The Corn King and the Spring Queen

by Naomi Mitchison

  I was there that evening and the whole of the night, in great discomfort and not, of course, able to write. I was not hungry, but very thirsty. I slept a little, and the morning came. I wished Black Holly had killed me, because I thought I was likely to get a worse death from the Chief. Then there was violent shouting and screaming and other noise. I began to smell smoke. First smoke and then flame went past the small window of the room. The walls were stone but the roof was wooden, so it would catch and then fall in on me. Sparks blew in. I rolled to the far side of the room, choking and slightly burnt. The smoke got thicker. I felt the edges of the paper against my skin. I thought that would be burnt too. Then someone cut the rope. It was Kotka. He said: ‘The Red Riders are on us. Up and fight, you Greek!’ The roof had caught by then. If Kotka had not remembered me I should have been burnt to death in a few minutes.

  I scrambled up and got out somehow into the street at the back of the Chief’s house. I picked up a spike of some sort for a weapon and stopped a minute to breathe and stretch my arms. Then I ran towards the loudest noise.

  I will say at once that the Red Riders had ridden up during the festival when every one was in the town and attacked the market, hoping to plunder both Marob and the southern traders. They managed to set fire to some houses and in the confusion took away goods and money, but they were being beaten out of the town even when I joined in. I was in a doorway most of the time, banging the legs of the horses and the riders when I could get at them. I had a piece of board for a shield. Then I think I was knocked over and perhaps stunned. The next thing that I knew was gradually becoming aware that I was slung over a saddle and that my head and arm were hurting abominably. Upside down like this I vomited several times against the horse’s legs. It was like the end of the world.

  I am not very certain of the next several days. At night the jolting and the worst of the pain stopped, and I suppose one ate and drank. There were horrible noises and smells all the time. Then one day I found myself in a skin tent and the Chief of Marob was sitting beside me. There was a loud drumming and that was a thunderstorm on the tent; the rain-cooled air filled it. I sat up. The Chief said: ‘Are you well enough to listen?’ Then he explained. We are prisoners of the Red Riders, and so are a certain number of others. But the Red Riders are killing them a few at a time in honour of their gods. They are tied on to an altar and certain parts of their bodies, including finally the heart, are cut out by the priests. We have not seen this, but we have heard it. He and I are separate from the others. He thinks they mean to use us for some great occasion. We are well treated, but each of us has an iron fetter on one ankle fastened to a longish raw-hide rope, and that to the tent-pole. We have no knife and our tent seems to be in the middle of the camp. There is apparently nothing to be done, for the moment at least, but I have smoothed out the paper and made a kind of ink with fruit juice. I asked the Chief if he would like a piece to write on, but he said no. I do not think he can settle down to write. He knows his house was set on fire and he is horribly anxious about the child. He has not told me yet how he came to be taken prisoner. I am not at all sure how much he wants to talk to me, but he has been kind. My arm is a mass of bruises still, but the bone does not seem to be broken. He had several arrow wounds, which are healing well. I have dressed those he cannot reach for himself. He is sitting on the other side of the tent now. Both of us are, of necessity, growing very disgusting stubbly beards. Still, there’s no one to kiss! I should be glad enough to tell him now about Erif and how her mind is towards him all the time and how she sent me really to try and help him. But I do not know whether to speak. I think, though, that he will be a goodish companion in any misfortune.

  The two chiefs of the Red Riders are called Tigru and Diorf. Tigru at least is even more revolting than the rest of the savages. He is short and rather fat, with light eyes and his front teeth filed to points and great ear-rings. Such women as we have seen are very fat too. A Marob woman would always kill herself sooner than be carried off by these savages. Diorf is taller and squints.

  THERE IS STILL NOTHING to do, or if there is anything it is Tarrik who is doing it, not I. But I am going to write down some of this that is happening between Tarrik and me, because, whatever darkness comes, it is good that friendship has been. For some days we did not talk. I was still suspicious of him because he is violent and I believed him cruel, because he does not think like me, and I believed he did not think at all, because—I suppose most of all—he is Erif’s husband and I did not want him to be loved by her. And he of me because I was a Greek, an Athenian, a fellow-citizen of Epigethes (he has told me about that and I pride myself that, having worked with Berris Der, I understand), a fellow-philosopher of Sphaeros, and—again most of all!—a friend of his Erif. Then, through sheer force of loneliness and anxiety, we began to talk, roughly at first, each trying to defend himself against the other, but gradually leaving that behind.

  He said one day: ‘Plenty of people will think this was your doing, bringing bad luck on the midsummer market. Quick work! But I’m certain your friend Menoitas will say so.’ I said: ‘Menoitas is sufficiently stupid and uneducated to think anything. He is not my friend. I gather you don’t think so yourself?’ He said: ‘I’m afraid you’re not an important enough philosopher for the seasons to pay you much attention!’ And he showed his teeth at me a little. I said: ‘Of course I am quite utterly unimportant, but you admit I was right?’ ‘Right?’ said Tarrik. ‘Right to talk like that! If you had been I wouldn’t have jumped on you.’ I: ‘But you at least don’t believe this pack of nonsense about your being the sun!’ Tarrik: ‘It’s not my business rat-hunting after little scraps of truth. I know that what I do works.’ I: ‘By coincidence, sometimes.’ Tarrik: ‘No. Because—But why should I tell you, Greek!’ I shrugged my shoulders; I was a little angry. I did not think I wanted to know at all. They brought us in our supper of roots and milk and boiled horse-flesh.

  It was the next day that Tarrik spoke again. I am ashamed that it was he and not I who spoke first. He said suddenly: ‘I work the Year in Marob, because as the Corn King I am wholly a part of the life of the place. It is not only that the people believe in me, but I am not separate from the grain and the cattle and the sap creeping up the green veins of the plants. Whatever I do goes out like a wave to the rest of my place. It is all one. It is all the way of Nature.’ I knew that last for a Stoic phrase; it was queer at the end of the other thing. It set me suddenly loose to ask the question which I suppose Erif would have wanted me to ask: ‘That is you as Corn King. But I believe there is another part of you which is separate—which cannot look at things in that mystic way?’ He said: ‘Yes. Worse luck for me! But the thing that matters is being Corn King. When the alarm came this time I was in the flax market. They were on the western side of the town, where my Place is. I went straight there to guard my things. I had not enough men, and two arrows went through the soft part of my arm, nailing me to the door. That was how they got me. But I am inclined to think that I saved the sacred things, the Corn-cap, the Basket, the Wheel, the Plowshare of Marob. I went there, you see, not to my son.’ He threw back his head and gasped, and I said again I was sure no harm had come to the child. ‘If anything has,’ he said, ‘I would sooner be dead than alive and needing to tell Erif that—But half of them would have died for him, Kotka or Link.’ I think I feel almost the same about that little Tisamenos. Erif has talked of him so much. Besides, he was a nice little boy. One doesn’t care to have small children hurt.

  I think, by the way, that I understand also about Link, the Spring Queen. She is, as I supposed, pregnant, which means to these people that their seasons will be fruitful, but she keeps herself reserved from Tarrik apart from his existence as Corn King and regards herself as the formal substitute for Erif Der. When she comes back, Linit will marry and have much honour. Yet this Corn King and Spring Queen are kind and tender towards one another, as the relationship demands. It seems to me rather complicated, but I am allowing Tarrik
to convince me. After all, if he can, why not?

  I do not know if I am helping Tarrik at all. I can see how he has been hurting himself just as Erif said, and how it has led him to cruelty. I started by trying to get him back out of this, out of magic and Stoicism to the first principles of science. But now I find that the magic part of him does not admit my reasoning. He says, in effect, that this kind of truth does not apply to his world. It is only a pattern of half-life. Have I been halving life up to now? It is very difficult to believe that of oneself, but it is perhaps good practice to try to! If only I knew if we would ever—Ah, no use writing that.

  I HAVE NOT WRITTEN for three days. At first I was feeling an acute depression, partly for obvious reasons and partly because I was thinking out this business of Tarrik and Marob, so that at least if we are to die we can die clear headed and in more or less the same communion of ideas. Now I believe I have it ready to set out.

  I do not know how mankind began, and I doubt if it is much use speculating on origins, but I know more or less, from history and observation, how they have been for the last several hundred years, and how they are now. I take it, very tentatively, that the thing could perhaps be put into a formula of approximately this kind.

  It is natural for men to live in communities and painful to them when these communities break up. The closer the community is, the better for the general happiness, for there they have a unity ready provided for them, easy to accept, hard not to accept. They need never question: they need only live. And death is not a severance from the community, but merely another facet of it.

  Yet, as men’s minds grow, they have to question. And as they question and become different one from another and want to be still more different and to lead each his own separate life, so the community breaks up. The people in it are no longer part of a unity and harmony that includes their friends and their dead and their unborn—a unity in time—and no longer part of the earth and the crops and the festivals of the community—a unity in space. They question the gods, and the gods crumble and fade and are no more help. When this day comes a man must stand up for himself and face the truth as far as he knows it, and be no more helped by his citizenship and his sense of being part of a better whole. And it will be well for him if he is a strong man then.

  Now in general this comes gradually, and from generation to generation men have time to grow up until they are old enough and brave enough to wed with the naked truth and perhaps beget wonderful children on her. They can save themselves from the chaos and fear of being cityless and godless. The foolish ones invent for themselves new gods, each a god and saviour for himself. But the wise ones recognise this as a folly, and the only comfort and substitute they make for themselves is the love and trust of their friends and the excitement of the hunt after knowledge. Very often too, when men suddenly separate out like this, there is a change in the government of a State. It was because of this, I think, that we got democracy, in Hellas at least.

  But here in Marob there is and has been a close community in which, I suppose, all were to some extent happy, because all were to some extent in communion with the others, though even so I am not sure of them all, especially of the women, about whom it is always hard to tell. There were two who were the keystone of the community, the Corn King and the Spring Queen. Then through, as is usual, a combination of circumstances, but mostly because the Greek modes of thought, and especially those of Sphaeros the Stoic, had suddenly come on them, these two began to question, and, before they understood what was happening or could retrace their steps, they were out of their community and had to stand up unhelped and face a world of apparent chaos and pain and contradiction and moral choices which, being so thoroughly disturbed by old Sphaeros, they could not deal with.

  I do wonder if Sphaeros knows what he has done, and, if so, whether he regrets it at all!

  I THINK I AM BEGINNING to be able to explain all this to Tarrik. But for these things which have happened to us both I could never have done it, but now I have imaginative good-will towards him, and I can get into his mind. He does not set up barriers against me. I am doing what Erif asked me to do. I am being faithful to my friends.

  We have talked about her a great deal and about how she is to be saved. It seem to us that only some very beautiful and terrible event will shake her out of the solitude where she is, back into the life of Marob, and into Tarrik’s life if he has it still. We do not think that she can save herself entirely by any intellectual process. Women can very rarely do that. I do not say that one kind of mind is better or worse than another, but I do know that men and women are different. What I seem to want to do with Erif Der is to bring her back into godhead and magic and superstition. Yet it is not quite simply that. It is just that I want her to be completely herself, and she cannot be herself alone, any more than one honey bee separated from its hive and its flowers can be said to be a true bee at all.

  I am beginning to accept all this about plowing and Harvest. I am beginning to see the way in which it is compatible with science. Obviously, Harn Der is dead and ended: there is no more Harn Der. But so long as he is still in the minds of the Marob people and in Tarrik’s own mind, his image will be projected on to Tarrik. I am trying to give Tarrik the idea of death as complete sleep and finish, and a cessation from action of any sort, even the kind of consciousness of a sleep-walker. I swear by my master that I am not thinking of that all the time in connection with ourselves! And I am not afraid. Or at least only of the pain. Before it comes I shall have Tarrik standing on his feet.

  He has to save himself through his mind. He has begun to tell me what are the things that entangle and horrify him. He said: ‘Even if we escape now, yet when I begin to grow old, when other men have peace and comfort and story-telling to grand-children round the fire, they will come one day and cut my throat. They will cut my throat in my own place and Tisamenos will eat me, eat my flesh!’ He looked shudderingly down at his own legs and body. I confess I was a little horrified myself, but I said: ‘Why not? He will not do it from choice, any more than you did yourself when the thing happened. It is the kind of action which one has been led to suppose is awful and shocking, but only because our ancestors did it once for pleasure, and now our taste is so utterly turned away from it that we are in revolt against our ancestral blood. When you are dead you will not feel or know. It will be all one whether you are eaten by worms or men or fire.’ And I said: ‘You will be spared old age, the misery and shame of not being able to do accustomed things any longer, the pains of disease and loosening teeth, and no more love, and the distress of seeing your companions in the same state.’ I said then: ‘What happens to the Spring Queen?’ He said: ‘My mother died when I was a child, trying to bring to birth another son, who died too. But the custom is that there are always new Spring Queens, so that it is very seldom that any woman is still Spring Queen when she grows old. Yet,’ he said, ‘I think Erif would mind dying that way less than I do.’ And then he said suddenly: ‘But after all, I wonder if you are not right. Perhaps there is nothing really so bad about it.’ If he can go on thinking that!

  Is it stupid of me to be glad all the same that this is not going to happen to Erif Der?

  But it is not that alone. He is up against the whole idea of the death of the individual. I wonder if I can explain to him that it seems less difficult to me now, since I have got this notion of a close community so well into my head. So long as one is still in one’s community! In the Garden. In Marob. There is no such thing as an individual. We are not divided one from another, friend from friend. It is hard to be sure of that when there are sundering seas and wars and poverty. But yet I know I am sure. I will make Tarrik sure too! Before we die.

  TARRIK HAS BEEN TALKING to the chiefs of the Red Riders. They came into the tent and stared at us and pointed, as they always do. We are still odd beasts for them. Tarrik is both a strange and a sacred beast. They know he was the Corn King and wonder-worker of Marob. Once they stripped him and looked at
his body for signs. He did not resist and they did not try to hurt him, but he could not sleep that night because they had touched him so much. Ever since the first days he has been trying to talk to Tigru and Diorf, really to hold their attention. He has told them that the Marob people would give them yearly tribute of gold and wine and women if they would let him and the rest of the prisoners go. At first I thought he even meant it. But the Red Riders cannot or will not take this in. They are either too stupid or not stupid enough! They did not answer him. But lately Tigru has seemed to attend. He has a Marob girl who was taken this time, in his tent. We did not know about her at first, but now she screams and screams. He would like to get other women. She is the first who has been taken alive for a long time. He came in today without Diorf and said that if Tarrik sent for a hundred women and two hundred head of cattle, and had them delivered at the edge of the forest, he and I would be released. Tarrik said he would like Diorf’s word on it too.