Peleg said to himself: “This queer-looking little fellow in black stumping along with a Roman sword for a staff must be the Lost Towers’ latest pick-up. From the fellow’s expression I doubt if the wench has got him as completely as she thinks she has!”
Petrus thought: “Haven’t I met this dark girl somewhere before round here? Or is it you, my pretty one,” and he gave a caressing squeeze to the lodestone in his innermost garment, “who have pointed her out to me when we were going about? Whoever she is, she’s a powerful person; and I’d be a prize idiot to neglect her help in my Antichrist crusade and a plain fool not to try to find what she herself feels about this damned Brazen Head?”
As for Ghosta herself; she was acquainted, by reason of her job in the Convent kitchen, with all the gossip of the neighbourhood, for the Nuns heard everything, and those among them who weren’t born to be spiritual were the best authorities in the district on all that was going on, on the quarrels and alliances, on the friendships and enmities, on the misunderstandings and idiotic manias, in all the various manorial centres whose circles of authority over-lapped at this point.
“O I do hope and pray,” Ghosta cried in her heart, “that Peleg’s discovery of this traveller’s association with Lost Towers won’t start him off again on his mad suspicion of their being some sexual connection between me and the Friar!”
It was naturally enough the clever clasper of that dangerous magnetic weapon who broke the somewhat awkward silence with which the pair ascending from the cave encountered the pair skirting that tricky declivity.
“I am a visitor to your country, Master”—here Petrus bowed politely to the Jewish giant—“to your country, Mistress”—and here he did the same to Ghosta—“with the purpose of inspecting this wonderful invention of your Friar Bacon of which I have been told by this gentle lady, whom I had the good fortune to meet when I first landed on your shores, and which she tells me is to be found in a Castle called the Fortress of Roque, the Lord of which has only recently recovered from an attack made upon him by a demented animal, by a horse in fact, whom some wicked magician had tried to turn into one of those classical creatures who have men’s heads on horses’ necks and were called Centaurs, and one of them indeed”—here the traveller bowed graciously to both the giant and Ghosta—“as frequenters of monastic libraries, like yourselves, no doubt know, was a sort of schoolmaster to swift-footed Achilles.”
“You had better take them to the main Fortress gate, Peleg,” said Ghosta quickly. “I must run back to the Convent now, and I shan’t have to ring that big front bell anyway, for I’ll get in at the back, where there’s a door close to the passage where my room is. I’ll be here,” she added in a lower voice, giving the great knuckles of the giant whose right hand was squeezed into his leather belt, a quick pressure, “tomorrow, wet or fine, at the same time as today!”
And with this she was off; and they all watched her tall slight figure hurry down the path towards the Convent.
“Well, Master — well, Mistress Lilith,” said Peleg, “shall we go straight to the Fortress? It’s inside the Fortress, you know, in fact in the armoury, that the Friar’s Brazen Head has been put for safety. This Papal Legate, or whatever he calls himself, whose name has such a friendly sound — I mean Bonaventura — has been making so much trouble round here that we — but I mustn’t go on like this with you, Mistress Lilith, here; for you naturally have to take the side of your dad and I naturally have to take the side of my lord — but anyway, you, sir, as an experienced traveller, will have seen many local divergencies far more extreme than any of ours and bringing with them far more risky consequences to the country concerned.”
Lilith smiled at him with a quick, humorously confidential smile, as much as to say, “O my dear big man, you weren’t born in the midst of our silly little dissensions, but you’ll have to take us as you find us.”
“Somebody told us as we came along,” murmured Petrus almost wistfully, “that, if we wanted to have a word with Albert of Cologne, who has come over here to see Friar Bacon, we ought to go to the Priory where the great man has been invited tonight to dine with the reverend Prior. It would be a pity, wouldn’t it, to put you to the trouble of showing us the way to the Fortress, only to find when we reach it that the man we are seeking has just left to go to the Priory?”
To this fretful commentary upon the course of events it was Lilith, not the Jewish giant, who replied.
“The obvious thing to do,” she said, stepping forward quickly, and with one slender hand putting pressure on the giant’s hip and with the other upon the elbow of Petrus Peregrinus, “is to get to the Fortress as quickly as we can and find out if the man has yet started for the Priory. It may well happen that we shall be allowed to accompany him there, and possibly be able to eat a crust with the Friar, while Albertus is dining with Prior Bog.”
The long legs of Peleg and the short legs of Petrus found themselves obeying her, almost as if they’d been the fore-legs and the hind-legs of the same horse drawing her chariot.
“Little does this fellow guess,” thought Petrus pressing his sword-staff into the rocks and the lichen and the moss and the mud and the grass, and his lodestone into his own scrotum, “that the sole reason of our desire to meet this Albertus is to put an end to his fight on behalf of Christ, and to help this self-worshipping Bonaventura to smash to atoms the Friar’s Brazen Head.”
But, whatever their thoughts, they all three hurried on, and had the Welsh tinker or one of his witch-wives watched them pass, they would have seemed like a giant from Palestine accompanied by a dwarf from Egypt and led by a siren from the Isles of Greece.
The truth was that Peleg and Lilith between them managed to lead the student of magnetism so rapidly, and by paths so completely unknown to him, that it was neither a surprise nor a shock when the girl stopped them with an excited gesture and pointed to a moving mass of gleaming weapons at the foot of four great dark-foliaged pines, and cried out in a thin, wavering, wispy voice, as if she’d been a frightened maiden from the convent rather than the seductive heiress of Lost Towers: “There! there! there’s a lot of soldiers! Your friend from Cologne must have brought a big bodyguard with him! They’re coming this way. What about waiting for them here?”
It was then that Peleg intervened. He spoke slowly and deliberately; but it was clear that he was agitated by what he saw.
“It seems to me, Master Petrus, that those are King’s Men from London; and what is more, Mistress Lilith, I believe I hear some royal music. So it can’t be the ecclesiastic from Germany. It must be some royal captain on his way from London to tell us all some important news. Perhaps King Henry is dying. News doesn’t travel as fast in this island as it does between the Tigris and the Eu—” He stopped suddenly; and Lilith, who had been watching him, turned round, as suddenly, to her other companion.
But her other companion was behaving in a very strange manner. It appeared that Petrus Peregrinus was undergoing a kind of mental agitation so extreme that it amounted to something resembling a fit. He was holding both his hands to his ears, as if to render himself deaf to some sound that he was finding too horrible to endure; and he was doing this without losing his hold of the sheathed weapon he had been using as a staff.