The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  No sooner had Bonaventura finished speaking than Lady Lilt and Sir Maldung, as well as Lilith, whose long black mantle now trailed after her as she moved, made a circle round him, all three of them talking excitedly and at the same time.

  It was not, however, as may easily be imagined, until after a prolonged and delicious supper at this same table—without the need for any blindfolding, and after a prolonged and undisturbed sleep in that luxurious bed on the top floor, without the need for any attendant sylphs, and without even knowing whether the wind was blowing or not—that the General of the Franciscan Friars, on just the sort of horse he had asked for, and with just the sort of escort he wanted, set out in the morning for the Fortress of Roque.

  X

  THE JEW FROM TARTARY

  Peleg took swift decisive measures, precipitate measures they might be called, to ascertain that it really and truly was, without any doubt or question, his true love of that wild night when his life was saved by Sir Mort on those crusader-battled borders between East and West, and when he made that vow of devoted fidelity to him into which he threw at one drastic fling all his Jewish intensity and all his Mongolian strength of will. And though his feeling about her was so absolute that there were moments when it actually rendered him as limp as a bending reed, he was aware at the same time of a strange shyness at the thought of their facing each other.

  It was with something of a double motive, therefore, partly in order to put off for a little while longer the actual moment of this overwhelming encounter, and partly to make sure he was doing nothing treacherous to his sworn lord and master, Sir Mort, that well before noon on a fine February day, Peleg set out, when all his domestic tasks were over, to make sure of meeting this eccentric head of the House of Abyssum.

  It was the very morning of the unexpected arrival of Bonaventura at the great gates of the Fortress and the morning also of the instantaneous departure, the moment the gate-keeper appeared, of a band of curious riders in ramshackle armour and motley patches of red-brown cloth.

  What Peleg did to make sure of catching Sir Mort as he came out of the Fortress—for he knew enough of Lady Valentia’s weakness for distinguished foreigners to be quite certain that her husband, whatever feeling he might have for or against the General of the Franciscan Friars, wouldn’t stay long as a partner to their talk—was to run at full speed across the piece of ground that separated the point at which the big gates were visible from the point at which the postern-entrance was visible, a distance which he could cover in time enough to catch Sir Mort departing from either of the two exits.

  He took care to carry with him his mace with the iron spikes round its heavy circular head, for he had vivid memories of certain occasions when Sir Mort was all for carrying him off on a sudden foray and he had to insist on returning for his favourite weapon.

  It was outside the postern that he finally caught his man, and the dialogue that followed was eminently characteristic of them both.

  “That fellow with the staring eyes is after my John’s friend, Friar Bacon. Holy Jesus, but he’s the devil of a wizard-hunter! Do you know what he wants? But of course I’ll do nothing of the kind; though Lady Val thinks I ought to! He wants me to swear to Bog of Bumset that the Pope has told him I must take a few muscular serfs with me and haul the Brazen Head down from Bacon’s cell and lug the confounded thing here; so that here, if you please, here in our own grounds, here in this very strip of forest, the best piece of hunting-ground in the Manor, I can have this curst Brazen Head of his smashed to bits—to bits, mind you, and here, within a bow-shot, here, in less than a bow-shot, of this shrine Tilton’s so keen on building; and very well he’s building it too!

  “If I’m a good fighter, Peleg, my Gim-crack Jew, Tilton’s a good designer, a good builder, a good carver, and a good one, I shouldn’t wonder too, at getting rid of smoke and soot. And here’s this staring-eyed fellow, who thinks his grey mantle’s as grand as Caesar’s purple, wants us to hammer to bits in front of my boy’s shrine a wizard-oracle, to whose funeral will come no doubt twenty devils far worse than any Brazen Head, who, when they see Tilton’s shrine to the Mother of God, you can bet your big Tartar soul, they’ll all come huddling into our house, and scenting out quick enough where my bed is, hug each other under it till midnight, and then——No, by God! I’m not going to have any Brazen Head hammered to bits in front of my door!”

  Peleg had wisely held his peace during this indignant outburst; but as it went on he discovered that, without having said to himself anything resembling, “Now, my good friend, it’s your business to think out carefully where your interest lies in all this,” he had perceived, in a flash, in a pulse-beat, in the whirl of a swallow’s wings, just what he must say.

  “O you are so right, dear my lord!” he murmured, leaning in such a manner upon the handle of his iron mace as not to tower above the man who had saved him and whom he served forever, “and I have just by good chance discovered something that will make it possible, I really do think, for me to be of more real use to you than alas! considering I owe everything to you, I can often be.”

  “Aye? What’s that? What are you saying, big man? Have you caught this staring-eyed Pontifex-Cockolorum in flagrante delicto? Have you found him raping our Abbess?”

  “May I speak quite freely, my lord?”

  “Of course! Don’t we always? I to thee and thou to me’s the tune! So out with it, my Lion of Judah and Behemoth of Karakorum!”

  “But, my dear lord, it goes back a long way and concerns my own private life very deeply. It is indeed, if you will allow me to say so, my dear lord, my chief secretum secretorum, and it is only because it was a thing of despair rather than of hope that I kept it to myself.”

  A peculiar tone in the giant’s voice quieted Sir Mort’s wrought-up nerves. He fumbled at the leather belt round his waist that kept his hunting horn in a convenient position.

  “Tell me straight out, Peleg, old friend, what you’re talking about.”

  “About a woman, my lord.”

  “Ah! Ah! And what a double-dyed fool I was not to think of that before! Here have you been, a proud, handsome, majestic, powerful man, and, just because you’re such a giant and outside the category of common men, I let myself—fool that I was!—assume that you lacked the natural feelings of every man born into the world who isn’t a sodomite! Well, old friend, tell me her name quick, and where she’s to be found, and by God! I’ll get her for you even if she lives in Karakorum!”

  Peleg did not hesitate. “She is a girl I made friends with just before that bloody fight, where, save for you, my lord, I should now be under the earth. Her name is Ghosta. She is a Jewess from Mesopotamia and she is now working in the Abbess’s kitchen here. Lay-Brother Tuck from Prior Bog’s kitchen told me about her. He told Friar Bacon too about her and the Friar wished to see her, and she went to see him, unknown to her nuns and unknown to the Prior.”

  “So that’s it!” chuckled Sir Mort with a friendly grimace. “Kitchen to kitchen, eh? And do you want to marry this ghost of a girl from Mesopotamia? If that’s the idea, you old Jewish Goliath, you’ll have to go to Lady Val. She’s the one who arranges our matrimonial affairs. But I daresay I could—but what’s the matter, Peleg? Do you feel ill? You’re not going to faint are you? You look as if you’d seen something worse than a ghost-girl!”

  “I—haven’t—seen—her—yet,” stammered the agitated giant.

  Sir Mort looked at him intently. “You’re bewitched, old friend. There’s no doubt about it. I see you’re feeling exactly the sort of thing that I felt myself when I fell in love with Lady Val a quarter of a century ago, when I’d only caught one glimpse of her at the Winchester tourney. Well, the best thing you can do, Peleg my lad, is to go straight away now and find your girl and have a good talk, a long talk with her, and discover what she wants to do! She may be so happy with those nuns and made such a pet of, that she won’t want to consider moving to the Fortress kitchen, even if Lady Val had room fo
r her here. On the other hand she may—Holy Jesus, take care! What is the matter with you? Are you ill, Peleg?”

  The giant would indeed have fallen prone on his face if Sir Mort hadn’t caught him in his arms. He hadn’t lost consciousness however; and when his master propt him up in a sitting-posture with his broad back against the trunk of a pine, he still had the wit left to grope for his iron mace, and when he’d got it in his grasp, to prop it up between his knees, the round bronze ball of its handle, about the size of an apple, pressing against his chin.

  Sir Mort laid a hand on his head. “What you want, my boy, is a sip of that strong water Nurse used to give Tilton when he got one of his fainting-fits. If I weren’t afraid of those damned red devils from Lost Towers, who brought that Bonaventura here, lighting on you and slaughtering you or carrying you off, I’d leave you here and get a drop of that stuff from Nurse. Look up, big sonny! Let a man see your face. If you’re bewitched to this tune, before you’ve even seen the wench, what’ll you be when you meet her face to face?”

  At this the giant did raise his head, and the two men stared gravely for a moment into each other’s eyes. Then Sir Mort hesitated no longer. “By the wounds of Jesus, I’ll risk it! Don’t you dare to move! And if any of those red-jerkin’d villains come along, you just pretend to be dying till they get near and then give them what for with your iron mace! If you threaten one of the sods with it, the rest will bolt!”

  And with a nod and a grim shadow of a smile, he took himself off; and Peleg was left alone, propt up against that pine. His feelings grew queerer and queerer as he waited. “Am I really bewitched?” he thought, “and is it possibly that she’s always been some kind of a demon and not a real girl at all? Well; I’ll be damned if I care if she is a demon. She’s my true love, demon or no demon. I’d sooner go down to Hell with her than to the highest Heaven with anybody else!

  “But it’s all very well for me to think like that! The point is: what does she think? It’s no good for me to go on telling myself these crazy stories about her, while she, maybe, doesn’t give me a thought, or, if she does, has lost all wish to see me again! Besides I must remember that by this time she’s older, and no doubt wiser, and may not at all be in a mood to be carried away by the great love of a hulking monster like me. She’s probably decided that all this business of having children and taking care of children, and having a man and taking care of a man, is simply slavery; whereas if she retains her maidenhood and finds some work for herself that suits her and that doesn’t tax her strength beyond a certain point, she may go on being absolutely independent.

  “Of course her danger in that direction would be the risk of becoming a nun with holy Jesus in the offing and the Holy Ghost—Ghost for Ghosta!—on the horizon. And this sort of life must in many ways, when you really come to think of it in detail, be no independence at all! O Ghosta, Ghosta, what are you, now at this very moment, thinking about? Does the faintest thought of your lover ever cross your mind?”

  At this point Peleg’s cogitations were interrupted by the reappearance of Sir Mort accompanied by both his sons; nor did our Mongolian fail to notice that, as usually happened in their father’s company, the two lads were in a state of quiet fraternal expectation, ready for anything to happen, and interested in anything that did happen, but not engaged in an angry argument, as they had such a tendency to be when with their mother or their sister.

  “You’re sure your mother said it was pure Neapolitan, that white wine, and not some crazy drink that Tuck of Bumset has concocted and that’s been smuggled into our kitchen from theirs?”

  Sir Mort’s words were addressed to Tilton, who held in his hands with exemplary care a four-sided bottle of colourless liquid closed with a glass stopper of an emerald tint.

  “O yes, Father,” Tilton replied, quietly enough, but with obvious eagerness to see what effect upon the gigantic patient this particular beverage would have, and excitedly ready to be the one called upon to administer this cure for over-excitement.

  “Mother said she’d just given a glass of it to Nurse when Nurse was so upset by Lil-Umbra’s taking John’s side—wasn’t she, John?—that her hands shook till she dropped a plate on the stone floor and it broke into three pieces; and John said—didn’t you, John?—that one piece was Lil-Umbra and one was himself and one was me. Here it is! Shall I give it to Peleg?”

  Sir Mort gravely nodded; and Peleg taking it from the boy’s hand, and removing the stopper, poured the whole contents of the bottle down his throat in three long gulps. The effect on the big man was instantaneous. He handed back the phial that had contained this saving grace to Tilton; and quite calmly and naturally squared his shoulders, grasped his great mace by the middle, and bending his head automatically towards his master, and deliberately and with great dignity towards the two lads, went off with long and rapid strides in the direction of the Priory and the Convent.

  As he went, the strangest feelings swept through him, affecting his attitude to everything in the world. He felt perfectly calm, but prepared to fight to the death, for two inexhaustible causes, each of which he saw at that moment in close connection with a separate aspect of the scenery through which he was hurrying, the first with a long line of stately pines and the second with a distant hill-top upon which at that moment rested a large white cloud.

  His first cause was to win Ghosta against all the world, and his second was, when once he had won her, to fight on behalf of her people, her tribe, her ideas, her religion—yes, on behalf of everything that belonged to her, of everything she loved and represented, of everything she had set her heart upon, whether to do or to enjoy.

  There was even a third cause that came to him as he passed a dark avenue descending into a mossy gully; and this was to fight to the death against all the things and people and customs and ways and systems and institutions, which she loathed and hated! It was just when he was passing this sombre declivity, which the Sun himself, even at the high hour of noon, seemed to hesitate to enter, that he heard behind him the sound of running feet and the quick panting breath of the runner.

  He stopped and swung round, tightening his hold on his mace. And there, behold, was young John! John never looked his age. He was over eighteen; but any stranger seeing him as he looked at that moment would have taken him for sixteen or seventeen. John’s eyes were hazel in colour, and were large and full of spirit; in fact they gave the impression that his soul was much nearer the surface of his skin than is usual with young men; and as Peleg waited till the lad got his breath, he told himself that it was no wonder this learned Friar, whom everyone talked about, enjoyed teaching a boy like this.

  “Father sent me,” John said, “because he thought it might help if I were to go into the Convent and say that mother was very anxious to see her and had sent me to fetch her; and then, of course, after we three were out of their sight, I could come home alone. Father said it would seem quite all right for you to take her back later, and that mother would really be very glad to see her at the Fortress.”

  Peleg stared down at him for a second in silence. Then he said slowly, “Your Father is extremely wise in these things. And of course when my friend and I are once safe in the Fortress, we can find out whether Lady Val would really like to see her or not. Yes, come on Master John, and we’ll see what happens!”

  But as they threaded their way together between the trunks of the pines, that seemed to grow especially tall in this particular corner of the Manor, Peleg cursed the hour he had decided to take his master into his confidence. “It’s always unsafe to get their help,” he told himself. “They are so different from us. They do everything quicker, and yet, in a manner, more sideways, than we do things. But I expect I’m silly in not being overjoyed at this young master’s help. And yet I don’t know! How can I be glad to have anyone else, anybody at all, present when I first see Ghosta again? O but I’ve been a prize fool to let them into my secret! And yet on the other hand what would I have done with Ghosta if I hadn’t had t
his help? Where, in the name of all the devils, would I have taken her? As it is now, Lady Val may give her a place in their Fortress kitchen? But will she want that to happen? Girls are queer cattle! They live their own life quite apart from us. Thai’s what these damned Nordic crusaders never have, and never will, understand!”

  Peleg was so moved by this psychic discovery that he broke his silence. “What is your opinion of girls, Master John?”

  John’s eyes became absolutely brilliant, like two lamps lit by a divine flame in the Holy Tabernacle of the Ark of the Covenant.

  “O I adore them! I worship them! I embrace—in my mind of course, or in my imagination—every single one of them I meet! Off, off, off, off I slip their pretty clothes! And oh! so quickly I’m hugging them! But that’s the worst of it, for it’s the whole of the best of it, and the end of it! For I have an ecstasy at once, and all my soul rushes out, and all my seed is gone, in a minute, and I’ve no strength left to ravish them and take their divine maidenheads!

  “That’s my trouble, Peleg; and I don’t see how I can get over it! I don’t see how I’m ever to enjoy a woman properly, or ever to have a child, or ever to become a grandfather and a great-grandfather and a great-great-grandfather and a real proper ancestor! Tilton’s quite different. I think—only it’s a great secret, of course, between you and me—but I think Tilton’s already got a girl who lives round here. She’s a very, very slim girl, and she goes about with a little child, her niece I think it is, called Bet, who’s a very nice kid.