John Powys - The Brazen Head

“I tell you, master bailiff, if you take our horse it will be just simply a death-sentence to us all!”

“Pardon me, holy sir,” said the bailiff, looking straight into the twitching, high-coloured face of Bonaventura, whose excited eyes, always very prominent, were now literally bulging from his head; “pardon me till I’ve dealt with this fellow!”

Meanwhile the little girl, whose hand her grandfather was still tightly clutching, couldn’t keep the idea out of her mind that the interest of this hooded rider in what was going on was so intense that it might at any moment project those inflated eyes of his out of his head like a pair of globular puff-balls.

She was even beginning to imagine the simultaneous pop with which those two voracious peerers would strike the tree beside her and the amount of effervescent juice that would pour down the tree’s trunk at their bursting, when she heard the bailiff protest to the owner of those same orbs that he would give him his full attention as soon as he had got rid of these tiresome people.

“Full attention” was the very last thing any one of the group of human bipeds flung together beneath these pines could hope for. But at least the ragged little girl, whose name was Bet, and who had been endowed by Nature with several extra drops of imagination, derived an agreeably alarming impression from the bulging eyes of the saintly General of the Franciscan Order of Friars.

But there was nothing but distress in the shock she received when she saw her grand-dad throw himself down on his knees before ‘Master Sygerius and actually embrace his straddling pair of sturdy legs, while with head thrown back he gazed up imploringly at all that could possibly be seen from that position of the man’s physiognomy, which could only have been the reddish-brown beard protruding from the obstinately square jaw.

“If you take our horse away, master,” cried the old man, “it just means starvation! While my son was alive, he could plough as fast as any man on the manor. And plough he did, and sow and reap too, with the best in the land. But if after his death our only horse is to be what’s called your Heriot, considering I’m too old and feeble to plough or to sow or to reap or to carry in the harvest, it’s just murder you’re committing! Yes, what you’re doing, bailiff, is sheer murder! I tell you, here and now, it’s squeezing the orange dry!”

The bailiff, evidently no less conscious of the staring eyes of the hooded man on Cheiron’s back than was the ragged little Bet, stepped away so hurriedly that the old supplicant, losing his balance, fell forward with both his hands outstretched upon the red-brown earth. The spot where the old man fell was a spot strewn with several generations of pine-needles, but it was quite bare of moss and quite bare also of that particular sort of forest-grass, soft as the hair of a Dryad, which grew luxuriantly in those parts, especially in the district between the Fortress and Lost Towers.

Little Bet had so far only spent seven years upon earth but she had already noticed that, when her elders quarrelled among themselves and began to argue, something always seemed to be drawn into the contention that came from far away. Yes! she had often noticed that some unexpected bird or beast or reptile appeared at such times, or an unusual storm of wind, or a torrent of water, or even a falling star. And it now came about that as Bet’s grand-dad, whose name was Dod Pole, scrambled to his feet, with the palms of his hands and the undersides of his fingers pricking viciously from the pine-needles, and commenced in unabashed indignation to express his feelings, a tiny little bird, on the look-out for the crumbs that it had come to associate with these meetings of vociferous bipeds, was so absorbed in its own private quest that it remained oblivious to the nearby hovering of a hungry hawk, who, instinctively aware that no arrows were to be feared from that preoccupied party, descended like a feathered plummet and made its fellow-citizen of the air its helpless prey.

“O you bailiffs and reeves and forest-wardens,” shouted old Dod Pole, his voice growing harsher and huskier as he went on and his grip on little Bet’s hand hurting the child’s fingers more and more, “you are all the same in your fat-headed stupidity! You think the land belongs to the Barons whose castles on it we have built, or to the Church, whose barley and wheat and fruit and vegetables we have grown. O you wooden-headed coxcombs! I tell you a day will come when we shall have a King after our own hearts, a King as wise as Solomon, and as strong as Coeur-de-Lion, and as well-supported as Caesar, and with as many magic weapons as King Arthur, who will raise us up and thrust you down! Who gave your precious Barons the right to make us thresh our corn on their threshing-floors and grind it with their grind-stones? Are your Barons so many Gods? Did they create the land that we cultivate? Did they create the wheat and the barley that we sow and reap and gather in barns?

“Just because you call taking our horse a Heriot — a mighty grand lawyers’ word the word Heriot, ain’t it? — you think all is settled! You wait a bit, my good master bailiff, you wait a bit, my noble lord, Sir Mort! A day will come when it will be to a really great and true King chosen by us , yes! by us, who are now serfs and slaves, that you and your barons will have to come for the making of all the laws in the land! And I’ll tell you this, too, Master Sygerius—”

The obstinate bailiff, at whom this revolutionary outburst was aimed, still stood his ground sullenly, silently, tenaciously and with an ugly purpose in his grim countenance. But the aged Dod Pole still went on. Indeed as he recklessly and desperately flung out these thoughts, he felt in his soul as if over all the countries in the world millions of serfs and slaves like himself were uttering the same thoughts, and he couldn’t but believe that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, if not the God of Jesus, was their inspiration and would avenge them upon their enemies.

But the Bastard of the King of Bohemia, whose mother had called him Spardo and whose only affection and pride in the whole universe was his concern for the deformed horse Cheiron, had at that moment — perhaps because along with his other faculties his conscience had gone to sleep — a different sort of inspiration, one that only Hermes himself, the God of thieves, could have put into his head.

He had already observed that Bonaventura possessed a deep pocket in his Friar’s garb, at the bottom of which he was carrying a leather bag full of thick golden pieces. He had found this out by spying on the saintly man when the latter retired from his seat on Gheiron to relieve his bowels; and he derived no little satisfaction at this moment from discovering that the richly-filled leather bag in the flapping skirt of Cheiron’s rider had somehow or other, by good chance, worked itself along the animal’s side till it was close to his own caressing, stroking, toying, soothing, and encouraging left hand.

The more violent old Dod became in what he was saying, the more closely was Bonaventura absorbed in watching him; so that to a born pilferer of unguarded treasures like this offspring of the loins of a King, who had just refused a more dangerous crown than the one he wore, it was not a very difficult achievement to transfer to his own person, in fact to an interior pocket next his own skin, two of these massive golden coins stamped with this same Germanic crown that the crafty King of Bohemia had refused to assume.

“Amen, Amen, Amen, old man!” Spardo now shouted, dancing into the arena between the feverish aura of the serf’s oration and the bailiff’s contemptuous silence. “In the country where I come from there are shrines to the Mother of God where every farthing offered by visitors, yes! and every penny given by pilgrims, and every shekel flung down by travellers, is gathered into a special treasury for the benefit of such as labour with their hands! Pardon me, Master Sygerius, if as an ambassador from abroad, in fact from three kingdoms and a dozen Free Cities, I exchange a few words with this ancient man of resounding speech. I think there are things that I can say to him that will be of value to him and to me and to us all!”