The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy (128 page)

But Titus knew nothing of this swarthy light. Nor that he was being taken down a steep track through the ferns to a district where the great chestnuts far from forming a solid forest, as it falsely appeared from the surrounding slopes, were marshalled a furlong deep about the margin of a wide expanse of water. The points of light that had caught the bearers’ attention were all that they had been able to see of the moonlit lake when for a moment they had paused on a high open shoulder.

But what of the glow? It was not long before Titus knew all about it. He was by now among the deep moon-dappled chestnut groves. His exhausted bearers, the sweat pouring down their bodies and running into their eyes, were turning into a ride of ancient trees that led to the centre of the southern bank.

Had his vision been free he would have seen upon his left, and tethered to the low branches of the nearby trees, a hundred or more horses. Their harnessings, bridles, halters and saddles were slung across the higher branches. Here and there the moonlight penetrating the upper foliage set a stirrup dazzling in the gloom or gloated upon the leather of long traces. And then, a little further along the track where the trees were not so numerous, there stood ranged in lines, as though for inspection, a great variety of carriages, carts and traps. Here where there was less covering, the moonlight shone almost unimpeded, and was by now so high and was casting so strong a light that the varying colours of the carriages could be distinguished one from another. The wheels of each were decorated with foliage of young trees whose branches were threaded through the spokes, and with sunflowers also; in the long horse-drawn cavalcade which a few hours previously had made its overland journey to the chestnut woods, there had not been one wheel out of the many hundreds, that, in turning had not set the foliage revolving and the heads of sunflowers circling in the dusk.

All this had been lost to the boy – all this and many another flight of fancy which from hour to hour during the day had been set in motion or enacted according to old customs whose origin or significance was long forgotten.

But the bearers were for the first time slackening their pace. Once again he leaned forward, his hands grasping the basket-work rim of his chair. ‘Where are we?’ he shouted. ‘How much longer will it be? Can’t you answer me?’

The silence about him was like something that hummed against his eardrums. This was another kind of silence. This was not the silence of nothing happening – of emptiness, or negation – but was a positive thing – a silence that knew of itself – that was charged, conscious and wide awake.

And now the bearers stopped altogether, and almost at once, across the stillness, Titus heard the sound of approaching footsteps, and then –

‘My lord Titus,’ said a voice, ‘I am here to bid you welcome and to offer you on behalf of your mother, your sister and all who are here gathered, our felicitations on your tenth birthday.

‘It is our desire that what has been prepared for your amusement will give you pleasure; and that you will find the tedium of the long and solitary day that now lies at your back has been worth the suffering; in short, my Lord Titus, your mother the Countess Gertrude of Gormenghast, Lady Fuchsia and every one of your subjects are hoping that what is left of your birthday will be very happy.’

‘Thank you,’ said Titus. ‘I would like to get down.’

‘At once, your lordship,’ said the same voice.

‘And I’d like this scarf off my eyes.’

‘In one moment. Your sister is on her way to you. She will remove it when she has taken you to the south platform.’

‘Fuchsia!’ his voice was sharp and strained. ‘Fuchsia! Where are you?’

‘I’m coming,’ she shouted. ‘Hold his arm, you man, there! How do you think he can stand in the dark like that – give him to me, give him to me. Oh Titus,’ she panted, holding her blind brother tightly in her arms, ‘it won’t be long now – and O, it’s wonderful! wonderful! As wonderful as it was when it was all for me, years ago, and it’s a better night than I had, and absolutely calm with a great white moon on top.’

She led him along as she talked, and all at once the marginal trees were behind them and Fuchsia knew that every step they took and every movement they made was watched by a multitude.

As Titus stumbled at her side he tried to imagine in what kind of place he could be. He could form no picture from Fuchsia’s disjointed comments. That he was to be taken to a platform of some kind, that there was a moon, and that the whole castle seemed resolved to make amends for the long prefatory day he had spent alone was all that he could gather.

‘Twelve steps up,’ said Fuchsia, and he felt her placing his foot upon the first of the rough treads. They climbed together, hand in hand, and when they reached the platform she guided him to where a large horse-hair chair bloated with moonlight, an ugly thing if ever there was one – a heavy beast with a purple skin that had tired out the two cart horses by the time they had covered half the journey.

‘Sit down,’ said Fuchsia, and he sat down gingerly in the darkness, upon the edge of the ugly couch.

Fuchsia stood back from him. Then she raised both her arms above her head. In reply to her signal a voice called out of the darkness. ‘It is time! Let the scarf be unwound from his eyes!’

And another voice – quick as an echo –

‘It is time! Let his birthday begin!’

And another –

‘For his Lordship is ten.’

Titus felt Fuchsia’s fingers undoing the knot and then the freeing of the cloth about his eyes. For a moment he remained with his lids closed, and then he slowly opened them and as he did so he rose involuntarily to his feet with a gasp of wonder.

Before him, as he stood, one hand at his mouth, his eyes round as coins, there was stretched, as it were, across the area of his vision, a canvas – a canvas hushed and unearthly. A canvas of great depth; of width that spread from east to the west and of a height that wandered way above the moon. It was painted with fire and moonlight – upon a dark impalpable surface. The lunar rhythms rose and moved through darkness. A counterpoint of bonfires burned like anchors – anchors that held the sliding woods in check.

And the glaze! The earthless glaze of that midnight lake! And the multitude across the water, motionless in the shadow of the sculptured chestnut trees. And the bonfires burning!

And then a voice out of the paint cried ‘Fire!’ and a cannon roared, recoiled and smoked upon the bank. ‘Fire!’ cried the voice again, and then again, until the gun had bellowed ten times over.

It was the sign, and suddenly the picture, as though at the stroke of a warlock’s wand, came suddenly to life. The canvas shuddered. Fragments detached themselves and fragments came together. From the height to the depths it was that that Titus saw.

Firstly the moon, by now immediately overhead; a thing as big as a dinner plate and as white, save where the shadows of its mountains lay. The moon whose lustre was over everything like a veil of snow.

And all about the moon, the midnight sky. It came down, this sky, like a curtain, expansive as nemesis and under the sky the hilltops in a haze of ferns that overlapping one another with their fronds, descended the hill, fold after fold until the chestnut forest, luxuriant in its foliage, its upper canopies shining, stretched on Titus’ eye-level in a great curve. And under these trees, along the water’s edge, as thick upon the ground as nettles in wasteland, was the life of the distant castle, the teeming populace. A hundred at a time would be contained in the cast-shadow of a single tree; a hundred more be lit in a lozenge of moonlight. And then the swarms of faces, thick as bees, illumined and flushed in the red light of the lakeside bonfires. Now that the gun had fired its salute, this long strip of the canvas had begun to seethe. Across the lake it was too far for Titus to be able to make out any single creature, but movements ran through these crowds as a ripple of wind over a field of tares. But this was not all. For these ripples, these trembling blotches of shadow and moonlight, these movements on the shore, were being simultaneously repeated in the lakes. Not the least motion of a head beneath the trees but its ghost had moved beneath it in the water. Not the flicker of a fire was lost in the reflecting water.

And it was this nocturnal glass in whose depths shone the moon-bathed foliage of the chestnut trees that held the eye the longest. For it was nothingness, a sheet of death; and it was everything. Nothing it held was its own although the least leaf was reflected with microscopic accuracy – and, as though to light these aqueous forms with a luminary of their own, a phantom moon lay on the water, as big as a plate and as white, save where the shadow of its mountains lay.

And yet this visual richness gave less a sense of satisfaction than of expectancy. This was a setting if ever there were one – but a setting for
what
? The stage was set, the audience was gathered – what next? Titus turned his eyes for the first time to where his sister had been standing, but she was no longer there. He was alone on the platform with the horse-hair chair.

And then he saw her seated on a log with her mother beside her. From their feet the land dipped gradually to the water and on this decline was gathered what was pleased to think itself the upper stratum of Gormenghast society. To right and left the ground swarmed with officials of every kind – and over Titus, and over them all were the spreading terraces of the trees.

Finding himself alone, Titus sat down on the purple chair and then, to make himself more comfortable, curled his feet under him, and rested his arm on the bolster-like arm. He lifted his eyes to the lake with its upside down picture of all that was spread above it.

Fuchsia trembled as she sat beside her mother. She remembered how the chestnut woods had held back their secret until this moment, years ago, and how they would now throw out their startling characters. She turned her head to see whether she could catch her brother’s eye, but he was staring straight ahead, and as she watched him his hand went to his mouth again and she saw him sit forward on the couch as rigidly as though he had been turned to stone.

For immediately ahead of him, across the unblemished lake, figures as tall as the chestnut trees themselves were straddling out of the shadows, and to the verge of the opposite bank, where they stood, unbelievably. Before them, their liquescent stage lay spread. The reflections of their fantastically elongated bodies were already deep in the lake.

There were four of them, and they came out one after another from various parts of the forest. They appeared to take no notice of one another although they turned their heads to right and left. The movements of their bodies appeared stiff and exaggerated, but extraordinarily eloquent.

From the high masks that topped them, to the grass on which they balanced could not have measured less than thirty feet.

They were beings of another realm and the crowds that stared up at them from below had not only been shrivelled up into midgets, but were also made to appear grey and prosaic. For these four giants were in every way most beautiful and extraordinary. The woods behind them seemed darker than ever now, for these lofty spectres were tinted under the moon’s rays with colours as sharp and barbaric as the plumage of tropical birds.

From one to another, Titus turned his gaze, unable to resist the movements of his eyes, although he longed to dwell on each one separately.

Upon their lofty shoulders they carried their heads like kings – abstracted and inscrutable. Their dignity was something that infused their slightest movement. In the stiff and measured raising of an arm the very humus appeared to be drawn out of the soil below. The tilting of their faces to the sky made the sky naked – made the moon guilty.

The group had stalked out of that part of the forest that faced Titus across the lake. Their four heads were very different. That of the most northerly was crowned with a high conical hat like a dunce’s, under which a great white head resembling a lion’s turned slowly to left and right, upon the shoulders that supported it. The eyes, perfectly circular, were painted the purest emerald green and when the head was raised they shone to the moon.

But its mane was its glory. From close above the eyes, and from the sides and back of the head it billowed forth luxuriantly and fell as far as the waist in undulations of imperial purple. From the waist downwards – a twenty foot drop to the feet of the stilts – a prodigious skirt descended like a cascade, weighted down by its own length of material. It was quite black, as were those of the other three. This mutual darkness of the lower two thirds of their bodies gave an illusory effect to their upper parts. The skirts could be seen, and their reflections could be seen, but with nothing like the same clarity. It was, at times, almost as though their coloured ‘heights’ were floating. The arms emerged from halfway down the mane. In either hand the Lion held a dagger.

Next to this figure with its purple mane, stood one as far removed as the Lion from the natural, but more sinister in that the wolfish character of the head was not redeemed by either a noble cast of feature, or lightened by the charade-like nature of the long white dunce’s hat.

This vulpine monster was undeniably wicked – but so decoratively wicked! The head was crimson, and the cocked and pointed ears were deepest azure. This azure was repeated in the circles that were scattered over the grey hide of the upper body. In either hand was an enormous cardboard bottle of poison. As with the Lion the black skirt fell like a wall of darkness.