The Brazen Head (3 page)

Lil-Umbra could see that her bold divulging of this long and intimate association between her brother John and the notorious Friar Bacon was no small shock to her companion. The Tartar jerked back his head from the Sun-ray and gave it a rather strained twist sideways, a twist that enabled him to follow, as the girl had been doing, the retreat into space of that silvery Moon, but, instead of keeping his gaze there, he now suddenly lowered his head and turned his whole attention upon the murderous spikes of that iron mace he held on his lap, hugging it almost affectionately between his thighs, while with both his hands he abstractedly toyed with those appalling spikes, pressing his thumb against their vicious points in careful and calculated succession.

What he was feeling in his mind was a black void of desperate loneliness. He had been of late congratulating himself on having a really deep and unique pact, unspoken and
inarticulate
, but none the less massively consolidated, with his master Sir Mort, but this revelation from the man’s daughter of a secret as important as this—and a secret connected with Sir Mort’s own son—gave the gigantic Mongol the feeling that he was not even yet a really intimate member of this family and that he had better take what comfort he could as he used to do as an orphan in Dalmatia by imagining himself alone in space like the star Aldebaran.

But the wheel of his fate selected that moment to touch one
of those mysterious “opposites” concerning which he had just been talking. And it was brought about, by one of those secret chains of events that are often so confounding when they emerge out of the underground mole-runs of cause and effect into the twilight of consciousness, that some small token, either the sight at such a moment of an intensely glittering gleam where a particular Sun-ray truck a special spot on the spiky ball he was holding, or the reappearance of a tiny wisp of white cloud, totally forgotten until he recalled it now, that he had seen only a minute or two ago in contact with the
retreating
Moon, roused in the depths of the tragic loneliness into which he had been plunged a darting flame of a possible redemption of everything.

This came like the leap of a shining fish out of a black pool, and the form it took was the form of a girl not much older than Lil-Umbra herself. But though of like age with the young creature now leaning so trustingly against him, the redemptive vision that rushed into his mind was that of a strangely
appealing
Jewish maid. Before the bloody day on which Sir Mort had earned his everlasting adhesion Peleg had met in this maid the ideal love of his whole life. She was certainly beautiful; but it was in a strange, very rare degree, and with a beauty that seemed perpetually re-created by some mysterious sorcery in herself. Her name was Ghosta, and on first setting eyes on her Peleg had experienced a thrill of unutterable pride at having in his own veins the blood of Israel.

Yes, this youthful virgin of his own race became from the moment he saw her the supreme light of his life. But it had been in vain that he had rushed round the battlefield and the camp trying desperately to find her again. They had met: they had looked into each other’s eyes: they had loved: and then the girl had vanished. And when all was over, and he had become for life the free slave of the House of Roque, it was as if she had been carried off on a cloud.

Like himself she must, he supposed, have been willingly or unwillingly carried off by some Anglo-Norman crusader to a castle in the north of Africa or on the borders of Palestine or in Gascony or Sicily or Piedmont or somewhere in England or Ireland or Scotland or Wales or peradventure on the shores of the Bosphorus.

But there now shot into the heart of the smouldering crater of his desperation a weird and unaccountable hope, based on something as slight as that wisp of cloud on the Moon or that dazzling Sun-gleam on the ball of spikes, but something from whose fluttering motion, like a will-of-the-wisp crossing a death-swamp, there arose a suggestion of salvation.

The mysterious Friar Bacon, now a prisoner of Prior Bog of Bumset, possessed a queer servant who was never known by any other name than that of “Miles”, an appellation which, being interpreted, might be said to mean an extremely private, reserved, original, exceptional, but also an extremely
professional
soldier
: and it had recently happened that, while Peleg was delivering a message to Prior Bog of Bumset, this same Miles had made a casual allusion which for Peleg had been like the sudden appearance, above a scoriac plain and under a dull, grey, monotonous, and devitalized sky, of a miraculous waterspout.

For a second he felt as if he were himself being changed, like Lot’s wife, into a pillar of salt; but at the next moment both these mirages of sensation—himself as the pillar of salt, and the wild, mad, hope-against-hope chance that Miles was referring to Ghosta—melted into each other and floated away into space like a triumphantly burst bubble.

What Miles had alluded to in passing, without attributing any especial interest to it, was the fact that one of the Priory servants who helped Master Tuck the chief cook had declared that the said Master Tuck had recently purchased at the price of ten silver Jewish shekels a Jewish woman who had been brought over among the followers of some crusader from
Mesopotamia
.

Of course there was only one chance in ten thousand that this Jewish woman was his lost Ghosta; but at least it was not impossible. O if she were! If she only were! Such a chance, if it really came true, would reduce to a grain of black dust every despair he’d ever felt!

“Did you groan then, Peleg?” Lil-Umbra suddenly
enquired
, “or did you crush down in your heart a shout of joy? I’m sure you made a very important noise. I make important noises myself sometimes when I just
have to do something
but don’t want anybody else to know!”

“Little lady——” he began; but stopped abruptly.

“Yes, Peleg: were you going to tell me just then your very, very greatest secret?”

“What makes you say that, little lady?”

“Because I heard you make a noise in the bottom of your heart like Father makes when Mother asks him what’s the matter with him! I know perfectly well what’s the matter with him. He’s got something on his mind that he wants to take out of the place where it hurts and carry away to some great desert-plain or mountain-side where he can turn it over and over and over in his mind and nobody be a bit the wiser!”

“
He
’ll be the wiser himself, won’t he, little lady?”

“Oh yes! But nobody else will know!
That
’s the great thing; nobody else to know what we’ve got down at the very bottom of us! But tell me this, Peleg. Why do you keep twisting your head round towards the Moon? And then start staring so straight into the blaze of the Sun? And then hang your head low down and fix your eyes on a root or a stone or a
molehill
or on one of those funny clumps of grey lichen?—and then, after that, as if you wanted to end up with something more exciting than anything on earth, why do you lift your chin up and stop looking at anything but the sky, just the sky alone, as if you expected some angel to come flying down towards you?”

The Tartar giant lowered his head and gazed earnestly at the young girl.

“I’ll tell you exactly, little lady, why I look at things as you say, and in such a definite order, beginning with the Sun and ending with the universal air. As I look at each of these things in turn I make the motion of my mind that I make when Sir Mort, your Dad, is worshipping and I am with him in church, or on the march, or at a sacred shrine, or at some gathering of the crusaders. All of us in the whole world, little lady, worship in our own way and as we worship do
something
to the Thing we’re worshipping; and we do this
according
to our different natures. Having an animal nature what I imagine myself doing to all the Deities I worship
is eating them
.”

Lil-Umbra gave a cry of delight and clapped her hands. “Of course,” went on Peleg, “I don’t ask you to believe that I really and truly eat the Moon or the Sun or the Earth or the
Air. I only mean that I ‘make the motino’ of eating each of these things, and then afterwards imagine that I’m getting the comfortable and delicious feeling of
having
eaten them! In short, to tell you the real truth, little lady, I
pretend
to myself I’m eating these things, and play at eating them as little boys play at cutting off heads and arms and legs in imaginary tournaments!

“I admit, dear heart,
when it comes to the Air
it’s not easy to pretend to myself that I’m eating it. But a person
can pretend
almost anything: and that’s all I ask, the right to pretend I’m eating air.”

“O Peleg! Peleg!” cried Lil-Umbra, in a frenzy of delight. “I’ll do exactly what you do when I’m sick to death of
Religion
. Oh yes, I will! And I’ll ask John to ask Friar Bacon what
his
opinion is of this method of worshipping. But shall I tell you a great secret, Peleg? From what I’ve seen Father do when I’ve been watching him and he doesn’t know anyone is watching him, I believe he has a funny way of worshipping, just as you have. But Roger Bacon thinks the best way to worship is to invent things! John says Roger Bacon is now inventing a Brazen Head, that one day when he’s finished with it will utter oracles very, very helpful to us and to our country. That’s an exciting way to worship, isn’t it? To invent a talking Brazen Head!”

As she spoke the girl smiled radiantly at the giant; but the mention of John brought back upon Peleg all the old cloud of deadly gloom. The thought that no one had told him
anything
about John having become a personal pupil of Friar Bacon, and that every single one of them, including Sir Mort, Lady Val, the elder boy Tilton, John himself, and even this little Lil-Umbra, had deliberately concealed from him this important piece of news—which wasn’t only family news but was also political, ecclesiastical, and international news—was a crushing blow.

What it meant was—so he told himself—that he was not the feudal retainer of the house of Abyssum that he had begun to assume he was, but just a hired man who had to fight for them, eat for them, and sleep for them, and whose sustenance was his wage. So once again his terribly imaginative
desperation
returned; and he felt as if this secretiveness towards
him of the family he served was enough in itself to cast him into outer darkness and to turn him into one of those lost souls he was always hearing about from the pious Christians around him who loved to remind each other of the possibility for their enemies of what they called “the Second Death”. That very expression “the Second Death” came back with appalling vividness at this moment; and Peleg felt as if he were clinging desperately to one of the horns of that waning Moon that was now vanishing in space, while an unspeakably horrible monster of colossal size resembling an enormous cuttlefish dragged and dragged at him to pull him down to that same bottomless chasm in the floor of the ocean out of which, according to the blasphemous notion of the Baron Maldung and Lady Lilt, the whole vegetable world and all the grain upon which we live emerged at the beginning like one multiform devil with green sap for blood.

The wretchedness of Peleg’s mind at that moment and the ghastly mood into which he had fallen was revealed at this point by a positively heart-rending sigh from the very depths of his being, the sort of sigh that a prisoner who has betrayed his best friend in the hope of saving his own life might have been heard uttering when he suddenly became aware that he has been fooled by his enemies and that his betrayal of his best friend will not save his own life.

“Peleg, Peleg,” whispered the little maid at his side, “your heart is crying! Tell your Lil-Umbra what is the matter! Have you suddenly thought that the Pope might decide to start a crusade to cut off all Mongolian mothers from the face of the earth?”

The giant gasped, choked, turned his head, and spat. “Not quite as bad as that, dear child,” he murmured. Then he rose slowly to his feet, and taking one of her hands in one of his, as a great wafture of ocean-foam from a broken wave might enclose a little shell, that has been lying on the sand, “I’ll tell it all to you another time,” he murmured, “but just now we must go back; for Sir Mort’s sure to be wanting me, and Lady Val will be wondering what’s happened to you.”

Lil-Umbra followed obediently; but she couldn’t help
noticing
that the long shadows as she now ascended the avenue gave the trees a completely different look from what they had when
she descended; nor was she unaware that those mysterious movements at the top of the branches, that had put such strange thoughts into her head before the sun rose, had now completely passed away, and that the smallest twig against the sky was now as motionless as the largest branch close to the earth.

The door-keeper of the Fortress of Roque was an extremely simple-minded, middle-aged man called Cortex, whose
childless
wife, Bundy, ten years older than her husband, but with a considerably quicker brain, helped him at his unpredictable, incalculable job. The Fortress’s entrance consisted of double doors of colossal thickness that were only closed at night. For these hours of darkness they were fastened by a couple of huge iron bars, strong enough to have barricaded the Skaian Gate of Ilium itself.

These doors opened directly into an entrance-hall that could have sheltered half a hundred men-at-arms if they had been able to pile up their armour in a secluded court-yard that was available on the inner side of this vast reception room.

While Peleg and Lil-Umbra were watching the Sun advance and the Moon retreat from their nature-made throne of stone, an interesting messenger was being interviewed at the great gate of the Fortress of Roque. This was a devil-may-care soldier of fortune called Spardo, who was a bastard son of Ottocar, King of Bohemia, and who was never tired of boasting of his regal begetting.

In order to extend his own predatory explorations, which already had carried him to Byzantium and to most of the ports on the northern shores of Africa, this plausible rogue had recently constituted himself a sort of supernumerary guide, amateur factotum, and diplomatic outrider to a European group of courtly travellers, a few of whom were bound for Oxford, but the rest were wealthy pilgrims, anxious to visit the more famous shrines in all parts of these islands.

Along with the others, however, were a certain number who at the moment were following with fanatical devotion wherever he went, as the same sort of crowd undoubtedly used to follow St. Francis and probably used to follow Jesus, the saintly “general”, as he was appointed to be, of the Order of
Franciscan
Friars, known to all Europe as Saint Bonaventura. This was the Order that Roger Bacon had rather incautiously joined when his family had completely ruined itself in its service of the King against the Barons; and it was anything but fortunate for him when Bonaventura was made the Head of the Order.

It had been no other than St. Francis himself who had given to Jean de Fidanza the name of Bonaventura, by which he was known throughout the whole world; and it was Saint Francis who had started him upon his career of notorious sanctity.

As for this Spardo, he was a tall slender person of about thirty, with a carefully trimmed red beard and large roving blue eyes. He was now holding by the bridle an odd-looking grey horse, which at first sight might have given the impression that it had two heads.

This surprising effect was due to some organic deformity in the poor creature’s neck, a deformity which excited the curiosity not only of human beings but also of other animals. As this tall, slender, comical-looking Spardo advanced towards the great gates of Roque leading this equally slender grey horse by its bridle, the man’s gaze seemed to be focussed on the horse’s deformity, which the horse seemed to be deliberately covering with a strange self-induced film, and to be doing this with so obstinate a determination that the simple-minded Master Cortex, as he watched the two of them approaching, received the queer impression that the lean beast was
desperately
struggling to answer the man’s gaze through the
deformity
at which the man was staring, just as if that repellent excrescence possessed something corresponding to an eye.

“I have come,” began Spardo, addressing the bewildered gatekeeper, “to enquire whether a special group of noblemen and ladies, who feel a natural reluctance to add themselves to the crowd who are taking advantage of the hospitality of Prior Bog, especially as they will be more than ready before
they depart to offer as their quota to the doubtless already rich Treasury of the Fortress such pieces of gold and shekels of silver as may fittingly commemorate the occasion, might perhaps be welcomed by this noble and ancient Fortress of Roque and allowed to rest here for a few hours?”

At this point the man stopped to take breath; and both he and the deformed animal he was leading turned their heads a little, as if to catch upon the air some faint premonition of approaching riders.

“I can see at once, master,” Spardo went on, “that you’ve got a long experience of life in these high circles and in these difficult times, so that you must forgive me if I don’t stop to explain what might bewilder any ordinary person. But this particular group of travellers, you understand, are on a journey to Oxford and London; and it would be a most blessed relief and comfort to them if your renowned Sir Mort Abyssum and your noble and beautiful Lady Valentia would allow them to rest here for a short space and be refreshed by the famous hospitality of this princely House.”

The door-keeper, though anything but a quick-witted
individual
, was one of those mortals whose sympathy with animals is strong and instinctive, although totally inarticulate. There was therefore a wordless exchange of ideas going
forward
at this moment between Master Cortex and the grey horse on the absorbing topic, of intense interest to them both, of this mysterious deformity in the creature’s neck.

So occupied indeed were both the door-keeper and the horse in the exchange of wordless communications about this weird growth in the latter’s neck that the former soon ceased to listen to what Spardo was saying to him. It must have been after more than five minutes of this concentrated examination of the phenomenal shape which this strange growth on the horse’s neck was gradually assuming, that the door-keeper suddenly leapt to his feet and began shouting: “Bundy! Bundy! Bundy! come quick! Here’s a horse that’s going to have two heads! For God’s sake come quick, Bundy, and look! It’s going to have a man’s head as well as its own! Quick! Quick! Bundy! come quick!”

The fellow’s appeal didn’t go unanswered. He had kept it up after leaving the horse altogether and throwing all his
strength into pushing the great double gate of Roque wide open enough to admit half a dozen horses, when his wise old spouse emerged from her retreat and shuffling up to the animal’s side began at once stroking it tenderly. “Kyre! Kyre! Kyre!” she chanted in a curious kind of gloating ecstasy, as she rubbed the knuckles of one hand up and down over the crown of the creature’s forehead, above its large, blurred, weary, and far-away-staring eyes, while with the ringers of her other hand she gently stroked its thick mane.

Her repetition of the word “Kyre” had an odd effect on the man Spardo. He had been educated in a monastery where they knew a little classical Greek as well as theological Greek; so that to hear this old lady repeat these two syllables which might mean “O Lord!” and also might mean “Hail!” and to see her obvious assumption that in either case the word would please the deformed creature, impressed to the depths of his being the man who was leading it, for he handed its bridle to the doorkeeper, came round by the animal’s tail and bowed low before Bundy, who was a grey-haired old woman with an extremely long face not altogether unlike the face of a horse.

“Spardo is my name, mistress,” he said, “and it’s Spardo who now salutes you and does homage to you, and does so more deeply than you can possibly know. I don’t suppose you’ve ever had the son of a king as your familiar friend; but you’ve got one now, and if I know anything of women you’ll find me even better suited to your taste than the master here.”

What the lady thus addressed felt in her secret mind, as she listened to this fantastic progeny of the King of Bohemia, it would be impossible for any male chronicler to describe—but it was clear that the rogue didn’t displease her; for though she didn’t blot out from her attention the massive jaw, the small eyes, and the narrow, sucked-in mouth of her mate—which latter feature resembled one of those straight lines which certain melodramatic chroniclers tend to throw in between a blow and a cry, or between a cry and a crash—she drew a little closer. Soon indeed she was touching the side of the horse with a fascinated interest in the extraordinary growth in its neck. As for Spardo, his movements were spectacular.
He seemed as unable to keep still as a white butterfly in a vegetable garden.

What he was doing now was rolling his blue eyes so queerly in his head that while one of them seemed to be caressing with besotted unction the deformity in his horse, the other seemed to be lingering with no less maudlin tenderness on the
elongated
and almost equally equine countenance of the old lady.

Then quite suddenly, and with the organic outburst of that sort of irresistible impulse that creates a psychic stir in the whole surrounding atmosphere of any particular spot, he sank down on one knee in front of her, his thin red beard brushing the knee that was not on the ground like a bird’s tail that goes on flicking a branch below the one on which it has settled. While the woman’s husband regarded him with blank
astonishment
, he began deliberately imitating the tone in which she made such a natural sing-song out of the syllables that may have been either “Kyre” or “Kaire”.

“O noblest of wise women!” he cried, clutching at her petticoats so that she couldn’t draw away from him, “you have no idea how near the truth you are when you chant that word. Haven’t you noticed what that swelling in his neck really is?”

He now leapt to his feet and touched the horse’s deformity with a solemn reverence as if it were something absolutely sacred. As for Mistress Bundy, she hurriedly let both her hands fall to her sides. Then she lifted them up a little, and proceeded to wipe them very very carefully with her apron. “It’s the improperly-shaped beginning of a man’s head, you cleverest of all ladies! That’s what it’s intended to be and that’s what it will be. It will be a centaur, that’s to say, a horse with a man’s head!”

At the sound of the word “Centaur” the compressed mouth of the door-keeper went through a faint relaxation. In his boyhood he had attended Saint Aldhelm’s School at
Sherborne
, and there he had heard of the centaur Cheiron and of the lessons in healing which this wise being gave the son of Aesculapius.

The word “Centaur” however meant nothing to Mistress Bundy; and there was therefore not the faintest element in her interest in this creature’s neck of anything save the pure
fascination of some grotesquely weird or fantastically shocking aspect of a deformity.

Both the woman and Spardo jumped back quickly enough however when the sound of trotting horses became audible. “They are coming!” Spardo cried. “Well! I’ll ride and meet them and tell them—for I can see from your manner what you allow me to say—that they may expect, if they behave quietly and don’t crowd in with all their armour and if they leave their horses outside, a princely welcome!”

“O yes, yes, yes!” cried Bundy in great excitement: “Go! go! go! And Cortex will hasten now to tell Lady Val you are all coming! I am sure that both she and Sir Mort would blame us terribly if we let you pass this door and proceed on your way without stopping!”

The son of the King of Bohemia obeyed Mistress Bundy without a word. He swung himself upon the creature he had long ago nicknamed Cheiron and galloped off. There was no wind at that moment moving among the green spruce-firs and the brown larches and the few majestic deeply-indented, reddish-barked pines, which were the only trees close to this main entrance to the Fortress of Roque, an entrance which faced due south and which lacked, for some technical strategic reason when it was first constructed, any smoothly-sloping approach, like the avenue of elms leading eastward from the postern door.

But if there had been such a wind, and if we were
permitted
to endow it with anything resembling our own
impressions
about people and things, it would certainly have received a shock of surprise when it noted that before Master Cortex rushed down the passage leading to the interior of the Fortress, and before Mistress Bundy shuffled back to her chamber in the rampart beside the great gate, neither of them gave the other so much as a glance, far less made any attempt to exchange views on the direction towards which events were moving.

Meanwhile within a small ante-room to their bed-chamber Lady Valentia was impatiently awaiting her husband’s return from his accustomed early jaunt. Lady Val could see from where she sat both the elderly women, the upright, bony Nurse Rampant, with her formidable clear-cut Norman
profile and her tall muscular figure, and Mother Guggery, the nurse’s help, with her short legs, well-rounded belly, and her grey curls, so fantastically trimmed with purple ribbons that her head resembled a bird’s nest in an aviary full of irises. These two females were hard at work in the inner chamber, sweeping out the dust and making the bed, and while they worked they were keeping up a regular word-dance of enticing scandal which, by an infinitely crafty and
long-practised
skill, they exchanged in such a way as to reveal absolutely nothing to their mistress with which she wasn’t already acquainted or in which either of them could specially preen herself as the revealer.

Thus it was easy enough for Lady Val to give herself up to a certain rather bitter vein of meditation, for which she only had the appropriate leisure when, as at this moment, she was waiting for Sir Mort before taking the lead in some exacting social function.

“It’s no good,” she told herself, “imagining at this late stage what my life might have been if I hadn’t married Sir Mort and handed this place over to him with his weird Abyssum blood, for just as I never could understand his parents, so, though I love him from my heart as the father of my two boys and of our darling little Lil-Umbra, I do sometimes feel as if, being as I am the only living descendant and
representative
, in this ill-mannered and unruly island, of our old and civilized house of Dormequil, I might have done better had I given myself and our historic Manor of Roque to one of our cousins in Brabant, or even to one of our second cousins in Piedmont.