The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  He soon became aware that the narrow road he had come by, and the three radiating roads now offering themselves as rivals for his next move, were all sloping upwards. And the queer thing was that, while there were occasional trees, some big, some small, some deciduous, some coniferous, along the edges of all these roads, the ridge or rim of the shallow grassy basin out of which they all led and over which they all vanished into the void or into the clouds, was entirely bare, bare of gorse or bracken or black-thorn, so nakedly bare that it was possible even to note the varying height of particular patches of ordinary meadow grass.

  “Why is it,” the man asked himself, “that to stand at the bottom of a shallow bowl like this and look up at its grassy rim, about half a mile, I suppose, from this hut, gives me such complete acceptance of my fate as I feel at this moment? If my fate had been totally different from what it is, I mean different from the fate of being the Antichrist, who has been prophesied of as long as the Christ has been prophesied of, should I, I wonder, feel this same acceptance of it simply from staring up at this rim of grass?

  “If, for instance I’d been a Jewish youth like Moses and had come here straight from a vision of the burning bush, with the voice of Jehovah issuing from it and the revelation that it was my fate to lead Israel out of Egypt, should I be feeling this same calm acceptance of such a fate as I feel now when I fall into my role as the self-appointed antagonist of Jesus? Is there perhaps a revelation of some planetary Anangkee, or sublime Necessity, in the mere presence of a naked rondure of earth and grass like this against the whole of empty Space?”

  With this thought and with this spectacle in his mind, Petrus Peregrinus returned the larger of the two silver coins to the folds of his jerkin and handed the smaller one to the woman, who clutched it, and proceeded to bite it with what were obviously the only teeth in her head that were opposite each other.

  Clearly satisfied with the sensation in her mouth caused by this action, she opened with a metallic snap a small receptacle fastened to a leather belt round her waist and slipped the coin inside.

  “And now,” cried Petrus Peregrinus, fumbling with a bag in the lining of his jerkin adjoining the abode of his special treasure the loadstone. Presently he produced from this receptacle a small live slow-worm, at the sight of which the woman in front of him was seized with panic, and leaving her seat crouched down behind her mate, who groaned and shut his eyes.

  All Petrus did however was to fling the slow-worm into the uplifted jaws of the great sow, who promptly bit off its head. Nobody but Petrus saw the pitiful flap which the tail of the slow-worm made to avoid following its head down the sow’s throat. These are the things that, if they can only be seen by the right person, lead to some very curious conclusions as to the mystery of life. For as the sow lay down to digest what it had swallowed, the decapitated tail, without wriggling at all and with a final motion of infinite relaxation, as if it were thankfully joining the vast army of exhausted organisms whose reckless, desperate, and aggressive “heads” have flung them aside, stretched out to welcome eternal rest.

  “And now,” murmured Petrus Peregrinus, “I shall leave you, and take the road to the nearest port for the Isle of Britain where I have a greater conquest to achieve than you—or he——” and he nodded at the old man with closed eyes—“or you either, old lady——” and with the handle of his sheathed sword-dagger he prodded the sow’s back—“could possibly understand. And that”—and he pointed to the continuation, over the rim of the valley, of the road by which he had come, “that will be the way I shall go.”

  With this he turned his back upon them all, upon the old man, whose whole conscious personality seemed devoted to the task of allowing nothing to make him open his eyes, upon the sow who was clearly finding the digestion of a small saurian head an occupation both peaceful and soothing, upon the absolutely motionless body of the decapitated slow-worm, against which, as against the side of a Leviathan, two small insects were already tentatively extending their minute feelers, and finally upon the old lady, who, as she watched that small dark figure—for his soldier’s cap was black, his jerkin was black, a heavy velvet cloak he carried on his arm was black, his stockings and wooden shoes were black, while the blackest of all was his one single weapon, that half-sword, half-dagger, which he left in its sheath and used as a short staff to support his steps on any uphill road—uttered from the depths of her whole being the oldest of all European curses.

  It wasn’t till he was just not quite out of hearing that the old woman stretched out both her arms to give full expression to this malediction. With the fingers of both her hands tightly closed she repeated the word Erre!

  “Erre! Erre!” she cried over and over again, pronouncing each syllable of the word with peculiar emphasis.

  Petrus of Maricourt turned quickly enough when he caught those two syllables upon the air. In Picardy, as well as in Savoy, and of course everywhere along the shore of the Mediterranean, that phrase was used to express loathing and bitter contempt. So there was the magic word that he had stopped so long at that turn-pike hovel to extract from its witch-wife! Erre! And the word was the very same curse that had been heard in all the harbours of all the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean and Aegean since the days of Homer.

  Petrus Peregrinus hadn’t been a traveller in all parts of Europe for nothing, and he had often pondered on the mystery of this word with its deadly rush of execration—“Get out of here, you rat, you maggot, you worm, you abomination, you lump of filth!”—and he knew well that it had been allowed to remain in all the most authoritative texts of the Homeric manuscripts, and must have been passed, not only by the Athenian censors of the days of King Peisistratus of Athens, but by the far more particular censors of the Library of Alexandria and by the tremendous scholars who revised the “Codex Marcianus” in the Library of San Marco in Venice.

  He made no retort to it at this moment however; but every time he pressed his scabbarded sword-dagger into the ground to support his steps over the rim of the basin-like declivity from which he was now rapidly emerging, he concentrated his whole soul upon a solemn covenant he was now making with himself.

  “It has become clear to me,” murmured his inmost heart communing with itself, “that my chief enemy at this moment among the righteous is Albertus of Cologne. He seems to have got some secretus secretorum out of the raw material of the Aristotelian “hulee”, of which the universe is made, that enables him to cast some sort of spell over his pupils. He’s been having with him of late, and they say they live together in the same lodging, which always gives a teacher a special personal influence over a young man, that eccentric silent youth with a big head who is called Aquinas. Yes! I know what you want me to do, my darling little Rod of Power!”

  And the weak-legged, black-garbed, black-capped, wooden-booted climber upwards clutched, as he mounted the rim of the depression, the lodestone in the slit of his breeches.

  “You want me to go straight to this great donkey of Cologne, who makes friends not with handsome young people but with great head-heavy lunatics, who think of nothing but dovetailing fantastical dogmas, and when I’m face to face with this double-dyed idiot, you want me to let you loose on him, to make him skip a bit! Don’t tell me that’s not what you want, for I know very well it is! But listen to me, my precious little Baton of Power. You’re the Wand of Merlin the Brython. You’re the Rod of Moses the Israelite. You’re the finger that Jehovah lifted when He bade the World leap up like a fish out of Nothing.

  “But though you are all you are, little Push-Pin of Omnipotence, the fact remains that, if I am to win in this contest with Albertus Magnus in this arena of this amphitheatre of the universe, I must confront the fellow face to face.

  “Well, little soul-prick of the world’s gizzard, you think that’s impossible don’t you? And you think since it is impossible, you and I will have to find another way of getting round this beggar and outwitting him! But let me tell you now, my Magnet of Satan, it’s no
t impossible. I’ve just heard—never you mind how or by whom!—that he’s been invited by Roger Bacon—yes! by Friar Bacon himself, Push-Pin, my devilkin! and you take note of that!—to go and see for himself that Brazen Head magicked into life by Brother Bacon. So that’s where you and I come in, little lovely, and so let Holy Jesus beware!”

  The small dark figure with his black military boots, black military cap, and black sheathed weapon to support his weak legs, was now well across the rim of the geological earth-circle over which that Homeric “Erre! Erre!” of the old woman had hurried him.

  Looking round at all he saw and at how the highway he was following was losing itself in a distance that he knew well was westward and seaward, our resolute antagonist of the Christian religion, whom many people would have described as a grotesque little idiot but whom Paul of Tarsus and Jesus of Nazareth would have taken as seriously as he took himself, plucked now from out of his garments the magic lodestone with which he hoped to frustrate the whole Revelation. Rubbing it up and down against the tight black garments that covered his emaciated flanks, just as if he were sharpening a butcher’s knife, he proceeded to stretch the thing out to the full length of his arm and began working it up and down as if he were actually making a slit in some vast, invisible, planetary tent, through which when once his stabber, his prodder, his love-piercer, his hope-drainer, his life-borer, his faith-rinser, his root-sucker, his magnet of universal destruction had found its way, it might really hurt and wound and injure whatever universe or multiverse there might be outside and beyond our world.

  Once clear of this whole district and aiming for the channel between France and England, our peregrinating Antichrist pursued his future movements with what really was uncommonly careful consideration. Having made straight for the channel, he followed the French coast harbour by harbour, till he hit upon the precise sort of vessel he wanted sailing direct to a Wessex port.

  All went well, just as he hoped, and it was not until he had actually disembarked that any trouble came, and when trouble did come, it came from out of his own head, and not from any external event. How it came, why it came, and what made it come, Petrus had not then, and never had afterwards, any clear idea.

  It came suddenly out of his memory, as he stood on the shore after waving farewell to the ship that had brought him there: and it came to him just as if somebody else were telling the story, somebody, however, who knew his thoughts and feelings with a perfectly terrible exactitude, somebody in fact who was uncomfortably like God.

  What came to him was his memory of a certain occasion when, with other French soldiers, he was being conveyed in a French ship along the shores of Palestine not far from the Port of Acre. Here, because of something he had done or had not done, the ship’s commander had had him thrown overboard.

  He had not clung very long, however, to an overturned boat which happened to drift past him, when he suddenly found himself close under the bows of the grandest British vessel that in all his peregrinations he had ever beheld. That this vessel was English there could be no doubt, and that it carried on board some extremely important, perhaps even some royal personage seemed more than likely.

  “Can it be Lord Edward’s ship?” he thought; and in a shorter time than it would have taken him to consult his lodestone, which he always treated as a familiar spirit, he found himself hauled on board this formidable vessel and confronted with its royal voyager who, as he had predicted, was indeed no other than Lord Edward himself, the heir to the British throne.

  The whole interview that followed took place on the main deck of this crusading vessel.

  “I thought you were right, Gunter,” Lord Edward muttered, addressing the master of the vessel, a man whose most marked propensity was the power of becoming nothing, and a predilection for becoming nothing, or as near nothing as it was possible for a native of the harbour of Weymouth, near the ancient city of Durnovaria, with a handsome wife and a dozen children, to become.

  “My sailor-friend here,” went on the warrior-prince, addressing Petrus now, but practising as he spoke, just as if he were quite alone, some particular gesture in the difficult art of slinging, “assures me that his wife has relatives in Picardy and that he felt quite certain, from the tone of your voice just now when you answered him from the sea, that you were from that part of the world. Is that so, master? Well, in any case,”—and Edward turned a shrewd glance upon the vessel from which Petrus had been flung, and which was now making use of every inch of sail it possessed to get quickly away—“your friends aren’t waiting for you! May I ask what your business is? Or are you, as seems more likely from your looks, now that I see you close, travelling to London from some foreign court? Are you perhaps from Madrid or from——”

  Their conversation was interrupted by a series of piercing and painful screams, and Edward turned angrily to the ship’s captain whom he had addressed as “Gunter”. “Haven’t I told you I won’t have that man allowed to make that noise! Didn’t I tell you to tie him up so that he can’t scream? Its all in the way he’s tied, I tell you! The point I insist on is that he should suffer pain; but that doesn’t mean that I want to hear his shrieks. In fact if he’s tied so that he can’t shriek, he’ll suffer a lot more. To shriek is a relief. That’s why Nature lets us indulge in it. I trust you haven’t forgotten, Gunter, quite all I ordered. I am accustomed to being obeyed at sea as promptly as on land. That man deliberately disobeyed me, and he must suffer till he has learnt his lesson!”

  It was almost as if the sea itself, with the whole weight of the steel-green purple-shadowed mass of its salt water, had risen up to protest against this haughty announcement; for a terrific wave curved up out of the deep at that point and completely drowned both the screams from below and the exchange of words between the Lord Edward and Master Gunter and Peter of Maricourt.

  But it may easily be believed that the last named had not missed the rough brutality with which the future ruler of England had referred to this victim of his violent temper; and as he gazed at him now while all three of them were watched rather humorously by a couple of sailors, his own bodily longing to change his clothes became far less important to him than a rush of purely emotional feeling that quivered through every nerve of his body, a rush of desperate hatred of this powerful, dominating, ruggedly handsome, battle-loving, strong-willed Lord Edward.

  And under the power of this blind rush of emotional hatred which he longed to gratify by some spectacular use of his precious lodestone, he realised that this was a crisis in his life.

  “Yes,” he thought, “may my soul burn in hell if I don’t give this great English bully something to make him remember those screams.”

  But as he watched him closely and dallied with the instrument pressed against his own body, it came over him with the unutterable force of a premonition totally beyond the range of his own fighting spirit, that it would be useless to try to work by magnetism the death of this particular tyrant.

  “But wait a moment”—he felt as if these words were reaching him out of the air—“What about this hammering bully’s offspring? He’s the King’s son. Will not his son be King also when the time comes? And how unlikely, how almost impossible, as the world goes, it would be for the son of a man of iron like this, a back-breaker and a skull-cracker, a master of armies and a sacker of cities, to be born like his begetter, or, if the child were a girl, for her to be a stirrer up of savagery and slaughter! So listen, Lodestone darling! Don’t you agree with me, you precious little heart-breaker, life-piercer, lava-flinger, angel-slayer, blow-them-up-alive? Surely you do, my darlingest of little volcanoes? Surely you do? Very well then, my pretty one! The covenant’s signed and sealed twixt thee and me. What we’ll do is to lie in wait for the feeble offspring of our great shark; and when we’ve got him we’ll fix him! We’ll follow him up all his life—or if we’re dead our spirits shall—and he shall die screaming!”

  It was a curious thing—indeed it was what we pathetic tribes of mortals love to ca
ll “one of those things”—that almost simultaneously with Petrus’s private talk with his lodestone, Master Gunter, who had gone below, came up again, and going straight up to Lord Edward, announced the death of the man who had been screaming. But that was not all, for there suddenly fell in the midst of the three of them, slam-bang upon the deck, the bleeding, mangled body of a small sea-bird that had been suddenly seized by a roving sea-hawk ready for any mouthful but not inclined to pause for a substantial meal.

  The sanguinary slap that the fall of this small feathered corpse made upon the deck, and the shrill wail from the creature’s mate that followed it, shook Petrus out of his diffidence to such a degree that he boldly asked Master Gunter whether he could give him a berth and have his clothes dried; and it was almost within touch of the man who had just paid the last penalty for defying the ruler not only of the land, but of the waves of the sea, that Peter of Picardy fell asleep that night hugging his lodestone.

  XX

  THE CERNE GIANT

  It was of these events that our student of magnetism was thinking now, as he stood staring for almost five minutes at the uneven curves of the sea-tide’s advances and retreats, as if he were listening to an invisible Brazen Head reporting these things to a mixed court of celestial and infernal judges. When, however, he shook off his memories, he found himself on the edge of a series of wide-stretching reedy swamps, interspersed with estuaries of salt water where wind-tossed alders and wind-swept willows led to lonely huts on flat marshy levels, only separated from the sea by desolate sand-dunes, whose human inhabitants lived on the finned and feathered natives they snared and slew.