The Brazen Head (34 page)

“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.”

“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 thrones 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
.”

“Never mind
him
, Tilton.
He’s
nothing to us. The person for us to watch is that devilish girl! God in Heaven, but she’s a beauty! I’d like to——Listen, Tilton, why shouldn’t we get hold of her? Let’s carry her back to the Fortress as a
prisoner-of
-war!”

“John, John, what’s come over you? What’s the matter with you? You’re looking at me as if you’d like to knock my head off. What have I done to make you so angry? Do you think I want to start fighting as to which of us should have that girl? Heaven help you John! You’re getting queer. It’s that confounded Brazen Head that’s the trouble. Ever since that blasted thing came into the armoury you’ve been behaving more and more queerly. Didn’t I hear you the other day tell mother that you’d like to go and visit Iscalis—or what do they teach us to call that village now—Ilchester! And why? I know the damned place. There’s nothing there but a river, and a few houses by a bridge, and a lot of marshy fields! You
think it’s wonderful because your precious Friar’s uncle or brother or somebody lives there. I tell you it’s not half as exciting as Montacute, where at least there’s a high pointed hill, or as Glastonbury, where King Arthur’s grave is!”

“If you don’t stop talking such nonsense, Tilton, I’ll give you such a rap over your dull, stupid, traditional,
commonplace
, church-building skull that you won’t be able to sleep for——”

“Stop that, you two fools!”

The sudden appearance of the utterer of these surprising words was as much of a shock to the two brothers as it was to Lilith and Maitre Pierre de Maricourt. Peleg was less startled because he had been for some while able, from the watch-tower of his own height, to detect some creature’s secretive movements from alder-bush to alder-bush, scrub-oak to scrub-oak,
weeping
-willow to weeping-willow; but he hadn’t imagined for a minute that a warrior in the rather extravagant accoutrements of a captain from the Royal Guard should be following these tactics.

But so it was. The intruder, who had interrupted not only this old familiar quarrel between the brothers that was being so craftily fomented by Master Peter and his pet lodestone, but who also had diverted from their aim that traveller’s further plans, turned out to be none other than Perspicax himself, captain of these King’s Men who had just arrived, and a cousin of Friar Bacon and like him a native of Ilchester.

By this time Perspicax, through his social skill in the delicate art of handling superiors and his formidable gift for inspiring respect in inferiors, had become one of the most active and important military officers that the old king possessed.

Having heard of the disturbances stirred up by Bonaventura and of the local war—for it had by now become more than a feud—between the Manor of Roque and the Barony of Lost Towers, Perspicax had persuaded the already dying Henry to let him come down to the Wessex Coast with a quite large squadron of King’s Men.

With a few decisive explanations and a moderate use of his enormous powers of persuasion and domination, Perspicax soon had all the five of them, the two young men, equally with
Peleg and Lilith and Master Peter of Picardy, under his personal control.

He led them all straight back to the Fortress, and he found no difficulty in arranging with the door-keeper, or rather with the door-keeper’s competent dame, exactly just where and how the whole lot of his men had best encamp that night, and what special additions to their already substantial supply of food and drink they might expect to receive. He then found no
difficulty
at all in smoothing the way with Lady Val and the Baron, not only for the reception of Peter Peregrinus, but even—and this made everybody in the Fortress exchange puzzled and excited comments—for the conferring of a solitary night’s rest in a suitable chamber upon Lilith of Lost Towers.

Once safely alone in a small room at the back of the Fortress, a room which their nurse, in that instinctive forestalling of awkward situations which had made her what she was to all of them, had reserved as a sort of retiring-place for herself, our lonely traveller, whose magnetic power had led him to regard himself as Antichrist, decided that it would be silly to play any of his tricks with “Little Pretty” while he was only half-alive by reason of an overpowering need for sleep.

So, removing the said “Little Pretty” from its coign of vantage at the fulcrum of its owner’s life-force, and placing it on a small bracket at the foot of a stone image of Our Lady that had obviously come from over-sea, for its whole style suggested North Italy, he managed with the most reverent and the most delicate care to prop it up in such a manner that “it”, or “her”, or “he”, was supported by the droop of the Virgin’s robe as it hung between her knees.

This duty having been satisfactorily performed, with a final worshipful glance at the foot-long object of his veneration, now safely if sacrilegiously propped up at the knees of the Mother of God, Petrus flung his sword on the floor, wrapped the bed-blanket round him just as he was, and sank into an impenetrable sleep.

What he would have done if there hadn’t been a clear sky and a three-quarter Moon that night, together with a window through which this luminary could shine, and a particularly well-polished metallic receptacle for both solid and liquid human excreta from which its light was brilliantly reflected,
is indeed a question. He would either have had to play his tricks in pitch darkness or he would have had to give them up till the arrival of dawn.

As it was, it must have been about midnight when he awoke; and awoke to find himself in full moonlight. He tossed off the blanket, picked up his sword, still in its black sheath, and hung it on the handle of the closed door, a handle very imposingly moulded and much more like the hilt of a Roman sword than was the object which he suspended from it.

Then he rushed to the base of the image against the wall, extricated his egregious darling from between the knees of Our Lady, and held it up in the moonlight. The lodestone was about seven inches in length and about one inch in diameter. Its colour was a pale pinkish grey touched here and there with blots and smears of a dim yellowish tint. But one end of the thing was a good deal thicker than the other, and this thicker end did unquestionably possess a certain remote likeness to a human head.

Nor was an obscure resemblance to a human face quite wanting either, if a person did what the thing’s owner was certainly always doing, that is to say if he made a lively use of the imagination. The thing, however, never changed its expression. No imagination could make it do that.

But its expression was one which, if this dressing-room of the old nurse of the Fortress could speak, it would have described as “wicked curiosity”.

With those peering eyes at such a queer angle to each other, with that almost frog-like nose and mouth, with that forehead that seemed to bulge where it ought to retreat, with those ears that looked as if in the endless process of listening to dirty sounds and yet more dirty echoes, they had been worn into filthy cracks, all these characteristics only required a little imagination to be the perfect attributes of a lodestone converted into an orectic and prurient spy.

Sitting on the edge of his bed after pressing to his lips in the moonlight the particular smear on his pet’s visage that he liked to pretend was its mouth, Petrus now jigged the thing up and down in the air towards what he assumed to be the southern and eastern and western portions of the Fortress.

He vaguely took it for granted, from what seemed to him to
be the position of the Moon, that he was sitting with his back to the north; and it was one of his occult theories that it was always from the north that great magicians—and of course Antichrist must be a very great magician—always came and always summoned their devils.

The southern populations of the world might be gluttonous, lecherous, and wine-bibbing, but it was from the north, and from no other quarter of the compass, that Satan always set forth on his goings to and fro over the earth.

There is no doubt that, compared with the authentic
inventive
genius of Friar Bacon, Master Peter of Maricourt had only an extremely exalted imagination. For years he had used this imagination to complete in every way he could what might be called the feminization of his precious lodestone. What he had to do at this moment was not at all easy. He had to make a guess as to the particular direction, north or south or east or west of where he was now, in which a room had been found for Lilith in this ramshackle edifice. But assuming, from the outrageous tales he had listened to when with Mother Wurzel and her daughter at Deadstone, that Tilton would be far too occupied with his sister Lil-Umbra to give Lilith a thought, he forced “Little Pretty” to concentrate her dangerous attention upon young John.

In fact he went so far as to direct the whole of his own
will-power
, and the whole of the magnetism in “Little Pretty” that worked with this will-power, towards establishing an erotic connection between young John and Lilith.

“The time must be now,” he told himself, “about half-way between midnight and one o’clock. In that case, shouldn’t ‘Little Pretty’ draw young John to slip quietly on bare feet or in silent sandals to Lilith’s room? She’ll be wise enough to guess who it is if he knocks gently at her door, and once
together
he’ll be her slave forever!

“That it’s such a devil of an effort to me to do this may simply be because I’m her slave! I am, I am, I
am
her slave; I confess it. But not perhaps forever. I’ve enjoyed her so fully, so utterly, so completely—and from such enjoyment the male animal enjoys anyway the
sensation
of domination—that I already feel to a certain degree free from her: not altogether free of course, because I shall never to the end of my days
enjoy anyone as I do her, but still a good deal more free than I ever thought would be possible before we visited the Cerne Giant. Well, Master John, you’ve got, you’ve got, you’ve
got
to go to Lilith’s room!”

He pointed the head of the lodestone towards a certain queer stain on one of the walls, a stain that he had noticed directly he entered the room, which had by this time associated itself in his mind with a spurt of blood from some rarely affected human vein.

It was at this moment to his unspeakable surprise that he heard a knocking at his own door. He plunged his “Little Pretty” into a much more natural place than the knees of the Madonna, and scrambling across his bed, for he had been sitting with his back to his own door as he thought of young John’s door, he unhooked his sword from the bronze
door-handle
, and holding it, still in its black sheath, in his right hand, he opened the door with his left.

It was Lilith herself who now slipped into his room, slim as a hamadryad from the Moon who has descended straight from the clouds, and arrayed in a floating white night-gown much too large for her, which she had borrowed for that one night from Lil-Umbra. This garment hung so loosely on her slender figure that, as she stretched herself upon his bed, Petrus of Picardy was compelled, for the third time in his whole life, to give himself up to such a wave of passionate adoration that he felt he could sacrifice even the pride of being Antichrist in his worship of those pearly contours of Lilith’s body, now resting there like a white shell half-revealed and half-concealed beneath a wavy tangle of foam as it lies on the sand.