Gormenghast (38 page)

       No expression at all came into their eyes, nor would there have been room for any, for they were separately filled, each one of them, with a foreign body, for in each of the four glazed pupils the image of the young man was exquisitely reflected. Let those who have tried to pass love letters through the eyes of needles or to have written poems on the heads of pins take heart. Crude and heavy handed as they found themselves, yet they will never appreciate the extent of their clumsiness for they will never know how Steerpike's head and shoulders leaned forward through circles the size of beads, whose very equidistance from one another (the Twins were cheek to cheek) was as though to prove by ghastly repetition the nightmare of it all. Minute and exquisite in the microcosm of the pupils, these four worlds, identical and terrible, gleamed between the lids. It would seem they had been painted - these images of Steerpike - with a single hair or with the proboscis of a bee - for the very whites of his eyes were crystalline. And when Steerpike at the door drew back his head - drew it back on a sudden impulse, then the four heads, no bigger than seeds, were drawn back at that same instant, and the eight eyes narrowed as they stared back from the four microscopic mirrors - stared back at their origin, the youth, mountain high in the doorway, the youth on whom their quick and pulseless lives depended - the youth with his eyes narrowed, and whose least movement was theirs.

       That the eyes of the Twins should be ignorant of that they reflected was natural enough but it was not natural that in carrying the image of Steerpike to their identical brains, there should be, by not so much as the merest shade, a due to the excitement in their breasts. For it seemed that they felt nothing, that they saw nothing, that they were dead, and stood upon their feet by some miracle.

       Steerpike knew at once that yet another chapter was over in his relationship with Cora and Clarice. They had become day in his hands, but they were day no more, unless there is in day not only something imponderable but something sinister also. Not only this, but something adamantine. From now on he knew that they were no longer ductile - they had changed into another medium - a sister medium - but a harsher one - they were stone.

       All this could be seen at a glance. But now, suddenly, there was something which escaped his vigilance. It was this. His reflections were no longer in their eyes. Their ladyships had unwittingly expelled him. Something else had taken place - and as he was unaware that he had ever been reflected so he was equally unaware that he was no longer so - and that in the lenses of their eyes he had exchanged places with the head of an axe.

       But what Steerpike 'could' see was that they were no longer staring at him - that their gaze was fixed upon something above his head. They had not tilted their heads back although it would have been the normal thing to do for whatever they were looking at was all but out of their line of vision. Their upturned eyes shone white. Save for this movement of their eyeballs they had not so much as stirred.

       Fighting down his fear that were he to move his eyes from them, even for a second, he would fall in a peculiar way into some trap, he swung himself about and in a moment had seen a great axe dangling a dozen feet above him, and the complex network of cords and strings which, like a spider's web in the darkness of the upper air, held in position the cold and grizzly weight of the steel head.

       With a backward leap the young man was through the doorway. Without a pause he slammed the door and before he had turned the key in the lock he had heard the thud as the head of the axe buried itself in that part of the floor where he had been standing.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Steerpike's return to the castle's heart was rapid and purposeful. A pale sun like a ball of pollen was hung aloft an empty and faded sky, and as he sped below it his shadow sped with him, rippling over the cobbles of great squares, or cruising alongside, upright, where at his elbow the lit and attenuate walls threw back the pallid light. For all that within its boundaries, this shadow held nothing but the uniform blankness of its tone, yet it seemed every whit as predatory and meaningful as the body that cast it - the body, that with so many aids to expressiveness within the moving outline, from the pallor of the young man and the dark red colour of his eyes, to the indefinable expressions of lip and eye, was drawing nearer at every step to a tryst of his own making.

       The sun was blocked away. For a few minutes the shadow disappeared like the evil dream of some sleeper who on waking finds the substance of his nightmare standing beside his bed - for 'Steerpike' was there, turning the corners, threading the mazes, gliding down slopes of stone or flights of rotten wood. And yet it was strange that with all the vibrancy that lay packed within the margins of his frame, yet his shadow when it reappeared reaffirmed its self-sufficiency and richness as a scabbard for malignity. Why should this be - why with certain slender proportions and certain tricks of movement should a sense of darkness be evoked? Shadows more terrible and grotesque than Steerpike's gave no such feeling. They moved across their walls bloated or spidery with a comparative innocence. It was as though a shadow had a heart - a heart where blood was drawn from the margins of a world of less substance than air. A world of darkness whose very existence depended upon its enemy, the light.

       And there it was; there it slid, this particular shadow - from wall to wall, from floor to floor, the shoulders a little high, but not unduly, the head cocked, not to one or other side, but forward. In an open space it paled as it moved over dried earth, for the sun weakened - and then it fainted away altogether as the fringe of a cloud half the size of the sky moved over the sun.

       Almost at once the rain began to fall, and the air yet further darkened. Nor was this darkening enough, for beneath the expanse of the cloud that moved inexorably to the north, dragging behind it miles and miles of what looked like filthy linen, beneath 'this' expanse, yet another, of similar hugeness, but swifter, began to overtake it from beneath, and when this lower continent of cloud began to pass over that part of the sky where the sun had lately been shining, then something very strange made itself felt at once.

       A darkness almost unprecedented had closed down over Gormenghast. Steerpike glancing left and right could see the lights begin to burn in scores of windows. It was too dark to see what was happening above, but judging from a still deepening of the pall, yet further clouds, thick and rain-charged, must have slid across the sky to form the lowest of three viewless and enormous layers.

       By now the rain was loud on the roofs, was flooding along the gutterings, gurgling in crannies and brimming the thousand irregular cavities that the centuries had formed among the crumbling stones. The advance of these weltering clouds had been so rapid that Steerpike had not entirely escaped the downpour, but it was not for more than a few moments that the rain beat on his head and shoulders, for, running through the unnatural darkness to the nearest of the lighted windows, he found himself in a part of the castle that he remembered. From here he could make the rest of the journey under cover.

       The premature darkness was peculiarly oppressive. As Steerpike made his way through the lighted corridors he noticed how at the main windows there were groups gathered, and how the faces that peered out into the false night wore expressions of perplexity and apprehension. It was a freak of nature, and no more, that the world had been swathed away from the westering sun as though with bandages, layer upon layer, until the air was stifled. Yet it seemed as though the sense of oppression which the darkness had ushered in had more than a material explanation.

       As though to fight back against the circumscribing darkness the hierophants had lighted every available lantern, burner, candle and lamp, and had even improvised an extraordinary variety of reflectors, of tin and glass, and even trays of gold and plates of burnished copper. Long before any message could have been couriered across the body of Gormenghast, there was not a limb, not a digit that had not responded to the universal sense of suffocation, not the merest finger joint of stone that had not set itself alight.

       Countless candles dribbled with hot wax, and their flames, like little flags, fluttered in the uncharted currents of air. Thousands of lamps, naked, or shuttered behind coloured glass, burned with their glows of purple, amber, grass-green, blue, blood red and even grey. The walls of Gormenghast were like the walls of paradise or the walls of an inferno. The colours were devilish or angelical according to the colour of the mind that watched them. They swam, those walls, with the hues of hell, with the tints of Zion. The breasts of the plumaged seraphim; the scales of Satan.

       And Steerpike, moving rapidly through these varying flushes, could hear the loudening of the rain. He had come to something very like an isthmus - a corridor with circular windows on either side that gave upon the outer darkness. This arcade, or cover-way - this isthmus that joined together one great mass of sprawling masonry to another, was illumined along its considerable length at three more or less regular intervals by firstly a great age-green oil lamp with an enormous wick as wide as a sheep's tongue. The glass globe that fitted over it was appallingly ugly; a fluted thing, a piece missing from its lower lip. But its colour was something apart - or rather the colour of the glass when lit from behind, as it now was. To say it was indigo gives no idea of its depth and richness, nor of the underwater or cavernous glow that filled that part of the arcade with its aura.

       In their different ways the other two lamps, with their globe of sullen crimson and iceberg green, made within the orbits of their influence, arenas no less theatrical. The glazed and circular windows, dark as jet, were yet not featureless. Across the blind blackness of those flanking eyes the strands of rain which appeared not to move but to be stretched across the inky portholes like harp strings - these strands, these strings of water burned blue, beyond the glass, burned crimson, burned green, for the lamplight stained them. And in the stain was something serpentine - something poisonous, exotic, feverish and merciless; the colours were the colours of the sea-snake, and beyond the windows on either hand, was the long-drawn hiss of the reptilian rain.

       And while Steerpike sped along this covered-way, the shadow that he cast changed colour. Sometimes it was before him as though eager to arrive at some rendezvous before the body of its caster; and sometimes it followed him, sliding at his heels, dogging him, changing its dark colour as it flowed.

       With the isthmus behind him, and a continent of stone once more about him, a continent into whose fastnesses he moved the deeper with every step and with every breath he took, Steerpike banished from his mind every thought of the Twins and of their behaviour. His mind had been largely taken up with conjecture as to the cause of their insurrection, and with tentative plans for their disposal.

       But there were matters more pressing and one matter in particular. With enviable ease he emptied his mind of their ladyships and filled it with Barquentine.

       His shadow moved upon his right hand. It was climbing a staircase. It crossed a landing. It descended three steps. It followed for a short while at its maker's heels and then overtook him. It was at his elbow when it suddenly deepened its tone and grew up the side of the wall until the shadow-head twelve feet above the ground, pursued its lofty way, the profile undulating from time to time, when it was forced to float across the murky webs that choked the junction of wall and ceiling.

       And then the giant shade began to shrivel, and as it descended it moved a little forward of its caster, until finally it was a thick and stunted thing - a malformation, intangible, terrible, that led the way towards those rooms where its immediate journey could, for a little while, be ended.

THIRTY-NINE

Barquentine in his room sat with his withered leg drawn up to his chin. His hair, dirty as a fly-blown web, hung about his face, dry and lifeless. His skin, equally filthy, with its silted fissures, its cheese-like cracks and discolorations, was dry also - an arid terrain, dead it seemed, and waterless as the moon, and yet, at its centre those malignant lakes, his vile and brimming eyes.

       Outside the broken window at the far end of the room lay stretched the stagnant waters of die moat.

       He had been sitting there, his only leg drawn up to his face, his crutch leaning against the back of his chair, his hands clasped about his knee, a hank of his beard between his teeth - he had been sitting there, for over an hour. On the table before him at least a dozen books lay spread; books of ritual and precedence, books of cross-reference, ciphers and secret papers. But his eyes were not on them. No less ruthless for being out of focus and gleaming wetly in their dry sockets, they could not see that a shadow had entered the room - that intangible as air, yet graphic to a degree, it had reared itself against high tiers of books - books of all shapes and in every stage of dilapidation, that glimmered in the bad light save where this shadow lay athwart them, black as a shade from hell.

       And while he sat there, what was he thinking of, this wrinkled and filthy dwarf?

       He was thinking of how a change had come over the workings of Gormenghast - over the workings of its heart and the temper of its brain. Something so subtle that he could in no way fix upon it. Something that was not to be located in the normal way of his thinking yet something which, nevertheless, was filling his nostrils with its odour. He knew it to be evil, and what was evil in the eyes of Barquentine was anything that smelt of insurrection, anything that challenged, or worked to undo the ancient procedures.

       Gormenghast was not what it was. He knew it. There was devilry somewhere among these cold stones. And yet he could not put his finger upon the spot. He could not say what it was that was now so different. It was not that he was an old man. He was not sentimental about the days of his youth. They had been dark and loveless. But he had no pity for himself. He had only this blind, passionate and cruel love for the dead letter of the castle's law. He loved it with a love as hot as his hate. For the members of the Groan line itself he had less regard than for the meanest and drearest of the rituals that it was their destiny to perform. Only in so far as they were symbols did he bow his ragged head. He had no love for Titus - only for his significance as the last of the links in the great chain. There was something about the way the boy moved... a restlessness, an independence, that galled him. It was almost as though this heir to a world of towers had learned of other climes, of warm, clandestine lands, and that the febrile and erratic movements of the child's limbs were the reflection of what lived and throve in his imagination. It was as though his brain, in regions remote and seductive, was sending its unsettling messages to the small bones, to the tissues of the boy, so that there was, in his movements, something remote and ominous.