The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [453]
He raised his head and gazed across the thousands of faces below him. He nodded his head in a kind of pompous approval as yet another carving was tossed into the great bonfire. He counted a score of towers to his left. ‘All mine …’ he said, but the words sounded emptily in his head when suddenly something happened which blew his terror and his hope sky-high, which filled him with a joy too huge for him to contain, which took him and shook him out of his indecisions, and swept him into a land of hectic and cruel brilliance, of black glades, and of a magic insupportable.
For, as he was watching, something happened with great rapidity. A coal black raven, its head cocked, its every feather exquisitely chiselled, its claws gripping a wrinkled branch was about to be thrown into the flames when, as Titus watched, in a half-dream, a ripple in the silent, heat-heavy crowd, showed where a single figure was threading its way with an unusual speed. The hereditary ‘vandal’ had hold of the wooden raven by its head and swung back his hand. The bonfire leapt and crackled and lit his face. The arm came forward; the fingers loosed their grip; that raven sailed up in the air, turning over and over and began to fall towards the fire when, as unforeseen and rapid as the course of a dream, there leapt from the body of the fire-lit crowds something that, with a mixture of grace and savagery quite indescribable, snatched at the height of its leap the raven from the air, and holding it above its head continued without a pause or break in the superb rhythm of its flight, and apparently floating over an ivy-covered wall disappeared into the night. For more than a minute there was no movement at all. A dreadful embarrassment held the witnesses immobile as though with a vice. The individual shock that each sustained was heightened by the stunned condition of the mass. Something unthinkable had been done, something so flagrant that the anger that was so soon to show itself was for the moment held back as though by a wall of embarrassment.
Such violation of a hallowed ceremony was unprecedented.
The Countess was one of the first to stir. For the first time since Steerpike’s escape she was moved by a tremendous anger that had no connexion with the skewbald rebel. She rose to her feet and with her big hands gripping the balustrade stared into the night. The congested clouds hung with a terrible nearness and an increasing weight. The air sweated. The crowds began to mutter and to move like bees in a hive. Isolated cries of rage from below the balcony sounded close, raw and horrible.
What was the death of a few hierophants at Steerpike’s hand compared with the stabbing of the castle’s very heart. The heart of Gormenghast was not its garrison – its transient denizens, but that invisible thing that had been wounded in their sight. As the cries rose and the swollen clouds pressed down, Titus, the last to move, turned his eyes to his mother’s with a sidelong sweep. Sick with excitement he rose gradually to his feet.
He alone, of all who had been so fundamentally affected by the profane insult to tradition, was affected for a reason of his own. The shock he had suffered was unique. He had not been drawn into the maelstrom of the general shock. He was alone in his unique excitement. At the first sight of that mercurial creature he was transported in a flash to an earlier day, a day which he had no longer believed in, and had relegated to the world of dreams: to a day when among the spectral oakwoods he had seen, or had thought he had seen, an air-borne figure with its small head turned away. It was so long ago. It had become no more than a fume of his mind – a vapour.
But it was she. There was no doubting that it had all been true. He had seen her before, when lost among the oakwood she had floated past like a leaf. And now again! Taller, of course, as he was taller. But no less fleet, no less uncanny.
He remembered how the momentary sight of her had awakened in him an awareness