The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [515]
The hunger burned in his stomach but there was another burn, the heartburn of the displaced; the unrecognized; the unrecognizable.
Why did they not know of him? What right had any man to touch him? To whirl him away on four mouldering wheels? To abduct him and to force him to his courtyard? To lean over him and stare at him with eyebrows raised? What right had anyone to save him? He was no child! He had known horror. He had fought, and he had killed. He had lost his sister and his father and the long man Flay, loyal as the stones of Gormenghast. And he had held an elf in his arms and seen her struck by lightning to a cinder, when the sky fell in and the world reeled. He was no child … no child … no child at all, and rising shakily to his feet he stood swaying in his weakness as he swung his fist at Muzzlehatch’s face – a vast face that seemed to disintegrate before him, only to clear again … only to dissolve.
His fist was caught in the capacious paw of the rudder-nosed man, who signed to his servants to carry Titus to a low room where the walls from floor to ceiling were lined with glass cases, where, beautifully pinned to sheets of cork, a thousand moths spread out their wings in a great gesture of crucifixion.
It was in this room that Titus was given a bowl of soup which, in his weakness, he kept spilling, until the spoon was taken from him, and a small man with a chip out of his ear fed him gently as he lay, half-reclined, on a long wicker chair. Even before he was halfway through his bowl of soup he fell back on the cushions, and was within a moment or two drawn incontinently into the void of a deep sleep.
ELEVEN
When he awoke the room was full of light. A blanket was up to his chin. On a barrel by his side was his only possession, an egg-shaped flint from the Tower of Gormenghast.
The chip-eared man came in.
‘Hullo there, you ruffian,’ he said. ‘Are you awake?’
Titus nodded his head.
‘Never known a scarecrow to sleep so long.’
‘How long?’ said Titus, raising himself on one elbow.
‘Nineteen hours,’ said the man. ‘Here’s your breakfast.’ He deposited a loaded tray at the side of the couch and then he turned away, but stopped at the door.
‘What’s your name, boy?’ he said.
‘Titus Groan.’
‘And where d’you come from?’
‘Gormenghast.’
‘That’s the word. That’s the word indeed. “Gormenghast.” If you said it once you said it twenty times.’
‘What! In my sleep?’
‘In your sleep. Over and over. Where is it, boy? This place. This Gormenghast.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Titus.
‘Ah,’ said the little man with the chip out of his ear, and he squinted at Titus sideways from under his eyebrows. ‘You don’t know, don’t you? That’s peculiar, now. But eat your breakfast. You must be hollow as a kettledrum.’
Titus sat up and began to eat, and as he ate he reached for the flint and moved his hand over its familiar contours. It was his only anchor. It was, for him, in microcosm, his home.
And while he gripped it, not in weakness or sentiment but for the sake of its density, and proof of its presence, and while the midday sunlight sifted itself to and fro across the room, a dreadful sound erupted in the courtyard and the open door of his room was all at once darkened, not by the chip-eared man but, more effectively, by the hindquarters of an enormous mule.
TWELVE
Titus, sitting bolt upright, stared incredulously at the rear of this great bristling beast whose tail was mercilessly thrashing its own body. A group of improbable muscles seldom brought into play started, now here, now there, across its shuddering rump. It fought in situ with something on the other side of the door until it forced its way inch by inch out into the courtyard again, taking a great piece of the wall with it. And all the time the hideous, sickening sound of hate; for there is something stirred up in the breasts of mules and