The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

The apprentices gave him to understand that they were listening very hard.

Before the chef continued he applied himself to the bottle once again. This time he held the glass neck between his teeth and tilting his head back until the bottle was vertical, drained it and spat it out over the heads of the fascinated throng. The sound of black glass smashing on the flagstones was drowned in screams of approval.

‘Food,’ said Swelter, ‘is shelestial and drink is mosht entrancing – such flowers of flatulence. Sush gaseous buds. Come closer in, steal in, and I will shing. I will lift my sweetest heart into the rafters, and will shing to you a shong. An old shong of great shadness, a most dolorous piece. Come closer in.’

It was impossible for the apprentices to force themselves any closer to the chef, but they struggled and shouted for the song, and turned their glistening faces upwards.

‘Oh what a pleasant lot of little joints you are,’ said Swelter, peering at them and wiping his hands up and down his fat hips. ‘What a very drippy lot of little joints. Oh yesh you are, but so underdone. Lishen cocks, I’ll twisht your grandmas so shweetly in their graves. We’ll make them turn, my dears, we’ll make them turn – and what a turn for them, my own, and for the worms that nibble. Where’s Steerpike?’

‘Steerpike! Steerpike!’ yelled the youths, the ones in front twisting their heads and standing upon their toes, the ones in the rear craning forward and peering about them. ‘Steerpike! Steerpike! He’s somewhere here, sir! Oh there he is sir! There he is sir! Behind the pillar sir!’

‘Silence,’ bellowed the chef, turning his gourd of a head in the direction of the pointed hands as the high-shouldered boy was pushed forward.

‘Here he is, sir! Here he is, sir!’

The boy Steerpike looked impossibly small as he stood beneath the monstrous monument.

‘I shall shing to you, Steerpike, to you,’ whispered the cook, reeling and supporting himself with one hand against the stone pillar that was glistening with condensed heat, little trickles of moisture moving down its fluted sides. ‘To you, the newcomer, the blue mummer and the slug of summer – to you the hideous, and insidious, and appallingly cretinous goat in a house of stenches.’

The apprentices rocked with joy.

‘To you, only to you, my core of curdled cat-bile. To you alone, sho hearken diligentiums. Are you sharkening? Are you all lishening for this his how’s it goesh. My shong of a hundred yearsh ago, my plaintivly mosht melancholic shong.’

Swelter seemed to forget he was about to sing, and after wiping the sweat from his hands on the head of a youth below him, peered for Steerpike again.

‘And why to you, my ray of addled sunshine? Why to you aslone? Shtaking it for granted, my dear little Steerpike – taking it for more than for mosht granted, that you, a creature of lesh consequence than stoat’s-blood, are sho far removal’d from anything approaching nature – yet tell me, more rather, don’t tell me why your ears which musht originally have been deshigned for fly-papers, are, for shome reason butter known to yourself, kept imodeshtly unfurled. What do you proposhe to do next in thish batter? You move here and there on your little measly legs, I have sheen you at it. You breathe all over my kitchen. You look at thingsh with your insholent animal eyes. I’ve sheen you doing it. I have sheen you look at me. Your looking at me now. Shteerpike, my impatient love-bird, what doesh it all mean, and why should I shing for you?’

Swelter leaned back and seemed to be considering his own question a moment as he wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his forearm. But he waited for no reply and flung his pendulent arms out sideways and somewhere on the orbit of an immense arc something or other gave way.

Steerpike was not drunk. As he stood below Mr Swelter, he had nothing but contempt for the man who had but yesterday struck him across the head. He could do nothing, however, except stay where he was, prodded and nudged from behind by the excited minions, and wait.

The voice recurred from above. ‘It is a shong, my Steerpike, to an imaginawary monshter, jusht like yourshelf if only you were a twifle bigger and more monshtrous shtill. It is a shong to a hard-hearted monshter sho lishen mosht shfixedly, my pretty wart. Closher, closher! Can’t you come a little closher to a dirgeous mashterpeesh?’

The wine was beginning to redouble its subversive activity in the chef’s brain. He was now supporting himself almost the whole of the while against the sweating pillar and was sagging hideously.

Steerpike stared up at him from under his high bony brow. The cook’s eyes were protruding like bloodshot bubbles. One arm hung, a dead-weight, down the fluted surface of the support. The enormous area of the face had fallen loose. It glistened like a jelly.

A hole appeared in the face. Out of it came a voice that had suddenly become weaker.