John Powys - The Brazen Head

Over the soft forest-grass, that was a special kind of grass and as delicate and tenuous as a mermaid’s hair, and over the brown floor of the pine-needles Basileus now dragged his master, and did this so effectively that it wasn’t very long before Bonaventura’s eyes could follow them no further. Then and only then and not till then, he left the window, and calmly descending the remaining flight of stairs, directed his steps to where the sounds and smells and wavering lights and shadows made the locality of the supper-chamber discoverable.

He was clearly expected, although nobody had suggested waiting for him. But he was no sooner within the dining-hall than agitation upon agitation shook him. Why hadn’t these people sent somebody to fetch him, to accompany him into this dining-hall, to tell him where he was supposed to sit? They had waited on him, bathed him, anointed him, and then just left him to find his way alone to his seat at this important meal! That wasn’t the way to treat a person who, in the depth of his noble, heroic, spiritual, intellectual, and absolutely unique nature, was struggling at this very moment with the Greatest Temptation possible to a Great Man — namely whether to decide at this turning-point in his life to aim at acquiring the appearance of possessing the sort of statesmanlike sagacity which a man must appear to have if he is to be elected Pope, or simply to go on, as he was doing at present, emphasizing the unusual perfection of his spiritual purity as a real saint.

Something about the vision of the horse Basileus, pulling the arrow from the shoulder of that fair-bearded man and dragging him as if he’d been a load of hay over both brown earth and green earth, remained vivid in Bonaventura’s mind. He had the uncomfortable sensation that his own fate was being pulled along by a Power over which he himself had only partial control.

And yet he kept telling himself that this feeling could not possibly represent the truth. No one in the whole world, he kept telling himself, had as close and intimate a relation with God as he had. Of that he was absolutely certain. It was his life, his destiny, his whole being! It was what made Bonaventura to be Bonaventura; and all the world knew it!

Nobody who had ever lived understood God and the Will of God as thoroughly as he did I Nobody who had ever lived, except Jesus Christ — and of course you couldn’t bring Him into such a calculation — talked to God as he did, and was talked to by God as he was. There could be no question; there could be no doubt about it. He and God understood each other in and out, up and down, body and soul, back and front!

As he moved slowly round that great square table with patient dignity and unflagging self-respect, he told himself that he and God must consider more carefully than they had done before, whether it would be better for the world if the cardinals in conclave decided, when the present Pope died, to elect him as his successor, or better for the world that they should nominate that one among them that he, Bonaventura, decided possessed the cleverest and the most practical brain.

“O God, my beloved companion,” he prayed desperately, as his staring eyes caught sight of a red stain on the edge of the table where Lady Lilt was seated, “I implore you to give me the power tonight, so to impress this evil woman and this evil man and this evil daughter, that it is resounded all over Christendom from the Thames to the Danube that Saint Bonaventura has snatched Lost Towers out of the jaws of Hell!”

It was then that he noticed that there was a large empty throne near where Baron Maldung was sitting, made of the sort of wood and of the sort of woven fabric covering the wood that lent themselves best to receiving the red-brown dye, and that next to this throne Lilith was resting, her entrancing white thighs exposed in such a manner that a man seated in that chair would naturally and inevitably, as he poured out his wine, rest his free hand upon one of those perfect limbs and lightly slide his caressing fingers between it and its mate.

He also noticed that the young girl herself was looking intently at him as he advanced towards where she sat. The air must have been full of strangely contradictory currents of thought as the saintly man approached that empty throne; for the intensity of these airy battles caused a deep hush to fall upon that whole assembly of revellers.

It was at this point that Bonaventura commanded in a clear voice one of the attendants to tie a white napkin securely round his eyes, “Lest I should forget for a moment before you all,” he said aloud, “the vows of purity I have made.”

The motives that led him to this move were subtler than he could himself have explained; but to one among them, had his conscience prodded him, he would have shamelessly confessed — namely, a fear that it might be supposed he was so hungry and so greedy that the nakedness of Lilith was no temptation to him at all, in fact that he didn’t give her presence a thought. He even went so far as to repeat these words about his vow of purity as he allowed himself, still in the same dead silence, and taking exaggerated precautions not to stumble over any obstacle in the way, to be helped to reach his throne, and to be aided in seating himself there in close proximity to Lilith.

When, however, his hand fell, as fate beyond all human control compelled it to fall, upon that soft bare thigh, a shock of unmitigated lust so overpowered him as to change every plan he had made. Lust quivered through him with a compulsion so convulsive as to drive him into unexpected action. With something like a savage bound he leapt to his feet.

“I must beg you all,” he cried in a hoarse voice, a voice that was almost like an animal’s growl, “to — to pardon me”: and then in a second, while they all stared at him in amazement, he had recovered his self-possession.

“The truth is,” he went on, addressing them all easily and quietly, as if in some senatorial or ecclesiastical assembly, “the truth is, it is a privilege that I have been allowed by the Most High, to have illuminations or revelations direct from Himself. Such an illumination I have just had, bidding me leave you tonight and bidding me to ask you for a few important favours so as to make my departure easier, and my reception — for that is where my revelation tells me I must spend this coming night — at the Fortress of Roque more friendly and gracious.

“What my revelation commands me to beg from you is simply this, that you put at my disposal a very quiet horse, preferably an old and good-tempered horse, such as I shall be able myself to ride, and, in addition to this, put me in the care of a small party of well-armed horsemen, who will hand me over in safety to the gatekeeper of Roque Fortress and then return to you at once without demanding anything for themselves, anything except”—here Bonaventura’s voice rose to something that resembled the clanging of a great cracked bell—“except what I am now going to make plain to you all.”

That the man was sincere in the emotion he displayed must at any rate have been plain to all. One undeniable manifestation of it was the fact that as he spoke he wept, and as he wept his mouth and cheeks assumed the only too familiar screwed-up grimace of a small child in a fit of crying, and there was something weirdly and grotesquely impressive about the ringing and yet broken words with which this emotional saint, who had the power of weeping without sobbing, began to make his point clear.

“As you know only too well, you people of Lost Towers, there is a conspiracy against you through this whole district, based on the absurd idea that you are — what of course we all are, for it is the unusual condition of the children of men — more evil than good.