John Powys - The Brazen Head

And Petrus of Maricourt swore within himself that it was upon him, and upon him alone of all men living or dead, that the burden of the tremendous deliverance was laid.

“I am the one,” he cried to the very tune of his embraces of Lilith, “appointed from the dawn of history to lead the revolt of all natural earthly life, whether human, animal, vegetable, or mineral, against this accurst inhibition, inspired by these mad religious teachers from Palestine. Anti-Christ! Antichrist! Anti-christ! That is what I am. And the crazy joke of it is that this Jesus, whom they call the Second Person of this Trinity they’ve invented, always said that we were all the Sons of God.”

At this point Petrus of Picardy scrambled to his feet, and bending down modestly and courteously over his companion arranged and tidied her disturbed garments.

It was nearly dark by the time Peter of Maricourt and Lilith of Lost Towers passed that glen of the Welsh Tinker which was so near the gate of the Convent. They were on their way to the Priory, where they hoped to waylay Albertus Magnus, who had — so local rumour informed them — been invited that night to dine with the Prior. It was in the mind of Petrus Peregrinus that they might encounter young John there too, setting off for home from his daily visit to the imprisoned Friar. This possibility however Petrus refrained from communicating to Lilith, though exactly what his motive was for this particular piece of rather curious reticence he would have been himself puzzled to say, although it might enter the head of a mean-minded chronicler that it had something to do with the good looks and youth of the person in question.

It was in any case much less of a surprise to the girl from Lost Towers than to the man from Maricourt when up from the Tinker’s Cave, where these children of Israel had been stealing between their separate duties a celestial hour of delicious happiness without troubling their heads about Welsh gods or Welsh tinkers or Welsh witches, came the giant Peleg holding his Ghosta by the hand.

The path upward of the ascending pair crossed irrevocably the path of the couple who were skirting the edge of the declivity, so that an encounter was inescapable. Any aboriginal spirit at this juncture, whether that of a deity, or a tinker, or a witch, who possessed the power of reading the thoughts in alien brains, would have been fascinated, as it darted like a sand-martin from cavity to cavity in these unusual skulls, to note the absolute difference between what was going on in all four heads.

Lilith was wondering whether she lost anything by the fact that the deliciously wicked delight, which she derived from leading people into mischief while she satisfied her senses with their erotic embraces, had never been, even to the faintest wafture of such a thing, touched by the breath of romantic love. “What the devil can that feeling be like?” she wondered irritably.

Peleg said to himself: “This queer-looking little fellow in black stumping along with a Roman sword for a staff must be the Lost Towers’ latest pick-up. From the fellow’s expression I doubt if the wench has got him as completely as she thinks she has!”

Petrus thought: “Haven’t I met this dark girl somewhere before round here? Or is it you , my pretty one,” and he gave a caressing squeeze to the lodestone in his innermost garment, “who have pointed her out to me when we were going about? Whoever she is, she’s a powerful person; and I’d be a prize idiot to neglect her help in my Antichrist crusade and a plain fool not to try to find what she herself feels about this damned Brazen Head?”

As for Ghosta herself; she was acquainted, by reason of her job in the Convent kitchen, with all the gossip of the neighbourhood, for the Nuns heard everything, and those among them who weren’t born to be spiritual were the best authorities in the district on all that was going on, on the quarrels and alliances, on the friendships and enmities, on the misunderstandings and idiotic manias, in all the various manorial centres whose circles of authority over-lapped at this point.

“O I do hope and pray,” Ghosta cried in her heart, “that Peleg’s discovery of this traveller’s association with Lost Towers won’t start him off again on his mad suspicion of their being some sexual connection between me and the Friar!”

It was naturally enough the clever clasper of that dangerous magnetic weapon who broke the somewhat awkward silence with which the pair ascending from the cave encountered the pair skirting that tricky declivity.

“I am a visitor to your country, Master”—here Petrus bowed politely to the Jewish giant—“to your country, Mistress”—and here he did the same to Ghosta—“with the purpose of inspecting this wonderful invention of your Friar Bacon of which I have been told by this gentle lady, whom I had the good fortune to meet when I first landed on your shores, and which she tells me is to be found in a Castle called the Fortress of Roque, the Lord of which has only recently recovered from an attack made upon him by a demented animal, by a horse in fact, whom some wicked magician had tried to turn into one of those classical creatures who have men’s heads on horses’ necks and were called Centaurs, and one of them indeed”—here the traveller bowed graciously to both the giant and Ghosta—“as frequenters of monastic libraries, like yourselves, no doubt know, was a sort of schoolmaster to swift-footed Achilles.”

“You had better take them to the main Fortress gate, Peleg,” said Ghosta quickly. “I must run back to the Convent now, and I shan’t have to ring that big front bell anyway, for I’ll get in at the back, where there’s a door close to the passage where my room is. I’ll be here,” she added in a lower voice, giving the great knuckles of the giant whose right hand was squeezed into his leather belt, a quick pressure, “tomorrow, wet or fine, at the same time as today!”

And with this she was off; and they all watched her tall slight figure hurry down the path towards the Convent.

“Well, Master — well, Mistress Lilith,” said Peleg, “shall we go straight to the Fortress? It’s inside the Fortress, you know, in fact in the armoury, that the Friar’s Brazen Head has been put for safety. This Papal Legate, or whatever he calls himself, whose name has such a friendly sound — I mean Bonaventura — has been making so much trouble round here that we — but I mustn’t go on like this with you, Mistress Lilith, here; for you naturally have to take the side of your dad and I naturally have to take the side of my lord — but anyway, you, sir, as an experienced traveller, will have seen many local divergencies far more extreme than any of ours and bringing with them far more risky consequences to the country concerned.”

Lilith smiled at him with a quick, humorously confidential smile, as much as to say, “O my dear big man, you weren’t born in the midst of our silly little dissensions, but you’ll have to take us as you find us.”

“Somebody told us as we came along,” murmured Petrus almost wistfully, “that, if we wanted to have a word with Albert of Cologne, who has come over here to see Friar Bacon, we ought to go to the Priory where the great man has been invited tonight to dine with the reverend Prior. It would be a pity, wouldn’t it, to put you to the trouble of showing us the way to the Fortress, only to find when we reach it that the man we are seeking has just left to go to the Priory?”

To this fretful commentary upon the course of events it was Lilith, not the Jewish giant, who replied.

“The obvious thing to do,” she said, stepping forward quickly, and with one slender hand putting pressure on the giant’s hip and with the other upon the elbow of Petrus Peregrinus, “is to get to the Fortress as quickly as we can and find out if the man has yet started for the Priory. It may well happen that we shall be allowed to accompany him there, and possibly be able to eat a crust with the Friar, while Albertus is dining with Prior Bog.”