The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [316]
With the rhythm of his progress broken, his belief that he was in a state of dream was finally dispelled. For his hunger had become insistent.
He looked about him. The same scene enclosed him with its mellow cyclorama – its hateful dream of gold.
But for all this horror (it had laid hold of him again now that he no longer believed himself asleep), his fear was in some way lessened by a peculiar thrill which seemed to grow in intensity rather than quieten until it had become a trembling globe of ice under his ribs. Something for which he had unconsciously pined had shown either itself or its emblem in the gold oak woods. Realizing that he had been wide awake ever since he had crept (how long ago!) to the stables of Gormenghast, he knew that slender spectre – that reed-like, feather-like thing with its head turned halfway as it rose in slanting volitation across a glade as wide as a lawn, was true, was here in the oak forest with him at that very moment: was perhaps watching him.
It was not only the uncanniness of such a phasma which haunted him now. It was his craving to see again that essence so far removed from what was Gormenghast.
And yet, what had he seen? Nothing that he could describe. It had been so rapid – that flight across his vision: gone, as it were, before his eyes were ready. The head turned away … turned away. What was it that cried to him? What was it that this shred, this floating shred of life, expressed? For in the air with which it had moved through space was a quality for which Titus unknowingly hungered. On the long glissade of the wasp-gold flight, like a figment from a rarer and more curious climate than Titus had ever breathed, it had expressed as it rose across the glade the quintessence of detachment: the sense of something intrinsically tameless, and of a distilled and thin-air beauty.
All this in a flash. All this, a confusion in Titus’ heart and brain.
What he had felt when he had halted his horse that same morning and heard the voices of the mountain and the woods crying, ‘Do you dare!’ was redoubled within him. He had seen something which lived a life of its own: which had no respect for the ancient lords of Gormenghast, for ritual among the foot-worn flagstones: for the sacredness of the immemorial House. Something that would no more think of bowing to the seventy-seventh Earl than would a bird, or the branch of a tree.
He beat his fist into the palm of his other hand. He was frightened. He was excited. His teeth chattered. The glimpse of a world, of an unformulated world, where human life could be lived by other rules than those of Gormenghast, had shaken him; but for all the newness, all the vague hugeness of the mutinous sensations that were thronging in him, yet under the pain of his hunger, even they began to give way to the consuming need for food.
Was there a slightly different feeling about the light as it slanted through the oak leaves and lay along the glades? Was there a less deathly stillness in the air? For a moment Titus thought he heard a sigh among the leaves above him. Was there a quickening in the torpor of the midday stillness?
There was no way for Titus to know which way to turn. He only knew that he could not return in the direction from which he had come. And so he began to walk as quickly, yet as lightly, as he could (to avoid the nightmare sensation that those loping and unbridled flights through the air had bred in him) in the direction in which the mysterious and floating creature had disappeared.
It was not long before the peerless lawns of moss that stretched between the oaks became pranked by clumps of ferns which, ignoring the sun’s rays, appeared silhouetted, so dark was the viridian of their hanging fronds, so luminous their golden background. The relief to