The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [225]
With four stumps of the crutch the old man was below him again and sluicing him with his hot wet eyes.
‘By the blind powers, it’s the truth,’ he said. He cleared his throat. ‘Don’t stand there staring. What is Law? Answer me, curse you!’
Steerpike replied without a moment’s consideration but with the worm of his guile like a bait on the hook of his brain: ‘Destiny, sir, Destiny.’
Vacant, trite and nebulous as was the reply, it was of the right kind. Steerpike knew this. The old man was aware of only one virtue – Obedience to Tradition. The destiny of the Groans. The law of Gormenghast.
No individual Groan of flesh and blood could awake in him this loyalty he felt for ‘Groan’ the abstraction – the symbol. That the course of this great dark family river should flow on and on, obeying the contours of hallowed ground, was his sole regard.
The seventy-sixth Earl should he ever be found, dead or alive, had forfeited his right to burial among the Tombs. Barquentine had spent the day among volumes of ritual and precedent. So exhaustive was the compilation of relevant and tabulated procedure to be adopted in unorthodox and unforeseen circumstances that a parallel to Lord Sepulchrave’s disappearance was at last rooted out by the old man – the fourteenth Earl of Groan having disappeared leaving an infant heir. Nine days only had been allowed for the search, after which the child was to be proclaimed the rightful Earl, standing the while upon a raft of chestnut boughs afloat on the lake, a stone in the right hand, an ivy-branch in the left, and a necklace of snail-shells about the neck; while shrouded in foliage the next of kin and all who were invited to the ‘Earling’ stood, sat, crouched or lay among the branches of the marginal trees.
All this had now, once again, hundreds of years later, to be put in hand, for the nine days were over and it was in Barquentine that all power in matters of procedure was vested. It was for him to give the orders. In his little old body was Gormenghast in microcosm.
‘Ferret,’ he said, still staring up at Steerpike, ‘your answer’s good. Body of me, Destiny it is. What is your bastard name, child?’
‘Steerpike, sir.’
‘Age?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘Buds and fledglings? So they still spawn ’em so! Seventeen.’ He put a withered tongue between his dry, wrinkled lips. It might have been the tongue of a boot. ‘Seventeen,’ he repeated in a voice of such ruminative incredulity as startled the youth, for he had never before heard any such intonation emerge from that old throat. ‘Bloody wrinkles! say it again, chicken.’
‘Seventeen,’ said Steerpike.
Barquentine went off into a form of trance, the well-heads of his eyes appearing to cloud over and become opaque like miniature sargassos, of dull chalky-blue – the cataract veil – for it seemed that he was trying to remember the daedal days of his adolescence. The birth of the world; of spring on the rim of Time.
Suddenly he came-to, and cursed; and as though to shake off something noxious he worked his shoulder-blades to and fro, as he pad-hopped irritably around his crutch, the ferrule squeaking as it swivelled on the carpetless floor.
‘See here, boy,’ he said, when he had come to a halt, ‘there is work to do. There is a raft to be built, body of me, a raft of chestnut boughs and no other. The procession. The bareback racing for the bagful. The barbecue in the Stone Hall. Hell slice me up, boy! call the hounds off.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Steerpike. ‘Shall I send them back to their quarters?’
‘Eh?’ muttered Barquentine, ‘what’s that?’
‘I said shall I return them to their quarters?’ said Steerpike. An affirmative noise from the throat of strings was the reply.
But as Steerpike began to move off, ‘Not yet, you dotard! Not yet!’ And then: ‘Who’s your master?’
Steerpike reflected a moment. ‘I have no immediate master,’ he said. ‘I attempt to make myself useful – here and there.’
‘You do, do you, my sprig? “Here and there,” do you? I can see through you. Right the way through you, suckling, bones and brain. You can’t fool me, by the stones you