John Powys - The Brazen Head

The long legs of Peleg and the short legs of Petrus found themselves obeying her, almost as if they’d been the fore-legs and the hind-legs of the same horse drawing her chariot.

“Little does this fellow guess,” thought Petrus pressing his sword-staff into the rocks and the lichen and the moss and the mud and the grass, and his lodestone into his own scrotum, “that the sole reason of our desire to meet this Albertus is to put an end to his fight on behalf of Christ, and to help this self-worshipping Bonaventura to smash to atoms the Friar’s Brazen Head.”

But, whatever their thoughts, they all three hurried on, and had the Welsh tinker or one of his witch-wives watched them pass, they would have seemed like a giant from Palestine accompanied by a dwarf from Egypt and led by a siren from the Isles of Greece.

The truth was that Peleg and Lilith between them managed to lead the student of magnetism so rapidly, and by paths so completely unknown to him, that it was neither a surprise nor a shock when the girl stopped them with an excited gesture and pointed to a moving mass of gleaming weapons at the foot of four great dark-foliaged pines, and cried out in a thin, wavering, wispy voice, as if she’d been a frightened maiden from the convent rather than the seductive heiress of Lost Towers: “There! there! there’s a lot of soldiers! Your friend from Cologne must have brought a big bodyguard with him! They’re coming this way. What about waiting for them here?”

It was then that Peleg intervened. He spoke slowly and deliberately; but it was clear that he was agitated by what he saw.

“It seems to me, Master Petrus, that those are King’s Men from London; and what is more, Mistress Lilith, I believe I hear some royal music. So it can’t be the ecclesiastic from Germany. It must be some royal captain on his way from London to tell us all some important news. Perhaps King Henry is dying. News doesn’t travel as fast in this island as it does between the Tigris and the Eu—” He stopped suddenly; and Lilith, who had been watching him, turned round, as suddenly, to her other companion.

But her other companion was behaving in a very strange manner. It appeared that Petrus Peregrinus was undergoing a kind of mental agitation so extreme that it amounted to something resembling a fit. He was holding both his hands to his ears, as if to render himself deaf to some sound that he was finding too horrible to endure; and he was doing this without losing his hold of the sheathed weapon he had been using as a staff.

Suddenly with a choking gasp he let his hands sink down till his weapon, held to his wrist by a strap, trailed in the dust. At the same time an expression of incredible relief relaxed his features and clouded with a misty haze his incredibly black eyes. Both Peleg and Lilith surveyed him with astonishment, an astonishment that was increased when they heard him talking to himself, and doing so in English though with a strong French accent.

“Thank the Devil he’ll be dead soon now! And thank the Devil that he can put so much power into his voice that even in the midst of this unspeakable way they’re murdering him a lot of the pain goes into his screams. O thanks be to the Devil! He’s quite dead now!”

Pierre of Maricourt became silent at that point, and leant so heavily on his scabbarded weapon that it sank several inches into the marshy ground upon which, at the sight of the gleaming arms of those distant men, they had all three paused.

“What is it Sieur de Maricourt?” enquired Lilith. “Nobody is screaming here. Nobody is being killed here. What is it, Maitre Pierre?”

The reply came slowly but quite clearly, each word of it being like an enormous gobbet of human flesh, steaming with red foam and dripping with hot blood.

“No! no! this thing is not happening now. It’s going to happen! It — is — all — in — the — future. I — am— making it — happen. It’s going to happen to the son of — never mind that! — who is being tortured to death in a castle whose name is — whose name begins with B. But he’s dead now; and with his screams went a lot of his pain — into the air! My little pretty one and I have done it … the prince of … of … of … of … But never mind that! But mark you … it has … it has … it has to happen! Little Pretty and I have done it already! All the rest can be left to the huge wave of natural necessity that carries us all before it. But there are certain”—and here even Lilith, the daughter of Baron Maldung of Lost Towers, was startled by the look of concentrated, merciless, indeed you might say insane ferocity in the two enormous black eyes, now almost become one, above the traveller’s raptorial beak—“but there are certain turnpike valleys, in the future lives of us all,” he went on, “in which things can be made to happen to us, either as a blessing or as a curse, by concentrated will supported by concentrated prayer addressed to Heaven or — mark you! — to Hell: certain turnpike valleys I say that this great rushing universal stream of Necessity lacks the power to touch.

“These turnpikes in our lives are so indurated, so scooped and gouged out, so chiselled and indented, so engraved, so branded by the intense will and the intense prayer of our worst enemy or our best friend, that this frantic hate or this desperate love works those effects that our excitable doctors of divinity, like this confounded Cologne potentate, call miracles.

“And in a popular sense they are miracles. But we must remember that the mass of people are so stupid, yes! so stupid and dull-witted and silly, that anything achieved by exceptional will-power or exceptional energy appears miraculous. And these accursed ecclesiastics are worse than the mob; for they are at bottom as stupid as the mob, but they have learnt the tricks of their trade and know how to appear both learned and clever.”

Peleg and Lilith exchanged amused glances at this point; for it had become clear to them that this student of magnetism had already become, not only a professor, but a professor whose contempt for other professors surpassed his contempt for common humanity. His companions’ thoughts must somehow have reached him, but instead of quelling his professorial desire to lecture, not so much to teach others as to get the thrill of haranguing others, these thoughts of theirs drove him on. For human beings are only surpassed in their quickness of emotional reaction to unspoken thoughts by one other animal on earth; namely by dogs; but unlike the reactions of dogs, our reactions are generally contradictory. This is proved by the way Petrus acted now.

He straightened his rounded shoulders and thin legs, and hurriedly clambered up upon a broad flat stone. Mounted on this natural rostrum he stretched out his black-sheathed sword-dagger towards the soldiers, who were now definitely marching in their direction, and cried in a shrill voice:

“And these military people too! What do any of them know of the real nature of the necessities of the country, or of the king, or of the nation? All they know is how to obey their trumpets and bugles. After the vulgar herd, and after the grotesque array of half-doting, ridiculously pontifical teachers, the most absurd body of men to be found in our crazy world are soldiers — yes! every kind of soldiers, soldiers of Kings, soldiers of Queens, soldiers of Regents, soldiers of sovereign realms who have only Dictators!

“You tell me those soldiers are English soldiers. Well, I can only tell you that I feel unutterable contempt for every soldier serving in that force and obeying a kindly King who is weak and dying, and only longing to obey a King who is strong, hard, and brutal and loves fighting for fighting’s sake. I tell you there’s not one single one of all these men now marching in their damned orderly ranks towards us, who has the intelligence of an ordinary dog, not one single one!”