The Corn King and the Spring Queen (72 page)

‘But he did not save the people,' said Sphaeros with a deep sigh.

‘I don't know,' Gyridas said. ‘He must have died and saved something—mustn't he?'

Nobody answered him, but Berris said: ‘Kings don't always save their own people. Not at once anyway. By the way, Hyperides, you notice that the oracle has been fulfilled?'

‘In some respects,' said Hyperides, ‘but I never denied that coincidences do occur! If it has, Apollo presumably knows what people Kleomenes died for.'

He and Berris and Tarrik were all standing together now. Erif sat on the couch, still dazed and smiling, and her son, who seemed to have decided that he rather liked her, sat beside her dangling his brown legs. Tarrik said: ‘My Spring Queen has been given back to me. Also, I did not have to die myself, though I thought, when she went away, that I would most likely have to. Because death had been brought into the seasons. Perhaps Kleomenes of Sparta has died for Marob.'

‘It is as the boy said,' Hyperides answered him. ‘One doesn't know. Possibly it may become clearer in time. In
the meanwhile the great thing is to preserve an attitude of scepticism.'

For a time none of them spoke. Erif had got Klint to come and sit on her knee; she was asking him questions and at the same time stroking her chin with extraordinary pleasure against the tips of his golden-brown curls. Berris said: ‘I wonder whether she has quite forgotten Philylla.' And his face stayed for a time old and strained and bitter among the happiness of the others. For even Sphaeros was glad, because of what had happened to Gyridas. Berris had been glad to see his friends—very glad to see Tarrik—and for a time relief at his sister's return had filled him completely. But now again he was becoming blackly absorbed in the pointlessness of life.

For four days he had been at work almost solidly, exhausting himself of all other feelings. Or not, perhaps, even going through such a human process as that. Because feelings did not belong to what he was doing. While he was at work he had become again the little man on the vase, not happy, not hoping or loving, but in some odd way content and apart and observant. Now the other side of him asserted itself. He could see nothing but the terrible plain fact that Philylla whom he had loved for seven years was dead. Seven years of his life had been more or less steeped in the consciousness of her presence, near or far. Now they were wiped out, wasted; he could not think of them any longer. Reality and beauty had been taken out of past and present, and the substitute was this dull, hopeless pain; he saw nothing else in the future. Berris Der looked at the world and found it evil, and promised himself to return its evil with evil of his own. He looked at his statue and got some momentary satisfaction; that was a slap on the mouth for the kind and hopeful people who thought everything must come right in the end if only one waited patiently! He had made a portrait of what there really was at the end. But did anyone seriously hope? Yes, probably always the quite young. And the saved. He would have to make something worse before he could get at them. He would, some day. Once, a very short time ago, Berris Der had been innocent—not hurting, not wanting to hurt. Now he knew the innocence had dropped off him. He did want to hurt.

He went to his pictures and turned them over, so that
they faced out into the room. Two of them were quite finished. Tarrik came and looked with him; he had not done that satisfactorily before, because he had been so preoccupied about Erif. Now, for a time, he could leave her with the child.

The first picture was of the feast at the prison, the last eating together. Berris had made the two helot servants tell him about it, and he had kept more or less to the grouping, though he altered the room so as to get three windows across the back of his picture. The King was in the centre, with Panteus beside him, leaning against his breast. Berris had made Panteus look rather young, more as he had seen him in Sparta at the end of the first year, when he had wrestled with the King in the open field, the boys of his class watching. That picture was grave and balanced; the fringed Egyptian cloaks drooped heavily off the pale bodies of the King and the twelve Spartiates, in rich and sombre colours touched with gold and only lightened where the three windows threw a curtained shining down on to them. There was food on the tables, picking up the same colours. The Spartans drank wine and broke bread with curious fixed gestures which pleased Berris now, looking at them.

The second was a much smaller picture, less grave and static, and in a different range of colours. Hippitas riding on the colt, with the others round him waving swords and shouting, and the crowd behind them at each side shouting too and waving branches and coloured cloths. The one short moment of triumph before the end, yet too violently tensed to have any possible duration. The tension was expressed in a squareness and angularity of muscle and movement, and even in a sky strip heavily and threateningly blue between white houses.

The third was the picture of the death of the men, with Panteus fallen over Kleomenes. Berris had felt suddenly uncertain while he was doing it, and so only those figures were finished. The others were all sketched in, with crossed and twisted arms and legs, sometimes a foot or an elbow jutting into the foreground and meticulously drawn. Behind, sketched roughly, were the wooden skeletons of the market booths.

The next he turned over was the squared charcoal drawing
of the death of the children. It had been the hardest to do, and had been fidgeting him with its problems and implications even while he had been tackling the other three. The women were mourning over the dead eldest son, the boy Nikomedes, one older woman and one younger, Kratesikleia and Philylla. It was a curious parallel to one of his earlier pictures of the mother and grandmother mourning over the hanged King Agis, who had been only so few years older than Nikomedes. The figures of the women were beautiful, and the head of the old Queen was finished in exquisite and painful wrinkles, but he had not yet faced making that final portrait of Philylla. He had tried; his hand and mind had been willing; but some part of him had shuddered away and spoilt his craftsmanship. So far he had not been able to regard her too as so much material for his work—less now than when she had been alive. He turned that one back quickly with its face to the wall.

There was one more small sketch of the stake with its cross-piece and the snake coiled on it. The body was hidden altogether. Round the margin he had drawn the growing vine which King Ptolemy had sent, and the cup, and then the hammer which had driven in the stake, in through the flayed flesh of the King. Tarrik took this out of his hands to look at it more closely. He had commented a good deal on all the pictures, but though it was mostly praise, and intelligent praise at that, and praise from a friend, Berris had paid no attention. ‘What are you going to do with all these?' said Tarrik at last.

Berris said: ‘They are part of a story. I made them for—her. Anyone can have them now. The first lot are in Sparta, or should be. These had better go to them.' Then he called across the room: ‘Oh, Gyridas, do you want my pictures?'

Gyridas said very quickly: ‘Yes!' And then: ‘I'd take them home. I'd show them to—to anyone there is. Berris Der, do you really mean me to have them?'

Berris nodded: ‘In about a week. I must finish them off, Gyridas. Then you will have to tell me if I have made good likenesses of your father and Nikomedes.' He watched to see how much the boy would wince, but he stood it almost without moving.

Erif had been looking at the pictures too. She said:
‘The charcoal one is wonderfully good of Philylla, Berris. One can almost see her moving. Why haven't you gone on with her? And why did you turn it to the wall just now? I wanted to look at it longer.' There was a queer, silvery quality about her voice, as though she were still not quite awake. Tarrik wondered how long that would last. He thought he would be able to wake her without hurting her; he thought he would be able to substitute some intellectual acceptance—the kind of thing he had got from Hyperides—for this magical one before it ended. He would be able to communicate his own certainty.

He said now: ‘When you have finished your pictures, let us go home, Berris. The Spring Queen and I must be there by midsummer.'

‘I'll come with you,' said Berris. ‘I want to do some metal-work again. I think I shall marry Essro. I am sure it makes her unhappy not to be married, and she will be able to imagine I am like my brother. She will think of my pictures as she thought of the secret road. And I may as well have some children.'

‘That is a very good idea,' said Tarrik, ‘and then she will stop being frightened of me.'

‘And the statue?' Sphaeros said. ‘I know what I would do with that if I were you, Berris Der.'

‘What?'

‘I would break it. It ought to be broken. Things like that are only disturbing, and men are enough disturbed. It is not reality, but only an image distorted by pain. Break it, Berris!'

Berris grinned with hard lips. ‘I might have done that five years ago, Sphaeros. I would have thought how right, how good Sphaeros is! But he isn't right. And my statue is meant to be disturbing, it is meant to break up all kinds of little realities which ordinary men and women have made for themselves, and little calmnesses which philosophers have made for them. It appears to be successful. I am glad you hate it, Sphaeros! Between now and then I will think of the right thing to do with it and the right place for it to go. Are you coming back to Marob, Sphaeros?'

Sphaeros shook his head. ‘No,' he said. ‘You go back to Marob and the future, Tarrik and Erif and Berris. I must stay here with the past. I am going to be tutor to
Princess Arsinoë, as I was to Kleomenes and Eukleidas, and to Nikomedes and Nikolaos. It all happens over and over again. But Gyridas—' He looked round uncertainly. He was thinking that Alexandria would be no place for that boy, even with the pardon he was almost sure he could get for him.

But Hyperides said: ‘I'm going to Athens, which seems to be rather completely the present, because my play's to be acted there this summer. And I'll take Gyridas with me. Then he and his pictures can go back to Sparta when it's safe.'

‘You won't find you can keep away from Marob,' Tarrik said. ‘You know, Hyperides, you did better work there than you've ever done in your life. I made you!'

‘Yes, Tarrik,' said Hyperides, ‘and that's why I've got to get away from you, to see that I can work by myself. But I'll come back to Marob often in the summer, to ride through the future with you and Erif! Keep a good horse for me, Tarrik.'

‘After I come back, there will be a good season in Marob,' said Erif suddenly, standing beside the witch Disdallis, an arm round her neck, ‘and dancing and marriages and new songs and new things made. Everything will go on again.'

‘And now,' said Klint-Tisamenos, ‘can I go out? Will you take me out, mother, if no one else will? I want to see the lighthouse!'

K
ING PTOLEMY WAS
having a supper-party at Canopus on the night of the full moon. There were tables and couches set in the marble square of the garden, between the fountains and the statues, under the palms and holm oaks and bong trees. Dancers and flute-players wandered about from one group to another, in and out of the deep shadows; they caught fireflies and let them spark about in the dances; they carried heavily scented long garlands of jasmine and water-lilies. Agathoklea had brought her mother, and Oenanthe had brought a very special little dancer, a Jewess she had discovered and bought in the docks, who could imitate the sailors of every country in every stage of love-making. Oenanthe had taken rather a fancy to Kottalos, and Kottalos was divided between the
certainty that his fortune was assured if—And yet, on the other hand—The divine Ptolemy and his friends made life very complicated for a simple officer of the guards.

Sphaeros was there. He had said good-bye to his friends. He must not regret them nor wish life had been otherwise. He had new duties. He watched his present pupil, the blonde Princess Arsinoë; she had received him with a fierce pride, a kind of malice against the world; it was difficult to be sure how to deal with that. What was she thinking now? Glancing towards him with that same look of hurt malice from between two of her maids of honour, girls not much older than herself. He trusted they would withdraw before the end of the party—if it was going to be like most of Ptolemy's parties.

Something seemed to be amusing Sosibios. He grinned to himself and ate rather fast and not very fastidiously. Metrotimé sent one of her girl-friends to find out what it was all about. After sitting on his knee and being rather intimately pinched and tickled, she discovered the secret, and shortly afterwards found her way back to Metrotimé. ‘My dear,' she said, shaking herself, ‘he pinches like a camel, the fat old wretch! And all he's got to grin over is a silly letter from Greece. The King's party in Sparta have gone and murdered their magistrates, and he's laughing because they're just too late. That's all! Dearest, lend me a pin. He's torn my gathers right out at the shoulder. And his breath! What he wants is a good wash—with soap.' She laughed and stuck the pin in cleverly. She was thinking that if this Greek news hadn't come too late, and if Kleomenes of Sparta had gone back—well, there wouldn't have been any snake or any processions or any new hero to whisper and shiver about in the hot afternoons. But Metrotimé didn't believe in that. Or said she didn't, anyway.

A new course was brought by ivy-wreathed dancers and torch-bearers to the King's table, with a music of stringed instruments, a low throbbing that caught oddly at the pit of the stomach. One was put down before every guest; the arms of the dancers reached over their shoulders; flowers and breasts squashed for a moment lightly against them. Ptolemy reached behind him for the unseen dancer's thigh, and dug his fingers and polished nails into it. He had ordered the course himself, so he knew. Every guest
had a marzipan crocodile about a foot long, dyed in natural colours and biting a naked man or woman made of white nuts appropriately stained with red in parts. The nut faces had all been carved separately by a Persian ivory-worker, each into a different and individual little mask of screaming horror. If you liked that sort of thing, that was the sort of thing you liked. Agathokles did, for instance. The throbbing music went on, as though to drown the tiny squeaking cries such tortured dolls must give. Agathoklea shuddered a little and pulled her crocodile to bits. She wanted a nice, strong man to snuggle against. Then it would be all right, then she'd be able to giggle at the crocodiles. She looked round for a nice, strong man—hairy.

King Ptolemy suddenly had a brilliant thought. He let go the bruised dancer and leant towards Agathokles. ‘Next time,' he said, ‘we will have an even newer sweet. We will have a staked body and a snake—yes, Kleomenes! This. Persian is brilliant; he will get the likeness. See that he stays with us. Do you like my idea?'

Agathokles was a little uneasy. ‘A marvellous conception,' he said. ‘But—the effect? Some of your guests may take it too seriously.'

‘Ah, but I take it seriously myself!' said Ptolemy. ‘Kleomenes is mine now, my god that I have flayed and staked and done what I wanted with. His image must be made.'

Agathokles quivered and twitched responsively. ‘For a small party, then. Just ourselves. As you say, to eat. That will be wonderful: better than this, even. We'll have a poem written for it.'

‘Metrotimé shall do that.'

‘Metrotimé,' said Agathokles, rather spitefully, ‘has become quite incapable of doing anything one asks her since Berris Der gave her that new statue of his.'

‘Not incapable of everything,' said Ptolemy, and smiled to himself. He had found her a particularly stimulating companion. ‘She understands,' he said, delicately grooving along his crocodile's back with one nail.

‘What?' said Agathokles, sharply jealous.

Ptolemy lifted his head. ‘About kings dying. About sacrificing kings. Taking a living man and mixing him with pain and death—yes, mixing him—like a cook—and
making a god. I have made a god that way. A new form of god. Dionysos-Sabazios has shown himself again on one man, a torn man. Like Pentheus in the play. By the way, Agathokles, we might have that acted again soon, before people forget. It was a pine-stake—his tree. And the growing vine. It was a manifestation. I made it appear.'

Agathokles looked away, his face working. He wanted not to believe in the thing at all; he wanted to laugh at it the way Sosibios laughed. But he had seen with his own eyes.

Princess Arsinoë and two of her maids of honour came to the table where Sphaeros sat, talking quietly to the man next him. The girls carried a basket of fruit; all kinds, heaped and fine in the torchlight. She offered the basket to him with a pretty speech. He was touched. The pomegranates were particularly large and rosy: he took one. There were interesting analogies to be drawn from the structure of a pomegranate, the tough though red-cheeked rind, and the multiplicity of seeds. He put his knife into it. The pomegranate was made of painted wax. All the fruits in the basket were wax. Arsinoë laid her hands on her hips and threw her head back in the torch glare and laughed in shaking fits. The other two girls laughed too, spilling the wax fruit, clinging on to one another with delight at their successful joke. ‘You can't even tell whether a pomegranate's real or not,' said Arsinoë. ‘You and your kataleptike phantasia!'

Sphaeros put the pomegranate aside gently, steadying himself against the mocking laughter of the girls. ‘Pomegranates, after all, are not so very important,' he said, ‘and perhaps I meant to take a wax one—how do you know?'

And Arsinoë stopped laughing and looked at him and said: ‘Yes, perhaps you did.'