The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [496]
As he swam he gloried. The torchlit water closed over him, and broke away again in yellow flakes. He rose and subsided on the flood, his arms thrashing at the waves. All that the sky had emptied from its maw, the giant reservoirs, broke at his brow. He gloried.
His fever mounted. As he grew weaker he grew fiercer. Perhaps he was in a dream. Perhaps it was all a delusion – the heads at a thousand windows – the boats tossing like gold beetles at the foot of the midnight heights; the flooded window that yawned for blood and drama, the upper window where his mother loomed, her red hair smouldering, her face like marble.
Perhaps he was swimming to his death. It didn’t matter. He knew that what he was doing was what he must do. He had no option. His whole life had been a time of waiting. For this. For this moment. For all it was and all it would mean.
Who was it that swam within him, whose limbs were his limbs and whose heart was his heart? Who was he – what was he, as he battled through bright waters? Was he the Earl of Gormenghast? The seventy-seventh lord? The son of Sepulchrave? The son of Gertrude? The son of the Lady at the window? The brother of Fuchsia? Ah yes, he was that. He was the brother of the girl with the white sheet to her chin and her black hair spread across the snow-white pillow. He was this. But he was no brother of her ladyship – but only of the drowned girl. And he was no one’s figurehead. He was only himself. Someone who might have been a fish of the water, a star, or a leaf or a stone. He was Titus, perhaps, if words were needed – but he was no more than that – oh no, not Gormenghast, not the seventy-seventh, not the House of Groan, but a heart in a body that swam through space and time.
The Countess had seen him from her window but there was nothing she could do. He was not making for the cave-mouth, where the boats were already filling the narrow entrance, but for one of those outer stairways that rose out of the water at irregular intervals along the castle’s face.
But she had not time to wait and follow his progress. Three swimmers were already in the water and giving chase. Now that she had seen the first of the boats entering the cave-mouth she turned back from the window and returned to the centre of the room where a group of officers was gathered about the huge spy-hole. As she approached them, a tall man who had been kneeling above the opening fell backwards with a crimson chin. Four of his teeth had been broken off and these with a small pebble rattled together in his mouth while his head shook with pain. The others drew away at once from the dangerous opening.
As they did so Titus entered the room, leaving a trail of water at every step. It was obvious that he was ill with fever and exhaustion, and ungovernable with the fire of it. His naturally pale skin was flushed. His peculiarities of body appeared to be strangely accentuated.
The sense of scale, which he had inherited from his mother – that effect of being larger than he really was, of being over-size, was now peculiarly in evidence. It was as though it were not just that Titus Groan had entered, but that his abstract, a prototype had come through the door, and that the floodwater that dripped from his clothes was somehow spilled in heroic measure.
The rather bluntish cast of his face was even blunter and plainer. The lower lip, trembling with excitement, hung open like a child’s. But his pale eyes, so often sullen in