John Powys - The Brazen Head

“If you’re only good,

When you feel your heart prick,

In the depths of the wood

You will hear a Tick-Tick.

If you’re only bad,

When you feel your heart burst,

You’ll go howling mad

And take best for worst!

With the end of your rod

Mix honey and gall,

So that neither God

Nor the Devil gets all!

A drop of the worst

Is the way to the best:

Let the Devil take the first:

And let God have the rest!”

Bob Talirag could see that to the Baron of Cone this blasphemous jingle was by no means unpleasing; but the news brought by Auntie Moll, when the old lady returned from the interior of Bumset, was so startling that it drove away all other impressions.

It appeared that Albert the Great of Cologne had spent the night with Friar Bacon, and then, before any one in the Priory save Brother Tuck, who was too drunk to know his head from his tail, was awake, had carried the Friar off with him, no one knew whither. Bob Talirag’s aunt was pretty certain that it was to the camp of the King’s Men from London that the two of them had gone, but she wouldn’t swear to this.

“Well, Mistress,” said Boncor, “that’s where we must go! And please accept this small token of our gratitude for your information.”

Saying this he must have handed her a golden coin; for the final impression Bob Talirag had of his Aunt Moll was of her supporting Lay-Brother Tuck, bed-clothes and all, with one arm, as they went in under the curved archway, while with the other she shook her clenched fist, containing the coin she had received, in an ecstasy of exultation.

If the visit of Baron Boncor of Cone to the Priory of Bumset was too late to achieve anything to the easing of the tension in Wessex, the visit of Sir Mort to Boncor’s wife Ulanda and her extremely ingenuous son was, from Sir Mort’s point of view, a triumphant success. He found Lady Ulanda in more than harmony with his project, and it proved easy enough, with the assistance of the lively Colin and the resolute Clamp, not to speak of the youthful Sir William, who might himself have well been called a “King’s Man”, to add the toughest of the Cone retainers to his own stalwarts.

“I’ll come with you! I’ll come with you! I’ll come with you!” cried Lady Ulanda; and then to her son: “No! Never mind where your Father’s gone! It’s a grand chance for you to show your metal as a true knight of our King, who is a nephew of Richard the Lion-hearted! Besides, I’m coming myself! Yes! my child, your mother herself is coming! I’ve not got the blood of Rursuk and King Stephen for nothing; Sir Mort here agrees with me that we don’t need Brazen Heads, or Grey Friars either, to guard our shores!

“Farewell good Turgo! Greet your master when he comes back, and say I told you to tell him that I shall be very angry indeed if he follows us! Tell him that, till his shoulder is entirely healed, he must , he must behave as a wounded man. Where the devil he’s gone to now, only God knows! He has a way of climbing high hills before breakfast! I’ve never known him eat a morsel till he’s been to the ridiculous top of some silly hill! I can’t cure him of this madness. Yes! He’s up there!”—and the besotted lady pointed solemnly to four visible uplands, one on the north, one on the south, one on the east, and one on the west, and gazed so reverently at each of these small eminences, that Sir Mort, accustomed to Lady Val’s very different attitude to himself, began to wonder whether this formidable woman wouldn’t have benefited by the advice, when she was a child, of Nurse Rampant or even of somebody like Mother Guggery.

She had an expression on her face as she raised it to those four uplands as if her husband had been a divine personage rather than a human one.

But Sir Mort kept saying to himself: “Remember this, my good friend. The greatest worries in life come from the heads of these Orders of fanatical men, whatever they call themselves, and it’s worth while being a little rough, even with the elements you worship, if you can give a crack or two to these same bloody heads! There’s this head of the Franciscans trying to make the thieves of Lost Towers into heroic crusaders, if they’ll smash the Brazen Head along with its maker’s head! And now here’s this Cologne fellow, who’s head of the Black Friars, and who’s bound to be savagely hostile to every Grey Friar in the land, whether he’s a Head-maker or a Head-breaker!”

In such terms did what we have been taught to call “thought” pass in and out of Sir Mort’s skull. And meanwhile the whole party, made up of the best fighters of both the Fortress and Cone Castle, didn’t take long in reaching the outskirts of the former. There quite suddenly and without giving the lovers time to move, they came upon Peleg and Ghosta embracing each other beneath an oak tree.

After a hurried glance at Lady Ulanda — but that pathetically infatuated devotee of her lawful mate was so occupied with hill-tops that she had no eye for the roots of oaks — Sir Mort addressed the lovers in his most friendly and direct manner. He wasn’t even humorous at their expense. He took the whole thing naturally and, as some historian would have put it, “in his stride”.

“I tell you what you two might do for me,” he told them. “You might run into the armoury and bring out the Brazen Head. You could carry it, couldn’t you, Peleg? And you wouldn’t mind putting a hand on it, would you, lady, if the thing tottered a bit on his shoulders? You see, don’t you, that if we’re to finish off these devils by the help of the King’s Men, we mustn’t leave any hostages behind?”

It can be imagined how quickly the lovers obeyed him; and this daring worshipper of the elements was not to prod the earth, splash the rain-water in a hollow elder-stump, wave his spear in the air and brandish it towards the only star still visible, before the Mongolian Jew-giant, accompanied by Ghosta with one long white arm raised to the Thing on her friend’s shoulder, rejoined the weirdly heterogeneous group that, with Ulanda in its centre blazing with love and hate, now appeared at the entrance to Lost Towers.

Lilith was already there, and Perspicax with his King’s Men was already there. Never since he first fabricated his demonic lodestone, after a much longer time spent upon it than Friar Roger ever spent on the Brazen Head, had Petrus Peregrinus felt more excited than he felt at this supreme hour of his life.

He had had to earn his living under terribly heavy handicaps so as to get the leisure to study, whereas Bacon’s family after the defeat of Simon de Montfort had at least recovered something, though not very much, of their considerable manorial property. Not that Friar Roger had kept one silver piece of his private inheritance. The amount he had spent—“squandered”, some would say, “given back to the Devil”, was a more common opinion — on his scientific labours, was really startling. But it had all gone, and now he had nothing but what he could get, as a begging Friar, from the imaginative, the pious, and the charitable.

But here they were! Yes, here was the imprisoned Friar, and here was the wandering native of Maricourt, the one watching his Brazen Head swaying to and fro on the shoulder of a Jewish giant, and the other pressing his precious lodestone against his own body as he awaited his chance, not only to prove that in his person Antichrist had actually come, but to do something with “Little Pretty” in the presence of all men, that would show the world — even if he died while showing it — that by magnetism, and by magnetism alone, did the stars move on their courses, and Suns and Moons wax and wane!