The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy полностью

‘Come here and we will dance together on the battlements. The turrets are white with bird-lime. It is like phosphorus. Join hands with me, Muzzlehatch, and Juno, loveliest of all, and step out into space. We will not fall alone for as we pass window after window, a score of heads will bob along beside us, grinning like ten-to-three. Veil and the Black Rose: Cusp-Canine and the Grasses … and close to me, all the way as we fell, was the head of Fuchsia; her black hair in my eyes, but I could not wait for there was the Thing to seek. The Thing. She lived in the bole of a tree. The walls were honeycombs and the bole droned, but never a bee would sting us. She leapt from branch to branch until the schoolmasters came, Bellgrove, Cutflower, and the rest; their mortar-boards slanting through the shadows. Dig a great pit for them: sing to them. Make flower fairies out of hollyhocks. Throw down the bean-pods like dove-green canoes. That ought to keep them happy through the winter. Happy? Happy? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. The owls are on their way from Gormenghast. Ha, ha, ha! The ravenous owls … the owls … the little owls.’

SEVENTY-TWO

When Titus saw her first he imagined her to be yet another of the crowding images, but as he continued to stare at her he knew that this was no face in the clouds.

She had not seen him open his eyes, and so Titus was afforded the opportunity of watching, for a moment or two, the ice in her features. When she turned her head and saw him staring at her she made no effort to soften her expression, knowing that he had taken her unawares. Instead, she stared at Titus in return, until the moment came when, as though they had been playing the game of staring-one-another-out, she made as though she could keep her features set no longer and the ice melted away and her face broke into an expression that was a mixture of the sophisticated, the bizarre, and the exquisite.

‘You win,’ she said. Her voice was as light and as listless as thistledown.

‘Who are you?’ said Titus.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘As long as I know who you are … or does it?’

‘Who am I then?’

‘Lord Titus of Gormenghast, Seventy-Seventh Earl.’ The words fluttered like autumn leaves.

Titus shut his eyes.

‘Thank God,’ he said.

‘For what?’ said Cheeta.

‘For knowing. I’d grown to almost doubt the bloody place. Where am I? My body’s on fire.’

‘The worst is over,’ said Cheeta.

‘Is it? What kind of worst?’

‘The search. Drink this and lie back.’

‘What a face you have,’ said Titus. ‘It’s paradise on edge. Who are you? Eh? Don’t answer, I know it all. You are a woman! That’s what you are. So let me suck your breasts, like little apples, and play upon your nipples with my tongue.’

‘You are obviously feeling better,’ said the scientist’s daughter.

SEVENTY-THREE

One morning, not very long after he had fully recovered from his fever, Titus rose early, and dressed himself with a kind of gaiety. It was a sensation somewhat foreign to his heart. There had been a time, and not so long ago, when a whim of ludicrous thought could bend him double; when he could laugh at everything and anything as though it were nothing … for all the darkness of his early days. But now it seemed had come a time when there was more darkness than light.

But a time had been reached in his life when he found himself laughing in a different kind of way and at different things. He no longer yelled his laughter. He no longer shouted his joy. Something had left him.

Yet on this particular morning, something of his younger self seemed to be with him as he rolled out of bed and on to his feet. An inexplicable bubble; a twinge of joy.