The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  “My name, your Eminence, is Pierre de Maricourt, and I come from Picardy. My profession, as you see, is that of a soldier of the King of France. But I am also a student of the ancient tongues and I spend my wages in buying books. I know a little Greek and Latin, your Eminence, already; and I hope, before I die, to be able to learn a little Hebrew. I came over to have an opportunity of acquiring at close quarters a few details about the kind of mistakes—in orthodox divinity I mean—which Friar Bacon has been making.”

  Petrus spoke slowly from more than one motive, and from more than one motive too he kept his terrific black eyes fixed as magnetically as he could upon Bonaventura’s face. Beneath his clothes, as you may believe, he kept the head of Little Pretty—for he knew by touch her head from her tail—aimed straight at his interlocutor and it soon became clear that Little Pretty’s effect, aided by the intensity of his own magnetic gaze was overmastering.

  Bonaventura began showing signs of extreme agitation. He kept turning round and glancing anxiously at the brown-and-red jerkins and breeches of the group he had just left, as if he were afraid that the presence of their young mistress among them might dispel and destroy his own authority over them, and even result in some form of action entirely different from the line he wished them to take.

  In his own secret consciousness Bonaventura was more upset than he had been for years. “I must,” he told himself, “adopt some powerful course of action with this accurst runaway from Picardy, who evidently is a lecherous pick-up of Lilith’s. I must frighten him in some sort of way.”

  Meanwhile Petrus had commenced in dead silence conveying his wishes to “Little Pretty”.

  “We must will him to lift up first one of his legs and then the other,” he told her, articulating his intention very definitely and moving her head, still pressed against his skin, so that it should point straight at Bonaventura’s skull. “First one and then the other, my treasure!” he repeated.

  And behold! it actually happened; yes! it happened just exactly as our scientific student of magnetism had indicated to his precious magnet. Up went one leg of the General of the Grey Friars, while he made a shuffling movement with the foot still on the ground.

  “Now make him lift the other, my sweet!” And down came Bonaventura’s left leg and up went his right. “Make the old sod dance a proper jig now, pretty one. We’ll learn him to be a Legate!”

  And to the absolute amazement of a couple of Lost Towers men who had turned to look back while the rest of the crew were following Lilith into the Forest, and to the even greater astonishment of Friar Roger’s cousin from London, the enterprising Perspicax, who having been invited the night before to take his breakfast with Tilton and young John and possibly even with their parents too, if the Baron got back in time from his morning jaunt, now stood at Peter Peregrinus’ elbow.

  “Is that a new kind of penance?” enquired the commander of the King’s Men.

  “Do you know, Capitaine, I really do believe that it is!” replied Maître Pierre de Maricourt. “And the odd thing is,” he continued, twisting “Little Pretty” around against his own body so that her head pointed straight at the centre of the intruder’s not very high forehead, “the odd thing is that this particular penance is infectious! I even feel like joining it myself!” And he shuffled a little with the toes and heels of his sandals in the long grass.

  To the commander of the King’s Men this untimely dance was indeed infectious. He raised his well-armoured knees in this grotesque jig even higher than the stately personage before them was lifting his grey robe; and he even went so far, for he had a daring and reckless spirit under his military restraint, as to stretch out his right hand and seize, much to this latter’s discomfiture, Bonaventura’s left hand.

  This crazy dance, which might well have been, so Petrus grimly assured himself as he watched them, a dance in honour of an East-Indian idol, performed at Karakorum before the Khan, went on without a pause till the last of the red-brown bandits, together with their “leukolenian” or white-armed princess, had disappeared, and until a little group of highly amused but somewhat puzzled King’s Men had come up from the camp and arranged themselves in a line, evidently waiting for the morning’s proper business to begin.

  It was from sheer exhaustion that both these dancers, Bonaventura in his noble grey garments and Perspicax in his by no means ignoble royal colours, finally and simultaneously sank, side by side, upon the moss and small ferns and wood-grass and ground-lichen beneath a half-circle of the massive trunks of five majestic pines. Mingled with an infernal satisfaction which distorted his face and made his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth—and of course all chroniclers of Peter Peregrinus who neglect the physical motions of his tongue are dodging something essential—was a totally unexpected pity for the prostrate Perspicax.

  What brought this pity into the erratic heart of our traveller was the simple pride which his humiliated victim had taken in being a soldier. This pride brought back to him his own childhood, and suggested to his mind the behaviour of the stately officials of the castle at Maricourt, and he couldn’t help muttering aloud a familiar tag of Homeric Greek that he had learnt as a boy in a monastic school: “Ephane mega seema!” “There appeared a great sign!”

  And indeed as he watched the King’s Men lift up their commander and carry him off to their camp, and as he himself was assisting Bonaventura to his feet, there appeared, coming from between those enormous pine-trees, whose branchless trunks enhanced the romance of every event that occurred beneath them, no less a couple of celebrities than Albertus Magnus of Cologne and Friar Roger Bacon!

  It was clear in a second to the wielder of “Little Pretty” that the great Dominican, who looked indeed a rampart of strength in his singular head-dress and peat-black raiment, had compelled the Prior of Bumset to liberate his captive, at least for a time.

  “Whither were they bent now?” he thought. “Who could say? They must have started at dawn from the Priory! The Cologne man must have stayed the night there; perhaps in the very chamber of Roger Bacon, with whom he may have been arguing and discussing all night. There’s simply no limit,” thus Peter Peregrinus’ thoughts ran on, “to these learned idiots’ powers of disputation.”

  Curiously enough in the agitating look-skirmish and gesture-drama that ensued between these four men—with “Little Pretty”, the deadly lodestone, pressed against the skin of Master Peter—the one who conducted himself with the greatest ease and the most successful assurance was Bonaventura.

  Master Peter, as you can well imagine, didn’t miss this fact; his agile mind kept turning it over and over, and even as he hurried to be the first to speak, he decided that this superiority in social self-possession came from the fact of Bonaventura’s much wider experience of the contemporary world and more intimate knowledge of the royal courts of Europe than Friar Bacon could possibly have—or Albertus either, in spite of his two years as a Bishop.

  “You will pardon me, your Reverence, I trust, for addressing you without your permission. But I am a student of scientific magnetism—a most complicated subject—and I was anxious to visit this famous inventor of the Brazen Head whom I now find in your company.”

  At this point Friar Bacon, who, to Peter’s discerning black eyes, was far the most embarrassed of all the four, spoke out strongly, though Petrus could almost see his heart beating under his grey robe and his pulses throbbing under his grey sleeves.

  “What we must all do now, and you with us, Master——”

  “Petrus of Maricourt in Picardy!” interposed Bonaventura with a nod and a smile.

  “And you with us, Master Petrus,” went on Friar Bacon, “is to take advantage of my cousin Perspicax having a body of King’s Men from London with him, and go straight to Lost Towers and possess ourselves of it in the King’s name. King Henry, though very ill, is still alive, and we all know what his son, Lord Edward, would do if he were with us today! He would make short work of this stronghold of bandits, who have for
some many years troubled the lives of quiet people in this part of our land! So the first thing we must do—and I trust you will accompany us, Maître Pierre de Maricourt—is to go to the camp and tell my Cousin Perspicax to assemble his men at once and follow us to Lost Towers.”

  Petrus told himself as he looked from this Friar in grey to the courtly Bonaventura, also in grey, and from them both to the black raiment and incredible headgear of Albert the Great, that what he really needed at this crisis in his life was one clear and definite and decisive word from the Devil Himself—for He alone could really help him at such an amazing concatenation as this—telling him by what word, what blow, what death-dance, he, Petrus, ought to make it clear to the whole lot of them that the long-predicted Antichrist was at last really among them, and that the hour had come for the crashing down, once for all, of the whole shaky edifice of the Christian faith.

  “It is extraordinary,” Petrus told himself, as he followed the two grey figures and the one black figure in the direction in which the King’s Men had just conveyed their exhausted commander, “how a weak, timid, nervous, hermit of philosophy like this Roger Bacon can suddenly take the lead, and without any ‘Little Pretty’ pressed against his skin, can dominate—can dare to try to dominate—two such figures as this Grey One and this Black One, not to mention Antichrist himself, who in the shape of a lodestone-bearer has come among them!

  “But it shows one thing. It shows that when a man is quiet and peaceful and timid and philosophical, and scared of both God and the Devil, and longs to live entirely for his own lonely sensations and for his fine points of learning and for the mystery of words, there may come a moment when he suddenly finds himself with a power of plunging into action and of abandoning himself to reckless and desperate moves, such as much stronger characters and much more formidable wills would never dare to display.”

  The four singular visitors were not long in discovering that, although he had so recently been down in the very depths of impotence, Friar Roger’s cousin from Ilchester was now perfectly ready to retake complete command of the bulk of his men. And so without more ado, they set out through the forest and actually found themselves in less than a couple of hours at the entrance to Lost Towers.

  They were, however, certainly not prepared for what they found when they reached those gates. Instead of riding for pure pleasure that morning, far less engaging in any boar-hunt or any wolf-hunt, the Lord of the Manor of Roque had left his bed while it was still quite dark, and had taken with him, completely unknown to Lady Val or Lil-Umbra or either of his two sons, the whole force of all the best Fortress-fighters who were available, and had hurried off with them to Cone Castle, where he obtained an interview with Lady Ulanda and her son. As for Baron Boncor himself, he had heard about the squadron of King’s Men arriving by forced marches into Wessex and had foreseen that Friar Bacon and his Brazen Head were bound to be included in the local trouble which the arrival of this royal force was sure to bring with it. And so, knowing that nothing would stop Lady Ulanda from rushing openly and shamelessly into the fray as long as there was the faintest chance that it might lead to the destruction of the inventor of the Head, he had already taken his own sensible counsel and nobody else’s.

  Having for once been able to slip out of their mutual bed without waking his infatuated lady, he had gone bare-footed to his cousin Raymond’s chamber and communicated his intention to him. Raymond de Laon did exactly what his friend wanted him to do. He dressed with incredible speed, picked up a long hunting-spear with which, by climbing upon a particular buttress, he could tap on Lil-Umbra’s window-sill at the Fortress, and glided, more like a beneficent spirit than an enamoured young man, out of Cone Castle and clear away from its precincts.

  “Yes,” he promised his cousin, “I’ll hang around in the forest, clear of Perspicax’s camp, till it’s light enough for a talk at her window. So you get away, while the going’s good. Don’t give me a thought!”

  So after ordering the obstreperous Turgo on no account to leave the Castle till his return, Boncor set off with only one attendant, namely a certain Bob Talirag, who had an aunt who worked there, and hurried through the forest by the first light of dawn to Bumset Priory. He felt he must see Roger Bacon and discuss the whole matter with him, not even excluding, if the Friar proved friendly, Lady Ulanda’s prejudice and the unfortunate misunderstanding that had given birth to this prejudice.

  But, as happens so often in our complicated world, this sensible course of action, taken by the only really wise and good ruler in that part of Wessex, was taken too late. The only person to be got hold of at that hour in Bumset Priory was Lay-Brother Tuck, who with some difficulty was roused from a drunken sleep. This was achieved by Bob Talirag, who obtained an entrance by climbing into the window of his Aunt Moll, an aged scullery-maid.

  Brother Tuck, wrapt up against the chill of dawn in all his bedclothes, was soon seated on the top step of the Priory entrance, with the door open behind him. “The truth is my Lord,” murmured the dishevelled and perspiring Tuck “I wake up slowly.”

  “Are we to enter without further parley, my Lord?” enquired Bob Talirag, who, having been brave enough to disturb his respected and formidable Aunt Moll, felt ready for anything.

  But before Boncor could reply, above the muffled head of Brother Tuck, who was fully prepared to go to sleep again, appeared the already quite decently attired figure of Bob Talirag’s aunt.

  “I am sorry, my lord, to have to say such a thing—be quiet Bob! I’m not talking to you!—but the truth is, my lord, his Reverence the Prior is still fast asleep. And when his Reverence the Prior is asleep”—and Bob Talirag’s aunt gave vent to a high-pitched chuckle of an experienced jackdaw who has already educated more than one brood of open-mouthed ignoramuses in the ways of the world—“nobody can see nobody”.

  “Could this young friend of yours, my dear Dame,” enquired Boncor quietly, “run upstairs to ask Friar Bacon if I could come up to give him a word of warning?”

  “One minute, my Lord,” replied the lady, and disappeared; while Brother Tuck, who had roused himself to consciousness again under his perambulated bed-clothes, went on more obscurely than before:

  “The question I asked King Stephen in my dream was the simple question: who was the giant who had so many wives that in the end they turned him into a puppy-dog and wouldn’t let him do his business in his own palace? And do you know what King Stephen answered? He said the giant’s name was Boncor! And when he uttered that name, your name, my lord, do you know what I heard? I heard a choir of angels singing in a great purple cloud, and do you know, my lord, what words they sang? They sang a song my granny taught me when I was young. It went something … something like this:

  “If you’re only good,

  When you feel your heart prick,

  In the depths of the wood

  You will hear a Tick-Tick.

  If you’re only bad,

  When you feel your heart burst,

  You’ll go howling mad

  And take best for worst!

  With the end of your rod

  Mix honey and gall,

  So that neither God

  Nor the Devil gets all!

  A drop of the worst

  Is the way to the best:

  Let the Devil take the first:

  And let God have the rest!”

  Bob Talirag could see that to the Baron of Cone this blasphemous jingle was by no means unpleasing; but the news brought by Auntie Moll, when the old lady returned from the interior of Bumset, was so startling that it drove away all other impressions.

  It appeared that Albert the Great of Cologne had spent the night with Friar Bacon, and then, before any one in the Priory save Brother Tuck, who was too drunk to know his head from his tail, was awake, had carried the Friar off with him, no one knew whither. Bob Talirag’s aunt was pretty certain that it was to the camp of the King’s Men from London that the two of them had gone, but she wouldn’t swear to this. />
  “Well, Mistress,” said Boncor, “that’s where we must go! And please accept this small token of our gratitude for your information.”

  Saying this he must have handed her a golden coin; for the final impression Bob Talirag had of his Aunt Moll was of her supporting Lay-Brother Tuck, bed-clothes and all, with one arm, as they went in under the curved archway, while with the other she shook her clenched fist, containing the coin she had received, in an ecstasy of exultation.

  XXII

  THE ORACLE

  If the visit of Baron Boncor of Cone to the Priory of Bumset was too late to achieve anything to the easing of the tension in Wessex, the visit of Sir Mort to Boncor’s wife Ulanda and her extremely ingenuous son was, from Sir Mort’s point of view, a triumphant success. He found Lady Ulanda in more than harmony with his project, and it proved easy enough, with the assistance of the lively Colin and the resolute Clamp, not to speak of the youthful Sir William, who might himself have well been called a “King’s Man”, to add the toughest of the Cone retainers to his own stalwarts.

  “I’ll come with you! I’ll come with you! I’ll come with you!” cried Lady Ulanda; and then to her son: “No! Never mind where your Father’s gone! It’s a grand chance for you to show your metal as a true knight of our King, who is a nephew of Richard the Lion-hearted! Besides, I’m coming myself! Yes! my child, your mother herself is coming! I’ve not got the blood of Rursuk and King Stephen for nothing; Sir Mort here agrees with me that we don’t need Brazen Heads, or Grey Friars either, to guard our shores!

  “Farewell good Turgo! Greet your master when he comes back, and say I told you to tell him that I shall be very angry indeed if he follows us! Tell him that, till his shoulder is entirely healed, he must, he must behave as a wounded man. Where the devil he’s gone to now, only God knows! He has a way of climbing high hills before breakfast! I’ve never known him eat a morsel till he’s been to the ridiculous top of some silly hill! I can’t cure him of this madness. Yes! He’s up there!”—and the besotted lady pointed solemnly to four visible uplands, one on the north, one on the south, one on the east, and one on the west, and gazed so reverently at each of these small eminences, that Sir Mort, accustomed to Lady Val’s very different attitude to himself, began to wonder whether this formidable woman wouldn’t have benefited by the advice, when she was a child, of Nurse Rampant or even of somebody like Mother Guggery.