The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  “Forgive her, Raymond!” murmured the Baron gently. “The poor old girl had a bit of a shock a day or two ago.” Something in the tone of his voice induced Ulanda to resume her seat; though those ominous rings on her fingers jangled remorselessly still against the table’s edge.

  “May I tell him about your visit to the Friar?” enquired the Baron; and added hurriedly: “I think I ought to tell him, you know, because then he’ll realize better our whole feeling about the Friar and his confounded Brazen Oracle.”

  Ulanda’s reply to this question was only a bowing of her head still lower over her knees. But her husband firmly, though very gently, went on. “Yes, she went to see this Bacon fellow to ask him to help her in preparing some of those ointments for which our present-day ladies have such a mania—the sort of ointment, you know, that that queer tinker or whatever he is, who rides a horse with a swelling in its neck like the head of a man, is always trying to sell and swearing too—I’ve often heard him at it!—that it’s what they used in Babylon when the whale swallowed Jonah.

  “And how do you suppose this modern Simon Magus received our lady! No! I’ll tell him, my precious. Don’t you interrupt! You can correct me later. He burst into a fit of fury and acted to Ulanda with unpardonable discourtesy—Forgive me, Raymond! It’s only my shoulder. I didn’t draw back from your hand—lean against the back of my neck. I don’t get the ghost of a twinge there! He’s not really a good bowman, our Lost Towers rogue: and I don’t myself think he’s much of a catch for Satan. I mean I don’t think he’s half as corrupt or half as clever as his wife and daughter. What do you say, my dear, on that nice point?”

  But Ulanda who had flung herself back in her chair, her knuckles white with the intensity with which she clutched the carved lionheads at its elbow, took no notice of this amiable request.

  “Tell him at once,” she ejaculated, spitting out the words in a low hoarse voice, and with as complete disregard for the presence of Raymond as if what she said had to pass no further than from one organic portion of her own person to another, “tell him at once,” and it was as if the gall within her addressed itself to the midriff within her, “that it matters nothing to us by whose hand this accurst wizard is unfrocked and sent begging, as long as it is done, and all his fabrications pounded into dust! Tell him to say to Bonaventura that when the job is completed, we hope to welcome him here and do all we can to help him in his hunt for other traffickers with the Devil!”

  It was difficult for Raymond to get the precise expression on that curly-bearded face, as Boncor, while slowly rising from his chair, turned towards him.

  What increased the young man’s uncertainty on this point was the fact that the act of rising caused a spasm of pain to pass through Boncor’s wounded shoulder, and this, though largely concealed by his beard, for pain affects the mouths of certain types of men more than their eyes or foreheads, did perceptibly obscure the intimately direct look which the Baron fixed upon his friend.

  “I shall go downstairs with him at once, my dear, and deal with these Red-Brown Tunics from the Towers, and have a word with Turgo. You may depend on it, my treasure, that all your rightful dignity, and all your natural lady-like feelings will be considered to the uttermost in the arrangements your old adorer makes; so don’t worry! Keep the fire up and get out some wine by the time we come up again! And have a sip yourself for a while! We shan’t be as long as, O I know so well how long you’re now imagining we’ll be! You’ll see. Thanks, Raymond.”

  And all that Ulanda could now hear were the double thuddings of their feet, her husband’s considerably heavier than his friend’s, as the two men tramped down the turret stairs.

  Ulanda sat still, seeing nothing but the living heart of the fire in front of her, and hearing nothing but the dark, deep, dead silence that surrounded the crackling of those burning sticks. Her thoughts were much less desperate than Raymond could possibly have imagined, as he accompanied her husband into the reception chamber on the ground floor below. To be alone always suited her; and though she knew well at the bottom of her heart that her husband would never, in spite of his encouraging words, really see to it that her longed-for revenge on Roger Bacon would be brought about, she was able, now that she was no more actually in the presence of this friendship she hated so much, to treat the whole matter, and her own feelings about it, with something approaching a philosophic mind.

  And the most powerful of all the divinities with whom it is our destiny to get more acquainted the older we grow—namely, that frivolous, merciless, apparently irresponsible goddess, whose name is Tyche or Chance—did not refuse at this crisis in her life to give the passionate Ulanda the breathing-space to which any sort of humane judicial authority would have taken for granted she was entitled; for there sounded now a quite different step upon the turret stairs, a step the familiar vibration of which in place of making her sit up and prepare for action made her relax with an ineffable sense of relief.

  “O Mabbernob! Do you know what has just happened to me? And for the first time too in all the days of my life? And it wasn’t because I’m a real knight either, and knighted by the King himself! You’ll never guess, Mabbernob darling, what it was! But try a moment: O do try a moment to guess, before I sit down!”

  An affectionately friendly and a comfortably appreciative smile spread softly over Ulanda’s whole personality. She felt—she always felt in this manner—just exactly as when, after a second’s submerging under the waters of unconsciousness, she had first beheld this only offspring of her love for the Lord of Cone lying beside her. It had not been very long before she found herself translating a constantly repeated sequence of babyish babblement into the word “Mabbernob,” by which the little creature was designating the womb from which it came and the paps that fed it.

  “Well, well,” she now replied, in an affectionately jocular tone, “Honey-Pot holy, Honey-Pot mighty, Honey-Pot washed and dressed, tell Mabbernob the whole story!”

  The young knight stalked solemnly to Ulanda’s side of the big table, placed the back of a hand clutching a pair of gauntlets against his left hip, tightened his bare fingers about the handle of his sword, and tilted his chin in the air. “It was,” he announced, “as I went into the ante-room just now. There were half-a-dozen fellows there, all trick’d out in that funny red-brown stuff they wear at the Towers, stuff that when you see it at close quarters is all made of rags, rags patched together you know, like the clots and clouts of wandering beggars on the Icen Way: and what must they do the moment they saw me standing there, but rush forward, kneel down before me, stretch out their arms towards me, and cry in the sort of voice—do you remember, Mabbernob?—in which those play-acting masqueraders who came from Sicily cried, when they acted Sabine prisoners begging to have back their wives!

  “But what these poor devils cried was—but do tell me this, Mabbernob, before I go on; has Father been hunting over there and catching these wretches for sport instead of badgers and foxes?—what, I say, they cried was:

  “‘Be our leader, Sir William, be our leader against this wicked, hateful, abominable hell-born Friar Bacon who has devilishly been making, with all his infernal cleverness, out of tin and iron and copper and brass a real breathing, thinking human being, just exactly as if he were God, a Being, you must understand, made of Brass, a Being who predicts the end of the world, a Being who has the power not only to predict the end of the world but—think of their believing that, Mabbernob!—to bring it about! So please, please, please, Sir William,’ these poor wretches cried out, ‘consent to be our leader and help us to break into little pieces this New Man invented by this New Devil! Thou art a knight, Sir William, and here is work proper to thy knightly arms!’”

  “Sit down over there in your Father’s chair, son of my heart, and you and I will discuss this whole matter as carefully as we can.”

  Ulanda’s voice was so extremely quiet that her son, though he wasn’t quite the well-balanced sage he fancied himself to be, received n
ot the faintest intimation of the seething and smouldering hurricane of feverish thoughts that was whirling in her head.

  “Shall I use this child?” she asked herself. “Boncor will never go as far as I want; and these wretches have nothing to lose and everything to gain by killing this devil of a Friar! Besides if Lord Edward comes home before he’s expected and before Henry dies, he’ll be less inclined to make a fuss if it’s an excitable boy who brought about the killing of this sorcerer, and did it by the hands of this Lost Towers gang who’ve always been irresponsible outlaws.”

  Thud—thud—thud—Ah! there were the steps of her bearded husband and his handsome and diplomatic young friend! As she heard these steps there was something about the image of her husband’s beard that flung new fuel on her fury. In these subtle fits of nervous rage, which most of us experience at one time or another, some particular visual image will often detach itself from its proper setting, like a scarf or a belt or a brooch or a feather from some old picture upon the wall, and fly to blend itself with the bodily target of our resentment, even partaking, though the luckless thing is in itself absolutely innocent, in the special objectionableness of the cause of our rancour.

  Thus it was that several seconds before the actual appearance of the middle-aged man she loved and the young man she hated, the curly beard of the former and the clear-cut Hellenic profile of the latter rose so vividly before her mind’s eye that, in a flash of mad fury, Ulanda decided that at all costs, and in spite of all her love for the man himself, Boncor’s beard must be cut off.

  The idea of a beardless Boncor did indeed so fulfil and so satisfy her wrath that, as she listened to what the two men were saying, she became actually aware, though she wouldn’t let herself enjoy that awareness, of a relaxation in the bitterness of her feelings. Something had come into her mind now that resembled a faint reflection in a sprinkling of water, by the side of a weary and unending road, along which she was riding.

  She watched with an abstracted gaze how her son settled himself more and more comfortably in his father’s chair, and as she rubbed with the inside tips of the trembling fingers of one hand the white knuckles of the other, which was fiercely pressed against the edge of the maps of all the world, she vividly imagined herself stroking, with an absolutely sated satisfaction, the bare, soft, hairless chin of the man she possessed.

  But at this moment, as Boncor and Raymond crossed the room, she felt as if they were both as transparent as ghosts.

  “They’ve gone, Ulanda,” Boncor announced, “and you should have seen the effect of the light they carried, as it fell on the clump of firs at our gate!”

  “And then on their red-brown costumes,” added Raymond de Laon.

  “Is Bonaventura waiting for them?” Ulanda enquired. “Is he going boldly to lead them into the Priory and straight up the steps into that chamber where the wretch manufactures his devilish machines?” As the two of them moved up to the table they both replied at once.

  “I told them plainly that I wouldn’t have any killing of Friars on land that belongs to me. But when they asked: ‘Will you forbid your people to meddle with them as they carry off the sorcerer?’ I answered that I never interfere with private quarrels between different sections of my people. If the pious ones want to kill the impious ones, Let the Devil look after his own! is what I say. And if the profane ones want to kill the pious ones, Leave it to God! is my motto.”

  “You know, lady, there are some quite presentable fellows among these Lost Towers rascals! I expected them to look like a pack of thieves,” added Raymond de Laon, “but, I assure you, Lady, they weren’t all like that!”

  It was at this point that little Sir William, who had been listening to their words like a prince in a fairy-tale, rose portentously to his feet. “Don’t you think, Father, don’t you think, Raymond, that it would be a good thing if I went down and talked things over with Turgo? When I discussed with him last week the question of what weapons our Cone bodyguard had better carry on important occasions, he was very impressed by what I told him I’d seen in London at King Henry’s court. I noticed just now when I saw what they were carrying—I mean the ones who were going into the forest to keep watch on these brown-backed bandits—that Turgo had taken my advice. But there was just one little thing that he’d forgotten on which I had specially insisted, namely that their short Roman blades should be unsheathed before placing them in their belts; and that their belts should be furnished with leather clasps, or leather bands, all the way round their waists, so that it would be possible for each man”—Here the new-made knight clapt his hands to his own belt, which bristled with the handles of two or three gleaming blades—“for each man at any sudden attack to defend himself with desolating—no! I mean devastating—no! what I had in mind was penetrating, for the daggers of course must be ready to go in—I mean to be plunged into their enemies’ bodies. I think—don’t you agree, Father?—that it might be a real help to our good Master Turgo if I went more fully into this matter of the way our Cone bodyguard should be armed at this important chorus—I mean crisis—in this history of our house here, and perhaps of—of—of this hemisphere. Don’t you agree with me, father?”

  The belted knight’s progenitor bowed his head. But having gasped and gurgled and almost choked in his effort not to laugh, he glanced appealingly at his wife, and there was a prolonged—and for Raymond de Laon—an embarrassing silence.

  The truth was that Ulanda hadn’t been listening. Not a single word of all that her son had so pontifically repeated about belts and daggers had “penetrated” the walls of her mind. She had known he was speaking “in character”. She had known that her husband was trying not to laugh. She had known that Raymond was vaguely watching all three of them with ironic detachment, and was probably calculating in his own mind how early in the morning he would have to wake up if he were to get a glimpse of Lil-Umbra before their breakfast at the Fortress, and whether he could make himself wake up or whether he’d better get Turgo to wake him.

  Ulanda knew all these things. But as at this instant she glanced under the left arm of her boastful offspring and caught a certain humorously resigned expression in the eyes of her mate, she suddenly felt such a rush of love for him that she could hardly keep herself from betraying it. But she used all her will-power to struggle against this wave of emotion; and, as she overcame it, it became clear to her that to have yielded to it at this moment would have meant the giving up for good of her sworn revenge upon Friar Bacon.

  It was at this precise point in Ulanda’s cogitations that wild excited cries and alarming crashing sounds were heard in the rooms below, followed by a rush of half-a-dozen feet up their staircase. Raymond ran to the door that opened on these stairs and jerked it wide open, repeating as he did so in a high-pitched voice: “What the devil is this? What on earth’s happening?”

  But the broad-shouldered Turgo, with half-a-dozen stalwart and extremely excited men-at-arms behind him, flung him aside, and bursting into the room, stood like a rocky water-fall of indignation in front of the three persons grouped round that map-laden table, behind which, in the absence of fresh logs, the fire was almost dead.

  “It’s too much to endure, my lord! It’s too much for anybody to endure! There’s a big lot of men from the Fortress outside there now, led, yes! actually led, by that boy John who’s the younger of them two, so he ain’t even the heir to Roque! He’s only a young scholard, that’s what he is, yes! that’s all he is—just a scrap of a lad at school! And there he is outside the main gate of Cone waving God knows what sort of weapon in his hand and defying these Lost Towers men and our men and all the men of Wessex to touch his precious Friar and his Friar’s bedevilments!”

  At this point the formidable bailiff of Cone straightened his tremendous shoulders to a degree that might have made even the powerful lover of Ghosta take notice.

  “The man we need here now,” bellowed Turgo, “is Lord Edward himself—O may he soon be our lord and King!—who is already
on ship-board on his way home. It’s him we need now, in this wretched bandit-beset country! Lord Edward would soon settle this crazy confusion in our ancient forest! Why, when he was with the King in London, none of these curst, insurrectionary barons dared lift a cry or wave a banner in this forest of ours! No, they daren’t, I tell you, my lord. They daren’t, I tell you, my lady! That’s what we need here today, a proper knightly prince like Lord Edward!”

  “I’ll come down at once, Turgo,” said Boncor, giving his wife an enquiring glance and apparently taking for granted that she would confirm his decision. “You’d better stay up here with your mother, son,” he added in rather a less assured tone, when he noticed how nervously and anxiously the newly-made knight was pulling out and thrusting back the various silver-handled and brass-handled daggers which protruded from his leather belt.

  In a flash Ulanda rushed round the table and clutched her husband by his left wrist. She had seen in a sudden vision these Fortress adherents, urged on by this crazy young John, and full of the idea that Friar Bacon, the greatest teacher in the world, must be saved at all costs, striking the already-wounded Boncor a blow that would be his death; while she, bereft of the love of her life, would be doomed to abide for the rest of her mortal days listening to this swaggering son of hers and trying to make him turn his words into deeds. God in Heaven, no! that would be more than she could bear! Let all three of them perish before that happened!

  “You go down with Turgo, Sonny!” she cried. “Your father’s a wounded man. I can’t possibly let him fight with those devils! Only for Christ’s blessed sake take care of yourself, son. I don’t want you wounded too!”

  Only once before in all his life had the Lord of Cone been required by the fate or by the chance that governs us all to make a psychic effort comparable with the one he had to make now. But he succeeded in making it; and the apparent ease with which he accepted the issue, when he had done so, was a triumph for his personality of which not a soul present had the faintest shadow of an idea.