The Brazen Head (40 page)

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.

“I
think
I saw old Dod Pole’s Bet hurrying off home with Bailiff Randy’s daughter Crumb,” replied Colin rather
wistfull
; for he had a tender feeling for both these little maids, especially for the exquisite way Crumb’s hair would float on the wind when there was wind on which it could float.

“I can tell you whither those little birds are flitting!” threw in the unequivocal Clamp. “They’re off to take the news to Lady Val!”

The prediction of Clamp proved correct. At that familiar little postern, whence from her infancy, and before she had so much as heard of the formidable House of Abyssum, she had peered out into the forest, Lady Val was even now listening to the sound of horses’ hooves growing first nearer and then further.

And well indeed might the lady listen to those hoof-beats, for the horses were bringing, not only Roger Bacon and
Brother Tuck to the gate of the Priory, but Lil-Umbra and Raymond de Laon to that very door.

“Don’t ‘ee cry, child! They will all be back soon!”
whispered
Nurse Rampant on her left hand.

“Not without having seen and having spoke to the girt Devil himself, every thumping one of them!” grunted old mother Guggery on her right hand.

Young John had remained standing alone after Lil-Umbra and Raymond had carried off Roger Bacon and Brother Tuck. He had heard that roll of thunder. He had seen that cloud like a giant’s head. And he was now staring at the closed doors of Lost Towers. Why he was compelled to stare at them he could not have told a living soul, not even his master Roger Bacon, for whom his devoted love went beyond all reason.

But suddenly young John saw those doors open wide and two human forms holding each other by the hand come forth, the forms of Petrus Peregrinus of Maricourt and Lilith of Lost Towers. Young John had always dreaded certain particular mental images, and the worst of all among these was the image of something different from the male organ of generation being thrust into a female’s womb. Another was the image of a fiery rod being thrust into a man’s anus.

Both these terrifying images now rushed simultaneously into young John’s mind and even seemed to incarnate themselves in the human figures of Petrus Peregrinus and Lilith.

But the moment Petrus Peregrinus began speaking, these horrible images vanished from young John’s mind—vanished forever, nor, until his death long afterwards, ever returned to trouble him. They did not even dare—although horrible images of this sort clearly possess devilish intelligencies of their own—to come near him on his deathbed.

“I am Antichrist!”
were the words that Petrus was now
shouting
, and shouting in a voice whose appallingly penetrating tone none who heard it that day ever forgot to the end of their lives.

It was as if some power, far beyond the reach of any wanderer from Picardy, had spoken out of a hiding-place as old as the world. What young John did in the depths of his mind to drive into silence, not only the insane voice of this Antichrist from Maricourt, but the much less insane and for that very
reason the far more loathsome voices of the treacherous and hypocritical and meretricious champions of a Christ with whom they had less in common than had His most shameless enemy; what young John did in the depths of his mind to
overwhelm
both of these was a very singular thing.

He gathered up all those wild and strange speculations about microscopes and telescopes and air-vessels and sub-marine vessels, of which Friar Bacon was always talking to him, and made of them in his mind a great mechanical shield which was so convoluted in its metalwork that it could repel any sound in the whole universe; and the echo it threw back when that Antichrist cry reached it was at once so rocky and aerial and oceanic and fiery that, as it rolled into space, it carried away with it both the pious hypocrisy that had been pierced by the voice of Antichrist and its own heroic recalcitrance to them both. In fact it carried everything away.

But when the echo from that shield he had mentally created from all those metallic elements died down, young John saw to his astonishment Lilith fling one of her long white arms about her companion’s shoulders and swing him round till they both faced the castle.

Then young John saw the girl raise up both her arms, and he noticed that she held in her hands a curious little object like an extra large pen or pencil or a leafless hog-weed-stalk or a small six-inches-long bull-rush.

This little object Lilith first lifted up towards the sky, and then, with an incredibly swift movement of her arm, turned it against the Castle. And at once, clear before John’s eyes, and before the eyes of all who were present, the whole structure of Lost Towers went up into the air, went up with the swiftness of a falling star, only it was a star that in this case was not falling but rising, until it vanished from sight in the blue depths of the empyrean. Then both those two figures turned to each other, each of them with raised arms. And it became clear to John for one blinding second that all four hands were clasped round that strange little object.

“They are pointing it at their own bodies!” he said to himself. And his vision of what they were doing was indeed the truth. Both their bodies now burst into flame and became one single fiery ball; and as John watched it, this burning orb
became so dazzling as to shine in his eyes with the blaze of a sapphire, and he perceived that it was moving fast through the air towards the Brazen Head. At that moment he heard the Head speak.

“Time
was
,” it said. “Time is,” it said. “And time
will
——”

But the burning meteor then fell upon it, and neither it nor what destroyed it was ever seen again.

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) was born in Derbyshire, brought up in the West Country (the Somerset–Dorset border area was to have a lasting influence on him), went to Cambridge University and then became a teacher and lecturer mainly in the USA where he lived for about thirty years. On returning to the UK, after a short spell in Dorset, he settled in Wales in 1935 where he lived for the rest of his long life. In addition to his
Autobiography
his masterpieces are considered to be
Wolf Solent, Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands
and
Porius
. But his lesser, or less well-known, works shouldn’t be overlooked, they spring from the same weird, mystical, brilliant and obsessive imagination.