She took the tablets and began to write slowly. ‘Philylla, daughter of Themisteas, to Panteus, son of Menedaios (she was going to do it properly!), greeting. I thank you with all my heart for the four things. I think you want me to like the arrows best. They are beautiful and straight and I will shoot with them. But I do like the magpie too.’ She thought a moment, then decided to be really truthful, and made the last sentence into ‘I like the magpie best.’
Deinicha took the tablet and read it, then shrieked with laughter and fluttered her hands. ‘Philylla, you baby, you weren’t going to send that! Do remember you’re thirteen years old and one of us! Rub it all out—we’ll tell you what to say.’
‘I won’t,’ said Philylla solidly.
‘But—my dear child—what will he think of it? You’ll never keep him! You must put something in— well, a little pretty. This is the sort of letter you’d write to a brother. Poor things, one must give them a little encouragement!’
Philylla hugged the tablets to her, very red and uncomfortable, feeling partly that Deinicha must know what one ought to do, and partly that, after all, if it was really true that Panteus liked her, it was her own affair. ‘He doesn’t want to be encouraged.’
‘Oh, is it as bad as all that—?’ They all giggled.
‘I hate encouraging people!’ said Philylla, stamping. ‘You’re making it all horrid. Take this and go!’ She turned and half shouted at the helot woman, shoving her out. Then she ran to the bench and her things. ‘If you talk about it any more, you shan’t have any of my cakes!’ The rest subsided laughing at her behind the looms, and whispering to one another. She was fondling the magpie, and talking low to it, soothing her hot cheeks with the cold black and white of its wing feathers, offering it a bit of her cake; and the tame bird flirted with her, hopping from her shoulder to its own cage-top, and back, whistling its odd, half-human tune over and over again.
That evening she came to the Queen with a thick garland of violets on her own head, and two in her hand, one for Nikomedes, the eldest child, who could scarcely keep it on his head for wanting to take it off and smell it, and the other—if she would!—for the Queen.
‘Where did you get them, lamb?’ said Agiatis, surprised, stooping her head to be crowned.
Philylla explained. ‘And I may keep the magpie, mayn’t I? I do love him! I’m afraid we ate all the cakes; there were just enough to go round.’
‘Yes, of course keep him. But—sweetheart—are you old enough for all this?’
‘All what?’
‘Well,’ said the Queen, smoothing Philylla’s hair between her finger-tips, wondering how much to say or leave unsaid, ‘why did Panteus send you the presents?’
Philylla frowned and tried to get it clear to herself. ‘Because he wanted to show me he really thinks I’m grown up, in spite of having talked to me in the field as if I was a cry-baby!’
‘You haven’t spoken to him before?’
Philylla shook her head. ‘I’ve seen him often, of course—with the King.’ Then, suddenly bold: ‘Do you love him too?’
Agiatis sat down on one end of the bench, clasping her knee and leaning forward, suddenly very young looking, so much so that Philylla felt, quite rightly, that for all intents they were the same age, and sat down too, quite close to the Queen, so that she could reach over and stroke her arm. Agiatis said suddenly, ‘I do love him. You see, Kleomenes has been very unhappy—I’m telling you this just for yourself—first when he was a boy, with that horrible father, and afterwards too. I couldn’t make him happy at first, because my heart was shut up with the dead ones, my baby, and Agis. That’s all come straight now, but it meant that when he was just growing up I didn’t help him. At first he had Xenares—you’ve seen him, haven’t you?—I never liked him much, he hadn’t the fire, the courage, he tried to hold back the future. That came to an end, as it was bound to, and then he’d only got me; and I had the children, I couldn’t give him what he needed, could I, Philylla?’
‘Yes,’ said Philylla, a little uncomfortably, wriggling her feet together, ‘I mean, no.’
‘Then, when things were just starting, last year, Panteus was brought to us by that lame cousin of his. He hadn’t ever done anything but games and hunting, but all the rest was in him, waiting. Kleomenes talked to him, and he came alive. That was just before the beginning of the war, and once they were out, facing the League, Panteus showed he was a born soldier. So then, he and Kleomenes fell in love with each other and he’s made Kleomenes happy at last, and so I love him too.’
‘And so do I,’ said Philylla, ‘and I’m glad—oh I’m very glad he sent me the arrows and the magpie!’
Chapter Two
THEY WERE SITTING round the mess-table, King Kleomenes at the head, his friends and officers at each side. They had been speaking of the war with the League, and plans for the spring, a month ahead, when roads would be good for marching again. ‘If I knew what Aratos would do next,’ Kleomenes said, for the third time, nursing his head, crouching angularly forward against the table, ‘if I could make sure I had no enemies but him and his Achaeans! But supposing he were to get help from somewhere else—from Egypt—or Macedon.’
‘We’ve got to leave that out for now,’ said Therykion, from two down the bench, a tall, nervous man with a short beard. ‘Aratos has nothing to offer them. They don’t look his way—or ours. Take it in Hellas alone. That’s what counts.’
‘That’s what’s real. The other places are only—appearances. Yet perhaps appearances will kill us all before we’re ten years older!’
Therykion shook his head gloomily, and drank, out of old habit, though this rough wine they had at the mess was very different from what he had been used to a year ago. None of them spoke for a time; all had enough to think of these days.
Then Hippitas, who was sitting at the King’s right hand, looked up. He was rather older than the others, and lame from an old wound, but he was always one of the happiest of them, and extraordinarily gentle, with blue eyes that he blinked a great deal and a country burr in his voice. It was he who had first brought Panteus, his first cousin, to see the King and hear about the new things. ‘But look,’ he said, ‘everything is very different from last year. We never thought it would be so simple. Three-quarters of the country will be for us whatever we do. You can go as fast as you like, Kleomenes.’
‘Yes!’ said a fair, rough-looking man from the far end of the table. ‘I speak for my people, Kleomenes. Get on with it!’ This was Phoebis, half-helot and not a citizen—yet. But he was the son of the King’s old nurse; they had been brought up together as young boys. He was as brave as any of them, and, if possible, even more anxious for the change in Sparta.
Gradually the King unstiffened; he began to poke the dry walnuts in front of him more hopefully. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this much for tonight. Now—a song before we go.’ His eyes travelled round the table till they lighted on Panteus, and stayed. ‘You,’ he said, very tenderly, so that every one looked up, smiling at one another, because this love of the King’s was, as it were, their own Spartan flower, the sign of the new times, and every one cherished it and watched it grow.
Panteus stood up and came slowly over towards the King, who took off his own garland and crowned him with it. All shifted a little towards the song, except Therykion, who was afraid of music or anything beautiful, anything that might possibly tempt him out of the straight path. Panteus picked up the small lyre and rubbed the strings of it softly, thinking what the King would like from him. He was three years younger than Kleomenes, and not so tall, with blue eyes and rough, light-brown hair that grew low on the middle of his forehead and curled and tangled over his ears. He had an extraordinarily compact, strong body, that seemed of itself to know the way of things, to run and jump and wrestle without his mind being quite aware of it. Like the rest of the younger men, he wore the short tunic, one loom’s-width of wool doubled, pinned at the shoulders, and belted with the edges loose and open at the left, hangin
g forward from the brooch as he stooped to the lyre, so that the skin of his side and thigh looked wonderfully pale and beautiful against the deep red of the stuff. He sang them old songs, in the mode they knew and liked and thrilled to now, ‘Swords Tomorrow,’ ‘The Barberry Bush,’ ‘You go my Way,’ and so on, then a very early thing, ten lines by Tyrtaeus, that had become less a song than a symbol of past turning future, and then a last, even shorter one, of soldiers waiting before a charge, as they themselves might be soon. His voice just filled the room, very sweet, and unelaborate as a shepherd on the hills.
Then suddenly the King stood up, tall and thin, with his long neck and jutting brows, and the frown that stayed as part of him, even when he was smiling. ‘Good night,’ he said, ‘good night, friends.’ They went out by twos and threes; as they pushed back the leather curtain from the door, great waves of frosty air blew in and shook the flame of the lamps and chilled the room. Outside it was starry—a calm, deeply arched sky with that familiar closing inward and upward of mountains on each horizon, the valley of Sparta like a cup to hold so many stars. The King’s brother, that much younger and less assured, less complicated, stopped a moment. ‘Are you sure the ephors are going to send you, Kleomenes? Suppose they don’t want the war?’
‘That will be all right, Eukleidas,’ said the King.
‘But—’ the brother began. And then, ‘Well, I suppose it’s got to be your way, Kleomenes,’ and he went out too, after a worried and questioning kiss.
Panteus waited easily, as if his body were asleep and his mind only half awake. Suddenly both came alive, his eyelids lifted, his hands turned inwards towards the King.
‘Look!’ he said, ‘I wanted to show you this.’ It was the letter from Philylla.
Kleomenes read it laughing. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’ve got your answer!’
‘But she didn’t mind, did she?—about the arrows?’
‘Dear, you’ll have her falling in love with you if you don’t take care. Don’t you see from her letter? She’s got as far as speaking truth to you, and that’s a long way for a woman.’
‘She’s not a woman, she’s a child.’
‘She’s a little bit of a faun. Hadn’t she got prick ears, Panteus? No, but truly, Agiatis loves her, and I trust Agiatis to see into people’s hearts. Why don’t you take Philylla out and teach her to shoot properly? Teach her to throw a spear and ride.’
‘Kleomenes, is she as much of a boy as all that?’
‘You would teach my girl if she were older, Panteus. Perhaps you will if—if things go right. And I know Agiatis thinks Philylla could do all this, if she had the chance. But her own father and mother—well, we know Themisteas. Catch him and Eupolia having their daughter taught to be anything but a pretty softy!’
‘But they let her come to Agiatis?’
‘Yes, but they didn’t know what Agiatis is like. People don’t. You do, Panteus.’ He took hold of the other’s shoulder and pressed it gently.
‘Yes,’ said Panteus. ‘Shall I ever have the luck to marry someone like her, Kleomenes?’
‘There aren’t two of her, any more than there are two of you. Your wife will be the lucky one, Panteus.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Panteus seriously, sure to the bottom of his soul, as is perhaps right in love, how much less good he was than his lover. ‘Besides, that’s a long way off.’
‘Yes,’ said the King looking deeply at him, and seeing after a time that he was shivering, partly with cold, took half of his cloak and wrapped it round, over his friend’s shoulders and bare arms.
It was three days later that a Hellespontine merchant ship put into harbour at Gytheum, after a long and anxious but not very adventurous voyage. Tarrik and his Scythians had stayed at Byzantium for the worst weeks of mid-winter and there changed ship. Even on the way south, after that, they had delayed at a dozen small ports, kept in by contrary winds or the fear of them, often turning back maddeningly at the harbour mouth. Their captain had attended to every possible omen! But here at last they were. Before it was light enough even to guess at the coast-line, Sphaeros had been on deck, standing with his books and change of clothes all done up in a bundle under his arm. By dawn they were fairly near in with Kythera behind them and the two sides of the great bay gradually closing in on them and the great ridge of Tainaron rising to the left and Taygetos far and high ahead of them, misted and silvery in the first light; it was not different from ten years ago. The Scythians were all dressing up, putting on armour and swords and elaborate bows and quivers and necklaces and bracelets and fur-cloaks, and their best coats and breeches sewn with gold and silver, so that they jingled proudly and fantastically about the ship. Only Tarrik, who had been there before and remembered or guessed a little about it, had put on nothing but a plain shirt and trousers and coat, white linen bordered with white fox fur; the only gold about him was a belt-clasp in branching leafwork that Berris had made on the voyage, and a narrow circlet of gold on his head. He was not armed either, except for a small hunting-knife insignificantly tucked into the side of his belt.
He had told the others that this was the best thing to do, but none of them chose to follow his advice, and after all, they were free nobles and could dress as they wanted. Only Berris was much as usual. He had been so thrilled for the last few days, while they were touching at one after another of the Greek Islands and getting nearer and nearer to the country of his dreams, that he had not thought about things like clothes; as far as he considered them he felt ashamed and inappropriate with his barbarian things—the solid stuff of coat and trousers, the thick boots and childish ornaments. He wanted to slip quietly ashore and creep into the heart of Hellas unobserved.
They had to wait about by the harbour for the best part of that day while their things were being unloaded; a good deal stared at, but still, nowadays there were so many odd foreigners going to Hellas that no one was really surprised. Probably they had come to hire officers for some infinitely remote war of their own. In the meantime the only problem was how much money was to be extracted from them here at Gytheum—before these robbers of inlanders could get at the pickings! Sphaeros managed to look after them to some extent, but a few insisted on making purchases. All of them could speak Greek fairly fluently and they liked showing it off. Two of the most sensible were sent off to hire riding and pack-horses.
That day they got about five miles, and filled the whole of the country inn. They were all excited about different things—the heat in the middle of the day already, the clothes, the food, the women, and the fact, which is always, somehow, so surprising in a foreign country, that even the smallest children could speak this difficult language. Berris had seen odd and brilliant flowers growing by the roadside—crocuses and irises and cyclamen—and the air had been intensely clear between him and the purple hills. These were the first really jagged and violent hills he had ever seen: the ranges west of Marob were low and thickly wooded all over.
It seemed to Sphaeros that Sparta was unchanged, so far. It was just as he remembered it—a rather disgusting place where wealth was the one real standard. Gloomily he thought that it would take more than one man, even Agis returned from death, to move this mass of a population gone bad. But as they got nearer the city of Sparta itself, things began to look better. He had seen one or two young men going about with a certain proud simplicity of dress and bearing, carrying spears. Perhaps he could ask one of the mule-drivers who they were.
The Corn King and the Spring Queen Page 14
