John Powys - The Brazen Head

“Everybody’s life’s like a star with at least forty points branching out in all directions, and every one of these points can turn eventually into a life-long road of unending interest. But at the heart of that star the real Peleg and the real Ghosta can sit at their hearth over their crock of pottage, and watch the shadows on the wall, and hear the wind in the chimney and the rain on the roof, and take to themselves the mystery of everything.

“Well, my dear, you tidy up the room and get it into the shape you like to leave it in when you go out into the world; and I’ll deal with the remains of our meal and clean the things.”

Peleg obeyed her; and until the horizontal rays of the descending Sun thrust the angular shadow of the pine-tree’s elbow almost as far as the cracks in the wet dark wall, out of which the elfin faces of the dumb progeny of the awful Horm could be imagined peering at them, the two of them kept an almost religious silence.

Nor was it only silence they shared: for as they went to and fro about their homely tasks the same thought hovered in their minds; the thought that they were both, save for this miracle of a life together which had only begun today, strangers and pilgrims in a foreign land. And this thought of theirs, as he went on tidying up and arranging, according to his ideas of a proper chamber, the whole appearance of their cave, and as she emptied and washed and dried and polished their pots and pans and dishes, did not only hover about them; it also grew deeper and more definite.

Indeed they had both decided, before they left the cave, she with her black mantle and white hood wrapt round her body and head, and her right hand held tightly in his left, and he with his great iron mace swinging its terrific spikes through the withered stalks of last autumn’s grasses, as if to scare them out of the path of the over-cautiously sprouting new ones, that there was nothing as yet in this new worship of the Trinity, with its Father and Son and Holy Spirit, so closely linked with the Assumption into Heaven of the Blessed Virgin, to compel them, by any spontaneous recognition of a deeper truth, to relinquish their old ancestral faith in Jehovah as their one invisible God, or to bow themselves on the ground before the Crucified Jesus.

That this spiritual decision, by a telepathic interchange of thought that is rare even among lovers, had been accepted by them both, was proved by the murmured exclamations they uttered as they left that glade among the rocks in a wood even more dominated by their union than that cave was dominated by its pine-tree, or those cracks in its wall at the back by that appalling Horm.

It would almost seem as if, over every measurable geographical square of the planetary surface of the earth — and this would apply whether our earth were flat or round, or neither the one nor the other — there vibrates a special and particular amount of magnetic receptivity, by means of which each individual creature is attracted to or repelled by all the other creatures who are dwelling in or are passing through the same arena, an attraction or repulsion which is obviously stronger or weaker in proportion to the type of creature who is exerting it or feeling it.

If this theory has any truth, it was under the influence of something beyond mere accident or chance that, when this terribly-armed adherent of the House of Abyssum, holding by the hand his cloaked and flashing-eyed bride, just as the Sun was sinking behind them on that perfect February day in the year of Grace twelve hundred and seventy two, came to be within measurable distance of Spardo filius Regis Bohemiensis, along with his deformed horse known as Cheiron, the two pairs moved hurriedly to their encounter.

Peleg had met Spardo several times already, and himself was well known to Spardo; but Peleg was at this moment not a little disturbed by such a meeting and was extremely disinclined to allow it to be a cause of delay in the important business of introducing Ghosta to the interior of the Fortress of Roque. But Ghosta was, as may well be imagined, fascinated at once by the sight of this extraordinary horse, with what under the horizontal rays of the setting Sun did really look like a human head beginning to thrust itself forth through that horribly swollen neck.

Spardo himself treated the gigantic Mongol as he treated everybody with whom he had any contact in that part of Wessex. Without disregarding him, he behaved as if the giant had been some inanimate object, a chair perhaps, or a bench, or a ladder, or a door, or a stone outside a door, or a mat in front of the fire where his supper was being prepared, or the hand-rail beside the steps leading up to the chamber where he was to sleep, or even the barrel of oats near the comfortable manger, he would presently leave Cheiron when he had replenished his bin.

The huge Tartar managed to restrain his impatience for the space of about five minutes while Ghosta’s black robe and white hood, and Spardo’s flapping beard, mud-stained jerkin, and motley-coloured leather breeches, kept circling round and round that impassive horse, whose own gaze, with its far-away inscrutable stare, seemed to be fixed upon some invisible landscape where events were taking place that hadn’t the faintest connection with all this fuss about that unfortunate swelling in his own neck.

When however for the third time Ghosta bent in absorbed concentration above that weird deformity, Peleg could bear it no longer. “Pardon me, Master Spardo,” he cried, “but I’ve got an appointment for this lady at the Fortress, and it won’t do to keep Lady Val waiting!”

With these words he flung his left arm round his obsessed girl, administered to Cheiron’s flank a friendly tap with the knuckle of the hand from which the great mace was swinging, gave Cheiron’s master an affable nod, and muttering something in Hebrew, that might have meant, as far as Spardo could follow it, “Goodbye till we meet in Hell!” he strode off with the lady on his left and the mace on his right.

Whether to their eventual advantage or disadvantage, it is curious that no instinct warned Peleg just then that the worst possible moment for winning the favour of the Lady of Roque was during the particular hour she was accustomed to move to and fro between the manorial kitchen and the dining hall, with occasional interruptions from Nurse Rampant and Mother Guggery, and intermittent debouchings up and down the steps leading to her daughter’s chamber. If it hadn’t been that his nerves were so strung-up by his possession of Ghosta that all life’s ordinary routine seemed projected to a distance, rather like that unknown vision upon which Cheiron’s gaze seemed to be fixed, he would certainly have realized this fact.

Indeed it may easily be that he did realize it, only not with sufficient intensity to allow it to influence his action. In any case, with a massive recklessness that was a deep element in his nature, though it was a rare event for him to draw upon it, Peleg led Ghosta to the great gate of the Fortress, where as a quite natural event the gate-keeper admitted them without even glancing up at his wife’s window to see if their entrance aroused her more shrewd attention.

Once inside the Fortress, the worthy Cortex straightway escorted them, without stopping to obtain the mediation of any of the servants, to the familiar corridor between the dining-hall and the kitchen, where at this hour Lady Val was almost always to be found. And there indeed they found her. And if we are to assume — though at these mysterious and fatal moments in human lives, where so many paths into the unknown future seem to offer themselves, it is a doubtful wisdom to assume anything — that happy relations between Sir Mort’s lady and Peleg’s lady was a desirable occurrence, it was unlucky that neither Nurse Rampant nor old mother Guggery happened to be present at this encounter; for both these women had the gift, refined upon by age-long practice, of softening and modifying the impact upon the touchy and susceptible Lady Val, of any troublesome intruder.