The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

‘Tell me, you dirty old man,’ said Titus softly, for a kind of hot anger filled him and a desire to squash the creature beneath his feet, ‘why do you eat money?’ And Titus picked up a rock from beside the road.

‘Whelp!’ said the beggar at last. ‘Do you think I’d waste my wealth? Coins are too big, you dog, to sidle through me. Too small to kill me. Too heavy to be lost! I am a beggar.’

‘You are a travesty,’ said Titus, ‘and when you die the earth will breathe again.’

Titus dropped the heavy stone he had lifted in anger, and with not a backward glance made for the right-hand fork where, with a prodigious sigh, an avenue of cedars inhaled him, as though he were a gnat.

SEVENTEEN

Tree after tree slid by to the pace of his footsteps. In the gloom of the cedars his heart was happy. Happy in the chill of the tunnel. Happy in the danger of it all. Happy to remember his own childhood and how he had acquitted himself in a tract of ivy. Happy in spite of the helmeted spies, though they awoke within him a dark alarm.

He had lived on his wits for what seemed so long a while that he was very different now from the youth who had ridden away.

It had seemed that the avenue was endless, but suddenly and unexpectedly the last of the cedars floated away behind him as though from a laying-on of hands, and the wide sky looked down, and there before him was the first of the structures.

He had heard of them but had not expected anything quite so far removed from the buildings he had known, let alone the architecture of Gormenghast.

The first to catch his eye was a pale-green edifice, very elegant, but so simple in design that Titus’ gaze could find no resting place upon its slippery surface.

Next to this building was a copper dome the shape of an igloo but ninety feet in height, with a tapering mast, spider-frail and glinting in the sunlight. An ugly crow was sitting on the cross-tree and fouling from time to time the bright dome beneath.

Titus sat down by the side of the road and frowned. He had been born and bred to the assumption that buildings were ancient by nature, and were and always had been in the process of crumbling away. The white dust lolling between the gaping bricks; the worm in the wood. The weed dislodging the stone; corrosion and mildew; the crumbling patina; the fading shades; the beauty of decay.

Unable to remain seated, for his curiosity was stronger than his longing to rest, he got to his feet and, wondering why there was no one about, began to make his way to whatever lay beyond the dome, for the buildings curved away as though to obscure some great circle or arena. And indeed it was something of this kind that broke upon his view as he rounded the dome, and he came to a halt through sheer amazement; for it was vast. Vast as a grey desert, its marble surface glowing with a dull opaque light. The only thing that could be said to break the emptiness was the reflection of the structures that surrounded it.

The farthest away of these buildings, in other words those that fanned out in a glittering arc on the opposite side of the arena, were, to Titus’ gaze, no larger than stamps, thorns, nails, acorns, or tiny crystals, save for one gigantic edifice out-topping all the rest, which was like an azure match-box on its end.

EIGHTEEN

Had Titus come across a world of dragons he could hardly have been more amazed than by these fantasies of glass and metal; and he turned himself about more than once as though it were possible to catch a last glimpse of the tortuous, poverty-stricken town he had left behind him, but the district of Muzzlehatch was hidden away by a fold in the hills and the ruins of Gormenghast were afloat in a haze of time and space.

And yet, though his eyes shone with the thrill of his discovery, he suffered at the same time a pang of resentment – a resentment that this alien realm should be able to exist in a world that appeared to have no reference to his home and which seemed, in fact, supremely self-sufficient. A region that had never heard of Fuchsia and her death, nor of her father, the melancholy earl, nor of his mother the countess with her strange liquid whistle that brought wild birds to her from distant spinneys.

Were they coeval; were they simultaneous? These worlds; these realms – could they both be true? Were there no bridges? Was there no common land? Did the same sun shine upon them? Had they the constellations of the night in common?

When the storm came down upon these crystal structures, and the sky was black with rain, what of Gormenghast? Was Gormenghast dry? And when the thunder growled in his ancient home was there never any echo hereabouts?

What of the rivers? Were they separate? Was there no tributary, even, to feel its way into another world?

Where lay the long horizons? Where throbbed the frontiers? O terrible division! The near and the far. The night and the day. The yes and the no.

A VOICE. ‘O Titus, can’t you remember?’

TITUS. ‘I can remember everything except …’

VOICE. ‘Except …?’

TITUS. ‘Except the way.’

VOICE. The way where?’

TITUS. ‘The way home.’

VOICE. ‘Home?’

TITUS. ‘Home. Home where the dust gathers and the legends are. But I have lost my bearings.’

VOICE. ‘You have the sun and the North Star.’

TITUS. ‘But is it the same sun? And are the stars the stars of Gormenghast?’

He looked up and was surprised to find himself alone. His hands were cold with sweat, and the dread of being lost and having no proof of his own identity filled him with a sudden stabbing terror.

He looked about him at this sheer and foreign land, and then, all in a breath, something fled across the sky. It made no sound other than the slither of a finger across a slate, though it seemed to have passed as close as a scythe.