John Powys - The Brazen Head

“The white skin and sweet flesh of a young girl like you,” she chanted, “if they be offered up as a living sacrifice to the powers of destruction, will recoil not only on those who offer them up, but on her to whom they belong!”

Lil-Umbra was more astonished than she would have considered it possible for her ever to have been in the house of her birth by what happened then. For Lilith of the Lost Towers seemed suddenly seized by a great panic. She clutched nervously and frantically at a few objects of attire that she had as yet, while putting on her clothes, neglected to re-assume, and holding these against her navel, she swung round, and with head down and her eyes on nothing but the path she was following, she bolted into the forest with the blind rush of a small animal desperate to escape.

With nothing of Lilith’s desperation but with hardly less haste, Lil-Umbra now left her observation-post at that memorable arrow-slit and hurried by the nearest passage to the armoury. She was so agitated by what she had just heard and seen that the chance she might encounter Raymond de Laon had grown a bit blurred, more like the heavenly end to a complicated fairy-tale than something that might occur in a few minutes.

The armoury of the Fortress of Roque was, as anyone would have anticipated, considering the reputation for reckless violence of the ancestors of Lady Val, and considering the peculiar character of its new master, Sir Mort, as capacious and crowded a chamber as any in the place. At the very time when Lady Val, still making her heroic effort to recover from her fit of weakness and to be worthy of her grandmother when that lady entertained the rather difficult bride of Llewelyn the Great, was listening with especially gracious interest to the chatter of the new bailiff’s wife and her lively daughter-in-law “the Crumb”, her own errant daughter with very different emotions but with something of Lady Val’s spirit was approaching the huge and glowing hearth of what might have been called the altar-fire of that vast collection of weapons, in a mood of chastened wistfulness.

It had been several weeks ago when she found Raymond de Laon here quite alone, and not only alone, but with the door ajar and praying that she might pass by! On this occasion she shut the door very carefully behind her as she went in; and once inside the room, the look with which she surveyed its present occupant was a very tender and subtle one. The personage towards whom this look of hers was directed was a very old man, and an old man who was, as it appeared, luxuriating, in a quaint and peculiar manner, in his own old age.

He was like a certain broken and dilapidated stone pillar, Lil-Umbra thought, that had arrested her attention this very morning as she sat talking to Peleg on that massive stone seat which so closely resembled a giant’s throne; but not only did that hunched-up pillar come into her head when she saw this old man, but his pose by the fire as she approached him made her think of a desiccated willow-stump, of which she had caught a glimpse while among the stones in the stone-circle where they had watched the sunrise.

Heber Sygerius was a short bony man with very broad shoulders. He had no hair at all on his face, which he shaved much more carefully than most elderly men, and he was almost entirely bald. His skull was large and on both sides of it were two very curious discolourations of a tint almost as impossible to describe as it would have been to describe the colour of the grey and brown mist which that very afternoon, when their late breakfast-lunch was over, would swallow up the Sun.

Full of golden light that Sun had been when Lil-Umbra had watched its first rising. Full of its light had the forest-path been she had just watched; but after this long meal their kitchen had to provide its glory would be gone. But this old man was assuredly enjoying himself before that blazing fire, into which at intervals he kept flinging a small piece of wood from a heap at his side.

What surrounded this old figure with a special aura of attraction for Lil-Umbra was that it had been to meet this man, who had only recently handed over his reeveship of the Manor of Roque to his middle-aged son, that Raymond de Laon — at least that was what he had said — had been here the last time she had come.

As we have already noted, the two latrines of Roque Fortress had finally come to be placed side by side adjacent to the interior courtyard. It is simply use-and-wont and the gradual adjustments of custom that create what historians of human decency might well be justified in calling the “epochal fashion” in excremental convenience. There were several antiquated hieroglyphs, that might well have reverted to the days of Constantine, scrawled over a low arch leading from that inner court to the left of this armoury; and another set of syllables of the same debased and deteriorated Latinity carved on a block of stone over that similar small arch under which Lil-Umbra had recently passed.

On this latter, among other syllables, was engraved the abbreviation “Fem”; and on the former the syllable “Mas”. It was indeed of his own meditated retreat to the masculine one of these two retiring places that the old Heber Sygerius had been thinking before Lil-Umbra appeared, for although he was aware that neither his bladder nor his bowels needed immediate easement, he had already arrived at that stage in the progress of old age when men, and in some cases women too, grow over-conscious, though sometimes with only too good reason, of their urinal and excremental evacuations. But fortunately he was at this moment in no hurry to obey the particular bodily call of which he felt a vague premonition, so that when he became aware of the light step of the girlish intruder, he was quite ready to turn upon her his peculiarly magnetic smile full of a more than natural kindliness.

It was this curious magnetism in the old ex-bailiff that had warded off many an insurrection of the over-wrought serfs of the Manor of Roque, and had even been effective, a smile in this case being equal to the authority of the most aristocratic of stewards, in persuading various rich free-men not to take away their thrice-precious coins of the realm from the confines of this populous Manor to squander them on a last desperate crusade that would probably only land them in some French or Italian or German prison.

What was going on in the excited consciousness of Lil-Umbra as she entered the armoury and confronted the extraordinarily shaped hairless skull of this kindly-crafty grandfather-curator of the Manor of Roque? Whatever it was, it was obviously only partially revealed in the quick, gasping sigh she gave as she yielded to his welcoming gesture and sat herself down on a four-legged stool to the left of those burning logs.

When once the two of them were seated quietly together, the exchange of feelings between this girl in her teens and this old man of eighty resolved itself quickly enough into pure gratitude, each to each, for the unembarrassed silence which that good moment permitted to both of them.

The thoughts that in a little while began to filter through the old man’s hairless skull were curiously characteristic of the dominant temper of his mind throughout his whole life. Raymond de Laon used to say of Heber Sygerius that he had always served the Manor of Roque rather than the Manor’s Lord or Lady at any special epoch. He certainly had always been, from every point of view, the ideal administrator of an exquisitely adjustable miniature kingdom, nourished from its roots up by the fruits of the earth and the beasts of the field, and dominated by a traditional routine never broken save to humour the caprices of the elements.

But old Heber’s way of managing the manor was over now for good and ill. His wife was long dead, and his son and his son’s wife were administrators of a totally different type. In all the spontaneous and instinctive motions of his mind Heber was still, as he had been all his days, at once profoundly kind and profoundly cunning.