The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

‘I followed you and then I let you continue here with me, but your house, Keda, where your husband carved, has been taken from you. You can do nothing. When you left us the Ancients met, the Old Carvers, and they have given your house to one who is of their company, for they say that now that your husband is dead you are not worthy to live in the Square of the Black Rider.’

‘And my husband’s carvings,’ said Keda, ‘what has become of them?’

While she waited for him to answer she heard his breathing quicken and could dimly see him dragging his forearm over his brow.

‘I will tell you,’ he said. ‘O fire! why was I so slow – so slow! While I was watching for you, watching from the rocks, as I have done every night since you left, Braigon broke into your house and found the Ancients dividing up your own carvings among themselves. “She will not come back,” they said of you. “She is worthless. The carvings will be left untended”, they said, “and the grain-worm will attack them.” But Braigon drew his knife and sent them into a room below the stairs and made twelve journeys and carried the carvings to his own house, where he has hidden them, he says, until you come.

‘Keda, Keda, what can I do for you? Oh Keda, what can I do?’

‘Hold me close to you,’ she said. ‘Where is that music?’

In the silence they could hear the voice of an instrument.

‘Keda …’

His arms were about her body and his face was deep in her hair.

She could hear the beating of his heart, for her head was lying close to him. The music had suddenly ended and silence, as unbroken as the darkness about them, returned.

Rantel spoke at last. ‘I will not live until I take you, Keda. Then I will live, I am a Sculptor. I will create a glory out of wood, I will hack for you a symbol of my love. It will curve in flight. It will leap. It shall be of crimson and have hands as tender as flowers and feet that merge into the roughness of earth, for it shall be its body that leaps. And it shall have eyes that see all things and be violet like the edge of the spring lightning, and upon the breast I shall carve your name – Keda, Keda, Keda – three times, for I am ill with love.’

She put up her hand and her cool fingers felt the bones of his brow and his high cheekbones, and came to his mouth where they touched his lips.

After a little while Rantel said softly: ‘You have been crying?’

‘With joy,’ she said.

‘Keda …’

‘Yes …’

‘Can you bear cruel news?’

‘Nothing can pain me any more,’ said Keda. ‘I am no longer the one you knew. I am alive.’

‘The law that forced you in your marriage, Keda, may bind you again. There is another. I have been told he has been waiting for you, Keda, waiting for you to return. But I could slay him, Keda, if you wish.’ His body toughened in her arms and his voice grew harsher. ‘Shall I slay him?’

‘You shall not speak of death,’ said Keda. ‘He shall not have me. Take me with you to your house.’ Keda heard her own voice sounding like that of another woman, it was so different and clear. ‘Take me with you – he will not take me after we have loved. They have my house, where else should I sleep tonight but with you? For I am happy for the first time. All things are clear to me. The right and the wrong, the true and the untrue. I have lost my fear. Are you afraid?’

‘I am not afraid!’ cried Rantel into the darkness, ‘if we love one another.’

‘I love all, all,’ said Keda. ‘Let us not talk.’

Dazed, he took her with him away from the square, and threading their way through the less frequented lanes found themselves at last at the door of a dwelling at the base of the castle wall.

The room they entered was cold, but within a minute Rantel had sent the light from an open fire on the earth dancing across the walls. On the mud floor was the usual grass matting common to all the dwellings.

‘Our youth will pass from us soon,’ said Keda. ‘But we are young this moment and tonight we are together. The bane of our people will fall on us, next year or the year after, but now – NOW, Rantel; it is NOW that fills us. How quickly you have made the fire! Oh, Rantel, how beautifully you have made it! Hold me again.’

As he held her there was a tapping at the window; they did not move, but only listened as it increased until the coarse slab of glass sunk in the mud walls vibrated with an incessant drumming. The increasing volume of the sudden rain was joined by the first howls of a young wind.

The hours moved on. On the low wooden boards, Rantel and Keda lay in the warmth of the fire, defenceless before each other’s love.

When Keda wakened she lay for some while motionless. Rantel’s arm was flung over her body and his hand was at her breast like a child’s. Lifting his arm she moved slowly from him, lowered his hand again softly to the floor. Then she rose and walked to the door. And as she took the first steps, there flashed through her the joyous realization that the mood of invulnerability before the world was still with her. She unlatched the door and flung it open. She had known that the outer wall of Gormenghast would face her as she did so. Its rough base within a stone’s throw would rise like a sheer cliff. And there it was, but there was more. Ever since she could remember anything the face of the outer wall had been like the symbol of endlessness, of changelessness, of power, of austerity and of protection. She had known it in so many moods. Baked to dusty whiteness, and alive with basking lizards, she could remember how it flaked in the sun. She had seen it flowering with the tiny pink and blue creeper flowers that spread like fields of coloured smoke in April across acres of its temperate surface. She had seen its every protruding ledge of stone, its every jutting irregularity furred with frost, or hanging with icicles. She had seen the snow sitting plumply on those juttings, so that in the darkness when the wall had vanished into the night these patches of snow had seemed to her like huge stars suspended.

And now this sunlit morning of late autumn gave to it a mood which she responded to. But as she watched its