by Mervyn Peake
To the clank of the boulder a score of hearts made echo. On this particular morning as Barquentine spat upon the heavy stone, the size of a melon, and sent it netherward on its resounding journey past many a darkened floor of bedded inmates (who, waking as it leapt behind their couches in the hollow of the walls, cursed him, the dawn and this cock-crow of a boulder) – on this particular morning there was more than the normal light of lust for ritual in the wreckage of the ancient’s face – there was something more, as though his greed for the observances to take place in the shadow of his aegis was filling him with a passion hardly bearable in so sere a frame.
There was one picture on the wall of his verminous hovel; an engraving, yellow with age and smirched with dust, for it had no glass across it, save the small ice-like splinter at one corner that was all that remained of the original glazing. This engraving, a large and meticulous affair, was of the Tower of Flints. The artist must have stood to the south of the tower as he worked or as he studied the edifice, for beyond the irregularity of turrets and buttresses that backed it and spread almost to the sky like a seascape of stormy roofage, could be seen the lower slopes of Gormenghast Mountain, mottled with clumps of shrub and conifer.
What Barquentine had not noticed was that the doorway of the Tower of Flints had been cut away. A small area of paper, the size of a stamp was missing. Behind this hole the wall had been laboriously pierced so that a little tunnel of empty darkness ran laterally from Barquentine’s chamber to the hollow and capacious shaft of a vertical chimney, whose extremity was blocked from the light by a landslide of fallen slates long sealed and cushioned with gold moss, and whose round base, like the base of a well of black air, gave upon the small cell-like room so favoured by Steerpike that even at this early and chilly hour he was sitting there, at the base of the shaft. All about him were mirrors of his own construction, placed to a nicety, each at its peculiar angle, while above him, punctuating the tubular darkness, a constellation of mirrors twinkled with points of light one above the other.
Every now and again Barquentine would be reflected immediately behind the hollow mouthway of the engraved Tower of Flints where an angled mirror in the shaft sent down his image to another and then another – mirror glancing to mirror – until Steerpike, reclining at the base of the chimney, with a magnifying glass in his hands peered amusedly at the terminal reflection and saw in miniature the crimson rags of the dwarfish pedant as he raised the boulder in his hands and flung it through the ring.
If Barquentine rose early from his hideous couch, Steerpike in a secret room of his own choosing, a room as spotless and bright as a new pin, arose earlier. This was not a habit with him. He had no habits in that sort of way. He did what he wanted to do. He did what furthered his plans. If getting up at five in the morning would lead to something he coveted, then it was the most natural thing in the world for him to rise at that hour. If there was no necessity for action he would lie in bed all morning reading, practising knots with the cord he kept by his bedside, making paper darts of complicated design which he would float across his bedroom, or polishing the steel of the razor-edged blade of his swordstick.
At the moment it was to his advantage to impress Barquentine with his efficiency, indispensability and dispatch. Not that he had not already worked his way beneath the cantankerous crust of the old man’s misanthropy. He was in fact the only living creature who had ever gained Barquentine’s confidence and grudging approval.
Without fully realizing it, Barquentine, during his daily administrations, was pouring out a hoard of irreplaceable knowledge, pouring it into the predatory and capacious brain of a young man whose ambition it was, when he had gained sufficient knowledge of the observances, to take over the ceremonial side of the castle’s life, and, in being the only authority in the minutiae of the law (for Barquentine was to be liquidated), to alter to his own ends such tenets as held him back from ultimate power and to forge such fresh, though apparently archaic documents, as might best serve his evil purposes as the years went by.
Barquentine spoke little. In the pouring out of his knowledge there was no verbal expansiveness. It was largely through action and through access to the Documents that Steerpike learned his ‘trade’. The old man had no idea that day after day the accumulating growth of Steerpike’s cognizance and the approach of his own death moved towards one another through time, at the same pace. He had no wish to instruct the young man beyond the point of self-advantage. The pale creature was useful to him and that was all, and were he to have known how much had been divulged of Gormenghast’s inner secrets through the seemingly casual exchanges and periodical researches in the library, he would have done all in his power to eliminate from the castle’s life this upstart, this dangerous, unprecedented upstart, whose pursuit of the doctrines was propelled by a greed for personal power as cold as it was tameless.
The time was almost ripe in Steerpike’s judgement for the Master of Ritual to be dispatched. Apart from other motives the wiping out of so ugly a thing as Barquentine seemed to Steerpike, upon aesthetic considerations alone, an act long overdue. Why should such a bundle of hideousness be allowed to crutch its way about, year after year?
Steerpike admired beauty. It did not absorb him. It did not affect him. But he admired it. He was neat, adroit, slick as his own swordstick, sharp as its edge, polished as its blade. Dirt offended him. Untidiness offended him. Barquentine, old, filthy, his face cracked and pitted like stale bread, his beard tangled, dirty and knotted, sickened the young man. It was time for the dirty core of ritual to be plucked out of the enormous mouldering body of the castle’s life and for him to take its place, and from that hidden centre – who knew how far his tangent wits might lead him?
It was a wonder to Barquentine how Steerpike was able to meet him with such uncanny precision and punctuality sunrise after sunrise. It was not as though his lieutenant sat there waiting outside the Master’s door, or at some landing on the stairs by which Barquentine made his way to the small eating-room. O no. Steerpike, his straw-coloured hair smoothed down across his high globular forehead, his pale face shining, his dark red eyes disconcertingly alive beneath his sandy eyebrows, would walk rapidly out of the shadows and, coming to a smart halt at the old man’s side, would incline himself at a slight angle from the hips.
There was no change this morning in the dumb show. Barquentine wondered, for the hundredth time, how Steerpike should coincide so exactly with his arrival at the top of the walnut stairs, and as usual drew his brows down over his eyes and peered suspiciously through the veils of unpleasant moisture that smouldered there, at the pale young man.
‘Good morning to you, sir,’ said Steerpike.
Barquentine, whose head was on a level with the banisters, put out a tongue like the tongue of a boot and ran it along the wreckage of his dry and wrinkled lips. Then he took a grotesque hop forwards on his withered leg and brought his crutch to his side with a sharp report.
Whether his face was made of age, as though age were a stuff, or whether age was the abstract of that face of his, that bearded fossil of a thing that smouldered and decayed upon his shoulders – there was no doubt that archaism was there, as though something had shifted from the past into the current moment where it burned darkly as though through blackened glass in defiance of its own anachronism and the callow present.
He turned this head of his to Steerpike.
‘To hell fire with your “good morning”, you peeled switch,’ he said. ‘You shine like a bloody land-eel! What d’you do to yourself, eh? Every poxy sunrise of the year, eh, that you burst out of the decent darkness in that plucked way?’
‘I suppose it’s this habit of washing I seem to have got into, sir.’
‘Washing,’ hissed Barquentine, as though he was mentioning something pestilent. ‘Washing, you wire-worm. What do you think you are, Mister Steerpike? A lily?’
‘I’d hardly say that, sir,’ said the young man.
‘Nor would I,’ barked the
old man.’ Just skin and bones and hair? That’s all you bloody are and nothing more. Dull yourself down. Get the shine off you – and no more of this oiled-paper nonsense, every dawn.’
‘Quite so, sir. I am too visible.’
‘Not when you’re wanted!’ snapped Barquentine, as he began to hobble downstairs. ‘You can be invisible enough when you want to be, eh? Hags-hell, boy, you can be nowhere when it suits you, eh? By the guts of the great auk! I see through you – my pretty whelp! I see through you!’
‘What, when I’m invisible, sir?’ asked Steerpike, raising his eyebrows as he trod lightly behind the cripple who was raising echoes on all sides with the stamping of his crutch on the wooden stairs.
‘By the piss of Satan, pug, your sauce is dangerous!’ shouted Barquentine hoarsely, turning precariously in his tracks, with his withered leg two steps above his crutch.
‘Are the north-cloisters done?’ He shot the question at Steerpike, in a changed tone of voice – a tone no less vicious, cantankerous, but pleasanter to the young man’s ear, being less personally vituperative.
‘They were completed last night, sir.’
‘Under your guidance, for what it’s worth?’
‘Under my guidance.’
They were approaching the first landing of the walnut stairs. Steerpike, as he trod behind Barquentine, took a pair of dividers from his pocket, and using them as though they were tongs, lifted up a hank of the old man’s hair from the back of his head, to reveal a neck as wry as a turtle’s. Amused by his success at being able to raise so thick a bunch of dirty grey hair without the cripple’s knowledge, he repeated the performance while the harsh voice continued and the crutch clack-clack-clacked down the long flight.
‘I shall inspect them immediately after breakfast.’
‘Quite so,’ said Steerpike.
‘Has it occurred to your suckling-brain that this day is hallowed by the very dirt of the castle. Eh? Eh? That it is only once a year, boy, once a year, that the Poet is honoured? Eh? Why, the lice in my beard alone know, but there it is, by the black souls of the unbelievers, there it is, a law of laws, a rite of the first water, dear child. The cloisters are ready, you say; by the sores on my withered leg, you’ll pay for it if they’re coloured the wrong red. Eh? Was it the darkest red of all? Eh – the darkest of all the reds?’
‘Quite the darkest,’ said Steerpike. ‘Any darker and it would have been black.’
‘By hell, it had better be,’ said Barquentine. ‘And the rostrum?’ he continued after crossing the gnarled landing of black walnut with its handrail missing from the banisters and the banisters themselves leaning in all directions and capped with dust as palings are capped with snow in wintertime.
‘And the rostrum?’
‘It is set and garnished,’ said Steerpike. ‘The throne for the Countess has been cleaned and mended, and the high chairs for the gentry, polished. The long forms are in place and fill the quadrangle.’
‘And the Poet,’ cried Barquentine. ‘Have you instructed him, as I ordered you? Does he know what is expected of him?’
‘His rhetoric is ready, sir.’
‘Rhetoric? Cat’s teeth! Poetry, you bastard, Poetry.’
‘It has been prepared, sir!’ Steerpike had re-pocketed his dividers and was now holding a pair of scissors (he seemed to have endless things in his pockets without disturbing the hang of his clothes) and was clipping off strands of Barquentine’s hair where it hung below his collar, and was whispering to himself in an absurd undertone, ‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor’ as the matted wisps fell upon the stairs.
They had reached another landing. Barquentine stopped for a moment to scratch himself. ‘He may have prepared his poem,’ he said turning his time-wasted visage to the slender, high shouldered young man, ‘but have you told him about the magpie? Eh?’
‘I told him that he must rise to his feet and declaim within twelve seconds of the magpie’s release from the wire cage. That while declaiming his left hand must be clasping the beaker of moat-water in which the Countess has previously placed the blue pebble from Gormenghast river.’
‘That is so, boy. And that he shall be wearing the Poet’s Gown, that his feet shall be bare, did you tell him that?’
‘I did,’ said Steerpike.
‘And the yellow benches for the Professors. Were they found?’
‘They were. In the south stables. I have had them re-painted.’
‘And the seventy-seventh earl, Lord Titus, does the pup know that he is to stand when the rest are seated, and seat himself when the rest are standing? Does the child know that – eh – eh – he is a scatterbrained thing – have you instructed him, you skinned candle? By the gripes of my seventy years, your forehead shines like a bloody iceberg!’
‘He has been instructed,’ said Steerpike.
Barquentine set out again on his descent to the eating-room. Once the walnut stairs had been negotiated, the Master of Ritual stuttered his way down the level corridors like something possessed. As the dust rose from the floor at each bang of the crutch, Steerpike, following immediately behind his master, amused himself by the invention of a peculiar dance, a kind of counterpoint to Barquentine’s jerking progress – a silent and elaborate improvisation, laced, as it were, with lewd and ingenious gestures.
TWENTY-THREE
The long summer minutes dragged by for Titus as he sat at his desk in the schoolroom where Professor Cutflower (who had once made a point of being at least one mental hour ahead of his class in whatever subject he happened to be taking, but who had long since decided to pursue knowledge on an equal footing with his pupils) was, with the lid of his high desk raised to hide his activity, taking a long pull at a villainous looking bottle with a blue label. The morning seemed endless …
But, for Barquentine with a score of preparations still to be completed, and with his rough tongue victimizing the workmen in the south quadrangle, the hours sped by with the speed of minutes.
And so, after what seemed an infinity to Titus and a whisk of time’s skirt to Barquentine, the morning that was both fleet and tardy, fructified and like a grape of air, in whose lucent body the earth was for that moment suspended – that phantom ripeness throbbed, that thing called noon.
Before it had awoke to die on the instant of its waking, a score of bells and clocks had shouted midday and for a minute after its death, from near and far the clappers in their tents of rusted iron clanged across Gormenghast. It was as though no mechanism on earth could strike or chain that ghost of time. The clocks and the bells stuttered, boomed and rang. They trod with their iron imprint. They beat with their ancient fists and shouted with archaic voices – but the ghost was older.
Noon, ripe as thunder and silent as thought, had fled unfingered.
When every echo had died from even those clocks in the western outcrops, whose posthumous tolling was proverbial, so that the phrase, ‘late as a western chime’ was common in the castle – when every echo had died, Titus became aware of another sound.
After the languid threnody of the chimes, this fresh sound, so close upon the soft heels of the pendulums, appeared hideously rapid, merciless and impatient.
It had the almost dream-like insistence, for all its actuality, of some hound with feet of stone or iron; or some coursing beast, that, rattling its rapacious and unalterable way in the wake of its prey, was momently closing the gap between evil and innocence.
Titus heard the sound, as though its cause were alongside. Yet the corridor down which he was moving was empty, and the tapping of the crutch was in reality coming from a parallel passageway, and Barquentine, although only a few yards from him, was separated from the boy by a solid wall of stone.
As Titus came to a halt, his heart beating, his eyes narrowed and an expression of hatred came over his childish features – an expression hardly credible in so young a face. To him, Barquentine was the symbol of tyranny, of age, of all that held him back from summer days among the woods, from diving in t
he moat with his friends, from all he longed for.
As he stood shuddering with his hot uprising of fear and detestation, he listened intently. In which direction, behind that wall of stone, was the crutch travelling?
At either end of Barquentine’s corridor subsidiary passages led into the corridor in which Titus now stood. It seemed to him that the Master of Ritual was moving rapidly in a parallel direction to his own. He turned and began to retrace his steps, but the corridor was suddenly darkened by a solid block of Professors who bore down upon him with a fluttering of ethiop draperies and a fleet of mortar-boards. His only hope was to run in the original direction and cross the communicating passage, and away, before Barquentine’s possible arrival at that juncture.
He began to run. It was not because of any particular misdeed or rational fear that he ran. It was a compulsion, a necessity for withdrawal. A revolt against anything that was old. Anything that had power. A nebula of terror possessed him and he ran.
Along the right-hand side of the corridor a phalanx of dusty statues loomed in the dim light that gave them the colour of ash. Set, for the most part, on massive plinths they towered above Titus, their silent limbs sawing the dark air, or stabbing it bluntly with broken arms. The heads were almost invisible, matted as they were with cobwebs, and shrouded in perpetual twilight.
He had known these monuments since childhood. But he no more noticed them or remembered them than another child would notice the monotonous pattern of some nursery wallpaper.
But Titus was brought again to a standstill by the tiny yet unmistakable silhouette of the cripple as it rounded the far corner and proceeded towards him out of the distance.
Before Titus had realized what he was doing he had leapt sideways quick as a squirrel, and was all at once in an almost complete darkness that brooded behind the ponderous and muscled carving of a figure without head or arms. The plinth on which this great trunk of stone stood balanced was itself above the level of his head.
