02 Gormenghast - Peake

       There had once been a great casement facing upon this terrace. It was gone.

       Neither broken glass nor iron nor rotten wood was anywhere to be seen. Beneath the moss and ground creepers it may be that there were other and deeper layers, rotten with antiquity; but where the long window had stood the hollow darkness of a hall remained. It opened its unprotected mouth midway along the pavement's inner verge. On either side of this cavernous opening, widely separated, were the raw holes in the stonework that were once the supporting windows. The hall itself was solemn with herons. It was there they bred and tended their young. Preponderately a heronry, yet there were recesses and niches in which by sacredness of custom the egrets and bitterns congregated.

       This hall, where once the lovers of a bygone time paced and paused and turned one about another in forgotten measures to the sound of forgotten music, this hall was carpeted with lime-white sticks. Sometimes the setting sun as it neared the horizon slanted its rays into the hall, and as they skimmed the rough nests the white network of the branches flared on the floor like leprous corals, and here and there (if it were spring) a pale blue-green egg shone like a precious stone, or a nest of young, craning their long necks towards the window, their thin bodies covered with powder-down, seemed stage-lit in the beams of the westering sun.

       The late sunbeams shifted across the ragged floor and picked out the long, lustrous feathers that hung from the throat of a heron that stood by a rotten mantelpiece; and then a whiteness once more as the forehead of an adjacent bird flamed in the shadows... and then, as the light traversed the hall, an alcove was suddenly dancing with the varied bars and blotches and the reddish-yellow of the bitterns.

       As dusk fell, the greenish light intensified in the masonry. Far away, over the roofs, over the outer wall of Gormenghast, over the marshes, the wasteland, the river and the foothills with their woods and spinneys, and over the distant hazes of indeterminate terrain, the claw-shaped head of Gormenghast Mountain shone like a jade carving. In the green air the herons awoke from their trances and from within the hall there came the peculiar chattering and clanking sound of the young as they saw the darkness deepening and knew that it would soon be time for their parents to go hunting.

       Crowded as they had been in their heronry with its domed roof, once golden and green with a painting, but now a dark, disintegrating surface where flakes of paint hung like the wings of moths - yet each bird appeared as a solitary figure as it stepped from the hall to the terrace: each heron, each bittern, a recluse, pacing solemnly forwards on its thin, stiltlike legs.

       Of a sudden in the dusk, knocking as it were a certain hollow note to which their sweet ribs echoed, they were in air - a group of herons, their necks arched back, their ample and rounded wings rising and falling in leisurely flight: and then another and another: and then a night-heron with a ghastly and hair-raising croak: more terrible than the unearthly booming note of a pair of bitterns, who soaring and spiralling upwards and through the clouds to great heights above Gormenghast, boomed like bulls as they ascended.

       The pavement stretched away in greenish darkness. The windows gaped, but nothing moved that was not feathered. And nothing had moved there, save the winds, the hailstones, the clouds, the rain-water and the birds for a hundred years.

       Under the high green clawhead of Gormenghast Mountain the wide stretches of marshland had suddenly become stretches of tension, of watchfulness.

       Each in its own hereditary tract of water the birds stood motionless, with glistening eyes and heads drawn back for the fatal stroke of the dagger-like beak. Suddenly and all in a breath, a beak was plunged and withdrawn from the dark water, and at its lethal point there struggled a fish. In another moment the heron was mounted aloft in august and solemn flight.

       From time to time during the long night these birds returned, sometimes with frogs or water-mice in their beaks or newts or lily buds.

       But now the terrace was empty. On the marshlands every heron was in its place, immobile, ready to plunge its knife. In the hall the nestlings were, for the moment, strangely still.

       The dead quality of the air between the clouds and the earth was strangely portentous. The green, penumbral light played over all things. It had crept into the open mouth of the hall where the silence was.

       It was then that a child appeared. Whether a boy or a girl or an elf there was not time to tell. But the delicate proportions were a child's and the vitality was a child's alone. For one short moment it had stood on a turret at the far end of the terrace and then it was gone, leaving only the impression of something overcharged with life - of something slight as a hazel switch. It had hopped (for the movement was more a hop than a leap or a step) from the turret into the darkness beyond and was gone almost as soon as it had appeared, but at the same moment that the phantom child appeared, a zephyr had broken through the wall of moribund air and run like a gay and tameless thing over the gaunt, harsh spine of Gormenghast's body. It played with sere flags, dodged through arches, spiralled with impish whistles up hollow towers and chimneys, until, diving down a saw-toothed fissure in a pentagonal roof, it found itself surrounded by stern portraits - a hundred sepia faces cracked with spiders' webs; found itself being drawn towards a grid in the stone floor and, giving way to itself, to the law of gravity and to the blue thrill of a down-draught, it sang its way past seven storeys and was, all at once, in a hall of dove-grey light and was clasping Titus in a noose of air.

THIRTEEN

The old, old man in whose metaphysical net the three disciples, Spiregrain, Throd and Splint were so irrevocably tangled, leaned forward in space as though weighing on the phantom handle of an invisible stick. It was a wonder he did not fall on his face.

       'Always draughty in this reach of the corridor,' he said, his white hair hanging forward over his shoulders. He struck his thighs with his hands before replacing them at a point in space where a stick would have been. 'Breaks a man up - wrecks him - makes a shadow of him - throws him to the wolves and screws his coffin down.'

       Reaching down with his long arms he drew his thick socks over the ends of his trousers and then stamped his feet, straightened his back, doubled it forward again, and then threw a look of antagonism along the corridor.

       'A dirty, draughty reach. No reason for it. Scuppers a man,' he said. 'And yet' - he shook his white locks- 'it isn't true, you know. I don't believe in draughts. I don't believe I'm cold. I don't believe in anything! ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! I can't agree with you, for instance.'

       His companion, a younger man, with long, hollow cheeks, cocked his head as though it were the breech of a gun. Then he raised his eyebrow as much as to say, 'Carry on...: but the old man remained silent. Then the young man raised his voice as though he were raising the dead, for it was a singularly flat and colourless affair...

       'How do you mean, sir, that you can't agree?'

       'I just can't,' said the old man, bending forward, his hands gripped before him, 'that's all.'

       The young man righted his head and dropped his eyebrow.

       'But I haven't 'said' anything yet: we've only just met, you know.'

       'You may be right,' replied the old man, stroking his beard. 'You may very well be right; I can't say.'

       'But I tell you I haven't 'spoken'!' The colourless voice was raised, and the young man's eyes made a tremendous effort to flash; but either the tinder was wet or the updraught insufficient, for they remained peculiarly sparkless.

       'I haven't 'spoken',' he repeated.

       'Oh, that!' said the old man. 'I don't need to depend on that.' He gave a low, horribly knowledgeable laugh. 'I can't agree, that's all. With your face, for instance. It's wrong -like everything else. Life is so simple when you see it that way - ha, ha, ha, ha!' The low, intestinal enjoyment which he got out of his attitude to life was frightful to the young man, who, ignoring his own nature, his melancholy, ineffectual face, his white voice, his lightless eyes, became angry.

       'And 'I' don't agree with 'you'!' he shouted. 'I don't agree with the way you bend your ghastly old knacker's-yard of a body at such an absurd angle. I don't agree with the way' your white beard hangs from your chin like dirty seaweed... I don't agree with your broken teeth... I...'

       The old man was delighted; his stomach laughter cackled on and on... 'But nor do I, young man,' he wheezed... 'nor do I. I don't agree with it, either. You see, I don't even agree that I'm here; and even if I did I wouldn't agree that I ought to be. The whole thing is ridiculously simple.'

       'You're being cynical!' cried the young man; 'so you are!'

       'Oh no,' said the old man with short legs, 'I don't believe in being anything. If only people would stop trying to 'be' things! What can they be, after all, beyond what they already are - or would be if I believed that they were anything?'

       'Vile! vile! VILE!' shouted the young man with hollow cheeks. His thwarted passions had found vent after thirty years of indecision. 'Surely we have long enough in the grave, you old beast, in which to be 'nothing' - in which to be cold and finished with! Must life be like that, too? No, no! let us burn!' he cried. 'Let us burn our blood away in life's high bonfire!'

       But the old philosopher replied: 'The grave, young man, is not what you imagine. You insult the dead, young man. With every reckless word, you smirch a tomb, deface a sepulchre, disturb with clumsy boots the humble death-mound. For death is life. It is only living that is lifeless. Have you not seen them coming over the hills at dusk, the angels of eternity? Have you not?'

       'No, said the young man, 'I haven't!'

       The bearded figure leaned even further forward and fixed the young man with his gaze.

       'What! you have never seen the angels of eternity, with their wings as big as blankets?'

       'No,' said the young man. 'And I don't want to.'

       'To the ignorant nothing is profound,' said the bearded ancient. 'You called me a cynic. How can I be? I am nothing. The greater contains the less. But this I will tell you: though the Castle is a barren image - though green trees, bursting with life, are in reality bursting for lack of it - when the April lamb is realized to be nothing more nor less than a lamb in April- when these things are known and accepted, then, oh, it is then' - he was stroking his beard very fast by this time - 'that you are on the borderland of Death's amazing kingdom, where everything moves twice as fast, and the colours are twice as bright, and love is twice as gorgeous, and sin is twice as spicy. Who but the doubly purblind can fail to see that it is only on the Other Side that one can begin to Agree? But here, here...' he motioned with his hands as though to dismiss the terrestrial world - 'what is there to agree with? There is no sensation here, no sensation at all.'

       'There is joy and pain,' said the young man.

       'No, mo, no. Pure illusion,' said the ancient. 'But in Death's amazing kingdom Joy is unconfined. It will be nothing to dance for a month on end in the celestial pastures... nothing at all. Or to sing as one flies astride a burning eagle... to sing out of the gladness of one's breast.'

       'And what of pain?' said the youth.

       'We have invented the idea of pain in order to indulge ourselves in self-pity,' was the reply. 'But Real Pain, as we have it on the Other Side, that will be worth having. It 'will' be an experience to burn one's finger in the Kingdom.'

       'What if 'I' set fire to your white beard, you old fraud!' shouted the young man, who had stubbed his toes during the day and knew the validity of the earthly discomforts.

       'What if you did, my child?'

       'It would sting your jaw, and you know it!' cried the youth.

       The supercilious smile which played across the lips of the theorist was unbearable, and his companion had no strength to stop himself as he stretched out his arm for the nearest candle and lit the beard that hung there like a challenge. It flared up quickly and gave to the horrified and astonished expression of the old man an unreal and theatrical quality which belied the very real pain, terrestrial though it was, which he felt, first of all, against his jaw and then along the sides of his head.

       A shrill and terrible scream from his old throat, and the corridor was at once filled with figures, as though they had been awaiting their entrance cues. Coats were thrown over his head and shoulders and the flames stifled, but not before the excited youth with the hollow cheeks had made his escape, never to be heard of again.

SPIREGRAIN, THROD AND SPLINT

The old man was carried to his room, a small dark-red box of a place, with no carpet on the floor, but a picture over the mantelpiece of a fairy sitting in a buttercup against a very blue sky. After three days he recovered consciousness only to die of shock a moment later when he remembered what had happened.

       Among those present at the death-bed in the small red room were the three friends of the old fire-blackened pedagogue.

       They stood in a line, stooping a little, for the room was very low. They were standing unnecessarily close to one another for, with the slightest movement of their heads, their old black leather mortar-boards struck against one another and were tilted indecorously.

       And yet it was a moving moment. They could feel the exodus of a great source of inspiration. Their master lay dying below them. Disciples to the end, they believed in the absence of physical emotion so implicitly, that when the master died what could they do but weep that the origin of their faith was gone for ever from them?

       Under their black leather mortar-boards their heads dislodged the innocent air, remorselessly as though their brows, noses and jaws, like the features of a figurehead, were cleaving paths for them through viewless water. Only in their hanging gowns, their flat leather mortar-boards and the tassels that hung like the grizzly spilths that swing from turkeys' beaks, had they anything in common.

       Flanking the death-bed was a low table. On it stood a small prism and a brandy bottle which held a lighted candle. This was the only illumination in the room, yet the red walls burned with a sombre effulgence. The three heads of the Professors, which were roughly at the same height from the ground, were so different as to make one wonder whether they were of the same genus. In running the eye from one face to the next, a similar sensation was experienced as when the hand is run from glass to sandpaper, from sandpaper to porridge. The sandpaper face was neither more nor less interesting than the glass one, but the eyes were forced to move slowly over a surface so roughened with undergrowth, so dangerous with its potholes and bony outcrops, its silted gullies and thorny wastes, that it was a wonder that any eye ever reached the other side.