The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [502]
The knife was ready for the strike. He had thrown back his head. In the darkness of the leaves above him he heard a sound. It was a kind of cry or gasp – and then, a great bush of branches fell in a crackling heap – fell, as it were, down the black chimney which Steerpike’s sudden violence had created – fell with gathering speed with Titus riding upon its back.
As Titus fell he saw the two red points of light below him. He saw them through the tangle of the broken ivy.
Fear had a few moments earlier suddenly come to him, for his brain had cleared – as in a hot sky of continuous cloud, an area, no bigger than one’s thumbnail will clear, and show the sky. And with this momentary clearance of his brain from the fumes of fever and fatigue, came the fear of Steerpike and darkness, and death.
But directly the branches broke below him as he hung in the twisted night, and directly he fell, the fear left him again. He said to himself, ‘I am falling. I am moving very fast. I will soon be on top of him. Then I will kill him if I can.’
The knife in his hand was quite steady as he fell: and when he crashed his way through the branches which had come to a thick and watery halt at the congested surface of the flood he saw it shine in his hand like a splinter of glass in a penetrating ray of the moon. But only for the fraction of a fleeting instant did he see that thin blade of steel for, as he had fallen he had been shovelled outwards into the moonlight so that suddenly another object as brilliant as the thin blade held his eyes, a thing with eyes like beads of blood, and a forehead like a ball of lard – a thing whose mouth, thin as a thread, was opening and as it opened was curling up its corners so that no other note could possibly have come from such a cavity as the note that now rang across the flood-bay that climbed the ancient walls and turned the silent audience to stone – a note from the first dawn, the high-pitched overweening cry of a fighting cock.
But even as this blast of arrogance vibrated through the night, and the crowing echoes rang through the hollow rooms and wandered to and fro, and thinly died – Titus struck.
He could see nothing of the body into which his small knife plunged. Only the head, with its distended mouth and its grizzly blood-lit eyes, was visible. But he struck the darkness under the head, and his fist was suddenly wet and warm.
What had happened to Steerpike that he should have been the first to receive a blow – and a blow so mortal? He had recognized the earl, who like himself had been lit by the moonbeams. That the Lord of Gormenghast should have been delivered into his hands at this great moment and be his for the killing, had so appealed to his sense of fitness that the urge to crow had become irresistible.
He had swung full circle. He had given himself up to the crowding forces. He, the rationalist, the self-contained!
And so, in a paroxysm of self-indulgence – or perhaps in the grip of some elemental agency over which he had no power, he had denied his brain, and he had lost the one and only moment of time in which to strike before his enemy.
But at the rip of the knife in his chest all vision left him. He was again Steerpike. He was Steerpike wounded, and bleeding fast, but not yet dead. Snarling with pain he stabbed, but as he stabbed Titus fell in a faint and the knife cut a path across the cheek – not deep but long and bloody. The sharp pain of it cleared the boy’s mind for a fraction of time and he thrust again into the darkness below his face. The world began to spin and he was spinning with it and he heard again, very far away the sound of crowing, and then opening his eyes he saw his fist at his enemy’s breast, for the lozenge of moonlight had spread across them both, and he knew that he had no strength to withdraw the knife from between the ribs of a body arched like a bow, in the thick leaves. Then