The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy (70 page)

Steerpike moved to the table, approaching in a curious, swift and sideways manner. There was no carpet on the floor and his footsteps sounded crisply.

When he reached the table and stood opposite the old man, he inclined his head to one side.

‘Search over,’ said Barquentine. ‘Call the dogs off. Do you hear?’

He spat over his shoulder.

Steerpike bowed.

‘No more nonsense!’ barked the old voice. ‘Body of me, we’ve seen enough of it.’

He started to scratch himself through a horrible-looking tear in his scarlet rags. There was a period of silence while this operation proceeded. Steerpike began to shift the weight of his body to his other leg.

‘Where do you think you’re going to? Stand still, you rat-damned misery, will you? By the lights of the mother I buried rump-end up, hold your clod, boy, hold your clod.’ The hairs about his mouth were stuck with spittle as he fingered his crutch on the stone table.

Steerpike sucked at his teeth. He watched every move of the old man in front of him, and waited for a loophole in the armour.

Sitting at the table, Barquentine might have been mistaken for a normally constructed elder, but it came as a shock even to Steerpike to see him clamber off the seat of the high-backed chair, raise his arm for the crutch and strike a path of wood and leather around the circumference of the table, his chin on a level with its surface.

Steerpike, who was himself on the small side, even for his seventeen years, found that the Master of Ritual, were he to have brought his head forward for a few inches, would have buried his bristling nose a hand’s breadth above the navel, that pivot for a draughtsman’s eye, that relic whose potentiality appears to have been appreciated only by the dead Swelter, who saw in it a reliable saltcellar, when that gentleman decided upon eggs for his breakfast in bed.

Be that as it irrelevantly may, Steerpike found himself staring down in to an upturned patch of wrinkles. In this corrugated terrain two eyes burned. In contrast to the dry sand-coloured skin they appeared grotesquely liquid, and to watch them was ordeal by water; all innocence was drowned. They lapped at the dry rims of the infected well-heads. There were no lashes.

He had made so rapid and nimble a detour of the stone table that he surprised Steerpike, appearing with such inexpectation beneath the boy’s nose. The alternate thud, and crack of sole and crutch came suddenly to silence. Into this silence a small belated sound, all upon its own, was enormous and disconnected. It was Barquentine’s foot, shifting its position as the crutch remained in place. He had improved his balance. The concentration in the ancient’s face was too naked to be studied for more than a moment at a time. Steerpike, after a rapid survey, could only think that either the flesh and the passion of the head below him was fused into a substance of the old man’s compounding; or that all the other heads he had ever seen were masks – masks of matter
per se
, with no admixture of the incorporeal. This old tyrant’s head
was
his feeling. It was modelled from it, and of it.

Steerpike was too near it – the nakedness of it. Naked and dry with those wet well-heads under the time-raked brow.

But he could not move away – not without calling down, or rather calling
up
the wrath of this wizened god. He shut his eyes and worked his tongue into a tooth-crater. Then there was a sound, for Barquentine, having exhausted, apparently, what diversion there was to be found in the youth’s face as seen from below, had spat twice and very rapidly, each expectoration finding a temporary lodging on the bulges of Steerpike’s lowered lids.

‘Open them!’ cried the cracked voice. ‘Open them up, bastard whelp of a whore-rat!’

Steerpike with wonder beheld the septuagenarian balancing upon his only leg with the crutch raised above his head. It was not directed at himself, however, but with its grasper swivelled in the direction of the table, seemed about to descend. It did, and a thick dusty mist arose from the books on which it landed. A moth flapped through the dust.

When it had settled, the youth, his head turned over his shoulder, his small dark-red eyes half closed, heard Barquentine say:

‘So you can call the dogs off! Body of me, if it isn’t time! Time and enough. Nine days wasted! Wasted! – by the stones wasted! Do you hear me, stoat’s lug? Do you hear me?’

Steerpike began to bow, with his eyebrows raised by way of indicating that his ear drums had proved themselves equal to the call made upon them. If the art of gesture had been more acutely developed in him he might have implied by some hyper-subtle inclination of his body that what aural inconvenience he experienced lay not so much in his having to strain his ears, as in having them strained for him.

As it was, it proved unnecessary for him to ever complete the bow he had begun, for Barquentine was delivering yet another blow to the books and papers on the table, and a fresh cloud of dust had arisen. His eyes had left the youth – and Steerpike was stranded – in one sense only – in that the flood-water of the eyes no longer engulfed him, the stone table as though it were a moon, drawing away the dangerous tide.

He wiped the spittle from his eyelids with one of Dr Prunesquallor’s handkerchiefs.

‘What are those books, boy?’ shouted Barquentine, returning the handle of his crutch to his armpit, ‘By my head of skin, boy, what are they?’

‘They are the Law,’ said Steerpike.

With four stumps of the crutch the old man was below him again and sluicing him with his hot wet eyes.

‘By the blind powers, it’s the truth,’ he said. He cleared his throat. ‘Don’t stand there staring. What is Law? Answer me, curse you!’

Steerpike replied without a moment’s consideration but with the worm of his guile like a bait on the hook of his brain: ‘Destiny, sir, Destiny.’

Vacant, trite and nebulous as was the reply, it was of the right
kind
. Steerpike knew this. The old man was aware of only one virtue – Obedience to Tradition. The destiny of the Groans. The law of Gormenghast.

No individual Groan of flesh and blood could awake in him this loyalty he felt for ‘
Groan
’ the abstraction – the symbol. That the course of this great dark family river should flow on and on, obeying the contours of hallowed ground, was his sole regard.

The seventy-sixth Earl should he ever be found, dead or alive, had forfeited his right to burial among the Tombs. Barquentine had spent the day among volumes of ritual and precedent. So exhaustive was the compilation of relevant and tabulated procedure to be adopted in unorthodox and unforeseen circumstances that a parallel to Lord Sepulchrave’s disappearance was at last rooted out by the old man – the fourteenth Earl of Groan having disappeared leaving an infant heir. Nine days only had been allowed for the search, after which the child was to be proclaimed the rightful Earl, standing the while upon a raft of chestnut boughs afloat on the lake, a stone in the right hand, an ivy-branch in the left, and a necklace of snail-shells about the neck; while shrouded in foliage the next of kin and all who were invited to the ‘Earling’ stood, sat, crouched or lay among the branches of the marginal trees.

All this had now, once again, hundreds of years later, to be put in hand, for the nine days were over and it was in Barquentine that all power in matters of procedure was vested. It was for him to give the orders. In his little old body was Gormenghast in microcosm.

‘Ferret,’ he said, still staring up at Steerpike, ‘your answer’s good. Body of me, Destiny it is. What is your bastard name, child?’

‘Steerpike, sir.’

‘Age?’

‘Seventeen.’

‘Buds and fledglings? So they still spawn ’em so! Seventeen.’ He put a withered tongue between his dry, wrinkled lips. It might have been the tongue of a boot. ‘Seventeen,’ he repeated in a voice of such ruminative incredulity as startled the youth, for he had never before heard any such intonation emerge from that old throat. ‘Bloody wrinkles! say it again, chicken.’

‘Seventeen,’ said Steerpike.

Barquentine went off into a form of trance, the well-heads of his eyes appearing to cloud over and become opaque like miniature sargassos, of dull chalky-blue – the cataract veil – for it seemed that he was trying to remember the daedal days of his adolescence. The birth of the world; of spring on the rim of Time.

Suddenly he came-to, and cursed; and as though to shake off something noxious he worked his shoulder-blades to and fro, as he pad-hopped irritably around his crutch, the ferrule squeaking as it swivelled on the carpetless floor.

‘See here, boy,’ he said, when he had come to a halt, ‘there is work to do. There is a raft to be built, body of me, a raft of chestnut boughs and no other. The procession. The bareback racing for the bagful. The barbecue in the Stone Hall. Hell slice me up, boy! call the hounds off.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Steerpike. ‘Shall I send them back to their quarters?’

‘Eh?’ muttered Barquentine, ‘what’s that?’

‘I said shall I return them to their quarters?’ said Steerpike. An affirmative noise from the throat of strings was the reply.

But as Steerpike began to move off, ‘Not yet, you dotard! Not yet!’ And then: ‘Who’s your master?’

Steerpike reflected a moment. ‘I have no immediate master,’ he said. ‘I attempt to make myself useful – here and there.’

‘You do, do you, my sprig? “Here and there,” do you? I can see through you. Right the way through you, suckling, bones and brain. You can’t fool me, by the stones you can’t. You’re a great little rat but there’ll be no more “here and there” for you. It will be only “here”, do you understand?’ The old man ground his crutch into the floor. ‘
Here
,’ he added, with an access of vehemence; ‘beside
me
. You may be useful. Very useful.’ He scratched himself through a tear at his armpit.

‘What will my salary amount to?’ said Steerpike, putting his hands in his pockets.

‘Your
keep
, you insolent bastard! your
keep
! What more do you want? Hell fire child! have you no pride? A roof, your food, and the honour of studying the Ritual. Your
keep
, curse you, and the secrets of the Groans. How else could you serve me but by learning the iron Trade? Body of me – I have no son. Are you ready?’

‘I have never been more so,’ said the high shouldered boy.

Little gusts of fresh, white air blew fitfully through the high trees that surrounded the lake. In the dense heat of the season it seemed they had no part; so distinct they were from the sterile body of the air. How could such thick air open to shafts so foreign and so aqueous? The humid season was split open for their every gush. It closed as they died like a hot blanket, only to be torn again by a blue quill, only to close again; only to open.

The sickness was relieved, the sickness and the staleness of the summer day. The scorched leaves pattered one against the next, and the tares screaked thinly together, the tufted heads nodding, and upon the lake was the stippled commotion of a million pin-pricks and the sliding of gooseflesh shadows that released or shrouded momently the dancing of diamonds.

Through the trees of the southern hanger that sloped steeply to the water could be seen, through an open cradle of high branches, a portion of Gormenghast Castle, sun blistered and pale in its dark frame of leaves; a remote façade.

A bird swept down across the water, brushing it with her breast-feathers and leaving a trail as of glow-worms across the still lake. A spilth of water fell from the bird as it climbed through the hot air to clear the lakeside trees, and a drop of lake water clung for a moment to the leaf of an ilex. And as it clung its body was titanic. It burgeoned the vast summer. Leaves, lake and sky reflected. The hanger was stretched across it and the heat swayed in the pendant. Each bough, each leaf – and as the blue quills ran, the motion of minutiae shivered, hanging. Plumply it slid and gathered, and as it lengthened, the distorted reflection of high crumbling acres of masonry beyond them, pocked with nameless windows, and of the ivy that lay across the face of that southern wing like a black hand, trembled in the long pearl as it began to lose its grip on the edge of the ilex leaf.