head at them.
‘Power,’ they replied blankly and both together, as though they had rehearsed the scene. The utter tonelessness of their voices contrasted so incongruously with the gist of the subject that even Doctor Prunesquallor was for a moment taken aback and loosened his stiff white collar around his throat with his forefinger.
‘It’s power we want,’ Lady Clarice repeated. ‘We’d like to have that.’
‘Yes, it’s that we want,’ echoed Cora, ‘lots of power. Then we could make people do things’, said the voice.
‘But Gertrude has all the power,’ came the echo, ‘which we ought to have but which we haven’t got.’
Then they stared at Swelter, Sourdust and Flay in turn.
‘
Twelve days had elapsed since she had discovered that she was no longer the only child. She had steadily refused to see her brother and today for the first time she would be obliged to be with him. Her first anguish, inexplicable to herself, had dulled to a grudging acceptance. For what reason she did not know, but her grief had been very real. She did not know what it was that she resented.
Mrs Slagg had had no time to help Fuchsia to look presentable, only telling her to comb her hair and to put her white dress on at the
The sunlight on the lawns and the flowers in the vases and the room itself had seemed pleasant auguries for the afternoon before the entrance of the two servants, and the unfortunate incident that occurred. This violence had set a bitter keynote to the ensuing hours.
Fuchsia came in with her eyes red from crying. She curtseyed awkwardly to her mother’s cousins and then sat down in a far corner, but she was almost at once forced to regain her feet, for her father, followed closely by the Countess, entered and walked slowly to the centre of the room.
Without a word of warning Sourdust rapped his knuckles on the table and cried out with his old voice: ‘All are gathered save only him, for whom this gathering is gathered. All are here save only he for whom we all are here. Form now before the table of his baptism in the array of waiting, while I pronounce the entrance of Life’s enterer and of the Groan inheritor, of Gormenghast’s untarnished child-shaped mirror.’
Sourdust coughed in a very ill way and put his hand to his chest. He glanced down at the book and ran his finger along a new line. Then he tottered around the table, his knotted grey-and-white beard swinging a little from side to side, and ushered the five into a semi-circle around the table, with their backs to the window. In the centre were the Countess and Lord Sepulchrave. Fuchsia was to her father’s left and Doctor Prunesquallor on the right of Lady Groan, but a little behind the semi-circle. The twin sisters were separated, one standing at either extremity of the arc. Flay and Swelter had retreated a few paces backwards and stood quite still. Flay bit at his knuckles.
Sourdust returned to his position behind the table which he held alone, and was relatively more impressive now that the crag of Flay and the mound of Swelter no longer dwarfed him. He lifted his voice again, but it was hard for him to speak, for there were tears in his throat and the magnitude of his office weighed heavily on him. As a savant in the Groan lore he knew himself to be spiritually responsible for the correct procedure. Moments such as this were the highlights in the ritualistic cycle of his life.
‘Suns and the changing of the seasonal moons; the leaves from trees that cannot keep their leaves, and the fish from olive waters have their voices!’
His hands were held before him as though in prayer, and his wrinkled head was startlingly apparent in the clear light of the room. His voice grew stronger.
‘Stones have their voices and the quills of birds; the anger of the thorns, the wounded spirits, the antlers, ribs that curve, bread, tears and needles. Blunt boulders and the silence of cold marshes – these have their voices – the insurgent clouds, the cockerel and the worm.’
Sourdust bent down over his book and found the place with his finger and then turned the page.
‘Voices that grind at night from lungs of granite. Lungs of blue air and the white lungs of rivers. All voices haunt all moments of all days; all voices fill the crannies of all regions. Voices that he shall hear when he has listened, and when his ear is tuned to Gormenghast; whose voice is endlessness of endlessness. This is the ancient sound that he must follow. The voice of stones heaped up into grey towers, until he dies across the Groan’s death-turret. And banners are ripped down from wall and buttress and he is carried to the Tower of Towers and laid among the moulderings of his fathers.’
‘How much more is there?’ said the Countess. She had been listening less attentively than the occasion merited and was feeding with crumbs from a pocket in her dress a grey bird on her shoulder.
Sourdust looked up from his book at Lady Groan’s question. His eyes grew misty for he was pained by the irritation in her voice.
‘The ancient word of the twelfth lord is complete, your ladyship,’ he said, his eyes on the book.
‘Good,’ said Lady Groan. ‘What now?’
‘We turn about, I think, and look out on the garden,’ said Clarice vaguely, ‘don’t we, Cora? You remember just before baby Fuchsia was carried in, we all turned round and looked at the garden through the window. I’m sure we did – long ago.’
‘Where have you been since then?’ said Lady Groan, suddenly addressing her sisters-in-law and staring at them one after the other. Her dark-red hair was beginning to come loose over her neck, and the bird had scarred with its feet the soft inky-black pile of her velvet dress so that it looked ragged and grey at her shoulder.
‘We’ve been in the south wing all the time, Gertrude,’ replied Cora.
‘That’s where we’ve been,’ said Clarice. ‘In the south wing all the time.’
Lady Groan emptied a look of love across her left shoulder, and the grey bird that stood there with its head beneath its wing moved three quick steps nearer to her throat. Then she turned her eyes upon her sisters-in-law: ‘Doing what?’ she said.
