At that moment there was a knock at the door and a messenger entered. 'What do you want?' said Fuchsia.
'I have a message, my lady.'
'What is it?'
'Her ladyship, the Countess, your mother, wishes Lord Titus to accompany me back to her room. She is going to take him for a walk.'
Titus and Fuchsia stared at the messenger and then at one another. Several times they opened their mouths to speak but closed them again. Then Fuchsia turned her eyes back to the melting snow - and Titus walked out through the half open door, the messenger following him closely.
The Countess was waiting for them on the landing. She gestured the messenger to be gone with a single, lazy movement to her head.
She gazed at Titus with a curious lack of expression. It was as though what she saw interested her, but in the way that a stone would interest a geologist, or a plant, a botanist. Her expression was neither kindly nor unkindly. It was simply absent. She appeared to be unconscious of having a face at all. Her features made no effort to communicate anything.
'I am taking them for a walk,' she said in her heavy, abstracted, millstone voice.
'Yes, mother,' said Titus. He supposed she was talking of her cats.
A shadow settled for a moment on her broad brow. The word mother had perplexed her. But the boy was quite right, of course.
Her massive bulk had always impressed Titus. The hanging draperies and scollop'd shadows, the swathes of musty darkness - all this he found most awesome.
He was fascinated by her but he had no point of contact. When she spoke it was in order to make a statement. She had no conversation.
She turned her head and, pursing her lips, she whistled with a peculiar ululation. Titus gazed up at the sartorial mass above him. Why had she wanted him to accompany her? he wondered. Did she want him to tell her anything? Had she anything to tell 'him'? Was it just a whim?
But she had started to descend the stairs and Titus followed her.
From a hundred dim recesses, from favourite ledges, from shelves and draught-proof corners, from among the tattered entrails of old sofas, from the scarred plush of chairs, from under clock-stands, from immemorial sun-traps, and from nests of claw-torn paper - from the inside of lost hats, from among rafters, from rusty casques, and from drawers half-open, the cats poured forth, converged, foamed, and with a rapid pattering of their milk-white feet filled up the corridors, and a few moments later had reached the landing and were on their way, in the wake of their great mistress, down the stairway they obscured.
When they were in the open and had passed through an archway in the outer wall and were able to see Gormenghast Mountain dear before them, with dark grey snow on its cruel heights, the Countess waved her ponderous arm, as though she were scattering grain, and the cats on the instant, fanning out, sped in every direction, and leapt, twisting in the air, curvetting for the very joy of their only release from the castle since first the snow came down. And though a number of them sported together, rolling over one another, or sitting up straight with their heads bridled back, tapped at each other sparring like fighters, only to lose all interest of a sudden, their eyes unfocusing, their thoughts turning - yet for the main the white creatures behaved as though each one were utterly alone, utterly content to be alone, conscious only of its own behaviour, its own leap into the air, its own agility, self-possessed, solitary, enviable and legendary in a beauty both heraldic and fluent as water.
Titus walked by his mother's side. For all the interest in the scene before him he could not help turning his eyes to his mother's face. Its vague, almost mask-like character was something which he was beginning to suspect of being no index of her state of mind. For more than once she had gripped his shoulder in her big hand and led him from the path and without a word she had shown him, all but shrouded by the ivy on a tree stem, a cushion of black star-moss. She had turned off a rough track, and then pointed down a small snow- filled gully to where a fox had rested. Every now and again she would pause and gaze at the ground, or into the branches of a tree, but Titus, stare as he would, could see nothing remarkable.
For all that the birds had died in their thousands, yet as Titus and his mother drew near to a strip of woodland where the snow had melted from the boughs, and small streams were running over the stones and snow-flattened grass, they could see that the trees were far from empty.
The Countess paused, and holding Titus by his elbow, they stood motionless.
A bird whistled and then another, and then suddenly the small kingfisher, like a blue legend, streaked along a stream.
The cats were leagues away. They breathed the sharp air into their lungs. They roamed to the four quarters. They powdered the horizons.
The Countess whistled with a shrill sweet note, and first one bird and then another flew to her. She examined them, holding them cupped in her hands. They were very thin and weak. She whistled their various calls and they responded as they hopped about her or sat perched upon her shoulders, and then, all at once a fresh voice from the wood silenced the birds. At every whistle of the Countess, this new answer came, quick as an echo.
Its effect on the Countess seemed out of all reason.
She turned her head. She whistled again and her whistle was answered, quick as an echo. She gave the calls of a dozen birds and a dozen voices echoed her with an insolent precision. The birds about her feet and on her shoulders had stiffened.
Her hand was gripping Titus' shoulder like an iron clamp. It was all he could do not to cry out. He turned his head with difficulty and saw his mother's face - the face that had been so calm as the snow itself. It had darkened.
It was no bird that was answering her; that much she knew. Clever as it was, the mimicry could not deceive her. Nor did it seem that whatever gave vent to the varying calls was anxious to deceive. There had been something taunting about the rapidity with which each whistle of the Countess had been flung back from the wood.
What was it all about? Why was his arm being gripped? Titus, who had been fascinated by his mother's power over the birds, could not understand why the calls from the wood should have so angered her. For
