TWELVE
A roof of cloud stretching to every horizon held the air motionless beneath it, as though the earth and sky, pressing towards one another, had squeezed away its breath. Below the cruddled underside of the unbroken cloud-roof, the air, through some peculiar trick of light, which had something of an under-water feeling about it, reflected enough of itself from the gaunt back of Gormenghast to make the herons restive as they stood and shivered on a long-abandoned pavement half in and half out of the clouds.
The stone stairway which led up to this pavement was lost beneath a hundred seasons of obliterating ivy, creepers and strangling weeds. No one alive had ever struck their heels into the great cushions of black moss that pranked the pavement or wandered along its turreted verge, where the herons were and the jackdaws fought, and the sun's rays, and the rain, the frost, the snow and the winds took their despoiling turns.
There had once been a great casement facing upon this terrace. It was gone.
Neither broken glass nor iron nor rotten wood was anywhere to be seen. Beneath the moss and ground creepers it may be that there were other and deeper layers, rotten with antiquity; but where the long window had stood the hollow darkness of a hall remained. It opened its unprotected mouth midway along the pavement's inner verge. On either side of this cavernous opening, widely separated, were the raw holes in the stonework that were once the supporting windows. The hall itself was solemn with herons. It was there they bred and tended their young. Preponderately a heronry, yet there were recesses and niches in which by sacredness of custom the egrets and bitterns congregated.
This hall, where once the lovers of a bygone time paced and paused and turned one about another in forgotten measures to the sound of forgotten music, this hall was carpeted with lime-white sticks. Sometimes the setting sun as it neared the horizon slanted its rays into the hall, and as they skimmed the rough nests the white network of the branches flared on the floor like leprous corals, and here and there (if it were spring) a pale blue-green egg shone like a precious stone, or a nest of young, craning their long necks towards the window, their thin bodies covered with powder-down, seemed stage-lit in the beams of the westering sun.
The late sunbeams shifted across the ragged floor and picked out the long, lustrous feathers that hung from the throat of a heron that stood by a rotten mantelpiece; and then a whiteness once more as the forehead of an adjacent bird flamed in the shadows... and then, as the light traversed the hall, an alcove was suddenly dancing with the varied bars and blotches and the reddish-yellow of the bitterns.
As dusk fell, the greenish light intensified in the masonry. Far away, over the roofs, over the outer wall of Gormenghast, over the marshes, the wasteland, the river and the foothills with their woods and spinneys, and over the distant hazes of indeterminate terrain, the claw-shaped head of Gormenghast Mountain shone like a jade carving. In the green air the herons awoke from their trances and from within the hall there came the peculiar chattering and clanking sound of the young as they saw the darkness deepening and knew that it would soon be time for their parents to go hunting.
Crowded as they had been in their heronry with its domed roof, once golden and green with a painting, but now a dark, disintegrating surface where flakes of paint hung like the wings of moths - yet each bird appeared as a solitary figure as it stepped from the hall to the terrace: each heron, each bittern, a recluse, pacing solemnly forwards on its thin, stiltlike legs.
Of a sudden in the dusk, knocking as it were a certain hollow note to which their sweet ribs echoed, they were in air - a group of herons, their necks arched back, their ample and rounded wings rising and falling in leisurely flight: and then another and another: and then a night-heron with a ghastly and hair-raising croak: more terrible than the unearthly booming note of a pair of bitterns, who soaring and spiralling upwards and through the clouds to great heights above Gormenghast, boomed like bulls as they ascended.
The pavement stretched away in greenish darkness. The windows gaped, but nothing moved that was not feathered. And nothing had moved there, save the winds, the hailstones, the clouds, the rain-water and the birds for a hundred years.
Under the high green clawhead of Gormenghast Mountain the wide stretches of marshland had suddenly become stretches of tension, of watchfulness.
Each in its own hereditary tract of water the birds stood motionless, with glistening eyes and heads drawn back for the fatal stroke of the dagger-like beak. Suddenly and all in a breath, a beak was plunged and withdrawn from the dark water, and at its lethal point there struggled a fish. In another moment the heron was mounted aloft in august and solemn flight.
From time to time during the long night these birds returned, sometimes with frogs or water-mice in their beaks or newts or lily buds.
But now the terrace was empty. On the marshlands every heron was in its place, immobile, ready to plunge its knife. In the hall the nestlings were, for the moment, strangely still.
The dead quality of the air between the clouds and the earth was strangely portentous. The green, penumbral light played over all things. It had crept into the open mouth of the hall where the silence was.
It was then that a child appeared. Whether a boy or a girl or an elf there was not time to tell. But the delicate proportions were a child's and the vitality was a child's alone. For one short moment it had stood on a turret at the far end of the terrace and then it was gone, leaving only the impression of something overcharged with life - of something slight as a hazel switch. It had hopped (for the movement was more a hop than a leap or a step) from the turret into the darkness beyond and was gone almost as soon as it had appeared, but at the same moment that the phantom child appeared, a zephyr had broken through the wall of moribund air and run like a gay and tameless thing over the gaunt, harsh spine of Gormenghast's body. It played with sere flags, dodged through arches, spiralled with impish whistles up hollow towers and chimneys, until, diving down a saw-toothed fissure in a pentagonal roof, it found itself surrounded by stern portraits - a hundred sepia faces cracked with spiders' webs; found itself being drawn towards a grid in the stone floor and, giving way to itself, to the law of gravity and to the blue thrill of a down-draught, it sang its way past seven storeys and was, all at once, in a hall of dove-grey light and was clasping Titus in a noose of air.
THIRTEEN
The old, old man in whose metaphysical net the three disciples, Spiregrain, Throd and Splint were so irrevocably tangled, leaned forward in space as though weighing on the phantom handle of an invisible stick. It was a wonder he did not fall on his face.
'Always draughty in this reach of the corridor,' he said, his white hair hanging forward over his shoulders. He struck his thighs with his hands before replacing them at a point in space where a stick would have been. 'Breaks a man up - wrecks him - makes a shadow of him - throws him to the wolves and screws his coffin down.'
Reaching down with his long arms he drew his thick socks over the ends of his trousers and then stamped his feet, straightened his back, doubled it forward again, and then threw a look of antagonism along the corridor.