The Brazen Head

by John Cowper Powys

  And when the Baron obeyed this curt command, Spardo only acknowledged it with a nod. It would be almost as difficult for the most penetrating chronicler to describe the thoughts that whirled through the head of Peter of Maricourt at this juncture, as it would be to describe what Cheiron himself was thinking.

  But this much might certainly be hazarded: that if Cheiron’s thoughts were concentrated partly upon what Spardo had given him to eat, and partly on the question as to whence this food came and how much more of it was available in the place, wherever that place was, from which it came, Master Peter’s thoughts were concentrated, first on the question as to whether he dared to make another experiment with the perilous object he kept in a velvet bag between his legs, tightly pressed against his body close to his privy parts, or whether the present moment was even less propitious for an experiment of this sort than was the recent occasion in Roger Bacon’s room at Bumset Priory.

  The object in that velvet bag, squeezed so scrupulously against his most hidden stretch of skin, was indeed the very centre and focus of Maître Pierre’s whole life. It was a magnet of immense and so far of quite unfathomed power.

  Ever since he’d been a small boy Maître Pierre had been obsessed by a passion for magnetic experiments, and for the last twenty years his whole life had been given to the study of everything he could pick up on this queer topic.

  The accumulated result of this frantic quest—for in many ways it was much more like this quest for the Sangraal than any ordinary alchemistic pursuit—was, as far as the man’s own secret life went, only alchemistic on the side. In its main conscious urge what Master Peter of Maricourt was after was nothing less than the deliberate manipulation of his own sexual force, by means of this powerful magnet, for the domination of the souls and wills and minds of other entities.

  He was in fact at this moment absorbed in this particular game, just as he had been for the last twenty years, and it was Friar Bacon’s psychic awareness of this mania in his friend that always troubled and alarmed him when they were together, although it had a tremendous interest for him. The Friar never let it invade his own experimental work; and whenever it became evident to him as uppermost in Peter’s mind, it troubled him both in his nerves and in his conscience.

  Yes! and in something else within him, beyond both nerves and conscience; for Friar Roger in his own spirit was always aware of the presence of an almighty force behind the whole panorama of experience, behind the animal, vegetable and mineral worlds, behind infinite space and infinite time, behind all possible suns, moons, planets and stars, in fact behind all possible, as well as all existing, universes.

  It was his consciousness of this remote and ultimate power that Roger Bacon felt he needed to keep his peace of mind and keep him happy and contented in his work. Thus there was always something, in spite of his admiration for Pierre of Picardy, that frightened him about his friend’s attitude, for it struck him as reducing not only his own life, as he knew it himself, but the lives of all other entities as they knew them themselves, the lives of insects, such as midges and moths, the lives of plants and trees, the lives of worms and serpents, the lives of fish in the sea, birds in the air, the lives of the beasts of forest and field; reducing in fact all these lives to the level of lonely, desperate, lost souls, clinging to each other in a boundless, godless, cavernous nothingness, in fact to what he had heard a travelling Welsh tinker call Diddym, “the ultimate Void”.

  To the original mind and autocratic humour of the Lord of the Manor of Roque there was something about this scene under the light of that suspended lantern that seemed monstrously comical as well as strangely weird and startling. What was this man up to now?

  Master Peter had clearly and obviously some concentrated purpose; but who could possibly know that he was pressing that lodestone of his, in its absurd sheath of flexible velvet, against his naked organs of generation? His eyes, as he did this, were fixed on the head of the horse Cheiron, who was snorting rather indignantly and gazing rather reproachfully at his master, Spardo.

  Spardo himself never moved from his seat on the tree-stump which had become for him a sort of elfin throne from which he could, though without any oracular authority, and without attempting to claim any mundane weight, play the part of a wandering goblin, who happened to be making a grave attempt to be an historian of the primitive antics of the human race.

  Nor was it very long before both the eccentric Baron of Roque and the observant owner of Cheiron had something to set down in their “year-book” of manorial history. With his hands pressing more and more strongly, and with ever intenser concentration, his precious lodestone against his privy parts, Peter did really seem at that moment to be a man possessed by a fit of insane devilry. It is likely enough that what made him select Cheiron, rather than Cheiron’s master, for his magnetic experiment was the passing glimpse he may have had, when the darkness was broken by some gleam from the lantern swaying in the wind, of that deformity in the horse’s neck.

  But whatever it was that set him off practising his tricks in this direction, the result was sufficiently unexpected. Cheiron suddenly leapt up on his hind-legs and advanced, pawing the air with his front-legs, straight upon Master Peter, who promptly scuttled behind the Lord of Roque.

  And this moment really produced, if the truth had been carried over the length and breadth of his manorial domain, one of those situations in which this extraordinary owner of this by no means extraordinary strip of fir-forest had a chance of showing that it was not for nothing that the skull of his grandfather, when by some chance it was exposed to the air long after it was buried, had a twist of dark hair gathered round it, indicating, so an Assyrian astrologer who saw it declared, that its zodiacal tendency belonged to the constellation of the Ram, since there had always been known, from the beginning of history, certain rare persons born under that influence, the roots of whose hair came from a deeper level than their skin.

  Instead therefore of being in the least perturbed by the towering belly and menacing hooves hovering above him, the Lord of Roque experienced the sort of exultation that Job declares Behemoth felt when he believed he could drain Jordan to the dregs of all its waters.

  Spardo was so astonished at what he now beheld that he rose from his seat on the tree-stump and stood like one confounded. Master Peter whose magnetic experiment was the cause of this classic catastrophe, did what Friar Bacon’s collapse had clearly not made him do. He carefully shifted, in a number of minute jerks, his perilous lodestone. He did this knowing the thing couldn’t be lost, for its velvet container was suspended by a cord from his waist; and he adjusted it now so that while it was still in contact with his bare skin, it was at the base of his stomach and quite out of reach of his organs of generation.

  But not a soul in that small lantern-lit group was more astonished than was Cheiron himself when he felt, hurled against his privy parts—which were, and this was no doubt an additional effect of Master Peter’s experiment, unusually excited just then—the formidable skull of the Lord of Roque.

  Unable now to bring his legs to the ground, the angry horse found his right hoof hanging helplessly over the man’s left shoulder and his left hoof thrust out at an extremely awkward and even a painful angle over the man’s right shoulder, while he himself, his whole equine shape and deformed neck, was lifted bodily off the ground!

  It only lasted a second, this incredible display of human strength, a display that Hercules himself would have witnessed with amazement: but when it was over the Lord of Roque and his deformed antagonist were struggling together on the ground.

  And it was then that there occurred the same total collapse of consciousness in the brain of the Lord of the Manor as had occurred some half a dozen hours earlier in the case of Friar Bacon. At one second he was saying to himself: “I am a beast. Man is no more. Your own beasthood learn to adore!” and was beginning to force himself to enjoy the strong hirsute odour of Cheiron’s under-belly, when suddenly, without any warning
at all, everything became dark, and he himself became as nonexistent as if he had never been born.

  The sharp-eyed dame of the gate-keeper had already left her less alert husband’s side; and with a thick scarf round her head, and a still thicker one round her shoulders, was soon at the side of her unconscious master; and it can be imagined, with an experienced old lady of her sort at the head of affairs, and with the gate-keeper, inspired by her example, obedient to her least hint, how soon it was that the Lord of the Fortress lay stretched out on his own bed with Lady Val bending over him and his three children, along with excited emissaries from every part of the Fortress, hovering round the door.

  Both Spardo and Cheiron were comfortably asleep, and also in closer proximity to each other than anyone who had witnessed the recent struggle and its surprising termination would have predicted, before Master Peter of Maricourt had succeeded in persuading the perspicacious lady of the gate-house to allow him a sleeping-place. This indeed, when she found it for him, could not be called under her roof, for it was in the back premises of the Fortress on the opposite side from the entrance, but such as it was, it was so much in the warmest part of the whole building and so surrounded by the sleeping-places of animals, that when Peter of Picardy had settled his great black head on the sack of wool that formed his substantial pillow, he found that the melancholy wailing of the wind across the forest was so comfortably animalized by the noises of the beasts in his immediate vicinity that his thoughts became so agreeable to him that he felt reluctant to fall asleep too quickly.

  His present situation was indeed so harmonious with his mood that he disentangled his precious lodestone, which, it would seem, after these two murderous experiments, could scarcely be called a harmless magnet, and examined it as carefully as was possible under the light of a stable-lantern which hung from a time-darkened oak-beam several yards above his pillow.

  “I have succeeded,” he told himself. “I have succeeded beyond all expectation.” Had there been an onlooker at this scene—say an angel or a devil crouched on that wooden beam above the lantern and endowed with a powerful enough sight—he might, or she might, have described this half-natural, half-artificial object to some acquaintance up in the roof in the following terms. “It is about half a foot long and is simply a spear-head of the particular colour which waves take when they are beginning to change from blue to green, a change which happens when the winds rise, not so much as a sign of a coming storm, as to prove that, if a storm did come, they would show themselves to be the proud-curving cohorts they were, of an approaching sea-god.”

  With exquisite satisfaction did Master Peter of Picardy caress his newly formulated, newly invented, newly tested magnet; and as he did so a series of the wildest fantasies raced through his mind. He saw himself dominating the rulers of all the countries of the world, and through his power over them he saw himself, although always craftily in the background, having his revenge upon the whole human race.

  “O how I do hate them all!” he thought. “I hate them with my brain, with my body, and with my soul! I hate them with everything I am, everything I was, and everything I shall be!”

  And then he began again to wonder, as he had so often wondered before, whether it was possible that he really was that Antichrist, prophesied of from the beginning of the world, who was destined to destroy the Kingdom of Christ.

  “What I would do then,” he told himself, “the moment I had got the world entirely under my control, would be to build up an absolutely different kind of world altogether. I would have no more of this hypocritical humbug about ‘love’—as if it were possible for any child of the elements, born of earth, air, water and fire, to fight for anything, to achieve anything, to enjoy anything, to become anything, except by the assertion of his separate, distinctive, individual, and unique self—and what I would aim at in my world, in my Antichrist world, in my super-scientific world, would be to create a new race of beings altogether, creatures as superior to what mankind is now as man is superior to beasts, birds, and fishes!”

  The demonic delight, which radiated in the train of these thoughts through the whole being of Master Peter, was so deliciously transporting that it carried him away altogether from his material position at that moment, and bore him aloft, as if in a chariot of air and fire, a chariot that flew upward upon the waving of two wings, one of which might have been Space and the other Time, for both together seemed to acquire a mysterious force that soon carried their voyager into a sleep, if sleep it were, where he found himself in reality, if reality it were, beyond all description by the words the human race has hitherto used.

  XVII

  ALBERT OF COLOGNE

  Raymond de Laon was not given to moods of special exultation or to moods of special depression. He possessed an extremely well-balanced nature. He had been saved from quarrels with parents by having been made an orphan at an early age; and he was lucky now in having found a betrothed who exactly suited him. He took the shocks and accidents and misadventures of life with a calm, and yet, in a certain way, with an exultant commonsense, that was as much a support to Lil-Umbra as it was an authentic advantage to himself in his struggle with life. He had certainly done well in his present mission; for here by his side was none other than Albertus Magnus. At this moment with his band of armed retainers, who had been rather unwillingly provided by the authorities of Cone Castle to support him on this daring embassy, he had just reached the entrance to the convent where Ghosta was employed, and they were all now about to pass, while the Sun was at his hottest on that June day, the mysterious cave in the grove of oaks and willows, which Peleg had been assured was the abode of that tinker from Wales about whom the wildest rumours were current.

  It was said for instance that he was helped in his work as a travelling tinker by several women from different parts of the country, all of whom had sold their souls to the Devil.

  It was at this point that Raymond began rather nervously explaining to the great teacher from Cologne that they would be soon arriving at the main gate of the Fortress of Roque; and he went on to indicate more specifically, what he had already mentioned shyly to him before, namely that Lady Val, who was expecting him as her guest that night, was the mother of the young lady to whom he himself was betrothed, and was the wife of the most formidable boar-hunter and wolf-slayer in all that portion of England. Nor did he hesitate, though even more diffidently, to explain that they were all so weary of the violent personal quarrels between these two belligerent Franciscans, Friar Bacon and Bonaventura that they welcomed the appearance among them of a renowned Dominican whose presence alone would be sufficient to break up these vindictive quarrels.

  The whole party paused at this point at the request of the visitor, to enable him to retire behind a clump of willows with a view to relieving himself. When he returned he kept them standing for a moment above the leafy declivity containing the entrance to this cave of the tinker’s witch-wives, while he begged Raymond de Laon to tell him as definitely as he could what his own private and personal reaction was in regard to the quarrel between these famous men.

  He had no sooner asked this question and Raymond was frowning and biting his lips and searching his mind for an adequate answer, when they all heard quite distinctly, borne up upon the wind from the depths of the leafy gully beneath them a wild husky voice singing a ditty which clearly was, whether they were able to follow all its crazy words or not, a blasphemous defiance of Providence above, of the Church below, and of all that mankind from generation to generation has been taught to hold sacred.

  The day was so hot and the sky above was so blue, that the effect of this howl of defiance to everything they had all been accustomed from infancy to venerate was enhanced by the complete absence at that spot of any work of men’s hands, whether of wood or stone. It was like a voice from the depths of the earth replying to a voice from uttermost space. It seemed to be addressed to the formless and shapeless rocks of granite and basalt that lay around this small group of
travellers, and it seemed to be appealing desperately to earth, air, and water, not to allow the sun-rays that were so lifegiving to all, to fool them by their warmth.

  It was the sort of defiance such as the ghost of a baby of a million years ago, a baby or “baban” whose skull, “penglog”, had been discovered in the grave of an antediluvian giant, “gawr”, might have uttered to all oracles and prophets and announcers of revelations and to all deities and pantheons of deities who were already gathering in the mists of the future to claim human worship.

  “Until I’m dust I’ll enjoy my hour—

  Penglog y Baban yr Gawr!

  I’ll gather my harvest and grind my flour—

  Penglog y Baban yr Gawr!

  With Holy Rood I’ll have naught to do—

  Penglog y Baban yr Gawr!

  Adam am I, and Eve are you,

  And Eden’s wherever we are, we two—

  Penglog y Baban yr Gawr!

  A mortal’s fate is the same as a mole’s—

  Penglog y Baban yr Gawr!

  The same as the fishes that leap in shoals,

  Penglog y Baban yr Gawr!

  Where leaf do fall—there let leaf rest—

  Where no Grail be there be no quest—

  Be’ee good, be’ee bad, be’ee damned, be’ee blest—

  Be’ee North, be’ee South, be’ee East, be’ee West

  The whole of Existence is naught but a jest—

  Penglog y Baban yr Gawr!”

  The effect upon that small company, together with Raymond their leader and Albertus Magnus their visitor, of this weird ditty, a ditty followed by dead silence, save for the sound of the wind in the trees about them and the far-off cry of a buzzard high in the air above them, would have been for anyone concerned with the results of unexpected shocks upon human nerves, of no small interest.