The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

On seeing Titus struggling with his long bow-oar they made no sound but stepped at once and without hesitation into the river and waded into the deepening bed, until only their plumed heads remained above the surface of the unreflecting water; and their heads appeared to Titus, even in the extremity of his escape, to be detached and floating on the surface as though they could be slid to and fro as kings and knights are slid across a chessboard.

This was not the first time that Titus had been suddenly accosted in regions as apparently remote. He had escaped before, and now, as his boat danced away on the water, he remembered how it was always the same – the sudden appearance, the leap of evasion, and the strange following silence as his would-be captors dwindled away into the distance, to vanish … but not for ever.

FIVE

He had seen, asleep in the bright grey air, a city, and he put aside the memories of his deserted home, and of his mother and the cry of a deserter in his heart; and for all his hunger and fatigue he grinned, for he was young as twenty years allowed, and as old as it could make him.

He grinned again, but lurched as he did so, and without realizing what he was doing he fell upon his side in a dead faint, and his grin lost focus and blurred his lips and the oar fell away from his grasp.

SIX

Of the bulk of the night he knew nothing; nothing of how his small boat twisted and turned; nothing of the city as it slid towards him. Nothing of the great trees that flanked the river on either side, with their marmoreal roots that coiled in and out of the water and shone wetly in the moonlight; nothing of how, in the half-darkness where the water-steps shelve to the stream, a humpbacked man turned from untangling a miserable net, and seeing an apparently empty boat bearing down upon him, stern first, splattered his way through the water and grabbed at the rowlocks and then, with amazement, at the boy, and dragged him from his moon-bright cradle so that the craft sped onward down the broad stream.

Titus knew nothing of all this; nor of how the man who had saved him stared blankly at the ragged vagrant beneath him on the shelving water-steps, for that is where he had laid the heap of weariness.

Had the old man bent down his head to listen he might have heard a faraway sound, and seen the trembling of Titus’ lips, for the boy was muttering to himself:

‘Wake up, you bloody city … bang your bells!

I’m on my way to eat you!’

SEVEN

The city was indeed beginning to turn in its sleep, and out of the half-darkness figures began to appear along the waterfront; some on foot hugging themselves in the cold; some in ramshackle mule-drawn carriages, the great beasts flaring their nostrils at the sharp air, their harsh bones stretching the coarse hide at hip and shoulder, their eyes evil and their breath sour.

And there were some, for the most part the old and the worn, who evolved out of the shades like beings spun from darkness. They made their way to the river in wheel-barrows, pushed by their sons and their sons’ sons; or in carts, or donkey wagons. All with their nets or fishing-lines, the wheels rattling on the cobbled waterfront while the dawn strengthened; and a long shadowy car approached with a screech out of the gloom. Its bonnet was the colour of blood. Its water was boiling. It snorted like a horse and shook itself as though it were alive.

The driver, a great, gaunt, rudder-nosed man, square-jawed, long-limbed, and muscular, appeared to be unaware of the condition of his car or of the danger to himself or to the conglomeration of characters who lay tangled among their nets in the rotting ‘stern’ of the dire machine.

He lay, rather than sat, his head below the level of his knees, his feet resting lazily on the clutch and the brake, and then, as though the snorting of a distant jackass were his clue, he rolled out of the driver’s seat and on to his feet at the side of the hissing car, where he stretched himself, flinging his arms so wide apart in doing so that he appeared for a moment like some oracle, directing the sun and moon to keep their distance.

Why he should trouble so often to bring his car at dawn to the water-steps and so benefit whatever beggars wished to climb into the mouldering stern, it is not easy to fathom, for he was eminently a man of small compassion, a hurtful man, brazen and loveless, who would have no one beside him in the front of the car, save occasionally an old mandrill.

Nor did he fish. Nor had he any desire to watch the sun rising. He merely loomed out of the night-old shadows and lit an old black pipe, while the cold and hungry began to pour towards the bank of the river, a dark mass, as the first fleck of blood appeared on the skyline.

And it was while he stood this particular morning, with arms akimbo, and while he watched the boats being pushed out and the dark foam parting at the blunt prows, that he saw, kneeling on the water-steps, the humpbacked man with a youth lying prostrate below him.

EIGHT

The old hunchback was obviously at a loss to know what to do with this sudden visitant from nowhere. The way he had clawed at Titus and dragged him from the sliding boat might well have suggested that he was, for all his age, a man of rapid wit and action. But no. What he had done was something which never afterwards failed to amaze him and amaze his friends, for they knew him to be clumsy and ignorant. And so, reverting to type, now the danger was over, he knelt and stared at Titus helplessly.

The torches further down the stream had been lit and the river was ruddy with reflected light. The cormorants, released from their wicker-work cages, slid into the water and dived. A mule, silhouetted against the torchlight, lifted its head and bared its disgusting teeth.

Muzzlehatch, the owner of the car, had wandered over to the hunchback and the youth and was now bending over Titus, not with any gentleness or concern, so it seemed, but with an air of detachment – proud, even in the face of another’s plight.

‘Into the chariot with it,’ he muttered. ‘What it is I have no idea, but it has a pulse.’

Muzzlehatch removed his finger and thumb from Titus’ wrist and pointed to his long vibrating car with a massive index-finger.

Two beggars, pushing forward through the crowd that now surrounded the prostrate Titus, elbowed the old man out of their way and lifted the young Earl of Gormenghast, as ragged a creature as themselves, as though he were a sack of gravel, and shuffling to the car they laid him in the stern of the indescribable vehicle – that chaos of mildewed leather, sodden leaves, old cages, broken springs, rust and general squalor.

Muzzlehatch, following them with long, slow, arrogant strides, had reached about halfway to his diabolical car when a pelt of darkness shifted in the sky and the scarlet rim of an enormous sun began to cut its way up as though with a razor’s edge, and immediately the boats and their crews and the cormoranteers and their bottle-necked birds, and the rushes and the muddy bank and the mules and the vehicles and the nets and the spears and the river itself, became ribbed and flecked with flame.

But Muzzlehatch had no eye for all this and it was well for Titus that this was so, for on turning his head from the day-break as though it were about as interesting as an old sock, he saw, by the light of what he was dismissing, two men approaching smoothly and rapidly, with helmets on their identical heads and scrolls of parchment in their hands.

Muzzlehatch lifted his eyebrows so that his somewhat louring forehead became rucked up like the crumpled leather at the back of his car. Turning his eyes to the machine, as though to judge how far it was away, he continued walking towards it with a barely perceptible lengthening of his stride.

The two men who were approaching seemed to be not so much walking as gliding, so smoothly they advanced, and those fishers who were still left upon the cobbled waterfront parted at their approach, for they made their way unswervingly to where Titus lay.

How they could know that he was in the car at all is hard to conceive: but know it they did, and with helmets glittering in the dawn rays they bore down upon him with ghastly deliberation.

NINE

It was then that Titus roused himself and lifted his face from his arms and saw nothing but the flush of the dawn sky above him and the profuse scattering of the stars.

What use were they? His stomach cried with hunger and he shook with the cold. He raised himself upon one elbow and moistened his lips. His wet clothes clung to him like seaweed. The acrid smell of the mouldering leather began to force itself upon his consciousness, and then, as though to offer him something different by way of a change, he found himself staring into the face of a large rudder-nosed man who at the next moment had vaulted into the front seat, where he slid into an all but horizontal position. Lying at this angle he began to press a number of buttons, each one of which, replying to his prodding finger, helped to create a tumult quite vile upon the eardrums. At the height of this cacophony the car backfired with such violence that a dog turned over in its sleep four miles away, and then, with an upheaval that lifted the bonnet of the car and brought it down again with a crash of metal, the wild thing shook itself as though bent upon its own destruction, shook itself, roared, and leapt forward and away down tortuous alleys still wet and black with the night shadows.

Street after street flew at them as they sped through the waking town; flew at them and broke apart at the prow-like bonnet. The streets, the houses, rushed by on either side, and Titus, clinging to an old brass railing, gasped at the air that ran into his lungs like icy water.

It was all that Titus could do to persuade himself that the impetuous vehicle was, in fact, being driven at all, for he could see nothing of the driver. It seemed that the car had an existence of its own and was making its own decisions. What Titus could see was that instead of a normal mascot, this stranger who was driving him (though why or where he did not know) had fixed along the brass cap of the radiator the sun-bleached skull of a crocodile. The cold air whistled between its teeth and the long crown of its skull was flushed with sunrise.

For now the sun was clear of the horizon, and as the world flew past, it climbed, so that for the first time Titus became aware of the nature of the city into which he had drifted like a dead branch.

A voice roared past his ears, ‘Hold tight, you pauper!’ and the sound flew away into the cold air as the car swerved in a sickening loop, and then again and again as the walls reared up before them, only to stream away in a high torrent of stone; and then, at last, diving beneath a low arch, the car, turning and slowing as it turned, came to rest in a walled-in courtyard.

The courtyard was cobbled and in between the cobbles the grass flourished.

TEN

Around three sides of the yard the walls of a massive stone-built building blocked the dawn away, save in one place where the slanting rays ran through a high eastern window and out of an even higher western window to end their journey in a pool of radiance upon a cold slate roof.

Ignorant of its setting and of the prodigious length of its shadow; ignorant that its drab little breast glowed in the sunrise, a sparrow pecked at its tinted wing. It was as though an urchin, scratching himself, absorbed in what he was doing, had become transfigured.

Meanwhile Muzzlehatch had rolled out of the driver’s seat and lashed the car, as though it were an animal, to the mulberry tree which grew in the centre of the yard.

Then he meandered with long, lazy, loose-jointed strides towards the dark north-western corner of the yard and whistled between his teeth with the penetration of a steam whistle. A face appeared at a window above his head. And then another. And then another. There was then a great rattling to be heard of feet upon stairs, and the jangling of a bell, and behind these noises a further noise, more continuous and more diverse, for there was about it the suggestion of beasts and birds; of a howling and a coughing and a screaming and a kind of hooting sound, but all of it in the distance and afar from the foreground noises, the feet loud upon the stairs and the jangling of a near-by bell.

Then out of the shadows that hung like black water against the walls of the great building a group of servants broke from the house and ran towards their master, who had returned to his car.

Titus was sitting up, with his face drawn, and as he sat there facing the huge Muzzlehatch, he became, without thought, without cognizance, irrationally savage, for at the back of his mind was an earlier time when for all the horror and the turmoil and the repetitive idiocy of his immemorial home, he was in his own right the Lord of a Domain.

The hunger burned in his stomach but there was another burn, the heartburn of the displaced; the unrecognized; the unrecognizable.

Why did they not know of him? What right had any man to touch him? To whirl him away on four mouldering wheels? To abduct him and to force him to his courtyard? To lean over him and stare at him with eyebrows raised? What right had anyone to save him? He was no child! He had known horror. He had fought, and he had killed. He had lost his sister and his father and the long man Flay, loyal as the stones of Gormenghast. And he had held an elf in his arms and seen her struck by lightning to a cinder, when the sky fell in and the world reeled. He was no child … no child … no child at all, and rising shakily to his feet he stood swaying in his weakness as he swung his fist at Muzzlehatch’s face – a vast face that seemed to disintegrate before him, only to clear again … only to dissolve.

His fist was caught in the capacious paw of the rudder-nosed man, who signed to his servants to carry Titus to a low room where the walls from floor to ceiling were lined with glass cases, where, beautifully pinned to sheets of cork, a thousand moths spread out their wings in a great gesture of crucifixion.

It was in this room that Titus was given a bowl of soup which, in his weakness, he kept spilling, until the spoon was taken from him, and a small man with a chip out of his ear fed him gently as he lay, half-reclined, on a long wicker chair. Even before he was halfway through his bowl of soup he fell back on the cushions, and was within a moment or two drawn incontinently into the void of a deep sleep.

ELEVEN

When he awoke the room was full of light. A blanket was up to his chin. On a barrel by his side was his only possession, an egg-shaped flint from the Tower of Gormenghast.

The chip-eared man came in.

‘Hullo there, you ruffian,’ he said. ‘Are you awake?’

Titus nodded his head.

‘Never known a scarecrow to sleep so long.’

‘How long?’ said Titus, raising himself on one elbow.

‘Nineteen hours,’ said the man. ‘Here’s your breakfast.’ He deposited a loaded tray at the side of the couch and then he turned away, but stopped at the door.

‘What’s your name, boy?’ he said.

‘Titus Groan.’

‘And where d’you come from?’

‘Gormenghast.’

‘That’s the word. That’s the word indeed. “Gormenghast.” If you said it once you said it twenty times.’

‘What! In my sleep?’

‘In your sleep. Over and over. Where is it, boy? This place. This Gormenghast.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Titus.

‘Ah,’ said the little man with the chip out of his ear, and he squinted at Titus sideways from under his eyebrows. ‘You don’t know, don’t you? That’s peculiar, now. But eat your breakfast. You must be hollow as a kettledrum.’

Titus sat up and began to eat, and as he ate he reached for the flint and moved his hand over its familiar contours. It was his only anchor. It was, for him, in microcosm, his home.

And while he gripped it, not in weakness or sentiment but for the sake of its density, and proof of its presence, and while the midday sunlight sifted itself to and fro across the room, a dreadful sound erupted in the courtyard and the open door of his room was all at once darkened, not by the chip-eared man but, more effectively, by the hindquarters of an enormous mule.

TWELVE

Titus, sitting bolt upright, stared incredulously at the rear of this great bristling beast whose tail was mercilessly thrashing its own body. A group of improbable muscles seldom brought into play started, now here, now there, across its shuddering rump. It fought in situ with something on the other side of the door until it forced its way inch by inch out into the courtyard again, taking a great piece of the wall with it. And all the time the hideous, sickening sound of hate; for there is something stirred up in the breasts of mules and camels when they have the scent of one another which darkens the imagination.

Jumping to his feet, Titus crossed the room and gazed with awe at the antagonists. He was no stranger to violence, but there was something peculiarly horrible about this duel. There they were, not thirty feet away, locked in deadly grapple, a conflict without scale.

In that camel were all the camels that had ever been. Blind with a hatred far beyond its own power to invent, it fought a world of mules; of mules that since the dawn of time have bared their teeth at their intrinsic foe.

What a setting was that cobbled yard, now warm and golden in the sunlight, the gutter of the building thronged with sparrows; the mulberry tree basking in the sunbeams, its leaves hanging quietly while the two beasts fought to kill.

By now the courtyard was agog with servants and there were shouts and countershouts and then a horrible quiet, for it could be seen that the mule’s teeth had met in the camel’s throat. Then came a wheeze like the sound of a tide sucked out of a cave; a shuffle of shingle, and the rattle of pebbles.

And yet that bite that would have killed a score of men appeared to be no more than an incident in this battle, for now it was the mule who lay beneath the weight of its enemy, and suffered great pain, for its jaw had been broken by a slam of the hoof and a paralysing butt of the head.

Sickened but thrilled, Titus took a step into the courtyard, and the first thing he saw was Muzzlehatch. This gentleman was giving orders with a peculiar detachment, mindless that he was stark naked except for a fireman’s helmet. A number of servants were unwinding an old but powerful-looking hose, one end of which had already been screwed into a vast brass hydrant. The other end was gurgling and spluttering in Muzzlehatch’s arms.

Its nozzle trained at the double-creature, the hose-pipe squirmed and jumped like a conger, and suddenly a long, flexible jet of ice-cold water leapt across the quadrangle.

This white jet, like a knife, pierced here and there, until, as though the bonfire of their hatred had been doused, the camel and the mule, relaxing their grips, got slowly to their feet, bleeding horribly, a cloud of animal heat rising around them.

Then every eye was turned to Muzzlehatch, who took off his brass helmet and placed it over his heart.

As though this were not peculiar enough, Titus was next to witness how Muzzlehatch ordered his servants to turn off the water, to seat themselves on the floor of the wet courtyard, and to keep silent, and all by the language of his expressive eyebrows alone. Then, more peculiar still, he was surprised to hear the naked man address the shuddering beasts from whose backs great clouds of steam were rising.

‘My atavistic, my inordinate friends,’ whispered Muzzlehatch in a voice like sandpaper, ‘I know full well that when you smell one another, then you grow restless, then you grow thoughtless, then you go … too far. I concede the ripe condition of your blood; the darkness of your native anger; the gulches of your ire. But listen to me with those ears of yours and fix your eyes upon me. Whatever your temptation, whatever your primordial hankering, yet’ (he addressed the camel), ‘yet you have no excuse in the world grown sick of excuses. It was not for you to charge the iron rails of your cage, nor, having broken them down, to vent your spleen upon this mule of ours. And it was not for you’ (he addressed the mule), ‘to seek this rough-and-tumble nor to scream with such unholy lust for battle. I will have no more of it, my friends! Let this be trouble enough. What, after all, have you done for me? Very little, if anything. But I – I have fed you on fruit and onions, scraped your backs with bill-hooks, cleaned out your cages with pearl-handled spades, and kept you safe from the carnivores and the bow-legged eagle. O, the ingratitude! Unregenerate and vile! So you broke loose on me, did you – and reverted!’

The two beasts began to shuffle to and fro, one on its hassock-sized pads and the other on its horny hooves.

‘Back to your cages with you! Or by the yellow light in your wicked eyes I will have you shaved and salted.’ He pointed to the archway through which they had fought their way into the courtyard – an archway that linked the yard in which they stood to the twelve square acres where animals of all kinds paced their narrow dens or squatted on long branches in the sun.

THIRTEEN

The camel and the mule lowered their terrible heads and began their way back to the arch, through which they shuffled side by side.

What was going on in those two skulls? Perhaps some kind of pleasure that after so many years of incarceration they had at last been able to vent their ancient malice, and plunge their teeth into the enemy. Perhaps, also, they felt some kind of pleasure in sensing the bitterness they were arousing in the breasts of the other animals.

They stepped out of the tunnel, or long archway, on the southern side, and were at once in full view of at least a score of cages.

The sunlight lay like a gold gauze over the zoo. The bars of the cages were like rods of gold, and the animals and birds were flattened by the bright slanting rays, so that they seemed cut out of coloured cardboard or from the pages of some book of beasts.

Every head was turned towards the wicked pair; heads furred and heads naked; heads with beaks and heads with horns; heads with scales and heads with plumes. They were all turned, and being so, made not the slightest movement.

But the camel and the mule were anything but embarrassed. They had tasted freedom and they had tasted blood, and it was with a quite indescribable arrogance that they swaggered towards the cages, their thick, blue lips curled back over their disgusting teeth; their nostrils dilated and their eyes yellow with pride.

If hatred could have killed them they would have expired a hundred times on the way to their cages. The silence was like breath held at the ribs.

And then it broke, for a shrill scream pierced the air like a splinter, and the monkey, whose voice it was, shook the bars of its cage with hands and feet in an access of jealousy so that the iron rattled as the scream went on and on and on, while other voices joined it and reverberated through the prisons so that every kind of animal became a part of bedlam.

The tropics burned and broke in ancient loins. Phantom lianas sagged and dripped with poison. The jungle howled and every howl howled back.

FOURTEEN

Titus followed a group of servants through the archway and into the open on the other side where the din became all but unbearable.

Not fifty feet from where he stood was Muzzlehatch astride a mottled stag, a creature as powerful and gaunt as its rider. He was grasping the beast’s antlers in one hand, and with the other he was gesticulating to some men who were already, under his guidance, beginning to mend the buckled cages, at the back of which sat the miscreants licking their wounds and grinning horribly.

Very gradually the noise subsided and Muzzlehatch, turning from the scene, saw Titus, and with a peremptory gesture beckoned him. But Titus, who had been about to greet the intellectual ruffian who sat astride the stag like some ravaged god, stayed where he was, for he saw no reason why he should obey, like a dog to the whistle.

Seeing how the young vagrant made no response Muzzlehatch grinned, and turning the stag about he made to pass his guest as though he were not there, when Titus, remembering how his host-of-one-night had saved him from capture and had fed him and slept him, lifted his hand as though to halt the stag. Staring at the stag-rider, Titus realized that he had never really seen that face before, for he was no longer tired nor were his eyes blurred, and the head had come into a startling focus – a focus that seemed to enlarge rather than contract, a head of great scale with its crop of black hair, its nose like a rudder, and its eyes all broken up with little flecks and lights, like diamonds or fractured glass, and its mouth, wide, tough, lipless, almost blasphemously mobile, for no one with such a mouth could pray aloud to any god at all, for the mouth was wrong for prayer. This head was like a challenge or a threat to all decent citizens.

Titus was about to thank this Muzzlehatch, but on gazing at the craggy face he saw that his thanks would find no answer, and it was Muzzlehatch himself who volunteered the information that he considered Titus to be a soft and rancid egg if he imagined that he, Muzzlehatch, had ever lifted a finger to help anyone in his life, let alone a bunch of rags out of the river.

If he had helped Titus it was only to amuse himself and to pass the time, for life can be a bore without action, which in its turn can be a bore without danger.

‘Besides,’ he continued, gazing over Titus’ shoulder at a distant baboon, ‘I dislike the police. I dislike their feet. I dislike that whiff of leather, oil and fur, camphor and blood. I dislike officials, who are nothing, my dear boy, but the pip-headed, trash-bellied putrid scrannel of earth. Out of darkness it is born.’

‘What is?’ said Titus.

‘There is no point in erecting a structure,’ said Muzzlehatch, taking no notice of Titus’ question, ‘unless someone else pulls it down. There is no value in a rule until it is broken. There is nothing in life unless there is death at the back of it. Death, dear boy, leaning over the edge of the world and grinning like a boneyard.’

He swung his gaze from the distant baboon and pulled back the antlers of the mottled stag until the creature’s head pointed at the sky. Then he stared at Titus.

‘Don’t burden me with gratitude, dear boy. I have no time for –’

‘Don’t bother,’ said Titus. ‘I will never thank you.’

‘Then go,’ said Muzzlehatch.

The blood ran into Titus’ face and his eyes shone.

‘Who do you think you are talking to?’ he whispered.

Muzzlehatch looked up sharply. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘who am I talking to? Your eyes blaze like the eyes of a beggar – or of a lord.’

‘Why not?’ said Titus. ‘That is what I am.’

FIFTEEN

He made his way back through the tunnel and across the quadrangle and so out of the grounds until he came to a spider’s web of tortuous lanes, and walking on and on, found himself at last upon a wide stone highway.

From there he saw the river far below and smoke rising in rosy plumes from countless chimneys.

But Titus turned his back on the vista and, as he climbed, two long cars, side by side, flashed by without a sound. There could have been no more than an inch of space between them as they sped.

At the back of the cars, one in each, and very upright, sat two dark, bejewelled, deep-bosomed women who had no eyes for the flying landscape but smiled at each other with unhealthy concentration.

Far behind in the wake of the cars and farther with every passing moment, a small ugly black dog with its legs far too short for its body, tore with a ridiculous concentration of purpose down the centre of the long winding road.

As Titus climbed and as the trees closed in on either side, he wondered at a change that had come over him. The remorse that had filled him lately with so black a cloud had spent itself and there was a ripple in his blood and a spring in his step. He knew himself to be a deserter; a traitor to his birthright, the ‘shame’ of Gormenghast. He knew how he had wounded the castle, wounded the very stones of his home; wounded his mother … all this he knew in his head, but it did not affect him.

He could only see now the truth of it – that he could never turn back the pages.

He was Lord Titus, Seventy-Seventh Lord of Gormenghast, but he was also a limb of life, a sprig, an adventurer, ready for love or hate: ready to use his wits in a foreign world; ready for anything.

This was what lay beyond those far horizons. This was the pith of it. New cities and new mountains; new rivers and new creatures. New men and new women.

But then a shadow came over his face. How was it that they were so self-sufficient, those women in their cars, or Muzzlehatch with his zoo – having no knowledge of Gormenghast, which was of course the heart of everything?

He climbed on, his shadow climbing beside him on the beautiful white stone of which the road was built, until he had almost reached a dividing of the highway, the eastern arm, an aisle of great oaks, and the western … but Titus was not able to fix his attention upon the trees nor upon anything else, for moving out of the shade into the sunlight, with a dreadful unhurried pace, were the two tall figures, identical in every way, their helmets casting a deep shade across their eyes, their bodies moving smoothly across the ground.

SIXTEEN

Without waiting for any orders from the brain a demon in his feet had already carried Titus deep into the flanking trees, and through the great park-like forest he ran and ran and ran, turning now this way and now that way until one would say he was irrevocably lost, were it not that he was always so.

But when, having fallen exhausted, he got to his knees and parted some branches, he found himself gazing at the very road from which he had fled. But there was no one there and after some while he walked out boldly and stood in the centre of the road as though to say, ‘Do your worst.’ But nothing happened except that what Titus had taken to be an old thorn bush got to its feet and shambled its way towards him, its shadow like a crab on the white stone highway. When it had come so close to Titus that he could have touched it with an outstretched foot the thorn bush spoke.

‘I am a beggar,’ it said, and the soft grit of its dreadful voice sent Titus’ heart into his mouth. ‘That is why I am stretching out my withered arm. Do you see it? Eh? Would you call it beautiful with that claw at the end of it – can you see it?’

The beggar stared at Titus through the red circles of his eyelids, and alternately shook his old knuckly fist and opened it out with the palm upwards.

The palm of that hand was like the delta of some foul dried-up river. At its centre was a kind of callus or horny disc, a telltale shape that argued the receipt and passage of many coins.

‘What do you want?’ said Titus. ‘I have no money for you. I thought you were a thorn bush.’

‘I’ll thorn you!’ said the beggar. ‘How dare you refuse me! Me! An emperor! Dog! Whelp! Cur! Empty your gold into my sacred throat.’

‘Sacred throat! What does he mean by that?’ thought Titus, but only for a moment, for suddenly the beggar was no longer there but was twenty feet away and was staring down the white highway looking more like a thorn bush than ever. One of his arms, like a branch, was crook’d so that the claw at the end of it was conveniently cupped at the ear.

Then Titus heard it – the distant whirring sound of a fast machine, and a moment later a yellow car the shape of a shark sped from the south.

It seemed that the cantankerous old mendicant was about to be run down, for he stood on the crown of the road with his arms out like a scarecrow, but the yellow shark swerved past him, and as it did so a coin was tossed into the air by the driver, or by the shape that could only be the driver, for there was nothing else at the wheel but something in a sheet.

It was gone as quietly as it had arrived and Titus turned his face to the beggar, who had retrieved the coin. Seeing that he was being scrutinized the beggar leered at Titus and threw out his tongue like the mildewed tongue of a boot. Then to Titus’ amazement the foul old man swung back his head and, dropping the silver coin into his mouth, swallowed it at a gulp.

‘Tell me, you dirty old man,’ said Titus softly, for a kind of hot anger filled him and a desire to squash the creature beneath his feet, ‘why do you eat money?’ And Titus picked up a rock from beside the road.

‘Whelp!’ said the beggar at last. ‘Do you think I’d waste my wealth? Coins are too big, you dog, to sidle through me. Too small to kill me. Too heavy to be lost! I am a beggar.’

‘You are a travesty,’ said Titus, ‘and when you die the earth will breathe again.’

Titus dropped the heavy stone he had lifted in anger, and with not a backward glance made for the right-hand fork where, with a prodigious sigh, an avenue of cedars inhaled him, as though he were a gnat.

SEVENTEEN

Tree after tree slid by to the pace of his footsteps. In the gloom of the cedars his heart was happy. Happy in the chill of the tunnel. Happy in the danger of it all. Happy to remember his own childhood and how he had acquitted himself in a tract of ivy. Happy in spite of the helmeted spies, though they awoke within him a dark alarm.

He had lived on his wits for what seemed so long a while that he was very different now from the youth who had ridden away.

It had seemed that the avenue was endless, but suddenly and unexpectedly the last of the cedars floated away behind him as though from a laying-on of hands, and the wide sky looked down, and there before him was the first of the structures.

He had heard of them but had not expected anything quite so far removed from the buildings he had known, let alone the architecture of Gormenghast.

The first to catch his eye was a pale-green edifice, very elegant, but so simple in design that Titus’ gaze could find no resting place upon its slippery surface.

Next to this building was a copper dome the shape of an igloo but ninety feet in height, with a tapering mast, spider-frail and glinting in the sunlight. An ugly crow was sitting on the cross-tree and fouling from time to time the bright dome beneath.

Titus sat down by the side of the road and frowned. He had been born and bred to the assumption that buildings were ancient by nature, and were and always had been in the process of crumbling away. The white dust lolling between the gaping bricks; the worm in the wood. The weed dislodging the stone; corrosion and mildew; the crumbling patina; the fading shades; the beauty of decay.

Unable to remain seated, for his curiosity was stronger than his longing to rest, he got to his feet and, wondering why there was no one about, began to make his way to whatever lay beyond the dome, for the buildings curved away as though to obscure some great circle or arena. And indeed it was something of this kind that broke upon his view as he rounded the dome, and he came to a halt through sheer amazement; for it was vast. Vast as a grey desert, its marble surface glowing with a dull opaque light. The only thing that could be said to break the emptiness was the reflection of the structures that surrounded it.

The farthest away of these buildings, in other words those that fanned out in a glittering arc on the opposite side of the arena, were, to Titus’ gaze, no larger than stamps, thorns, nails, acorns, or tiny crystals, save for one gigantic edifice out-topping all the rest, which was like an azure match-box on its end.

EIGHTEEN

Had Titus come across a world of dragons he could hardly have been more amazed than by these fantasies of glass and metal; and he turned himself about more than once as though it were possible to catch a last glimpse of the tortuous, poverty-stricken town he had left behind him, but the district of Muzzlehatch was hidden away by a fold in the hills and the ruins of Gormenghast were afloat in a haze of time and space.

And yet, though his eyes shone with the thrill of his discovery, he suffered at the same time a pang of resentment – a resentment that this alien realm should be able to exist in a world that appeared to have no reference to his home and which seemed, in fact, supremely self-sufficient. A region that had never heard of Fuchsia and her death, nor of her father, the melancholy earl, nor of his mother the countess with her strange liquid whistle that brought wild birds to her from distant spinneys.

Were they coeval; were they simultaneous? These worlds; these realms – could they both be true? Were there no bridges? Was there no common land? Did the same sun shine upon them? Had they the constellations of the night in common?

When the storm came down upon these crystal structures, and the sky was black with rain, what of Gormenghast? Was Gormenghast dry? And when the thunder growled in his ancient home was there never any echo hereabouts?

What of the rivers? Were they separate? Was there no tributary, even, to feel its way into another world?

Where lay the long horizons? Where throbbed the frontiers? O terrible division! The near and the far. The night and the day. The yes and the no.

A VOICE. ‘O Titus, can’t you remember?’

TITUS. ‘I can remember everything except …’

VOICE. ‘Except …?’

TITUS. ‘Except the way.’

VOICE. The way where?’

TITUS. ‘The way home.’

VOICE. ‘Home?’

TITUS. ‘Home. Home where the dust gathers and the legends are. But I have lost my bearings.’

VOICE. ‘You have the sun and the North Star.’

TITUS. ‘But is it the same sun? And are the stars the stars of Gormenghast?’

He looked up and was surprised to find himself alone. His hands were cold with sweat, and the dread of being lost and having no proof of his own identity filled him with a sudden stabbing terror.

He looked about him at this sheer and foreign land, and then, all in a breath, something fled across the sky. It made no sound other than the slither of a finger across a slate, though it seemed to have passed as close as a scythe.

By now it was settling, a speck of crimson on the far side of the marble desert where the furthest mansions glinted. It had seemed to have no wings but an incredible purpose and beauty, like a stiletto or a needle, and as Titus fixed his eyes upon the building in whose shadow it lay, he thought he could see not one, but a swarm.

And this was so. Not only was there already quite a fleet of fish-shaped, needle-shaped, knife-shaped, shark-shaped, splinter-shaped devices, but all kinds of land-machines of curious design.

NINETEEN

Before him lay stretched the grey marble, a thousand acres of it, with its margins filled with the reflections of the mansions.

To walk alone across it, in view of all the distant windows, terraces, and roof-gardens was to proclaim arrogance, naked and culpable. But this is what he did, and when he had been walking for some while a small green dart detached itself from the planes on the far side of the arena and sped towards him, its glass-green belly skimming the marble, and an instant later it was upon him, only to veer at the last moment and sing away into the stratosphere, only to plunge, only to circle Titus’ head in narrowing gyres, only to return like a whippet of the air to the black mansion.

Bewildered, startled as he was, Titus began to laugh, though his laughter was not altogether without a touch of hysteria.

This exquisite beast of the air; this wingless swallow; this aerial leopard; this fish of the water-sky; this threader of moonbeams; this dandy of the dawn; this metal play-boy; this wanderer in black spaces; this flash in the night; this drinker of its own speed; this godlike child of a diseased brain – what did it do?

What did it do but act like any other petty snooper, prying upon man and child, sucking information as a bat sucks blood; amoral; mindless; sent out on empty missions, acting as its maker would act, its narrow-headed maker – so that its beauty was a thing on its own, beautiful only because its function shapes it so; and having no heart it becomes fatuous – a fatuous reflection of a fatuous concept – so that it is incongruous, or gobbles incongruity to such an outlandish degree that laughter is the only way out.

And so Titus laughed, and as he laughed, high-pitched and uncontrolled (for at the back of it all he was scared and little relished the idea of being singled out, pin-pointed, and examined by a mechanical brain), while he laughed, he began at the same time to run, for there was something ominous in the air, ominous and ludicrous – something that told him that to stay any longer on this marble tract was to court trouble, to be held a vagrant, a spy, or a madman.

Indeed the sky was beginning to fill with every shape of craft, and little clusters of people were spreading out across the arena like a stain.

TWENTY

Seen from above Titus must have appeared very small as he ran on and on. Seen from above, it could also be realized how isolated in the wide world was the arena with its bright circumference of crystal buildings: how bizarre and ingenious it was, and how unrelated it was to the bone-white, cave-pocked, barren mountains, the fever-swamps and jungles to the south, the thirsty lands, the hungry cities, and the tracts beyond of the wolf and the outlaw.

It was when Titus was within a hundred yards of the olive palace, and as the princes of maintenance turned or paused in their work to stare at the ragged youth, that a gun boomed, and for a few minutes there was a complete silence, for everyone stopped talking and the engines were shut off in every craft.

This gun-boom had come just in time, for had it been delayed a moment longer Titus must surely have been grabbed and questioned. Two men, halted in their tracks by the detonation, drew back their lips from their teeth and scowled with frustration, their hands halted in mid-air.

On every side of him were faces; faces for the most part turned towards him. Malignant faces, speculative faces, empty faces, ingenuous faces – faces of all kinds. It was quite obvious that he would never pass unnoticed. From being lost and obscure he was the focus of attention. Now, as they posed at every angle, as stiff as scarecrows caught in the full flight of living, their halfway gestures frozen – now was his time to escape.

He had no idea of the significance which was presumably attached to the firing of the cannon. As it was he was served well by his own ignorance and with a pounding heart he ran like a deer, dodging this way and that way through the crowd until he came to the most majestic of the palaces. Racing up the shallow glass pavements and into the weird and lucent gloom of the great halls, it was not long before he had left the custom-shackled hierophants behind him. It is true that there was a great number of persons scattered about the floor of the building who stared at Titus whenever he came into their range of vision. They could not turn their heads to follow him, nor even their eyes because the cannon had boomed, but when he passed across their vision they knew at once he was not one of them and that he had no right to be in the olive palace. And then as he ran on and on the cannon boomed again and at once Titus knew that the world was after him, for the air became torn with cries and counter-cries, and suddenly four men turned a corner of the long glass corridor, their reflections in the glazed floor as detailed and as crisp as their true selves.

‘There he goes,’ cried a voice. ‘There go the rags!’ But when they reached the spot where Titus had halted for a moment they found he was indeed gone and all they had to stare at were the closed doors of a lift shaft.

Titus, who had found himself cornered, had turned to the vast, purring, topaz-studded lift not knowing exactly what it was. That its elegant jaws should have been open and ready was his salvation. He sprang inside and the gates, drawing themselves together, closed as though they ran through butter.

The interior of the lift was like an underwater grotto, filled with subdued lights. Something hazy and voluptuous seemed to hover in the air. But Titus was in no mood for subtleties. He was a fugitive. And then he saw that wavering in his underwater world were rows of ivory buttons, each button carved into some flower, face, or skull.

He could hear the sound of footsteps running and angry voices outside the door and he jabbed indiscriminately among the buttons, and immediately soaring through floor after floor in a whirl of steel the lift all at once inhaled its own speed and the doors slid open of their own accord.

How quiet it was and cool. There was no furniture, only a single palm tree growing out of the floor. A small red parrot sat on one of the upper branches and pecked itself. When it saw Titus it cocked its head on one side and then with great rapidity it kept repeating, ‘Bloody corker told me so!’ This phrase was reiterated a dozen times at least before the bird continued pecking at its wing.

There were four doors in this cool upper hall. Three led to corridors but the last one, when Titus opened it, let in the sky. There, before and slightly below him, lay spread the roof.

TWENTY-ONE

No one found him all that sun-scorched evening and when the twilight came and the shadows withered he was able to steal to and fro across the wide glass roofscape and see what was going on in the rooms below.

For the most part the glass was too thick for Titus to see more than a blur of coloured shapes and shadows but he came at last to an open skylight through which he could see without obstruction a scene of great diversity and splendour.

To say a party was in progress would be a mean and cheese-paring way of putting it. The long sitting-room or salon, no more than twelve or fifteen feet below him, was in the throes of it. Life, of a kind, was in spate.

Music leaped from the long room and swarmed out of the skylight while Titus lay on his stomach on the warm glass roof, his eyes wide with conjecture. The sunken sun had left behind it a dim red weight of air. The stars were growing fiercer every moment, when the music suddenly ended in a string of notes like coloured bubbles and to take their place a hundred tongues began to wag at once.

Titus half closed his eyes at the effulgence of a forest of candles, the sparkle of glass and mirrors, and the leaping reflections of light from polished wood and silver. It was so close to him that had he coughed a dozen faces would, for all the noise in the room, have turned at once to the skylight and discovered him. It was like nothing else he had seen, and even from the first glimpse, it appeared as much like a gathering of creatures, of birds and beasts and flowers, as a gathering of humans.

They were all there. The giraffe-men and the hippopotamus-men. The serpent-ladies and the heron-ladies. The aspens and the oaks: the thistles and the ferns – the beetles and the moths – the crocodiles and the parrots: the tigers and the lambs: vultures with pearls around their necks and bison in tails.

But this was only for a flash, for as Titus, drawing a deep breath, stared again, the distortions, the extremes, appeared to crumble, to slip away from the surge of heads below him, and he was again among his own species.

Titus could feel the heat rising from the long dazzling room so close below him – yet distant as a rainbow. The hot air as it rose was impregnated with scent; a dozen of the most expensive perfumes were fighting for survival. Everything was fighting for survival – with lungs, and credulity.

There were limbs and heads and bodies everywhere: and there were faces! There were the foreground faces; the middle distance faces; and the faces far away. And in the irregular gaps between the faces were parts of faces, and halves and quarters at every tilt and angle.

This panorama in depth was on the move, whole heads turning, now here, now there, while all the while a counterpoint of tadpole quickness, something in the nature of a widespread agitation, was going on, because, for every head or body that changed its position in space there would be a hundred flickering eyelids; a hundred fluttering lips, a fluctuating arabesque of hands. The whole effect had something in the nature of foliage about it, as when green breezes flirt in poplar trees.

Commanding as was Titus’ view of the human sea below him, yet however hard he tried he could not discover who the hosts might be. Presumably an hour or two earlier when even a deep breath was possible without adding to the discomfort of some shoulder or adjacent bosom – presumably the ornate flunkey (now pinned against a marble statue) had announced the names of the guests as they arrived; but all that was over. The flunkey, whose head, much to his embarrassment, was wedged between the ample breasts of the marble statue, could no longer even see the door through which the guests arrived, let alone draw breath enough to announce them.

Titus, watching from above, marvelled at the spectacle and while he lay there on the roof, a half-moon above him, with its chill and greenish light, and the warm glow of the party below him, was able not only to take in the diversity of the guests but, in regard to those who stood immediately below him, to overhear their conversation …

TWENTY-TWO

‘Thank heavens it’s all over now.’

‘What is?’

‘My youth. It took too long and got in my way.’

‘In your way, Mr Thirst? How do you mean?’

‘It went on for so long,’ said Thirst. ‘I had about thirty years of it. You know what I mean. Experiment, experiment, experiment. And now …’

‘Ah!’ whispered someone.

‘I used to write poems,’ said Thirst, a pale man. He made as if to place his hands upon the shoulder of his confidant, but the crush was too great. ‘It passed the time away.’

‘Poems,’ said a pontifical voice from just behind their shoulders, ‘… should make time stand still.’

The pale man, who had jumped a little, merely muttered, ‘Mine didn’t,’ before he turned to observe the gentleman who had interpolated. The stranger’s face was quite inexpressive and it was hard to believe that he had opened his mouth. But now there was another tongue at large.

‘Talking of poems,’ it said, and it belonged to a dark, cadaverous, over-distinguished nostril-flaring man with a long blue jaw and chronic eyestrain, ‘reminds me of a poem.’

‘I wonder why,’ said Thirst irritably, for he had been on the brink of expansion.

The man with eyestrain took no notice of the remark.

‘The poem which I am reminded of is one which I wrote myself.’

A bald man knitted his brows; the pontifical gentleman lit a cigar, his face as expressionless as ever; and a lady, the lobes of whose ears had been ruined by the weight of two gigantic sapphires, half opened her mouth with an inane smirk of anticipation.

The dark man with eyestrain folded his hands before him.

‘It didn’t come off,’ he said, ‘– although it had something –’ (he twisted his lips). ‘Sixty-four stanzas in fact.’ (He raised his eyes) ‘– Yes, yes – it was very, very long and ambitious – but it didn’t come off. And why …?’

He paused, not because he wanted any suggestions, but in order to take a deep, meditative breath.

‘I will tell you why, my friends. It didn’t come off because you see, it was verse all the time.’

‘Blank verse?’ inquired the lady, whose head was bent forward by the weight of the sapphires. She was eager to be helpful. ‘Was it blank verse?’

‘It went like this,’ said the dark man, unclasping his hands before him and clasping them behind him, and at the same time placing the heel of his left shoe immediately in front of the toe of his right shoe so that the two feet formed a single and unbroken line of leather. ‘It went like this.’ He lifted his head. ‘But do not forget it is not Poetry – except perhaps for three singing lines at the outside.’

‘Well, for the love of Parnassus – let’s have it,’ broke in the petulant voice of Mr Thirst who, finding his thunder stolen, was no longer interested in good manners.

‘A-l-t-h-o-u-g-h,’ mused the man with the long blue jaw, who seemed to consider other people’s time and patience as inexhaustible commodities like air, or water, ‘a-l-t-h-o-u-g-h,’ (he lingered over the word like a nurse over a sick child), ‘there were those who said the whole thing sang; who hailed it as the purest poetry of our generation – “incandescent stuff” as one gentleman put it – but there you are – there you are – how is one to tell?’

‘Ah,’ whispered a voice of curds and whey. And a man with gold teeth turned his eyes to the lady with the sapphires, and they exchanged the arch expression of those who find themselves, however unworthily, to be witnesses at an historic moment.

‘Quiet please,’ said the poet. ‘And listen carefully.’

A mule at prayer! Ignore him: turn to me

Until the gold contraption of our love

Rattles its seven biscuit boxes, and the sea

Withdraws its combers from the rhubarb-grove.

This is no place for maudlin-headed fays

To smirk behind their mushrooms! ’t is a shore

For gaping daemons: it is such a place,

As I, my love, have long been looking for.

Here, where the rhubarb-grove into the wave

Throws down its rueful image, we can fly

Our kites of love, above the sandy grave

Of those long lost in ambiguity.

For love is ripest in a rhubarb-grove

Where weird reflections glimmer through the dawn:

O vivid essence vegetably wove

Of hues that die, the moment they are born.

Lost in the venal void our dreams deflate

By easy stages through green atmosphere:

Imagination’s bright balloon is late,

Like the blue whale, in coming up for air.

It is not known what genus of the wild

Black plums of thought best wrinkle, twitch and flow

Into sweet wisdom’s prune – for in the mild

Orchards of love there is no need to know.

What use to cry for Capricorn? it sails

Across the heart’s red atlas: it is found

Only within the ribs, where all the tails

The tempest has are whisking it around.

No time for tears: it is enough, today,

That we, meandering these granular shores

Should watch the ponderous billows at their play

Like midnight beasts with garlands in their jaws …

It was obvious that the poem was still in its early stages. The novelty of seeing so distinguished-looking a man behave in a manner so blatant, so self-centred, so withdrawn at one and the same time had intrigued Titus so keenly that he had outlasted at least thirty guests since the poem started. The lady with the sapphires and Mr Thirst had long since edged away, but a floating population surrounded the poet who had become sightless as he declaimed, and it would have been all the same to him if he had been alone in the room.

Titus turned his head away, his brain jumping in his skull with words and images.

TWENTY-THREE

Now that the poem was gone, and gone with it the poet, for truly he seemed to follow in the wake of something greater than himself, Titus became aware of a strange condition, a quality of flux, an agitation; a weaving or a threading motion – and then, all at once, one of those tidal movements that occur from time to time at crowded parties, began to manifest itself. There is nothing that can be done about them. They move to a rhythm of their own.

The first sensation perceived by the guest was that he or she was off-balance. There was a lot of elbow-jogging and spirit-spilling. As the pressure increased a kind of delicate stampeding began. Apologies broke loose on every side. Those by the walls were seriously crushed, while those in the centre leaned across one another at intimate angles. Tiny, idiotic footsteps were taken by everyone as the crowd began to surge meaninglessly, uncontrollably, round and round the room. Those who were talking together at one moment saw no sign of one another a few seconds later, for underwater currents and cross-eddies took their toll.

And yet the guests were still arriving. They entered through the doorway, were caught up in the scented air, wavered like ghosts and, hovering for a moment on the coiling fumes, were drawn into the slow but invincible maelstrom.

Titus, who had not been able to foresee what was about to happen, was now able to appreciate in retrospect the actions of a couple of old roués whom he had observed a few minutes earlier, seated by the refreshment table.

Long versed in the vicissitudes of party phenomena, they had put down their glasses and, leaning back, as it were, in the arms of the current, had given themselves up to the flow, and were now to be seen conversing at an incredible angle as they circled the room, their feet no longer touching the floor.

By the time some balance was restored it was nearly midnight, and there was a general pulling down of cuffs, straightening of garments, fingering of coifs and toupees, a straightening of ties, a scrutiny of mouths and eyebrows and a general state of salvage.

TWENTY-FOUR

And so, by a whim of chance, yet another group of guests stood there beneath him. Some had limped and some had slid away. Some had been boisterous: some had been aloof.

This particular group were neither and both, as the offshoots of their brain-play merited. Tall guests they were, and witless that through the accident of their height and slenderness they were creating between them a grove – a human grove. They turned, this group, this grove of guests, turned as a newcomer, moving sideways an inch at a time, joined them. He was short, thick and sapless, and was most in appropriate in that lofty copse, where he gave the appearance of being pollarded.

One of this group, a slender creature, thin as a switch, swathed in black, her hair as black as her dress and her eyes as black as her hair, turned to the newcomer.

‘Do join us,’ she said. ‘Do talk to us. We need your steady brain. We are so pitifully emotional. Such babies.’

‘Well I would hardly –’

‘Be quiet, Leonard. You have been talking quite enough,’ said the slender, doe-eyed Mrs Grass to her fourth husband. ‘It is Mr Acreblade or nothing. Come along dear Mr Acreblade. There … we are … there … we are.’

The sapless Mr Acreblade thrust his jaw forward, a sight to be wondered at, for even when relaxed his chin gave the impression of a battering ram; something to prod with; in fact a weapon.

‘Dear Mrs Grass,’ he said, ‘you are always so unaccountably kind.’

The attenuate Mr Spill had been beckoning a waiter, but now he suddenly crouched down so that his ear was level with Acreblade’s mouth. He did not face Mr Acreblade as he crouched there, but swivelling his eyes to their eastern extremes, he obtained a very good view of Acreblade’s profile.

‘I’m a bit deaf,’ he said. ‘Will you repeat yourself? Did you say “unaccountably kind”? How droll.’

‘Don’t be a bore,’ said Mrs Grass.

Mr Spill rose to his full working height, which might have been even more impressive were his shoulders not so bent.

‘Dear lady,’ he said. ‘If I am a bore, who made me so?’

‘Well who did darling?’

‘It’s a long story –’

‘Then we’ll skip it, shall we?’

She turned herself slowly, swivelling on her pelvis until her small conical breasts, directed at Mr Kestrel, were for all the world like some kind of delicious threat. Her husband, Mr Grass, who had seen this manoeuvre at least a hundred times, yawned horribly.

‘Tell me,’ said Mrs Grass, as she let loose upon Mr Kestrel a fresh broadside of naked eroticism, ‘tell me, dear Mr Acreblade, all about yourself.’

Mr Acreblade, not really enjoying being addressed in this off-hand manner by Mrs Grass, turned to her husband.

‘Your wife is very special. Very rare. Conducive to speculation. She talks to me through the back of her head, staring at Kestrel the while.’

‘But that is as it should be!’ cried Kestrel, his eyes swimming over with excitement, ‘for life must be various, incongruous, vile and electric. Life must be ruthless and as full of love as may be found in a jaguar’s fang.’

‘I like the way you talk, young man,’ said Grass, ‘but I don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘What are you mumbling about?’ said the lofty Spill, bending one of his arms like the branch of a tree and cupping his ear with a bunch of twigs.

‘You are somewhat divine,’ whispered Kestrel, addressing Mrs Grass.

‘I think I spoke to you, dear,’ said Mrs Grass over her shoulder to Mr Acreblade.

‘Your wife is talking to me again,’ said Acreblade to Mr Grass. ‘Let’s hear what she has to say.’

‘You talk about my wife in a very peculiar way,’ said Grass. ‘Does she annoy you?’

‘She would if I lived with her,’ said Acreblade. ‘What about you?’

‘O, but my dear chap, how naïve you are! Being married to her I seldom see her. What is the point of getting married if one is always bumping into one’s wife? One might as well not be married. Oh no dear fellow, she does what she wants. It is quite a coincidence that we found each other here tonight. You see? And we enjoy it – it’s like first love all over again without the heartache – without the heart in fact. Cold love’s the loveliest love of all. So clear, so crisp, so empty. In short, so civilized.’

‘You are out of a legend,’ said Kestrel, in a voice that was so muffled with passion that Mrs Grass was quite unaware that she had been addressed.

‘I’m as hot as a boiled turnip,’ said Mr Spill.

‘But tell me, you horrid man, how do I feel?’ cried Mrs Grass as she saw a newcomer, lacerating her beauty with the edge of her voice. ‘I’m looking so well these days, even my husband said so, and you know what husbands are.’

‘I have no idea what they are,’ said the fox-like man newly arrived at her elbow, ‘but you must tell me. What are they? I only know what they become … and perhaps … what drove them to it.’

‘Oh, but you are clever. Wickedly clever. But you must tell me all. How am I, darling?’

The fox-like man (a narrow-chested creature with reddish hair above his ears, a very sharp nose and a brain far too large for him to manage with comfort) replied:

‘You are feeling, my dear Mrs Grass, in need of something sweet. Sugar, bad music, or something of that kind might do for a start.’

The black-eyed creature, her lips half open, her teeth shining like pearls, her eyes fixed with excited animation on the foxy face before her, clasped her delicate hands together at her conical breasts.

‘You’re quite right! O, but quite!’ she said breathlessly. ‘So absolutely and miraculously right, you brilliant, brilliant little man; something sweet is what I need!’

Meanwhile Mr Acreblade was making room for a long-faced character dressed in a lion’s pelt. Over his head and shoulders was a black mane.

‘Isn’t it a bit hot in there?’ said young Kestrel.

‘I am in agony,’ said the man in the tawny skin.

‘Then why?’ said Mrs Grass.

‘I thought it was Fancy Dress,’ said the skin, ‘but I mustn’t complain. Everyone has been most kind.’

‘That doesn’t help the heat you’re generating in there,’ said Mr Acreblade. ‘Why don’t you just whip it off?’

‘It is all I have on,’ said the lion’s pelt.

‘How delicious,’ cried Mrs Grass, ‘you thrill me utterly. Who are you?’

‘But my dear,’ said the lion, looking at Mrs Grass, ‘surely you …’

‘What is it, O King of Beasts?’

‘Can’t you remember me?’

‘Your nose seems to ring a bell,’ said Mrs Grass.

Mr Spill lowered his head out of the clouds of smoke. Then he swivelled it until it lay alongside Mr Kestrel. ‘What did she say?’ he asked.

‘She’s worth a million,’ said Kestrel. ‘Lively, luscious, what a plaything!’

‘Plaything?’ said Mr Spill. ‘How do you mean?’

‘You wouldn’t understand,’ said Kestrel.

The lion scratched himself with a certain charm. Then he addressed Mrs Grass.

‘So my nose rings a bell – is that all? Have you forgotten me? Me! Your onetime Harry?’

‘Harry? What … my …?’

‘Yes, your Second. Way back in time. We were married, you remember, in Tyson Street.’

‘Lovebird!’ cried Mrs Grass. ‘So we were. But take that foul mane off and let me see you. Where have you been all these years?’

‘In the wilderness,’ said the lion, tossing back his mane and twitching it over his shoulder.

‘What sort of wilderness, darling? Moral? Spiritual? O but tell us about it!’ Mrs Grass reached forward with her breasts and clenched her little fists at her sides, which attitude she imagined would have appeal. She was not far wrong, and young Kestrel took a step to the left which put him close beside her.

‘I believe you said “wilderness”,’ said Kestrel. ‘Tell me, how wild is it? Or isn’t it? One is so at the mercy of words. And would you say, sir, that what is wilderness for one might be a field of corn to another with little streams and bushes?’

‘What sort of bushes?’ said the elongated Mr Spill.

‘What does that matter?’ said Kestrel.

‘Everything matters,’ said Mr Spill. ‘Everything. That is part of the pattern. The world is bedevilled by people thinking that some things matter and some things don’t. Everything is of equal importance. The wheel must be complete. And the stars. They look small. But are they? No. They are large. Some are very large. Why, I remember –’

‘Mr Kestrel,’ said Mrs Grass.

‘Yes, my dear lady?’

‘You have a vile habit, dear.’

‘What is it, for heaven’s sake? Tell me about it that I may crush it.’

‘You are too close, my pet. But too close. We have our little areas you know. Like the home waters, dear, or fishing rights. Don’t trespass, dear. Withdraw a little. You know what I mean, don’t you? Privacy is so important.’

Young Kestrel turned the colour of a boiled lobster and retreated from Mrs Grass who, turning her head to him, by way of forgiveness switched on a light in her face, or so it seemed to Kestrel, a light that inflamed the air about them with a smile like an eruption. This had the effect of drawing the dazzled Kestrel back to her side, where he stayed, bathing himself in her beauty.

‘Cosy again,’ she whispered.

Kestrel nodded his head and trembled with excitement until Mr Grass, forcing his way through a wall of guests, brought his foot down sharply upon Kestrel’s instep. With a gasp of pain, young Kestrel turned for sympathy to the peerless lady at his side, only to find that her radiant smile was now directed at her own husband where it remained for a few moments before she turned her back on them both and, switching off the current, she gazed across the room with an aspect quite drained of animation.

‘On the other hand,’ said the tall Spill, addressing the man in the lion’s pelt, ‘there is something in the young man’s question. This wilderness of yours. Will you tell us more about it?’

‘But oh! But do!’ rang out the voice of Mrs Grass, as she gripped the lion’s pelt cruelly.

‘When I say “wilderness”,’ said the lion, ‘I only speak of the heart. It is Mr Acreblade that you should ask. His wasteland is the very earth itself.’

‘Ah me, that Wasteland,’ said Acreblade, jutting out his chin, ‘knuckled with ferrous mountains. Peopled with termites, jackals, and to the north-west – hermits.’

‘And what were you doing out there?’ said Mr Spill.

‘I shadowed a suspect. A youth not known in these parts. He stumbled ahead of me in the sandstorm, a vague shape. Sometimes I lost him altogether. Sometimes I all but found myself beside him, and was forced to retreat a little way. Sometimes I heard his singing, mad, wild, inconsequential songs. Sometimes he shouted out as though he were delirious – words that sounded like “Fuchsia”, “Flay” and other names. Sometimes he cried out “Mother!” and once he fell on his knees and cried, “Gormenghast, Gormenghast, come back to me again!”’

‘It was not for me to arrest him – but to follow him, for my superiors informed me his papers were not in order, or even in existence.

‘But on the second evening the dust rose up more terribly than ever, and as it rose it blinded me so that I lost him in a red and gritty cloud. I could not find him, and I never found him again.’

‘Darling.’

‘What is it?’

‘Look at Gumshaw.’

‘Why?’

‘His polished pate reflects a brace of candles.’

‘Not from where I am.’

‘No?’

‘No. But look – to the left of centre I see a tiny image, one might almost say of a boy’s face, were it not that faces are unlikely things to grow on ceilings.’

‘Dreams. One always comes back to dreams.’

‘But the silver whip RK 2053722220 – the moon circles, first of the new –’

‘Yes, I know all about that.’

‘But love was nowhere near.’

‘The sky was smothered with planes. Some of them, though pilotless, were bleeding.’

‘Ah, Mr Flax, how is your son?’

‘He died last Wednesday.’

‘Forgive me, I am so sorry.’

‘Are you? I’m not. I never liked him. But mark you – an excellent swimmer. He was captain of his school.’

‘This heat is horrible.’

‘Ah, Lady Crowgather, let me present the Duke of Crowgather; but perhaps you have met already?’

‘Many times. Where are the cucumber sandwiches?’

‘Allow me –’

‘Oh I beg your pardon. I mistook your foot for a tortoise. What is happening?’

‘No, indeed, I do not like it.’

‘Art should be artless, not heartless.’

‘I am a great one for beauty.’

‘Beauty, that obsolete word.’

‘You beg the question, Professor Savage.’

‘I beg nothing. Not even your pardon. I do not even beg to differ. I differ without begging, and would rather beg from an ancient, rib-staring, sightless groveller at the foot of a column than beg from you, sir. The truth is not in you, and your feet smell.’

‘Take that … and that,’ muttered the insultee, tearing off one button after another from his opponent’s jacket.

‘What fun we do have,’ said the button-loser, standing on tip-toe and kissing his friend’s chin: ‘Parties would be unbearable without abuse, so don’t go away Harold. You sicken me. What is that?’

‘It is only Marblecrust making his bird noises.’

‘Yes, but …’

‘Always, somehow …’

‘O no … no … and yet I like it.’

‘And so the young man escaped me without knowing,’ said Acreblade, ‘and judging by the hardship he must have undergone he must surely be somewhere in the City … where else could he be? Has he stolen a plane? Has he fled down the …?’

TWENTY-FIVE

Then came the stroke of midnight, and for a few moments gooseflesh ran up every leg in Lady Cusp-Canine’s party, swarmed up the thighs and mustered its hideous forces at the base of every backbone, sending forth grisly outriders throughout the lumbar landscape. Then up the spine itself, coiling like lethal ivy, fanning out, eventually, from the cervicals, draping like icy muslin across the breasts and belly. Midnight. As the last cold crash resounds, Titus, alone on the rooftop, easing the cramp in his arm, shifting the weight of his elbow, smashes suddenly the skylight and with no time to recover, falls through the glass roof in a shower of splinters.

TWENTY-SIX

It was very lucky for all concerned that no one was seriously hurt. Titus himself was cut in a few places but the wounds were superficial and as far as the actual fall was concerned, he was particularly fortunate in that a dome-shouldered, snowball-breasted lady was immediately below him as he fell.

They capsized together, and lay for a moment alongside one another on the thickly carpeted floor. All about them glittered fragments of broken glass, but for Juno, lying at Titus’ side, and for the others who had been affected by his sudden appearance in mid-air and later on the floor, the overriding sensation was not pain but shock.

For there was something that was shocking in more than one sense in the almost biblical visitation of a youth in rags.

Titus withdrew his face, which had been crushed against a naked shoulder, and got dizzily to his feet, and as he did so he saw that the lady’s eyes were fixed upon him. Even in her horizontal position she was superb. Her dignity was unimpaired. When Titus reached down to her with his hand to help her she touched his fingertips and rose at once and with no apparent effort to her feet, which were small and very beautiful. Between these little feet of hers and her noble, Roman head, lay, as though between the poles, a golden world of spices.

Someone bent over the boy. It was the Fox.

‘Who the devil are you?’ he said.

‘What does that matter?’ said Juno. ‘Keep your distance. He is bleeding … Isn’t that enough?’ and with quite indescribable élan she tore a strip from her dress and began to bind up Titus’ hand, which was bleeding steadily.

‘You are very kind,’ said Titus.

Juno softly shook her head from side to side, and a little smile evolved out of the corner of her generous lips.

‘I must have startled you,’ said Titus.

‘It was a rapid introduction,’ said Juno. She arched one of her eyebrows. It rose like a raven’s wing.

TWENTY-SEVEN

‘Did you hear what he said?’ snarled a vile voice. ‘“I must have startled you.” Why, you mongrel-pup, you might have killed the lady!’

An angry buzz of voices suddenly began and scores of faces raised themselves to the shattered skylight. At the same time a nearby section of the crowd, which until a few moments ago had appeared to be full of friendly flippancy, was now wearing a very different aspect.

‘Which one of you,’ said Titus, whose face had gone white, ‘which one of you called me a mongrel-pup?’ In the pocket of his ragged trousers his hand clutched the knuckle of flint from the high towers of Gormenghast.

‘Who was it?’ he yelled, for all at once rage boiled up in him, and jumping forward he caught the nearest figure by the throat. But no sooner had he done so than he was himself hauled back to his position at Juno’s side. Then Titus saw before him the back of a great angular man, on whose shoulder sat a small ape. This figure whose proportions were unmistakably those of Muzzlehatch now moved very slowly along the half-circle of angry faces and as he did so he smiled with a smile that had no love in it. It was a wide smile. It was a lipless smile. It was made up of nothing but anatomy.

Muzzlehatch stretched out his big arm: his hand hovered and then took hold of the man who had insulted Titus, picked him up, and raised him through the hot and coiling air to the level of his shoulder, where he was received by the ape who kissed him upon the back of his neck in such a way that the poor man collapsed in a dead faint, and then, since the ape had already lost interest in him, he slid to the carpeted floor.

Muzzlehatch turned to the gaping circle of faces and whispered ‘Little children. Listen to Oracle. Because Oracle loves you,’ and Muzzlehatch drew a wicked-looking penknife from his pocket, flicked it open and began to strop it upon the ball of his thumb.

‘He is not pleased with you. Not so much because you have done anything wicked but because your Soul smells – your collective Soul – your little dried-up turd of a Soul. Is it not so? Little Ones?’

The ape began to scratch itself with slow relish and its eyelids trembled.

‘So you would menace him, would you?’ said Muzzlehatch. ‘Menace him with your dirty little brains, and horrid little noises. And you, ladies, with your false bosoms and ignorant mouths. You also have menaced him?’

There was a good deal of shuffling and coughing; and those who were able to do so without being seen began to retreat into the crowded body of the room.

‘Little children,’ he went on, the blade of his knife moving to and fro across his thumb, ‘pick up your colleague from the floor and learn from him to keep your hands off this pip-squeak of a boy.’

‘He is no pip-squeak,’ said Acreblade. ‘That is the youth I have been trailing. He escaped me. He crossed the wilderness. He has no passport. He is wanted. Come here, young man.’

There was a hush that spread all over the room.

‘What nonsense,’ said a deep voice at last. It was Juno. ‘He is my friend. As for the wilderness – good Heavens – you misconstrue the rags. He is in fancy dress.’

‘Move aside, madam. I have a warrant for his arrest as a vagrant; an alien; an undesirable.’

Then he moved forward, did this Acreblade, out of the crowd of guests, forward towards where Titus, Juno, Muzzlehatch and the ape waited silently.

‘Beautiful policeman,’ said Muzzlehatch. ‘You are exceeding your duty. This is a party – or it was – but you are making something vile out of it.’

Muzzlehatch worked his shoulders to and fro and shut his eyes.

‘Don’t you ever have a holiday from crime? Do you never pick up the world as a child picks up a crystal globe – a thing of many colours? Do you never love this ridiculous world of ours? The wicked and the good of it? The thieves and angels of it? The all of it? Throbbing, dear policeman, in your hand? And knowing how all this is inevitably so, and that without the dark of life you would be out on your ear? Yet see how you take it. Passports, visas, identification papers – does all this mean so much to your official mind that you must needs bring the filthy stink of it to a party? Open up the gates of your brain then, policeman dear, and let a small sprat through.’

‘He is my friend,’ said Juno again, in a voice as ripe and deep as some underwater grotto, some foliage of the sea-bed. ‘He is in fancy dress. He is as nothing to you. What was it you said? “Across the wilderness?” Oh ha ha ha ha ha,’ and Juno, having received a cue from Muzzlehatch, moved forward and in a moment had blocked Mr Acreblade’s vision, and as she did this she saw away to her left, their heads a little above the heads of the crowd, two men in helmets who appeared to slide rather than walk. To Juno they were merely two of the guests and meant nothing more, but when Muzzlehatch saw them he gripped Titus by the arm just above the elbow and made for the door, leaving behind him a channel among the guests like the channel left on a field of ripe corn where a file of children has followed its leader.

Inspector Acreblade was trying very hard to follow them but every time he turned or made a few steps his passage was blocked by the generous Juno, a lady with such a superb carriage and such noble proportions, that to push past her was out of the question.

‘Please allow me –’ he said. ‘I must follow them at once.’

‘But your tie, you cannot go about like that. Let me adjust it for you. No … no … don’t move. Th-ere we are … There … we … are …’

TWENTY-EIGHT

Meanwhile Titus and Muzzlehatch were turning to left and right at will, for the place was honeycombed with rooms and corridors.

Muzzlehatch, as he ran, a few feet ahead of Titus, looked like some kind of war-horse, with his great rough head thrown back, and his chest forward.

He did not look round to see whether Titus could keep up with his trampling pace. With his dark-red rudder of a nose pointing to the ceiling he galloped on with the small ape, now wide awake, clinging to his shoulder, its topaz-coloured eyes fixed upon Titus, a few feet behind. Every now and again it cried out only to cling the tighter to its master’s neck as though frightened of its own voice.

Covering the ground at speed Muzzlehatch retained a monumental self-assurance – almost a dignity. It was not mere flight. It was a thing in itself, as a dance must be, a dance of ritual.

‘Are you there?’ he suddenly muttered over his shoulder. ‘Eh? Are you there? Young Rag’n’bone! Fetch up alongside.’

‘I’m here,’ panted Titus. ‘But how much longer?’

Muzzlehatch took no notice but pranced around a corner to the left and then left again, and right, and left again, and then gradually slackening pace they ambled at last into a dimly lit hall surrounded by seven doors. Opening one at random the fugitives found themselves in an empty room.

TWENTY-NINE

Muzzlehatch and Titus stood still for a few moments until their eyes became adjusted to the darkness.

Then they saw, at the far end of the apartment, a dull grey rectangle that stood on end in the darkness. It was the night.

There were no stars and the moon was on the other side of the building. Somewhere far below they could hear the whisper of a plane as it took off. All at once it came into view, a slim, wingless thing, sliding through the night, seemingly unhurried, save that suddenly, where was it?

Titus and Muzzlehatch stood at the window and for a long while neither of them spoke. At last Titus turned to the dimly outlined shape of his companion.

‘What are you doing here?’ he said. ‘You seem out of place.’

‘God’s geese! You startled me,’ said Muzzlehatch, raising his hand as though to guard himself from attack. ‘I’d forgotten you were here. I was brooding, boy. Than which there is no richer pastime. It muffles one with rotting plumes. It gives forth sullen music. It is the smell of home.’

‘Home?’ said Titus.

‘Home,’ said Muzzlehatch. He took out a pipe from his pocket, and filled it with a great fistful of tobacco; lit it, drew at it; filled his lungs with acrid fumes, and exhaled them, while the bowl burned in the darkness like a wound.

‘You ask me why I am here – here among an alien people. It is a good question. Almost as good as for me to ask you the same thing. But don’t tell me, dear boy, not yet. I would rather guess.’

‘I know nothing about you,’ said Titus. ‘You are someone to me who appears, and disappears. A rough man: a shadow-man: a creature who plucks me out of danger. Who are you? Tell me … You do not seem to be part of this – this glassy region.’

‘It is not glassy where I come from, boy. Have you forgotten the slums that crawl up to my courtyard? Have you forgotten the crowds by the river? Have you forgotten the stink?’

‘I remember the stink of your car,’ said Titus, – sharp as acid; thick as gruel.’

‘She’s a bitch,’ said Muzzlehatch, ‘– and smells like one.’

‘I am ignorant of you,’ said Titus. ‘You with your acres of great cages, your savage cats; your wolves and your birds of prey. I have seen them, but they tell me little. What are you thinking of? Why do you flaunt this monkey on your shoulder as though it were a foreign flag – some emblem of defiance? I have no more access to your brain than I have to this little skull,’ and Titus fumbling in the dark stroked the small ape with his forefinger. Then he stared at the darkness, part of which was Muzzlehatch. The night seemed thicker than ever.

‘Are you still there?’ said Titus.

It was twelve long seconds before Muzzlehatch replied.

‘I am. I am still here, or some of me is. The rest of me is leaning on the rails of a ship. The air is full of spices and the deep salt water shines with phosphorus. I am alone on deck and there is no one else to see the moon float out of a cloud so that a string of palms is lit like a procession. I can see the dark-white surf as it beats upon the shore; and I see, and I remember, how a figure ran along the strip of moonlit sand, with his arms raised high above his head, and his shadow ran beside him and jerked as it sped, for the beach was uneven; and then the moon slid into the clouds again and the world went black.’

‘Who was he?’ said Titus.

‘How should I know?’ said Muzzlehatch. ‘It might have been anyone. It might have been me.’

‘Why are you telling me all this?’ said Titus.

‘I am not telling you anything. I am telling myself. My voice, strident to others, is music to me.’

‘You have a rough manner,’ said Titus. ‘But you have saved me twice. Why are you helping me?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Muzzlehatch. ‘There must be something wrong with my brain.’

THIRTY

Although there was no sound, yet the opening of the door produced a change in the room behind them; a change sufficient to awake in Titus and his companion an awareness of which their conscious minds knew nothing.

No, not the breath of a sound; not a flicker of light. Yet the black room at their backs was alive.

Muzzlehatch and Titus had turned at the same time and as far as they knew they turned for no more reason than to ease a muscle.

In fact they hardly knew that they had turned. They could see very little of the night-filled room, but when a moment later a lady stepped forward, she brought with her a little light from the hall beyond. It was not much of an illumination but it was strong enough to show Titus and his companion that immediately to their left was a striped couch and on the other side of the room, down-stage as it were, supposing the night to be the auditorium, was a tall screen.

At the sight of the door opening Muzzlehatch plucked the small ape from Titus’ shoulder and muzzling it with his right hand and holding its four feet together in his left, he moved silently through the shadows until he was hidden behind the tall screen. Titus, with no ape to deal with, was beside him in a moment.

Then came the click and the room was immediately filled with coral-coloured light. The lady who had opened the door stepped forward without a sound. Daintily, for all her weight, she moved to the centre of the room, where she cocked her head on one side as though waiting for something peculiar to happen. Then she sat down on the striped couch, crossing her splendid legs with a hiss of silk.

‘He must be hungry,’ she whispered, ‘the roof-swarmer, the skylight-burster … the ragged boy from nowhere. He must be very hungry and very lost. Where would he be, I wonder? Behind that screen for instance, with his friend, the wicked Muzzlehatch?’ There was a rather silly silence.

THIRTY-ONE

While sitting there Juno had opened a hamper which she had filled at the party before following the boy and Muzzlehatch.

‘Are you hungry?’ said Juno, as they emerged.

‘Very hungry,’ said Titus.

‘Then eat,’ said Juno.

‘O my sweet flame! My mulcted one. What are you thinking of?’ asked Muzzlehatch, but in a voice so bored that it was almost an insult. ‘Can you imagine how I found him, love-pot?’

‘Who?’ said Juno.

‘This boy,’ said Muzzlehatch. ‘This ravenous boy.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Washed up, he was,’ said Muzzlehatch, ‘– at dawn. Ain’t that poetic? There he lay, stranded on the water-steps – sprawled out like a dead fish. So I drove him home. Why? Because I had never seen anything so unlikely. Next day I shoo’d him off. He was no part of me. No part of my absurd life, and away he went, a creature out of nowhere, redundant as a candle in the sun. Quite laughable – a thing to be forgotten – but what happens?’

‘I’m listening,’ said Juno.

‘I’ll tell you,’ continued Muzzlehatch. ‘He takes it upon himself to fall through a skylight and bears to the ground one of the few women who ever interested me. O yes. I saw it all. His head lay sidelong on your splendid bosom and for a little while he was Lord of that tropical ravine between your midnight breasts: that home of moss and verdure: that sumptuous cleft. But enough of this. I am too old for gulches. How did you find us? What with our twistings and turnings and doubling back – we should by rights have shaken off the devil himself – but then you wander in as though you’d been a-riding on my tail. How did you find me?’

‘I will tell you, Muzzle-dove, how I found you. There was nothing miraculous about it. My intuition is as non-existent as the smell of marble. It was the boy who gave you both away. His feet were wet and still are. They left a glister down the corridors.’

‘A glister, what’s a glister?’ said Muzzlehatch.

‘It’s what his wet feet left behind them – the merest film. I had only to follow it. Where are your shoes, pilgrim-child?’

‘My shoes?’ said Titus, with a chicken bone in his hand. ‘Why, somewhere in the river, I suppose.’

‘Well then; now that you’ve found us, Juno, my love-trap – what do you want of us? Alone or separately? I, after all, though unpopular, am no fugitive. So there’s no need for me to hide. But young Titus here (Lord of somewhere or other – with an altogether most unlikely name) – he, we must admit, is on the run. Why, I’m not quite sure. As for myself, there is nothing I want more than to wash my two hands of both of you. One reason is the way you haven’t my marrow. I yell for nothing but solitude, Juno, and the beasts I brood on. Another is this young man – the Earl of Gorgon-paste or whatever he calls himself – I must wash my hands of him also, for I have no desire to be involved with yet another human being – especially one in the shape of an enigma. Life is too brief for such diversions and I cannot bring myself to scrape up any interest in the problems of his breast.’

The small ape on Muzzlehatch’s shoulder nodded its head and then began to fish about in the depth of its master’s hair; its wrinkled, yet delicate, fingers probing here and there were as tender yet as inquisitive as any lover’s.

‘You’re almost as rude as I was hungry,’ said Titus. ‘As for the workings of my heart, and my lineage, you are as ignorant as that monkey on your shoulder. As far as I am concerned you will remain so. But get me out of here. It is a swine of a building and smells like a hospital. You have been good to me, Mr Marrow-patch, but I long to see the last of you. Where can I go, where can I hide?’

‘You must come with me,’ said Juno. ‘You must have clean clothes, food, and shelter.’ She turned her splendid head to Muzzlehatch. ‘How are we going to leave without being seen?’

‘One move at a time,’ said Muzzlehatch. ‘Our first is to find the nearest lift-shaft. The whole place ought to be asleep by now.’ He strode to the door and, opening it quietly, discovered a young man bent double. He had been given no time to rise from the keyhole, let alone escape.

‘But my dearest essence of stoat’ – said Muzzlehatch, gradually drawing the man forward into the room by his lemon-yellow lapels (for he was a flunkey of the household) – ‘you are most welcome. Now, Juno dear, take Gorgon-paste with you and lean with him over the balustrade and stare down into the darkness. It will not be for long.’

Titus and Juno, obeying his curiously authoritative voice, for it had power however ridiculous its burden, heard a peculiar shuffling sound, and then a moment later – ‘Now then, Gorgon-blast, leave the lovely lady in charge of the night and come here.’

Titus turned and saw that the flunkey was practically naked. Muzzlehatch had stripped him as an autumn tree is stripped of its gold leaves.

‘Off with your rags and into the livery,’ said Muzzlehatch to Titus. He turned to the flunkey, ‘I do hope you’re not too chilly. I have nothing against you, friend, but I have no option. This young gentleman must escape, you see.’

‘Hurry, now, “Gorgon”,’ he shouted. ‘I have the car waiting and she is restless.’

He did not know that as he spoke the first strands of dawn were threading their way through the low clouds and lighting not only the few aeroplanes that shone like spectres, but also that monstrous creature, Muzzlehatch’s car. Naked as the flunkey, naked in the early sunbeams, it was like an oath, or a jeer, its nose directed at the elegant planes; its shape, its colour, its skeleton, its tendons, its skull, its muscles of leather – its low and rakish belly, and its general air of blood and mutiny on the high seas. There she waited far below the room where her captain stood.

‘Change clothes,’ said Muzzlehatch. ‘We can’t wait all night for you.’

Something began to burn in Titus’ stomach. He could feel the blood draining from his face.

‘So you can’t wait all night for me,’ he said in a voice he hardly recognized as his own. ‘Muzzlehatch, the zoo-man, is in a hurry. But does he know who he is talking to? Do you?’

‘What is it, Titus?’ said Juno, who had turned from the window at the sound of his voice.

‘What is it?’ cried Titus. ‘I will tell you, madam. It is this bully’s ignorance. Does he know who I am?’

‘How can we know about you, dear, if you won’t tell us? There, there, stop shaking.’

‘He wants to run away,’ said Muzzlehatch. ‘But you don’t want to be jailed, do you now? Eh? You want to get free of this building, surely.’

‘Not with your help,’ shouted Titus, though he knew as he shouted that he was being mean. He looked up at the big cross-hatched face with its proud rudder of a nose and the living light in its eye and a flicker of recognition seemed to pass between them. But it was too late.

‘Then to hell with you, child,’ said Muzzlehatch.

‘I will take him,’ said Juno.

‘No,’ said Muzzlehatch. ‘Let him go. He must learn.’

‘Learn, be damned!’ said Titus, all the pent-up emotion breaking through. ‘What do you know of life, of violence and guile? Of madmen and subterfuge and treachery? My treachery. My hands have been sticky with blood. I have loved and I have killed in my kingdom.’

‘Kingdom?’ said Juno. ‘Your kingdom?’

A kind of fearful love brimmed in her eyes. ‘I will take care of you,’ she said.

‘No,’ said Muzzlehatch, ‘let him find his way. He will never forgive you if you take him now. Let him be a man, Juno dear – or what he thinks to be a man. Don’t suck his blood, dear. Don’t pounce too soon. Remember how you killed our love with spices – eh? My pretty vampire.’

Titus, white with indecision, for to him Juno and Muzzlehatch seemed to talk a private language, took a step nearer to the smiling man who had turned his head across his shoulder so that the little ape was able to rest its furry cheek along its master’s.

‘Did you call this lady a vampire?’ he whispered.

Muzzlehatch nodded his smiling head slowly.

‘That is so,’ he said.

‘He meant nothing,’ said Juno. ‘Titus! O, darling … O …’

For Titus had whipped out his fist with such speed that it was a wonder it did not find its mark. This it failed to do, for Muzzlehatch, catching Titus’ fist as though it were a flung stone, held it in a vice and then, with no apparent effort, propelled Titus slowly to the doorway, through which he pushed the boy before closing the door and turning the key.

For a few minutes Titus, shocked at his own impotence, beat upon the door, yelling ‘Let me in, you coward! Let me in! Let me in!’ until the noise he made brought servants from all quarters of the great mansion of olive-green glass.

While they took Titus away struggling and shouting, Muzzlehatch held Juno firmly by her elbow, for she longed to be with the sudden young man dressed half in rags and half in livery, but she said nothing as she strained against the grip of her one-time lover.

THIRTY-TWO

The day broke wild and shaggy. What light there was seeped into the great glass buildings as though ashamed. All but a fraction of the guests who had attended the Cusp-Canines’ party lay like fossils in their separate beds, or, for various sunken causes, tossed and turned in seas of dream.

Of those who were awake and on their feet, at least half were servants of the House. It was from among these few that a posse of retainers (on hearing the shindy) converged upon the room, switching on lights as they ran, until they found Titus striking upon the outside of the door.

It was no good for him to struggle. Their clumsy hands caught hold of him and hustled him away and down seven flights into the servants’ quarters. There he was kept prisoner for the best part of the day, the time being punctuated by visits from the Law and the Police and towards evening by some kind of a brain-specialist who gazed at Titus for minutes on end from under his eyebrows and asked peculiar questions which Titus took no trouble to answer, for he was very tired.

Lady Cusp-Canine herself appeared for one fleeting minute. She had not been down to the kitchens for thirty years and was accompanied by an Inspector, who kept his head tilted on one side as he talked to her Ladyship while keeping his eyes on the captive. The effect of this was to suggest that Titus was some kind of caged animal.

‘An enigma,’ said the Inspector.

‘I don’t agree,’ said Lady Cusp-Canine. ‘He is only a boy.’

‘Ah,’ said the Inspector.

‘And I like his face, too,’ said Lady Cusp-Canine.

‘Ah,’ said the Inspector.

‘He has splendid eyes.’

‘But has he splendid habits, your Ladyship?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Lady Cusp-Canine. ‘Why? Have you?’

The Inspector shrugged his shoulders.

‘There is nothing to shrug about,’ said Lady Cusp-Canine. ‘Nothing at all. Where is my Chef?’

This gentleman had been hovering at her side ever since she had entered the kitchen. He now presented himself.

‘Madam?’

‘Have you fed the boy?’

‘Yes, my Lady.’

‘Have you given him the best? The most nutritious? Have you given him a breakfast to remember?’

‘Not yet, your Ladyship.’

‘Then what are you waiting for!’ Her voice rose. ‘He is hungry. He is despondent, he is young!’

‘Yes, your Ladyship.’

‘Don’t say “yes” to me!’ She rose on tip-toe to her full height, which did not take her long for she was minute. ‘Feed him and let him go,’ and with that she skimmed across the room on tiny septuagenarian feet, her plumed hat swaying dangerously among the loins and briskets.

THIRTY-THREE

Meanwhile, the powerful Muzzlehatch had escorted Juno out of the building and had helped her into his hideous car. It was his intention to take her to her house above the river and then to race for home, for even Muzzlehatch was weary. But, as usual when he was at the wheel, whatever plans had been formulated were soon to be no more than chaff in the wind, and within half a minute of his starting he had changed his mind and was now heading for that wide and sandy stretch of the river where the banks shelved gently into the shallow water.

The sky was no longer very dark, though one or two stars were still to be seen, when Muzzlehatch, having taken a long and quite unnecessary curve to the west, careered off the road and, turning left and right to avoid the juniper bushes that littered the upper banks, swept all of a sudden into the shallows of the broad stream. Once in the water he accelerated and great arcs of brine spurted from the wheels to port and starboard.

As for Juno, she leaned forward a little; her elbow rested on the door of the car, and her face lay sideways in the gloved palm of her hand. As far as could be seen she was quite oblivious to the speed of the car, let alone the spray: nor did she take any notice of Muzzlehatch, who, in his favourite position, was practically lying on the floor of the machine, one eye above the ‘bulwarks’ from whence came forth a sort of song:

‘I have my price: it’s rather high –

(About the level of your eye),

But if you’re nice to me, I’ll try

To lower it for you –

To lower it; to lower it;

Upon the kind of rope they knit

From yellow grass and purple hay

When knitting is taboo –’

A touch of the wheel and the car sped deeper into the river so that the water was not far from brimming over, but another movement brought her out again while the steam hissed like a thousand cats.

‘Some knit them pearl,’ roared Muzzlehatch,

‘Some knit them plain –

Some knit their brows of pearl in vain

Some are so plain they try again

To tease the wool of love!

But ah! the palms of yesterday –

There’s not a soul from yesterday

Who’s worth the dreaming of – they say –

Who’s worth the dreaming of …’

As Muzzlehatch’s voice wandered off the sun began to rise out of the river.

‘Have you finished?’ said Juno. Her eyes were half closed.

‘I have given my all,’ said Muzzlehatch.

‘Then listen please!’ – her eyes were a little wider but their expression was still faraway.

‘What is it, Juno love?’

‘I am thinking of that boy. What will they do to him?’

‘They’ll find him difficult,’ said Muzzlehatch, ‘very difficult. Rather like a form of me. It is more a case of what will he do to them. But why? Has he set a sparrow twittering in your breast? Or woken up a predatory condor?’

But there was no reply, for at that moment he drew up at the front door of Juno’s house, with a great cry of metal. It was a tall building, dusty pink in colour, and was backed by a small hill or knoll surmounted by a marble man. Immediately behind the knoll was a loop of the river. On either side of Juno’s house were two somewhat similar houses but these were forsaken. The windows were smashed. The doors were gone and the rooms let in the rain.

But Juno’s house was in perfect repair and when the door was opened by a servant in a yellow gown it was possible to see how daringly yet carefully the hall was furnished. Lit up in the darkness, it presented a colour scheme of ivory, ash, and coral red.

‘Are you coming in?’ said Juno. ‘Do mushrooms tempt you – or plovers’ eggs? Or coffee?’

‘No my love!’

‘As you wish.’

They sat without moving for a little while.

‘Where do you think the boy is?’ she said at last.

‘I have no idea,’ said Muzzlehatch.

Juno climbed out of the car. It was like a faultless disembarkation. Whatever she did had style.

‘Good night, then,’ she said, ‘and sweet dreams.’

Muzzlehatch gazed at her as she made her way through the dark garden to the lighted hall. Her shadow cast by the light reached out behind her, almost to the car, and as she moved away step by long smooth step, Muzzlehatch felt a twitch of the heart, for it seemed that he saw in the slow leisure of her stride something, at the moment, that he was loth to forgo.

It was as if those faraway days when they were lovers came flooding back, image upon image, shade upon shade, unsolicited, unbidden, each one challenging the strength of the dykes which they had built against one another. For they knew that beyond the dykes heaved the great seas of sentiment on whose bosom they had lost their way.

How often had he stared at her in anger or in boisterous love! How often had he admired her. How often had he seen her leave him, but never quite like this. The light from the hall where the servant stood came flooding across the garden and Juno was a silhouette against the lighted entrance. From the full, rounded, and bell-shaped hips which swayed imperceptibly as she moved, arose the column of her almost military back; and from her shoulders sprang her neck, perfectly cylindrical, surmounted by her classic head.

As Muzzlehatch gazed at her he seemed to see, in some strange way, himself. He saw her as his failure – and he knew himself to be hers. For they had each received all that the other could provide. What had gone wrong? Was it that they need no longer try because they could see through one another? What was the trouble? A hundred things. His unfaithfulness; his egotism; his eternal playacting; his gigantic pride; his lack of tenderness; his deafening exuberance; his selfishness.

But she had run out of love; or it had been battered out of her. Only a friendship remained: ambient and unbreakable.

So it was strange, this twitch of the heart, strange that he should follow her with his eyes; strange that he should turn the car about so slowly, and it was strange also (when he arrived in the courtyard of his home) to see how ruminative was the look upon his face as he tied his car to the mulberry tree.

THIRTY-FOUR

In the late afternoon of the next day they took Titus and they put him in a cell. It was a small place with a barred window to the south-west.

When Titus entered the cell this rectangle was filled with a golden light. The black bars that divided the window into a dozen upright sections were silhouetted against the sunset.

In one corner there was a rough trestle bed with a dark-red blanket spread over it. Taking up most of the space in the middle of the cell was a table that stood up on three legs only, for the stone floor was uneven. On the table were a few candles, a box of matches and a cup of water. By the side of the table stood a chair, a flimsy-looking thing which someone had once started to paint: but they (whoever they may have been) had grown tired of the work so that the chair was piebald black and yellow.

As Titus stood there taking in the features of the room the jailer closed the door behind him and he heard the key turn in the lock. But the sunbeams were there, the low, slanting beams of honey-coloured light; they flooded through the bars and gave a kind of welcome to the prisoner – so that he made, without a pause, for the big window, where, holding an iron bar with either hand, he stared across a landscape.

It seemed it was transfigured. So ethereal was the light that great cedars floated upon it and hilltops seemed to wander through the gold.

In the far distance Titus could see what looked like the incrustation of a city, and as though the sun were striking it obliquely there came the golden flash of windows, now here, now there, like sparks from a flint.

Suddenly, out of the gilded evening a bird flew directly towards the window where Titus stood staring through the bars. It approached rapidly, looping its airborne way, was all at once standing on the window-ledge.

By the way its head moved rapidly to and fro upon its neck it seemed it was looking for something. It was evident that the last occupant of the cell had shared his crumbs with the piebald bird – but today there were no crumbs and the magpie at last began to peck at its feathers as though in lieu of better fare.

Then out of the golden atmosphere: out of the stones of the cell: out of the cedars: out of a flutter of the magpie’s wing, came a long waft of memory so that images swam up before his eyes and he saw, more vividly than the sunset or the forested hills, the long coruscated outline of Gormenghast and the stones of his home where the lizards lazed, and there, blotting out all else, his mother as he had last seen her at the door of the shanty, the great dripping castle drawn up like a backcloth behind her.

‘You will come back,’ she had said. ‘All roads lead back to Gormenghast’; and he yearned suddenly for his home, for the bad of it no less than for the good of it – yearned for the smell of it and the taste of the bitter ivy.

Titus turned from the window as though to dispel the nostalgia, but the mere movement of his body through space was no help to him, and he sat down on the edge of the bed.

From far below the window came the fluting of a blackbird; the golden light had begun to darken and he became conscious of a loneliness he had never felt before.

He leaned forward pressing the tightened muscles below his ribs and then began to rock back and forth, like a pendulum. So regular was the rocking that it would seem that no assuagement of grief could result from so mechanical a rhythm.

But there was a kind of comfort to be had, for while his brain wept, his body went on swaying.

An aching to be once again in the land from which he grew gave him no rest. There is no calm for those who are uprooted. They are wanderers, homesick and defiant. Love itself is helpless to heal them though the dust rises with every footfall – drifts down the corridors – settles on branch or cornice – each breath an inhalation from the past so that the lungs, like a miner’s, are dark with bygone times.

Whatever they eat, whatever they drink, is never the bread of home or the corn of their own valleys. It is never the wine of their own vineyards. It is a foreign brew.

So Titus rocked himself in grief’s cradle to and fro, to and fro, while the cell darkened, and at some time during the night he fell asleep.

THIRTY-FIVE

What was it? He sat bolt upright and stared about him. It was very cold but it was not this that woke him. It was a little sound. He could hear it now quite clearly. It came from within a few feet of where he sat. It was a kind of tapping, but it did not seem to come from the wall. It came from beneath the bed.

Then it stopped for a little and when it returned it seemed as though it bore some kind of message, for there was a pattern or rhythm in it: something that sounded like a question. ‘Tap – Tap … Tap – Tap – Tap. Are … yóu … thére …? Are … yóu … thére …?’

This tapping, sinister as it was, had the effect, at least, of turning Titus’ mind from the almost unbearable nostalgia that had oppressed it.

Edging himself silently from the flimsy bed, he stood beside it, his heart beating, and then he lifted it bodily from where it stood and set it down in the centre of the cell.

Remembering the candles on the table, he fumbled for one, lit it, and then tip-toed back to where the bed had stood, and then moved the small flame to and fro along the flagstones. As he did so the tapping started again.

‘Are … yóu … thére …?’ it seemed to say – ‘Are … yóu … thére …?’

Titus knelt down and shone the candle flame full upon the stone from immediately below which the tapping appeared to proceed.

It seemed quite ordinary, at first, this flagstone, but under scrutiny Titus could see that the thin fissure that surrounded it was sharper and deeper than was the case with the adjacent stones. The candlelight showed up what the daylight would have hidden.

Again the knocking started and Titus, taking the knuckle of flint from his pocket, waited for the next lull. Then, with a trembling hand, he struck the stone slab twice.

For a moment there was no reply and then the answer came – ‘One … two …’

It was a brisk ‘one – two’, quite unlike the tentative tapping which had preceded it.

It was as though, whoever or whatever stood or lay or crawled beneath the flagstone, the mood of the enigma had changed. The ‘being’, whatever it was, had gained in confidence.

What happened next was stranger and more fearful. Something more startling than the tapping had taken its place. This time it was the eyes that were assailed. What did they see that made his whole body shake? Peering at the candle-lit flagstone below him, he saw it move.

Titus jumped back from the oscillating stone and, lifting his candle high in the air, he looked about him wildly for some kind of weapon. His eyes returned to the stone which was now an inch above the ground.

From where Titus stood in the centre of the cell he could not see that the stone was supported by a pair of hands that trembled with its weight. All he saw was a part of the floor rising up with a kind of slow purpose.

Woken out of his sleep to find himself in a prison – and then to hear a knocking in the darkness – and then to be faced with something phantasmagoric – a stone, apparently alive, raising itself in secret in order to survey the supine vaults – all this and the depth of his homesickness – what could all this lead to but a lightness in the head? But this lightness, though it all but brought a kind of mad laughter in its train, did not prevent him seeing in the half-painted chair a possible weapon. Grabbing it, with his eyes fixed upon the flagstone, he wrenched the chair to pieces, this way and that, until he had pulled free from the skeleton one of its front legs. With this in his hand he began to laugh silently as he crept towards his enemy, the stone.

But as he crept forward he saw before the flagstone, which was by now five inches up in the air, two thick grey wrists.

They were trembling with the weight of the stone slab, and as Titus watched, his eyes wide with conjecture, he saw the thick slab begin to tilt and edge itself over the adjacent stone until, by degrees, the whole weight was transferred and there was a square hole in the floor.

The thick grey hands had withdrawn, taking their fingers with them – but a moment later something arose to take their place. It was the head of a man.

THIRTY-SIX

Little did he know – this riser-out-of-flagstones – that his head was that of a batter’d god – nor that with such a visage, he was, when he spoke, undermining his own grandeur, for no voice could be tremendous enough for such a face.

‘Be not startled,’ he whined, and his accents were as soft as dough. ‘All is well; all is lovely; all is as it should be. Accept me. That is all I ask you. Accept me. Old Crime they call me. They will have their little jokes. Dear boys, they are. Ha ha! That I have come to you through a hole in the floor is nothing. Put down that chair leg, friend.’

‘What do you want?’ said Titus.

‘Listen to him,’ replied the soft voice. ‘“What do you want?” he says. I want nothing, dear child. Nothing but friendship. Sweet friendship. That is why I have come to see you. To initiate you. One must help the helpless, mustn’t one? And pour out balm, you know: and bathe all kinds of bruises.’

‘I wish to hell you had left me alone,’ said Titus savagely. ‘You can keep your balm.’

‘Now is that nice?’ said Old Crime. ‘Is that kind? But I understand. You are not used to it: are you? It takes some time to love the Honeycomb.’

Titus stared at the leonine head.

The voice had robbed it of all grandeur, and he placed the chair leg on the table within reach.

‘The Honeycomb? What’s that?’ said Titus at last. The man had been staring at him intently.

‘It is the name we give, dear boy, to what some would call a prison. But we know better. To us it is a world within a world – and I should know, shouldn’t I? I’ve been here all my life – or nearly all. For the first few years I lived in luxury. There were tiger-skins on the scented floorboards of our houses: and golden cutlery and golden plates. Money was like the sands of the sea. For I come from a great line. You have probably heard of us. We are the oldest family in the world – we are the originals.’ He edged forward, out of the hole.

‘Do you think that because I am here, in the Honeycomb, I am missing anything? Do you think I am jealous of my family? Do you think I miss the golden plates and the tiger-skins? No! Nor the reflections in the polished floor. I have found my luxury here. This is my joy. To be a prisoner in the Honeycomb. So, my dear child, be not startled. I came to tell you there’s a friend below you. You can always tap to me. Tap out your thoughts. Tap out your joys and sorrows. Tap out your love. We will grow old together.’

Titus turned his face sharply. What did he mean, this vile, unhealthy creature.

‘Leave me alone,’ cried Titus, ‘– leave me alone!’

The man from the cell below stared at Titus. Then he began to tremble.

‘This used to be my cell,’ he said. ‘Years and years ago. I was a fire-raiser. “Arson” they called it. I did so love a fire. The flames make up for everything.

‘Bring on the rats and mice! Bring on my skinning-knife. Bring on the New Boys.’

He moved a step towards Titus who, in his turn, moved a little nearer to the chair-leg weapon.

‘This is a good cell. I had it once,’ whined Old Crime. ‘I made something out of it, I can tell you. I learned the nature of it. I was sad to leave it. This window is the finest in the prison. But who cares about it now? Where are the frescoes gone? My yellow frescoes. Drawings, you understand. Drawings of fairies. Now they have been covered up and nothing is left of all my work. Not a trace.’

He lifted his proud head and but for the shortness of his legs he might well have been Isaiah.

‘Put that chair leg on the table, boy. Forget yourself. Eat up your crumbs.’

Titus looked down at the old lag and the craggy grandeur of his upturned face.

‘You’ve come to the right place,’ said Old Crime. ‘Away from the filthy thing called Life. Join us, dear boy. You would be an asset. My friends are unique. Grow old with us.’

‘You talk too much,’ said Titus.

The man from below stretched out his strong arm slowly. His right hand fastened upon Titus’ biceps and as it tightened Titus could feel an evil strength, a sense that Old Crime’s power was limitless and that, had he wanted to, he could have torn the arm away with ease.

As it was he brought Titus to his side with a single pull, and far back in the sham nobility of his countenance Titus could see two little fires no bigger than pin-heads burning.

‘I was going to do so much for you,’ said the man from below. ‘I was going to introduce you to my colleagues. I was going to show you all the escape routes – should you want them – I was going to tell you about my poetry and where the harlots prowl. After all one mustn’t become ill, must we? That wouldn’t do at all.

‘But you have told me I talk too much, so I will do something quite different and crack your skull like an egg-shell.’

All in a breath the dreadful man let go of Titus, wheeled in his tracks, and lifting the table above his head he flung it, with all the force he could command, at Titus. But he was too late, for all his speed. Directly Titus saw the man reach for the table he sprang to one side, and the heavy piece of furniture crashed against the wall at his back.

Turning now upon the massive-chested and muscular creature, he was surprised to hear the sound of sobbing. His adversary was now upon his knees, his huge archaic face buried in his hands.

Not knowing what to do, Titus re-lit one of the candles which had been on the table and then sat down on his trestle bed, the only piece of furniture left in the cell that hadn’t been smashed.

‘Why did you have to say it? Why did you have to? O why? Why?’ sobbed the man.

‘O God,’ said Titus to himself, ‘what have I done?’

‘So I talk too much? O God, I talk too much.’

A shadow passed over Old Crime’s face. At the same moment there was a heavy sound of feet beyond the door and then after a rattling of keys the sound of one turning in the lock. Old Crime was by this time on the move and by the time the door began to open he had disappeared down the hole in the floor.

Hardly knowing what he was doing, Titus dragged the trestle bed over the hole and then lay down on it as the door opened.

A warder came in with a torch. He flashed it around the cell, the beam of light lingering on the broken table, the broken chair, and the supposedly sleeping boy.

Four strides took him to Titus, whom he pulled from his bed only to beat him back again with a vicious clout on the head.

‘Let that last you till the morning, you bloody whelp!’ shouted the warder. ‘I’ll teach you to keep your temper! I’ll teach you to smash things.’ He glowered at Titus. ‘Who were you talking to?’ he shouted, but Titus, being half stunned, could hardly answer.

In the very early morning when he awoke he thought it had all been a dream. But the dream was so vivid that he could not refrain from rolling to the floor and peering in the half-darkness beneath the trestle bed.

It had been no dream, for there it was, that heavy slab of stone, and he immediately began to shift it inch by inch and it fell into its former place. But just before the hole was finally closed he heard the old man’s voice, soft as gruel, in the darkness below.

‘Grow old with me …,’ it said. ‘Grow old with me.’

THIRTY-SEVEN

A dim light shone above his Worship’s head. In the hollow of the Court someone could be heard sharpening a pencil. A chair creaked, and Titus, standing upright at the bar, began to bang his hands together, for it was a bitter cold morning.

‘Who is applauding what?’ said the Magistrate, recovering from a reverie. ‘Have I said something profound?’

‘No, not at all, your Worship,’ said the large, pock-marked Clerk of the Court. ‘That is, sir, you made no remark.’

‘Silence can be profound, Mr Drugg. Very much so.’

‘Yes, your Worship.’

‘What was it then?’

‘It was the young man, your Worship; clapping his hands, to warm them, I imagine.’

‘Ah, yes. The young man. Which young man? Where is he?’

‘In the dock, your Worship.’

The Magistrate, frowning a little, pushed his wig to one side and then drew it back again.

‘I seem to know his face,’ said the Magistrate.

‘Quite so, your Worship,’ said Mr Drugg. ‘This prisoner has been before you several times.’

‘That accounts for it,’ said the Magistrate. ‘And what has he been up to now?’

‘If I may remind your Worship,’ said the large pock-marked Clerk of the Court, not without a note of peevishness in his voice,’ – you were dealing with this case only this morning.’

‘And so I was. It is returning to me. I have always had an excellent memory. Think of a Magistrate with no memory.’

‘I am thinking of it, your Worship,’ said Mr Drugg as, with a gesture of irritation, he thumbed through a sheaf of irrelevant papers.

‘Vagrancy. Wasn’t that it, Mr Drugg?’

‘It was,’ said the Clerk of the Court. ‘Vagrancy, damage, and trespass’ – and he turned his big greyish-coloured face to Titus and lifted a corner of his top lip away from his teeth like a dog. And then, as though upon their own volition, his hands slid down into the depths of his trouser pockets as though two foxes had all of a sudden gone to earth. A smothered sound of keys and coins being jangled together gave the momentary impression that there was about Mr Drugg something frisky, something of the playboy. But this impression was gone as soon as it was born. There was nothing in Mr Drugg’s dark, heavy features, nothing about his stance, nothing about his voice to give colour to the thought. Only the noise of coins.

But the jangling, half smothered as it was, reminded Titus of something half forgotten, a dreadful, yet intimate music; of a cold kingdom; of bolts and flag-stoned corridors; of intricate gates of corroded iron; of flints and visors and the beaks of birds.

‘“Vagrancy”, “damage”, and “trespass”,’ repeated the Magistrate, ‘yes, yes, I remember. Fell through someone else’s roof. Was that it?’

‘Exactly, sir,’ said the Clerk of the Court.

‘No visible means of support?’

‘That is so, your Worship.’

‘Homeless?’

‘Yes, and no, your Worship,’ said the Clerk. ‘He talks of –’

‘Yes, yes, yes, yes. I have it now. A trying case and a trying young man – I had begun to tire, I remember, of his obscurity.’

The Magistrate leaned forward on his elbows and rested his long, bony chin upon the knuckles of his interlocked fingers.

‘This is the fourth time that I have had you before me at the bar, and as far as I can judge, the whole thing has been a waste of time to the Court and nothing but a nuisance to myself. Your answers, when they have been forthcoming, have been either idiotic, nebulous, or fantastic. This cannot be allowed to go on. Your youth is no excuse. Do you like stamps?’

‘Stamps, your Worship?’

‘Do you collect them?’

‘No.’

‘A pity. I have a rare collection rotting daily. Now listen to me. You have already spent a week in prison – but it is not your vagrancy that troubles me. That is straightforward, though culpable. It is that you are rootless and obtuse. It seems you have some knowledge hidden from us. Your ways are curious, your terms are meaningless. I will ask you once again. What is this Gormenghast? What does it mean?’

Titus turned his face to the Bench. If ever there was a man to be trusted, his Worship was that man.

Ancient, wrinkled, like a tortoise, but with eyes as candid as grey glass.

But Titus made no answer, only brushing his forehead with the sleeve of his coat.

‘Have you heard his Worship’s question?’ said a voice at his side. It was Mr Drugg.

‘I do not know,’ said Titus, ‘what is meant by such a question. You might just as well ask me what is this hand of mine? What does it mean?’ And he raised it in the air with the fingers spread out like a starfish. ‘Or what is this leg?’ And he stood on one foot in the box and shook the other as though it were loose. ‘Forgive me, your Worship, I cannot understand.’

‘It is a place, your Worship,’ said the Clerk of the Court. ‘The prisoner has insisted that it is a place.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said the Magistrate. ‘But where is it? Is it north, south, east, or west, young man? Help me to help you. I take it you do not want to spend the rest of your life sleeping on the roofs of foreign towns. What is it, boy? What is the matter with you?’

A ray of light slid through a high window of the Courtroom and hit the back of Mr Drugg’s short neck as though it were revealing something of mystical significance. Mr Drugg drew back his head and the light moved forward and settled on his ear. Titus watched it as he spoke.

‘I would tell you, if I could, sir,’ he said. ‘I only know that I have lost my way. It is not that I want to return to my home – I do not; it is that even if I wished to do so I could not. It is not that I have travelled very far; it is that I have lost my bearings, sir.’

‘Did you run away, young man?’

‘I rode away,’ said Titus.

‘From … Gormenghast?’

‘Yes, your Worship.’

‘Leaving your mother …?’

‘Yes.’

‘And your father …?’

‘No, not my father …’

‘Ah … is he dead, my boy?’

‘Yes, your Worship. He was eaten by owls.’

The Magistrate raised an eyebrow and began to write upon a piece of paper.

THIRTY-EIGHT

This note, which was obviously intended for some important person, probably someone in charge of the local Asylum, or home for delinquent youths – this note fell foul of the Magistrate’s intentions, and after being dropped and trodden on, was recovered and passed from hand to hand until it came to rest for a little while in the wrinkled paw of a half-wit, who eventually, after trying to read it, made a dart out of it, and set it sailing out of the shadows and into a less murky quarter of the Court.

A little behind the half-wit was a figure almost completely lost in the shadows. In his pocket lay curled a salamander. His eyes were closed and his nose, like a large rudder, pointed at the ceiling.

On his left sat Mrs Grass with a hat like a yellow cabbage. She had made several attempts to whisper in Muzzlehatch’s ear, but had received no response.

Some distance to the left of these two sat half a dozen strong men, husky and very upright. They had followed the proceedings with strict, if frowning, attention. In their view the Magistrate was being too lenient. After all the young man in the dock had proved himself no gentleman. One had only to look at his clothes. Apart from this, the way he had broken into Lady Cusp-Canine’s party was unforgivable.

Lady Cusp-Canine sat with her little chin propped up by her little index finger. Her hat, unlike Mrs Grass’s cabbage-like creation, was black as night and rather like a crow’s nest. From under the multiform brim of twigs her little made-up face was mushroom-white save where her mouth was like a small red wound. Her head remained motionless but her small, black, button eyes darted here and there so that nothing should be missed.

Very little was, when she was around, and it was she who first saw the dart soar out of the gloom at the back of the Court and take a long leisurely half-circle through the dim air.

The Magistrate, his eyelids dropping heavily over his innocent eyeballs, began to slip forward in his high chair until he assumed the kind of position that reminded one of Muzzlehatch at the wheel of his car. But there the similarity ended, for the fact that they had both, even now, closed their eyes meant little. What was important was that the Magistrate was half asleep while Muzzlehatch was very wide awake.

He had noticed, in spite of his seeming torpor, that in an alcove, half hidden by a pillar, were two figures who sat very still and very upright; with an elasticity of articulation; an imperceptible vibrance of the spine. They were upright to the point of unnaturalness. They did not move. Even the plumes on their helmets were motionless, and were in every way identical.

He, Muzzlehatch, had also picked out Inspector Acreblade (a pleasant change from the tall enigmas), for there could be nothing more earthy than the Inspector, who believed in nothing so much as his hound-like job, the spoor and gristle of it: the dry bones of his trade. Within his head there was always a quarry. Ugly or beautiful; a quarry. High morals took no part in his career. He was a hunter and that was all. His aggressive chin prodded the air. His stocky frame had about it something dauntless.

Muzzlehatch watched him through eyelids that were no more than a thread apart. There were not many people in Court that were not being watched by Muzzlehatch. In fact there was only one. She sat quite still and unobserved in the shade of a pillar and watched Titus as he stood in the dock, the Magistrate looming above him, like some kind of a cloud. His forgetful face was quite invisible but the crown of his wig was illumined by the lamp that hung above his head. And as Juno stared, she frowned a little and the frown was as much an expression of kindness as the warm quizzical smile that usually hovered on her lips.

THIRTY-NINE

What was it about this stripling at the bar? Why did he touch her so? Why was she frightened for him? ‘My father is dead,’ he had answered. ‘He was eaten by owls.’

A group of elderly men, their legs and arms draped around the backs and elbow-rests of pew-like settees, made between them a noisy corner. The Clerk of the Court had brought them to order more than once but their age had made them impervious to criticism, their old jaws rattling on without a break.

At that moment the paper dart began to loop downward in a gracile curve so that the central figure of the elderly group – the poet himself – jumped to his feet and cried out ‘Armageddon!’ in so loud a voice that the Magistrate opened his eyes.

‘What’s this!’ he muttered, the dart trailing across his line of vision. There was no answer, for at that moment the rain came down. At first it had been the merest patter; but then it had thickened into a throbbing of water, only to give way after a little while to a protracted hissing.

This hissing filled the whole Court. The very stones hissed and with the rain came a premature darkness which thickened the already murky Court.

‘More candles!’ someone cried. ‘More lanterns! Brands and torches, electricity, gas and glow-worms!’

By now it was impossible to recognize anyone save by their silhouettes, for what lights had begun to appear were sucked in by the quenching effect of the darkness.

It was then that someone pulled down a small emergency lever at the back of the Court, and the whole pace was jerked into a spasm of naked brilliance.

For a while the Magistrate, the Clerk, the witnesses, the public, sat blinded. Scores of eyelids closed: scores of pupils began to contract. And everything was changed save for the roaring of the rain upon the roof. While this noise made it impossible to be heard, yet every detail had become important to the eye.

There was nothing mysterious left; all was made naked. The Magistrate had never before suffered such excruciating limelight. The very essence of his vocation was ‘removedness’; how could he be ‘removed’ with the harsh unscrupulous light revealing him as a particular man? He was a symbol. He was the Law. He was Justice. He was the wig he wore. Once the wig was gone then he was gone with it. He became a little man among little men. A little man with rather weak eyes; that they were blue and candid argued a quality of magnanimity, when in Court; but they became irritatingly weak and empty directly he removed his wig and returned to his home. But now the unnatural light was upon him, cold and merciless: the kind of light by which vile deeds are done.

With this fierce radiance on his face it was not hard for him to imagine that he was the prisoner.

He opened his mouth to speak but not a word could be heard, for the rain was thrashing the roof.

The gaggle of old men, now that their voices were drowned, had gone into their shells, their old tortoise faces turned from the violence of the light.

Following Titus’ gaze, Muzzlehatch could see that he was staring at the Helmeted Pair and that the Helmeted Pair were staring at Titus. The young man’s hands were shaking on the rail of the bar.

One of the group of six had picked up the paper dart and smoothed it out with the flat of his big insensitive hand. He frowned as he read and then shot a glance at the young man at the bar. Spill, the tall deaf gentleman, was peering over the man’s shoulder. His deafness made him wonder at the lack of conversation in the Court. He could not know that a black sky was crashing down upon the roof nor that the light flooding the walnut-panelled Court was so incongruously coinciding with the black downpour of the outer world.

But he could read, and what he read caused him to dart a glance at Titus, who, turning his head at last from the Helmeted Pair, saw Muzzlehatch. The blinding light had plucked him from the shadows. What was he doing? He was making some kind of sign. Then Titus saw Juno, and for a moment he felt a kind of warmth both for and from her. Then he saw Spill and Kestrel. Then he saw Mrs Grass and then the poet.

Everything was horribly close and vivid. Muzzlehatch, looking about nine foot high, had reached the middle of the Court, and choosing the right moment he relieved the man of the crinkled note.

As he read, the rain slackened, and by the time he had finished, the black sky, as though it were a solid, had moved away, all in one piece, and could be heard trundling away into another region.

There was a hush in the Court until an anonymous voice cried out – ‘Switch off this fiendish light!’

This peremptory order was obeyed by someone equally anonymous, and the lanterns and the lamps came into their own again: the shadows spread themselves. The Magistrate leaned forward.

‘What are you reading, my friend?’ he said to Muzzlehatch. ‘If the furrow between your eyes spells anything, I should guess it spells news.’

‘Why, yes, your Worship, why, yes, indeed. Dire news,’ said Muzzlehatch.

‘That scrap of paper in your hands,’ continued the Magistrate, ‘looks remarkably like a note I handed down to my Clerk, creased though it is and filthy as it has become. Would it be?’

‘It would,’ said Muzzlehatch, ‘and it is. But you are wrong; he isn’t. No more than I am.’

‘No?’

‘No!’

‘Isn’t what?’

‘Can you not remember what you wrote, your Worship?’

‘Remind me.’

Muzzlehatch, instead of reading out the contents of the note, slouched up to the Magistrate’s bench and handed him the grubby paper.

‘This is what you wrote,’ he said. ‘It is not for the public. Nor for the young prisoner.’

‘No?’ said the Magistrate.

‘No,’ said Muzzlehatch.

‘Let me see … Let me see …’ said the Magistrate, pursing his mouth as he took the note from Muzzlehatch and read to himself.

Ref.: No. 1721536217

My dear Filby,

I have before me a young man, a vagrant, a trespasser, a quite peculiar youth, hailing from Gorgonblast, or some such improbable place, and bound for nowhere. By name he admits to ‘Titus’, and sometimes to ‘Groan’, though whether Groan is his real name or an invention it is hard to say.

It is quite clear in my mind that this young man is suffering from delusions of grandeur and should be kept under close observation – in other words, Filby, my dear old chap, the boy, to put it bluntly, is dotty. Have you room for him? He can, of course, pay nothing, but he may be of interest to you and even find a place in the treatise you are working on. What was it you were calling it? ‘Among the Emperors’?

O dear, what it is to be a Magistrate! Sometimes I wonder what it is all about. The human heart is too much. Things go too far. They become unhealthy. But I’d rather be me than you. You are in the entrails of it all. I asked the young man if his father were alive. ‘No,’ he said, ‘he was eaten by owls.’ What do you make of that? I will have him sent over. How is your neuritis? Let me hear from you, old man.

Yours ever,

Willy.

The Magistrate looked up from his note and stared at the boy. ‘That seems to cover it,’ he said. ‘And yet … you look all right. I wish I could help you. I will try once more – because I may be wrong.’

‘In what way?’ said Titus; his eyes were fixed on Acreblade, who had changed his seat in the Court and was now very close indeed.

‘What is wrong with me, your Worship? Why do you peer at me like that?’ said Titus. ‘I am lost – that is all.’

The Magistrate leaned forward. ‘Tell me, Titus – tell me about your home. You have told us of your father’s death. What of your mother?’

‘She was a woman.’

This answer raised a guffaw in the Court.

‘Silence,’ shouted the Clerk of the Court.

‘I would not like to feel that you are showing contempt of Court,’ said the Magistrate, ‘but if this goes on any longer I will have to pass you on to Mr Acreblade. Is your mother alive?’

‘Yes, your Worship,’ said Titus, ‘unless she has died.’

‘When did you last see her?’

‘Long ago.’

‘Were you not happy with her? – You have told us that you ran away from home.’

‘I would like to see her again,’ said Titus. ‘I did not see very much of her; she was too vast for me. But I did not flee from her.’

‘What did you flee from?’

‘From my duty.’

‘Your duty?’

‘Yes, your Worship.’

‘What kind of duty?’

‘My hereditary duty. I have told you. I am the last of the Line. I have betrayed my birthright. I have betrayed my home. I have run like a rat from Gormenghast. God have mercy on me.

‘What do you want of me? I am sick of it all! Sick of being followed. What have I done wrong – save to myself? So my papers are out of order, are they? So is my brain and heart. One day I’ll do some shadowing myself!’

Titus, his hands gripping the sides of the box, turned his full face to the Magistrate.

‘Why was I put in jail, your Worship,’ he whispered, ‘as though I were a criminal? Me! Seventy-Seventh Earl and heir to that name.’

‘Gormenghast,’ murmured the Magistrate. ‘Tell us more, dear boy.’

‘What can I tell you? It spreads in all directions. There is no end to it. Yet it seems to me now to have boundaries. It has the sunlight and the moonlight on its walls just like this country. There are rats and moths – and herons. It has bells that chime. It has forests and it has lakes and it is full of people.’

‘What kind of people, dear boy?’

‘They had two legs each, your Worship, and when they sang they opened their mouths and when they cried the water fell out of their eyes. Forgive me, your Worship, I do not wish to be facetious. But what can I say? I am in a foreign city; in a foreign land; let me go free. I could not bear that prison any more.

‘Gormenghast was a kind of jail. A place of ritual. But suddenly and under my breath I had to say good-bye.’

‘Yes, my boy. Please go on.’

‘There had been a flood, your Worship. A great flood. So that the castle seemed to float upon it. When the sun at last came out the whole place dripped and shone … I had a horse, your Worship … I dug my heels into her flank and I galloped into perdition. I wanted to know, you see.’

‘What did you want to know, my young friend?’

‘I wanted to know,’ said Titus, ‘whether there was any other place.’

‘Any other place …?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you written to your mother?’

‘I have written to her. But every time my letters are returned. Address unknown.’

‘What was this address?’

‘I have only one address,’ said Titus.

‘It is odd that you should have recovered your letters.’

‘Why?’ said Titus.

‘Because your name is hardly probable. Now is it?’

‘It is my name,’ said Titus.

‘What, Titus Groan, Seventy-Seventh Lord?’

‘Why not?’

‘It is unlikely. That sort of title belongs to another age. Do you dream at night? Have you lapses of memory? Are you a poet? Or is it all, in fact, an elaborate joke?’

‘A joke? O God!’ said Titus.

So passionate was his outcry that the Court fell silent. That was not the voice of a hoaxer. It was the voice of someone quite convinced of his own truth – the truth in his head.

FORTY

Muzzlehatch watched the boy and wondered why he had felt a compulsion to attend the Court. Why should he be interested in the comings and goings of this young vagabond? He had never from the first supposed the boy to be insane: though there were some in the Court who were convinced that Titus was mad as a bird, and had come for no other reason than to indulge a morbid curiosity.

No; Muzzlehatch had attended the Court because, although he would never have admitted it, he had become interested in the fate and future of the enigmatic creature he had found half drowned on the water-steps. That he was interested annoyed him for he knew, as he sat there, that his small brown bear would be pining for him and that every one of his animals was at that moment peering through the bars, fretful for his approach.

While such thoughts were in his head, a voice broke the stillness of the Court, asking permission to address the Magistrate.

Wearily, his Worship nodded his head, and then seeing who it was who had addressed him, he sat up and adjusted his wig. For it was Juno.

‘Let me take him,’ she said, her eloquent and engulfing eyes fixed upon his Worship’s face. ‘He is alone and resentful. Perhaps I could find out how best he could be helped. In the meantime, your Worship, he is hungry, travel-stained, and tired.’

‘I object, your Worship,’ said Inspector Acreblade. ‘All that this lady says is true. But he is here on account of serious infringement of the Law. We cannot afford to be sentimental.’

‘Why not?’ said the Magistrate. ‘His sins are not serious.’

He turned to her with a note almost of excitement in his tired old voice. ‘Do you wish to be responsible,’ he said, ‘both to me and for him?’

‘I take full responsibility,’ said Juno.

‘And you will keep in touch with me?’

‘Certainly, your Worship – but there’s another thing.’

‘What is that, madam?’

‘The young man’s attitude. I will not take him with me unless he wishes it. Indeed I cannot.’

The Magistrate turned to Titus and was about to speak when he seemed to change his mind. He returned his gaze to her.

‘Are you married, madam?’

‘I am not,’ said Juno.

There was a pause before the Magistrate spoke again.

‘Young man,’ he said, ‘this lady has offered to act as your guardian until you are well again … what do you say?’

All that was weak in Titus rose like oil to the surface of deep water. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you, madam. Thank you.’

FORTY-ONE

At first what was it but an apprehension sweet as far birdsong – a tremulous thing – an awareness that fate had thrown them together; a world had been brought into being – had been discovered? A world, a universe over whose boundaries and into whose forests they had not dared to venture. A world to be glimpsed, not from some crest of the imagination, but through simple words, empty in themselves as air, and sentences quite colourless and void; save that they set their pulses racing.

Theirs was a small talk – that evoked the measureless avenues of the night, and the green glades of noonday. When they said ‘Hullo!’ new stars appeared in the sky; when they laughed, this wild world split its sides, though what was so funny neither of them knew. It was a game of the fantastic senses; febrile; tender, tip-tilted. They would lean on the window-sill of Juno’s beautiful room and gaze for hours on end at the far hills where the trees and buildings were so close together, so interwoven, that it was impossible to say whether it was a city in a forest or a forest in a city. There they leaned in the golden light, sometimes happy to talk – sometimes basking in a miraculous silence.

Was Titus in love with his guardian, and was she in love with him? How could it be otherwise? Before either of them had formed the remotest knowledge of one another’s characters, they were already, after a few days, trembling at the sound of each other’s footsteps.

But at night, when she lay awake, she cursed her age. She was forty. A little more than twice as old as Titus. Next to others of her age, or even younger, she still appeared unparalleled, with a head like a female warrior in a legend – but with Titus beside her she had no choice but to come to terms with nature, and she felt an angry and mutinous pain in her bosom. She thought of Muzzlehatch and how he had swept her off her feet twenty years earlier and of their voyagings to outlandish islands, and of how his ebullience became maddening and of how they were equally strong-headed, equally wilful, and of how their travels together became an agony for them both, for they broke against one another like waves breaking against headlands.

But with Titus it was so different. Titus from nowhere – a youth with an air about him: carrying over his shoulders a private world like a cloak, and from whose lips fell such strange tales of his boyhood days, that she was drawn to the very outskirts of that shadowland. ‘Perhaps,’ she thought, ‘I am in love with something as mysterious and elusive as a ghost. A ghost never to be held at the breast. Something that will always melt away.’

And then she would remember how happy they sometimes were; and how every day they leaned on the sill together, not touching one another, but tasting the rarest fruit of all – the sharp fruit of suspense.

But there were also times when she cried out in the darkness biting her lips – cried out against the substance of her age: for it was now that she should be young; now above all other times, with the wisdom in her, the wisdom that was frittered away in her ‘teens’, set aside in her twenties, now, lying there, palpable and with forty summers gone. She clenched her hands together. What good was wisdom; what good was anything when the fawn is fled from the grove?

‘God!’ she whispered. – ‘Where is the youth that I feel?’ And then she would heave a long shuddering sigh and toss her head on the pillow and gather her strength together and laugh; for she was, in her own way, undefeatable.

She lifted herself on her elbow, taking deep draughts of the night air.

‘He needs me,’ she would mutter in a kind of golden growl. ‘It is for me to give him joy – to give him direction – to give him love. Let the world say what it likes – he is my mission. I will be always at his side. He may not know it, but I will be there. In body or in spirit always, near him when he most needs me. My child from Gormenghast. My Titus Groan.’

And then, at that moment, the light across her features would darken, and a shadow of doubt would take its place – for who was this youth? What was he? Why was he? What was it about him? Who were those people he spoke of? This inner world? Those memories? Were they true? Was he a liar – a cunning child? Some kind of wild misfit? Or was he mad? No! No! It couldn’t be. It mustn’t be.

FORTY-TWO

It was now four months since Titus first set foot in Juno’s house. A watery light filled the sky. There were voices in the distance. A rustle of leaves – an acorn falling – the barking of a distant hound.

Juno leaned her superb, tropical head against the window in her sitting-room and gazed at the falling leaves or to speak more truly, she gazed through them, as they fell, fluttering and twisting, for her mind was elsewhere. Behind her in her elegant room a fire burned and cast a red glow across the marble cheek of a small head on a pedestal.

Then, all at once, there he was! A creature far from marble, waving to her from the statue’d garden, and the sight of him swept cogitation from her face as though a web were snatched from her features.

Seeing this happen, this change in her aspect, and the movement of her marvellous bosom, young Titus experienced, all in a flash, a number of simultaneous emotions. A pang of greed, green-carnal to the quick, sang, rang like a bell, his scrotum tightening; skidaddled through his loins and qualming tissues and began to burn like ice, the trembling fig on fire. And yet at the same time there was an aloofness in him – even a kind of suspicion, a perversity quite uncalled for. Something that Juno had always felt was there – something she feared beyond failure; this thing she could not compass with her arms.

Yet even worse than this, there was mixed up in him a pity for her. Pity that punctures love. She had given him everything, and he pitied her for it. He did not know that this was lethal and infinitely sad.

And there was the fear in him of being caught – caught in the generous folds of her love – her helpless love: fierce and loyal.

They gazed at one another. Juno with a quite incredible tenderness, something not easily associated with a lady in the height of fashion, and Titus with his greed returning as he watched her, flung out his arms in a wild, expansive gesture, quite false; quite melodramatic; and he knew it to be so, and so did she; but it was right at the moment, for his lust was real enough and lust is an arrogant and haughty beast and far from subtle.

So quickly did they flow one into another, these sensations of pity, physical greed, revulsion, excitement and tenderness, that they became blurred in an overriding impetus, a desire to hold all this in his outflung arms; to bring the total of their relationship to a burning focus. To bring it all to an end. That was the sadness of it. Not to create the deed that should set glory in motion but to bring glory to an end – to stab sweet love: to stab it to death. To be free of it.

None of this was in his mind. It was far away, in another pocket of his being. What was important, now, with her eyes bent upon him, and the shadow of a branch trembling across her breast, was the immemorial game of love: no less a game for being grave. No less grave for being wild. Grave as a great green sky. Grave as a surgeon’s knife.

‘So you thought you’d come back, my wicked one. Where have you been?’

‘In hell,’ said Titus. ‘Swigging blood and munching scorpions.’

‘That must have been great fun, my darling.’

‘Not so,’ said Titus, ‘hell is overrated.’

‘But you escaped?’

‘I caught a plane. The slenderest thing you ever saw. A million years slid by in half a minute. I sliced the sky in half. And all for what?’

‘Well … what?’

‘To batten on you.’

‘What of the slender plane?’

‘I pressed a button and away she flew.’

‘Is that good or bad?’

‘It is very good. We don’t want to be watched, do we? Machines are so inquisitive. You’re rather far away. May I come up?’

‘Of course, or you’ll disjoint yourself.’

‘Stay, stay where you are. Don’t go – I’m on my way,’ and with a mad and curious tilt of the head he disappeared from the statue’d garden and a few minutes later Juno could hear his feet on the stairs.

He was no longer entangled in a maze of moods. Whatever was happening to his subconscious, it made no attempt to break surface. His mind fell asleep. His wits fell awake. His cock trembled like a harp-string.

As he flung open the door of her room he saw her at once; proud, monumental, relaxed; one elbow on the mantelpiece, a smile on her lips, an eyebrow raised a little. His eyes were so fixed upon her that it was not surprising that he tripped up on a footstool that stood directly in his path, and trying to recover his balance tripped again and fell headlong.

Before he could recover she was already sitting on the floor beside him.

‘This is your second time to crash at my feet. Have you hurt yourself, darling? Is it symbolic?’ said Juno.

‘Bound to be,’ said Titus – ‘absolutely bound to be.’

Had he known her less well this absurd fall might well have distracted him from his somewhat unoriginal purpose, but with Juno hovering above him and smelling like paradise, his passion, far from being quenched, took on a strange quality – something ridiculous and lovable – so that to laugh became a part of their tenderness.

When Juno laughed the process began like a child’s gurgle.

As for Titus he shouted his laughter.

It was the death-knell of false sentiment and of any cliché, or recognized behaviour. This was a thing of their own invention. A new compound.

A spasm caught hold of him. It sidled across his diaphragm and skidded through his entrails. It shot up like a rocket to the back of his throat; it radiated into separate turnings. It converged again, and capsized through him, cart-wheeled into a land of near-lunacy, where Juno joined him. What they were laughing at they had no idea, which is more shattering than a world of wit.

Titus, turning over with a shout, flung out his hand and a moment later found it resting upon Juno’s thigh, and suddenly his laughter left him, and hers also, so that she rose to her feet and when he had done so also they put their arms around one another and they wandered away to the doorway and up the stairs and along a corridor and into a room whose walls were filled with books and pictures, suffused with the light of the autumn sun.

There was a sense of peace in this remote room, with the long shafts of sunlight a-swim with motes. Without any form of untidiness, this library was strangely informal. There was the remoteness of a ship at sea – a removal from normal life about it, as though it had never been put together by carpenters and masons, but was a projection of Juno’s mind.

‘Why?’ said Titus.

‘Why what, my sweet?’

‘This unexpected room?’

‘You like it?’

‘Of course, but why the secrecy?’

‘Secrecy?’

‘I never knew it existed.’

‘It doesn’t really, not when it’s empty. It only comes to life when we are in it.’

‘Too glib, my sweet.’

‘Brute.’

‘Yes; but don’t look sad. Who lit the fire? And don’t say the goblins, will you?’

‘I will never mention goblins again. I lit it.’

‘How sure you are of me!’

‘Not really. I feel a nearness, that’s all. Something holds us together. In spite of our ages. In spite of everything.’

‘O, age doesn’t matter,’ said Titus, taking hold of her arms.

‘Thank you,’ said Juno. A wry little smile came to her lips and then withered away. Her sculptured head remained. The lovely room grew soft with evening light as Juno and Titus slid from their clothes, and, trembling, sank to the floor together and began to drown.

The firelight flickered and grew dim; danced and died again. Their bodies sent one shadow through the room. It swarmed across the carpet; climbed a wall of books, and shook with joy across the solemn ceiling.

FORTY-THREE

A long while later when the moon had risen and while Juno and Titus were asleep in each other’s arms by the dying fire, Muzzlehatch, in roguish mood, having found no answer to his knocking, had climbed the chestnut tree whose high branches brushed the library window, and had, at great risk to life and limb, made a lateral leap in the dark and had landed on the window-sill of Juno’s room, catching hold, as he did so, of the open frame.

More by luck than skill he had managed to keep his balance and in doing so had made no noise at all save for the swish of the returning leaves and a faint rattle of the window-sash.

For some while now, he had seen little of Juno. It is true that for a few days following the unforeseen twinge of heart, when he had watched her move away from him down the drive of her home, he had seen something of her; he had realized that the past can never be recaptured, even if he had wished it, and he turned his life away from her, as a man turns his back upon his own youth.

Why then this visitation late at night to his one-time love? Why was he standing on the sill, blocking out the moon and staring at the embers of the fire? Because he longed to talk. To talk like a torrent. To put into words the scores of strange ideas that had been clamouring for release; clamouring to set his tongue on fire. All day he had longed for it.

The morning, afternoon and evening had been spent in moving from cage to cage in his inordinate zoo.

But love them as he did, he was not with his animals tonight. He wanted something else. He wanted words, and in his wish, he realized as the sun went down, was the image of the only person in the wide world at the foot of whose bed he could sit; bolt upright, his head held very high, his jaw thrust forward, his face alight with an endless sequence of ideas. Who else but Juno?

He had thought he had had from her all that she had to give. They had grown tired of each other. They knew too much about each other; but now, quite unexpectedly, he needed her again. There were the stars to talk about, and the fishes of the sea. There were demons and there were the wisps of down that cling to the breasts of the seraphim. There were old clothes to ponder and terrible diseases. There were the flying missiles and the weird workings of the heart. There was all … all to be chosen from. It was talking for its own mad, golden sake.

So Muzzlehatch, ignoring his ancient car, chose from his animals a great smelling llama; saddled it and cantered from his courtyard and away across the hills to Juno’s house, singing as he went.

He had no wish to disturb the other sleepers, but, as there was no reply to the pebbles he flung up at her window he was forced to knock upon the door. As this bore no results, and as he had no intention of bashing his way in, or of prising a window open, he decided to climb the chestnut tree whose branches fingered the windows on the second floor. He tethered the llama to the foot of the chestnut and began to climb and eventually to make the jump.

Standing on the sill, with a thirty-foot drop below him, he continued to stare for some while at the glow of embers in the grate, before he climbed carefully at last over the sash and down into the darkness of the room.

He had been in this room before, several times, but long ago, and it seemed very different tonight. He knew that Juno’s bedroom was immediately below and he started to make for the shadowy door.

He grinned to think what a surprise it would be for her. She was wonderful in the way she took surprises. She never looked surprised. She just looked happy to see you – almost as though she had been waiting for you. Waking out of a deep sleep she had often surprised Muzzlehatch by turning her head to him and smiling with almost unbearable sweetness before she had even opened her eyes. It was this that he wished to see again before the burning words came tumbling out.

It was when he was but a few steps from the door that he heard the first sound. With a reflex stemming from far earlier times his hand moved immediately to his hip pocket. But there was no revolver there and he brought back his empty hand to his side. He had swung in his tracks at the sound and he faced the last few vermilion embers in the grate.

What he had heard exactly he did not know, but it might have been a sigh. Or it might have been the leaves of the tree at the window except that the sound seemed to have come from near the fireplace.

And then it came again: this time it was a voice.

‘Sweet love … O, sweet, sweet love …’

The words were so soft that had they not been whispered in the profound silence of the night they would never have been heard.

Muzzlehatch, motionless in the seemingly haunted room, waited for several long minutes, but there were no more words and no sound save for a long sigh like the sigh of the sea.

Moving silently forward and a little to the right Muzzlehatch became almost immediately aware of a blot of darkness more intense than the surrounding shades and he bent forward with his hands raised as though ready for action.

What kind of a creature would lie on the floor and whisper? What kind of monster was luring him forward?

And then there was a movement in the darkness by the dulling embers and then silence again and no more stirrings.

The moon broke free of the clouds and shone into the library, lighting up a wall of books – lighting up four pictures: lighting up a patch of carpet and the sleeping heads of Juno and the boy.

Walking with slow, silent strides to the window; climbing through; jumping for the chestnut tree; lowering himself branch by branch; slipping and bruising his knee; reaching the ground; untying the llama and riding home – all this was a dream. The reality was in himself – a dull and sombre pain.

FORTY-FOUR

The days moved by in a long, sweet sequence of light and air. Each day an original thing. Yet behind all this there was something else. Something ominous. Juno had noticed it. Her lover was restless.

‘Titus!’

His name sprang up the stairs to where he lay.

‘Titus!’

Was it an echo, or a second cry? Whichever one it was it failed to wake him. There was no movement – save in his dream, where, tumbling from a tower, a skewbald beast fell headlong.

The voice was twelve treads closer.

‘Titus! My sweet!’

His eyelid moved but the dream fought on for life, the blotched beast plunging and wheeling though sky after sky.

The voice had reached the landing –

‘My mad one! My bad one! Where are you, poppet?’

Through the curtained windows of the bedroom, a flight of sunbeams, traversing the warm, dark air, forced a pool of light on the pillow. And beside that pool of light, in the ash-grey, linen shadow, his head lay, as a boulder might lie, or a heavy book might lie; motionless; undecipherable – a foreign language.

The voice was in the doorway; a cloud moved over the sun; and the sunbeams died from the pillow.

But the rich voice was still a part of his dream, though his eyes were open. It was blended with that rush of images and sounds which swarmed and expanded as the creature of his nightmare, falling at length into a lake of pale rainwater, vanished in a spurt of steam.

And as it sank, fathom by darkening fathom, a great host of heads, foreign yet familiar, arose from the deep and bobbed upon the water – and a hundred strange yet reminiscent voices began to call across the waves until from horizon to horizon he was filled with a great turbulence of sight and sound.

Then, suddenly, his eyes were wide open –

Where was he?

The empty darkness of the wall which faced him gave him no answer. He touched it with his hand.

Who was he? There was no knowing. He shut his eyes again. In a few moments there was no noise at all, and then the scuffling sound of a bird in the ivy outside the tall window recalled the world that was outside himself – something apart from this frightful zoneless nullity.

As he lifted himself up on one elbow, his memory returning in small waves, he could not know that a figure filled the doorway of his room – not so much in bulk as in the intensity of her presence – filled it as a tigress fills the opening of her cave.

And like a tigress she was striped: yellow and black: and because of the dark shadows behind her, only the yellow bands were visible, so that she appeared to be cut in pieces by the horizontal sweeps of a sword. And so she was like some demonstration of magic – a ‘severed woman’ – quite extraordinary and wonderful to see. But there was no one to see her, for Titus had his back to her.

And Titus could not see that her hat, plumed and piratical, sprouted as naturally from her head as the green fronds from the masthead of a date-palm.

She raised her hand to her breast. Not nervously; but with a kind of tense and tender purpose.

Propped upon his elbow with his back to her, his aloneness touched her sharply. It was wrong that he should be so single; so contained, so little merged into her own existence.

He was an island surrounded by deep water. There was no isthmus leading to her bounty; no causeway to her continent of love.

There are times when the air that floats between mortals becomes, in its stillness and silence, as cruel as the edge of a scythe.

‘O Titus! Titus, my darling!’ she cried. ‘What are you thinking of?’

He did not turn his head immediately, although at the first sound of her voice he was instantaneously aware of his surroundings. He knew that he was being watched – that Juno was very close indeed.

When at last he turned, she took a step towards the bed and she smiled with genuine pleasure to see his face. It was not a particularly striking face. With the best will in the world it could not be said that the brow or the chin or the nose or the cheekbones were chiselled. Rather, it seemed, the features of his head had, like the blurred irregularities of a boulder, been blunted by the wash of many tides. Youth and time were indissolubly fused.

She smiled to see the disarray of his brown hair and the lift of his eyebrows and the half-smile on his lips that seemed to have no more pigment in them than the warm sandy colour of his skin.

Only his eyes denied to his head the absolute simplicity of a monochrome. They were the colour of smoke.

‘What a time of day to sleep!’ said Juno, seating herself on the edge of the bed.

She took a mirror from her bag and bared her teeth for a moment as she scrutinized the line of her top lip, as though it were not hers but something which she might or might not purchase. It was perfectly drawn – a single sweep of carmine.

She put her mirror away and stretched her strong arms. The yellow stripes of her costume gleamed in a midday dusk.

‘What a time to sleep!’ she repeated. ‘Were you so anxious to escape, my chicken-child? So determined to evade me that you sneak upstairs and waste a summer afternoon? But you know you are free in my house to do exactly what you please, don’t you? To live as you please, how you please, where you please, you know this don’t you, my spoiled one?’

‘Yes,’ said Titus, ‘I remember you saying so.’

‘And you will, won’t you?’

‘O yes, I will,’ said Titus, ‘I will.’

‘Darling, you look so adorable.’

Titus took a deep breath. How sumptuous, how monumental and enormous she was as she sat there close to him, her wonderful hat almost touching, so it seemed, the ceiling. Her scent hung in the air between them. Her soft, yet strong white hand lay on his knee – but something was wrong – or lost; because his thoughts were of how his responses to her magnetism grew vaguer and something had changed or was changing with every passing day and he could only think of how he longed to be alone again in this great tree-filled city of the river – alone to wander listless through the sunbeams.

FORTY-FIVE

‘You are a strange young man,’ said Juno. ‘I can’t quite make you out. Sometimes I wonder why I take so much trouble over you, dear. But then of course I know, a moment later, that I have no choice. Now have I? You touch me so, my cruel one. You know it, don’t you?’

‘You say I do,’ said Titus ‘– though why God only knows.’

‘Fishing?’ said Juno. ‘Fishing again? Shall I tell you what I mean?’

‘Not now,’ said Titus, ‘please.’

‘Am I boring you? Just tell me if I am. Always tell me. And if you are angry with me, don’t hide it. Just shout at me. I will understand. I want you to be yourself – only yourself. That’s how you flower best. O my mad one! My bad one!’

The plume of her hat swayed in the golden darkness. Her proud black eyes shone wetly.

‘You have done so much for me,’ said Titus. ‘Don’t think I am callous. But perhaps I must go. You give me too much. It makes me ill.’

There was a sudden silence as though the house had stopped breathing.

‘Where could you go? You do not belong outside. You are my own, my discovery, my … my … can’t you understand, I love you darling. I know I’m twice your – O Titus, I adore you. You are my mystery.’

Outside her window the sun shone fiercely on the honey-coloured stone of the tall house. The wall fell featurelessly down to a swift river.

On the other side of the house was the great quadrangle of prawn-coloured bricks and the hideous moss-covered statues of naked athletes and broken horses.

‘There is nothing I can say,’ said Titus.

‘Of course there is nothing you can say. I understand. Some things can never be expressed. They lie too deep.’

She rose from beside him and turning away, tossed her proud handsome head. Her eyes were shut.

Something fell and struck the floor with a faint sound. It was her right earring, and she knew that the proud flinging gesture of her head had dislodged it, but she also knew that this was not the moment to pay any attention to so trivial a disturbance. Her eyes remained shut and her nostrils remained dilated.

Her hands came slowly together and then she lifted them to her up-flung chin.

‘Titus,’ she said, and her voice was little more than a whisper, a whisper less affected than one would expect to emerge from a lady in the stance she was adopting, with the plumes of her hat reaching down between her shoulder blades.

‘Yes,’ said Titus, ‘What is it?’

‘I am losing you, Titus. You are dissolving away. What is it I am doing wrong?’

At a bound Titus was off the bed and with his hands grasping her elbows had turned her about so that they faced one another in the warm dust of the high room. And then his heart grew sick, for he saw that her cheeks were wet and there in the wetness that wandered down her cheek a stain from her lashes appeared to float and thinly spread so that her heart became naked to him.

‘Juno! Juno! This is too much for me. I cannot bear it.’

‘There is no need to, Titus – please turn your head away.’

But Titus, taking no notice, held her closer than ever while her cheekbones swam with tears. But her voice was steady.

‘Leave me, Titus. I would rather be alone,’ she said.

‘I will never forget you,’ said Titus, his hands trembling. ‘But I must go. Our love is too intense. I am a coward. I cannot take it. I am selfish but not ungrateful. Forgive me, Juno – and say good-bye.’

But Juno, directly he released her, turned from him and, walking to the window, took out a mirror from her handbag.

‘Good-bye,’ said Titus.

Again there was no reply.

The blood rushed into the boy’s head, and hardly knowing what he was doing he ran from the room and down the stairs and out into a winter afternoon.

FORTY-SIX

So Titus fled from Juno. Out of the garden and down the riverside road he kept on running. A sense of both shame and liberation filled him as he ran. Shame that he had deserted his mistress after all the kindness and love she had showered on him; and liberation in finding himself alone, with no one to weigh him down with affection.

But after a little while, his sense of aloneness was not altogether pleasurable. He was aware that something was missing. Something that he had half forgotten during his stay at Juno’s house. It was nothing to do with Juno. It was a feeling that in leaving her he had once again to face the problem of his own identity. He was a part of something bigger than himself. He was a chip of stone, but where was the mountain from which it had broken away? He was the leaf but where was the tree? Where was his home? Where was his home?

Hardly knowing where he was going, he found after a long while that he was drawing near to that network of streets that surrounded Muzzlehatch’s house and zoo; but before he reached that tortuous quarter he became aware of something else.

The road down which he stumbled was long and straight with high, windowless walls. The lines of perspective converged not many degrees from the skyline.

There was no one ahead of him in spite of the length of the road, but it seemed that he was no longer alone. Something had joined him. He turned as he ran, and at first saw nothing, for he had focused his eyes upon the distance. Then all at once he halted, for he became aware of something floating beside him, at the height of his shoulders.

It was a sphere no bigger than the clenched fist of a child, and was composed of some transparent substance, so pellucid that it was only visible in certain lights, so that it seemed to come and go.

Dumbfounded, Titus drew aside from the centre of the road until he could feel the northern wall at his back. For a few moments he leaned there seeing no sign of the glassy sphere, until suddenly, there it was again, hovering above him.

This time as Titus watched it he could see that it was filled with glittering wires, an incredible filigree like frost on a pane; and then as a cloud moved over the sun, and a dim, sullen light filled the windowless street, the little hovering globe began to throb with a strange light like a glow-worm.

At first, Titus had been more amazed than frightened by the mobile globe which had appeared out of nowhere, and followed or seemed to follow every movement he made; but then fear began to make his legs feel weak, for he realized that he was being watched not by the globe itself, for the globe was only an agent, but by some remote informer who was at this very moment receiving messages. It was this that turned Titus’ fear into anger, and he swung back his arms as though to strike the elusive thing which hovered like a bird of paradise.

At the moment that Titus raised his hand, the sun came out again, and the little glittering globe with its coloured entrails of exquisite wire slid out of range, and hovered again as though it were an eyeball watching every move.

Then, as though restless, it sped, revolving on its axis, to the far end of the street where it turned about immediately and sang its way back to where it hung again five feet from Titus, who, fishing his knuckle of flint from his pocket, slung it at the hovering ball, which broke in a cascade of dazzling splinters, and as it broke there was a kind of gasp, as though the globe had given up its silvery ghost … as though it had a sentience of its own, or a state of perfection so acute that it entered, for the split second, the land of the living.

Leaving the broken thing behind him he began to run again. Fear had returned, and it was not until he found himself in Muzzlehatch’s courtyard that he came to a halt.

FORTY-SEVEN

Long before Titus could see Muzzlehatch he could hear him. That great rusty voice of his was enough to split the ear-drums of a deaf-mute. It thudded through the house, stamping itself upstairs and down again, in and out of half-deserted rooms and through the open windows so that the beasts and the birds lifted up their heads, or tilted them upon one side as though to savour the echoes.

Muzzlehatch lay stretched at length upon a low couch, and gazed directly down through the lower panes of a wide french window on the third floor. It gave him an unimpeded view of the long line of cages below him, where his animals lay drowsing in the pale sunlight.

This was a favourite room and a favourite view of his. On the floor at his side were books and bottles. His small ape sat at the far end of the couch. It had wrapped itself up in a piece of cloth and gazed sadly at its master, who had only a few moments ago been mouthing a black dirge of his own concoction.

Suddenly the small ape sprang to its feet and swung its long arms to and fro in a strangely jointless way, for it had heard a foot on the stairs two floors beneath.

Muzzlehatch lifted himself on to one elbow and listened. At first he could hear nothing, but then he also became aware of footsteps.

At last the door opened and an old bearded servant put his head around the corner.

‘Well, well,’ said Muzzlehatch. ‘By the grey fibres of the xadnos tree, you look splendid, my friend. Your beard has never looked more authentic. What do you want?’

‘There is a young man here, sir, who would like to see you.’

‘Really? What appallingly low taste. That can only be young Titus.’

‘Yes, it’s me,’ said Titus, taking a step into the room. ‘Can I come in?’

‘Of course you can, sweet rebus. Should I be getting to my palsied feet? What with you in a suit like migraine, and a spotted tie, and co-respondent shoes, you humble me. But swish as a willow-switch you look indeed! There’s been some scissor flashing, not a doubt.’

‘Can I sit down?’

‘Sit down, of course you can. The whole floor is yours. Now then,’ muttered Muzzlehatch, as the ape leapt upon his shoulder, ‘mind my bloody eyes, boy, I’ll be needing them later,’ and then, turning to Titus –

‘Well, what do you want?’ he said.

‘I want to talk,’ said Titus

‘What about, boy?’

Titus looked up. The huge, craggy head was tilted on one side. The light coming through the window surrounded it with a kind of frosty nimbus. Remote and baleful, it put Titus in mind of the inordinate moon with its pits and craters. It was a domain of leather, rock and bone.

‘What about, boy?’ he said again.

‘First of all, my fear,’ said Titus. ‘Believe me, sir, I didn’t like it.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I am afraid of the globe. It followed me until I broke it. And when I broke it, it sighed. And I forgot my flint. And without my flint I am lost … even more lost than before. For I have nothing else to prove where I come from, or that I ever had a native land. And the proof of it is only proof for me. It is no proof of anything to anyone but me. I have nothing to hold in my hand. Nothing to convince myself that it is not a dream. Nothing to prove my actuality. Nothing to prove that we are talking together here, in this room of yours. Nothing to prove my hands, nothing to prove my voice. And the globe! That intellectual globe! Why was it following me? What did it want? Was it spying on me? Is it magic, or is it science? Will they know who broke it? Will they be after me?’

‘Have a brandy,’ said Muzzlehatch.

Titus nodded his head.

‘Have you seen them, Mr Muzzlehatch? What are they?’

‘Just toys, boy, just toys. They can be simple as an infant’s rattle, or complex as the brain of man. Toys, toys, toys, to be played with. As for the one you chose to smash, number LKZ00572 ARG 39 576 Aij9843K2532 if I remember rightly, I have already read about it and how it is reputed to be almost human. Not quite, but almost. So THAT is what has happened? You have broken something quite hideously efficient. You have blasphemed against the spirit of the age. You have shattered the very spear-head of advancement. Having committed this reactionary crime, you come to me. Me! This being so, let me peer out of the window. It is always well to be watchful. These globes have origins. Somewhere or other there’s a backroom boy, his soul working in the primordial dark of a diseased yet sixty horse-power brain.’

‘There’s something else, Mr Muzzlehatch.’

‘I’m sure there is. In fact there is everything else.’

‘You belittle me,’ said Titus, turning suddenly upon him, ‘by your way of talking. It is serious to me.’

‘Everything is serious or not according to the colour of one’s brain.’

‘My brain is black,’ said Titus, ‘if that’s a colour.’

‘Well? Spit it out. The core of it.’

‘I have deserted Juno.’

‘Deserted her?’

‘Yes.’

‘It had to happen. She is too good for males.’

‘I thought you would hate me.’

‘Hate you? Why?

‘Well, sir, wasn’t she your … your …’

‘She was my everything. But like the damned creature that I inescapably am, I swapped her for the freedom of my limbs. For solitude which I eat as though it were food. And if you like, for animals. I have erred. Why? Because I long for her and am too proud to admit it. So she slipped away from me like a ship on the ebb tide.’

‘I loved her too,’ said Titus: ‘If you can believe it.’

‘To be sure you did, my pretty cutlet. And you still do. But you are young and prickly: passionate and callow: so you deserted her.’

‘Oh God!’ said Titus. ‘Talk, sir, with fewer words. I am sick of language.’

‘I will try to,’ said Muzzlehatch. ‘Habits are hard to break.’

‘Oh, sir, have I hurt your feelings?’

Muzzlehatch turned away and stared through the window. Almost immediately below him, he could see, through the bars of a domed roof, a family of leopards.

‘Hurt my feelings! Ha ha! Ha ha! I am a kind of crocodile on end. I have no feelings. As for you. Get on with life. Eat it up. Travel. Make journeys in your mind. Make journeys on your feet. To prison with you in a filthy garb! To glory with you in a golden car! Revel in loneliness. This is only a city. This is no place to halt.’

Muzzlehatch was still turned away.

‘What of the castle that you talk about – that crepuscular myth? Would you return after so short a journey? No, you must go on. Juno is part of your journey. So am I. Wade on, child. Before you lie the hills, and their reflections. Listen! Did you hear that?’

‘What?’ said Titus.

Muzzlehatch did not trouble to answer as he raised himself on one elbow, and peered out of the window.

There away to the east, he saw a column of scientists marching, and almost at the same moment the beasts of the zoo began to lift their heads, and stare all in the same direction.

‘What is it?’ said Titus.

Muzzlehatch again took no notice, but this time Titus did not wait for an answer, but moved to the window, and stared down, with Muzzlehatch, cheek by cheek, at the panorama spread out below him.

Then came the music: the sound of trumpets as from another world: the distant throbbing of the drums; and then, shattering the distance, the raw immoderate yell of a lion.

‘They are after us,’ said Muzzlehatch. ‘They are after our guts.’

‘Why?’ said Titus. ‘What have I done?’

‘You have only destroyed a miracle,’ said Muzzlehatch. ‘Who knows how pregnant with possibilities that globe could be? Why, you dunderhead, a thing like that could wipe out half the world. Now, they’ll have to start again. You were observed. They were on their toes. Perhaps they found your flint. Perhaps they have seen us together. Perhaps this … perhaps that. One thing is certain. You must disappear. Come here.’

Titus frowned, and then straightened himself. Then he took a step towards the big man.

‘Have you heard of the Under-River?’ asked Muzzlehatch.

Titus shook his head.

‘This badge will take you there.’ Muzzlehatch folded back his cuff, and tore away a bit of fabric from the lining. On the small cloth badge was printed the sign

‘What is that supposed to mean?’ said Titus.

‘Keep quiet. Time is on the slide. The drums are twice as loud. Listen.’

‘I can hear them. What do they want? What about your …?’

‘My animals? Let them but try to touch them. I’ll loose the white gorilla on the sods. Put away the badge, my dear. Never lose it. It will take you down.’

‘Down?’ said Titus.

‘Down. Down into an order of darkness. Waste no time.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Titus.

‘This is no time for comprehension. This is a great moment for the legs.’

Then suddenly a screaming of monkeys filled the room, and even Muzzlehatch with his stentorian throat was forced to raise his voice to a shout.

‘Down the stairs with you, and into the wine cellars. Turn left immediately at the foot of the flight, and mind the nails on the hand-rail. Left again, and you will see ahead of you, dimly, a tunnel, vaulted and hung with filthy webs as thick as blankets. Press on for an hour at least. Go carefully. Beware of the ground at your feet. It is littered with the relics of another age. There is a stillness down there that is not to be dwelt upon. Here, cram these in your pockets.’

Muzzlehatch strode across the room, and pulling open a drawer in an old cabinet he took a fistful of candles.

‘Where are we? Ah yes. Listen. By now you will be under the city at the northern end, and the darkness will be intense. The walls of the tunnel will be closing in. There will not be much room above your head. You will have to move doubled up. Easier for you than for me. Are you listening? If not, I’ll blast you, child. This is no game.’

‘O sir,’ said Titus, ‘that is why I cannot keep still. Listen to the trumpets! Listen to the beasts!’

‘Listen to me instead! You have your candle raised; but in place of hollow darkness you have before you a gate. At the foot of the gate is a black dish, upside down. Underneath it you will find a key. It may not be the key to your miserable life, but it will open the gate for you. Once through, and you have before you a long, narrow gradient that stretches at average pace for forty minutes. If you whisper the world sighs and sighs again. If you shout the earth reverberates.’

‘Oh sir,’ said Titus, ‘don’t be poetic, I can’t bear it. The zoo is going mad. And the scientists … the scientists …’

‘Fugger the scientists!’ said Muzzlehatch. ‘Now listen like a fox. I said a gradient. I said echoes. But now another thing. The sound of water …’

‘Water,’ said Titus, ‘I’m damned if I’ll drown.’

‘Pull your miserable self together, Lord Titus Groan. You will come, inevitably, to where suddenly, on turning a corner, there is a noise above you, like distant thunder, for you will be under the river itself … the same river that brought you to the city months ago. Ahead of you will spread a half-lit field of flagstones, at the far end of which you will see the glow of a green lantern. This lantern is set upon a table. Seated at this table, his face reflecting the light, you will see a man. Show him the badge I have given you. He will scrutinize it through a glass, then look up at you with an eye as yellow as lemon peel, whistle softly through a gap in his teeth until a child comes trotting through the shadows and beckons you to follow to the north.’

FORTY-EIGHT

For all the noise of water overhead, there was silence also. For all the murk there were the shreds of light. For all the jostling and squalor, there were also the great spaces and a profound withdrawal.

Long fleets of tables were like rafts with legs, or like a market, for there were figures seated at these tables with crates and sacks before them or at their sides or heaped together upon the damp ground … a sodden and pathetic salvage, telling of other days in other lands. Days when hope’s bubble, bobbing in their breasts, forgot, or had not heard of dissolution. Days of bravado. Gold days and green days. Days half forgotten. Days with a dew upon them. And here they were, the hundreds of them, at their stalls, awaiting, or so it seemed, the hour that never came, the hour for the market to open and the bells to ring. But there was no merchandise. Nothing to buy or sell. What they had left was what they meant to keep. There was also something of a dreadful ward, for throughout the dripping halls that led in all directions there were beds and berths of every description, pallets, litters and mattresses of straw.

But there were no doctors and there was no authority: and the sick were free to leap among the shadows and soar with their own fever. And the hale were free to spend their days in bed, curled up like cats, or at full stretch, rigid as men in armour.