John Powys - The Brazen Head

He pointed the head of the lodestone towards a certain queer stain on one of the walls, a stain that he had noticed directly he entered the room, which had by this time associated itself in his mind with a spurt of blood from some rarely affected human vein.

It was at this moment to his unspeakable surprise that he heard a knocking at his own door. He plunged his “Little Pretty” into a much more natural place than the knees of the Madonna, and scrambling across his bed, for he had been sitting with his back to his own door as he thought of young John’s door, he unhooked his sword from the bronze door-handle, and holding it, still in its black sheath, in his right hand, he opened the door with his left.

It was Lilith herself who now slipped into his room, slim as a hamadryad from the Moon who has descended straight from the clouds, and arrayed in a floating white night-gown much too large for her, which she had borrowed for that one night from Lil-Umbra. This garment hung so loosely on her slender figure that, as she stretched herself upon his bed, Petrus of Picardy was compelled, for the third time in his whole life, to give himself up to such a wave of passionate adoration that he felt he could sacrifice even the pride of being Antichrist in his worship of those pearly contours of Lilith’s body, now resting there like a white shell half-revealed and half-concealed beneath a wavy tangle of foam as it lies on the sand.

Although he had already enjoyed her that same day at the foot of the Cerne Giant to a degree that he supposed must have exhausted all his seminal energy, and though this day itself had followed a night of the grotesque debaucheries of Deadstone, it suddenly came over him that, if he clutched his lodestone tightly enough in his hand while he was enjoying her now, he would find himself endowed with a superhuman power.

And so it did, in God’s truth and the Devil’s truth, happen, before the two of them were asleep. And, as may be imagined, the sleep that followed this Elysian ecstasy was so deep for them both that the dawn was well advanced before Petrus realized that the light which was making his eyes blink so hopelessly as he tried to open them was the light not of the Moon but of the Sun.

“I’ll wrap this round me,” whispered Lilith hurriedly, snatching up the blanket from the bed, “and, when I’m dressed to go out, I’ll come back here for you; for I want you to take me home. So don’t go till I come!” And, as he kissed her, Petrus recognized that this really was a solemn league and covenant between them.

His dressing took no time at all, and he had comfortable leisure to caress his “Little Pretty”, otherwise his demonic lodestone, to his heart’s content, as well as to make the pillows and the extremely primitive goat-skin rug that covered the foot of the bed look as if the room had been used solely as a retiring place for relieving human bowels; and since there was no way he could empty that particular piece of furniture, all he could do was to sit on the bed and wait.

When at last Lilith returned, she looked as fresh as a wild, white convolvulus on an ivy-covered wall.

“I’ve found a way out,” she whispered hurriedly, “and once out I know how to dodge this camp of King’s Men. Just come quietly after me, step by step as quickly as you can, and we’ll soon be clear of this blessed place.”

Petrus obeyed, and she led him out of the Fortress by a small door among the sheds and stables, the look of which and the general atmospheric odour of that part of the establishment reminded him of the occasion when the Lord of the Manor had suffered a fall wrestling with Spardo’s deformed horse, and when the idea of filling the prophetic role of the actual Antichrist had first entered his own head.

Lilith was perfectly right about her ability to dodge the camp of the King’s Men. At one point they did catch the voice of Perspicax giving orders in that effective competent way that was a second nature with him. And though it can well be believed how tightly Petrus clutched his little monster to his navel at this sound, he was far too scared of throwing everything into a chaos, in which anything might happen, to take the risk of pointing the lodestone at this man from Iscala who boasted himself to be a first cousin of the maker of the Brazen Head.

But the authoritative voice of Roger Bacon’s relative from Iscala had hardly died down, when lo! directly in their path through the forest, appeared a group of about a dozen men, unmistakably clothed in the red-brown attire of Lost Towers. These men were advancing with the swift, furtive, stealthy, wild-animal-like self-confidence of a perfectly trained body of woodsmen, to whom every aspect of forest life had been familiar from earliest boyhood.

Without a cry of delight or the faintest sign of surprise Lilith ran towards them; and in a pulse-beat of his agitated heart our all-too-human Antichrist began searching with the tip of his tongue the whole surface of the cavernous roof of his mouth, as if that tongue of his, which could be a deadly sting, had also the power of transforming itself into a divining-rod, a rod that could reveal the presence of any drop of the water of life in any portion of the skull that contained it.

But while Lilith was gliding in and out of the ranks of her red-brown adherents, like a “Wood-White” butterfly dominating a confused rabble of billowing and swirling “Meadow-Browns”, there suddenly emerged, walking towards him in an extremely dignified, though somewhat dramatic manner, out of the centre of the red-brown men, no less a personage than Bonaventura himself!

This tremendous redeemer of footpads was evidently deeply impressed by the revelation that Lilith, whose entrancing body he had only resisted because God destined him to be Pope or the maker of Popes, had a man-friend.

He recognized at once the black cap Petrus was wearing as part of the uniform of one of the best troops among the soldiers of the King of France; and the wild hope rushed into his mind that this siren of a girl had just come back from crossing the Channel with a body of men as large, if not larger, than the King’s Men who would shortly be waking from their sleep in the camp of this Perspicax of Iscala or Ilchester.

This descent upon Wessex of the King’s Men from London had been the second startling blow that Bonaventura had received in the last few days. The first was the appearance, totally unforeseen by him, of Albertus of Cologne, for whom, as the most famous of all teachers in the Dominican order, he, as the best known Franciscan throughout the world, felt the emotions that all of us experience, though some of us are cleverer than others in hiding them, when confronted by a successful rival.

Petrus of Maricourt clutched “Little Pretty” tightly against his skin and looked his opponent full in the face. “Mistress Lilith told me,” he said, “that I might have the proud pleasure of meeting the late legate of the Holy Father and the greatest doctor that our Holy Faith possesses in Paris and Oxford, but I never for one moment imagined that her words would come true. Your eminence knows what young ladies are, and of course I have already heard that your reverence disapproves of Friar Bacon’s Brazen Head. In fact, to be quite truthful, I have answered a number of people on this point by telling them bluntly and squarely that some of Friar Bacon’s inventions are under examination by the highest authorities in the Church, in case they may turn out to have no divine sanction but, on the contrary—” here Petrus bowed with his head and scraped with his foot, as he had seen his mother do when the Lord of Maricourt walked down the street—“on the contrary, are the work of the Devil.”

“What, if I may enquire,” asked Bonaventura, “is your name? And what, if you will absolve me of gross inquisitiveness, is your purpose in visiting these parts?”