The Brazen Head (7 page)

With nothing of Lilith’s desperation but with hardly less haste, Lil-Umbra now left her observation-post at that memorable arrow-slit and hurried by the nearest passage to the armoury. She was so agitated by what she had just heard and seen that the chance she might encounter Raymond de Laon had grown a bit blurred, more like the heavenly end to a complicated fairy-tale than something that might occur in a few minutes.

The armoury of the Fortress of Roque was, as anyone would have anticipated, considering the reputation for reckless violence of the ancestors of Lady Val, and considering the peculiar character of its new master, Sir Mort, as capacious and crowded a chamber as any in the place. At the very time when Lady Val, still making her heroic effort to recover from her fit of weakness and to be worthy of her grandmother when that lady entertained the rather difficult bride of Llewelyn the Great, was listening with especially gracious interest to the chatter of the new bailiff’s wife and her lively daughter-
in-law
“the Crumb”, her own errant daughter with very different emotions but with something of Lady Val’s spirit was
approaching
the huge and glowing hearth of what might have been called the altar-fire of that vast collection of weapons, in a mood of chastened wistfulness.

It had been several weeks ago when she found Raymond de Laon here quite alone, and not only alone, but with the door ajar and praying that she might pass by! On this occasion she shut the door very carefully behind her as she went in; and once inside the room, the look with which she surveyed its present occupant was a very tender and subtle one. The
personage towards whom this look of hers was directed was a very old man, and an old man who was, as it appeared, luxuriating, in a quaint and peculiar manner, in his own old age.

He was like a certain broken and dilapidated stone pillar, Lil-Umbra thought, that had arrested her attention this very morning as she sat talking to Peleg on that massive stone seat which so closely resembled a giant’s throne; but not only did that hunched-up pillar come into her head when she saw this old man, but his pose by the fire as she approached him made her think of a desiccated willow-stump, of which she had caught a glimpse while among the stones in the
stone-circle
where they had watched the sunrise.

Heber Sygerius was a short bony man with very broad shoulders. He had no hair at all on his face, which he shaved much more carefully than most elderly men, and he was almost entirely bald. His skull was large and on both sides of it were two very curious discolourations of a tint almost as impossible to describe as it would have been to describe the colour of the grey and brown mist which that very afternoon, when their late breakfast-lunch was over, would swallow up the Sun.

Full of golden light that Sun had been when Lil-Umbra had watched its first rising. Full of its light had the forest-path been she had just watched; but after this long meal their kitchen had to provide its glory would be gone. But this old man was assuredly enjoying himself before that blazing fire, into which at intervals he kept flinging a small piece of wood from a heap at his side.

What surrounded this old figure with a special aura of attraction for Lil-Umbra was that it had been to meet this man, who had only recently handed over his reeveship of the Manor of Roque to his middle-aged son, that Raymond de Laon—at least that was what he had said—had been here the last time she had come.

As we have already noted, the two latrines of Roque Fortress had finally come to be placed side by side adjacent to the interior courtyard. It is simply use-and-wont and the gradual adjustments of custom that create what historians of human decency might well be justified in calling the “epochal fashion”
in excremental convenience. There were several antiquated hieroglyphs, that might well have reverted to the days of Constantine, scrawled over a low arch leading from that inner court to the left of this armoury; and another set of syllables of the same debased and deteriorated Latinity carved on a block of stone over that similar small arch under which
Lil-Umbra
had recently passed.

On this latter, among other syllables, was engraved the abbreviation “Fem”; and on the former the syllable “Mas”. It was indeed of his own meditated retreat to the masculine one of these two retiring places that the old Heber Sygerius had been thinking before Lil-Umbra appeared, for although he was aware that neither his bladder nor his bowels needed immediate easement, he had already arrived at that stage in the progress of old age when men, and in some cases women too, grow over-conscious, though sometimes with only too good reason, of their urinal and excremental evacuations. But fortunately he was at this moment in no hurry to obey the particular bodily call of which he felt a vague premonition, so that when he became aware of the light step of the girlish intruder, he was quite ready to turn upon her his peculiarly magnetic smile full of a more than natural kindliness.

It was this curious magnetism in the old ex-bailiff that had warded off many an insurrection of the over-wrought serfs of the Manor of Roque, and had even been effective, a smile in this case being equal to the authority of the most aristocratic of stewards, in persuading various rich free-men not to take away their thrice-precious coins of the realm from the confines of this populous Manor to squander them on a last desperate crusade that would probably only land them in some French or Italian or German prison.

What was going on in the excited consciousness of Lil-Umbra as she entered the armoury and confronted the extraordinarily shaped hairless skull of this kindly-crafty grandfather-curator of the Manor of Roque? Whatever it was, it was obviously only partially revealed in the quick, gasping sigh she gave as she yielded to his welcoming gesture and sat herself down on a four-legged stool to the left of those burning logs.

When once the two of them were seated quietly together, the exchange of feelings between this girl in her teens and this
old man of eighty resolved itself quickly enough into pure gratitude, each to each, for the unembarrassed silence which that good moment permitted to both of them.

The thoughts that in a little while began to filter through the old man’s hairless skull were curiously characteristic of the dominant temper of his mind throughout his whole life. Raymond de Laon used to say of Heber Sygerius that he had always served the Manor of Roque rather than the Manor’s Lord or Lady at any special epoch. He certainly had always been, from every point of view, the ideal administrator of an exquisitely adjustable miniature kingdom, nourished from its roots up by the fruits of the earth and the beasts of the field, and dominated by a traditional routine never broken save to humour the caprices of the elements.

But old Heber’s way of managing the manor was over now for good and ill. His wife was long dead, and his son and his son’s wife were administrators of a totally different type. In all the spontaneous and instinctive motions of his mind Heber was still, as he had been all his days, at once profoundly kind and profoundly cunning.

There was not a serf on the manor who didn’t feel towards him, in all the minutest details of their communal life, as if he really were a wise and understanding, though somewhat inscrutable and secretive, elderly relative. Like many another indulgent grand-dad, he was cruelly missed by all who suffered under less considerate successors.

What none of his own family had ever realized in the least, and what even Raymond de Laon and young Sir William Boncor among the aristocracy of that district had never
properly
understood, was the disturbing effect upon Heber’s peculiar nature of what he had picked up and imbibed of the teachings of Friar Bacon. The Friar’s ideas had not reached him directly from the philosopher’s own mouth; but indirectly and, as may well be imagined, in a distorted form from various persons, male and female, employed in all sorts of capacities, within and without both Bumset Priory and Fenawl Convent, whose pastures, enclosures, fallows, and forest-tracks,
together
with their well-appointed tithe-barns and their movable sheep-folds, offered extensive if not specifically trained
employment
.

The sequestration of Friar Bacon under conditions of
semi-condemnation
and semi-imprisonment so close to Roque Manor had naturally a disturbing, exciting, and agitating effect upon others beside Heber; but of all who were affected by the Friar’s presence in that neighbourhood the old
ex-bailiff
was undoubtedly the one who gave himself up to pondering on the subject with the most serious and the most simple concentration.

Such was the power of the imprisoned Friar’s mind that the first difficulty the old man had encountered, and he had pondered on this for a pathetically long while, was whether these exciting new ideas belonged to the realm of religion, or of science, or of philosophy. By his using his shrewd native commonsense he decided in favour of philosophy. He felt that it was certainly easier to include both religion and science under philosophy than it would be to squeeze philosophy into the murderous arsenals of the fanatics of religion on one hand or of science on the other.

As the grandfather of this little manorial realm, to which both the Priory and the Convent might well have looked with daughter-like piety, for they were, in a real historic sense, its offspring, Heber Sygerius never let himself forget what his son and successor was only too apt to do—that the
thrice-precious
manorial threshing-floor and grind-stone, upon which the lives of the whole little community depended, were actually within the purlieus of the Priory; and that therefore when the serfs, who came to thresh and to grind the corn, which, when, once ground, was the bread of their life and the whole basis of their mortal existence, talked as they were bound to do with the servants of the Priory and the Convent, there was no escape from the contagion of the Friar’s dangerous ideas.

For revolutionary indeed these ideas were! In fact some of them led directly to the sort of peasant-revolts against the owners of manors which were beginning to be frequent on the continent of Europe. Some of them led to the serfs of Roque Manor for instance asking themselves point-blank whether, if the Lord of the Manor could make them pay for threshing on his threshing-floor and grinding with his grind-stone, he might suddenly exact payment—in fact wasn’t this what he
was
doing?—for the privilege of living on the earth at all? Then
there were all those innumerable magic sayings of the Friar in his role of race-sorcerer or tribal soothsayer; most especially those sayings connected with the most notorious of all his achievements, his construction of a Brazen Head that uttered oracles on behalf of Britain against the world.

The armoury of Roque Manor was indeed what might
literally
have been called, as Lil-Umbra had always called it, a magic room, for this was by no means the first time that a most strangely procreative and pregnant set of thoughts had been engendered here. But none had ever been born in this place stranger or more vibrant with eventful consequence than the thought-child now created by this casual and accidental contact between a precocious young girl and an unbelievably shrewd-witted old man.

There was something about this occasion, when Lil-Umbra’s mind was dallying with the hope that at any second Raymond de Laon might appear, and when old Heber’s mind was full of a difficult adjustment between the four points of the compass and the geography of the Manor, that gave to the warmth of that particular fire the power of so affecting the sympathetic silence in which they both were enveloped that there actually did come into existence by a sort of spontaneous generation a thought-child of the most significant kind, an offspring for which they were alone responsible.

Indeed they both felt in a weird and rather frightening manner that between the two of them, on this special day of this special month of the year of grace twelve hundred and seventy-two, an extremely formidable thought-child had been born, a thought-child, or rather a fate-child, for whose growth in power and for whose increase in stature a moment was as a day and a day was as a year; so that before a few months were over something would happen that would make their coming together on this particular morning a fearful and memorable milestone, not merely in the history of Roque Manor but in the history of the planet Earth.

As with so many other fatal events that have become
inaugural
turning-points in the story of our race, the chief actors in this divine or devilish drama only felt in the dimmest, faintest, indirectest, obliquest, shadowiest manner the
generative
importance of their encounter. In so far as they did
apprehend it they attributed it—and indeed where else could they have looked for a cause?—to the effect of the warmth of a burning fire upon an absolute silence. The old man would no doubt have defended himself from any charge of spiritual rape by emphasizing the extreme fragility, not to mention the quivering evasiveness, of a girl-child’s maidenhood; while Lil-Umbra would unquestionably have sworn that her whole being was entirely dominated by one sense alone, namely by the sense of hearing. Indeed she might well have argued that all the while the spirit of Fire in this magic armoury of Roque was satisfying its desire upon the spirit of Silence, she herself was completely absorbed in listening for any sound outside the door that could possibly mean the approach of the youth who filled her thoughts.

As for old Heber Sygerius, with this sylph-like figure
crouching
at his side, he really had begun to permit to his natural impulses certain liberties of imagination, such as would never have been allowed to lift their heads above the ground in the mind of her Mongol friend with his Hebraic conscience. “How strange it is,” the old man was pondering now to
himself
, “that the traditional separation between my lord’s daughter and my lord’s bailiff should totally stop, not only the faintest attempt on my part to meddle with this exquisite little creature, but also should prevent my explaining to her any of my private ideas about life in general, ideas that I worked out in my own head years and years before Friar Bacon was forced to leave Oxford and come among us as a
half-condemned
and half-imprisoned heretic.