The Corn King and the Spring Queen (74 page)

Suddenly Erif Gold laughed and said: ‘Do you know who painted the pictures?'

‘No,' said the man, hating her because she had laughed.

‘But I do,' said the girl.

‘And I,' said the Corn King. ‘Go on, you with my name. Did every one think so of the pictures?'

‘All of us. All of the poor. The rich did not know about them, or pretended not to know. And then King Nabis came and they renamed me Tisamenos. It was as though the thing we had asked for had happened.'

‘What thing?'

‘A King had come to the people. But we did not know then that he would have to die too.'

‘I have heard,' said Klint-Tisamenos slowly, ‘a good deal of evil of King Nabis.'

‘Yes, Lord,' said the slave, ‘because you heard it from the rich! They tell it their own way.'

‘Perhaps,' said Klint-Tisamenos, thinking of that very reasonable man, Hyperides, who had such a dislike for torture or any artificial and violent form of death.

‘He was our King,' said the man. ‘He made the revolution again. They hated him, they tried to stop it. So he killed them
and banished them. He took their land and money for us. He divided the land and made us citizens and soldiers; he built a navy and made an army, and Sparta was strong again. It was us. Us all together: no more rich and poor. The children of the first revolution were beginning to grow up. Every one was afraid of us because they saw us all together, all thinking of one thing. King Nabis was a kind of cousin of King Agis, but far off, and his wife Apea was from Argos; she thought like him. We did all the old things: the discipline and the eating-together. I was taken from herding pigs and put into a class and taught about the revolutions.' The man dropped silent for a time after that; he did not look frightened now and it seemed as though his foot were paining him less.

The girl said softly to Klint: ‘We must tell father. He always said they were rather bad pictures. But I would like to see them.'

Klint said: ‘Your father will laugh. I hate it when he laughs that way.'

The man went on: ‘King Kleomenes started the New Times and died for them, but perhaps he did not go far enough. He left the rich too much power. King Nabis did not make that mistake. His New Times were ours, ours only. In those days we were strong on the sea; he filled Gytheum with shipyards and stores for gear and arms; he made us refuge places in Crete. He had a guard of Cretans; it was useful. They would do—anything. Every year in my class I got prouder of being one of the citizens. They treated us rough; we liked it—mostly. The captains of the class went off raiding towards Messene and Megalopolis; the Achaeans ran and our men stuck them like pigs. Philopoemen was away again. We hated him and we hated Philip. We used to get news of what was going on in the rest of the world: how Antiochos of Syria went to India and the dragon places and the lands of fire and snow, and stayed there six years in war and magic. How the King and Queen of Egypt died in a queer way, and how the people of Alexandria revenged them in the end.'

Again Klint-Tisamenos and Erif Gold looked at one another and nodded, remembering what they had heard about Sosibios and Agathokles, and how amused Erif and Berris had been at their singularly unpleasant deaths.

The man was speaking again: ‘We heard about Philip's tyrannies, and we heard about the war between Rome and
Carthage and the great battles with ships and elephants. And after that we heard how the Rhodians had sent to Rome for help against Philip, just as the Aetolians had before. That was what it was like when I was a boy.'

‘Were you a Stoic?'

The man shook his head. ‘We didn't have time for all that. We didn't want it. We'd got what we wanted.' He went back to the telling: ‘Then the Romans did come; they attacked Philip. The Achaean League was friends with Macedon; they always had been. But they couldn't help this time, because we were keeping them busy. I did my first raiding then and killed my first man. Philip couldn't help them against us either, so they had to change sides. The Roman, Flaminius, made them do that. Then Philip tried to make peace, but Flaminius wouldn't give him terms.'

‘That,' said the Corn King, remembering it bit by bit, ‘was when you changed sides too.'

The man shrugged his shoulders. ‘Philip gave us Argos. It was Queen Apea's town—and, God, she did play with it too, later on, getting the revolution going! A proper little tiger bitch she was. But Philip was no good to us except for that, so he got the chuck and we made peace with Rome and even the Achaean League for a bit. Well, after that Philip was beaten, and Rome had it all her own way, and Flaminius went about making speeches about how they'd won the war and freed Greece. But we went on with our revolution. And in other states the poor people looked towards Sparta and they wanted a revolution too. So the end of it was that we had every one against us. All the rich, all the states that were jealous or frightened, and the Achaean League again, and Rhodes and Pergamon and Rome, and our own dirty lot of rich too, that we'd turned out earlier, instead of killing the whole pack of them as we ought to have. They came at us all at once, land and sea. We stuck it, though. He—he wasn't King of Sparta for nothing! We could do it for him. But they got the coast towns, they burnt the ships, they burnt the farms, they burnt the standing corn, they stormed Gytheum. They tried to storm Sparta itself-yes, Flaminius and the Romans did that—but we lighted fires—we burnt our own homes and drove them back. But in the end we had to come to terms. The rest of the states hated leaving us alive at all, but Flaminius didn't care. We had to give up Argos and the coast towns and the fleet and
give hostages. Yes. Our King gave his only son as a hostage. But the revolution stayed and the eating-together and the way we lived. The next year the Romans left Greece again. Flaminius had plenty of friends among the rich, the ones who wanted things to stay as they are. But the poor hated him because of what he had done to us. I know that because men used to come from the other states to get what hope they could from us; we showed them the pictures sometimes; they prayed too. A great many of us were killed then, but for those who were left it was not too bad.'

‘But then?'

‘Well, then we joined with the Aetolians against Rome. We hoped Antiochos and Philip would join too, but they were afraid. King Nabis blew on the ashes and the flame broke. We got back our sea towns. But Philopoemen was with the Achaean League again. We defeated him at sea. But—' The man stopped speaking for a moment and screwed up his eyes painfully. At last he went on: ‘He beat us, up in the hills, a little beyond Sellasia. We were driven back through Sellasia Pass into Sparta itself. I saw that old battlefield, looking awful and evil still. When we went between the two hills we made vows to King Kleomenes; we asked him to come back and help us; we sacrificed. In the end the Romans made peace again, but we were terribly weak, helpless, and Philopoemen just beyond the frontier waiting for his time. We knew that. But it was not the worst yet.'

‘That was the time when I was in Greece last,' said the Corn King. ‘I remember hearing about Sparta. Tisamenos! Was there a man called Gyridas? His father was Kleomenes' foster-brother, half a helot—'

‘Gyridas!' said the man eagerly. ‘God, yes! He was in it all, in to the neck! It was he who had the pictures first. It was he who was in command at Gytheum during the siege. He escaped then, but they killed him in the end. The Achaeans speared him clean. That was better than living on—as I did. Because the Aetolians saw we were no more use to them as allies, but they wanted to steal our State money. They sent the traitor Alexamenos with troops, as though they were bringing help; we let him into Sparta. And he murdered King Nabis in the King's house. But we killed him. We tore him into little rags and bloody pieces. It was all we could do. But we couldn't make our King alive again. And Philopoemen came
and took Sparta and dragged us into his Achaean League. We were too badly broken to stop him. That was four years ago—more.'

‘And since then? I thought nothing had happened in Greece, but the war with Antiochos. We've had little news up here.'

‘We didn't matter enough to be told about, Lord,' said the man. For a time he had been half-sitting on the stones of the quay, but now he knelt again, stiffly, stiffening himself to tell this last part, only his hurt foot sticking sideways. He said: ‘We stood it for two years. We kept things going somehow for the sake of the future; we thought they'd left us that. There were children. We told them. I got well of my wound, but most of my friends were dead. Dead as the Kings were dead. And there wasn't any woman I wanted much. Then all those exiles began coming back; they lived in the coast towns and laughed at us trying to live our way, and began to get back their land, for they were rich again now, richer than us. There were a lot in Las, near Gytheum. At last they made us too angry; we went for them, but a good many escaped. That was what the Achaeans had been wanting. They sent—yes, they sent to Sparta!—and said the ones who'd led the attack were to be handed over to them. There were even some in Sparta who were so afraid they would have done that; but not for long, because we killed them, thirty of them, and said we would have no more to do with Achaea. It was better to belong to Rome and the barbarians than that! But it was no good. Rome didn't care. They let Philopoemen in on us. He came marching over from Megalopolis, and the exiles came in after him. We couldn't begin to stand against them. He took all our leaders and made a mock trial and killed them. He pulled down all our walls and forts, Lord, and dismissed all the armies and—and he said we were not to have our things any more; the things the Kings had died for, the things Lycurgos had made first for Sparta. We were to be like any other state. He sucked the life out of us. I think he specially hated all of us like me, who had been helots; he wanted to wipe all that out. Some of us went away, to Crete or wherever we could. I had nowhere to go and no money; I had only my bit of goat pasture and three olives and my little knotty vines, up between the rocks. But I thought they would let me stay in the hills of Sparta, on my own earth;
they had taken away everything else. Oh, I thought I could stay when I loved it so!'

‘But you couldn't?' said Erif Gold, very gently, trying to help him.

‘No, lady,' he said. ‘The League passed a decree. Then they hunted us down all over Laconia. All of us who'd been soldiers, who had shared in the New Times, who had pictures of the Kings. They took my land away and then they took me and sold me. They sold three thousand of us. And now there are none of us in Sparta, but only the exiles and the Achaeans, the men from Megalopolis, Philopoemen's friends. Lord, I must go back to the ship, or I will be beaten again.'

‘You are not to go back to the ship,' said the Corn King. ‘I will buy you, Tisamenos.'

The man ducked his head again and murmured: ‘Lord.'

Erif Gold said: ‘Are there more of you on the ship?'

‘There is one, lady,' said the man. ‘We were cheap beasts to buy.'

‘My father will buy him,' said Erif Gold. ‘Then you will be together. It is better being together, isn't it, when you have the same Kings?'

‘Yes, lady,' said the man, staring, for he could not think how she knew that.

She asked: ‘Is your foot well?'

Astonished, he felt it with his hands, and slowly got to his legs and stood firm on it. ‘Yes, lady!' he said again.

She nodded, satisfied.

Klint-Tisamenos said: ‘I think this is a story I half know. About the kings who die. My father told me that. I am the King here, and when my time comes I will die for the people. That time is sure to come for a king. Your King Kleomenes died in Egypt because he did not die at Sellasia. My father told me that too. And now he has turned into a god, he has become part of the year. But you are staying here now. And in Marob we have got the thing straight.' And then he stood up, too, and he took the hand of the other Tisamenos and led him, wondering and dirty, back from the sea and the harbour into Marob.