by Mervyn Peake
She stood there for a moment, entirely alone in the dreaming oakwoods and began, with strangely rapid movements of her fingers, to pluck the feathers from a missel-thrush which, during her long fall through the foliage, she had snatched from its branch and throttled in her small fierce hand.
FORTY-ONE
Surrounding the outer walls of Gormenghast castle the mud city of the Outer Dwellers lay sprawled in the sun, its thousands of hovels hummocking the earth like molehills. These Dwellers, or Bright Carvers as they were sometimes called, had rituals of their own as sacrosanct as those of the castle itself.
Bitter with poverty and prone to those diseases that thrive on squalor, they were yet a proud though bigoted people. Proud of their traditions, of their power of carving – proud of their very misery, it seemed. For one of their number to have left them and to have become wealthy and famous would have been to them a cause for shame and humiliation. But such a possibility was unthinkable. In their obscurity, their anonymity lay their pride. All else was something lower – saving only the family of the Groans to whom they owed allegiance and under whose patronage they were allowed their hold upon the Outer Walls. When the great sacks of crusts were lowered by ropes from the summit of those Walls, over a thousand at a time making their simultaneous descents, they were received (this time-honoured gesture on the part of the castle) with a kind of derision. It was they, the Bright Carvers, who were honouring the castle; it was they who condescended to unhook the ropes every morning of the year, so that the empty sacks might be hoisted up again. And with every mouthful of these dry crusts (which with the jarl-root of the neighbouring forest composed the beginning and end of their diet) they knew themselves to be conferring an honour upon the castle bakeries.
It was perhaps the pride of the subjugated – a compensatory thing – but it was very real to them. Nor was it built on nothing, for in their carvings alone they showed a genius for colour and for ornament that had no kind of counterpart in the life of the Castle.
Taciturn and bitter as they were in their ancient antipathies yet their hottest enmity was directed, not against any that lived within the outer walls, but against those of their own kind who in any way made light of their own customs. At the heart of their ragged and unconventional life there was an orthodoxy as hard as iron. Their conventions were ice-bound. To move among them for a day without forewarning of their innumerable conventions would be to invite disaster. Side by side with an outrageous lack of the normal physical decencies was an ingrained prudery, vicious and unswervingly cruel.
For a child to be illegitimate was for that child to be loathed, as though it were a diseased thing. Not only this. A bastard babe was feared. There was a strong belief that in some way a love-child was evil. The mother would invariably be ostracized but it was only the babe who was to be feared – it was, in fact, a witch in embryo.
But it was never killed. For to kill, it would be only to kill the body. Its ghost would haunt the killer.
In a lane of flies that wound beneath a curve of the Outer Walls, the dusk began to settle down like pollen. It thickened by degrees until the lane and the irregular roofs of reeds and mud were drowned in it.
Along the wall of the lane or alleyway a line of beggars squatted. It seemed that they were growing out of the dust they sat in. It covered their ankles and their haunches. It was like a dead, grey sea. It was as though the tide were in – a tide of soft dust. It was voluptuously fine and feathery.
And in this common dove-coloured dust, they sat, their backs to the clay walls of a sun-warmed hovel. They had these luxuries, the soft dust and the warm fly-filled air.
As they sat there silently, while the night descended, their eyes were fixed upon those few figures on the other side of the alley, who, their carving over for the day, were gathering up their chisels, rasps and mallets and returning with them to their various huts.
Until a year ago there had been no need for the Bright Carvers to return their sculpture to the safety of their homes. It had remained all night in the open. It was never touched. No, not the meanest vandal of them all would dare to touch or move by an inch the work of another.
But now there was a difference. The carvings were no longer safe. Something horrible had happened. And so the beggars by the wall continued to stare as the removal of the wood sculpture proceeded. It had been going on now for twelve months, evening after evening, but they were not yet used to it. They could not grasp it. All their lives they had known the moonlight on the deserted lanes, and, flanking these lanes the wooden carvings like sentinels at every door. But now, after dark, the heart had gone out of the streets – a vibrancy, a beauty had departed from the alleys.
And so they still watched, at dusk, with a kind of hapless wonder, the younger men as they struggled to return the often massive and weighty horses with their manes like clusters of frozen sea foam – or the dappled gods of Gormenghast forest with their heads so strangely tilted. They watched all this and knew that a blight had come upon the one activity for which the Dwellers lived.
They said nothing, these beggars, but as they sat in the soft dust, there was, at back of each one’s mind, the image of a child. Of an illegitimate child, a pariah, a thing of not yet twelve years old, but a raven, a snake, witch, all the same, a menace to them all and to their carvings.
It had happened first about a year ago, that first midnight attack, secret, silent and of a maliciousness quite terrible.
A great piece of sculpture had been found at dawn, its face in the dust, its body scarred with long jagged knife wounds, and a number of small carvings had been stolen. Since that first evil and silent assault a score of works had been defaced and a hundred carvings stolen, carvings no bigger than a hand, but of a rare craftsmanship, rhythm and colour. There was no doubt as to who it was. It was the Thing. Shunned as a bastard ever since the day of her mother’s suicide, this child had been a thorn in the flesh of the Dwellers. Running wild, like an animal, and as untameable; a thief as though by nature, she was, even before she ran away, a legend, a thing of evil.
She was always alone. It seemed unthinkable that she could be companioned. There was no soft spot in her self-sufficiency. She stole for her food, moving shadowlike in the night, her face utterly expressionless, her limbs as light and rapid as a switch of hazel. Or she would disappear completely for months on end, but then, suddenly return and darting from roof to roof, blister the evening air with sharp cries of derision.
The dwellers cursed the day when the Thing was born; the Thing that could not speak but could run, it was rumoured, up the stem of a branchless tree; could float for a score of yards at a time on the wings of a high wind.
They cursed the mother that bore her – Keda, the dark girl, who had been summoned to the castle and who had fed the infant Titus from her breast. They cursed the mother, they cursed the child – but they were afraid – afraid of the super-natural and were oppressed with a sense of awe – that the tameless Thing should be the foster sister of the Earl, Lord Groan of Gormenghast, Titus the Seventy-seventh.
FORTY-TWO
When Steerpike had come out of his faint and when his consciousness of the horrors through which he had passed returned to him, as they did in a flash of pain, for he was raw with the searings of the fire, he got to his feet like a cripple and staggered through the night until he came at last to the Doctor’s doorway. There, after beating at the door with his feverish forehead, for his hands were scalded, he fainted again where he stood and knew no more until three days later when he found himself staring at the ceiling of a small room with green walls.
For a long while he could recall nothing, but bit by bit the fragments of that violent evening pieced themselves together until he had the whole picture.
He turned his head with difficulty and saw that the door was to his left. To his right was a fireplace, and ahead of him and near the ceiling was a fair sized window over which the blinds were partially drawn. By the dusky look in the sky he guessed it to b
e either dawn or evening. Part of a tower could be seen through the gap of the curtains, but he could not recognize it. He had no idea in what part of the castle he was lying.
He dropped his eyes and noticed that he was bandaged from head to foot, and as though he needed this reminder, the pain of his burns became more acute. He shut his eyes and tried to breathe evenly.
Barquentine was dead. He had killed him. But now, at the moment when he, Steerpike, should have been indispensable, being the sole confidant of the old custodian of the law, he was lying here inert, helpless, useless. This must be offset, this derangement of his plans, by quick and authoritative action. His body could do little but his brains were active and resourceful.
But there was a difference. His mind was as acute as ever, it is true, but, unknown to himself, there was something that had been added to his temperament, or perhaps it was that something had left him.
His poise had been so shattered that a change had come about – a change that he knew nothing of, for his logical mind was able to reassure him that whatever the magnitude of his blunder in Barquentine’s room, yet the shame was his alone, the mortification was private – he had only lost face to himself for no one had seen the old man’s quickness.
To have been so burned was too high a price to pay for glory. But glory would assuredly be his. The graver his condition the rarer his bravery in attempting to save the old man’s life from the flames. His prestige had suffered nothing, for Barquentine’s mouth was filled with the mud of the moat and could bear no witness.
But there was a change all the same, and when he was woken an hour later by a sound in the room, and when on opening his eyes he saw a flame in the fireplace, he started upright with a cry, the sweat pouring down his face, and his bandaged hands trembled at his sides.
For a long while he lay shuddering. A sensation such as he had never experienced before, a kind of fear was near him, if not on him. He fought it away with all his reserves of undoubted courage. At last he fell again into a fitful sleep, and when some while later he awoke he knew before he opened his eyes that he was not alone.
Dr Prunesquallor was standing at the end of his bed. His back was to Steerpike, his head was tilted up and he was staring through the window at the tower that was now mottled with sunlight and the shadows of flying clouds. The morning had come.
Steerpike opened his eyes and on seeing the Doctor, closed them again. In a moment or two he had decided what to do and turning his head to and fro slowly on the pillow, as though in restless sleep –
‘I tried to save you,’ he whispered, ‘O Master, I tried to save you,’ and then he moaned.
Prunesquallor turned around on his heel. His bizarre and chiselled face was without that drollery of expression which was so typical of him. His lips were set.
‘You tried to save who?’ said Prunesquallor very sharply as though to elicit some involuntary reply from the sleeping figure.
But Steerpike made a confused sound in his throat, and then in a stronger voice …
‘I tried … I tried.’
He turned again on the pillow and then as though this had awakened him he opened his eyes.
For a few moments he stared quite blankly and then –
‘Doctor,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t hold him.’
Prunesquallor made no immediate reply but took the swathed creature’s pulse – listened to the heart and then after a while – ‘You will tell me about it tomorrow,’ he said.
‘Doctor,’ said Steerpike, ‘I would rather tell you now. I am weak and I can only whisper, but I know where Barquentine is. He lies dead in the mud outside the window of his room.’
‘And how did he get there, Master Steerpike?’
‘I will tell you.’ Steerpike lifted his eyes, loathing the bland physician – loathing him with an irrational intensity. It was as though his power of hatred had drawn fresh fuel from the death of Barquentine. But his voice was meek enough.
‘I will tell you, Doctor,’ he whispered. ‘I will tell you all I know.’ His head fell back on the pillow and he closed his eyes.
‘Yesterday, or last week, or a month ago, for I do not know how long I have been lying here insensible – I entered Barquentine’s room about eight o’clock, which was my habit every evening. It was at that hour that he would give me my orders for the next day. He was sitting on his high chair and as I entered he was lighting a candlestick. I do not know why but he started at my entrance, as though I had surprised him, but when he turned his head back again, after cursing me – but he meant no harm to me for all his irritability – he misjudged his distance from the flame, his beard swept across it and a moment later was alight. I rushed to him but his hair and clothing had already caught. There were no rugs or curtains in the room with which to smother the fire. There was no water. But I beat the flames with my hands. But the fire grew fiercer and in his pain and panic he caught hold of me and I began to burn.’
The pupils of the young man’s dark eyes dilated as he recounted the partial fabrication, for Barquentine’s grip upon him had been no dream, and his brow began to sweat again, and a terrible authenticity appeared to give weight to his words.
‘I could not escape, Doctor; I was caught and held against his burning body. Every moment the fire grew fiercer – and my burns more terrible. There was only one thing I could do to get away. I knew I must reach the water that lay below his window. And so I ran. I ran with his arm gripping me. I ran to the window and jumped into the moat – and there in the cold black water, his hands at last gave way. I could not hold him up. It was all I could do to reach the side of the moat, and there, I think I fainted – and when I came round, I found I was naked and I came to your door … but the moat must be dragged and the old man must be found … in the name of decency he must be found and given a true burial. It is for me to carry on his work. I … I … cannot tell … you more … I am … not …’
He turned his head on the pillow, and in spite of his pains fell asleep. He had played his card and could afford to rest.
FORTY-THREE
‘My dear,’ said Bellgrove, ‘it is surely not for your betrothed to be kept waiting quite so long even though he is only the Headmaster of Gormenghast. Why on earth must you always be so late? Good grief, Irma, it isn’t as though I’m a green youth who finds it romantic to be drizzled on by the stinking sky. Where have you been for pity’s sake?’
‘I am inclined not to answer you!’ cried Irma. ‘The humiliation of it! Is it nothing to you that I should take a pride in my appearance – that I should make myself beautiful for you? You man, you. It breaks one’s heart.’
‘I do not complain lightly, my love,’ replied Bellgrove. ‘As I say, I cannot stand bad weather like a younger man. This was your idea of a place of rendezvous. It could hardly have been worse chosen, with not so much as a shrub to squat under. Rheumatism is on its way. My feet are soaked. And why? Because my fiancée, Irma Prunesquallor, a lady of quite exceptional talents in other directions – they always are in other directions – who has the entire day in which to pluck at her eyebrows, harvest her sheaves of long grey hair, and so on, cannot organize herself – or else has grown shall we say casual in regard to her suitor? Shall we say casual, my dear?’
‘Never!’ cried Irma. ‘O never! my dear one. It is only my longing that you should find me worthy that keeps me at my toilet. O my dearest, you must forgive me. You must forgive me.’
Bellgrove gathered his gown about him in great swathes. He had been staring into the gloomy sky while he had spoken but now, at last he turned his noble face to her. The landscape all about them was hazy with rain. The nearest tree was a grey blur two fields away.
‘You ask me to forgive you,’ said Bellgrove. He closed his eyes. ‘And so I do, and so I do. But remember, Irma, that a punctual wife would please me. Perhaps you could practise a little so that when the time comes I will have nothing to complain of. And now, we will forget about it, shall we?’
He turned his he
ad from her, for he had not yet learned to admonish her without grinning weakly with the joy of it. And so, with his face averted, he bared his rotten teeth at a distant hedgerow.
She took his arm and they began to walk.
‘My dear one,’ she said.
‘My love?’ said Bellgrove.
‘It is my turn to complain, is it not?’
‘It is your turn, my love!’ (He lifted his leonine head and shook the rain happily from his mane.)
‘You won’t be cross, dear?’
He raised his eyebrows and closed his eyes.
‘I will not be cross, Irma. What is it that you wish to say?’
‘It’s your neck, dearest.’
‘My neck? What of it!’
‘It is very dirty, dear one. It has been for weeks … do you think …’
But Bellgrove had stiffened at her side. He bared his teeth in a snarl of impotence.
‘O stinking hell,’ he muttered. ‘O stinking, rotten hell.’
FORTY-FOUR
Mr Flay had been sitting for over an hour at the entrance to his cave. The air was breathless and the three small clouds in the soft grey sky had been there all day.
His beard had grown very long and his hair that was once cropped close to the skull was now upon his shoulders. His skin had darkened with the sun and the last few years of hardship had brought new lines to his face.
He was by now a part of the woods, his eyesight sharp as a bird’s, and his hearing as quick. His footsteps had become noiseless. The cracking of his knee joints had disappeared. Perhaps the heat of the summer had baked the trouble out of them for his clothes being as ragged as foliage his knees were for the most part bare to the sun.
