The Brazen Head (36 page)

“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:

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.

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.

She had an expression on her face as she raised it to those four uplands as if her husband had been a divine personage rather than a human one.

But Sir Mort kept saying to himself: “Remember this, my good friend. The greatest worries in life come from the heads of these Orders of fanatical men, whatever they call themselves, and it’s worth while being a little rough, even with the elements you worship, if you can give a crack or two to these same bloody heads! There’s this head of the Franciscans trying to make the thieves of Lost Towers into heroic crusaders, if they’ll smash the Brazen Head along with its maker’s head! And now here’s this Cologne fellow, who’s head of the Black Friars, and who’s bound to be savagely hostile to every Grey Friar in the land, whether he’s a Head-maker or a Head-breaker!”

In such terms did what we have been taught to call “thought” pass in and out of Sir Mort’s skull. And meanwhile the whole party, made up of the best fighters of both the Fortress and Cone Castle, didn’t take long in reaching the outskirts of the former. There quite suddenly and without giving the lovers time to move, they came upon Peleg and Ghosta embracing each other beneath an oak tree.

After a hurried glance at Lady Ulanda—but that pathetically infatuated devotee of her lawful mate was so occupied with hill-tops that she had no eye for the roots of oaks—Sir Mort addressed the lovers in his most friendly and direct manner. He wasn’t even humorous at their expense. He took the whole thing naturally and, as some historian would have put it, “in his stride”.

“I tell you what you two might do for me,” he told them. “You might run into the armoury and bring out the Brazen Head. You could carry it, couldn’t you, Peleg? And
you
wouldn’t mind putting a hand on it, would you, lady, if the thing tottered a bit on his shoulders? You see, don’t you, that
if we’re to finish off these devils by the help of the King’s Men, we mustn’t leave any hostages behind?”

It can be imagined how quickly the lovers obeyed him; and this daring worshipper of the elements was not to prod the earth, splash the rain-water in a hollow elder-stump, wave his spear in the air and brandish it towards the only star still visible, before the Mongolian Jew-giant, accompanied by Ghosta with one long white arm raised to the Thing on her friend’s shoulder, rejoined the weirdly heterogeneous group that, with Ulanda in its centre blazing with love and hate, now appeared at the entrance to Lost Towers.

Lilith was already there, and Perspicax with his King’s Men was already there. Never since he first fabricated his demonic lodestone, after a much longer time spent upon it than Friar Roger ever spent on the Brazen Head, had Petrus Peregrinus felt more excited than he felt at this supreme hour of his life.

He had had to earn his living under terribly heavy handicaps so as to get the leisure to study, whereas Bacon’s family after the defeat of Simon de Montfort had at least recovered something, though not very much, of their considerable manorial property. Not that Friar Roger had kept one silver piece of his private inheritance. The amount he had spent—“squandered”, some would say, “given back to the Devil”, was a more common opinion—on his scientific labours, was really startling. But it had all gone, and now he had nothing but what he could get, as a begging Friar, from the imaginative, the pious, and the charitable.

But here they were! Yes, here was the imprisoned Friar, and here was the wandering native of Maricourt, the one watching his Brazen Head swaying to and fro on the shoulder of a Jewish giant, and the other pressing his precious lodestone against his own body as he awaited his chance, not only to prove that in his person Antichrist had actually come, but to do something with “Little Pretty” in the presence of all men, that would show the world—even if he died while showing it—that by magnetism, and by magnetism alone, did the stars move on their courses, and Suns and Moons wax and wane!

It was Albertus Magnus, and he alone, who caught the full significance of this strange conclave, which was partly a human council of war against the caprices of Nature, and partly a
parliament of primitive superstitious tribes instinctively fearful of being tricked into mystic slavery to some crafty Khan of Karakorum!

The red-brown jerkins and tunics and breeches, and the
red-brown
caps with short brown-and-white feathers sticking out in a queerly insolent and defiant manner, either above the wearer’s left ear or above his right ear, according to his individual taste, were drawn up in thick battalions on the two stony ridges in front of the main entrance to Lost Towers.

They were armed with the most deadly-looking weapons, like broad double-edged Roman sword-blades fixed into the massive handles of ordinary hunting spears. It seemed to Albertus that the King’s Men under Perspicax would not have a chance of victory, even though assisted by the wilder and less disciplined retainers from Gone Castle and the Fortress.

But the Cologne teacher had hardly reached this conclusion, with which without doubt most of his efficient and practical friends in that great centre of learning would have entirely agreed, when the sort of unexpected confusion arose such as probably only that particular portion of England in the whole western half of the entire world could have evoked.

The Lord and Lady of Lost Towers were evidently
quarrelling
between themselves; for the man’s voice and the woman’s voice were clearly audible above the general hoarse murmur and the general jarring chatter.

Presently both their figures, each pushed forward, evidently by their immediate attendants, hers female, and his male, were projected through the red-black lines with their alarming weapons and forced to come forward, though it was evident to everybody that the real force of the emotional feelings of those two was directed, not against the King’s men and not against the mass of men from the Fortress and from Cone, but solely against each other.

But something less personal and much more far-reaching was now beginning to happen. This dangerous disturbance did not—so it seemed to Albertus—have any connection with the quarrel between their Lord and their Lady. It sprang from among a group of serfs, who were clearly setting out to do some autumnal job in the harvest-field and had just been met by similar groups from both the manors of Cone and Roque, who
had joined the free followers of their respective lords of the manor out of curiosity rather than local patriotism.

Among these were old Dod Pole, that natural-born rebel, and several of his family, including not only little Bet, his
great-granddaughter
, but also his granddaughter Oona, or Una as many people called her, with whom—at least so we
overheard
the impulsive young John declare—his brother Tilton was in love.

These serfs, tagging along with the Fortress and Cone people, had quickly become the noisiest among their whole dramatic crowd, and talking earnestly among them by this time was none other than the outlandish figure of Spardo, mounted on his horse Cheiron, at the sight of whom, as it may be well believed, the father of Tilton and young John felt some rather odd feelings!

And not only at the sight of
that
pair was it Sir Mort’s destiny, that fine morning, to suffer curious sensations; for lo and behold! before his very eyes, only sufficiently far away for him not to have to undergo any immediate responsibility—and what in the devil’s name had brought
them
here?—were all his own family except Lady Val herself! There they all were: John so dark and slight and eager, Tilton so massively tall and fair and impassive, yes! and even Lil-Umbra herself, on horseback as usual—how that wench
did
love riding!—and her wise and tactful knight from Laon on horseback at her side.

Thank the gods, yes! His daughter was certainly like himself and knew sound wood from rotten wood! Would he
never
be able to make Valentia more sensible? The egoism of Sir Mort was so profoundly self-centred that it never entered his head to ask of destiny the obvious question—how it was that, just on this critical day and at this crucial hour when the Master and the Mistress of Lost Towers, having exhausted their verbal artillery, had become a pair of motley antagonists, wrestling in the midst of their red-brown retainers, all the whole neighbourhood supported by the enterprising Perspicax with the King’s Men should have appeared on the scene to witness the victory of defeat of one or other of these sad, mad, and absurdly fantastic persons!

But the really scrupulous historian of the reckless and quite
crazy doings of all of us mortal men will have made a shrewd guess already as to the particular cause of this queer
concatenation
.

“O how wonderful,” said Petrus Peregrinus to himself, “how wonderful, O how far beyond all I have ever hoped or imagined or dreamed could happen to me, to actually be selected by”—he was going to utter the word “Providence” but just stopped himself in time!—“by Destiny, to be the Antichrist himself, the real, actual, historic person predicted by every prophet who ever prophesied from the foundation of the world!”

Deep into the top-curve of the bony arch between his belly and his thighs, and just above his generative organs, Petrus had dug the blunt, thick, staring-eyed cranium of the demonic lodestone he persisted in calling “Little Pretty”, and while he dug it into himself, he had summoned into his presence every living person old or young, male or female, he had ever met or ever heard of in that district.

“I’ll have your false heart out of you!” cried the Lady of Lost Towers.

“I’ll tear the devil’s-dam tongue out of your hell’s throat for you!” cried the Lord of Lost Towers.

And then, before either Bonaventura in his grey robe or Albertus in his black robe could force a passage through the red-brown mêlée, some devoted adherent of the mistress of the Castle smashed the master’s skull with a heavy stone, and some furious armour-bearer of the murdered Maldung knelt on the lady and strangled her to death with his two hands, before his own head was severed from his crouching body and all three corpses were soaked in his blood.

For several seconds there was a ghastly hush after this, as if over that whole worked-up mass of human creatures an enormous dark feather had fallen from the Empyrean, a feather struck from the wing of the Eagle of Zeus by the lightning-swift descent of some falling star.

Then the whole company of serfs who were present—those who had been following old Dod Pole, their one revolutionary mouth-piece, as well as those who were on their way to their labour in the fields—moved instinctively forward, while Dod Pole himself, leaping up from their midst upon the marble pedestal of the broken and prostrate figure of some forgotten
Roman ruler, almost hidden now under yellow moss and white lichen and tiny ferns, began an exultant threnody over all the deaths of all the wrongful owners of a planet that should be owned in common by all mankind.

“I call upon you, my brothers and fellow workers,” cried old Dod Pole, in that trumpet-toned voice which had made him the prophet of those Wessex serfs for the last half century, “I call upon you to let these manor-lords, with their reeves and their bailiffs and their priests and their prelates, know, once for all, how we, the people of the West Country, really regard them and hold them! We hold them in contempt! We hold them to be thieves and robbers who claim the
hell-born
and not heaven-born right to hand down their stolen property from generation to generation!

“Yes, my friends, it is we who plough and sow and plant and reap and gather the harvest and bake the bread and butcher the meat! It is we, the shepherds and the hedge-planters, we, the cattle-tenders and the swine-herders, who own this sacred and holy and God-given earth of ours! Did these
manor-lords
create the earth? Did these water-lords create the seas and the rivers and the lakes and the ponds? Did they create the beasts of the earth and the fishes of the sea? Was it at their command that the birds of the air first spread their wings?

“Come, my friends, my companions, my brothers, let us make haste to show to these land-robbers and sea-shore thieves what their true position on this earth really is! They are all the same, every one of them! Handing down they are what they’ve stolen, from father to son, and son to grandson; and all the good earth and all the precious sea-shore of which they have robbed us curses them as wicked thieves! Come let us show them what we think of them!
To your tents, O Israel!
”