The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [460]
Yes, it was she. The vision had contracted to the small and tangible proportions of the uncompromising urchin – the rarefaction had become clay.
And then she turned her head and Titus saw a face that shocked and thrilled him. All that was Gormenghast within him shuddered: shuddered and bridled up in a kind of anger. All that was rebellious in him cried with joy: with the joy of witnessing the heart of defiance. The confusion in his breast was absolute. His memory of her, of a proud and gracile creature, was now destroyed. It was no longer true. It had become trite, shallow and saccharine. Proud, she was and vibrant in all conscience. And graceful, perhaps in flight – but not now. There was nothing graceful in the way her body, uninhibited as an animal’s, crouched over the flames. This was something new and earthy.
Titus who had been in love with an arrogance and a swallow-like beauty of limb, so that he longed savagely and fearfully to clasp it was now aware of how there were these new dimensions, this dark reality of slaughtered birds, of scattered feathers, of an animal’s posture and above all of an ignorant originality that was redolent in her every gesture.
Her head had turned. He had seen her face. He was staring at an original. It was not that the face had any unique peculiarity of proportion or feature but that it was so blatant an index of all she was.
And yet it was not through any particular mobility of the features that it conveyed the independence of her life. The line of the mouth seldom altered, save when, in devouring the roasted bird, she bit with an undue ferocity. No: the face was more mask-like than expressive. It symbolized her way of life, not her immediate thoughts. It was the colour of a robin’s egg, and as closely freckled. Her hair was black and thick but she had hacked it away, a little above her shoulders. Her rounded neck was set upright upon her shoulders, and was so flexible that the liquid ease with which she turned it was reminiscent of a serpent.
It was through such motions as this, and the movements of her small shoulders and in the quickness of her fingers that she conveyed to Titus, more vividly than any expression of the features could ever do, the quality of her fanatical independence.
As he watched she tossed the bones of the magpie over her shoulder, and dipping her hand into the shadows at her side drew up, out of the darkness that she cast, the little carving of the raven. Turning it round and round in her hand she stared at it intently, but no vestige of an expression crossed her face. She placed it on the ground at her side, but the earth was uneven and it fell forwards upon its face. Without a moment’s hesitation she struck it with her clenched fist as a child might strike a toy in anger, and then, rising in a smooth and single action to her feet, she flicked it out of her way with her foot so that it lay upon its side against the wall.
Upon her feet she had become another thing. It was difficult to reconcile her with the creature who had squatted by the fire. She had become a sapling. Her face was turned to where the water streamed across the cave-mouth. For a few moments she stared expressionlessly at the rain-filled opening and then she moved towards it, but at her third step she stopped and as her body tautened her head gyrated on her neck. Her shoulders had not moved, but as her head swivelled, her eyes sped around the walls of the cave. Something had disturbed her.
Her slender body was poised for instantaneous action. Again her eyes flew across the walls piercing every shadow, and then for a moment they stayed their flight and Titus could see from his dark recess that she had seen his shirt where it lay, torn and sodden, on the floor of the cave.
She turned and with a tread both light and apprehensive approached the garment that lay in a pool of its own making.