John Powys - The Brazen Head

For the first time since they first met Raymond noticed that Lil-Umbra had difficulty in replying. But with an effort she spoke clearly and distinctly.

“Something terrible is going to happen! I feel it all through me. But not to us, Raymond; no, not to you or to me. But stop, Raymond. Turn and look at those closed doors!”

He gazed at her in silence, and they both swung round, her eyes wide and terrified, staring at the entrance to the Castle, but his still fixed on her face. But as so often happens in a human crisis, they were suddenly jerked out of their tension by a voice at Raymond’s side; and there, close at his elbow, was none other than Lay-Brother Tuck!

“He’s gone to sleep, my lord of Laon! He’s gone to sleep, my lady of Leon! And I thought perhaps you’d take him back to the Priory on one of your horses and perhaps take me on the other! If you will agree to celebrate your union by this great charity before going to — to wherever you are going for your wedding-night — to the Fortress I expect — I can promise you not only my own special prayers, but the special prayers of the whole Priory of Bumset!

“The most lucky first night,” Brother Tuck went on, “that a bride and bridegroom can possibly have for their first bed together is a great and sweet charity, such as it would be to both me and the Friar if you found it in you to do for us this gallant and beautiful deed!”

Lay-Brother Tuck now began to bob and babble and bubble and burble round them so buoyantly that the tender clasp with which Lil-Umbra was holding Raymond’s hand became first an indignant pressure and then an angry clutch.

“Bridegroom with Bride you be!” he went on. “And I be a’begging of ‘ee to let me’s wone baby-self and Friar’s man-mighty self sit astride of your ‘osses while you makes ‘em gallop. ‘Gallopy up and gallopy to it! Gie her a sup and she’ll let ‘un do it!’ Don’t ‘ee understand, O most elegant lord of far-away Leon, that if the blessed Friar be behind she, and me wone self be behind thee, it won’t take long to be at Priory door; and a holy charity you’ll have performed.”

Lay-Brother Tuck kept bobbing round them so vigorously and making with his short bare arms so many effective if quite inaudible shoo-ings and shush-ings that, in their present dazed state, Lil-Umbra upset by her premonition of catastrophe, and Raymond wondering what Lady Val would say if they did follow Tuck’s suggestion and spend their wedding night in the Fortress, they were rushed down the hill just as if they’d been a goose and a gander, until they actually reached the oak under which Friar Bacon, in complete abstraction from all immediate events, was composing one of his most comprehensive sentences as to the relation between astronomy and astrology; and before they really knew what had happened to them, they were cantering rapidly towards Bumset and towards an extremely bewildered reception by Prior Bog.

Albertus Magnus of Cologne, having finished what in the energetic and impulsive simplicity of his mind he had suddenly conceived to be the will of the Maker and Sustainer of our incomprehensible universe, came slowly down the slope towards the group of manorial lords and their families who now surrounded Tilton and his bride Una. To the end of that generation some sticklers for local tradition persisted in calling Una by the more romantic name of Oona; and in his desire to make his brother as poetical as he could, so that he might be as far as possible from his own scientific and philosophical ideal, young John always warmly and ardently supported the Oona side in the division of opinion as to this maiden’s name.

Indeed it more than once crossed the mind of Lil-Umbra, when she noted Tilton’s interest in this beautiful member of what might be called the revolutionary family of old Dod Pole, whose influence was so great among the serfs of the Manor of Roque, that there was really something more daring and unconventional about Tilton’s unashamed attraction to a girl of this class than in all young John’s free-thinking attitude towards the foundations of the Christian faith.

What on earth their mother would think, what on earth their mother would feel, what on earth their mother would do and say, when Tilton and his bride, whether she was called Una or Oona, got home to the family hearth that night, she hardly dared to imagine.

“I mustn’t, I can’t wish this man from Cologne hadn’t come among us,” she said to herself. “But with Mother’s excitable nerves where anything to do with marriage comes in, and her sensitiveness about noble blood and noble manners, she may be furious with Father for letting this Albertus marry us off like this, as calmly as a Spanish prince breeds Arabian horses!”

But it was not of Tilton’s bride that Lil-Umbra was thinking as she accompanied Raymond in their wild ride to the Priory, carrying with them both the creator of the Brazen Head and the Priory court fool, Lay-Brother Tuck; it was about that premonitory shock she had suffered just before they began their ride through the forest.

What on earth had that meant, that vision she had suddenly seen of the whole of Lost Towers going up in fragments like the flaming scoriae lava from a bursting volcano, up, up, up, towards a black and thundering sky!

It was curious that both the great manor-lords, the father of Lil-Umbra and the devoted friend of Raymond, accepted without a murmur Albertus’ high-handed meddling with the destiny of marriage. Yes, both the scrupulous Baron Boncor and the unscrupulous Sir Mort Abyssum, took with complete sang froid the startling events that now began to occur. These events which future chroniclers will, let us hope, describe as calmly as we are describing them now, were heralded by a singular fit, or seizure, or obsession, so odd that it would be difficult to account for it, on the part of young Sir William Boncor, who surely must have been the youngest of all knights who ever received the accolade.

It is a faithful chronicler’s duty, not only to his sovereign lord but to his own lawful heirs and descendants, to record the queerest occurrences just as they occur without either obsequious or malicious exaggeration. And what Sir William did at this point was to dance a grotesque dance, a dance that had become popular at all the country fairs in Cornwall and had just spread into Wessex, a dance that was called “Jig it for Judy” and that had gestures in it that were more amusing than seemly.

Lady Ulanda at first pretended not to notice Sir William’s whirligig arabesque, but when the stately figure of Albertus of Cologne in his Dominican weeds joined their group and looked askance at this inexplicable tom-foolery, she let go her hold on her husband’s wrist and gave her son a shrewish cuff across his left ear-hole.

This maternal rebuke having successfully quieted her youthful knight-errant, Ulanda turned her attention to the Brazen Head, and with her hand once more caressing Baron Boncor’s wrist, as if she had chosen him as her only true-love that very day, she set herself to wonder whether anything especially disconcerting would happen to her if she suddenly snatched up the flintiest of the stones that sprinkled the hillside, and rushing straight at that Brazen Head in defiance of the Jewish couple who appeared to be guarding it, gave it a few of the straight blows she burned and throbbed to give its human creator.

The sun was already well-past its meridian, and there was a queer dark cloud resembling the head of a giant just above the sea-ward horizon, when everyone heard far away to the north a distinct roll of thunder.

“What the devil are all these people waiting for?” Perspicax enquired of Colin and Clamp, who, from an instinctive feeling that when King’s Men from London awaited events, events were sure to arrive, felt reluctant to depart.