“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.
Although he had already enjoyed her that same day at the foot of the Cerne Giant to a degree that he supposed must have exhausted all his seminal energy, and though this day itself had followed a night of the grotesque debaucheries of Deadstone, it suddenly came over him that, if he clutched his lodestone tightly enough in his hand while he was enjoying her now, he would find himself endowed with a superhuman power.
And so it did, in God’s truth and the Devil’s truth, happen, before the two of them were asleep. And, as may be imagined, the sleep that followed this Elysian ecstasy was so deep for them both that the dawn was well advanced before Petrus realized that the light which was making his eyes blink so hopelessly as he tried to open them was the light not of the Moon but of the Sun.
“I’ll wrap this round me,” whispered Lilith hurriedly, snatching up the blanket from the bed, “and, when I’m dressed to go out, I’ll come back here for you; for I want you to take me home. So don’t go till I come!” And, as he kissed her, Petrus recognized that this really was a solemn league and covenant between them.
His dressing took no time at all, and he had comfortable leisure to caress his “Little Pretty”, otherwise his demonic lodestone, to his heart’s content, as well as to make the pillows and the extremely primitive goat-skin rug that covered the foot of the bed look as if the room had been used solely as a retiring place for relieving human bowels; and since there was no way he could empty that particular piece of furniture, all he could do was to sit on the bed and wait.
When at last Lilith returned, she looked as fresh as a wild, white convolvulus on an ivy-covered wall.
“I’ve found a way out,” she whispered hurriedly, “and once out I know how to dodge this camp of King’s Men. Just come quietly after me, step by step as quickly as you can, and we’ll soon be clear of this blessed place.”
Petrus obeyed, and she led him out of the Fortress by a small door among the sheds and stables, the look of which and the general atmospheric odour of that part of the establishment reminded him of the occasion when the Lord of the Manor had suffered a fall wrestling with Spardo’s deformed horse, and when the idea of filling the prophetic role of the actual Antichrist had first entered his own head.
Lilith was perfectly right about her ability to dodge the camp of the King’s Men. At one point they did catch the voice of Perspicax giving orders in that effective competent way that was a second nature with him. And though it can well be believed how tightly Petrus clutched his little monster to his navel at this sound, he was far too scared of throwing everything into a chaos, in which anything might happen, to take the risk of pointing the lodestone at this man from Iscala who boasted himself to be a first cousin of the maker of the Brazen Head.
But the authoritative voice of Roger Bacon’s relative from Iscala had hardly died down, when lo! directly in their path through the forest, appeared a group of about a dozen men, unmistakably clothed in the red-brown attire of Lost Towers. These men were advancing with the swift, furtive, stealthy, wild-animal-like self-confidence of a perfectly trained body of woodsmen, to whom every aspect of forest life had been familiar from earliest boyhood.
Without a cry of delight or the faintest sign of surprise Lilith ran towards them; and in a pulse-beat of his agitated heart our all-too-human Antichrist began searching with the tip of his tongue the whole surface of the cavernous roof of his mouth, as if that tongue of his, which could be a deadly sting, had also the power of transforming itself into a divining-rod, a rod that could reveal the presence of any drop of the water of life in any portion of the skull that contained it.
But while Lilith was gliding in and out of the ranks of her red-brown adherents, like a “Wood-White” butterfly dominating a confused rabble of billowing and swirling “Meadow-Browns”, there suddenly emerged, walking towards him in an extremely dignified, though somewhat dramatic manner, out of the centre of the red-brown men, no less a personage than Bonaventura himself!
This tremendous redeemer of footpads was evidently deeply impressed by the revelation that Lilith, whose entrancing body he had only resisted because God destined him to be Pope or the maker of Popes, had a man-friend.
He recognized at once the black cap Petrus was wearing as part of the uniform of one of the best troops among the soldiers of the King of France; and the wild hope rushed into his mind that this siren of a girl had just come back from crossing the Channel with a body of men as large, if not larger, than the King’s Men who would shortly be waking from their sleep in the camp of this Perspicax of Iscala or Ilchester.
This descent upon Wessex of the King’s Men from London had been the second startling blow that Bonaventura had received in the last few days. The first was the appearance, totally unforeseen by him, of Albertus of Cologne, for whom, as the most famous of all teachers in the Dominican order, he, as the best known Franciscan throughout the world, felt the emotions that all of us experience, though some of us are cleverer than others in hiding them, when confronte
d by a successful rival.
Petrus of Maricourt clutched “Little Pretty” tightly against his skin and looked his opponent full in the face. “Mistress Lilith told me,” he said, “that I might have the proud pleasure of meeting the late legate of the Holy Father and the greatest doctor that our Holy Faith possesses in Paris and Oxford, but I never for one moment imagined that her words would come true. Your eminence knows what young ladies are, and of course I have already heard that your reverence disapproves of Friar Bacon’s Brazen Head. In fact, to be quite truthful, I have answered a number of people on this point by telling them bluntly and squarely that some of Friar Bacon’s inventions are under examination by the highest authorities in the Church, in case they may turn out to have no divine sanction but, on the contrary——” here Petrus bowed with his head and scraped with his foot, as he had seen his mother do when the Lord of Maricourt walked down the street—“on the contrary, are the work of the Devil.”
“What, if I may enquire,” asked Bonaventura, “is your name? And what, if you will absolve me of gross inquisitiveness, is your purpose in visiting these parts?”
Our traveller clutched with his left hand the body of “Little Pretty” under his clothes, and placing his right hand against the hilt of his eternally sheathed sword, he proceeded to balance his bottom upon this convenient knot of hammered metal-work and got strength and relief by so doing.
Indeed for a moment or two, as he listened to Bonaventura repeating his question with the judicial unction of an official executioner at the oriental court of Karakorum, he experienced a delicious thrill of complete irresponsibility, as if he had been an anonymous figure seated on a marble stool impervious to the goings on of mortals.
The Brazen Head Page 34