If the visit of Baron Boncor of Cone to the Priory of Bumset was too late to achieve anything to the easing of the tension in Wessex, the visit of Sir Mort to Boncor’s wife Ulanda and her extremely ingenuous son was, from Sir Mort’s point of view, a triumphant success. He found Lady Ulanda in more than harmony with his project, and it proved easy enough, with the assistance of the lively Colin and the resolute Clamp, not to speak of the youthful Sir William, who might himself have well been called a “King’s Man”, to add the toughest of the Cone retainers to his own stalwarts.
“I’ll come with you! I’ll come with you! I’ll come with you!” cried Lady Ulanda; and then to her son: “No! Never mind where your Father’s gone! It’s a grand chance for you to show your metal as a true knight of our King, who is a nephew of Richard the Lion-hearted! Besides, I’m coming myself! Yes! my child, your mother herself is coming! I’ve not got the blood of Rursuk and King Stephen for nothing; Sir Mort here agrees with me that we don’t need Brazen Heads, or Grey Friars either, to guard our shores!
“Farewell good Turgo! Greet your master when he comes back, and say I told you to tell him that I shall be very angry indeed if he follows us! Tell him that, till his shoulder is entirely healed, he must, he must behave as a wounded man. Where the devil he’s gone to now, only God knows! He has a way of climbing high hills before breakfast! I’ve never known him eat a morsel till he’s been to the ridiculous top of some silly hill! I can’t cure him of this madness. Yes! He’s up there!”—and the besotted lady pointed solemnly to four visible uplands, one on the north, one on the south, one on the east, and one on the west, and gazed so reverently at each of these small eminences, that Sir Mort, accustomed to Lady Val’s very different attitude to himself, began to wonder whether this formidable woman wouldn’t have benefited by the advice, when she was a child, of Nurse Rampant or even of somebody like Mother Guggery.
She had an expression on her face as she raised it to those four uplands as if her husband had been a divine personage rather than a human one.
But Sir Mort kept saying to himself: “Remember this, my good friend. The greatest worries in life come from the heads of these Orders of fanatical men, whatever they call themselves, and it’s worth while being a little rough, even with the elements you worship, if you can give a crack or two to these same bloody heads! There’s this head of the Franciscans trying to make the thieves of Lost Towers into heroic crusaders, if they’ll smash the Brazen Head along with its maker’s head! And now here’s this Cologne fellow, who’s head of the Black Friars, and who’s bound to be savagely hostile to every Grey Friar in the land, whether he’s a Head-maker or a Head-breaker!”
In such terms did what we have been taught to call “thought” pass in and out of Sir Mort’s skull. And meanwhile the whole party, made up of the best fighters of both the Fortress and Cone Castle, didn’t take long in reaching the outskirts of the former. There quite suddenly and without giving the lovers time to move, they came upon Peleg and Ghosta embracing each other beneath an oak tree.
After a hurried glance at Lady Ulanda — but that pathetically infatuated devotee of her lawful mate was so occupied with hill-tops that she had no eye for the roots of oaks — Sir Mort addressed the lovers in his most friendly and direct manner. He wasn’t even humorous at their expense. He took the whole thing naturally and, as some historian would have put it, “in his stride”.
“I tell you what you two might do for me,” he told them. “You might run into the armoury and bring out the Brazen Head. You could carry it, couldn’t you, Peleg? And you wouldn’t mind putting a hand on it, would you, lady, if the thing tottered a bit on his shoulders? You see, don’t you, that if we’re to finish off these devils by the help of the King’s Men, we mustn’t leave any hostages behind?”
It can be imagined how quickly the lovers obeyed him; and this daring worshipper of the elements was not to prod the earth, splash the rain-water in a hollow elder-stump, wave his spear in the air and brandish it towards the only star still visible, before the Mongolian Jew-giant, accompanied by Ghosta with one long white arm raised to the Thing on her friend’s shoulder, rejoined the weirdly heterogeneous group that, with Ulanda in its centre blazing with love and hate, now appeared at the entrance to Lost Towers.
Lilith was already there, and Perspicax with his King’s Men was already there. Never since he first fabricated his demonic lodestone, after a much longer time spent upon it than Friar Roger ever spent on the Brazen Head, had Petrus Peregrinus felt more excited than he felt at this supreme hour of his life.
He had had to earn his living under terribly heavy handicaps so as to get the leisure to study, whereas Bacon’s family after the defeat of Simon de Montfort had at least recovered something, though not very much, of their considerable manorial property. Not that Friar Roger had kept one silver piece of his private inheritance. The amount he had spent—“squandered”, some would say, “given back to the Devil”, was a more common opinion — on his scientific labours, was really startling. But it had all gone, and now he had nothing but what he could get, as a begging Friar, from the imaginative, the pious, and the charitable.
But here they were! Yes, here was the imprisoned Friar, and here was the wandering native of Maricourt, the one watching his Brazen Head swaying to and fro on the shoulder of a Jewish giant, and the other pressing his precious lodestone against his own body as he awaited his chance, not only to prove that in his person Antichrist had actually come, but to do something with “Little Pretty” in the presence of all men, that would show the world — even if he died while showing it — that by magnetism, and by magnetism alone, did the stars move on their courses, and Suns and Moons wax and wane!
It was Albertus Magnus, and he alone, who caught the full significance of this strange conclave, which was partly a human council of war against the caprices of Nature, and partly a parliament of primitive superstitious tribes instinctively fearful of being tricked into mystic slavery to some crafty Khan of Karakorum!
The red-brown jerkins and tunics and breeches, and the red-brown caps with short brown-and-white feathers sticking out in a queerly insolent and defiant manner, either above the wearer’s left ear or above his right ear, according to his individual taste, were drawn up in thick battalions on the two stony ridges in front of the main entrance to Lost Towers.
They were armed with the most deadly-looking weapons, like broad double-edged Roman sword-blades fixed into the massive handles of ordinary hunting spears. It seemed to Albertus that the King’s Men under Perspicax would not have a chance of victory, even though assisted by the wilder and less disciplined retainers from Gone Castle and the Fortress.
But the Cologne teacher had hardly reached this conclusion, with which without doubt most of his efficient and practical friends in that great centre of learning would have entirely agreed, when the sort of unexpected confusion arose such as probably only that particular portion of England in the whole western half of the entire world could have evoked.
The Lord and Lady of Lost Towers were evidently quarrelling between themselves; for the man’s voice and the woman’s voice were clearly audible above the general hoarse murmur and the general jarring chatter.
Presently both their figures, each pushed forward, evidently by their immediate attendants, hers female, and his male, were projected through the red-black lines with their alarming weapons and forced to come forward, though it was evident to everybody that the real force of the emotional feelings of those two was directed, not against the King’s men and not against the mass of men from the Fortress and from Cone, but solely against each other.