John Powys - The Brazen Head

“Come, my friends, my companions, my brothers, let us make haste to show to these land-robbers and sea-shore thieves what their true position on this earth really is! They are all the same, every one of them! Handing down they are what they’ve stolen, from father to son, and son to grandson; and all the good earth and all the precious sea-shore of which they have robbed us curses them as wicked thieves! Come let us show them what we think of them! To your tents, O Israel! ”

There must have been some immemorial power in this final cry, uttered in a really terrifying voice by old Dod Pole; for a most striking result followed at once, followed with that thundering finality that mankind knows as the most awe-inspiring sound in all human experience — a reverberating echo.

“Off with ye! Off with ye!” were now the words that rose from that whole heaving mass of red-brown rascality; and what they all proceeded to do came with the shock of a long-predicted earthquake that has now come. They tore off their mud-coloured tunics and jerkins, yes! and even in some cases their breeches too; though it interested the half-mad intelligence of Sir Mort to note that they had the wit — and he smiled sympathetically as he observed this — to throw nothing away.

Warm though the sun was, there was quite enough of autumn already in the air to make this a natural gesture, especially as the marshes and swamps to the west of Lost Towers only ended at the sand-dunes of the channel.

What most of them did was to wrap their mud-coloured vestments round their necks, though some, it is true, made bundles of them which they carried under their arms or even on their heads. But it was to the beat of the reverberating echo of Dod Pole’s “Off with ye!” that they vanished among the pine-trunks of the forest and the reedstalks of the swamp.

And so now, wholly devoid of any defence at all, the great gates of the ancient stronghold of Lost Towers stood wide open. And they stood open in front of the most fantastic conglomeration of people that had ever gathered together in that part of Wessex for any purpose, whether in the stone age, or in the bronze age, or in the age of King Arthur.

The whole company gazed in silence upon those open doors at the base of that huge tower; and it was as if their united will-power had called upon Lilith to appear. For there, before the whole lot of them, Lilith now defiantly stood; and it seemed as if, in her complete loneliness, she were uttering a contemptuous challenge to every event and every object and every earthly person and every super-earthly person in the entire multiverse.

And Petrus Peregrinus, as he watched her, felt an overpowering wave of emotion sweep over him. “Yes!” he thought. “ You , and you alone, come what may, in this world or any other world, are my one true love, and with you at my side I shall feel myself to be the real and only real Antichrist, destined by the creative power of Nature herself to destroy once and for all this poisonous, this corrupt, this rotten, this suppurating, this decomposing, this infecting, this contaminatory, this fulsome, this fetid, this fatal farce of an explanation of life, based on a crazy belief in the Persons of the Trinity.”

Rendered almost heroic, cruel coward as he was, by this wild resurgence of his love for Lilith, Petrus of Maricourt rushed up the slope, and leaping over the corpses and splashing through the blood, was on the point of ascending the stone pavement in the centre of which she stood, when between them, hot and perspiring with the effort he was making, appeared in grey and greedy stateliness, the figure of Bonaventura.

“O St. Francis, help your child now or never!” was what the man prayed; and with every nerve in his body he announced to himself, “This is my moment! I shall be the next Pope myself or the appointer of the next Pope! I must lay my hand, before this whole crowd, upon this girl’s head!”

In the twinkling of an eye, yes! in the pulse-beat of the most incorrigible vein in his whole body, Petrus turned the blunt thickskulled cranium of his “Little Pretty” full upon this grey-garbed interloper. “Off you go, my stately friend!” he murmured in his heart as he kept the other end — the “tail” we might call it — of his deadly lodestone pressed tight against himself.

Nor was the response for a second in doubt.

“That girl is too great a temptation!” the appointer of Popes told himself. “I should do for myself if I touched the tip of her fingers! A person can’t have it both ways! In a country of devils such as this England is, a natural-born Saint like me can make no headway. I have heard that even their famous Robert Grosseteste thought sometimes about making Brazen Images that could speak! No! Where there is any northern influence at all some sort of devilry’s sure to enter.

“Yes, dear God, I hear you, dear God, you are the only one in the whole world who understands me, I hear you clearly! You are advising me to take ship at once for France, and when well across their channel of sea-devils to make my way to Dijon and then to Avignon. No! I’ll be too dignified to bid anybody farewell. I expect they will listen all the better to that shallow orator from Cologne.

“They tell me that he, just like this Bacon from Ilchester, has long been promising all the boys who come to see him, especially if they come from Italy, grants from the Pope, for O! how he longs to put a little devilry from the north into the mind of that pupil of his called Aquinas! But you won’t succeed, you ugly great lecturer on the loves of bed-bugs and on the moral yearnings of will-o’-the-wisps! You won’t succeed!

“No! No! The north will always breed new devils for the south to exorcize. Yes, I must be off at once to the nearest sea-port. Why! There is that funny horse with the swollen neck, and that crazy fellow who takes it about! God must have sent that pair especially to take me to the coast!”

With these words comforting his heart, Bonaventura strode off. He knew well that he, the great Franciscan Pope-maker, if not the next Pope, was simply running away. But he justified his precipitate flight on the sound rational ground — and the unprejudiced chronicler must recognize that this was an authentic justification — that to be defeated in single spiritual combat by Albertus would be a much more serious blow to his personal career than a swift strategic retreat, a retreat which could always be explained as a sudden imperative call from Rome.

With all these thoughts settling themselves in his mind he now strode with as much dignity and self-possession down the slope as he had done a few minutes earlier up the slope, and even Albertus himself couldn’t resist observing with a sort of humorous self-derogatory admiration, that was almost like the feeling of a rival athlete, the way Bonaventura managed his feet and his steps under that grey robe as he descended, calling aloud in authoritative tones to Spardo, and, when at Cheiron’s side, hesitating not a second to mount the animal, an effort which he carried through with dignified ease and even with a certain grace.

Spardo himself, it must be confessed, was not greatly pleased by being taken possession of in this wholesale manner. Even if his employment by Bonaventura turned out well as a matter of business, he was not the son of his father for nothing. There was something ignoble in forsaking this tragic drama at the crucial point. But what was the alternative?

Cheiron was responding with interest to the way Bonaventura managed the reins; and the best thing he himself could do now was to make an exit worthy of leaving Lost Towers to its fate. And a dramatic exit he did manage to make. He suddenly seized, as he followed Cheiron and Cheiron’s stately rider, one of the massive pikestaves, which were really very dangerous weapons, carried by the King’s Men.