John Powys - The Brazen Head

Whether an invisible spirit, reading the thoughts of Peleg at this moment, would have been shocked at the pictorial images the mind of the giant conjured up, would doubtless depend on the nature of the spirit; but these enemies twisting and jerking, scriggling and wriggling, as Peleg certainly saw them groaning and moaning, weltering and sweltering, howling and mowling, in a blood-red palpitating swirl of bodies and bones and hair and teeth and eyes and entrails, over which, with his free thumb testing the spikes of his weapon, he could stride in triumph while what had been living and beautiful bodies fouled his legs with filth, would certainly have disturbed some spirits.

What old Heber saw as that dance of blue flame kept repeating itself in his mind as the Mongol led him away, was nothing less than Friar Bacon’s manufactured Brazen Head, enormous in size, hideous beyond all human imagination, and uttering words in a completely unknown tongue, but a tongue that was felt by all who heard it to be a multitudinous voice out of the Infinite.

By the time however that Peleg had got the old man out of the dung-house and back into the passage leading towards the dining-hall, the weird vision or revelation, which proximity to the excited heart of little Lil-Umbra had conjured into the ex-bailiff’s hairless skull, had given place to something completely different. But the thing to which it had given place was still quite sufficiently interesting to the old man to compel him to stand still himself and to make the unfortunate Peleg who guided him not only stand still also, but stare along with him at the dusky smoke-begrimed wall of the passage down which they were shuffling.

“Look, look, my good friend, look, I beseech you! Do you see these hieroglyphs on the wall? Shall I tell you what they mean? I know you pass these by, as most people do on their way to the dung-yard, like queer meaningless senseless marks, figures of some sort, mathematical figures, not human ones of course. But what they really are is an oracular announcement, yes! an announcement to the whole world that the idea of there being only three Gods, as the niggardly theologians teach, is a grievous error. There are Four Gods! That is what the great ancient thinker, Pythagoras, taught to his Greek colony in Italy; and that is what I, Heber Sygerius, am now teaching you, Peleg, the Jewish Mongol! Yes! there are Four Gods. But the strange thing that I now understand as I stare at those marks — No! Please, Peleg! Please wait here a minute longer! — is that we have to go to some especial and quite different spot to worship each of these Four Gods!”

Peleg gave vent to a hopeless sigh. “Has the old dotard,” he thought, “forgotten that our breakfast is waiting for us?”

Peleg looked desperately up and down the passage that led to the sleeping-rooms of Sir Mort and his lady and the sleeping-rooms of their two sons. He looked at the floor. He looked at the withered knuckles of the old man clutching his arm with the intensity of an aged hawk.

“What in Hell’s name can I do?” he asked himself. “Sir Mort will curse me like the devil. He is sure to see us coming in at the bottom of the table. Besides, this old fool’s son Randolph will be keeping a place for him, you bet your life, near to the top! Not that he won’t be as pleased as Pilate for me to get cursed for not dragging the old fool along more quickly! But, O Jehovah, hear me just this one single time in my life! Let me meet the whole blasted Sygerius family except this poor old doddipole for whom I’ve got some sort of crazy fondness, and I’ll scatter their brains with my iron club on that pretty patch of green grass they’re all so proud of, outside their damned front door!”

His vows of vengeance were interrupted by yet more astonishing behaviour on the part of the old man. He was now turning round in violent jerks and stamping on the ground at each spot, as he faced what he considered the four quarters of the compass.

“ North! ” he muttered in a hoarse and even frightened voice. “That’s the forest of course and Lost Towers. All the worst devils in the whole world come from the north!”

He jerked himself to the right. “ East! ” he cried in an exultant tone. “ That ’s where the miraculous Doctor Bacon is constructing the Brazen Head! That ’s where the Fourth God will speak one day!” Again he jerked himself round. “ South! ” he cried. “And that ’s Boncor Castle and all those noble and righteous people!”

And then with a final hop and skip and a fierce clutch from Peleg to keep him from falling: “ South! ” he shouted, “where our Tilton is erecting with spade and hammer and chisel and nails a shrine of his own to Our Blessed Lady!”

“That must be the end,” groaned Peleg to himself.

But the old man went on, still keeping them both rooted to that place in front of the wretched blotches on that dark and filthy wall. “Do you know how I discovered that there are Four Gods, Peleg, my friend? I discovered it by the help of another discovery: in fact by finding out that there is a faint dim vague obscure consciousness in everything made by the hands of men! I have found that out for myself, Peleg, my boy! And do you know what else I’ve found out, my good friend?”

“If this goes on much longer,” thought the desperate Mongol, “I’ll pick you up, Master Heber, carry you into the dining-hall and lay you down at Sir Mort’s feet!”

“I’ve found out,” went on the old man, “that on any piece of earth where old rituals have been going on for six or seven or eight centuries, the actual essence of the substance of the earth begins to stir in its sleep, craving it doesn’t know what! Friar Bacon teaches this — did you know that? And he calls this craving by a very curious metaphysical name. He calls it Privation —yes, the ‘Privation of Matter’.”

Peleg groaned. “O he calls it ‘Privation’, does he?” he murmured hoarsely; and then getting desperate he made a reckless plunge. “I am sorry to hurry you, Master Heber,” he began, speaking heavily and with as much effort as if he were forcing the handles of a wooden plough through frozen mind, “but we must hasten to the hall! Tonight after supper it will be most gracious of you if you’ll explain to us about the thoughts of sticks and stones and the ‘Privation’ they suffer when the Blessed Trinity mismanages matters and how the Fourth God eases things up.”

His voice was low, but Heber caught quickly enough the new tone in it and yielded without a struggle. But move his feet as fast as he could, it was physically impossible for him to quicken to a run, and while he had breath to walk he had breath to talk.

“Of course,” he said, “we needn’t believe all those tales about Lost Towers. But there must be something in them. They say that when the bishop laid his hand in blessing on the head of the daughter of that house, drops of such foul-smelling blood followed his ringers when he took them away that everybody else had to leave the church or the chapel or wherever it was, so perfectly appalling was the smell! And of course you’ve heard how poor old King Henry, who is sick to death while the Lord Edward is crusading nobody knows where, knighted young Will Boncor of Cone the other day in Westminster? The reason for that of course was to keep young Raymond de Laon from going back to France. Young men of his age aren’t happy without a comrade. They have to go about in pairs or they just die of tedium.”

“Tedium, do you call it,” cried the Jewish Tartar. “I call it by a different name! But let that go!.. The point is he’s come back, and Cone Castle is stronger than it’s ever been in the memory of man! But so also, Master Heber, is the Barony of Lost Towers! Very, very, very strong that also has become! And I tell you, Master Heber, I wouldn’t like to make my way against that castle, with its forest and its swamp, and its bottomless black moat where the waters go straight down to Gehenna!”