The Corn King and the Spring Queen (10 page)

‘His enemies tried to persuade him to come from the temple; he would not listen to them. But again he was trapped by his friends—by his own pure heart that would believe good of anyone until, too late, their evil was proved. They lured him out of his refuge and dragged him to prison. Leonidas and his followers among the elders came there to accuse the king, to show some pretence of justice. He stood before them, bound and smiling, and happy because of the things he had tried to do. They sentenced him to death; there was such a glory about him that the executioners dared not touch him. It was those one-time friends who dragged him to his place of death!

‘But now his mother and grandmother had heard. They rushed about the city, stirring up the people, reminding them of all he had done and hoped to do. They came clamouring round the gates of the prison, saying it was for them to hear and judge him. That only brought him a quicker death. The officers of the prison wept for him, as once they did in Athens for Sokrates. He bade them not to mourn for him dying innocent and unafraid. He gave his neck to the noose.

‘Then these friends who had betrayed him, came out with
fair words to the women, saying that there was no more danger for Agis. They brought in first the older woman, his grandmother, and killed her. Then his mother came in, thinking to have him in her arms again, and they were both lying dead. “Oh, my son,” she said, “it is your great mercy and goodness which has brought us all to ruin.” And they hanged her too, till she died.'

Sphaeros stopped suddenly and looked round at the Scythians. Eurydice's white hands were quiet now, Tarrik was leaning forward with his hand on his sword. The other two were both in tears. Said Erif: ‘But what happened to the other, his wife—Agiatis? Did they kill her too?'

‘No,' said Sphaeros, frowning a little. ‘They did not kill her. She was heiress to her father's estates, so Leonidas married her by force to the boy Kleomenes. She hated that; she had a little baby, and besides, she had loved Agis. She did all she could to keep herself his, and his alone: she hated Leonidas. But she was in his power—as all Sparta was then.'

Erif Der drew a breath of pity. ‘Poor dear, oh, poor dear! Was she very unhappy?'

‘I think so,' said Sphaeros. ‘The baby died very soon: and Leonidas was not kind to her. But my Kleomenes was gentle, and, as soon as he was old enough he began to love her so much that in time she loved him back. But she never forgot Agis, he was always in her heart, and by and bye she found that her husband was the one person she could talk to about him. I was in Sparta again some three years after this marriage (between-times I had been home again, in Olbia) and Kleomenes told me, as if it were something quite new, the story of Agis. He was all in a passion, flaring up and then crying like a child over it: he wanted to know what I thought of Sparta, as it was now under his father, a worse place than ever, rotten with luxury and idleness and the evil wills of the rich. He swore to me then, if ever he was king, with my help he would change it all and make it a place where men could be wise. And I swore too, that if, when the time came, he still needed me, I would come. Nine years ago his father died, worn out with desires and the vain image of pleasure. Kleomenes was still little more than a boy. He is a man now. He has written to say that at last he needs me.'

‘I see,' said Tarrik, and got up, and began walking about the room, fidgeting with his crown, his belt, the edges of his coat. At last he came to a stand in front of the philosopher and looked hard down at him for a minute or two, as if he were trying to see through the man's eyes into his mind and heart. ‘And so it seems as if you must go,' he ended his sentence.

‘Yes,' said Sphaeros gravely.

‘You may have difficulty in finding a ship.'

‘I know. His letter did not reach me till late in autumn. But you will help me, King of Marob.'

‘Yes,' said Tarrik, ‘I will help you.'

E
RIF DER LEANT OUT
of her father's window and watched them driving the bulls into the flax market. The openings of the streets and the house doors and lower windows were barred across, because of the half-wild beasts pouring in, tossing heads and tails, brown and white in the sunlight, not angry yet, but ready to be. From housetops and windows half Marob was watching. Snow had fallen the week before and been cleared away; now it was a lovely, sharp, windy morning. The well-head in the middle was covered over with hurdles to make a raised refuge place for the branders and killers. They stood about on it, some ten or twenty young men who wanted to show off to their girls and friends, all gay with coloured knots and leather fringes to their coats and boots. Tarrik was among them, standing right on top of the hurdles, with gold and red ivory scales sewn all over his clothes and the long, plaited whip hanging from his hand to the ground; he jerked his arm up and cracked it out over the bulls' backs. Most of the people shouted back at him, ready to give him his chance and let him show he was Corn King again. But Erif Der started, clinging to the side of the windows; she waved her hand to him, with something tinkling between the fingers; she was very white, and after a moment looked back into the room as if she were going to fall. Yellow Bull came close to her and whispered: ‘You are sure—this time?' She glared at her brother and said nothing. Harn Der, wiser and perhaps more anxious, pulled at his arm and got him away, right out of her sight.

They left her alone; she had worked out everything—everything except what the bulls would do: that she must leave to chance. She wished she could stay still now, frozen, unthinking, unpicturing, instead of being horribly alive to it all, in the middle of this magic that she had made herself, and that she knew was well made. She gathered it up against Tarrik and let it go; at any rate, she was in her father's house; why need she feel that there was any change between last winter and this?

The bulls were beginning to get angry now, swinging their great heads and bellowing; but so far they had kept clear of the men at the well-head, knowing the sound of whip-cracks and the gadfly bite that always followed. The people watching all round began throwing stones and shouting. One of the bulls charged suddenly, horns down, at a house wall, but then at the last moment swerved aside and came blundering back into the herd. Two women in the window above him screamed, and one of them called shrill to a boy among the branders, who yelled back and shot out his whip-lash and flicked the flank of the bull, angering him. In another ten minutes the show was at its height; the old bulls were being killed and the young ones branded with this year's mark. Blood ran dark and bright in the gutters; people and beasts alike were smelling it, and the singed hair and flesh. They got mad. The boys on the top of the flax stores were throwing down balls of tow that they had set on fire. One of the branders, not quick enough, was caught before the others could come to his help with their weighted whip-handles, and had to be carried into a house with his arm broken. But nobody minded except him: it was all part of the fun. Only Erif Der was not really looking, not enjoying it properly as she always had in other years; her father came softly behind her to see what she was doing, but she did not turn round, and he went away again with Yellow Bull to the other room. Yellow Bull wished he had been bullfighting too this year: it would have been, somehow, fairer. But his father had wanted to be quite sure of having him safe; he saw that this was wise, but all the same, it stopped him from getting any pleasure out of the show.

Tarrik had waited till there were a dozen bulls at once charging about the market, clatter and thud and grunt of
their wild, hot bodies, the weight and danger behind their sharp horns and stupid, savage brains. Then he marked his beast, jumped clear and threw out his coil of rope with the stone on its end. It went snaking out, low after the bull, and twisted round his hind-leg. Tarrik braced himself gloriously, with eyes and ears open for another brute to dodge. As the strain came, he heaved himself back on the rope, feeling his strength and godhead burn down through muscles of arms and back and legs to his quick feet hard on the rammed earth of the market-place. The bull fell, kicking with all four of its hoofs like knives, and he was on to it and banged it between the eyes with the bronze knob of his whip. The shouting all round rose to a yell for him; he heard his own name and thrilled to it, and stuck his knife deep into the bull's throat folds. It quivered immensely and groaned; then its eyes glazed and it died. Tarrik jumped on to its ribs and stamped on the warm, foam-streaked hide, cracking his whip and shouting shrilly as he felt the blood trickling down his hands. Then he began showing off to Marob, playing tricks, jumping over the brutes' backs and under their noses, roping a young bull to be branded, scoring the neck of an old one with his knife point to madden it; he was all barbarian.

From a broad window, not too high above it all, his aunt was watching; sometimes she felt herself almost swamped in the waves of savageness bursting all round her; she nearly got to her feet and yelled too. But still she could stop herself, look away, ask Apphé whether she had remembered the gold thread for the embroidery. She wondered if she would always be able to stay so beautifully calm; every year, as she grew older, she enjoyed it more. Sphaeros was sitting beside her, and he watched, but he did not seem as if he even wanted to yell; the lines on his face showed, his clasped fingers fitted together; he had not spoken much, nor even answered her questions with at all a courteous fullness, all the morning. Perhaps he was shocked, in spite of admitting it all intellectually: the Scythians of Olbia had never played this savage game.

Then Erif Der, sitting in her window, began to sing in a high, shaking voice. No one could have heard over the din in the market, but Tarrik seemed to be listening. He stood quite still where he was, with his rope trailing
on the ground; one of the bulls, charging blindly, just missed him; the other bull-fighters shouted at him, ran towards him—and then stopped, all shaken with fear at something in his face. They saw that his bad luck had come again, the blight on the Corn King: this was how he had been at Midsummer and Harvest.

Erif Der shut her eyes; she did not choose to see it happen. It was better, if one must think, to go right on into next year when it would be all over, and this house her house again. Then her mind split into two; one half worked quite free of the magic—the most living half; it darted about, hovering over faces remembered; her father telling her their plan, making her feel a grown woman fit to act with the men; Yersha walking blind into a magic net made fast with the pin of her own hair; Berris, unhappy, not wanting to make things; Tarrik. Tarrik. Tarrik. There he was, solid, at the end of all the paths that darting mind could take. Deliberately, with a great effort, she blotted out that half of the mind, shoved it down and under till she was poised again on a tide of magic, flowing out on the thin music of her song, to do what she wanted. She dared to open her eyes; all this boiling in her mind had taken incredibly little time. Tarrik still stood there, clouded, and yet—it was not finished.

For the first moment, Eurydice had not understood; she thought he was showing off again, and leant back, smiling half apologetically at Sphaeros. But then, when everybody else had seen, she saw too. She caught her neighbour Hellene by the arm, with a kind of soft, whispered shriek: ‘Look! She's killing him!' ‘Who?' said Sphaeros quickly. ‘Erif Der—that woman—oh, what are you going to do?' ‘Make him think,' said Sphaeros, and slipped the heavy cloak over his head and off, and put one knee up on the window-sill, blocking her view, so that for one moment she only saw the hard jut of muscles in his arm and shoulder, wondered dizzily at a middle-aged philosopher being like that, heard a yell of something—horror or admiration—go up from the crowd, and fainted.

Sphaeros saw it was only twelve feet to the ground, and jumped easily, his hands just touching the ground as he sprang up again. He watched his line among the bulls and
took it. Twenty years ago he had been a brilliant runner and proud of it; the pride was gone, but that same body was ready to do what action he willed. He called to Tarrik by his other, his Greek, name. ‘Wake!' he cried, ‘think!' And as he got there, Tarrik shuddered from his feet upwards and turned to him. They were almost touching when an old bull charged. Tarrik, coming alive, heard the loudening, sudden bellow, and saw the lowered terror of black horns coming at them. The cloud lifted.

The bull knocked Sphaeros over sideways, then dropped its head and spiked him in the armpit with one horn, roaring. Tarrik threw his looped whip over the other horn and dropped against it with all his weight. The bull, over-balanced, slid round on its forelegs with a wrenching grunt, and came down on one knee and the looped horn, which broke off short. Sphaeros' body had fallen across its neck, so that Tarrik stabbed behind the shoulder, falling forward on to the knife hilt to get it through to the beast's heart. Already half his mind was racing off into questions; but in the meantime he did exactly what he meant to do, and all Marob shouted for the Corn King.

Erif Der had seen. Back came her magic on to her own head, with shock on stinging shock, till she could only cling, rigid and speechless, to the window-bar, fighting against her own clouds. At last she tore the beads from her neck and wrists; they lay on the floor, faintly smoking in the sunshine. She stared down at them, panting. Her father and Yellow Bull came in. She had seen her brother angry before, but never Harn Der. She thought they were going to hurt her. In sudden terror she tried to turn the clouds on to them, but it was no use: she only span dizzily in her own magic till they took her by the shoulders and shook her. ‘What have you done, you little fool?' said Harn Der. ‘Look at that!' and twisted her round by the hair to look at the flax market and Tarrik's triumph. ‘Trust a woman!' said her brother bitterly, and then words became inadequate and he kicked her ankle as hard as he could.

But all the branders and slaughterers had come shouting up round Tarrik, keeping a space open and safe for him. The bull was quite dead. It had seemed to Sphaeros as if he were rushing off somewhere, on the clear path at last, away from the world, the thick air of passions and
arguments, into some simple, fiery place, from which the movements of the stars were all plain. Only his arm was holding him, pulling him back, with immense tension and pain; if once his spirit could make the supreme effort, tear itself away regardless of any hurt, he would be able to lose himself in that fire of truth and understanding. For long ages he struggled to bring his will to bear on this sure Good, and then without any pause he was looking up at Tarrik's face between him and the sky, noticing the flecked brown of his eyes and the tiny drops of sweat crawling down his forehead and nose. ‘Truth,' he said, clearly, in Greek, ‘truth is—a fire—God—Charmantides, my truth—' and so came back, dejected, into the tangle of unfriendly arms and legs that seemed to be his body. Tarrik put an arm under him, gently, and nodded to one of the others to pull, biting his lip, because he hated the sound of a friend in pain, and knew it would be bad, getting the horn out. ‘Don't strain!' he said, ‘go soft—we shall do it quicker so.' And obediently Sphaeros the Stoic relaxed into their hands, into heaving, alternate waves of pain and faintness, for some ten minutes, while they got him loose from the horn and bound up his shoulder with soft rags, and by and bye took him out of the flax market into a house. He found then that he was crying, making small noises like an animal, and he stopped himself, concentrating his mind instead on the problem of breathing without hurting his poor body too much. Tarrik was standing beside him, twisting knots and loops in his whip-lash, and then pulling them out again. ‘You saved me then,' he said dispassionately, into the air, as it were, over Sphaeros' head, and then again, ‘you risked your life to save me.'

‘Yes,' said Sphaeros at last, hoping not to have to say any more.

But Tarrik dropped on the floor beside him: ‘Is it because I am king? No. But why? Would you do it for anyone?'

‘Of course,' whispered Sphaeros again.

‘But do you not care for yourself at all? Sphaeros, Sphaeros, how are you so brave?' He bent closer, staring into the white face and eyes half shut: he could only just catch the sound of those faintly moving lips.

‘Good,' they whispered, ‘to do good,' and fell into the shape of laboured breathing again.

‘Is it because you are a Greek?' asked Tarrik again, very eagerly. ‘Are all good Greeks like you? Is it—could I see for myself? Was I wrong? Is it like this in Hellas after all?'

But for all Tarrik's wanting to know, and for all that he was Chief of Marob, he could get no answer at all out of Sphaeros then, nor for another half-day and night. But his mind had come awake and cloudless, and gone south, searching down a secret road—towards Hellas.

When Erif Der screamed, the odd part of it was that she screamed for her mother. It was not the sort of thing that either of the men expected of her, and it made them angrier than ever. Yellow Bull would probably have beaten her solidly with a stick, particularly as she started by hitting back at him and even getting in one good tug at his beard before he had her hands tight. But Harn Der would not have it: he was too deeply angry for a fleeting violence like this. He told her quietly that she had ruined everything, her father and brother, her family, Marob itself, how she was nothing but a woman after all in spite of the trust they had put in her, and the way he said it made her wince and quiver away as if he had spat in her face. She had a lump in her throat that stopped her explaining. She just said once: ‘It was the Greek—' but they did not choose to heed. They treated her at once as a naughty child and a wicked woman, and she, with her own hostile magic to deal with as well, had nothing to do but take it.