The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  And if no thought of that leaf on the floor crossed the furthest fringe of its parent-tree’s cogitations, you may be sure that neither Sir William nor Lady Val gave the slightest attention to its fate; and there it would have lain for the rest of that evening and the whole of that night had not old Mother Guggery been sent from the kitchen to ask some important semi-culinary, semi-social question of the Lady of the Manor.

  Mother Guggery always used a massive ebony stick when she walked, though physically she had not the least need of such support, and she showed now by the way she came stumping up between the young knight and Lady Val that the moment her curiosity was satisfied as to what they were talking about, or being silent about, she would turn her back upon the young man and concentrate on her mission to the lady.

  But in a household as turbulent with new starts and old upshots, with new conspiracies and old frustrations, as was this Fortress of Roque, it was impossible, especially at the close of a sunny day at this time of the year, and upon such a central and crucial debating-ground as this particular spot, for any discussion to be long confined to its originators.

  Thus before Mother Guggery had got down to the business of her message, who must come drifting in but Lady Val’s younger son, the intellectual young John, who was often called “John of London” at the Priory, because of his frequent visits to the King’s court on behalf of Friar Bacon. He now came loitering and drifting towards his mother with the air of one who had been using his wits all day long to such exhaustive effect among the high problems of metaphysic and theology that he has earned the right, now that the day is over and darkness is falling, to forget these high matters—yes! to forget this difficult super-world with its niceties of the human conscience, its nuances of Trinitarian Personalities, and its dissolving facets of unfathomable Absolutes, and to give himself up to any frivolity that drifted across his path in that domestic portico between kitchen and dining-hall.

  Nor does life often fail us under such conditions; for there is Something in life that is at once different from Chance and yet not quite identical with all that we mean by the word Fate; and it is this Something that almost always provides us with some spontaneous motive when we are, so to speak, angling for an urge to pursue any available flibbertigibbet.

  And thus it now happened with the younger son of Sir Mort Abyssum. Mother Guggery, having assumed by her lady’s look that more was in the air than she could cope with just then, came bolt out with the message from the kitchen, and, as she turned to go, her eyes fell on that last year’s alder-leaf lying on the floor. With the end of her ebony stick the old woman endeavoured, by obstinately poking at it, to get the leaf near enough to her feet to be able to stoop and pick it up. This whole picture, the ebony stick, the thin bent back, the patient motionless leaf, was enough, when taken in at a glance, to cause young John to rush forward and snatch up the leaf himself.

  And then, all in a second, an airy connection struck him between this whole small event and the teaching of Friar Bacon, who had always instructed him to save such vegetable waifs from bonfires, and to cast them, loose and free, as near their birthplace as possible. So into the young man’s most intimate pocket went this lucky leaf to be disposed of later.

  XII

  THE HERESY HUNT

  It was more than a surprise to the simpler dwellers in that portion of Wessex dominated by the traditional Manors of Roque and of Cone, and perpetually being interfered with by the unprecedented and incalculable domain of Lost Towers, when the holy, the thrice-blessed, the miraculously learned representative of the Holy Father himself in Rome, Bonaventura, the most famous of all Franciscans since Saint Francis, began, in that early spring of the year of grace 1272, searching the district for heretics and unbelievers, and using as his band of retainers nothing less than a regular cohort of brown-vested bandits from the swamps of Lost Towers.

  And this singular heresy-hunt, led by a reputed saint commanding a body-guard of reputed devils, was an incredible event even to the good-natured Baron of Cone himself, whom it disturbed not a little. He finally made up his mind to accept it at its face-value; but since his youth, when serving under King Henry at the battle of Lewes, he had beheld the triumph of Simon de Montfort, he had never had such a spiritual shock.

  When in the course of chronicling these events we seek to understand this shock, we are driven to conclude that it came from a certain inherent simplicity in Baron Boncor’s nature, which instinctively accepted without question all those natural assumptions about good and evil, which like the biblical “charity” are only too apt to “cover a multitude of sins.”

  In spite of the rapid healing of the serious hurt he had received from the arrow, shot at him by Baron Maldung, he felt convinced that it would be a case of taking the side of the Devil against God if he gave any aid, shelter, refreshment, hospitality, information, comfort, encouragement or welcome to Bonaventura and his brown-jerkin’d band.

  It was quite another thing with Lady Ulanda, Baron Boncor’s wife. Lady Ulanda had recently abandoned herself to a savage campaign against Friar Bacon and all his works. Ulanda was anything but a religious lady. Her whole nature was practical. She was in the fullest sense a woman of action. She was suspicious of all thought, of all art, of all mental analysis. She wasn’t a vicious woman, but she was what is called a possessive woman, to a degree that was a danger to everybody round her and especially to the object of this possessiveness.

  The object of it in this case was no child in her domestic world and no lover in the world outside. It was simply and solely her husband. And it was because of several very curious reasons, some physical, some mental, and some the result of occurrences in the early days of her marriage, that this dominant element in her nature had never from the beginning asserted itself in any perceptible degree in regard to her son. Her attitude to young Sir William was more like that of an affectionate aunt than a mother. She doted on him as a fanciful old maid might dote on a favourite pet; and it was a real blow to her when destiny brought it about that she was compelled to witness, day by day, the rapidly growing love-affair between her husband’s friend and cousin, Raymond de Laon, and the daughter of Lady Val of the Fortress.

  Ulanda’s almost frantic hostility to Friar Bacon was intimately connected with Baron Boncor’s affection for his relative Raymond. It had been pain and poison to her from the start—the interest Baron Boncor took in Raymond. She had hated his coming to be an inmate of their castle from the very first, but Boncor was so set upon it that, without a greater quarrel than she dared to embark on, she had to accept it.

  At the bottom of it was her simple recognition that her husband’s regard for Raymond de Laon was not unconnected with the young man’s exceptional good looks and the magnetic charm of his whole personality. She knew only too well that she herself, though full of an intense vitality and always able to carry off with dignity the proud assumptions of high-born authority, was grotesquely lacking in that sort of tender and appealing physical beauty which wins favour wherever it goes.

  Like many another high-spirited and passionate lady, Ulanda of Cone felt such an intense longing to be as beautiful in reality as she was beautiful in her inner ideal of herself, that she had actually visited Friar Bacon in that upper chamber in the Priory where he was virtually a prisoner, and made a direct personal face-to-face appeal to him to help her, by means of those mysterious arts in which she understood he was such a master, to acquire, without any drastic change in her appearance, that particular magnetic charm by which the most formidable of men can be seduced and captivated by a woman.

  As any of the serious disciples and pupils of the scientific Friar could have warned her, this shameless and unblushing assumption that he was some kind of a sex-wizard annoyed Roger Bacon so much that he refused point-blank to have anything to do with her; and Lady Ulanda came down the stone staircase from the Friar’s chamber resolved to have the most deadly revenge she could bring about on a man who refused so rudely—and he a sort
of half-condemned heretic too—a natural and perfectly lawful request from a lady of her importance in that western district of the kingdom.

  Lady Ulanda was not particularly fussy or punctilious in what might be called the heraldic or antiquarian aspects of the Barony of Cone. In fact she was a good deal less primed in such matters than were most of her contemporary ladies of title. She herself came of an old yeoman family called Dunderog entirely independent of any baronial manor, but claiming direct descent from Ralph Rorsuk, the predatory nephew of King Stephen.

  When not fishing or hunting or fighting or riding between his arable-fields and his pasture-fields, or surveying his forestry, Baron Boncor was in the habit of spending his time in a spacious chamber at the top of a small round tower above the south-west ramparts of the Castle. This chamber ever since his grandfather once, on a pilgrimage to Rome, purchased some illuminated scrolls, and obtained in the same city the aid of a famous book-binder to cover them with specially prepared skins, had come to be known as the Library.

  Boncor’s grandfather had fastened with golden-headed nails upon an enormous oak table opposite the hearth in this room a great number of large pictorial maps of the world, adapted to the comprehension of unclassical and unscholarly persons by the appearance at certain crucial points, on both land and sea, of various land-monsters and sea-monsters, and also of various voyagers, these latter enlarged in size so as to indicate by their dresses, arms, and banners, whether they came from Christian or Heathen countries, while the ships that carried them were reduced in size in comparison with the men—and women too sometimes—whom they carried, as if to compel recognition that a Power and a Mystery, that is at once half-human and half-divine, is ruling and will always rule the Air, the Earth, the Water and the Fire.

  On each side of a blazing fire of pine logs, kept in constant flame by sticks from a big pile in a capacious copper container, were two deep well-cushioned chairs, that resembled the rudder divided sterns of a couple of barges rather than baronial judgment-seats or collegiate library-benches or cathedral choir-stalls.

  It was between these two seats that the huge low eight-legged table of dark oak stood that was covered with these pictures of the world. One corner of this enormously large and very low table, on the surface of which Behemoths and Leviathans and dragons and sea-serpents were disporting themselves, was devoted to the art of book-binding, an art in which the present Baron of Cone took a lively and a practical interest.

  On this corner of the table adjoining the Baron’s chair was a careful selection of the skins of small local wild animals, by the aid of which the Baron was wont to practise with slow and sedulous care the by no means easy art of making bindings for both sacred and profane manuscripts.

  The delicate results of his devoted concentration on this unusual task could be seen meticulously arranged on various wooden stands beneath all the four walls of the chamber, including the one where a low and very narrow door opened on the stairway that led to the foot of the tower. It was not until an evening in the middle of February in that eventful Christian year of 1272 that the stored-up, banked-up, piled-up fury of Lady Ulanda against Friar Bacon burst out in full enough force, as she sat in the other curiously carved and richly cushioned chair over their fire of pine logs to make that easy-going Lord of the Manor of Cone realize that the situation was serious.

  “If you don’t do something and do it quickly,” hissed Ulanda, sitting straight up at the edge of her seat, and with her long, bare arms giving the rim of the great table, which extended its breadth and its length at their side, a series of desperate blows with her knuckles, “I shall go mad!”

  Across the maps fastened with golden nails to the table and making it look like the mingling of an illustrated bestiary with an illustrated cosmography, it seemed to Baron Boncor that under these violent blows all those weird sea-monsters and land-monsters quivered into a new life and ceased to be merely pictures. But the Baron’s look of bewildered concern only agitated her still more; and with a frantic artfulness she manipulated her knuckles so that her enormous signet-rings—rings that she only wore when she felt especially angry with the world, and which always made her husband think of certain pre-historic rings that had been found by one of his ploughmen near an ancient burial mound in the immediate vicinity of his castle—beat upon the table.

  Ulanda’s parents were both dead and she had no relatives left, but she always maintained that these two rings had belonged to Rorsuk, King Stephen’s nephew, and that it was because he had forgotten to put them on at some royal banquet that he was found murdered that same night in the bed of one of the court ladies.

  At any rate the sound that Ulanda’s rings, one of which carried on it the semblance of a wild-boar and the other the semblance of a whale, caused to vibrate across that monster-bearing table, suggested that a sea-serpent was catching its breath as it neared the land at the sight of a Behemoth munching grass on the sea-shore.

  It was at this moment, before the bewildered Baron could formulate any appeal to her enraged soul, that they both became aware of steps on the tower staircase. They looked at each other and they looked at the door. But no indignant look and no muttered curse could stop that door from opening. And there, quietly crossing the threshold, was Raymond de Laon!

  Raymond was as fair-haired as Baron Boncor, but his hair was straight, not curly like the Baron’s, and if he had grown a beard it would probably have been feathery and wispy in the manner of Spardo’s. In figure he was tall and slender, and his face had an alert, intent, interrogating look, as if he were forever searching for something he couldn’t find, and yet not at all as if this search was painful or as if he felt any touch of anger or desperation at not finding what he sought.

  The first thing he did on entering the chamber was to turn ha f-round, even while he was in the act of making a low obeisance, and to close the door. This he did with extreme punctiliousness and almost with the air of being a confederate in an exciting conspiracy. But the door once closed and his obeisance over, it was with a most unembarrassed and easy manner that he advanced to the edge of the great table, and leaning forward across it with the tips of his long fingers just touching it, he completely, although very politely, disregarded the evident hostility on the lady’s face and addressed himself entirely to Baron Boncor, who had risen with a friendly greeting and now sank down, composed and attentive, to hear what his young friend had to say.

  “I came to tell you, my lord,” Raymond began, “that your people in the reception room downstairs have just been considerably disturbed by the unexpected appearance among them tonight of a group of men from Lost Towers. None of my friends among your people have been able to tell me who it was who let these bandits come in. I fancy myself it was some young rogue who has been looking for an excuse to leave Cone altogether and to join these crazy followers of Lost Towers. Though evidently puzzled how they got in, your excellent Ralph Turgo, unwilling to be the one to start trouble, began at once giving them refreshments.

  “Well, I took advantage of this moment of relaxation to ask a few questions of one of these Lost Towers men; and what I picked up from him was an amazing piece of news. It appears that Bonaventura, head of all the Franciscans, is lodging at Bumset Priory tonight, and that he himself, and no one else, has hired for the occasion these master-ruffians from Lost Towers with the intention of using them as his own retainers, so that he can drag Friar Bacon out of his prison there, and carry him off to a ship that’s waiting on the Thames in London to take him to France where he’ll never he heard of again.

  “I heard them telling our Turgo—and Ralph’s a crafty fellow, you know, when it comes to inducing rascals like these Brown Tunics to talk—just what they told me, that Bonaventura wants them to carry off from the Priory-prison not only the Friar himself and all his unholy and heathen books, but also this Brazen Head of his, about which we hear so much. This Brazen Head he wants them to carry into some empty space in the forest, and when once they’ve got it th
ere—in some empty space, you understand, between the Fortress and Lost Towers—to hammer it to bits with stones and plough-shares and iron clubs!”

  Having thus delivered his startling news with dramatic intensity straight across that curious table which now bore upon its geographical face all the most terrifying monsters, of land, sea, and air, that have ever defied man’s domination of the world, the fair-haired lover of Lil-Umbra let his whole tension relax, and in an easy and quiet and apologetic way moved round the table till he reached the arm of Baron Boncor’s chair over which he bent.

  “I didn’t want to bother you with all this, my dear Baron,” he murmured, “but it struck me as such an unexpected coalition between God and the Devil that it gave me the feeling of an unpleasant conspiracy against all quiet and moderate people who dislike extremes. I can’t myself quite explain the shock it gave me; but an unpleasant shock it was. I rather think it had to do with the peculiar colour of the clothes these men wear, which is almost exactly the colour of that liquid we always see between the stones in those places where they slaughter animals.

  “I must have imagined the actual spectacle of these savage brown tunics doing the abominable bidding of this ferocious angel of God, who evidently would have loved to have seen hammered into unrecognizable bits not only the Friar’s Brazen Head but the Friar’s own human, all-too-human skull!”

  “And a good thing too!” hissed Lady Ulanda, rising to her feet and confronting her husband’s young friend across the outer edge of a picture of a terrifying sea, whose waves were breaking on the shores of what that primeval map called “the Land of Cathay,” and on whose breaking waves a monster was riding, whose head resembled the head of a colossal lizard and its rear end the tail of a gigantic dolphin.