The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [389]
The water had drawn away what clothes the fire had left. He was naked, covered with burns, half drowned, his body shaking with an icy cold, his brow burning with a feverish heat.
Crawling up the bank, not knowing what he was doing, save that he must find some place of neither fire nor water, he came at last to a patch of level mud where a few rank ferns and mudplants flourished, and there, as though (now that his affairs were concluded) he could afford to faint, he collapsed into darkness.
And there he lay motionless, very small and naked on the mud, like something lifeless that had been discarded, or like a fish thrown up by the sea over whose minute and stranded body the great cliffs tower, for the walls of Gormenghast rose high above the moat, soaring like cliffs themselves into the upper darkness.
FORTY
While the dust that lay upon the gaunt back of the castle became warm in the sun, and the birds grew drowsy in the shadows of the towers, and while there was little to hear but the droning of the bees as they hovered over the wastes of ivy – at the same time, in the green hush of noon, the spirit of Gormenghast forest held its breath like a diver. There was no sound. Hour followed hour and all things were asleep or in a state of trance. The trunks of the great oaks were blotched with honey-coloured shadows and the prodigious boughs were stretched like the arms of bygone kings and appeared to be heavy with the weight of their gold bangles, the bracelets of the sun. There seemed to be no end to the gold afternoon and then something fell from a high branch, and the faint swish of the leaves through which it passed awoke the region. The stillness had been for the moment punctured, but the wound healed over almost at once.
What was it that had fallen through the silence? Even the tree-cat would have hesitated to drop so far through the green gloom. But it was no cat, but something human that stood dappled with leaf-shaped shadows, a child, with its thick hair hacked off close to its head and the face freckled like a bird’s egg. The body, slender, indeed thin, appeared, when the child began to move, to be without weight.
The features of her face were quite nondescript – in fact, empty. It was as though she wore a kind of mask, neither pleasant nor unpleasant – something that hid rather than revealed her mind. And yet, at the same time, although by feature there was nothing to remember, nothing distinctive, yet the whole head was so set upon the neck, the neck so perfectly adjusted upon the slender shoulders, and the movements of those three so expressive in their relationship that it seemed that there was not only nothing lacking, but that for the face to have had a life of its own would have ruined the detached and unearthly quality she possessed.
She stood there for a moment, entirely alone in the dreaming oakwoods and began, with strangely rapid movements of her fingers, to pluck the feathers from a missel-thrush which, during her long fall through the foliage, she had snatched from its branch and throttled in her small fierce hand.
FORTY-ONE
Surrounding the outer walls of Gormenghast castle the mud city of the Outer Dwellers lay sprawled in the sun, its thousands of hovels hummocking the earth like molehills. These Dwellers, or Bright Carvers as they were sometimes called, had rituals of their own as sacrosanct as those of the castle itself.
Bitter with poverty and prone to those diseases that thrive on squalor, they were yet a proud though bigoted people. Proud of their traditions, of their power of carving – proud of their very misery, it seemed. For one of their number to have left them and to have become wealthy and famous would have been to them a cause