The Brazen Head (33 page)

Plod! Plod! Plod! But while he ascended that hill, to the sound of the holy bell of Cerne, Peter’s left hand and active fingers found time to untie every knot, loosen every tape, release every pin, disentangle every fold of the most intimate garments of the lovely creature at his side; with the result that, when their four feet and his plodding stick finally touched the chalk-white base of the Giant’s throne, there was nothing for it but a mutual collapse beneath the generative tool of that gigantic figure and an unavoidable union of their two bodies then and there.

No man will ever know what thoughts, and still less what feelings, passed through the consciousness of Lilith, while Petrus wreaked upon her the full measure of his
unconscionable
lust; but the thoughts and feelings of our great specialist in magnetism were very definite. Although with his face buried in the disordered tangles of Lilith’s hair, he could not see the sea, nor the Isle of the Slingers, nor that majestic beach of semi-precious stones that has come to be named Chesil, Petrus was in some curious and peculiar way conscious of these things.

As he merged his life with Lilith’s, it seemed to him as though the whole cosmos were being cleft in twain. It seemed to him as if he were himself all the oceans and seas and lakes and channels and estuaries and rivers in the world, and as if the slender form he was clasping were all the continents and capes and promontories and islands, round which, and across which, and into the heart of which, all these waters, salter than tears, were pouring their life.

And as these desperate paroxysms of ecstatic union went on beneath that shameless symbol of primeval audacity, it seemed to Petrus as if he were something more than those wave-curves and wave-spoutings. It seemed to him as if he were at that transcendant moment a real, actual, living incarnation of all the creative semen of human life from the day of Adam, the first man.

He felt as if beneath their united bodies the whole of that haunted West Country, from the furthest promontory of the Isle of Slingers to the furthest shoals of the mist-darkened Severn, were heaving up towards the Moon.

Was it, he thought in his nerve-dazed trance, that ever since Joseph of Arimathea brought the blood of Jesus to this coast, consecrating thereby the Mystery of Virginity and throwing a strange and desecrating shadow upon the greater Mystery of Procreation, there had been a craving, a longing, a hungering and thirsting, in the whole earthy substance of this portion of the West, so that the actual soil and sand and stones and rocks and gravel and pebbles of Wessex, along with the very slime of the worms beneath and the slugs above and the spawn of the frogs and the scum of the newts, and the cuckoo-spit of the smallest insect, had been roused to revolt against this preposterous edict of unnatural purity.

And Petrus of Maricourt swore within himself that it was upon him, and upon him alone of all men living or dead, that the burden of the tremendous deliverance was laid.

“I am the one,” he cried to the very tune of his embraces of Lilith, “appointed from the dawn of history to lead the revolt of all natural earthly life, whether human, animal, vegetable, or mineral, against this accurst inhibition, inspired by these mad religious teachers from Palestine. Anti-Christ!
Antichrist
! Anti-christ! That is what I am. And the crazy joke
of it is that this Jesus, whom they call the Second Person of this Trinity they’ve invented, always said that we were all the Sons of God.”

At this point Petrus of Picardy scrambled to his feet, and bending down modestly and courteously over his companion arranged and tidied her disturbed garments.

It was nearly dark by the time Peter of Maricourt and Lilith of Lost Towers passed that glen of the Welsh Tinker which was so near the gate of the Convent. They were on their way to the Priory, where they hoped to waylay Albertus Magnus, who had—so local rumour informed them—been invited that night to dine with the Prior. It was in the mind of Petrus Peregrinus that they might encounter young John there too, setting off for home from his daily visit to the imprisoned Friar. This
possibility
however Petrus refrained from communicating to Lilith, though exactly what his motive was for this particular piece of rather curious reticence he would have been himself puzzled to say, although it might enter the head of a mean-minded chronicler that it had something to do with the good looks and youth of the person in question.

It was in any case much less of a surprise to the girl from Lost Towers than to the man from Maricourt when up from the Tinker’s Cave, where these children of Israel had been stealing between their separate duties a celestial hour of delicious happiness without troubling their heads about Welsh gods or Welsh tinkers or Welsh witches, came the giant Peleg holding his Ghosta by the hand.

The path upward of the ascending pair crossed irrevocably the path of the couple who were skirting the edge of the declivity, so that an encounter was inescapable. Any aboriginal spirit at this juncture, whether that of a deity, or a tinker, or a witch, who possessed the power of reading the thoughts in alien brains, would have been fascinated, as it darted like a sand-martin from cavity to cavity in these unusual skulls, to note the absolute difference between what was going on in all four heads.

Lilith was wondering whether she lost anything by the fact that the deliciously wicked delight, which she derived from leading people into mischief while she satisfied her senses with their erotic embraces, had never been, even to the faintest
wafture of such a thing, touched by the breath of romantic love. “What the devil
can
that feeling be like?” she wondered
irritably
.

Peleg said to himself: “This queer-looking little fellow in black stumping along with a Roman sword for a staff must be the Lost Towers’ latest pick-up. From the fellow’s expression I doubt if the wench has got him as completely as she thinks she has!”

Petrus thought: “Haven’t I met this dark girl somewhere before round here? Or is it
you
, my pretty one,” and he gave a caressing squeeze to the lodestone in his innermost garment, “who have pointed her out to me when we were going about? Whoever she is, she’s a powerful person; and I’d be a prize idiot to neglect her help in my Antichrist crusade and a plain fool not to try to find what she herself feels about this damned Brazen Head?”

As for Ghosta herself; she was acquainted, by reason of her job in the Convent kitchen, with all the gossip of the
neighbourhood
, for the Nuns heard everything, and those among them who weren’t born to be spiritual were the best authorities in the district on all that was going on, on the quarrels and alliances, on the friendships and enmities, on the
misunderstandings
and idiotic manias, in all the various manorial centres whose circles of authority over-lapped at this point.

“O I do hope and pray,” Ghosta cried in her heart, “that Peleg’s discovery of this traveller’s association with Lost Towers won’t start him off again on his mad suspicion of their being some sexual connection between me and the Friar!”

It was naturally enough the clever clasper of that dangerous magnetic weapon who broke the somewhat awkward silence with which the pair ascending from the cave encountered the pair skirting that tricky declivity.

“I am a visitor to your country, Master”—here Petrus bowed politely to the Jewish giant—“to your country, Mistress”—and here he did the same to Ghosta—“with the purpose of inspecting this wonderful invention of your Friar Bacon of which I have been told by this gentle lady, whom I had the good fortune to meet when I first landed on your shores, and which she tells me is to be found in a Castle called the Fortress of Roque, the Lord of which has only recently recovered from
an attack made upon him by a demented animal, by a horse in fact, whom some wicked magician had tried to turn into one of those classical creatures who have men’s heads on horses’ necks and were called Centaurs, and one of them indeed”—here the traveller bowed graciously to both the giant and Ghosta—“as frequenters of monastic libraries, like yourselves, no doubt know, was a sort of schoolmaster to
swift-footed
Achilles.”

“You had better take them to the main Fortress gate, Peleg,” said Ghosta quickly. “I must run back to the Convent now, and I shan’t have to ring that big front bell anyway, for I’ll get in at the back, where there’s a door close to the passage where my room is. I’ll be here,” she added in a lower voice, giving the great knuckles of the giant whose right hand was squeezed into his leather belt, a quick pressure, “tomorrow, wet or fine, at the same time as today!”

And with this she was off; and they all watched her tall slight figure hurry down the path towards the Convent.

“Well, Master—well, Mistress Lilith,” said Peleg, “shall we go straight to the Fortress? It’s inside the Fortress, you know, in fact in the armoury, that the Friar’s Brazen Head has been put for safety. This Papal Legate, or whatever he calls
himself
, whose name has such a friendly sound—I mean
Bonaventura
—has been making so much trouble round here that we—but I mustn’t go on like this with you, Mistress Lilith, here; for you naturally have to take the side of your dad and I naturally have to take the side of my lord—but anyway, you, sir, as an experienced traveller, will have seen many local divergencies far more extreme than any of ours and bringing with them far more risky consequences to the country
concerned
.”

Lilith smiled at him with a quick, humorously confidential smile, as much as to say, “O my dear big man, you weren’t born in the midst of our silly little dissensions, but you’ll have to take us as you find us.”

“Somebody told us as we came along,” murmured Petrus almost wistfully, “that, if we wanted to have a word with Albert of Cologne, who has come over here to see Friar Bacon, we ought to go to the Priory where the great man has been invited tonight to dine with the reverend Prior. It would be a
pity, wouldn’t it, to put you to the trouble of showing us the way to the Fortress, only to find when we reach it that the man we are seeking has just left to go to the Priory?”

To this fretful commentary upon the course of events it was Lilith, not the Jewish giant, who replied.

“The obvious thing to do,” she said, stepping forward quickly, and with one slender hand putting pressure on the giant’s hip and with the other upon the elbow of Petrus Peregrinus, “is to get to the Fortress as quickly as we can and find out if the man has yet started for the Priory. It may well happen that we shall be allowed to accompany him there, and possibly be able to eat a crust with the Friar, while Albertus is dining with Prior Bog.”

The long legs of Peleg and the short legs of Petrus found themselves obeying her, almost as if they’d been the fore-legs and the hind-legs of the same horse drawing her chariot.

“Little does this fellow guess,” thought Petrus pressing his sword-staff into the rocks and the lichen and the moss and the mud and the grass, and his lodestone into his own scrotum, “that the sole reason of our desire to meet this Albertus is to put an end to his fight on behalf of Christ, and to help this self-worshipping Bonaventura to smash to atoms the Friar’s Brazen Head.”

But, whatever their thoughts, they all three hurried on, and had the Welsh tinker or one of his witch-wives watched them pass, they would have seemed like a giant from Palestine accompanied by a dwarf from Egypt and led by a siren from the Isles of Greece.

The truth was that Peleg and Lilith between them managed to lead the student of magnetism so rapidly, and by paths so completely unknown to him, that it was neither a surprise nor a shock when the girl stopped them with an excited gesture and pointed to a moving mass of gleaming weapons at the foot of four great dark-foliaged pines, and cried out in a thin, wavering, wispy voice, as if she’d been a frightened maiden from the convent rather than the seductive heiress of Lost Towers: “There! there! there’s a lot of soldiers! Your friend from Cologne must have brought a big bodyguard with him! They’re coming this way. What about waiting for them here?”

It was then that Peleg intervened. He spoke slowly and deliberately; but it was clear that he was agitated by what he saw.

“It seems to me, Master Petrus, that those are King’s Men from London; and what is more, Mistress Lilith, I believe I hear some royal music. So it can’t be the ecclesiastic from Germany. It must be some royal captain on his way from London to tell us all some important news. Perhaps King Henry is dying. News doesn’t travel as fast in this island as it does between the Tigris and the Eu——” He stopped
suddenly
; and Lilith, who had been watching him, turned round, as suddenly, to her other companion.

But her other companion was behaving in a very strange manner. It appeared that Petrus Peregrinus was
undergoing
a kind of mental agitation so extreme that it amounted to something resembling a fit. He was holding both his hands to his ears, as if to render himself deaf to some sound that he was finding too horrible to endure; and he was doing this without losing his hold of the sheathed weapon he had been using as a staff.

Suddenly with a choking gasp he let his hands sink down till his weapon, held to his wrist by a strap, trailed in the dust. At the same time an expression of incredible relief relaxed his features and clouded with a misty haze his incredibly black eyes. Both Peleg and Lilith surveyed him with astonishment, an astonishment that was increased when they heard him talking to himself, and doing so in English though with a strong French accent.

“Thank the Devil he’ll be dead soon now! And thank the Devil that he can put so much power into his voice that even in the midst of this unspeakable way they’re murdering him a lot of the pain goes into his screams. O thanks be to the Devil! He’s quite dead now!”

Pierre of Maricourt became silent at that point, and leant so heavily on his scabbarded weapon that it sank several inches into the marshy ground upon which, at the sight of the gleaming arms of those distant men, they had all three paused.