Peake, Mervyn - 02 Gormenghast

SIXTY-EIGHT

I

It was hunger that finally woke him. For a while as he lay with his eyes still closed he imagined himself to be in his room at the castle. Even when he opened his eyes and found on his right-hand side the rough wall of a rock and on his left a curtain of thick ferns he could not remember where he was. And then he became aware of a roaring sound and all at once he remembered how he had escaped from the castle and had made his way through an eternity of rain until he had come to a cave... to Flay's cave... to this cave in which he was now lying.

It was then that he heard something move. It was not a loud sound and it was only audible above the thrumming of the storm because of its nearness.

His first thought was that it was one of the animals, perhaps a hare, and his hunger made him cautious as he rose upon his elbow and parted the long tongue of the ferns.

But what he saw was something that made him forget his hunger as though it had never been: that made him start backwards against the rock and sent the blood rushing to his head. For it was she! But not as he remembered her. It was she! But how different!

What had his memory done to her that he should now be seeing a creature so radically at variance with the image that had filled his mind?

There she sat, the Thing, balanced upon her heels, unbelievably small, the light of a fresh fire flickering over her as she swivelled a plucked bird on a spit above the flames. All about her were scattered the feathers of a magpie. Was this the lyric swallow? The fleet limbed hurdler?

Was this small creature who was now squatting there like a frog in the dust, and scratching her thigh with a dirty hand the size of a beech leaf, was this what had floated through his imagination in arrogant rhythms that spanned the universe?

Yes, it was she. The vision had contracted to the small and tangible proportions of the uncompromising urchin - the rare-faction had become clay.

And then she turned her head and Titus saw a face that shocked and thrilled him. All that was Gormenghast within him shuddered: shuddered and bridled up in a kind of anger. All that was rebellious in him cried with joy: with the joy of witnessing the heart of defiance. The confusion in his breast was absolute. His memory of her, of a proud and gracile creature, was now destroyed. It was no longer true. It had become trite, shallow and saccharine. Proud, she was and vibrant in all conscience. And graceful, perhaps in flight - but not now. There was nothing graceful in the way her body, uninhibited as an animal's, crouched over the flames. This was something new and earthy.

Titus who had been in love with an arrogance and a swallow-like beauty of limb, so that he longed savagely and fearfully to clasp it was now aware of how there were these new dimensions, this dark reality of slaughtered birds, of scattered feathers, of an animal's posture and above all of an ignorant originality that was redolent in her every gesture.

Her head had turned. He had seen her face. He was staring at an original. It was not that the face had any unique peculiarity of proportion or feature but that it was so blatant an index of all she was.

And yet it was not through any particular mobility of the features that it conveyed the independence of her life. The line of the mouth seldom altered, save when, in devouring the roasted bird, she bit with an undue ferocity. No: the face was more mask-like than expressive. It symbolized her way of life, not her immediate thoughts. It was the colour of a robin's egg, and as closely freckled. Her hair was black and thick but she had hacked it away, a little above her shoulders. Her rounded neck was set upright upon her shoulders, and was so flexible that the liquid ease with which she turned it was reminiscent of a serpent.

It was through such motions as this, and the movements of her small shoulders and in the quickness of her fingers that she conveyed to Titus, more vividly than any expression of the features could ever do, the quality of her fanatical independence.

As he watched she tossed the bones of the magpie over her shoulder, and dipping her hand into the shadows at her side drew up, out of the darkness that she cast, the little carving of the raven. Turning it round and round in her hand she stared at it intently, but no vestige of an expression crossed her face. She placed it on the ground at her side, but the earth was uneven and it fell forwards upon its face. Without a moment's hesitation she struck it with her clenched fist as a child might strike a toy in anger, and then, rising in a smooth and single action to her feet, she flicked it out of her way with her foot so that it lay upon its side against the wall.

Upon her feet she had become another thing. It was difficult to reconcile her with the creature who had squatted by the fire. She had become a sapling. Her face was turned to where the water streamed across the cave-mouth. For a few moments she stared expressionlessly at the rain-filled opening and then she moved towards it, but at her third step she stopped and as her body tautened her head gyrated on her neck. Her shoulders had not moved, but as her head swivelled, her eyes sped around the walls of the cave. Something had disturbed her.

Her slender body was poised for instantaneous action. Again her eyes flew across the walls piercing every shadow, and then for a moment they stayed their flight and Titus could see from his dark recess that she had seen his shirt where it lay, torn and sodden, on the floor of the cave.

She turned and with a tread both light and apprehensive approached the garment that lay in a pool of its own making. She sat down on her heels at its side, and again she was a frog, an almost repellent thing. Her eyes still moved about the cave, suspiciously. For a little while they lingered upon the giant ferns that, arching over Titus, hid him in their shadows.

Swivelling her head she stared backwards to the mouth of the cave, but only for a second; for the next moment she had taken the shirt, and held it up before her. A stream of rain water slid from its folds to the floor; she crushed the cloth together and then began to wring it out with a surprising strength and then spreading it out upon the ground she gazed at it, her expressionless head upon one side like a bird's.

Titus, half numbed by his cramped position, was forced to lie back and rest his arms and straighten his leg. When he rose again upon his elbow she was no longer by the shirt but was standing at the cave-mouth. He knew that he could not stay where he was for ever. Sooner or later he must make his presence known - and he was about to get to his feet whatever the consequences when a glare of lightning showed him the Thing silhouetted against the brilliance, her backbone arched a little, her head thrown back to catch the stream of translucent rain that golden as the lightning itself was falling directly into her upturned mouth. For that split second of time she was something cut out of black paper, her head meticulous in its contour, the mouth wide open as though to drink the sky.

And then the dark came down, and he saw her appear out of the gloom and grow more visible as she approached the embers of the fire. It was evident that the shirt fascinated her, for she paused when she reached it, and stared at it now from one angle, now from another. Finally she took it up and pulling it over her head and thrusting her arms through the sleeves she stood as though in a nightgown.

Titus, whose conception of the Thing had been flung from one side of his mind to the other, so that he hardly knew whether she was a frog, a snake, or a gazelle, was now powerless to assimilate the bizarre transfiguration that now stood within a few feet of him.

All he knew was that what he had so avidly sought was with him in the cave, had sheltered, like himself, from the storm and was now standing like a child, staring down at his shirt that fell in wet folds almost to the ankles.