Gormenghast

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 possible light from the sky, and he had found himself among branches which switched 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, suddenly, 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 Gormenghast, 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 together 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 realized 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-breadth 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 along the walls of the castle, fold upon baleful fold, a great tide. Soundless, motionless, beneath some exorcism more potent that 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 drum-note 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 elements? 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 conversation 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 sideways 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 rockface 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 dearly; 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 curiosity 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 dangerous. But as he picked his way to lower levels the ground became correspondingly 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 towards the forest wall a snake slid down a rockface 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 den of silky grass; some great rocks with lizards and ferns, and the green forest wall. Why should these add up to so thrilling, so breath-taking 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 Titus 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 another 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 various 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 horse hide. 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 over 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 floorboards 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 window 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 horsehide 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 floor-boards had an almost faery colouring. Certainly there was nothing else particularly 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 curled 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 sun-beams 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 peculiar 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 floor-boards 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 underside 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 second of the long floor-boards, 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 paper 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 itself 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 against the flanking wall, and their enemies, crouched behind the desks, had their eyes fixed on the slippery floor-boards that ran across the classroom 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 window 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 floor-board; and a fraction of a second later to thump into the leather wall at the far end of the schoolroom, 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 reappearance 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 cessation in the game, for even as he crashed into the dented leather wall another of his team was already in mid-air, 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 beginning 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 tom 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-contracting thrill of a lightning skid across a mellow schoolroom: through mutual knowledge of the long leaf-shrouded flights through space: of their knowledge 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 sudden, 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 cupboard. 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 schoolroom, but it was as well to have the freckled urchin stationed on the cupboard from first thing in the morning onwards, for there was nothing more irritating 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 intentness 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 straw-headed youth.

The two floor-boards had been grabbed and shot back into their long, narrow 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 professor'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 Bellgrove'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 inkstained 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, PerchPrism, Throd, Flannelcat, Shred and Shimmer, Cutflower and the rest were easily recognizable. Deadyawn, 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 unprecedented 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 slipped! 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 before 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 hurled 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 floor-boards, 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 that 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 whatever 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 mortar-boards 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'1 man.' it said, 'for 't's 1ove 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?... Sparrowmarsh?... 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, immediately 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 Deadyawn'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 around. 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 seating 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 mortar-board 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 – Gentlemen,' said Perch-Prism, 'two things are paramount. One, that the search for the young Earl shall be pushed forward immediately in spite of interruption; and two, the appointment of the new Headmaster must be immediately made, to avoid anarchy. In my opinion,' said Perch-Prism, his hands grasping 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 handling 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 consistent with the proud cast of his face.

At that moment he knew himself to be of finer marl. He had known what ambition 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 orders! 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 hair 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 opening 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 Private' - 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 succeeding staff - those hoary and impossible bands with whom, by ancient tradition, 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 floor-boards 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 half-way 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 quality of the monster's upper half, yet in its numerous legs there was a certain gaiety. The little legs of blackness almost twinkled, almost hopped. The great legs let fall their echoing feet in a jocular and carefree fashion 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 longed 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 extra work...? Surely, at his age...?

The excitement in the multiform legs of the dragon had only begun to operate since the professors had left the Masters' Hall behind them, and with the Hall their duties also. For their day in the classrooms of Gormenghast was over, and if there was one thing above others that the professors 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 series of private smiles began to play. They were nearing a world they understood - 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 fifteen hours.

Taking deep breaths into its many lungs the hydra-headed dragon approached 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 floor-boards was spread before them until the walls (now about forty feet apart) turned abruptly away on either side to flank the wide wooden terrace which overlooked the flight of stairs. Although this flight was exceptionally broad and the professors as they descended had plenty of space in which to indulge themselves (if the whim should take them) in a general loosening of their deportment, 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 although 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 access 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 scuffling 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-smelling 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, catapults, chemicals and prisms, dates, battles and tame white mice, and hundred half-formed, ingenious and quizzical faces, with their chapped 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 bandits 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 occasionally 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 abstractedly at a group which stood out in silhouette against a swarm of golden 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 invitation cards which he had received that same afternoon by special messenger:

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 already 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 itself 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 sun-blotched 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 sensitized 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 amusement; 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-maidishness, 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 melancholy 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 functions 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 addressing Opus Fluke, for Bellgrove's mouth, though hardly hyper-human, 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, whispering 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 elder'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 position 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 Flannelcat,' 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 invitation 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 yourselves 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. Approaching his taunter, 'Red Ink,' he whispered, and then began to laugh uncontrollably. 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 driven 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 ancient 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 excitement 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 (although they were in shadow) with the dark rose-gold of the brick. Above the arches of the cloisters a terrace of rose-coloured brickwork 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, according to custom, the owner's name was added to the long list of former 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 occupants.

The first thing that the professors did on returning to their quarters 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 quadrangle, 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 together 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' invitations. 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 ribald 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 reflection was occasioned before they could regain the spirit of the evening.

The idea that anyone of them should get married seemed to them ludicrously 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 at the first opportunity of making himself heard. 'Shred and I were saying 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, after 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 motionless flotilla had raised their voices in an obscure chant of former 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 audience? 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 picture that hung there before him. Like a canvas of gold with its hundreds of majestic oaks, their winding branches dividing and sub-dividing into gilded fingertips the solid acorns and the deep clusters of the legendary 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 tom 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 finger-nails 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 endless, 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 silence. 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 vistas 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 little 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, effortless, soundless, dream-like bounds, deeper and deeper into the forest and over 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 gilded 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 further 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 impetus 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 cyclorama - 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 half way 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 quintessence 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 redoubled 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 among the foot-warn 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 unformulated 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 nightmare 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 dumps 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 dear 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 rooks 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 nervelessness 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 direction 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 olive-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 rook 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 rocklike 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 alms 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 knowledge 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 clay 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 circular 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 chimneys 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 lying 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 disproportionate shadows and withdrawing them with a concertina motion. The ferns, like tongues of fire, burned as they hung from the darkness of the domeing roof, and the stones of the crude oven in which an hour or more ago Flay had lit a great fire of wood and fir-cones, 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 shadow 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 instantaneously. 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 preoccupied 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 banished - 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. 'Banished, 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. 'Needed',' 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 happened, 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 urgency. '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 edifice, its rough square stones obliterated by the unbroken blanket of the parasitic lichen which gave it its name. This covering was so thick that a variety of birds were able to make their nests in the pale green fur. The two chambers, one above the other of this fort, were kept comparatively clean by a caretaker who slept there and kept the key.

Titus had been held prisoner in this fort on two previous occasions for flagrant offences against the hierarch - although he never knew exactly what he had done wrong. But this time it was for a longer period. He did not particularly mind. It was a relief to know what his punishment was, for when Flay had left him at the hem of the woods that showed them the castle but a couple of miles away, his anxiety had grown to such a pitch that he had visions of the most frightful punishments ahead. He had arrived in the early morning and found three fresh search parties marshalled in the red-stone yard and about to set out. Horses were drawn up at the stables and their riders were being given instructions. He had taken a deep breath and entered the yard, and staring straight ahead of him all the time, had marched across it, his heart beating wildly, his face perspiring, his shirt and trousers torn almost to shreds. At that moment he was glad he was heir to the mountainous bulks of masonry that rose above him, of the towers, and of the tracts he had crossed that morning in the low rays of the sun. He held his head up and clenched his hands, but when within a dozen yards of the cloisters, he ran, the tears gathering in his eyes, until he came to Fuchsia's room into which he rushed, his eyes burning, a dishevelled urchin, and falling upon his startled sister, clung to her like a child.

She returned his embrace, and for the first time in her life, kissed, and held him passionately in her arms; loved him as she had never loved a soul, and was so filled with pride to have been the one to whom he had fled, that she lifted her young, strident voice and shouted in barbaric triumph, and then breaking away from him, jumped to her window and spat into the morning sun. 'That's what I think of them, Titus: she shouted, and he ran after her, and spat himself, and then they both began to laugh until they were weak and fell upon the floor where they fought in a dizzy ecstasy until, exhausted, they lay side by side, their hands joined, and sobbed with the love they had found in one another.

Hungry for affection, yet not knowing what it was that made them restless, not even knowing that they 'were' restless, the truth had sprung upon them at the same instant with a shock which found no outlet for its expression save in this physical tumult. In a flash they had found faith in one another. They dared, simultaneously, to uncover their hearts. A truth had come, empiric, irrational and appallingly exciting. The truth that she, this extraordinary girl, ridiculously immature for all her twenty years, yet rich as harvest, and he, a boy on the brink of wild discoveries, were bound by more than their blood, and the loneliness of their hereditary status, and the lack of a mother in any ordinary sense, yes, more than this - were bound all at once in the cocoon of a compassion and an integration one with another as deep, it seemed, as the line of their ancestors; as inchoate, imponderable, and uncharted as the realms that were their darkened legacy.

For Fuchsia to have, not just a brother, but a boy who had run to her in tears because 'she, she' out of all Gormenghast, was the one he trusted - oh, that made up for everything. Let the world do what it might, she would dare death to protect him. She would tell lies for him! Giant lies! She would steal for him! She would kill for him! She rose to her knees and lifted her strong rounded arms, and as she sent forth a loud, incoherent shout of defiance, the door opened, and Mrs Slagg stood there. Her hand which was still on the door handle above her head trembled, as with amazement she stared at the kneeling girl and heard the unrestrained cry.

Behind her stood a man, with raised eyebrows, a lantern, jawed figure, in grey livery with a kind of seaweed belt which by some obscure edict of many a decade ago, it was his business, holding the position he did, to wear. A festoon of the golden weed trailed down his right leg to the region of his knee. The weather being dry, it crackled as he moved.

Titus was the first to see them and jumped to his feet. But it was Mrs Slagg who spoke first - 'Look at your hands!' she panted. 'Your legs, your face! Oh, my weak heart!

Look at the grime, and the cuts and bruised, and, and, oh my wicked, wicked lordship, look at the rags of you! Oh, I could smack you I could when I think of all I've mended, and washed and ironed and bandaged. Oh yes, I could, I could smack you and hurt you, you cruel, dirty, lordship-thing. How could you. How could you? And me with my heart almost stopped - but you wouldn't care, oh no, not though...'

Her pitiful tirade was broken into by the man with the lantern jaw.

'I have to take you to Barquentine,' he said simply, to Titus. 'Get washed, my lord, and don't be long.'

'What does 'he' want?' said Fuchsia in a low voice.

'I know, nothing of that, your ladyship,' said lantern-jaw. 'But for your brother's sake, get him clean, and help him with a good excuse. Perhaps he has one. I don't know. I know nothing.' His seaweed rattled dryly as he turned away from the door with his tongue in his cheek and his eyes on the ceiling.

II

The week that followed was the longest Titus ever spent, in spite of Fuchsia's illicit visits to the Lichen Fort. She had found an obscure and narrow window through which she passed what cakes and fruit she could, to vary the adequate but uninteresting diet which the warder, luckily a deaf old man, prepared for his fledgeling-prisoner. Through this opening she was able to whisper to her brother.

Barquentine had lectured him at length: had stressed the responsibility that would become his; but as Titus held to the story that he had, from the outset, lost himself and could not find his way home, the only crime was in having set out on the expedition in the first place. For such a misdemeanour several heavy tomes were fetched down from high shelves, the dust was blown and shaken from their leaves and eventually the appropriate verses were found which gave precedent for the sentence of seven days in the Lichen Fort.

During that week the wrinkled and altogether beastly face of Barquentine, the 'Lord of the Documents', came before him in the darkness of the night. No fewer than four times he dreamed of the wet-eyed, harsh-mouthed cripple, pursuing him with his greasy crutch; of how it struck the flagstones like a hammer; and of the crimson rags of his high office that streamed behind the pursuer, as they hurried down unending corridors.

And when he awoke he remembered Steerpike who had stood behind Barquentine's chair, or climbed the ladder to find the relevant tomes, and how the pale man, for so he was to Titus, had winked at him.

Beyond his knowledge, beyond his power of reason, a revulsion took hold of him and he recoiled from that wink like flesh from the touch of a toad.

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 sub-aqueous depths, so huge and vivid and yet unreal was the contact that they made with one another.

'Fuchsia.'

'Yes?'

'I have things to tell you.'

'Have you?'

'Yes. Secrets.'

'Secrets?'

'Yes, and adventure.'

'I won't tell! I won't ever tell. Nothing you tell me I'll tell. When I come tonight, or if you like when you're free, tell me then. It won't be long.'

Her finger tips left his. He was alone in space.

'Don't take your hand away,' she said after a moment's pause. 'Can you feel anything?'

He worked his fingers even further into the darkness and touched a paper object which with difficulty he tipped over towards himself and then withdrew. It was a paper bag of barley sugar.

'Fuchsia,' he whispered. But there was no reply. She had gone.

III

On the last day but one he had an official visitor. The caretaker of the lichen Fort had unbolted the heavy door and the grotesquely broad, flat feet of the Headmaster, Bellgrove, complete in his zodiac gown, and dog-eared mortarboard, entered with a slow and ponderous tread. He took five or more paces across the weed-scattered earthen floor before he noticed the boy sitting at a table in a corner of the fort.

'Ah. There you are. There you are, indeed. How are you, my friend?'

'All right. Thank you, sir.'

'H'm. Not much light in here, eh, young man? What have you been doing to pass the time away?'

Bellgrove approached the table behind which Titus was standing. His noble, leonine head was weak with sympathy for the child, but he was doing his best to play the 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 evoke Respect. What else had he to be? He couldn't remember.

'Give me your chair, young fellow,' he said in a deep and solemn voice. 'You can sit on the table, can't you? Of course you can. I seem to remember being able to do things like that when I was a boy!'

Had he been at all amusing? He gave Titus a sidelong glance in the faint hope that he 'had' been, but the boy's face showed no sign of a smile, as he placed the chair for his headmaster and then sat with his knees crossed on the table. Yet his expression was anything but sullen.

Bellgrove, holding his gown at the height of his shoulders and at the same time both leaning backwards from the hips and thrusting his head forward and downwards so that the blunt end of his long chin rested in the capacious pit of his neck like an egg in an egg-cup, raised his eyes to the ceiling.

'As your headmaster,' he said, 'I felt it my bounden duty, in loco parentis, to have a word with you, my boy.'

'Yes, sir.'

'And to see how you were getting along. H'm.'

'Thank you, sir,' said Titus.

'H'm,' said Bellgrove. There were a few moments of rather awkward silence and then the headmaster, finding that the attitude which he had struck was putting too great a strain upon those muscles employed for its maintenance, sat down upon the chair and began unconsciously to work his long, proud jawbone to and fro, as though to test it for the toothache that had been so strangely absent for over five hours. Perhaps it was the unwonted relief of his long spell of normal health that caused a sudden relaxing of Bellgrove's body and brain. Or perhaps it was Bellgrove's innate simplicity, which sensed that in this particular situation (where a boy and a Headmaster equally ill at ease with the Adult Mind, sat opposite one another in the stillness) there was a reality, a world apart, a secret place to which they alone had access. Whatever it was, a sudden relaxing of the tension he had felt made itself manifest in a long, wheezing, horse-like sigh, and he stared across at Titus contemplatively, without wondering in the least whether his relaxed, almost slumped position in the chair, was of the kind that headmasters adopt. But when he spoke, he had, of course, to frame his sentences in that threadbare, empty way to which he was now a slave. Whatever is felt in the heart or the pit of the stomach, the old habits remain rooted. Words and gestures obey their own dictatorial, unimaginative laws; the ghastly ritual, that denies the spirit.

'So your old headmaster has come to see you, my boy...'

'Yes, sir,' said Titus.

'... Leaving his classes and his duties to cast his eye on a rebellious pupil. A very naughty pupil. A terrible child who, from what I can remember of his scholastic progress, has little cause to absent himself from the seats of learning.'

Bellgrove scratched his long chin ruminatively.

'As your headmaster, Titus, I can only say that you make things a little difficult. What am I to do with you? H'm. What indeed? You have been punished. You are 'being' punished: so I am glad to say that there is no need for us to trouble any more about 'that' side of it; but what am I to say to you in 'loco parentis'. I am an old man, you would say, wouldn't you, my small friend? You would say I was an old man, wouldn't you?'

'I suppose so, sir.'

'And as an old man, I should by now, be very wise and deep, shouldn't I, my boy? After all I have long white hair and a long black gown, and that's a good start, isn't it?'

'I don't know, sir.'

'Oh, well it is, my, boy. You can take it from me. The first thing you must procure if you are anxious to be wise and sagacious is a long black gown, and long white hair, and if possible a long jaw-bone, like your old headmaster's.'

Titus didn't think that the Professor was being very funny, but he threw his head back and laughed very loudly indeed, and thumped his hands on the side of his table.

A flush of light illumined the old man's face. His anxiety fled from his eyes and hid itself where the deep creases and pits that honeycomb the skin of ancient men provided caves and gullies for its withdrawal.

It was so long since anyone had really laughed at anything he had said, and laughed honestly and spontaneously. He turned his big lion head away from the boy so that he could relax his old face in a wide and gentle smile. His lips were drawn apart in the most tender of snarls, and it was some while before he could turn his head about and return his gaze to the boy.

But at once the habit returned, unconsciously, and his decades of school-mastering drew his hands behind his back, beneath his gown, as though there were a magnet in the small of his back: his long chin couched itself in the pit of his neck; the irises of his eyes floated up to the top of 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, classroom, hall or yard where at one time or another some child had not stood for a moment with his inky hands behind his back, his chin lowered, his eyes cast up to the sky, and, perhaps, an exercise book on top of his head by way of mortar-board.

Titus watched his headmaster. He had no fear of him. But he had no love for him either. That was the sad thing. Bellgrove, eminently lovable, because of his individual weakness, his incompetence, his failure as a man, a scholar, a leader or even as a companion, was nevertheless utterly alone. For the weak, above all, have their friends. Yet his gentleness, his pretence at authority, his palpable humanity were unable, for some reason or other, to function. He was demonstrably the type of venerable and absent-minded professor about whom all the sharp-beaked boys of the world should swarm like starlings in wheeling murmurations - loving him all unconsciously, while they twitted and cried their primordial jests, flung their honey-centred, prickle-covered verbiage to and fro, pulled at the long black thunder-coloured gown, undid with fingers as quick as adders' tongues the buttons of his braces; pleaded to hear the ticking of his enormous watch of brass and rust red iron, with the verdigris like lichen on the chain; fought between those legs like the trousered stilts of the father of all storks; while the great, corded, limpish hands of the fallen monarch flapped out from time to time, to clip the ears of some more than venturesome child, while far above, the long, pale lion's head turned its eyes to and fro in a slow, ceremonious rhythm, as though he were a lighthouse whose slowly swivelling beams were diffused and deadened in the sea-mists; and all the while, with the tassel of the mortar-board swinging high above them like the tail of a mule, with the trousers loosening at the venerable haunches, with the cat-calls and the thousand quirks and oddities that grow like brilliant weeds from the no-man's-land of urchins' brains - all the while there would be this love like a sub-soil, showing itself in the very fact that they trusted his lovable weakness, wished to be with him because he was like them irresponsible, magnificent with his locks of hair as white as the first page of a new copy-book, and with his neglected teeth, his jaw of pain, his completeness, ripeness, false-nobility, childish temper and childish patience; in a word, that he belonged to them; to tease and adore, to hurt and to worship for his very weakness' sake. For what is more lovable than failure?

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 fitfully at its desk through the terms of sun and ice. And now, it was a Headmaster 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 believe. Thirty-seven. And what is thirty-seven? Why, it's just exactly the half-way age between us. So if I tried to be thirty-seven years young - and you tried to be thirty-seven years old - but that would be ' ' 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 somewhere 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-carpets 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 over 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, having 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 generals, 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 thoroughly 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 thread-bare material as he struggled into an upright position. He straightened his back and struck the attitude of a headmaster, but his old face had coloured.

'Hullo, Doctor Prune,' said Titus. 'We were just going to play marbles.'

'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 fallen 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 probably 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 tomorrow" 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 squatting on the floor, his pink, ingenious face directed at the tousel-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 Professor, '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 honoured.' 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 Barquentine 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 smouldering symbol of the law, as, in its crimson rags, it stamped its brimstone 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 centres.

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 himself. 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 floor-boards 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, wearing 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 sub-aqueous 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 window like an abstract of itself in a picture frame.

It was in such a hovel as this that the Master of Ritual had woken every 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 terminal 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 reverberating 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 floor-boards of his room, spat on it, and sent it hurtling down the crooked funnel, its' hoarse clanging growing fainter 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 particular 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 remained 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 beyond 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 dumps 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 secret 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 razoredged 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 misanthropy. 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 administrations, was pouring out a hoard of irreplaceable knowledge, pouring it into the predatory and capacious brain of a young man whose ambition it was, when he had gained sufficient knowledge of the observances, 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 apparently 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 Steerpike'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 swordstick, 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 .0 no. Steerpike, his straw-coloured hair smoothed down across his high globular forehead, his pale face shining, his dark red eyes disconcertingly alive beneath his sandy eyebrows, 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 wondered, for the hundredth time, how Steerpike should coincide so exactly 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 whether 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 something 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 hobble 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 eyebrows 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 Barquentine 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 vituperative.

'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 reveal 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 cripple'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 palings are capped with snow in winter time.

'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 quadrangle.'

'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 dividers 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 absurd 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 turning 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 scatterbrained 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 stuttered his way down the level corridors like something possessed. As the dust rose from the floor at each bang of the crutch, Steerpike, 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 improvisation, 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 whatever 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 completed, 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 stuttered, 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 outcrops, 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 Barquentine, 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 symbol 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 Master of Ritual was moving rapidly in a parallel direction to his own. He turned and began to retrace his steps, but the corridor was suddenly darkened by a solid block of Professors who bore down upon him with a fluttering of ethiop draperies and a fleet of mortar-boards. His only hope was to run in the original direction and cross the communicating passage, and away, before Barquentine's possible arrival at that juncture.

He began to run. It was not because of any particular misdeed or rational fear that he ran. It was a compulsion, a necessity for withdrawal. 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 cobwebs, and shrouded in perpetual twilight.

He had known these monuments since childhood. But he no more noticed 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 unmistakable 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 never 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 headmaster 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 perfidy 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 tunnelled 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 pleasant mellow colour, soothing to the eye. The bricks had been laid so that their narrow surfaces faced upwards, a device which must have called for twice as many as would otherwise have been necessary. But what gave the floor of the quadrangle its peculiar character was the herringbone pattern which the artificers had followed many hundred years ago.

Blurred, and worn as the yellow bricks had become, yet there was a vitality 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 declamation, 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 depressing 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 Titus, 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 Barquentine.

'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 shadow undulated across the irregular terrain of the scores of heads that filled the quadrangle. The Countess made no response. Steerpike straightened 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 observations in your own throat. My son is no chattel that you can discuss, Barquentine, with your pale lieutenant. Leave me. The occasion will proceed. 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 apprehension.

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 beaker 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 Gormenghast, the moon when it is red, the trumpet of the Groans.'

The Poet paused to breathe. The words he had just used were invariably declaimed 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 shuddering 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 element.

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 lengthened across the quadrangle. A cloud of starlings moved like migraine across 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 another.

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 horizontal 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 terrible 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 drowned 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 cavities. 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-lapped 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 itself 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 fastness 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 moment with him, the exquisitely frightening long-drawn, terroredged 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 perspectives 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 silence 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.

Immediately 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 direction, 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 vistas 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 nothing 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 begun to be absorbed into the stone. He must be on his feet. He must keep moving. He tiptoed 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 discovered, 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 usual 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 walked 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 lifted up the bracelet and continued for a few paces before hopping, rather clumsily, 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 began 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 escaped 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 suffocation.

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 soirée 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 something that would correspond to those glimpses that came to her in the darkness, 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 silk-swaddled 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 surprise attack; a bombardment of her tall angular clay - 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 resist 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 rôtier 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 dispensary 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 returning 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 stretched 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 perambulate the room on the palms of his hands with the peculiarly stilted, rolling and predatory gait of a starling.

TWENTY-EIGHT

It was on the following afternoon that Mrs Slagg died. She was found lying 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 aside 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, although 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 below 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 corridor, '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. 'What 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 uncontrollably 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, allowed 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, jerking 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 manifestation 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 wilderness of trees, and where, phantom or human, he knew not which, something 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 Prunesquallor, 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 brittle 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 summers 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. Catch 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 towards 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.