The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  At last, very quitely, Ghosta spoke: “I am ready to agree, my friend,” she said, “if you are anxious for me to go with you to the Fortress and have an interview with your Lady Val; but I can tell you this in advance, and you’ll see for yourself the truth of my prediction, if you accompany me into the presence of this lady: Lady Val will loathe the sight of me, and will command Sir Mort to have nothing to do with me! I don’t say for a moment that he’ll obey her in this, but she’ll no more want to have me working in the manorial kitchen than I want to work there. It’s this ancient hatred of us Jews which all the races in Europe feel, and which a certain class of men and women in this country especially suffers from.

  “I’ve thought about it a lot lately; and I think it is purely due to our superior intelligence. They feel instinctively that they’re not our equals in intelligence and that makes them hate us, and their hatred is continually being intensified by contempt every time they see how, in archery and hunting and tournaments and in all manly sports and in all athletic contests and public games, the simplest and stupidest among them can play a part, whereas we Hebrews—just as did the great Avicebron when he was a child, Avicebron for whom Friar Bacon has such a passion—have always thought that our mighty men of battle, our Samsons and Sauls and Joshuas and Abners and Joabs, were of far less account than our prophets and priests and men of God.”

  “But Ghosta, my Ghostal What are you saying? Aren’t our Scriptures full of the victories of Judah and Israel over their enemies? Wasn’t the Lord of Hosts always giving his chosen people triumphant. victories over Syrians and the Assyrians and Babylonians and Philistines?”

  Ghosta gave him a most peculiar look, a look that seemed to say: “I shall have to consider this very carefully. You are a man. I am a woman. I shall have to consider whether I can talk to you about these things, and tell you all that I’ve thought about them for a long time. Don’t ‘ee look like that, Peleg darling—as if I’d slapped you across the cheek. I shall always tell you the important things of my life, and you’ll always tell me the important things of your life. These political and religious questions aren’t the true reality of any actual life of a man and a woman who love each other. You might be very interested in them and might be totally indifferent to them, and we could live out our life in perfect contentment.

  “Everybody’s life’s like a star with at least forty points branching out in all directions, and every one of these points can turn eventually into a life-long road of unending interest. But at the heart of that star the real Peleg and the real Ghosta can sit at their hearth over their crock of pottage, and watch the shadows on the wall, and hear the wind in the chimney and the rain on the roof, and take to themselves the mystery of everything.

  “Well, my dear, you tidy up the room and get it into the shape you like to leave it in when you go out into the world; and I’ll deal with the remains of our meal and clean the things.”

  Peleg obeyed her; and until the horizontal rays of the descending Sun thrust the angular shadow of the pine-tree’s elbow almost as far as the cracks in the wet dark wall, out of which the elfin faces of the dumb progeny of the awful Horm could be imagined peering at them, the two of them kept an almost religious silence.

  Nor was it only silence they shared: for as they went to and fro about their homely tasks the same thought hovered in their minds; the thought that they were both, save for this miracle of a life together which had only begun today, strangers and pilgrims in a foreign land. And this thought of theirs, as he went on tidying up and arranging, according to his ideas of a proper chamber, the whole appearance of their cave, and as she emptied and washed and dried and polished their pots and pans and dishes, did not only hover about them; it also grew deeper and more definite.

  Indeed they had both decided, before they left the cave, she with her black mantle and white hood wrapt round her body and head, and her right hand held tightly in his left, and he with his great iron mace swinging its terrific spikes through the withered stalks of last autumn’s grasses, as if to scare them out of the path of the over-cautiously sprouting new ones, that there was nothing as yet in this new worship of the Trinity, with its Father and Son and Holy Spirit, so closely linked with the Assumption into Heaven of the Blessed Virgin, to compel them, by any spontaneous recognition of a deeper truth, to relinquish their old ancestral faith in Jehovah as their one invisible God, or to bow themselves on the ground before the Crucified Jesus.

  That this spiritual decision, by a telepathic interchange of thought that is rare even among lovers, had been accepted by them both, was proved by the murmured exclamations they uttered as they left that glade among the rocks in a wood even more dominated by their union than that cave was dominated by its pine-tree, or those cracks in its wall at the back by that appalling Horm.

  XI

  EBB AND FLOW

  It would almost seem as if, over every measurable geographical square of the planetary surface of the earth—and this would apply whether our earth were flat or round, or neither the one nor the other—there vibrates a special and particular amount of magnetic receptivity, by means of which each individual creature is attracted to or repelled by all the other creatures who are dwelling in or are passing through the same arena, an attraction or repulsion which is obviously stronger or weaker in proportion to the type of creature who is exerting it or feeling it.

  If this theory has any truth, it was under the influence of something beyond mere accident or chance that, when this terribly-armed adherent of the House of Abyssum, holding by the hand his cloaked and flashing-eyed bride, just as the Sun was sinking behind them on that perfect February day in the year of Grace twelve hundred and seventy two, came to be within measurable distance of Spardo filius Regis Bohemiensis, along with his deformed horse known as Cheiron, the two pairs moved hurriedly to their encounter.

  Peleg had met Spardo several times already, and himself was well known to Spardo; but Peleg was at this moment not a little disturbed by such a meeting and was extremely disinclined to allow it to be a cause of delay in the important business of introducing Ghosta to the interior of the Fortress of Roque. But Ghosta was, as may well be imagined, fascinated at once by the sight of this extraordinary horse, with what under the horizontal rays of the setting Sun did really look like a human head beginning to thrust itself forth through that horribly swollen neck.

  Spardo himself treated the gigantic Mongol as he treated everybody with whom he had any contact in that part of Wessex. Without disregarding him, he behaved as if the giant had been some inanimate object, a chair perhaps, or a bench, or a ladder, or a door, or a stone outside a door, or a mat in front of the fire where his supper was being prepared, or the hand-rail beside the steps leading up to the chamber where he was to sleep, or even the barrel of oats near the comfortable manger, he would presently leave Cheiron when he had replenished his bin.

  The huge Tartar managed to restrain his impatience for the space of about five minutes while Ghosta’s black robe and white hood, and Spardo’s flapping beard, mud-stained jerkin, and motley-coloured leather breeches, kept circling round and round that impassive horse, whose own gaze, with its far-away inscrutable stare, seemed to be fixed upon some invisible landscape where events were taking place that hadn’t the faintest connection with all this fuss about that unfortunate swelling in his own neck.

  When however for the third time Ghosta bent in absorbed concentration above that weird deformity, Peleg could bear it no longer. “Pardon me, Master Spardo,” he cried, “but I’ve got an appointment for this lady at the Fortress, and it won’t do to keep Lady Val waiting!”

  With these words he flung his left arm round his obsessed girl, administered to Cheiron’s flank a friendly tap with the knuckle of the hand from which the great mace was swinging, gave Cheiron’s master an affable nod, and muttering something in Hebrew, that might have meant, as far as Spardo could follow it, “Goodbye till we meet in Hell!” he strode off with the lady on his left and the mace
on his right.

  Whether to their eventual advantage or disadvantage, it is curious that no instinct warned Peleg just then that the worst possible moment for winning the favour of the Lady of Roque was during the particular hour she was accustomed to move to and fro between the manorial kitchen and the dining hall, with occasional interruptions from Nurse Rampant and Mother Guggery, and intermittent debouchings up and down the steps leading to her daughter’s chamber. If it hadn’t been that his nerves were so strung-up by his possession of Ghosta that all life’s ordinary routine seemed projected to a distance, rather like that unknown vision upon which Cheiron’s gaze seemed to be fixed, he would certainly have realized this fact.

  Indeed it may easily be that he did realize it, only not with sufficient intensity to allow it to influence his action. In any case, with a massive recklessness that was a deep element in his nature, though it was a rare event for him to draw upon it, Peleg led Ghosta to the great gate of the Fortress, where as a quite natural event the gate-keeper admitted them without even glancing up at his wife’s window to see if their entrance aroused her more shrewd attention.

  Once inside the Fortress, the worthy Cortex straightway escorted them, without stopping to obtain the mediation of any of the servants, to the familiar corridor between the dining-hall and the kitchen, where at this hour Lady Val was almost always to be found. And there indeed they found her. And if we are to assume—though at these mysterious and fatal moments in human lives, where so many paths into the unknown future seem to offer themselves, it is a doubtful wisdom to assume anything—that happy relations between Sir Mort’s lady and Peleg’s lady was a desirable occurrence, it was unlucky that neither Nurse Rampant nor old mother Guggery happened to be present at this encounter; for both these women had the gift, refined upon by age-long practice, of softening and modifying the impact upon the touchy and susceptible Lady Val, of any troublesome intruder.

  The Tartar giant saw in a moment how completely his attempt to establish a happy understanding between these two women was doomed to absolute failure. But it was too late to retreat now; and so he blundered on.

  “Pardon my intrusion, my lady, but this is an old friend of mine who comes from that so much fought-over strip of land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, where so many of your own renowned ancestors won their glory. I have already told my friend here many of those heroic stories that your revered children love to relate. Your son Tilton, for instance, has often told us about that amazing encounter between your great-grandfather, Sir Stephen Dormaquil, and that monstrous Tartar with three arms who fought with six sharp-pointed elephants’ tusks, one in each of his six hands; and who, after being chopped into sixteen pieces by your noble ancestor, was carried off to the top of Mount Carmel by eagles, and there was so completely disposed of that not a bone of his own nor the splinter of his ivory weapons was ever seen again. My friend here, my Lady, has thought of nothing else, since I told her about Sir Stephen and the other Dormaquils, and she begged me to bring her here just to see, if only for a moment, the living descendant of such heroic people.”

  Peleg was so pleased with the whole situation, so proud of himself in Ghosta’s presence for his tactful speech, and so proud of himself in Lady Val’s presence for making it so easy for Ghosta to keep a discreet silence, that Sir Mort would have thought him pathetically childish not to have detected what was going on, all the while he was speaking, between the two women.

  But then Sir Mort knew the mother of his three children better than the wisest of his henchmen could possibly know the lady of his house. Besides, Peleg was not only a foreigner and an oriental; he was also a giant, and looking down upon that pair of feminine brows and eyebrows, each of them quivering with implacable hostility, he was so impervious to the wordless, and you might almost say to the mindless, aura of antagonism, automatically generated between them, that he stept backwards as if to avoid a blow at the tone in Lady Val’s voice as she remarked to Ghosta:

  “You want employment here, I take it? Are you prepared to do any kind of work? Or do you want something special? We’ve no opening just now for a new hand indoors, but it’s quite possible, if you apply to our bailiff, Master Randolph Sygerius, that he’ll be able to find you work in the garden. We depend a lot on green food and we gather it all the year round; so if you——”

  “I happen to be quite satisfied with what I’m doing in the Convent just at present, Lady, I thank you. Indeed so far I’ve never been driven to work out-of-doors, but if ever——”

  “Where, if I may enquire,” interrupted Lady Val, her voice growing shrill, “were you brought up? My family here have given work I know, in past times, to black females. In fact if I remember correctly, my grandfather’s bailiff employed a family of Ethiopians. Of course this particular family may have been the slaves of some trader who died over here when he was selling leopards’ skins; but if you wait in the scullery till after dinner, you’ll be able, or Peleg here will be able on your behalf, to catch Master Randy, our present bailiff. Do you help, may I ask, in the Convent latrine? I remember there was——”

  “My lady, my lady——” broke in Peleg at this point. “My friend here is a learned Jewess, who has worked with Doctors and with Rabbis of our ancient faith, copying, for instance, with pencils and brushes certain faded pages in the Hebrew scriptures. And so, no doubt, though the Convent kitchen must already have come to depend on her delicate touch with their food, we can hardly expect——”

  “Be quiet, Peleg!” almost screamed Lady Val. “Since you brought this woman here to stare at me with her bold, black, impertinent eyes, perhaps you’ll tell me whether she wants to be allowed to prepare for me some of those Jewish spells with her pencils and her brushes, such as I can use on my enemies in this place? If so, you can tell her that, though she may have bewitched you and some of those simple nuns, who in such things are no wiser than children, I won’t have her bewitching me or my young daughter! But take her into the scullery, Peleg, and find a corner there for her till after dinner and then take her back to the convent. I don’t want any Jewish sorceress in my house or garden or kitchen! And what’s more—” This was added, when, without any other retort, Ghosta had wrapt her mantle more tightly round her shoulders and pulled her hood more closely round her face and had turned her dark eyes with a mute interrogation towards Peleg—“And what’s more,” announced Lady Val, “I shall have to have a very serious talk with Sir Mort about this whole subject of your making friends with women of this kind. But let that go now.”

  This “let that go” was uttered in the confident tone of a person for whom victory in a battle implies the power to be generous.

  “You must tell Cook, Peleg,” she went on, “to give your friend what supper she has time to scrape together while she’s dishing up dinner. I can see she hasn’t been taught in her childhood, and hasn’t had an opportunity to learn since, how a well-brought-up maiden, of any race in the world, behaves when she enters anyone’s house; but I’m sure she didn’t mean to be rude, just standing there and staring. I don’t know anything about Pharisees and Sadducees, and not much about Solomon and the Queen of Sheba; but I do know that because Queen Jezabel worshipped idols, she was thrown out of a window to be eaten by dogs. So you can, both of you, see that I am not quite ignorant of the Hebrew scriptures——”

  With the sort of inclination of a half-veiled head that the mighty Sisera might have received in the entrance to the tent of Heber the Kenite, Ghosta turned away, and, followed submissively by Peleg, began to move off, not, however, towards the kitchen, but towards the door by which they entered.

  They hadn’t gone many paces, however, towards this door, when they were met by an extremely youthful personage, tricked out in the very latest armorial fashion for budding warriors, and before they could stand aside to let him pass, Lady Val was greeting him, and he was greeting Peleg and gazing respectfully and admiringly at Ghosta.

  “Why, if it isn’t our dear Sir William!” cried Lady V
al—delighted, so Ghosta’s giant lover told himself, at so good an excuse for smoothing over the biting sting of Ghosta’s dignity under her crude abuse. “How nice you look, my darling boy, in that breast-plate and that scarf and that belt! Where is Raymond de Laon? Oh, of course I know! You men mustn’t give each other away! He’s with Lil-Umbra, of course. Oh yes! This is a great friend of our Peleg! I’ve just been discussing with him what place we can find for her in our little barony. Why, how very nicely you did that, my dear boy!”

  This final remark was involuntarily drawn from the lady by the really perfect alacrity with which the slender little Sir William, after skipping up to her side, knelt down on one knee and kissed the knuckles of the hand she held out to him.

  It was clear to Peleg, as she began talking rapidly to the young newly-made knight, and after every sentence shot a quick glance in their direction to see if they were still there, that her desire to have this lad to herself was intense. “She’s wishing that her Tilton and her John were more like this elegant young man,” the Tartar told himself. And then he thought: “I know Ghosta wants me to go off with her and that we ought to go; but I would like to see how this little elf-knight wins favour before we leave them!”

  Young William Bancor of Gone was certainly what the doting old King Henry had called him at first sight—the liveliest and sprightliest little “Knave of Hearts” in the whole kingdom. His self-confidence and aplomb and his humorous enjoyment of his own attractive presence gave a zest to every moment which anyone spent in his company. Everybody could see at a glance how conceited he was. But he had no pride at all; and was prepared to throw his whole body, soul, and spirit into showing off before the poorest and meanest beggar he met. He “made love,” so to speak, to every man, woman, and child, who crossed his path.