But the Bastard of the King of Bohemia, whose mother had called him Spardo and whose only affection and pride in the whole universe was his concern for the deformed horse Cheiron, had at that moment—perhaps because along with his other faculties his conscience had gone to sleep—a different sort of inspiration, one that only Hermes himself, the God of thieves, could have put into his head.
He had already observed that Bonaventura possessed a deep pocket in his Friar’s garb, at the bottom of which he was carrying a leather bag full of thick golden pieces. He had found this out by spying on the saintly man when the latter retired from his seat on Gheiron to relieve his bowels; and he derived no little satisfaction at this moment from discovering that the richly-filled leather bag in the flapping skirt of Cheiron’s rider had somehow or other, by good chance, worked itself along the animal’s side till it was close to his own caressing, stroking, toying, soothing, and encouraging left hand.
The more violent old Dod became in what he was saying, the more closely was Bonaventura absorbed in watching him; so that to a born pilferer of unguarded treasures like this offspring of the loins of a King, who had just refused a more dangerous crown than the one he wore, it was not a very difficult achievement to transfer to his own person, in fact to an interior pocket next his own skin, two of these massive golden coins stamped with this same Germanic crown that the crafty King of Bohemia had refused to assume.
“Amen, Amen, Amen, old man!” Spardo now shouted, dancing into the arena between the feverish aura of the serf’s oration and the bailiff’s contemptuous silence. “In the country where I come from there are shrines to the Mother of God where every farthing offered by visitors, yes! and every penny given by pilgrims, and every shekel flung down by travellers, is gathered into a special treasury for the benefit of such as labour with their hands! Pardon me, Master Sygerius, if as an ambassador from abroad, in fact from three kingdoms and a dozen Free Cities, I exchange a few words with this ancient man of resounding speech. I think there are things that I can say to him that will be of value to him and to me and to us all!”
Old Dod now permitted his voice to die away in the midst of a sentence and looked enquiringly at little Bet. The owner of Cheiron had the wit to interpret this quick glance correctly. “Like all orators,” he thought, “the old fellow is hopelessly dependent on women for every practical move he makes, and as the only female here is that ragged little girl, he daren’t move a step without appealing to her!”
It was at this point that Spardo, who understood small girls better than he understood either religion or revolution, exchanged a smile and a wink with little Bet that arranged it all.
“The man wants a word with you, grand-dad,” she whispered to Dod Pole; and the three of them retreated beneath the pine-trunks. Once out of sight of the Friar-General and the Manor bailiff, Cheiron’s owner produced one of his great gold pieces and explained its worth in relation to the coinage of Britain to old Dod.
“Won’t that be enough and to spare, my friend,” he said, “to keep you and your family till next winter?”
Again he caught old Dod Pole glancing at little Bet. And again it was clear to him that the child’s vigorous series of emphatic nods settled the matter. “Well then,” he commanded in the nearest approach to an official dismissal he could assume, “off with you! And put that piece of gold”—and here he came close to the old man and felt his sides and hips with his two hands—“in therel” he added, when he had discovered a secure little receptacle in Dod Pole’s innermost garment, already containing a few coins; and without a glance at their retreating figures he rejoined Cheiron and the horse’s two companions.
“I’ve been explaining to his Reverence,” announced Spardo to the bailiff, “that, when he reaches Lost Towers, he’d better take no notice of what Baron Maldung may have to say, and concentrate his attention upon any definite information he can get out of Lady Lilt. I don’t know, I’m sure, master bailiff, if you share my view that in all these affairs it’s wisest to go straight to the woman, if there is a woman in the case.”
The bailiff of Roque looked from the General of the Franciscan Friars to the horse with the growing appearance of two heads.
“You’d better,” he said, “hurry your beast on, if you’re going to see anything of any of the three of them tonight! It gets dark at Lost Towers, I understand, before the proper time! At least that’s what they say, and I’m ready to believe anything of that awful place! For myself I’ll never be caught going near it. But they do tell me your Reverence has the reputation of being a great Saint, and my missus do say every time I put head to pillow—‘Randy,’ she do say—that’s short for Randolph you understand—‘hast thee said thee’s prayers straight and proper to the Blessed Saint Aldhelm?’
“And when I do say to she: ‘Bain’t Prior Bog of Bumset as good a church-lord as any old Saint?’ she’s answer to I is allus the same: ‘Bog be Bog and Bumset be Bumset,’ she do say,’ but when thee do pray to They Above, ‘tis a very different style of Holy Man thee dost need for thee’s pass to Salvation!’
“But that bain’t all my missus do say when head and pillow do come together. ‘Why do us pray,’ her says, ‘when Night be come and Dark do cover all? Because the Devil be six times nearer to we at such times! Beware of Darkness, Randy,’ she do say. ‘Call on Saint Aldhelm to keep ‘ee calm and cosy in the lap of the Blessed Virgin, else thee may go wandering down one of they girt dark roads that go anywhere and lead nowhere for ever and ever and ever and ever!’ So my advice to your Reverence, and to thee too, Master Spardo, is to hurry on as fast as may be, lest Sun be gone when Lost Towers be come!”
And with that, and a swift look upwards, as if at any moment some vast Devil’s bird might carry off the sun in its beak and darken the earth with its wings, Randolph Sygerius, the new bailiff, marched off, walking like a soldier who needs all the strength of will he possesses to accept the fact that in Roque Manor day is followed by night.
The deformed Cheiron however hadn’t gone on for more than twenty minutes, with Bonaventura silent on his back and Spardo silent at his side, when they came to a track that crossed the one they were following, and there, just as if he had been purposely awaiting them, astride of his tall war-horse till he had grown as sleepy as the plodding Spardo, was none other than the Baron—not the Baron of Lost Towers, but of Castle Cone, that cheerful stronghold on the southern side of Roque Fortress, inhabited by the Boncor family.
Baron Boncor was a big strong man, with a thick fair beard and as placid and friendly a cast of countenance as any pair of agitated travellers could wish to meet. Human nature is such, however, that when we have “worked ourselves up”, as we say, to expect one thing, and find instead of it not only something quite different, but something that is the direct opposite of what we’ve expected, even if what we’ve found is pleasing to us beyond hope, our immediate reaction—such is our pride in the way we’ve mentally prepared ourselves to meet this encounter—is a curious shock of disappointment. We might just as well have never bothered to prepare for battle at all!
But Baron Boncor had in him as much commonsense as good nature. He greeted this queer-looking trinity of unusual explorers with an instinctive courtesy that set them at their ease at once.
“Welcome to our dark forests, your Eminence!” he began. “Though I fear after your sunlit Italy you’ll have to be careful to keep your cloak about you. And you too, Master Spardo, for through my wife’s friendship with her good neighbour Lady Val, I’ve heard all about you and your strange steed here! Cheiron you call him, don’t you? They talk a lot about him in the Fortress stables when I take my old Basileus there for a rub down. Give Cheiron a kiss, Basileus! No, no, a real proper kiss! That’s the boy! I warrant he’s not so much younger than you are; and who can tell? You may, if you kiss each other often enough, turn into a real Centaur as he seems to be turning. But if you do——”
He was interrupted by the appearance of the most amazing human figure t
hat any of them, man or beast, had ever seen in his life before. This personage came dancing into their midst, and not one of them could take his eyes off him for a second when once he appeared. He inhaled and sucked in and tried to drain up the essence of every living soul upon that spot, whether such a soul belonged to a man or an animal or a bird or a reptile or a toad or a worm or an insect. None of the three human beings present at that cross-track in the forest had a flicker of doubt as to who this intruder was, who thus came dancing into the midst of them.
It was Baron Maldung himself, the Lord of Lost Towers! Well, they had come to seek him. They had come to visit him. And here he was! Beneath his tunic and his breeches Baron Maldung was clothed in only two garments; but these two garments literally covered him from head to foot—that is to say, from half-way down his neck to the soles of both his feet. The under-garment was of thick, warm, white sheep’s wool; while the garment that covered it was of thin delicate coal-black satin.
Every movement the Baron made was like a step in a dance that he knew by heart: and as he fluttered from one to another of these five beings, two super-intelligent horses, and three rather unusual men, the lightly-blowing wind as it opened his tunic revealed the fact that this black satin covering he wore above his sheep’s-wool under-garment was an attempt, almost a pathetic attempt, on the part of this demonic man to round off his ungainly limbs into a sort of grace, at any rate into a grace that sheep’s wool alone could not give.
“O you must come, you must, you must, you must, all of you, now at once, now that you are here!” he murmured, as he and his shadow—for the sun seemed to be playing a private game with the two of them—danced their special man-and-his-shadow dance. And the wind too had a share in it; for the thin straight dusky hair of the Baron of Lost Towers was lifted up and down on his head as if by the puffs of a petulant rival of that obsequious shadow.
Probably owing to some instinctive gust of fellow-feeling for a being as much devoid of man’s moral sense as he was devoid of man’s self-righteous attitude towards his exploitation of animals, both horses now made an emphatic movement to follow him.
“Well, Basileus,” muttered Baron Boncor, “it evidently looks as if we men must obey the oracles of creatures who probably know the will of heaven better than we do! So come along my Christian friends! Let two legs follow four legs and all our eyes see what happens!”
It cannot be said that Bonaventura looked at Spardo or that Spardo nodded a reply to Bonaventura’s look. It might rather be said that the man on the back of Cheiron and the man at the side of Cheiron followed Baron Maldung as unquestioningly as if they were members of the Household of Lost Towers.
As for Baron Boncor of Cone, he brought up the rear upon Basileus with an expression on his good-natured bearded face which seemed to say: “Well! as long as I’ve got your crazy backs in front of me, I’m ready for anything! From behind I can see how things go. Chance often gives a chance to those who don’t mind bringing up the rear; and, if it doesn’t in this case, so be it.”
It was rather a startling surprise to both Spardo and Bonaventura when they found themselves completely clear of the forest, and saw in front of them, a vast reedy swamp that extended to the horizon in every direction, save the one from which they had come to the really terrifying bulk of Lost Towers.
Lost Towers looked at first sight like a ruin built entirely of black marble; but on nearer approach it showed itself to be anything but a ruin; for the vast blocks of black stone of which it was built had something Egyptian and pyramidal in their size, and although divided and broken up into many small domes and minarets and watch-towers, the general effect made a tremendous awe-inspiring impression upon everyone who had never seen it before. There was something staggering—in truth you might say almost shocking—about its antiquity. It looked as if it had been built of materials brought on barges through a network of canals from the sea-coast, a coast which had been reached by ship from Atlantis itself in pre-historic times. A very queer effect was produced upon a traveller’s nerves the moment he set eyes upon it, a disturbing, troubling, and bewildering effect. The first sight of it must have always touched some long-buried race-nerve in us all that goes back to antediluvian times.
It was certainly as queer a cortège as had ever reached that weird mass of domes and towers in all its incredibly long history, this little group that now approached its portentous entrance. By reason of its own Baron being the leader of this queer band, they were received in a manner bordering upon a religious ceremony.
Lady Lilt herself came out to meet them, dressed so extravagantly that Baron Boncor assured his grey horse that the lady must have been waiting for their arrival in a wardrobe-chamber looking out their way. The retainers who assembled on the small square of cut grass in front of the high, narrow, strangely painted gates, gates that never, by night or day, seemed entirely shut or entirely open, must have amounted to a dozen men and a dozen women, all dressed so much alike and all so mingled together that it was hard to distinguish men-servants from maid-servants as they surrounded the visitors.
But the apparel they all wore was so remarkable in its colour that only a very discerning eye would have been likely to detect that the materials, whereof these richly-coloured garments were made, were a sorry draggled-tailed patch-work of odds and ends, stitched together anyhow, a motley agglomeration of woven stuffs that had only two purposes; the first, to cover—you couldn’t say to warm—human bodies, and, the second, to receive the particular red-brown dye which had been the prerogative of a special family from somewhere in the far north, who, for several generations, had lived in Lost Towers, to prepare, to make, to mix, to adapt to every kind of weather, and to apply to every sort of fabric. This colour had exactly, precisely, and to the last nicety, the shade of the ground at the roots of the forest pines, and also of the narrow foot-wide paths that horsemen, and very often their dogs too, had to follow, as they made their way through the woods.
Baron Maldung himself resembled a middle-aged acrobat with a profile so startlingly like that of certain busts of the Emperor Nero that visitors to Lost Towers who had pilgrimaged to Rome wondered sometimes, especially when they observed the dictatorial manner of the Baron and the something like obsequiousness with which everyone treated him, whether he might not really be, as the man himself always maintained he was, descended from ancestors who had not come from the North at all, but from Rome itself.
There was a tall black poplar on one side of this stretch of grass, now crowded with retainers in the Lost Towers red-brown attire; and though there were few leaf-buds on it at this early season the great tree had a happy and vital look, as if its sap was already stirring. Not far from this benevolent forest-giant there grew a small thorn, and it happened that Bonaventura, whose hold on Chieron’s reins was entirely negligible, now that he had so much to see and so much more to think about, allowed the horse to press so closely against this leafless bush that a perceptible tuft of the creature’s skin with a patch of his fur was torn away by the bush’s powerful thorns.
In a flash Baron Maldung observed this misadventure and quick as lightning leapt upon the offending thorn-bush and began hacking at it with a short sharp little war-axe which he unhooked from his belt. Lady Lilt, who had been tenderly stroking the deformity on the neck of Chieron, a deformity that to the eyes of Spardo seemed growing larger and more like a human head with every touch the lady gave it, now sprang to the side of her lord, and first with one bare arm and then with the other, though both arms were soon bleeding as the thorn-bush defended itself, held up the thing’s branches towards the slashing fury of Maldung’s war-axe.
The small bush was soon level with the ground; but the insanity of life-hatred in Maldung seemed to increase moment by moment with each advance in the demolition of those crumpled, twisted, wrinkled, broken little twigs, and, as can be imagined, each little drop of perspiration from the white arms that were acting like assistant executioners added to the man’s frenzy.
Her part just now seemed to be the pretence that she had rushed forth from the hands of her tirewomen, in such haste to join the fight against these appalling monsters who had invaded this innocent world of noble animals, that she had been too hurried to remember to put all her clothes on. Her haste was, however, as even Spardo could see, attended by an exquisite delicacy of choice as to just where the effect of not being fully dressed would be maddeningly tantalizing, and indeed, not only seductive, but what you might call ravishing.
And they all could see that to the human nerves of the good Baron Boncor such provocation was unendurable. In fact all that that good-natured warrior found gall enough to do under such exceptional tension was to take a dignified and simple farewell of Bonaventura and to give Spardo a definite invitation.
“Don’t you forget, Master Spardo, that you’ll always be welcome at Gone Castle, whenever your wanderings bring you our way!”
And then, not without some difficulty—for Basileus was showing signs in a manner not quite seemly in so warlike a steed, of being unduly attracted to Cheiron’s deformity—Baron Boncor turned his horse clear round and urged him into a rather shy and not wholly polite retreat.
But to retreat from Lost Towers, when once you had discovered it, was more difficult than the discovery. Lady Lilt lifted one long white arm to direct her husband’s attention to this retirement of their chief antagonist; and with her other arm she groped for the bow and quiver hanging over the shoulder of Baron Maldung. This small bow, with its arrow already notched against its extended string she thrust into Maldung’s hands. “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!” she hissed. And when the Baron of Lost Towers released the string and the feathered shaft pierced the flesh of Boncor’s right shoulder and remained there quivering, the blood that dripped in big drops upon the mane of Basileus was a much brighter red than the red-brown of the Lost Towers retinue.
The Brazen Head Page 12
