The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [521]
Where lay the long horizons? Where throbbed the frontiers? O terrible division! The near and the far. The night and the day. The yes and the no.
A VOICE. ‘O Titus, can’t you remember?’
TITUS. ‘I can remember everything except …’
VOICE. ‘Except …?’
TITUS. ‘Except the way.’
VOICE. The way where?’
TITUS. ‘The way home.’
VOICE. ‘Home?’
TITUS. ‘Home. Home where the dust gathers and the legends are. But I have lost my bearings.’
VOICE. ‘You have the sun and the North Star.’
TITUS. ‘But is it the same sun? And are the stars the stars of Gormenghast?’
He looked up and was surprised to find himself alone. His hands were cold with sweat, and the dread of being lost and having no proof of his own identity filled him with a sudden stabbing terror.
He looked about him at this sheer and foreign land, and then, all in a breath, something fled across the sky. It made no sound other than the slither of a finger across a slate, though it seemed to have passed as close as a scythe.
By now it was settling, a speck of crimson on the far side of the marble desert where the furthest mansions glinted. It had seemed to have no wings but an incredible purpose and beauty, like a stiletto or a needle, and as Titus fixed his eyes upon the building in whose shadow it lay, he thought he could see not one, but a swarm.
And this was so. Not only was there already quite a fleet of fish-shaped, needle-shaped, knife-shaped, shark-shaped, splinter-shaped devices, but all kinds of land-machines of curious design.
NINETEEN
Before him lay stretched the grey marble, a thousand acres of it, with its margins filled with the reflections of the mansions.
To walk alone across it, in view of all the distant windows, terraces, and roof-gardens was to proclaim arrogance, naked and culpable. But this is what he did, and when he had been walking for some while a small green dart detached itself from the planes on the far side of the arena and sped towards him, its glass-green belly skimming the marble, and an instant later it was upon him, only to veer at the last moment and sing away into the stratosphere, only to plunge, only to circle Titus’ head in narrowing gyres, only to return like a whippet of the air to the black mansion.
Bewildered, startled as he was, Titus began to laugh, though his laughter was not altogether without a touch of hysteria.
This exquisite beast of the air; this wingless swallow; this aerial leopard; this fish of the water-sky; this threader of moonbeams; this dandy of the dawn; this metal play-boy; this wanderer in black spaces; this flash in the night; this drinker of its own speed; this godlike child of a diseased brain – what did it do?
What did it do but act like any other petty snooper, prying upon man and child, sucking information as a bat sucks blood; amoral; mindless; sent out on empty missions, acting as its maker would act, its narrow-headed maker – so that its beauty was a thing on its own, beautiful only because its function shapes it so; and having no heart it becomes fatuous – a fatuous reflection of a fatuous concept – so that it is incongruous, or gobbles incongruity to such an outlandish degree that laughter is the only way out.
And so Titus laughed, and as he laughed, high-pitched and uncontrolled (for at the back of it all he was scared and little relished the idea of being singled out, pin-pointed, and examined by a mechanical brain), while he laughed, he began at the same time to run, for there was something ominous in the air, ominous and ludicrous – something that told him that to stay any longer on this marble tract was to court trouble, to be held a vagrant, a spy, or a madman.
Indeed the sky was beginning to fill with every shape of craft, and little clusters of people were spreading out across the arena like a stain.
TWENTY
Seen from above Titus must have appeared very small as he ran on and on. Seen from above, it could also be realized how isolated in the wide world was the arena with its bright circumference of crystal buildings: how bizarre