Peake, Mervyn - 02 Gormenghast

       Steerpike slithered rapidly through the inky darkness. He knew that he must get as far as he could before rising to the air for breath. But like Titus he was deadly tired.

       When he reached the window, the air was half gone from his lungs. He could feel the stone support with his left hand. The keel of the third boat was just above his head and to the right. For a moment he rested and lifted his head to it, and then shoving himself away he passed through the lower half of the window, grazing its rough stone sill, and then turning sharply to his left slid along the wall. Six feet above the darkness in which he swam, the sheen of the surface water lapped the wall beneath the Countess' window.

       He remembered, of course, that one of the two barges was immediately above him. He was swimming beneath a wooden monster, its catwalks bristling with torches - its blunt nose crowded with men.

       What he did not know as he rose to draw breath, his lungs all but bursting, was whether between the side of the long barge and the wall that towered above it, there would be room for his head to rise above the surface.

       He had never seen these castle barges before and had no idea whether their sides rose vertically out of the water, or whether they swelled slightly outwards. If the latter, there was a chance of his being able to be hidden by the convexity, which, reaching out as far as the wall, would leave a long roofed-in ditch where for a little while at least he could breathe and be hidden.

       As he rose he felt for the wall. His fingers were spread out and ready for the touch of the rough stones; and it was with a shock that they made contact, not with stone but with a matted, fibrous, tough subaqueous blanket of that luxuriant wall-ivy which covered so great an area of the castle's face. He had forgotten how, as he had skimmed to the fateful flood-room in the stolen canoe he had noticed this ivy with its long tentacles, and how the face of the castle had appeared not only mutilated and pocked with sockets of where once the glass eyes glittered, but was covered with these climbing rashes of black growth.

       As he clawed at the underwater branches he continued to rise, and all at once his head struck upon the hull of the barge where it bulged out to the wall.

       It was then that he knew that he was nearer death than he had ever been.

       Nearer than when he was caught in the burning arms of the dead Barquentine. Nearer than when he had climbed to Fuchsia's secret attic. For he had no more breath than for a few excruciating seconds. His way was blocked above him. The side of the barge, in swelling outwards made contact with the wall below the surface and blocked his upward path. There was no pocket of air. It was solid water. But even as a great hammer of desperation beat at his temples he turned to the ivy. To drag himself up by its outer branches would simply take him to the long narrow water-filled roof. But how deep was it, this labyrinthine under-water shuffle of saturated midnight; of endless leaves, of hairy arms and fingers?

       With what remained of his strength he fought it. He fought the ivy. He tore at the scales of its throat. He pulled himself into it. He tore at its ligaments, he broke its small water-logged bones; he forced its ribs apart and as they strained to return to their ancient curves he fought his way through them. And as he grappled and pulled his way inwards, something inside him and very far away was saying, 'You have not reached the wall... you have not reached the wall...'

       But neither had he reached the air - and then at a moment when unable to hold his breath any longer, he took his first inevitable draught of water.

       The world had gone black, but with a kind of reflex, his arm and legs fought onwards for a few seconds longer, and then with his head thrown back he collapsed, his body supported by the network of the ivy boughs about him.

       It was some while before he opened his eyes to find that only the mask of his face was above water. He was in a kind of vertical forest - an undergrowth that stood upon its end. He found that he was doing nothing to support himself. He was cradled. He was a fly in a drowned web. But the last spasms of his upward straining body had taken his face above the water.

       Slowly he turned his eyes. He was but a few inches above the level of the barge's catwalk. He could see nothing of the barge itself, but through gaps in the ivy the torches shone like jewels, and so he lay in the arms of the giant creeper and heard a voice from above: 'All boats will stand out from the cave-mouth. A line will be formed across the bay immediately. Light every torch aboard, every lantern, every stick! Ropes will be passed beneath the keel of every boat! This man could hide in a rudder. By the powers, he has more life in him than the lot of you...'

       Her voice, in the complete silence that had followed the withdrawal of the squall, sounded like cannon fire.

       'Great hell, he is no merman! He has no tailor fins! He must breathe! He must breathe!'

       The boats moved out with much splashing of oars and paddles, and the two barges wallowing in the still water were shoved away from the wall. But while the various craft moved into the open bay and began to form a line sufficiently far out as to be beyond the range of any under-water swimmer, Titus, standing beside his mother at the window, hardly knowing that she was there or that the boats had moved, for all the commotion and for all the violence and volume of his mother's orders, had his eyes focused, fanatically, upon something almost immediately below him. What his eyes were fixed upon seemed innocent enough, and no one but Titus in his febrile state would have continued to scrutinize a small area of ivy a foot above the surface of the water. It was no different from any other section that might be chosen at random from the great blanket of leaves. But Titus, who, before his mother's arrival at the window beside him, had been rocking in a kind of dizzy sickness to and fro had, as the accumulated effect of his rising fever and physical exhaustion began to reach a final stage, seen a movement that he could not understand - a movement that was not apart of his dizziness.

       It was a sharp and emphatic commotion among the ivy leaves. The water and the boats and the world were swaying. Everything was swaying. But this disturbance of the ivy was not a part of this great drift of illness. It was not inside his head. It was taking place in the world below him - a world that had become as silent and motionless as a sheet of glass.

       His heartbeat quickened with a leaping guess.

       And out of his guess, out of his weakness, a kind of power climbed through him like sap. Not the power of Gormenghast, or the pride of lineage. These were but dead-sea fruit. But the power of the imagination's pride. He, Titus, the traitor, was about to prove his existence, spurred by his anger, spurred by the romanticism of his nature which cried not now for paper boats, or marbles, or the monsters on their stilts, or the mountain cave, or the Thing afloat among the golden oaks, or anything but vengeance and sudden death and the knowledge that he was not watching any more, but living at the core of drama.

       His mother stood at his shoulder. Behind her a group of officers obtained the best view that they could of the scene without. He must make no mistake. At a slip or a sign a dozen hands would grab him.

       He slipped his knife into his belt, his hand shaking as though it were blue with cold. Then he rested his hands upon the window-sill again and as he did so he stole a glance over his shoulder. His mother stood with her arms folded. She stared at the scene before her with a merciless intensity. The men behind him were dangerously close but were gazing past him to where the boats were forming a single line.

       And then, almost before he had decided to do so, he gathered his strength together and half vaulting, half tumbling himself over the sill, fell the first half dozen feet through the loose outer fringes of the ivy, before he snatched at the stems and, checking the momentum of his descent, found that he was at last hanging from branches that had ceased to break.

       He had noted that the small, suspicious area of ivy for which he was making was directly below the window from which he had vaulted (and which was now filled with startled faces), directly below, and at water level. He could hear his name being called and orders being shouted across the 'bay' for a boat to be brought up immediately, but they were sounds from another world.

       And yet, while this sense of being far removed from what he was doing held him suspended in a world of dreams he was, at the same time, drawn down the ivy-wall as though by a magnet. Within the blur of weakness and remoteness was a core of vivid impulse, an immediate purpose.

       He hardly knew what his body was doing. His arms and legs and hands seemed to be making their own decisions. He followed them downwards through the leaves.

       But Steerpike, who had had to alter his position when an unbearable cramp had affected his left leg and shoulder, and who had hoped that a careful stretching of his limbs would in no way affect the stillness of the outermost leaves, had by now heard the noise of branches breaking above him, and knew that the results of his movement were dire indeed. After so desperately fought a battle for refuge from his pursuers, it was indeed a malicious fate that saw to it that he should so soon be discovered.

       He had of course no idea that it was the young earl who was descending upon him. His eyes were fixed upon the dark tangle of fibrous arms above his face. It was obvious that whosoever it was would not make his descent through the body of the ivy, close to the wall. To do this would be to move at a snail's pace, and to battle all the way with the heaviest branches. His pursuer would slide down the outer foliage and probably burrow wall-wards when a little above and out of reach of him.

       And this is what Titus intended, for when he was about five feet above the water he came to a stop and waited a little to regain his breath.

       The moon which was now high in the sky had to some extent made the torches redundant. The bosom of the bay was leprous. The ivy leaves reflected a glossy light. The faces at the windows were both blanched and wooden.

       For a moment he wondered whether Steerpike had moved, had climbed from where a foot above the water he had seen the tell-tale ivy come to life and shiver, and whether he, Titus, was even now within a few inches of his foe, and in mortal peril. It seemed strange at that instant that no daggered hand arose out of the leaves and stabbed him where he hung. But nothing happened. The silence was accentuated rather than lessened by the sound of distant oars rising and falling in the bay.

       Then, with his left hand gripping some interior stem, he forced away the swathes before his face and peered into the heart of the foliage where the branches shone like a network of white and twisted bones at the inrush of the moonbeams.

       There was but one course for him. To burrow in as deeply as he could, and then to descend in the gloom until he found his foe. The moonlight was now so strong that a kind of deep twilight had taken the place of the rayless midnight among the leaves. Only at the deeply-hidden face of the wall itself was the darkness complete. If Titus could reach as far inward as the wall and work his way down it might be possible to see, before he reached the level of the flood, some shape that was not the shape of ivy branch or leaf - some curve or angle that loomed among the leaves - perhaps an elbow, or a knee, or the bulge of a forehead...

VI

The murderer had not moved. Why should he move? There was little to choose between one cradle of ivy and another. What was there to be gained by any temporary evasion? Where could he escape to, anyway? The patch of ivy was a mere seventy feet in breadth. It was only a matter of time before his capture. But time when it is short is very sweet and very precious. He would stay where he was. He would indulge himself - would taste the peculiar quality of near-death on the tongue - would loll above the waters of Lethe.

       It was not that he had lost his will to live. It was that his brain was so exact and cold a thing that when it told him that his life, for this reason, and for that reason, was within a few hours of its end, he had no faculties wherewith to combat its logic. Below him was the water in which he could not breathe. To the north was the water through which to swim was immediate capture. To move to his left or right would bring him to the margins of the ivy. To climb would bring him to the scores of windows in every one of which there was a face.

       Whoever it was who was crawling towards him down the wall had presumably informed the world of his purpose, or had been given orders to come to grips. Someone had seen a movement in the ivy.

       But it was strange that, as far as he could hear, there was only one boat approaching. The rise and fall of the two oars were distant but perfectly distinct; why was not the whole flotilla on its way towards him?

       As he drew his knife to and fro across his forearm some dust fell through the twisted stems above him and then a branch broke with a crack that seemed within a yard of his head.

       But it was not immediately above him, this noise. It appeared to come from deeper in the ivy, from somewhere between himself and the wall.

       For him to move would be to make a sound. He was curled up like an emaciated child in a cot of twigs. But with his right hand gripping the dagger at his left shoulder, he was prepared at any instant to make an upward stab.

       His small, close-set eyes smouldered with an unnatural concentration in the darkness, but it was not their natural colour, extraordinary as that was, that showed in the gloom, but something more terrible. It was as though the red blood in his brain, or behind his eyes, was reflected in the lenses. His lips, thin as a prude's, had fused into a single bloodless thread.

       And now he began to experience again, but with even greater intensity, those sensations that affected him when, with the skeletons of the titled sisters at his feet, he had strutted about their relics as though in the grip of some primordial power.

       This sensation was something so utterly alien to the frigid nature of his conscious brain that he had no means of understanding what was happening within him at this deeper level, far less of warding off the urge to 'show himself'. For an arrogant wave had entered him and drowned his brain in black, fantastic water.

       His passion to remain in secret had gone. What was left of vigour in his body craved to strut and posture.

       He no longer wanted to kill his foe in darkness and in silence. His lust was to stand naked upon the moonlit stage, with his arms stretched high, and his fingers spread, and with the warm fresh blood that soaked them sliding down his wrists, spiralling his arms and steaming in the cold night air - to suddenly drop his hands like talons to his breast and tear it open to expose a heart like a black vegetable - and then, upon the crest of self-exposure, and the sweet glory of wickedness, to create some gesture of supreme defiance, lewd and rare; and then with the towers of Gormenghast about him, cheat the castle of its jealous right and die of his own evil in the moonbeams.