The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  Why couldn’t he tell her about this discovery of his and about its connection with a power he had recently begun to develop in himself, old as he was, the power of getting into touch with something that was almost like consciousness in things that are considered completely inanimate.

  It was at this moment that he gave a violent start and looked at Lil-Umbra in such a way that it came near to seriously scaring her.

  “Didn’t you feel something then, little lady,” he cried, “something you never felt before in your whole life, no! not till a minute or two ago? I felt it; and though I’ve lived more than ten times as long as you, I’ve never felt anything like it! It was as if our thoughts, your beautiful young thoughts and my ugly old thoughts, had, for a second, yes! for half the beat of the pulse of a second, become one. No doubt it had to do with our sitting in silence by these dancing flames—and then we saw something, something that was standing between us, standing between you on your stool and me in this chair, something that was like that statue of Our Lady in Prior Bog’s private refectory—the one that’s so dark—dark as a gipsy, dark as a Jewess!”

  Not a syllable of all this had been missed by Lil-Umbra, and it had its effect. The thoughts in that preposterously bare skull and in that delicate girlish head had in some mysterious unique manner become one, and “Something,” as old Heber had put it, had entered the room, had stayed in the room, and had stood or sat or crouched or planted itself between them.

  And the thing that had done this was, as the young girl knew quite as fully and distinctly as the old man, nothing less than an image, or what the ancient Greeks called an “Eidolon”, of that dark and terribly beautiful woman, whom she had recently seen encountering Lilith of Lost Towers!

  What the old man hadn’t sufficiently remembered during this whole interview was that they were waiting for the appearance of Lil-Umbra’s father, under whose authority they would both go to take their places at the first meal of the day. He himself had already swallowed a substantial bowl of barley-meal washed down by a good draught of ale, whereas Lil-Umbra, though she had got up so early and been with Peleg to the Stone Circle, had not tasted a thing. Her nervous agitation at this moment was certainly accentuated by this fasting.

  It may even have had something to do with the nervous leap to her feet and the irrepressible cry, almost a little scream, with which she now greeted the opening of the door and the sudden appearance of the very person she was hoping for, namely young Raymond de Laon, accompanied by none other than her recent companion, the Tartar-Jew Peleg.

  Polite and friendly, if extremely airy and casual, were the greetings with which young Raymond de Laon saluted the ex-bailiff as he carried off the girl, who herself was so excited that she even forgot to turn her head to nod to the old man till her curls were hidden by young De Laon’s broad shoulders. Peleg however closed the door quietly behind them and came straight up to Heber’s side.

  “Has Sir Mort come back?” the old man enquired. Peleg nodded.

  “And is this confounded Bonaventura, this ‘General’, if that’s what they call him, of the Friars come too?”

  “He’s here now anyway,” answered Peleg, “but you never know with these clerical almighties! He’ll probably stroll round the kitchen first to see what sort of feast there’s going to be! Some say he’s one for fasting. But I doubt if he can practise that little game when he’s travelling! He won’t want to get so light that his horse will shake him off like a dead leaf.”

  Heber smiled his most endearing smile at the tall Mongol.

  “Lend me a hand, my boy, will you, to help me up? And, maybe, you’ll give me your arm to the dung-house next door, and then help me down to the hall?”

  The Jewish Mongol obeyed and gravely helped him to his feet, and while he did so the eyes of both of them were drawn to the fire by a curious dance which a couple of lively blue flames took upon themselves to perform, for the special benefit, it might almost seem, of these two men.

  We say “it might almost seem”, but as a matter of fact it was a completely different set of impressions that the middle-aged man and the old man derived from that dance. If there really were any sub-human and sub-conscious psychic impulse behind the motion of those two blue flames as they raced up and down that thin strip of pine-wood between a large spruce-log and a small larch-log, both logs having their own particular reaction of this performance, and if this psychic impulse had been interpreted by some new technical machine invented by Friar Bacon, it would at any rate have been made clear that such an impulse was a sub-sexual as well as a sub-human one.

  “If Sir Mort,” thought Peleg, “supposes that my gratitude is such a slavish thing that I’m going to take passively whatever happens, he really will have to give more attention to my character as a person. I’m ready to serve him in every possible way, but I’m a born fighter and to be nothing but a guiding-dog to a drooling old fellow like this, and nothing but a schoolmaster-nurse to a little Lady First-Love like that pretty child, is not enough. Besides—O hell’s damnation take it all!”

  This last outcry was due to the fact that the giant suddenly realized for the first time that he’d forgotten to leave his iron mace in its usual hiding-place and had carried it along with him. Its awkward presence in his hand at this moment set him upon imagining a terrific attack upon the fortress by a band of formidable enemies, among whom he now felt himself wildly rushing, in full fighting ecstasy for the House of Abyssum, swinging his club with its iron spikes and converting a crowd of living men into a ghastly heaving mass of bones and hair and flesh and swirling blood.

  Whether an invisible spirit, reading the thoughts of Peleg at this moment, would have been shocked at the pictorial images the mind of the giant conjured up, would doubtless depend on the nature of the spirit; but these enemies twisting and jerking, scriggling and wriggling, as Peleg certainly saw them groaning and moaning, weltering and sweltering, howling and mowling, in a blood-red palpitating swirl of bodies and bones and hair and teeth and eyes and entrails, over which, with his free thumb testing the spikes of his weapon, he could stride in triumph while what had been living and beautiful bodies fouled his legs with filth, would certainly have disturbed some spirits.

  What old Heber saw as that dance of blue flame kept repeating itself in his mind as the Mongol led him away, was nothing less than Friar Bacon’s manufactured Brazen Head, enormous in size, hideous beyond all human imagination, and uttering words in a completely unknown tongue, but a tongue that was felt by all who heard it to be a multitudinous voice out of the Infinite.

  By the time however that Peleg had got the old man out of the dung-house and back into the passage leading towards the dining-hall, the weird vision or revelation, which proximity to the excited heart of little Lil-Umbra had conjured into the ex-bailiff’s hairless skull, had given place to something completely different. But the thing to which it had given place was still quite sufficiently interesting to the old man to compel him to stand still himself and to make the unfortunate Peleg who guided him not only stand still also, but stare along with him at the dusky smoke-begrimed wall of the passage down which they were shuffling.

  “Look, look, my good friend, look, I beseech you! Do you see these hieroglyphs on the wall? Shall I tell you what they mean? I know you pass these by, as most people do on their way to the dung-yard, like queer meaningless senseless marks, figures of some sort, mathematical figures, not human ones of course. But what they really are is an oracular announcement, yes! an announcement to the whole world that the idea of there being only three Gods, as the niggardly theologians teach, is a grievous error. There are Four Gods! That is what the great ancient thinker, Pythagoras, taught to his Greek colony in Italy; and that is what I, Heber Sygerius, am now teaching you, Peleg, the Jewish Mongol! Yes! there are Four Gods. But the strange thing that I now understand as I stare at those marks—No! Please, Peleg! Please wait here a minute longer! —is that we have to go to some especial and quite different spot to worship ea
ch of these Four Gods!”

  Peleg gave vent to a hopeless sigh. “Has the old dotard,” he thought, “forgotten that our breakfast is waiting for us?”

  Peleg looked desperately up and down the passage that led to the sleeping-rooms of Sir Mort and his lady and the sleeping-rooms of their two sons. He looked at the floor. He looked at the withered knuckles of the old man clutching his arm with the intensity of an aged hawk.

  “What in Hell’s name can I do?” he asked himself. “Sir Mort will curse me like the devil. He is sure to see us coming in at the bottom of the table. Besides, this old fool’s son Randolph will be keeping a place for him, you bet your life, near to the top! Not that he won’t be as pleased as Pilate for me to get cursed for not dragging the old fool along more quickly! But, O Jehovah, hear me just this one single time in my life! Let me meet the whole blasted Sygerius family except this poor old doddipole for whom I’ve got some sort of crazy fondness, and I’ll scatter their brains with my iron club on that pretty patch of green grass they’re all so proud of, outside their damned front door!”

  His vows of vengeance were interrupted by yet more astonishing behaviour on the part of the old man. He was now turning round in violent jerks and stamping on the ground at each spot, as he faced what he considered the four quarters of the compass.

  “North!” he muttered in a hoarse and even frightened voice. “That’s the forest of course and Lost Towers. All the worst devils in the whole world come from the north!”

  He jerked himself to the right. “East!” he cried in an exultant tone. “That’s where the miraculous Doctor Bacon is constructing the Brazen Head! That’s where the Fourth God will speak one day!” Again he jerked himself round. “South!” he cried. “And that’s Boncor Castle and all those noble and righteous people!”

  And then with a final hop and skip and a fierce clutch from Peleg to keep him from falling: “South!” he shouted, “where our Tilton is erecting with spade and hammer and chisel and nails a shrine of his own to Our Blessed Lady!”

  “That must be the end,” groaned Peleg to himself.

  But the old man went on, still keeping them both rooted to that place in front of the wretched blotches on that dark and filthy wall. “Do you know how I discovered that there are Four Gods, Peleg, my friend? I discovered it by the help of another discovery: in fact by finding out that there is a faint dim vague obscure consciousness in everything made by the hands of men! I have found that out for myself, Peleg, my boy! And do you know what else I’ve found out, my good friend?”

  “If this goes on much longer,” thought the desperate Mongol, “I’ll pick you up, Master Heber, carry you into the dining-hall and lay you down at Sir Mort’s feet!”

  “I’ve found out,” went on the old man, “that on any piece of earth where old rituals have been going on for six or seven or eight centuries, the actual essence of the substance of the earth begins to stir in its sleep, craving it doesn’t know what! Friar Bacon teaches this—did you know that? And he calls this craving by a very curious metaphysical name. He calls it Privation—yes, the ‘Privation of Matter’.”

  Peleg groaned. “O he calls it ‘Privation’, does he?” he murmured hoarsely; and then getting desperate he made a reckless plunge. “I am sorry to hurry you, Master Heber,” he began, speaking heavily and with as much effort as if he were forcing the handles of a wooden plough through frozen mind, “but we must hasten to the hall! Tonight after supper it will be most gracious of you if you’ll explain to us about the thoughts of sticks and stones and the ‘Privation’ they suffer when the Blessed Trinity mismanages matters and how the Fourth God eases things up.”

  His voice was low, but Heber caught quickly enough the new tone in it and yielded without a struggle. But move his feet as fast as he could, it was physically impossible for him to quicken to a run, and while he had breath to walk he had breath to talk.

  “Of course,” he said, “we needn’t believe all those tales about Lost Towers. But there must be something in them. They say that when the bishop laid his hand in blessing on the head of the daughter of that house, drops of such foul-smelling blood followed his ringers when he took them away that everybody else had to leave the church or the chapel or wherever it was, so perfectly appalling was the smell! And of course you’ve heard how poor old King Henry, who is sick to death while the Lord Edward is crusading nobody knows where, knighted young Will Boncor of Cone the other day in Westminster? The reason for that of course was to keep young Raymond de Laon from going back to France. Young men of his age aren’t happy without a comrade. They have to go about in pairs or they just die of tedium.”

  “Tedium, do you call it,” cried the Jewish Tartar. “I call it by a different name! But let that go!… The point is he’s come back, and Cone Castle is stronger than it’s ever been in the memory of man! But so also, Master Heber, is the Barony of Lost Towers! Very, very, very strong that also has become! And I tell you, Master Heber, I wouldn’t like to make my way against that castle, with its forest and its swamp, and its bottomless black moat where the waters go straight down to Gehenna!”

  It was at that moment that a flickering torch became suddenly visible, carried round a sharp corner of the passage they were following, and the long, narrow, cadaverous countenance of Sir Mort Abyssum, Lord of the Manor of Roque, made its appearance.

  “What in the name of all the angels and of all the devils has been happening to you two?” cried the apparition, as it advanced towards them entirely alone and holding in one hand the torch, now quite useless for there were plenty of lights in the passage now, and in the other a naked sword.

  There sometimes arise moments in the lives of men upon earth when there is no human power or human art or human skill, whether of painter or sculptor or musician or poet or tale-teller, that could possibly do what Aristotle called “imitate nature”, or what Goethe called “realize the intention of nature”, or what Shakespeare and Rubens did without thinking of what they were doing.

  On these occasions certain human figures make their appearance where and when there is no onlooker, no observer, no audience, no witness that is possessed of the faintest or remotest understanding of what is being presented to its attention. Its own nature has rendered this awareness as oblivious as fire to water, even when it is about to be put out by it, and as earth to air even when it is about to be dissolved into it. The human figures who thus appear and make not the smallest, faintest, weakest, slightest impression might be described as appearing in a complete void. There is for them, when they appear, a total absence of every conceivable recording and of every possible reflection or memorial.

  It was in such a void that the long, narrow, hollow-eyed, hollow-cheeked, ghastly-white visage of the Lord of the Manor of Roque manifested itself on this occasion. But all the same had there been any truth—and perhaps there was some truth —in the discovery by the ex-bailiff of Roque of the semi-consciousness of certain inanimate elements, these walls of the passage between the dung-yard and the dining-hall of that place would have recorded the appearance of a human figure and a human face that seemed to be crying out to the whole universe, from the deepest pit of Hell to the highest peak of Heaven, a protest against life having been created, or having created itself, or having been brought about by chance, after the accursed manner we all know so well.

  VI

  ROGER BACON

  A few days after the departure of those disturbing visitors to the Fortress heralded by Spardo and his deformed horse, Roger Bacon in his attic prison in the Priory of Bumset was at work on his Opus Tertium. He was seated on a high-backed chair with a well-stuffed black cushion under his buttocks and all his writing materials conveniently before him. These included some specially adaptable pages of parchment cut carefully into folio size and studiously covered with straight lines to guide the writer’s pen, save where at certain premeditated places on the page these lines came to an end in order to admit of the insertion of large illuminated capital letters in ever
y shade of colour and designed with every sort of fanciful decoration.

  The famous Friar, a beardless, clean-shaved man, gave the impression at first sight of a sedentary person of high rank who might easily have been himself the Prior of Bumset, or rather perhaps, for his air and manners were not entirely ecclesiastical, some highly placed secular lawyer from old King Henry’s court in London. Although beardless, Roger was the reverse of bald, and a second glance at his appearance might even have given a stranger the impression, not in this case altogether erroneous, of a man endowed with a certain fastidious self-respect in regard to the appearance and the cleanliness of his own hair and skin.

  Roger Bacon always looked a good deal younger than he really was; and very likely it was this dainty youthfulness, both in his look and in his manner, that excited no small part of the almost morbid severity with which he had been treated for some time by the ecclesiastical authorities; that is to say by all except one. This one was Guido Fulcode, who had only taken orders after the death of his wife and who, as a skilful lawyer, had been the lay adviser of Louis IX of France long before, as a cardinal, he became Papal Legate in England in 1263 and was elected Pope in 1265 under the name of Clement IV.

  It was only three years ago that this wise ruler of the western world’s religion had himself received its last rites; but before he died both Raymond de Laon, and even Raymond’s friend, the then extremely youthful John of the Fortress of Roque, had played their part as devoted adherents of Bacon and sometimes even as intermediaries between him and this briefly reigning Pope.

  But this interlude of hope and harmony was now over forever; and the incorrigible Friar was left to fight for himself. From the present Pope, Gregory X, a friend of the saintly Bonaventura, he could hope for nothing. The authorities who hated him had in fact got him where they wanted. His revolt had been suppressed; and the influence of his revolutionary metaphysic, allowing such dangerous scope both to experience and to experiment, would now, so his enemies hoped and prayed, die away as quickly as the same sort of curiosity such as the study of astrology, and the same sort of scholarship such as the study of Greek and Hebrew, died away after the death of that over-clever Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, nearly twenty years ago.