The Corn King and the Spring Queen (26 page)

‘You couldn't have lived like that, being Spring Queen,
could you? And none of us who are witches can, because we're ourselves. We can't be only Marob. The Corn King has to be separate too. Yellow Bull was, when—when he was that.' Then she went on nervously: ‘Erif, it doesn't make any difference between us, all that's happened, does it?'

Erif laughed and patted her hand, but did not answer. It was very comfortable in the house among the marshes; she didn't want to talk.

The next morning, though, they began to consider seriously what to do. Essro had been quite cut off all winter, first by snow and ice, then as these melted by marsh and floods. But the floods were going down. They walked round the island on slime-coated grass that smelt as though it had been half choked. The water was down even since the day before; at one side they were almost joined to the mainland; anyone could have walked across. The winter lake was beautiful; it lay in long soft curves, caressing the shapes of the land, except in one place, away across on the right, where it was broken and changed by man's work and led into long ditches beside a raw, straight dike of earth and hurdles, the beginning of the secret road. Essro peered northward over the shallow, hurrying flood water, screwing up her eyes; she was rather short-sighted. There was no sort of security in them now, beyond another day or two. Erif turned round suddenly and found that Essro was crying. ‘They'll come,' Essro said, turning her wet eyes towards Erif; ‘they're going to come. It's no good. They're going to kill my Yan. We can't do anything. I may as well give him up first as last. You can't possibly help me.'

‘Don't be a fool, Essro!' said Erif sharply, feeling that she herself might very easily get infected with this woman's hopelessness. ‘I—I—oh, they shan't kill your baby! What good am I if I can't see to that? It's something real.' She took Essro's arm and walked her back towards the house, away from the smell of marshes. Then she said suddenly: ‘Why not the secret road?'

The next day they started. Essro's men rowed them along the dike below the level of the empty road that was to bring Marob to new places. It went from island to island and often there were wooden bridges laid on the tops of piles with flood water sucking them over or bobbing viciously at them with
drift wood. Beyond the end of the road Essro took out a roll of drawings which Yellow Bull had made month by month, showing the lie of the islands and currents, first from one point, then from the one next farther on. He had marked their way in red, which Essro said he had got by pricking his arm with his sharp pen. With the help of these they got from island to island until they felt they were out of reach. They had poles and felt for two tents, with blankets and cooking-pots, flour, meal, cheese, salt fish and meat, and a goat which would have kids the next month, so that there would be plenty of milk for Yan if his mother ran dry, as she was likely to soon. They had fire in a charcoal pot and kept it carefully dry. The boat went slowly after the first day. No one talked much. Erif Der felt very well. At last they came to a high island with willows in small leaf rising out of it. There seemed to be no wild boars about, or other beasts that would be a danger. They cut a clearing and camped.

Then every day things got greener. Hourly the lovely rushes crept up, till inch by inch they had made a live curtain round the island. As the floods dropped the marshes were sheeted gold and pink; it was impossible to look at one single flower, there were so many! Where the great channels of water still flowed, year-long draining the wet lands, they were blue and shining and reed-edged. The air was full of larks. The rank, ungrazed grass grew where some day the secret road was to bring the flocks and herds of Marob. Essro had given up that dreadful northward peering for danger and busied herself about the camp, painted the tents with dyes made out of one or another juicy stem, and tamed a willow wren to come down and feed out of her hand. The men shot duck and sometimes swans with their bows and arrows, and cooked, and cut down trees, and sat about, and sang songs, and told stories. Yan ate all the flowers he could. Erif was well and happy. It was all quite different from what she had expected, and much easier. In that first moment of saying: ‘The Secret Road,' she had pictured herself with Essro and the child stealing and hiding about marsh ways in a small boat, holding their breaths, chased. But instead everything was calm and green and growing. It was her own spring. Had she made it, down here in the marshes beyond Marob? She did not know or care. Yet by and bye, as it went on, as the earliest flowers
began busily to drop their petals and turn to the building up of seed pods, the Spring Queen began to think uneasily of the other spring which she had left deserted and which would be needing her.

The she-goat had kids. They killed and ate one, and its milk went to Yan. The men caught fish; once or twice they set nets and caught the salmon running up from the sea. Then one day there was a heavy rainstorm, with wind. It cleared up the next day to a pale gleaming morning over sweet-smelling bruised reeds and dripping bushes. But some of the stores were soaked, including most of the flour and meal; the goat had broken her leg. Essro looked at it all, rubbed the wet oatmeal through her fingers. This was the stuff Yan needed now. She looked from it to Erif. And Erif suddenly said: ‘I must be off, Essro, back to the Spring-field and the young flax and my work in Marob. Send Murr in the boat with me and he will bring you back stores and news. That will be best for every one.'

That same day they started. Murr was the strongest of the men. He punted the boat through the marsh channels. Sometimes they were deep, and he had to stoop right over the pole, and when it came up dripping black mud he stretched and grinned and ran it up between his hands for another heave down. As it plunged again, the marsh gas came hurrying up through the water in great bubbles like eyes. Sometimes it seemed as though the channel was shallowing off to an end, but the grass field which Erif thought she saw, opened and parted and pressed down under their prow, and the water crowfoot flowers bobbed under water and streamed past her, drowned, drowned, only to rise again behind them, shaking and dripping.

Erif Der lay in the boat and trailed her fingers and looked at rushes and reeds and water-beetles and buttercups and crayfishes and moorhens and dragon-fly grubs crawling up the stems to wait and dry and split their fat sides in the sun. She saw water-rats and herons and big docks and marigolds and a great many grey or transparent or bright-spotted fish and thin wavy roots digging into black mud and a continuous life of little marsh creatures; and sometimes she saw the man Murr punting, looking down at her, grunting, shoving, shining wet hand over hand along the leaping pole, his head dark against the sky. He had a pleasant-shaped head. As
the day softened into evening, Erif drew a blanket up over herself; she felt the water so very near beyond the thin planks of the boat, and the brushing of the leaves of the water-plants under the keel, and the faint splashing of the pole. Murr's head was outlined now against a sky of lemon green that brightened moment by moment with stars, but between them was slowly fading into grey. Her eyelids sank, heavy as her body. The Spring Queen slept.

It was the same all the next day. They landed and ate cold porridge in a friendly way. She spoke to him about the things all round, the beasts and the flowers. He brought her a bird's nest. She took her shoes off and paddled among mud and reeds and short water-lilies. The fat water-lily buds pointed and strained towards the surface of the water. They had air inside them. Why? She broke one or two open. They smelt like a more delicate sort of mud. The soft mud rested her swelling body; her white ankles were too small for the body, a silly stalk for it to balance difficultly on, until they were buried, rooting into the mud. Murr found scented rushes and cut some for her to lie on. She thanked him and they went on.

They had Yellow Bull's drawings with them. When they were not sure how to go they bent together over them to look and point; but Murr was certain he would know the way back quite easily. He had the feeling of it in his head, the place where his mistress was waiting for her stores. When there was any difficulty about the way, it was always Murr who was right. Soon Erif was leaving it entirely to him. It was more comfortable so, too.

That evening again she went to sleep as the stars came out, but by and bye the moon rose and woke her. They were in a barer part of the marshes now, salter too perhaps. She dipped a finger; the water tasted faintly brackish. Round her mud islands shone whitish, with a few trailing plants; it was very warm and still. She could hear the duck flighting, but was too deeply sunk in this stillness of night even to turn her head to look. After a time Murr shipped the punt-pole; they were in a current that drew them very slowly on. The moon was behind her now; he could not tell by any gleam of her eyes whether she was awake or asleep. He slid to the bottom of the boat with his face an inch or two from her feet. His breath touched her feet, then his lips. Her cold
toes spread and curled against his warm cheek; the mud had dried on them to a fine, dark powder. Slowly, slowly, he began to kiss, up from her ankles. Still he did not know for certain whether she was awake or asleep. She did not know either. She could not move. He was beginning to creep over her. In a moment she would start awake. Why was her heavy body so calm and so aware of what was wanted?

She did start awake, half awake, into his arms. He held her, clung to her, looking up, praying to her. ‘Spring Queen,' he said, ‘Spring Queen, be kind, be gentle, be merciful! Let the spring come!' He had taken the words of Plowing Eve; they had made him eloquent and in a way impersonal. He was not Murr; he was the crowd, the whole people of Marob longing for the spring. Why not, then? Why not let him come? Spring Queens must be kind.

Tarrik would mind; Tarrik would be hurt perhaps. Tarrik did the same thing because he was Corn King. He must learn to understand and not be hurt.

Now Murr was urging her again. He had her dress open from the neck. He was mumbling against her breasts: ‘Let me come! Let me come! There is a child there already: nothing will happen. I cannot hurt you. Spring Queen, take me, take me! No one will know.'

She felt herself stiffen a little, rise a little out of his soft, fumbling grip; he was afraid of her. But could Tarrik mind? For, after all, the child was his. Because of the child she herself was his whoever else came into her. Could the child mind? No, no; no one would be hurt. And why be unkind? Why be unkind to the man and to herself?

The man panted and clutched at her dress. She felt him hot and leaping a little against her. ‘Be quick!' he said. ‘I must! No one will know.' Then, quite accidentally, his fingers caught in and pulled a loose piece of her hair. She hardened suddenly into a stiff violence; she caught his throat with both hands and knocked him off her, flung him against the side of the rocking boat; a little water splashed in. With an effort she righted it. He lay there crumpled with a darkening face, his mouth half open, licking at his own hands. He had been afraid of the Spring Queen. He had lost his woman. He began to cry and abuse her softly under his breath. She bade him pick up the pole again and keep silent. He obeyed her,
trembling a good deal. Neither of them slept any more that night.

The next day there was sun still on the marshes, but the Spring Queen was tired of them. She said nothing to Murr except when they landed to eat—but he ate nothing. He took a mouthful of porridge and chewed it and then spat it out. Once or twice she had been going to tell him to make haste, but he saw the look in her eyes and went on at his hardest. He was afraid of her still. They came to the end of the marshes; the low, willow slopes grew clear and unbroken ahead of them. Murr cast about for somewhere to land. They were several miles from Yellow Bull's farm, but that was in case the Chief had anyone there on watch. Just before they landed on to a solider mud-bank it came dreadfully and piteously into Murr's mind how lovely she had been, how soft, how warm, how alone with him in the boat and almost his. Before she could check him he threw himself at her feet, imploring her once more to be pitiful before it was too late and he lost her for ever. But Erif Der stepped out of the boat and walked away, leaving him to tie it up. She was angry with him because her shoes were muddy; he ought to have helped her out instead of grovelling like a grub in the bottom of the boat.

Before they came to the farm she was aware that he hated her. She did not mind, but she was a little alarmed about what effect it might have on Essro. However, there was no reason really why, hating her, the man should be disloyal to his own lady. Thinking this, she said nothing, but watched him. They came cautiously to the farm on the mound under the elm trees. It seemed to be deserted. They went into the courtyard. They could smell something very unpleasant. Erif had to go into a corner and be sick before she could go on. Murr went into the house and came out again rather quickly. He told Erif what he had seen. The Chief had been and gone. Before he went he had killed every one on the farm whom he had caught. After they had been killed they had just been left about. There was some evidence that he had tortured a few of them, presumably to tell him where Essro was. After that Murr went into the byres one after the other. Some of the beasts must have been killed
and eaten. Others had been left tied up with no one to feed them. The Chief must have been in a bad mood. Did the Spring Queen want to see? Or the bodies in the house? He could tell who they had been; he had worked with them all—his brother—No, no, Erif did not want to see! She went out and sat on the grass under a tree and tried not to think of Tarrik, whose child she bore, having done this. She sat there for some hours, until late in the evening. She was very hungry, but did not want to go back into the house. At last Murr came out and brought her food; he had a horse for her too. Several of Yellow Bull's horses had been loose, but they knew him and let him catch one of them. He had found goats too, and a ewe with lambs, and there was plenty of corn and meal. By that time it was quite dark. She stared at Murr and wrapped herself up in a blanket and lay down beside the tethered horse. Not for anything would she have bolted herself into one of the farm rooms now. Murr went away and slept somewhere too.