The Corn King and the Spring Queen

by Naomi Mitchison

  Tarrik was watching the sky. It was nearly evening now. All the afternoon the sun had been behind clouds, but there was a clear belt above the horizon. The sun was almost down to it. He waited, smelling the bull’s blood. He had eaten nothing since dawn and he was hungry. Now in a moment the sun would come clear over the western sea. He rose slowly to his feet and turned. As he looked down from the ship on to the people of Marob, they felt a warmth, a happiness they had not felt all day. They saw him in a golden haze, backed by the sun. He was coming down! The men threw out gang planks; the Council rushed to kneel and steady them. From the stern of the ship the Spring Queen came out. She had washed her hair the day before, and now it stood out over her shoulders and under her crown in a mane of soft lightness. They took hands and walked off the ship together and straight up into the Chief’s house without saying one word to any of the Council.

  For many days after that both of them had plenty to do. Erif went to the Spring-field, her place, and lighted such candles as she was allowed at this time of the year. Under one of the flower-pots where, later on, she would sow flax seed, there was a pigeon’s feather and a written message, which must be from Essro, saying she had gone to the house by the marshes and would trust to the snow all winter. Erif would have stopped the danger by Spring! It also said: ‘I never meant Yan to be Corn King. Tell Tarrik it was the Council.’ That was just like Essro! Erif found everything in good order at the Spring-field, but Tarrik had to spend many nights and days in his place, getting things straight again, for Yellow Bull seemed to have done some queer things in his last two months, as though he had not been able to think very clearly. The plowshare had a curious dent in it now. Tarrik thought he would have to make or have made a new one. He wished Berris was there to do it.

  The third day after they were home the snow began falling and went on steadily for a fortnight till the drifts were piled high against the outer houses. In the town it was trampled down hard and the households got out their sledges. The bullfighting had happened just before they landed; more than usual had been killed and salted down because of the shortage of fodder. All the boats were hauled up on land, including the ship Tarrik had come in. Things had ended at Marob for the year.

  Harn Der and the children had vanished. They must have gone at least twenty miles every day before the snowfall; they might be anywhere. Erif Der would have liked to tell her small sister about things, tell her about love even if she did not understand yet; Wheat-ear would have sat quiet and looked soft and wise. And it seemed a long time since she had played with Gold-fish. But she would not think about her father, not till the moment came to do so once and for all and then no more. She hoped they had plenty of food. It would be dull at first in the waggon camp, but when the snow had settled and firmed down over the land they would go about in their sledges and laugh at the silly trees half buried. Essro and Yan had vanished too. Yan had been a quite small, funny, sleepy baby. He had been born a few weeks before her own, and she had liked him because she was going to have a baby too. Only better, only dearer. He must be big now.

  It was warm in the Chief’s house. Erif found she did not like her old rooms. She took what had been Yersha’s, but cleared out everything, dropped the vases smash out of the windows and then was sorry, and had the walls painted over the pale frescoes with stripes of blue and red. There was a certain amount of books and clothes left, which the Chief’s aunt had not had time to pack and take away with her. Erif did various magics with them and then waded out into the cold sea, and threw them out as far as she could and bade them not to come back. She thought that the result might be weakened by its journey through the water to Rhodes, but still there would almost certainly be something to remind Aunt Eurydice of Marob! She would try to find out next summer. Erif had never mixed her magic with hate before. Even when she had done all those things to Tarrik there had been little real hate in it; she had thought there was at first, but now that she had got experience of the real thing she understood that what she had felt about Tarrik was only the same kind of tussle there had been when she and Berris had quarrelled as children and had sometimes been days pulling hair and calling names before they had kissed and made it up. Besides, with Tarrik, she had been so interested in seeing what happened. She had done it for fun, as perhaps magic should be done. Real hate was a queer, tricky thing. She did not like it much; she was not certain that it helped her magic at all. It had at least made her ashamed to tell Disdallis or any of the other witches who were friends of hers and who might have taken a share in what she was doing to Yersha’s old clothes.

  During the first weeks she had gone about proudly and gaily with Disdallis and the others, all going arm-in-arm over the trodden winter snow in their jolly winter clothes, singing the noisy cold-weather songs, stamping and clapping their hands and laughing, helping the laughter of Marob. They were glad to have the Spring Queen with them again; she was glad to be part of them. But this magic she made on Yersha was not a laughing magic: it separated her from them; it was malicious. When they were all together she spoilt it. They did not know why it was happening, but often they did not want her. Often the witch girls of Marob played their games alone or only let Erif Der come in because she was the Spring Queen. She, feeling it, had sudden moods when she spirted out hate against them and against magic. She wanted to be separate. She would have liked to be in Greece again talking to Philylla and Queen Agiatis, liking it and yet free of their life—light as a leaf. Yet that only came on her from time to time during the winter and it did not distress her much until later. So long as she was right with Tarrik she was essentially right with the world.

  During the first month Tarrik had to see to rationing the corn and also had to make certain that there should be crop seed next year for anyone with land to sow in. Some of the Council were not altogether pleased, as they had managed to collect a surplus, even in such a desperately bad year, out of their very wide lands, and they were considering profits. But most of them approved what Tarrik ordered. Of course, the Corn King himself had never any land, except the house and garden. If he had he might have neglected other people’s. But he could always take what he wanted in the way of food-stuffs. This winter he took his usual share; if there was any over it would go in feasts for the whole of Marob. But he gave very fine gifts for it. Nobody but Erif knew how much emptier the treasure-rooms were than they had been. It seemed to her that he was taking a great deal of thought about how to be King, but she did not say anything to him by way of comment, because he might have suddenly begun to suspect himself of having been influenced by Sphaeros and the Greeks. He had one or two people killed during the first few days, but it seemed rather unnecessary, and he did not behave with the rest as though he were going to go on being suspicious or afraid or likely to do any more killings. He was very anxious to know just how far the secret road had gone and said that he would take it further himself next year. The worst of it was that Yellow Bull had been bad at explaining what he wanted done, except quite immediately. He kept most of his plans in his head, and such as were written down would all be in his house by the marshes.

  The little almond trees Tarrik had brought back with him from Greece were put in Erif’s room and watered. They stood on the top of a chest. Inside the chest were the clothes she had got ready for her baby. The almond would bloom again. Erif Der would bear another son.

  Chapter Two

  THE SNOW HAD MELTED almost everywhere, uncovering the ever-green leaves and the very young leaves and the brown, soft hummocks of earth, rested and sweet after the winter. If you went outside the town and listened, you heard water all round, trickling and soaking away towards the sea. If you listened better still, as Erif listened, you would hear the murmur of the great waters fretting and foaming among mud islands and channels far to the south. She stood beside Tarrik and watched him pressing his hands into the cold sticky clay. He liked it. She felt an absurd, mild annoyance at his absorption with it. ‘Tarrik!’ she muttered impatiently, ‘Tarrik,
stop, get up!’ He looked at her with smiling, possessive eyes, and spoke softly and thickly as though the stickiness of the soil and the early spring fogs were clinging about his tongue and lips. ‘Plowing Eve! We will make a good furrow, Erif!’

  It was always the same, year after year, as winter began to loosen and soften, and Plowing Eve got nearer. People came out of their houses more and talked more, looking at one another, men and women, with sudden discovery, and felt a growing and brightening of the senses, keener sight, smell, taste, hearing, touch, not quite a falling in love and yet comparable with it, as though perhaps it were a falling in love with the young, young spring, the incredibly pale and remote and maiden season, still wrapped about with snow. Children felt it as well. Fewer people died at that time of year. They watched the comings and goings of the Corn King and the Spring Queen, looking for signs of the godhead that was ripening in both of them, and getting into touch with it themselves.

  Tarrik was used to it and expected it, and yet every year it was equally exciting. They began to give him odd and traditional foods, and hid away all his coats except those of red and yellow. He began to feel extraordinarily strong and gay and sure of himself. As he walked through the streets he would suddenly bound towards people, women mostly, and touch their faces or hands. Even if they had been looking ill or unhappy before, their answer to him for the moment would be laughter and happiness. Childless wives put themselves in his way; often they had luck afterwards. It was good to be able to do that. In his security and confidence he said one day to the Council that he would not care now if Harn Der came back tomorrow; he would not so much as frown at the old man with no power. Of course, no one quite took what the Corn King said at these times as anything binding, but all the same Harn Der’s friends looked at one another and felt it was something to start on.

  He went to his own Place and did various things there. The new plowshare had to be made by the best of the metal-workers, a friend of Berris, a man so much interested in his actual craft that he was scarcely interested at all in the directions which Tarrik gave him. Most of the time while it was being made, Tarrik hung about the forge, handled tongs or bellows, helped with the cooling. He knew a good deal about the smith’s trade, but had never taken the trouble to go through with making any big thing—and small ones bored him. He found himself talking a great deal about Greece. It was odd, but he did not try to stop himself in anything that came naturally to his mind or body just before Plowing Eve. Though he had put out of his thought as much as possible of the people and ideas, yet some of the things stayed, the things Berris had shown him in Athens, and the mountains, and the dry, deep summer colours everywhere. So he talked and talked, and sometimes the man who was working on the plowshare listened to him, and sometimes he was too deep in his work. The snow outside reflected quantities of light into the spark-jetted cave of the forge. When the plowshare was finished absolutely rightly, Tarrik wrapped it in a piece of new linen and took it back by night and in silence to its place.

  In the morning of Plowing Eve, every one went up to the fallow field in their best clothes. There were thick clay jars standing about, filled with a brownish drink that was made out of fermented wheat and only used on feast days. As it was rather nasty it was usually mixed with honey. Early in the day it had been raining, but by the latter part of the morning it had stopped, and the clouds rose and parted. The people stood and sat and lay about the edges of the damp field, with the coloured rods standing upright in it for the plowing marks. They got drunk, but this stuff, instead of making them softly drunk, as their usual herb-steeped mead did, made them drunk and hard and excited. After a time, in one and then another and another part of the ring round the field, the excitement grew and flared to a point, a violence, but, instead of wanting to fight, the man would want to shout, would begin shouting for the Corn King to come, for the plowing, for the year to begin. The shouting ran in waves, round and round. They clapped their hands on their thighs. The shouting took rhythm, became a double song of men and women, deep and shrill. It beat across the fallow field, and on to the plowshare at the side of it.

  Now it was noon. At opposite sides the ring parted, huddled back on to itself as the song dropped to satisfied eagerness. From the south came the Spring Queen, with her eyes straight and held, unseeing, unsmiling, past men and women she knew well, brushing by her friend Disdallis, more apart than a bride, and so into the middle of the field. She sat down quietly there and hung her hands over her knees and dropped her head forward on to her wrists. She had a white dress with hundreds and hundreds of little coloured wool flowers fastened on to it all over by long wool stalks. As she walked slowly over the fallow field she was almost shapeless with the hanging mass of them, dropping over her fingers and down from the hem nearly over her feet. Her hair hung behind her in a tight single plait.

  From the north end of the field came the Corn King, leading his white plow-oxen with painted horns. He himself wore a curious garment, long strips of coloured stuff over his naked body from neck to knee, belted at the waist, but splitting everywhere as he moved. Tarrik, wearing it, knew that his body was all shivering with no more than this between it and the March wind. All round the ring every one still wore furs and felt. Yet it was scarcely cold that he was. He did not look towards the Spring Queen, but yoked his oxen to the plow and began to drive them along the outer edge of the field. The ring of people were singing and dancing: the plow went in a square, inside their circle; it moved slowly past them like a knife-blade scraping along flesh. In the dance they too began to move slowly round the field, slower than the plow. Birds hovered, crows and seagulls, but did not dare to settle in the furrow for fear of the people. Tarrik pressed on the plow-beam, in, in to the hard, sticky, reluctant earth. After he had made and closed the full square about the field, he did not plow it all, only went parallel with his first lines and then suddenly inward on a sharp turn just as his immanent godhead and the sight of one of the plow marks might move him. After a time he began to talk to the Spring Queen in the middle, over his shoulder, in a loud, impersonal voice.

  He talked about the plowing. He said: ‘This is my field. Mine.’ He said: Other things are mine. Everything I think of is mine, everything I name. Under the plow. They go under. The plow is a ship. It goes through thick water. It is bringing gold to Marob. I am the plow. It is my body. It is hard and strong. It leaps on the closed sod and plunges through. Soon comes the seed.’ And every time he said one of these things the crowd would sigh after him: ‘Plow hard! Plow deep!’

  At first the Spring Queen said nothing. She seemed asleep. Then she raised her head a little from her knees and began to answer: ‘Though you plow the field it is not your field. Why should the field hear? The closed soil has no pleasure of the plow, and cold and hard it will be to the seed. Why should the spring come?’ But the people of Marob cried at her softly from the edges of the field: ‘Spring Queen, be kind, be kind!’

  So they went on until the middle of the afternoon. Tarrik was the plow, the seed, the warmth and force of growth. Erif was the hard, fallow field; the cold, reluctant spring. The words they said were in no set form or order, only, on every Plowing Eve since the beginning of Marob, the same kind of loud, unhurrying talk had gone on between the sweating Corn King and the still, shivering Spring Queen, with the same implications behind it. It would go on happening for countless years longer. This way, in Marob at least, the food and wealth of the people was made to grow. It was better not to make the talk into a plain repetition, a formula; the life might go out of it. Now as it went on the people divided up more and more, the women shouting at the Corn King to plow deep and hard, the men calling on the Spring Queen to be kind.

  Tarrik had done all this at Plowing Eve since he was a boy. And afterwards, if he thought about it, he could never understand how he got the strength for the whole day, the plowing and dancing and shouting. When it was over he always slept dreamlessly and deliciously, yet not for longer than usual. He remembered that
for the first few years he had been afraid, when the day came, that he would not be able to go through it rightly; but he always did. Now he had no fears. Only it was difficult to wait through the morning, after every one had left the Chief’s house and gone up to the field, to wait there by himself, doing nothing, getting more and more aware of the smell and texture of the brown earth of the fallow field lying ready for him. He did not think of the day when he would begin to feel his strength go. Why should he? It was no part of him yet. As he plowed and talked and pressed and ached and held hard for the plow marks and felt the furrow opening and the wave of earth turning, the dark, torn clods and crumbs tumbling and settling, he knew that the Spring Queen was in the middle of the field and he was coming towards her. He had forgotten that she was also his wife, Erif Der.

  This was her third Plowing Eve. The first time she had been a young girl, proud and confident and sure of her strength and her magic, deeply excited, but yet underneath always herself and her father’s daughter, working for the moment with the seasons and with Tarrik, but ultimately not surrendered and prepared to work against Tarrik whenever she chose, later on, although at the moment she was doing the thing she liked, for fun. Last year it had been with her brother, Yellow Bull, and it had all seemed wrong and twisted. There had been something very queer about his plowing; even the oxen had noticed it, and she had seen at once through her half-shut eyes. And she was ill then, full of pains that suddenly took her and swept away everything else. She knew that she had fainted once or twice during her wait in the middle of the field, and once or twice she had heard herself speaking as she became fully conscious again, and was only thankful that the godhead was still with her enough to move through her senses. When she had realised that, she had let herself go into a sort of dim condition in which it possessed her and did and said the things for her, and she could look on and bear the pain that she thought then was coming from Tarrik’s child, but was really the poison with which Yersha was trying to kill her.