The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy (103 page)

Every evening it was taken up and placed outside Barquentine’s door, this boulder, and every morning the old man lifted it up above the iron ring in the floorboards of his room, spat on it, and sent it hurtling down the crooked funnel, its hoarse clanging growing fainter and fainter as it approached the eating-room. It was a warning to the servants that he was on his way down, that his breakfast and a number of other preliminaries were to be ready.

To the clank of the boulder a score of hearts made echo. On this particular morning as Barquentine spat upon the heavy stone, the size of a melon, and sent it netherward on its resounding journey past many a darkened floor of bedded inmates (who, waking as it leapt behind their couches in the hollow of the walls, cursed him, the dawn and this cock-crow of a boulder) – on this particular morning there was more than the normal light of lust for ritual in the wreckage of the ancient’s face – there was something more, as though his greed for the observances to take place in the shadow of his aegis was filling him with a passion hardly bearable in so sere a frame.

There was one picture on the wall of his verminous hovel; an engraving, yellow with age and smirched with dust, for it had no glass across it, save the small ice-like splinter at one corner that was all that remained of the original glazing. This engraving, a large and meticulous affair, was of the Tower of Flints. The artist must have stood to the south of the tower as he worked or as he studied the edifice, for beyond the irregularity of turrets and buttresses that backed it and spread almost to the sky like a seascape of stormy roofage, could be seen the lower slopes of Gormenghast Mountain, mottled with clumps of shrub and conifer.

What Barquentine had not noticed was that the doorway of the Tower of Flints had been cut away. A small area of paper, the size of a stamp was missing. Behind this hole the wall had been laboriously pierced so that a little tunnel of empty darkness ran laterally from Barquentine’s chamber to the hollow and capacious shaft of a vertical chimney, whose extremity was blocked from the light by a landslide of fallen slates long sealed and cushioned with gold moss, and whose round base, like the base of a well of black air, gave upon the small cell-like room so favoured by Steerpike that even at this early and chilly hour he was sitting there, at the base of the shaft. All about him were mirrors of his own construction, placed to a nicety, each at its peculiar angle, while above him, punctuating the tubular darkness, a constellation of mirrors twinkled with points of light one above the other.

Every now and again Barquentine would be reflected immediately behind the hollow mouthway of the engraved Tower of Flints where an angled mirror in the shaft sent down his image to another and then another – mirror glancing to mirror – until Steerpike, reclining at the base of the chimney, with a magnifying glass in his hands peered amusedly at the terminal reflection and saw in miniature the crimson rags of the dwarfish pedant as he raised the boulder in his hands and flung it through the ring.

If Barquentine rose early from his hideous couch, Steerpike in a secret room of his own choosing, a room as spotless and bright as a new pin, arose earlier. This was not a habit with him. He had no habits in that sort of way. He did what he wanted to do. He did what furthered his plans. If getting up at five in the morning would lead to something he coveted, then it was the most natural thing in the world for him to rise at that hour. If there was no necessity for action he would lie in bed all morning reading, practising knots with the cord he kept by his bedside, making paper darts of complicated design which he would float across his bedroom, or polishing the steel of the razor-edged blade of his swordstick.

At the moment it was to his advantage to impress Barquentine with his efficiency, indispensability and dispatch. Not that he had not already worked his way beneath the cantankerous crust of the old man’s misanthropy. He was in fact the only living creature who had ever gained Barquentine’s confidence and grudging approval.

Without fully realizing it, Barquentine, during his daily administrations, was pouring out a hoard of irreplaceable knowledge, pouring it into the predatory and capacious brain of a young man whose ambition it was, when he had gained sufficient knowledge of the observances, to take over the ceremonial side of the castle’s life, and, in being the only authority in the minutiae of the law (for Barquentine was to be liquidated), to alter to his own ends such tenets as held him back from ultimate power and to forge such fresh, though apparently archaic documents, as might best serve his evil purposes as the years went by.

Barquentine spoke little. In the pouring out of his knowledge there was no verbal expansiveness. It was largely through action and through access to the Documents that Steerpike learned his ‘trade’. The old man had no idea that day after day the accumulating growth of Steerpike’s cognizance and the approach of his own death moved towards one another through time, at the same pace. He had no wish to instruct the young man beyond the point of self-advantage. The pale creature was useful to him and that was all, and were he to have known how much had been divulged of Gormenghast’s inner secrets through the seemingly casual exchanges and periodical researches in the library, he would have done all in his power to eliminate from the castle’s life this upstart, this dangerous, unprecedented upstart, whose pursuit of the doctrines was propelled by a greed for personal power as cold as it was tameless.

The time was almost ripe in Steerpike’s judgement for the Master of Ritual to be dispatched. Apart from other motives the wiping out of so ugly a thing as Barquentine seemed to Steerpike, upon aesthetic considerations alone, an act long overdue. Why should such a bundle of hideousness be allowed to crutch its way about, year after year?

Steerpike admired beauty. It did not absorb him. It did not affect him. But he admired it. He was neat, adroit, slick as his own swordstick, sharp as its edge, polished as its blade. Dirt offended him. Untidiness offended him. Barquentine, old, filthy, his face cracked and pitted like stale bread, his beard tangled, dirty and knotted, sickened the young man. It was time for the dirty core of ritual to be plucked out of the enormous mouldering body of the castle’s life and for him to take its place, and from that hidden centre – who knew how far his tangent wits might lead him?

It was a wonder to Barquentine how Steerpike was able to meet him with such uncanny precision and punctuality sunrise after sunrise. It was not as though his lieutenant sat there waiting outside the Master’s door, or at some landing on the stairs by which Barquentine made his way to the small eating-room. O no. Steerpike, his straw-coloured hair smoothed down across his high globular forehead, his pale face shining, his dark red eyes disconcertingly alive beneath his sandy eyebrows, would walk rapidly out of the shadows and, coming to a smart halt at the old man’s side, would incline himself at a slight angle from the hips.

There was no change this morning in the dumb show. Barquentine wondered, for the hundredth time, how Steerpike should coincide so exactly with his arrival at the top of the walnut stairs, and as usual drew his brows down over his eyes and peered suspiciously through the veils of unpleasant moisture that smouldered there, at the pale young man.

‘Good morning to you, sir,’ said Steerpike.

Barquentine, whose head was on a level with the banisters, put out a tongue like the tongue of a boot and ran it along the wreckage of his dry and wrinkled lips. Then he took a grotesque hop forwards on his withered leg and brought his crutch to his side with a sharp report.

Whether his face was made of age, as though
age
were a stuff, or whether age was the abstract of that face of his, that bearded fossil of a thing that smouldered and decayed upon his shoulders – there was no doubt that archaism was there, as though something had shifted from the past into the current moment where it burned darkly as though through blackened glass in defiance of its own anachronism and the callow present.

He turned this head of his to Steerpike.

‘To hell fire with your “good morning”, you peeled switch,’ he said. ‘You shine like a bloody land-eel! What d’you do to yourself, eh? Every poxy sunrise of the year, eh, that you burst out of the decent darkness in that plucked way?’

‘I suppose it’s this habit of washing I seem to have got into, sir.’

‘
Washing
,’ hissed Barquentine, as though he was mentioning something pestilent. ‘
Washing
, you wire-worm. What do you think you
are
, Mister Steerpike? A lily?’

‘I’d hardly say that, sir,’ said the young man.

‘Nor would I,’ barked the old man.’ Just skin and bones and hair? That’s all you bloody are and nothing more. Dull yourself down. Get the shine off you – and no more of this oiled-paper nonsense, every dawn.’

‘Quite so, sir. I am too visible.’

‘Not when you’re wanted!’ snapped Barquentine, as he began to hobble downstairs. ‘You can be invisible enough when you want to be, eh? Hags-hell, boy, you can be nowhere when it suits you, eh? By the guts of the great auk! I see through
you
– my pretty whelp! I see through you!’

‘What, when I’m invisible, sir?’ asked Steerpike, raising his eyebrows as he trod lightly behind the cripple who was raising echoes on all sides with the stamping of his crutch on the wooden stairs.

‘By the piss of Satan, pug, your sauce is dangerous!’ shouted Barquentine hoarsely, turning precariously in his tracks, with his withered leg two steps above his crutch.

‘Are the north-cloisters done?’ He shot the question at Steerpike, in a changed tone of voice – a tone no less vicious, cantankerous, but pleasanter to the young man’s ear, being less personally vituperative.

‘They were completed last night, sir.’

‘Under your guidance, for what it’s worth?’

‘Under my guidance.’

They were approaching the first landing of the walnut stairs. Steerpike, as he trod behind Barquentine, took a pair of dividers from his pocket, and using them as though they were tongs, lifted up a hank of the old man’s hair from the back of his head, to reveal a neck as wry as a turtle’s. Amused by his success at being able to raise so thick a bunch of dirty grey hair without the cripple’s knowledge, he repeated the performance while the harsh voice continued and the crutch clack-clack-clacked down the long flight.

‘I shall inspect them immediately after breakfast.’

‘Quite so,’ said Steerpike.

‘Has it occurred to your suckling-brain that this day is hallowed by the very dirt of the castle. Eh? Eh? That it is only once a year, boy, once a year, that the Poet is honoured? Eh? Why, the lice in my beard alone know, but there it is, by the black souls of the unbelievers, there it is, a law of laws, a rite of the first water,
dear
child. The cloisters are ready, you say; by the sores on my withered leg, you’ll pay for it if they’re coloured the wrong red. Eh? Was it the darkest red of all? Eh – the darkest of all the reds?’

‘Quite the darkest,’ said Steerpike. ‘Any darker and it would have been black.’

‘By hell, it had better be,’ said Barquentine. ‘And the rostrum?’ he continued after crossing the gnarled landing of black walnut with its handrail missing from the banisters and the banisters themselves leaning in all directions and capped with dust as palings are capped with snow in wintertime.

‘And the rostrum?’

‘It is set and garnished,’ said Steerpike. ‘The throne for the Countess has been cleaned and mended, and the high chairs for the gentry, polished. The long forms are in place and fill the quadrangle.’

‘And the Poet,’ cried Barquentine. ‘Have you instructed him, as I ordered you? Does he know what is expected of him?’

‘His rhetoric is ready, sir.’

‘Rhetoric? Cat’s teeth! Poetry, you bastard, Poetry.’

‘It has been prepared, sir!’ Steerpike had re-pocketed his dividers and was now holding a pair of scissors (he seemed to have endless things in his pockets without disturbing the hang of his clothes) and was clipping off strands of Barquentine’s hair where it hung below his collar, and was whispering to himself in an absurd undertone, ‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor’ as the matted wisps fell upon the stairs.

They had reached another landing. Barquentine stopped for a moment to scratch himself. ‘He may have prepared his poem,’ he said turning his time-wasted visage to the slender, high shouldered young man, ‘but have you told him about the magpie? Eh?’

‘I told him that he must rise to his feet and declaim within twelve seconds of the magpie’s release from the wire cage. That while declaiming his left hand must be clasping the beaker of moat-water in which the Countess has previously placed the blue pebble from Gormenghast river.’

‘That is so, boy. And that he shall be wearing the Poet’s Gown, that his feet shall be bare, did you tell him that?’

‘I did,’ said Steerpike.

‘And the yellow benches for the Professors. Were they found?’

‘They were. In the south stables. I have had them re-painted.’

‘And the seventy-seventh earl, Lord Titus, does the pup know that he is to stand when the rest are seated, and seat himself when the rest are standing? Does the child know that – eh – eh – he is a scatterbrained thing – have you instructed him, you skinned candle? By the gripes of my seventy years, your forehead shines like a bloody iceberg!’

‘He has been instructed,’ said Steerpike.