John Powys - The Brazen Head

All went well, just as he hoped, and it was not until he had actually disembarked that any trouble came, and when trouble did come, it came from out of his own head, and not from any external event. How it came, why it came, and what made it come, Petrus had not then, and never had afterwards, any clear idea.

It came suddenly out of his memory, as he stood on the shore after waving farewell to the ship that had brought him there: and it came to him just as if somebody else were telling the story, somebody, however, who knew his thoughts and feelings with a perfectly terrible exactitude, somebody in fact who was uncomfortably like God.

What came to him was his memory of a certain occasion when, with other French soldiers, he was being conveyed in a French ship along the shores of Palestine not far from the Port of Acre. Here, because of something he had done or had not done, the ship’s commander had had him thrown overboard.

He had not clung very long, however, to an overturned boat which happened to drift past him, when he suddenly found himself close under the bows of the grandest British vessel that in all his peregrinations he had ever beheld. That this vessel was English there could be no doubt, and that it carried on board some extremely important, perhaps even some royal personage seemed more than likely.

“Can it be Lord Edward’s ship?” he thought; and in a shorter time than it would have taken him to consult his lodestone, which he always treated as a familiar spirit, he found himself hauled on board this formidable vessel and confronted with its royal voyager who, as he had predicted, was indeed no other than Lord Edward himself, the heir to the British throne.

The whole interview that followed took place on the main deck of this crusading vessel.

“I thought you were right, Gunter,” Lord Edward muttered, addressing the master of the vessel, a man whose most marked propensity was the power of becoming nothing, and a predilection for becoming nothing, or as near nothing as it was possible for a native of the harbour of Weymouth, near the ancient city of Durnovaria, with a handsome wife and a dozen children, to become.

“My sailor-friend here,” went on the warrior-prince, addressing Petrus now, but practising as he spoke, just as if he were quite alone, some particular gesture in the difficult art of slinging, “assures me that his wife has relatives in Picardy and that he felt quite certain, from the tone of your voice just now when you answered him from the sea, that you were from that part of the world. Is that so, master? Well, in any case,”—and Edward turned a shrewd glance upon the vessel from which Petrus had been flung, and which was now making use of every inch of sail it possessed to get quickly away—“your friends aren’t waiting for you! May I ask what your business is? Or are you, as seems more likely from your looks, now that I see you close, travelling to London from some foreign court? Are you perhaps from Madrid or from—”

Their conversation was interrupted by a series of piercing and painful screams, and Edward turned angrily to the ship’s captain whom he had addressed as “Gunter”. “Haven’t I told you I won’t have that man allowed to make that noise! Didn’t I tell you to tie him up so that he can’t scream? Its all in the way he’s tied, I tell you! The point I insist on is that he should suffer pain; but that doesn’t mean that I want to hear his shrieks. In fact if he’s tied so that he can’t shriek, he’ll suffer a lot more. To shriek is a relief. That’s why Nature lets us indulge in it. I trust you haven’t forgotten, Gunter, quite all I ordered. I am accustomed to being obeyed at sea as promptly as on land. That man deliberately disobeyed me, and he must suffer till he has learnt his lesson!”

It was almost as if the sea itself, with the whole weight of the steel-green purple-shadowed mass of its salt water, had risen up to protest against this haughty announcement; for a terrific wave curved up out of the deep at that point and completely drowned both the screams from below and the exchange of words between the Lord Edward and Master Gunter and Peter of Maricourt.

But it may easily be believed that the last named had not missed the rough brutality with which the future ruler of England had referred to this victim of his violent temper; and as he gazed at him now while all three of them were watched rather humorously by a couple of sailors, his own bodily longing to change his clothes became far less important to him than a rush of purely emotional feeling that quivered through every nerve of his body, a rush of desperate hatred of this powerful, dominating, ruggedly handsome, battle-loving, strong-willed Lord Edward.

And under the power of this blind rush of emotional hatred which he longed to gratify by some spectacular use of his precious lodestone, he realised that this was a crisis in his life.

“Yes,” he thought, “may my soul burn in hell if I don’t give this great English bully something to make him remember those screams.”

But as he watched him closely and dallied with the instrument pressed against his own body, it came over him with the unutterable force of a premonition totally beyond the range of his own fighting spirit, that it would be useless to try to work by magnetism the death of this particular tyrant.

“But wait a moment” —he felt as if these words were reaching him out of the air—“What about this hammering bully’s offspring? He’s the King’s son. Will not his son be King also when the time comes? And how unlikely, how almost impossible, as the world goes, it would be for the son of a man of iron like this, a back-breaker and a skull-cracker, a master of armies and a sacker of cities, to be born like his begetter, or, if the child were a girl, for her to be a stirrer up of savagery and slaughter! So listen, Lodestone darling! Don’t you agree with me, you precious little heart-breaker, life-piercer, lava-flinger, angel-slayer, blow-them-up-alive? Surely you do, my darlingest of little volcanoes? Surely you do? Very well then, my pretty one! The covenant’s signed and sealed twixt thee and me. What we’ll do is to lie in wait for the feeble offspring of our great shark; and when we’ve got him we’ll fix him! We’ll follow him up all his life — or if we’re dead our spirits shall — and he shall die screaming!”

It was a curious thing — indeed it was what we pathetic tribes of mortals love to call “one of those things”—that almost simultaneously with Petrus’s private talk with his lodestone, Master Gunter, who had gone below, came up again, and going straight up to Lord Edward, announced the death of the man who had been screaming. But that was not all, for there suddenly fell in the midst of the three of them, slam-bang upon the deck, the bleeding, mangled body of a small sea-bird that had been suddenly seized by a roving sea-hawk ready for any mouthful but not inclined to pause for a substantial meal.

The sanguinary slap that the fall of this small feathered corpse made upon the deck, and the shrill wail from the creature’s mate that followed it, shook Petrus out of his diffidence to such a degree that he boldly asked Master Gunter whether he could give him a berth and have his clothes dried; and it was almost within touch of the man who had just paid the last penalty for defying the ruler not only of the land, but of the waves of the sea, that Peter of Picardy fell asleep that night hugging his lodestone.

It was of these events that our student of magnetism was thinking now, as he stood staring for almost five minutes at the uneven curves of the sea-tide’s advances and retreats, as if he were listening to an invisible Brazen Head reporting these things to a mixed court of celestial and infernal judges. When, however, he shook off his memories, he found himself on the edge of a series of wide-stretching reedy swamps, interspersed with estuaries of salt water where wind-tossed alders and wind-swept willows led to lonely huts on flat marshy levels, only separated from the sea by desolate sand-dunes, whose human inhabitants lived on the finned and feathered natives they snared and slew.