The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [501]
It was not that he had lost his will to live. It was that his brain was so exact and cold a thing that when it told him that his life, for this reason, and for that reason, was within a few hours of its end, he had no faculties wherewith to combat its logic. Below him was the water in which he could not breathe. To the north was the water through which to swim was immediate capture. To move to his left or right would bring him to the margins of the ivy. To climb would bring him to the scores of windows in every one of which there was a face.
Whoever it was who was crawling towards him down the wall had presumably informed the world of his purpose, or had been given orders to come to grips. Someone had seen a movement in the ivy.
But it was strange that, as far as he could hear, there was only one boat approaching. The rise and fall of the two oars were distant but perfectly distinct; why was not the whole flotilla on its way towards him?
As he drew his knife to and fro across his forearm some dust fell through the twisted stems above him and then a branch broke with a crack that seemed within a yard of his head.
But it was not immediately above him, this noise. It appeared to come from deeper in the ivy, from somewhere between himself and the wall.
For him to move would be to make a sound. He was curled up like an emaciated child in a cot of twigs. But with his right hand gripping the dagger at his left shoulder, he was prepared at any instant to make an upward stab.
His small, close-set eyes smouldered with an unnatural concentration in the darkness, but it was not their natural colour, extraordinary as that was, that showed in the gloom, but something more terrible. It was as though the red blood in his brain, or behind his eyes, was reflected in the lenses. His lips, thin as a prude’s, had fused into a single bloodless thread.
And now he began to experience again, but with even greater intensity, those sensations that affected him when, with the skeletons of the titled sisters at his feet, he had strutted about their relics as though in the grip of some primordial power.
This sensation was something so utterly alien to the frigid nature of his conscious brain that he had no means of understanding what was happening within him at this deeper level, far less of warding off the urge to show himself. For an arrogant wave had entered him and drowned his brain in black, fantastic water.
His passion to remain in secret had gone. What was left of vigour in his body craved to strut and posture.
He no longer wanted to kill his foe in darkness and in silence. His lust was to stand naked upon the moonlit stage, with his arms stretched high, and his fingers spread, and with the warm fresh blood that soaked them sliding down his wrists, spiralling his arms and steaming in the cold night air – to suddenly drop his hands like talons to his breast and tear it open to expose a heart like a black vegetable – and then, upon the crest of self-exposure, and the sweet glory of wickedness, to create some gesture of supreme defiance, lewd and rare; and then with the towers of Gormenghast about him, cheat the castle of its jealous right and die of his own evil in the moonbeams.
There was nothing left, no, of the brain that would have scorned all this. The brilliant Steerpike had become a cloud of crimson. He wallowed in the dawn of the globe.
Ignoring all precautions, he wrenched the boughs about him, and every window heard the sound, as they cracked in the silence with reports like gunfire. The lenses of his eyes were like red-hot pinheads.
He tore away the thick ivy stems, and cleared a cave, within the masses of