The Corn King and the Spring Queen

by Naomi Mitchison

  ‘Still stiff,’ said the man, and then, with a curious but unembarrassing gesture, rubbed his head against her arm. If there were masters and servants again, it would not be so bad to be her servant. She understood that, too. He went on: ‘Neareta is here; she’s had a letter. Tiasa is quarrelling with her again. I came out.’

  ‘The silly bitches!’ said Philylla, suddenly violently irritated, because now she was sure to get tangled up in that instead of being able to think about Panteus and her own plans in the middle of the peaceable farm smells.

  ‘Her boy’s here too,’ said Mikon softly.

  When she gave the door a push from her hard wrist it clattered open. Although she was married she was not at her full strength yet, but getting stronger every month, more pleased to carry weights and shove animals about and give her own orders. A Spartiate woman. How could she bear to live in another woman’s house-hold, in her mother’s! She must go, go. Set up her own house in Alexandria. It all went suddenly through her mind as she came into the room where Neareta and Tiasa were quarrelling with a close, concentrated fierceness, and the twelve-year-old boy, Gyridas, was sitting in a corner, watching them, and sometimes tossing his head about and shivering. He was very like his father, but a thinner and much sadder Phoebis; it looked to Philyila as though he would never be able to play quite happily any more. He saw her first and jumped up, crying: ‘We’ve a letter from father!’

  Tiasa swung round on them with a flap of her big breasts under her tunic like heavy fish. ‘Yes, the sort of letter you’d run a mile for,’ she said, ‘and be sick into the stewpot when you’d read it! And this crazy Neareta’s as bad as you—yes, I will say it!—you and your runaway king, stealing off honest women’s husbands into God-knows-where—’

  Philylla lifted her hand quietly. ‘Now, Tiasa,’ she said, ‘don’t be silly. Alexandria is only a few days’ journey.’ On the spur of the moment she added: ‘I am probably going there myself.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Neareta, ‘I knew you’d stand firm, Philylla!’

  But Tiasa gasped and flounced. ‘I’d like to know what your mother says to that! As if you’d be let cut off your nose to spite your face. If you can’t see reason for yourself, you’ll be made to see it, my lady!’

  Philylla was afraid of losing her temper and with it all the advantage of her position. She did not answer at once.

  But Neareta did. ‘It’s not your place, Tiasa, to speak that way to a real lady! You’re just a slave-woman, aren’t you, Tiasa!’ And then Tiasa flew at her and there they were at it again, not even arguing, but abusing each other stupidly.

  Philylla shrugged her shoulders. Neareta wasn’t usually like that. It came of what had been happening to her. They hadn’t even got the boy’s body home for five days, and then Neareta had to see to it herself. She beckoned to young Gyridas: ‘Tell me what your letter said.’

  The boy took her hand and they went out of the house together and sat down on Mikon’s bench. ‘Father wants us to come out to Alexandria,’ he said, ‘and we’re going. The ephors have taken almost all our land, but we’ve got enough money for the journey, so that’s all right. Do you know, Philylla,’ he went on, ‘they tried to have me turned out of my class—the class where my brother was!—because of father being one of the King’s citizens, not the old ones; but the rest of the boys wouldn’t have it, and my captain went to the ephors himself. But I’ll have to leave it now. Do you think we shall need to stay long in Egypt?’

  ‘When the King comes back to his own again, it will all be made up to you. All that can be.’ She thought for a moment of his elder brother, and then again of herself.

  ‘But is it sure he’ll come back? Philylla, is it sure?’

  She saw Mikon lift his head and look round from the almost plucked hen to her. For both of them her word was certainty. If only she was sure herself!—as she had been as a child, when Agiatis was still there to tell her that the good things were surely true. She said: ‘I believe he will come back to Sparta. Or, if he does not himself, I believe the things he worked for will.’

  ‘But he himself!’ said Mikon. ‘Oh, it must be my King again! If not, we’ll have been hurt in vain. I can’t‘—he stopped and looked round him, then down in a sort of astonishment at his own maimed body—‘I can’t bear this all the rest of my life. Not after having had the King’s Times.’ It was a plain statement; the one thing was not possible after the other. Therefore it must happen that the King should come back to his people.

  Philylla could not answer any better than she had done already. She turned to the boy again. ‘What else was there in the letter, Gyridas? Anything about any of the others?’

  ‘He said everything was going on as well as it could, only that was slow at the best. He said the people in Alexandria were kind, but not like our people. He said he was teaching Nikomedes pole-jumping. I can do that already. He said I would be friends with Nikomedes and Nikolaos when I came out. I expect I will.’

  Neareta came out of the house then. She said: ‘We’ll be going down to Gytheum at once, Philylla, my dear, and we’ll just wait quietly for a ship. I’ve cousins there. He says we’ll be coming back maybe in spring. It’s then that things come right mostly. And you?’

  ‘I haven’t been told what to do,’ said Philylla, and her hands closed over the breast-fold of her dress and the hard corners of the letter. ‘I envy you rather, Neareta.’

  Tiasa stood in the doorway, a country malice in her eyes and breasts. She ignored Neareta and spoke straight at her foster-daughter. ‘Still thinking of running away, my babsie-ba? And where does she think the money’s to come from?’

  Philylla frowned. It had hurt her when Panteus ‘land and livestock had been taken away. It had been her own little house, where they had been happy. The ephors had taken all the small possessions he had as well. It looked rather as if someone who knew about it had told them. She was markedly silent on this subject to her mother. There was not much about the confiscations in the letter; he could not realise at all completely what had happened while he was away; he would go on dreaming about his land and the house where they had slept together. She said:’ I think you’re forgetting, Tiasa, that my father was in the battle.’

  ‘Oh yes!’ said Tiasa. ‘But he knows enough to lie low and let those who can help him. And he won’t be too pleased with a young man who runs off and leaves his wife without so much as a word or a silver piece to click her teeth on! Will he, now?’ Philylla waited and breathed and hoped she would be able to think of some reason why this was not true. Tiasa looked round. Neareta and the boy were gone, and Mikon had limped away after them. She came a step nearer and suddenly her voice thickened and softened. ‘Aye, there, we know what you’ve been through. We’ll get you out of it yet. Let him go back to his King and stay there! You’ll marry another, a good one that’ll look your way all the time and stay looking! Don’t go telling me that’s not what you want: aren’t you made of woman’s flesh, my sweetie, the same as me? Don’t I know! It’s hurting you, isn’t it, it’s screwing round like a knife every blessed minute?’

  Philylla made one great effort to throw it off, to give the lie in calm anger to her foster-mother. But as she lifted her head her throat ached with shut sobs, and all at once her misery betrayed her into complete collapse on to this tenderness which was as old as her own body. ‘It’s true, it’s true!’ she cried. ‘He doesn’t love me!’ And then she merely let herself run with tears, let herself be kissed and petted and cooed over. She listened, tingling and fascinated behind her wet eyes, while Tiasa stood and abused her husband. The words beat round her and there was just enough truth in them to soothe the pride and love in her which had been injured and which wanted to be angry with him. That part of her was at last being understood; her complaint against life was being made at last. Between these luxurious bouts of listening she cried jerkily with her mouth open and flung out her hands and flapped them against Tiasa’s body. Lovely, lovely, to let go!

  But after
a time this curious pleasure ceased as abruptly as it had begun. The hands went still, the wrenching sobs died down into childish hiccups, she blinked her swollen eyelids and began to look about her. At any rate, she hadn’t shown Tiasa the letter, even though her foster-mother had perhaps guessed about it. She said: ‘It may be all true enough about me being hurt, but he doesn’t understand that. If he did he wouldn’t have hurt me. But then, he wouldn’t have been a man.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ said Tiasa, ‘but I can’t see you being torn to bits under my eyes just because it’s by a man! Now, you listen to me: if you go to him you’re going to worse than you left, for you’re nowhere with Panteus when it’s a choice between you and the King, and you’ve got to see that. If the King wants him he’ll take him every bit, and you for the gutter.’

  ‘No!’ said Philylla, ‘I’m somewhere. And—and I choose to serve my King too!’

  But Tiasa only laughed and went on: ‘And you won’t have any of your own folks at your back then. You’ll be Mrs. Nobody out there among the black foreigners. You won’t even have your old nurse to order about!’ This time it was Philylla who laughed, but Tiasa went on: ‘Oh, my sock-lamb, I’d be cut into little pieces if it was anyways for your good—don’t I know my masters?—but I won’t go an inch out of my road when it’s for nothing but a young girl’s silliness that I know best about, as how shouldn’t I, being thirty years older than you? But there’ll be no one to die for you in Egypt, nor to know you’re any way different from that stuck-up Neareta and her little brat of a boy not half so big nor so clever as our Dontas for all he’s been put to school with his betters! There’ll be no one to stay by you if you’re sick nor see you through when your time comes and that man of yours maybe off with the King. What’ll you live on if you do get out there? Are you going to beg from the Egyptians?’

  ‘You have forgotten Queen Kratesikleia.’

  ‘Well, so I did, but there’s little enough in it! The thing that counts is the heart, and you’ll be hit there over and over again, for all the old Queen’s in Egypt. Don’t you mistake about that. But if you’ll stay here—stay and get healed and forget all this—grow out of it—why, don’t I know that young spark of your sister’s would ten times rather have you, a beauty like you, just plum-ripe for the biting! And he’ll keep you well, like wives were kept in the old days, you’ll be Mrs Somebody then, not dragging about without a change of linen for all the foreigners to laugh at, but lady of one of the first estates in the land, with a great household to make what you like of, and dresses and jewels—why, Chaerondas could bring up all the boys you like to bear, and that’s more than Panteus ever can, now—isn’t it, duckie? Just you let me tell Chaerondas you’d be willing to see him—no more than that! Ianthemis can wait a bit—what’s she compared with you, my own lovely dove?’ Suddenly she threw herself down on her knees in the muck of the farmyard and flung her arms up and round Philylla. ‘Do it!’ she cried. ‘Oh do it, and make your old nursie happy and get happy yourself!’

  But Philylla disentangled herself and caught Tiasa hard by the two hands and looked down into her eyes. ‘I’ll tell you if I need you,’ she said. ‘Just now—I don’t.’

  Chapter Five

  ERIF AND BERRIS Der came late in autumn into Sparta. Everything had freshened up after the rains; there were clouds on the hills at both sides, but the sky between was blue. Berris was not exactly getting fat, but he did not care how he stood and he was a little soft about the body. His arms, though, were extremely strong and he could twist very tough bits of metal in his fingers. They found that most of their old friends were killed or in exile; there were new people in the same houses. But Berris Der by now had a certain reputation; in fact, people had begun to say that he was not a barbarian at all, but a Greek; that annoyed him rather. He had no difficulty in finding friends or work among the rich in any state he visited.

  He had begun portrait painting and was finding it amusing, though sometimes his subjects were not pleased, for he was in an unromantic phase. One of his commissions was a full-length of the Macedonian Governor of Sparta. He did this very competently, and his sister talked to the governor’s mother, who was quite a dear old lady. They talked mostly about the gods of Macedonia, who all had Greek names but were rather different in their action, and more particularly about some mountain rites which the nice old thing remembered with a sucking in of lips and wrinkling round eyes. ‘Girls will be girls,’ she said, ‘and we all did it. The best families. These chits of Greeks down here, they haven’t the blood. No, my dear. But up in the north we’re different, we know how to live. You tell your brother he should take you to Macedonia, you’ll find yourself a man there.’ She quite disregarded the fact that Erif was married; she liked something she could see and understand. On the same lines, she was cross with Berris because he was not sufficiently accurate in painting the scars on her son’s legs. They were honourable scars; once he had a pike-head right through his left calf; he still walked a little lame of it, but not enough to spoil his dignity. Berris, annoyed, made a sketch of the governor with no clothes and more than all the scars, but for safety’s sake it had to be burned.

  Then one day Erif met Eupolia and Ianthemis at a party the governor’s wife was giving. She looked no odder than the Macedonians now in her Greek dress as she came quickly forward to speak to them. Eupolia was quite reasonably pleasant, but Ianthemis was shy and distressed and seemed cross. The girl was thinner and darker than her sister, and her skin was smudgy, so that it was thought better for her to use powder. But behind it her eyes were less guarded than her mother’s, so it was she that Erif Der decided to get the news from, after Eupolia, having given courteous replies about her husband’s health, had moved on and begun to talk to their hostess. Ianthemis had wanted to follow her mother; she was afraid of being left alone and talked to by strangers, but she was not used enough to parties to finish off her conversation with Erif neatly and quickly, and the thing dragged on and her mother was out of sight and the slaves with cakes seemed all to be at the other end of the room! Erif Der said quickly: ‘Do you ever hear from Philylla now?’ Ianthemis gaped. ‘Does she like Egypt?’

  ‘Oh!’ said Ianthemis, ‘she’s not in Egypt!’

  Erif was so surprised that she nearly lost her grip of the talk, but Ianthemis was not enough on the spot to get away before the question: ‘Is she here then?’

  ‘No-oo!’ said Ianthemis, and laughed and then looked at the foreign woman, who was, after all, not a Macedonian, and decided to tell her—well, something. ‘She’s at home,’ said Ianthemis, ‘and mother sees she stays there! Besides, she doesn’t like these parties.’

  ‘Why is she at home, Ianthemis?’ said Erif, smiling as nicely as she knew how and beckoning one of the cake-girls over. ‘Do tell me. You see, I don’t know anything!’

  Half won, Ianthemis said: ‘Panteus wants her to go to Egypt. But of course it would be silly. So she’s got to be stopped. Even though she is grown up.’

  ‘Would it be silly, though?’ asked Erif. ‘Wives have to obey their husbands first, don’t they? And besides—‘she dropped her voice, glancing down at the little cake in her hand—‘supposing all this doesn’t last for ever?’

  ‘Oh, you mustn’t!’ said Ianthemis quickly. ‘We don’t ever say that—or think it! Anyhow, Panteus hasn’t ordered her to come.’

  ‘I see,’ said the Queen of Marob, and suddenly found herself uncertain of the patterns of Sparta or what had happened to them now. She realised that Eupolia had rather definitely not asked her to the house, though at the time she had not noticed it, because she had not particularly wanted to go there. Now she did want. She tried the direct method. ‘How pretty you’ve grown, Ianthemis! You don’t mind my telling you so? I expect plenty of people do. I wish my brother could see you. He’s so tired of painting rather plain governors!’

  In a pleasant distraction Ianthemis took another cake; there hadn’t been anything so good to eat in all her life before! They had
paste of dates and chestnuts and some little greenish sweet lumps—She wanted so badly to ask whether Erif really thought she was as pretty as her sister, but somehow she couldn’t! She could only say: ‘Oh, do you really think so, how nice of you!’ And, flurried, began on admiration in her own turn. ‘Your brother must be so clever! Every one says so. Did he make your lovely bracelets?’ She fingered the lowest of the very fine set which Erif wore, perhaps rather barbarically, between elbow and shoulder.

  Erif undid it carelessly. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘they’re amusing, aren’t they? He’s always making them. Look at the lizard’s head.’ She slid it suddenly on to the girl’s arm. ‘Why, it’s nothing, do keep it! I shall think you hate me if you don’t!’

  And really it did look beautiful, and it made—didn’t it?—her arm look almost rather beautiful too! She’d had so few pretty things since the time father had made mother give up all her jewellery for the King. Herself, she hadn’t minded then, she was too little, but now she did mind. She didn’t know enough about jewels to tell if this was valuable at all; probably it was just nothing, as Erif had said. She blushed and thanked and inadvertently licked the cake crumbs inelegantly off her fingers, and blushed again for that.