John Powys - The Brazen Head

“Where are you going to sleep tonight, Spardo?” The Lord of the Fortress never for a moment lost his special and peculiar power of propitiating the oddest, queerest, and most intransigent personalities in the world, whether in the human or sub-human sphere of life.

At this moment, without ceasing to transport to his mouth as much stew as his wooden spoon could carry, Spardo didn’t hesitate for a second in his reply to this question.

“With your permission, good my lord, I should like to tie up Cheiron in the horse-stall behind the Fortress; for I’ve got the permission of the dame at your gate, if yourself, good my lord, have no objection, to sleep in her gate-house across there.”

“Could the same good lady, do you suppose,” said the Lord of the Fortress, “find room on a mattress in the same retreat for my friend Maître Pierre, a foreign gentleman from Picardy?”

The said Master Peter, as may easily be imagined, did not miss one jot of the instinctive sagacity with which the Baron, upon whose good or bad, wise of foolish behaviour so many destinies in that corner of the west country depended, managed to eliminate himself completely, as the local potentate whose whim was law, and to create a half-humorous atmosphere of adventure in which they all were taking chances.

Nor did he miss the perfectly natural manner in which Spardo, who was now scraping the inside of his bowl with his spoon, entered into this game, and instead of rising from the tree-stump on which he was squatting, when he saw Cheiron straining to get some fodder that was just beyond his reach, called out to the Baron, “Kick that stuff nearer the horse, my lord, if you don’t mind!”

And when the Baron obeyed this curt command, Spardo only acknowledged it with a nod. It would be almost as difficult for the most penetrating chronicler to describe the thoughts that whirled through the head of Peter of Maricourt at this juncture, as it would be to describe what Cheiron himself was thinking.

But this much might certainly be hazarded: that if Cheiron’s thoughts were concentrated partly upon what Spardo had given him to eat, and partly on the question as to whence this food came and how much more of it was available in the place, wherever that place was, from which it came, Master Peter’s thoughts were concentrated, first on the question as to whether he dared to make another experiment with the perilous object he kept in a velvet bag between his legs, tightly pressed against his body close to his privy parts, or whether the present moment was even less propitious for an experiment of this sort than was the recent occasion in Roger Bacon’s room at Bumset Priory.

The object in that velvet bag, squeezed so scrupulously against his most hidden stretch of skin, was indeed the very centre and focus of Maître Pierre’s whole life. It was a magnet of immense and so far of quite unfathomed power.

Ever since he’d been a small boy Maître Pierre had been obsessed by a passion for magnetic experiments, and for the last twenty years his whole life had been given to the study of everything he could pick up on this queer topic.

The accumulated result of this frantic quest — for in many ways it was much more like this quest for the Sangraal than any ordinary alchemistic pursuit — was, as far as the man’s own secret life went, only alchemistic on the side. In its main conscious urge what Master Peter of Maricourt was after was nothing less than the deliberate manipulation of his own sexual force, by means of this powerful magnet, for the domination of the souls and wills and minds of other entities.

He was in fact at this moment absorbed in this particular game, just as he had been for the last twenty years, and it was Friar Bacon’s psychic awareness of this mania in his friend that always troubled and alarmed him when they were together, although it had a tremendous interest for him. The Friar never let it invade his own experimental work; and whenever it became evident to him as uppermost in Peter’s mind, it troubled him both in his nerves and in his conscience.

Yes! and in something else within him, beyond both nerves and conscience; for Friar Roger in his own spirit was always aware of the presence of an almighty force behind the whole panorama of experience, behind the animal, vegetable and mineral worlds, behind infinite space and infinite time, behind all possible suns, moons, planets and stars, in fact behind all possible, as well as all existing, universes.

It was his consciousness of this remote and ultimate power that Roger Bacon felt he needed to keep his peace of mind and keep him happy and contented in his work. Thus there was always something, in spite of his admiration for Pierre of Picardy, that frightened him about his friend’s attitude, for it struck him as reducing not only his own life, as he knew it himself, but the lives of all other entities as they knew them themselves, the lives of insects, such as midges and moths, the lives of plants and trees, the lives of worms and serpents, the lives of fish in the sea, birds in the air, the lives of the beasts of forest and field; reducing in fact all these lives to the level of lonely, desperate, lost souls, clinging to each other in a boundless, godless, cavernous nothingness, in fact to what he had heard a travelling Welsh tinker call Diddym , “the ultimate Void”.

To the original mind and autocratic humour of the Lord of the Manor of Roque there was something about this scene under the light of that suspended lantern that seemed monstrously comical as well as strangely weird and startling. What was this man up to now?

Master Peter had clearly and obviously some concentrated purpose; but who could possibly know that he was pressing that lodestone of his, in its absurd sheath of flexible velvet, against his naked organs of generation? His eyes, as he did this, were fixed on the head of the horse Cheiron, who was snorting rather indignantly and gazing rather reproachfully at his master, Spardo.

Spardo himself never moved from his seat on the tree-stump which had become for him a sort of elfin throne from which he could, though without any oracular authority, and without attempting to claim any mundane weight, play the part of a wandering goblin, who happened to be making a grave attempt to be an historian of the primitive antics of the human race.

Nor was it very long before both the eccentric Baron of Roque and the observant owner of Cheiron had something to set down in their “year-book” of manorial history. With his hands pressing more and more strongly, and with ever intenser concentration, his precious lodestone against his privy parts, Peter did really seem at that moment to be a man possessed by a fit of insane devilry. It is likely enough that what made him select Cheiron, rather than Cheiron’s master, for his magnetic experiment was the passing glimpse he may have had, when the darkness was broken by some gleam from the lantern swaying in the wind, of that deformity in the horse’s neck.

But whatever it was that set him off practising his tricks in this direction, the result was sufficiently unexpected. Cheiron suddenly leapt up on his hind-legs and advanced, pawing the air with his front-legs, straight upon Master Peter, who promptly scuttled behind the Lord of Roque.

And this moment really produced, if the truth had been carried over the length and breadth of his manorial domain, one of those situations in which this extraordinary owner of this by no means extraordinary strip of fir-forest had a chance of showing that it was not for nothing that the skull of his grandfather, when by some chance it was exposed to the air long after it was buried, had a twist of dark hair gathered round it, indicating, so an Assyrian astrologer who saw it declared, that its zodiacal tendency belonged to the constellation of the Ram, since there had always been known, from the beginning of history, certain rare persons born under that influence, the roots of whose hair came from a deeper level than their skin.