The Corn King and the Spring Queen

by Naomi Mitchison

  ‘But the other things, the good ones—the things that make us happy,’ cried Disdallis. ‘Why not choose them?’ Her eyes moved round the room, looking at the fire, the beautiful furs, the gay coloured carpets, the two little almond trees in frail and lovely blossom beside the unshuttered window, and the March sun streaming in all round them, squaring a pool of quivering light on the clean flag-stones of the floor, while above in the rafters a still more dancing and paler pool came from the same sunlight reflected out of the small waves in the harbour.

  Erif looked too. The things stayed stockily all round her. She put out her tongue at them; they didn’t alter one bit or come any closer. Ashamed, she shut her mouth hard. They don’t choose me,’ said Erif.

  They heard Tarrik’s voice in the next room. Disdallis jumped up, slipping her shoulders under the yoke, and turned sideways to the door with her head bent, looking down into the milk. Tarrik did not notice her. He went over to the little Greek almond trees; he stretched his hands at them, clawed, as if he would have torn off the blossom, and then jerked himself away and moved towards Erif Der. While the Corn King and the Spring Queen were looking at one another, Disdallis slipped out. Erif Der said: ‘Tarrik, I must know now! What do you want with Essro and Yan? Do you want to kill them?’

  Tarrik said: ‘You are not to think about these things. I will do what is best for you. When I see you I want not to have to think of them.’

  ‘Why won’t you tell me, Tarrik?’ said Erif, then, with a half-laughing, half-bitter shakiness: ‘I suppose you tell Sardu!’

  Tarrik laughed. She began to cry. It was uncomfortable to cry now; it made her feel sick, a sick, dizzy weight along her back, up into the roots of her brain, her throat, her palate. She went pale with crying.

  Tarrik suddenly said: ‘I wonder what a woman four months gone is like inside. I should like to cut one open and see.’

  Erif stopped crying, choked on a deep breath. She did not know whether fear or anger or horror had got her most; she only knew that Tarrik, as he was now, meant it quite seriously. It was the sort of thing he did like. At last she said: ‘What is the matter with you, Tarrik? Why has everything gone wrong?’

  He said: ‘You see that too?’ Then: ‘There is nothing wrong with me when I am god. I can feel the seed-corn sprouting now all over Marob. But that will come to an end, as it did with my father. I shall be killed, and parts of me will be eaten. They will perhaps be eaten by that queer little thing in your belly, Erif.’ He shivered and said: ‘Every year the corn springs again. It is cut down. The seed is stored. After the plowing it is thrown into the dark earth. The earth holds it, buried and forgotten. But it comes alive again. That is the game we play at harvest. But where does Tarrik come in? I am tired of playing the game for the corn, making it go on, the food of Marob, making Marob go on, but leaving myself out. And you. I leave you out. Women die. They die in childbirth, Erif. Often they die! Why must it always be the corn and never us? I want to play a different game.’

  But he was walking up and down the room all the time he was speaking. Erif had not really heard, only the parts about herself. She thought that perhaps death was now five months away from her and coming steadily and inevitably nearer. She wished Tarrik would take her in his arms. But he did nothing of the sort. He took a painted jar up from a shelf; it was a jar from Olbia with centaurs painted on it, a Greek story, but very un-Greek to look at, and rather fine. ‘We die,’ he said, and dropped it out of his hands, ‘like that!’ And he put his foot on the shards and began grinding them into the floor. Erif gave a little scream. She had liked the vase. He had just opened his fingers and dropped it quite deliberately, watched it drop and crash.

  Later, during that evening, Erif reassembled her neglected magic. She made a spell with beads and cowries and a smoky fire that left blackish traces afterwards on the green-painted rafters of the room. Then she sent for Sardu, and Sardu walked into the pit. Erif was quite kind; she did not really dislike Sardu, though she thought she smelt. It was always possible to recognise her smell on Tarrik—something slightly disgusting. But, after all, what could you expect from a slave girl? Besides, Sardu really belonged to Berris still, and Erif was not going to damage her brother’s property. The girl stood in the middle with her eyes running a little, staring at the spell which was laid out on a table between her and Erif and answering the questions which she seemed to think it, or perhaps Tarrik, was asking her. Erif found out, quite easily, that the Chief was going to send or go himself south, as soon as the ground was firm enough, and that would be any day now, to have the baby Yan killed, and, if necessary, his mother Essro with him. Sardu went out again with her hands to her forehead. She did not know quite what had happened during the last half-hour, only that it had been unpleasant, and that now her eyes and the whole inside of her head ached with the smoke of that fire.

  The next morning Erif Der saw Kotka coming away from the Chief, looking angry and miserable as he so often did now. He tried to avoid her, but she called him over. Instead of asking questions, as he had feared she would, she said: ‘Tell Disdallis it is no use trying to pick up spilt milk.’ Kotka said he would and was pleased. He knew that this was likely to be something to do with his wife’s magic, and was glad they were this much together again. He went home, and the Chief went to the Council, and Erif went to the stables and had out her strong, quiet, pony mare. She waved the guard back when they would have followed, and they obeyed her because it is foolish to cross a pregnant woman when one of her moods is on her. She had food with her and there was a great blanket under the saddle which did to sleep in at night. As always, there was a small bag of corn tied to the pommel. She was afraid they would track her sooner or later, so she rode the pony through sheep and then down the muddy bed of a stream. She went south across the plain, very visible and going slow because of the soggy ground, but still no one saw her. That was partly luck and partly her own doing. Up to that time she had been sick most mornings and often in the afternoons as well, but during this ride she was only sick once and that was because she had not wrapped herself up properly one night and woke rather chilled.

  On the last day she came in sight of the house under the elms, and brisked up the pony. She rode down through sallows, knocking up clouds of sweet golden pollen; fat shining leaves were unfolding out of the mud. But between her and Yellow Bull’s farm was a brown mile of floods. Westwards the sun dropped towards red reflections. She rode a few yards through the water, splashing, and suspected it was nowhere deep, but she grew nervous, and the pony, feeling it through her, refused to go on. She felt shaken and sick. At last she did what she had not meant to do. She crouched in the brim of the flood among the muddied grass stems and stirred the water into ripples, talking to it all the time; the ripples went off towards the island with the elms. She sat in the saddle and waited. Before it was quite dark two of Essro’s servants rowed over in a flat-bottomed boat. Erif stepped in and they tied the pony behind. ‘Essro sent you at once,’ she said contentedly, glad to think of the fire and dry bed waiting for her. But the men frowned at one another. ‘We saw you—didn’t we?’ said the elder of the two.

  Essro stood in the doorway, one clenched hand over her heart. ‘It’s only you, Erif!’ she said. ‘I thought—at least, I didn’t think—come in!’ They had supper of salt fish and cheese and grain that had been damped and begun to sprout and was then boiled with herbs. Erif told her sister-in-law how things were. Yan slept in a wicker cradle between them, a great, pink, happy lump of a boy, ridiculously like Yellow Bull. ‘I’m still nursing him,’ said Essro. ‘You see, I don’t expect I shall ever have another, Erif. But I give him food as well. He has got four great teeth and he stands up like a man. I wish—oh, I wish he were big, Erif! Then he could talk to me.’

  ‘I’m going to have one in summer,’ said Erif.

  ‘I thought so. Are you glad?’

  ‘It would be much better,’ said Erif, looking sulkily at Yan, ‘if we hadn’t ever started being glad
or sorry. We could just have had children, or been killed, or fallen in love, or whatever it was, and that would have been all right and we wouldn’t have asked questions about it.’

  ‘You couldn’t have lived like that, being Spring Queen, could you? And none of us who are witches can, because we’re ourselves. We can’t be only Marob. The Corn King has to be separate too. Yellow Bull was, when—when he was that.’ Then she went on nervously: ‘Erif, it doesn’t make any difference between us, all that’s happened, does it?’

  Erif laughed and patted her hand, but did not answer. It was very comfortable in the house among the marshes; she didn’t want to talk.

  The next morning, though, they began to consider seriously what to do. Essro had been quite cut off all winter, first by snow and ice, then as these melted by marsh and floods. But the floods were going down. They walked round the island on slime-coated grass that smelt as though it had been half choked. The water was down even since the day before; at one side they were almost joined to the mainland; anyone could have walked across. The winter lake was beautiful; it lay in long soft curves, caressing the shapes of the land, except in one place, away across on the right, where it was broken and changed by man’s work and led into long ditches beside a raw, straight dike of earth and hurdles, the beginning of the secret road. Essro peered northward over the shallow, hurrying flood water, screwing up her eyes; she was rather short-sighted. There was no sort of security in them now, beyond another day or two. Erif turned round suddenly and found that Essro was crying. ‘They’ll come,’ Essro said, turning her wet eyes towards Erif; ‘they’re going to come. It’s no good. They’re going to kill my Yan. We can’t do anything. I may as well give him up first as last. You can’t possibly help me.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Essro!’ said Erif sharply, feeling that she herself might very easily get infected with this woman’s hopelessness. ‘I—I—oh, they shan’t kill your baby! What good am I if I can’t see to that? It’s something real.’ She took Essro’s arm and walked her back towards the house, away from the smell of marshes. Then she said suddenly: ‘Why not the secret road?’

  The next day they started. Essro’s men rowed them along the dike below the level of the empty road that was to bring Marob to new places. It went from island to island and often there were wooden bridges laid on the tops of piles with flood water sucking them over or bobbing viciously at them with drift wood. Beyond the end of the road Essro took out a roll of drawings which Yellow Bull had made month by month, showing the lie of the islands and currents, first from one point, then from the one next farther on. He had marked their way in red, which Essro said he had got by pricking his arm with his sharp pen. With the help of these they got from island to island until they felt they were out of reach. They had poles and felt for two tents, with blankets and cooking-pots, flour, meal, cheese, salt fish and meat, and a goat which would have kids the next month, so that there would be plenty of milk for Yan if his mother ran dry, as she was likely to soon. They had fire in a charcoal pot and kept it carefully dry. The boat went slowly after the first day. No one talked much. Erif Der felt very well. At last they came to a high island with willows in small leaf rising out of it. There seemed to be no wild boars about, or other beasts that would be a danger. They cut a clearing and camped.

  Then every day things got greener. Hourly the lovely rushes crept up, till inch by inch they had made a live curtain round the island. As the floods dropped the marshes were sheeted gold and pink; it was impossible to look at one single flower, there were so many! Where the great channels of water still flowed, year-long draining the wet lands, they were blue and shining and reed-edged. The air was full of larks. The rank, ungrazed grass grew where some day the secret road was to bring the flocks and herds of Marob. Essro had given up that dreadful northward peering for danger and busied herself about the camp, painted the tents with dyes made out of one or another juicy stem, and tamed a willow wren to come down and feed out of her hand. The men shot duck and sometimes swans with their bows and arrows, and cooked, and cut down trees, and sat about, and sang songs, and told stories. Yan ate all the flowers he could. Erif was well and happy. It was all quite different from what she had expected, and much easier. In that first moment of saying: ‘The Secret Road,’ she had pictured herself with Essro and the child stealing and hiding about marsh ways in a small boat, holding their breaths, chased. But instead everything was calm and green and growing. It was her own spring. Had she made it, down here in the marshes beyond Marob? She did not know or care. Yet by and bye, as it went on, as the earliest flowers began busily to drop their petals and turn to the building up of seed pods, the Spring Queen began to think uneasily of the other spring which she had left deserted and which would be needing her.

  The she-goat had kids. They killed and ate one, and its milk went to Yan. The men caught fish; once or twice they set nets and caught the salmon running up from the sea. Then one day there was a heavy rainstorm, with wind. It cleared up the next day to a pale gleaming morning over sweet-smelling bruised reeds and dripping bushes. But some of the stores were soaked, including most of the flour and meal; the goat had broken her leg. Essro looked at it all, rubbed the wet oatmeal through her fingers. This was the stuff Yan needed now. She looked from it to Erif. And Erif suddenly said: ‘I must be off, Essro, back to the Spring-field and the young flax and my work in Marob. Send Murr in the boat with me and he will bring you back stores and news. That will be best for every one.’

  That same day they started. Murr was the strongest of the men. He punted the boat through the marsh channels. Sometimes they were deep, and he had to stoop right over the pole, and when it came up dripping black mud he stretched and grinned and ran it up between his hands for another heave down. As it plunged again, the marsh gas came hurrying up through the water in great bubbles like eyes. Sometimes it seemed as though the channel was shallowing off to an end, but the grass field which Erif thought she saw, opened and parted and pressed down under their prow, and the water crowfoot flowers bobbed under water and streamed past her, drowned, drowned, only to rise again behind them, shaking and dripping.

  Erif Der lay in the boat and trailed her fingers and looked at rushes and reeds and water-beetles and buttercups and crayfishes and moorhens and dragon-fly grubs crawling up the stems to wait and dry and split their fat sides in the sun. She saw water-rats and herons and big docks and marigolds and a great many grey or transparent or bright-spotted fish and thin wavy roots digging into black mud and a continuous life of little marsh creatures; and sometimes she saw the man Murr punting, looking down at her, grunting, shoving, shining wet hand over hand along the leaping pole, his head dark against the sky. He had a pleasant-shaped head. As the day softened into evening, Erif drew a blanket up over herself; she felt the water so very near beyond the thin planks of the boat, and the brushing of the leaves of the water-plants under the keel, and the faint splashing of the pole. Murr’s head was outlined now against a sky of lemon green that brightened moment by moment with stars, but between them was slowly fading into grey. Her eyelids sank, heavy as her body. The Spring Queen slept.

  It was the same all the next day. They landed and ate cold porridge in a friendly way. She spoke to him about the things all round, the beasts and the flowers. He brought her a bird’s nest. She took her shoes off and paddled among mud and reeds and short water-lilies. The fat water-lily buds pointed and strained towards the surface of the water. They had air inside them. Why? She broke one or two open. They smelt like a more delicate sort of mud. The soft mud rested her swelling body; her white ankles were too small for the body, a silly stalk for it to balance difficultly on, until they were buried, rooting into the mud. Murr found scented rushes and cut some for her to lie on. She thanked him and they went on.

  They had Yellow Bull’s drawings with them. When they were not sure how to go they bent together over them to look and point; but Murr was certain he would know the way back quite easily. He had the feeling of it in
his head, the place where his mistress was waiting for her stores. When there was any difficulty about the way, it was always Murr who was right. Soon Erif was leaving it entirely to him. It was more comfortable so, too.

  That evening again she went to sleep as the stars came out, but by and bye the moon rose and woke her. They were in a barer part of the marshes now, salter too perhaps. She dipped a finger; the water tasted faintly brackish. Round her mud islands shone whitish, with a few trailing plants; it was very warm and still. She could hear the duck flighting, but was too deeply sunk in this stillness of night even to turn her head to look. After a time Murr shipped the punt-pole; they were in a current that drew them very slowly on. The moon was behind her now; he could not tell by any gleam of her eyes whether she was awake or asleep. He slid to the bottom of the boat with his face an inch or two from her feet. His breath touched her feet, then his lips. Her cold toes spread and curled against his warm cheek; the mud had dried on them to a fine, dark powder. Slowly, slowly, he began to kiss, up from her ankles. Still he did not know for certain whether she was awake or asleep. She did not know either. She could not move. He was beginning to creep over her. In a moment she would start awake. Why was her heavy body so calm and so aware of what was wanted?

  She did start awake, half awake, into his arms. He held her, clung to her, looking up, praying to her. ‘Spring Queen,’ he said, ‘Spring Queen, be kind, be gentle, be merciful! Let the spring come!’ He had taken the words of Plowing Eve; they had made him eloquent and in a way impersonal. He was not Murr; he was the crowd, the whole people of Marob longing for the spring. Why not, then? Why not let him come? Spring Queens must be kind.