The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy (78 page)

Mr Rottcodd, gauging by the converging stares of the turreted cats, what area of distant earth to scan, for with such motionless and avid concentration in every snow-lit form and yellow eye, there must surely be a spectacle of peculiar interest below them, he was able within a few moments to discover, moving toy-like, from the woods, a cavalcade of the stone castle’s core.

Toy horses led. Mr Rottcodd, who had long sight but who could hardly tell how many fingers he held up before his own face save by the apprehension of the digits themselves, removed his glasses. The blurred figures, so far below his window, threading their way through sunlight, no longer swam, but, starting into focus, startled him. What had happened? As he asked himself the question, he knew the answer. That no one had thought fit to tell him! No one! It was a bitter pill for him to swallow. He had been forgotten. Yet he had always wished to be forgotten. He could not have it both ways.

He stared: and there was no mistaking. Each figure was tiny but crystal clear in the rain-washed atmosphere. The cradle-saddled horse that led the throng: the child whom he had never glimpsed before, asleep, one arm along the cradle’s rim. Asleep on the day of his ‘Earling’. Rottcodd winced. It was Titus. So Sepulchrave had died and he had never known. They had been to the lake; to the lake; and there below him on a slow grey mare was borne along the path – the Seventy-seventh.

Leading the mare by a bridle was a youth he had not seen before. His shoulders were high and the sun shone on a rounded forehead. Over the back of the mare, beneath the saddle-cradle, and hanging almost to the ground, there was hung a gold embroidered carpet riddled with moth holes.

With Titus in the cradle was tied a cardboard crown, a short sword in a sky-blue scabbard and a book, the parchment leaves of which he was creasing with his little sprawling thighs. He was fast asleep.

Behind him, riding side-saddle, came the Countess, her hair like a pin-head of fire. She made no movement as her mount paced on. Then Mr Rottcodd noticed Fuchsia. Her back very straight and her hands loose upon the rein. Then the Aunts in their trap, whom Mr Rottcodd found it difficult to recognize for all the uniqueness of their posture, shed as they were of their purple. He noticed Barquentine, whom he took for Sourdust, his dead father, jabbing his crutch into his horse’s flank, and then Nannie Slagg alone in her conveyance, her hands at her mouth and a stable boy at the pony’s. As vanguard to the pedestrians came the Prunesquallors, Irma’s arm through her brother’s followed by Pentecost and the wedge-faced poet. But who was that mule-headed and stocky man who slouched between them, and where was Swelter the chef, and where was Flay? Following Pentecost, but at a respectful distance, ambled the rank and file – the innumerable menials which the far forest momently disgorged.

To see, after so long a while, the figure heads of the castle pass below him – distant as they were – was, to Rottcodd in his hall of the Bright Carvings, a thing both of satisfaction and of pain. Satisfaction because the ritual of Gormenghast was proceeding as sacredly and deliberately as ever before, and pain because of his new sense of flux, which, inexplicable and irrational as it appeared on the surface, was, nevertheless, something which poisoned his mind and quickened his heart-beat. An intuitive sense of danger which, although in its varying forms and to varying degrees had made itself felt among those who lived below – had not, until this morning disturbed the dusty and sequestered atmosphere in which it had been Mr Rottcodd’s lot to doze away his life.

Sepulchrave dead? And a new Earl – a child not two years old? Surely the very stones of the castle would have passed the message up, or the Bright Carvings have mouthed the secret to him. From the toyland of figures and horses and paths and trees and rocks and from the glimpse of a green reflection in the lake the size of a stamp, arose, of a sudden, the cry of an old voice, cruel, even in its remoteness, and then the silence of the figures moving on, broken by an occasional minutiae of sound as of a tin-tack falling on a brick, as a hoof struck a stone; a bridle creaked with the voice of a gnat, and Rottcodd stared from his eyrie as the figures moved on and on towards the base of the Castle, each with a short black shadow sewn to its heels. The terrain about them was as though freshly painted, or rather, as though like an old landscape that had grown dead and dull it had been varnished and now shone out anew, each fragment of the enormous canvas, pristine, the whole, a glory.

The leading mare with Titus on her back, still fast asleep in the wickerwork saddle, was by now approaching that vaster shadow, cast by the Castle itself, which fanned itself out prodigiously, like a lake of morose water from the base of the stone walls.

The line of figures was stretched out in an attenuate sweep, for even now with the head of the procession beneath the walls the far copses by the lake were still being emptied. Rottcodd switched his eyes back for a moment to the white cats – each on its grey-moss turret. He could see now that they were not merely staring at the group, as before, but towards a certain section of the line, towards the head of the line, where rode the silent Countess. Their bodies were no longer motionless. They were shuddering in the sun; and as Mr Rottcodd turned his pebbly eyes away, and peered at the figurettes below (the three largest of whom might have been fitted into the paw of the most distant of the cats, who were themselves a good fifty feet below Rottcodd), he was forced to return his gaze at once to the heraldic malkins, for they had sent forth in unison from their quivering bodies a siren-like, and most unearthly cry.

The long, dusty hall behind Mr Rottcodd seemed to stretch away into the middle distance, for with its lethal silence reaffirmed by that cry from the outer world, its area appeared to expand and a desert land was at his shoulder blades; and beyond the far door, and under the boards in the halls below, and beneath them stretching on either hand where mute stairs climbed or wound, the brooding castle yawned.

The Countess had reined in her horse and lifted her head. For a moment she moved her eyes across the face of the precipice that overhung her. And then she pursed her mouth and a note like the note of a reed, shrill and forlorn, escaped her.

The turrets of grey moss were suddenly tenantless. Like white streams of water, like cascades, the cats sped earthwards down the mountainous and sickening face of stone. Rottcodd, unable to realize how they had so suddenly melted into nothing like snow in the sun, was amazed to see, when he transferred his eyes from the empty tableland of roof, to the landscape below him, a small cloud moving rapidly across a field of tares. The cloud slowed its speed and swarmed, and as the Countess jogged her slow mount forwards, it was as though it paddled in a white mist, fetlock deep, that clung about the progress of the hooves.

Titus awoke as the mare which bore him entered the Castle’s shadow. He knelt in his basket, his hair black with the morning’s rain and clinging snake-like about his neck and shoulders. His hands clasped the edge of the saddle-cradle before him. His drenched and glittering smock had become grey as he passed into the deep, water-like darkness where the mare was wading. One by one the tiny figures lost their toy-like brilliance and were swallowed. The hair of the Countess was quenched like an ember in that sullen bay. The feline cloud at her feet was now a smoke-grey mist. One by one, the bright shapes moved into the shadow and were drowned.

Rottcodd turned from the window. The carvings were there. The dust was there. The chandeliers threw their weak light. The carvings smouldered. But everything had changed. Was this the hall that Rottcodd had known for so long? It was ominous.

And then, as he stood quite still, his hands clasped about the handle of the feather duster, the air about him quickened, and there was
another
change,
another
presence in the atmosphere. Somewhere, something had been shattered – something heavy as a great globe and brittle like glass; and it had been shattered, for the air swam freely and the tense, aching weight of the emptiness with its insistent drumming had lifted. He had heard nothing but he knew that he was no longer alone. The castle had drawn breath.

He returned to his hammock – strangely glad and strangely perplexed. He lay down, one hand behind his head, the other trailing over the side of the hammock in the cords of which he could feel the purring of a sentient Castle. He closed his eyes. How, he wondered, had Lord Sepulchrave died? Mr Flay had said nothing about his being ill. But that was long ago. How long ago? With a start, which caused him to open his eyes he realized that it was over a year since the thin man had brought the news of Titus’ birth. He could remember it all so clearly. The way his knees had clicked. His eye at the keyhole. His nervousness. For Mr Flay had been his most recent visitor. Could it be that, for more than a year he had seen no living soul?

Mr Rottcodd ran his eyes along the wooden back of a dappled otter. Anything might have happened during that year. And again he experienced an acute uneasiness. He shifted his body in the hammock. But what
could
have happened? What could have happened? He clicked his tongue.

The Castle was breathing, and far below the Hall of the Bright Carvings all that was Gormenghast revolved. After the emptiness it was like tumult through him; though he had heard no sound. And yet, by now, there would be doors flung open; there would be echoes in the passageways, and quick lights flickering along the walls.

Through honeycombs of stone would now be wandering the passions in their clay. There would be tears and there would be strange laughter. Fierce births and deaths beneath umbrageous ceilings. And dreams, and violence, and disenchantment.

And there shall be a flame-green daybreak soon. And love itself will cry for insurrection! For tomorrow is also a day – and Titus has entered his stronghold.

For
MAEVE

Titus is seven. His confines, Gormenghast. Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual: for his ears, echoes, for his eyes, a labyrinth of stone: and yet within his body something other – other than this umbrageous legacy. For first and ever foremost he is
child
.

A ritual, more compelling than ever man devised, is fighting anchored darkness. A ritual of the blood; of the jumping blood. These quicks of sentience owe nothing to his forbears, but to those feckless hosts, a trillion deep, of the globe’s childhood.

The gift of the bright blood. Of blood that laughs when the tenets mutter ‘Weep’. Of blood that mourns when the sere laws croak ‘Rejoice!’ O little revolution in great shades!

Titus the seventy-seventh. Heir to a crumbling summit: to a sea of nettles: to an empire of red rust: to rituals’ footprints ankle-deep in stone.

Gormenghast.

Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet bears away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone a doll’s hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs …

And darkness winds between the characters
.

Who are the characters? And what has he learned of them and of his home since that far day when he was born to the Countess of Groan in a room alive with birds?

He has learned an alphabet of arch and aisle: the language of dim stairs and moth-hung rafters. Great halls are his dim playgrounds: his fields are quadrangles: his trees are pillars.