John Powys - The Brazen Head

But so it was. The intruder, who had interrupted not only this old familiar quarrel between the brothers that was being so craftily fomented by Master Peter and his pet lodestone, but who also had diverted from their aim that traveller’s further plans, turned out to be none other than Perspicax himself, captain of these King’s Men who had just arrived, and a cousin of Friar Bacon and like him a native of Ilchester.

By this time Perspicax, through his social skill in the delicate art of handling superiors and his formidable gift for inspiring respect in inferiors, had become one of the most active and important military officers that the old king possessed.

Having heard of the disturbances stirred up by Bonaventura and of the local war — for it had by now become more than a feud — between the Manor of Roque and the Barony of Lost Towers, Perspicax had persuaded the already dying Henry to let him come down to the Wessex Coast with a quite large squadron of King’s Men.

With a few decisive explanations and a moderate use of his enormous powers of persuasion and domination, Perspicax soon had all the five of them, the two young men, equally with Peleg and Lilith and Master Peter of Picardy, under his personal control.

He led them all straight back to the Fortress, and he found no difficulty in arranging with the door-keeper, or rather with the door-keeper’s competent dame, exactly just where and how the whole lot of his men had best encamp that night, and what special additions to their already substantial supply of food and drink they might expect to receive. He then found no difficulty at all in smoothing the way with Lady Val and the Baron, not only for the reception of Peter Peregrinus, but even — and this made everybody in the Fortress exchange puzzled and excited comments — for the conferring of a solitary night’s rest in a suitable chamber upon Lilith of Lost Towers.

Once safely alone in a small room at the back of the Fortress, a room which their nurse, in that instinctive forestalling of awkward situations which had made her what she was to all of them, had reserved as a sort of retiring-place for herself, our lonely traveller, whose magnetic power had led him to regard himself as Antichrist, decided that it would be silly to play any of his tricks with “Little Pretty” while he was only half-alive by reason of an overpowering need for sleep.

So, removing the said “Little Pretty” from its coign of vantage at the fulcrum of its owner’s life-force, and placing it on a small bracket at the foot of a stone image of Our Lady that had obviously come from over-sea, for its whole style suggested North Italy, he managed with the most reverent and the most delicate care to prop it up in such a manner that “it”, or “her”, or “he”, was supported by the droop of the Virgin’s robe as it hung between her knees.

This duty having been satisfactorily performed, with a final worshipful glance at the foot-long object of his veneration, now safely if sacrilegiously propped up at the knees of the Mother of God, Petrus flung his sword on the floor, wrapped the bed-blanket round him just as he was, and sank into an impenetrable sleep.

What he would have done if there hadn’t been a clear sky and a three-quarter Moon that night, together with a window through which this luminary could shine, and a particularly well-polished metallic receptacle for both solid and liquid human excreta from which its light was brilliantly reflected, is indeed a question. He would either have had to play his tricks in pitch darkness or he would have had to give them up till the arrival of dawn.

As it was, it must have been about midnight when he awoke; and awoke to find himself in full moonlight. He tossed off the blanket, picked up his sword, still in its black sheath, and hung it on the handle of the closed door, a handle very imposingly moulded and much more like the hilt of a Roman sword than was the object which he suspended from it.

Then he rushed to the base of the image against the wall, extricated his egregious darling from between the knees of Our Lady, and held it up in the moonlight. The lodestone was about seven inches in length and about one inch in diameter. Its colour was a pale pinkish grey touched here and there with blots and smears of a dim yellowish tint. But one end of the thing was a good deal thicker than the other, and this thicker end did unquestionably possess a certain remote likeness to a human head.

Nor was an obscure resemblance to a human face quite wanting either, if a person did what the thing’s owner was certainly always doing, that is to say if he made a lively use of the imagination. The thing, however, never changed its expression. No imagination could make it do that.

But its expression was one which, if this dressing-room of the old nurse of the Fortress could speak, it would have described as “wicked curiosity”.

With those peering eyes at such a queer angle to each other, with that almost frog-like nose and mouth, with that forehead that seemed to bulge where it ought to retreat, with those ears that looked as if in the endless process of listening to dirty sounds and yet more dirty echoes, they had been worn into filthy cracks, all these characteristics only required a little imagination to be the perfect attributes of a lodestone converted into an orectic and prurient spy.

Sitting on the edge of his bed after pressing to his lips in the moonlight the particular smear on his pet’s visage that he liked to pretend was its mouth, Petrus now jigged the thing up and down in the air towards what he assumed to be the southern and eastern and western portions of the Fortress.

He vaguely took it for granted, from what seemed to him to be the position of the Moon, that he was sitting with his back to the north; and it was one of his occult theories that it was always from the north that great magicians — and of course Antichrist must be a very great magician — always came and always summoned their devils.

The southern populations of the world might be gluttonous, lecherous, and wine-bibbing, but it was from the north, and from no other quarter of the compass, that Satan always set forth on his goings to and fro over the earth.

There is no doubt that, compared with the authentic inventive genius of Friar Bacon, Master Peter of Maricourt had only an extremely exalted imagination. For years he had used this imagination to complete in every way he could what might be called the feminization of his precious lodestone. What he had to do at this moment was not at all easy. He had to make a guess as to the particular direction, north or south or east or west of where he was now, in which a room had been found for Lilith in this ramshackle edifice. But assuming, from the outrageous tales he had listened to when with Mother Wurzel and her daughter at Deadstone, that Tilton would be far too occupied with his sister Lil-Umbra to give Lilith a thought, he forced “Little Pretty” to concentrate her dangerous attention upon young John.

In fact he went so far as to direct the whole of his own will-power, and the whole of the magnetism in “Little Pretty” that worked with this will-power, towards establishing an erotic connection between young John and Lilith.

“The time must be now,” he told himself, “about half-way between midnight and one o’clock. In that case, shouldn’t ‘Little Pretty’ draw young John to slip quietly on bare feet or in silent sandals to Lilith’s room? She’ll be wise enough to guess who it is if he knocks gently at her door, and once together he’ll be her slave forever!

“That it’s such a devil of an effort to me to do this may simply be because I’m her slave! I am, I am, I am her slave; I confess it. But not perhaps forever. I’ve enjoyed her so fully, so utterly, so completely — and from such enjoyment the male animal enjoys anyway the sensation of domination — that I already feel to a certain degree free from her: not altogether free of course, because I shall never to the end of my days enjoy anyone as I do her, but still a good deal more free than I ever thought would be possible before we visited the Cerne Giant. Well, Master John, you’ve got, you’ve got, you’ve got to go to Lilith’s room!”