Leading the mare by a bridle was a youth he had not seen before. His shoulders were high and the sun shone on a rounded forehead. Over the back of the mare, beneath the saddle-cradle, and hanging almost to the ground, there was hung a gold embroidered carpet riddled with moth holes.
With Titus in the cradle was tied a cardboard crown, a short sword in a sky-blue scabbard and a book, the parchment leaves of which he was creasing with his little sprawling thighs. He was fast asleep.
Behind him, riding side-saddle, came the Countess, her hair like a pin-head of fire. She made no movement as her mount paced on. Then Mr Rottcodd noticed Fuchsia. Her back very straight and her hands loose upon the rein. Then the Aunts in their trap, whom Mr Rottcodd found it difficult to recognize for all the uniqueness of their posture, shed as they were of their purple. He noticed Barquentine, whom he took for Sourdust, his dead father, jabbing his crutch into his horse’s flank, and then Nannie Slagg alone in her conveyance, her hands at her mouth and a stable boy at the pony’s. As vanguard to the pedestrians came the Prunesquallors, Irma’s arm through her brother’s followed by Pentecost and the wedge-faced poet. But who was that mule-headed and stocky man who slouched between them, and where was Swelter the chef, and where was Flay? Following Pentecost, but at a respectful distance, ambled the rank and file – the innumerable menials which the far forest momently disgorged.
To see, after so long a while, the figure heads of the castle pass below him – distant as they were – was, to Rottcodd in his hall of the Bright Carvings, a thing both of satisfaction and of pain. Satisfaction because the ritual of Gormenghast was proceeding as sacredly and deliberately as ever before, and pain because of his new sense of flux, which, inexplicable and irrational as it appeared on the surface, was, nevertheless, something which poisoned his mind and quickened his heart-beat. An intuitive sense of danger which, although in its varying forms and to varying degrees had made itself felt among those who lived below – had not, until this morning disturbed the dusty and sequestered atmosphere in which it had been Mr Rottcodd’s lot to doze away his life.
Sepulchrave dead? And a new Earl – a child not two years old? Surely the very stones of the castle would have passed the message up, or the Bright Carvings have mouthed the secret to him. From the toyland of figures and horses and paths and trees and rocks and from the glimpse of a green reflection in the lake the size of a stamp, arose, of a sudden, the cry of an old voice, cruel, even in its remoteness, and then the silence of the figures moving on, broken by an occasional minutiae of sound as of a tin-tack falling on a brick, as a hoof struck a stone; a bridle creaked with the voice of a gnat, and Rottcodd stared from his eyrie as the figures moved on and on towards the base of the Castle, each with a short black shadow sewn to its heels. The terrain about them was as though freshly painted, or rather, as though like an old landscape that had grown dead and dull it had been varnished and now shone out anew, each fragment of the enormous canvas, pristine, the whole, a glory.
The leading mare with Titus on her back, still fast asleep in the wickerwork saddle, was by now approaching that vaster shadow, cast by the Castle itself, which fanned itself out prodigiously, like a lake of morose water from the base of the stone walls.
The line of figures was stretched out in an attenuate sweep, for even now with the head of the procession beneath the walls the far copses by the lake were still being emptied. Rottcodd switched his eyes back for a moment to the white cats – each on its grey-moss turret. He could see now that they were not merely staring at the group, as before, but towards a certain section of the line, towards the head of the line, where rode the silent Countess. Their bodies were no longer motionless. They were shuddering in the sun; and as Mr Rottcodd turned his pebbly eyes away, and peered at the figurettes below (the three largest of whom might have been fitted into the paw of the most distant of the cats, who were themselves a good fifty feet below Rottcodd), he was forced to return his gaze at once to the heraldic malkins, for they had sent forth in unison from their quivering bodies a siren-like, and most unearthly cry.
The long, dusty hall behind Mr Rottcodd seemed to stretch away into the middle distance, for with its lethal silence reaffirmed by that cry from the outer world, its area appeared to expand and a desert land was at his shoulder blades; and beyond the far door, and under the boards in the halls below, and beneath them stretching on either hand where mute stairs climbed or wound, the brooding castle yawned.
