The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

Be that as it irrelevantly may, Steerpike found himself staring down in to an upturned patch of wrinkles. In this corrugated terrain two eyes burned. In contrast to the dry sand-coloured skin they appeared grotesquely liquid, and to watch them was ordeal by water; all innocence was drowned. They lapped at the dry rims of the infected well- heads. There were no lashes.

He had made so rapid and nimble a detour of the stone table that he surprised Steerpike, appearing with such inexpectation beneath the boy’s nose. The alternate thud, and crack of sole and crutch came suddenly to silence. Into this silence a small belated sound, all upon its own, was enormous and disconnected. It was Barquentine’s foot, shifting its position as the crutch remained in place. He had improved his balance. The concentration in the ancient’s face was too naked to be studied for more than a moment at a time. Steerpike, after a rapid survey, could only think that either the flesh and the passion of the head below him was fused into a substance of the old man’s compounding; or that all the other heads he had ever seen were masks – masks of matter per se, with no admixture of the incorporeal. This old tyrant’s head was his feeling. It was modelled from it, and of it.

Steerpike was too near it – the nakedness of it. Naked and dry with those wet well-heads under the time-raked brow.

But he could not move away – not without calling down, or rather calling up the wrath of this wizened god. He shut his eyes and worked his tongue into a tooth-crater. Then there was a sound, for Barquentine, having exhausted, apparently, what diversion there was to be found in the youth’s face as seen from below, had spat twice and very rapidly, each expectoration finding a temporary lodging on the bulges of Steerpike’s lowered lids.

‘Open them!’ cried the cracked voice. ‘Open them up, bastard whelp of a whore-rat!’

Steerpike with wonder beheld the septuagenarian balancing upon his only leg with the crutch raised above his head. It was not directed at himself, however, but with its grasper swivelled in the direction of the table, seemed about to descend. It did, and a thick dusty mist arose from the books on which it landed. A moth flapped through the dust.

When it had settled, the youth, his head turned over his shoulder, his small dark-red eyes half closed, heard Barquentine say:

‘So you can call the dogs off! Body of me, if it isn’t time! Time and enough. Nine days wasted! Wasted! – by the stones wasted! Do you hear me, stoat’s lug? Do you hear me?’

Steerpike began to bow, with his eyebrows raised by way of indicating that his ear drums had proved themselves equal to the call made upon them. If the art of gesture had been more acutely developed in him he might have implied by some hyper-subtle inclination of his body that what aural inconvenience he experienced lay not so much in his having to strain his ears, as in having them strained for him.

As it was, it proved unnecessary for him to ever complete the bow he had begun, for Barquentine was delivering yet another blow to the books and papers on the table, and a fresh cloud of dust had arisen. His eyes had left the youth – and Steerpike was stranded – in one sense only – in that the flood-water of the eyes no longer engulfed him, the stone table as though it were a moon, drawing away the dangerous tide.

He wiped the spittle from his eyelids with one of Dr Prunesquallor’s handkerchiefs.

‘What are those books, boy?’ shouted Barquentine, returning the handle of his crutch to his armpit, ‘By my head of skin, boy, what are they?’

‘They are the Law,’ said Steerpike.

With four stumps of the crutch the old man was below him again and sluicing him with his hot wet eyes.

‘By the blind powers, it’s the truth,’ he said. He cleared his throat. ‘Don’t stand there staring. What is Law? Answer me, curse you!’

Steerpike replied without a moment’s consideration but with the worm of his guile like a bait on the hook of his brain: ‘Destiny, sir, Destiny.’

Vacant, trite and nebulous as was the reply, it was of the right kind. Steerpike knew this. The old man was aware of only one virtue – Obedience to Tradition. The destiny of the Groans. The law of Gormenghast.

No individual Groan of flesh and blood could awake in him this loyalty he felt for ‘Groan’ the abstraction – the symbol. That the course of this great dark family river should flow on and on, obeying the contours of hallowed ground, was his sole regard.

The seventy-sixth Earl should he ever be found, dead or alive, had forfeited his right to burial among the Tombs. Barquentine had spent the day among volumes of ritual and precedent. So exhaustive was the compilation of relevant and tabulated procedure to be adopted in unorthodox and unforeseen circumstances that a parallel to Lord Sepulchrave’s disappearance was at last rooted out by the old man – the fourteenth Earl of Groan having disappeared leaving an infant heir. Nine days only had been allowed for the search, after which the child was to be proclaimed the rightful Earl, standing the while upon a raft of chestnut boughs afloat on the lake, a stone in the right hand, an ivy-branch in the left, and a necklace of snail-shells about the neck; while shrouded in foliage the next of kin and all who were invited to the ‘Earling’ stood, sat, crouched or lay among the branches of the marginal trees.

All this had now, once again, hundreds of years later, to be put in hand, for the nine days were over and it was in Barquentine that all power in matters of procedure was vested. It was for him to give the orders. In his little old body was Gormenghast in microcosm.

‘Ferret,’ he said, still staring up at Steerpike, ‘your answer’s good. Body of me, Destiny it is. What is your bastard name, child?’

‘Steerpike, sir.’

‘Age?’

‘Seventeen.’

‘Buds and fledglings? So they still spawn ’em so! Seventeen.’ He put a withered tongue between his dry, wrinkled lips. It might have been the tongue of a boot. ‘Seventeen,’ he repeated in a voice of such ruminative incredulity as startled the youth, for he had never before heard any such intonation emerge from that old throat.