by Mervyn Peake
When he had freed himself of his harness, and had cut away the deflated silk, he lowered himself branch by branch, and by the time he had reached the forest floor the sunshine was threading its way through the trees.
Now he was really alone and in making for the east he had no better reason than that it was out of there that the sunbeams were pouring.
Hungry, weary, he made his solitary way, eating roots and berries and drinking from the streams. Month followed month until one day, as he wandered through the lonely void, his heart jumped into his throat.
ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-TWO
Why had he stopped to stare at the shape of a rock, as though it were in any way unusual? There it stood, perfectly normal, a great lichened boulder of a thing, pock-marked by time, its northern side somewhat swollen like the sail of a ship. Why was he staring at it as though struck by recognition?
As his eyes raced over the triturated surface of this dead yet evocative thing he took a step backwards. It was as though he was being warned.
There was no getting away from it. He had seen this rock before. He had stood upon its back, a ‘king of the castle’, in his childhood. He now remembered the long scar, a saw-toothed fissure down its crusty flank.
He knew that if he scaled it now and stood, once again, as in the old days, a ‘king of the castle’, he would see the very towers of Gormenghast.
That was why he trembled. The long indented outline of his home was blocked away from his sight by the mere proximity of a boulder. It was, for no reason he could see, a challenge.
A flood of memories returned; and as they spread and inter-spread and deepened, another part of his brain was wide aware of closer manifestations. The recognized existence, the very proof of the stone, there before him, not twenty feet away, argued the no less real existence of a cave that yawned at his right hand. A cave where an infinity ago he had struggled with a nymph.
At first he did not dare to turn his head, but the moment had come when he must do so, and there it was at last, away behind his right shoulder, and he knew for very proof that he was in his own domain once more. He was standing on Gormenghast Mountain.
As he rose to his feet a fox trotted out of the cave. A crow coughed in a nearby spinney and a gun boomed. It boomed again. It boomed seven times.
There it lay behind the boulder; the immemorial ritual of his home. It was the dawn salvo. It boomed for him, for the Seventy-Seventh Earl, Titus Groan, Lord of Gormenghast, wherever he might be.
There burned the ritual; all he had lost; all he had searched for. The concrete fact of it. The proof of his own sanity and love.
‘O God! It’s true! It’s true! I am not mad! I am not mad!’ he cried.
Gormenghast, his home. He could feel it. He could almost see it. He had only to skirt the base of the great rock or climb its crusty crown, for his eyes to become filled with towers. There was a taste in the air of iron. There was a quickening it seemed of the very stones and of the bridgeless spaces. What was he waiting for?
It would have been possible, had he wished it, to have reached the mouth of the cave without a glimpse of his Home. Indeed he took a step or two towards the cave-mouth. But again a sense of impending danger held back his feet, and a moment later he heard his own voice saying …
‘No … no … not now! It is not possible … now.’
His heart beat out more rapidly, for something was growing … some kind of knowledge. A thrill of the brain. A synthesis. For Titus was recognizing in a flash of retrospect that a new phase of which he was only half aware, had been reached. It was a sense of maturity, almost of fulfilment. He had no longer any need for home, for he carried his Gormenghast within him. All that he sought was jostling within himself. He had grown up. What a boy had set out to seek a man had found, found by the act of living.
There he stood: Titus Groan, and he turned upon his heel so that the great boulder was never seen by him ever again. Nor was the cave: nor was the castle that lay beyond, for Titus, as though shaking off his past from his shoulders like a heavy cape began to run down the far side of the mountain, not by the track by which he had ascended, but by another that he had never known before.
With every pace he drew away from Gormenghast Mountain, and from everything that belonged to his home.
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Epub ISBN 9781409019794
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Published by Vintage 2011
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Copyright © The Estate of Mervyn Peake 1992
Introduction copyright © China Miéville 2011
Note on the illustrations © Sebastian Peake 2011
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Titus Groan first published in Great Britain in 1946 by Eyre and Spottiswoode
Gormenghast first published in Great Britain in 1950 by Eyre and Spottiswoode
Titus Alone first published in Great Britain in 1959 by Eyre and Spottiswoode
This edition first published in 1992 by Mandarin Paperbacks
Interior illustrations by Mervyn Peake
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099528548
