The Brazen Head (21 page)

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.

“All right my dear; I’ll stay with you. Off you go, William! Do whatever Turgo thinks best when you’re down there. That little fool John has no right to bring his Dad’s men into our place. But I’ve heard he’s the best disciple the Friar’s got round here; and we know what these students are! Keep an eye on our lad, Turgo, my friend. Remember he’s the youngest knight of the oldest king in Christendom! I should say we do indeed need Lord Edward here; and I warrant these confounded lands he’s crusading in, whether they’re Arabian or Christian, will go on in the same turmoil whether he’s there or not.”

By the time the Lord of Cone had completely covered up the heart-heaving moral effort he’d just made in thus remaining in the library of his Castle, both Turgo and Sir William had reached the stairs, the latter much more concerned with the arrangement of the weapons in his own belt than with the whereabouts of the son of his sovereign, and the door had been closed behind them.

Ulanda promptly pushed both her quiescent lord into his chair and sliding down upon her knee drew his head towards her own. But it was then that the goddess of chance displayed her most devilish impishness. In the impetuosity of this gesture of affection the impulsive lady had forgotten a certain most perilously explosive inhibition in her own nerves; namely her loathing of beards.

But now, as their heads met, her husband’s curly beard tickled her cheek. By long practice she had acquired the art of kissing him without incurring this contact. But the truth was that she had come to be obsessed of late more than ever before by this loathing for, and intolerable disgust at, the touch of a man’s beard. The Baron indeed had recently begun to grow aware of this nervous mania of hers, and he often found himself wondering why at an earlier stage in their alliance she had not protested against his refusal to shave. This refusal of his was wholly instinctive.

He was constitutionally slow-moving; and was addicted to the habit of adapting himself to existing conditions; and one of the most obvious of such conditions was the simple law of Nature that the chins of men grew beards. Thus between these two persons there inevitably existed, lodged in the physical make-up of them both, the perilous possibility of a bodily, primeval, skin-for-skin quarrel of a serious kind.

It was an unfortunate coincidence however that at the very moment when her cheek was touched by the lips she loved and the beard she hated, there should have come to her ears from outside their secluded retreat, and even from outside the Castle itself, tumultuous cries and shouts and the noise of blows mixed with resounding yells of anger and pain.

These sounds may possibly have intensified her feelings by adding to her nervous mania a shiver of anxiety, though not more than a shiver, about her son. In a mad reaction against the touch of that bushy beard, she leapt up from his knee and uttered a piercing scream of rage, that flew out into the night like a wild bird whose wings were on fire.

It might well have happened that such a scream, rising from aggravated feminine nerves, and whirling off into the darkness from a height above the tops of the tallest trees, especially when the court-yard and gateway of the place were resounding with
blows and cries, would have dissolved in the air unregarded by anyone except the two persons concerned.

But either by another random hit from the wanton bow of chance or, let us hope, by some special intervention of a brave man’s guardian angel, this scream from Ulanda gave to the death-pangs of young Ralph Gaulter of Evercreech the one thing needed to wholly redeem his desperation.

Gaulter had only just entered the service of the Baron of Cone, and he had only done so because of a savage tragedy, three or four generations ago, when his great-grandmother, Matilda Gaulter, had been raped by one of the Lords of Roque. But at the moment of Ulanda’s piercing scream that seemed to come down from heaven, young Gaulter was on his back on the grass with one of the red-brown bandits kneeling on his chest and pressing a broad and rusty kitchen-knife deep into his neck.

From his childhood he had heard tales of this ancestress of his, her beauty, her pride and her pitiful end, and now in his death throes the idea took hold of him that he was giving up his life in some mysterious way for this dead woman’s living sake, and that this cry from above actually came from Matilda Gaulter.

Thus as the pressure of that broken, broad-headed, rusty knife just below the apple of his throat made his life-blood spurt forth from beneath his chin till it drenched his distorted and desperate face, the dying youth felt absolutely convinced that he really was, in these death-gasps and under these spouts of blood, sacrificing his life for this old ancestress of his who had been so horribly wronged.

Black gulfs of death might swallow up his body and threaten his soul, but the fairy-tale Great-Granny of all the years of his life was saved forever!

Ralph Gaulter was the only one who, in this irresponsible three-cornered hurly-burly, lost his life. Others were wounded in the confusion but none of them mortally; while in the struggle of young John and his couple of henchmen with the red-brown bandits from Lost Towers it soon became clear that it was this latter group—tipsy though half of them were, and wildly excited though all of them were—who were destined to win; though when they had carried the Brazen Head away into the forest, and so well out of reach of all possible rescue or recovery, that Bonaventura himself felt justified in returning to the Priory, young John and his two companions obstinately pursued them.

Bonaventura evidently felt sure that when his red-brown allies had grown a little more sober they would finish the job and pound the Head to pieces. What really saved this
unparalleled
invention from destruction was not the protective magic, whether we call it “black” or “white”, of its creator. It was something, though it is impossible to say exactly what, in the Head itself, just as if by some inexplicable chance the creative energy in the Friar had overreached its proper scientific limits, and had created a being capable, not only of personifying its own identity, but of escaping altogether from the control of its creator.

By the power of his immense sacerdotal reputation over the whole of Europe, Bonaventura had finally managed so to convince the Prior that he had some special mandate from the Holy Father at Rome, that he was actually permitted to lead his bodyguard of reckless devils into the Friar’s chamber. Here
he had made them open the sacred alcove and wrench from its recess and carry downstairs the imperturbable Head.

With the person of Bacon himself he could not meddle, for the Prior of Bumset was alone responsible for his official prisoner; but it was a startling as well as a bewildering surprise to him when the Friar made not the very faintest attempt to resist this sacrilegious and autocratic invasion of his chamber, but from an absolutely calm and wholly preoccupied absorption in what he was writing at his table, simply looked up once or twice, neither smiling nor frowning, but treating the whole incident as if the General of the Order and his piratical allies were so many negligible mice.

Of what happened later, when Bonaventura, leaving the destruction of the Brazen Head to his reckless allies, had honoured and delighted the Prior by consenting to share that epicurean ecclesiastic’s evening meal and to sleep that night under the priory roof, neither the Baron of Cone nor his over-wrought lady could ever get a clear or consecutive account.

It was obviously due to the commonsense and tact—yes! and no less to the courage—of Raymond de Laon that young Sir William was spared any grievous shock, whether to his person, or to his “amour propre,” or to his reputation, in the confused mêlée that accompanied the triumphant departure of the excited bandits of Lost Towers, carrying with them into the depth of the forest the Brazen Head.

They were not as numerous as they seemed to be, nor half as formidable, and they were so proud of being given “carte blanche” to be the violent executioners of the will and purpose of the Pope of Rome that they couldn’t resist shouting and dancing in a wild orgy of excitement round the mysterious object they were carrying.

Many of them waved spears and javelins. Others brandished two-edged swords. A few carried torches, and some had bows and arrows with which they just amused themselves, shooting blindly into the pine-trees above their heads, as if to dislodge any living creature who might be there, whether bird or bat or squirrel or wild-cat, anything in fact that might be up there and could be hit by a random shot. It took four of them to bear the weight of the Brazen Head, which they had fastened
with ropes to a couple of fir-poles, and which in the thick grey darkness looked like the head of some colossal decapitated giant whom they had caught asleep.

The confused henchmen of Baron Boncor, who were much better armed, but at the same time much less certain of the reason of their arming, or of the cause of the turmoil, than any other of the groups involved, were endeavouring, in a
thinly-dispersed
, widely-scattered circle, to enclose the wild men of Lost Towers till they could be assaulted from every side at once and compelled to surrender their animate-inanimate spoil. The formation of this mobile circle had been the plan of Raymond de Laon and it would have been a very good plan if the course of events had followed any sort of rational order. But at that time of night and with no less than three Baronies, each acting like the troop of a separate dominion, events were badly diverted from their logical cause-and-effect sequence.

De Laon himself, armed with a long straight sword, and with a small round shield almost exactly like some of the shields depicted on certain ancient vase-paintings, kept running at full speed round this extended circle, exhorting its human figures to draw in as steadily and resolutely as possible round this dancing and shouting crew of excited bandits.

Young John of the Fortress, who hadn’t been left for long without full information of what was happening in regard to the greatest of all the inventions of his admired instructor, had soon appeared on the scene with a rather eccentric couple of Roque-Manor adherents ready to follow their leader anywhere, but really rather out for adventure than for any particular cause or principle; and all John did was to lead them blindly forward, straight towards the bandits who were carrying the Brazen Head, the appearance of which made the lad think, the moment he caught sight of it under the flickering torches, of the description in the Jewish Scriptures of the “Ark of the Covenant” containing the spiritual presence of Jehovah.

So well had all the Fortress people been trained by their lord and lady to keep an eye on Tilton and John and
Lil-Umbra
, while they let these young people feel they were completely free to act as they pleased, that the nearer young John—who had no weapon but a peculiar kind of axe fastened to a long pole, a weapon he had invented for himself—
approached this thing of mystery, the more closely was he hedged in by two free-men of the Manor of Roque, who were both equally eccentric, but who could at a pinch hoist John upon their shoulders and make off with him.

All might have gone well for the friends and liberators of the Brazen Head; and the madly chanting bandits of Lost Towers might have been put to headlong flight, leaving their projected victim, free from even a single hammer-blow, staring up at his rescuers in divine detachment from his bed upon the
silvery-grey
ground-lichen, had it not been for one of those annoying accidents that we love to call “ironical”, because by the use of this classic word we endow the antics of acrobatic chance with a conscious flightiness that takes away the shame of our human frustration and defeat.

What actually happened was that at the very moment when young John and his supporters came near to advancing
point-blank
upon the ruffians who carried the Bronze Head, Sir William Boncor, the youngest belted knight of the
longest-reigning
monarch in the world, stumbled over a hole in the earth containing the offspring, a male and a female, of the common badger.

These little creatures had been well-suckled that day at noon by their mother; and as a result they crept in a sleepy manner to the mouth of their hole, thinking to themselves that the moment had come for a little independent exploration of the forest; but they felt so satisfied, and so cosy and comfortable, and also so sleepy, that they soon relinquished this desire, and curling themselves up fell into a deeper sleep than they had enjoyed for months.

And it was this happy sleep that was disturbed by the
sharply-spurr’d
heels of portly little Sir William. These came down on both their little heads, completely separating them from their necks and crushing them together into a pulp of flesh, bones, blood, and bloody hair, against a slab of rock-slate. It was upon this rock-slate thus plastered with a gouache of bones, blood, brains and hair that both the heels of our youthful knight slid awkwardly forward, bringing him down with a mighty crash upon his back-side and extracting from him the sort of indignant and outraged howl against the whole causal sequence of events that had led to this culminating collapse, such as an
infant who can run and cry but cannot yet talk naturally utters when brought low.

This event proved to be a turning point in this chaotic skirmish, for it completely brought to an end all further participation of Cone Castle in the confused mêlée. Raymond de Laon, hurrying to pick up the fallen knight, whose howl he knew half-a-mile away, was soon followed by the rest of the Cone party, which was naturally, since it was all happening at the foot of Cone Castle, more numerous than John’s followers from Roque; and the result of this was that the blood-
and-dirt
-clad bearers of the Brazen Head, still recklessly blundering through the darkness, looking for a rock, or a heap of rocks, where they could smash the Head into smithereens, were only followed with any real obstinate determination by the eccentric couple of Fortress-men who through thick and thin stuck to young John.

John himself was agitated through his whole nature. This was the first time he had found himself engaged in a physical struggle the issue of which, whether bad or good, affected what was the main preoccupation of his life—his devotion to Friar Bacon and his work. The Lost Towers gang were still shouting and jesting and leaping and dancing through the darkness, as they swung the Brazen Head, bound with cords to a couple of poles, from one pair of bearers to another; and every now and then they banged at it with some log of wood they picked up in passing, or with some incongruous piece of culinary iron, that, like John’s own axe on a pole, was in some ways more deadly than an ordinary sword or spear.

They soon had gone so far, and John had had to follow them so fast, that not only was he himself completely puzzled as to the direction in which he was being led, but his two quaint attendants seemed as much at a loss as he was. One of these was a certain red-haired freeman of the manor called Colin Catteract, whose thin body, long shanks and peculiarly
malleable
physiognomy, instantaneously expressive of every fantasy that came into his head, made him by the destiny of his inmost identity the sort of individual who is born to be a player, a performer, an actor, especially in such a role as a
court-clown
or king’s jester.

The other was at the extremest opposite pole of human
perversity. His name was Ralph Riddel-de-Rie, and he was the best carpenter in Roque, but he had such a habit of using the expression, “clamp ‘em up”—an expression that always suggested to the old ex-bailiff in the armoury the figure of some colossal demiurgic world-carpenter, fitting the Earth and the Moon into the sun’s chariot, before passing on to deal with Orion or the Pleiades—that he’d got the permanent nickname of “Clamp”. He was a short, squat, stumpy man, and was extremely reticent. But when he did utter any opinion, he did so in a portentous tone of grim and final decision.

The present moment however certainly lent itself better to the airy-fairy vivacity of Colin than to the heavy-weather determination of Clamp. These accurst bandits might be in a riotous mood at the moment, but they were skilled in making their way through all the regions of this locality, a locality where the densest thickets or bushes and brakes often led to morasses and pools and reedy swamps, out of which again, in still more surprising contrast, rose grassy slopes and mossy undulations, pillared by tall pines: and they could accomplish this, so completely did they know the whole district, in darkness as well as in the clearest moonlight.

Young John now began to experience real terror. Whither was he being led, he and his friends Colin and Clamp? Were they being decoyed, cunningly and artfully, by this dramatic show-off of a bacchanalian riot, round the utmost outskirts of the Manor of Roque, towards the very brink of the Lost Towers swamp?

It was extremely painful to him to watch that great dim phantasm of a Human Head go bobbing up and down in front of this mad crew; and he began to experience a strange feeling about the Head and a weird fear that
It
itself—yes! this magical construction of an inventor acting the part of God—might play Satan towards its Creator, and go over to the enemy!

The bandits, after all, weren’t so numerous. There were only about a dozen of them. John had already counted them. And it was clear to him that they were moving much more slowly than at the start. He and his companions had now not the slightest difficulty in keeping up with them. The odd thing was, that though, first one, and then another, among those who were not at the moment helping with the Head, turned
round to take a good look at the three men, so obstinately following them, nobody made the faintest attempt to attack them or to stop their pursuit. Could he regard it as possible that they were waiting till they reached some particular spot on the borders of Lost Towers, some spot where they had already arranged that others of their band should await them, possibly under the command of Baron Maldung himself?

John’s uneasiness finally rose to such a pitch over the various terrifying possibilities his mind conjured up that he called his two friends to a halt under a massive pine-tree, and put to them the blunt and drastic question whether the three of them were, or were not, rushing madly into a grievous snare? Agitated though he was John couldn’t help being struck by the quaint contrast his two supporters made as he produced his small box of flint and tinder and put a light to the unlit torch Colin was carrying.

Colin himself had already begun to laugh, as was his habitual custom under all the chances and changes of mortal life. When he laughed, which was a simple and natural return to his normal condition, his childishly excited face, with the straight, pale, yellow hair waving above it, assumed the appearance of a flickering candleflame, of which his thin flexible body was the candlestick or empty bottle, from which protruded the finger of wax which contained the burning wick.