The Corn King and the Spring Queen

by Naomi Mitchison

  But Tarrik did not think much about it. All that was utterly remote. And Erif only thought of Agiatis going to Kleomenes and nursing him—and he got well in the end! Berris also wrote a good deal about his work and how now, in the clear shining air, he could stand away from it and look, and once or twice about the girl, Philylla, and her father, whom he liked and who had bought an inlaid breastplate which he had made, not his best work, but then no one seemed to like that! Berris Der wondered if his sister herself would, now. And so, reading his letter, did she.

  Meanwhile the flax was pulled and laid in its pits; there was much cheese-making and taking of honey; plums were ripe and dropping. Those who understood went out every day to look at the standing corn. With the new moon they began the harvest. And now Tarrik felt from his heart outward that another feast was coming; the books grew less real. He was beginning to think that they must be leading him wrong, that really it was all much simpler and gayer than that. He surprised and shocked the Council by playing one of his old tricks on a houseful of Greek merchants. But the young men laughed and went about telling one another and telling the girls. The next day he burnt almost all the books. Even while he did it he knew he was going to be sorry, but he also somehow knew that he would not himself feel the sorrow at all until after Harvest. So it did not matter.

  Chapter Six

  ON THE FIRST DAY of the two days of Harvest they reaped the last field in Marob. The rest had all been cut and stooked by the evening before. Dozens of young men turned out in their best clothes with their sharpest sickles to show how well they could reap. A girl, all in her best too, would go behind each to bind the sheaves. Reaping and binding together was counted as the surest sort of betrothal, and if you found a couple sleeping together after that it was the same as a marriage. Sometimes two or three girls all wanted to bind for one young man; then there’d be bitter scolding and quarrelling and often faces scratched and hair pulled out before it was settled, while the reaper either went on, grinning, or else came back to help the girl he really wanted and took the chance of some other young man getting his swathe. Every one was tired by the end of Harvest and very apt to quarrel. It was a lucky year when there were no murders about then.

  The smell of the sweating reapers hung pleasantly and excitingly about the field. People brought them drinks and in return picked up an ear or two to mix in with their own seed corn. The Corn King and the Spring Queen waited and talked to their friends and did not yet feel the godhead at all urgent on them. Tarrik had a leash of spotted dogs, small hounds that were used for tracking roe deer in the forest; they jumped about, and their tongues dripped and quivered out of their grinning mouths. Erif stuck poppies into their collars. Her women had fans made of leaves and feathers, and baskets of cakes, which every one ate. The field had a grass bank all round it so that it was easy to sit and see everything.

  The reaping went on through the hottest part of the day and at last all was finished but the very middle. Tarrik got up and stretched himself and went across the stubble with the sickle in his hands; it had golden corn ears inlaid on its wide bronze blade. The reapers gathered round him and he looked at them smiling—his young men! He was their elder brother, he had given them the wheat. He looked at the round, firm breasts of their girls, coming back from piling the sheaves. Their sweat-soaked shirts and bodices clung to them; nipples and bellies and thighs thrust themselves at him. He beckoned them nearer to touch long and gently a damp neck or arm; he stooped to touch stubble scratches on a bare instep, smoothed back a clinging, sweaty curl. He wanted them all in his arms, all to kiss solemnly and gently; they understood and touched him back. For the moment they liked him better than they liked their own young men. They would have put their breasts like apples into his cupped hands.

  But he moved; he made a sign to the reapers. All at once, with him in the middle, they shouted and rushed on the last of the corn. Hares and mice were hiding in the thick patch; as it went down before the sickles they came shooting out, terrified, zigzagging. But the reapers clapped their hands and threw sticks and chased all the little beasts off into the crowd at the banks, which killed them joyfully. The girls took handfuls of shining, heavy-eared straw and pressed round Tarrik with it. They bound it with ties of itself round his legs and arms and body, made a stiff, tickly straw man of him. Their quick, clever hands caressed him. Some were witches, some not. At harvest all were women. With one after the other, at full length of his straw-shining arms he did a short and rather odd little posturing dance.

  Then the Council, all solemnly in their best, came across the stubble towards him, and among them was, as always, the man whom they had chosen to be it, the actor in the Corn Play of the life of the corn. This choice was their privilege, and, though the Chief was always told beforehand, they insisted that it should be a free choice. This time they had chosen Harn Der. It was to be a token of reconciliation between one half of Marob and the other, a closing of old wounds. There was honour all the year for the man who was it at harvest. Harn Der was to get back what he had lost. They would see him in his old place again. Tarrik himself had wanted them to choose Kotka, whom he thought he had insulted in spring and whose wife he had certainly gone out of his way to terrify. But the Council had met without him, as their right was, and had decided to keep to their own choice.

  Harn Der was dressed in the usual rabbit-skins, dyed a rather unpleasant whitey-green; he looked pale himself between eyes and beard where generally his cheeks showed a fine ruddy branching of veins. He said to himself that there was nothing to be afraid of. Tarrik looked perfectly friendly. His old companions on the Council who had planned and hunted with him and followed him against the Red Riders, they were all urging him on with their faces full of respect and admiration and interest. His honour would come back to him. He tried to think only of being the actor in the Corn Play. Why must his mind keep on groping past that to something else and worse?

  Tarrik greeted him in the old form of words and began to transfer the Corn idea from himself to the it. First he took off his straw sheathings and bound them on to Harn Der. Then he laid his open hands over heart and back and whispered into Harn Der’s ear. The Corn King must always thus for a night and a day give up his godhead to another. It was because the actor in the Corn Play must die and lie dead in the sight of Marob before he was brought to life again. As god he could do it, but not as Chief. It would be bad luck. That had been decided at the very beginning of things. One of the Council silently handed over the Corn-cap, the thing of soft leather and gold that had a golden wheat-ear sticking straight out at the top. Tarrik put it on his own head for a moment and then took it off to crown Harn Der. Then he stepped back, feeling curiously light and free, and regarded it to see how this weight of the transferred godhead was borne by someone else.

  Meanwhile the reapers and their girls had been making great round, thick swags of very tightly bound-up corn with poppies and corn cockles and marigolds and spurrey stuck into the ties. When they were made it took two people to carry them, with forked sticks to hold them up straight. These they brought to the Corn King’s own place and leant them against the walls outside. Tarrik unlocked the door and gave the keys to IT, who went inside and found the old guardian huddled and quite unaware of him over the tiny fire into which from time to time she dropped single leaves that crackled and smoked. There was food and drink too, good and plentiful, and a lamp if he should want it, so that he need not have to pass too grim a night. Tarrik locked the door and went home gaily to the Chief’s house where a feast was being got ready.

  Most people in Marob ate and drank well that night; few women need lie lonely and wanting a man. There were a dozen feasts going on besides the main one at the Chief’s house. The next morning they woke late and slowly, with heavy eyes and slack muscles, prepared to be sad, to weep and mourn with all their hearts at the Corn Play. Tarrik went to his place and unlocked the door and let out IT, whom he was somehow surprised to see was still the same old, smiling, rather s
cornful Harn Der. They went back together to the harvest field. Tarrik had a wooden rattle which he shook round over his head with one hand, and a bell which he jangled hard with the other, to summon the people. They came following, and many carried laden branches of fruit on their shoulders, wild plums and raspberries mostly, but sometimes even boughs from the orchards. Last came the Spring Queen pacing among her women, each of whom carried one of the things she was to use in the play.

  As at Plowing Eve, there was a booth set up for the Corn Play, and those who had fruit branches heaped them all round, so that there was a sweet, heady smell of warm juice dripping from crushed fruit pulp, that helped the sad, excited feeling among the people of Marob. For a time yet Harn Der and his daughter were not called upon to face one another again. The it of the Corn Play lay on his back in the middle of the stage, with a black cloth over him. The audience stood all round, whispering. There was no music for this; it was the most earnest thing in the year. Tarrik himself sat on a raised part of the bank on a scarlet blanket. One of the women carried his baby Klint and tried to make him look at what was going on. But the baby had hardly yet come into the world of sight; he could only just stare without seeing, and smile.

  The Spring Queen came to the booth and her women laid the things she would need along its edge. She was dressed in white linen, embroidered all over with blobs and dabs and feathers and circles, bits of metal and glass and precious stones; for now she was not only the spring, but the life of the whole year. She took a breath and moved forward. Two years ago she had acted this same thing. She could not remember who had been IT: so much he had ceased for her to be himself, some man she knew or did not know in Marob, and become instead the other actor. Two years ago she had stepped on to the stage and at once she too had ceased to be herself, Erif Der. The crowd had not existed except as a background of waiting, hoping anxiety; it could not influence her. Why was that not happening now? Why did she still feel the crowd as something critical, broken up into separate men and women who would see things in separate ways? Why was she so much embarrassed by their nearness to her? But she knew why. She knew she was obsessed by something that was for the moment more powerful than her godhead and all Marob pushing her forward to do their work. But it made things difficult. She had to do every step, make every gesture, through her brain instead of directly and simply through her body. So she stumbled. She was aware of people she knew in the audience, aware of Disdallis, most of all aware of Tarrik. She thought she heard the baby crying. She frowned and tried to concentrate. She knew they would see her frowning. She looked for help to the intricacies of her dress, the hundreds of little embroidered patterns that might be meant to remind one of fruit and flowers and birds and people. She had to think what came next in the play, instead of knowing it.

  She took up from among the things a polished lump of crystal to catch the sunlight and throw it down in a round dancing circle on the sleeping IT. She could not remember how it should be held, fumbled, almost dropped it. If she had? That piece of glass was the sun. She took a bowl of water and sprinkled rain from her finger-tips. Those were the spring showers, the gentleness of April. But was she doing it right? Even if she appeared to, if she satisfied the audience, was she really? She did not feel as if she had any of that sort of power coming out of her now. So would the seasons miss it?

  IT sat up jerkily, flapping his corn-bound arms, stretching his corn-bound legs. The audience gasped with relief. He went through a series of stiff movements, turning about, growing, rising. The Spring Queen took green cloths and hung him with them; then she laid them by, but did the same thing with yellow cloths embroidered with gold. She waved a clapper to chase the birds away. She hoed round his feet. He stood stiff at his full height, his hands above his head. He stared right in front of him. Mostly, she moved below the level of his eyes. He began to dread the moment when she would show herself to him.

  But it came: on a sudden cry, a call from the Corn King to his substitute. Harn Der and his daughter took hands, and stamped, and round and round they whirled, leaning away from each other. His beard touched her face and his hands gripped at hers, trying to send her messages, somehow certain that it was the last chance. But she stamped again and changed direction so that her dress twisted suddenly like a snake round her, and then untwisted and flew out; and she would not accept anything from his body to hers. Still in both of them, the thing that seemed as if it was going to happen, had not yet come clear or quite to the top of consciousness.

  Then came the great moment in the Corn Play when the Spring Queen takes the sickle and cuts the corn, and IT must die and be mourned for before IT can rise again. Yet every one in Marob had faith that IT would rise! How else could they live?

  So the Spring Queen took the sickle of bronze and gold and the people of Marob saw her go to lay it lightly on the throat of the other actor in his green rabbit-skins, and this would be the symbol of death and waiting and winter. But Tarrik, watching his wife, saw that she was not going to do the right thing, and his mind fell back in horror from what he had instantaneously known she must be going to do instead, and he could not move. And Harn Der at last looked his daughter in the eyes and he knew, too, but it was too late to stop her, too late to come out of the Play into real life, to leap aside or at her wrists. And when the Red Riders came again he would not be there to lead the men of Marob to defend the fields they loved.

  She drew the sickle with both hands in a deepening wound across his throat, and in the first second, before he began to fall, a bit of his beard dropped off, cut by the razor edge of the sickle. Then the blood sprang at her, and then there was a great cry, not from Harn Der himself, who died at once, silent, but from Tarrik. Somewhere in the crowd there was a bitter voice which said, dropping like a stone into the deep silence of men waiting to breathe again: ‘She has killed the Corn Year, IT will not rise again now.’

  Then it seemed to her that she, too, might have to die, and angry, groaning noises came at her, and the crowd began to move. But Tarrik got to her first. He leapt on to the booth and flung himself down on his back over Harn Der’s body and shut his eyes and said ‘Go on!’ So she laid by the sickle and took up the winnowing basket and began to shake it about in the next movement of the dance, and as she did this she became quite calm again; she stopped being herself. She was only the Spring Queen in the middle of the Corn Play at Harvest.

  The sun was still hot and high above the stubble field. Now the Spring Queen was mourning for the cut corn; her crying voice jerked up and down; she shook her hair loose and over her face, tugged at it, pulled out a wisp to scatter over the body. From her knees up she flung herself about, she cried to the women of Marob to leave husband and children and come and mourn with her. They came, in a long procession, picking up heavy black blankets from the pile that had been made ready for them. They followed her, they went through all the movements of tearing hair and dress, scratching hands and faces with arrow-heads. The pretence grew so real in their hearts that they did weep bitterly and almost felt blood run. For the proper time they wailed their way round the double corpse of the corn.

  The next thing was that the Laughing Man came, whose business it was to stop all mourning and raise up the dead corn in laughter and rejoicing. Failing his being IT, Tarrik had got the Council to choose Kotka for this. He wore a grinning mask with black hair sticking up at the top and a blue and red beard sticking out all round. He was naked to the waist and had coloured spots and curliewurlies painted amusingly on his body. He had a tail, and he had long flippers hanging out at the ends of his fingers. Some of the children screamed, including his own two, but the grown-ups liked him very much. He parted the crowd with a peculiar springing bound and a screech of laughter; he flourished himself in front of them. He leapt over to the women and twitched at their loose hair and black blankets. ‘Why are you snivelling?’ he said. ‘What’s all this goats’-dung colour for? Who pulled your hair down, my pretties? What else did he pull? Aha, so that’s it, my li
ttle cry-babies. But didn’t he make you laugh, too? Oh, didn’t he, didn’t he?’ And so on and so forth with nothing at all witty or original, but all exactly what was expected of him, with no stopping or hesitation, until the mere rapid piling on of words and jokes got the male crowd worked up into tension that broke down suddenly on all sides into hysterical laughter that would take anything as fresh food.

  Then the Laughing Man began his great boast: ‘I can cure anything! I can cure eagles of flying, salmon of swimming, young women of talking, old men and bulls of growing horns, and pigs of jumping over haystacks!’ He went on, a great bout of boasting, the boasting of the magic of Marob, the magic of the men and farmers, the harvest laughter that can cure anything, in the end even death. Before this, the women were swept away into playthings with their comic love affairs and comic birth-pains and their amazingly comic bodies, the final and inexhaustible butt of a man’s laughter. They clung together, blushing, all in their deepest feelings knocked over, pummelled, on their backs, for the prancing of the Laughing Man. Oh, how he hurt them, how he tickled them, how the crowd laughed at him and them! By this time Kotka had become so much the Laughing Man of this once in every year, had lost his own voice and manner so entirely, that the next day Disdallis could scarcely connect her husband with the things she had been made to listen to whether she would or not—but all the same would she have missed it if she could?—would any of the others?—this tearing naked, this violence, this cold bath of laughter and male boasting! Most of it went over the heads of the young children. He was a funny, jumping man.