The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy (43 page)

‘Did you talk to me like that when I was a baby,’ asked Fuchsia.

‘Of course I did,’ said Mrs Slagg. ‘Don’t be silly. Oh, the ignorance of you! Are you going to tidy your room for me now?’

She hobbled to the door with her precious bundle. Every day she asked this same question, but never waited for an answer, knowing that whatever it was, it was
she
who would have to make some sort of order out of the chaos.

Fuchsia again turned to the window and stared at the Mountain whose shape down to the least outcrop had long since scored its outline in her mind.

Between the castle and Gormenghast Mountain the land was desolate, for the main part empty wasteland, with large areas of swamp where undisturbed among the reedy tracts the waders moved. Curlews and peewits sent their thin cries along the wind. Moorhens reared their young and paddled blackly in and out of the rushes. To the east of Gormenghast Mountain, but detached from the trees at its base, spread the undulating darkness of the Twisted Woods. To the west the unkempt acres, broken here and there with low stunted trees bent by the winds into the shape of hunchbacks.

Between this dreary province and the pine wood that surrounded the West Wing of the castle, a dark, shelving plateau rose to a height of about a hundred to two hundred feet – an irregular tableland of greeny-black rock, broken and scarred and empty. It was beyond these cold escarpments that the river wound its way about the base of the Mountain and fed the swamps where the wild fowl lived.

Fuchsia could see three short stretches of the river from her window. This afternoon the central portion and that to its right were black with the reflection of the Mountain, and the third, away to the west beyond the rocky plateau, was a shadowy white strip that neither glanced nor sparkled, but, mirroring the opaque sky, lay lifeless and inert, like a dead arm.

Fuchsia left the window abruptly and closing the door after her with a crash, ran all the way down the stairs, almost falling as she slipped clumsily on the last flight, before threading a maze of corridors to emerge panting in the chilly sunlight.

Breathing in the sharp air she gulped and clenched her hands together until her nails bit at her palms. Then she began to walk. She had been walking for over an hour when she heard footsteps behind her and, turning, saw Steerpike. She had not seen him since the night at the Prunesquallors’ and never as clearly as now, as he approached her through the naked autumn. He stopped when he noticed that he was observed and called.

‘Lady Fuchsia! May I join you?’

Behind him she saw something which by contrast with the alien, incalculable figure before her, was close and real. It was something which she understood, something which she could never do without, or be without, for it seemed as though it were her own self, her own body, at which she gazed and which lay so intimately upon the skyline. Gormenghast. The long, notched outline of her home. It was now his background. It was a screen of walls and towers pocked with windows. He stood against it, an intruder, imposing himself so vividly, so solidly, against her world, his head overtopping the loftiest of its towers.

‘What do you want?’ she said.

A breeze had lifted from beyond the Twisted Woods and her dress was blown across her so that down her right side it clung to her showing the strength of her young body and thighs.

‘Lady Fuchsia!’ shouted Steerpike across the strengthening wind. ‘I’ll tell you.’ He took a few quick paces towards her and reached the sloping rock on which she stood. ‘I want you to explain this region to me – the marshes and Gormenghast Mountain. Nobody has ever told me about it. You know the country – you understand it,’ (he filled his lungs again) ‘and though I love the district I’m very ignorant.’ He had almost reached her. ‘Can I share your walks, occasionally? Would you consider the idea? Are you returning?’ Fuchsia had moved away. ‘If so, may I accompany you back?’

‘That’s not what you’ve come to ask me,’ said Fuchsia slowly. She was beginning to shake in the cold wind.

‘Yes, it is,’ said Steerpike, ‘it is just what I’ve come to ask you. And whether you will tell me about Nature.’

‘I don’t know anything about Nature,’ said Fuchsia, beginning to walk down the sloping rock. ‘I don’t understand it. I only look at it. Who told you I knew about it? Who makes up these things?’

‘No one,’ said Steerpike. ‘I thought you must know and understand what you love so much. I’ve seen you very often returning to the castle laden with the things you have discovered. And also, you
look
as though you understand.’

‘I
do
?’ said Fuchsia, surprised. ‘No, I can’t do. I don’t understand wise things at all.’

‘Your knowledge is intuitive,’ said the youth. ‘You have no need of book learning and such like. You only have to gaze at a thing to
know
it. The wind is getting stronger, your Ladyship, and colder. We had better return.’

Steerpike turned up his high collar, and gaining her permission to accompany her back to the castle, he began with her the descent of the grey rocks. Before they were halfway down, the rain was falling and the autumn sunlight had given way to a fast, tattered sky.

‘Tread carefully, Lady Fuchsia,’ said Steerpike suddenly; and Fuchsia stopped and stared quickly over her shoulder at him as though she had forgotten he was there. She opened her mouth as though to speak when a far rattle of thunder reverberated among the rocks and she turned her head to the sky. A black cloud was approaching and from its pendulous body the rain fell in a mass of darkness.

Soon it would be above them and Fuchsia’s thoughts leapt backward through the years to a certain afternoon when, as today, she had been caught in a sudden rain storm. She had been with her mother on one of those rare occasions, still rarer now, when the Countess for some reason or other decided to take her daughter for a walk. Those occasional outings had been silent affairs, and Fuchsia could remember how she had longed to be free of the presence that moved at her side and above her, and yet she recalled how she had envied her huge mother when the wild birds came to her at her long, shrill, sweet whistle and settled upon her head and arms and shoulders. But what she chiefly remembered was how, on that day, when the storm broke above them, her mother instead of turning back to the castle, continued onward towards these same layers of dark rock which she and Steerpike were now descending. Her mother had turned down a rough, narrow gully and had disappeared behind a high slab of dislodged stone that was leaning against a face of rock. Fuchsia had followed. But instead of finding her mother sheltering from the downpour against the cliff and behind the slab, to her surprise she found herself confronted with the entrance to a grotto. She had peered inside, and there, deep in its chilly throat, was her mother sitting upon the ground and leaning against the sloping wall, very still and silent and enormous.

They had waited there until the storm had tired of its own anger and a slow rain descended like remorse from the sky. No word had passed between them, and Fuchsia, as she remembered the grotto, felt a shiver run through her body. But she turned to Steerpike. ‘Follow me, if you want to,’ she said. ‘I know a cave.’

The rain was by now thronging across the escarpment, and she began to run over the slippery grey rock surfaces with Steerpike at her heels.

As she began the short, steep descent she turned for an instant to see whether Steerpike had kept pace with her, and as she turned, her feet slipped away from under her on the slithery surface of an oblique slab, and she came crashing to the ground, striking the side of her face, her shoulders and shin with a force that for the moment stunned her. But only for a moment. As she made an effort to rise and felt the pain growing at her cheekbone, Steerpike was beside her. He had been some twelve yards away as she fell, but he slithered like a snake among the rocks and was kneeling beside her almost immediately. He saw at once that the wound upon her face was superficial. He felt her shoulder and shinbone with his thin fingers and found them sound. He removed his cape, covered her and glanced down the gully. The rain swam over his face and thrashed on the rocks. At the base of the steep decline he could see, looming vaguely through the downpour, a huge propped rock, and he guessed that it was towards this that Fuchsia had been running, for the gully ended within forty feet in a high, unscalable wall of granite.

Fuchsia was trying to sit up, but the pain in her shoulder had drained her of strength.

‘Lie still!’ shouted Steerpike through the screen of rain that divided them. Then he pointed to the propped rock.

‘Is that where we were going?’ he asked.

‘There’s a cave behind it,’ she whispered. ‘Help me up I can get there all right.’

‘Oh no,’ said Steerpike. He knelt down beside her, and then with great care he lifted her inch by inch from the rocks. His wiry muscles toughened in his slim arms, and along his spine, as by degrees he raised her to the level of his chest, getting to his feet as he did so. Then, step by tentative step over the splashing boulders he approached the cave. A hundred rain thrashed pools had collected among the rocks.

Fuchsia had made no remonstrance, knowing that she could never have made this difficult descent; but as she felt his arms around her and the proximity of his body, something deep within her tried to hide itself. Through the thick, tousled strands of her drenched hair she could see his sharp, pale, crafty face, his powerful dark-red eyes focused upon the rocks below them, his high protruding forehead, his cheekbones glistening, his mouth an emotionless line.

This was Steerpike. He was holding her; she was in his arms; in his power. His hard arms and fingers were taking the weight at her thighs and shoulders. She could feel his muscles like bars of metal. This was the figure whom she had found in her attic, and who had climbed up the sheer and enormous wall. He had said that he had found a stone sky-field. He had said that she understood Nature. He wanted to learn from her. How could he with his wonderful long sentences learn anything from her? She must be careful. He was clever. But there was nothing wrong in being clever. Dr Prune was clever and she liked him. She wished she was clever herself.

He was edging between the wall of rock and the slanting slab, and suddenly they were in the dim light of the grotto. The floor was dry and the thunder of the rain beyond the entrance seemed to come from another world.

Steerpike lowered her carefully to the ground and propped her against a flat, slanting portion of the wall. Then he pulled off his shirt and began, after wringing as much moisture from it as he could, to tear it into long narrow pieces. She watched him, fascinated in spite of the pain she was suffering. It was like watching someone from another world who was worked by another kind of machinery, by something smoother, colder, harder, swifter. Her heart rebelled against the bloodlessness of his precision, but she had begun to watch him with a grudging admiration for a quality so alien to her own temperament.

The grotto was about fifteen feet in depth, the root dipping to the earth, so that in only the first nine feet from the entrance was it possible to stand upright. Close to the arching roof, areas of the rock face were broken and fretted into dim convolutions of stone, and a fanciful eye could with a little difficulty beguile any length of time by finding among the inter-woven patterns an inexhaustible army of ghoulish or seraphic heads according to the temper of the moment.

The recesses of the grotto were in deep darkness, but it was easy enough for Fuchsia and Steerpike to see each other in the dull light near the shielded entrance.

Steerpike had torn his shirt into neat strips and had knelt down beside Fuchsia and bandaged her head and staunched the bleeding which, especially from her leg, where the injury was not so deep, was difficult to check. Her upper arm was less easy, and it was necessary for her to allow Steerpike to bare her shoulder before he could wash it clean.

She watched him as he carefully dabbed the wound. The sudden pain and shock had changed to a raw aching and she bit her lip to stop her tears. In the half light she saw his eyes smouldering in the shadowy whiteness of his face. Above the waist he was naked. What was it that made his shoulders look deformed? They were high, but were sound, though like the rest of his body, strangely taut and contracted. His chest was narrow and firm.

He removed a swab of cloth from her shoulder slowly and peered to see whether the blood would continue to flow.

‘Keep still,’ he said. ‘Keep your arm as still as you can. How’s the pain?’