by Mervyn Peake
Muzzlehatch, the owner of the car, had wandered over to the hunchback and the youth and was now bending over Titus, not with any gentleness or concern, so it seemed, but with an air of detachment – proud, even in the face of another’s plight.
‘Into the chariot with it,’ he muttered. ‘What it is I have no idea, but it has a pulse.’
Muzzlehatch removed his finger and thumb from Titus’ wrist and pointed to his long vibrating car with a massive index-finger.
Two beggars, pushing forward through the crowd that now surrounded the prostrate Titus, elbowed the old man out of their way and lifted the young Earl of Gormenghast, as ragged a creature as themselves, as though he were a sack of gravel, and shuffling to the car they laid him in the stern of the indescribable vehicle – that chaos of mildewed leather, sodden leaves, old cages, broken springs, rust and general squalor.
Muzzlehatch, following them with long, slow, arrogant strides, had reached about halfway to his diabolical car when a pelt of darkness shifted in the sky and the scarlet rim of an enormous sun began to cut its way up as though with a razor’s edge, and immediately the boats and their crews and the cormoranteers and their bottle-necked birds, and the rushes and the muddy bank and the mules and the vehicles and the nets and the spears and the river itself, became ribbed and flecked with flame.
But Muzzlehatch had no eye for all this and it was well for Titus that this was so, for on turning his head from the day-break as though it were about as interesting as an old sock, he saw, by the light of what he was dismissing, two men approaching smoothly and rapidly, with helmets on their identical heads and scrolls of parchment in their hands.
Muzzlehatch lifted his eyebrows so that his somewhat louring forehead became rucked up like the crumpled leather at the back of his car. Turning his eyes to the machine, as though to judge how far it was away, he continued walking towards it with a barely perceptible lengthening of his stride.
The two men who were approaching seemed to be not so much walking as gliding, so smoothly they advanced, and those fishers who were still left upon the cobbled waterfront parted at their approach, for they made their way unswervingly to where Titus lay.
How they could know that he was in the car at all is hard to conceive: but know it they did, and with helmets glittering in the dawn rays they bore down upon him with ghastly deliberation.
NINE
It was then that Titus roused himself and lifted his face from his arms and saw nothing but the flush of the dawn sky above him and the profuse scattering of the stars.
What use were they? His stomach cried with hunger and he shook with the cold. He raised himself upon one elbow and moistened his lips. His wet clothes clung to him like seaweed. The acrid smell of the mouldering leather began to force itself upon his consciousness, and then, as though to offer him something different by way of a change, he found himself staring into the face of a large rudder-nosed man who at the next moment had vaulted into the front seat, where he slid into an all but horizontal position. Lying at this angle he began to press a number of buttons, each one of which, replying to his prodding finger, helped to create a tumult quite vile upon the eardrums. At the height of this cacophony the car backfired with such violence that a dog turned over in its sleep four miles away, and then, with an upheaval that lifted the bonnet of the car and brought it down again with a crash of metal, the wild thing shook itself as though bent upon its own destruction, shook itself, roared, and leapt forward and away down tortuous alleys still wet and black with the night shadows.
Street after street flew at them as they sped through the waking town; flew at them and broke apart at the prow-like bonnet. The streets, the houses, rushed by on either side, and Titus, clinging to an old brass railing, gasped at the air that ran into his lungs like icy water.
It was all that Titus could do to persuade himself that the impetuous vehicle was, in fact, being driven at all, for he could see nothing of the driver. It seemed that the car had an existence of its own and was making its own decisions. What Titus could see was that instead of a normal mascot, this stranger who was driving him (though why or where he did not know) had fixed along the brass cap of the radiator the sun-bleached skull of a crocodile. The cold air whistled between its teeth and the long crown of its skull was flushed with sunrise.
For now the sun was clear of the horizon, and as the world flew past, it climbed, so that for the first time Titus became aware of the nature of the city into which he had drifted like a dead branch.
A voice roared past his ears, ‘Hold tight, you pauper!’ and the sound flew away into the cold air as the car swerved in a sickening loop, and then again and again as the walls reared up before them, only to stream away in a high torrent of stone; and then, at last, diving beneath a low arch, the car, turning and slowing as it turned, came to rest in a walled-in courtyard.
The courtyard was cobbled and in between the cobbles the grass flourished.
TEN
Around three sides of the yard the walls of a massive stone-built building blocked the dawn away, save in one place where the slanting rays ran through a high eastern window and out of an even higher western window to end their journey in a pool of radiance upon a cold slate roof.
Ignorant of its setting and of the prodigious length of its shadow; ignorant that its drab little breast glowed in the sunrise, a sparrow pecked at its tinted wing. It was as though an urchin, scratching himself, absorbed in what he was doing, had become transfigured.
Meanwhile Muzzlehatch had rolled out of the driver’s seat and lashed the car, as though it were an animal, to the mulberry tree which grew in the centre of the yard.
Then he meandered with long, lazy, loose-jointed strides towards the dark north-western corner of the yard and whistled between his teeth with the penetration of a steam whistle. A face appeared at a window above his head. And then another. And then another. There was then a great rattling to be heard of feet upon stairs, and the jangling of a bell, and behind these noises a further noise, more continuous and more diverse, for there was about it the suggestion of beasts and birds; of a howling and a coughing and a screaming and a kind of hooting sound, but all of it in the distance and afar from the foreground noises, the feet loud upon the stairs and the jangling of a near-by bell.
Then out of the shadows that hung like black water against the walls of the great building a group of servants broke from the house and ran towards their master, who had returned to his car.
Titus was sitting up, with his face drawn, and as he sat there facing the huge Muzzlehatch, he became, without thought, without cognizance, irrationally savage, for at the back of his mind was an earlier time when for all the horror and the turmoil and the repetitive idiocy of his immemorial home, he was in his own right the Lord of a Domain.
The hunger burned in his stomach but there was another burn, the heartburn of the displaced; the unrecognized; the unrecognizable.
Why did they not know of him? What right had any man to touch him? To whirl him away on four mouldering wheels? To abduct him and to force him to his courtyard? To lean over him and stare at him with eyebrows raised? What right had anyone to save him? He was no child! He had known horror. He had fought, and he had killed. He had lost his sister and his father and the long man Flay, loyal as the stones of Gormenghast. And he had held an elf in his arms and seen her struck by lightning to a cinder, when the sky fell in and the world reeled. He was no child … no child … no child at all, and rising shakily to his feet he stood swaying in his weakness as he swung his fist at Muzzlehatch’s face – a vast face that seemed to disintegrate before him, only to clear again … only to dissolve.
His fist was caught in the capacious paw of the rudder-nosed man, who signed to his servants to carry Titus to a low room where the walls from floor to ceiling were lined with glass cases, where, beautifully pinned to sheets of cork, a thousand moths spread out their wings in a great gesture of crucifixion.
It was in this room that Titus was gi
ven a bowl of soup which, in his weakness, he kept spilling, until the spoon was taken from him, and a small man with a chip out of his ear fed him gently as he lay, half-reclined, on a long wicker chair. Even before he was halfway through his bowl of soup he fell back on the cushions, and was within a moment or two drawn incontinently into the void of a deep sleep.
ELEVEN
When he awoke the room was full of light. A blanket was up to his chin. On a barrel by his side was his only possession, an egg-shaped flint from the Tower of Gormenghast.
The chip-eared man came in.
‘Hullo there, you ruffian,’ he said. ‘Are you awake?’
Titus nodded his head.
‘Never known a scarecrow to sleep so long.’
‘How long?’ said Titus, raising himself on one elbow.
‘Nineteen hours,’ said the man. ‘Here’s your breakfast.’ He deposited a loaded tray at the side of the couch and then he turned away, but stopped at the door.
‘What’s your name, boy?’ he said.
‘Titus Groan.’
‘And where d’you come from?’
‘Gormenghast.’
‘That’s the word. That’s the word indeed. “Gormenghast.” If you said it once you said it twenty times.’
‘What! In my sleep?’
‘In your sleep. Over and over. Where is it, boy? This place. This Gormenghast.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Titus.
‘Ah,’ said the little man with the chip out of his ear, and he squinted at Titus sideways from under his eyebrows. ‘You don’t know, don’t you? That’s peculiar, now. But eat your breakfast. You must be hollow as a kettledrum.’
Titus sat up and began to eat, and as he ate he reached for the flint and moved his hand over its familiar contours. It was his only anchor. It was, for him, in microcosm, his home.
And while he gripped it, not in weakness or sentiment but for the sake of its density, and proof of its presence, and while the midday sunlight sifted itself to and fro across the room, a dreadful sound erupted in the courtyard and the open door of his room was all at once darkened, not by the chip-eared man but, more effectively, by the hindquarters of an enormous mule.
TWELVE
Titus, sitting bolt upright, stared incredulously at the rear of this great bristling beast whose tail was mercilessly thrashing its own body. A group of improbable muscles seldom brought into play started, now here, now there, across its shuddering rump. It fought in situ with something on the other side of the door until it forced its way inch by inch out into the courtyard again, taking a great piece of the wall with it. And all the time the hideous, sickening sound of hate; for there is something stirred up in the breasts of mules and camels when they have the scent of one another which darkens the imagination.
Jumping to his feet, Titus crossed the room and gazed with awe at the antagonists. He was no stranger to violence, but there was something peculiarly horrible about this duel. There they were, not thirty feet away, locked in deadly grapple, a conflict without scale.
In that camel were all the camels that had ever been. Blind with a hatred far beyond its own power to invent, it fought a world of mules; of mules that since the dawn of time have bared their teeth at their intrinsic foe.
What a setting was that cobbled yard, now warm and golden in the sunlight, the gutter of the building thronged with sparrows; the mulberry tree basking in the sunbeams, its leaves hanging quietly while the two beasts fought to kill.
By now the courtyard was agog with servants and there were shouts and countershouts and then a horrible quiet, for it could be seen that the mule’s teeth had met in the camel’s throat. Then came a wheeze like the sound of a tide sucked out of a cave; a shuffle of shingle, and the rattle of pebbles.
And yet that bite that would have killed a score of men appeared to be no more than an incident in this battle, for now it was the mule who lay beneath the weight of its enemy, and suffered great pain, for its jaw had been broken by a slam of the hoof and a paralysing butt of the head.
Sickened but thrilled, Titus took a step into the courtyard, and the first thing he saw was Muzzlehatch. This gentleman was giving orders with a peculiar detachment, mindless that he was stark naked except for a fireman’s helmet. A number of servants were unwinding an old but powerful-looking hose, one end of which had already been screwed into a vast brass hydrant. The other end was gurgling and spluttering in Muzzlehatch’s arms.
Its nozzle trained at the double-creature, the hose-pipe squirmed and jumped like a conger, and suddenly a long, flexible jet of ice-cold water leapt across the quadrangle.
This white jet, like a knife, pierced here and there, until, as though the bonfire of their hatred had been doused, the camel and the mule, relaxing their grips, got slowly to their feet, bleeding horribly, a cloud of animal heat rising around them.
Then every eye was turned to Muzzlehatch, who took off his brass helmet and placed it over his heart.
As though this were not peculiar enough, Titus was next to witness how Muzzlehatch ordered his servants to turn off the water, to seat themselves on the floor of the wet courtyard, and to keep silent, and all by the language of his expressive eyebrows alone. Then, more peculiar still, he was surprised to hear the naked man address the shuddering beasts from whose backs great clouds of steam were rising.
‘My atavistic, my inordinate friends,’ whispered Muzzlehatch in a voice like sandpaper, ‘I know full well that when you smell one another, then you grow restless, then you grow thoughtless, then you go … too far. I concede the ripe condition of your blood; the darkness of your native anger; the gulches of your ire. But listen to me with those ears of yours and fix your eyes upon me. Whatever your temptation, whatever your primordial hankering, yet’ (he addressed the camel), ‘yet you have no excuse in the world grown sick of excuses. It was not for you to charge the iron rails of your cage, nor, having broken them down, to vent your spleen upon this mule of ours. And it was not for you’ (he addressed the mule), ‘to seek this rough-and-tumble nor to scream with such unholy lust for battle. I will have no more of it, my friends! Let this be trouble enough. What, after all, have you done for me? Very little, if anything. But I – I have fed you on fruit and onions, scraped your backs with bill-hooks, cleaned out your cages with pearl-handled spades, and kept you safe from the carnivores and the bow-legged eagle. O, the ingratitude! Unregenerate and vile! So you broke loose on me, did you – and reverted!’
The two beasts began to shuffle to and fro, one on its hassock-sized pads and the other on its horny hooves.
‘Back to your cages with you! Or by the yellow light in your wicked eyes I will have you shaved and salted.’ He pointed to the archway through which they had fought their way into the courtyard – an archway that linked the yard in which they stood to the twelve square acres where animals of all kinds paced their narrow dens or squatted on long branches in the sun.
THIRTEEN
The camel and the mule lowered their terrible heads and began their way back to the arch, through which they shuffled side by side.
What was going on in those two skulls? Perhaps some kind of pleasure that after so many years of incarceration they had at last been able to vent their ancient malice, and plunge their teeth into the enemy. Perhaps, also, they felt some kind of pleasure in sensing the bitterness they were arousing in the breasts of the other animals.
They stepped out of the tunnel, or long archway, on the southern side, and were at once in full view of at least a score of cages.
The sunlight lay like a gold gauze over the zoo. The bars of the cages were like rods of gold, and the animals and birds were flattened by the bright slanting rays, so that they seemed cut out of coloured cardboard or from the pages of some book of beasts.
Every head was turned towards the wicked pair; heads furred and heads naked; heads with beaks and heads with horns; heads with scales and heads with plumes. They were all turned, and being so, made not the slightest movement.
If hatred could have killed them they would have expired a hundred times on the way to their cages. The silence was like breath held at the ribs.
And then it broke, for a shrill scream pierced the air like a splinter, and the monkey, whose voice it was, shook the bars of its cage with hands and feet in an access of jealousy so that the iron rattled as the scream went on and on and on, while other voices joined it and reverberated through the prisons so that every kind of animal became a part of bedlam.
The tropics burned and broke in ancient loins. Phantom lianas sagged and dripped with poison. The jungle howled and every howl howled back.
FOURTEEN
Titus followed a group of servants through the archway and into the open on the other side where the din became all but unbearable.
Not fifty feet from where he stood was Muzzlehatch astride a mottled stag, a creature as powerful and gaunt as its rider. He was grasping the beast’s antlers in one hand, and with the other he was gesticulating to some men who were already, under his guidance, beginning to mend the buckled cages, at the back of which sat the miscreants licking their wounds and grinning horribly.
Very gradually the noise subsided and Muzzlehatch, turning from the scene, saw Titus, and with a peremptory gesture beckoned him. But Titus, who had been about to greet the intellectual ruffian who sat astride the stag like some ravaged god, stayed where he was, for he saw no reason why he should obey, like a dog to the whistle.
