John Powys - The Brazen Head

He always felt, if only a shred of him remained — only a nail-paring, only a scab, only a tiny bone, only a handful of ashes — as long as this speck of the matter which had once belonged to his body remained, so that his unconquerable soul could hover over it, he would be still Sir Mort, he would not be dead yet.

He now raised himself up and pulled his spear out of the earth and stared in front of him into a great alder-bush from the heart of which, it suddenly had struck him, somebody was watching him. And then, in one quick beat of his pulse, he knew who it was. It was none other than his neighbour, Sir Maldung of Lost Towers. Not only was Sir Maldung watching him, but he held a drawn bow in his hand whose arrow was aimed straight at Sir Mort’s heart.

Sir Mort had never been calmer, stronger, quieter, more entirely collected, more absolutely poised in his mind than he was at that instant. He didn’t feel in the faintest degree afraid. It was a peculiarity of his that, as long as he had his wits about him, and saw clearly what his enemy was aiming at, not a flicker of apprehension crossed his mind.

“I shall know by his expression,” he said to himself, “when he lets that arrow fly and I shall be perfectly able to dodge it before it touches me! I am myself a drawn bow and a pointed arrow! And when you are yourself both arrow and bow, it is fine sport to watch your enemy’s face!”

And certainly Sir Maldung’s face was something to watch at that moment. It was positively convulsed with the ultimate ecstasy of killing. His mouth was open and twisted awry; his eyes stared so intently that they seemed as if at any second they might flow or drip or sweat or soak into the alder-bush. His whole face was crumpled and wrung and knotted and sucked inwards.

And then in a second it relaxed like the bursting of a boil, and became, as far as any human expression was concerned, blurred and blotted out. Sir Mort dived to the ground; and the arrow skimmed over his back and quivered into the trunk of a fir-tree.

Sir Mort straightened his body and uttered a queer little laugh. But it did not occur to him to pursue the figure that was now in full flight. “Silly old devil!” he muttered; and strolled, as slowly as he had been doing before, towards the postern entrance of the Fortress of Roque.

“I’ll go,” thought Lil-Umbra, “as if Mother had sent me with an important message. I will not speak to a soul: and when anyone speaks to me I’ll pretend not to hear, or to be so occupied in delivering my message that though they see I can’t help hearing I need not take any notice of what people say. It was , after all, not only once but twice that I found Raymond de Laon there! Of course the first time he was there he couldn’t have had the faintest idea that I should be likely to come in. But that second time he didn’t seem surprised to see me. He seemed glad: very glad in fact, but he didn’t seem at all surprised.

“O! I do wonder what he feels about me! It’s so teasing never to know! That’s the worst of it with a grown-up boy. If it were John now, it would all be so easy! But of course he would have let it out to everybody and I’d have had all I could do to make him keep his mouth shut! I suppose I’ll never know with Raymond till he suddenly bursts out with it. He looks at me all the time: and that day we were alone at Cone Castle, when Baron Boncor had taken Will with him to London and I was turning the pages with him of one after another of those old books he is always finding in some secret recess in one of those lovely turrets of Cone Castle, I noticed how for some reason or other the hand I wasn’t using, to turn a page or to point at a picture, was held in his hand.

“But, O dear! I am afraid I’m just being silly! Plenty of girls much handsomer, cleverer, and more important than me, must have been attracted to him and tried to win his favour. And there’s that time he had — and he told me himself how much he enjoyed it! — when he was studying philosophy in Paris. He must have been a guest at all sorts of grand houses, and met lots of wonderful women! O why aren’t girls like me allowed to attend the lectures of these great Doctors? It is all so unfair! People don’t realize how lucky young men are in these clever modern days to be allowed to hear really important thinkers explaining the nature of—”

It was at this point that Lil-Umbra had to extricate herself from an extremely formidable group of crusaders from the south of Anjou who looked at her in the way — so she told herself — that such comrades-in-arms must have looked at every unravished maid they encountered in their holy campaign. “O why can’t we find out the real true nature,” so Lil-Umbra’s thoughts ran on, and they were rendered more rebellious still by contact with these consecrated warriors, “of such mysteries as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, and, let’s hope, put an end once for all to all the stuff the priests”—and here her thoughts were again intensified in their revolt by yet another body of guests, for she was now squeezing herself between a sculptured procession of angels in Purbeck marble and a group of excited persons who, although freemen of the Manor of Roque, were nevertheless, as far as their habits of thought went, on no higher level than the humblest serfs—“all the stuff the priests keep putting into our heads.”

It was soon after she had safely squeezed her way along this succession of marble angels, which must have been a strip of masonry left intact during the Fortress’s renovation a century earlier, that Lil-Umbra came upon a narrow window, especially adapted for defence by arrow-shooting, out of which, though she had to stand on tip-toe to do so, she couldn’t resist taking a peep into the surrounding forest. The Fortress was such an erratic and rambling erection, and it had been added to during so many experiments in castellated building throughout the years, that to Lil-Umbra’s surprise she found herself peering into a portion of the forest almost directly opposite the small unfinished shrine to Our Lady of the Holy Ass, now being so devotedly built by the two hands of Tilton alone, though Lil-Umbra had not failed to guess that it had been under the influence of some impious brain, possibly young John’s, that Tilton had given his work that grotesque name: but at this moment it wasn’t of an ass or of a horse that she was thinking, as she pressed her chin upon her eight white knuckles in order to peer out of the arrow-slit in the ancient wall.

She was indeed experiencing a moment of heart-wrung disturbance such as any ordinary onlooker would have felt to be beyond all proportion to its cause, when she saw the figure of a young girl, of about her own height and slenderness, but dressed with a most subtle and most deliberate aim, in that unusually warm February sunshine, of making herself exquisitely provocative to masculine senses, lying sideways on a mantle which she had spread out on a mossy bank bordering on the well-trodden path that led — and didn’t Lil-Umbra know that path by heart! — from the postern-gate to the unfinished shrine of Our Lady of the Holy Ass.

It may easily be imagined that it was not only about the quick return to breakfast of her two brothers along that familiar forest-track that Lil-Umbra was now troubled. What if Raymond de Laon had taken into his head — O he too too easily might! — to pay a visit to the shrine Tilton was raising to Our Lady?

It was sufficiently unusual for the eldest son of the lord of a Manor as large as Roque, which everybody knew was more thickly populated than any other in the West Country, to design and plan such a shrine with his own brain and to build it and to carve it with his own hands, to have already started queer rumours in that part of England, without the half-naked daughter of the adjoining castle waylaying him between his new shrine and his parents’ dwelling!