The Corn King and the Spring Queen

by Naomi Mitchison

  Then Erif Der, sitting in her window, began to sing in a high, shaking voice. No one could have heard over the din in the market, but Tarrik seemed to be listening. He stood quite still where he was, with his rope trailing on the ground; one of the bulls, charging blindly, just missed him; the other bull-fighters shouted at him, ran towards him—and then stopped, all shaken with fear at something in his face. They saw that his bad luck had come again, the blight on the Corn King: this was how he had been at Midsummer and Harvest.

  Erif Der shut her eyes; she did not choose to see it happen. It was better, if one must think, to go right on into next year when it would be all over, and this house her house again. Then her mind split into two; one half worked quite free of the magic—the most living half; it darted about, hovering over faces remembered; her father telling her their plan, making her feel a grown woman fit to act with the men; Yersha walking blind into a magic net made fast with the pin of her own hair; Berris, unhappy, not wanting to make things; Tarrik. Tarrik. Tarrik. There he was, solid, at the end of all the paths that darting mind could take. Deliberately, with a great effort, she blotted out that half of the mind, shoved it down and under till she was poised again on a tide of magic, flowing out on the thin music of her song, to do what she wanted. She dared to open her eyes; all this boiling in her mind had taken incredibly little time. Tarrik still stood there, clouded, and yet—it was not finished.

  For the first moment, Eurydice had not understood; she thought he was showing off again, and leant back, smiling half apologetically at Sphaeros. But then, when everybody else had seen, she saw too. She caught her neighbour Hellene by the arm, with a kind of soft, whispered shriek: ‘Look! She’s killing him!’ ‘Who?’ said Sphaeros quickly. ‘Erif Der—that woman—oh, what are you going to do?’ ‘Make him think,’ said Sphaeros, and slipped the heavy cloak over his head and off, and put one knee up on the window-sill, blocking her view, so that for one moment she only saw the hard jut of muscles in his arm and shoulder, wondered dizzily at a middle-aged philosopher being like that, heard a yell of something—horror or admiration—go up from the crowd, and fainted.

  Sphaeros saw it was only twelve feet to the ground, and jumped easily, his hands just touching the ground as he sprang up again. He watched his line among the bulls and took it. Twenty years ago he had been a brilliant runner and proud of it; the pride was gone, but that same body was ready to do what action he willed. He called to Tarrik by his other, his Greek, name. ‘Wake!’ he cried, ‘think!’ And as he got there, Tarrik shuddered from his feet upwards and turned to him. They were almost touching when an old bull charged. Tarrik, coming alive, heard the loudening, sudden bellow, and saw the lowered terror of black horns coming at them. The cloud lifted.

  The bull knocked Sphaeros over sideways, then dropped its head and spiked him in the armpit with one horn, roaring. Tarrik threw his looped whip over the other horn and dropped against it with all his weight. The bull, over-balanced, slid round on its forelegs with a wrenching grunt, and came down on one knee and the looped horn, which broke off short. Sphaeros’ body had fallen across its neck, so that Tarrik stabbed behind the shoulder, falling forward on to the knife hilt to get it through to the beast’s heart. Already half his mind was racing off into questions; but in the meantime he did exactly what he meant to do, and all Marob shouted for the Corn King.

  Erif Der had seen. Back came her magic on to her own head, with shock on stinging shock, till she could only cling, rigid and speechless, to the window-bar, fighting against her own clouds. At last she tore the beads from her neck and wrists; they lay on the floor, faintly smoking in the sunshine. She stared down at them, panting. Her father and Yellow Bull came in. She had seen her brother angry before, but never Harn Der. She thought they were going to hurt her. In sudden terror she tried to turn the clouds on to them, but it was no use: she only span dizzily in her own magic till they took her by the shoulders and shook her. ‘What have you done, you little fool?’ said Harn Der. ‘Look at that!’ and twisted her round by the hair to look at the flax market and Tarrik’s triumph. ‘Trust a woman!’ said her brother bitterly, and then words became inadequate and he kicked her ankle as hard as he could.

  But all the branders and slaughterers had come shouting up round Tarrik, keeping a space open and safe for him. The bull was quite dead. It had seemed to Sphaeros as if he were rushing off somewhere, on the clear path at last, away from the world, the thick air of passions and arguments, into some simple, fiery place, from which the movements of the stars were all plain. Only his arm was holding him, pulling him back, with immense tension and pain; if once his spirit could make the supreme effort, tear itself away regardless of any hurt, he would be able to lose himself in that fire of truth and understanding. For long ages he struggled to bring his will to bear on this sure Good, and then without any pause he was looking up at Tarrik’s face between him and the sky, noticing the flecked brown of his eyes and the tiny drops of sweat crawling down his forehead and nose. ‘Truth,’ he said, clearly, in Greek, ‘truth is—a fire—God—Charmantides, my truth—’ and so came back, dejected, into the tangle of unfriendly arms and legs that seemed to be his body. Tarrik put an arm under him, gently, and nodded to one of the others to pull, biting his lip, because he hated the sound of a friend in pain, and knew it would be bad, getting the horn out. ‘Don’t strain!’ he said, ‘go soft—we shall do it quicker so.’ And obediently Sphaeros the Stoic relaxed into their hands, into heaving, alternate waves of pain and faintness, for some ten minutes, while they got him loose from the horn and bound up his shoulder with soft rags, and by and bye took him out of the flax market into a house. He found then that he was crying, making small noises like an animal, and he stopped himself, concentrating his mind instead on the problem of breathing without hurting his poor body too much. Tarrik was standing beside him, twisting knots and loops in his whip-lash, and then pulling them out again. ‘You saved me then,’ he said dispassionately, into the air, as it were, over Sphaeros’ head, and then again, ‘you risked your life to save me.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sphaeros at last, hoping not to have to say any more.

  But Tarrik dropped on the floor beside him: ‘Is it because I am king? No. But why? Would you do it for anyone?’

  ‘Of course,’ whispered Sphaeros again.

  ‘But do you not care for yourself at all? Sphaeros, Sphaeros, how are you so brave?’ He bent closer, staring into the white face and eyes half shut: he could only just catch the sound of those faintly moving lips.

  ‘Good,’ they whispered, ‘to do good,’ and fell into the shape of laboured breathing again.

  ‘Is it because you are a Greek?’ asked Tarrik again, very eagerly. ‘Are all good Greeks like you? Is it—could I see for myself? Was I wrong? Is it like this in Hellas after all?’

  But for all Tarrik’s wanting to know, and for all that he was Chief of Marob, he could get no answer at all out of Sphaeros then, nor for another half-day and night. But his mind had come awake and cloudless, and gone south, searching down a secret road—towards Hellas.

  When Erif Der screamed, the odd part of it was that she screamed for her mother. It was not the sort of thing that either of the men expected of her, and it made them angrier than ever. Yellow Bull would probably have beaten her solidly with a stick, particularly as she started by hitting back at him and even getting in one good tug at his beard before he had her hands tight. But Harn Der would not have it: he was too deeply angry for a fleeting violence like this. He told her quietly that she had ruined everything, her father and brother, her family, Marob itself, how she was nothing but a woman after all in spite of the trust they had put in her, and the way he said it made her wince and quiver away as if he had spat in her face. She had a lump in her throat that stopped her explaining. She just said once: ‘It was the Greek—’ but they did not choose to heed. They treated her at once as a naughty child and a wicked woman, and she, with her own hostile magic to deal with as well, had nothing to do
but take it.

  Outside, the bullfighting was over for that year. The young bulls had been driven, branded and exhausted, to their winter byres: the old ones had been killed and the carcasses taken away for salting. The crowd had almost gone. Dumb and aching in her spirit from all this unanswered anger, Erif Der turned and jumped out of the window. Air and earth were kind to her still; she fell unhurt, but with Tarrik’s clouds so wrapped about her eyes that she stumbled into pools of blood and knocked herself against a corner of the hurdles on the well-head. She went home to the Chief’s house: for once she felt utterly lost and baffled and unhappy. As she passed the forge, she looked in, and there was Berris leaning over his bench, making a chain of triple rings. He looked up vaguely, his face changing to astonishment as he saw her. Then she ran.

  All the household were scurrying about with excitement: Sphaeros had been carried in and was lying on the great bed in the guest-room. She stood in the doorway for a moment, listening to the laboured heave of his breathing. Though it was all his doing, she did not, somehow, hate him. For some time she sat on her own bed, with her hands clasped in her lap. It was odd that Tarrik should be alive after all that afternoon. From minute to minute she was struggling inwardly with her own magic; the clouds were on her so badly that there seemed to be nothing to do but acquiesce and wait till it was over, as it must be some time. She wished Tarrik would come; she wanted fantastically to have somebody’s arms to creep into and take shelter in from herself. She groped out for a shirt of his and held on to it, until he should come himself. But instead of the Chief, Eurydice came in, with the maid Apphé behind her.

  ‘Well, Erif Der,’ she said, ‘I think even our Charmantides must see now.’

  Erif Der gathered herself up to meet this with some of the lies that had been her daily sport with Eurydice—for months now. But her tongue was slow and she could not help looking at the hunchback maid leering at her from behind. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said at last, rather wearily, ‘and if I did, I don’t care!’

  ‘But you will care,’ said Eurydice, ‘all in time. And how did your dear father like it?’

  ‘If you think you’ve found out anything that Tarrik hasn’t known for half a year,’ said Erif, low and savagely, sitting sideways on the bed, screwing her eyes up, ‘go and tell him! Much he’ll thank you for it, you double-clever Eurydice!’

  But Eurydice was bending over her, looking down into her clouded, miserable soul. ‘I have seen him looking like this,’ said the aunt, ‘yes. … So you can be hurt too: of course. These things are in your nature. Well, child, I am glad to know it.’

  Erif Der jumped up and hit out at her; but the same thing happened to her that would have happened to Tarrik with the bulls. Her right hand jerked up with all the fingers out as if something had suddenly pulled at it, and a bluish and buzzing flash blinded her for a second. ‘Oh,’ she said, very softly, ‘so it would have been like that.’ By now the clouds had hidden Eurydice; she was left alone inside herself, and there she was thinking that this was what Tarrik had escaped. From behind a thick curtain, she felt that Eurydice was laughing and going out, and that the hunchback maid had gone with her and left the room calm again. For herself, there was nothing to do; she lay down and slept.

  Tarrik came in and held a lamp close to her face and looked at her; her shut eyelids screwed and twitched and she whimpered in her sleep. He had meant to wake her, to hit her suddenly in the face so that she would wake in a fright and answer any questions. But he watched a few minutes, thinking it over, and at last decided not to. He felt strong enough now to stay uncertain and not make judgments. He lay down beside her, pulled the blankets over to his side, and he slept too.

  Nothing more happened for a few days; the fine, late autumn weather that had come after that storm lasted on, though any evening it might break, for good this time. Eurydice copied poems and embroidered, and re-read Pythagoras without understanding him any more than usual, and smiled to herself, because it seemed to her that what she wanted was going to happen at last, and she believed, of course, that it was good. Erif Der stayed very quietly wherever she happened to be; she had come out of her clouds, and now she was very angry with her magic and would not touch it for the time being. She had left some of her beads in Harn Der’s house, but she would not even go and fetch them. She thought they could look after themselves; besides she would rather lose them than see her father or brother again, or even know what they were doing. One day she went and walked along the shore, to the place where the cliffs began to heighten; there was a spring of fresh water there, just at the top of the shingle, icy-cold to her feet, but she liked drinking from it, cheating, as it were, the salt of the sea. There were still occasional timbers being washed up from the ship that had been wrecked; she pulled one up, with horrid naked-looking barnacles dangling from it, and took some of them back, and shoved them in through the window of the forge for Berris to see. But Berris Der did not like them very much; he was after something fresh, something which could not be interpreted through any natural form. He was not sure what it was, only he knew that it was in some way intellectual, a beauty of the mind rather than the eye.

  As for Tarrik, it was as if part of him had suddenly been let loose. He went about with his eyes shining as if he were in love with a new girl: Sphaeros was teaching him philosophy. He had never done anything with that part of his mind before, and he admired himself enormously for the lucid and quick way that it was going. It had set to work on a whole new series of problems, and was tumbling about them like a puppy. Sphaeros found it restful, while he was still lying down and in some pain, to be able to give these very mild first lessons in the unreality of the physical universe, and to watch the disintegrating effect of the discovery that after all tables and chairs are only one sort of reality and that a not very interesting sort, on an intelligent mind which had never considered tables or reality before. Tarrik’s barbarian world of colour and smell and solidity broke up deliciously about him into a new freedom, a universe of appearance slithering round his head, a sense of time being within himself, not a mere black and white blinking of nights and days. For nearly a week, he revelled in this, while Sphaeros, gradually getting well, regarded him and waited for the reaction.

  It came, of course. His underneath mind had gone on working, following ideas to their conclusion, and then disconcertingly presenting them at odd moments in the shape of disturbing emotions. Tarrik woke up in the middle of the night and found he had lost his grip on everything and was left quite unrelated to life, dithering in the middle of this world of appearance, alone, alone. He turned over and caught hold of Erif Der. She was half awake, alone too, but in a different way. Her world was real enough still; but it had turned against her. She could not get far enough out of her own unhappiness to sympathise with his; wearily she let him kiss her and hug her close and tight. But it was less than no good, a mockery by stupid bodies, when their souls were withdrawn, each into its own void, too far away to make much effort, even to break through into ordinary life again.

  They turned away. Erif began to try and recapture part of her world again; it seemed to her that the ring of safety Sphaeros had unwittingly made round the Chief was not protecting Yersha. After a time she went to sleep, thinking of ways and means. But Tarrik lay quite still and astonished, almost afraid to move in case everything disappeared. If this went on there was no meaning in being Chief of Marob. He clutched for support at his godhead, being Corn King; but that seemed to be gone too; he was not even much interested in wondering what would happen to the crops. At last he quieted down to formulating a set of questions to ask Sphaeros the next morning.

  He had forgotten that there was to be a gathering of the soldiers that day, and he had to be dressed up with crown and sword, bronze rings on neck and arms, and a round gold shield like the sun. He was angry and impatient, and knocked down one of his men, who had scratched him with the edge of his breast-plate. It was only when they brought his horse that he calmed
down and mounted, and went out through the square seaward door of his house. The men were drawn up between the house and the harbour in a great mass, roughly divided into squares, after the universally admired fashion of the Macedonian phalanx, but without the Macedonian discipline. Almost all had bows, and nearly half were mounted. When he came out they all shouted and waved their bows, and the horses reared and kicked, and everything got into a tangle. He scowled at them, considering that they must at least be treated as real, and gave orders, cursed them or praised them, and had up the headmen and captains and told them what they were doing wrong, sharply and definitely, as befitted the Chief. They loved him for being like that, and thought the curse was well off him; at least most of them did. But Harn Der had many friends, and they had come to certain conclusions and had decided to stay by them. Yellow Bull had brought his men to the gathering, and had come up with the other captains to see the Chief. Tarrik caught sight of him, rather at the back, and suddenly called him forward. ‘How is the road?’ he said; ‘I am not forgetting it, Yellow Bull. Give me time.’ Yellow Bull thanked him awkwardly. Nobody else seemed to be thinking of his road; it always made him feel a curious love for the Chief when he talked of it, as if they were sharing some secret.

  Sphaeros was trying to write; but the Chief’s house was not a really quiet place, except in Eurydice’s rooms, which he was always doing his best to keep out of. When Tarrik came clamouring in, lie sighed and gave it up in despair. ‘Yes,’ he said at last, ‘this is the fear of Chaos, which is the first step to knowledge. I can cure you of fear.’

  ‘Can you?’ said Tarrik; ‘it is something real after all?’

  ‘It must be, or there would be nothing to know. Unless there were some standard, one could not even know that one does know. It is certain that the mirror image is less true than the thing itself, that the straightness of the rod is more proper to it than the crookedness we see in it when we look at it through water; so there must be degrees of unreality, until at last one comes down to certain appearances which are so undistorted that one may take them to be sure. It is these that seize upon the mind, and are in turn seized upon and turned into security: the Kataleptike Phantasia. They build the wall against unreality and the fearful place where a man may lose himself.’