yet it was more a horse than anything else. It was monstrous, in its own way,
with an expression of such fatuous melancholy that Titus could neither laugh nor
cry for neither expression was true to what he felt.

Upon its head, this giantess wore an enormous basket-work hat whose brim cast a cir-
cular shadow upon the moonlit water far beneath. Long powder blue ribbons fell lud-
icrously from the crown of the hat and clustered about the hairy shoulder ten feet
below. All about the lower part of the crown the hat was decorated with grass and
livid lilies.

From beneath all this resplendence the loose-lipped head of the Horse protruded
with baleful idiocy. Like the Lion, its long maudlin head was white, but red cir-
cles were painted on either side between the eyes and the curve of the jaws. The
neck was long and absurdly supple, with a stubby fringe of orange hair along the
spine.

It was clothed in an apple-green smock from under which the long skirt descended,
hiding the tall and perilous stilts that protruded for no more than six inches b-
eneath the black hem. In one hand the Horse carried a parasol and in the other a
book of poems. From time to time the Horse would slowly turn its head and incline
it, with a sort of sad and smirking deference, to the Lamb upon its left.

This Lamb, a little less in height than its companions, for all its towering sta-
ture, was a mass of pale golden curls. Its expression was one of unspeakable sanc-
tity. However it moved its head--whatever the angle, whether it scanned the heavens
in search of some beatific vision, or lowered its face as though to muse upon its
own unspotted breast--there was no escape from its purity. Between its ears, and
set upon the golden curls was a silver crown. The swathes of a grey shawl were drawn
demurely over the shoulders, across the golden breast and fell in sculpturesque
folds of some length, so that there was less to be seen of the inevitable skirt.
It carried nothing in its hands for they were clasped upon its heart.

These four, with their heads as big as doors, yet appearing almost small in propor-
tion to the awe-inspiring loftiness of the bodies, these four had not stood at the
margin of the reflecting lake for more than a minute before, with startling unanim-
ity of purpose, they set forth upon the waters.

Titus, crying with excitement, gripped the rotten upholstery of the chair on either
side, his fingers working their way into the ancient horse-hair.

The Four ahead of him appeared to be moving upon the surface across the lake. Their
strange, spidery strides took them far from the shore, but the hem of their skirts
were still dry! Titus could in no way understand it, until suddenly he realized that
in spite of the clear reflections that seemed to plunge into fathomless water, the
great lake was in reality but a few inches deep. It was a film.

For a moment he was disappointed. There is danger in deep water, and danger is more
real than beauty in a boy's mind. But this disappointment was immediately forgotten
for there could have been nothing of all this had the lake not been the merest glaze
of water. The masque of the Four upon the lake was designed, many hundreds of years
ago, for this setting among the nocturnal chestnuts.

The gestures of the Lion, grandiloquent, absurd yet impressive--the shaking of its
purple mane, from which tremendous operation the other three invariably drew back--
the terrible, side-long progress of the Wolf with the poison bottle as he manoeuvred
himself ever nearer the golden lamb, and the outlandish gait of the Horse with its
garnished hat, as it straddled from one end of the lake to the other, reading from
its book of poems, while with its parasol it beat time in upper air to the rhythm of
the verses--all this was a formula as ancient as the walls of the castle itself.

And all the while this masked drama, played upon stilts as tall as trees and upon a
lake that reflected not only the progress of the performers, but the moon over whose
liquid image the monstrous Horse would invariably stumble as though he had been trip-
ped--all the while the silence continued unbroken. For although a strong strain of
the ridiculous ran through everything, this was not the dominant impression. When the
Horse-creature tripped or waved its parasol; when the Wolf was thwarted and its lower
jaw fell open like a drawbridge; when the Lamb cast its eyes to the moon, only to be
distracted in the throes of its sanctity by the whisking of the Lion's mane--when
these things happened there was no laughter but only a kind of relief, for the grand-
eur of the spectacle, and the godlike rhythms of each sequence were of such a nature
that there were few present who were not affected as by some painful memory of child-
hood.

At last, the time-hallowed ritual drew to its end, and the lofty creatures stepped
from the shallow lake, and turning before they disappeared into the deep woods, bowed
across the shallows to Titus, as might the gods of Poetry and Battle bow to one an-
other, as equals across enchanted water.

The Four, as they departed, took the silence with them. The rest of the night was by
way of being a release from perfection, and was given over to every kind of scatter-
ed activity.

Between the bonfires that surrounded the lake and warmed the air above the chestnut
forest, fresh fires were being lit, and under the lake-ward boughs hampers and bas-
kets of provisions were being unpacked.

The Countess of Groan, who had remained throughout the masque as immovable as the
log on which she sat, now turned her head over her shoulder.

But Titus was no longer on the platform, nor was Fuchsia at her side.

She rose from the log, the traditional place of honour, and moved abstractedly down
to the lake's edge between lines of functionaries, who on seeing her rise knew that
they were now free for the rest of the night to disport themselves as they wished.

Against the shimmering lake her massive form loomed darkly save for the moonlight
on her shoulders and her dark red hair.

She gazed about her but seemed to be unaware of the crowds that thronged the water's
edge.

A giant picnic was piecing itself together as the fish and fruit and loaves and pies
were laid out beneath the trees, and it was not long before the lake was surrounded
by an unbroken feast.

And while all these preparations were going on, shrill packs of urchins raced through
the chestnut woods, swarmed among the branches, or streaming out of the trees, pranced
or cart-wheeled to the centre of the lake, their reflections flying beneath them, and
the film of water spouting from their feet. And when a pack would meet its rival pack,
then hand to hand, a hundred watery combats would churn the shallows, as scattered
over the aqueous arena the children grappled, the moonlight sliding on their slippery
limbs.

And Titus watching longed with his whole being to be anonymous--to be lost within the
core of such a breed--to be able to live and run and fight and laugh and if need be,
cry, on his own. For to be one of those wild children would have been to be alone among
companions. As the Earl of Gormenghast he could never be alone. He could only be lonely.
Even to lose himself was to be lost with that other child, that symbol, that phantom,
the seventy-seventh Earl of Gormenghast who hovered at his elbow.

Fuchsia had signalled him to jump from the platform, and together they had raced into
the chestnut woods immediately behind, and for a moment or two, in the darkness, they
had held each other in the deep shadows of the trees and had heard one another's
hearts beating.

"It was wicked of me," said Fuchsia at last, "and dangerous. We are supposed to have
our midnight supper at the long table, with mother. And we must go back soon."

"You can if you like," said Titus, who was trembling with a deep hatred of his status.
"But I'm leaving."

"Leaving?"

"Leaving for ever," said Titus. "For ever and ever. I am going into the wild, like...
Flay... and like that..."

But he could think of no way to describe that wisp of a creature who had floated
through a forest of gold oaks.

"You can't do that," said Fuchsia. "You would die and I wouldn't let you."

"You couldn't stop me," cried Titus. "Nobody could stop me--" and he began to tear
off the long grey tunic, as though it were in his path.

But Fuchsia, her lips trembling, held his arms to his sides.

"No! no!" she whispered passionately. "Not now, Titus. You can't..."

But with a jerk he freed himself, but immediately tripped in the darkness and fell
upon his face. When he raised himself, and saw his sister above him he pulled her
down, so that she knelt at his side. In the distance they could hear the cries of
the children by the lake, and then, suddenly, the harsh ringing of a bell.

"That is for supper," whispered Fuchsia, at last, for she had waited in vain for
Titus to speak, "and after supper we will go along the shore together and see the
cannon."

Titus was crying. The long day he had spent alone, the lateness of the hour, the
excitement, the sense of his essential isolation--all these things had worked to-
gether to weaken him. But he nodded. Whether Fuchsia saw his silent answer to her
question or not, she made no further remark, but lifting him from the ground, she
dried his eyes with the loose sleeve of her dress.

Together they picked their way to the edge of the wood, and there were the bonfires
again and the crowds and the lake with the chestnut trees beyond, and there was the
platform where he had sat alone, and there was their mother at the long table with
her elbows on the moonlit linen, and her chin in her hands, while before her, and
seemingly unnoticed, for her gaze was fixed upon the distant hills, the customary
banquet lay spread in all its splendour, a rich and crowded masterpiece, the gold
plate of the Groans burning with a slow and mellow fire and the crimson goblets
smouldering at the moon.



FIFTY-ONE


I


And all the while the progress of the seasons, those great tides, enveloped and
stained with their passing colours, chilled or warmed with their varying exhala-
tions, the tracts of Gormenghast. And so, as Fuchsia wanders across her room in
search of a lost book, the south spinneys below her window are misty with a green
hesitation, and a few days later the sharp green fires have broken out along the
iron boughs.


II


Opus Fluke and Flannelcat are leaning over the verandah railing above the Profes-
sors' Quadrangle. The old quadman is sweeping the dust thirty feet below them. It
is thick and white with heat, for the spring has long since passed.

"Hot work for an old fellow!" shouts Fluke to the old man. The ancient lifts his
head and wipes his brow. "Ah!" he calls up in a voice that could not have been
used for weeks. "Ah, sir, it's a dry do." Fluke retires and in a few minutes has
returned with a bottle which he has stolen from Mulefire's apartment. This he low-
ers on a length of string to the old man, far below in the dust.


III


In his study, and locked away from the world, Prunesquallor, lying rather than sit-
ting in his elegant arm chair, reads with his crossed feet resting just below the
mantelpiece.

The small fire in the grate lights up his keen, absurdly refined, and for all its
weirdness of proportion, delicate face. The magnifying lenses of his spectacles,
which can give so grotesque an effect to his eyes, gleam in the firelight.

It is no book of medicine that he is so absorbed in. On his knee there is an old
exercise book filled with verses. The handwriting is erratic but legible. Sometimes
the poems are in a heavy, ponderous and childish hand--sometimes in a quick, ex-
cited calligraphy, full of crossings-out and misspellings.

That Fuchsia should have ever asked him to read them was the most thrilling thing
that he had ever experienced. He loved the girl as though she were his own daugh-
ter. But he had never sought her out. Little by little, as the times went by she
had taken him into her confidence.

But as he reads, and while the autumn wind whistles in the branches of the garden
trees, his brow contracts and he returns his gaze to the four curious lines which
Fuchsia had crossed out with a thick pencil--

　　　　　How white and scarlet is that face,
　　　　　Who knows, in some unusual place
　　　　　The coloured heroes are alight
　　　　　With faces made of red and white.


IV


It is a cold and dreary winter. Once again Flay, who is now as much at home in the
Silent Halls as he had been in the forests, sits at the table in his secret room.
His hands are deep in his ragged pockets. Before him is spread a great sail of paper
that not only covers the table, but descends in awkward folds and creases to the
floor on every side. A portion near its centre is covered with markings, laboriously
scripted words, short arrows, dotted lines, and incomprehensible devices. It is a
map; a map which Mr Flay has been working upon for over a year. It is a map of the
district that surrounds him--the empty world, whose anatomy, little by little, he is
piecing together, extending, correcting, classifying. He is, it seems, in a city that
has been forsaken and he is making it his own; naming its streets and alleys, its av-
enues of granite, its winding flights and blackened terraces--exploring ever further
its hollow hinterlands, while over all, like a lowering sky, as continuous and as
widespread are the endless ceilings and the unbroken roof.

He is no master of graphology. A pen sits awkwardly in his hand. But both while en-
gaged upon his expeditions and when adding with painful slowness to his map, during
the long days his life in the pathless woods is standing him in good stead.

With no stars to help him, his sense of orientation has become uncanny.

Tonight he will keep watch upon Steerpike's door as has become his custom in the
small hours, and if the opportunity arises, he will follow him upon whatever busi-
ness he is bent. Until then he has seven hours in which to push forward with this
task of reconnaissance which has now become a passion.

He takes his hands out of his pockets and with a scarred and bony forefinger he trac-
es for himself the path he proposes to follow. It takes a northward course sweeping
in a number of arcs before it zig-zags through a veritable cross-hatching of narrow
alleys to reappear as a twelve foot corridor with a worn pavement on its either side.
This corridor heads undeviatingly to the north and fades out in a series of small,
hesitant dots that part of Mr Flay's paper that has all but overlapped the table. It
has reached the margin of his knowledge to the north.

He pulls the chart towards him and the loose paper on the far side of the table slides
upwards from the floor, and then, in creeping forwards to beneath his outstretched
head, it opens out its wastes of untrodden whiteness with an arctic yawn.


V


And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury
one another and it is spring again and yet again and the small streams that run over the
rough sides of Gormenghast Mountain are big with rain while the days lengthen and sum-
mer sprawls across the countryside, sprawls in all the swathes of its green, with its gold
and sticky head, with its slumber and the drone of doves and with its butterflies and
its lizards and its sunflowers, over and over again, its doves, its butterflies, its lizards,
its sunflowers, each one an echo-child while the fruit ripens and the grotesque boles
of the ancient apple trees are dappled in the low rays of the sun and the air smells of
such rotten sweetness as brings a hunger to the breast, and makes of the heart a sea-
bed, and a tear, the fruit of salt and water, ripens, fed by a summer sorrow, ripens and
falls... falls gradually along the cheekbones, wanders over the waste-lands listlessly, the
loveliest emblem of the heart's condition.

And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury
one another and the field-mice draw upon their granaries. The air is murky, and the sun is
like a raw wound in the grimy flesh of a beggar, and the rags of the clouds are clotted.
The sky has been stabbed and has been left to die above the world, filthy, vast and blood-
y. And then the great winds come and the sky is blown naked, and a wild bird screams
across the glittering land. And the Countess stands at the window of her room with the
white cats at her feet and stares at the frozen landscape spread below her, and a year
later she is standing there again but the cats are abroad in the valleys and a raven
sits upon her heavy shoulder.

And every day the myriad happenings. A loosened stone falls from a high tower. A fly
drops lifeless from a broken pane. A sparrow twitters in a cave of ivy.

The days wear out the months and the months wear out the years, and a flux of moments,
like an unquiet tide, eats at the black coast of futurity.

And Titus Groan is wading through his boyhood.



FIFTY-TWO



A kind of lull had settled upon the castle. It was not that events were lacking but
that even those of major importance had about them a sense of unreality. It was as
though some strange wheel of destiny had brought to the earth its preordained lacuna.

Bellgrove was now a husband. Irma had not wasted a moment before she began to raise
those formidable earthworks that can so isolate the marital unit from the universe.

She always knew what was best for Bellgrove. She always knew what he most needed.
She knew how the headmaster of Gormenghast should behave and she knew how his infer-
iors should behave in his presence. The staff were terrified of her. There was no
difference between them and their pupils where Irma was concerned. It was a case of
whispering behind the hand; tip-toeing past the door of Bellgrove's apartment; look-
ing to the condition of their fingernails, and, worst of all, attending their classes
at the scheduled time.

She had changed almost out of recognition. Marriage had given her vanity both drive and
direction. It had not taken her long to discover the inherent weakness of her husband.
She loved him no less for this, but her love became militant. He was her child. Noble,
but ah, no longer wise. It was she who was wise and in her loving wisdom it was for her
to guide him.

From Bellgrove's point of view it was a sad story. Having had her in the palm of his
hand--it was now a bitter business, this reversal. He had been unable to keep it up.
Little by little, his lack of will, his native feebleness became apparent. She had
found him, one day, practising a series of noble expressions before the mirror. She
saw him shake his beautiful white locks, and she had heard him chiding her for some
imaginary misdemeanour. "No, Irma," he was saying. "I will not have it. I would be
gratified if you would remember your station," and then he had smirked, as though
ashamed, and on looking into the mirror again, had seen her standing behind him.

But he knew himself to be her superior. He knew that there was in him a kind of gold-
en fund, a reserve of strength, but at the same time he knew that this strength was
of no avail for he had never drawn upon it. He did not know how to. He didn't even
know exactly what kind of strength it was. But it was there, and it was real to him
in the way that an ultimate innocence, like a nest egg, awaits its moment in the
breasts of sinners.

And yet for all his subjugation it was a relief to be able to be weak again. Grad-
ually he gave himself up to it, bearing in mind, all the time, his own secret super-
iority--as a man--and as a broken reed. Better, he argued to have been a thing of
mystery and music and to have been broken than to have never been a reed, but to
have been composed of some prosaic if quite unbreakable material with about as much
mystery or music in its bloodstream as there is love in a condor's eye.

All these thoughts, of course, he kept strictly to himself. To Irma's mind he was her
lord upon a leash. To the staff he was simply on a leash. In his own mind, leash or
not, a philosophy was growing. The philosophy of invisible revolution.

He peered at her, not unlovingly, through his white eyelashes. He was glad she was
there, mending his ceremonial gown. It was better than being baited by the staff as
in the old days. After all, she couldn't tell what he was thinking. He watched her
pointed nose. How had he ever admired it?

But oh the glee of thinking to himself. Of dreaming of impossible escapes, or of re-
versing the status quo, so that once again she would be in his power, as on that mag-
ical evening in the dappled arbour. But then--the strain of it, the strain of it.
There was no joy in will-power.

He settled back in his chair and revelled in his weakness, his old mouth twisting a
little at one corner, his eyes half-closing as he relaxed the leonine features of
his magnificent old head.


The sense of unreality which had spread through the castle like some strange malaise
had muffled Bellgrove's marriage so that although there was no lack of incident, and
no question as to its importance, a sharpness, an awareness was missing and nobody
really believed in what was happening. It was as though the castle was recovering
from an illness, or was about to have one. It was either lost in a blur of unfocused
memory or in the unreality of a disquietening premonition. The immediacy of the cas-
tle's life was missing. There were no sharp edges. No crisp sounds. A veil was over
all things, a veil that no one could tear away.

How long it lasted was impossible to say, for although there was this general oppres-
sion that weighed on every action, all but annihilating its reality of significance,
making, for instance, of Bellgrove's marriage a ceremony of dream, yet the sense of
unreality in each individual was different; different in intensity, in quality, and
in duration, according to the temperaments of all who were submerged.

There were some who hardly realized that there was a difference. Thick bullet-headed
men with mouths like horses, were scarcely aware. They felt that nothing mattered
quite as much as it used to do, but that was all.

Others were drowned in it, and walked like ghosts. Their own voices, when they spoke,
appeared to be coming to them from far away.

It was the influence of Gormenghast, for what else could it have been? It was as
though the labyrinthian place had woken from its sleep of stone and iron and in draw-
ing breath had left a vacuum, and it was in this vacuum that its puppets moved.

And then came a time when, on a late spring evening, the castle exhaled and the dist-
ances came forward in a rush, and the far away voices grew sharp and close, and the
hands became aware of what they were grasping, and Gormenghast became stone again
and returned to its sleep.

But before the weight of emptiness had lifted, a number of things had happened which,
although when seen in retrospect appeared vague and shadow, had nevertheless taken
place. However nebulous they had appeared at the time their repercussions were con-
crete enough.

Titus was no longer a child, and the end of his schooldays was in sight. He had, as
the years went by become more solitary. To all save Fuchsia, the Doctor, Flay and
Bellgrove he presented a sullen front. Beneath this dour and unpleasing armour his
passionate longing to be free of his hereditary responsibilities smouldered rebelliously.
His hatred, not for Gormenghast, for its very dust was in his blood-stream, and he
knew no other place, but for the ill fate that had chosen him to be the one upon
whose restless shoulders there would rest, in the future, the heavy onus of an an-
cient trust.

He hated the lack of choice: the assumption on the part of those around him that
there were no two ways of thinking: that his desire for a future of his own making
was due to ignorance or to a wilful betrayal of his birthright.

But more than all this he hated the confusion in his own heart. For he was proud. He
was irrationally proud. He had lost the unselfconsciousness of childhood where he
was a boy among boys; he was now Lord Titus and conscious of the fact. And while he
ached for the anonymity of freedom he moved erect with a solitary pride of bearing,
sullen and commanding.

And it was this contradiction within himself that was as much as anything else the
cause of his blunt and uncompromising manners. With the youths of his own age he had
become more and more unpopular, his schoolmates seeing no cause for the violence of
his outbursts. He had ripped the lid off his desk for less than nothing. He could be
dangerous and as time went on his isolation grew more complete. The boy who had been
ready for any act of mischief, for any midnight venture, in the long dormitories, was
now another being!

The tangle of his thoughts and emotions--the confused groping for an outlet for his
wayward spirit, his callow lust for revolt, left no room in him for those things that
would once have quickened his pulse. He had found that to be alone was more intoxica-
ting. He had changed.

And yet, in spite of the long years that had passed since he, Doctor Prunesquallor
and Professor Bellgrove had played marbles in the small fort, he was still as able to
delight in the most childish of amusements. He would often be found sitting by the
moat, and launching by the hour small wooden boats of his own making. But more ab-
stractedly than in the old days, as though for all his apparent concentration, as he
carved with his penknife the tapering bows or the blunt stern of some monarch of the
waves--his mind was really far away.

Yet he carved away at these small craft and he named them as he launched them upon
their perilous missions to the isles of blood and spices. And he would visit the Doc-
tor and watch him making those peculiar drawings which Irma had never cared for, those
drawings of small spidery men, a hundred on a page, engaged now in battle, now in con-
clave, now in scenes of hunting, now in worship before some spidery god. And for the
hour he would be very happy. And he would visit Fuchsia and they would talk and talk
until their throats were sore... would talk about all there was in Gormenghast for
they knew no other place--but neither to his sister nor to Bellgrove who would some-
times, when Irma was engaged elsewhere, shamble down to the moat's edge to launch a
ship or two--neither to him, nor to the Doctor did Titus ever unburden himself of his
secret fear, the fear that his life would become no more than a round of preordained
ritual. For there was no one, not even Fuchsia who, however much she might sympathize,
could help him now. There was no one who would dare to encourage him in his longing
to free himself of his yoke to escape and to discover what lay beyond the margins of
his realm.



FIFTY-THREE



The unearthly lull that had descended upon Gormenghast had not failed to affect so
imaginative and highly strung a nature as Fuchsia's. Steerpike who, although sensitive
to atmosphere in a high degree, was less submerged, and moved as it were with his craft-
y head protruding above the weird water. He could see Fuchsia, as she walked in a trans-
parent world, far below the surface. Acutely aware of this trance-like omnipresence,
Steerpike, following the course of his nature, was at once concerned with how best he
could use this drug to further his own ends, and it was not long before he had come to
a decision.

He must woo the daughter of the House. He must woo her with all the guile and artistry
in his power. He must break down her reserve with an approach both simple and candid,
with an assumed gentleness, and a concentration upon those things which he could pre-
tend they had in common: and with a charming yet manly deference to her rank. At the
same time he would both give the impression of those fires within him that were un-
doubtedly there, if for the wrong reason, and by devious means, so engineer their as-
signations and coincidental meetings that she would often come upon him in hazardous
situations, for he knew already how much she admired his bravery.

But at the same time he must keep his face hidden as much as possible. He had no
illusions about its power to horrify. That she was impregnated with the heavy yet far
away atmosphere of the place, was no reason for him to assume that she was impervious
to the fearfulness of his ruined face. They would meet after dark, when with no visual
distraction she could gradually realize that only in him could she find that complete
companionship, that harmony of mind and spirit--that sense of confidence, of which
she had been so starved. But she was starved for more than this. He knew her life
had been loveless--and he knew of the warmth and vibrancy of her nature. But he
had always waited. And now the time had come.

He laid his plans. He made his first advances in the dusky evenings. As Master of
Ceremonies, it was not difficult for him to know what parts of the castle would be
clear of possible intruders at varying times of the late evening.

Fuchsia, deeply affected by the unearthly atmosphere that had made of her ancient
home a place that she could hardly believe in, was led by subtle degrees, through a
period of weeks, to a state of mind where she felt it a natural thing to have her
advice solicited, as to this point or that, and for Steerpike to tell her of what
had happened to him during the day. His voice was quiet and even. His vocabulary,
rich and flexible. She was attracted by his grip upon whatever subject they convers-
ed about--it was so far beyond her own powers. Her admiration for his vitality of
mind developed, in its turn, into an excited interest in the whole being, this
Steerpike, this nimble, fearless confidant of their nocturnal meetings. He was un-
like anyone else. He was wide awake and alive to his fingertips. Her old revulsion
at the memory of his burned face and red hands became buried under the ever grow-
ing structure of this propinquity.

That she, the daughter of the Line, should see so much of an officer of the castle,
for unofficial reasons, was, she knew, a crime against her station. But she had been
so long a time alone. To be able to feel that she could interest anyone to the extent
of their wanting to see her night after night was something so new to her that it was
but a short way to the outskirts of that treacherous land whose paths she would so
soon be treading.

But she did not look ahead. Unlike this new companion, this man of the dusk, whose
every sentence, every thought, every action was ulterior, she lived in the moment of
excitement, savouring the taste of an experience that was enough in itself. She had
no instinct of self-preservation. She had no apprehension. For Steerpike had moved
towards her with a gradual and circuitous cunning until the evening came when their
hands met involuntarily in the darkness, and neither hand was withdrawn, and from
that moment, it seemed to Steerpike that his road to power was clear before him.

And for a long time everything continued to develop in the way he had foreseen, the
intimacy of their secret meetings leading them ever more deeply into, as Fuchsia
thought, each other's confidence.

But, with the evil knowledge of the power that was now his, Steerpike, indulging
himself in the anticipation of final conquest, made no rash attempt to seduce Fuch-
sia. He knew that with Fuchsia no longer a virgin, he would have her, if for no
other reason than that of simple blackmail, in the palm of his hand. But he was
not ready yet. There was a lot to be considered.

As for Fuchsia, it was all so new and tremendous to her that her emotions had
enough on which to feed. She was happier than she had ever been in her life.



FIFTY-FOUR



The disappearance of the Earl, Sepulchrave, Titus' father, and of his sisters,
the Twins, and of their terrible and secret ends; the death of Sourdust by
burning, and of his son Barquentine by fire and water, what of all this mys-
tery and violence in the eyes of the castle? They had spread themselves, these
horrors, over a period of twelve or more years, and although the minds, active
in their different ways, of the Countess, the Doctor, and Flay, had, from their
different angles, made periodic efforts to discover in the tragedies some com-
mon ground, yet no proof of foul play had yet been found which could support
their suspicions.

Flay alone knew the grizzly truth about the secret death of his master, Lord
Sepulchrave, and of his enemy the gross Swelter whom he had killed. This know-
ledge he had never divulged.

But his own banishment had been the result of Steerpike's gesture of disloyalty
to his mad master, when the skewbald man was a youth of seventeen or eighteen
years, and this disloyalty had remained rooted in Flay's mind. But of the in-
carceration and death of the Twins he knew nothing, although, witless of its
origins and significance, he had heard their terrible laughter as they died in
the hollow halls.

He had strained his brain and memory, as had the Doctor and the Countess, to
draw some significant conclusion from the common deaths by fire of the father
and son--Sourdust and Barquentine--and from the fact that Steerpike had been
the hero of both occasions. Try as they would they were unable to rationalize
their suspicions.

And yet there were, over the course of the years, small concrete although dis-
connected reasons for apprehension. As yet they fitted into no pattern, but
they were there, and they were not forgotten.

The Doctor had always been anxious to discover Steerpike's reason for leaving
his service and establishing himself as confidant and retainer of the vacant
Twins. His was no mind to find pleasure in such surroundings. His only reason
must have been for social advancement or for some darker motive. The identical
Twins had disappeared. Their note which Steerpike had found on their table had
told of their intention to kill themselves. Prunesquallor had got hold of this
note and compared its calligraphy with a letter Irma had once received from
them. He compared them in mirrors--he devoted an entire evening to their scru-
tiny. It seemed that they were by the same hand, the formation of letters big
and round and uncertain as a child's.

But the Doctor had known these retarded women for many years and he did not
believe, for all the oddness of their thwarted natures, that they would ever
take their own lives.

Nor did the Countess believe that they were capable of making an end to them-
selves. Their puerile ambition and vanity--and their only too obvious longing
to assume, one day, the roles in which they were always seeing themselves, the
roles of ladies, great and splendid, bedecked with jewels, precluded any such
idea as suicide. But there was no proof either way.

The Doctor had told the Countess of Steerpike's delirious cry "And the twins
will make it five!" She had stared out of the window of her room.

"Five what?" she had said.

"Exactly," said the Doctor. "Five what?"

"Five enigmas," she answered heavily, without a change of expression.

"And what are they, your ladyship? Do you mean five...?"

She interrupted him heavily. "The Earl, my husband," she said. "Vanished. One.
His sisters, vanished: two. Swelter, vanished: three.

Sourdust and Barquentine, burned: five..."

"But the deaths of Sourdust and Barquentine were hardly enigmatic..."

"One wouldn't be. Two would," said the Countess. "And the youth at them both."

"The youth?" queried the Doctor.

"Steerpike," said the Countess.

"Ah," said the Doctor, "we have the same fears."

"We have," said the Countess. "I am waiting."

The Doctor thought of Fuchsia's poem:

　　　　　How white and scarlet is that face!
　　　　　Who knows in some unusual place
　　　　　The coloured heroes are alight
　　　　　With faces made of red and white.

"But your ladyship," he said--she was still staring through the window. The
words “And the Twins will make it five” suggest to me that their ladyships
Cora and Clarice would make two of the group he had in his delirious mind.
He was making a list of individuals, in his fever, I will stake my brightest
penny."

"And so..."

"And so, your ladyship, the deaths and disappearances would be six, not five."

"Who knows?" said the Countess. "It is too early. Give him rope. We have no
proof. But by the black tap-root of the very castle, if my fear is founded,
the towers themselves will sicken at his death: the oldest stones will spew."

Her heavy face flushed. She lowered her hand into a wide pocket, and drawing
forth some grain she extended her arm. A small mottled bird appeared out of
nowhere and running along her outstretched arm, perched with its claws about
her index finger and with a sideways movement began to peck from her palm.



FIFTY-FIVE



"But he can't help giving you your ritual for each day, can he?" said Fuchsia.
"And instructing you. It's not his fault, it's the law. Father had to do it
when he was alive--and his father had to--and they've all had to. It isn't
possible for him to do any different. He has to tell you what's in the books,
however trying it is for you."

"I hate him," said Titus.

"Why? Why?" cried Fuchsia. "What's the good of hating him because he's doing
what he has to do? You don't expect that he can make an exception, do you,
after thousands of years? I suppose you'd rather have Barquentine. Can't you
see how bigoted you are? I think he does his work wonderfully."

"I hate him!" said Titus.

"You're becoming a bore!" said Fuchsia, with heat. "Can't you say anything
except “I hate him”? What's wrong with him? Do you hold his appearance a-
gainst him? Do you? If so, you're mean and damnable."

She shook her thick black hair away from her eyes. Her chin trembled.

"Oh God! God! Do you think I want to quarrel with you, Titus, my darling?
You know how I love you. But you're unfair. Unfair. You know nothing about
him."

"I hate him," said Titus. "I hate the cheap and stinking guts of him."



FIFTY-SIX



As the months passed the tensions increased. Titus and Steerpike were at
daggers drawn, although Steerpike, the soul of bland discretion, showed no-
thing of his feelings, and gave no sign to Titus or the outside world of
his loathing of this forward boy--the boy who unconsciously stood between
him and the zenith of his ambition.

Titus, who ever since that day when, little more than a child, he had de-
fied Steerpike in the classroom silence, and had fallen fainting from his
desk, had held on grimly to the dangerous ascendancy he had gained by that
curious and childish victory.

Every day the details of his after-school duties were read out to Titus in
the Library, Steerpike flicking through the pages of crossreference, and
explaining the obscurer passages with clarity and precision. Up till now
the Master of Ceremonies had kept rigidly to the letter of the Law. But
now, in the all but invulnerable position of being the only one who had ac-
cess to the tomes of reference and procedure, he was making a list of du-
ties which he would insert among the ancient papers. He had been able to
unearth some of the original paper, and it was only for him to forge the
copper-plate writing, and the archaic spelling and invent a series of du-
ties for Titus which would be both galling and, on occasion, sufficiently
hazardous for there to be always the outside chance of the young Earl com-
ing to grief. There were for instance stairways that were no longer safe--
there were the rotten beams and crumbling masonry. Beyond this there would
always be the possibility of deliberately weakening and undermining certain
cat-walks that stretched along the upper walls of the castle, or in some
way or another of making sure that in following out the forged procedures,
Titus would sooner or later fall accidentally to his death.

And with the death of Titus, and with Fuchsia in his power, the Countess
alone would stand between him and a virtual dictatorship.

There would yet be enemies. There would be the Doctor whose intelligence
was rather more acute than Steerpike would have wished; and there was the
Countess herself, the only character for whom he held a puzzled and grudging
respect--not for her intelligence, but for the reason of the very fact that
she baffled his analysis. What was she? What was she thinking and by what
processes? His mind and hers had no point of contact. In her presence he
was doubly careful. They were animals of different species. They watched
one another with the mutual suspicion of those who have no common tongue.

As for Fuchsia, it was but a step towards mastery. He had surpassed him-
self. Her heart was now as tender as his overtures had been, with their
delicate gradations, their subtle cadences, their superb restraint.

It was no longer a case of their meeting at dusk, now here, now there, at
varying rendezvous. For some while, Steerpike had for his own delectation
been furnishing yet another secret room for himself. He now had nine,
scattered throughout the castle only one of which, a large bedroom-study,
was known to the castle. Of the rest five were in obscure quarters of
Gormenghast, and three, though in the most populous areas, were as curi-
ously hidden as a wren's nest in a bank of grass and weeds. Their doors,
abutting on major arteries of the castle, were never seen to open. They
were there for all to see but no one saw them.

In one of these rooms which he had but recently appropriated, and which
he only visited at night when thick silence lay along the corridor, he had
got together a few pictures, some books, a cabinet of shallow drawers in
which he kept his collection of stolen jewellery, of old coins, a range
of poisons, and various secret papers. A thick crimson carpet covered the
floor. The small table and the two chairs were of elegant design and he
had skilfully repaired the damage that long years had worked upon them.
How different was this interior to the rough stone corridor without, with
its stone pillars on either side of every door and the heavily protruding
shelf-like slabs of stone above.

It was to this room that Fuchsia made her nocturnal journeys, her heart
beating, her pupils dilated in the darkness. And it was here that she was
so courteously received. A shaded lamp threw out a soft golden glow. A
book or two, carefully chosen, lay casually here and there. It was always
irksome for Steerpike to make those last few changes in the disposition
of the objects which were calculated to give an air of informality to the
room. He detested untidiness as he detested love. But he knew that Fuchsia
would be ill at ease with the kind of formal and perfect arrangement that
gave him pleasure.

Even so, she seemed strangely incongruous in that tasteful and orderly
trap. For Steerpike could not entirely destroy the reflection of his own
coldness. She seemed too much alive--alive in so different a sense from
the glittering and icy vitality of her companion--too much alive in the
way that love like an earthquake or some natural and sinless force, is
incompatible with a neat and formal world. However quietly she sat back
in her chair, her black hair about her shoulders, she was potentially
disruptive.

But she admired what she saw. She admired all that she was not. It was
all so different from Gormenghast. When she remembered her old untidy
attic and the rooms she now occupied with the floor littered with poems,
and the walls with drawings, she supposed that there must be something
wrong with her.

When she remembered her mother, she felt, for the first time, embarrass-
ed.

One night when she tapped upon the door with her fingertips there was no
reply. She tapped again, glancing apprehensively along the corridor on
either side. The silence was absolute. She had never before had to wait
for more than the fraction of a second. And then a voice said, "Be care-
ful, my lady."

Fuchsia had started at the sound as at the touch of a red iron. The voice
had come from nowhere. There was no sound of a step. In fear and trembling
she lit the candle she carried in her hand--a rash and risky thing to do.
But there was no one. And then, in the far distance, something began to
approach her rapidly. Long before she could see Steerpike she knew it was
he. It was but a few moments before his swift, narrow, high-shouldered
form was upon her and had snatched the candle from her hand and crushed
out the flame. In another moment his key had been turned in the lock and
she had been hustled through the door. He locked it from the inside, in
the darkness, but he had already whispered fiercely "Fool." With that
word the world turned over. Everything changed.

The delicate balance of their relationship was set in violent agitation
--and a dead weight came down over Fuchsia's heart.

Had the crystalline and dazzling structure which Steerpike had gradually
erected, adding ornament to ornament until, balanced before her in all
its beauty, it had dazzled the girl--an outward sign of his regard for
her--had the exquisite structure been less exquisite, less crystalline,
less perfect, then its crash upon the cold stones far beneath would never
have been so final. Its substance, brittle as glass, had been scattered
in a thousand fragments.

The short, brutal word, and the push which he had given her had turned
her on the instant from a dark and eager girl into something more sombre.
She was shocked and resentful--but less resentful, for those first moments,
than hurt. She had also become, without her knowing it, Lady Fuchsia. Her
blood had risen in her--the blood of her Line. She had forgotten it when
love was tender, but now in bitterness she was again the daughter of an
Earl.

She had known, of course, that to light a candle outside the very door
was against all their strictest rules of care and secrecy. But she had
been frightened. Maddening as it would have been for their rendezvous to
have been discovered, yet there had been no sin in it, save that of her
conducting her affairs in secret, and of allowing herself to be the
close friend of a commoner.

But his face had been ugly with anger. She had never known that he could
so lose that perfect, that chiselled quietness of pose and feature. She
had never known that his clear, neat and persuasive voice could have
taken on a tone so savage and cruel.

And to have been pushed! To have been thrust forwards in the darkness.
His hands, which once, like those of a musician, had been so thrilling
in their delicate strength, had been rough as the claws of an animal.
As surely as the change of his voice, as surely as the word "fool",
this shove in the darkness had woken her to a reality both bitter and
galling.

But, as she trembled, there was, mixed with the mortification, the ghost-
ly and exciting memory of that voice out of nowhere. It had evolved out
of the darkness and at no more distance from her than a few feet, but
there had been no one there. She had no more idea of how it had origi-
nated than of the intention or meaning of its warning. She only knew now,
that she would not seek assistance from Steerpike; she would not confide
her fear of this inexplicable "voice' in someone who had degraded her.
All the Lords of Gormenghast were at her shoulder.

She turned on her heel, in the darkened room, and before he had lit the
lamp, "Let me out of here," she said. But almost immediately the familiar
room was filled with the gold lamp-light and she saw upon the table, sit-
ting with its face cupped in its wrinkled hands, a monkey. It was dressed
in a little costume of red and yellow diamonds. On its head was a small
velvet hat, like a pirate's, with a violet feather curling from the crown.

Steerpike had covered his face with his hands, but he was watching Fuchsia
through the slits between his fingers. He had lost command. The sight of
a flame, where it had no cause to be, had struck at him like a lash. He
had not been burned for nothing and fire was his only fear. Once again he
had failed.

But he did not know how seriously. He watched her through his fingers.

She stared at the monkey with an expression quite indefinable. What sur-
prise she felt was not in evidence. The turmoil and the shock of having
been so roughly treated was still too strong in her for any other emotion
to supplant it, however bizarre the stimulus might be. But when the vivid
little animal rose to its feet and took off its hat, and when it replaced
it after scratching its head and yawning, then, for an instant, something
less sad suffused her face with a fleeting animation.

But it was impossible for her mood to be swung so rapidly from one extreme
to another. A part of her mind was fascinated by the oddness of it all,
but nothing touched her heart. It was a monkey dressed up and that was all.
What would once have inflamed her with excitement, left her now, at this
paralysing moment, quite frozen.

Steerpike had gained a moment or two but what could he do with them? She
had commanded him to let her go from the room when the monkey had caught
her eye.

Once again she turned her gaze to him. Her black eyes appeared quite dead,
the lustre drained away. Her lips were tightly closed.

She saw him with his hands across his face. And then she heard his voice.

"Fuchsia," he said. "Allow me one moment, only one, in which to tell you
of the danger from which we have just escaped. There was no time to be
lost and though there could never be any excuse, and although I can never
ask for forgiveness, yet you must allow me a short moment in which to ex-
plain my violence.

"Fuchsia! it was for you. My violence was for you. My roughness was the
roughness of love. I had no time to do other than to save you. Have you
not heard the footsteps? She has just gone by. One moment later and your
light would have brought her to this door. And you know the punishment.
Of course you do, the punishment, which by ancient law is meted out to
those daughters of the Line who consort with the mere outsiders. It is
too awful to think about. And that is why our plans have been so secret,
our rules so rigorous. And you know this. And you have been meticulous.
But tonight you misjudged the time, did you not? You were four minutes
early. O that was risky enough. But to add to such a peril the lighting
of your candle. And then, as always happens, it was precisely when all
this was happening that your mother should follow me."

"My mother?" Fuchsia's voice was a whisper.

"Your mother. I had led her away for I knew that she was near. I doubled
back. I crossed my tracks. I doubled back again and yet she was there,
and moving slowly--I cannot understand it--but I came as I intended to
this door with the length of the corridor between us--the length of the
corridor and the odd twenty feet that would give me the chance of whip-
ping into our room in time--but no, it wasn't this that I was going to
do. No. For what would have been more likely than for you to have met
her--and then..."

Steerpike dropped his hands from his face where they had been all this
time. His voice had been running on with a certain charm for he had man-
aged to vary it with a kind of stutter--not so much nervous in effect as
eager and candid.

"But what happened, Fuchsia? Well, you know that as well as I do. I turn-
ed the north corner with your mother the length of a corridor behind--and
there you were, like a bonfire, the length of the corridor before me. Put
yourself in my place. One cannot have all the noble emotions at the same
time. One cannot mix up desperation with being a perfect gentleman. At
least I can't. Perhaps I should have been given lessons. All I could do
was to save the situation. To hide you. To save you. You were there too
early; and Fuchsia, it made me angry. I have never been angry with you
before as you know. I could never imagine being angry with you. And per-
haps even now, it wasn't really you I was angry with, but fate, or des-
tiny or whatever it is that might have upset our plans. And it was because
our plans have always been so carefully prepared--so that there shall be
no risk, and you shall come to no harm--that my rage boiled up. You were
no longer Fuchsia to me, at that moment. You were this thing that I was
to save. After I had got behind the door, then you would be Fuchsia ag-
ain. Had I waited for a moment before stifling your light or getting you
through the door, then our lives might indeed have been ruined. For I
love you, Fuchsia. You are all I ever longed for. Can't you see that it
was because of this that I had no time to be polite? It was a boiling
moment. It was a maelstrom. I called you “fool”, yes “fool”, out of
my love for you--and then... and then...here in this room again, it all
seemed so unbelievable and it does so still, and I am half ashamed of
the gift I had brought you and the writing I have done for you--O Fuch-
sia--I don't even know if I can show it to you now..." he turned abrupt-
ly with his hand clenched at his forehead, and then as though to say he
would not give way to his despair, "Come on then, Satan," he whispered.
"Come on, my wicked boy!" and the monkey leapt on to Steerpike's shoul-
der.

"What writing?" said Fuchsia.

"I had written you a poem." He spoke very softly, in a way that had often
proved successful but he was a step too far in advance of his progress.

"But perhaps now," he said, "you will not wait to see it, Fuchsia."

"No," she said after a pause. "Not now."

Her inflection was so strange that it was impossible to tell whether she
meant "not now' in the sense of it being no longer possible for her to
do anything so intimate as to read a love poem; or not now, but some o-
ther time.

Steerpike could only cry, "I understand," and placed the monkey on the
table where it walked rapidly to and fro, on all four legs, and then
leapt onto one of his cabinets.

"And I will understand, if you have no wish for Satan."

"Satan?" her voice was quite expressionless.

"Your monkey," he said. "Perhaps you would rather not be bothered. I
thought he would please you. I made his clothes myself."

"I don't know! I don't know!" cried Fuchsia suddenly. "I don't know, I
tell you, I don't know!"

"Shall I take you to your room?"

"I will go myself."

"As you please," said Steerpike. "But recall what I have said, I implore
you. Try and understand; for I love you as the shadows love the castle."

She turned her eyes to him. For a moment a light came into them, but in
the next moment they appeared empty once more; empty and blank.

"I will never understand," she said. "It is no good however much you talk.
I may have been wrong. I don't know. At any rate everything is changed.
I don't feel the same any more. I want to go now."

"Yes, of course. But will you grant me two small favours?"

"I suppose so," said Fuchsia. "What are they? I'm tired."

"The first one is to ask you from the bottom of my heart to try to under-
stand the strain which was put upon me, and to ask you whether, even if
it is for the last time, you will meet me, as we have done for so long,
meet me that we can talk for a little while--not about us, not about our
trouble, not about my faults, not about this terrible chasm between us,
but about all the happy things. Will you meet me tomorrow night, on those
conditions?"

"I don't know!" said Fuchsia. "I don't know! But I suppose so. O God, I
suppose so."

"Thank you," said Steerpike. "Thank you, Fuchsia."

"And my other request is only this. To know, whether, if you have no use
for Satan, you will let me have him back--because he is yours... and..."
Steerpike turned his head from her and moved away a few paces.

"You would like to know, wouldn't you, Satan, to whom you belong..." he
cried in a voice that was intended to sound gallant.

Fuchsia turned on him suddenly. It seemed that she had now realized the
natural edge of her own intellect. She stared at the skewbald man with the
monkey on his shoulder and then her words cut into the pale man like knives.
"Steerpike," she said. "I think you're going soft."

From that moment Steerpike knew that when she came on the following night
he would seduce her. With so dark a secret to keep hidden, the daughter of
the Countess would indeed be at his mercy. He had waited long enough. Now,
upon the heels of his mistake, was the only time for him to strike. He had
felt the first intimation of something slipping away beneath his feet. If
guile and coercion failed him, then there could be no two ways about it.
This was no time for mercy--and though she proved a tigress he would have
her--and blackmail would follow as smoothly as a thundercloud.



FIFTY-SEVEN


I


When Flay heard the door open quietly below him he held his breath. For a few mo-
ments no one appeared and then a shape still darker than the darkness stepped out
into the corridor and began to walk rapidly away to the south. When he heard the
door close again he lowered himself from the great stone shelf that stretched
above Steerpike's doorway and with his long bony arms outstretched to their full
extent he dropped the odd few inches to the ground.

His frustration at being unable to gain any clue as to what had been going on in-
side the room was only equalled by his horror at finding that it was Fuchsia who
had been the clandestine visitor.

He had sensed her danger. He knew it in his bones. But he could not have persuad-
ed her, suddenly, in the night, that she was in peril. He could not have told her
what kind of peril. He did not know himself. But he had acted on the spur of the
moment and in whispering to her out of the darkness he hoped that she might be put
upon her guard, if only for reasons of supernatural fear.

He followed Fuchsia only so far as to be sure that she was safely upon her way to
her own rooms. It was all he could do not to call after her, or overtake her, for he
was deeply perplexed and frightened. His love for her was something quite alone in
his sour life. Fond as he was of Titus, it was the memory of Fuchsia, more than of
the boy, or of any other living soul, that gave to the flinty darkness of his mind those
touches of warmth which, along with his worship of Gormenghast, that abstraction
of outspread stone, were seemingly so foreign to his nature.

But he knew that he must not speak to her tonight. The distracted way in which she
moved, sometimes running and sometimes walking, gave him sufficient evidence of
her fatigue and, he feared, of her misery.

He did not know what Steerpike had done or said but he knew he had hurt her, and
if it were not that he felt upon the brink of gaining some kind of damning evidence,
then he would have returned to that room from which Fuchsia had emerged, and on the
reappearance of Steerpike, at the doorway, he would have plucked the skewbald face,
barehanded, from the head.


II


As he returned in the direction of the fateful corridor, a heavy pain lay across
his forehead and his thoughts pursued one another in a confusion of anger and spec-
ulation. He could not know that with every step he was travelling, not nearer to
his room but further from it--further in time, further in space, nor that the
night's adventures far from coming to a close were about to begin in earnest.

By now the night was well advanced. He had returned with a slow and somewhat drag-
ging pace, lingering here and there to lean his head against the cold walls while
his headache hammered behind his eyes and across his angular brow. Once he sat
down for a hour upon the lowest step of a flight of age-hollowed stairs, his long
beard falling upon his knee, and taking the sharp curve of them and falling
again in a straggle of string-like hair to within a few inches of the floor.

Fuchsia and Steerpike? What could it mean? The blasphemy of it! The horror of it!
He ground his teeth in the darkness.

The castle was as silent as some pole-axed monster. Inert, breathless, spreadeagl-
ed. It was a night that seemed to prove by the consolidation of its darkness and
its silence the hopelessness of any further dawn. There was no such thing as dawn.
It was an invention of the night's or of the old-wives of the night--a fable, im-
memorially old--recounted century after century in the eternal darkness; retold
and retold to the gnomic children in the tunnels and the caves of Gormenghast--a
tale of another world where such things happened, where stones and bricks and ivy
stems and iron could be seen as well as touched and smelt, could be lit and col-
oured, and where at certain times a radiance shone like honey from the east and
the blackness was scaled away, and this thing they called dawn arose above the
woods as though the fable had materialized, the legend come to life.

It was a night with a bull's mouth. But the mouth was bound and gagged. It was a
night with enormous eyes, but they were hooded. The only sound that Flay could
hear was the tapping of his heart.


III


It was later, and at an indeterminate hour of the same night, or inky morning,
that Mr Flay, long after passing the door in the passage, came to an involuntary
halt as he was about to cross a small cloistered quadrangle.

There was no reason why he should have been startled by the single band of livid
yellow in the sky. He must have known that the dawn could not have been much long-
er delayed. He was certainly not held by its beauty. He did not think in that way.

In the centre of the quadrangle was a thorn tree, and his eyes turned to the pitch-
y silhouette of that part of it that cut across the yellow of the sunrise. His fam-
iliarity with the shape of the old tree caused him to stare more intently at the
rough and branching stem. It seemed thicker than usual. He could only see with
any clarity that portion of its bole that crossed the sunrise. It appeared to have
changed its outline. It was as though something were leaning against it and adding
a little to its bulk. He crouched so that still more of the unfamiliar shape came
into view, for the upper part was criss-crossed with branches. As his vision was
lowered and he commanded a clearer view beneath the overhanging boughs his muscles
became tense for it seemed that against the livid strip of sky--which threw every-
thing else both on the earth and in the air into yet richer blackness--it seemed--
that against this livid strip the unfamiliar outline on the left of the stem was
narrowing to something the shape of a neck. He got silently to his knee and then,
lowering his head and lifting his eyes, he obtained an uninterrupted view of Steer-
pike's profile. His body and the back of the head were glued together as though he
and the tree had grown up as one thing from the ground.

And that was all there was. The universal darkness above and below. The horizontal
stream of saffron yellow and, like a rough black bridge that joined the upper dark-
ness to the lower, the silhouette of the ragged thorn stem, with the profile of a
face among the stems.

What was he doing there in the darkness alone and motionless?

Flay raised himself and leaned against the nearest of the cloistered pillars. The
cut-out face of his enemy was immediately obscured by branches. But what had caught
his eye--the unfamiliar outline of the bole he now recognized as being formed by
an angle of the young man's elbow and the line of his hip and thigh.

Without wasting a moment in trying to rationalize his instinctive belief that some
fresh act of evil was afoot, Mr Flay prepared himself for, if necessary, a protract-
ed vigil. There was nothing evil in leaning against a thorn tree as the first light
broke in a yellow band--even though the leaning form was Steerpike's. There was no
reason why he should not return at any moment to his room and sleep or indulge in
some other equally innocent occupation.

He knew that he was caught up in one of those stretches of time when for anything
to happen normally would be abnormal. The dawn was too tense and highly charged for
any common happening to survive.

Steerpike, while he leaned there, rigid with the cold and flexible steel of his own
conspirings, eyed the yellow light. He now knew that whatever steps were to be taken
for his own advancement should be taken now. However much he may have wished to de-
lay his designs there was no gainsaying the sense of urgency--the sense that time
was not, for all the logic of his mind, upon his side.

It was true that there was still no evidence of his guilt. But there was something
almost as bad. An indescribable sensation that his power was somehow crumbling away;
that the earth was slippery beneath his feet; that in spite of his formidable posi-
tion, there was that in Gormenghast that, with a puff, could blow him into darkness.
However much he told himself that he had made no fundamental error--that the few
slips he had made had been invariably in minor matters, maddening as they might be,
yet this sensation remained. It had come upon him with the shutting of the door--
when Fuchsia had left him and he was alone in his room. It was new to him. He had
believed in nothing that could not be proven one way or another, in the cells of his
agile brain. Apart from the inconvenience that his carelessness would, for a short
time, cause him, what else was there for him to rack his brains about in regard to
the incident of a few hours earlier? What was there for Fuchsia to hold against him
--or even to give as evidence, save that he, the Master of Ceremonies, had been
rude to her?

And yet all this was beside the point of his apprehension. If it was Fuchsia's re-
sentment that had uncovered, witlessly, the dark pit into which he was now staring,
what then was this pit, wherefore was its depth, and why its darkness?

It was the first time that he had ever known that sleep, though he craved it, was
beyond him. But his habit of making good use of every moment was deeply rooted--
and especially when the time at his disposal was that in which the castle lay abed.

And Flay knew this. He knew that it was hardly a part of Steerpike's nature to
lean against a tree for the sake of watching the sun rise. Nor was it character-
istic of him to brood. He was no romantic. He lived too much upon the edge of in-
stancy for introspection. No. It was for some other reason that he leaned there,
biding his time--for what?

Mister Flay knelt down again and with his chin almost touching the ground and his
small eyes swivelled upwards he stared once more at that sharp profile, its edges
razor-keen against the yellow band. And then, while on his knees, two things oc-
curred to him almost simultaneously. The first, that it was more than possible
that Steerpike was waiting for sufficient light to enable him to make his way to
unfamiliar ground. That he wished to go secretly and yet not lose his way, for e-
ven now the darkness was intense, the bar of light that lay like a livid ruler a-
cross the black east in no way lightening the earth or the sky about it. It kept
its brilliance to itself; saffron inlaid on ebony. And this was Flay's guess: that
the silhouette was waiting for the first diffusion of the light--that the line of
the elbow and the hip would alter--that a profile would detach itself from a thorn
tree and that a figure, lithe as a lynx, would steer into the gloom. But not alone.
Flay would be following and it was when Flay, still upon his bony knees, his head
near the ground, his beard spread, was turning this over in his mind that the need
for some confederate not for reason of companionship or safety, but in order to
bear witness, occurred to him. Whatever he was to find, whatever lay ahead, however
innocent or however bloody, it would be his word alone against the pale man's. It
would be the word of an exile against that of the Master of Ritual. In being within
the precincts of the castle at all, he was committing a grievous sin. He had been
banished by the Countess and it would ill become him to point his finger at an of-
ficer unless his accusation was doubly backed with proof.

No sooner had this notion occurred to him than he was on his feet. He judged that
he had, at the most, another quarter of an hour in which to waken--whom? He had no
choice. Titus and Fuchsia alone knew of his return to the castle and that he lived
in secret among the Hollow Halls.

It was of course grotesquely out of the question either that Fuchsia should be dis-
turbed or allowed within Steerpike's range. As for Titus, he was now almost grown
to his full height. But he was of an odd highly strung nature--sullen and excitable
by turns. Strong as need be for his years, he was more apt to have his energy sap-
ped by the excess of his imagination than of his body. Flay did not understand him,
but he trusted him, and he knew of how the boy's loathing of Steerpike had estrang-
ed him from Fuchsia. He had no doubt that Titus would join him, but he doubted for
a moment his own courage to do so dangerous a thing as to draw the heir of Gormen-
ghast within the circle of expected danger. Yet he knew that above all else it was
his duty to unmask if possible his enemy, for upon so doing hung the safety of the
young earl and all he symbolized. And what is more, he swore by the iron of his
long muscles, and by the strong teeth in his bony head, that whatever danger might
menace his own person, no harm would come to the boy.

And so, without a moment to lose, he turned and re-entered the door in the cloist-
ers and set off upon what in saner moments he would have considered an unthinkable
mission. For what could be more iniquitous than to jeopardize the safety of his
lordship? But now he saw only that by awakening Titus and launching him at dawn
upon so dark a game as that of shadowing a suspect, he was perhaps bringing closer
the day when the heart of Gormenghast, purged and loyal, would beat again unthreat-
ened.

With every moment the yellow band in the sky was brightening. He sped with the
awkward speed of the predatory spider, his long legs eating up the corridors, four
feet at a stride and treading the stairways beneath them as though he were on
stilts. But when he came to the dormitory he moved with the circumspection of a
thief.

He opened the door by degrees. On his right was the janitor's cubicle. Directly he
heard the sound of sand-paper scraping away behind the woodwork he recognized the
breathing of the same old man who had held this watch-dog office from the early
days and he knew that he was safe enough from that quarter.

But how to recognize the Earl? He had no light. Apart from the breathing of the
janitor the dormitory was in absolute silence. There was no time for anything but
to put his first notion into operation. There were two rows of beds that stretch-
ed away to the southwest. Why he turned to the right hand wall he did not know,
but he did so without hesitation. Feeling for the end-rail of the first bed, he
leaned over. "Lordship!" he whispered. "Lordship!" There was no reply. He turned
to the second bed and whispered again. He thought he heard a head turn upon a pi-
llow but that was all. He repeated this quick, harsh whisper at the foot of every
bed. "Lordship...lordship!..." but nothing happened and the time was slipping by.
But at the fourteenth bed he repeated the whisper for a third time, for he could
feel rather than hear a restlessness in the darkness below him. "Lordship!..."
he whispered again. "Lord Titus!"

Something sat up in the darkness and he could hear the catch in a boy's breathing.

"Have no fear," he whispered fiercely and his hand shook on the bedrail.

"Have no fear. Are you Titus, the Earl?"

Immediately there was a reply. "Mister Flay? What are you doing here?"

"Have you a coat and stockings?"

"Yes."

"Put them on. Follow me. Explain later, lordship."

Titus made no reply but slid over the side of his bed and after fumbling for his
shoes and garments, clasped them like a bundle in his arms. Together they tip-toed
to the dormitory door and, once without, walked rapidly in the darkness, the beard-
ed man with his hand upon the boy's elbow.

At the head of a staircase Titus got into his clothes, his heart beating loudly.
Flay stood beside him and when he was ready they descended the stairs in silence.

As they drew nearer to the quadrangle Flay in short broken phrases was able to
give Titus a disjointed idea of why he had been woken and whisked out into the
night. Much as Titus sympathized with Flay's suspicions and with his hatred of
Steerpike, he was becoming afraid that Flay himself had gone mad. He could see
that it was a very odd thing for Steerpike to spend the night leaning against a
thorn tree, but equally there was nothing criminal in it. What, he wondered, in
any event, was Flay doing to be there himself? and why should the long ragged
creature of the woods be so anxious to have him with him? There was no doubt a-
bout the excitement of it all and that to be sought out was deeply flattering,
but Titus had but a vague idea as to what Flay meant by needing a witness. A
witness to what, and to prove what? Deeply as Titus suspected Steerpike of being
intrinsically foul, yet he had never suspected him of actually doing other than
his duty in the castle. He had never hated him for any understandable reason.
He had simply hated him for being alive at all.

But when they reached the cloisters and when he peered along Flay's outstretched
arm as they lay upon the cold ground, and saw, all at once, after a long and a-
bortive scrutiny of the thorn, the sharp profile, as angular as broken glass save
for the doming forehead, then he knew that the gaunt man lying beside him was no
more mad than himself, and that for the first time in his life he was tasting u-
pon his tongue the acid of an intoxicating fear, of a fearful elation.

He also knew that to leave Steerpike where he was and to return to bed would be
to deliberately turn away from a climate of sharp and dangerous breath.

He put his lips to his companion's ear.

"It's Doctor's quadrangle," he whispered.

Flay made no reply for several moments, for the remark made little sense to him.

"What of it?" he replied in an almost inaudible voice.

"Very close--on our side," whispered Titus, "just across the quadrangle."

This time there was a longer silence. Flay could see at once the advantage of yet
another witness and also of a double bodyguard for the boy. But what would the
Doctor think of his reappearance after all these years? Would he countenance this
clandestine return to the castle--even in the knowledge that it was for the cas-
tle's sake? Would he be prepared, in the future, to deny all knowledge of his, Mr
Flay's, return?

Again Titus whispered, "He is on our side."

It seemed to Mr Flay that he was now so deeply involved that to argue each prob-
lem as it posed itself, to study each move would get him nowhere. Had he behaved
in a rational way he would never have left the woods, and he would not now be ly-
ing upon his stomach, staring at a man leaning innocently against a tree. That
the figure's profile against the saffron dawn was sharp and cruel was no proof
of anything.

No. It was for him to obey the impulse of the moment and to have the courage to
risk the future. This was no time for anything but action.

The dawn, although fiercer in the east, was yet withheld. There was no light in
the air--only a strip of intense colour. But at any moment a diffusion of the
sunrise would begin and the sun would heave itself above the broken towers.

There was no time to lose. In a matter of minutes the quadrangle might become
impossible to cross without attracting Steerpike's attention, or Steerpike,
judging himself to have sufficient light for whatever journey he wished to make,
might slip away suddenly into the gloom and be irreparably lost among a thou-
sand ways.

The Doctor's house was on the far side of the quadrangle. To get there would
necessitate a detour around the margin of the quadrangle for the thorn tree was
at the centre.

Obeying Flay's instructions Titus took off his shoes, and, like Flay with his
boots, tied the laces together and slung them around his neck. It was Flay's
first idea that they should go together, but they had no sooner taken the first
few silent paces than the sudden disappearance of Steerpike reminded Flay that
it was only from the particular place where they had been lying that they could
keep a check upon his movements. From the Doctor's side of the quadrangle there
would be no way of knowing whether or not he were still beneath the tree.

It was a full minute before Flay knew what he ought to do; and then, it was on-
ly because one of his hands, thrust deep into a ragged pocket, came upon a piece
of chalk that a solution occurred to him. For a piece of white chalk meant only
one thing to him. It meant a trail. But who was to blaze it? There was only one
answer, and for two reasons.

In the first place, if one of them were to remain where he was and keep Steerpike
under observation, and in the event of Steerpike's moving away from the thorn
tree, of following him and leaving chalk marks upon the ground or upon walls--
then it were best for Flay to perform this none too simple function, not only be-
cause of his experience of stalking in the woods and of the danger of being dis-
covered, but because secondly, in learning of what was afoot the Doctor would more
readily and speedily accompany the young Earl than Mr Flay, the long lost exile,
with whom a certain amount of time-wasting explanation would be a preliminary nec-
essity.

And so Flay explained to Titus what he must do. He must waken the Doctor, silent-
ly. How this was to be done he did not know. He must leave this to the boy's in-
genuity. He must impress upon the Doctor that there was no time to be lost. It was
not the moment in which to warn him that the whole venture was based upon guess-
work--that in sober fact there was no cause to rouse the Doctor from his bed. That
in the open air, there was not a leaf that was not whispering of treachery, not a
stone but muttered its warning, was not the kind of argument to impress anyone
wakened of a sudden from their sleep. And yet he must impress the Doctor with a
sense of urgency.

They must return across the quadrangle to where they were now crouching, for
only from this position could they tell whether Steerpike were still beneath the tree,
unless, as might have happened, the sun had suddenly risen. Had it not done so,
and if Steerpike was still there beneath the thorn, then they would find Mr Flay
where Titus had left him; but if Steerpike had gone, then Mr Flay would also have
disappeared and it was for them to move swiftly to the thorn tree, and if there
were enough light, to follow the chalk trail which Flay would have begun to blaze.
If, however, it were still too dark to see the marks, they were to follow them
directly there was enough light. It was for them to move sufficiently rapidly to
be able to overtake Mr Flay, but absolute silence was the prime essential, for
the gap between Flay and Steerpike might, for reasons of darkness, be, of neces-
sity, perilously narrow.

Feeling his way from pillar to pillar, Titus began to make a circuit of the quad-
rangle. His stocking'd feet made no noise at all. Once a button on the sleeve of
his coat clicked against an outcrop of masonry and sounded like the snapping of
a twig, so that he stopped dead in his tracks and listened for a moment or two
anxiously in the silence, but that was all and a little afterwards he was stand-
ing beneath the Doctor's wall.

Meanwhile Flay lay stretched out beneath the pillar on the far side of the square,
his bearded chin propped by his bony hands.

Not for a moment did his eyes wander from the silhouette of the head against the
dawn. The yellow band had widened and still further intensified so that it was now
not so much a thing that might be painted as a radiance beyond the reach of pigment.

As he watched he saw the first movement. The head raised itself and as the face
stared up into the branches the mouth opened in a yawn. It was like the yawning
of a lizard; the jaws, sharp, soundless, merciless. It was as though all thought
was over, and out of some reptilian existence the yawn grew and opened like a re-
flex. And it was so, for Steerpike, leaning there, had, instead of pitying himself
and brooding upon his mistakes, been tabulating and re-grouping in his scheduled
brain every aspect of his position, of his plans, of his relationship not only
with Fuchsia but with all with whom he had dealings, and making out of the maze,
of these relationships and projects a working pattern--something that was a mas-
terpiece of cold-blooded systemization. But the plan of action, condensed and cry-
stallized though it was, was nevertheless, for all its ingenuity, somehow less
microscopically careful in its every particular than usual. He was prepared for
the first time to take risks. The time had come for drawing together the hundred
and one threads that had for so long been stretched from one end of the castle to
another. This would need action. For the moment he could relax. This dawn would
be his own. Tonight he must bewilder Fuchsia; dazzle her, awake her; and if all
failed, seduce her so that, compromised in the highest degree, he would have her
at his mercy. In her present mood she was too dangerous.

But today? He yawned again. His brainwork was done. His plans were complete. And
yet there was one loose end. Not in the logic of his brain, but in spite of it--
a loose end that he wished to tuck away. What his brain had proved his eyes were
witless of. It was his eyes that needed confirmation.

He ran his tongue between his thin, dry lips. Then he turned his face to the east.
It shone in the yellow light. It shone like a carbuncle, as, breaking suddenly out
of the darkness, the first direct ray of the climbing sun broke upon his bulging
brow. His dark red eyes stared back into the heart of the level ray. He cursed the
sun and slid out of the beam.



FIFTY-EIGHT



It was lucky for Titus that when the Doctor started from his sleep he immediately
recognized the boy's shape against the windowpane. Titus had climbed the thick
creeper below the Doctor's window and had with difficulty forced up the lower sash.
There had been no other way to enter. To knock or ring would have been to have
lost Steerpike.

Dr Prunesquallor reached for the candle by his bed but Titus bent forward in the
darkness.

"No, Dr Prune, don't light it...it's Titus...and we want your help...terribly...
sorry it's so early...can you come?...Flay is with me..."

"Flay?"

"Yes, he has come from exile--but out of concern for Fuchsia, and me, and the laws
...but quickly, Doctor, are you coming? We are trailing Steerpike--he's just outside."

In a moment the Doctor was in his elegant dressing gown--had found and put on his
spectacles, a pair of socks and his soft slippers.

"I am flattered," he said, in his quick, stilted, yet very pleasant voice. "I am
more than flattered--lead on, boy, lead on."

They descended the dark stairs; on reaching the hall the Doctor vanished but reap-
peared almost at once with two pokers: one long, top-heavy brass affair with a mur-
derous club-end and the other a short heavy iron thing with a perfect grip.

The Doctor hid them behind his back. "Which hand?" he said. Titus chose the left
and received the iron. Even with so crude a weapon in his grip the boy's confidence
rose at once. Not that his heart beat any the less rapidly or that he was any the
less aware of danger, but the feeling of acute vulnerability had gone.

The Doctor asked no questions. He knew that this strange business would unfold its
meaning as the minutes went by. Titus was in no state to give an explanation now.
He had begun breathlessly to tell the Doctor of how Flay would leave a trail of
chalk, but had ceased, for there was no time to act and to explain together. Before
they opened the front door Dr Prunesquallor drew the blind of the hall window. The
quadrangle though still extremely dark was no longer a featureless and inky mass.
The buildings on the far side loomed, and a blot of ebony blackness that appeared
to float in the gun-grey air showed where the thorn tree grew.

Titus was at the Doctor's side and peered through the pane.

"Can you see him, Doctor?"

"Where ought he to be, my boy?"

"Under the thorn."

"Hard to say...hard to say..."

"Easy to tell from the other side, Doctor. Shall we go round by the cloisters...?
If he's gone there's no time to lose, is there?"

"I take it from you that there isn't, Titus, though what in the name of guilt we
are doing only the screech-owl knows. However, away!"

He stood upon his toes in the hall, and lifting his arms, stretched them before him.
Between his outstretched fingertips the brass poker was poised as though it were a
mace, or some symbolic rod. His dressing gown was corded tightly at his slender waist.
His delicate features were set in an extraordinary expression of speculative deter-
mination both impressive and bizarre.

He unlatched the door and the two of them set off down the garden path. The Doc-
tor in his slippers, Titus in his socks, with his shoes slung loosely around his neck,
they moved rapidly and silently along the skirting cloisters until Titus, gripping
the Doctor's arm, brought his companion to a halt. There was the thorn, an inky etch-
ing against the rising sun, but the silhouette of Steerpike was missing. This was no
surprise for Flay had also vanished. Without loss of time they sped across the quad-
rangle, and in the early light were able at once to see the dim sign of a chalk mark
on the ground at their feet. Titus went down on his knees to it at once. That it was
a rough arrow pointing to the north was apparent enough, but there were some words
scrawled below which were not so easy to decipher, but at last Titus was able to dis-
entangle the roughened phrase "every twenty paces'.

"“Every twenty paces” I think it is," Titus whispered.

Together they counted their steps as they moved gingerly to the north, the pokers in
their hands, their eyes peering into the darkness ahead of them for the first sign of
Flay or of danger.

Sure enough, at roughly the twentieth pace another arrow pointed them their way and
showed Titus' interpretation of Flay's crude lettering to have been correct. They went
forward now with more confidence. It seemed certain that they must come first upon Mr
Flay, and that so long as they made no sound they could do no harm by moving swiftly
from one arrow to another. There were times when these arrows were of necessity
closer together; when the paths divided, or there was any kind of choice of direction.
At other times, when, with high flanking walls on either side, or a mile of doorless pas-
sageways ahead, and where there was no alternative direction to confuse his followers,
Flay had not troubled to make his chalk marks for long stretches. There were times when
the length of these stone arteries was such that, all unknowing, the Doctor and Titus
had more than once set forth along a fresh corridor before Steerpike, at the other end,
had made his exit. Flay alone could hazard the guess that before him and behind him his
friends and his enemy were all at once beneath the same long ceiling.

Rapid as Titus had been in calling the Doctor yet there was a great space between them
and Mr Flay, for no sooner had Titus left Flay's side than Steerpike had yawned and sped
into the night.

As the light grew it became easier for the Doctor and Titus to accelerate their pace and
to see what part of the castle they were moving through. The chalk arrows had become short
brusque marks upon the ground. Suddenly, as they turned a corner they came upon the second
of the bearded man's messages. It was scrawled at the foot of some stone stairs. "Faster,"
it read. "He is in a hurry. Catch me but silence."

By now the light was strong enough for them both to know that they were lost. Neither of
them could recognize the masonry that rose about them, the twisting passageways, the shal-
low flights of stairs and the long treadless inclines; they were speeding through a new
world. A world unfamiliar in its detail--new to them, although unquestionably of the very
stuff of their memories and recognizable in this general and almost abstract way. They had
never been there before, yet it was not alien--it was all Gormenghast.

But this did not mean it was not dangerous. It was obvious that they were in a deserted
province. Early as was the hour yet that was not the reason for the silence. There was an
abandoned, empty, voiceless hollow atmosphere that had nothing to do with the dawn or
with multitudes abed and asleep.

What beds there were would be broken and empty. What multitudes there were would be the
multitudes of the ant and the weevil.

And now began a series of dusky journeys across open squares, with the sky reddening ov-
erhead. The Doctor, wildly incongruous in so grim a setting, moved with surprising speed,
his brass poker held in both hands at the height of his breast, his head erect, the skirt of
his dressing gown flaring behind him.

Titus beside him looked by contrast like a beggar. His socks had worn out, and although
they gripped his ankles, the soles had gone, and his feet were cut and bruised. But this
he hardly noticed. His hair was across his face. His jacket was bundled over his nightshirt.
His trousers were half undone. His shoes jogged at his shoulders.

They had increased their speed, even to the point of running when it seemed safe to do so.
But whenever they came to a corner they invariably stopped and peered cautiously about it
before proceeding. The chalk marks never failed them, though from the way they had changed
from thick white arrows to the merest flick of chalk on stone or boarding it was plain not
only that the speed of Flay's progress had increased but that the stick of chalk itself
was wearing out.

There was no longer any difficulty as far as visibility was concerned. They moved in the
naked light. It was surely no longer possible for Mr Flay to keep at close range with his
quarry. And yet, with all their swiftness they had not yet caught up with him. The Doctor's
brow was glistening with perspiration. Both he and Titus were growing increasingly weary.
The unfamiliar buildings came and went. One after another, square after square, hall after
hall, corridor after corridor, winding and turning to and fro in a maze of dawn-lit stone.

And then, half in a state of disbelief--as though it were all a dream, the Doctor, mechan-
ically stopping at the corner of a high wall, moved his head so that he could command a
view of the next expanse or artery that lay ahead. But instead of rounding the corner, his
body recoiled a fraction and his arm moved backwards.

When his hand had found Titus and had gripped his elbow he drew the boy to his side. To-
gether they could see him--the gaunt and bearded figure. He was at the far end of a narrow
lane, the floor of which was a foot deep in dust and plaster. He was in an almost identical
position to their own for he was also stationed at a corner; around which he was peering,
and like themselves he had his eyes fixed upon some object of vivid and immediate interest,
for even at so considerable a distance the Doctor could see how tense was his scarecrow
body.

Had they been a few moments later they would have missed him for even as they watched
he slid around the base of the high, sharp corner and was lost to them. At once, Titus and
the Doctor set off in hot pursuit until they came to that angle of stone which Flay had
so recently vacated. Cautiously, they moved their heads until once again they were afford-
ed yet another long perspective with its floor crisp and ashen with fallen plaster. And
there at the end of the corridor was a replica of the picture they had been witnessing a
minute earlier, with Flay at yet another angle of stone. It was as though they were re-
living the incident, for, visually, it differed in no particular. But this time they did
not wait for Mr Flay to disappear. At a sign from the Doctor they began to run towards
him. Evidently Steerpike was still in view for Mr Flay, motionless as a stick-insect, made
no move until Titus and the Doctor were within a short way of him. Then suddenly, at the
sound of plaster breaking under Titus' feet, faint though it was, he turned his craggy
face over his shoulder and saw them.

He touched his brow with his hand, and darted a questioning glance at the Doctor. Then he
put his finger to his lips as he bared his irregular teeth. The Doctor inclined his body,
so splendidly sheathed in its dressing gown, in the gaunt man's direction. Meanwhile Titus
crept to the angle of the wall and peering around the corner saw, at a distance of about
sixty feet, something which set his heart pounding. It was the Master of Ritual, Steerpike;
the man with the red and white face. It was his foe--long since defied in the summer
schoolroom--the pale and agile officer of the realm--the one who had spoiled his happi-
ness and weaned his sister from him.

There he sat upon the edge of some kind of low stone basin like a drinking trough that
protruded from the wall at the side of the plaster-littered passage. Beyond him there was
an arch, hung with torn sacking which obscured whatever lay beyond.

As Titus watched, he saw the sitting figure draw up his knee so that his feet were beneath
him on the rim of the trough. His head and shoulders were turned a little away so that it
was not easy for Titus to tell what he had taken from his pocket. It seemed that Steer-
pike's hands were near his mouth and a little forward of it and then suddenly, as the first
thin reedy note of a bamboo pipe shrilled along the resonant corridor, all became plain.
For some little while, it was impossible to know how long, the three watchers listened to
the solitary figure, to his nimble fingering of the stops, to the shrill and plaintive
improvisations. Only the Doctor realized how well he played. Only the Doctor knew how
quick and cold it was. How brilliant and empty.

"Is there nothing he can't do?" muttered Prunesquallor to himself. "By all that's versa-
tile, he frightens me."

The music had come to an end, and Steerpike stretched out his arms and legs and then slip-
ping his recorder into a pocket, stood up. It was then that Titus gasped, and as he did so
was plucked back from the corner by the two men behind him. For a few moments they hardly
dared to draw breath. But no footsteps approached them from the adjacent corridor. What
was it he had seen? Neither the Doctor nor Flay dared question him, but after a little
while the latter, squinting round the corner, could see what it was that had startled
the boy. He had himself been puzzled by Steerpike's monkey. For a long while he had been
unable to tell what it was that sat hunched upon his quarry's shoulder, or bounded at his
side. At other times it disappeared altogether. It had not added, for instance, to the
silhouette beneath the thorn tree, and Flay could only think that it clung closely to his
side and was lost for long periods at a time beneath the folds of his cape.

But now it bounded beside him, or stood on two legs, its long thin arms hanging loosely,
its wrinkled hands trailing among the scraps of plaster.

And so there was a double need for silence. What Steerpike might miss his monkey might
easily hear.

But the discovery of what had startled Titus was of small importance compared with the
fact that Flay was only just in time to see the man and his monkey pass through the hang-
ings, and under the arch. A moment later and there would have been no knowing whether
he had turned to the left or the right. As it was it was not easy to tell save by the in-
dicative rippling of the ragged hangings. What lay beyond? There was no reason to suppose
that there would be any further repetition of this corner-to-corner trailing.

Save for the fatigue of the journey and for their constant grip upon the silence, they
had as yet encountered neither problem nor peril. But now, as they stared at the hang-
ings, that were yet moving a little in the still air, they knew that they were entering
upon a new phase.

Titus gripped the short iron poker in his hand as though to squeeze he life out of it.
The Doctor tossed his head, arched his nostrils, and tip-toed to the very point where
Steerpike had disappeared. Flay, who insisted on leading, had already drawn back, by no
more than half an inch, a fold of the drapery, and was peering to his left. What he saw
brought the blood to his head and his hand trembled violently.

He found himself staring along a short passage to where the slanting section of yet an-
other and broader corridor slanted darkly.

This further corridor was faced with cold bricks; its floor also, and that was all, but
it brought the sweat suddenly to his brow and to the palms of his hands. Yet why, for he
was looking at no more than the sort of things he had seen a score of times already on
this same morning? But there was this difference. He had seen those bricks before. He had
come upon the outskirts of his own domain. Unwittingly as he had moved through the un-
charted hinterlands, he had come upon the outskirts of the Hollow Halls--the world he had
made his own. He was no longer lost. Steerpike had led them by a trail of his own to a
domain which Mr Flay had thought to be impregnable.

What was he doing here? Here, where Mr Flay had stood, his blood running cold, and had
heard the grizzly laughter long ago? Here, where night after night and day after day he
had sought the screaming nest to no avail? Here, where ever since those days the silence
had come down like a deadweight--so that he had not dared to return, for the stillness
had become more terrible than the demoniac laughter.

He alone knew of this. He passed the back of his hand across his eyes.

Without waiting to make so much as a sign to the two behind him he paced out grotesquely,
on tip-toe to the juncture and, again to his left he saw the young man. Had Steerpike
turned to the right he might well have proceeded towards those districts which Mr Flay
knew so well. Turning to the left, however, took him into that labyrinth in which he had
so often lost himself in his search for the haunted room.

Mr Flay knew only too well that to keep Steerpike in sight would be no easy task. There
was the double difficulty of their following him closely enough to keep him in sight, and
yet to remain inaudible and unseen themselves.

Nothing would be more embarrassing than for them to be discovered--for Steerpike was com-
mitting no crime in moving rapidly through this deserted place. If there were anything
nefarious going on, it was upon their side, in shadowing the Master of Ritual.

But there was no need for Flay to warn the Doctor and the boy that the necessity for ab-
solute silence was even more acute. As they slid along the brickwork corridor they felt
a closing in of the world.

And now began the threading of a maze so labyrinthine as to suggest that the builders of
these sunless walls had been ordered to construct a maze for no other purpose than to
torture the mind and freeze the memory. It was no wonder that Flay had never done more
in those past days, than stumble blindly through so tortuous a region. And yet, in spite
of the confusion, and the necessity for his concentrating upon keeping Steerpike in view,
his instincts were working upon their own and they told him that they were returning by
devious and contradictory roads to the proximity of the cold brick corridor from which
they had started. Steerpike had slowed his pace. His head hung forward on his chest, not
dejectedly but with an air of abstraction. His feet moved even slower, until he was vir-
tually loitering. When he came to flights of shallow stairs he descended with a kind of
loose-jointed and collapsing motion of the legs--as though his body had forgotten its
own existence. He wandered round corners with a dream-like motion, his body at so strange
an angle of relaxation as to be almost dangerous.

When at last he came to a certain door he straightened himself with a jerk--stretched out
his fingers and became on the instant all awareness. He made a sound between his teeth
and the monkey scrambled from the folds of his cape and sat upon his shoulder, the feath-
er in its hat nodding to and fro. For a moment as the monkey turned his head, and its
black eyes peered from that small and wrinkled face, peered back along the way it had
come, the Doctor thought he had been seen. But he did not draw back his head or make any
movement and the creature with its naked face and its costume of coloured diamonds scratch-
ed itself and turned away at last. Only then did the Doctor and his companions withdraw
themselves even more deeply into the shadows.

Meanwhile Steerpike sorted out a key from a bunch in his pocket and after pausing a moment
or two turned it with difficulty in the lock. But he did not touch the handle of the door.
He turned his back upon it and gazed along the way he had come, tapping his teeth with
his thumb nail.

It was obvious that for some reason best known to himself he was chary of walking in. The
monkey on his shoulder shifted its position and in doing so its long tail tapped lightly
across Steerpike's face. But that was seemingly enough to irritate its master, for the
little beast was flung to the floor where it crouched and whimpered.

As Steerpike turned his eyes from his bruised plaything his attention was caught by sprawl-
ing heaps of rubbish, stones and broken timbers that lay a little way along the side pass-
age. As he stared at them his anger drained from his face, and his features became set
again and the corner of his lips lifted into a dead line.

For a moment or two the three watchers feared that they had lost him for he moved suddenly
out of their range of vision. It was fortunate for them that the monkey remained where it
was, outside the door where it nursed its bruised forearm. Had they followed Steerpike
they would at once have met him face to face, for he returned within a minute with a long
broken pole.

And now began an operation that completely baffled the hidden spectators. With extreme
care Steerpike turned the handle and released the latch. The door was now free but was
not yet opened by so much as a quarter of an inch. He stood back from it, and holding the
broken pole like a battering ram, pushed gently at the black wooden panel of the mysteri-
ous door. It moved upon its hinges with no great difficulty and Steerpike was able to ob-
tain a view of a section of the room beyond. For a little while he held the pole motion-
less as he stared along its length and through the narrow opening. It was obvious that
what he saw concerned him deeply. He rose upon his toes. He cocked his head to one side.
Then he withdrew the pole and laid it on the ground at his feet. It was now, at this same
moment, as he took a scarf from his pocket and tied it about his face so that only his
eyes were visible, that the Doctor, Flay and Titus became conscious of a sickly and musty
odour. But the strange performance that was going on before their eyes, so riveted their
attention that at first they hardly noticed it. Again Steerpike raised the pole and push-
ing at the panels with the utmost caution was able momentarily to see more and more of
the room which he was evidently so anxious to inspect. When the door was sufficiently
ajar to admit the entry of a man, he paused.

As he did so the monkey, whose feathered hat had fallen in the dust, began to make its
inquisitive way to the open door. It was evident that its arm was hurting it. Once or
twice, in spite of its eagerness to explore the room beyond the door, it glanced appre-
hensively over its shoulder at Steerpike, baring its teeth in a nervous grimace. But its
resilient nature became dominant and springing off its back legs it clung to the door
handle with its nervous little hands. Again Steerpike pressed upon the long pole, this
time with more force, and as the door swung ajar the monkey, swinging with it, let go
and dropped upon the great mouldering carpet that lay within. But it did not drop alone,
for no sooner had its four feet touched the ground than with a sickening thud an axe-
head fell from high above the door, severing the long tail of the monkey as it buried
its murderous edge in the floor. The shrill and appallingly human scream of the little
creature rang through the hollow district, echoing and re-echoing the agony of that mo-
ment, while, beside itself with pain, surprise and rage, it tore about the huge room
that lay spread before it, leaping from chair to chair, from window-sill to mantelpiece,
from cupboard to cupboard, scattering vases, lamps and small objects of all kinds to
left and right in its wild circuits.

Into this room, now spattered with the monkey's blood, Steerpike advanced at once. There
was no longer any caution in his bearing. He gave the careering creature not so much as
a single glance. Had he done so he might have noticed that on seeing him the monkey halt-
ed its flight and was crouched quivering upon the back of a chair. Its eyes were upon
him and in them was a moist and lethal hatred, as though all the spleen and gall of the
vile tropics was floating there beneath the small grey eyelids. Its pain and its humili-
ation were laid at the door of the man who had flung it from his shoulder. As it watched
its master it bared its teeth and wrung its hands together. The blood dripped freely from
the stump of its tail. What had happened to the monkey--what had caused its harrowing out-
cry was, of course, unknown to Titus, the Doctor and Mr Flay. But the urgency of that hu-
man cry lifted them out of their hiding places, and brought them to the door. They saw at
once that Steerpike had left this first room and had presumably descended the three or
four steps that led to a second apartment. But the monkey caught sight of them at once
and ran towards them. When it reached Titus it rose to its back legs and began a series
of grimaces, which in any other circumstances would have been amusing enough, but were
at that moment almost heartbreaking. But they had no time for it. Too much was at stake.
Their nerves were at full stretch. They were all but exhausted and above all they were
still in the invidious position of following a man without any warrant or rational excuse.
Nevertheless the last half-hour had intensified their suspicions to a high degree. They
knew in their hearts that they had been right to follow him. They were now prepared for
anything that might unfold.

Their apprehension had grown so dark, their speculation so fantastic that when they crept
to the second door and peered into the apartment below, and when they saw in the centre
of the great carpet that filled the room the two skeletons lying side by side in their
fast decaying dresses of imperial purple, their pulses beat no faster. Their emotions
had been over-strained and had gone limp. But their brains raced.

The Doctor, who had been holding his silk handkerchief across his face, had known for
some while that there was death in the air. He was also the first to know that they
were looking at all that was left of Cora and Clarice Groan. Titus had no idea that he
was staring at his aunts. He was simply looking at skeletons. He had never seen skele-
tons before.

It was a moment or two before Mr Flay remembered the invariable purple of the Twins.
That there had been foul play was immediately apparent to them all.

The remoteness of these rooms from the castle; the double-death; the windowless walls;
the possession by Steerpike of a key and his familiarity with the corridors of approach
--and more than all this, his present behaviour. For as they watched him the young man,
never doubting the security of his solitude, began to behave in a way which could only
be interpreted by those who watched him as a form of madness, or if not madness, some-
thing so eccentric as to tread its arbitrary borderland.

Steerpike was aware, directly he had entered the terrible room, that he was behaving
strangely. He could have stopped himself at any moment. But to have stopped himself
would have been to have stopped a valve--to have bottled up something which would have
clamoured for release. For Steerpike was anything but inhibited. His control that had
so seldom broken had never frustrated him. In one way that this new expression had need
of an outlet he gave himself up to whatever his blood dictated. He was watching himself,
but only so that he should miss nothing. He was the vehicle through which the gods were
working. The dim primordial gods of power and blood.

There at his feet were the decomposing relics, the purple of their dresses hanging
over the ribs in clotted folds, the skulls protruding horribly, their sockets staring at the
ceiling. No less than had been their vanished faces, these skulls were identical save that
across a single socket some spider, fastidious in his craftsmanship, had spun a delicate
web. At its centre struggled a fly, so that in a way a kind of animation had come to either
Cora or to Clarice.

In some kind of way the Doctor, though he could not understand, was able to gain an ink-
ling as to what was happening in Steerpike's mind, as the skewbald homicide began to
strut like a cockerel about the bodies of the women he had imprisoned, humiliated and
starved to death. The Doctor could see that Steerpike was by no means mad in any accept-
ed sense for every now and then he would repeat a number of high stepping paces as though
to perfect them. It was as though he were identifying himself with some archetypal war-
rior, or fiend. A fiend, which although it had no sense of humour, had a ghastly gaiety
--a kind of lethal lightness that struck at the very heart of the humanities; struck at
it, darted at it, played about it jabbing here and there, as though with a blade of
speargrass.

When Flay and the Doctor, in their different ways, saw what was happening in the room
they were both aware that Titus should not be with them. He was no child, but this was
no scene for a boy. But there was nothing they could do. For them to separate would be
criminally unwise. He could never in any event have found his way back alone. That as
yet there had been no movement on their part to disturb the criminal was fortunate, but
this deathly silence, in which the only sound was that of Steerpike's footsteps, could
not last for ever.

The Doctor was appalled, but at the same time, as a man of high intelligence and curio-
sity he was fascinated by what he saw. Not so Flay. An eccentric himself he despised
and abhorred any form of eccentricity in others and what he was now witnessing had the
effect of all but blinding him with a kind of bourgeois rage. Only in one thing was he
happy--that the upstart had unmasked himself and that from now onwards the battle was
joined in earnest.

His small eyes were fixed upon his enemy. His neck was thrust out like a turtle's. His
long beard trembled as it hung forward on his chest. His forest knife shook in his hand.

It was not the only weapon that was shaking. The short heavy poker in Titus' clenched
fist was far from steady. The young earl was quite frankly terrified by what he saw. An
area of solid ground had given way beneath his feet and he had fallen into an underworld
of which he had had no conception. A place where a man can pace like a cock about the
ribs and skulls of his victims. A place where the air was rank with their corruption.

The Doctor was gripping his arm to steady him, and the grip tightened suddenly. Steer-
pike had stopped for a moment to re-tie his shoelace. When this was completed he rose
from his knee and stood on tip-toe where he remained poised, his head thrown back. Then
he dropped his heels and flexed his knees and at the same time turning his toes outwards,
he raised his arms to his side, and with his elbows bent at right angles, he began to
stamp, his fists clenched at the height of his shoulders. The sound of his feet was
very loud and close.

He was in the posture of some earthish dancer, but he soon tired of this strange dis-
play--this throw-back to some savage rite of the world's infancy. He had given himself
up to it for those few moments, in the way that an artist can be the ignorant agent of
something far greater and deeper than his conscious mind could ever understand. But as
he strutted, his knees bent, his feet turned outwards, his body and head erect, his el-
bows crooked, and his hands clenched, he had enjoyed the novelty of what he was doing.
He was amused at this peculiar need of his body; that it wished to stamp, to strut, to
rear on tip-toes, to sink upon the heels--and all because he was a murderer--all this
intrigued him, titillating his brain, so that, now, as he ceased to stamp, and sank
into a dusty chair, the muscles of his throat went through the contractions that form
laughter--but no sound came.

He shut his eyes, and in the darkness, it seemed to him that he was in peril and he o-
pened them again with a start and sat forward in his chair, glancing about the room.
This time as his gaze returned to the skeletons he was revolted. Not with what he had
done to bring them to this state--but that they should pollute this room; that they
should show him their ugly skulls and hollow bones.

He rose from his chair in anger. But he knew in his heart that he was not angry with
them. He was enraged with himself. For what had seemed amusing a few moments ago
was now a source, almost of fear to him. In looking back and seeing himself strutting
like a cock about their bodies, he realized that he had been close to lunacy. This was
the first time that any such thought had entered his head, and to dismiss it he crowed
like a cock. He was not afraid of strutting; he had known what he was doing; to prove
it he would crow and crow again. Not that he wished to do so, but to prove that he could
stop whenever he wanted, and start when he wished to, and be all the while in complete
control of himself, for there was no madness in him.

What he did not realize was that the death of Barquentine, and the nightmare of the
fire and the vile waters of the moat and the long fever that followed had made a dif-
ference to him. Whatever he now believed about himself was based on the assumption
that he was the same Steerpike as his former self of a few years earlier. But he was
no longer that youth. The fire had burned a part of him away. Something of him was
drowned for ever in the waters of the moat. His daring was no longer a thing that
fanned itself abroad; it had contracted into a fist of brimstone.

He was meaner, more irritable, more impatient for the ultimate power which could only
be his through the elimination of all rivals; and if he had ever had any scruples,
any love at all for even a monkey, a book, or a sword-hilt, all this, and even this,
had been cauterized and drowned away.

As he had entered this second apartment, he had propped the broken pole against the
wall on his left. He now felt himself gravitating towards it. He no longer stamped
or strutted. He was himself again, or perhaps he had ceased to be himself. At any
rate, the three watchers recognized again that familiar walk, with the shoulders
hunched and the cat-like footsteps. When he reached the pole he ran his hand along
its side. The scarf was still about his face. His dark red eyes were like small cir-
cular pits.

As his hand strayed over the surface of the pole, rather as a pianist will fondle
a keyboard, his fingers came across a fissure in the wood, and as they played about
it they found how easy it would be to tear from the beam a long and narrow splinter.
Abstractedly, hardly knowing that he was doing it, a score of disquieting impres-
sions had taken the place of the surety within him, he prised the splinter away,
using, at the last, the whole strength of his arm as it arched, in its tension,
from the pole. He did not look at it, and he was about to throw it away, for the
tearing of it from the pole had been his only interest, when, his gaze having re-
turned to the skeletons, he wandered towards them, and running the long resilient
splinter along their ribs, as a child might run a stick along a railing, he heard
the bone-notes of an instrument.

For a few minutes he spent his time in this way, creating by a series of taps and
runs, a kind of percussive rhythm in key with his mood.

But he was tiring of the place. He had returned in order to satisfy his eyes that
the Twins were truly dead, and he had stayed longer than he had intended. Now he
flung the splinter away and, kneeling, unclasped the strings of pearls that hung
about the vertebrae. Rising, he dropped them into his pocket and made at once for
the three steps that led to the upper room and as he did so Mr Flay stepped out
from his hiding place.

The effect upon Steerpike was electric. He bounded backwards, with a leap like the
leap of a dancer, his cloak swirling about him and his thin lips parted in a mur-
derous snarl of amazement.

There was no longer any case of symbolism. The strutting and the stamping were no-
thing to the fierce reality of that leap which sent him, as though from a sprin-
gboard, backwards through the air.

Quick as a reflex, even at the height of his elevation, he felt for his knife. Before
he landed he knew that he was unmasked. That from now onwards, unless he slew
the bearded figure, on the instant, he would be on the run. In a flash he saw the
life of a fugitive spread out before him.

It was only as he landed that he realized at whom he was looking. He had not seen
Flay for many years and had supposed him dead. The beard had altered him. But now
he knew him, and this knowledge did nothing to stay his hand. Of all men, Flay
would have the least sympathy for a rebel.

He had found his knife, had balanced it upon the palm of his hand and had drawn
back his right arm when he saw the Doctor and Titus.

The boy was white. The poker shook in his hand but his teeth were gritted. A ter-
rible sickness had hold of him. He was in a nightmare. The last sixty minutes had
added more than an hour to his age.

The Doctor was pale also. His face had lost all trace of its habitual drollery.
It was a face cut out of marble, strangely proportioned but refined and determin-
ed.

The sight of the three of them, blocking the stairs, halted Steerpike's arm as he
was about to launch the knife.

And then, in a peculiarly quiet voice clear and precise, a voice that told nothing
of the hammering heart...

"You will drop your penknife to the ground. You will come forward with your arms
raised. You are under arrest," said the Doctor.

But Steerpike hardly heard him. His future was ruptured. His years of self-advance-
ment and intricate planning were as though they had never been. A red cloud filled
his head. His body shuddered with a kind of lust. It was the lust for an unbridled
evil. It was the glory of knowing himself to be pitted, openly, against the big bat-
talions. Alone, loveless, vital, diabolic--a creature for whom compromise was no
longer necessary, and intrigue was a dead letter. If it was no longer possible for
him to wear, one day, the legitimate crown of Gormenghast, there was still the dark
and terrible domain--the subterranean labyrinth--the lairs and warrens where, mon-
arch of darkness like Satan himself, he could wear undisputed a crown no less imp-
erial. Poised like an acrobat and vividly aware of the slightest move that was made
by the three figures before him, the Doctor's voice for all his sensory acuteness,
seemed to come from far away.

"I give you one last chance," said his ex-patron. "If you have not dropped your knife
within five seconds from now, we will advance upon you!"

But it was not the knife that dropped. It was Flay. The loyal seneschal fell back-
wards with a grinding cry and was half caught in the arms of Titus and the Doctor,
and in that instant, while the blade of Steerpike's knife still quivered in his heart,
and while the four hands of Flay's friends were engaged with the weight of the long
ragged body, the young man, following the path of the flung knife, as though he were
tied behind it, sped over their shoulders and was in the upper room before they could
recover.

Now, with the fear of retributory death upon him, and the redoubled cunning that comes
to the marked man, Steerpike lost not a second in speeding from the room. But he did
not pass through the door alone, for as he slammed it and turned the key in the lock
he was bitten savagely in the back of the neck. With a scream he swivelled on his feet
and clutched at nothing.

A panic possessed him and he ran as he had never run before, turning left and right
like a wild creature as he made his way ever deeper into a nether empire.

Outside the door of what had been the Twins' apartment, the monkey, squatting on a
rafter, chattered and wrung its hands.



FIFTY-NINE



A few days after the murder of Mr Flay and the subsequent smashing of the door and
escape of the Doctor and Titus from those dread apartments, the relics of the Twins
were heaped into a single coffin and were buried, at the orders of the Countess,
with all the rites and solemnities that were due to the sisters of an earl.

Mr Flay was buried on the same day in the graveyard of the Elect Retainers, a small
space of nettle-covered ground. At evening the long shadow of the Tower of Flints
lay across this simple boneyard with its conical heaps of stones to show where not
more than a dozen servants of exceptional loyalty lay silently under the tall weeds.

Had Mr Flay been able to foresee his funeral he would have appreciated the honour
of joining so small and loyal a company of the dead. And if he had known that the
Countess herself, in draperies as black and as intense as the plumage of her own
ravens, was to be there at the graveside, then his wounds would indeed have been
healed.

The Poet had taken over as Master of Ritual. He had no easy task. Night after
night, his long wedge-shaped head was bowed over the manuscripts.

When the Countess had been told by Prunesquallor of the finding of the Twins, the
manner of Flay's death, and of Steerpike's escape, she had risen from the upright
chair in which she had been sitting, and without any change of expression in her
big face had lifted the chair from the floor and had methodically broken its curved
legs off one by one, and had then, in what seemed to be a state of abstraction,
tossed the chair-legs one after another through the glass-panes of the nearest
window.

When she had done this she moved to the smashed window and stared through the
jagged hole. There was a white mist in the air and the tops of the towers appeared
to be floating.

From where the Doctor stood he saw, for the first time, a picture. He was not look-
ing for one. What pictures he had ever painted had been very delicate and charming.
But this was quite different. He saw something dynamic, something quite wonderful
in the contrast of the sharp and angular edges of the broken glass, and the smooth
and doming line of her ladyship's shoulders that, in the immediate foreground,
curved heavily across the jaggedness. And at the same time he saw the deep, copper-
beech colour of her hair against the pearl-grey tower-tops that floated in the
distance. And the blackness of her dress, and the marble of her neck and the sheen
of the glass, and the pollen-like softness of the sky and towers so jaggedly cir-
cumscribed. She was a monument against a broken window and beyond the broken
window
her realm, tremulous and impalpable in the white mist.

But Dr Prunesquallor had only a few moments in which to regret that he had not
learned to paint, for the monument turned about.

"Sit down," she said.

Prunesquallor looked about him. The confusion in the room made it difficult for
him to see anything that could possibly be sat on, but he found himself a perch
at last in the corner of a window-sill that was scattered with bird seed.

She approached and stood above him. She did not look down, but gazed through a
small casement above his head while she spoke. Finding that she never turned her
eyes to him and that for him to look up when listening or speaking was neither
noticed nor necessary, and what is more that it gave him a pain at the back of
his neck, the doctor gazed at the scallops of sartorial immediately ahead of him
and within a few inches of his nose, or simply shut his eyes as they conversed.

It was soon obvious to the Doctor that he was in conversation with someone whose
thoughts were concentrated upon the capture of Steerpike not only to the exclu-
sion of everything else but with a menacing power and a ruthless simplicity.

Her heavy voice was slower than ever.

"All normal work shall be suspended. Man, woman and child shall be given their
orders-of-search. Every known spring and wellhead, every cistern, tank and catch-
ment shall have its sentry. No doubt the beast must drink."

The Doctor suggested a meeting of officers, the drawing up of a plan of campaign,
the working out of a time table or rota of sentries and search parties, and the
formation of redoubtable bands drawn from the young blood of the castle's lower
life where there was no lack of spleen, and where the price which was to be set
upon Steerpike's head would encourage their intrepidity.

They agreed that there was no time to waste for with every hour that passed the
fugitive would be withdrawing ever more deeply into some forgotten quarter, or
constructing some ambuscade or hiding place, even at the heart of the castle's
activities. There was no place on earth so terrible and so suited to a game of
hide and seek as this gaunt warren.

Leaders were to be chosen. Weapons were to be served out. The castle was to be
placed upon a war footing. A curfew was to be imposed, and wherever he might be
lurking, from vault to eyrie, the murderer was to have no respite from the sound
of feet and the light of torches. Sooner or later he would make his first mis-
take. Sooner or later, in the corner of some eye, the tail of his shadow would
be seen. Sooner or later if there was no relaxation in the search, he would be
found at some well-head, drinking like an animal, or flying from some storehouse
with his plunder.

The Countess was using her powerful brain as though for the first time. The
Doctor had never known her like this. Had her cats entered the room or a bird
descended flapping to her shoulder it is doubtful whether, at this moment, she
would have noticed them. Her thoughts were so concentrated upon the seizure of
Steerpike that she had not moved a muscle since she and the Doctor had started
talking. Only her lips had moved. She had talked very slowly and quietly but
there was a thickness in her voice.

"I shall outwit him," she said. "The ceremonies shall continue."

"The Day of the Bright Carvings?" queried the Doctor. "Shall it proceed as us-
ual?"

"As usual."

"And the Outer-dwellers be allowed within the gates?"

"Naturally," she said. "What could stop them?"


What could stop them? It was Gormenghast that spoke. A fiend might be wander-
ing the castle with dripping hands, but the traditional ceremonies were at the
back of it all, enormous, immemorial, sacrosanct. In a fortnight's time it was
their day, the day of the Mud Dwellers, when all along the white stone shelf
at the foot of the long courtyard wall the coloured carvings would be display-
ed; and at night, when the bonfires roared and all but the three chosen statues
were turned to ash in their flames, Titus standing on the balcony with the Out-
er Dwellers below him in the fire-lit darkness, would hold aloft in turn, each
masterpiece. And as each was raised above his head, a gong would clash. And
after the echoes of the third reverberation had died away he would order them
to be taken to the Hall of Bright Carvings where Rottcodd slept and the dust
collected and the flies crawled over the tall slatted blinds.

Prunesquallor rose to his feet. "You are right," he said. "There must be no
difference, your ladyship, save for an eternal vigilance, and unflagging pur-
suit."

"There is never any difference," she replied. "There is never any difference."
Then she turned her head for the first time and looked at the Doctor. "We will
have him," she said. Her voice, as soft and heavy and thick as velvet, was in
so grim and incongruous a contrast to the merciless pin-head of light that
glittered in her narrowed eyes that the doctor made for the door. He was in
need of an atmosphere less charged. As he turned the door handle he caught
sight of the smashed window, and saw through the jagged star-shaped opening
the towers floating. The white mist seemed lovelier than ever, and the towers
more fairy-like.



SIXTY



Bellgrove and his wife sat opposite one another in their living room, Irma,
very upright, as was her habit, her back as straight as a yard of pump-water.
There was something irritating in this unnecessary rigidity. It was, perhaps,
ladylike, but it was certainly not feminine. It annoyed Bellgrove for it made
him feel that there was something wrong in the way that he had always used a
chair. To his mind an armchair was something to curl up in, or to drape one-
self across. It was a thing for human delectation. It was not built to be
perched on.

And so he curled his old spine and draped his old legs and lolled his old head,
while his wife sat silently and stared at him.

"...And why on earth should you think that he would dream of risking his life
in order to attack you?" the old man was saying. "You deceive yourself, Irma.
Peculiar as he is, there is no reason why he should flatter you to the extent
of killing you. To climb in at your bedroom window would be highly hazardous.
The entire castle is on the watch for him. Do you really imagine that it matters
to him whether you are alive or dead, any more than whether I am alive or dead,
or that fly up there on the ceiling is alive or dead? Good grief, Irma, be reason-
able if you can, if only for the sake of the love that once I bore you."

"There is no need for you to speak like that," Irma replied, in a voice as
clipped as the sound of castanets. "Our love has nothing to do with what we
are talking about. Nor is it anything to mock at. It has changed, that is all.
It is no longer green."

"And nor am I," murmured Bellgrove.

"What an obvious thing to say!" said Irma, with forced brightness. "And how
very trite--I said how very trite!"

"I heard you, my dear."

"And this is no time for shallow talk. I have come to you as a wife should
come to her husband. For guidance. Yes, for guidance. You are old, I know,
but..."

"What the hell has my age got to do with it?" snarled Bellgrove, lifting his
magnificent head from a cushion. The milk-white locks were clustered on his
shoulders. "You were never one to ask for advice. You mean you're terrified."

"That is so," said Irma. She said it so simply and so quietly that she did
not recognize her own voice. She had spoken involuntarily. Bellgrove turned
his head sharply in her direction. He could hardly believe that it was she
who had spoken. He rose from his chair and crossed the ugly carpet to where
she sat bolt upright. He squatted on his heels before her. A sense of pity
stirred in him. He took her long hands in his.

At first she tried to withdraw them but he held them tightly. She had tried
to say "don't be ridiculous' but no words came.

"Irma," he said at last. "Let us try again. We have both changed--but that is
perhaps as it should be. You have shown me sides of your nature which I
never knew existed. Never. How could I ever have guessed, my dear, that you
should for instance have thought that half my staff were in love with you--
or that you could become so irritated with my innocent habit of falling asleep?
We have our different spirits, our different needs, our different lives. We are
fused, Irma, it is true; we are integrated--but not all that much. Relax your
back, my dear. Relax your backbone. It makes it easier for me to talk. I've ask-
ed you so often--and in all humility--knowing as I do that your spine is your
own."

"My dearest husband," said Irma. "You are talking overmuch. If you could
leave a sentence alone, it would be so much stronger."She bowed her head
to him. "But I will tell you something," she continued, "it makes me happy to
see you there, crouched at my feet. It makes me feel young again--or it would
do, it would do, if they could only lay their hands on him and end the suspense.
It is too much--too much...night after night...night after night...Oh can't you
see how it racks a woman? Can't you? Can't you?"

"My brave one," said Bellgrove. "My lady love; pull yourself together. Sin-
ister as the business is, there is no need for you to take the whole thing
personally. You are nothing to him, Irma, as I have said before. You are
not his foe, my dear, are you? Nor yet his accomplice? Or are you?"

"Don't be ridiculous."

"Quite so. I am being ridiculous. Your husband, the headmaster of Gormenghast,
is being ridiculous. And why? Because I have caught the germ. I have caught
it from my wife."

"But in the darkness...in the darkness...I seem to see him."

"Quite so," said Bellgrove. "But if you did see him you would feel worse
still. Except of course that we could claim a reward, you know!"

Bellgrove found that his legs were aching so he rose to his feet.

"My advice, Irma, is to put a little more trust in your husband. He may not
be perfect. There may be husbands with finer qualities. With nobler profiles
for instance, eh? Or with hair like almond blossom. It is not for me to say.
And of course there may be husbands who have even become headmasters, or
whose intellect is wider, or whose youth was more dazzling in its gallantry.
It is not for me to say. But such as I am I have become yours. And such as
you are you have become mine. And such as we both are we have become one
another's. And what does this lead to? It leads to this. That if all this
is so, and yet you quake at every sound of the night, then I take it that
your trust in me has waned since those early days when I had you at my feet.
O you have schemed...schemed...!"

"How dare you!" cried Irma. "How dare you!"

Bellgrove had forgotten himself. He had forgotten what his argument was in-
tended to prove. A little whiff of temper springing from some unformulated
thought had caught him unaware. He tried to recover.

"Schemed," he continued, "for my happiness. And you have very largely suc-
ceeded. I like you sitting there, if you weren't so upright. Can't you melt,
my dear one...just a little. One grows so very tired of straight lines. As
for Steerpike, take my advice; make use of me when you are frightened. Run
to me. Fly to me. Press yourself against my chest; run your fingers through
my locks. Be comforted. If he ever did appear before me, you know very well
how I would deal with him."

Irma looked at her venerable husband. "I certainly do not," she said. "How
would you?"

Bellgrove, who had even less idea than Irma, stroked his long chin, and then
a sickly smile appeared on his lips.

"What I would do," he said, "is something that no gentleman could possibly
divulge. Faith: that is what you need. Faith in me, my dear."

"There would be nothing you could do," said Irma, ignoring her husband's sug-
gestion that she should have faith in him. "Nothing at all. You are too old."

Bellgrove, who had been about to resume his seat, remained standing. His back
was to his wife. A dull pain began to grow beneath his ribs. A sense of the
black injustice of bodily decay came over him, but a rebellious voice crying
in his heart "I am young, I am young," while the carnal witness of his three
score years and ten sank suddenly at the knees.

In a moment Irma was at his side. "Oh my dear one! What is it? What is it?"

She lifted his head and put a cushion beneath it. Bellgrove was fully consc-
ious. The shock of finding himself suddenly on the floor had upset him for a
moment or two and had taken his breath away, but that was all.

"My legs went," he said, looking up at the earnest face above him with its
wonderfully sharp nose. "But I am all right again."

Directly he had made this remark he was sorry for it, for he could have done
with an hour of nursing.

"Perhaps you had better get up in that case, my dear," said Irma. "The floor
is no place for a headmaster."

"Ah, but I feel very..."

"Now, now!" interrupted Irma. "Let me have no nonsense. I shall go and see
whether the doors have been locked. When I return I expect to find you in
your chair again." She left the room.

After kicking his heels irritably on the carpet, the headmaster struggled
to his feet, and when he was in his chair again he put out his tongue at
the door through which Irma had passed, but immediately he had done so he
blushed for shame and blew a kiss in the same direction from the wasted
palm of his hand.



SIXTY-ONE



There was a part of the outer wall which was so deeply hidden with canopies
of creeper that for over a hundred years no eyes had seen the stones of the
wall itself but the eyes of insects, mice and birds. These undulating acres
of hanging foliage overlooked a certain lane which lay so close to the outer
wall of Gormenghast that had the mice or the hidden birds been capable of
tossing a twig out of the leafy darkness it would have fallen into this lane
that lay below.

It was a narrow way, in deep shadow for most of the day. Only in the late
evening, as the sun sank over Gormenghast forest, a quiverful of honey-col-
oured beams would slant along the alley and there would be pools of amber
where all day long the chill, inhospitable shadows had brooded.

And when these amber pools appeared the curs of the district would congre-
gate out of nowhere and would squat in the golden beams and lick their sores.

But it was not in order to watch those half-wild dogs or to marvel at the
sunbeams that the Thing had taken to working her way through the dense growth
of the wall-draped creepers, threading the vertical foliage with the noise-
less ease of a snake until twenty feet above the ground she moved outward
from the wall to such a position that she could look down upon certain sec-
tions of the lane. It was for a reason more covetous. It was because the
solitary carver who shared this evening hour with the dogs and the sunbeams
never failed to be at his accustomed place at sundown. It was then that he
worked upon the block of jarl-wood. It was then that the image grew under
his chisel. It was then that the Thing watched, with her eyes wide as a
child's, the evolution of the wooden raven. And it was for this carving
that she pined angrily, impatiently. It was so that she might snatch it
from its maker, and then away, in a breath, to the hills, that she crouch-
ed there evening after evening, watching greedily from the loose ivy, for
the completion of so pretty a toy.



SIXTY-TWO



When Fuchsia heard the news of Steerpike's treachery and when she realized
how her first and only affair of the heart had been with a murderer, an ex-
pression of such sickness and horror darkened her face that her aspect was,
from that moment, never wholly free of that corosive stain.

For a long while she spoke to no one, keeping herself to her room, where,
unable to cry, she became exhausted with the emotions that fought in her to
find some natural outlet. At first there was only the sense of having been
physically struck, and the pain of the wound. Her arms gave little jerks
and tingled. A depression of utter blackness drowned her. She had no wish
to live at all. Her breast pained her. It was as though a great fear filled
the cage of her ribs, a globe of pain that grew and grew. For the first
week after the crushing news she could not sleep. And then a kind of hard-
ness entered her. Something she had never housed before. It came as a pro-
tection. She needed it. It helped her to grow bitter. She began to kill at
birth all thoughts of love that were natural to her. She changed and she
aged as she wandered to and fro across her solitary room. She began to see
no reason why others, as well as Steerpike, should not be double-faced and
merciless. She hated the world.

When Titus called to see her he was amazed at the change in her voice, and
the sunken look of her eyes. He saw for the first time that she was a woman
as well as being his sister.

On her side, she saw a change in him. His restlessness was as real as her
disillusion. His longing for freedom as pressing as her longing for love.

But what could he do, and what could she do? The castle was round and about
them, widespread and as unchartable as a dark day.

"Thank you for coming," she said, "but there's nothing we can talk about!"

Titus said nothing but leaned against a wall. She looked so much older. His
heel began to work away at a piece of loose plaster above the skirting board
until it came away.

"I can't believe he's dead," said the boy at last.

"Who?"

"Flay, of course. And all the things he did. What about his cave? Empty for
ever I suppose. Would you like to..."

"No," said Fuchsia, anticipating his question. "Not now. Not any more. I
don't want to go anywhere, really. Have you seen Dr Prune?"

"Once or twice. He asked me to tell you that he'd like to see you, whenever
you want. He's not very well."

"None of us are," said Fuchsia. "What are you going to do? You look quite
different. Was it awful, seeing what happened? But don't tell me. I don't
want to dwell on it!"

"There are sentries everywhere," said Titus.

"I know."

"And a curfew. I have to be in my room by eight o'clock. Who's the man out-
side the door here?"

"I don't know his name. He's there most of the day and all night. A man in
the courtyard too, under the window."

Titus wandered to the window and looked down. "What good is he doing there?"
And then, turning about. "They'll never catch him," he said. "He's too cun-
ning, the bloody beast. Why can't they burn the whole place down, and him
with it, and us with it, and the world with it, and finish the whole dirty
business, and the rotten ritual and everything and give the green grass a
chance?"

"Titus," she said. "Come here." He approached her, his hands shaking.

"I love you, Titus, but I can't feel anything. I've gone dead. Even you are
dead in me. I know I love you. You're the only one I love, but I can't feel
anything and I don't want to. I've felt too much, I'm sick of feelings...
I'm frightened of them."

Titus took another step towards her. She gazed at him. A year ago they
would have kissed. They had needed each other's love.

Now, they needed it even more but something had gone wrong. A space had
formed between them, and they had no bridge.

But he gripped her arm for a moment before walking quickly to the door and
disappearing from her sight.



SIXTY-THREE



The Day of the Bright Carvings was at hand. The Carvers had put the final
touches to their creations. The expectancy in the castle was as acute as
it was possible for it to be, when at the same time the larger and more
horrible awareness that Steerpike might at any moment strike again, took
up the larger part of their minds. For the skewbald man had struck four
times within the last eight days with accuracy, a small pebble being found,
in every case, near the fractured heads of the newly-slain, or lodged in
the bone above the eyes. These killings, so wicked in their want of pur-
pose, took place in such widely separated districts as to give no clue as
to where the haunt of the homicide might be. His deadly catapult had
spread a clammy terror through Gormenghast.

But in spite of this preponderant fear, the imminence of the traditional
day of carvings had brought a certain excitement of a less terrible kind
to the hearts of the denizens. They turned with relief to this age-old
ceremony as though to something on which they could rely--something that
had happened every year since they could remember anything at all. They
turned to tradition as a child turns to its mother.

The long courtyard where the ceremony was to be held had been scrubbed
and double scrubbed. The clanking of buckets, the swilling and hissing
of water, the sound of scouring had echoed along the attenuate yard, sun-
rise after sunrise, for a week past. The high southern wall in particular
was immaculate. The scaffolding to which the scrubbers had clung like mon-
keys while they ferreted among the rough stones, scraping at the inter-
stices and sluicing every vestige of accumulated dust from niche and crack,
had been removed. It sailed away, this wall, in a dwindling perspective
of gleaming stone--and five feet from the ground along its entire length
the Carvers' shelf protruded. The solid shelf or buttress was of so hand-
some a breadth that even the largest of the coloured carvings stood com-
fortably upon it. It had already been whitewashed in preparation for the
great day, as had also the wall above it, to the height of a dozen feet.
What plants and creepers had forced their way through the stones during
the past year, were cut down, as usual, flush with the stones.

It was into this courtyard so unnaturally lustrated that the Carvers from
the Outer Dwellings were to pour like a dark and ragged tide, bearing their
heavy wooden carvings in their arms or upon their shoulders, or when the
works were too weighty for a man to sustain he would be aided by his fam-
ily--the children running alongside, barefooted, their black hair in their
eyes their shrill excited voices jabbing the heavy air as though with sti-
lettos.

For the air was full of an oppressive weight. What breath there was moved
hotly on its way as though it were fanned by the mouldering wings of huge
and sickly birds.

The Steerpike terror had been still further intensified by these stifling
conditions, and the ceremony of the Bright Carvings was for this reason all
the more eagerly anticipated, for it was a relief for the mind and spirit
to be able to turn to something the only purpose of which was beauty.

But, for all the consummate craft and rhythmic loveliness of the carvings
there was no love lost between their jealous authors. The inter-family riv-
alries, the ancient wrongs, a hundred bitter quarrels, were all remembered
at this annual ceremony. Old wounds were reopened or kept green. Beauty and
bitterness existed side by side. Old claw-like hands, cracked with long
years of thankless toil, would hold aloft a delicate bird of wood, its wings,
as thin as paper, spread for flight, its breast afire with a crimson stain.

On the penultimate evening all was ready. The Poet, now fully established
as Master of Ritual, had made his final tour of inspection with the Coun-
tess. On the following morning the gates in the Outer Wall were opened and
the Bright Carvers began the three miles trail to the Carver's Courtyard.

From then onwards the day blossomed like a rose, with its hundred blooms
and its thousand thorns. Grey Gormenghast became blood-shot, became glutted
with gold, became chill with blues as various as the blue of the flowers,
and the waters became stained with evergreen from the softest olive to ver-
idian, became rich with all the ochres; flamed and smouldered, shuddered
with the hues of earth and air.

And holding these solid figures in their arms were the dark and irritable
mendicants. By afternoon the long stone shelf had been loaded with its col-
oured forms, its birds, its beasts, its fantasies, its giant grasshoppers,
its reptiles and its rhythms of leaf and flower; its hundred heads that
turned upon their necks, that dropped or were raised more proudly from the
shoulders than any living head of flesh and blood.

There they stood in a long burning line with their shadows behind them on
the southern wall. From all these carvings three were to be chosen as the
most original and perfect and these three would be added to those that
were displayed in the unfrequented Hall of the Bright Carvings. The rest
were to be burned that same evening.

The judging was a long and scrupulous affair. The carvers would eye the
judges from a distance as they squatted about the courtyard in families,
or leaned against the opposite wall. Hour after hour the fateful business
proceeded--the only sound being the shouting and crying of the scores of
urchins. At about six o'clock the long tables were carried out by the cas-
tle servants and placed end to end in three long lines. These tables were
then loaded with loaves, and bowls of thick soup.

When dusk began to fall the judging was all but completed. The sky had be-
come overcast and an unusual darkness brooded over the scene. The air had
become intolerably close. The children had ceased to run about, although
in other years they had sported tirelessly until midnight. But now they
sat near their mothers in a formidable silence. To lift an arm was to be-
come tired and to sweat profusely. Many faces were turned to the sky where
a world of cloud was gathering together its gloomy continents, tier behind
tier like the foliage of some fabulous cedar.

As a minor Titus was not directly involved in the actual choice of the
"Three', but his technical approval had to be obtained when the decisions
were finally made. He had wandered restlessly up and down the line of the
exhibits, threading his way through the crowds, which parted deferentially
at his approach. The weight of the iron chain about his neck and the stone
that was strapped to his forehead became almost too much to bear. He had
seen Fuchsia but had lost her again in the crowds.

"There's going to be an almighty storm, my boy," said a voice at his shoul-
der. "By all that's torrential, there most certainly is!"

It was Prunesquallor.

"Feels like it, Doctor Prune," said Titus.

"And looks like it, my young stalker of felons!"

Titus turned his gaze to the sky. It seemed to have gone mad. It bulged and
shifted itself as though it were not moved by any breeze or current of the
air, but only through its own foul impulses.

It was a foul sky, and it was growing. It was accumulating filth from the
hot slums of hell. Titus turned his eyes from its indescribable menace and
faced the doctor again. His face was gleaming with sweat. "Have you seen
Fuchsia?" he said.

"I saw her," answered Titus. "But I lost her again. She is somewhere here."
The Doctor lifted his head high and stared about him, his Adam's apple very
angular, his teeth flashing, but in a smile that Titus could see was empty.

"I wish you would see her, Doctor Prune...she looks awful, suddenly."

"I will certainly see her, Titus, and as soon as I can."

At that moment a messenger approached. Titus was wanted by the judges.

"Away with you," cried the doctor in this new voice that had lost its ring.
"Away with you, young fellow!"

"Good-bye, doctor."



SIXTY-FOUR



That night, upon the balcony, his mother sat upon his right hand like an en-
ormous stranger, and the Poet upon his left, an alien figure. Below him was
a vast field of upturned faces. Away ahead of him and far beyond the reach
of the great bonfire's radiance the Mountain was just visible against the
dark sky.

The moment was approaching when he must call for the three successful carvers
to come forward and for him to draw up the carvings from below with a cord
and to place them in full sight of the crowd.

The flames of the bonfire around which the multitude was congregated streamed
up into the sky. Its insatiable heat had already reduced a hundred dreams to
ashes.

As he watched, a glorious tiger, its snarling head bent back along its spine,
and its four feet close together beneath its belly, was flung through the air,
by one of the twelve hereditary "vandals'. The flames appeared to flick out
their arms to receive it, and then they curled about it and began to eat.

His longing to escape came upon him with a sudden and elemental force. He
hated this gross wastage that was going on below him. The heat of the eve-
ning made him sick. The nearness of his mother and of the abstracted Poet
disquieted him. His eyes moved to Gormenghast Mountain. What lay beyond?
Was there another land...? Another world? Another kind of life?

If he should leave the castle! The very notion of it made him shake with a
mixture of fear and excitement. His thought was so revolutionary that he
glanced at his mother's back to see whether she had heard his mind at work.

If he should leave Gormenghast? He was unable to hazard a guess as to what
such a thought implied. He knew of no other place. He had thought before,
of Escape. Escape as an abstract idea. But he had never thought seriously
of where he would escape to, or of how he would live in some place where
he would be unknown.

And a seditious fear that he was in reality of no consequence came over him.
That Gormenghast was of no consequence and that to be an earl and the son
of Sepulchrave, a direct descendant of the blood line--was something of on-
ly local interest. The idea was appalling.

He raised his head and gazed across the thousands of faces below him. He
nodded his head in a kind of pompous approval as yet another carving was
tossed into the great bonfire. He counted a score of towers to his left.
"All mine..." he said, but the words sounded emptily in his head when sud-
denly something happened which blew his terror and his hope sky-high, which
filled him with a joy too huge for him to contain, which took him and shook
him out of his indecisions, and swept him into a land of hectic and cruel
brilliance, of black glades, and of a magic insupportable.

For, as he was watching, something happened with great rapidity. A coal
black raven, its head cocked, its every feather exquisitely chiselled, its
claws gripping a wrinkled branch was about to be thrown into the flames
when, as Titus watched, in a half-dream, a ripple in the silent, heat-heavy
crowd, showed where a single figure was threading its way with an unusual
speed. The hereditary "vandal' had hold of the wooden raven by its head
and swung back his hand. The bonfire leapt and crackled and lit his face.
The arm came forward; the fingers loosed their grip; that raven sailed up
in the air, turning over and over and began to fall towards the fire when,
as unforeseen and rapid as the course of a dream, there leapt from the bod-
y of the fire-lit crowds something that, with a mixture of grace and savagery
quite indescribable, snatched at the height of its leap the raven from the
air, and holding it above its head continued without a pause or break in the
superb rhythm of its flight, and apparently floating over an ivy-covered wall
disappeared into the night. For more than a minute there was no movement at
all. A dreadful embarrassment held the witnesses immobile as though with a
vice. The individual shock that each sustained was heightened by the stunned
condition of the mass. Something unthinkable had been done, something so fla-
grant that the anger that was so soon to show itself was for the moment held
back as though by a wall of embarrassment.

Such violation of a hallowed ceremony was unprecedented.

The Countess was one of the first to stir. For the first time since Steer-
pike's escape she was moved by a tremendous anger that had no connexion with
the skewbald rebel. She rose to her feet and with her big hands gripping the
balustrade stared into the night. The congested clouds hung with a terrible
nearness and an increasing weight. The air sweated. The crowds began to mut-
ter and to move like bees in a hive. Isolated cries of rage from below the
balcony sounded close, raw and horrible.

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 gar-
rison--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 crea-
ture 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 doubt-
ing that it had all been true. He had seen her before, when lost among the oak-
wood 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 aware-
ness 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. Ever-
ything was as it was. His mother was still beside him, her big hands on the bal-
ustrade. 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 bel-
dam's bed.

Ahead of him, Gormenghast Mountain and the widespread slopes of Gormenghast for-
est 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 a-
corns 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 tho-
usand 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 e-
choes 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 sick-
ening 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 hiero-
phants 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 result-
ing 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 Gor-
menghast 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 a-
cross the trackless expanses of Gormenghast Mountain, he had no idea. He simply be-
lieved 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 any-
thing. 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 flight.



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 hip-
popotami; 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 stream-
ing over his body mitigated the heat.

Beyond the soaking grasslands, and the alder copses, beyond the stony and grass-
less 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 immedi-
ately 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 deter-
mine 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 na-
ture 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 be-
come 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 ti-
gress 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 af-
finity 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 Ti-
tus 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 there been no deluge he would have
made for it. He thought of it as a centre from which he could move in the wild-
erness and to which he could return.

But when he reached it he was hesitant to enter. The old stone mouth gaped emp-
tily. 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 fan-
tastically 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 suggest-
ed 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 ex-
pected in a person twice his age.

This darkness in his face was by no means the outcome of sad or tragic experi-
ence. 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 a-
cross the realm of Gormenghast, marvelling, as he did so, at all that it was,
and how it was his mammoth legacy.

His physical vitality had begun to find its outlet through solitary exploration
of the castle and the surrounding country but it was the expeditions of his im-
agination, of his day dreams, that drew him further and further away from com-
panionship.

He had been, virtually, an orphan. That his mother, deep in her heart, too deep
for her own recognition, had a strange need for him, as a son of the Line, was
of no value to him, for he knew nothing of it.

To be alone was nothing new to him. But to have defied his mother and his sub-
jects as he had done this day was new, and this knowledge of his treachery made
him feel, for the first time since he had escaped from the carver's balcony,
lonely in the extreme. Lonely, not for his home, but lonely in the knowledge
of his inward isolation.

He took a step nearer the cave. The rain, surging over his head, had so glued-
down his hair that his skull showed its shape like a boulder. His slightly hea-
vy cheekbones, his blunt nose, his wide mouth were by no means handsome in the-
selves, but, held in by the oval outline of the face, they formed a kind of
simple harmony that was original and pleasant to the eye.

But his habit of drawing down his eyebrows and scowling to hide his feelings
was making him look more than his seventeen years, and it appeared that a young
man rather than a boy was approaching the cave. Directly he had decided to wait
no longer, and had passed under the rough natural archway he was startled at
the freedom of his head and body from the battering of the rain. He had become
so used to it that standing there in the dry dust beneath the vaulting roof of
the tunnel, he felt a sudden buoyancy as though a burden had been lifted.

And now another wave of fatigue heaved up in him, and he longed for nothing so
much as sleep in a dry place. The air was warm in the cave, for the rain, heavy
as it was, had done nothing to relieve the heat. He longed to lie down, in his
newfound lightness of body, and with nothing pouring down upon him from above,
to sleep for ever.

Now that he was inside the cave, the melancholy atmosphere of desertion had
lost its potency. Perhaps he was too tired and his emotions too blunted to be
conscious any more of such subtleties.

When he came to the main, inner chamber with its ample space, its natural
shelves, its luxuriating ferns he could hardly keep his eyes open. He hardly
noticed that a number of small woodland animals had taken shelter and were
lying upon the stone shelves, or squatting on the ferny floor, watching him
with bright eyes.

Automatically he tore off his clinging clothes and stumbling to a dark corner
of a cave lay down beneath the arched arms of a great fern and fell, incontin-
ently, fast asleep.



SIXTY-SEVEN



As Titus slept the small animals were joined by a drenched fox and a few birds
which perched on outcrops of rock near the doming roof. The boy was all but
invisible where he lay beneath the overhang of the ferns. So deep was his sleep
that the lightning that had begun to play across the sky and illumine the mouth
of the cave had no effect upon him. The thunder, when it came, for all that it
was louder than before was equally powerless to wake him. But it was drawing
closer all the while, and the last of the bull-throated peals caused him to
turn over in his sleep. By now it was afternoon but the air had darkened so
that there was now less light than there was when Titus sat upon the "look-out'
rock.

The roaring and hissing of the rain was mounting steadily in volume and the
noise of it upon the stones and the earth outside the mouth of the cave made
all but the most violent of the thunder-peals inaudible. A hare with its ears
laid along its back sat motionless with its eyes fixed upon the fox. The cave
was filled with the noise of the elements, and yet there was a kind of silence
there, a silence within the noise; the silence of stillness, for nothing moved.

When the next flash of lightning skinned the landscape, ripping its black hide
off it so that there was no part of its anatomy that was not exposed to the
floodlight, the reflections of that blinding illumination were fanned to and
fro across the cavern walls so that the birds and beasts shone out like radiant
carvings among the radiant ferns, and their shadows flew away across the walls
and contracted again as though they were made of elastic: and Titus stirred
beneath the archery of the giant hearts-tongue which shielded him from the
momentary glare, so that he did not waken, and he could not see that at the
mouth of the cave stood the "Thing'.



SIXTY-EIGHT


I


It was hunger that finally woke him. For a while as he lay with his eyes still
closed he imagined himself to be in his room at the castle. Even when he opened
his eyes and found on his right-hand side the rough wall of a rock and on his
left a curtain of thick ferns he could not remember where he was. And then he
became aware of a roaring sound and all at once he remembered how he had escaped
from the castle and had made his way through an eternity of rain until he had
come to a cave...to Flay's cave...to this cave in which he was now lying.

It was then that he heard something move. It was not a loud sound and it was on-
ly audible above the thrumming of the storm because of its nearness.

His first thought was that it was one of the animals, perhaps a hare, and his
hunger made him cautious as he rose upon his elbow and parted the long tongue
of the ferns.

But what he saw was something that made him forget his hunger as though it had
never been: that made him start backwards against the rock and sent the blood
rushing to his head. For it was she! But not as he remembered her. It was she!
But how different!

What had his memory done to her that he should now be seeing a creature so rad-
ically at variance with the image that had filled his mind?

There she sat, the Thing, balanced upon her heels, unbelievably small, the light
of a fresh fire flickering over her as she swivelled a plucked bird on a spit
above the flames. All about her were scattered the feathers of a magpie. Was
this the lyric swallow? The fleet limbed hurdler?

Was this small creature who was now squatting there like a frog in the dust,
and scratching her thigh with a dirty hand the size of a beech leaf, was this
what had floated through his imagination in arrogant rhythms that spanned the
universe?

Yes, it was she. The vision had contracted to the small and tangible propor-
tions of the uncompromising urchin--the rarefaction had become clay.

And then she turned her head and Titus saw a face that shocked and thrilled him.
All that was Gormenghast within him shuddered: shuddered and bridled up in a
kind of anger. All that was rebellious in him cried with joy: with the joy of
witnessing the heart of defiance. The confusion in his breast was absolute. His
memory of her, of a proud and gracile creature, was now destroyed. It was no
longer true. It had become trite, shallow and saccharine. Proud, she was and
vibrant in all conscience. And graceful, perhaps in flight--but not now.

There was nothing graceful in the way her body, uninhibited as an animal's,
crouched over the flames. This was something new and earthy.

Titus who had been in love with an arrogance and a swallow-like beauty of limb,
so that he longed savagely and fearfully to clasp it was now aware of how there
were these new dimensions, this dark reality of slaughtered birds, of scattered
feathers, of an animal's posture and above all of an ignorant originality that
was redolent in her every gesture.

Her head had turned. He had seen her face. He was staring at an original. It
was not that the face had any unique peculiarity of proportion or feature but
that it was so blatant an index of all she was.

And yet it was not through any particular mobility of the features that it con-
veyed the independence of her life. The line of the mouth seldom altered, save
when, in devouring the roasted bird, she bit with an undue ferocity. No: the
face was more mask-like than expressive. It symbolized her way of life, not her
immediate thoughts. It was the colour of a robin's egg, and as closely freckled.
Her hair was black and thick but she had hacked it away, a little above her
shoulders. Her rounded neck was set upright upon her shoulders, and was so flex-
ible that the liquid ease with which she turned it was reminiscent of a serpent.

It was through such motions as this, and the movements of her small shoulders
and in the quickness of her fingers that she conveyed to Titus, more vividly
than any expression of the features could ever do, the quality of her fanatical
independence.

As he watched she tossed the bones of the magpie over her shoulder, and dipping
her hand into the shadows at her side drew up, out of the darkness that she cast,
the little carving of the raven. Turning it round and round in her hand she
stared at it intently, but no vestige of an expression crossed her face. She
placed it on the ground at her side, but the earth was uneven and it fell for-
wards upon its face. Without a moment's hesitation she struck it with her clench-
ed fist as a child might strike a toy in anger, and then, rising in a smooth
and single action to her feet, she flicked it out of her way with her foot so
that it lay upon its side against the wall.

Upon her feet she had become another thing. It was difficult to reconcile her
with the creature who had squatted by the fire. She had become a sapling. Her
face was turned to where the water streamed across the cave-mouth. For a few
moments she stared expressionlessly at the rain-filled opening and then she
moved towards it, but at her third step she stopped and as her body tautened
her head gyrated on her neck. Her shoulders had not moved, but as her head
swivelled, her eyes sped around the walls of the cave. Something had disturbed
her.

Her slender body was poised for instantaneous action. Again her eyes flew a-
cross the walls piercing every shadow, and then for a moment they stayed their
flight and Titus could see from his dark recess that she had seen his shirt
where it lay, torn and sodden, on the floor of the cave.

She turned and with a tread both light and apprehensive approached the garment
that lay in a pool of its own making. She sat down on her heels at its side,
and again she was a frog, an almost repellent thing. Her eyes still moved about
the cave, suspiciously. For a little while they lingered upon the giant ferns
that, arching over Titus, hid him in their shadows.

Swivelling her head she stared backwards to the mouth of the cave, but only
for a second; for the next moment she had taken the shirt, and held it up be-
fore her. A stream of rain water slid from its folds to the floor; she crushed
the cloth together and then began to wring it out with a surprising strength
and then spreading it out upon the ground she gazed at it, her expressionless
head upon one side like a bird's.

Titus, half numbed by his cramped position, was forced to lie back and rest
his arms and straighten his leg. When he rose again upon his elbow she was
no longer by the shirt but was standing at the cave-mouth. He knew that he
could not stay where he was for ever. Sooner or later he must make his pre-
sence known--and he was about to get to his feet whatever the consequences
when a glare of lightning showed him the Thing silhouetted against the bril-
liance, her backbone arched a little, her head thrown back to catch the
stream of translucent rain that golden as the lightning itself was falling
directly into her upturned mouth. For that split second of time she was
something cut out of black paper, her head meticulous in its contour, the
mouth wide open as though to drink the sky.

And then the dark came down, and he saw her appear out of the gloom and grow
more visible as she approached the embers of the fire. It was evident that
the shirt fascinated her, for she paused when she reached it, and stared at
it now from one angle, now from another. Finally she took it up and pulling
it over her head and thrusting her arms through the sleeves she stood, as
though in a nightgown. Titus, whose conception of the Thing had been flung
from one side of his mind to the other, so that he hardly knew whether she
was a frog, a snake, or a gazelle, was now powerless to assimilate the biz-
arre transfiguration that now stood within a few feet of him.

All he knew was that what he had so avidly sought was with him in the cave,
had sheltered, like himself, from the storm and was now standing like a
child, staring down at his shirt that fell in wet folds almost to the ankles.

And he forgot the wilderness within her. He forgot her ignorance. He forgot
the raw blood and the speed. He only saw the stillness. He only saw the de-
ceptive grace of her head as it hung forward. And seeing only this he pushed
aside the ferns and rose to his feet.


II


The effect of his sudden appearance upon the Thing was so violent that Titus
took a step backwards. Encumbered as she was with her new garment she leapt
to the side of the cave where the floor was littered with loose stones, and
all in a breath she had snatched at one and flung it with a vicious speed at
Titus. He jerked his head to one side but the rough stone scraped his cheek-
bone and stung him badly, the blood running down his neck.

The pain and surprise which lit his face were in contrast to her inscrutable
features. But it was his body that was still, and hers that moved.

She had swarmed up the rock face on her side of the cave and was leaping from
ledge to ledge in an attempt to circumscribe the rough circle of wall beneath
the dome. Titus had been between her and the entrance tunnel, and she was even
now springing to a position from which she could swing herself over his head
and drop on the stormward side--and so away.

But Titus, just in time to realize what she was doing, retreated further down
the tunnel, so that he blocked the way for her escape. But he was still in a
position to observe her. Thwarted in her plan, she sprang backwards to one of
the higher ledges that she had already used, and there, twelve feet above him,
her head among the ferns that hung downwards from the roof, she directed her
gaze upon him, her freckled face expressionless, but her head moving continu-
ously from side to side like an adder's.

The effect of the blow on his cheek was to waken Titus out of his adulation.
His temper flared out, and his fear of her lessened, not because she was not
dangerous, but because she had resorted to so ordinary a means of warfare as
the flinging of a stone. That was something he could understand.

Had she been able to pluck out rocks from the fern-cloaked roof she would e-
ven now be doing so, and hurling them down upon him. But even as he stared
up at her with angry amazement, he felt an irrational longing for her, for
what was she doing but defying, through him, the very core of Gormenghast?
And it was this solitary insurrection that had first affected him with wonder
and excitement. And while the stinging of his cheekbone angered him so that
he wished to shake her, strike her and subdue her, at the same time the ease
with which she had flitted from ledge to perilous ledge, the long wet garment
slapping on the rocks as she sped, had made him lust for her small breasts and
her slender limbs. He yearned to crush and master them. And yet he was angry.

How it was that she had been able to move at all across the rock face with his
shirt impeding the freedom of her legs, let alone travel so speedily, he could
not tell. The long sleeves flapped about her hands, but somehow or other she
had been able to flick out her fingers from the folds, time after time, to
grasp the cavern outcrops.

Now, as she crouched in the upper shadows, the damp cloth clinging to her and
taking the form of her narrow limbs as though it had been sculptured, Titus,
watching from below, cried out suddenly in a voice that seemed not his own.

"I am your friend! Your friend! Can't you understand? I am Lord Titus! Can't
you hear me?"

The face like a robin's egg stared down at him from among the ferns, but there
was no reply, save what sounded like a distant hissing.

"Listen to me," he shouted again, more loudly than before, although his heart
beat wildly and the words were difficult to form. "I have followed you. Don't
you see?...followed you...O, can't you understand! I've run away..." He took
a step nearer the wall so that she was almost directly overhead...

"And I've found you! So speak to me, for God's sake, can't you? Can't you?"

He saw her mouth open above him, and at that moment she might have been a gi-
ant phantom, something too earthless to be held in by the worldly dimensions
of this cave, something beyond measurement. And her open mouth gave him the
answer to his question.

"So speak," he shouted, "can't you?" And this is what she could not do, for
the first sound which Titus heard her utter bore no relation to human speech.
Nor did the tone of it convey that he was being answered even in a language
of her own. It was a sound, quite solitary and detached. It had no concern with
communication. It was inward and curiously pitched.

So divorced was it, this nameless utterance from the recognized sounds of
the human throat, that it left Titus in no doubt that she was incapable of
civilized speech and not only this but that she had not understood a word
he had said.

What could he do to show her he was not her enemy, that he had no wish to
avenge himself for the blood on his cheek? The thought of his wound gave
him an idea, and he immediately lowered himself to his knees, never taking
his eyes off her, and felt about him for a stone, her eyes following his
every movement with the concentration of a cat. He could see the tenseness
of her body vibrating through the shirt. When his fingers closed upon a
stone he rose to his feet, stretched out his hand with the missile display-
ed upon his open palm. Surely she must realize that it was now in his power
to fling the thing at her. For a moment or two he showed her the stone, and
then tossed it backwards over his shoulder where it clanged on the solid
rock of the wall behind him.

But no expression crossed the freckled face. She had seen everything but as
far as Titus could tell it had meant nothing to her. But as he stared up he
became conscious that she was preparing to change her position, or to make
some kind of attempt at escape. For the hundredth part of a second her eyes
had flicked away as though to remind herself of the surrounding footholds
and the dangerous ledges, and then again her eyes switched from his face,
but this time it was to something that lay behind Titus on the other side
of the cave. Quick as thought he turned his head and saw what he had forgot-
ten all about, the two wide natural chimneys through the rock, that, twelve
feet above the entrance of the cave, led to the outer air.

So that was what she would try and do. He knew that she could not reach these
rounded vents from where she was, but that if she could circle the cave, she
might spring from the opposite side into the upper chimney, and so, out into
the open, where, no doubt, she would be able to swarm across the moss-grey
walls of streaming rain.

For the rain was still pounding. It was an inevitable background to all they
did. They were no longer conscious of the steady roaring, of the shouts of
the thunder or of the intermittent lightning. It had become normality.

And then, from where she crouched, the Thing rose in the air, and was all at
once upon a broader ledge six feet to her right. There seemed to have been
no muscular effort. It was flight. But once there, she tore at Titus' shirt,
hauling it over her head as though she were freeing herself of a sail, but
somehow it had become entangled about her, during her leap, and, blinded for
a moment by its folds across her face, she had, in a momentary panic, shifted
her foothold and, misjudging the area of the ledge, she had overbalanced in
the darkness and, with a muffled cry, had toppled from the height.

Involuntarily, as she had leapt to the broader shelf of rock, Titus had moved
after her, as though drawn by the magic of her mobility, so that as she over-
balanced he was within a few feet of where she would have struck the floor.
But before she had fallen more than her own length he was stationed beneath
her, his knees flexed, his hands raised, his fingers spread, his head thrown
back.

But what he caught was so unsubstantial that he fell with it to the floor
from the very shock of its lightness. His legs weakened beneath him with
surprise, as though they had been cheated of the weight, however slight,
that they were prepared to sustain. He had caught at a feather and it had
struck him down. But his arms closed about the sprite that struggled in the
cold wet linen, and Titus gripped her with an angry strength, the full
weight of his body lying across hers, for they had rolled over one another
and he had forced her under.

He could not see her face; it was closely shrouded in the wet linen, but
the shape of it was there as her head tossed to and fro; it was like the
head of sea-blurred marble long drowned beneath innumerable tides, save
where a ridge of cloth was stretched across the forehead and took the shape
of the temples. Titus, his body and his imagination fused in a throbbing
lust, gripping her even more savagely than before with his right arm, tore
at the shirt with his left until her face was free.

And it was so small that he began to cry. It was a robin's egg, and his
whole body weakened as the first wild virgin kiss that trembled on his
lips for release died out. He laid his cheek along hers. She had ceased
to move. His tears ran. He could feel her cheek grow wet with them. He
raised his head. He had become far away and he knew that there would be
no climax. He was sick with a kind of glory.

Her head was turned to one side upon the ground and her eyes were fixed
upon something. Her body had become rigid. For a moment it had melted and
was like a stream in his arms, but now it was frozen once more, like ice.

Slowly he turned his head, and there was Fuchsia, the rain water streaming
from her to the ground, her drenched hair hanging snake-like over her face,
and her face in her hand.


III


All of a sudden Titus knew that he was lying alone. The sleeve of the shirt
was clenched in his hands but the Thing had gone. He had forgotten there was
any other world. A world in which he had a sister and a mother, in which he
was an earl. He had forgotten Gormenghast.

And then he heard the shrill scream of derision which he was never to forget.
He leapt to his feet and ran dizzily to the door of the cave. There he saw
her standing in the downpour, knee deep in water, naked as the rain itself.
The lightning was playing continuously now, lighting her as though she were
a thing of fire herself, now flickering across her in a yellow half light.

As he stared a kind of ecstasy filled him. He had no sense of losing her--but
only the blind and vaunting pride that he had held her in his arms; that na-
ked creature that was now crying again, derisively in a language of her own.

It was finality. Titus knew in his bones that he could expect no more than
this. His teeth had met in the dark core of life. He watched her almost with
indifference--for it was all in the past--and even the present was nothing to
the pride of his memory.

But when, out of the heart of the storm that searing flash of flame broke
loose, and ripping a path across the dazzled floods, burned up the "Thing'
as though she had been a dry leaf in its path, and when Titus knew that the
world was without her for ever, then something fled in him--something fled
away--or was burned away even as she had been burned away. Something had
died as though it had never been.

At seventeen he stepped into another country. It was his youth that had died
away. His boyhood was something for remembrance only. He had become a man.

He turned and retraced his steps to where Fuchsia leaned against the wall.
They could not speak.

How pitifully human she was. When he parted the long locks that straggled
over her face and saw how defenceless she was, and when she pushed his hand
away with the tired disillusion of a woman twice her age, then he realized
his own strength.

At a time when he should have been broken by the scene he had just witnessed
--by the death of his imagination--he found himself to be emptied of distress.
He was himself. He was free for the first time. He had learned that there were
other ways of life from the ways of his great home. He had completed an exper-
ience. He had emptied the bright goblet of romance; at a single gulp he had
emptied it. The glass of it lay scattered on the floor. But with the beauty
and the ugliness, the ice and the fire of it on his tongue and in his blood
he could begin again.

The Thing was dead...dead...lightning had killed her, but had Fuchsia not
been there he would have shouted with happiness for he had grown up.


IV


It was a long time before a word was exchanged. They sat exhausted side by
side. Fuchsia had been persuaded to take off her long red dress, and Titus
had wrung it out and it was now spread before the fire he had re-kindled.
He longed to leave the cave. It was now so much dead rock. It was over and
done with. But Fuchsia, sick with exhaustion, was in no state to start the
return journey for an hour or
more.

While he moved about the cave, Titus caught sight of some dead birds on a
ledge of rock but his hunger had never returned. Then he heard Fuchsia's
voice, very low and heavy.

"I thought perhaps you'd be here. I am better now. We must go back. The
flood is rising."

Titus walked quickly to the door of the cave. It was true. They were in dan-
ger. Far from lessening the rain was heavier than ever with formidable mass-
ings of cloud.

He returned quickly to her side.

"I told them you had lost your memory," she said. "I told them you had been
like this before. You must say the same. We'll part near the Castle. Come on."

She got to her feet and pulled her damp red dress over her head. Her heart
was raw with disappointment. Her fear had been for Titus' safety and she had
risked her neck for him, but her hopes had been that he would be proud of her.
To struggle all that way, and to find him with...the "Thing'!

Clinging fiercely and painfully to her pride, she swore to herself that she
would never ask him--would never speak of her. She had thought that there was
no one so close to him as herself--or that if there was, he would tell her.
She knew that she was only his sister but she had had a blind faith that even
though she had defied him over Steerpike, yet she was more necessary to him
than Steerpike had ever been to her.

Titus was gazing at her as he tucked the torn and fateful shirt into his trou-
sers.

"She is dead, Fuchsia."

She lifted her head.

"Who?" she murmured.

"The wild girl."

"The...wild...girl...? So soon?"

"The lightning."

Fuchsia turned to the cave-mouth and began to move towards the storm.

"Oh God," she whispered as though to herself. "Is there nothing but death and
beastliness?" and then, not turning as she spoke, but raising her voice. "Don't
tell me, Titus. Don't tell me anything. I would rather know nothing. You live
your life and I'll live mine."

Titus joined her at the mouth of the cave. It was a frightening sight that lay
before them. The landscape was filling up with water. There was not a moment to
lose.

"There's only one hope," said Titus.

"I know," said Fuchsia. "The tunnel."

They stepped forward together and received the weight of the cascading sky. There-
after their journey was a nightmare of water.

Time after time they saved one another in the treacherous flood as they waded to-
wards the entrance of the long underground passage. A hundred incidents befell
them. Their feet were caught in underwater creepers; they stumbled over submerged
bushes; the limbs of trees fell headlong into the water at their sides, and all
but struck or drowned them. At times they were forced to return and make long de-
tours where the water was too deep, or too marshy. When they came to the high bank
on the hill they were all but drowned. But the tunnel was there and although the
water had begun to pour down its black throat yet their relief at seeing it was
such that they involuntarily clasped each other. For a fleeting moment the years
rolled back and they were brother and sister again in a world of no heartburn.

They had forgotten that the tunnel was so long; so inky dark, so full of vegetable
beastliness, of hampering roots, and foul decay. As they neared the castle the water
became deeper; for on every side of Gormenghast the landscape shelved gradually
downward, the widespread mazes of rambling masonry lying at the centre in a meas-
ureless basin.

When eventually they were able to stand upright and emerged from the tunnel, and be-
gan to wade along the corridors that led to the Hollow Halls, the water was up to
their waists.

Their progress was maddeningly slow. Step by step they forced their way through the
heavy element, the inky water curling at their waist. Sometimes they would climb
steps and would be able to rest for a while, at the top of a flight, but they could
not stay for long, for all the while the water was rising. It was a mercy that Ti-
tus had become familiar with the one route that took them by degrees to that point
behind the giant carving where, so long ago, he had escaped from Barquentine to
lose himself in those watery lanes that they were now so slowly wading through.

It came at last: the halt behind the statue. Titus was in front and he worked his
way around the base of the carving and cautiously leaning forward, peered to left
and right along the dusky corridor. It was deserted and no wonder. Here as else-
where the water lay like a dark and slowly moving carpet. It was obvious that the
flood had poured in on every side and that the ground level of Gormenghast had
been evacuated. His dormitory was upon the floor above, and Fuchsia's room was
likewise above flood level. Fuchsia was by now beside him, and they were about to
step forward through the water and proceed along their separate paths to their
rooms when they heard the sound of a splash, and Titus dragged his sister back.
The sound was repeated and repeated again in a regular beat, and then as it grew
louder, they saw a glimmer on the water as a soft red light began to approach
from the west.

Holding their breath they waited and a moment later they saw the flat nose of a
punt or narrow raft slide into their line of vision. An oldish man sat upon a
low seat at its centre. He held in either hand a short pole and these were dip-
ped simultaneously on either side of his craft. They had not far to submerge be-
fore they struck the stone beneath and the punt was propelled forward in a smooth
and unhurried manner. At the bows was a red lantern. Across the stern lay a fire-
arm, its hammer cocked.

Both Fuchsia and Titus had seen the man before. He was one of the many watchmen
or sentries who had been detailed to patrol these lower corridors. Evidently nei-
ther the storm nor Titus' disappearance had caused any relaxation in the daylong,
nightlong search for the skewbald beast.

Directly the light of his lantern and its red reflection had grown small in the
distance the brother and sister waded to the nearest of the great stairways.

As they climbed they became aware, even before they had reached the stairhead of
the first of the spreading storeys, that a great change had come about. For look-
ing up they saw, out-topping the stone banisters, high piles of books and furni-
ture, of hangings and crockery, of crate on crate of smaller objects, of carpets
and swords, so that the landing was like a great warehouse or emporium. And lying
across tables, or slouched over chairs, in every kind of attitude of fatigue were
numbers of exhausted men. There were few lanterns still alight, but no one seemed
awake, and nothing moved.

Tip-toeing past the sleepers, and leaving trails of water behind them as they went,
Titus and Fuchsia came at last to a junction of two corridors. There was no time
for them to linger or to talk but they stood still for a moment and looked at one
another.

"This is where we part," said Fuchsia. "Don't forget what I told you. You lost your
memory and found yourself in the woods. I never found you. We never saw each other."

"I won't forget," said Titus.

They turned from each other and, following their diverging paths, disappeared into
the darkness.



SIXTY-NINE



There was no one alive in Gormenghast who could remember a storm in any way comp-
arable to this black and endless deluge that, flooding the surrounding country,
and mounting with every passing minute, was already lapping at the landings of the
first storey. The thunder was continuous. The lightning went on and off as though
a child were playing with a switch. On the vast expanse of water, the heavy branch-
es of riven trees floated and tossed like monsters. The fish of Gormenghast river
swam out in every direction, and could be seen steering through the castle's lowest
windows.

Where high ground or an isolated rock or a watch tower broke the surface, these
features were crowded with small animals of all kinds, that huddled together in
heterogeneous masses, and took no notice of one another. By far the vastest of
these natural sanctuaries was, of course, Gormenghast Mountain which had become
an island of dramatic beauty, the thick forest trees hanging out of the water at
its base, its streaming skull flickering balefully with the reflection of the vi-
bratory lightning.

By far the greatest proportion of the animals still alive were congregated upon
its slopes, and the sky above it, violent and inhospitable as it was, was never
free of birds that wheeled and cried.

The other great sanctuary was the castle itself towards whose walls the tired
foxes swam, the hares beside them, the rats in their wake, the badgers, martins,
otters and other woodland and river creatures.

From all the quarters of the compass they converged, their heads alone visible
above the surface, their breath coming quick and fast, their shining eyes fixed
on the castle walls.

This gaunt asylum, like the Mountain (that faced it across the rain-lashed lakes,
that were so soon to form an inland sea), had become an island. Gormenghast was
marooned.

As soon as it became evident to the inhabitants that it was no ordinary storm
that had broken upon them and that the outer ramifications of the castle were
already threatened and were liable to be isolated from the main mass, and that
the outbuildings, in particular the stables and all structures of wood, were in
peril of being washed away, instructions were given for the evacuation of the
remote districts, for the immediate recall of the Bright Carvers, and for the
driving of all livestock from the stables to within the walls. Bands of men and
boys were dispatched for the bringing in and the salvaging of carts, ploughs
and all kinds of farm equipment. All this, along with the carriages and harness-
ings of the horses, was temporarily housed in the armoury on the east side of
one of the inner quadrangles. The cattle and the horses were herded into the
great stone refectory, the beasts being segregated by means of improvised bar-
riers made largely from the storm-snapped boughs of trees that were piling up
continuously beneath the southern windows.

The Outer Dwellers, already smarting with the insult of the broken Ceremony,
were in no mood to return to the castle, but when the rain began to loosen the
very foundation of the encampments, they were forced to take advantage of the
order they had received, and to make a sullen exodus from their ancient home.

The magnanimity that was shown them in their time of peril, far from being ap-
preciated, still further embittered them. At a time when they had no other work
than to withdraw themselves and to brood over the vile insult they had sustain-
ed at the hands of the House of Groan, they were forced to accept the hospital-
ity of its figurehead. Carrying their infants and their few belongings over
their shoulders, a horde of sodden malcontents drew in upon the castle, the
dark water gurgling about their knees.

An extensive peninsula of the castle, a thing of rough unpointed masonry, a
mile or more in length and several storeys high, had been given over to the
Carvers. There they staked their claims, upon the mouldering floorboards,
each family circumscribing their "sites' in thick lines drawn with lumps of
chalky plaster.

In this congested atmosphere their bitterness flourished, and unable to vent
their spleen on Gormenghast, the great abstract, they turned upon one another.
Old scores were remembered and a kind of badness filled the long sullen pro-
montory. Floor above floor was rancour. Their homes of clay were gone. They
had become something which they would never have admitted in the days when
they lived in open squalor beyond the castle walls--they had become a depend-
ency.

From their windows they could see the dark rain pouring. With every day that
passed the sky seemed thicker, and fouler in the sagging horror of its black
and glutted belly. From the upper halls at the far and straggling limit of
the promontory, the prisoners, for so they were in everything but name, were
able to obtain a view of Gormenghast Mountain. With the first light of dawn,
or by lightning flashes during the night, they noted how the flood had climb-
ed its flanks. The horizontal branch of a far tree, or a peculiarity of some
rock face near the water's edge would be taken as a reference point, and it
became their morbid interest to gauge how high and a what speed the flood was
rising.

And then a kind of relief came to them--not from any outside source but through
the foresight of an old carver, and this relief to their frustration took the
form of boatbuilding. It was not carving in the creative sense in which they
excelled, but it was carving. Directly the idea was launched, it sent forth
its ripples that spread from one end of the peninsula to the other.

That they had been unable to carve had been as galling as the insult they had
swallowed. Their rasps and chisels, saws and mallets had been the first things
that they had gathered together when all hope of remaining in their hovels had
disappeared. But they had been unable to carry with them the heavy timber or
the jarl roots which they had always used. Now, however, their former media
would be useless. Something of a very different nature was needed for the con-
struction of boats or rafts or dug-outs, and it was not long before the redun-
dant beams that spanned the ceilings, the panels from the inner walls, the
doors themselves and where possible the joists and floorboards began to disap-
pear. The competition among the families to build up within their chalk-marked
sites a pile of board and timber, was deadly and humourless, and was only to
be compared with the subsequent rivalry to build not only the most navigable
and watertight craft but the most original and beautiful.

They asked for no permission; they acted spontaneously, ripping away, or pris-
ing apart floorboard and panel; they climbed for hours among filthy rafters and
sawed through solid pine and timbers of black oak; they stole by night and they
denied their thefts by day; they kept watch and set forth on expeditions; they
argued over the safety of the floors; over which timbers were dangerous to move
and which were ornamental. Great gaps appeared in the floors through which the
ragged children flung filth and dust upon the heads of the carvers on the floor
below. The lives of the Outer Dwellers had become almost normal again. Bitter-
ness was their bread and rivalry their wine.

And the boats began to take shape, and hammering filled the air, as in the semi-
darkness, with the rain lashing through the windows and the thunder rolling, a
thousand forms of craft grew into beauty.

Meanwhile in the main body of the castle there was little time for any other
activity than that of moving upwards, eternally upwards, the multitudinous ef-
fects of Gormenghast.

The second floor was by now untenable. The flood, finding its own level within
the honeycombed interiors, had become more than a threat to property. A growing
number of the less agile or intelligent had already been trapped and drowned;
doors being unopenable by reason of the weight of pressing water or directions
being lost among the unfamiliar waterways.

There were few who were not engaged upon the back-breaking business of forcing
a world of belongings up the scores of stairways.

The cattle so necessary to the survival of the marooned had changed their quart-
ers time after time. Driving them up the broadest flights it had been difficult
to control their panic. The stout banisters had given way like matchsticks--iron
railings had been bent by the pressing weight of the climbing herds; masonry had
been loosened, a huge stone lion at the head of a stairway falling down the well
of the stairs, four cows and a heifer following it to their deaths in the cold
water below.

The horses were led up one by one, their hooves pawing at the treads of the
stairs, their nostrils distended, the whites of their eyes shining in the gloom.

A dozen men were kept busy all day shifting the loads of hay up to the upper halls.
The carts and ploughs had had to be abandoned as had a heavy and irreplaceable in-
ventory of machines and bulk of every description.

On every floor an abandoned conglomeration was left behind, for the climbing water
to despoil. The armoury was a red pond of rust. A score of libraries were swamps
of pulp. There were pictures floating down long corridors, or being lifted gradual-
ly from their hooks. The crevices in wood or brick and tiny caves between the stones
of the innumerable walls had been swilled free of the complexity of insect life.
Where generations of lizards had lived in secrecy there was only water now. Water
that rose like terror, inch by clammy inch.

The kitchens had been moved to the highest of the suitable areas. The gathering to-
gether and transporting of the thousand and one things necessary to the feeding of
the castle had been itself an epic undertaking, as also, in another way, had been
the frantic packing and dragging from the Central Library of the traditional manu-
scripts, the sacred laws of Ritual and the thousands of ancient volumes of refe-
rence but for which the complex machinery of the castle's life could never be re-
vived. These heavy crates of sacrosanct and yellowing papers were dragged at once
to the high attics and a couple of sentries were posted before them.

As every landing filled with salvage, the exhausted men, their shirts stuck to
their backs, their brows shining like candlewax, from the sweat that poured into
their eyes, cursed the storm, cursed the water, cursed the day they were born.
It seemed to have gone on for ever, this shouldering of giant cases up tortuous
stairs; of straining upon ropes, only to hear them snap and the burden crash head-
long down the flights they had won so dearly; the aching of their bodies and thighs;
this ghastly fatigue. There was no end to it; to the mechanics of gear and rigging;
to a hundred extempore inventions; to the levering and the cranking; to the winding
of home-made pulleys; to the gradual raising of stock and metal; of fuel, grist and
treasure; of vintage and hoards of miscellaneous lumber. From storehouse, depository,
vault and warehouse, from magazine, dump and coffer, from granary and arsenal; from
the splendid rooms of bygone days where the great "pieces' mouldered; from the pri-
vate rooms of countless officers; from the communal halls and the dormitories of
the hierophants--from all these places everything went up, the furniture, the chat-
tels, the works of vanity and the works of art; from the enormous tables of carved
oak, to the least of silver bracelets.

But all this was not without organization. Behind it all there was a brain at work.
A brain that had been drowsing since girlhood--that had been for so long a time un-
focused that it had taken no less a thing than Steerpike's rebellion to make it
yawn and stretch itself. It was now fully awake. It belonged to the Countess.

It was she who had given the first orders; who had called in the Bright Carvers;
who had, with a great map of the central district of Gormenghast spread before her,
remained seated at a table at one of the central landings, and, co-ordinating the
multifarious activities of salvage and resettlement, had given her subjects no
time to think of the peril they were in but only of their immediate duties.

From where she sat she could see the last of the removals from the landing below.
The water had reached to about the fifth tread of this upper staircase. She stared
down at the four men who were struggling with a long blackish chest. As it moved
water poured out of it. Step by step it was hoisted up the wide flight. The lap-
ping water was choked with floating objects. Every floor had delivered to the
flood its quota of things lost, forgotten or worthless, the lower regions lifting
their buoyant chattels inch by inch to loftier waterways where, joined by fresh
flotillas, newly launched, the heterogeneous flotsam grew and grew.

For a few moments the Countess eyed the dark water in the well of the stairs be-
fore turning to a group of runners, who were stationed before her.

As she turned to face them a fresh messenger arrived panting. He had been to check
the rumours that had reached the central castle of how the Bright Carvers were
engaged upon boat-building and had all but gutted the promontory.

"Well?" she said, staring at the runner.

"It is true, your ladyship. They are building boats."

"Ah," said the Countess. "What else?"

"They ask for awnings, your ladyship."

"Awnings. Why?"

"The lower storeys have been flooded out, as here. They have been forced to launch
their boats, unfinished, through the windows. They have no protection from the rain.
The upper storeys refused them entry. They are already overcrowded."

"What kind of boats?"

"All shapes, your ladyship. Excellently made."

She propped her chin on her big hand. "Report to the Master of the Rough Hangings.
Have him send all the canvas that has been salvaged. Inform the Carvers their craft
may be requisitioned in emergency. They must make all the vessels they can. Send me
the Custodian of the River Boats. We have some craft of our own, have we not?"

"I believe so, your ladyship. But not many."

"Next messenger!" said the Countess.

An old man came forward. "Well?" she said.

"I see no break in the storm," he said. "On the contrary..."

"Good," said the Countess.

At this remark every eye was turned to her. At first they did not trust their hearing.
Turning to each other the score or so of officials and messengers who surrounded her
could see, however, that none of them had misheard. They were all equally perplexed.
She had spoken softly, heavily, hardly above a whisper. "Good', she had said. It was
as though they had overheard some private thought.

"Is the leader of the Heavy Rescue here?"

"Yes, your ladyship." A tired and bearded figure came forward.

"Rest your men."

"Yes, your ladyship. They need it."

"We all need it. What of it? The waters are rising. You have your list of priorities?"

"Yes."

"Have the leaders of every section made their working copies?"

"They have."

"In six hours' time the flood will be at our feet. In two hours' time all hands are
to be woken. There is no possibility of the night being spent on this level. The Che-
quered Stairway is the widest. You have my order of priority; livestock, carcasses,
corn; and so on, have you not?"

"Certainly, your ladyship."

"Are the cats comfortable?"

"They have the run of the twelve blue attics."

"Ah...and then..." her voice tailed away.

"Your ladyship?"

"… And then, gentlemen, we shall begin. The mounting water draws us all together. Is
that so, gentlemen?"

They bowed their perplexed assent.

"With every hour less rooms are tenable. We are driven up, are we not, into a confine.
Tell me, gentlemen, can traitors live in air and feed on it? Can they chew the cloud?
Or swallow the thunder or fill their bellies with lightning?"

The gentlemen shook their heads and eyed one another.

"Or can they live beneath the surface of the water like the pike I see below me in
the darkness? No. He is like us, gentlemen. Are the sentries posted as usual? Is the
kitchen guarded?"

"It is, your ladyship."

"Enough! We are squandering the time. Give orders that there are two hours' sleep.
You will leave me."

She got to her feet as her audience retired to propagate her instructions and leaned
over the heavy balustrade that surrounded the stairhead. The water had risen half the
height of a tread since she had heard of the Carvers' boats. She leaned there, like
something over life size, her heavy arms folded on the balustrade, a lock of her dark
red hair hanging over her wide, pale brow as she stared over and down to where the
black water brooded in the well of the stairs.



SEVENTY



When the Countess had heard of Titus' return to the castle, she had summoned him at
once and had heard from him of how the heat had overpowered him, and of how he had
lost his memory and, after he knew not how long a time, had found himself alone on
the outskirts of Gormenghast forest.

As Titus had recounted these falsehoods she had stared at him but made no comment,
save, after a long pause, to ask him, whether on his return he had seen Fuchsia.

"I say on your return' (she had added), "as on your outward journey you were in no
state to recognize anyone. Is that so?"

"Yes, mother."

"And did you see her, when you were returning, or after you returned?"

"No."

"I will have your story circulated throughout the castle. Within an hour the Carve-
rs will be informed of your loss of memory. Your oblivion was ill-timed. You may go
now."



SEVENTY-ONE



For little short of a fortnight the rain continued unabated; so great a pro-
portion of the castle was now under water that in spite of the rain it was
necessary for encampments to be formed upon the suitable roofs which were ap-
proached through attic hatchways. The congestion in the upper zones was appall-
ing.

The first of the commandeered flotillas had been paddled across the deep water
from the carvers' promontory. On their return journey across the roofs and up-
per floors the carvers were permitted to take with them what loose timber they
could carry. The Countess had a broad and handsome craft. It was designed for
oarsmen and had an ample space for her at the stern to sit
and steer with comfort.

The carvers had been supplied with tar and great drums of paint, and this solid
boat was decorated with devices of red, black and gold. Its bows rose out of
the water with a slow and massive grace and terminated in a carved head that
resembled a bird of prey, its throat of sculptured feathers and its bald fore-
head a dusky scarlet, its eyes yellow and petalled like the heads of sunflowers,
its curved beak black and sinister. This idea of a figurehead had been almost
universally adopted by the carvers. As much care had been lavished in this way
as upon the structure and the safety of the boats.

One day Titus was informed that a special craft had been created for him, and
that it awaited him in a southern corridor. He went at once and alone to where
it lay floating. At any other time Titus would have cried with joy to receive
the slim and silver creature of the waterways, so exquisitely balanced on the
flood; to have been allowed to step from the water-logged and immovable table
that was half afloat on the castle's seventh floor -- to step into this canoe,
which, unlike any he had ever seen in his picture books when a child, seemed
eager to be away, at the dip of a paddle.

As it was he loved it; but with heartburn. It seemed to remind him of all he
vaguely longed for. It reminded him of the days when he hardly knew himself to
be an earl; when to have no father and no affection from his mother seemed nor-
mal enough; when he had seen no violence; no death; no decay. Of days when
there was no Steerpike at large like a foul shadow that darkened everything
and kept the nerves on edge; and more than this; the slight canoe beneath him
reminded him of the days when he knew nothing of the terrible antithesis with-
in him -- the tearing in two directions of his heart and head -- the divided
loyalties -- the growing and feverish longing to escape from all that was meant
by Gormenghast, and the ineradicable, irrational pride in his lineage, and the
love, as deep as the hate, which he felt, unwittingly, for the least of the
cold stones of his loveless home.

What else was it that brought the tears to his eyes as he took the paddle that
was handed down to him, and dipped its blue blade in the sullen water? It was
his memory of something that had fled as surely as his boyhood had fled; some-
thing that was as swift and slight and tameless as he knew this craft would be.
It was his memory of the Thing.

He dipped his blade. A craftsman's masterpiece cock'd, as it were, her sweet
and tapering head, whispered a curve of silver to the north, and slipping
through a dusky gallery, leapt at the quickening of his paddle-stroke. Ahead
of him, at the hinge of perspective, far away, a point of light, the water
halfway up its distant frames, sped towards him, as, skimming the flood of a
black corridor, he drew, with every stroke, the nearer to the cold and rain-
churned sea.

And all the time his heart was crying, and the exhilaration and the beauty of
it all were the agents of his pain. Swiftly as he sped he could not outstrip
his body or his mind. The paddles dipped and the craft flew but could not
leave his haunted heart behind. It flew with him on the sepulchral water.

And then, as he neared the all-but flood-filled window he realized for the
first time how dangerously close was its upper lintel to the surface. The
light from without had strengthened considerably during the last hour and
the reflection of the square of light had been so strong as to have given
Titus the impression that the entire area of light, the reflections included,
was an opening through which he could pass. But now he saw that he had only
the top half of the bright square through which to skim. Flying towards it
he fell back suddenly, and lying with his head below the level of the sides
and with his eyes shut he heard the faintest of gritty whispers as, shooting
the window, the delicate prow of the vessel grated the lintel.

Suddenly the sky was wide above him. An inland sea was ahead of him. A steady
rain was pouring down, but compared with the long deluge they had grown to
accept as normal, it seemed that he was afloat in good weather. He allowed
the canoe to slacken speed of its own and when it had come to a bobbing stand-
still he turned her about with a stroke and there ahead of him the upper mass-
ives of his kingdom broke the surface. Great islands of sheer rock weather-
pock'd with countless windows, like caves or the eyries of sea-eagles. Archi-
pelagos of towers, gaunt-fisted things, with knuckled summits -- and other
towers so broken at their heads as to resemble pulpits, high and sinister;
black rostrums for the tutelage of evil.

And then a qualm, empty cold and ringing, as though he was himself a hollow
bell stirred in his bowels like a clapper. An exquisite sense of loneliness
grew beneath his ribs, like a bubble of expanding glass.

The rain had ceased to fall. The agitated water had become silent, motion-
less. It had taken on a dark translucence. Afloat upon a yawning element he
gazed down to where, far below him, trees grew, to where familiar roads
wound in and out, to where the fish swam over walnut trees and strangest
of all to the winding bed of Gormenghast river, so full of water that it
had none of its own.

What had all this that filled his eyes with amazement and pleasure, what
had it all to do with the despoiling flood, the wreck of treasures, the
death of many, the haunt of Steerpike who, driven slowly upwards, was hid-
ing even now? Was this where Fuchsia lived? And the Doctor and the Count-
ess, his own mother, who, it seemed, after trying to approach him had drawn
away again?

In a state of overwrought melancholy he began to slide forward over the
still waters, dipping his paddle every now and again. A dull light from
the sky played over the water that streamed in sheets from gutterless roofs.

As he neared the isles of Gormenghast, he saw away to the north, the car-
vers' navy like scattered jewels on the slate-grey flood. Immediately ahead
of him, as he proceeded, was the wall through one of the windows of which
he had so dangerously skimmed. What was left of the window and of those on
either side was now submerged and Titus knew that yet another floor of the
central castle had by now been abandoned.

This wall, which formed the blunt nose of a long stone headland, had a
counterpart a mile to the east. Between these two a vast and sombre bay
lay stretched, with not a break in its surface. As with its twin, this sec-
ond headland had no windows open at flood level. The water had a good twelve
feet to climb before the next tier of casements could be entered or affected.
But turning his eyes to the base, or curve of the great bay -- to where (had
it been in reality a bay) the sands might well have stretched, Titus could
see that the far windows in that line of cliffs, no larger in his sight than
grains of rice, were, unlike those of the headlands, far from regular.

Those walls, covered with ivy, were in many ways peculiar. Stone stairs climb-
ed up and down their outer sides and led to openings. The windows, as he had
already observed, appeared to be sprinkled over the green facades of the cliff
with an indiscriminate and wayward profluence that gave no clue as to how the
inner structures held together.

It was towards this base of the ‘bay' that Titus now began to paddle, the
limpid flood as chill as death beneath him, with all its raindrowned
marvels.



SEVENTY-TWO



It seemed to Titus a deserted place, a fastness of no life -- rank with ivy,
dumb with its toothless mouths, blind with its lidless eyes.

He drew in to the base of the abandoned walls where a flight of steps rose
slanting out of the depths of the water, and, climbing alongside the wet green
wall of ivy, rose to a balcony forty feet above his head -- a stone affair sur-
rounded by an iron railing decoratively wrought but so corroded with rust, that
it only waited the tap of a stick to send it crumbling to the water.

As Titus stepped from his craft on to the stone steps at water level, and
kneeling, lifted it dripping from the water and laid it carefully along the
length of a stone tread, for he had no painter, he became conscious of a dis-
tinct malevolence. It was as though the great walls were watching his every
move.

He pushed his brown hair back from his forehead and lifted his head so that
he faced the towering masonry. His eyebrows were drawn together, his eyes
were narrowed, his trembling chin was thrust aggressively forward. There was
no sound but the dripping of the rain from the acres of ivy.

Unpleasant as was this sense of being under observation, he fought back the
panic that might so easily have developed and, more to prove to himself that
he was not afraid of mere stone and ivy rather than because he really wished
to mount the stairway and discover what lay within the melancholy walls, he
began to climb the slippery steps that led to the balcony. And as he began
his ascent, the face that had been watching him disappeared from a small win-
dow close to the summit of the lowering wall. But only for a moment, for it
reappeared so suddenly again at another opening that it was difficult to be-
lieve that it could be the same face that now stared down to where the steps
slid under the water and where Titus' canoe lay ‘beached'. But there could
be no doubt of it. No two faces could either be so identical of blemish, nor
so cruelly similar. The dark red eyes were fixed upon the little craft. They
had watched its approach across the ‘bay'. They noted how light, rapid and
manoeuvrable it was, how it had answered to the merest whim of its rider.

He turned his eyes from the craft to Titus, who by now, having climbed a do-
zen steps was within a couple more of being immediately below the heavy block
of stone which Steerpike had loosened, and which he had half a mind to send
hurtling down upon the youth below.

But he knew that the death of the Earl, much as it would have gratified him,
would not in fact materially advance his chance of escape. Had it been cer-
tain that the stone would strike his lordship dead, he would have had no hes-
itation in satisfying what had now become a lust for killing. But were the
stone to miss its prey and splinter on the steps far below, then not only
would Titus have every right to imagine that he had been ambushed -- and who
would ambush the Earl save he himself? -- but also a more immediate dislo-
cation of his plans would result. For there was little doubt that Titus on
recovering from his shock would not dare to continue with his upward climb,
but would return immediately to his craft. And it was this boat that Steer-
pike was after. To be able to move at speed through the tortuous waterways
of the castle would double his mobility.

Driven from haunt to haunt, from hiding place to hiding place by the rising
water, his operations conditioned always by the necessity of his being with-
in striking range of the stores and larders, it had in the narrowing zone of
manoeuvre become imperative for him to be able to travel with equal speed
and silence over both land and water. For days he had starved when the mo-
bile kitchens were so positioned in a curve of the spacious west wing that
it was impossible for him, guarded as they were, to plunder.

But they had moved, since then, at least three times, and now, with the pos-
sibility of the rain having stopped for good, it was his savage hope that
they had found a fixity in that high sub-attic room above which in a barri-
caded and all but lightless loft he had established his headquarters. In
the ceiling of this murky refuge a trap door opened upon a sloping roof of
slates, where swathes of creeper bandaged it from sight. But it was the hatch
in the floor below him which, when lifted with a tender and secret care more
usually associated with the handling of sucklings, that gave him access to
the most pressing of his needs: for below him lay the stores. In the small
hours, when it became necessary he would lower himself inch by noiseless
inch on a long rope. The sack he brought down with him he would fill with
the least perishable provisions. A dozen or more of the staff would be a-
sleep on the floor, but the sentries were naturally posted on the outer
side of the three doors and were no bother to him.

But this was not his only hide-out. He knew that sooner or later the floods
would fall. The kitchens would again become nomadic.

It was impossible to tell in which direction the life of the castle would
sway as on its slowly downward journey it trod upon the wet heels
of the subsiding water.

The spreading roofs themselves furnished him with seven secret strongholds.
The attics and the three dry floors below provided for at least four as
safe, in their varying ways, as his garret above the kitchen. And now that
the flood had stayed at the same level for three days, a few feet above
the majority of the landings of the ninth floor, it had become possible
for him to prepare in advance a number of aqueous asylums.

But how much simpler and safer it would be for him were he able to recon-
noitre the high canals in such a craft as he now saw below him.

No. He could not afford to send the rough stone hurtling down. There was
more than a chance of his failure to slay. The acute temptation to crush
at a single blow that life out of the heir to Gormenghast -- and leave no-
thing more than brick and stone behind -- the intoxicating temptation to
take the risk and to do this, was hard to resist.

But before all else came his own survival, and if by so much as an iota he
deviated in any way from what he considered to be his final advantage then
the end would surely come if not now, then very soon. For he knew he was
walking on a razor's edge. He gloried in it. He had slid into the skin of
a solitary Satan as though he had never enjoyed the flourish of language,
the delights of civil power. It was war, now. Naked and bloody. The sim-
plicity of the situation appealed to him. The world closed in upon him,
its weapons drawn, eager for his death. And it was for him to outwit the
world. It was the simplest and most fundamental of all games.

But his face was not the face of a thing at play. Or even of the Steerpike
of a few years back -- at play; or even of sin at play, for something new
had happened to it. The terrible pattern that made of it a map, the white
of the sea, the red, the continents and spattered islands, was hardly not-
iceable now. For it was the eyes that drew away the attention from all else.

For all the characteristic cunning and agility of his brain, he was no
longer living in the same world that he lived in before he murdered Flay.
Something had altered. It was his mind. His brain was the same but his
mind was different. He was no longer a criminal because he chose to be.
He had no longer the choice. He lived now among the abstractions. His
brain dealt with where he would hide and what he would do if certain con-
tingencies arose, but his mind floated above all this in a red ether. And
the reflection of his mind burned through his eyes, filling the pupils
with a grizzly bloodlight.

As he stared down like a bird of prey from its window'd crag, his brain
saw, far below him a canoe. It saw Titus standing on the stone balcony.
It saw him turn and after a moment's hesitation enter the rotting halls
and disappear from view.

But his mind saw nothing of all this. His mind was engaged in a warfare
of the gods. His mind paced outwards over no-man'sland, over the fields
of the slain, paced to the rhythm of the blood's red bugles. To be alone
and evil! To be a god at bay. What was more absolute.

Three minutes had passed since the Earl had disappeared into the maw of
the building below him. Steerpike had given him time to move well into
the fastness before he took action. There had been the chance of the sud-
den reappearance of the youth, for the lower halls were dark and sinister.
But he had not reappeared, and the time was now ripe for Steerpike to
make his leap. The descent was of a sickening duration. The blood ham-
mered in the murderer's head. His stomach turned over and for a while he
lost consciousness. When his reflection, flying upwards from the depths
to meet him was shattered at the surface, and as the spume of water rose
like a fountain, Steerpike's body, far below the surface, continued its
descent until, at last, as his feet touched lightly upon the submerged
head of a weather-cock, he began to rise again to the surface.

The disturbed water had become quite smooth again.

Dazed with the effort of the long fall, sick with swallowed water and
with painful lungs, yet it was only a moment or two before he had struck
out for the stone stairway.

When he reached it and climbed the few steps to where the canoe lay qui-
etly upon her side, he wasted not a moment in setting her upon the water.
Boarding her nimbly he grasped the paddle that lay within and with the
first half-dozen strokes was speeding beneath the ivy-covered walls to-
wards one of the few windows which coincided with the water level.

It was of course necessary for Steerpike to make immediately for cover.
The great bay ahead was a death trap, where, were a fish to raise its
head above the surface it would be seen at once!

At any moment the young Earl might return. It was for him to skid unseen
through the first of the flood windows leaving no trace. As Steerpike
sped rapidly over the water he had, as far as possible kept his head turn-
ed back over his shoulders for the possible reappearance of the earl. Were
he to be seen it would be necessary for him to make his way at once to one
of his hiding places. There would be no possibility of his being overtaken,
but to be sighted would, for many reasons, be unfortunate. He had no wish
for the castle to know he could travel by water -- nor that he roamed so
far afield as to these frowning headlands; the sentries might well be re-
inforced, the vigilance sharpened.

So far he had been fortunate. He had survived his fall. His enemy had been
out of earshot when he had splashed into the water; he had sighted a win-
dow through which he would pass with ease and behind the dark jaw of which
he could remain until darkness descended.

For a few minutes at a time, as he slipped along the base of the dark walls
he was forced to turn his head, to correct the course of the canoe, but for
the most part his eyes were fixed upon the empty balcony to which at any
moment his enemy might return. It was when he had but three or four lengths
of his canoe to go, before he turned her into the castle that, concentrat-
ing upon a faultless entry, he was unable to see that Titus had stepped out
upon the open balcony.

He could not see that on immediately discovering the disappearance of his
boat, Titus had started forward and had then swept his eyes across the bay
until they had come to rest upon the only moving object -- the far canoe as
it began its curve into the cliff. Without a thought Titus drew backwards
into the doorway around which he now peered, his body shaking with excite-
ment. Even at that distance there was no mistaking the hunched shoulders
of the marauder. It was well that he had stepped backwards so quickly, for
as the canoe took its curve and straightening out, slid rapidly at the cas-
tle, as though to crash its delicate prow against its flank, Steerpike, cer-
tain of a perfect entry, returned his attention to the distant balcony, and
as he noted its emptiness he disappeared into the wall like a snake into a
rock.



SEVENTY-THREE



The Doctor was exhausted: his eyes red with lack of sleep, his features wasted
and drawn. His skill was in unending demand. The flood had gathered in its wake
a hundred subsidiary disasters.

In a long attic room which became known as the hospital, the improvised beds
were not only filled with cases of fracture and accident of every description,
but with the victims of exhaustion, and of various sicknesses resulting from the
dank and unhealthy conditions.

He was now upon his way to a typical accident. The news had been brought to him
of yet another case of broken bones. A man had fallen apparently while trying to
carry a heavy crate up a slippery stairway, its treads swimming in rain water.
On reaching the place the Doctor found that it was a clean break of the femur.
The man was lifted onto the professional raft at the spacious centre of which
the Doctor could apply his splints or perform whatever temporary operation was
necessary, while at the same time his orderly at the rear propelled them back
in the direction of the hospital.

Dipping his long pole with excellent regularity the orderly would send the raft
sliding steadily along the corridors. On this particular occasion as the raft,
when about halfway to its goal, crept gingerly through a wooden arch somewhat
narrow and difficult of manoeuvre, and came out into what must have once been
a ballroom, for in one of its hexagonal corners the upper levels of an ornate
platform emerged above the surface, suggesting that an orchestra once filled the
place with music--as the raft edged itself out of the restricted passageway and
floated forward into all this wealth of space, Doctor Prunesquallor sank back a-
gainst the rolled up mattress he kept towards the stern of the raft. At his feet
lay the man he had been attending, his trouser torn open from heel to hip; his
thigh in a splint. The white bandages, bound with a beautiful and firm deliber-
ation, were reflected in the ballroom water.

The Doctor shut his eyes. He hardly knew what was happening about him. His head
swam; but when he heard his raft being hailed by some kind of dugout that was be-
ing paddled in his direction from the far end of the ballroom he raised an eyelid.
It was indeed a dugout that was drawing closer, a long, absurd affair, obviously
made by the men who were now manning it, for the Carvers would never have allowed
such an object to leave their workshops. At its stern, with his hand on the tiller
was Perch-Prism, who was obviously in command. His black-gowned crew, using their
mortar-boards as paddles, sat in varying degrees of dejection, one behind the other.
They disliked not being able to face the way they were going, and resented Perch-
Prism's captaincy and consequent control over their watery progress. However, Bell-
grove had appointed Perch-Prism to his post and given orders (which he had never
dreamed would be carried out) that his staff should help patrol the waterways.
Schooling, of course, had become impossible, and the pupils, now that the rain had
stopped, spent most of their time leaping and diving from the battlements, the
turrets, the flying buttresses, the tops of towers, from any and every vantage
point, into the deep clear water where they swam like a plague of frogs in and
out of windows and over the wide breast of the flood, their shrill screams sound-
ing from near and far.

And so the staff were free of scholastic duties. They had little to do but yearn
for the old days, and to chaff one another until the chaff became acrimonious
and a morose and tacit silence had fallen upon them and none of them had anything
original left to say about the flood.

Opus Fluke, the stern oar, brooded darkly over the armchair that the flood had
swallowed--the armchair which he had inhabited for over forty years--the filthy,
mouldering, hideous and most necessary support of his existence, the famous
"Fluke's cradle' of the Common-Room--it had gone for ever.

Behind him in the dugout sat Flannelcat, a poor oarsman if ever there was one.
For Flannelcat to be glum and speechless was nothing new. If Fluke brooded on
the death of an armchair, Flannelcat brooded on the death of all things and had
done so for as long as anyone could remember. He had always been ineffectual
and a misery to himself and others, and so, having plumbed the depths for so
long, this flood was a mere nothing to him.

Mulefire, the most difficult of the crew for Perch-Prism to control, sat like a
hulk of stupid, bull-necked irritability, immediately behind the miserable Flan-
nelcat, who looked to be in perpetual danger of being bitten in the back of the
neck by Mulefire's tomb-stone teeth, and of being lifted out of his seat and
slung away across the ballroom water. Behind Mulefire sat Cutflower; he was the
last of them all to admit that silence was the best thing that could happen to
them. Chatter was lifeblood--and it was a mere shadow of the one time vapid but
ebullient wag who sat now staring at Mulefire's heavily muscled back.

There were only two other members to this crew: Shred and Swivell. No doubt the
rest of the staff had got hold of boats from somewhere, or, like these gentlemen,
had constructed something themselves, or even ignored Bellgrove's ruling, and
kept to the upper floors.

Shred and Swivell dipping their mortarboards in the glassy surface were of course
the nearest to the approaching raft. Swivell, the bow "oar', turning his ageing
face to see who it was that Perch-Prism was hailing, upset for a few moments the
balance of the dugout which listed dangerously to the port side.

"Now then! Now then!" shouted Perch-Prism from the stern. "Are you trying to cap-
size us, sir?"

"Nonsense," shouted Swivell, colouring, for he hated being reprimanded over the
seven heads of his colleagues. He knew that he had behaved in an utterly unworthy
way, for a bow oar, but "Nonsense' he shouted again.

"We will not discuss the matter now sir, if you please!" said Perch-Prism, drop-
ping the lids over his small black and eloquent eyes, and half turning away his
head so that the underside of his porcine nose caught what light there was re-
flected from the water.

"I would have thought it were enough that you had endangered your colleagues.
But no. You wish to justify yourself, like all men of science. Tomorrow you and
Cutflower will change places."

"Oh Lord! la!" said Cutflower, testily. "I'm comfy where I am, la!"

Perch-Prism was about to let the ungracious Cutflower into a secret or two on
the nature of mutiny when the Doctor came alongside.

"Good morning, Doctor," said Perch-Prism.

The Doctor, starting out of an uneasy sleep, for even after he had heard Perch-
Prism's shout across the water he had been unable to keep his eyes open, forced
himself upright on the raft and turned his tired eyes upon the dugout.

"Did somebody say something?" cried he, with a valiant effort at jocularity,
though his limbs felt like lead and there was a fire in the top of his head.

"Did I hear a voice across the brine? Well, well, it's you, Perch-Prism, by all
that's irregular! How are you, admiral?"

But even as the Doctor was flashing one of his Smiles along the length of the
dugout, like a dental broadside, he fell back upon the mattress, and the orderly
with the long pole, taking no notice of Perch-Prism and the rest, gave a great
shove against the ballroom floor and the raft swam forward and away from the Pro-
fessors in the direction of the hospital, where, he hoped, he could persuade the
Doctor to lie down for an hour or two irrespective of the maimed and distressed,
the dead and the dying.



SEVENTY-FOUR



Irma had not spared herself over the furnishing of her home. A great deal of work,
a great deal of thought--and, in her opinion, a great deal of taste--had been lav-
ished upon it. The colour scheme had been carefully considered. There was not a
discordant note in the whole place. It was so tasteful, in fact, that Bellgrove
never felt at home. It gave him a sense of inferiority and he hated the powder-blue
curtains and the dove-grey carpets, as though it were their fault that Irma had
chosen them. But this meant little to her. She knew that he as a mere man would
know nothing of "artistic' matters. She had expressed herself, as women will, in
a smug broadside of pastel shades. Nothing clashed because nothing had the strength
to clash; everything murmured of safety among the hues; all was refinement.

But the vandal water came and the work and the thought and the taste and the re-
finement, O where was it now? It was too much! It was too much! That all the love
she had lavished was drowned beneath the mean, beastly, stupid, unnecessary rain,
that this thing, this thing, this useless, brainless element called rain, should turn
her artistry to filth and pulp!

"I hate nature," she cried. "I hate it, the rotten beast..."

"Tut, tut," muttered Bellgrove as he lolled in a hammock and stared up at one of
the beams in the roof. (They had been assigned a small loft where they were able
to be miserable in comparative comfort.) "You can't talk about nature like that,
my ignorant child. Good gracious, no! Dammit, I should think not."

"Nature," cried Irma scornfully. "Do you think I'm frightened of it! Let it do
what it likes!"

"You're a piece of nature yourself," said Bellgrove after a pause.

"O don't be stupid, you...you..." Irma could not continue.

"All right, what am I then?" murmured Bellgrove. "Why don't you say what's in your
empty little woman's mind? Why don't you call me an old man like you do when you're
angry with something else? If you're not nature, or a bit of it, what the hell are
you?"

"I'm a woman," screamed his wife, her eyes filling with tears. "And my home is
under...under...the vile...rainwater..."

With a great effort Mr Bellgrove worked his emaciated legs over the side of the
hammock and when they touched the floor, rose shakily to his feet and shambled
uncertainly in his wife's direction. He was very conscious of doing a noble act-
ion. He had been very comfortable in the hammock; he knew that there was a very
slender chance of his chivalry being appreciated, but that was life. One had
to do certain things to keep up one's spiritual status, but apart from that, her
terrible outburst had unnerved him. He had to do something. Why did she have to
make such an unpleasant noise about it all? Her voice went through his head like
a knife.

But oh it had been pathetic too: railing against Nature. How maddeningly ignorant
she was. As though nature should have turned back when it reached as far as her
boudoir. As though a flood would whisper to itself, "Sh...sh...sh...less noise...
less...noise...this is Irma's room...lavender and ivory you know...lavender and
ivory'--Tut-tut-tut, what a wife to be saddled with in all conscience ...and yet
...and yet...was it only pity that drew him to her? He did not know.

He sat down by her side beneath a small top window, and he put his long, loose
arm about her. She shuddered a moment and then stiffened again. But she did not
ask him to remove his arm.

In the small loft with the great castle beneath them like a gigantic body with
its arteries filled with water, they sat there side by side, and stared at where
a piece of plaster had fallen from the opposite wall, and had left a small grey
pattern the shape of a heart.



SEVENTY-FIVE



It was not that Fuchsia did not struggle against her mounting melancholia. But
the black moods closing in on her ever more frequently were becoming too much
for her.

The emotional, loving, moody child had had small chance of developing into a hap-
py woman. Had she as a girl been naturally joyous yet all that had befallen her
must surely have driven away the bright birds, one by one, from her breast. As
it was, made of a more sombre clay, capable of deep happiness, but more easily
drawn to the dark than the light, Fuchsia was even more open to the cruel winds
of circumstances which appeared to have singled her out for particular punishment.

Her need for love had never been fulfilled; her love for others had never been
suspected, or wanted. Rich as a dusky orchard, she had never been discovered.
Her green boughs had been spread, but no travellers came and rested in their
shade nor tasted the sweet fruit.

With her mind for ever turning to the past, Fuchsia could see nothing but the
ill-starred progress of a girl who was, in spite of her title and all it im-
plied, of little consequence in the eyes of the castle, a purposeless misfit
of a child, hapless and solitary. Her deepest loves had been for her old nurse
Nannie Slagg, for her brother, for the Doctor, and in a strange way for Flay.
Nannie Slagg and Flay were both dead; Titus had changed. They loved one an-
other still but a wall of cloud lay between them, something that neither had
the power to dispel.

There was still Dr Prune. But he had been so heavily overworked since the
flood that she had not seen him. The desire to see the last of her true
friends had weakened with every black depression. When she most needed the
counsel and love of the Doctor, who would have left the world bleeding to
help her, it was then that she froze within herself and locking herself away,
became ill with the failure of her life, the frustration of her womanhood,
and tossing and turning in her improvised bedroom twelve feet above the
flood, conceived, for the first time, the idea of suicide.

What was the darkest of the causes for so terrible a thought it is hard to
know. Her lack of love; her lack of a father or a real mother? Her loneli-
ness. The ghastly disillusion when Steerpike was unmasked, and the horror
of her having been fondled by a homicide. The growing sense of her own in-
feriority in everything but rank. There were many causes, any one of which
might have been alone sufficient to undermine the will of tougher natures
than Fuchsia's.

When the first concept of oblivion flickered through her mind, she raised
her head from her arms. She was shocked and she was frightened. But she was
excited also.

She walked unsteadily to the window. Her thought had taken her into a realm
of possibility so vast, awe-inspiring, final and noiseless that her knees
felt weak and she glanced over her shoulder although she knew herself to be
alone in her room with the door locked against the world.

When she reached the window she stared out across the water, but nothing that
she saw affected her thought or made any kind of visual impression on her.

All she knew was that she felt weak, that she was not reading about all this
in a tragic book but that it was true. It was true that she was standing at
a window and that she had thought of killing herself. She clutched her hands
together over her heart and a fleeting memory of how a young man had sudden-
ly appeared at another window many years ago and had left a rose behind him
on her table, passed through her mind and was gone.

It was all true. It wasn't any story. But she could still pretend. She would
pretend that she was the sort of person who would not only think of killing
herself so that the pain in her heart should be gone for ever, but be the
kind of person who would know how to do it, and be brave enough.

And as she pondered, she slid moment by moment even deeper into a world of
make-believe, as though she were once more the imaginative girl of many years
ago, aloft in her secret life. She had become somebody else. She was someone
who was young and beautiful and brave as a lioness. What would such a person
do? Why, such a person would stand upon the window-sill above this water.
And...she...would...and as the child in her was playing the oldest game in
the world, her body, following the course of her imagination, had climbed to
the sill of the window where it stood with its back to the room.

For how long she would have stood there had she not been jerked back into a
sudden consciousness of the world--by the sound of someone knocking upon the
door of her room, it is impossible to know, but starting at the sound and
finding herself dangerously balanced upon a narrow sill above the deep water,
she trembled uncontrollably, and in trying to turn without sufficient thought
or care, she slipped and clutching at the face of the wall at her side found
nothing to grasp, so that she fell, striking her dark head on the sill as she
passed, and was already unconscious before the water received her, and drown-
ed her at its ease.



SEVENTY-SIX



Now that the flood had reached its height it was vital that not a moment
should be lost in combing the regions in which Steerpike might be lurking--
in surrounding them with cordons of picked men who, converging inwards to
the centre of each chosen district, by land and water, should, theoretically,
sooner or later, close upon the beast. And now above all was the time to
throw in every man. The Countess had circled areas of the Gormenghast map
with a thick blue pencil. Captains of Search had been given their instructions.
Not a cranny was to be left unscoured--not a drain unprobed. It would be
difficult enough, with the flood at its present level to run to earth so sly a
quarry, yet with every day that passed the chances of Steerpike's capture
would recede even further--would recede as the flood receded, for as one floor
after another began to open up its labyrinthian ways, so the fugitive in the
multiplying warrens, would burrow ever deeper into darkness.

It would of course be slow and gradual this going-down of the flood, but the
Countess was fiercely conscious of how time was the salient factor: how never
again would she have Steerpike within so close a net. Even for the flood to
leave a single floor would be for a hundred vistas to spread out on every side
with all their countless alleys of wet stone. There was no time to be lost.

As it was the theatre of manoeuvre--the three dry topmost floors and the wet
"floor of boats' (where the coloured craft of the carvers sped to and fro,
or lay careening beneath great mantelpieces, or tied up to the banisters of
forgotten stairways, cast their rich reflections in the dark water)--these
theatres of manoeuvre--the three dry levels and the one wet, were not the on-
ly areas which had to be considered in the drawing up of the Master Plan.
The Countess also had to remember the isolated outcrops of the castle. Luck-
ily most of the widely scattered and virtually endless ramifications of the
main structure of Gormenghast were under water, and consequently of no use
to the fugitive. But there were a number of towers to which the young man
might well have swum. And there was also Gormenghast Mountain.

As far as this latter was concerned, the Countess was not apprehensive of
his having escaped there, not merely because she had checked the boats each
evening, and was satisfied that there had been no thefts but because a
string of boats, like coloured beads, was at her orders in perpetual rota-
tion around the castle summits, and would have cut him off by day or night.

The core of her strategy hinged upon the fact that the young man must eat.
As for drink, he had a wet world brimming at his mouth.

That he might already be dead from accident or from starvation was ruled
out by the body that on this very day had been discovered floating face
downwards alongside an upturned coracle. The man had been no more than a
few hours dead. A pebble was lodged in his forehead.

The headquarters of the Countess was now in a long, narrow room that lay
immediately and somewhat centrally above the "floor of boats'.

There she received all messages: gave all orders: prepared her plans: stu-
died the various maps and gave instructions for new ones to be rapidly
prepared of the unplotted districts so that she should have as powerful a
grasp upon the smallest details as she had upon the comprehensive sweep
of her master-plan.

Her preparations completed she rose from the table at which she had been
sitting, and pursing her lips at the goldfinch on her shoulder she was
about to move with that characteristically heavy and ruthless deliberation
towards the door when a panting messenger ran up to her.

"Well?" she said. "What is it?"

"Lord Titus, my lady...he's..."

"He's what?" she turned her head sharply.

"He's here."

"Where?"

"Outside the door, your ladyship. He says he has important news for you."

The Countess moved at once to the door and opening it, found Titus sitting
upon the floor, his head between his knees, his sodden clothes in rags, his
legs and arms bruised and scratched, and his hair grey with grime.

He did not look up. He had not the strength. He had collapsed. In a confus-
ed way he knew where he was, for he had been straining his muscles with long
and hazardous climbs, struggling shoulder deep through flooded passageways,
crawling giddily over slanting roofs, intent upon one thing--to reach this
door under which he had slumped. The door of his mother's room.

After a little time he opened his eyes. His mother was kneeling heavily at
his side. What was she doing there? He shut his eyes again. Perhaps he was
dreaming. Someone was saying in a far away voice "Where is that brandy?" and
then, a little later, he felt himself being raised, the cold rim of a glass
at his lips.

When he next opened his eyes he knew exactly where he was and why he was
there.

"Mother!" he said.

"What is it?" Her voice was quite colourless.

"I've seen him."

"Who?"

"Steerpike."

The Countess stiffened at his side. It was as though something more of ice
than of flesh was kneeling beside him.

"No!" she said at last. "Why should I believe you?"

"It is true," said Titus.

She bent over him and taking his shoulders in her powerful hands, forced them
with a deceptive tenderness to and fro, as though to ease some turmoil in her
heart. He could feel through the gentle grasp of her fingers the murderous
strength of her arms.

At last she said, "Where? Where did you see him?"

"I could take you there...northwards."

"How long ago?"

"Hours...hours...he went through a window...in my boat...he stole it."

"Did he see you?"

"No."

"Are you sure of that?"

"Yes."

"Northwards you say. Beyond the Blackstone Quarter?"

"Far beyond. Nearer the Stone Dogshead and the Angel's Buttress."

"No!" cried the Countess in so loud and husky a voice that Titus drew back on
his elbow. She turned to him.

"Then we have him." Her eyes were narrowed. "Did you not have to crawl across
the Coupee--the high knife-edge? How else could you have returned?"

"I did," said Titus. "That is how I came."

"From the North Headstones?"

"Is that what it is called, mother?"

"It is. You have been in the North Headstones beyond Gory and the Silver Mines.
I know where you've been. You've been to the Twin Fingers where Little Sark be-
gins and the Bluff narrows. Between the Twins would be water now. Am I right?"

"There's what looks like a bay," said Titus. "If that's what you mean."

"The district will be ringed at once! And on every level!"

She rose ponderously to her feet, and turning to one of the men--"Have the
Search Captains called immediately. Take up the boy. Couch him. Feed him. Give
him dry clothes. Give him sleep. He will not have long to rest. All craft will
patrol the Headstones night and day. All search parties will be mustered and
concentrated to the south side of the Coupee neck. Send out all messengers. We
start in one hour from now."

She turned to look down at Titus who had risen to one knee. When he was on his
feet he faced his mother.

She said to him:

"Get some sleep. You have done well. Gormenghast will be avenged. The castle's
heart is sound. You have surprised me."

"I did not do it for Gormenghast," said Titus.

"No?"

"No, mother."

"Then for whom or for what?"

"It was an accident," said Titus, his heart hammering. "I happened to be there."
He knew he should hold his tongue. He knew that he was talking a forbidden lan-
guage. He trembled with excitement of telling the dangerous truth. He could not
stop. "I am glad it's through me he's been sighted," he said, "but it wasn't for
the safety or the honour of Gormenghast that I've come to you. No, though because
of me he'll be surrounded. I cannot think of my duty any more. Not in that way.
I hate him for other reasons."

The silence was thick and terrible--and then at last her millstone words. "What
...reasons?" There was something so cold and merciless in her voice that Titus
blanched. He had spoken as he had never dared to speak before. He had stepped
beyond the recognized border. He had breathed the air of an unmentionable world.

Again the cold, inhuman voice:

"What reasons?"

He was altogether exhausted but suddenly out of his physical weakness another
wave of nervous moral strength floated up in him. He had not planned to come
out into the open, or to give any hint to his mother of his secret rebellion
and he knew that he could never have voiced his thoughts had he planned to do
so but finding now that he had shown himself in the colours of a traitor, he
flushed, and lifting his head he shouted:

"I will tell you!"

His filthy hair fell over his eyes. His eyes blazed with an upsurge of defiance,
as though a dozen pent up years had at last found outlet. He had gone so far
that there was no return. His mother stood before him like a monument. He saw
her great outline through the blur of his weakness and his passion. She made no
movement at all.

"I will tell you! My reasons were for this. Laugh if you like! He stole my boat!
He hurt Fuchsia. He killed Flay. He frightened me. I do not care if it was rebel-
lion against the Stones--most of all it was theft, cruelty and murder. What do I
care for the symbolism of it all? What do I care if the castle's heart is sound
or not? I don't want to be sound anyway! Anybody can be sound if they're always
doing what they're told. I want to live! Can't you see? Oh, can't you see? I want
to be myself, and become what I make myself, a person, a real live person and not
a symbol any more. That is my reason! He must be caught and slain. He killed Flay.
He hurt my sister. He stole my boat. Isn't that enough? To hell with Gormenghast."

In the unbearable silence the Countess and those present could hear the sound of
someone approaching rapidly.

But it was an eternity before the footsteps came to rest and a distraught figure
stood before the Countess and waited with head bowed and trembling hands for per-
mission to give his message. Dragging her gaze from the face of her son she turned
at last to the messenger.

"Well," she whispered, "what is it, man?"

He raised his head. For a few seconds he could not speak. His lips were apart but
no sound came, and his jaws shook. In his eyes was such a light that caused Titus
to move towards him with sudden fear.

"Not Fuchsia! Not Fuchsia!" he cried with a ghastly knowledge, even as he framed
the words, that something had happened to her.

The man, still facing the Countess, said, "The Lady Fuchsia is drowned."

At these words something happened to Titus. Something quite unpredictable. He now
knew what he must do. He knew what he was. He had no fear left. The death of his
sister like the last nail to be driven into his make-up had completed him, as a
structure is completed, and becomes ready for use while the sound of the last ham-
mer blow still echoes in the ears.

The death of the Thing had seen the last of his boyhood.

When the lightning killed her he had become a man. The elasticity of childhood had
gone. His brain and body had become wound up, like a spring. But the death of Fuch-
sia had touched the spring. He was now no longer just a man. He was that rarer
thing, a man in motion. The wound-up spring of his being recoiled. He was on his
way.

And the agent of his purpose was his anger. A blind white rage had transformed him.
His egotistic outburst, dramatic enough, and dangerous enough on its own account,
was nothing to the fierce loosening of his tongue, that like a vent for the uprush
of his rage and grief, amazed his mother, the messenger and the officers who had
only known him as a reserved and moody figurehead.

Fuchsia dead! Fuchsia, his dark sister--his dear sister.

"Oh God in Heaven, where?" he cried. "Where was she found. Where is she now. Where?
Where? I must go to her."

He turned to his mother. "It is the skewbald beast," he said. "He has killed her.
He has killed your daughter. Who else would kill her? Or touch a hair of her head,
O braver than you ever knew, who never loved her. Oh, God, mother, get your cap-
tains posted. Every weapon'd man. My tiredness has gone. I will come at once. I
know the window. It is not yet dark. We can surround him. But by boat, mother. That
is the quickest way. There is no need for the North Headstones. Send out the boats.
Every one. I saw him, mother, the killer of my sister."

He turned again to the bearer of the shattering news.

"Where is she now?"

"A special room has been prepared by the Doctor near the hospital. He is with her."

And then the voice of the Countess, low and deep. She was speaking to the Head
Officer present.

"The Carvers must be informed that they are needed, and every watertight boat fin-
ished or unfinished. All boats already in the castle to be drawn up alongside the
west wall. All weapons to be distributed at once," and then, to the messenger who
had spoken of where Fuchsia lay, "Lead the way."

The Countess and Titus followed the man. No word was spoken until they were within
a stone's throw of the hospital, when the Countess without turning to Titus said:

"If it were not that you were ill..."

"I am not ill," said Titus, interrupting.

"Very well, then," said the Countess. "It is upon your head."

"I welcome it," said Titus.

While he could feel no fear, he was at the same time surprised at his own audacity.
But it was so small an emotion compared with the hollow ache with which the know-
ledge of Fuchsia's death had filled him. To be brave among the living--what was
that compared with the bonfire of his rage against Steerpike at whose door he laid
the responsibility for Fuchsia's death? And the tides of the loneliness that had
surged over him, drowned him in seas that knew no fear of the living, even of a
mother such as his own.

When the door was opened they saw the tall thin figure of Dr Prunesquallor stand-
ing at an open window, his hands behind his back, very still and unnaturally up-
right. It was a small room with low rafters and bare boards on the floor, but it
was meticulously clean. It was obvious that it had been freshly scrubbed and wash-
ed, boards, walls and ceiling.

Against the wall to the left was a stretcher supported at either end upon wooden
boxes. On the stretcher lay Fuchsia, a sheet drawn up to her shoulders, her eyes
closed. It seemed hardly her.

The Doctor turned. He did not seem to recognize either Titus or the Countess. He
stared through them, only touching Titus' arm in a gentle way as he passed, for
he had no sooner seen the mother and the brother of his favourite child than he
had begun to move to the door.

His cheeks were wet, and his glasses had become so blurred that he stumbled when
he reached the door, and could not find the handle. Titus opened the door for him
and for a moment caught a glimpse of his friend in the corridor outside as he re-
moved his glasses and began to wipe them with his silk handkerchief, his head bow-
ed, his weak eyes peering at the spectacles in his hand with that kind of concen-
tration that is grief.

Left together in the room the mother and son stood side by side in worlds of their
own. Had they not both been moved it might well have been embarrassing. Neither
knew nor cared what was going on in the breast of the other.

The face of the Countess showed nothing, but once she drew the corner of the sheet
up a little further over Fuchsia's shoulder, with an infinite gentleness, as
though she feared her child might feel the cold and so must take the risk of wak-
ing her.



SEVENTY-SEVEN



Knowing that he had several hours to wait before it would be dark enough for him
to venture forth, Steerpike had dropped off to sleep in the canoe. As he slept the
canoe began to bob gently on the inky water a few feet from where the flood swam
through the window entrance. This entrance, seen from the inside of the "cavern',
was like a square of light. But the breast of the great bay, which, from the
dark interior of Steerpike's refuge, appeared luminous was, in reality, as the mo-
ments passed, drawing across its nakedness shawl after shawl of shadow.

When Steerpike had slid from the outer world, and through the brimming window,
seven hours earlier, he had of course been able to see exactly what kind of a
room he had entered. The light striking through the window had glanced upwards
off the water and lit the interior.

His first reaction had been one of intense irritation for there were no corri-
dors leading from the room and no stairways to the floor above. The doors had
been closed when the flood had filled the room so that they were immovable with
the weight of water. Had the inner doors been open he might have slid through
their upper airways into ampler quarters. But no. The place was virtually a cave
--a cave with a few mouldering pictures hanging precariously a few inches above
high-water mark.

As such he suspected it from the first. It was no more than a trap. But to pad-
dle out of its mouth and across the open water seemed to him more dangerous than
to remain where he was for the few hours that remained before darkness fell.

A breeze was stirring the surface of the wide freshwater bay, blowing from the
direction of the mountain and a kind of gooseflesh covered the surface of the
water. These ripples began to move into the cave, one after another and the
canoe rocked with a gentle side-to-side motion.

On either side of the "bay' the two identical headlands, with their long lines
of windows, had become silhouetted against the dusk.

Between them the ruffled waters faced the sky with an unusual agitation--a
shuffling backwards and forwards of its surface which, though by no means
dangerous in itself either to the smallest craft or even to a swimmer, was nev-
ertheless peculiar and menacing.

Within a minute the breathless quiet of the evening had become something very
different. The hush of dusk, the trance of stonegrey light was broken. There
was no break in the silence but the air, the water, the castle and the darkness
were in conclave.

A chill breath from the lungs of this conspiracy, stealing across the gooseflesh
water must have moved into the cave-like chamber where Steerpike slept, for he
sat up suddenly in his canoe and turning his face at once to the window, the
small hairs rose along his spine and his mouth became the mouth of a wolf, for
as the blood shone behind the lenses of his eyes, his thin and colourless lips
parted in a snarl that extended like an open gash a mask of wax.

As his brain raced, he plucked at the paddle and whisked the boat to within a
few feet of the window, where, in absolute darkness himself he could command a
view of the bay.

What he had seen had been the reflections only of what he now stared at in their
entirety--for from where the canoe had been stationed the upper section of the
window had been hidden by a hanging sail of wallpaper. What he had seen had been
the reflections of a string of lights. What he now saw were the lanterns, where
they burned at the bows of a hundred boats. They were strung out in a half-circle
that even as he watched was drawing in his direction thick as fireflies.

But worse than all this was a kind of light upon the water immediately outside
the window. Not a strong light, but more than he could account for by the last
of the day. Nor was it natural in colour. There was something of green in the
faint haze from which he now turned his eyes again. For with every moment the
boats were narrowing the distance between themselves and the castle walls.

Whether or not there were other interpretations of the spectacle before him it
was not for him at this critical moment to give them the shadow of a thought.
It was for him to assume the bloodiest and the worst.

It was for him to suppose that they were not only ranged across the bay in search
of him--that they knew he was in hiding somewhere close at hand between the twin
headlands--but more than this, that they knew the very window through which he
had passed. He must assume that he had been seen as he entered this trap and that
not only were his pursuers fanned out across the water and eager for his blood,
but the cold sheen upon the water immediately ahead of him was cast from lanterns
or torches that were even now burning from the window above his head.

Whether or not his only hope was to slip out of the cave and, risking a fusil-
lade from the window above, make all speed across the waters of the bay before
the approaching boats not only closed their ranks as they converged, but made
the cave-mouth livid with the concentration of their lights--whether he should
do this, and by so doing and gaining speed in the dusk, fly like a swallow a-
cross the face of the bay and swerving to and fro as only this canoe had power
to do--hope to pierce the lanterned ring, and so, running his boat alongside
one or other of the creepered headlands, climb the coarse foliage of the walls
--whether he should do this or not, it was now, in any event, too late for a
brilliant yellow light was shining outside the window and danced on the choppy
water.

A pair of heavy castle-craft, somewhat the shape of barges, creeping in along
the lapping walls, from either side of Steerpike's window, were the cause of
the yellow light which the murderer had observed to his horror as it danced u-
pon the water, for these heavy boats bristled with torches; sparks flew over
the flood and died hissing upon its surface. The scene about the opening of
the cave had been transformed from one of dark and anonymous withdrawal to a
firelit stage of water, upon which every eye was turned. The stone supports
of the window, weather-scarred and ancient as they were had become things of
purest gold, and their reflections plunged into the black water as though to
ignite it. The stones that surrounded the windows were lit with equal bril-
liance. Only the mouth of the room, with the firelit water running through
and into the swallowing blackness of the throat beyond, broke the glow. For
there was something more than black about the intensity of that rough square
of darkness.

It was not for these barges to do more than to remain with their square noses
in line with the stone edges of the window. It was for them to make the place
as bright as day. It was for the arc of lanterned boats to close in and to
form the thickset audience, armed and impenetrable.

But those that manned the barges and held the torches aloft, and those that
rowed or paddled the hundreds of boats that were nowwithin a stone's throw of
the "cave' were not the only witnesses.

High above the entrances to Steerpike's retreat the scores of irregularly pos-
itioned windows were no longer gaping emptily as when Titus stared up at them
from the canoe and felt the chill of that forsaken place. They were no longer
empty. At every window there was a face: and every face directed downwards to
where the illuminated waves rose and fell to such an extent that the shadows of
the men upon the barges leapt up and down the firelit walls, and the sound of
splashing could be heard below them as combers of rainwater ran and broke upon
the castle walls.

The wind was making, and certain of the boats that formed the chain found it
difficult to keep in position. Only the watchers from above were unaffected
by the worsening weather. A formidable contingent had travelled by land.
There were few who had been that way before and none who had travelled so
far afield as the Coupee and the Headstones of Little Sark, within the last
five years.

The Countess had journeyed by water but it had been necessary for Titus to
travel overland at the head of the leading phalanx, for it was no easy itin-
erary with the dusk falling and the innumerable choices to be made at the
junctures of passages and roof tops. With his return journey fresh in his
mind he had no choice but to put his knowledge at the disposal of the many
hundreds whose duty it would be to scour the Headstones. But he was in no
condition to make that long journey again on the same day, without assist-
ance. While the officials were casting about for some appropriate convey-
ance Titus remembered the chair on poles in which he was carried, blind-
folded, on his tenth birthday. A runner was despatched for this, and some
time later the "land army' moved to the north with Titus leaning back in
his "mountain chair', a jug of water in the wooden well at his feet, a
flask of brandy in his hand and a loaf of bread and a bag of raisins on
the seat beside him. At different times during the journey, when crossing
from one roof to another or when climbing difficult stairways, he would
descend from the chair and continue on foot--but for most of the way it
was possible for him to lean back in the chair, his muscles relaxed, mere-
ly giving fierce instructions to the Captain of the land searchers when
occasion arose. A dark anger was gaining strength in him.

What had passed through his mind as he moved through the evening air? A
hundred thoughts and shadows of a hundred more. But among all these were
those giant themes that overshadowed all else and were continually shoul-
dering themselves back into his consciousness, and making his heart at
their every return break out afresh with painful hammering. Within so
short a time--within the last few hours--he had thrice been through an
emotional turmoil for which he was in no way prepared.

Out of nowhere, suddenly, the first sight of the elusive Steerpike. Out
of nowhere, suddenly, the news of Fuchsia's death. Out of nowhere, and
suddenly, the uprush of his rebellion--the danger of it, the shock of it
for all about him, the excitement of it, and the thrill of finding him-
self free of duplicity--a traitor if they liked, but a man who had torn
away the brambles from his clothes, the ivy from his limbs, the bindweed
from his brain.

Yet had he? Was it possible at a single jerk to wrench himself free of
his responsibility to the home of his fathers?

As his bearers threaded their way through the upper stories he was sure
that he was free. When Steerpike had been dragged like a water-rat from
his lair and slain--what then would there be for him to stay for in this
only world he knew? Rather would he die upon its borders, wherever they
might be, than rot among the rites. Fuchsia was dead. Everything was
dead. The Thing was dead and the world had died. He had outgrown his
kingdom.

But behind all this, behind his stumbling thoughts, was this growing
anger, an anger such as he had never known before. On the face of it,
it might seem that the rage that was eating him was absurd. And the
rational part of Titus might have admitted that this was so. For his
rage was not that Fuchsia had died and as he thought at Steerpike's
hand, nor that he had been thwarted in his love for the Thing by the
arbitrary lightning flash--it was not, in his conscious mind, either
of these that caused him to tremble with eagerness to close with
the skewbald man, and if he could to kill him.

No, it was because Steerpike had stolen his canoe, his own canoe--so
light, so slight: so fleet upon the flood.

What he did not guess was that the canoe was neither more nor less than
the Thing. Deep in the chaos of his heart and his imagination--at the
core of his dreamworld it was so--the Canoe had become, perhaps had al-
ready been when he had first sent her skimming beneath him into the free-
dom of an outer world, the very centre of Gormenghast forest, the Thing
herself.

But more than this. For another reason also. A reason of no symbolism:
no darkened origin: a reason clear-cut and real as the dagger in his
belt.

He saw in the canoe, now lost to the murderer, the perfect vehicle for
sudden and silent attack--in other words for the avenging of his sister.
He had lost his weapon.

Had Titus thought sufficiently he would have realized that Steerpike
could not have killed her, for he could not possibly have been so far
to the north as the Headstones so soon after Fuchsia's fall. But his
brain was not working in that way. Steerpike had killed his sister.
And Steerpike had stolen his canoe.

When at long last the roof-top army had reached the ultimate battlements
and saw below them the black waters of the "bay", lookouts were posted
and given instructions to inform their captains directly the first
lights appeared around the nose of the south headland. Meanwhile the
hordes which covered the near-by roofs were gradually drawn down by sky-
lights, vents and hatches until they were absorbed into a deserted and
melancholy wilderness of room upon room, hall upon hall, a wilderness
that had yawned so emptily and for so many years until Steerpike had
begun his explorations.

The torches were lit. It seemed that the advantage of being able to
tell at once whether a room were empty or not outweighed the warning
that the light would give the fugitive. Nevertheless the work was slow.
At last and about the time that the four possible floors had been prov-
ed as empty as tongueless bells, a message came down that lights had
been seen across the bay.

At once every window of the West walls became filled with heads, and
sure enough the necklace of coloured sparks which Steerpike had seen
through the mouth of his flood-room was strung across the darkness.

That no sign of Steerpike had been found in the scores of upper rooms
more than suggested that he was still within his lair at water level.
Titus had at once descended to the lowest of the unflooded floors, and
leaning through a window, roughly at the centre of the facade, he was
able, by reaching out dangerously, with his hand gripping an ivy branch,
to recognize the very window through which Steerpike had sped into the
castle.

Now that the light had appeared on the bay there was no time to lose
for it was possible that if Steerpike was below, and saw them, he would
make a dash for it. In the meantime Titus and the three captains who
were with him turned back through the room and gaining the corridor be-
hind, ran for a matter of sixty or seventy feet before they turned again
into one of the west rooms and, on reaching its window and looking down,
found that they were almost immediately above the flooded window.

There was no sign of him on the bay. As far as they could judge they
gauged him to be directly below the room to their right which they could
see through a connecting door, a largish, square-ish room covered with
a layer of dust as soft as velvet.

"If he's below there and it were necessary, my lord, we could cut through
to him from above..." and the man began to make his way into the room in
question.

"No! No!" whispered Titus fiercely. "He may hear your footsteps. Come
back."

"The boats aren't near enough," said another man. "I doubt he can get
further into the castle. The water's only four foot from the window top.
Sooner or later the doors will all be water jammed. Quite right, my lord.
We must be silent."

"Then be silent," said Titus, and in spite of his anger, the heady wine
of autocracy tasted sweet upon his tongue--sweet and dangerous--for he
was only now learning that he had power over others, not only through
the influence of his birthright but through a native authority that was
being wielded for the first time--and all this he knew to be dangerous,
for as it grew, this bullying would taste ever sweeter and fiercer and
the naked cry of freedom would become faint and the Thing who had
taught him freedom would become no more than a memory.

It was while the boats approached and converged and before the castle
barges had stationed themselves on either side of the window with their
effulgence, and while there was a comparative darkness still brooding u-
pon the water outside the mouth of his lair, that Steerpike decided that
he would rather remain for the moment where he was and fight the whole
world if necessary with the knowledge that he could not be attacked from
the rear, than skim from his retreat only to find himself surrounded in
the "bay'. It was no easy choice and it is possible that he had not truly
made it, before the barge lights flared--but in all events he stayed where
he was, and turning his canoe about he made another turn of his dark room.
It was then that the sudden yellow light flared cruelly outside the window
and stayed -- as though a curtain had gone up and the drama had begun.
Even as he started at the light, he knew that his enemies could not know
for certain that he was in this watery room. They could not possibly know
for instance that the inner doors of the room were shut and impassable.
They could not be absolutely certain that, although he had been seen pass-
ing through the window, he had not passed out again. But how, if ever, to
make use of their uncertainty, he had, for the moment, no idea.

There was nothing but the empty picture-hung walls and the water; nothing
in the room to help him. And then, for the first time he thought of the
ceiling. He looked up and saw that there was but a single layer of floor-
boards laid across rotting joists. He cursed himself for his delay and im-
mediately began to balance himself upright in his canoe beneath a crumbling
patch in the ceiling. As he reached upwards to obtain a grip upon the joists,
preparatory to striking, he heard the terrifying sound of footsteps above
him and the floorboards trembled within a few inches of his head.

In a moment he had dropped back into the canoe that was now rocking appreci-
ably. The freshening wind was sending sheets of water scurrying through the
window across the comparatively even surface of the emprisoned flood.

He was cut off from above and from every side. His eyes were constantly upon
the brilliant yellow square of water immediately outside the window. All at
once a wave rather heavier than its forerunners sent its spray leaping up to
the height of the window top and the wave itself smacked spitefully at the
stone support. The dark room had become full of the slapping sound of impri-
soned water. Not loud but cold and cruel--and then all at once Steerpike
heard another sound--the first of the returning rain. With the sound of its
hissing a kind of hope came to him.

It was not that he had lost hope. He had had none. He had not thought in
those terms. He had so concentrated upon what he should do, second by second,
that he had not envisaged that there might be a moment when all was lost. He
had, furthermore, an overweening pride that saw in this concentration of the
castle's forces a tribute to himself. This was no part of the ritual of Gor-
menghast. This was something original.

The unwitting pageantry of the lantern-lit boats was unique. It had not been
thought out or dictated. There had been no rehearsal. It was necessitated. It
was necessitated by their fear of him. But mixed with his vanity and pride was
a fear of his own. Not a fear of the men who were closing in upon him, but of
fire. It was the sight of the torches that stretched his face into that vul-
pine snarl that whetted his evil cunning. The memory of his near-death when
he and Barquentine had been wrapped together in a single flame had so fester-
ed within him, had so affected his brain that at the approach of a flame mad-
ness grew very near.

At any moment he would see, beyond the window, the gold of the rain-spattered
waves broken by the bows of a boat--or perhaps of several boats without an
inch between them. Or perhaps a voice would hail him and order him forth.

The lanterned craft were now close enough for their crews to be recognizable
by the light of the multi-coloured flames that burned across the rough water.

Again he heard the footsteps above and again he turned up his red eyes to the
rotten planks. As he did so he kept his balance with difficulty for the waves
were now by no means easy to ride.

As his gaze returned from the ceiling he saw something for the first time. It
was a ledge, fortuitously formed by the protruding lintel of the window.

At once he knew it as his immediate perch. He had hopes of a returning storm
and of the scattering abroad of the flotilla that rose and fell in the mount-
ing waves.

But if a storm were to develop then there would be even less time to spare be-
fore his enemies made their first move. Time was on no one's side, neither
theirs nor his. They would be entering at any moment.

But it was no easy task to reach this ledge above the window, where the sha-
dows were at their deepest. He stood in the bows of the slight canoe so that
its stern rose high out of the water. One of his hands clasped a joist of the
low roof above his head and the other felt along the lintel's upper edge in
search of a grip. All this time it was necessary for him to keep the canoe
flush against the wall, while the swell in the cave lifted it up and down.

It was vital that the canoe were kept from dancing forward on a wave so that
its bows protruded across the square of the window and into the line of vis-
ion of those without. It was a hideous exertion, stretched as he was at an
angle, his hands upon the ledge and ceiling, his feet together in the vola-
tile prow of the canoe, the water dashing to and fro, lifting and falling,
the thin spray everywhere.

Luckily for him he had obtained by now a firm grip with his right hand, for
his fingers had found a deep crack in the uneven stone of the protruding
lintel. It was not the height of this shelf that made him wonder whether he
would ever reach it with the rest of his body, for, standing as he was in the
canoe, it was only a foot above his head. It was the synchronization of the
various things he had to do before he could find himself crouched above the
window, with the canoe beside him that was so desperately difficult.

But he was as tenacious as a ferret and slowly, by infinitesimal degrees he
withdrew his right leg from the canoe and prised his knee against the inside
edge of the stone upright. The canoe was still standing practically on its
head by reason of the pressure of his left foot in the bows. So vertical had
she become that he was able with a kind of febrile genius of his own to let
go of the joist above his head and with this same left hand to lift the canoe
clean out of the water. He was now left with both his arms engaged--one in
holding him where he was and the other in holding the canoe away from the
light. He was suffering with his right knee prised as it was against the
upright of the window. The other leg dangled like a dead thing.

For a little while he remained as he was, the sweat pouring over his piebald
face, his muscles shrieking for release from so ghastly a strain. For this
period he had no doubt that there was no end to this save that of dropping
like a dead fly from a wall--dropping into the water below, where, bobbing
in the golden torch light below the lintel, he would be picked up by the
nearest of his enemies.

But at the height of his pain he began to pull at the entire weight of his
body, to pull at it with his single hand whose crooked finger shook in the
lintel crack. Inch by inch, moaning to himself as though he were a baby, or
a sick dog, he drew the deadweight of his body up until, twisting over a
little on one side, he was able to bring his other leg into play. But he
could find no kind of irregularity in the stone upright for the questing
toe of his shoe.

He rolled his eye in a frenzy of despair. Again he thought he was dropping
into the water. But as his eye rolled it had, halfconsciously, become aware
of a great rusty nail leaning out horizontally from the shadowy joist. It
shrivelled and it swelled out, this nail, as he turned his eyes to it again
with a blurred conception floating in his mind that he could not at once de-
cipher. But what his thoughts could not define, his arm put into practice.
He watched it raise itself, this left arm of his; he watched it lift the
canoe gradually until the bows were above his head and then, as a man might
hang his hat upon a peg, he hung his craft upon the rusty nail. Now that his
left hand was free he was able to get a second purchase upon the lintel
crack, and to draw himself upwards with a comparative lack of pain until
he was kneeling on all fours upon the twelve-inch protuberance of the heavy
lintel.

Where there had been so emphatic a division between the black waves within
the room and the yellow waves that tossed beyond the window, there was no
longer so sharp a demarcation. The tongues of golden water slithered further
into the room and the black tongues flickered out less freely into the outer
radiance.

Steerpike was now lying along the shelf face downwards a few feet above the
water. He was lowering his head gradually over the window's upper and north-
erly corner. A few dead strands of creeper that struggled across the outside
wall and blurred to some extent the stone angle provided him with a kind of
screen through which it was his intention to gain some knowledge of his ene-
mies' intentions.

Lowering his head inch by inch he suddenly saw them. A solid wall of boats
not twelve feet away surrounded the entrance. They rose and subsided on a
dangerous swell. The rain flew down, thin but vicious, slanting across the
wet and torchlit faces.

They were armed, not as he had imagined they would be, with firearms but
with long knives, and at once he remembered the death-law of the place which
decreed that, where possible, all homicides should die in a way as closely
resembling the death of their victims as possible. It was obvious that his
slaughter of Flay had precipitated the choice of weapons.

The torchlight flamed on the slippery steel. The noses of the boats wedged
themselves even closer about the window's mouth.

Steerpike raised himself and sat back on his haunches. The light in the cave
had grown. It was like a gold twilight. He glanced at the hanging canoe. Then
he began deliberately, but rapidly to take from his various pockets those few
objects that were always on his person.

The knife and the catapult he placed side by side as carefully and neatly
as a housewife arranging a mantelpiece. Most of his ammunition he left in
his pocket, but a dozen pebbles were formed up like soldiers in three
straight rows.

Then he took a small mirror and comb, and by the dull golden light that
had crept into the cave, he arranged his hair.

When this was completed to his satisfaction, he lowered his head again o-
ver the corner of the lintel and saw how the thick-set boats had made be-
tween them something like a solid wall that heaved as it hemmed him in
beyond all possibility of escape. Over this solid mass, crowded with men,
a smaller boat was being carried and even as he watched, was set down u-
pon the turbulent water on the near side, so that its bows were within a
few feet of the window-mouth.

And then he noticed with a start that the two castle barges were nosing
their way closer to one another across the window so that his means of
exit to the outside world had become a mere passageway.

With the closing in of the barges, a number of the torches that they car-
ried were now able to send their glow directly through the window, so
that Steerpike found the surface of the water in the room below him was
dancing with such brilliance that were he not immediately above the win-
dow he would have been fully exposed to view.

But he also noticed that the surface brilliance had robbed the water of
its translucency. There was no sense of the walls continuing down below
the water level. It might well have been a solid floor of gold that heav-
ed like an earthquake and reflected its effulgence across the walls and
ceiling. He lifted his catapult from beside him and raising it to his
mouth he pursed his thin, merciless lips and kissed it as a withered spin-
ster might kiss a spaniel's nose. He slid a pebble into the soft leather
of the pouch, and as he waited for the bows of a boat to appear below him,
or for a voice to hail him, a great wave lifted through the window and
swirling around the room like a mad thing poured out again leaving a whirl-
pool at the centre of the room. At the same moment he heard a clamour of
voices without, and shouts of warning for the backwash had swept over the
sides of several of the rocking boats. And at the same moment, as his wea-
pon lay in his hand and the threatening water swirled below him, another
thing happened. Behind the sound of the water; behind the sound of the
voices outside the window, there was another sound, a sound that made it-
self apparent, not through its volume or stridency, but through its per-
sistence. It was the sound of sawing. Someone in the room above had worked
some sharp instrument through a rotten piece of the floor--quite silently,
for Steerpike had heard nothing, and now the end of a saw protruded through
the ceiling into Steerpike's room, and was working rapidly up and down.

Steerpike's attention had been so concentrated upon what was happening out-
side the window where the small exploratory boat had been set upon the wat-
er, a few feet away, that he had neither ears nor eyes for what was happen-
ing above him.

But in a lull of the waves and the shouting he had suddenly heard it, the
deliberate triding of a saw, and looking up he could see the jag-edged thing,
shining in the water-reflected light, as though it were of gold, while it
plunged and withdrew, plunged and withdrew at the centre of the ceiling.



SEVENTY-EIGHT


I


Titus, as the minutes had passed had grown more and more restless. It was
not that the preparation for the storming of the flooded room had not been
proceeding swiftly and well, but that far from his anger fading, it was
gaining more and more of a grip on him.

Two images kept floating before his eyes, one of a creature, slender and
tameless; a creature who, defying him, defying Gormenghast, defying the
tempest, was yet innocent as air or the lightning that killed her, and the
other of a small empty room with his sister lying alone upon a stretcher,
harrowingly human, her eyes closed. And nothing else mattered to him but
that these two should be avenged--that he should strike.

And so he had not remained at the window overlooking the bright and heav-
ing water. He had left the room and descended an outer staircase, and had
boarded one of the boats, for now that Steerpike's "cave' was so closely
ringed there were scores of craft that bobbed uselessly to and fro on the
waves. He ordered the oarsmen to land him where the inner circle of boats
was forming an unbroken arc around the window's mouth. He made his way over
the heaving floor of boats until he was facing the window and peering along
the water's surface he could see the room, filled with its bright reflect-
ions, so clearly, that a picture hanging on its far wall was perfectly visible.

But the Countess had taken the opposite course--and though they did not see
each other they must have crossed in the amber light, for as Titus peered
into the flooded room, his mother was climbing the outer staircase. She had
also conceived the idea of cutting through the roof immediately above the
window, for she could see that it would be difficult for anyone to enter
Steerpike's trap without great danger to himself. It was true that the room
looked empty but it had been of course impossible for her to know what lay
within the shadows of the nearest corners or against the near walls that
flanked the window.

And it would be there that Steerpike would crouch, were he in the room at
all.

And so she thought of the room above. When she reached it and saw that what
she had planned was already being put into practice, she moved to the window
and looked down. The rain which had stopped for a little had returned and a
steady, slanting stream was pouring itself against the walls, so that, be-
fore she had been a minute at the window she was soaked to the skin. After
a little time she turned her head to the left and stared along the adjacent
wall. It reached away in wet perspective. She turned her head upwards, and
the stone acres rose dripping into the night. But the great facade was any-
thing but blank; for from every window there was a head thrust forth. And
every head in the glow of the torchlight was of the colour of the walls
from which it protruded, so that it seemed that the watchers were of stone,
like gargoyles, each face directed to the brilliant barge-light that welter-
ed on the waves outside the "cave'.

But as the Countess continued to stare at "carvings' that studded the walls
to the left, a kind of subtraction came into play. It was as though embarrass-
ment spread itself across the stone surfaces. One by one the heads withdrew
until there was nothing to the left of the Countess but the emptiness of the
streaming walls.

And then she turned her head the other way, where, in reverse, the scores
of heads protruded and shone with the torch-lit rain--until, like their
counterparts, they also one by one, withdrew themselves.

The Countess turned her eyes again to the scene immediately below her and
the numberless wet faces were drawn forth at once, as though by suction,
from the castle walls, or in the way that the heads of turtles issue from
their shells.

The small craft which had been carried over the back of the boat-cordon was
now within a foot of the window. A man sat within and wielded a powerful
paddle. A black leather hat, with a broad brim shielded his eyes from the
rain. Between his teeth he gripped a long dirk.

It was no easy task for him, this approach through the window, between the
flanking barges. The small skiff rolled dangerously, shipping the gold water
over her side. The wind was now something that could be heard whining across
the bay.

All at once Titus called out to the man to return.

"Let me go first," he cried. "Come back you man. Let me have your dagger."
The face of his sister swam across the window. The Thing danced on the
bright water like a sprite and he bared his teeth.

"Let me kill him! Let me kill him!" he cried again, losing in that moment
his last four years of growth, for he had become like a child, hysterical
with the intensity of his imagination--and for a moment the boatman waver-
ed, his head over his shoulder, but a voice from the wall above roared out.

"No! by the blood of love! Hold the boy down!"

Two men held Titus firmly, for he had made as though to plunge into the
water.

"Quiet, my lord," said the voice of one of the men who held him. "He may
not be there."

"Why not?" shouted Titus, struggling. "I saw him, didn't I? Let go of me!
Do you know who I am? Let go of me!"


II


Steerpike was as motionless as the lintel on which he crouched. Only his
eyes moved to and fro, to and fro, from the saw that cut its circular path
through the boards above him to the radiant water below him, where at any
moment the nose of the skiff might appear. He had heard the roar of the
Countess' "No!" sounding from above, and knew that when the ceiling had
been cut through she would be one of the first to peer down for him--and
there was no doubt that they would have a perfect view of him where he
crouched in the reflected light.

To split each forehead open as it appeared at the gap of the ceiling--to
leave his pebbles half protruding like the most eloquent of tombstones in
the foreheads of his foes--this might very well be what he would do, but
he knew that his enemies had yet no proof positive that he was there. Dir-
ectly the work of his lethal catapult became evident it would only be a
matter of time before his capture.

It was obvious that he could do nothing to stop the regular progress of the
man with the saw. Three quarters of a circle had been completed in the rot-
ten planks. Pieces of wood had fallen already into the swirling water.

All depended upon the appearance of the skiff. Within a minute there would
be a great round eye in the woodwork above him. Even as he itched for the
boat, its bows appeared, bucking like a horse, and then, suddenly, as it
leapt forward again, there below him, close enough to touch, was the broad
-brimmed hat of the oarsman with the dirk in his mouth.


III


The Countess, satisfied that there was no longer any danger of Titus leap-
ing into the water, returned to where the man with the saw was resting his
arm before the last dozen plunges and withdrawals of the hot and grinding
blade.

"The first to put his face through the hole is likely to receive a pebble
in his head. You have no doubt of this, gentlemen." She spoke slowly. Her
hands were on her hips. Her head was held high. Her bosom heaved with a
slow sea-like rhythm. She was consumed with the passion of the chase, but
her face showed nothing. She was intent upon the death of a traitor.

But what of Titus? The upheaval of his emotions, the bitterness of his tone;
his lack of love for her--all this was, whether she wished it or not, mixed
up with the cornering of Steerpike. It was no pure and naked contest between
the House of Groan and a treacherous rebel, for the seventy-seventh Earl was,
by his own confession, something perilously near a traitor himself.

She returned to the window and as she did so, Steerpike in the room below,
changing his plan completely with the dawn of a fresh idea, thrust his cata-
pult back in his pocket and grasping his knife got gradually and noiselessly
to his feet, where he poised himself, his head and shoulders bent forward by
the proximity of the roof.

The figure in the boat, who had volunteered for this hazardous mission, far
from being able to keep his eyes skinned for the enemy, was unable to concen-
trate upon anything else but the control of the skiff, which with the waves
that were now breaking upon the outer wall and sending their surges through
the window, had made the flood-room into a wall of tossing water.

Nevertheless, the time came when, with a deceptive lull in the riot of trap-
ped waves, the boatman swung his head over his shoulder, and was able for the
first time to focus his eyes upon the window end of the room. At once he saw
Steerpike, his face lit from below.

Directly the man saw him he let forth a gasp of excited terror. He was no
chicken-heart, having volunteered to enter the cave alone, and he was now
prepared to fight as he had never fought before, but there was something so
terrible in the poised over-hanging aspect of the young man that it turned
his bowels to water. For the moment, the volunteer was out of range of any-
thing but the thrown knife--and it was his intention to put his lips to the
whistle which hung by a cord around his neck, and warn them of the discovery
of Steerpike by the single blast which had been agreed upon, when he found
himself being swung forward on the crest of a wave that had entered a moment
before and was following the walls as though to swill the "cave' out. He
strained at the paddle but there was no holding back the skiff, and within
a matter of moments, he found himself slithering along the western side and
into the shadowy corner of the "seaward' wall.

As the boat, running forward and striking its nose upon the stones at Steer-
pike's side, was about to make for the window below him, Steerpike sprang
outwards, and to the left, and fell with a stunning force, for all his light-
ness, upon the volunteer. There was no time for any struggle, the knife run-
ning between the ribs and through the man's heart three times within as many
seconds.

As Steerpike delivered the third of the lightning stabs, the sweat pouring
off his face like wet blood in the reflected torch light, he turned his small
hot eyes to the ceiling and found that the saw was within an inch of complet-
ing the circle. In another moment he would be exposed to the view of the
Countess and the searchers.

The corpse was beside him in the boat, which at the impact of his jumping body
had shipped a bucket or two of water. Perhaps it was this that slowed her upon
her swirling course. Whatever it was, Steerpike was able to jam his foot against
a support of the adjacent window and grasping the paddle to force the boat a-
gainst the weakening sweep of water, until the last of the whirl had poured it-
self to "sea' again through the window. In the few seconds of respite as he bob-
bed in the comparative darkness of the outer corner he plucked the broad-brimmed
hat of leather from the corpse's head and thrust it on his own. Then he ripped
the coat off the limp and heavy body and got into it at once. There was no time
for more...A sound of hammering above told him that the circle of floor-boards
was being knocked through. He caught the corpse beneath its knees and under its
arms and with a supreme effort toppled it over the side where it sank beneath
the restless surge.

It was now up to him to control the skiff, for he wanted not only to keep it
from capsizing but to station it below the hole in the ceiling. As he plunged
the heavy paddle into the water and forced the skiff to the centre of the room,
the circle of wood fell out of the ceiling and a new light from above made a
great pool of radiance at the watery centre of Steerpike's lair.

But Steerpike did not look up. He fought like a demon to keep his boat immedi-
ately below the lamplit circle--and then he began to call in a husky voice which,
if it was nothing like his victim's, was certainly nothing like his own.

"My lady!" he called.

"What's that?" muttered the Countess in the room above.

A man edged his way towards the opening.

Again the voice from below. "Ahoy there! Is the Countess there!"

"It's the volunteer," cried the man who had gone so far as to peer over the rim
of the circular hole. "It's the volunteer, lady! He's immediately below."

"What does he say?" cried the Countess in a hollow voice, for a black fear tug-
ged at her heart.

"What does he say, man! For the love of the stones!"

And then she took a step forward so that she could see the broad-brimmed hat and
the heavy coat twelve feet below her. She was about to call down to the figure,
although the volunteer made no move to raise his head, but it was his voice that
broke the silence. For there was a kind of silence, although the rain hissed, and
the wind blew, and the waves slapped against the walls. There was a tension which
over-rode the natural sounds. And a terror that the grizzly fowl had flown.

The voice came up from under the rim of the hat.

"Tell her ladyship there's nothing here! Only a room full of water. There's no way
out but the window. The doors are water-jammed. Nothing but water, tell her. Nowhere
to hide an eyelash! He's gone, if ever he was here, which I doubt."

The Countess went down on her knees as though she was going to pray. Her heart had
gone dead in her. This was the moment, if ever there was one, for an enemy of Gor-
menghast to be caught and slain. Now, with the eyes of the world focused upon his
capture and his punishment. And yet the man had cried "Only a room full of water'.

But something in her would not have it that so great a preparation, so formidable
a massing of the castle's strength should prove abortive--and more than this, there
was something in her, at a deeper level, that refused to believe that the certainty,
the quite irrational certainty that this was the day of vengeance, was but her wis-
hfulness.

She lowered herself to her elbows and dropped her head below the level of the floor.

At the first glance it was desperately true. There was nowhere to hide. The walls
were blank, save for a few mouldering pictures. The floor was nothing but water.
She turned to the man below.

It was true that it was difficult for him to contend with the restless swell of the
waves in the cave, but at the same time it seemed odd that this volunteer made no
effort to dart a single glance towards the roof where he knew his audience lay and
watched expectantly. She had seen him step into his boat some time earlier and pad-
dle his way between the barges. She had gazed down from the window, the rain strik-
ing her face, and had wondered what he would find. She had had no doubt that Steer-
pike would be waiting for him. It was this certainty which still lingered in spite of the
emptiness below which prompted her to stare again at the man who had found nothing
but water.

When it struck her that he was of slighter build than she had thought her notion
brought no suspicion in its trail. But her eyes, which had left the volunteer again
and were following the curve of the wall, now came to rest on something which she
had previously missed. The shadows were darker to the right of the single window and
she had failed to detect that there was something hanging from the ceiling. At first
she could make nothing of it, save that it appeared to be suspended from a joist and
that it was about six feet in length, but gradually, as her eyes became used to the
peculiar vibrations of the reflected light, and as now one part and now another of
the object became illuminated by a glancing beam, so she became at last aware that
she was looking at Titus' canoe...the canoe which Steerpike had stolen...and in which
he had entered this very room. Then where was he? The room was empty of life, empty
of everything save the water, the canoe and the volunteer. And there was no way to
escape on foot and no reason why he should have wished to do so with so slight and
safe a vessel at his command. Whatever the cause of Steerpike's disappearance, why
should the canoe be hanging from the ceiling?

When she turned her eye back to the broad-brimmed hat below her and noted the shoul-
ders beneath it, and saw the nervous strength and agility with which the man handled
the boat, she was affected by the first shadow of a suspicion that this volunteer
below her had altered in some subtle and curious way from the solid boatman she had
seen from the window. But her suspicion was so tenuous that she had no grasp upon
its implications. Yet that a kind of disturbance, a kind of suspicion, had been a-
roused, however vague, was enough for her to draw a deep breath and then, in a voice
of such power and volume that the figure below her started at the sound--

"Volunteer!" she roared.

The man beneath her appeared to be in such trouble with his boat that it was impos-
sible for him to keep her from shipping water and to look up at the Countess at the
same time.

"My Lady?" he cried up, wielding his paddle feverishly, as though to keep immediate-
ly below her, "Yes, My Lady?"

"Are you blind?" came the voice from the ceiling. "Have your eyes rotted in your
head?" What could she mean by that? Had she seen...? "Why have you made no report
on it?" boomed the voice. "Have you not seen it?"

"Very...difficult...keep afloat, My Lady, let alone..."

"The canoe, man! Does it mean nothing to you that the traitor's boat is hanging from
the ceiling? Let me see your--"

But at that moment a fresh surge swept through the window below and twisted Steer-
pike's boat about as though it had been a leaf, and as it rotated the wash and swell
of the water turned it so far over upon its side that as it was carried away from
the centre of the flooded room the Countess saw a flash of white and scarlet beneath
the broad-brimmed hat and at almost the same moment her eyes were attracted away from
their prize, for an empty face appeared out of the waves immediately below her; for
a moment it bobbed about like a loaf of bread and then it sank again.

The world had gone dead in her, and then with almost unbelievable rapidity the two
faces, appearing one after another, had transformed her gloom, her brooding spleen,
her hungry malice, her disappointment into a sudden overriding vigour of brain and
body. Her anger fell like a whip lash upon the waters below. She had seen, within a
moment of each other, the skewbald traitor and the volunteer.

Why the boat was hanging from the ceiling, and a score of other questions were no
longer of the remotest interest. They were entirely academic. Nothing mattered at all
save the death of the man in the broad-brimmed hat.

For a moment she thought that she would bluff him, for it was unlikely that he had
seen the head appear out of the waves, or knew that she had glimpsed his mottled face.
But this was no time for games of bluff and blarney--no time to spin it out. It was
true that she might have given secret orders to the outer boats to enter the cave
in force and to take him at a moment when he was diverted from his scrutiny of the
window by some object being thrown into the water from above, but all such niceties
were not relevant to her mood, which was for quick and final slaughter in the name
of the Stones.


IV


Titus had ceased to struggle and was only waiting for the moment when the two louts,
who (no doubt with the most loyal intentions) were saving him from himself, relaxed
for a moment and gave him the opportunity to jerk himself clear of them.

They had him by his coat and collar, on either side. His hands which were free had
crept gradually together across his chest and he had secretly undone all but one of
the jacket buttons.

The scores of boatmen, dizzy with the rising and falling of the water, and drenched
with the rain, and tired with the eternal rekindling of the torches, had been unable
to understand what was happening within the flooded "cave', or in the room above it.
They had heard voices and a few excited shouts but had no idea of the true situation.

But suddenly, the Countess herself appeared at the window and her resonant voice
bored its way through the wind and rain.

"All boatmen will attend! There will be no fumbling! The Volunteer is dead. The traitor
who is now wearing his hat and coat is immediately below the window, in the room you
are surrounding."

She paused, and wiped the rain off her face with the flat of her hand, and then her
voice again, louder than ever--"The four central boats will be sculled by their stern
oars. Three armed men will be on the bows of each boat. These boats will move forward
when I lift my hand. He will be brought out dead. Draw your knives."

As these last words were thrust out into the storm the excitement was so great and
there was such pressing forward of all the men and boats that it was with difficulty
that the four central boats of the cordon freed themselves from one another and man-
oeuvred into line.

It was then that Titus, noticing how his captors had loosened their grip upon him as
they stared spellbound at the window of the fateful room, wrenched himself forward
and slipped his arms suddenly out of the sleeves of his jacket, and dodging through
a group of boatmen dived into the water, leaving his empty coat behind him, in their
hands.

He had had no sleep for many hours. He had had little to eat. He was living upon the
raw end of his nerves, as a fanatic will walk upon spikes. A fever had started. His
eyes had become big and hot. His nondescript hair was plastered over his forehead
like seaweed. His teeth chattered. He burned and froze alternately. He had no fear.
It was not that he was brave. It was that fear had been left somewhere behind. It
had been mislaid. And fear can be wise and intelligent. Titus had no wisdom at this
moment and no sense of selfpreservation.

No sense of anything at all except a hunger for finality. All his heartburn had been
laid, unfairly for the most part, at Steerpike's door--as had been his sister's death
and the death of his Passion, the mercurial sprite.

As he swam he gloried. The torchlit water closed over him, and broke away again in
yellow flakes. He rose and subsided on the flood, his arms thrashing at the waves.
All that the sky had emptied from its maw, the giant reservoirs, broke at his brow.
He gloried. His fever mounted. As he grew weaker he grew fiercer. Perhaps he was
in a dream. Perhaps it was all a delusion--the heads at a thousand windows--the
boats tossing like gold beetles at the foot of the midnight heights; the flooded
window that yawned for blood and drama, the upper window where his mother loomed,
her red hair smouldering, her face like marble.

Perhaps he was swimming to his death. It didn't matter. He knew that what he was
doing was what he must do. He had no option. His whole life had been a time of
waiting. For this. For this moment. For all it was and all it would mean.

Who was it that swam within him, whose limbs were his limbs and whose heart was his
heart? Who was he--what was he, as he battled through bright waters? Was he the Earl
of Gormenghast? The seventy-seventh lord? The son of Sepulchrave? The son of Ger-
trude? The son of the Lady at the window? The brother of Fuchsia? Ah yes, he was
that. He was the brother of the girl with the white sheet to her chin and her black
hair spread across the snow-white pillow. He was this. But he was no brother of her
ladyship--but only of the drowned girl. And he was no one's figurehead. He was only
himself. Someone who might have been a fish of the water, a star, or a leaf or a
stone. He was Titus, perhaps, if words were needed--but he was no more than that--
oh no, not Gormenghast, not the seventy-seventh, not the House of Groan, but a heart
in a body that swam through space and time.

The Countess had seen him from her window but there was nothing she could do. He
was not making for the cave-mouth, where the boats were already filling the narrow en-
trance, but for one of those outer stairways that rose out of the water at irregular
intervals along the castle's face.

But she had not time to wait and follow his progress. Three swimmers were already
in the water and giving chase. Now that she had seen the first of the boats entering
the cave-mouth she turned back from the window and returned to the centre of the
room where a group of officers was gathered about the huge spy-hole. As she ap-
proached them, a tall man who had been kneeling above the opening fell backwards
with a crimson chin. Four of his teeth had been broken off and these with a small
pebble rattled together in his mouth while his head shook with pain. The others
drew away at once from the dangerous opening.

As they did so Titus entered the room, leaving a trail of water at every step. It
was obvious that he was ill with fever and exhaustion, and ungovernable with the
fire of it. His naturally pale skin was flushed. His peculiarities of body appear-
ed to be strangely accentuated.

The sense of scale, which he had inherited from his mother--that effect of being
larger than he really was, of being over-size, was now peculiarly in evidence. It
was as though it were not just that Titus Groan had entered, but that his abstract,
a prototype had come through the door, and that the floodwater that dripped from
his clothes was somehow spilled in heroic measure.

The rather bluntish cast of his face was even blunter and plainer. The lower lip,
trembling with excitement, hung open like a child's. But his pale eyes, so often
sullen in their withdrawal, were now not only bright with the fever but with a
lust of revenge--no lovely sight--and were icy at the same time with a determina-
tion to prove himself a man.

He had seen his private world break up. He had seen characters in action. It was
now for him to take the limelight. Was he the Earl of Gormenghast? Was he the sev-
enty-seventh? No, by the lightning that killed her! He was the First--a man upon
a crag with the torchlight of the world upon him! He was all here--there was no-
thing missing, brains, heart and sentience--an individual in his own right--a
thing of legs and arms, of loins, head, eyes and teeth.

He walked sightlessly to the window. He made no sign to his mother. He was her
traitor. Let her watch him, then! Let her watch him, then!

He had known, ever since he slipped from his coat and dived into the water, the
radiant purpose of the single mind. He had no room in his system for fear. He
knew that it was only for him to fall upon this symbol of all things tyrannical
--Steerpike the cold and cerebral beast--for him to be fulfilled. His medium was
a short and slippery knife. He had bound a rag about its handle. He stood at the
window, clasping the ledge with both hands, and stared out at the fantastic torch
-lit scene. The rain had stopped, and the wind that had been so boisterous had
dropped with remarkable suddenness. In the high north-east the moon disengaged
itself of a smothering cloud.

A kind of ashen light spread itself over Gormenghast, and a silence came down
over the bay which was only broken by the slapping of the water against the walls,
for although the wind had ceased the flood had not subsided.

Titus could not have said why he was standing there. Perhaps it was because he
was as near as he could be to the fugitive--the flood-entrance being denied him,
and the circular opening guarded. From where he was, free of his captors, he
could at least be close to the man he wished to kill. And yet it was more than
this. He knew that his would be no spectator's role. He knew somehow or other
that the human hounds, armed as they were, would be no match for so sly an animal
as the one they had at bay. He could not believe that mere numbers could deal
with so lithe and ingenious a fiend.

None of this had been consciously argued within his head. He was in no state to
rationalize anything. As he knew it was for him to escape and to swim to the
steps, so he knew that it was for him to enter this room and to stand at this
window.


V


All at once there was a terrible cry from below, and then another. Steerpike,
who had had no alternative but to bring his skiff to the back of the room as
the first of the four boats nosed her way through the window, had stretched
and loosened his deadly elastic, twice, in quick succession. His next three
deliveries were aimed at the torches that were stuck in iron rings along the
sides of the first boat, and two of these were sent hurtling into the water
where they hissed and sank.

These three pebbles were the last of his ammunition save for those which he
had left behind him on the lintel above the window. He had his knife, but he
knew that he could only throw it once. His enemies were countless. It was
better for him to keep it as a dagger than to throw it away, and to waste it
upon the death of some cipher.

By now his enemies were very close--the length of an oar away. The nearest
man was hanging lifeless over the side. The two cries that had been heard were
from the men towards the stern who had received a stone apiece in the ribs
and the cheekbone. There had been no cry from the first man who was hanging
over the stern like a sack of flour and trailing a hairy hand in the water,
as his journey from this world to the next had been so rapid as to allow him
no time for remonstrance.

With no pebbles left Steerpike tossed his catapult away and following it with
his body was all at once deep in the water and swimming beneath the keels of
the boats. He had dived steeply and was quite certain that he could not be
seen from above, for he had noticed how although there were reflections upon
the water there was no sign of anything tangible beneath the surface.

The only one in the first boat who was in a condition to shout, lost no time
about informing the world. In a voice that sounded more relieved than anything
else, although the man had tried to hide his emotions, "He's dived!" he shout-
ed. "He's under the boats! Watch the window, there, third boat! Watch the win-
dow!"

Steerpike slithered rapidly through the inky darkness. He knew that he must
get as far as he could before rising to the air for breath. But like Titus
he was deadly tired.

When he reached the window, the air was half gone from his lungs. He could
feel the stone support with his left hand. The keel of the third boat was
just above his head and to the right. For a moment he rested and lifted his
head to it, and then shoving himself away he passed through the lower half
of the window, grazing its rough stone sill, and then turning sharply to his
left slid along the wall. Six feet above the darkness in which he swam, the
sheen of the surface water lapped the wall beneath the Countess' window.

He remembered, of course, that one of the two barges was immediately above
him. He was swimming beneath a wooden monster, its catwalks bristling with
torches--its blunt nose crowded with men.

What he did not know as he rose to draw breath, his lungs all but bursting,
was whether between the side of the long barge and the wall that towered a-
bove it, there would be room for his head to rise above the surface.

He had never seen these castle barges before and had no idea whether their
sides rose vertically out of the water, or whether they swelled slightly
outwards. If the latter, there was a chance of his being able to be hidden
by the convexity, which, reaching out as far as the wall, would leave a long
roofed-in ditch where for a little while at least he could breathe and be
hidden.

As he rose he felt for the wall. His fingers were spread out and ready for
the touch of the rough stones; and it was with a shock that they made con-
tact, not with stone but with a matted, fibrous, tough subaqueous blanket
of that luxuriant wall-ivy which covered so great an area of the castle's
face. He had forgotten how, as he had skimmed to the fateful flood-room in
the stolen canoe he had noticed this ivy with its long tentacles, and how
the face of the castle had appeared not only mutilated and pocked with sock-
ets of where once the glass eyes glittered, but was covered with these climb-
ing rashes of black growth.

As he clawed at the underwater branches he continued to rise, and all at once
his head struck upon the hull of the barge where it bulged out to the wall.

It was then that he knew that he was nearer death than he had ever been.
Nearer than when he was caught in the burning arms of the dead Barquentine.
Nearer than when he had climbed to Fuchsia's secret attic. For he had no
more breath than for a few excruciating seconds. His way was blocked above
him. The side of the barge, in swelling outwards made contact with the wall
below the surface and blocked his upward path. There was no pocket of air.
It was solid water. But even as a great hammer of desperation beat at his
temples he turned to the ivy. To drag himself up by its outer branches would
simply take him to the long narrow water-filled roof. But how deep was it,
this labyrinthine under-water shuffle of saturated midnight; of endless
leaves, of hairy arms and fingers?

With what remained of his strength he fought it. He fought the ivy. He tore
at the scales of its throat. He pulled himself into it. He tore at its liga-
ments, he broke its small water-logged bones; he forced its ribs apart and as
they strained to return to their ancient curves he fought his way through them.
And as he grappled and pulled his way inwards, something inside him and very
far away was saying, "You have not reached the wall...you have not reached
the wall..."

But neither had he reached the air--and then at a moment when unable to hold
his breath any longer, he took his first inevitable draught of water.

The world had gone black, but with a kind of reflex, his arms and legs fought
onwards for a few seconds longer, and then with his head thrown back he col-
lapsed, his body supported by the network of the ivy boughs about him.

It was some while before he opened his eyes to find that only the mask of his
face was above water. He was in a kind of vertical forest--an undergrowth that
stood upon its end. He found that he was doing nothing to support himself. He
was cradled. He was a fly in a drowned web. But the last spasms of his upward
straining body had taken his face above the water.

Slowly he turned his eyes. He was but a few inches above the level of the
barge's catwalk. He could see nothing of the barge itself, but through gaps
in the ivy the torches shone like jewels, and so he lay in the arms of the
giant creeper and heard a voice from above:

"All boats will stand out from the cave-mouth. A line will be formed across the
bay immediately. Light every torch aboard, every lantern, every stick! Ropes
will be passed beneath the keel of every boat! This man could hide in a rudder.
By the powers, he has more life in him than the lot of you..."

Her voice, in the complete silence that had followed the withdrawal of the
squall, sounded like cannon fire.

"Great hell, he is no merman! He has no tail or fins! He must breathe! He must
breathe!"

The boats moved out with much splashing of oars and paddles, and the two barges
wallowing in the still water were shoved away from the wall. But while the var-
ious craft moved into the open bay and began to form a line sufficiently far out
as to be beyond the range of any under-water swimmer, Titus, standing beside his
mother at the window, hardly knowing that she was there or that the boats had
moved, for all the commotion and for all the violence and volume of his mother's
orders, had his eyes focused, fanatically, upon something almost immediately be-
low him. What his eyes were fixed upon seemed innocent enough, and no one but
Titus in his febrile state would have continued to scrutinize a small area of
ivy a foot above the surface of the water. It was no different from any other
section that might be chosen at random from the great blanket of leaves. But
Titus, who, before his mother's arrival at the window beside him, had been rock-
ing in a kind of dizzy sickness to and fro had, as the accumulated effect of his
rising fever and physical exhaustion began to reach a final stage, seen a movement
that he could not understand--a movement that was not a part of his dizziness.

It was a sharp and emphatic commotion among the ivy leaves. The water and the boats
and the world were swaying. Everything was swaying. But this disturbance of the ivy
was not a part of this great drift of illness. It was not inside his head. It was
taking place in the world below him--a world that had become as silent and motion-
less as a sheet of glass.

His heartbeat quickened with a leaping guess.

And out of his guess, out of his weakness, a kind of power climbed through him like
sap. Not the power of Gormenghast, or the pride of lineage. These were but dead-sea
fruit. But the power of the imagination's pride. He, Titus, the traitor, was about
to prove his existence, spurred by his anger, spurred by the romanticism of his na-
ture which cried not now for paper boats, or marbles, or the monsters on their
stilts, or the mountain cave, or the Thing afloat among the golden oaks, or any-
thing but vengeance and sudden death and the knowledge that he was not watching
any more, but living at the core of drama.

His mother stood at his shoulder. Behind her a group of officers obtained the best
view that they could of the scene without. He must make no mistake. At a slip or a
sign a dozen hands would grab him.

He slipped his knife into his belt, his hand shaking as though it were blue with
cold. Then he rested his hands upon the window-sill again and as he did so he stole
a glance over his shoulder. His mother stood with her arms folded. She stared at
the scene before her with a merciless intensity. The men behind him were dangerous-
ly close but were gazing past him to where the boats were forming a single line.

And then, almost before he had decided to do so, he gathered his strength to-
gether and half vaulting, half tumbling himself over the sill, fell the first half
dozen feet through the loose outer fringes of the ivy, before he snatched
at the stems and, checking the momentum of his descent, found that he was
at last hanging from branches that had ceased to break.

He had noted that the small, suspicious area of ivy for which he was making
was directly below the window from which he had vaulted (and which was now
filled with startled faces), directly below, and at water level. He could hear
his name being called and orders being shouted across the "bay' for a boat to
be brought up immediately, but they were sounds from another world.

And yet, while this sense of being far removed from what he was doing held
him suspended in a world of dreams he was, at the same time, drawn down the
ivy-wall as though by a magnet. Within the blur of weakness and remoteness
was a core of vivid impulse, an immediate purpose.

He hardly knew what his body was doing. His arms and legs and hands seemed to
be making their own decisions. He followed them downwards through the leaves.

But Steerpike, who had had to alter his position when an unbearable cramp had
affected his left leg and shoulder, and who had hoped that a careful stretch-
ing of his limbs would in no way affect the stillness of the outermost leaves,
had by now heard the noise of branches breaking above him, and knew that the
results of his movement were dire indeed. After so desperately fought a battle
for refuge from his pursuers, it was indeed a malicious fate that saw to it
that he should so soon be discovered.

He had of course no idea that it was the young earl who was descending upon
him. His eyes were fixed upon the dark tangle of fibrous arms above his face.
It was obvious that whosoever it was would not make his descent through the
body of the ivy, close to the wall. To do this would be to move at a snail's
pace, and to battle all the way with the heaviest branches. His pursuer would
slide down the outer foliage and probably burrow wall-wards when a little a-
bove and out of reach of him.

And this is what Titus intended, for when he was about five feet above the
water he came to a stop and waited a little to regain his breath.

The moon which was now high in the sky had to some extent made the torches
redundant. The bosom of the bay was leprous. The ivy leaves reflected a
glossy light. The faces at the windows were both blanched and wooden.

For a moment he wondered whether Steerpike had moved, had climbed from where
a foot above the water he had seen the telltale ivy come to life and shiver,
and whether he, Titus, was even now within a few inches of his foe, and in
mortal peril. It seemed strange at that instant that no daggered hand arose
out of the leaves and stabbed him where he hung. But nothing happened. The
silence was accentuated rather than lessened by the sound of distant oars
rising and falling in the bay.

Then, with his left hand gripping some interior stem, he forced away the
swathes before his face and peered into the heart of the foliage where the
branches shone like a network of white and twisted bones at the inrush of
the moonbeams.

There was but one course for him. To burrow in as deeply as he could, and
then to descend in the gloom until he found his foe. The moonlight was now
so strong that a kind of deep twilight had taken the place of the rayless
midnight among the leaves. Only at the deeply-hidden face of the wall itself
was the darkness complete. If Titus could reach as far inward as the wall
and work his way down it might be possible to see, before he reached the
level of the flood, some shape that was not the shape of ivy branch or
leaf--some curve or angle that loomed among the leaves--perhaps an elbow,
or a knee, or the bulge of a forehead...


VI


The murderer had not moved. Why should he move? There was little to choose
between one cradle of ivy and another. What was there to be gained by any
temporary evasion? Where could he escape to, anyway? The patch of ivy was
a mere seventy feet in breadth. It was only a matter of time before his
capture. But time when it is short is very sweet and very precious. He would
stay where he was. He would indulge himself--would taste the peculiar qual-
ity of near-death on the tongue--would loll above the waters of Lethe.

It was not that he had lost his will to live. It was that his brain was so
exact and cold a thing that when it told him that his life, for this reason,
and for that reason, was within a few hours of its end, he had no faculties
wherewith to combat its logic. Below him was the water in which he could
not breathe. To the north was the water through which to swim was immediate
capture. To move to his left or right would bring him to the margins of the
ivy. To climb would bring him to the scores of windows in every one of
which there was a face.

Whoever it was who was crawling towards him down the wall had presumably in-
formed the world of his purpose, or had been given orders to come to grips.
Someone had seen a movement in the ivy.

But it was strange that, as far as he could hear, there was only one boat
approaching. The rise and fall of the two oars were distant but perfectly
distinct; why was not the whole flotilla on its way towards him?

As he drew his knife to and fro across his forearm some dust fell through
the twisted stems above him and then a branch broke with a crack that seem-
ed within a yard of his head.

But it was not immediately above him, this noise. It appeared to come from
deeper in the ivy, from somewhere between himself and the wall.

For him to move would be to make a sound. He was curled up like an emac-
iated child in a cot of twigs. But with his right hand gripping the dagger at his
left shoulder, he was prepared at any instant to make an upward stab.

His small, close-set eyes smouldered with an unnatural concentration in the
darkness, but it was not their natural colour, extraordinary as that was, that
showed in the gloom, but something more terrible. It was as though the red
blood in his brain, or behind his eyes, was reflected in the lenses. His lips,
thin as a prude's, had fused into a single bloodless thread.

And now he began to experience again, but with even greater intensity, those
sensations that affected him when, with the skeletons of the titled sisters
at his feet, he had strutted about their relics as though in the grip of
some primordial power.

This sensation was something so utterly alien to the frigid nature of his
conscious brain that he had no means of understanding what was happening
within him at this deeper level, far less of warding off the urge to show
himself. For an arrogant wave had entered him and drowned his brain in black,
fantastic water.

His passion to remain in secret had gone. What was left of vigour in his
body craved to strut and posture.

He no longer wanted to kill his foe in darkness and in silence. His lust
was to stand naked upon the moonlit stage, with his arms stretched high,
and his fingers spread, and with the warm fresh blood that soaked them
sliding down his wrists, spiralling his arms and steaming in the cold
night air--to suddenly drop his hands like talons to his breast and tear
it open to expose a heart like a black vegetable--and then, upon the crest
of self-exposure, and the sweet glory of wickedness, to create some ges-
ture of supreme defiance, lewd and rare; and then with the towers of Gor-
menghast about him, cheat the castle of its jealous right and die of his
own evil in the moonbeams.

There was nothing left, no, of the brain that would have scorned all this.
The brilliant Steerpike had become a cloud of crimson. He wallowed in the
dawn of the globe.

Ignoring all precautions, he wrenched the boughs about him, and every win-
dow heard the sound, as they cracked in the silence with reports like gun-
fire. The lenses of his eyes were like red-hot pinheads.

He tore away the thick ivy stems, and cleared a cave, within the masses of
the foliage, stamping and descending with his feet until they found pur-
chase a foot beneath the water. His left hand gripped a solid arm of the
parasite, as hairy as a dog's leg.

The knife was ready for the strike. He had thrown back his head. In the
darkness of the leaves above him he heard a sound. It was a kind of cry
or gasp--and then, a great bush of branches fell in a crackling heap--
fell, as it were, down the black chimney which Steerpike's sudden vio-
lence had created--fell with gathering speed with Titus riding upon its
back.

As Titus fell he saw the two red points of light below him. He saw them
through the tangle of the broken ivy.

Fear had a few moments earlier suddenly come to him, for his brain had
cleared--as in a hot sky of continuous cloud, an area, no bigger than
one's thumbnail will clear, and show the sky. And with this momentary
clearance of his brain from the fumes of fever and fatigue, came the
fear of Steerpike and darkness, and death.

But directly the branches broke below him as he hung in the twisted night,
and directly he fell, the fear left him again. He said to himself, "I am
falling. I am moving very fast. I will soon be on top of him. Then I will
kill him if I can."

The knife in his hand was quite steady as he fell: and when he crashed
his way through the branches which had come to a thick and watery halt
at the congested surface of the flood he saw it shine in his hand like
a splinter of glass in a penetrating ray of the moon. But only for the
fraction of a fleeting instant did he see that thin blade of steel for,
as he had fallen he had been shovelled outwards into the moonlight so
that suddenly another object as brilliant as the thin blade held his
eyes, a thing with eyes like beads of blood, and a forehead like a ball
of lard--a thing whose mouth, thin as a thread, was opening and as it
opened was curling up its corners so that no other note could possibly
have come from such a cavity as the note that now rang across the flood-
bay that climbed the ancient walls and turned the silent audience to
stone--a note from the first dawn, the high-pitched overweening cry of
a fighting cock.

But even as this blast of arrogance vibrated through the night, and the
crowing echoes rang through the hollow rooms and wandered to and fro,
and thinly died--Titus struck.

He could see nothing of the body into which his small knife plunged.
Only the head, with its distended mouth and its grizzly bloodlit eyes,
was visible. But he struck the darkness under the head, and his fist
was suddenly wet and warm.

What had happened to Steerpike that he should have been the first to
receive a blow--and a blow so mortal? He had recognized the earl, who
like himself had been lit by the moonbeams. That the Lord of Gormen-
ghast should have been delivered into his hands at this great moment
and be his for the killing, had so appealed to his sense of fitness
that the urge to crow had become irresistible.

He had swung full circle. He had given himself up to the crowding
forces. He, the rationalist, the self-contained!

And so, in a paroxysm of self-indulgence--or perhaps in the grip of
some elemental agency over which he had no power, he had denied his
brain, and he had lost the one and only moment of time in which to
strike before his enemy.

But at the rip of the knife in his chest all vision left him. He was
again Steerpike. He was Steerpike wounded, and bleeding fast, but not
yet dead. Snarling with pain he stabbed, but as he stabbed Titus fell
in a faint and the knife cut a path across the cheek--not deep but
long and bloody. The sharp pain of it cleared the boy's mind for a
fraction of time and he thrust again into the darkness below his face.
The world began to spin and he was spinning with it and he heard again,
very far away the sound of crowing, and then opening his eyes he saw
his fist at his enemy's breast, for the lozenge of moonlight had spread
across them both, and he knew that he had no strength to withdraw the
knife from between the ribs of a body arched like a bow, in the thick
leaves. Then Titus stared at the face, as a child who cannot tell the
time will stare at the face of a clock in wonder and perplexity, for
it was nothing any more--it was just a thing, narrow and pale, with an
open mouth and small, lacklustre eyes. They were turned up.

Steerpike was dead.

When Titus saw that this was indeed so, he collapsed at the knees and
then slumped forward out of the ivy and fell face downwards into the o-
pen water. At once a cry broke out from a hundred watchers, and his mo-
ther, framed by the window overhead, leaned forward and her lips moved
a little as she stared down at her son.

She and the watchers from the windows all about her and above her had,
of course, seen nothing but the commotion of the ivy leaves at the foot
of the wall. Titus had disappeared from the air and had burrowed into
the thick and glossy growth, its every heartshaped leaf had glinted in
the moonlight. For long seconds at a time the agitation of the leaves
had ceased. And then they had begun again, until suddenly they had seen
a fresh disturbance and realized that there were two figures under the
ivy.

And when Steerpike had thrown his secrecy away and when Titus had fall-
en through the chimney of leaves, and while they had exchanged blows,
the sound of their struggle and the breaking of branches and the splash
and gurgle of the water as their legs moved under the surface--all these
noises had sounded across the bay with peculiar clarity. The flotillas,
in the meantime, unheard by the protagonists, had once again advanced
upon the castle and were now very close to the wall. The captains had
expected fresh orders on arriving beneath the walls, but the Countess,
immobile in the moonlight, filled up her window like a carving, her
hand on the sill, her gaze directed downwards, with motionless concen-
tration. But it was the cry of the cock, triumphant, terrible, that
broke the atrophy and when, a little later, Titus fell forward out of
the ivy and the blood from his cheek darkened the water about his head,
she sent forth a great cry, thinking him dead, and she beat her fist
upon the stone sill.

A dozen boats lunged forward to lift his body from the flood, but the
boat which had been the first to leave the flotilla some while earlier
and whose oars both Titus and Steerpike had heard was in advance of the
rest, and was soon alongside the body. Titus was lifted aboard, but dir-
ectly he had been laid at the bottom of the boat, he startled the awe-
struck audience by rising, as it seemed, from the dead, for he stood up,
and pointing to that part of the wall from which he had fallen, he or-
dered the boatmen to pull in.

For a moment the men hesitated, glancing up at the Countess, but they
received no help from her. A kind of beauty had taken possession of her
big, blunt features. That look which she reserved, unknowingly, for a
bird with a broken wing, or a thirsty animal, was now bent upon the
scene below her. The ice had been melted out of her eyes.

She turned to those behind her in the room. "Go away," she said. "There
are other rooms."

When she turned back she saw that her son was standing in the bows, and
that he was looking up at her. One side of his face was wet with blood.
His eyes shone strangely. It seemed that he wished to be sure that she
was there above him and was able to see exactly what was happening. For
as the body of Steerpike was hauled aboard by the boatmen, he glanced
at it and then at her again before a black faint overtook him and his
mother's face whirled in an arc, and he fell forward into the boat as
though into a trench of darkness.



SEVENTY-NINE



There was no more rain. The washed air was indescribably sweet. A kind
of natural peace, almost a thing of the mind, a kind of reverie, descend-
ed upon Gormenghast--descended, it seemed, with the sunbeams by day, and
the moonbeams after dark.

By infinitesimal degrees, moment by golden moment, hour by hour, day by
day, and month by month the great floodwaters fell. The extensive roof-
scapes, the slates and stony uplands, the long and slanting sky-fields,
and the sloping altitudes, dried out in the sun. It shone every day,
turning the waters, that were once so grey and grim, into a smooth and
slumbering expanse over whose blue depths the white clouds floated idly.

But within the castle, as the flood subsided and the water drained away
from the upper levels, it could be seen how great was the destruction
that the flood had caused. Beyond the windows the water lay innocently,
basking, as though butter would not melt in its soft blue mouth, but at
the same time the filthy slime lay a foot deep across great tracts of
storeys newly drained. Foul rivulets of water oozed out of windows. From
the floors lately submerged the tops of objects began to appear and all
was covered with grey slime. It began to be apparent that the shovelling
away of the accumulated sediment, the swilling and scouring of the cast-
le, when at long last, if ever, it stood on dry land again, would stretch
away into the future.

The feverish months of hauling up the stairways of Gormenghast all that
was now congesting the upper storeys would be nothing to this regenera-
tive 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 imag-
ined 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 with-
drew. 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, through-
out the day, the traditional life of the place was, as far as possible, con-
tinued. The great Tomes of Procedure had been saved from the wreckage,
and the Poet, now Master of Ceremonies, was ceaselessly at work. Ex-
tensive areas had been covered with shanties and huts of every des-
cription. 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 jag-
ged 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 a-
ble 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 Steer-
pike'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 sculp-
tured 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 avail-
able.

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 rest-
ing 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 count-
less coves and bitten deep with shadowy embayments. A continent, off
whose shores the crowding islands lay; islands of every shape that tow-
ers can be; and archipelagos; and isthmuses and bluffs; and stark pen-
insulas 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 exhaust-
ion 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 improvis-
ed 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 intelli-
gence which had up till now been concentrated upon the creation of dazz-
ling, 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 ab-
sorbing variant of the problem of Ceremony and the human element.

This was as it should be. The Master of Ritual was, after all, the key-
stone 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 hiero-
phants 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.

But even this became monotonous. The honey tasted sickly in his mouth.
His mother had nothing to say to him. She had become even more with-
drawn. Her pride in the courage he had shown had emptied her of words.
She had reverted to the heavy and formidable figure, with her white
cats for ever within range of her whistle and the wild birds upon her
massive shoulders.

She had risen to an occasion. The uprooting of Steerpike and the sal-
vaging 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 no-
where and everywhere was necessarily based upon Gormenghast. But he
knew that there would be a difference; and that there could be no o-
ther 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 indepen-
dence how it was only fear that held people together. The fear of be-
ing 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 coralcoloured 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 a-
gainst 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 strik-
ing 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 sin-
gle 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 at-
mosphere 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 gen-
erations, 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 val-
our. 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 rea-
sons, 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 mea-
ndered 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 sud-
denly into the world of reality, came to a halt. For some time he re-
mained 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 stock-
ade had been built to surround the long shanty where the Countess
lived.

Before he entered the stockade through the clumsy iron gate he moti-
oned 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 enclo-
sure. 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 dir-
ection 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 can-
dle 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.

"Going where?" she said at last.

"I am leaving," said Titus. "I am leaving Gormenghast. I cannot ex-
plain. I do not want to talk. I came to tell you and that is all.
Good-bye, mother."

He turned and walked quickly to the door. He longed with his whole
soul to be able to pass through and into the night without another
word being spoken. He knew she was unable to grasp so terrible a con-
fession of perfidy. But out of the silence, that hung at his shoulder
blades, he heard her voice. It was not loud. It was not hurried.

"There is nowhere else," it said. "You will only tread a circle, Titus
Groan. There's not a road, not a track, but it will lead you home. For
everything comes to Gormenghast."

He shut the door. The moonlight flowed across the cold encampment. It
shone on the roofs of the castle and lit the high claw of the Mountain.

When he came to the Tower of Flints his mare was waiting. He mounted,
shook the reins, and moved away at once through the inky shadows that
lay beneath the walls.

After a long while he came out into the brilliant light of the hunter's
moon and sometime later he realized that unless he turned about in his
saddle there was no cause for him to see his home again. At his back
the castle climbed into the night. Before him there was spread a great
terrain.

He brushed a few strands of hair away from his eyes, and jogged the grey
mare to a trot and then into a canter, and finally with a moonlit wild-
erness before him, to a gallop.

And so, exulting as the moonlit rocks fled by him, exulting as the tears
streamed over his face--with his eyes fixed excitedly upon the blurred
horizon and the battering of the hoof-beats loud in his ears, Titus rode
out of his world.