The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [472]
And then a qualm, empty cold and ringing, as though he was himself a hollow bell stirred in his bowels like a clapper. An exquisite sense of loneliness grew beneath his ribs, like a bubble of expanding glass.
The rain had ceased to fall. The agitated water had become silent, motionless. It had taken on a dark translucence. Afloat upon a yawning element he gazed down to where, far below him, trees grew, to where familiar roads wound in and out, to where the fish swam over walnut trees and strangest of all to the winding bed of Gormenghast river, so full of water that it had none of its own.
What had all this that filled his eyes with amazement and pleasure, what had it all to do with the despoiling flood, the wreck of treasures, the death of many, the haunt of Steerpike who, driven slowly upwards, was hiding even now? Was this where Fuchsia lived? And the Doctor and the Countess, his own mother, who, it seemed, after trying to approach him had drawn away again?
In a state of overwrought melancholy he began to slide forward over the still waters, dipping his paddle every now and again. A dull light from the sky played over the water that streamed in sheets from gutterless roofs.
As he neared the isles of Gormenghast, he saw away to the north, the carvers’ navy like scattered jewels on the slate-grey flood. Immediately ahead of him, as he proceeded, was the wall through one of the windows of which he had so dangerously skimmed. What was left of the window and of those on either side was now submerged and Titus knew that yet another floor of the central castle had by now been abandoned.
This wall, which formed the blunt nose of a long stone headland, had a counterpart a mile to the east. Between these two a vast and sombre bay lay stretched, with not a break in its surface. As with its twin, this second headland had no windows open at flood level. The water had a good twelve feet to climb before the next tier of casements could be entered or affected. But turning his eyes to the base, or curve of the great bay – to where (had it been in reality a bay) the sands might well have stretched, Titus could see that the far windows in that line of cliffs, no larger in his sight than grains of rice, were, unlike those of the headlands, far from regular.
Those walls, covered with ivy, were in many ways peculiar. Stone stairs climbed up and down their outer sides and led to openings. The windows, as he had already observed, appeared to be sprinkled over the green façades of the cliff with an indiscriminate and wayward profluence that gave no clue as to how the inner structures held together.
It was towards this base of the ‘bay’ that Titus now began to paddle, the limpid flood as chill as death beneath him, with all its rain-drowned marvels.
SEVENTY-TWO
It seemed to Titus a deserted place, a fastness of no life – rank with ivy, dumb with its toothless mouths, blind with its lidless eyes.
He drew in to the base of the abandoned walls where a flight of steps rose slanting out of the depths of the water, and, climbing alongside the wet green wall of ivy, rose to a balcony forty feet above his head – a stone affair surrounded by an iron railing decoratively wrought but so corroded with rust, that it only waited the tap of a stick to send it crumbling to the water.
As Titus stepped from his craft on to the stone steps at water level, and kneeling, lifted it dripping from the water and laid it carefully along the length of a stone tread, for he had no painter, he became conscious of a distinct malevolence. It was as though the great walls were watching his every move.
He pushed his brown hair back from his forehead and lifted his head so that he faced the towering masonry. His eyebrows were drawn together, his eyes were narrowed, his trembling chin was thrust