Thus while reconstructing this book I worked primarily from the first typescript, constantly checking the second to ensure that I incorporated those alterations made by Peake, at a later date, to the section that had not been modified by the editor.
My aim has been to incorporate all Peake’s own corrections while ignoring all other alterations. It has also been to try to make the book as consistent as possible with the minimum of my own alterations.
I have been forced to exercise my own judgement only in a few places, where normally one would have been obliged to consult the author. I have changed several inconsistencies, the only important alteration being the reluctant deletion of twenty-five words of Titus’ delirium, in which he remembered characters whom only the reader, not he, had met.
Had Peake been able to continue there is no doubt that he would have polished the story still more. But I believe that in this version the factory has become a much more powerful expression of that evil which attained for Peake its supreme manifestations when, having been commissioned as a war artist, he entered Belsen at the end of the war. Peake seemed to regard evil and tragedy as a tangible force, and the book reflects a struggle that was taking place in reality, when Peake himself was facing a horror more dreadful and more protracted than that endured by Titus, and to which, after ten years, he succumbed.
ONE
To north, south, east or west, turning at will, it was not long before his landmarks fled him. Gone was the outline of his mountainous home. Gone that torn world of towers. Gone the grey lichen; gone the black ivy. Gone was the labyrinth that fed his dreams. Gone ritual, his marrow and his bane. Gone boyhood. Gone.
It was no more than a memory now; a slur of the tide; a reverie, or the sound of a key, turning.
From the gold shores to the cold shores: through regions thighbone-deep in sumptuous dust: through lands as harsh as metal, he made his way. Sometimes his footsteps were inaudible. Sometimes they clanged on stone. Sometimes an eagle watched him from a rock. Sometimes a lamb.
Where is he now? Titus the Abdicator? Come out of the shadows, traitor, and stand upon the wild brink of my brain!
He cannot know, wherever he may be, that through the worm-pocked doors and fractured walls, through windows bursted, gaping, soft with rot, a storm is pouring into Gormenghast. It scours the flagstones; churns the sullen moat; prises the long beams from their crumbling joists; and howls! He cannot know, as every moment passes, the multifarious action of his home.
A rocking-horse, festooned with spiders’ rigging, sways where there’s no one in a gusty loft.
He cannot know that as he turns his head, three armies of black ants, in battle order, are passing now like shades across the spines of a great library.
Has he forgotten where the breastplates burn like blood within the eyelids, and great domes reverberate to the coughing of a rat?
He only knows that he has left behind him, on the far side of the skyline, something inordinate; something brutal; something tender; something half real: something half dream; half of his heart; half of himself.
And all the while the far hyena laughter.
TWO
The sun sank with a sob and darkness waded in from all horizons so that the sky contracted and there was no more light left in the world, when, at this very moment of annihilation, the moon, as though she had been waiting for her cue, sailed up the night.
Hardly knowing what he was doing, young Titus moored his small craft to the branch of a riverside tree and stumbled ashore. The margins of the river were husky with rushes, a great militia whose contagious whisperings suggested discontent, and with this sound in his ears he dragged his way through the reeds, his feet sinking ankle-deep in ooze.
It was his hazy plan to take advantage of the rising ground that was heaping itself up upon the right bank, and to climb its nearest spur, in order to gain a picture of what lay ahead of him, for he had lost his way.
But when he had fought his way up-hill through the vegetation, and by the time he had fallen in a series of mishaps and had added to the long tears in his clothes, so that it was a wonder that they held together at all – by this time, though he found himself at the crown of a blunt grass hill, he had no eyes for the landscape, but fell to the ground at the foot of what appeared to be a great boulder that swayed; but it was Titus who was swaying, and who fell exhausted with fatigue and hunger.
There he lay, curled up, and vulnerable it seemed in his sleep, and lovable also as are all sleepers by reason of their helplessness; their arms thrown wide, their heads turned to some curious angle that moves the heart.
But the wise are careful in their compassion, for sleep can be like snow on a harsh rock and melt away at the first fleck of sentience.
