The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

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

Shred ambled forward from the door and, after bowing slightly in Deadyawn’s direction, he buttonholed Bellgrove.

‘In pain, my dear Bellgrove? In pain?’ he inquired, but in a hard, irritating, inquisitive voice – with as much sympathy in it as might be found in a vampire’s breast.

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

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

Bellgrove snarled.

‘And why is the mind diseased?’ He took hold of Bellgrove’s gown just below that gentleman’s left shoulder and, with his face raised, scrutinized the big head above him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Why not?’ said Deadyawn. ‘But not too loudly.’

‘Or shall Bellgrove read it out, sir?’

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

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

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

‘Read it,’ said The Fly. ‘It’s from Barquentine.’

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

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

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

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

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

A snarl was heard through the smoke.

‘Is that what it is? Is that what it is? La!’

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

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

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

‘Silence!’ shouted The Fly, interrupting Crust, who had not realized he had been sitting so close to a colleague until he heard Cutflower’s affected accents beside him. Everyone knew that Crust had no wife in exile, ill or otherwise. They also knew that his endless requests were not so much because he was poverty-stricken but were made in the desire to cut a dashing figure. To have a wife in exile who was dying in unthinkable pain appeared to Crust to give him a kind of romantic status. It was not sympathy he wanted but envy. Without an exiled and guttering mate what was he? Just Crust. That was all. Crust to his colleagues and Crust to himself. Something of five letters that walked on two legs.

But Cutflower, taking advantage of the smoke, had slipped from the table. He took a few dainty steps to his left and tripped over Mulefire’s outstretched leg.

‘May Satan thrash you purple!’ roared an ugly voice from the floor. ‘Curse your stinking feet, whoever you bloody are!’

‘Poor old Mulefire! Poor old hog!’ It was yet another voice, a more familiar one; and then there was the sense of something rocking uncontrollably, but there was no accompanying sound.

Flannelcat was biting at his underlip. He was overdue for his class. They were all overdue. But none save Flannelcat was perturbed on that score. Flannel knew that by now the classroom ceiling would be blue with ink: that the small bow-legged boy, Smattering, would be rolling beneath his desk in a convulsion of excited ribaldry: that catapults would be twanging freely from every wooden ambush, and stink-bombs making of his room a nauseous hell. He knew all this and he could do nothing. The rest of the staff knew all this also, but had no desire to do anything.

A voice out of the pall cried: ‘Silence, gentlemen, for Mr Bellgrove!’ and another … ‘Oh, hell, my teeth! my teeth!’ … and another … ‘If only he didn’t dream of stoats!’ … and another: ‘Where’s my gold watch gone to?’ and then The Fly again: ‘Silence, gentlemen! Silence for Bellgrove! Are you ready, sir?’ The Fly peered into Deadyawn’s vacant face.

In reply Deadyawn answered: ‘Why … not?’ with a peculiarly long interval between the ‘Why’ and the ‘not’.

Bellgrove read:

Edict 1597577361544329621707193

To Deadyawn, Headmaster, and to the Gentlemen of the Professorial Staff: to all Ushers, Curators and others in authority –

This – day of the –th month in the eighth year of the Seventy-seventh Earl, to wit: Titus, Lord of Gormenghast – notice and warning is given in regard to their attitude, treatment and methods of behaviour and approach in respect of the aforementioned Earl, who now at the threshold of the age of reason, may impress Headmaster, gentlemen of the professorial staff, ushers, curators, and the like, with the implications of his lineage to the extent of diverting these persons from their duty in regard to the immemorial law which governs the attitude which Deadyawn, etc., are strictly bound to show, inasmuch that they treat the seventy-seventh Earl in every particular and on every occasion as they would treat any other minor in their hands without let or favour: that a sense of the customs, traditions and observances – and above all, a sense of the duties attached to every branch of the Castle’s life – be instilled and an indelible sense of the responsibilities which will become his when he attains his majority, at which time, with his formative years spent among the riff-raff of the Castle’s youth, it is to be supposed that the 77th Earl will not only have developed an adroitness of mind, a knowledge of human nature, a certain stamina, but in addition a degree of learning dependent upon the exertions which you, Sir, Headmaster, and you, Sir, gentlemen of the professorial staff, bring to bear, which is your bounden duty, to say nothing of the privilege and honour which it represents.

All this, Sirs, is, or should be common knowledge to you, but the 77th Earl now being in his eighth year, I have seen fit to reawaken you to your responsibilities, in my capacity as Master of Ritual, etc., in which capacity I have the authority to make appearances at any moment in any classroom I choose in order to acquaint myself with the way in which your various knowledge is inculcated, and with particular regard to its effect upon the progress of the young Earl.

Deadyawn, Sir, I would have you impress your Staff with the magnitude of their office, and in particular …

But Bellgrove, his jaw suddenly hammering away as upon a white-hot anvil, flung the parchment from him and sank to his knees with a howl of pain which awoke Deadyawn to such a degree that he opened both his eyes.

‘What was that?’ said Deadyawn to The Fly.

‘Bellgrove in pain,’ said the midget. ‘Shall I finish the notice?’

‘Why not?’ said Deadyawn.

The paper was passed up to The Fly by Flannelcat, who had scrambled nervously out of the ashes, and was already imagining Barquentine in his classroom and the dirty liquid eyes of that one-legged creature fixed upon the ink that was even now trickling down the leather walls.

The Fly plucked the paper from Flannelcat’s hand and continued after a preparatory whistle effected through a collusion of the knuckles, lips and windpipe. So shrill was the sound of it that the recumbent staff were jolted upright on their haunches as one man.

The Fly read quickly, one word running into the next, and finished Barquentine’s edict almost at a single breath.

… would have you impress your Staff with the magnitude of their office, and in particular those members who confuse the ritual of their calling with mere habit, making of themselves obnoxious limpets upon the living rock; or, like vile bindweed round a breathing stem, stifle the Castle’s breath.

Signed (as for) Barquentine, Master of Ritual, Keeper of the Observances, and hereditary overlord of the manuscripts by

Steerpike (Amanuensis).

Someone had lit a lantern. It did very little, as it stood on the table, but illumine with a dusky glow the breast of the stuffed cormorant. There was something disgraceful about its necessity at noon in summer-time.

‘If ever there was an obnoxious limpet swaddled in bindweed you are that limpet, my friend,’ said Perch-Prism to Bellgrove. ‘Do you realize that the whole thing was addressed to you? You’ve gone too far for an old man. Far too far. What will you do when they remove you, friend? Where will you go? Have you anyone that loves you?’

‘Oh, rotten hell!’ shouted Bellgrove, in so loud and uncontrolled a voice that even Deadyawn smiled. It was perhaps the faintest, wannest smile that ever agitated for a moment the lower half of a human face. The eyes took no part in it. They were as vacant as saucers of milk; but one end of the mouth lifted as might the cold lip of a trout.

‘Mr … Fly …’ said the Headmaster in a voice as far away as the ghost of his vanished smile. ‘Mr … Fly … you … virus, where … are … you?’

‘Sir?’ said The Fly.

‘Was … that … Bellgrove?’

‘It was, sir,’ said The Fly.

‘And … how … is … he … these … days?’

‘He is in pain,’ said The Fly.

‘Deep … pain …?’

‘Shall I inquire, sir?’ said The Fly.

‘Why … not …?’

‘Bellgrove!’ shouted The Fly.

‘What is it, damn you?’ said Bellgrove.

‘The Head is inquiring about your health.’

‘About mine?’ said Bellgrove.

‘About yours,’ said The Fly.

‘Sir?’ queried Bellgrove, peering in the direction of the voice.

‘Come … nearer …’ said Deadyawn. ‘I … can’t … see … you … my … poor … friend.’

‘Nor I you, sir.’

‘Put … out … your … hand, … Bellgrove. Can … you … feel … anything?’

‘Is this your foot, sir?’

‘It … is … indeed, … my … poor … friend.’

‘Quite so, sir,’ said Bellgrove.

‘Now … tell … me … Bellgrove, … tell … me …’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Are … you … unwell … my … poor … friend?’

‘Localized pain, sir.’

‘Would … it … be … the … mandibles …?’

‘That is so, sir.’

‘As … in … the … old … days … when … you … were … ambitious … When … you … had … ideals, … Bellgrove…. We … all … had … hopes … of … you, … I … seem … to … remember.’ (There was a horrible sound of laughter like porridge.)

‘Indeed, sir.’

‘Does … anyone … still … believe … in … you, … my … poor … poor … friend?’

There was no answer.

‘Come … come. It is not for you to resent your destiny. To … cavil … at … the … sere … and … yellow … leaf. Oh … no, … my … poor … Bellgrove, … you … have … ripened. Perhaps … you … have … over-ripened. Who … knows? We … all … go … bad … in … time. Do … you … look … about … the … same, … my … friend?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Bellgrove.

‘I … am … tired,’ said Deadyawn. ‘What … am … I … doing … here? Where’s … that … virus … Mr … Fly?’

‘Sir!’ came the musket shot.

‘Get … me … out … of … this. Wheel … me … out … of … it … into stillness … Mr … Fly…. Wheel … me … into … the … soft … darkness …’ (His voice lifted into a ghastly treble, which though it was still empty and flat had in it the seeds of life.) ‘Wheel … me …’ (it cried) ‘into … the … golden … void.’

‘Right away, sir,’ said The Fly.

All at once it seemed as though the Professors’ Common-Room was full of ravenous seagulls, but the screaming came from the unoiled wheels of the high chair, which were slowly turning. The door handle was located by Flannelcat after a few moments’ fumbling and the door was pushed wide. A glow of light could be seen in the passage outside. Against this light the smoke-wreaths coiled, and a little later the high, fantastic silhouette of Deadyawn, like a sack at the apex of the rickety high chair made its creaking departure from the room like some high, black form of scaffolding with a life of its own.

The scream of the wheels grew fainter and fainter.

It was some while before the silence was broken. None present had heard that high note in the Headmaster’s voice before. It had chilled them. Nor had they ever heard him at such length, or in so mystical a vein. It was horrible to think that there was more to him than the nullity which they had so long accepted. However, a voice did at last break the pensive silence.

‘A very dry “do” indeed,’ said Crust.

‘Some kind of light, for grief’s sake!’ shouted Perch-Prism.

‘What can the time be?’ whimpered Flannelcat.

Someone had started a fire in the grate, using for tinder a number of Flannelcat’s copybooks, which he had been unable to collect from the floor. The globe of the world was put on top, which, being of some light wood, gave within a few minutes an excellent light, great continents peeling off and oceans bubbling. The memorandum that Slypate was to be caned, which had been chalked across the coloured face, was purged away and with it the boy’s punishment, for Mulefire never remembered and Slypate never reminded him.

‘My, my!’ said Cutflower, ‘if the Head’s subconscious ain’t self-conscious call me purblind, la! … call me purblind! What goings-on, la!’

‘What is the time, gentlemen? What can it be, if you please?’ said Flannelcat, groping for his exercise-books on the floor. The scene had unnerved him, and what books he had recovered from the floor kept falling out of his arms.

Mr Shrivell pulled one of them out of the fire and, holding it by a flameless corner, waved it for a moment before the clock.

‘Forty minutes to go,’ he said. ‘Hardly worth it … or is it? Personally, I think I’ll just …’

‘So will I, la!’ cried Cutflower. ‘If my class isn’t either on fire by now or flooded out, call me witless, la!’

The same idea must have been at the back of most of their minds, for there was a general movement towards the door, only Opus Fluke remaining in his decrepit arm-chair, his loaf-like chin directed at the ceiling, his eyes closed and his leathery mouth describing a line as fatuous as it was indolent. A few moments later the husky, whispering sound of a score of flying gowns as they whisked along the walls of corridors presaged the turning of a score of door handles and the entry into their respective class-rooms of the professors of Gormenghast.

TWELVE

A roof of cloud stretching to every horizon held the air motionless beneath it, as though the earth and sky, pressing towards one another, had squeezed away its breath. Below the cruddled underside of the unbroken cloud-roof, the air, through some peculiar trick of light, which had something of an underwater feeling about it, reflected enough of itself from the gaunt back of Gormenghast to make the herons restive as they stood and shivered on a long-abandoned pavement half in and half out of the clouds.

The stone stairway which led up to this pavement was lost beneath a hundred seasons of obliterating ivy, creepers and strangling weeds. No one alive had ever struck their heels into the great cushions of black moss that pranked the pavement or wandered along its turreted verge, where the herons were and the jackdaws fought, and the sun’s rays, and the rain, the frost, the snow and the winds took their despoiling turns.

There had once been a great casement facing upon this terrace. It was gone. Neither broken glass nor iron nor rotten wood was anywhere to be seen. Beneath the moss and ground creepers it may be that there were other and deeper layers, rotten with antiquity; but where the long window had stood the hollow darkness of a hall remained. It opened its unprotected mouth midway along the pavement’s inner verge. On either side of this cavernous opening, widely separated, were the raw holes in the stonework that were once the supporting windows. The hall itself was solemn with herons. It was there they bred and tended their young. Preponderately a heronry, yet there were recesses and niches in which by sacredness of custom the egrets and bitterns congregated.

This hall, where once the lovers of a bygone time paced and paused and turned one about another in forgotten measures to the sound of forgotten music, this hall was carpeted with lime-white sticks. Sometimes the setting sun as it neared the horizon slanted its rays into the hall, and as they skimmed the rough nests the white network of the branches flared on the floor like leprous corals, and here and there (if it were spring) a pale blue-green egg shone like a precious stone, or a nest of young, craning their long necks towards the window, their thin bodies covered with powder-down, seemed stage-lit in the beams of the westering sun.

The late sunbeams shifted across the ragged floor and picked out the long, lustrous feathers that hung from the throat of a heron that stood by a rotten mantelpiece; and then a whiteness once more as the forehead of an adjacent bird flamed in the shadows … and then, as the light traversed the hall, an alcove was suddenly dancing with the varied bars and blotches and the reddish-yellow of the bitterns.

As dusk fell, the greenish light intensified in the masonry. Far away, over the roofs, over the outer wall of Gormenghast, over the marshes, the wasteland, the river and the foothills with their woods and spinneys, and over the distant hazes of indeterminate terrain, the claw-shaped head of Gormenghast Mountain shone like a jade carving. In the green air the herons awoke from their trances and from within the hall there came the peculiar chattering and clanking sound of the young as they saw the darkness deepening and knew that it would soon be time for their parents to go hunting.

Crowded as they had been in their heronry with its domed roof, once golden and green with a painting, but now a dark, disintegrating surface where flakes of paint hung like the wings of moths – yet each bird appeared as a solitary figure as it stepped from the hall to the terrace: each heron, each bittern, a recluse, pacing solemnly forwards on its thin, stiltlike legs.

Of a sudden in the dusk, knocking as it were a certain hollow note to which their sweet ribs echoed, they were in air – a group of herons, their necks arched back, their ample and rounded wings rising and falling in leisurely flight: and then another and another: and then a night-heron with a ghastly and hair-raising croak, more terrible than the unearthly booming note of a pair of bitterns, who soaring and spiralling upwards and through the clouds to great heights above Gormenghast, boomed like bulls as they ascended.

The pavement stretched away in greenish darkness. The windows gaped, but nothing moved that was not feathered. And nothing had moved there, save the winds, the hailstones, the clouds, the rain-water and the birds for a hundred years.

Under the high green clawhead of Gormenghast Mountain the wide stretches of marshland had suddenly become stretches of tension, of watchfulness.

Each in its own hereditary tract of water the birds stood motionless, with glistening eyes and heads drawn back for the fatal stroke of the dagger-like beak. Suddenly and all in a breath, a beak was plunged and withdrawn from the dark water, and at its lethal point there struggled a fish. In another moment the heron was mounted aloft in august and solemn flight.

From time to time during the long night these birds returned, sometimes with frogs or water-mice in their beaks or newts or lily buds.

But now the terrace was empty. On the marshlands every heron was in its place, immobile, ready to plunge its knife. In the hall the nestlings were, for the moment, strangely still.

The dead quality of the air between the clouds and the earth was strangely portentous. The green, penumbral light played over all things. It had crept into the open mouth of the hall where the silence was.

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

THIRTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

‘How do you mean, sir, that you can’t agree?’

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

The young man righted his head and dropped his eyebrow.

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

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

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

‘I haven’t spoken,’ he repeated.

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

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

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

‘You’re being cynical!’ cried the young man; ‘So you are!’

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

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

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

‘No,’ said the young man, ‘I haven’t!’

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

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

‘No,’ said the young man. ‘And I don’t want to.’

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

‘There is joy and pain,’ said the young man.

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

‘And what of pain?’ said the youth.

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

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

‘What if you did, my child?’

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

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

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

SPIREGRAIN, THROD AND SPLINT

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

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

They stood in a line, stooping a little, for the room was very low. They were standing unnecessarily close to one another for, with the slightest movement of their heads, their old black leather mortar-boards struck against one another and were tilted indecorously.

And yet it was a moving moment. They could feel the exodus of a great source of inspiration. Their master lay dying below them. Disciples to the end, they believed in the absence of physical emotion so implicitly, that when the master died what could they do but weep that the origin of their faith was gone for ever from them?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Said Throd of the wet face: ‘It is grief’s gravy, Spiregrain.’

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

‘Nonsense,’ whispered Splint, in a fierce, surly voice. He was really very gentle, in spite of his tropical face – but he became angry when he felt his more brilliant colleagues were simply indulging themselves. ‘Nonsense. Neither icicle nor gravy it was. Straightforward fire, it was. Cruel enough, in all faith. But …’ and his eyes became wild with a kind of sudden excitement more in keeping with his visage than they had been for years … ‘but look you! He’s the one who wouldn’t believe in pain, you know – he didn’t acknowledge fire. And now he’s dead I’ll tell you something … (He is dead, isn’t he?)’ …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Not when he was burned to death,’ said Throd, who saw no reason why Spiregrain should not recant as fully as himself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No more longing for Life’s End,’ boomed Throd.

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

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

FOURTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

Multiply the sixes and add how many noughts? Two. I suppose. Six sixes are thirty-six. Thirty-six and two noughts is 3,600. Three thousand and six hundred seconds in an hour. Quarter of an hour is left before the silkworms – before the ‘Slogger’ – before the plover’s nest. Buzz-fly, buzz! Tick, clock, tick! Divide 3,600 by four and then subtract a bit because of the time taken to work it all out.

Nine hundred seconds! Oh, marvellous! marvellous! Seconds are so small. One – two – three – four – seconds are so huge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then, all at once, blotting it out, a swarm of leaves were swirling through him, a host of yellow leaves, coiling, diving, rising, as they swept forward across a treeless desert, while overhead, like a bonfire in the sky, the sun shone down on the rushing leaves. It was a yellow world: a restless, yellow world: and Titus was beginning to drift into a yet deeper maw of the colour when Bellgrove wakened with a jerk, gathered his gown about him like God gathering a whirlwind, and brought his hand down with a dull, impotent thud on the lid of his desk. His absurdly noble head raised itself. His proud and vacant gaze settled at last on young Dogseye.

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

Dogseye, a nondescript little figure, wriggled.

‘Answer me, Dogseye. Were you carving away when you thought your old master was asleep?’

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

‘What were you carving, my boy?’

‘My name, sir.’

‘What, the whole thing, my boy?’

‘I’d only done the first three letters, sir.’

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

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

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

IRMA WANTS A PARTY

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

There was a wild and happy desperation in his voice. Happy, in that a decision had been made at all, however unwisely. Desperate, because life with Irma was a desperate affair in any case; but especially in regard to this passion of hers to have a party.

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

‘What weight I have I’ll pull to pieces for you, Irma.’

‘You are resolved, Alfred – I say, you are resolved,’ she asked breathlessly.

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

There was something that did not altogether ring true in his shrill laughter. Was there a touch of bitterness in it somewhere?

‘After all,’ he continued, perching himself on the back of a chair (and with his feet on the seat and his chin on his knees he looked remarkably like a grasshopper) … ‘After all, you have waited a long time. A long time. But, as you know, I would never advise such a thing. You’re not the type to give a party. You’re not even the type to go to a party. You have nothing of the flippancy about you that makes a party go, sister mine; but you are determined.’

‘Unutterably,’ said Irma.

‘And have you confidence in your brother as a host?’

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

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

‘That’s the sort of nonsense I loathe!’ cried Irma, suddenly becoming passionate. ‘Are we going to talk about the party, or are we going to listen to your silly soufflés? Answer me, Alfred. Answer me at once.’

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

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

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

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

‘Irma!’ cried her brother. ‘You aren’t!’

‘Oh, yes, I am,’ muttered Irma. ‘Oh yes, I am.’

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

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

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

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

‘I do, indeed.’

‘My skin is the whitest in Gormenghast.’

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

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

‘Yes, yes!’ said Irma.

‘And when we will ask them.’

‘That’s easier,’ said Irma.

‘And at what time of the day.’

‘The evening, of course,’ said Irma.

‘And what they shall wear.’

‘Oh, their evening clothes, obviously,’ said Irma.

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

‘Oh, that is of no avail.’

‘Do you mean “of no account”?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Irma.

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

‘There will be no women.’

‘No women!’ cried her brother, genuinely startled.

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

‘But what of the entertainment for your guests?’

‘I shall be there,’ said Irma.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Listen to me.’ Prunesquallor spoke very slowly. His high voice was strangely meditative. ‘I will be as concise as I can. Only you must listen, Irma.’

She nodded.

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

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

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

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

‘It won’t,’ said Irma.

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

‘Well, some of them must be left out, then.’

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

‘The Professors.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘You know very well, Alfred.’

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

‘Alfred.’

‘My love?’

‘How many do you think would be ideal?’

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

‘No, no, Alfred, it’s a party! It’s a party! Things happen at parties – not at friends’ gatherings. I’ve read about it. Twenty, at least, to make the atmosphere pregnant.’

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

‘Do you think we could call it a soirée, Alfred?’

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

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

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

‘Alfred!’

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

‘My gown of a thousand frills, with its corsage of hand-painted parrots will be ready within ten days, and …’

‘Parrots!’ cried the Doctor in consternation.

‘Why not?’ said Irma, sharply.

‘But,’ wavered her brother, ‘how many of them?’

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

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

‘Alfred!’ Her voice jerked him back to his chair.

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

‘I will,’ said her brother.

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

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

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

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

FIFTEEN

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

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

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

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

The third ‘island’ was the shape of a heart. A coruscating heart of tares on fire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And from it came the voice again.

‘Do you dare? Do you dare?’

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

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

‘Who’s there?’ Her voice had sounded strangely husky from the other side.

‘It’s me,’ said Titus.

‘What do you want?’

‘Nothing,’ said Titus. ‘I’m going for a ride.’

‘It’s beastly weather,’ said Fuchsia. ‘Good-bye.’

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

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

Free …!

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

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

He knew no other world. Here all about him the raw material burned: the properties and settings of romance. Romance that is passionate; obscure and sexless: that is dangerous and arrogant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ivy leaves fluttered a little and a flag here and there stirred against its pole, but there was no vitality in these movements, no purpose, any more than the long hair of some corpse, tossing this way and that in a wind, can deny the death of the body it flatters.

Not a head appeared at any of those topmost, teeth-like windows that ran along the castle’s brow. Had anyone stood there he might have seen the sun hanging a hand’s-breath above the margins of the ground mist.

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

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

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

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

SIXTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His yearnings became focused. His truancy no longer nagged him. His curiosity burned.

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

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

The green wall of the forest rose higher into the sunny sky as he neared, until he had to raise his head to see the highest branches.

Gormenghast was hidden behind a rise in the ground to the west. To the east and behind him the slopes of the mountain climbed in ugly shelves. He drew in the reins and slid from the horse’s back.

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

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

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

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

SEVENTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was rarely that either Barquentine or Deadyawn made a tour of the schoolroom, but it was as well to have the freckled urchin stationed on the cupboard from first thing in the morning onwards, for there was nothing more irritating than for the class to be disturbed.

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

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

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

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

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

‘The “Yawner”!’ he screamed. ‘Quick! quick! quick! The Yawner’n all of ’em! Let me down! let me down!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the door opened, thirty or so boys, doubled over their desks, could be seen scribbling furiously, their brows knit in concentration.

There was for the moment an unholy silence.

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

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

The wheels began to squeak again as the high chair was steered up one of the ink-stained aisles between the rows of desks.

By this time the mortar-boards had followed the Headmaster into the room, and under these mortar-boards the faces of Opus Fluke, Spiregrain, Perch-Prism, Throd, Flannelcat, Shred and Shimmer, Cutflower and the rest were easily recognizable. Deadyawn, who was on a tour of the classrooms, had, after inspecting each in turn, sent the boys to their red-stone yard and kept their masters with him – so that he now had practically the whole staff at his heels. The boys would shortly be spread out in great fans and sent off on a day-long hunt for Titus. For it was his disappearance which was causing this unprecedented activity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Name … an … isthmus!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What d’you mean by “whatever his qualifications” … damn you, ’Prism?’ he snarled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

EIGHTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But here it was a more leisurely affair. There was neither the scuffling nor the agitation. They were in their own realms again. Their apartments that surrounded the small quadrangle would be waiting for them. What did it matter if they waited a little longer than they could have wished? The long, bland, archaic, nostalgic, almond-smelling evening lay ahead of them, and then the long, sequestered night before the clanging bell aroused them, and a day of ink-and thumb-marks, cribbing and broken spectacles, flies and figures, coastlines, prepositions, isthmuses and essays, paper darts, test tubes, catapults, chemicals and prisms, dates, battles and tame white mice, and hundred half-formed, ingenious and quizzical faces, with their chapped red ears that never listened, renewed itself.

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

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

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

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

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

And so it was. The sprightly Perch-Prism was dispensing the invitation cards which he had received that same afternoon by special messenger:

IRMA and ALFRED PRUNESQUALLOR

hope to have the

pleasure of … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …’s company

on

… … … … … … … … … … … … … … …. (etc.)

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

Some were so stupefied that they were forced to sit down on the steps for a short while until their pulse rate slackened.

Shred and Shrivell tapped their teeth with the gilded edges of their cards, and were already making guesses at the psychological implications.

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

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

Bellgrove had his great prophet’s jaw hanging wide.

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

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

Suddenly Opus Fluke’s long leather mouth opened like a horse’s and a howl of insensitive laughter reverberated through the sun-blotched place.

A score of mortar-boards swivelled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For neatness’ sake he could not help wishing that he were addressing Opus Fluke, for Bellgrove’s mouth, though hardly hyper-human, was nothing like a horse’s.

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

He coughed and shook his leonine head. ‘Change your idiom, my young friend, or change your tense, and lend me a handkerchief to put over my head – these sunbeams are giving me a headache.’ Perch-Prism produced a blue silk handkerchief at once and draped it over the peeved and noble head.

‘Poor old “prickles” Bellgrove, poor old fangs,’ he mused, whispering the words into the old man’s ears as he tied the corners of the blue handkerchief into little knots, where it hung over the elder’s head. ‘It’ll be just the thing for him, so it will – a wild party at the Doctor’s, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!’

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

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

‘What a peculiar business this Prunesquallor affair is, my dear Flannelcat,’ said Mr Crust. ‘I rather doubt whether I can afford to go. I wonder whether you could possibly – er – lend me …’

But Flannelcat interrupted. ‘They’ve asked me, too,’ he said, his invitation card shaking in his hand. ‘It is a long time since …’

‘It is a long time since our evenings were disturbed from the Outside like this,’ interrupted Perch-Prism. ‘You gentlemen will have to brush yourselves up a bit. How long is it since you have seen a lady, Mr Fluke?’

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

‘But you will accept, of course, won’t you, my dear fellow?’ said Perch-Prism, inclining his shiny round head to one side.

Opus Fluke yawned and then stretched himself before he replied.

‘When is it, friend?’ he asked (as though it made any difference to him when his every evening was an identical yawn).

‘Next Friday evening, at seven o’clock – R.S.V.P. it is,’ panted Flannelcat.

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

Bellgrove bared his irregular teeth in a leonine snarl and then he took out a small notebook, with his eyes on Mr Fluke, made a note. Approaching his taunter, ‘Red Ink,’ he whispered, and then began to laugh uncontrollably. Mr Fluke was stupefied.

‘Well … well … well …’ he said at last.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their mortar-boards were hung up behind their doors or sent skimming across their rooms to some convenient ledge or corner. The dog’s-eared condition of most of their boards was due to this ‘skimming’. When thrown in the right way, out of doors and against a slight breeze, they could be made to climb into the air, the black cup uppermost, the tassels floating below like the black tails of donkeys. When thirty at a time soared at the sun above the quadrangle, then was a schoolboy’s nightmare made palpable.

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

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

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

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

‘But yes, but yes, indeed. Cutflower, you are right,’ said Shrivell at the first opportunity of making himself heard. ‘Shred and I were saying much the same thing.’

‘Quite so,’ said Shred.

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

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

A bell rang.

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

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

Hold fast

To the law

Of the last

Cold tome,

Where the earth

Of the truth

Lies thick

On the page,

And the loam

Of faith

In the ink

Long fled

From the drone

Of the nib

Flows on

Through the breath

Of the bone

Reborn

In a dawn

Of doom

Where blooms

The rose

For the winds

The Child

For the tomb

The thrush.

For the hush

Of song,

The corn

For the scythe

And the thorn

In wait

For the heart

Till the last

Of the first

Depart,

And the least

Of the past

Is dust

And the dust

Is lost.

Hold fast!

NINETEEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of a sudden he became sharply aware of his fatigue and of hunger, and at the same time a weakening of his conviction that he was dreaming. ‘If I am dreaming,’ he thought, ‘then why should I need to spring from the ground? Why shouldn’t I just be carried along?’ And to test his idea he made no further effort, merely keeping his balance in the air each time his drop to earth lifted him again into those long and fantastic cruises; but the impetus weakened with every dwindling flight and the volitant boy came gradually to a standstill.

With the rhythm of his progress broken, his belief that he was in a state of dream was finally dispelled. For his hunger had become insistent.

He looked about him. The same scene enclosed him with its mellow cyclorama – its hateful dream of gold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘My Lord!’ It was a sharp, rough cry, with a catch in the throat as though the voice had not been sounded for a long while.

Titus, whose instincts had been torn between flying from those hot wild eyes and his excitement at finding another human being, however emaciated and uncouth, stepped forward into the sunlight at the river’s edge. He was frightened and his heart beat loudly, but he was famished also and deadly weary.

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

‘Flay,’ he said at last, his voice hardly audible.

‘Flay!’ cried Titus. ‘I’ve heard of you.’

‘Aye,’ said Flay, his hands gripped together … ‘likely enough, my lord.’

‘They told me you were dead, Mr Flay.’

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

‘Yes,’ said Titus. ‘Are you ill?’

Titus had never seen so gaunt a man before.

‘Ill, lordship? No, boy, no … but banished.’

‘Banished!’ cried Titus.

‘Banished, boy. When you were only a … when your father … my lord …’ He ended suddenly. ‘Your sister Fuchsia?’

‘She’s all right.’

‘Ah!’ said the thin man, ‘no doubt of it.’ (There was a note almost of happiness in his voice, but then, with a new note): ‘You’re done, my lord, ’n windless. What brought you?’

‘I escaped, Mr Flay – ran away. I’m hungry, Mr Flay.’

‘Escaped!’ whispered the long man to himself with horror; but he gathered and pocketed his hook and line and withheld a hundred burning questions.

‘Water’s too deep – too fast here. Made crossing – boulders – half mile up stream – not far, lordship, not far. Follow your edge with me, follow your river edge, boy – we’ll have a rabbit’; (he seemed to be talking to himself as he waded back to the bank on his side of the river) ‘rabbit and pigeon and a long cabin-sleep … Blown he is … son of Lord Sepulchrave … ready to drop … Tell him anywhere … eyes like her ladyship’s … Escaped from the Castle! … No … no … mustn’t do that … No, no … must send him back, seventy-seventh Earl…. Had him in my pocket … size of a monkey … long ago …’

And so Flay rambled on as he strode along the bank, with Titus following him on the opposite shore, until after what seemed an endless journey by the water’s edge they came to the crossing of boulders. The river ran shallowly at this point, but it had been no easy work for Flay to shift and set the heavy boulders in place. For five years they had stood firm in the rushing water. Flay had made a perfect ford, and Titus crossed at once to him. For a moment or two they stood awkwardly staring at each other; and then, all of a sudden, the cumulative effects of his physical excitement, the shocks and privations of the day, told upon Titus and he collapsed at the knees. The gaunt man caught him up in an instant and, putting the boy carefully over his shoulder, set off through the trees. For all his apparent emaciation there was no question as to Mr Flay’s stamina. The river was soon left far behind. His long, sinewy arms held Titus firmly in place across his shoulder; his lank legs covered the ground with a long, thin, muscular stride and, save for the clicking of his knee-joints, with peculiar silence. He had learned during his exile among the woods and rocks the value of silence, and it was second nature for him to pick his way over the ground like a man born to the woods.

The pace and certainty of his progress testified to his intimate knowledge of every twist and turn of the terrain.

Now he was waist deep in a valley of bracken. Now he was climbing a slope of reddish sandstone; now he was skirting a rock face whose crown overhung its base and whose extensive surface was knuckly with the day nests of innumerable martins; now he had below him a drop into a sunless valley; and now the walnut-covered slopes from where, each evening, with hideous regularity a horde of owls set sail on bloody missions.

When Flay, topping the brow of a sandy hill, stood for a moment breathing heavily and stared down into the little valley, Titus, who had insisted upon walking by himself for some while past – for even Flay had not been able to sustain his weight during the uphill climbs – stopped also, and with his hands on his knees, his tired legs rigid, he leaned forward in a position of rest.

The little valley, or dell, beneath them was shut in by tree-covered slopes, save to the south where walls of rock overgrown with lichen and mosses shone brightly in the rays of the declining sun.

At the far end of this grey-green wall were three deep holes in the rock – two of them several feet above the ground and one at the level of the valley’s sandy floor.

Along the valley ran a small stream, broadening out into an extensive pool of clear water in the centre, for at the far end of the lake where it had narrowed to a tongue was a rough dam. Long evenings had been spent in its making, simple as it was. Flay had hauled a couple of the heaviest logs he could manage and laid them close to one another across the stream. Titus could see them plainly from where he stood, and the thin stream of the overflow at the dam’s centre. The sound of this overflow trilled and splashed in the silence of the evening light, and the little valley was filled with its glass-like voice.

They descended to the patchwork valley of grass and sand and skirted the stream until they reached the dam and the broad expanse of the trapped water. Not a breath of air disturbed the tender blue of its glass-like surface in which the hillside trees were minutely reflected. Rows of stakes had been driven into and against the inner sides of the logs to form a crib. This space had been filled with mud and stones until a wall had risen and the lake had formed, and a new sound had come to the valley – the tinkling sound of the glittering overflow.

A few moments later they were at the mouth of the lowest of the openings into the rock. It was but a cleft, about the width of an ordinary door, but it widened into a cave, a spacious and fern-hung place. This inner cave was lit by the reflected light thrown from the sides of the wide natural chimneys whose vents were those mouth-like openings in the rock face a dozen feet above the entrance. Titus followed Flay through this fissure-like doorway and when he had reached the cool and roughly circular floor of the inner cave he marvelled at its lightness, although it was not possible for a single ray of the sun to pierce unhindered, for the wide rocky chimneys wound this way and that before they reached the sunlight. Yet the sunbeams reflected from the sides of the winding chimneys flooded the floor with cool light. It was a high domed place, this cave, with several massive shelves of rock and a number of natural ledges and niches. On the left-hand side the most impressive of these natural outcrops stood out from the wall in the form of a five-sided table with a smooth shelving top.

These few things Titus was able to take in automatically, but he was too exhausted and sick with hunger to do more than nod his head and smile faintly at the long man, who had lowered his tilted head at Titus as though to see whether the boy was pleased. A moment later Titus was lying on a rough couch of deep dry ferns. He closed his eyes and, in spite of his hunger, fell asleep.

TWENTY

When Titus awoke the walls of the cave were leaping to and fro in a red light, their outcrops and shelves of stone flinging out their disproportionate shadows and withdrawing them with a concertina motion. The ferns, like tongues of fire, burned as they hung from the darkness of the dome-ing roof, and the stones of the crude oven in which an hour or more ago Flay had lit a great fire of wood and fir-cones, glowed like liquid gold.

Titus raised himself on his elbow and saw the scarecrow silhouette of the almost legendary Mr Flay (for Titus had heard many stories of his father’s servant) as he knelt against the glow with his twelve-foot shadow reaching along the gleaming floor and climbing the wall of the cave.

‘I am in the middle of an adventure,’ Titus repeated to himself, several times, as though the words themselves were significant.

His mind raced over the happenings of the day which had just ended. He had no sense of confusion when he woke. He recollected everything instantaneously. But his recollections were interrupted by the sudden teasing excitement of the rich odour of something being roasted – it may have been this that had awakened him. The long man was twisting something round and round, slowly, on the flames. The ache of his hunger became unbearable, and Titus got to his feet, and as he did so Mr Flay said, ‘It’s ready, lordship – stay where you are.’

Breaking pieces from the flesh of the pheasant, and pouring over them a rich gravy, he brought them over to Titus on a wooden plate which he had made himself. It was the cross section of what had been a dead tree, four inches thick, its centre scooped into a shallow basin. In his other hand, as he approached the boy, was a mug of spring water.

Titus lay down again on the bracken bed, resting himself on one elbow. He was too ravenous to speak but gave the straggling figure that towered over him a gesture of the hand – as though of recognition – and then, without a moment wasted, he devoured the rich meal like a young animal.

Flay had returned to the stone oven, where he busied himself with various tasks, feeding himself intermittently as he proceeded. Then he sat down on a ledge of rock near the fire on which he fixed his eyes. Titus had been too pre occupied to watch him, but now, with his wooden plate scraped to the grain, he drank deeply of the cold spring water and glanced over the lip of the mug at the old exile, the man whom his mother had banished – the faithful servant of his dead father.

‘Mr Flay,’ he said.

‘Lordship?’

‘How far away am I?’

‘Twelve miles, lordship.’

‘And it’s very late. It’s night-time, isn’t it?’

‘Aye. Take you at dawn. Time for sleep. Time for sleep.’

‘It’s like a dream, Mr Flay. This cave. You. The fire. Is it true?’

‘Aye.’

‘I like it,’ said Titus. ‘But I’m afraid, I think.’

‘Not proper, lordship – you being here – in my south cave.’

‘Have you other caves?’

‘Yes, two others – to the west.’

‘I will come and see them – if I can escape, one day, eh, Mr Flay?’

‘Not proper, lordship.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Titus. ‘What else have you got?’

‘A shanty.’

‘Where?’

‘Gormenghast forest – river-bank – salmon – sometimes.’

Titus got up and walked to the fire where he sat down, his legs crossed. The flames lit his young face.

‘I’m a bit frightened, you know,’ he said. ‘It’s my first night away from the castle. I suppose they are all looking for me … I expect.’

‘Ah …’ said Flay. ‘Mostly likely.’

‘Do you ever get frightened, all on your own?’

‘Not frightened, boy – exiled.’

‘What does it mean – exiled?’

Flay shifted himself on the ledge of rock, and shrugged his high, bony shoulders up to his ears; like a vulture. There was a kind of tickling in his throat. He turned his small, sunken eyes at last to the young Earl as he sat by the flames, his head raised, a puzzled frown on his brows. Then the tall man lowered himself to the floor, as though he were a kind of mechanism, his knee joints cracking like musket shots as he bent and then straightened his legs.

‘Exiled?’ he repeated at last, in a curiously low and husky voice. ‘Banished, it means. Forbidden, lordship, forbidden service, sacred service. To have your heart dug out; to have it dug out with its long roots, lordship – that’s what exiled means. It means, this cave and emptiness while I am needed. Needed,’ he repeated hotly. ‘What watchmen are there now?’

‘Watchmen?’

‘How do I know? How do I know?’ he continued, ignoring Titus’ query. Years of silence were finding vent. ‘How do I know what devilry goes on? Is all well, lordship. Is the castle well?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Titus. ‘I suppose so.’

‘You wouldn’t know, would you, boy,’ he muttered. ‘Not yet.’

‘Is it true that my mother sent you away?’ asked Titus.

‘Aye. The Countess of Groan. She exiled me. How is she, my lordship?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Titus. ‘I don’t see her very often.’

‘Ah …’ said Flay. ‘A fine, proud woman, boy. She understands the evil and the glory. Follow her, my lord, and Gormenghast will be well; and you will do your ancient duty, as your father did.’

‘But I want to be free, Mr Flay. I don’t want any duties.’

Mr Flay jerked himself forward. His head was lowered. In the deep shadows of their sockets his eyes glowed. His hand that supported his weight shook on the ground below him.

‘A wicked thing to say, my lord, a wicked thing,’ he said at last. ‘You are a Groan of the blood – and the last of the line. You must not fail the Stones. No, though the nettles hide them, and the blackweeds, my lord – you must not fail them.’

Titus stared up at him, surprised at this outburst in the taciturn man; but even as he stared his eyes began to droop for he was weary.

Flay arose to his feet, and as he did so a hare loped through the entrance of the cave where it was lit up against the intense darkness like a thing of gold. It stopped for a moment sitting bolt upright and stared at Titus, and then leapt upon a fern-hung shelf of moss and lay as still as a carving, its long ears laid like sheaths along its back.

Flay lifted Titus and laid him along the bracken-bed. But something had happened, suddenly, in the boy’s brain. He sat bolt upright the moment after his head had touched the floor, and his eyes had closed, as it seemed in that quick moment, in a long sleep.

‘Mr Flay,’ he whispered with a passionate urgency. ‘O, Mr Flay.’

The man of the woods knelt down at once.

‘Lordship? What is it?’

‘Am I dreaming?’

‘No, boy.’

‘Have I slept?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Then I saw it.’

‘Saw what, lordship? Lie quiet now – lie quiet.’

‘That thing in the oakwoods, that flying thing.’

Mr Flay’s body tautened and there was an absolute silence in the cave.

‘What kind of a thing?’ he muttered at last.

‘A thing of the air, a flying thing … sort of … delicate … but I couldn’t see its face … it floated, you know, across the trees. Was it real? Have you seen it, Mr Flay? What was it, Mr Flay? Tell me, please because … because …’

But there was no need for an answer to the boy’s question, for he had fallen into a deep sleep and Mr Flay rose to his feet, and, moving across the cave where the light was dying as the fire smouldered into ashes, made his way to the entrance of his cavern. Then he leaned against the outer wall. There was no moon but a sprinkling of stars were reflected dimly in the dammed-up lake of water. Faint as an echo in the silence of the night came the bark of a fox from Gormenghast forest.

TWENTY-ONE

I

Titus was to be kept in the Lichen Fort for a week. It was a round, squat edifice, its rough square stones obliterated by the unbroken blanket of the parasitic lichen which gave it its name. This covering was so thick that a variety of birds were able to make their nests in the pale green fur. The two chambers, one above the other of this fort, were kept comparatively clean by a caretaker who slept there and kept the key.

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

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

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

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

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

Titus was the first to see them and jumped to his feet. But it was Mrs Slagg who spoke first –

‘Look at your hands!’ she panted. ‘Your legs, your face! Oh, my weak heart! Look at the grime, and the cuts and bruises, and, and, oh my wicked, wicked lordship, look at the rags of you! Oh, I could smack you I could when I think of all I’ve mended, and washed and ironed and bandaged. Oh yes, I could, I could smack you and hurt you, you cruel, dirty, lordship-thing. How could you. How could you? And me with my heart almost stopped – but you wouldn’t care, oh no, not though …’

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

One afternoon of his imprisonment he was interrupted at his hundredth attempt at impaling his jack-knife in the wooden door, at which he flung the weapon in what he imagined was a method peculiar to brigands. He had cried himself to a stop during the morning, for the sun shone through the narrow window-slits and he longed for the wild woods that were so fresh in his mind and for Mr Flay and for Fuchsia.

He was interrupted by a low whistle at one of the narrow windows, and then as he reached it, Fuchsia’s husky whisper:

‘Titus.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s me.’

‘O, good!’

‘I can’t stay.’

‘Can’t you?’

‘No.’

‘Not for a little, Fuchsia?’

‘No. Got to take your place. Beastly tradition business. Dragging the moat for the Lost Pearls or something. I should be there now.’

‘Oh!’

‘But I’ll come after dark.’

‘O, good!’

‘Can’t you see my hand? I’m reaching as far as I can.’

Titus thrust his arm as far as he could through the window slit of the five-foot wall, and could just touch the tip of her fingers.

‘I must go.’

‘Oh!’

‘You’ll soon be out, Titus.’

The silence of the Lichen Fort was about them like deep water, and their fingers touching might have been the prows of foundered vessels which grazed one another in the subaqueous depths, so huge and vivid and yet unreal was the contact that they made with one another.

‘Fuchsia.’

‘Yes?’

‘I have things to tell you.’

‘Have you?’

‘Yes. Secrets.’

‘Secrets?’

‘Yes, and adventure.’

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

Her fingertips left his. He was alone in space.

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

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

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

III

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

‘Ah. There you are. There you are, indeed. How are you, my friend?’

‘All right. Thank you, sir.’

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

Bellgrove approached the table behind which Titus was standing. His noble, leonine head was weak with sympathy for the child, but he was doing his best to play the rôle of headmaster. He had to inspire confidence. That was one of the things that headmasters had to do. He must be Dignified and Strong. He must evoke Respect. What else had he to be? He couldn’t remember.

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And to see how you were getting along. H’m.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Titus.

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