Petrus Peregrinus hadn’t been a traveller in all parts of Europe for nothing, and he had often pondered on the mystery of this word with its deadly rush of execration—“Get out of here, you rat, you maggot, you worm, you abomination, you lump of filth!”—and he knew well that it had been allowed to remain in all the most authoritative texts of the Homeric manuscripts, and must have been passed, not only by the Athenian censors of the days of King Peisistratus of Athens, but by the far more particular censors of the Library of Alexandria and by the tremendous scholars who revised the “Codex Marcianus” in the Library of San Marco in Venice.
He made no retort to it at this moment however; but every time he pressed his scabbarded sword-dagger into the ground to support his steps over the rim of the basin-like declivity from which he was now rapidly emerging, he concentrated his whole soul upon a solemn covenant he was now making with himself.
“It has become clear to me,” murmured his inmost heart communing with itself, “that my chief enemy at this moment among the righteous is Albertus of Cologne. He seems to have got some secretus secretorum out of the raw material of the Aristotelian “hulee”, of which the universe is made, that enables him to cast some sort of spell over his pupils. He’s been having with him of late, and they say they live together in the same lodging, which always gives a teacher a special personal influence over a young man, that eccentric silent youth with a big head who is called Aquinas. Yes! I know what you want me to do, my darling little Rod of Power!”
And the weak-legged, black-garbed, black-capped, wooden-booted climber upwards clutched, as he mounted the rim of the depression, the lodestone in the slit of his breeches.
“You want me to go straight to this great donkey of Cologne, who makes friends not with handsome young people but with great head-heavy lunatics, who think of nothing but dovetailing fantastical dogmas, and when I’m face to face with this double-dyed idiot, you want me to let you loose on him, to make him skip a bit! Don’t tell me that’s not what you want, for I know very well it is! But listen to me, my precious little Baton of Power. You’re the Wand of Merlin the Brython. You’re the Rod of Moses the Israelite. You’re the finger that Jehovah lifted when He bade the World leap up like a fish out of Nothing.
“But though you are all you are, little Push-Pin of Omnipotence, the fact remains that, if I am to win in this contest with Albertus Magnus in this arena of this amphitheatre of the universe, I must confront the fellow face to face.
“Well, little soul-prick of the world’s gizzard, you think that’s impossible don’t you? And you think since it is impossible, you and I will have to find another way of getting round this beggar and outwitting him! But let me tell you now, my Magnet of Satan, it’s not impossible. I’ve just heard — never you mind how or by whom! — that he’s been invited by Roger Bacon — yes! by Friar Bacon himself, Push-Pin, my devilkin! and you take note of that! — to go and see for himself that Brazen Head magicked into life by Brother Bacon. So that’s where you and I come in, little lovely, and so let Holy Jesus beware!”
The small dark figure with his black military boots, black military cap, and black sheathed weapon to support his weak legs, was now well across the rim of the geological earth-circle over which that Homeric “Erre! Erre!” of the old woman had hurried him.
Looking round at all he saw and at how the highway he was following was losing itself in a distance that he knew well was westward and seaward, our resolute antagonist of the Christian religion, whom many people would have described as a grotesque little idiot but whom Paul of Tarsus and Jesus of Nazareth would have taken as seriously as he took himself, plucked now from out of his garments the magic lodestone with which he hoped to frustrate the whole Revelation. Rubbing it up and down against the tight black garments that covered his emaciated flanks, just as if he were sharpening a butcher’s knife, he proceeded to stretch the thing out to the full length of his arm and began working it up and down as if he were actually making a slit in some vast, invisible, planetary tent, through which when once his stabber, his prodder, his love-piercer, his hope-drainer, his life-borer, his faith-rinser, his root-sucker, his magnet of universal destruction had found its way, it might really hurt and wound and injure whatever universe or multiverse there might be outside and beyond our world.
Once clear of this whole district and aiming for the channel between France and England, our peregrinating Antichrist pursued his future movements with what really was uncommonly careful consideration. Having made straight for the channel, he followed the French coast harbour by harbour, till he hit upon the precise sort of vessel he wanted sailing direct to a Wessex port.
All went well, just as he hoped, and it was not until he had actually disembarked that any trouble came, and when trouble did come, it came from out of his own head, and not from any external event. How it came, why it came, and what made it come, Petrus had not then, and never had afterwards, any clear idea.
It came suddenly out of his memory, as he stood on the shore after waving farewell to the ship that had brought him there: and it came to him just as if somebody else were telling the story, somebody, however, who knew his thoughts and feelings with a perfectly terrible exactitude, somebody in fact who was uncomfortably like God.
What came to him was his memory of a certain occasion when, with other French soldiers, he was being conveyed in a French ship along the shores of Palestine not far from the Port of Acre. Here, because of something he had done or had not done, the ship’s commander had had him thrown overboard.
He had not clung very long, however, to an overturned boat which happened to drift past him, when he suddenly found himself close under the bows of the grandest British vessel that in all his peregrinations he had ever beheld. That this vessel was English there could be no doubt, and that it carried on board some extremely important, perhaps even some royal personage seemed more than likely.
“Can it be Lord Edward’s ship?” he thought; and in a shorter time than it would have taken him to consult his lodestone, which he always treated as a familiar spirit, he found himself hauled on board this formidable vessel and confronted with its royal voyager who, as he had predicted, was indeed no other than Lord Edward himself, the heir to the British throne.
The whole interview that followed took place on the main deck of this crusading vessel.
“I thought you were right, Gunter,” Lord Edward muttered, addressing the master of the vessel, a man whose most marked propensity was the power of becoming nothing, and a predilection for becoming nothing, or as near nothing as it was possible for a native of the harbour of Weymouth, near the ancient city of Durnovaria, with a handsome wife and a dozen children, to become.
“My sailor-friend here,” went on the warrior-prince, addressing Petrus now, but practising as he spoke, just as if he were quite alone, some particular gesture in the difficult art of slinging, “assures me that his wife has relatives in Picardy and that he felt quite certain, from the tone of your voice just now when you answered him from the sea, that you were from that part of the world. Is that so, master? Well, in any case,”—and Edward turned a shrewd glance upon the vessel from which Petrus had been flung, and which was now making use of every inch of sail it possessed to get quickly away—“your friends aren’t waiting for you! May I ask what your business is? Or are you, as seems more likely from your looks, now that I see you close, travelling to London from some foreign court? Are you perhaps from Madrid or from—”