The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [473]
Unpleasant as was this sense of being under observation, he fought back the panic that might so easily have developed and, more to prove to himself that he was not afraid of mere stone and ivy rather than because he really wished to mount the stairway and discover what lay within the melancholy walls, he began to climb the slippery steps that led to the balcony. And as he began his ascent, the face that had been watching him disappeared from a small window close to the summit of the lowering wall. But only for a moment, for it reappeared so suddenly again at another opening that it was difficult to believe that it could be the same face that now stared down to where the steps slid under the water and where Titus’ canoe lay ‘beached’. But there could be no doubt of it. No two faces could either be so identical of blemish, nor so cruelly similar. The dark red eyes were fixed upon the little craft. They had watched its approach across the ‘bay’. They noted how light, rapid and manoeuvrable it was, how it had answered to the merest whim of its rider.
He turned his eyes from the craft to Titus, who by now, having climbed a dozen steps was within a couple more of being immediately below the heavy block of stone which Steerpike had loosened, and which he had half a mind to send hurtling down upon the youth below.
But he knew that the death of the Earl, much as it would have gratified him, would not in fact materially advance his chance of escape. Had it been certain that the stone would strike his lordship dead, he would have had no hesitation in satisfying what had now become a lust for killing. But were the stone to miss its prey and splinter on the steps far below, then not only would Titus have every right to imagine that he had been ambushed – and who would ambush the Earl save he himself? – but also a more immediate dislocation of his plans would result. For there was little doubt that Titus on recovering from his shock would not dare to continue with his upward climb, but would return immediately to his craft. And it was this boat that Steerpike was after. To be able to move at speed through the tortuous waterways of the castle would double his mobility.
Driven from haunt to haunt, from hiding place to hiding place by the rising water, his operations conditioned always by the necessity of his being within striking range of the stores and larders, it had in the narrowing zone of manoeuvre become imperative for him to be able to travel with equal speed and silence over both land and water. For days he had starved when the mobile kitchens were so positioned in a curve of the spacious west wing that it was impossible for him, guarded as they were, to plunder.
But they had moved, since then, at least three times, and now, with the possibility of the rain having stopped for good, it was his savage hope that they had found a fixity in that high sub-attic room above which in a barricaded and all but lightless loft he had established his headquarters. In the ceiling of this murky refuge a trap door opened upon a sloping roof of slates, where swathes of creeper bandaged it from sight. But it was the hatch in the floor below him which, when lifted with a tender and secret care more usually associated with the handling of sucklings, that gave him access to the most pressing of his needs: for below him lay the stores. In the small hours, when it became necessary he would lower himself inch by noiseless inch on a long rope. The sack he brought down with him he would fill with the least perishable provisions. A dozen or more of the staff would be asleep on the floor, but the sentries were naturally posted on the outer side of the three doors and were no bother to him.
But this was not his only hide-out. He knew that sooner or later the floods would fall. The kitchens would again become nomadic. It was impossible to tell in which direction the life of the castle would sway as on its slowly downward journey it trod upon the wet heels of the