The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [171]
Again she was affected by an uprising of love. The mad smile making incongruous every remark which the Earl ventured, for he spoke with tenderness and moderation, had for the moment ceased to frighten her. In her short life she had been brought face to face with so many forms of weirdness that although the uncanny horror of the sliding smile distressed her, yet the sudden breaking of the barriers that had lain between them for so long as she could remember overpowered her fear. For the first time in her life she felt that she was a daughter – that she had a father – of her own. What did she care if he was going mad – saving for his own dear sake? He was hers.
‘My books …’ he said.
‘I have them here, father. Shall I fill up the first long shelf for you?’
‘With the Sonian Poets, Fuchsia.’
‘Yes.’
She picked up a cone from the heap at her side and placed it on the end of the line she had scored in the ground. The Earl watched her very carefully.
‘That is Andrema, the lyricist – the lover – he whose quill would pulse as he wrote and fill with a blush of blue, like a bruised nail. His verses, Fuchsia, his verses open out like flowers of glass, and at their centre, between the brittle petals lies a pool of indigo, translucent and as huge as doom. His voice is unmuffled – it is like a bell, clearly ringing in the night of our confusion; but the clarity is the clarity of imponderable depth – depth – so that his lines float on for ever more, Fuchsia – on and on and on, for ever more. That is Andrema … Andrema.’
The Earl, with his eyes on the cone which Fuchsia had placed at the end of the first line, opened his mouth more widely, and suddenly the pines vibrated with the echoes of a dreadful cry, half scream, half laughter.
Fuchsia stiffened, the blood draining from her face. Her father, his mouth still open, even after the scream had died out of the forest, was now upon his hands and knees. Fuchsia tried to force her voice from the dryness of her throat. Her father’s eyes were on her as she struggled, and at last his lips came together and his eyes recovered the melancholy sweetness that she had so lately discovered in them. She was able to say, as she picked up another cone and made as if to place it at the side of ‘Andrema’: ‘Shall I go on with the library, father?’
But the Earl could not hear her. His eyes had lost focus. Fuchsia dropped the cone from her hand and came to his side.
‘What is it,’ she said. ‘Oh father! father! what is it?’
‘I am not your father,’ he replied. ‘Have you no knowledge of me?’ And as he grinned his black eyes widened and in either eye there burned a star, and as the stars grew greater his fingers curled. ‘I live in the Tower of Flints,’ he cried. ‘I am the death-owl.’
A ROOF OF REEDS
To her left, as she moved slowly along the broken and overgrown track Keda was conscious the while of that blasphemous finger of rock which had dominated the western skyline for seven weary days. It had been like a presence, something which, however the sunlight or moonlight played upon it, was always sinister; in essence, wicked.
Between the path she walked and the range of mountains was a region of marshland which reflected the voluptuous sky in rich pools, or with a duller glow where choked swamps sucked at the colour and breathed it out again in sluggish vapour. A tract of rushes glimmered, for each long sword-shaped leaf was edged with a thread of crimson. One of the larger pools of almost unbroken surface not only reflected the burning sky, but the gruesome, pointing finger of the rock, which plunged through breathless water.
On her right the land sloped upwards and was forested with misshapen trees. Although their outermost branches were still lit, the violence of the sunset was failing, and the light was crumbling momently from the boughs.
Keda’s shadow stretched to her right, growing, as she proceeded, less and less intense as the raddled ground dulled from a reddish tint to a nondescript ochre, and then from ochre to a warm grey which moment by moment grew more chill, until she found herself