John Powys - The Brazen Head

Peter of Maricourt was in his most natural element here, for the human beings he encountered had for so many hundreds of years been accustomed to just such predatory explorers that they were as little surprised by the strange appearance of some of them as by the weird accents of others, or by the extraordinary weapons used by yet more unusual apparitions.

As may well be imagined a large portion of the retainers of Lost Towers had been supplied from dwellers in this sea-bordering marsh-land which was inserted, so to say, along that coast between high-rolling chalk hills like a wet wide-open entrance-gate between towering walls.

Lilith of Lost Towers found most of her female intimates in the human hovels sprinkled along these desolate haunts of unusual sea-birds interspersed with wild geese and wild ducks. Nor was it unnatural that this strange maiden herself should in some of her moods, when out of touch it might be with both her parents, pay lengthy visits to these intimates of her own sex in these lonely places.

“As it happened however,” so the wisest chroniclers, who are also the humblest, are always being reduced to admitting, Lilith’s chief confederate didn’t live in the midst of these sea-marshes but on the edge of a quite different stretch of country. This was an expanse of rough, wild moorland, covered with heather, which, as long at any rate as local memory went, had been regarded as once belonging to the ancient Welsh god or king whose name was Llyr or Lear. The woman in this case was Mother Wurzel, who lived in the part of this moor and from which there was a rider’s track leading to what was once the important Roman city of Durnovaria, where Lilith’s friend as a practiser of both black and white magic had clients of many different sorts.

Petrus Peregrinus had visited the rather unusual abode of Mother Wurzel more than once in his expeditions through Wessex, for it was his practice, when he had too soon exhausted the money he had earned by soldiering, to make use of the innumerable tricks which his pet lodestone could play to keep him in bread and in cheese and in wine.

The habitation of Mother Wurzel was founded upon a very small circle of tall upright stones. The stones must have originally come from the isle of Portland, but they looked as if before being brought here they had stood in a much wider circle; for they had a rather uneasy expression, as if they were not receiving their due of respect in their present crowded and somewhat humiliating position.

And yet the maker of this queer habitation cannot have been totally indifferent to the elements of dignity and beauty, for great care had been taken with regard to making the superstructure harmonize with this queer base. The space within the circle had been given a smooth marble floor and a roof arched as carefully as the crypt of a cathedral, and there had been placed over that one single wooden chamber entirely built of oak. The first time Petrus entered this dwelling, which was called Deadstone, he enquired of Mother Wurzel how on earth she had got possession of it; and she explained that it really belonged to the Lord of Lost Towers, but that he, under his daughter’s influence, had made it over in perpetuity to herself as his daughter’s friend.

Having got safely clear of the formidable Lord Edward, it didn’t take the wanderer from Picardy very long to reach Deadstone, and after an enjoyable night there, for Mother Wurzel’s middled-aged daughter, whose name was Puggie-Wuggie, had more deliciously wicked little ways when once you had her by your side in bed than any feminine being Petrus had ever known, he was allowed the privilege of meeting Lilith herself.

When once these two were together, however, things moved more crucially; and everything, at least for our student of magnetism, became much more complicated. In the first place there happened to him something that had never happened to him in his life before. He became completely infatuated with this fatal young lady.

The scrupulous chronicler of these agitating events has to endeavour in his narration of them to proceed as cautiously and meticulously as the events themselves seemed to be proceeding. As always with the actual impacts of life, there were so many different currents joining our special stream of events that this same stream was constantly being thickened here and thinned there, darkened here and lightened there, rendered bluish here and greenish there, and even splashed, it might be, with horrifying drops of blood at certain other places in its course.

At least that is how it all presented itself to Peter of Maricourt; and it did so with such ever-increasing, and now and then with such overlapping, overwhelming, overpowering, and almost drowning force, that he felt as he looked at her that, whether she yielded to his obsession or whether she didn’t yield to his obsession, it was now quite as important to him to remain in sight of her as it was to know that he, the gate-keeper’s son in the manor of Maricourt, was really and truly the long rumoured, long predicted, long prophesied Antichrist of sacred tradition.

The little red point of Peter’s tongue didn’t stay quiet any longer within the inner side of its menacing port-cullis. It came out; or, as a more elegant historian would say, it issued forth. What in plain words it did, this tongue of the enemy of Christ, was to lick both its upper lip and its lower lip, a proceeding that would have been a staggering sight for Peter’s only friend, his precious lodestone, if that object, now pressed so nervously against its owner’s organ of generation, had possessed the power of vision.

“You are asking me, my beautiful one,” he was now saying to Lilith, “what I want you to do for me at this juncture. Well! I’ll tell you exactly what’s in my mind. I think the thing for us to do is to go as quickly as possible to the Fortress, while this ex-bishop from Cologne is still there.

“Since I’ve found out how perfectly beautiful and irresistible you are, it has come over me that if I want to stop this man’s interference with everybody’s affairs in this part of the world — and you know how deep the gulf has already grown — down to the centre of the universe — between Bonaventura, and his dicegames with Satan, and Friar Bacon and his attempts to change the creative methods of God by getting some parcener of Eve to help him in the making of Adam. You know of course, my beautiful one, the difficulties we have to surmount if we really are to put a stop to this man’s meddling? But here is my plan, my dear, if you’ll help me to carry it out.

“In the first place we’ve got to pretend that we are horrified, beyond all expression, by this assault on Bacon’s Brazen Image, which must be to us of course the work of a loyal believer in Christ; and not only so but must contain within itself a splash, a spark, a breath, a sip, a sigh, a bubble, a dewdrop of that Spirit they believe in, who, at Pentecost, descended from Heaven in the shape of a thousand flames of fire and lodged on the heads of a crazy crowd of Jewish madmen.

“Of course it was in the shape of a dove that the Thing descended on Jesus himself at his baptism in Jordan. But by the time of Pentecost Jesus was already ‘ascended’, and when this Ghost they call ‘Holy’ ‘descended’, it came as a sort of Substitute for Jesus to keep things going till the event they call the ‘Crack of Doom’ or the ‘Last Day’.”

While Petrus was thus lecturing her on what, if they were to be successful in destroying it all, it was necessary for them to know, he was embracing her with every portion of his mind and not a few portions of his body.

“What we’ve got to do, my loveliest of all possible Eves, is to remember how long these confounded doctors of the church have been confusing our brains with their absurd problems about the embryo in the womb. This poor little urchin of a formless foetus begins by being on a par with the vegetable world, and has only got what they call a ‘vegetative soul’. Then, when it is a tiny bit bigger, and is being definitely fed upon the substance of its mother’s life, it is promoted to share the lives of all baby-creatures of the animal world and is allowed to possess what they call a ‘nutritive soul’. But just listen to this, my sweet,” and, as he spoke, his amorous caresses made it clear that he would not in the least object to becoming the begetter of the kind of creature he was describing.