The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

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 Suddenly and all in a breath, a beak was plunged and withdrawn from the dark water, and at its lethal point there struggled a fish.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?’