The Corn King and the Spring Queen

by Naomi Mitchison

  There was one more small sketch of the stake with its cross-piece and the snake coiled on it. The body was hidden altogether. Round the margin he had drawn the growing vine which King Ptolemy had sent, and the cup, and then the hammer which had driven in the stake, in through the flayed flesh of the King. Tarrik took this out of his hands to look at it more closely. He had commented a good deal on all the pictures, but though it was mostly praise, and intelligent praise at that, and praise from a friend, Berris had paid no attention. ‘What are you going to do with all these?’ said Tarrik at last.

  Berris said: ‘They are part of a story. I made them for—her. Anyone can have them now. The first lot are in Sparta, or should be. These had better go to them.’ Then he called across the room: ‘Oh, Gyridas, do you want my pictures?’

  Gyridas said very quickly: ‘Yes!’ And then: ‘I’d take them home. I’d show them to—to anyone there is. Berris Der, do you really mean me to have them?’

  Berris nodded: ‘In about a week. I must finish them off, Gyridas. Then you will have to tell me if I have made good likenesses of your father and Nikomedes.’ He watched to see how much the boy would wince, but he stood it almost without moving.

  Erif had been looking at the pictures too. She said: ‘The charcoal one is wonderfully good of Philylla, Berris. One can almost see her moving. Why haven’t you gone on with her? And why did you turn it to the wall just now? I wanted to look at it longer.’ There was a queer, silvery quality about her voice, as though she were still not quite awake. Tarrik wondered how long that would last. He thought he would be able to wake her without hurting her; he thought he would be able to substitute some intellectual acceptance—the kind of thing he had got from Hyperides—for this magical one before it ended. He would be able to communicate his own certainty.

  He said now: ‘When you have finished your pictures, let us go home, Berris. The Spring Queen and I must be there by midsummer.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Berris. ‘I want to do some metal-work again. I think I shall marry Essro. I am sure it makes her unhappy not to be married, and she will be able to imagine I am like my brother. She will think of my pictures as she thought of the secret road. And I may as well have some children.’

  ‘That is a very good idea,’ said Tarrik, ‘and then she will stop being frightened of me.’

  ‘And the statue?’ Sphaeros said. ‘I know what I would do with that if I were you, Berris Der.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I would break it. It ought to be broken. Things like that are only disturbing, and men are enough disturbed. It is not reality, but only an image distorted by pain. Break it, Berris!’

  Berris grinned with hard lips. ‘I might have done that five years ago, Sphaeros. I would have thought how right, how good Sphaeros is! But he isn’t right. And my statue is meant to be disturbing, it is meant to break up all kinds of little realities which ordinary men and women have made for themselves, and little calmnesses which philosophers have made for them. It appears to be successful. I am glad you hate it, Sphaeros! Between now and then I will think of the right thing to do with it and the right place for it to go. Are you coming back to Marob, Sphaeros?’

  Sphaeros shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You go back to Marob and the future, Tarrik and Erif and Berris. I must stay here with the past. I am going to be tutor to Princess Arsinoë, as I was to Kleomenes and Eukleidas, and to Nikomedes and Nikolaos. It all happens over and over again. But Gyridas—’ He looked round uncertainly. He was thinking that Alexandria would be no place for that boy, even with the pardon he was almost sure he could get for him.

  But Hyperides said: ‘I’m going to Athens, which seems to be rather completely the present, because my play’s to be acted there this summer. And I’ll take Gyridas with me. Then he and his pictures can go back to Sparta when it’s safe.’

  ‘You won’t find you can keep away from Marob,’ Tarrik said. ‘You know, Hyperides, you did better work there than you’ve ever done in your life. I made you!’

  ‘Yes, Tarrik,’ said Hyperides, ‘and that’s why I’ve got to get away from you, to see that I can work by myself. But I’ll come back to Marob often in the summer, to ride through the future with you and Erif! Keep a good horse for me, Tarrik.’

  ‘After I come back, there will be a good season in Marob,’ said Erif suddenly, standing beside the witch Disdallis, an arm round her neck, ‘and dancing and marriages and new songs and new things made. Everything will go on again.’

  ‘And now,’ said Klint-Tisamenos, ‘can I go out? Will you take me out, mother, if no one else will? I want to see the lighthouse!’

  Chapter Five

  KING PTOLEMY WAS having a supper-party at Canopus on the night of the full moon. There were tables and couches set in the marble square of the garden, between the fountains and the statues, under the palms and holm oaks and bong trees. Dancers and flute-players wandered about from one group to another, in and out of the deep shadows; they caught fireflies and let them spark about in the dances; they carried heavily scented long garlands of jasmine and water-lilies. Agathoklea had brought her mother, and Oenanthe had brought a very special little dancer, a Jewess she had discovered and bought in the docks, who could imitate the sailors of every country in every stage of love-making. Oenanthe had taken rather a fancy to Kottalos, and Kottalos was divided between the certainty that his fortune was assured if—And yet, on the other hand—The divine Ptolemy and his friends made life very complicated for a simple officer of the guards.

  Sphaeros was there. He had said good-bye to his friends. He must not regret them nor wish life had been otherwise. He had new duties. He watched his present pupil, the blonde Princess Arsinoë; she had received him with a fierce pride, a kind of malice against the world; it was difficult to be sure how to deal with that. What was she thinking now? Glancing towards him with that same look of hurt malice from between two of her maids of honour, girls not much older than herself. He trusted they would withdraw before the end of the party—if it was going to be like most of Ptolemy’s parties.

  Something seemed to be amusing Sosibios. He grinned to himself and ate rather fast and not very fastidiously. Metrotimé sent one of her girl-friends to find out what it was all about. After sitting on his knee and being rather intimately pinched and tickled, she discovered the secret, and shortly afterwards found her way back to Metrotimé. ‘My dear,’ she said, shaking herself, ‘he pinches like a camel, the fat old wretch! And all he’s got to grin over is a silly letter from Greece. The King’s party in Sparta have gone and murdered their magistrates, and he’s laughing because they’re just too late. That’s all! Dearest, lend me a pin. He’s torn my gathers right out at the shoulder. And his breath! What he wants is a good wash—with soap.’ She laughed and stuck the pin in cleverly. She was thinking that if this Greek news hadn’t come too late, and if Kleomenes of Sparta had gone back—well, there wouldn’t have been any snake or any processions or any new hero to whisper and shiver about in the hot afternoons. But Metrotimé didn’t believe in that. Or said she didn’t, anyway.

  A new course was brought by ivy-wreathed dancers and torch-bearers to the King’s table, with a music of stringed instruments, a low throbbing that caught oddly at the pit of the stomach. One was put down before every guest; the arms of the dancers reached over their shoulders; flowers and breasts squashed for a moment lightly against them. Ptolemy reached behind him for the unseen dancer’s thigh, and dug his fingers and polished nails into it. He had ordered the course himself, so he knew. Every guest had a marzipan crocodile about a foot long, dyed in natural colours and biting a naked man or woman made of white nuts appropriately stained with red in parts. The nut faces had all been carved separately by a Persian ivory-worker, each into a different and individual little mask of screaming horror. If you liked that sort of thing, that was the sort of thing you liked. Agathokles did, for instance. The throbbing music went on, as though to drown the tiny squeaking cries such tortured dolls mu
st give. Agathoklea shuddered a little and pulled her crocodile to bits. She wanted a nice, strong man to snuggle against. Then it would be all right, then she’d be able to giggle at the crocodiles. She looked round for a nice, strong man—hairy.

  King Ptolemy suddenly had a brilliant thought. He let go the bruised dancer and leant towards Agathokles. ‘Next time,’ he said, ‘we will have an even newer sweet. We will have a staked body and a snake—yes, Kleomenes! This. Persian is brilliant; he will get the likeness. See that he stays with us. Do you like my idea?’

  Agathokles was a little uneasy. ‘A marvellous conception,’ he said. ‘But—the effect? Some of your guests may take it too seriously.’

  ‘Ah, but I take it seriously myself!’ said Ptolemy. ‘Kleomenes is mine now, my god that I have flayed and staked and done what I wanted with. His image must be made.’

  Agathokles quivered and twitched responsively. ‘For a small party, then. Just ourselves. As you say, to eat. That will be wonderful: better than this, even. We’ll have a poem written for it.’

  ‘Metrotimé shall do that.’

  ‘Metrotimé,’ said Agathokles, rather spitefully, ‘has become quite incapable of doing anything one asks her since Berris Der gave her that new statue of his.’

  ‘Not incapable of everything,’ said Ptolemy, and smiled to himself. He had found her a particularly stimulating companion. ‘She understands,’ he said, delicately grooving along his crocodile’s back with one nail.

  ‘What?’ said Agathokles, sharply jealous.

  Ptolemy lifted his head. ‘About kings dying. About sacrificing kings. Taking a living man and mixing him with pain and death—yes, mixing him—like a cook—and making a god. I have made a god that way. A new form of god. Dionysos-Sabazios has shown himself again on one man, a torn man. Like Pentheus in the play. By the way, Agathokles, we might have that acted again soon, before people forget. It was a pine-stake—his tree. And the growing vine. It was a manifestation. I made it appear.’

  Agathokles looked away, his face working. He wanted not to believe in the thing at all; he wanted to laugh at it the way Sosibios laughed. But he had seen with his own eyes.

  Princess Arsinoë and two of her maids of honour came to the table where Sphaeros sat, talking quietly to the man next him. The girls carried a basket of fruit; all kinds, heaped and fine in the torchlight. She offered the basket to him with a pretty speech. He was touched. The pomegranates were particularly large and rosy: he took one. There were interesting analogies to be drawn from the structure of a pomegranate, the tough though red-cheeked rind, and the multiplicity of seeds. He put his knife into it. The pomegranate was made of painted wax. All the fruits in the basket were wax. Arsinoë laid her hands on her hips and threw her head back in the torch glare and laughed in shaking fits. The other two girls laughed too, spilling the wax fruit, clinging on to one another with delight at their successful joke. ‘You can’t even tell whether a pomegranate’s real or not,’ said Arsinoë. ‘You and your kataleptike phantasia!’

  Sphaeros put the pomegranate aside gently, steadying himself against the mocking laughter of the girls. ‘Pomegranates, after all, are not so very important,’ he said, ‘and perhaps I meant to take a wax one—how do you know?’

  And Arsinoë stopped laughing and looked at him and said: ‘Yes, perhaps you did.’

  PART IX

  They that Mourn

  Dem Begriffe nach, einmal ist allemal.

  Hegel

  Homeric Hymn to Dionysos

  NEW PEOPLE IN THE NINTH PART THE EPILOGUE

  People of Marob

  Klint-Tisamenos as Corn King

  Erif Gold, youngest daughter of

  Berris Der and Essro

  Greeks

  Tisamenos, a helot, and others

  EPILOGUE

  THERE WERE TWO people standing on the big breakwater of Marob harbour. One was the Corn King, Klint-Tisamenos, wearing the Corn King’s crown of ramping beasts, and the other was his cousin, the girl Erif Gold, the youngest child of Berris Der and Essro. She had been fishing off the end of the breakwater, for she had a way with fish, and now there were a dozen in the heavy net slung over her shoulder. Her hair blew into her eyes, so she stopped and swung the net down beside her cousin, and began to remake her plaits. She laughed to herself, because the wind pulled at her hair and skirt and because she was standing beside the Corn King and because she had just discovered that, besides being a witch and able to catch fish quicker than anyone else in Marob, she could also make a peculiarly lovely green enamel, which all the metal-workers had come to see and admire, including the young man she was very nearly in love with. She had been telling Klint-Tisamenos about that, which had made it all suddenly realer, and it was spring, and the most exciting and the best-coloured spring she had ever lived through.

  The ships from the south had been coming into Marob for the last few weeks. There was one moored near them now, her black, pitched bulwarks about on a level with them, but rising at bow and stern, so that the red-painted eyes looked out side-ways over the quay. During the war between Flaminius the Roman and King Antiochos of Syria, Marob had been cut off from the south almost altogether. Byzantium and the straits were deeply involved, and the merchants took their cargoes elsewhere. But now there was peace again and everything was cleared up, and the Black Sea harbours were filling with Rhodian and Cretan and Corinthian and Athenian ships, and Antiochos was beaten and sulking, and the Romans had gone back to their western place on the other side of the civilised world, and in Marob the midsummer market would be held again with the old magnificence and profit and passing about of goods and money.

  This ship was a Cretan, laden with wine in casks and jars, and oil, and some woven stuffs. They had been unlading all the morning, and now three or four slaves were clearing up the decks. Sometimes one of them would begin some kind of song, or what had once been a song, but had now been reduced to something sub-human, an insect’s drone; not encouraged, it dropped again. Otherwise they scarcely spoke; they worked dully. Marob was a harbour like any of the other harbours where they had strained and slipped and ached through days of lading and unlading between other and endless days of rowing. There was nothing for slaves to talk about.

  Erif Gold and Klint-Tisamenos did not notice them. She picked up her fish-net again, sticking her fingers in among the firm, sticky bodies; their salty cold smell brightened the spring about her; the hair on her forehead and temples and the base of her neck curled and shone into tighter rings; she kept a grip of the hour, balancing on her airy happiness. The Corn King saw this and saw it as a part of the thing he did in Marob. He breathed deeply and steadily, and for him, too, time went as he chose. He thought of his cousin’s marriage coming soon, the toughness and gentleness and pleasure of her body, as though that net weight she slung about so easily were already a child. She knew he thought this, and her skin warmed as it would have under kisses or a cloudless sun, and her mind went back to the forge and the praising circle of faces and the lovely colour she had made, and she began to picture a cup with lion handles and green inside, so that the lions should constantly be staring and straining down to a green, tiny lake. And then she saw that the Corn King had suddenly stopped thinking of her and was listening. He was listening because he had heard his own name spoken aloud, his rather curious Greek name, Tisamenos.

  Earlier that morning the edge of a wine-cask had dropped on to a slave’s bare foot, so that he screeched and let go of a rope that kept the gang plank in place, and he was properly lammed into by the captain, first with the rope’s end and then more thoroughly with a stick that had nail points in it. However, he was quite unable for the time being to stand up again, in spite of this inducement to do so, and after a time one of the others helped him down into the dark of the hold, and tied up his foot with rags and left him. As his eyes got used to the almost lightlessness he turned his head towards them again, those drawings of the kings he and his friend had made on the planks in red and charco
al, after the pictures they both knew: the picture of Agis betrayed and dead, the picture of Kleomenes in agony at the pillar, and the picture of Nabis with a bloody axe. He talked to the pictures. He asked King Agis and King Kleomenes to come back and help him, to come back to their wretched and mourning people, but he did not say that to King Nabis because he himself had seen Nabis dead and stiff, murdered by his false friend, the Aetolian Alexamenos.

  He lay on his side with his head on a bean sack, muttering and remembering, thinking sometimes of Nabis and the revolution which had made him a citizen and a soldier, but mostly telling the other two—the Kings who had died before his time—what had been done to him, to him and his friends and new Sparta; and it seemed to him that King Agis answered that he had suffered too, and suffered worse things, even the last thing of all when he was still young, and he understood, and King Kleomenes answered that he had suffered all that, he had died for Sparta, and he would come back one day and revenge it on Philopoemen and Megalopolis; he was the snake, the vine, the cup, the remedy, the king who remembered his people. So by and bye the man fell asleep, and while he slept his foot got better and his cut back almost stopped stinging, and when they shouted down to him to come up quick and help them scrub decks, he came without too much pain and with some curious kind of faint hope of something, some idea that he was not alone. And that one of the others who had been his fellow-soldier in the old days, called him by the name he had got then, Tisamenos.