The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [551]
The voice was in the doorway; a cloud moved over the sun; and the sunbeams died from the pillow.
But the rich voice was still a part of his dream, though his eyes were open. It was blended with that rush of images and sounds which swarmed and expanded as the creature of his nightmare, falling at length into a lake of pale rainwater, vanished in a spurt of steam.
And as it sank, fathom by darkening fathom, a great host of heads, foreign yet familiar, arose from the deep and bobbed upon the water – and a hundred strange yet reminiscent voices began to call across the waves until from horizon to horizon he was filled with a great turbulence of sight and sound.
Then, suddenly, his eyes were wide open –
Where was he?
The empty darkness of the wall which faced him gave him no answer. He touched it with his hand.
Who was he? There was no knowing. He shut his eyes again. In a few moments there was no noise at all, and then the scuffling sound of a bird in the ivy outside the tall window recalled the world that was outside himself – something apart from this frightful zoneless nullity.
As he lifted himself up on one elbow, his memory returning in small waves, he could not know that a figure filled the doorway of his room – not so much in bulk as in the intensity of her presence – filled it as a tigress fills the opening of her cave.
And like a tigress she was striped: yellow and black: and because of the dark shadows behind her, only the yellow bands were visible, so that she appeared to be cut in pieces by the horizontal sweeps of a sword. And so she was like some demonstration of magic – a ‘severed woman’ – quite extraordinary and wonderful to see. But there was no one to see her, for Titus had his back to her.
And Titus could not see that her hat, plumed and piratical, sprouted as naturally from her head as the green fronds from the masthead of a date-palm.
She raised her hand to her breast. Not nervously; but with a kind of tense and tender purpose.
Propped upon his elbow with his back to her, his aloneness touched her sharply. It was wrong that he should be so single; so contained, so little merged into her own existence.
He was an island surrounded by deep water. There was no isthmus leading to her bounty; no causeway to her continent of love.
There are times when the air that floats between mortals becomes, in its stillness and silence, as cruel as the edge of a scythe.
‘O Titus! Titus, my darling!’ she cried. ‘What are you thinking of?’
He did not turn his head immediately, although at the first sound of her voice he was instantaneously aware of his surroundings. He knew that he was being watched – that Juno was very close indeed.
When at last he turned, she took a step towards the bed and she smiled with genuine pleasure to see his face. It was not a particularly striking face. With the best will in the world it could not be said that the brow or the chin or the nose or the cheekbones were chiselled. Rather, it seemed, the features of his head had, like the blurred irregularities of a boulder, been blunted by the wash of many tides. Youth and time were indissolubly fused.
She smiled to see the disarray of his brown hair and the lift of his eyebrows and the half-smile on his lips that seemed to have no more pigment in them than the warm sandy colour of his skin.
Only his eyes denied to his head the absolute simplicity of a monochrome. They were the colour of smoke.
‘What a time of day to sleep!’ said Juno, seating herself on the edge of the bed.
She took a mirror from her bag and bared her teeth for a moment as she scrutinized the line of her top lip, as though it were not hers but something which she might or might not purchase. It was perfectly drawn – a single sweep of carmine.
She put her mirror away