Gormenghast (64 page)

       The first of the commandeered flotillas had been paddled across the deep water from the carvers' promontory. On their return journey across the roofs and upper floors the carvers were permitted to take with them what loose timber they could carry.

       The Countess had a broad and handsome craft. It was designed for oarsmen and had an ample space for her at the stern to sit and steer with comfort.

       The carvers had been supplied with tar and great drums of paint, and this solid boat was decorated with devices of red, black and gold. Its bows rose out of the water with a slow and massive grace and terminated in a carved head that resembled a bird of prey, its throat of sculptured feathers and its bald forehead a dusky scarlet, its eyes yellow and petalled like the heads of sunflowers, its curved beak black and sinister. This idea of a figurehead had been almost universally adopted by the carvers. As much care had been lavished in this way as upon the structure and the safety of the boats.

       One day Titus was informed that a special craft had been created for him, and that it awaited him in a southern corridor. He went at once and alone to where it lay floating. At any other time Titus would have cried with joy to receive the slim and silver creature of the waterways, so exquisitely balanced on the flood; to have been allowed to step from the water-logged and immovable table that was half afloat on the castle's seventh floor - to step into this canoe, which, unlike any he had ever seen in his picture books when a child, seemed eager to be away, at the dip of a paddle.

       As it was he loved it; but with heartburn. It seemed to remind him of all he vaguely longed for. It reminded him of the days when he hardly knew himself to be an earl; when to have no father and no affection from his mother seemed normal enough; when he had seen no violence; no death; no decay. Of days when there was no Steerpike at large like a foul shadow that darkened everything and kept the nerves on edge; and more than this; the slight canoe beneath him reminded him of the days when he knew nothing of the terrible antithesis within him - the tearing in two directions of his heart and head - the divided loyalties - the growing and feverish longing to escape from all that was meant by Gormenghast, and the ineradicable, irrational pride in his lineage, and the love, as deep as the hate, which he felt, unwittingly, for the least of the cold stones of his loveless home.

       What else was it that brought the tears to his eyes as he took the paddle that was handed down to him, and dipped its blue blade in the sullen water? It was his memory of something that had fled as surely as his boyhood had fled; something that was as swift and slight and tameless as he knew this craft would be. It was his memory of the Thing.

       He dipped his blade. A craftsman's masterpiece cock'd, as it were, her sweet and tapering head, whispered a curve of silver to the north, and slipping through a dusky gallery, leapt at the quickening of his paddle-stroke. Ahead of him, at the hinge of perspective, far away, a point of light, the water half way up its distant frames, sped towards him, as, skimming the flood of a black corridor, he drew, with every stroke, the nearer to the cold and rain-churned sea.

       And all the time his heart was crying, and the exhilaration and the beauty of it all were the agents of his pain. Swiftly as he sped he could not outstrip his body or his mind. The paddles dipped and the craft flew but could not leave his haunted heart behind. It flew with him on the sepulchral water.

       And then, as he neared the all-but flood-filled window he realized for the first time how dangerously close was its upper lintel to the surface. The light from without had strengthened considerably during the last hour and the reflection of the square of light had been so strong as to have given Titus the impression that the entire area of light, the reflections included, was an opening through which he could pass. But now he saw that he had only the top half of the bright square through which to skim. Flying towards it he fell back suddenly, and lying with his head below the level of the sides and with his eyes shut he heard the faintest of gritty whispers as, shooting the window, the delicate prow of the vessel grated the lintel.

       Suddenly the sky was wide above him. An inland sea was ahead of him. A steady rain was pouring down, but compared with the long deluge they had grown to accept as normal, it seemed that he was afloat in good weather. He allowed the canoe to slacken speed of its own and when it had come to a bobbing standstill he turned her about with a stroke and there ahead of him the upper massives of his kingdom broke the surface. Great islands of sheer rock weather-pock'd with countless windows, like caves or the eyries of sea-eagles. Archipelagos of towers, gaunt-fisted things, with knuckled summits - and other towers so broken at their heads as to resemble pulpits, high and sinister; black rostrums for the tutelage of evil.

       And then a qualm, empty cold and ringing, as though he was himself a hollow bell stirred in his bowels like a dapper. An exquisite sense of loneliness grew beneath his ribs, like a bubble of expanding glass.

       The rain had ceased to fall. The agitated water had become silent, motionless. It had taken on a dark translucence. Afloat upon a yawning element he gazed down to where, far below him, trees grew, to where familiar roads wound in and out, to where the fish swam over walnut trees and strangest of all to the winding bed of Gormenghast river, so full of water that it had none of its own.

       What had all this that filled his eyes with amazement and pleasure, what had it all to do with the despoiling flood, the wreck of treasures, the death of many, the haunt of Steerpike who, driven slowly upwards, was hiding even now? Was this where Fuchsia lived? And the Doctor and the Countess, his own mother, who, it seemed, after trying to approach him had drawn away again?

       In a state of overwrought melancholy he began to slide forward over the still waters, dipping his paddle every now and again. A dull light from the sky played over the water that streamed in sheets from gutterless roofs.

       As he neared the isles of Gormenghast, he saw away to the north, the carvers' navy like scattered jewels on the slate-grey flood. Immediately ahead of him, as he proceeded, was the wall through one of the windows of which he had so dangerously skimmed. What was left of the window and of those on either side was now submerged and Titus knew that yet another floor of the central castle had by now been abandoned.

       This wall, which formed the blunt nose of a long stone headland, had a counterpart a mile to the east. Between these two a vast and sombre bay lay stretched, with not a break in its surface. As with its twin, this second headland had no windows open at flood level. The water had a good twelve feet to climb before the next tier of casements could be entered or affected. But turning his eyes to the base, or curve of the great bay - to where (had it been in reality a bay) the sands might well have stretched, Titus could see that the far windows in that line of cliffs, no larger in his sight than grains of rice, were, unlike those of the headlands, far from regular.

       Those walls, covered with ivy, were in many ways peculiar. Stone stairs climbed up and down their outer sides and led to openings. The windows, as he had already observed, appeared to be sprinkled over the green façades of the cliff with an indiscriminate and wayward profluence that gave no clue as to how the inner structures held together.

       It was towards this base of the 'bay' that Titus now began to paddle, the limpid flood as chill as death beneath him, with all its rain-drowned marvels.

SEVENTY-TWO

It seemed to Titus a deserted place, a fastness of no life - rank with ivy, dumb with its toothless mouths, blind with its lidless eyes.

       He drew in to the base of the abandoned walls where a flight of steps rose slanting out of the depths of the water, and, climbing alongside the wet green wall of ivy, rose to a balcony forty feet above his head - a stone affair surrounded by an iron railing decoratively wrought but so corroded with rust, that it only waited the tap of a stick to send it crumbling to the water.

       As Titus stepped from his craft on to the stone steps at water level, and kneeling, lifted it dripping from the water and laid it carefully along the length of a stone tread, for he had no painter, he became conscious of a distinct malevolence. It was as though the great walls were watching his every move.

       He pushed his brown hair back from his forehead and lifted his head so that he faced the towering masonry. His eyebrows were drawn together, his eyes were narrowed, his trembling chin was thrust aggressively forward. There was no sound but the dripping of the rain from the acres of ivy.

       Unpleasant as was this sense of being under observation, he fought back the panic that might so easily have developed and, more to prove to himself that he was not afraid of mere stone and ivy rather than because he really wished to mount the stairway and discover what lay within the melancholy walls, he began to climb the slippery steps that led to the balcony. And as he began his ascent, the face that had been watching him disappeared from a small window close to the summit of the lowering wall. But only for a moment, for it reappeared so suddenly again at another opening that it was difficult to believe that it could be the same face that now stared down to where the steps slid under the water and where Titus' canoe lay 'beached'. But there could be no doubt of it. No two faces could either be so identical of blemish, nor so cruelly similar. The dark red eyes were fixed upon the little craft. They had watched its approach across the 'bay'. They noted how light, rapid and manoeuvrable it was, how it had answered to the merest whim of its rider.

       He turned his eyes from the craft to Titus, who by now, having climbed a dozen steps was within a couple more of being immediately below the heavy block of stone which Steerpike had loosened, and which he had half a mind to send hurtling down upon the youth below.

       But he knew that the death of the Earl, much as it would have gratified him, would not in fact materially advance his chance of escape. Had it been certain that the stone would strike his lordship dead, he would have had no hesitation in satisfying what had now become a lust for killing. But were the stone to miss its prey and splinter on the steps far below, then not only would Titus have every right to imagine that he had been ambushed - and who would ambush the Earl save he himself? - but also a more immediate dislocation of his plans would result. For there was little doubt that Titus on recovering from his shock would not dare to continue with his upward climb, but would return immediately to his craft. And it was this boat that Steerpike was after. To be able to move at speed through the tortuous waterways of the castle would double his mobility.

       Driven from haunt to haunt, from hiding place to hiding place by the rising water, his operations conditioned always by the necessity of his being within striking range of the stores and larders, it had in the narrowing zone of manoeuvre become imperative for him to be able to travel with equal speed and silence over both land and water. For days he had starved when the mobile kitchens were so positioned in a curve of the spacious west wing that it was impossible for him, guarded as they were, to plunder.

But they had moved, since then, at least three times, and now, with the possibility of the rain having stopped for good, it was his savage hope that they had found a fixity in that high sub-attic room above which in a barricaded and all but lightless loft he had established his headquarters. In the ceiling of this murky refuge a trap door opened upon a sloping roof of slates, where swathes of creeper bandaged it from sight. But it was the hatch in the floor below him which, when lifted with a tender and secret care more usually associated with the handling of sucklings, that gave him access to the most pressing of his needs: for below him lay the stores. In the small hours, when it became necessary he would lower himself inch by noiseless inch on a long rope. The sack he brought down with him he would fill with the least perishable provisions. A dozen or more of the staff would be asleep on the floor, but the sentries were naturally posted on the outer side of the three doors and were no bother to him.

       But this was not his only hide-out. He knew that sooner or later the floods would fall. The kitchens would again become nomadic. It was impossible to tell in which direction the life of the castle would sway as on its slowly downward journey it trod upon the wet heels of the subsiding water.

       The spreading roofs themselves furnished him with seven secret strongholds. The attics and the three dry floors below provided for at least four as safe, in their varying ways, as his garret above the kitchen. And now that the flood had stayed at the same level for three days, a few feet above the majority of the landings of the ninth floor, it had become possible for him to prepare in advance a number of aqueous asylums.

       But how much simpler and safer it would be for him were he able to reconnoitre the high canals in such a craft as he now saw below him.

       No. He could not afford to send the rough stone hurtling down. There was more than a chance of his failure to slay. The acute temptation to crush at a single blow that life out of the heir to Gormenghast - and leave nothing more than brick and stone behind - the intoxicating temptation to take the risk and to do this, was hard to resist.

       But before all else came his own survival, and if by so much as an iota he deviated in any way from what he considered to be his final advantage then the end would surely come if not now, then very soon. For he knew he was walking on a razor's edge. He gloried in it. He had slid into the skin of a solitary Satan as though he had never enjoyed the flourish of language, the delights of civil power. It was war, now. Naked and bloody. The simplicity of the situation appealed to him. The world closed in upon him, its weapons drawn, eager for his death. And it was for him to outwit the world. It was the simplest and most fundamental of all games.