‘But you couldn’t?’ said Erif Gold, very gently, trying to help him.
‘No, lady,’ he said. ‘The League passed a decree. Then they hunted us down all over Laconia. All of us who’d been soldiers, who had shared in the New Times, who had pictures of the Kings. They took my land away and then they took me and sold me. They sold three thousand of us. And now there are none of us in Sparta, but only the exiles and the Achaeans, the men from Megalopolis, Philopoemen’s friends. Lord, I must go back to the ship, or I will be beaten again.’
‘You are not to go back to the ship,’ said the Corn King. ‘I will buy you, Tisamenos.’
The man ducked his head again and murmured: ‘Lord.’
Erif Gold said: ‘Are there more of you on the ship?’
‘There is one, lady,’ said the man. ‘We were cheap beasts to buy.’
‘My father will buy him,’ said Erif Gold. ‘Then you will be together. It is better being together, isn’t it, when you have the same Kings?’
‘Yes, lady,’ said the man, staring, for he could not think how she knew that.
She asked: ‘Is your foot well?’
Astonished, he felt it with his hands, and slowly got to his legs and stood firm on it. ‘Yes, lady!’ he said again.
She nodded, satisfied.
Klint-Tisamenos said: ‘I think this is a story I half know. About the kings who die. My father told me that. I am the King here, and when my time comes I will die for the people. That time is sure to come for a king. Your King Kleomenes died in Egypt because he did not die at Sellasia. My father told me that too. And now he has turned into a god, he has become part of the year. But you are staying here now. And in Marob we have got the thing straight.’ And then he stood up, too, and he took the hand of the other Tisamenos and led him, wondering and dirty, back from the sea and the harbour into Marob.
First published in 1931 by Jonathan Cape
First published as a Canongate Classic in 1990,
and reprinted in 2001
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2009
by Canongate Books Ltd
Copyright © Naomi Mitchison, 1931
Introduction copyright © Naomi Mitchison, 1990
All rights reserved
The publishers gratefully acknowledge general
subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards
the Canongate Classics series and a specific
grant towards the publication of this title
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN: 978 1 84767 512 5
www.meetatthegate.com
The Corn King and the Spring Queen Page 77
