Gormenghast (23 page)

       'My dear Doctor,' said Bellgrove, his hands clasping his gown near the shoulders, its torn portion trailing the floor at his feet like a fallen sail - 'It is indeed I. My pupil, the young earl, having misbehaved himself, I felt it my bounden duty, in loco parentis, to bring what wisdom I have at my command to bear upon his predicament. To help him, if I can, for, who knows, even the old may have experience; to succour him, for, who knows, even the old may have mercy in their bones; and to lead him back into the current of wise living - for, who knows, even the old may...'

       'I don't like "current of wise living", Bellgrove - a beastly phrase for a headmaster, if I may make so damnably bold,' said Prunesquallor. 'But I see what you mean. By all that smacks of insight, I most probably do. But what a place for incarcerating a child! Let's have a look at you, Titus. How are you, my little bantam?'

       'All right, thank you, sir,' said Titus. 'I'll be free tomorrow.'

       'Oh God, it breaks my heart,' cried Prunesquallor. '"I'll be free tomorrow" indeed! Come here, boy.'

       There was a catch in the Doctor's voice. Free tomorrow, he thought. Free tomorrow. Would the child ever be free tomorrow?

       'So your headmaster has come to see you and is going to play marbles with you,' he said. 'Do you know that you are greatly honoured? Have you thanked him for coming to see you?'

       'Not yet, sir,' said Titus.

       'Well, you must, you know, before he leaves you.'

       'He's a good boy,' said Bellgrove. 'A very good boy.' After a pause he added, as though to get back to firm, authoritarian ground again, 'and a very wicked one at that.'

       'But I'm delaying the game - by all that's thoughtless, I am indeed!' cried the Doctor, giving Titus a pat on the back of the head.

       'Why don't you play, too, Doctor Prune?' inquired Titus. 'Then we could have "threecorners".'

       'And how do you play "threecorners"?' said Prunesquallor, hitching up his elegant trousers and squatting on the floor, his pink, ingenious face directed at the tousel-haired child. 'Do 'you' know, my friend?' he enquired, turning to Bellgrove.

       'Indeed, indeed,' said Bellgrove, his face lighting up. 'It is a noble game.' He lowered himself to the ground again.

       'By the way,' said the Doctor, turning his head quickly to the Professor, 'you're coming to our party, aren't you? You will be our chief guest, as you know, sir.'

       Bellgrove, with a great grinding and creaking of joints and fibres, got all the way to his feet again, stood for a moment magnificently and precariously upright and bowed to the squatting doctor, a lock of white hair falling across his blank blue eyes as he did so.

       'Sir,' he said, 'I 'am', sir - and my staff with me. We are deeply honoured.' Then he sank to his knees again with extraordinary rapidity.

       For the next hour, the old prison warder, peering through a keyhole the size of a table-spoon, in the inner door, was astounded to see the three figures crawling to and fro across the floor of the prison fort, to hear the high trill of the Doctor develop and strengthen into the cry of a hyena, the deep and wavering voice of the Professor bell forth like an old and happy hound, as his inhibitions waned, and the shrill cries of the child reverberate abut the room, splintering like glass on the stone walls while the marbles crashed against one another, spun in their tracks, lodged shuddering in their squares, or skimmed the prison floor like shooting stars.

TWENTY-TWO

There was no sound in all Gormenghast that could strike so chill against the heart as the sound of that small and greasy crutch on which Barquentine propelled his dwarfish body.

       The harsh and rapid impact of its iron-like stub upon the hollow stones was, at each stroke, like a whip-crack, an oath, a slash across the face of mercy.

       Not a hierophant but had heard at one time or another the sound of that sinister shaft mounting in loudness as the Master of Ritual thrust himself forwards, his withered leg and his crutch between them negotiating the tortuous corridors of stone, at a pace that it was difficult to believe.

       There were few who had not, on hearing the crack of that stub of a crutch on distant flag-stones, altered their directions to avoid the small smouldering symbol of the law, as, in its crimson rags, it stamped its brimstone path along the centre of every corridor, altering its course for no man.

       Something of the wasp, and something of the scraggy bird of prey, there was, about this Barquentine. There was something of the gale-twisted thorn tree also, and something of the gnome in his blistered face. The eyes, horribly liquid, shot their malice through veils of water. They seemed to be brimming, those eyes of his, as though old, cracked, sandy saucers were filled so full of topaz-coloured tea as to be swollen at their centres.

       Endless, interwoven and numberless as were the halls and corridors of the castle, yet even in the remotest of these, in the obscure fastnesses, where, infinitely removed from the main arteries, the dank and mouldering silence was broken only by the occasional fall of rotten wood or the hoot of an owl - even in such tracts as these a wanderer would be haunted and apprehensive for fear of those ubiquitous tappings - faint it may be, as faint as the clicking of fingernails, but a sound for all its faintness that brought with it a sense of horror. There seemed no refuge from the sound. For the crutch, ancient, filthy and hard as iron, was the man himself. There was no good blood, no good red blood in Barquentine any more than there was in his support, that ghastly fulcrum. It grew from him like a diseased and nerveless limb - an extra limb. When it struck the stones or the hollow floor-boards below him it was more eloquent of spleen than any word, than any language.

       The fanaticism of his loyalty to the House of Groan had far outstripped his interest or concern for the living - the members of the Line itself. The Countess, Fuchsia and Titus were mere links to him in the blood-red, the imperial chain - nothing more. It was the chain that mattered, not the links. It was not the living metal, but the immeasurable iron with its patina of sacred dust. It was the Idea that obsessed him and not the embodiment. He moved in a hot sea of vindication, a lust of loyalty.

       He had risen as usual this morning, at dawn. Through the window of his filthy room he had peered across the dark flats to Gormenghast Mountain, not because it shone in a haze of amber and seemed translucent but in order to get some indication of the kind of day to expect. The ritual of the hours ahead was to some extent modified by the weather. Not that a ceremony could be cancelled because of adverse weather, but by reason of the sacred Alternatives, equally valid, which had been prescribed by leaders of the faith in centuries gone by. If, for example, there was a thunderstorm in the afternoon and the moat was churned and spattered with the rain, then the ceremony needed qualifying in which Titus, wearing a necklace of plaited grass was to stand upon the weedy verge and, with the reflection of a particular tower below him in the water, so sling a golden coil that, skimming the surface and bounding into the air as it struck the water, it sailed over the reflection of a particular tower in one leap to sink in the watery image of a yawning window, where, reflected, his mother stood. There could be no movement and no sound from Titus or the spectators until the last of the sparkling ripples had crept from the moat, and the sub-aqueous head of the Countess no longer trembled against the hollow darkness of the cave-like window, but was motionless in the moat, with birds of water on her shoulders like chips of coloured glass and all about her the infinite, tower-filled depths.

       All this would necessitate a windless day and a glass surface to the moat, and in the Tomes of Ceremony there would, were the day stormy, be an alternative rendering, an equally honourable way of enriching the afternoon to the glory of the House and the fulfilment of the participants.

       And so, it was Barquentine's habit to push open his window at dawn and stare out across the roofs and the marshes beyond, to where the Mountain, blurred, or edged like a knife gave indication of the day ahead.

       Leaning forward, thus, on his crutch, in the cold light of yet another day, Barquentine scratched savagely at his ribs, at his belly, under his arms, here, there, everywhere with his claw of a hand.

       There was no need for him to dress. He slept in his clothes on a lice-infested mattress. There was no bed; just the crawling mattress on the carpetless floor-boards where cockroaches and beetles burrowed and insects of all kinds lived, bred and died, and where the midnight rat sat upright in the silver dust and bared its long teeth to the pale beams, when in its fullness the moon filled up the midnight window like an abstract of itself in a picture frame.

       It was in such a hovel as this that the Master of Ritual had woken every morning for the last sixty years. Swivelling about on his crutch, he stumped his way from the window and was almost immediately at the rough wall by the doorway. Turning his back to this irregular wall he leaned against it and worked his ancient shoulder-blades to and fro, disturbing in the process a colony of ants which (having just received news from its scouts that the rival colony near the ceiling was on the march and was even now constructing bridges across the plaster crack) was busily preparing its defences.

       Barquentine had no notion that in easing the itch between his blades he was incapacitating an army. He worked his back against the rough wall, to and fro, to and fro in a way quite horrible in so old and stunted a man. High above him the door rose, like the door of a barn.

       Then, at last, he leaned forward on his crutch and hopped across the room to where a rusted iron ring protruded from the floor. It was like the mouth of a funnel, and indeed a metal pipe led down from this terminal opening to where, several stories below, it ended in a similar metal ring, or mouthpiece, which protruded several inches from the ceiling of an eating-room. Immediately 'beneath' this termination and a score of feet below it, a hollow, disused cauldron awaited the heavy stone which morning after morning rumbled its way down the winding pipe to end its journey with a wild clang in the belly of the reverberating bowl, murmuring to itself in an undertone for minutes on end with the boulder in its maw.

       Every evening it was taken up and placed outside Barquentine's door, this boulder, and every morning the old man lifted it up above the iron ring in the floor-boards of his room, spat on it, and sent it hurtling down the crooked funnel, its' hoarse clanging growing fainter and fainter as it approached the eating-room. It was a warning to the servants that he was on his way down, that his breakfast and a number of other preliminaries were to be ready.

       To the clank of the boulder a score of hearts made echo. On this particular morning as Barquentine spat upon the heavy stone, the size of a melon, and sent it netherward on its resounding journey past many a darkened floor of bedded inmates (who, waking as it leapt behind their couches in the hollow of the walls, cursed him, the dawn and this cock-crow of a boulder) - on this particular morning there was more than the normal light of lust for ritual in the wreckage of the ancient's face - there was something more, as though his greed for the observances to take place in the shadow of his aegis was filling him with a passion hardly bearable in so sere a frame.

       There was one picture on the wall of his verminous hovel; an engraving, yellow with age and smirched with dust, for it had no glass across it, save the small ice-like splinter at one corner that was all that remained of the original glazing. This engraving, a large and meticulous affair, was of the Tower of Flints. The artist must have stood to the south of the tower as he worked or as he studied the edifice, for beyond the irregularity of turrets and buttresses that backed it and spread almost to the sky like a seascape of stormy roofage, could be seen the lower slopes of Gormenghast Mountain, mottled with dumps of shrub and conifer.

       What Barquentine had not noticed was that the doorway of the Tower of Flints had been cut away. A small area of paper, the size of a stamp was missing. Behind this hole the wall had been laboriously pierced so that a little tunnel of empty darkness ran laterally from Barquentine's chamber to the hollow and capacious shaft of a vertical chimney, whose extremity was blocked from the light by a landslide of fallen slates long sealed and cushioned with gold moss, and whose round base, like the base of a well of black air, gave upon the small cell-like room so favoured by Steerpike that even at this early and chilly hour he was sitting there, at the base of the shaft. All about him were mirrors of his own construction, placed to a nicety, each at its peculiar angle, while above him, punctuating the tubular darkness, a constellation of mirrors twinkled with points of light one above the other.

       Every now and again Barquentine would be reflected immediately behind the hollow mouthway of the engraved Tower of Flints where an angled mirror in the shaft sent down his image to another and then another - mirror glancing to mirror - until Steerpike, reclining at the base of the chimney, with a magnifying glass in his hands peered amusedly at the terminal reflection and saw in miniature the crimson rags of the dwarfish pedant as he raised the boulder in his hands and flung it through the ring.

       If Barquentine rose early from his hideous couch, Steerpike in a secret room of his own choosing, a room as spotless and bright as a new pin, arose earlier. This was not a habit with him. He had no habits in that sort of way. He did what he wanted to do. He did what furthered his plans. If getting up at five in the morning would lead to something he coveted, then it was the most natural thing in the world for him to rise at that hour. If there was no necessity for action he would lie in bed all morning reading, practising knots with the cord he kept by his bedside, making paper darts of complicated design which he would float across his bedroom, or polishing the steel of the razoredged blade of his swordstick.