Three shafts of the rising sun, splintering through the murk, appeared to set fire to the earth where they struck it. The bright impact of the nearest beam exposed a tangle of branches which clawed in a craze of radiance, microscopically perfect and adrift in darkness.
The second of these floodlit islands appeared to float immediately
At its northern extremity there grew from the wasp-gold earth certain forms like eruptions of masonry rather than spires and buttresses of natural rock. The sunshaft had uncovered a mere finger of some habitation which, widening as it entered the surrounding darkness to the North, became a fist of stones, which, in its turn, heaving through wrist and forearm to an elbow like a smashed honeycomb, climbed through darkness to a gaunt, time-eaten shoulder only to expand again and again into a mountainous body of timeless towers.
But of all this nothing was visible but the bright and splintered tip of a stone finger.
The third ‘island’ was the shape of a heart. A coruscating heart of tares on fire.
To the dark edge of this third light a horse was moving. It appeared no bigger than a fly. Astride its back was Titus.
As he entered the curtain of darkness which divided him from his citylike home he frowned. One of his hands gripped the mane of his mount. His heart beat loudly, in the absolute hush. But the horse moved without hesitation, and he was quietened by the regular movement beneath him.
All at once a new ‘island’ of light, undulating as it ran from the east, enlarging its mercurial margins all the while as though to push away the darkness, created in the gloom a fantastic kaleidoscope of fleeting rocks and trees and valleys and ridges – the fluctuating ‘coastline’ flaring in sharp and minute tracery. This flow of radiance was followed by another and another. Great saffron gaps had appeared in the sky – and then, from skyline to skyline, the world was naked light.
Titus shouted. The horse shook its head; and then, over the land of his ancestors, he galloped for home.
But in the excitement of the gallop Titus turned his head from the castle towers, which lifted themselves momently higher above the horizon, turned it to where, away in the cold haze of the dawn Gormenghast Mountain with its claw-like peak threw out its challenge across the thrilling air – ‘
Titus leaned back in the stirrups and tugged his horse to a standstill, for a rare confusion of voices and images had made a cockpit of his panting body. Forests as wet and green as romance itself heaved their thorned branches through him as he sat there shuddering, half turned on the saddle. Swathes of wet foliage shuffled beneath his ribs. In his mouth he tasted the bitterness of leaves. The smell of the forest earth, black with rotted ferns and pungent with fermentation, burned for a moment in his nostrils.
His eyes had travelled down from the high, bare summit of Gormenghast Mountain to the shadowy woods, and then again had turned to the sky. He stared at the sun as it climbed. He felt the day beginning. He turned his horse about. His back was towards Gormenghast.
The mountain’s head shone in a great vacancy of light. It held within its ugly contour either everything or nothing at all. It awakened the imagination by its peculiar emptiness.
And from it came the voice again.
‘
And a host of voices joined. Voices from the sun-blotched glades. From the marshes and the gravel beds. From the birds of the green river reaches. From where the squirrels are and the foxes move and the woodpeckers thicken the drowsy stillness of the day with their far arcadian tapping: from where the rotten hollow of some tree, mellow with richness, glows as though lit from within by the sweet and secret cache of the wild bees.
Titus had risen an hour before the bell. He had hurried into his clothes without a sound, and had then tip-toed through silent halls to a southern gateway; and then, running across a walled-in courtyard, had arrived at the Castle stables. The morning was black and murky, but he was restless for a world without Walls. He had paused at Fuchsia’s door on his way and had tapped at it.
‘Who’s there?’ Her voice had sounded strangely husky from the other side.
‘It’s me,’ said Titus.
‘What do you want?’
‘Nothing,’ said Titus. ‘I’m going for a ride.’
‘It’s beastly weather,’ said Fuchsia. ‘Good-bye.’
