The Corn King and the Spring Queen (17 page)

After that battle nothing very much happened for some time. There was a great deal of feeling in the Achaean League that Aratos, with the main body of the army, had not supported Lydiades and the cavalry, and had consequently lost them the battle. Some said it was deliberate treachery, others that it was just his usual dislike of actual fighting. Finally, they said they would give him no more money, and if he wanted to go on with the war he could pay for it himself. And so, for a time, he did. He was an odd little man; he did not care much for other people,
but he cared immensely for his rather unexciting political ideals, for the Achaean League of free cities—oligarchies, of course. He had read Aristotle. He saw that the only chance for the Greece of his time was for the cities to bind themselves together as securely as possible. All the little states had been romantic and inspiring in time past, but that was before the days when Alexander's generals and their successors for nearly a hundred years had made rich and powerful kingdoms out of the barbarian nations: Egypt, Macedonia, Syria, Cappadocia, and so on. As it was, he had to get help, sell himself here and there, but never completely. He had very few friends, but he had one son and he kept a diary. Some day, it seemed to him, this would be published and read, and people would do justice to him, that is, if he was successful. He cared a good deal about the opinion of the world, but did not care whether it was to be his own world, or some future one. Again and again his feeling about Kleomenes was pure annoyed anger at this bad luck which had thrown up, after so many generations of mediocrity, a Spartan king who had to be reckoned with and to whom this future approval might go from those who did not understand. And all these revolutionary ideas of Kleomenes made him look like something very grand to that large number of men in every one of the free cities of the League, who, naturally, were not included in the oligarchy. All the same, thought Aratos, reason would win in the end and certainly reason was on his side.

Tarrik suddenly decided that he wanted to see Athens, and see Athens he did, with Berris and half a dozen others; they went round by sea. Athens had been under the Macedonians up to a few years ago, though not very painfully so. However, it was now free again; the foreign garrisons were gone and there was a fairly full democracy. It was Aratos who had bought off the Macedonian general, for he had a curious intellectual passion for the place, but somehow the Athenians had rather disregarded him and his League. Not that they had any sort of liking for Kleomenes of Sparta, but that was hardly to be expected.

Athens was perfectly accustomed to strangers. Tarrik and his friends found a whole programme of sight-seeing almost inevitably mapped out for them. The time before, when he had been to Greece as a boy with his Aunt Eurydice,
they had lived in Corinth, a rather secluded life among oldish people, with a visiting tutor to give Charmantides a good Greek accent and a grounding in ancient history. He had visited Athens for a few days, but somehow the only impressions he had got of it were of his tutor taking him firmly to places of historical interest and making him stand still while he was being lectured to, or else of meeting some other old Scraggy and then the two of them would have endlessly dull conversations while the boy dawdled about and yawned and was not allowed out of sight. He still remembered a sweet-stall they used to pass—always so unkindly to pass! He tried to find it again now so as to buy masses of sweets, but it had disappeared and had to be left as part of the geography in the slowly enlarging Platonic Kingdom of the Unattainable.

There was no denying that they found it exciting. There was the sense of the sea all the time: it kept the mountains back, that had been walling them in all along the horizon, day after day, round Sparta and Megalopolis. And then there was so much actual beauty. At first they could hardly see the trees for the wood; it was difficult to get more than a tangle of impressions, and when it came to pictures and statuary, the guides who had been introduced to them were sometimes rather tryingly reminiscent of Epigethes. Berris was rude to them and was suitably snubbed, and finally he went off on his own and hunted down the things that pleased him and afterwards dragged Tarrik off to see as many as possible.

At first he had been distressed at finding nothing but a naturalistic convention, or at least one that tried to be. Marble and metal alike made soft and plastic, treated like flesh or as clay, not allowed to take their own proper forms. He had not discovered any of the cold, logical lines and masses that he looked for now. The only thing he liked for a long time was the brilliant colour, deep yellow and red and black caught up in the fierce light that came on to everything. If marble was to be treated as they seemed to enjoy treating it, the only thing to do was to pretend it was something else and cover it with paint—but even that was not done by the more modern sculptors.

The actual pictures amused him very much. He had seen very little of the sort before, and he loved finding out what could be done with perspective and grouping. There was
one he particularly liked by Philoxenos of Eretria: a huge battle-piece, with Alexander and his generals, the whole background filled up with great pikes, straight and slanting, twenty feet of wall striped with these painted Macedonian sarissas. Another by the same painter had palm trees used as a background in much the same way. It was not more than a few days before he managed to make friends with a young painter, a pupil from one of the famous studios, who was doing the back wall of a colonnade that had been given to the city by a group of rich citizens; it was to go alongside the new fish market, and was being painted with groups of fisher boys pouring the catch out of nets. Then he had a delightful time learning the technicalities of design and material. Soon he was helping to mix the colours and clean the brushes. It all had to be done very rapidly before the plaster dried, and in the end several square feet of that Athenian colonnade were painted by Berris Der with the great sturgeon that they catch in the landward part of the marshes south of Marob.

He found his way about the older stuff too, and with his young painter friend rediscovered some of the archaic things which were just becoming fashionable again with the more advanced groups. There was plenty of three and four hundred year old sculpture stowed away in the backs of temples, too sacred to be destroyed though too old fashioned to be shown. They got leave to draw and measure it and then produced statues of their own with as much of the old conventions as could be worked in nicely. All this amused Berris; none of the Athenian artists whom he met seemed to him serious about their work, as he had been serious about his; but it was a good change for him and he learned all the time, for they were competent craftsmen. He had done hardly any work on marble or stone before and enjoyed finding out about it, watching the way it chipped, fascinated by the new surfaces he could make.

Once, rather cautiously, he had asked if anyone had known a man called Epigethes. The name seemed vaguely familiar to one or two, and at last someone thought he remembered a rather inferior person of that name, who had been turned out of one of the great bronze-casting studios for stealing another man's savings without adequate excuse, and had then had to go and make his living among
the barbarians. Berris said no more; he felt infinitely grown up now. He could not imagine how he could ever have been so silly and unsure of himself as to fall down and worship anything that smelt ever so little of Athens—now that he had seen the real thing! Now that he had seen hundreds and hundreds of Greek pictures, vases, sculpture and metal work, every form of art, and could compare, and say what was beautiful and what was a copy and bad at that. Now that he felt sure of his craft. Tarrik reminded him that this had happened before and that sooner or later he always became unsure and transitional again, but Berris did not think these precedents held any longer. Perhaps he had been like that as a boy, but he was a man now. Altogether he enjoyed himself very much for three weeks.

Tarrik had been less happy. He was looking for something, a wisdom, a way of life and action and government, and he did not find it in Athens, even though they were friendlier than in Sparta. He went to hear various philosophers, sometimes with introductions from Sphaeros, sometimes on his own, struck perhaps by something he had heard by chance in the street or theatre. But he never got much out of them. Instead, he would go off with the younger and sillier of his nobles, and such of the Athenian youth as were attracted, and spend a great deal of money and over-eat, and either go to expensive actresses or else make elaborate and giggling plans for climbing over garden walls and kissing respectable citizens' wives. When Tarrik was being deliberately stupid, he was worse than anyone. And he did not make any friends. At last he said they must go back.

Between the battle of Leuctrum and their start for Athens, Berris had not managed to see Philylla and he had not liked to write to her. He was not sure how she would take the fact that he had killed Lydiades. But once they were back, he decided that he must see her and tell her all about Athens. It was a few days before they met; he was getting impatient. When he did see her, he stopped her and said: ‘You promised you'd let me talk to you about beauty if I killed a general of the League. You know I've done that for you, and now you're trying to hide!'

‘I know,' said Philylla, ‘that in a way I am to blame for Lydiades of Megalopolis being killed. But I haven't been
hiding, and I keep my promises. I can't stop now, because we are all going to put down the linen for bleaching. But I'll meet you this evening when the others are singing.'

‘But don't you want to sing?' asked Berris, suddenly quite shy and afraid he was being a nuisance.

‘No,' said Philylla definitely. She did not want to say, least of all to a Scythian, that the others refused to have her when they were singing, because she would insist on trying to sing too, and there had been rather a fight about it, but there were more of them than there was of her. ‘At the top of the bleaching-ground,' she said, ‘after supper.'

Before going, she told Agiatis, who was a little nervous. She said: ‘Beauty is a dangerous thing to talk about, a dangerous goddess—you know we kept her in chains in the old days?' ‘Oh yes,' said Philylla, ‘but you know, darling, I can look after myself. It's not as if he was a man, he's only a silly boy. And if he tries to kiss me I shall run down the bleaching-ground; I know where the pegs are and he doesn't, so he'll trip over them and come down on his nose.'

Berris, however, did not try to kiss her; all he did was to catch hold of her wrist and emphasise his points by hitting it against his knee. This embarrassed her a good deal, but as it would have embarrassed her still more to make him let go, she allowed him to keep it. She did not in the least understand most of what he said, although by now his Greek was quite good and very fluent. At first, while he was taking some trouble over making things clear and considering her rather than what he was talking about, it was easy enough; but then he began on technicalities and went on as if he were talking to himself, and when she tried to stop him and make him explain he got impatient. She did not much like it, either, that he was always talking about Athens. She tried to get him back on to subjects that she considered interesting, but it was no good. Just a little of what he said stuck, enough, she found afterwards, to make her uncomfortable, not sure whether after all she did really like any of the things she used to think were pretty, whether she had ever looked at them, really looked at them—what Berris Der called looking! Naturally, she wouldn't admit it at first, but when she had to, that was what it came to.

As they sat there talking the sun dipped towards the level
of the mountain tops; dimly peaked shadows spread all across the land and up towards them. They were sitting on the ground under a low pomegranate tree with the squares of bleaching linen wide out on the slope below them, held down with stones or pegs. Philylla's magpie perched on a twig and sometimes whistled; she shook the branch and pomegranate flowers fell and lodged themselves a moment, brilliant scarlet, between its glossy shoulders. Berris began to talk about his sister, and now Philylla listened altogether. He told her about the women's magic of Marob that was handed down from mother to daughter, how bad witches were drowned and even their babiest daughters were drowned with them in case the thing had been taught already, and he told how good witches were allowed to do all sorts of things just like men: could walk alone in the fields and carry knives, and if they chose to marry they made the best of wives, because they were too much interested in magic to want lovers. Suddenly he said: ‘If you were in my country, Philylla, you would be a witch.'

‘Would I?' said Philylla inadequately, and blushed. Then she said: ‘It must be sad for your sister to be left alone now.'

‘Yes,' said Berris, ‘I wish I knew what she was doing just this moment! She will have plenty to see to, because she is the Spring Queen and she has to make things start. She has to walk among the flax fields with the other chief women of Marob and all the witches that can be found. I don't know what they do; it is a woman's magic, but they make the flax grow long and tough.'

Philylla said: ‘Do you really believe that, Berris Der? I mean, of course, I know there is some magic, and people can tell fortunes, and I once saw an Egyptian myself who could swallow fire and pull live pigeons out of an empty bag, but all this about the flax! It's the sort of thing the slaves believe in here, only of course all of us know that the seeds just spring when the time comes and there's rain and sun for them. I wish you didn't believe in that kind of magic, Berris!'

‘But I do,' he said. ‘I've seen it happen. I know my sister and I know Tarrik, and they aren't pretending about it. They are quite certain they do it with the magic that is in them, and I can feel it all about them too.'