The Corn King and the Spring Queen (28 page)

Disdallis said: ‘He thought you were angry. He thought he would die a worse death if he were taken. But what does it matter? You are the Spring Queen. He was only a herdsman.' She stroked Erif's hair and rubbed her cheek against the Queen's cold cheek.

‘I would not have killed him,' said Erif Der. ‘I would rather have lain with him.' She went on: ‘He was afraid of me. I was unkind to him. I wish now I had been kind. The Spring Queen should be kind.' She thought of the boat in the marshes and Murr's groping hands that were now stiff. She had no definite custom to go on. For it was said that in old days the Spring Queen belonged to all the men of Marob for them to work their magic on. At the new moons of spring she had lain with the householders in green furrows and flax fields for the sake of the seasons. But now this did not happen; since then the Corn King had gathered so much power and violence into himself that he counted for all the men of Marob with the Spring Queen, and because of that, and because he was also the chief, the
war-leader, none of them now dared to force her nor even to entreat her except in the name of the whole community at Plowing Eve. Yet there was nothing alien in the thought that the Spring Queen should be taken by any man. If this was followed by anger, that was the affair of the man and the Chief. She herself could not be reproached. Surely she could do nothing but good by being kind! Surely she was making it easier for the rain and warmth to come, for the corn to spring, for beasts and women to breed! Surely she was making peace in the household of Marob!

She should have been kind. Marob wanted it. Her own body wanted it. She had wronged the life behind her body and Murr's. Ah wrong, wrong, the thing Sphaeros had talked about, dear Sphaeros, telling them about the way of Nature and how one should always follow it! Now she was bitterly and deeply ashamed, more than she could ever explain to Disdallis, or to Tarrik. One way and another her body and mind were as bad as Tarrik's now, and besides she had done her bad things more reasonably, less on the impulse of the moment. She was worse tangled than even he was.

Yet, for the moment, she would not consider the tangle; she had not the strength. She could and must wait until her baby was born. Being a woman, she was allowed that much delay, even by her own conscience. Also, she had some tough, non-rational idea at the back of her head that possibly with the birth of her baby, with that terrific interruption and test of life, it might perhaps all be wiped out and made clean again.

Later on her cousin told her that the man had been prowling round the Chief's house for days before, looking up at the windows, hiding and watching. He did no harm, so they had not said anything about him. He looked like a man under a spell. Erif was angry that she had not seen him, angry with her women and with herself. He should have been real enough to see! He had been hers, but Sardu had been the one to find him and talk to him. He had belonged last and most to Sardu. She would never be able to find out if he had talked to Sardu about the boat in the marshes.

Failing Murr, it was Erif herself who went to fetch Essro and tell her that she could come back, that the Chief was no
longer hungry for Yan. She rode very easily this time, with Black Holly and his men as well as half her own women. At night they pitched a striped and embroidered tent for her in the middle of flowers. After a time they sent a messenger and Kotka came to meet them, looking very down-hearted. Erif told him the news and said she must have a boat. ‘Essro is at the far end of the secret road,' said Erif, ‘beyond where it has got to yet.' Kotka looked at her and his eyes widened slowly and he pushed a hand through his hair. ‘As you were saying it,' he said, ‘I wondered whether she could be there. But why didn't I look there before?'

She found it very difficult to remember her way to Essro's island and went wrong several times. She wished she could summon Murr to guide her back, but she had not that power. She did not think that anyone of Marob had it in her time, though it used to be done not so many years back. But at last she got there and persuaded Essro that it was true and she must really bring Yan home. He had grown tremendously, and howled at Erif when she tried to lift him. He had forgotten her altogether. They left the goats and sheep on the island; it was easily big enough for them. When the secret road got there it would find them or their descendants. Essro did not come back to the town of Marob for a long time; she stayed on at the farm and sometimes got very frightened; she always kept a boat ready to fly in just in case Tarrik changed his mind. She could not get happy anyhow; she had been married young to Yellow Bull and her marriage was in some way the thing she measured everything against. It was dreadful not to be married. Tarrik had broken it and she would not see him again—not yet, at least. And Erif Der thought she was right.

Kotka came back still very angry with Disdallis, because, although of course he was delighted that it had all ended so well, he was not going to stand being interfered with by her. But when he got to his house he found that she had just been sent for to one of the out-grazing herds where there was trouble, the cows refusing, as they sometimes do, to suckle their calves. He followed her there, but arrived when she had already begun the rite, so stayed behind the ring of cattle-men to watch. She went up to one of the calves which was lying on the grass, with sides fallen in and legs sprawling
weakly from hunger. Its mother was grazing quietly with her back to it, a little way off, completely regardless of its miserable and now very faint bleatings. Disdallis crouched beside it, opened its mouth, blew down its throat, and spoke some words. Then she stood up and talked to the cow. After a time the cow turned round, walked back to the calf and stood chewing and blowing while it sucked her. The first time it was so weak that Disdallis had to hold it up. She did the same with the other cows and calves, and walked back to the cattle-men with the halter of the heifer which she had been given as her payment. She saw Kotka and smiled at him droopingly, rather tired with her day's work. He asked her again, as he had done before, how she did it; but she could not explain, except that they were home cattle, part of the Marob herd, food for her man and children. That was how her life was joined to theirs and why she had power over them. She did not think she could do it with strangers' cattle. Then she told Kotka how Tarrik had met her in the flax market and what he had said. It was very disquieting, and they went about cautiously for several weeks. But Tarrik did and said nothing more; he was all smiles to them both. By the time they had finished all their talking it was too late for Kotka even to be very angry with Disdallis.

Riders went west and north-west to find Harn Der. The inlanders who came to Marob in trade were told to pass word through the forest that he and his household might come back. The Council were glad that after this bloody and alarming spring, summer had come so well to the Corn King. It would be splendid to have them both, reconciled, for the good of Marob and the harm of Marob's enemies; one against famine, the other against the Red Riders. Erif Der said nothing. She looked forward to seeing Gold-fish and Wheat-ear again. The rest must wait. She would not think about Harn Der until after her baby was born. She would not let whatever it was that she intended take shape until after that.

Just before midsummer Harn Der and his waggons came back to Marob. Tarrik rode out to meet him. The old man was smiling in his beard; he greeted Tarrik with the salute to the Chief and then a hard handshake. He seemed all one piece with his horse, his bow and silver-plated quiver, the
axe in his belt, his helmet of gold and bronze, and his short iron sword. His body was only one more thing that he used, as a weapon or for his pleasure. The two children of his body were tall and rosy, perched on big horses. The waggons were full of fine forest pelts, bear and deer and marten and ermine; pairs of stags' horns, painted in his colours, were nailed along the ridge poles, and bunches of boars' tusks and lynxes' claws dangled from the axles. He had a piece of beautiful clouded amber to offer to the Chief, the kind of thing which would be much praised in Marob. Yes, it had been a fine holiday for Harn Der!

But Tarrik had expected this; he was prepared to meet it with an equally elaborate pretence game of his own. What he had not expected was to see Harn Der, in the moments between the smiles and the easy talk look suddenly for a breath old and unhappy and beaten, hurt to the roots of his soul. His power and honour were much diminished, his hopes which he had worked at so long and patiently were unfulfilled, and he could see as well as anyone that they never could be fulfilled now, even if Gold-fish grew up to be another Yellow Bull; his wife and his eldest son were dead; another son had gone right away, perhaps for ever; his eldest and dearest daughter—well, who could say? Not he, not Tarrik, not even perhaps Erif herself. It was a nasty sort of tangle, enough to make a man feel old. Tarrik had meant to tease him, to withhold news of Essro and Yan, make him think perhaps that the one grandchild was lost too; but after a short time he began to feel a horrid and disturbing sense of being himself in some way the same as Harn Der, in trouble too, in a worse trouble than the men of Marob knew. He was angry at not being able to tease Harn Der, but his silly, unsure mind kept jumping into the other man's skin and hurting him from there! So Tarrik found himself gravely reassuring his father-in-law about the health of Yellow Bull's son.

Harn Der went back to his house and waited for Erif Der to come to it. He himself did not go to any but the most public parts of the Chief's house, the halls where the Council and the feasts were held. She did not ask him to come nearer. But she sent for Gold-fish and Wheat-ear and gave them lovely sweets and things she had bought for them in Greece. Gold-fish was nearly as tall as she was now, and he
could ride and shoot like a man and bear pain; he stuck one of her long pins into his arm to show her. Wheat-ear liked seeing that; she turned pink and stuck her tongue out; but it made Erif feel sick. Gold-fish had a hawk of his own, as Berris used to have; he understood them. These were the eye-teeth of his first wolf; this was a heron's egg; he had climbed so high he had almost forgotten what the ground was like, and the big herons had tried to jab his face; he had killed a man already, one of the inlanders who had come thieving round the waggons.

Wheat-ear was getting a big girl too! Erif couldn't accustom herself to it. The little sister was growing up, her shape was beginning to change; she wasn't a soft baby any more, but a long, budding thing, half-way to a woman. Erif was shy of her till she saw it was mostly appearance; Wheat-ear was unconscious of it herself; she thought about the same animals and games and things she was learning, as she always had; she was not interested in her own growing up or what might be going to happen in her mind or body. She was pleased that Erif was going to have a new baby; she seemed to have forgotten about the one who had been killed—or, as she must have thought, died, as babies do. And she liked being in the Chief's house and seeing everything; she rummaged about in her sister's big chests full of things and tried on all her dresses that did not belong to special occasions. Erif Der was quite happy about those two. Whatever happened they would not be much disturbed: they were too deep in the life and peace of Marob to have very much that was their own and separate and vulnerable.

A few days after Harn Der came back, Tarrik had a letter from his Aunt Eurydice in Rhodes. When they gave it to him he did not know whether he wanted to read it or burn it. He took it with him to a meeting of the Council, crumpling it down inside his coat. When he brought it out again he found that Erif's warm star which had stopped burning him, had scorched a hole right through the thick Egyptian paper and loosened the thread which had kept it fast. He read then that his Aunt Eurydice had wondered whether to write to him all through the bright, cool months of her Rhodian winter; she had hoped he understood now why she had acted as she did (and yet she did not hope too
much, for perhaps it was better for him not to understand if he was happiest so—though in heart so far now from her who had been almost a mother to him!). There were wide seas between them, and there should be peace. If he did at all understand, would he force or pray Harn Der's daughter not to go on tormenting her!

She went on to speak of books she had read, objects which she had bought, a garden with a fountain and myrtles, sunnier and stonier than her garden at Marob. And the pale bodies of swimmers: a different sea to the Euxine. She said little of her husband. Tarrik smoothed the letter out and took it to his wife.

She looked at the scorched hole and then read it to herself. ‘Well?' she said, and then: ‘I suppose you do understand everything she wants you to understand by now, Tarrik?'

‘What is happening to her?' asked Tarrik, not answering.

‘I'm not sure,' said Erif. ‘I suppose—yes, you see she left some of her dresses behind here. It was a wet magic, because of going over-sea. It must really be odder for her husband than for her!' She laughed a little, but not very prettily.

Tarrik waited till that was over and then said: ‘How long will it last, Erif?'

‘It will probably dry itself out in time, unless I do it again. I have some dresses still. I was not sure how it would work, whether I was being clever enough, but it seems to have done as well as I hoped. I like being able to do things.'

‘But are you going to do it again?'

‘I expect so,' said Erif Der. ‘After all, why not?'

M
IDSUMMER DAY WAS
always a kind of triumph, a thing shared between the people and the land, and this good year more than ever. Although, afterwards, life sloped down into longer nights and shorter days, there was no sadness about this feast; the sun would go on getting hotter and hotter for another month; if harvest nights were longer they were warm and starry and better for sleeping out in the fields. The sun had worked well for Marob; every house had jars full of honey already; the first crop of hay had been
cut and the second was thickening and deep green. Fleeces had been heavy and clean. The fishing-boats had done well. The inlanders had come peacefully and respectfully with trading goods. Everywhere there were crops and beasts almost ready for the big markets. The year was working up through midsummer to harvest.

There were always a good many foreigners at this feast. They joined in the processions and songs; it was a good thing. They were part of the prosperity. All the Marob families who were out in the plain with their waggons had harnessed up the oxen or horses and come in for the few days round about midsummer. It was always arranged that there should be a market just afterwards. They were all gay and sunburnt and delighted to see one another, pleased with themselves and their neighbours and especially with seeing and smelling the sea again after so many green weeks in the un-salt inland country. The servants they had left behind had scrubbed and painted their houses till the winter feeling had quite gone, and now stood at the doors to welcome their masters back. The winter sweethearts hung about the doors, too, to whistle and throw flowers and watch critically to see whether their girls had grown too fat on butter and fresh meat. And the heads of households had always plenty to talk to one another about.

As soon as the midsummer sun rose everybody got up and began hanging out the garlands they had made over-night; they were fastened across the streets from house to house and in great swags along the sides of the flax market; where the sun struck on them they dried up and petals shrivelled and dropped, but by that time they had been handled and admired and complimented and their gaiety had got into the day; they had become stuff for lovely bonfires! People wore flowers on their heads and shoulders. Children came running back from the fields with basketfuls for every one to take. Most of them brought a few to the Chief's house and played a game of throwing small, tight posies of field flowers up onto the window ledges. The whole place smelt sharp and sweetish of moon daisies and hawkweed and yellow bed-straw and polleny grass.

It was from the Chief's house that the procession started. It went all through Marob, up and down the streets under the garlands, noisily and at great length. It was the best of
the feasts for gay noise and colour and the smell of flowers. People had wicker cages full of wild birds, which they let go when the procession passed their own house-doors, for the birds to tell the news of midsummer all over the land. If they were ordinary small brown birds, they had red patches painted on their wings. It was not lucky to shoot those message birds afterwards until the colour had worn off.

First of all in the procession came a great many children with masks of animals which they had made themselves, rats and mice and weasels and dogs and goats and birds. They pretended to worry and eat one another. That was always great fun. Then came a piebald cow with one crooked horn and lots and lots of flowers fastened on to her head and back. Then came the Corn King on foot and dancing, with a long coat, white and striped, and leading a bear cub from the forest on the end of a chain. The bear had been given fermented honey before they started, and it always danced well, at first anyhow; sometimes it snapped, but as it was only a young cub nobody got really hurt, and the Corn King's thick coat and boots kept it off him. No one knew what the bear was for, except that everybody danced at midsummer, and, as bears can be made to dance, why not bears too! Afterwards it was turned loose outside the town, and the boys and girls threw stones at it till it limped away towards the forest.

After the Corn King came the Spring Queen, sitting high on a cart, with every possible colour in her dress, the keys of the Spring-field hanging from her belt, and a high hat with ribbons and flowers. She carried a wheel made of string stretched on a framework of sticks like a spider's web. After her came the rest of the procession, every one in Marob who chose to join in, some with cocks on their shoulders that every now and then flapped their wings and crowed at one another and helped to make a noise too. They joined in at every street; husbands and wives raced out hand in hand and jostled along with the rest. They went by almost all the houses and round the walls and so to the flax market in the heat of the day. Here everybody sat down in whatever shade there was, and the children ran over to the well and hauled up cold rippling buckets of water and passed them round, and then pulled their masks off and splashed one another. Tarrik and the bear both drank, too, and the bear went to
sleep. But Tarrik took his coat off and moved into the full sun and began to do the dance of the Year.

He had a basketful of coloured wooden objects rather like roots, which he had to put down at twelve points at an equal distance from one another on the outside of a circle whose centre was a flat grey stone with a cross on it, each of whose arms was tipped with a little feather of three tails. People called these the flax tails and said they were put there when the flax market was started, but that was not, of course, what they really were. At first Tarrik glanced at the stone from time to time, to get his points, but by and bye it became fixed in his head, and he knew where to put down each of the things just because when he came to the right place he knew he must. There were words to be said with each of them and silence while he said them, but when each was properly placed and planted, every one sang the song about the year-house that the Corn King built. The song got one line longer every time and ended with a satisfactory thudding shout of men and women and children all together slam on to the word. After each placing and while he was still on his knees, he fastened up with teeth and fingers a new knot in the rush plaiting of the basket. These would be loosed, one by one, during winter, as it seemed necessary. But the whole basket was full of knots.

Tarrik had done that dance wrong once, when Erif had magicked him; but that did not trouble him now. For the moment nothing was troubling him except the tickling drops of sweat that ran down his face as he stooped or raised himself in time with the rhythm of the house he was building, that was partly in his own body and partly in the people of Marob as they clapped their hands and spun him on in his dance. When he had built the House of the Year he went to the Spring Queen's cart, and she reached him down the string wheel which she had carried upright all this time. He threw it sideways with a queer little grunting cry at the effort and restraint that made it land fair in the middle of his House, over the cross-marked stone.

Then he began running, first slowly, then quicker and quicker, round and round his House, and at the same time everybody else began throwing things in, wheels and flowers and coloured sticks and balls. It was bad luck to miss, to
throw too far or not far enough, but very few did. The Corn King shouted to encourage them, called out their names, or when something was not fully in knocking it in with his feet as he passed. When anyone threw right into the centre that was the best luck of all, and the whole marketful shouted at it. Those who had thrown once successfully did not need to throw again, but often they were too excited to stop. Then they were apt to throw things at the Corn King himself instead of into his House. Still, this did not matter much because they were small and light things: flowers and feathers and flax balls flapping and tapping like sunshine itself against his hot, light-browned body. He leapt higher; he made the bear dance again, and the piebald cow. He picked up a child, stripped off her rat mask with one hand and her thin shirt with the other, and ran with her, yelping for pleasure and fright on his shoulder, clinging hot to his neck, her hard little plaits sticking out like sun rays all round her head. The House of the Year was full and all the people of Marob followed their Corn King in the gayest possible dance round and round the flax market, sweeping along children and animals, the old and sick and lame, the lazy and unhappy—all went swinging in!

Only the Spring Queen's heavy cart was left in place, only the Spring Queen stayed out of the dance. This was not her feast, though she and her kindness had helped to bring it about. One by one her women were dragged away by the pull of the dance, half reluctant yet very willing, looking back at her, kissing their hands, laughing. Erif herself looked down and remembered two years ago when she had made it go all wrong and had then come by night and alone and herself rebuilt the House of the Year. People had not known whether to throw things into the bad House which her magicked Tarrik had made, all crookedly, saying the words wrong. They did not know whether it might not be less unlucky to do nothing. She remembered the older men whispering and consulting hurriedly, their coloured things in their hands. They threw them in finally and half-heartedly, thinking the ill-luck would be on the Corn King alone and not on them. Her father had started that idea, knowing almost for certain that it was his daughter's doing, to help his plan. He had said, and then others had said, that there must be a new and luckier Corn King. She
had heard Harn Der saying all this, and then seen him throwing in the first thing himself. He was somewhere among the throwers this time, too, but she did not try to see him.

And then she thought that, in spite of what had been done wrong that midsummer, it had made very little difference to crops or beasts. Of course, the people themselves were uneasy enough for weeks afterwards! Perhaps, though, this, as well as the badness of Yellow Bull as Corn King, had made things go wrong last year. Perhaps. No. The autumn had been no worse two years ago. But why? Had she put it right, quite right, afterwards? She felt, thinking of that night alone with the basket and the cross-marked stone, that if it had happened now she would not have dared.

The sunset and the starry dusk hung low and sweetly over Marob. Men and women and sleepy children went back to their homes, still singing, trailing a few flowers, kind arms round soft and happily tired shoulders. The Corn King and the Spring Queen and the cow and the bear went back to their house. The next day people came late and sleepily out of their houses and unhooked all the faded garlands from walls and windows, carried the slack, thick-smelling field and hedge stuff in deep baskets to the flax market, and swept it all together, and with it all the luck tokens which had been thrown into the Year House, as well as the things which had marked the circle, piled them up over the stone with straw underneath to start the blaze, and made a splendid bonfire. Those who had taken cocks with them in the procession now mostly brought them, flat and skewered, to grill in front of the flames on the end of long sticks. The bonfire did not last long, but while it did every one stood about round it and talked loud and cheerfully and made bargains and considered marriages, and great lovely transparent flames beat up through the sunshine in the market-place like the focused heart of summer itself.

Then everything was cleared away, and booths were put up and cattle driven in, and there was a big trading market. Foreigners from the south, Greeks and Egyptians and Phoenicians came with their goods, and the forest inlanders came with theirs. The Marob people made a profit between them, for it was a law that the inland people and the ship people could not trade directly together. There
was a rope across the market, and savage foreigners had to keep to one side of it, and ship foreigners to the other, and it was the worse for them if they signalled across it. Old-comers knew and new-comers were always warned three times by some member of the Council. After that market some of the ships sailed, and most of the households went back again in their great carts to the plains for another while.

The year went on securely, wild fruits and orchard fruits ripened. The Spring Queen bore another son to the Corn King, and gave him suck. For the first moment of seeing him she thought he was exactly like her first baby; she thought he was really her first baby come again. Then she knew that this was an appearance, and the new little creature was his own self already and the past was nothing to him. They called him Klint, and also, as the custom was, for the sake of the outside world, by a Greek name. They called him Tisamenos because he had been paid for. Greek and Scythian-Greek merchants who were in the town came to give the Chief their salutations, and they thought it was a queer name, when they thought about it at all, but by now a good many of the Marob people understood.

When the baby was a week old he was shown to the Council, but Harn Der did not come to the meeting. It seemed to him that if he had tried to come he would have fallen over something in the street and broken his leg, or a tile would have slipped off a roof on to his head, or a dog would have bitten him, or some other thing would have happened; and perhaps he was right. He knew his daughter. But the Council were pleased with the baby, and brought him presents. Disdallis brought him a very nice present: it was a bird on a perch made of shells and wax, that bowed and danced to one when one whistled to it.

For a time Erif had horrible dreams almost every night that he was being stolen away by masked stooping people who were going to kill him. She did not know how her first baby had died; she had never asked anyone who might have known. Sometimes she meant to, but she never could. Those dreams stayed with her, more or less, the whole day, though Tarrik sent her musicians and jugglers and the pick of every ship-load from the south. But when she got up and out into the sun the dreams got better and she had good milk for her baby.

Now Tarrik was glad that he had changed his mind and left Essro and Yan alone. He seemed calmer. Even Erif thought so; though her clear vision of him was obscured by her baby's delightful, silly body and dawning mind. But all the same, the dreadful thing had happened to Tarrik. He had become separate from the life of the community. It was only at the feasts and when he was going through the various observances that were laid down for him that he could get away from it, drop this painful, too-conscious self, and become again the Corn God, the dancing focus of other and more diffuse life, not just this blurred, still circle of his own. Secretly he went back to the books which Sphaeros had left him, hoping that, where nothing else would cure, he might get health from what had wounded him.