Gormenghast (14 page)

       '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 clawlike 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 tiptoed 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 tiptoeing 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-breadth 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 that 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.