The Corn King and the Spring Queen (70 page)

A
LL THAT DAY BERRIS
had gone on with his statue. He wouldn't eat, though he drank a good deal, and by the late afternoon Erif could see what was happening to it. The thing behind had taken shape at last and it had the flat brainless head of a bird and eyes staring to its sides, and its beak was open to tear Philylla, and its wings were closing on her greedily. It had no elk horns; there was nothing northern left in it. It was the desolation of the south, the vulture of the sand, Love changed into Death. This was the Egyptian convention, the very forms of Egypt, dissolved and recrystallised into something more potent than Egypt had made for a long time. Looking at it, Erif began to cry again till Berris turned and glared at her with his red-rimmed savage eyes. He had not slept much the night before, either, not until dawn, when he found out for certain that he could not see the bodies, that he would never see even that still image of Philylla again. Then he had slept for an hour and woke screaming—that woke Erif, screaming too—and he had gone straight to work on the thing he had dreamt of. Erif had sat and watched him. The dress she had been sewing for Philylla lay on a chest where Ankhet had folded it; every now and then she could not help seeing it; equally she could not bear to touch it and put it away. A dull pulling seemed to be going on in her mind; it was the kind of pain of her twisted ankle that time Tarrik had raped her. She called to him softly: ‘Tarrik, Tarrik,
Tarrik.' But nothing happened. Perhaps he was dead too. He and Klint. Perhaps everything had stopped. She held her breath, listening to see if there was still any life. She heard the chisel tapping against the stone. She thought of cooking something, an egg. Berris might eat an egg. She did not move. She watched the pain in her mind going on, steadily increasing. No use, nothing would come to birth, not even a statue of Death and Philylla.

In the evening, when it was beginning to get dark, exactly a day and a night after, Sphaeros came in. When she saw him, Erif screamed. There was no possible reason to; she could not have thought he was anyone else; he had not frightened her. But some tough layer had been stripped off her and under it she quivered like taut gut and screamed at a touch, as it does. She said she was sorry. Berris cursed her pretty foully and went on working. Sphaeros was kind and kissed her, a very odd thing for him to do. They sat together and watched Berris; he did not attempt consolation in words. Then something came into her mind. ‘Sphaeros,' she said, ‘there's just one thing we can do!'

‘What?' he asked.

‘Phoebis' boy. Don't you remember? Gyridas is down on a farm, getting well after his fever. They forgot that. We can save him.'

‘We will,' said Sphaeros.

Then Erif said in a whisper which would not disturb Berris: ‘Oh, if only I'd thought of it when I saw Neareta with the soldiers! I might have said something and she'd have known it would be all right. But they killed her and she didn't know.'

‘You couldn't have spoken then,' said Sphaeros. ‘It would have put the child in danger. I'll get him. His father and mother and elder brother, his playmates—all taken. Yes, he has been stripped to the soul. I wonder how, being mostly helot, he will stand it.'

‘But oh,' said Erif, ‘I might have made her a sign and I didn't!' And instead of being something saved from destruction, the thought of Gyridas turned in her mind into a new pain. She cried quite quietly, licking up the tears that ran into her mouth, as she had done when she was a child. Then she lighted the lamps, all of them, and the different light flickered and made queer shadows on the
statue, and Berris had to stop with a grunt and a sigh. Then he lay down rather suddenly, giving from the knees upward, flat on the floor among the stone dust and his scattered tools, and for him everything dimmed out into a merciful swaying dullness of all the senses, and he rested for a long time.

Quite late that evening Ankhet came into the room, bringing them food she had cooked herself. Berris did not move or speak. Nor did the other two, but she laid it out on a little table in front of them, with wine and a single lily flower in a tall glass and her best fringed napkins. Then she said: ‘There is an order from Canopus about—about one of the bodies.'

‘Kleomenes.' Sphaeros seemed certain.

She flushed and nodded. ‘It is to be flayed and impaled at the eastern cross-roads. That has not been done for a great many years.'

‘I see,' said Sphaeros, and scarcely shuddered at all.

Ankhet said suddenly: ‘It is like the thing that King Set did to King Osiris in the Mystery stories.' And she went out of the room and left them.

They ate a little, and then Sphaeros said: ‘Now you must try to sleep, my dear. The worst is over. After this, we shall only have to accustom ourselves to accepting it. That is comparatively easy. I think I can show you some exercises for it tomorrow. In the meantime I will see about Gyridas. There is no more for you to do. Try to calm yourself. Try to stand apart from the agony. Let it alone, do not touch it. Do not think of her till you can do it without too great disturbance.' And he kissed her again and went down the stairs by himself.

But she did not sleep that night, even though she stayed in the big room and lit the lamps again so as not to wake up in the dark and see Philylla fading into it with the kind of look she had at the moment when the soldiers came into the Queen's house. Every waking destroyed the rest and quiet she had perhaps been getting from the minutes of sleep. Her head and body ached, but not enough to stop her thoughts and imagination from racing. Towards midnight Berris began to talk in his sleep and that was very painful. He had not covered the statue, so when dawn began to seep into the room, she could not help looking at it. Without Berris to control it, the thing seemed to blur
and waver in front of her eyes. The bird behind seemed to move closer with its tearing beak. She could not bear it, but she did not dare to wake Berris right up, even though she thought he must be having horrible dreams. She got up and dressed and tried to read, standing by one of the windows, where there was enough light already, but her eyes were too sore with tiredness, and none of the books made sense. If this kind of thing could happen, what was the good of the world, what was the good of magic, why go on at all, why think of going back to Tarrik or Marob or her son who would have forgotten her, whom she did not know now and therefore could not love? Why imagine there was any reality in having been Spring Queen?

She looked from Berris to his statue, the god or devil he had made. For the moment he was lying very still. She stepped out quietly into the street. Very few people were up yet; during the night the lanes seemed to have emptied themselves of smells and hurry. They were fairly cool, but with odd pockets of undisturbed warm air, left over from the day before. She came into the main cross street and turned left towards the gate that led out to Lake Mareotis. It was very wearying even to walk when she was so tired already, but she had to do something. So she walked on. The sentries at the gate let her pass, and she went down to the shore of the lake and walked along it, first under the walls of Alexandria, then past market gardens and spaces of straggling tufts where goats grazed, east away from the town. The sun had risen almost straight ahead; the glare was beginning to make it difficult to see. She moved her head impatiently from side to side. Everywhere the lake had shrunk and dried away with summer, leaving a series of crusted curves of mud; beyond, it lay still and patient, waiting for rain. Quantities of birds were feeding out there, a good many ducks and moorfowl and cranes, but mostly the tall rosy birds, the flamingoes of the African marshes, great flocks of them the colour of the sunrise that had almost faded out of the eastern sky, that was giving place to the thick blue dazzle of day. The rosy birds stood on one leg, jutting their long necks and crooked beaks, fishing the muddy shallows. They paid no attention to Erif Der.

She took off her sandals and began to walk out towards them. She remembered there were leeches in Lake Mareotis,
but she did not mind. For a long way out it was little more than ankle deep, and there were patches of slimy weed. The birds began to move from in front of her; the cranes unfolded white wings and lifted themselves away to the far side; the flamingoes stalked slowly to right and left; the duck squattered towards the middle of the lake and settled again. It was cool underfoot. It reminded her suddenly of the salt marshes of the secret road; it reminded her of Murr, dead a long time ago, dead and forgotten as Philylla would be forgotten. She sobbed aloud as she walked out. The tears began running down her face again. She felt as though she had been used to that for years now. She remembered that she had once been happy. How was that? What did it feel like? And then she blamed herself and mocked herself for not being utterly happy in those impossible times. She had been frightened of happiness. Instead of taking it and accepting it, she had looked forward timorously to its inevitable ending—as though she could know then how it would end!—and used up her strength and thought in trying to ward off evil before evil was yet there. She had let herself be disturbed and driven away from happiness by countless things which were now not even noticeable. Even two days ago she might have been happy! She had been afraid of the jealousy of unknown powers, and had tried to propitiate them by spoiling her happiness, by cutting off a part of it to sacrifice to them. Today she was afraid of no power, not even death, now she knew what it was. She had doubted and feared and compromised and distrusted her happiness. So it was taken from her and it would never come back.

She saw now that she was a good way from the shore, walking slowly through water almost up to her knees, dragging her skirt in it. The rosy birds had stepped away with their long legs. There was only one left out of the whole flock. She was not at all surprised, because she suddenly remembered what bird it must be. She went up to it and said: ‘I don't know what to do, mother. Please tell me.'

The bird said: ‘I've been waiting for you, Erif. But I knew you'd come in the end, so that didn't matter. Stop crying, Erif. There, that's better.'

‘Do you know what's happened to me, mother, all these
years since you turned into a bird and we cut ourselves and mourned for you?'

‘Quite enough, Erif. You're Spring Queen, as your father meant you to be.'

‘You know what I did to father?'

‘Yes, darling, you had to. Men are so stupid sometimes, aren't they. And sometimes they're all one wants, for ever. I'm glad your Corn King is that kind of man. I always hoped he would be, even when your father was silly about him.'

‘Yes, but he isn't here and I haven't seen him for six years. And I haven't been Spring Queen for six years either.'

‘Oh yes, you have. You are going through the agony of the Spring Queen now. You have to do that, you know, before the really important thing happens.'

‘Nothing more is going to happen to me now, mother. I don't see how it can. The important thing has happened and it has broken and smashed everything else, for me and Berris, so that we just can't move. I've got stuck, mother; my life has got stuck and broken.'

‘That's part of it for both of you. You have to be broken before you can be put together again. That was what they did to King Osiris here, a long time ago. That was what happened to your father when he was made into the corn. It's curious, isn't it? Do you like my new feathers, Erif? You always used to like pretty things.' The bird stretched out its rosy wings and slid its neck admiringly across them.

‘Yes, mother, they're lovely. But even if something's going perhaps to start again with me—and I don't see how it possibly can—Philylla is dead and I loved her and she was younger than me and so beautiful. And my first baby is dead too. Both those things are real, not just in my mind. Each of them is—a kataleptike phantasia. And an utter waste.'

The bird laid its neck caressingly on Erif's; its pink feathers were cool and soft, but with an odd pliancy, a pleasant roughness of texture against human skin. It said: ‘I don't know about anyone except the people I love myself, and most of all you, because I love you best of all, Erif. And it's no good answering when one doesn't know. I expect somebody knows, or will some time. I wish you weren't so unhappy, my darling; but I think you've got to be, and I know it won't go on.'

‘I'm not so unhappy as I was half an hour ago. It's funny.'

‘When somebody one loves is dead, the worst time is just afterwards, when the final thing is done, when their bodies are buried or burnt.'

‘Philylla was burnt, mother.'

‘Up to then they have still some kind of reality. They are still in a way themselves. It's you who make me talk about reality, Erif, though it's a thing that always puzzled me. But when that happens there's a sort of thud, isn't there? Something heavy comes down on one. It echoes for a long time after that, but fainter.'

‘Yes, mother. That's the worst time. I suppose it does get fainter. I suppose one does stop keeping faith with one's friends after they've been dead for a little while.'

‘I don't think it's that,' said the bird. ‘Keeping faith has two sides, and this is only in your single heart. Don't cry, darling; that's not as bad as it sounds, and it'll make your head ache. You've got something difficult to do still.'

‘Have I? What?'

‘Well, there's the other part of the oracle, you see. Hadn't you remembered?'

‘Was it true, then, in spite of what Hyperides said?'

‘Oh, Hyperides was right too. You may tell him I said so, not that he'll believe you. Oracles are a clumsy way of doing things and they often go wrong. It would be much more sensible if King Apollo saw to things himself rather more. He used to, so perhaps he'll start again some day.'