The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [452]
As a minor Titus was not directly involved in the actual choice of the ‘Three’, but his technical approval had to be obtained when the decisions were finally made. He had wandered restlessly up and down the line of the exhibits, threading his way through the crowds, which parted deferentially at his approach. The weight of the iron chain about his neck and the stone that was strapped to his forehead became almost too much to bear. He had seen Fuchsia but had lost her again in the crowds.
‘There’s going to be an almighty storm, my boy,’ said a voice at his shoulder. ‘By all that’s torrential, there most certainly is!’
It was Prunesquallor.
‘Feels like it, Doctor Prune,’ said Titus.
‘And looks like it, my young stalker of felons!’
Titus turned his gaze to the sky. It seemed to have gone mad. It bulged and shifted itself as though it were not moved by any breeze or current of the air, but only through its own foul impulses.
It was a foul sky, and it was growing. It was accumulating filth from the hot slums of hell. Titus turned his eyes from its indescribable menace and faced the doctor again. His face was gleaming with sweat. ‘Have you seen Fuchsia?’ he said.
‘I saw her,’ answered Titus. ‘But I lost her again. She is somewhere here.’ The Doctor lifted his head high and stared about him, his Adam’s apple very angular, his teeth flashing, but in a smile that Titus could see was empty.
‘I wish you would see her, Doctor Prune … she looks awful, suddenly.’
‘I will certainly see her, Titus, and as soon as I can.’
At that moment a messenger approached. Titus was wanted by the judges.
‘Away with you,’ cried the doctor in this new voice that had lost its ring. ‘Away with you, young fellow!’
‘Good-bye, doctor.’
SIXTY-FOUR
That night, upon the balcony, his mother sat upon his right hand like an enormous stranger, and the Poet upon his left, an alien figure. Below him was a vast field of upturned faces. Away ahead of him and far beyond the reach of the great bonfire’s radiance the Mountain was just visible against the dark sky.
The moment was approaching when he must call for the three successful carvers to come forward and for him to draw up the carvings from below with a cord and to place them in full sight of the crowd.
The flames of the bonfire around which the multitude was congregated streamed up into the sky. Its insatiable heat had already reduced a hundred dreams to ashes.
As he watched, a glorious tiger, its snarling head bent back along its spine, and its four feet close together beneath its belly, was flung through the air, by one of the twelve hereditary ‘vandals’. The flames appeared to flick out their arms to receive it, and then they curled about it and began to eat.
His longing to escape came upon him with a sudden and elemental force. He hated this gross wastage that was going on below him. The heat of the evening made him sick. The nearness of his mother and of the abstracted Poet disquieted him. His eyes moved to Gormenghast Mountain. What lay beyond? Was there another land …? Another world? Another kind of life?
If he should leave the castle! The very notion of it made him shake with a mixture of fear and excitement. His thought was so revolutionary that he glanced at his mother’s back to see whether she had heard his mind at work.
If he should leave Gormenghast? He was unable to hazard a guess as to what such a thought implied. He knew of no other place. He had thought before, of Escape. Escape as an abstract idea. But he had never thought seriously of where he would escape to, or of how he would live in some place where he would be unknown.
And a seditious fear that he was in reality of no consequence came over him. That Gormenghast was of no consequence and that to be an earl and the son of Sepulchrave, a direct descendant of