The Brazen Head (35 page)

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?”

Our traveller clutched with his left hand the body of “Little Pretty” under his clothes, and placing his right hand against the hilt of his eternally sheathed sword, he proceeded to balance his bottom upon this convenient knot of hammered metal-work and got strength and relief by so doing.

Indeed for a moment or two, as he listened to Bonaventura repeating his question with the judicial unction of an official executioner at the oriental court of Karakorum, he experienced a delicious thrill of complete irresponsibility, as if he had been an anonymous figure seated on a marble stool impervious to the goings on of mortals.

“My name, your Eminence, is Pierre de Maricourt, and I come from Picardy. My profession, as you see, is that of a soldier of the King of France. But I am also a student of the ancient tongues and I spend my wages in buying books. I know a little Greek and Latin, your Eminence, already;
and I hope, before I die, to be able to learn a little Hebrew. I came over to have an opportunity of acquiring at close quarters a few details about the kind of mistakes—in orthodox divinity I mean—which Friar Bacon has been making.”

Petrus spoke slowly from more than one motive, and from more than one motive too he kept his terrific black eyes fixed as magnetically as he could upon Bonaventura’s face. Beneath his clothes, as you may believe, he kept the head of Little Pretty—for he knew by touch her head from her tail—aimed straight at his interlocutor and it soon became clear that Little Pretty’s effect, aided by the intensity of his own magnetic gaze was overmastering.

Bonaventura began showing signs of extreme agitation. He kept turning round and glancing anxiously at the
brown-and
-red jerkins and breeches of the group he had just left, as if he were afraid that the presence of their young mistress among them might dispel and destroy his own authority over them, and even result in some form of action entirely different from the line he wished them to take.

In his own secret consciousness Bonaventura was more upset than he had been for years. “I must,” he told himself, “adopt some powerful course of action with this accurst runaway from Picardy, who evidently is a lecherous pick-up of Lilith’s. I must frighten him in some sort of way.”

Meanwhile Petrus had commenced in dead silence conveying his wishes to “Little Pretty”.

“We must
will
him to lift up first one of his legs and then the other,” he told her, articulating his intention very definitely and moving her head, still pressed against his skin, so that it should point straight at Bonaventura’s skull. “First one and then the other, my treasure!” he repeated.

And behold! it actually happened; yes! it happened just exactly as our scientific student of magnetism had indicated to his precious magnet. Up went one leg of the General of the Grey Friars, while he made a shuffling movement with the foot still on the ground.

“Now make him lift the other, my sweet!” And down came Bonaventura’s left leg and up went his right. “Make the old sod dance a proper jig now, pretty one. We’ll learn him to be a Legate!”

And to the absolute amazement of a couple of Lost Towers men who had turned to look back while the rest of the crew were following Lilith into the Forest, and to the even greater astonishment of Friar Roger’s cousin from London, the
enterprising
Perspicax, who having been invited the night before to take his breakfast with Tilton and young John and possibly even with their parents too, if the Baron got back in time from his morning jaunt, now stood at Peter Peregrinus’ elbow.

“Is that a new kind of penance?” enquired the commander of the King’s Men.

“Do you know, Capitaine, I really do believe that it is!” replied Maître Pierre de Maricourt. “And the odd thing is,” he continued, twisting “Little Pretty” around against his own body so that her head pointed straight at the centre of the intruder’s not very high forehead, “the odd thing is that this particular penance is infectious! I even feel like joining it myself!” And he shuffled a little with the toes and heels of his sandals in the long grass.

To the commander of the King’s Men this untimely dance was indeed infectious. He raised his well-armoured knees in this grotesque jig even higher than the stately personage before them was lifting his grey robe; and he even went so far, for he had a daring and reckless spirit under his military restraint, as to stretch out his right hand and seize, much to this latter’s discomfiture, Bonaventura’s left hand.

This crazy dance, which might well have been, so Petrus grimly assured himself as he watched them, a dance in honour of an East-Indian idol, performed at Karakorum before the Khan, went on without a pause till the last of the red-brown bandits, together with their “leukolenian” or white-armed princess, had disappeared, and until a little group of highly amused but somewhat puzzled King’s Men had come up from the camp and arranged themselves in a line, evidently waiting for the morning’s proper business to begin.

It was from sheer exhaustion that both these dancers, Bonaventura in his noble grey garments and Perspicax in his by no means ignoble royal colours, finally and simultaneously sank, side by side, upon the moss and small ferns and
wood-grass
and ground-lichen beneath a half-circle of the massive trunks of five majestic pines. Mingled with an infernal satisfaction
which distorted his face and made his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth—and of course all chroniclers of Peter Peregrinus who neglect the physical motions of his tongue are dodging something essential—was a totally unexpected pity for the prostrate Perspicax.

What brought this pity into the erratic heart of our traveller was the simple pride which his humiliated victim had taken in being a soldier. This pride brought back to him his own childhood, and suggested to his mind the behaviour of the stately officials of the castle at Maricourt, and he couldn’t help muttering aloud a familiar tag of Homeric Greek that he had learnt as a boy in a monastic school: “Ephane mega seema!” “There appeared a great sign!”

And indeed as he watched the King’s Men lift up their commander and carry him off to their camp, and as he
himself
was assisting Bonaventura to his feet, there appeared, coming from between those enormous pine-trees, whose branchless trunks enhanced the romance of every event that occurred beneath them, no less a couple of celebrities than Albertus Magnus of Cologne and Friar Roger Bacon!

It was clear in a second to the wielder of “Little Pretty” that the great Dominican, who looked indeed a rampart of strength in his singular head-dress and peat-black raiment, had
compelled
the Prior of Bumset to liberate his captive, at least for a time.

“Whither were they bent now?” he thought. “Who could say? They must have started at dawn from the Priory! The Cologne man must have stayed the night there; perhaps in the very chamber of Roger Bacon, with whom he may have been arguing and discussing all night. There’s simply no limit,” thus Peter Peregrinus’ thoughts ran on, “to these learned idiots’ powers of disputation.”

Curiously enough in the agitating look-skirmish and
gesture-drama
that ensued between these four men—with “Little Pretty”, the deadly lodestone, pressed against the skin of Master Peter—the one who conducted himself with the greatest ease and the most successful assurance was Bonaventura.

Master Peter, as you can well imagine, didn’t miss this fact; his agile mind kept turning it over and over, and even as he hurried to be the first to speak, he decided that this superiority
in social self-possession came from the fact of Bonaventura’s much wider experience of the contemporary world and more intimate knowledge of the royal courts of Europe than Friar Bacon could possibly have—or Albertus either, in spite of his two years as a Bishop.