The Brazen Head (37 page)

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 Brazen 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.

With all these thoughts settling themselves in his mind he now strode with as much dignity and self-possession down the slope as he had done a few minutes earlier up the slope, and even Albertus himself couldn’t resist observing with a sort of humorous self-derogatory admiration, that was almost like the feeling of a rival athlete, the way Bonaventura managed his feet and his steps under that grey robe as he descended, calling aloud in authoritative tones to Spardo, and, when at Cheiron’s side, hesitating not a second to mount the animal, an effort which he carried through with dignified ease and even with a certain grace.

Spardo himself, it must be confessed, was not greatly pleased by being taken possession of in this wholesale manner. Even if his employment by Bonaventura turned out well as a matter of business, he was not the son of his father for nothing. There was something ignoble in forsaking this tragic drama at the crucial point. But what was the alternative?

Cheiron was responding with interest to the way Bonaventura managed the reins; and the best thing he himself could do now was to make an exit worthy of leaving Lost Towers to its fate. And a dramatic exit he did manage to make. He suddenly seized, as he followed Cheiron and Cheiron’s stately rider, one
of the massive pikestaves, which were really very dangerous weapons, carried by the King’s Men.

The person whose weapon Spardo seized naturally refused to relinquish it, until Perspicax himself, who was only a few paces away and who wasn’t at all anxious to start trouble, gave the man a nod to let him have the thing. Once in his possession none of the King’s Men, nor any member of any conceivable body-guard of royal persons, could have handled this weapon, in which the piercingness of a spear is mingled in such appalling unity with the cleavingness of an axe, more professionally than Spardo.

“Bastard I may be,” every swing and sweep of his
feather-like
beard seemed to chant to the hairy flanks of Cheiron and the flapping skirts of Bonaventura, “Bastard I may be, but my father was a King! Where is there a King here, among these petty baronies and manories and flanories? Kings of Bohemia are Kings indeed; and, as the song says, ‘the heart of the laurel is in its seed’; but these scrabblement codfish blown in from the sea haven’t got a King nearer than London; and the one they’ve got is a dying one, ‘fed upon pap and sleeping on sap’, as the song says.”

To feel this terrific weapon in his hand, and to feel that with it he could destroy anyone he wished at any moment, gave Spardo such lively satisfaction that it reconciled him to
following
his horse and its stately rider, even though it meant his own departure from this memorable scene; but by keeping a firm hold with his free hand on the back of Cheiron’s saddle he considerably reduced the pace of their retirement.

After using all his own magnetic will-power in addition to all the magnetism in his precious lodestone, to bring everybody to this particular spot, Petrus Peregrinus was beginning to find that it was easier to bring people together than to manage them when they were brought. Here certainly they all were!

But he knew only too well, as pressing “Little Pretty’s” oblong cranium harder and harder against himself, he awaited the next move of chance or providence, that his own future was anything but assured.

Suddenly he became aware that, not only was the
black-robed
form of Albertus Magnus approaching him, but that the gigantic figure of Peleg, carrying the Brazen Head itself on his
shoulder, with Ghosta at his side with one arm raised to help in supporting the thing’s weight, was also, yard by yard, slowly ascending the slope.

What unluckily nobody had seen—or luckily perhaps, for who can tell from what horrors to be safely dead may save any of us—was that by the force of his scientific magnetism Petrus had drawn Heber Sygerius, the old ex-bailiff himself, out of Sir Mort’s “Little Room”, and dragged him all through the forest, and not by the easiest route either, till he sank absolutely exhausted, just where this particular trail ended, at the foot of the Lost Towers slope.

Old Heber knew exactly where he was; and the odd thing was that, though totally exhausted and unable to advance another step, he felt, as he stretched himself out on the warm, dead, dry, brown pine-needles, and allowed his whole body to relax and his whole being to sink down and down and down and down into a deep delicious bed of submission to the need for everlasting rest, a wave of greater happiness than he had ever known in all his long life.

It may well be that what gives to the wind along that Wessex coast its indescribable mixture of vague sorrow and wild obscure joy comes from its passing, on its unpredictable path, the floating hair of so many love-lorn maidens and the
wild-tossed
beards of so many desolate old men.

As it blew now across those forests and those swamps, it might have been suspected of taking a goblinish delight in switching and twitching and bewitching the crazy wisps that fluttered this way and that from Spardo’s chin. Was its
long-drawn
wail made deeper, was its wild exultation made shriller, when it became the choric accompaniment to Spardo’s careless killing of the one man in all that place who had prayed morning by morning and night by night for years that he might perish by just such a stroke and cross Acheron while he slept? For with the weapon he had snatched the Bohemian Bastard beheaded old Heber.

It must have been his awareness of the black-robed teacher from Cologne advancing so rapidly up the slope behind him that made Peter Peregrinus start running towards Lilith, as she stood defying all possible universes with her slender girlish back to the open doors of the absolutely empty and deserted
Lost Towers. When he was just beneath her and only a foot or so below her, he gazed passionately at her face. He not only felt an over-mastering longing to possess her, but a longing to possess her in complete solitude. And where could he find such solitude if not within the mysterious castle before him, at whose entrance she stood?

But as he gazed at her he saw to his dismay that there had come into her face a look of horror at him and of loathing of him and of contempt for him, such as he had never seen upon anyone’s face before.

“All the same for that”, as Homer puts it when he deals with these crises in human affairs, Petrus moved towards her. What drove him, what actuated him was clear enough. The difficult question for any chronicler to decide is the question as to whence within the almost closed circle of this strange man’s consciousness he drew the strength, the energy, the spirit, to enable him to risk all, in this almost heroic manner? For
that he was risking all
was a truth he felt in himself, and of which he had not the slightest doubt.

And yet, cold-blooded, calculating, unscrupulous egoist as he was, he could not have been blind to the fact that there was no reason in the ordinary natural course of events why anyone, who so far had derived all sorts of thrilling feelings from being alone in life and being absolutely impervious to everything save his own private, uncommitted responses to life, should run a risk of this magnitude. Yes, from what region, or channel, or nerve in his being, did he derive the courage to take such a chance? Is it perhaps that in the lives of all human beings there come moments when some particular desire—in Peregrinus’s case just now, what we call “the passion of love”—drives such a sharp wedge into the rocky substance of our animal nature that it goes clean through it, leaving a slit or crevice or crack in the mysterious thing that Grosseteste taught Roger Bacon to analyse very carefully, the thing which the theologians declared to be the vegetative soul of the foetus developing a nutritive soul, which is thus laid open for “Something”, we can call it a rational soul, to enter from the limitless Outside when the infant is born.

Yes, he was risking his all and he knew it. And yet with this strength that came to him from somewhere outside himself,
perhaps from the great “Outside” of all our planetary struggles, he still went forward, pressing the lodestone desperately against the fork of his body and repeating hoarsely in the depths of his being: “I am Antichrist! I am Antichrist!”