The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy (153 page)

It was then that Titus, noticing how his captors had loosened their grip upon him as they stared spellbound at the window of the fateful room, wrenched himself forward and slipped his arms suddenly out of the sleeves of his jacket, and dodging through a group of boatmen dived into the water, leaving his empty coat behind him, in their hands.

He had had no sleep for many hours. He had had little to eat. He was living upon the raw end of his nerves, as a fanatic will walk upon spikes. A fever had started. His eyes had become big and hot. His nondescript hair was plastered over his forehead like seaweed. His teeth chattered. He burned and froze alternately. He had no fear. It was not that he was brave. It was that fear had been left somewhere behind. It had been mislaid. And fear can be wise and intelligent. Titus had no wisdom at this moment and no sense of self-preservation. No sense of anything at all except a hunger for finality. All his heartburn had been laid, unfairly for the most part, at Steerpike’s door – as had been his sister’s death and the death of his Passion, the mercurial sprite.

As he swam he gloried. The torchlit water closed over him, and broke away again in yellow flakes. He rose and subsided on the flood, his arms thrashing at the waves. All that the sky had emptied from its maw, the giant reservoirs, broke at his brow. He gloried.

His fever mounted. As he grew weaker he grew fiercer. Perhaps he was in a dream. Perhaps it was all a delusion – the heads at a thousand windows – the boats tossing like gold beetles at the foot of the midnight heights; the flooded window that yawned for blood and drama, the upper window where his mother loomed, her red hair smouldering, her face like marble.

Perhaps he was swimming to his death. It didn’t matter. He knew that what he was doing was what he must do. He had no option. His whole life had been a time of waiting. For this. For this moment. For all it was and all it would mean.

Who was it that swam within him, whose limbs were his limbs and whose heart was his heart? Who was he – what was he, as he battled through bright waters? Was he the Earl of Gormenghast? The seventy-seventh lord? The son of Sepulchrave? The son of Gertrude? The son of the Lady at the window? The brother of Fuchsia? Ah yes, he was that. He was the brother of the girl with the white sheet to her chin and her black hair spread across the snow-white pillow. He was this. But he was no brother of her
ladyship
– but only of the drowned girl. And he was no one’s figurehead. He was only himself. Someone who might have been a fish of the water, a star, or a leaf or a stone. He was Titus, perhaps, if words were needed – but he was no more than that – oh no, not Gormenghast, not the seventy-seventh, not the House of Groan, but a heart in a body that swam through space and time.

The Countess had seen him from her window but there was nothing she could do. He was not making for the cave-mouth, where the boats were already filling the narrow entrance, but for one of those outer stairways that rose out of the water at irregular intervals along the castle’s face.

But she had not time to wait and follow his progress. Three swimmers were already in the water and giving chase. Now that she had seen the first of the boats entering the cave-mouth she turned back from the window and returned to the centre of the room where a group of officers was gathered about the huge spy-hole. As she approached them, a tall man who had been kneeling above the opening fell backwards with a crimson chin. Four of his teeth had been broken off and these with a small pebble rattled together in his mouth while his head shook with pain. The others drew away at once from the dangerous opening.

As they did so Titus entered the room, leaving a trail of water at every step. It was obvious that he was ill with fever and exhaustion, and ungovernable with the fire of it. His naturally pale skin was flushed. His peculiarities of body appeared to be strangely accentuated.

The sense of scale, which he had inherited from his mother – that effect of being larger than he really was, of being over-size, was now peculiarly in evidence. It was as though it were not just that Titus Groan had entered, but that his abstract, a prototype had come through the door, and that the floodwater that dripped from his clothes was somehow spilled in heroic measure.

The rather bluntish cast of his face was even blunter and plainer. The lower lip, trembling with excitement, hung open like a child’s. But his pale eyes, so often sullen in their withdrawal, were now not only bright with the fever but with a lust of revenge – no lovely sight – and were icy at the same time with a determination to prove himself a man.

He had seen his private world break up. He had seen characters in action. It was now for him to take the limelight. Was he the Earl of Gormenghast? Was he the seventy-seventh? No, by the lightning that killed her! He was the First – a man upon a crag with the torchlight of the world upon him! He was all here – there was nothing missing, brains, heart and sentience – an individual in his own right – a thing of legs and arms, of loins, head, eyes and teeth.

He walked sightlessly to the window. He made no sign to his mother. He was her traitor. Let her watch him, then! Let her watch him, then!

He had known, ever since he slipped from his coat and dived into the water, the radiant purpose of the single mind. He had no room in his system for fear. He knew that it was only for him to fall upon this symbol of all things tyrannical – Steerpike the cold and cerebral beast – for him to be fulfilled. His medium was a short and slippery knife. He had bound a rag about its handle. He stood at the window, clasping the ledge with both hands, and stared out at the fantastic torch-lit scene. The rain had stopped, and the wind that had been so boisterous had dropped with remarkable suddenness. In the high north-east the moon disengaged itself of a smothering cloud.

A kind of ashen light spread itself over Gormenghast, and a silence came down over the bay which was only broken by the slapping of the water against the walls, for although the wind had ceased the flood had not subsided.

Titus could not have said why he was standing there. Perhaps it was because he was as near as he could be to the fugitive – the flood-entrance being denied him, and the circular opening guarded. From where he was, free of his captors, he could at least be close to the man he wished to kill. And yet it was more than this. He knew that his would be no spectator’s rôle. He knew somehow or other that the human hounds, armed as they were, would be no match for so sly an animal as the one they had at bay. He could not believe that mere numbers could deal with so lithe and ingenious a fiend.

None of this had been consciously argued within his head. He was in no state to rationalize anything. As he knew it was for him to escape and to swim to the steps, so he knew that it was for him to enter this room and to stand at this window.

All at once there was a terrible cry from below, and then another. Steerpike, who had had no alternative but to bring his skiff to the back of the room as the first of the four boats nosed her way through the window, had stretched and loosened his deadly elastic, twice, in quick succession. His next three deliveries were aimed at the torches that were stuck in iron rings along the sides of the first boat, and two of these were sent hurtling into the water where they hissed and sank.

These three pebbles were the last of his ammunition save for those which he had left behind him on the lintel above the window.

He had his knife, but he knew that he could only throw it once. His enemies were countless. It was better for him to keep it as a dagger than to throw it away, and to waste it upon the death of some cipher.

By now his enemies were very close – the length of an oar away. The nearest man was hanging lifeless over the side. The two cries that had been heard were from the men towards the stern who had received a stone apiece in the ribs and the cheekbone. There had been no cry from the first man who was hanging over the stern like a sack of flour and trailing a hairy hand in the water, as his journey from this world to the next had been so rapid as to allow him no time for remonstrance.

With no pebbles left Steerpike tossed his catapult away and following it with his body was all at once deep in the water and swimming beneath the keels of the boats. He had dived steeply and was quite certain that he could not be seen from above, for he had noticed how although there were reflections upon the water there was no sign of anything tangible
beneath
the surface.

The only one in the first boat who was in a condition to shout, lost no time about informing the world. In a voice that sounded more relieved than anything else, although the man had tried to hide his emotions, ‘He’s dived!’ he shouted. ‘He’s under the boats! Watch the window, there, third boat! Watch the window!’

Steerpike slithered rapidly through the inky darkness. He knew that he must get as far as he could before rising to the air for breath. But like Titus he was deadly tired.

When he reached the window, the air was half gone from his lungs. He could feel the stone support with his left hand. The keel of the third boat was just above his head and to the right. For a moment he rested and lifted his head to it, and then shoving himself away he passed through the lower half of the window, grazing its rough stone sill, and then turning sharply to his left slid along the wall. Six feet above the darkness in which he swam, the sheen of the surface water lapped the wall beneath the Countess’ window.

He remembered, of course, that one of the two barges was immediately above him. He was swimming beneath a wooden monster, its catwalks bristling with torches – its blunt nose crowded with men.

What he did not know as he rose to draw breath, his lungs all but bursting, was whether between the side of the long barge and the wall that towered above it, there would be room for his head to rise above the surface.

He had never seen these castle barges before and had no idea whether their sides rose vertically out of the water, or whether they swelled slightly outwards. If the latter, there was a chance of his being able to be hidden by the convexity, which, reaching out as far as the wall, would leave a long roofed-in ditch where for a little while at least he could breathe and be hidden.

As he rose he felt for the wall. His fingers were spread out and ready for the touch of the rough stones; and it was with a shock that they made contact, not with stone but with a matted, fibrous, tough subaqueous blanket of that luxuriant wall-ivy which covered so great an area of the castle’s face. He had forgotten how, as he had skimmed to the fateful flood-room in the stolen canoe he had noticed this ivy with its long tentacles, and how the face of the castle had appeared not only mutilated and pocked with sockets of where once the glass eyes glittered, but was covered with these climbing rashes of black growth.

As he clawed at the underwater branches he continued to rise, and all at once his head struck upon the hull of the barge where it bulged out to the wall.

It was then that he knew that he was nearer death than he had ever been. Nearer than when he was caught in the burning arms of the dead Barquentine. Nearer than when he had climbed to Fuchsia’s secret attic. For he had no more breath than for a few excruciating seconds. His way was blocked above him. The side of the barge, in swelling outwards made contact with the wall below the surface and blocked his upward path. There was no pocket of air. It was solid water. But even as a great hammer of desperation beat at his temples he turned to the ivy. To drag himself up by its outer branches would simply take him to the long narrow water-filled roof. But how deep was it, this labyrinthine under-water shuffle of saturated midnight; of endless leaves, of hairy arms and fingers?

With what remained of his strength he fought it. He fought the ivy. He tore at the scales of its throat. He pulled himself
into
it. He tore at its ligaments, he broke its small water-logged bones; he forced its ribs apart and as they strained to return to their ancient curves he fought his way through them. And as he grappled and pulled his way inwards, something inside him and very far away was saying, ‘You have not reached the wall … you have not reached the wall …’

But neither had he reached the air – and then at a moment when unable to hold his breath any longer, he took his first inevitable draught of water.

The world had gone black, but with a kind of reflex, his arms and legs fought onwards for a few seconds longer, and then with his head thrown back he collapsed, his body supported by the network of the ivy boughs about him.

It was some while before he opened his eyes to find that only the mask of his face was above water. He was in a kind of vertical forest – an undergrowth that stood upon its end. He found that he was doing nothing to support himself. He was cradled. He was a fly in a drowned web. But the last spasms of his upward straining body had taken his face above the water.

Slowly he turned his eyes. He was but a few inches above the level of the barge’s catwalk. He could see nothing of the barge itself, but through gaps in the ivy the torches shone like jewels, and so he lay in the arms of the giant creeper and heard a voice from above:

‘All boats will stand out from the cave-mouth. A line will be formed across the bay immediately. Light every torch aboard, every lantern, every stick! Ropes will be passed beneath the keel of every boat! This man could hide in a rudder. By the powers, he has more life in him than the lot of you …’

Her voice, in the complete silence that had followed the withdrawal of the squall, sounded like cannon fire.