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!”
There must have been some immemorial power in this final cry, uttered in a really terrifying voice by old Dod Pole; for a most striking result followed at once, followed with that thundering finality that mankind knows as the most awe-inspiring sound in all human experience—a reverberating echo.
“Off with ye! Off with ye!” were now the words that rose from that whole heaving mass of red-brown rascality; and what they all proceeded to do came with the shock of a long-predicted earthquake that has now come. They tore off their mud-coloured tunics and jerkins, yes! and even in some cases their breeches too; though it interested the half-mad intelligence of Sir Mort to note that they had the wit—and he smiled sympathetically as he observed this—to throw nothing away.
Warm though the sun was, there was quite enough of autumn already in the air to make this a natural gesture, especially as the marshes and swamps to the west of Lost Towers only ended at the sand-dunes of the channel.
What most of them did was to wrap their mud-coloured vestments round their necks, though some, it is true, made bundles of them which they carried under their arms or even on their heads. But it was to the beat of the reverberating echo of Dod Pole’s “Off with ye!” that they vanished among the pine-trunks of the forest and the reedstalks of the swamp.
And so now, wholly devoid of any defence at all, the great gates of the ancient stronghold of Lost Towers stood wide open. And they stood open in front of the most fantastic conglomeration of people that had ever gathered together in that part of Wessex for any purpose, whether in the stone age, or in the bronze age, or in the age of King Arthur.
The whole company gazed in silence upon those open doors at the base of that huge tower; and it was as if their united will-power had called upon Lilith to appear. For there, before the whole lot of them, Lilith now defiantly stood; and it seemed as if, in her complete loneliness, she were uttering a contemptuous challenge to every event and every object and every earthly person and every super-earthly person in the entire multiverse.
And Petrus Peregrinus, as he watched her, felt an overpowering wave of emotion sweep over him. “Yes!” he thought. “You, and you alone, come what may, in this world or any other world, are my one true love, and with you at my side I shall feel myself to be the real and only real Antichrist, destined by the creative power of Nature herself to destroy once and for all this poisonous, this corrupt, this rotten, this suppurating, this decomposing, this infecting, this contaminatory, this fulsome, this fetid, this fatal farce of an explanation of life, based on a crazy belief in the Persons of the Trinity.”
Rendered almost heroic, cruel coward as he was, by this wild resurgence of his love for Lilith, Petrus of Maricourt rushed up the slope, and leaping over the corpses and splashing through the blood, was on the point of ascending the stone pavement in the centre of which she stood, when between them, hot and perspiring with the effort he was making, appeared in grey and greedy stateliness, the figure of Bonaventura.
“O St. Francis, help your child now or never!” was what the man prayed; and with every nerve in his body he announced to himself, “This is my moment! I shall be the next Pope myself or the appointer of the next Pope! I must lay my hand, before this whole crowd, upon this girl’s head!”
In the twinkling of an eye, yes! in the pulse-beat of the most incorrigible vein in his whole body, Petrus turned the blunt thickskulled cranium of his “Little Pretty” full upon this grey-garbed interloper. “Off you go, my stately friend!” he murmured in his heart as he kept the other end—the “tail” we might call it—of his deadly lodestone pressed tight against himself.
Nor was the response for a second in doubt.
“That girl is too great a temptation!” the appointer of Popes told himself. “I should do for myself if I touched the tip of her fingers! A person can’t have it both ways! In a country of devils such as this England is, a natural-born Saint like me can make no headway. I have heard that even their famous Robert Grosseteste thought sometimes about making Braze
n Images that could speak! No! Where there is any northern influence at all some sort of devilry’s sure to enter.
“Yes, dear God, I hear you, dear God, you are the only one in the whole world who understands me, I hear you clearly! You are advising me to take ship at once for France, and when well across their channel of sea-devils to make my way to Dijon and then to Avignon. No! I’ll be too dignified to bid anybody farewell. I expect they will listen all the better to that shallow orator from Cologne.
“They tell me that he, just like this Bacon from Ilchester, has long been promising all the boys who come to see him, especially if they come from Italy, grants from the Pope, for O! how he longs to put a little devilry from the north into the mind of that pupil of his called Aquinas! But you won’t succeed, you ugly great lecturer on the loves of bed-bugs and on the moral yearnings of will-o’-the-wisps! You won’t succeed!
“No! No! The north will always breed new devils for the south to exorcize. Yes, I must be off at once to the nearest sea-port. Why! There is that funny horse with the swollen neck, and that crazy fellow who takes it about! God must have sent that pair especially to take me to the coast!”
With these words comforting his heart, Bonaventura strode off. He knew well that he, the great Franciscan Pope-maker, if not the next Pope, was simply running away. But he justified his precipitate flight on the sound rational ground—and the unprejudiced chronicler must recognize that this was an authentic justification—that to be defeated in single spiritual combat by Albertus would be a much more serious blow to his personal career than a swift strategic retreat, a retreat which could always be explained as a sudden imperative call from Rome.
The Brazen Head Page 36