The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  Peleg said to himself: “This queer-looking little fellow in black stumping along with a Roman sword for a staff must be the Lost Towers’ latest pick-up. From the fellow’s expression I doubt if the wench has got him as completely as she thinks she has!”

  Petrus thought: “Haven’t I met this dark girl somewhere before round here? Or is it you, my pretty one,” and he gave a caressing squeeze to the lodestone in his innermost garment, “who have pointed her out to me when we were going about? Whoever she is, she’s a powerful person; and I’d be a prize idiot to neglect her help in my Antichrist crusade and a plain fool not to try to find what she herself feels about this damned Brazen Head?”

  As for Ghosta herself; she was acquainted, by reason of her job in the Convent kitchen, with all the gossip of the neighbourhood, for the Nuns heard everything, and those among them who weren’t born to be spiritual were the best authorities in the district on all that was going on, on the quarrels and alliances, on the friendships and enmities, on the misunderstandings and idiotic manias, in all the various manorial centres whose circles of authority over-lapped at this point.

  “O I do hope and pray,” Ghosta cried in her heart, “that Peleg’s discovery of this traveller’s association with Lost Towers won’t start him off again on his mad suspicion of their being some sexual connection between me and the Friar!”

  It was naturally enough the clever clasper of that dangerous magnetic weapon who broke the somewhat awkward silence with which the pair ascending from the cave encountered the pair skirting that tricky declivity.

  “I am a visitor to your country, Master”—here Petrus bowed politely to the Jewish giant—“to your country, Mistress”—and here he did the same to Ghosta—“with the purpose of inspecting this wonderful invention of your Friar Bacon of which I have been told by this gentle lady, whom I had the good fortune to meet when I first landed on your shores, and which she tells me is to be found in a Castle called the Fortress of Roque, the Lord of which has only recently recovered from an attack made upon him by a demented animal, by a horse in fact, whom some wicked magician had tried to turn into one of those classical creatures who have men’s heads on horses’ necks and were called Centaurs, and one of them indeed”—here the traveller bowed graciously to both the giant and Ghosta—“as frequenters of monastic libraries, like yourselves, no doubt know, was a sort of schoolmaster to swift-footed Achilles.”

  “You had better take them to the main Fortress gate, Peleg,” said Ghosta quickly. “I must run back to the Convent now, and I shan’t have to ring that big front bell anyway, for I’ll get in at the back, where there’s a door close to the passage where my room is. I’ll be here,” she added in a lower voice, giving the great knuckles of the giant whose right hand was squeezed into his leather belt, a quick pressure, “tomorrow, wet or fine, at the same time as today!”

  And with this she was off; and they all watched her tall slight figure hurry down the path towards the Convent.

  “Well, Master—well, Mistress Lilith,” said Peleg, “shall we go straight to the Fortress? It’s inside the Fortress, you know, in fact in the armoury, that the Friar’s Brazen Head has been put for safety. This Papal Legate, or whatever he calls himself, whose name has such a friendly sound—I mean Bonaventura—has been making so much trouble round here that we—but I mustn’t go on like this with you, Mistress Lilith, here; for you naturally have to take the side of your dad and I naturally have to take the side of my lord—but anyway, you, sir, as an experienced traveller, will have seen many local divergencies far more extreme than any of ours and bringing with them far more risky consequences to the country concerned.”

  Lilith smiled at him with a quick, humorously confidential smile, as much as to say, “O my dear big man, you weren’t born in the midst of our silly little dissensions, but you’ll have to take us as you find us.”

  “Somebody told us as we came along,” murmured Petrus almost wistfully, “that, if we wanted to have a word with Albert of Cologne, who has come over here to see Friar Bacon, we ought to go to the Priory where the great man has been invited tonight to dine with the reverend Prior. It would be a pity, wouldn’t it, to put you to the trouble of showing us the way to the Fortress, only to find when we reach it that the man we are seeking has just left to go to the Priory?”

  To this fretful commentary upon the course of events it was Lilith, not the Jewish giant, who replied.

  “The obvious thing to do,” she said, stepping forward quickly, and with one slender hand putting pressure on the giant’s hip and with the other upon the elbow of Petrus Peregrinus, “is to get to the Fortress as quickly as we can and find out if the man has yet started for the Priory. It may well happen that we shall be allowed to accompany him there, and possibly be able to eat a crust with the Friar, while Albertus is dining with Prior Bog.”

  The long legs of Peleg and the short legs of Petrus found themselves obeying her, almost as if they’d been the fore-legs and the hind-legs of the same horse drawing her chariot.

  “Little does this fellow guess,” thought Petrus pressing his sword-staff into the rocks and the lichen and the moss and the mud and the grass, and his lodestone into his own scrotum, “that the sole reason of our desire to meet this Albertus is to put an end to his fight on behalf of Christ, and to help this self-worshipping Bonaventura to smash to atoms the Friar’s Brazen Head.”

  But, whatever their thoughts, they all three hurried on, and had the Welsh tinker or one of his witch-wives watched them pass, they would have seemed like a giant from Palestine accompanied by a dwarf from Egypt and led by a siren from the Isles of Greece.

  The truth was that Peleg and Lilith between them managed to lead the student of magnetism so rapidly, and by paths so completely unknown to him, that it was neither a surprise nor a shock when the girl stopped them with an excited gesture and pointed to a moving mass of gleaming weapons at the foot of four great dark-foliaged pines, and cried out in a thin, wavering, wispy voice, as if she’d been a frightened maiden from the convent rather than the seductive heiress of Lost Towers: “There! there! there’s a lot of soldiers! Your friend from Cologne must have brought a big bodyguard with him! They’re coming this way. What about waiting for them here?”

  It was then that Peleg intervened. He spoke slowly and deliberately; but it was clear that he was agitated by what he saw.

  “It seems to me, Master Petrus, that those are King’s Men from London; and what is more, Mistress Lilith, I believe I hear some royal music. So it can’t be the ecclesiastic from Germany. It must be some royal captain on his way from London to tell us all some important news. Perhaps King Henry is dying. News doesn’t travel as fast in this island as it does between the Tigris and the Eu——” He stopped suddenly; and Lilith, who had been watching him, turned round, as suddenly, to her other companion.

  But her other companion was behaving in a very strange manner. It appeared that Petrus Peregrinus was undergoing a kind of mental agitation so extreme that it amounted to something resembling a fit. He was holding both his hands to his ears, as if to render himself deaf to some sound that he was finding too horrible to endure; and he was doing this without losing his hold of the sheathed weapon he had been using as a staff.

  Suddenly with a choking gasp he let his hands sink down till his weapon, held to his wrist by a strap, trailed in the dust. At the same time an expression of incredible relief relaxed his features and clouded with a misty haze his incredibly black eyes. Both Peleg and Lilith surveyed him with astonishment, an astonishment that was increased when they heard him talking to himself, and doing so in English though with a strong French accent.

  “Thank the Devil he’ll be dead soon now! And thank the Devil that he can put so much power into his voice that even in the midst of this unspeakable way they’re murdering him a lot of the pain goes into his screams. O thanks be to the Devil! He’s quite dead now!”

  Pierre of Maricourt became silent at that point, and leant so heavily on
his scabbarded weapon that it sank several inches into the marshy ground upon which, at the sight of the gleaming arms of those distant men, they had all three paused.

  “What is it Sieur de Maricourt?” enquired Lilith. “Nobody is screaming here. Nobody is being killed here. What is it, Maitre Pierre?”

  The reply came slowly but quite clearly, each word of it being like an enormous gobbet of human flesh, steaming with red foam and dripping with hot blood.

  “No! no! this thing is not happening now. It’s going to happen! It—is—all—in—the—future. I—am—making it—happen. It’s going to happen to the son of—never mind that!—who is being tortured to death in a castle whose name is—whose name begins with B. But he’s dead now; and with his screams went a lot of his pain—into the air! My little pretty one and I have done it … the prince of … of … of … of … But never mind that! But mark you … it has … it has … it has to happen! Little Pretty and I have done it already! All the rest can be left to the huge wave of natural necessity that carries us all before it. But there are certain”—and here even Lilith, the daughter of Baron Maldung of Lost Towers, was startled by the look of concentrated, merciless, indeed you might say insane ferocity in the two enormous black eyes, now almost become one, above the traveller’s raptorial beak—“but there are certain turnpike valleys, in the future lives of us all,” he went on, “in which things can be made to happen to us, either as a blessing or as a curse, by concentrated will supported by concentrated prayer addressed to Heaven or—mark you!—to Hell: certain turnpike valleys I say that this great rushing universal stream of Necessity lacks the power to touch.

  “These turnpikes in our lives are so indurated, so scooped and gouged out, so chiselled and indented, so engraved, so branded by the intense will and the intense prayer of our worst enemy or our best friend, that this frantic hate or this desperate love works those effects that our excitable doctors of divinity, like this confounded Cologne potentate, call miracles.

  “And in a popular sense they are miracles. But we must remember that the mass of people are so stupid, yes! so stupid and dull-witted and silly, that anything achieved by exceptional will-power or exceptional energy appears miraculous. And these accursed ecclesiastics are worse than the mob; for they are at bottom as stupid as the mob, but they have learnt the tricks of their trade and know how to appear both learned and clever.”

  Peleg and Lilith exchanged amused glances at this point; for it had become clear to them that this student of magnetism had already become, not only a professor, but a professor whose contempt for other professors surpassed his contempt for common humanity. His companions’ thoughts must somehow have reached him, but instead of quelling his professorial desire to lecture, not so much to teach others as to get the thrill of haranguing others, these thoughts of theirs drove him on. For human beings are only surpassed in their quickness of emotional reaction to unspoken thoughts by one other animal on earth; namely by dogs; but unlike the reactions of dogs, our reactions are generally contradictory. This is proved by the way Petrus acted now.

  He straightened his rounded shoulders and thin legs, and hurriedly clambered up upon a broad flat stone. Mounted on this natural rostrum he stretched out his black-sheathed sword-dagger towards the soldiers, who were now definitely marching in their direction, and cried in a shrill voice:

  “And these military people too! What do any of them know of the real nature of the necessities of the country, or of the king, or of the nation? All they know is how to obey their trumpets and bugles. After the vulgar herd, and after the grotesque array of half-doting, ridiculously pontifical teachers, the most absurd body of men to be found in our crazy world are soldiers—yes! every kind of soldiers, soldiers of Kings, soldiers of Queens, soldiers of Regents, soldiers of sovereign realms who have only Dictators!

  “You tell me those soldiers are English soldiers. Well, I can only tell you that I feel unutterable contempt for every soldier serving in that force and obeying a kindly King who is weak and dying, and only longing to obey a King who is strong, hard, and brutal and loves fighting for fighting’s sake. I tell you there’s not one single one of all these men now marching in their damned orderly ranks towards us, who has the intelligence of an ordinary dog, not one single one!”

  Peter Peregrinus now descended from his stone of oration and put a straight question to the beautiful Lilith. “Well, little lady? Had we better wait their arrival here? Or shall we just go boldly on to meet them, and then enquire, of whatever captain or centurion or prince who is leading them, whether he knows just where Albertus of Cologne is passing the night? We could tell him that I have come from a besieger’s camp in France, especially to bring him an important message.”

  No chronicler could describe in words the expression on the face of Petrus Peregrinus at this moment. Neither Peleg from above him nor Lilith from below him had ever seen anything like the way those black eyes, just as if they had become the one solitary eye of an antediluvian creation from the bottom of the ocean, looked with an indescribably inward look at what his own red tongue was doing in its own cave-like mouth, into which it seemed as if this one eye must be able to watch this unique tongue tentatively emerging from the devil knows how much deeper a cavern, and beginning its exploration of the blood-sucking meat-mill which it has entered.

  But the eyes of Peter of Maricourt saw something now that drew them away from his own interior being. He saw two young men coming towards them down the slope of a hill, from a direction that was at right angles to the direct line between the place where they stood and the point now reached by the advancing soldiers. To him they were unknown; but the moment Peleg, following the obviously startled look he saw him turn in that direction, caught sight of them, their identity was revealed.

  “Why! there are Master Tilton and Master John! Do you wish me, Mistress Lilith, to call to them? I don’t think they have seen us yet; and to tell you the truth I don’t think they are likely to see us till they get quite close! It’s plain to me: indeed I can clearly hear,” and he exchanged a quick glance with Lilith, “that they’re arguing and disputing; and when those two begin that sort of thing, there’s no use trying to make them notice anything.”

  It was Lilith who spoke then. “And what,” she enquired gaily, “do you think, Master Peter?”

  What Peter thought, before anything else occurred to him, was simply how queer it was to see his wicked temptress of Lost Towers act like an ordinary and natural girl. It was clear that she was delighted with this new turn to the stream of events.

  Peter of Maricourt didn’t openly hesitate. But in his heart he did more than hesitate. What rushed across his mind, as the girl waited for his answer, was the thought that, if he could deprive the Fortress of both its young men, it would be a better stroke in his Antichrist crusade than even if he managed to put an end to Albertus of Cologne.

  He closed his mouth firmly against any premature licking of his lips; but there had come an excited note into his voice which it was impossible to miss, though he answered quietly enough.

  “There are times in life, little lady,” he said, “when we can only listen to the ticking of the clock of fate and wait for what is destined to happen. This is one of those times.”

  XXI

  THE PENANCE

  “But haven’t you the power to see,” young John was saying to his elder brother, his voice mounting up almost to a shout, “that the church has just created this whole business of the Trinity in order to catch the three in its fishing-net?”

  “What three classes,” enquired Tilton, “have you got in your head?”

  “In my head—nothing!” cried the other indignantly, “the classes I’m talking about are with us always. They are here in the Fortress! They are there in the Priory! They are everywhere. I am talking about first, stupid, simple, ordinary people: second, artistic, imaginative people: third, strong ambitious people. This third class is of course the class who govern and rule us—not always on thr
ones or on horseback, or in chariots—very often entirely behind the scenes.

  “By the idea of God the Father they catch the strong rulers who imprison and execute their enemies. By the ideas of God the Son they catch the simple, stupid mass of ordinary people who aren’t tricky or clever enough to be anything but good and obedient, and who make of what they call Love a mystical and magical power that works miracles.

  “And finally by the idea of the Holy Ghost they catch the poets, the story-tellers, the musicians, the painters, the builders and the scholars; and these are the ones who have invented Our Lady, and made Her the Mother of God, and the Fourth great Panel of the Pythagorean square!”

  “I’ve heard enough of your fancies and theories, John,” retorted his brother. “For heaven’s sake let’s take advantage of having the whole day to ourselves, while Mother and Father are both taken up with listening to this Dominican from Germany refuting this Franciscan from Italy.”

  John decided at this point that he must be more practical in talking to Tilton.

  “Presently,” he remarked, “they’ll be having—father and mother I mean—a nice tricky job if these King’s Men from London demand shelter for the night. I can’t make out what the idea was in sending them down here at all. I don’t believe the old King had anything to do with it. I fancy there’s some ‘funny business’, as we say in Oxford, going on in the King’s court. What we want is Lord Edward back again! Why does he go on with this ridiculous crusade? What’s this city of Acre, to him, or him to it, that he should fight for it? What I think about this whole affair is——”

  “Please, John, don’t go on any more like this! And look there—Isn’t that our Peleg? Who on earth are those two with him? Why—John! If that’s not Lilith of Lost Towers! Who’s that man with her? He’s a foreigner of some sort. He doesn’t look as if he knew his head from his tail. He’s mad or something! There! He’s seen us now. What the devil is he up to? He’s moving about watching us with his hands pressed between his legs as if he were turning himself into a flying battering-ram.”