Titus knew that here was another human, whether male or female he could not tell. He dragged himself across the frozen dust to the shapeless lump. His hands and legs were bound with rags, his head wrapped with whatever he had been able to twist round it, and his body, bound with straw and other matter, now twice its normal size. All he knew was that he must close the door and shut out the blizzard.
If he had not known that there was another living being whose life depended on him, he might have loosened the small and dwindling grasp he had on life. With the ungainliness that comes from disease he dragged himself nearer the door and the miraculous hexagonal snowflakes and what might in normal circumstances have taken half a second, now took what felt like an hour.
To force the door shut again took reserves of his energy that were fast dwindling. He had never possessed personal vanity, only a supreme arrogance of the importance of his inheritance, which during his wanderings grew more powerful. Forsaking this birthright, Titus entered this new world of his own free will. Anyone from his past would neither have recognised him nor cared for what they saw; a neuter, covered in rags. He dragged himself across the other heap of humanity, gradually stretching his arms to push or pull at the barn door. All he could hear, through the woollen filth that covered his ears, was so muffled – it must have been from another world. Panting, he at last reached the door and lay, arms outstretched. He pulled at a cord attached to the door, but the cord was frozen and so brittle that it snapped. Tears of frustration froze on his cheeks. With one great effort Titus pulled the door closed, letting in a gust of snow.
So much effort could only have one result – exhaustion.
3
Sacrifice. Behold
LIGHT FLOODED THE barn. There were sounds outside. Sounds that Titus began to discern as voices, although still distant. Titus felt half-mad from a slumber so numbed by cold, the sound of bells pierced his ears.
He could not speak.
He could not make out what lay some yards away from him; was it a hummock or a being?
The bells continued to plague him, making sounds he should understand, but could not.
Through his swollen lids he saw shapes moving. Hidden behind his frozen swaddling, which was beginning to drip, he could hear again what he remembered as voices. Yet the language was not what he could understand as language. Noises – and in his mind they were like the sound a mother lulls her child to sleep with.
The sounds were still distant and the hummock rose, but not of its own volition. A huge shape stood over him. He was insulated, yet engulfed. He was in a dream and he was not in a dream. He felt a trickle of water make its way into a stomach aching for sustenance, but fearful.
If he had had words with which to think he would have said to himself: ‘That is a dog, and those other shapes are men.’ Without words he understood faintly what he saw, as a feeble light made its way across the carnage to where he lay, he felt his body being lifted with the gentleness of a lepidopterist pinning his captured beauty to a board, before enclosing it in its glass case.
Voices came and went like the tides; no rough seas here, but rhythmic and peaceful. He knew that such peace might never be his again. His thoughts came and went with the tides and he floated, a piece of flotsam back and forth, into voices and out again.
The cargo that had been jettisoned in his barn was gone. Now, he – Titus – was going to follow.
There was a light, not of this world: pink, rosy, gleaming, brilliant. There was still the murmur of voices.
No roughness. Sometimes a gliding, and sometimes a sliding, and the uncanny sound of a mountain horn, not a warning as that of a horn in a sea mist.
It was to occur to him, very much later, that he was the cause of danger to the intrepid men with their mountain dog, and it was only then that he could begin to think of repayment. But how?
* * * * *
HE OPENED HIS eyes and felt himself. His legs and arms were there. He could see and, as he shouted, he knew he could hear. He could make noises, and he repeated to himself the names of the people who had been his childhood, and those who had been his youth, and those who had come and gone again like ghosts in his young manhood. He called up the rooms he had known – he counted the dead. He called and called for his sister Fuchsia, and as he slowly held out his arms and found an emptiness, he knew that he was alive.
‘I am awake,’ he shouted. ‘I am Titus Groan – where am I?’
An old woman swam into his vision. She smiled and shook her head. She pointed her finger to the further corner of the room.
He saw a shape. He thought, perhaps I cannot see, or what I see is not there. He looked again. This time there was a little more comprehension. It was the face of a woman. He called out, ‘Fuchsia?’
His violet eyes sought out the shape across the room. Something came into focus, but what it was he could no longer tell. There was an echo of something familiar, but it was hidden beneath the layers of memory as delicately poised as mille-feuilles. He dared not enquire yet into the mystery, which lay as inert as he himself.
The return of sentience is so slow and so painful that there are those who wish to delay it, and others who wish it never to return, but Titus had, for all the pains he had endured in his own home and out of it, clung to life.
4
Titus’s Awakening
A WARMTH OF body lit up his whole spirit. His eyes opened willingly, for the first time since his incarceration in the freezing barn.
He knew himself to be in a room that was a room of poverty. His eyes searched and saw it all. There was so little to see. A rafter with a ham that brought back to him other rafters in vaster places, with a rat that had been crunched to death by a man so vile that he closed his eyes to forget.
When he opened them again, at the side of his pallet bed he saw an old woman holding a bowl to his lips, urging his mouth to open. Her eyes were red-rimmed by age, and as he opened his mouth to receive the blessing of food, she smiled and her toothless gums were sweeter at that moment than any young woman’s lips. Liquid from the rough-hewn wooden bowl was gently poured down his throat by means of an equally rough spoon. Thus cared for, Titus enjoyed the sense of peace of an infant at its mother’s breast, although this was something that had not been his to know. How could he remember being suckled by Keda, his wet-nurse from the ‘Outer Dwellings’ of Gormenghast? He could only recall the insatiable, unsatisfied love he had felt for her daughter – his own foster sister – the ‘Thing’, and the world of Gormenghast to which he clung, hated and loved.
As the last spoonful trickled down into his whole being, he closed his eyes and a sigh of more than physical satisfaction broke the silence of the poor room. As a blind man could sense, so did he. He knew that in this room was another being, apart from the old woman, who also needed succour. ‘I must open my eyes. I must be a part of everything.’
The back of the old woman hid from view what he wished to see. He could only discern her movements. The old black-robed arm moved with the regularity of a tin soldier hitting his drum, up and down, but noiselessly. When the old woman ceased and moved from where she had been crouching, succouring another being, the light fell on two dark burning eyes, luminous as the snow had been. Eyes, huge and as yet unseeing. Titus felt such a yearning that his stomach, which had been hollow for so long, turned over, and the sickness he had hitherto known as lust he realised was some kind of love.