That night, upon the balcony, his mother sat upon his right hand like an enormous stranger, and the Poet upon his left, an alien figure. Below him was a vast field of upturned faces. Away ahead of him and far beyond the reach of the great bonfire’s radiance the Mountain was just visible against the dark sky.
The moment was approaching when he must call for the three successful carvers to come forward and for him to draw up the carvings from below with a cord and to place them in full sight of the crowd.
The flames of the bonfire around which the multitude was congregated streamed up into the sky. Its insatiable heat had already reduced a hundred dreams to ashes.
As he watched, a glorious tiger, its snarling head bent back along its spine, and its four feet close together beneath its belly, was flung through the air, by one of the twelve hereditary ‘vandals’. The flames appeared to flick out their arms to receive it, and then they curled about it and began to eat.
His longing to escape came upon him with a sudden and elemental force. He hated this gross wastage that was going on below him. The heat of the evening made him sick. The nearness of his mother and of the abstracted Poet disquieted him. His eyes moved to Gormenghast Mountain. What lay beyond? Was there another land …? Another world? Another kind of life?
If he should leave the castle! The very notion of it made him shake with a mixture of fear and excitement. His thought was so revolutionary that he glanced at his mother’s back to see whether she had heard his mind at work.
If he should leave Gormenghast? He was unable to hazard a guess as to what such a thought implied. He knew of no other place. He had thought before, of Escape. Escape as an abstract idea. But he had never thought seriously of where he would escape to, or of how he would live in some place where he would be unknown.
And a seditious fear that he was in reality of no consequence came over him. That Gormenghast was of no consequence and that to be an earl and the son of Sepulchrave, a direct descendant of the blood line – was something of only local interest. The idea was appalling.
He raised his head and gazed across the thousands of faces below him. He nodded his head in a kind of pompous approval as yet another carving was tossed into the great bonfire. He counted a score of towers to his left. ‘All mine …’ he said, but the words sounded emptily in his head when suddenly something happened which blew his terror and his hope sky-high, which filled him with a joy too huge for him to contain, which took him and shook him out of his indecisions, and swept him into a land of hectic and cruel brilliance, of black glades, and of a magic insupportable.
For, as he was watching, something happened with great rapidity. A coal black raven, its head cocked, its every feather exquisitely chiselled, its claws gripping a wrinkled branch was about to be thrown into the flames when, as Titus watched, in a half-dream, a ripple in the silent, heat-heavy crowd, showed where a single figure was threading its way with an unusual speed. The hereditary ‘vandal’ had hold of the wooden raven by its head and swung back his hand. The bonfire leapt and crackled and lit his face. The arm came forward; the fingers loosed their grip; that raven sailed up in the air, turning over and over and began to fall towards the fire when, as unforeseen and rapid as the course of a dream, there leapt from the body of the fire-lit crowds something that, with a mixture of grace and savagery quite indescribable, snatched at the height of its leap the raven from the air, and holding it above its head continued without a pause or break in the superb rhythm of its flight, and apparently floating over an ivy-covered wall disappeared into the night. For more than a minute there was no movement at all. A dreadful embarrassment held the witnesses immobile as though with a vice. The individual shock that each sustained was heightened by the stunned condition of the mass. Something unthinkable had been done, something so flagrant that the anger that was so soon to show itself was for the moment held back as though by a wall of embarrassment.
Such violation of a hallowed ceremony was unprecedented.
The Countess was one of the first to stir. For the first time since Steerpike’s escape she was moved by a tremendous anger that had no connexion with the skewbald rebel. She rose to her feet and with her big hands gripping the balustrade stared into the night. The congested clouds hung with a terrible nearness and an increasing weight. The air sweated. The crowds began to mutter and to move like bees in a hive. Isolated cries of rage from below the balcony sounded close, raw and horrible.
