Their conversation was interrupted by a series of piercing and painful screams, and Edward turned angrily to the ship’s captain whom he had addressed as “Gunter”. “Haven’t I told you I won’t have that man allowed to make that noise! Didn’t I tell you to tie him up so that he can’t scream? Its all in the way he’s tied, I tell you! The point I insist on is that he should suffer pain; but that doesn’t mean that I want to hear his shrieks. In fact if he’s tied so that he can’t shriek, he’ll suffer a lot more. To shriek is a relief. That’s why Nature lets us indulge in it. I trust you haven’t forgotten, Gunter, quite all I ordered. I am accustomed to being obeyed at sea as promptly as on land. That man deliberately disobeyed me, and he must suffer till he has learnt his lesson!”
It was almost as if the sea itself, with the whole weight of the steel-green purple-shadowed mass of its salt water, had risen up to protest against this haughty announcement; for a terrific wave curved up out of the deep at that point and completely drowned both the screams from below and the exchange of words between the Lord Edward and Master Gunter and Peter of Maricourt.
But it may easily be believed that the last named had not missed the rough brutality with which the future ruler of England had referred to this victim of his violent temper; and as he gazed at him now while all three of them were watched rather humorously by a couple of sailors, his own bodily longing to change his clothes became far less important to him than a rush of purely emotional feeling that quivered through every nerve of his body, a rush of desperate hatred of this powerful, dominating, ruggedly handsome, battle-loving, strong-willed Lord Edward.
And under the power of this blind rush of emotional hatred which he longed to gratify by some spectacular use of his precious lodestone, he realised that this was a crisis in his life.
“Yes,” he thought, “may my soul burn in hell if I don’t give this great English bully something to make him remember those screams.”
But as he watched him closely and dallied with the instrument pressed against his own body, it came over him with the unutterable force of a premonition totally beyond the range of his own fighting spirit, that it would be useless to try to work by magnetism the death of this particular tyrant.
“But wait a moment”—he felt as if these words were reaching him out of the air—“What about this hammering bully’s offspring? He’s the King’s son. Will not his son be King also when the time comes? And how unlikely, how almost impossible, as the world goes, it would be for the son of a man of iron like this, a back-breaker and a skull-cracker, a master of armies and a sacker of cities, to be born like his begetter, or, if the child were a girl, for her to be a stirrer up of savagery and slaughter! So listen, Lodestone darling! Don’t you agree with me, you precious little heart-breaker, life-piercer, lava-flinger, angel-slayer, blow-them-up-alive? Surely you do, my darlingest of little volcanoes? Surely you do? Very well then, my pretty one! The covenant’s signed and sealed twixt thee and me. What we’ll do is to lie in wait for the feeble offspring of our great shark; and when we’ve got him we’ll fix him! We’ll follow him up all his life — or if we’re dead our spirits shall — and he shall die screaming!”
It was a curious thing — indeed it was what we pathetic tribes of mortals love to call “one of those things”—that almost simultaneously with Petrus’s private talk with his lodestone, Master Gunter, who had gone below, came up again, and going straight up to Lord Edward, announced the death of the man who had been screaming. But that was not all, for there suddenly fell in the midst of the three of them, slam-bang upon the deck, the bleeding, mangled body of a small sea-bird that had been suddenly seized by a roving sea-hawk ready for any mouthful but not inclined to pause for a substantial meal.
The sanguinary slap that the fall of this small feathered corpse made upon the deck, and the shrill wail from the creature’s mate that followed it, shook Petrus out of his diffidence to such a degree that he boldly asked Master Gunter whether he could give him a berth and have his clothes dried; and it was almost within touch of the man who had just paid the last penalty for defying the ruler not only of the land, but of the waves of the sea, that Peter of Picardy fell asleep that night hugging his lodestone.
XX THE CERNE GIANT
It was of these events that our student of magnetism was thinking now, as he stood staring for almost five minutes at the uneven curves of the sea-tide’s advances and retreats, as if he were listening to an invisible Brazen Head reporting these things to a mixed court of celestial and infernal judges. When, however, he shook off his memories, he found himself on the edge of a series of wide-stretching reedy swamps, interspersed with estuaries of salt water where wind-tossed alders and wind-swept willows led to lonely huts on flat marshy levels, only separated from the sea by desolate sand-dunes, whose human inhabitants lived on the finned and feathered natives they snared and slew.
Peter of Maricourt was in his most natural element here, for the human beings he encountered had for so many hundreds of years been accustomed to just such predatory explorers that they were as little surprised by the strange appearance of some of them as by the weird accents of others, or by the extraordinary weapons used by yet more unusual apparitions.
As may well be imagined a large portion of the retainers of Lost Towers had been supplied from dwellers in this sea-bordering marsh-land which was inserted, so to say, along that coast between high-rolling chalk hills like a wet wide-open entrance-gate between towering walls.
Lilith of Lost Towers found most of her female intimates in the human hovels sprinkled along these desolate haunts of unusual sea-birds interspersed with wild geese and wild ducks. Nor was it unnatural that this strange maiden herself should in some of her moods, when out of touch it might be with both her parents, pay lengthy visits to these intimates of her own sex in these lonely places.
“As it happened however,” so the wisest chroniclers, who are also the humblest, are always being reduced to admitting, Lilith’s chief confederate didn’t live in the midst of these sea-marshes but on the edge of a quite different stretch of country. This was an expanse of rough, wild moorland, covered with heather, which, as long at any rate as local memory went, had been regarded as once belonging to the ancient Welsh god or king whose name was Llyr or Lear. The woman in this case was Mother Wurzel, who lived in the part of this moor and from which there was a rider’s track leading to what was once the important Roman city of Durnovaria, where Lilith’s friend as a practiser of both black and white magic had clients of many different sorts.
Petrus Peregrinus had visited the rather unusual abode of Mother Wurzel more than once in his expeditions through Wessex, for it was his practice, when he had too soon exhausted the money he had earned by soldiering, to make use of the innumerable tricks which his pet lodestone could play to keep him in bread and in cheese and in wine.
The habitation of Mother Wurzel was founded upon a very small circle of tall upright stones. The stones must have originally come from the isle of Portland, but they looked as if before being brought here they had stood in a much wider circle; for they had a rather uneasy expression, as if they were not receiving their due of respect in their present crowded and somewhat humiliating position.
And yet the maker of this queer habitation cannot have been totally indifferent to the elements of dignity and beauty, for great care had been taken with regard to making the superstructure harmonize with this queer base. The space within the circle had been given a smooth marble floor and a roof arched as carefully as the crypt of a cathedral, and there had been placed over that one single wooden chamber entirely built of oak. The first time Petrus entered this dwelling, which was called Deadstone, he enquired of Mother Wurzel how on earth she had got possession of it; and she explained that it really belonged to the Lord of Lost Towers, but that he, under his daughter’s influence, had made it over in perpetuity to herself as his daughter’s friend.