John Powys: The Brazen Head

Her repetition of the word “Kyre” had an odd effect on the man Spardo. He had been educated in a monastery where they knew a little classical Greek as well as theological Greek; so that to hear this old lady repeat these two syllables which might mean “O Lord!” and also might mean “Hail!” and to see her obvious assumption that in either case the word would please the deformed creature, impressed to the depths of his being the man who was leading it, for he handed its bridle to the doorkeeper, came round by the animal’s tail and bowed low before Bundy, who was a grey-haired old woman with an extremely long face not altogether unlike the face of a horse.

“Spardo is my name, mistress,” he said, “and it’s Spardo who now salutes you and does homage to you, and does so more deeply than you can possibly know. I don’t suppose you’ve ever had the son of a king as your familiar friend; but you’ve got one now, and if I know anything of women you’ll find me even better suited to your taste than the master here.”

What the lady thus addressed felt in her secret mind, as she listened to this fantastic progeny of the King of Bohemia, it would be impossible for any male chronicler to describe — but it was clear that the rogue didn’t displease her; for though she didn’t blot out from her attention the massive jaw, the small eyes, and the narrow, sucked-in mouth of her mate — which latter feature resembled one of those straight lines which certain melodramatic chroniclers tend to throw in between a blow and a cry, or between a cry and a crash — she drew a little closer. Soon indeed she was touching the side of the horse with a fascinated interest in the extraordinary growth in its neck. As for Spardo, his movements were spectacular. He seemed as unable to keep still as a white butterfly in a vegetable garden.

What he was doing now was rolling his blue eyes so queerly in his head that while one of them seemed to be caressing with besotted unction the deformity in his horse, the other seemed to be lingering with no less maudlin tenderness on the elongated and almost equally equine countenance of the old lady.

Then quite suddenly, and with the organic outburst of that sort of irresistible impulse that creates a psychic stir in the whole surrounding atmosphere of any particular spot, he sank down on one knee in front of her, his thin red beard brushing the knee that was not on the ground like a bird’s tail that goes on flicking a branch below the one on which it has settled. While the woman’s husband regarded him with blank astonishment, he began deliberately imitating the tone in which she made such a natural sing-song out of the syllables that may have been either “Kyre” or “Kaire”.

“O noblest of wise women!” he cried, clutching at her petticoats so that she couldn’t draw away from him, “you have no idea how near the truth you are when you chant that word. Haven’t you noticed what that swelling in his neck really is?”

He now leapt to his feet and touched the horse’s deformity with a solemn reverence as if it were something absolutely sacred. As for Mistress Bundy, she hurriedly let both her hands fall to her sides. Then she lifted them up a little, and proceeded to wipe them very very carefully with her apron. “It’s the improperly-shaped beginning of a man’s head, you cleverest of all ladies! That’s what it’s intended to be and that’s what it will be. It will be a centaur, that’s to say, a horse with a man’s head!”

At the sound of the word “Centaur” the compressed mouth of the door-keeper went through a faint relaxation. In his boyhood he had attended Saint Aldhelm’s School at Sherborne, and there he had heard of the centaur Cheiron and of the lessons in healing which this wise being gave the son of Aesculapius.

The word “Centaur” however meant nothing to Mistress Bundy; and there was therefore not the faintest element in her interest in this creature’s neck of anything save the pure fascination of some grotesquely weird or fantastically shocking aspect of a deformity.

Both the woman and Spardo jumped back quickly enough however when the sound of trotting horses became audible. “They are coming!” Spardo cried. “Well! I’ll ride and meet them and tell them — for I can see from your manner what you allow me to say — that they may expect, if they behave quietly and don’t crowd in with all their armour and if they leave their horses outside, a princely welcome!”

“O yes, yes, yes!” cried Bundy in great excitement: “Go! go! go! And Cortex will hasten now to tell Lady Val you are all coming! I am sure that both she and Sir Mort would blame us terribly if we let you pass this door and proceed on your way without stopping!”

The son of the King of Bohemia obeyed Mistress Bundy without a word. He swung himself upon the creature he had long ago nicknamed Cheiron and galloped off. There was no wind at that moment moving among the green spruce-firs and the brown larches and the few majestic deeply-indented, reddish-barked pines, which were the only trees close to this main entrance to the Fortress of Roque, an entrance which faced due south and which lacked, for some technical strategic reason when it was first constructed, any smoothly-sloping approach, like the avenue of elms leading eastward from the postern door.

But if there had been such a wind, and if we were permitted to endow it with anything resembling our own impressions about people and things, it would certainly have received a shock of surprise when it noted that before Master Cortex rushed down the passage leading to the interior of the Fortress, and before Mistress Bundy shuffled back to her chamber in the rampart beside the great gate, neither of them gave the other so much as a glance, far less made any attempt to exchange views on the direction towards which events were moving.

Meanwhile within a small ante-room to their bed-chamber Lady Valentia was impatiently awaiting her husband’s return from his accustomed early jaunt. Lady Val could see from where she sat both the elderly women, the upright, bony Nurse Rampant, with her formidable clear-cut Norman profile and her tall muscular figure, and Mother Guggery, the nurse’s help, with her short legs, well-rounded belly, and her grey curls, so fantastically trimmed with purple ribbons that her head resembled a bird’s nest in an aviary full of irises. These two females were hard at work in the inner chamber, sweeping out the dust and making the bed, and while they worked they were keeping up a regular word-dance of enticing scandal which, by an infinitely crafty and long-practised skill, they exchanged in such a way as to reveal absolutely nothing to their mistress with which she wasn’t already acquainted or in which either of them could specially preen herself as the revealer.

Thus it was easy enough for Lady Val to give herself up to a certain rather bitter vein of meditation, for which she only had the appropriate leisure when, as at this moment, she was waiting for Sir Mort before taking the lead in some exacting social function.

“It’s no good,” she told herself, “imagining at this late stage what my life might have been if I hadn’t married Sir Mort and handed this place over to him with his weird Abyssum blood, for just as I never could understand his parents, so, though I love him from my heart as the father of my two boys and of our darling little Lil-Umbra, I do sometimes feel as if, being as I am the only living descendant and representative, in this ill-mannered and unruly island, of our old and civilized house of Dormequil, I might have done better had I given myself and our historic Manor of Roque to one of our cousins in Brabant, or even to one of our second cousins in Piedmont.

“But perhaps then I would have died childless; for with all the proud shrinking of what Mort calls my ‘virginal qualms’, if I’d given myself to a man of my own nervous sensitivity instead of to my old thick-skinned raper of Sabines, these dear children of mine might never have been born! But O I do wish that Mort had never let John go to that awful Regent’s College, as they call it, in Oxford, where this man they call the Doctor Mirabilis got hold of him. The boy’s head has been completely turned by this cunning Friar with his devilish sorceries! Thank God that Tilton has a firm head on his dear broad shoulders! He has always been the only really well-balanced, sensible one of our family, and I can only pray he’ll more and more take the lead.