The Corn King and the Spring Queen

by Naomi Mitchison

  That was, apparently, herself—and nobody knew. Unless the goddess knew. This was only a priestess dressed up as a goddess. If Isis had known she would have felt it; she would have felt an eye on her. But she did not. She laughed a little to herself in safe darkness, unrecognised. Yersha’s Greek voice went on longer than the Egyptian voices, a priest had to sidle up and tap her on the shoulder. Yersha, with her wet, shining face. What had happened to the Rhodian? Had she lost him? It was enough to turn away any husband! She would not get another. Yersha, who had despised Tarrik and Marob!

  The play went on. Those who had spoken loosed hands and settled again to watch and sway. What, finally, was the connection between all this? Marob went on too. It was not this Yersha who had done those things, but a younger, stronger woman, who would have been ashamed to cry in a crowd of foreigners. A woman a long time ago at the furthest end of the sea, back in Marob. In Marob where Erif had danced at Plowing Eve. In Marob where her dead baby had been alive and sweet for a little time. In Marob, where Murr had been alive among the pollen of summer. In Marob, where Harn Der had been alive and a great fighter. They were all going the same road to the dark house of Serapis, to the doubtful star of Isis, to dust and darkness. Why should this strange woman in Egypt be hurt because of something a long time over and past which had happened in Marob? Erif slid her hand down over the pure linen, feeling for Tarrik’s knife, which would surely be the quickest spell-breaker on his aunt. But she was not wearing it. Of course not; she had left it at home; she seldom wore it here, seldom even looked at it, for what was the use in the too clear air of Greece or Egypt? It had not shone again since the day at Delphi. She said in Ankhet’s ear, hurriedly: ‘I have a gift for Isis—I must go—I am coming back.’ Then she turned quick and rose and scurried out, keeping her face away from Yersha, who might have looked round at this disturbance of the line of worshippers.

  Something rather trying happened on the way back. Erif thought she would not go by the main street, but would take a short cut she was sure she knew. But she lost herself in an odd part of the Egyptian quarter. Fortunately, the natives recognised and respected the white linen of the Mysteries, and put her on her way back, but she was flustered and distressed, and her hurry kept on breaking into little runs. All this time, whatever was going on went on, and she had not yet begun to alter it. Berris might have felt like that with an untouched block waiting for him while he shaved or ate or otherwise wasted his working time.

  She came to the house and ran up the stairs to their room, thinking about the knife and exactly how it was to be used to cut the spell. She wanted to run quietly across to her bed and take the thing from the shelf above the pillow. But she found Berris chasing Metrotimé round the room; they had already upset various jars and stools and pulled a curtain half down. When she came in they stopped, laughing and gasping, and Metrotimé pinned up her hair. ‘But how revoltingly chaste you look, Erif, my little angel,’ she said. ‘Come to the feast at the palace this evening and get a little splash or two!’

  Erif twitched her skirt away, frowning. ‘What feast?’

  ‘But the vintage, the vintage; haven’t you heard? Our divine King’s direct inspiration. No, it’s serious. Listen, Erif, it’s going to be desperately exciting. It will be—yes, almost really—a return of the God. We shall get him down to earth if anyone can.’

  ‘Catch any god coming to that palace of yours!’ said Erif.

  But Metrotimé held her wrist. ‘It won’t stay there. We shall go out—into the fields, into the vineyards. I think—we may get even the natives to see. It’s an idea. A great idea. To bring the nations together under the youngest, the reborn God! Ptolemy said that himself.’

  ‘An Alexander idea,’ said Berris nodding. ‘Right for this city.’

  ‘I don’t think the Egyptians will leave their gods for any of yours,’ said Erif. ‘Are you taking Berris?’

  They both at once said ‘Yes,’ and laughed. ‘He’s to be a faun,’ said Metrotimé.

  Erif raised her eyebrows at him. ‘He’ll like that!’

  ‘Well, why not?’ said Berris, challenging her; and then: ‘Come on, Erif, it’ll do you good; make you come alive. This summer’s too hot for us! Let’s get the heat out of us somehow!’

  ‘No,’ said Erif, ‘I’m busy. I—I have to get clear with Isis.’

  ‘What a bore you are these days!’ said Berris. ‘You and your cow-faced females!’

  But Metrotimé was rather shocked with him. She had been to the Temple of Isis herself before now. There was a stone image in a niche in her room; she had cooled a hot head against the knees of Her and the Child fairly often. If the Egyptians took Dionysos, the northern bull, she would gladly take the gentle, suffering and cow-shadowed southerner to comfort her when she needed it.

  Erif fetched her knife and came back through the room. Metrotimé was watching Berris making loops in a piece of copper wire. ‘What are you doing with Tarrik’s knife?’ he said sharply, looking up. But she jumped for the door and was running again. She could not explain. For a time the idea of her brother and Metrotimé held her, very disturbing. She liked Metrotimé in a way, but not Metrotimé with her hair down and dress slipping: let them have each other if they wanted, but not so untidily, not with all this silliness. She wanted it serious and honourable, a good magic, a hard, knife-edged delight to feel or think of. As he would have been with Philylla. As Tarrik was with her or with other women. The image of those two she had just left shook her thoughts of Tarrik; she could not feel the part of herself which had gone overseas to purr and smile at the new baby. These things she had thought beautiful and important reduced themselves grimacingly to something Metrotimé would laugh at. What was the use of love and generosity and magic? Why fuss about Yersha-Eurydice? Her pace slackened.

  She thought that this time she would go by the great street of Sun and Moon, so as not to miss her way again. It was warm dusk now and crowded with men and women going slowly after the day’s work. She walked quietly, her head down, the folds of her mantle over the knife. Very soon she came to the cross-roads, the centre of Alexandria, and had to wait a moment for a long string of potters’ donkeys to go by. In the centre of the cross-roads was Alexander’s tomb, the marble gleaming with extraordinary softness and brilliancy among the hard Egyptian limestone buildings. It was a great stepped sarcophagus, carved with eternal battles and perhaps eternal love between the Macedonians and their king. People brought offerings to it, barley cakes and cream and flowers; little snakes lived unharmed in cracks between the flag-stones and flickered in and out as though to show that life still faintly stirred there and might some day be roused. He had made Alexandria to live after him, and what else? Almost everything. But his only child had been killed. She believed all the stories she heard about him. He had magic. He had succeeded where Kleomenes of Sparta had failed. And now he was a kind of god. He had been fierce and serious and generous. He was like Tarrik, but not concentrated into one flame on one place and one small people, but spread about the world. As she thought of him, her heart calmed and lifted again and she went steadily to the Temple of Isis.

  The play was over and Ankhet waiting for her, anxious and delicately questioning. But she said firmly that it was laid on her to speak to this other stranger, and found out after a time that Yersha was in a separate room with one of the chief priestesses, telling her wrongs and miseries. Erif found another Greek-speaking priestess and gave her the knife, saying with the utmost solemnity that she must make very sure to go at once to the room and tell the stranger that the knife was given to her to cut the spell. ‘Then,’ said Erif, ‘it must be drawn very lightly down her face from brow to chin, and across from breast to breast. All this has been told me,’ she ended, ‘in a dream—fasting—and after having written the Names.’

  The priestess looked at her and took the knife. ‘Our Lady reveals herself in many kinds of darkness,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Erif suddenly, ‘what happens to Eurydice t
he Rhodian.’ The priestess nodded again, and Erif waited, shivering rather, behind a pillar, trying to understand the difficult pictures on it and knowing that she had given away Tarrik’s knife. Ankhet had to leave her to go back to the children; it must be night by now.

  After a long time the priestess came back and told Erif that the thing had been done and Eurydice’s face and body wiped with new cloths. Then she had suddenly fallen asleep and she was asleep still; her skin was dry and healthy as a child’s. ‘She knew the knife,’ the priestess said, ‘for she cried out when she saw it as those do whose evil spirit is faced with a thing of power. And the light of the full moon walked for a moment along the blade.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Erif, ‘did the knife glow?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the priestess. ‘And now you had better tell me all about it.’

  Extremely startled, Erif began to stammer, and suddenly found herself explaining it all to the uncommenting priestess—not very well, and constantly harking back to something she had forgotten. She dropped again into stammering and silence. She could not believe she had told.

  The priestess said calmly: ‘Then it was a lie about your dream.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Erif, ‘but the knife glowed the way it did at Delphi! It shone then when I was helping Hyperides, who denied Apollo, and it shone here when I lied to Isis.’ The priestess looked at her very gently. ‘So there,’ said Erif, but not in Greek. Some curious tide of security was mounting through her. Telling about Marob, she had become again the Spring Queen, the focus of the people, and she felt a quite definite sort of cousinship with Isis, who was a Year Queen too. This was only a priestess! As, in a way, Link had been her priestess, and now for a time had taken her place and was acting it as these priestesses had acted the story of Isis. For a brilliant moment everything in the world fitted together with clashing and sparking in her head. All difficulties could be solved by an immediate and complete explanation. While that held earth and air were equally weightless round her. Then something came into her head: her brother and Philylla; and she was back in the temple, and it must be very late because she was so tired. The priestess had been saying something, she did not know what. She shook her head, questioning. But this time the priestess only smiled and gave her a long and elaborate blessing which she only half understood.

  She went home through hot, dark streets, almost empty; because of her dress she was quite safe. She heard a certain amount of distant shouting, but did not heed it much. Berris was, of course, not in. She went into her own room, an alcove off the other one with a narrow window, undressed and fell asleep at once.

  After some immeasurable space of time Erif woke up to a noise and a bright spear of yellow light piercing through the crack of the curtains between her and the other room, jerking and sliding about. She turned over and put her hand over her ear; it was too hot for a blanket. But the noise went on, and even behind her shut eyes the light seemed to wobble drunkenly. She heard her brother’s voice and Metrotimé’s and others she knew; she came more and more definitely awake; her drowsed mind suddenly shook itself and began to race. She got up and slipped into her thin dress again; it was not quite cold yet.

  For a time she stood in the crack of the curtains watching the other room. There were ten or twelve men and women, most of whom she recognised as Greek or Macedonian courtiers, back from the Feast of the Vintage. They were all dressed as fauns and maenads, with bunches of half-squashed grapes in their hair and dragging down on to their shoulders, and skins of leopards and antelopes and fauns. One of them was trying a pipe-tune, which kept on breaking down in the same place. Metrotimé lay back on a couch, one breast bare, staring and breathing and sometimes passing a long bryony garland from right hand to left. Berris was leaning against one of his own statues, grinning to himself; Erif thought critically that he looked rather well in his short faun skin. Two of the girls in helpless giggles were failing to mend a thyrsus; the big gilt pine-cone went rolling about, and finally landed by Erif’s curtain.

  She picked it up and came out into the room; they shouted at her joyfully, and two or three ran up and kissed her. They smelt of grapes and wine and the hot night; she pushed them away, but not really angrily. She put one of the torches into a safer place and then picked up the thyrsus and mended it with a piece of string. It balanced nicely; she held it across the palm of her hand. Metrotimé sat up with a long swing from the hips, and in the same movement flung her garland across Erif’s shoulders. Bryony berries pattered on the floor. Berris leapt over and made it fast, over one shoulder and under the other. He stripped his own faun skin and tied it round her waist; it was hot and damp, and his naked belly and thighs when he took it off were stained with dust and grapes; there were little leaves and dry twigs caught up in his body hair; she reached out and pulled at them. He laughed and suddenly threw his arms round her and squashed her softly against him; the heat and excitement passed from his skin to hers; her throat and breasts and belly began to throb. He reached up a hand behind and pulled her dress loose from one shoulder. He let her go, staggering and laughing, the pure linen crumpled and spotted. She had left the people of Isis and gone over to Dionysos-Sabazios. So long as she was of some company it did not matter which. The evergreen things that had come down from Thrace with the plant-god, pine and smilax and holly, pricked her in Alexandria. She turned from her brother’s arms into the arms of another faun. Dimly she saw him and Metrotimé together on the couch, locked and intent, but it was not really Metrotimé: it was someone full of godhead, as she was.

  Once again that night she had a clear vision of Berris. She saw his mouth, hovering, kissing, biting a shoulder; and then he looked up and his eyes and the muscles of his face fixed themselves for a moment and quivered, so that she knew piercingly that he had thought of Philylla. At the same moment she herself thought of Tarrik; but Tarrik was well and happy with his new baby and his own harvest coming. And Philylla? She had not talked to Philylla for some time. They had smiled to one another at the wedding. Perhaps she was happy. The Spartans would not be sharing in the Vintage Feast. Then Berris dropped his mouth again hungrily and all her own thoughts were torn away from her and dispersed again into laughter and pleasure.

  After quite a long time it seemed to be dawn and there seemed to be fewer people there. She thought she must have been asleep again. Finally, there were only herself and Berris and leaves and trodden grapes and single untouched berries that had rolled into corners of the room. He brought water and they both drank and looked at one another, and stretched and laughed a little. A cool air of sunrise blew through the open window and the leaves danced about the floor. She was sleepy again, beautifully sleepy with a soft, all-embracing exhaustion. ‘I was thinking of Tarrik,’ she said, out of the happy weariness. Berris did not answer for a time. He looked at a chip that had somehow been made in a corner of one of his reliefs. He went over and touched it. Then he answered her: ‘And I was thinking of Philylla.’ But he did not say it in the tone that she had used; it seemed suddenly as though after all no part of him had been satisfied; he spoke not simply, but with layers of complicated bitterness in his voice. But Erif did not look up to see the stiff pain in his face, because she was already almost asleep again.

  Chapter Four

  IT WAS ONE DAY later on that autumn that the King got letters from Sparta in answer to his. He let Nikomedes read some of them over his shoulder. While he read he would every now and then feel the boy’s breath against his cheek, the tickling ends of his hair, and he would toss his own head up and rub it against the young face. Then he went off again to see King Ptolemy, and in the meantime sent to tell the others to come the next day. Nikomedes was wildly excited; he was suddenly certain that everything was going to come right. The letters he had seen—though his father was always folding them up again before he’d quite got the last lines!—had been hopeful, promising all sorts of support if only the King could come home with some impressive backing, something at least to make a start with. ‘And why, aft
er all, shouldn’t Ptolemy let us have it?’ he clamoured to Sphaeros. But the old man said: ‘These things don’t go by reason. Try and keep steady. You pitch up and down like a ship in rough weather! How will you ever be able to face life unless you can see it from one level? The bad with the good.’ He sighed, he found it difficult to tackle these boys; they had a kind of formal stoicism, sucked up with their milk almost, a way of abstracting themselves from their bodies. It was their method of avoiding punishment. But he was almost sure, though they wouldn’t tell him so, that they went, not into contemplation of wisdom, but into some play-world, back to Sparta perhaps. He could not meet their eyes. Even little Gorgo did it, copying her brothers.

  Kleomenes came back in the evening, profoundly cast down. To his mother’s questions he answered that he had not been able to see King Ptolemy at all, only Sosibios, and he could get nothing out of him except this endless, maddening talk! Had he asked for the King? Yes, but the King was busy—busy with one of his new boy-Nancies! The creatures Agathokles buys or bribes for him! Or boxers—nigger boxers with—But Kratesikleia, glancing at the listening children, hastily asked another question.

  Nikomedes was directly unhappy through his father. It was as though he were completely the same person. Yet he found it painfully difficult to talk; any kind of pure sympathy was silly and useless, and he couldn’t think of any reasonable way of helping! When Kleomenes was alone, the boys took it in turns to wait on him; tonight it was Nikolaos. He always managed to joke with his father, to make up some sort of game, even at the worst times. Nikomedes watched them and it made him feel unhappier still. He must do something!