by Mervyn Peake
‘Titus Groan,’ cried the ancient voice from the shore, ‘the Day has come! The Castle awaits your sovereignty. From horizon to horizon all is yours, to hold in trust – animal, vegetable and mineral, time without end, save for your single death that cannot stem a tide of such illustrious Blood.’
This was the Raftmen’s cue, and clambering over the side they placed the necklace of snails around the little wet neck, and as the voice from the shore cried, ‘Now!’ attempted to place in Titus’ hands the stone and the ivy branch.
But he would not hold them.
‘Hell’s blood and gallstones!’ screamed Barquentine, ‘what’s the matter? Rot your hides! what’s the matter? Give him his stone and ivy, curse you!’
They opened his little fingers with difficulty and placed the symbols against his palms, but he snatched his hands away from them. He would not hold the things.
Barquentine was beside himself. It was as though the child had a mind of its own. He smote the stage with his crutch and spat with fury. There was not one, either, among the dripping trees or along the strip of bubbling sand – not one whose eyes were not fixed on Titus.
The men on the raft were helpless.
‘Fools! fools! fools!’ came the hideous voice through the rain. ‘Leave them at his feet, curse your black guts! Leave them at his feet! Oh, body of me, take your damned heads away!’
The two men slipped back into the water, cursing the old man. They had left the stone and the ivy branch on the raft at the child’s feet.
Barquentine knew that the Earling was to be completed by noon: it was decreed in the old tomes and was Law. There was barely a minute to go.
He swung his bearded head to left and right. ‘Your Ladyship, the Countess Gertrude of Gormenghast! Your Ladyship Fuchsia of Gormenghast! Their Ladyships Cora and Clarice Groan of Gormenghast! Arise!’
Barquentine crutched himself forward on the slippery stage until he was within a few inches of the edge. There was no time to lose.
‘Gormenghast will now watch! And listen! It is the Moment!’
He cleared his throat and began and could not stop, for there was no time left. But as he cried the traditional words, his fingernails were splintering into the oakwood of his crutch and his face had become purple. The huge beads of sweat on his brow were lilac, for the colour of his congested head burned through them.
‘In the sight of all! In the sight of the Castle’s Southern wing, in the sight of Gormenghast Mountain, and in the sacred sight of your forefathers of the Blood, I, Warden of the immemorial Rites proclaim you, on this day of Earling, to be the Earl, the only legitimate Earl between heaven and earth, from skyline to skyline – Titus, the Seventy-seventh Lord of Gormenghast.’
A hush most terrible and unearthly had spread and settled over the lake, over the wood and towers and over the world. Stillness had come like a shock, and now that the shock was dying, only the white emptiness of silence remained. For while the concluding words were being cried in a black anger, two things had occurred. The rain had ceased and Titus had sunk to his knees and had begun to crawl to the raft’s edge with a stone in one hand and an ivy branch in the other. And then, to the horror of all, had dropped the sacrosanct symbols into the depths of the lake.
In the brittle, pricking silence that followed, a section of delicate blue sky broke free from the murk of the clouds above him, and he rose to his feet and, turning to the dark multitude of the Dwellers, approached in little careful paces to the edge of the raft that faced the side of the lake where they were gathered. His back was turned to Barquentine, to the Countess his mother, and to all who stared transfixed at the only moving thing in the porcelain silence.
Had a branch broken in any one of the thousand trees that surrounded the water, or had a cone fallen from a pine, the excruciating tension would have snapped. Not a branch broke. Not a cone fell.
In the arms of the woman by the shore the strange child she held began to struggle with a strength that she could not understand. It had reached outward from her breast, outward, over the lake; and as it did so the sky began to blossom in azure and Titus, at the edge of the raft, tore at his necklace with such force that he found it loose in his hands. Then he lifted his head and his single cry froze the multitude that watched him on every side, for it was neither a cry of tears nor of joy; nor was it fear, or even pain – it was a cry that for all its shrillness was unlike the voice of a child. And as he cried he swung the necklace across the sparkling water; and as it sank a rainbow curved over Gormenghast and a voice answered him.
A tiny voice. In the absolute stillness it filled the universe – a cry like the single note of a bird. It floated over the water from the Dwellers, from where the woman stood apart from her kind; from the throat of the little child of Keda’s womb – the bastard babe, and Titus’ foster-sister, lambent with ghost-light.
MR ROTTCODD AGAIN
The while, beneath the downpour and the sunbeams, the Castle hollow as a tongueless bell, its corroded shell dripping or gleaming with the ephemeral weather, arose in immemorial defiance of the changing airs, and skies. These were but films of altering light and hue: sunbeam shifting into moonbeam; the wafted leaf into the wafted snow; the musk into a tooth of icicle. These but the transient changes on its skin: each hour a pulse the more – a shade the less: a lizard basking and a robin frozen.
Stone after grey stone climbed. Windows yawned: shields, scrolls, and legendary mottoes, melancholy in their ruin, protruded in worn relief over arches or doorways; along the sills of casements, in the walls of towers or carved in buttresses. Storm-nibbled heads, their shallow faces striated with bad green and draped with creepers, stared blindly through the four quarters, from between broken eyelids.
Stone after grey stone; and a sense of the heaving skywards of great blocks, one upon another in a climbing weight, ponderous and yet alive with the labour of dead days. Yet, at the same time, still; while sparrows, like insects, flickered in wastes of ivy. Still, as though paralysed by its own weight, while about it the momentary motions fluttered and died: a leaf falling: a bullfrog croaking from the moat, or an owl on wings of wool floating earthwards in slow gyres.
Was there something about these vertical acres of stone that mouthed of a stillness that was more complete, a silence that lay within, and drummed. Small winds rustled on the castle’s outer shell; leaves dropped away or were brushed by a bird’s wing; the rain ceased and creepers dripped – but within the walls not even the light changed, save when the sun broke through and a series of dusty halls in the southern wing. Remoteness.
For all were at the ‘Earling’. Around the lakeside was the Castle’s breath. Only the old stone lung remained. Not a footfall. Not a voice. Only wood, and stone, and doorway, banister, corridor and alcove, room after room, hall after hall, province after province.
It was as though, at any moment some inanimate Thing must surely move; a door open upon its own, or a clock start whirling its hands: the stillness was too vast and charged to be content to remain in this titanic atrophy – the tension must surely find a vent – and burst suddenly, violently, like a reservoir of water from a smashed dam – and the shields fall from their rusty hooks, the mirrors crack, the boards lift and open and the very castle tremble, shake its walls like wings; yawn, split and crumble with a roar.
But nothing happened. Each hall a mouth that gaped and could not close. The stone jaws prised and aching. The doors like eye-teeth missing from the bone! There was no sound and nothing human happened.
What moved in these great caves? A shifting shadow? Only where sunlight through the south wing wandered. What else? No other movement?
Only the deathly padding of the cats. Only the soundlessness of the dazed cats – the line of them – the undulating line as blanched as linen, and lorn as the long gesture of a hand.
Where, in the wastes of the forsaken castle, spellbound with stone lacunas – where could they find their way? From hush to hush. All was unrooted. Life, bone and
breath; echo and movement gone…
They flowed. Noiselessly and deliberately they flowed. Through doors ajar they flowed on little feet. The stream of them. The cats.
Under the welkin of the flaking cherubs doming through shade, they ran. The pillars narrowing in chill perspective formed them their mammoth highway. The refectory opened up its tracts of silence. Over the stones they ran. Along a corridor of fissured plaster. Room after hollow room – hall after hall, gallery after gallery, depth after depth, until the acres of grey kitchen opened. The chopping blocks, the ovens and grills, stood motionless as altars to the dead. Far below the warped beams they flowed in a white band. There was no hesitation in their drift. The tail of the white line had disappeared, and the kitchen was as barren as a cave in a lunar hillside. They were swarming up cold stairs to other lands.
Where has she gone? Through the drear sub-light of a thousand yawns, they ran, their eyes like moons. Up winding stairs to other worlds again, threading the noonday dusk. And they could find no pulse and she was gone.
Yet there was no cessation. League after league, the swift, unhurried padding. The pewter room slid by, the bronze room and the iron. The armoury slid by on either side – the passageways slid by – on either side – and they could find no breath in Gormenghast.
The doorway of the Hall of the Bright Carvings was ajar. As they slid through the opening it was as though a long, snow-soft serpent had appeared, its rippling body sown with yellow eyes. Without a pause it streamed among the carvings lifting hundreds of little dust clouds from the floor. It reached the hammock at the shuttered end, where, like a continuation of silence and stillness in a physical form, dozed the curator, the only living thing in the castle apart from the feline snake that was flooding past him and was even now on its way back to the door. Above it, the coloured carvings smouldered. The golden mule – the storm grey child – the wounded head with locks of chasmic purple.
Rottcodd dozed on, entirely unaware, not only that his sanctum had been invaded by her ladyship’s cats, but unaware also that the castle was empty below him and that it was the day of the Earling. No one had told him of the Earl’s disappearance for no one had climbed to the dusty Hall since Mr Flay’s last visit.
When he awoke, he felt hungry. Hauling up the shutters of the window he noticed that the rain had stopped, and as far as he could judge from the position of the sun it was well into the afternoon. Yet nothing had been sent up for him in the miniature lift from the Kitchen, forty fathoms below. This was unheard of. It was so new an idea that his food should not be awaiting him that for the moment he could not be certain that he was awake. Perhaps he was dreaming that he had left his hammock.
He shook the cord that disappeared into the black well. Faintly he could hear the bell jangling far beneath. Remote as was the thin, metal sound, it seemed that it was much clearer today, than he ever remembered it to have been before. It was as though it were the only thing in motion. As though it had no other sound to contend with, not so much as the buzzing of a fly upon a pane – it jangled in so solitary a way, so distinct and so infinitely far. He waited, but nothing happened. He lifted the end of the cord for the second time and let it fall. Once more, as though from a city of forsaken tombs, a bell rang. Again he waited. Again nothing happened.
In deep and agitated thought he returned to the window which was so seldom open, passing beneath the glimmering chandeliers. Accustomed as he was to silence, there was something unique today about the emptiness. Something both close and insistent. And as he pondered he became aware of a sense of instability – a sensation almost of fear – as though some ethic he had never questioned, something on which whatever he believed was founded and through which his every concept filtered was now threatened. As though, somewhere, there was treason. Something unhallowed, menacing, and ruthless in its disregard for the fundamental premises of loyalty itself. What could be thought to count, or have even the meanest kind of value in action or thought if the foundations on which his house of belief was erected was found to be sinking and imperilling the sacrosanct structure it supported.
It could not be. For what could change. He fingered his chin and shot a hard, beady glance out of the window. Behind him the long, adumbrate Hall of the Bright Carvings glimmered beneath the suspended chandeliers. Here and there, a shoulder or a cheekbone or a fin or a hoof burned green or indigo, crimson or lemon in the gloom. His hammock swung a little.
Something had gone wrong. Even had his dinner been sent up the shaft to him in the normal way he must still have felt that there was something wrong. This silence was of another kind. It was portentous.
He turned his thoughts over, tortuously and his eyes, losing for a moment their beady look, wandered over the scene below him. A little to his left and about fifty feet beneath his window was a table-land of drab roof around the margin of which were turrets grey with moss, set about three feet apart from one another. There were many scores of them, and as his eyes meandered over the monotonous outline he jerked his head forwards and his focus was no longer blurred, for he had suddenly realized that every turret was surmounted by a cat, and every cat had its head thrust forwards, and that every cat, as white as a plume, was peering through slit eyes at something moving – something moving far below on the narrow, sand-coloured path which led from the castle’s outhouses to the northern woods.
Mr Rottcodd, gauging by the converging stares of the turreted cats, what area of distant earth to scan, for with such motionless and avid concentration in every snow-lit form and yellow eye, there must surely be a spectacle of peculiar interest below them, he was able within a few moments to discover, moving toy-like, from the woods, a cavalcade of the stone castle’s core.
Toy horses led. Mr Rottcodd, who had long sight but who could hardly tell how many fingers he held up before his own face save by the apprehension of the digits themselves, removed his glasses. The blurred figures, so far below his window, threading their way through sunlight, no longer swam, but, starting into focus, startled him. What had happened? As he asked himself the question, he knew the answer. That no one had thought fit to tell him! No one! It was a bitter pill for him to swallow. He had been forgotten. Yet he had always wished to be forgotten. He could not have it both ways.
He stared: and there was no mistaking. Each figure was tiny but crystal clear in the rain-washed atmosphere. The cradle-saddled horse that led the throng: the child whom he had never glimpsed before, asleep, one arm along the cradle’s rim. Asleep on the day of his ‘Earling’. Rottcodd winced. It was Titus. So Sepulchrave had died and he had never known. They had been to the lake; to the lake; and there below him on a slow grey mare was borne along the path – the Seventy-seventh.
Leading the mare by a bridle was a youth he had not seen before. His shoulders were high and the sun shone on a rounded forehead. Over the back of the mare, beneath the saddle-cradle, and hanging almost to the ground, there was hung a gold embroidered carpet riddled with moth holes.
With Titus in the cradle was tied a cardboard crown, a short sword in a skyblue scabbard and a book, the parchment leaves of which he was creasing with his little sprawling thighs. He was fast asleep.
Behind him, riding side-saddle, came the Countess, her hair like a pin-head of fire. She made no movement as her mount paced on. Then Mr Rottcodd noticed Fuchsia. Her back very straight and her hands loose upon the rein.
Then the Aunts in their trap, whom Mr Rottcodd found it difficult to recognize for all the uniqueness of their posture, shed as they were of their purple. He noticed Barquentine, whom he took for Sourdust, his dead father, jabbing his crutch into his horse’s flank, and then Nannie Slagg alone in her conveyance, her hands at her mouth and a stable boy at the pony’s. As vanguard to the pedestrians came the Prunesquallors, Irma’s arm through her brother’s followed by Pentecost and the wedge-faced poet. But who was that muleheaded and stocky man who slouched between them, and where was Swelter the chef, and where was Flay? Following Pentecost, but at a re
spectful distance, ambled the rank and file – the innumerable menials which the far forest momently disgorged.
To see, after so long a while, the figure heads of the castle pass below him – distant as they were – was, to Rottcodd in his hall of the Bright Carvings, a thing both of satisfaction and of pain. Satisfaction because the ritual of Gormenghast was proceeding as sacredly and deliberately as ever before, and pain because of his new sense of flux, which, inexplicable and irrational as it appeared on the surface, was, nevertheless, something which poisoned his mind and quickened his heart-beat. An intuitive sense of danger which, although in its varying forms and to varying degrees had made itself felt among those who lived below – had not, until this morning disturbed the dusty and sequestered atmosphere in which it had been Mr Rottcodd’s lot to doze away his life.
Sepulchrave dead? And a new Earl – a child not two years old? Surely the very stones of the castle would have passed the message up, or the Bright Carvings have mouthed the secret to him. From the toyland of figures and horses and paths and trees and rocks and from the glimpse of a green reflection in the lake the size of a stamp, arose, of a sudden, the cry of an old voice, cruel, even in its remoteness, and then the silence of the figures moving on, broken by an occasional minutiae of sound as of a tin-tack falling on a brick, as a hoof struck a stone; a bridle creaked with the voice of a gnat, and Rottcodd stared from his eyrie as the figures moved on and on towards the base of the Castle, each with a short black shadow sewn to its heels. The terrain about them was as though freshly painted, or rather, as though like an old landscape that had grown dead and dull it had been varnished and now shone out anew, each fragment of the enormous canvas, pristine, the whole, a glory.
The leading mare with Titus on her back, still fast asleep in the wickerwork saddle, was by now approaching that vaster shadow, cast by the Castle itself, which fanned itself out prodigiously, like a lake of morose water from the base of the stone walls.
