The Corn King and the Spring Queen

by Naomi Mitchison

  The King of Spain’s daughter

  Came to visit me,

  And all for the sake of

  My little nut tree.

  NEW PEOPLE IN THE SECOND PART

  Greeks

  Kleomenes iii, King of Sparta

  His wife Agiatis, widow of King Agis iv

  His children, Nikomedes, Nikolaos and Gorgo

  His mother, Kratesikleia

  His stepfather, Megistonous

  His brother, Eukleidas

  His foster-brother, Phoebis

  His friend, Panteus

  Philylla

  Her father, Themisteas

  Her mother, Eupolia

  Her younger sister, Ianthemis

  Her younger brother, Dontas

  Her foster-mother, Tiasa

  Therykion, Hippitas, and other Spartiates

  Deinicha and other Spartiate girls

  Panitas, Leumas, Mikon and other helots or non-citizens, their women and children

  Aratos of Sicyon

  Lydiades of Megalopolis

  Spartans, Argives, Athenians, Megalopolitans, Rhodians and others

  People of Marob

  Kotka, Black Holly and other men of Marob

  CHAPTER ONE

  IN A FIELD NEAR Sparta there were three children with bows and arrows shooting at a stone mark, roughly painted as a man with a shield. It was winter—you could scarcely call it the beginning of spring yet—and the grass had been cropped close by the beasts. At the high end of the field were twenty old olive trees, lifting grey, beautiful heads to any sun there was; through them a goat-path, trodden hard, led down from upland pastures to the city. All round the field there was a stone wall, and beyond, on three sides, the still jagged mountains of Sparta.

  The two younger children, a little girl and a still smaller boy, were looking crossly at their big sister; they wanted to play, and she was making it into work. They were chilly as well; she had made them leave off their warm cloaks, and the cold crept up their bare arms and legs, and under the thin wool of their indoor tunics. ‘A real bowman,’ she had said, ‘mustn’t let anything interfere with his shooting.’ And when they protested that they weren’t real bowmen, she said then they mustn’t shoot with her bows and arrows: so they had to be. But she’d always been like that, and it was worse than ever now she was maid of honour to the Queen.

  They had to shoot in turns, standing a long way from the mark, so that they hardly ever hit it, which was dull, and they had to watch their arrows and find them, and between times they had to stand quite still and not drop their bows. It was unbearable; by and bye the little boy, Dontas, rebelled. ‘You said it was going to be a game!’

  His big sister looked at him scornfully. ‘That was only to get you to come,’ she said, and her nose tilted at him. ‘This is much better than a game.’

  ‘It’s not!’ said the others, both together, and the small girl suddenly began to cry: ‘You’ve cheated us, Philylla! You said we were going to like it and we don’t!’

  ‘It’s better than any game,’ said Philylla in an excitement which somehow disregarded them. ‘It’s real! We’re all real Spartans now. I’m teaching you.’

  ‘We don’t want you to teach us, do we, Dontas?’ She appealed to the boy, who nodded, frowning as hard as he could. ‘You aren’t grown up any more than me, and besides we’re Spartans already!’

  The big one tossed her head and made a comprehensive face at them. ‘That sort of Spartan—very likely! That pay other people to do their fighting for them!’

  ‘Well, you can’t fight anyway,’ said the boy rashly, ‘you’re only a girl, Philylla. I’m tired of playing with girls.’

  Then he bolted, but not in time. Philylla suddenly losing the temper she had so admirably kept till then, jumped at him, and caught him almost at once, and shook him and hit him with her fists. ‘I’m not a girl!’ she said; ‘you shan’t call me that! I’m a soldier! I’m a Spartan! I shan’t ever let you touch my bows and arrows again!’

  The boy squealed and kicked, ineffectively, because his feet were bare; the little girl encouraged him shrilly from behind, but was too cautious to let her hair come within grab of Philylla’s long arm. This went on for a minute or two, till Philylla suddenly felt she was being a bully, and let go.

  Dontas broke away a yard or two, then stood, with his face red. ‘Keep your silly bow!’ he said. ‘When I’m a man you’ll be married and you won’t be allowed to do anything!’

  ‘Baby!’ said Philylla bitterly; ‘cry-baby, go home and play!’

  The small girl, afraid it would start again, pulled Dontas back, whispering to him; elaborately not saying good-bye, they took their cloaks and went trotting off towards the town.

  Philylla picked up her bow, talking to herself out loud. ‘I won’t marry,’ she said; ‘the Queen won’t want me to. I’ll be a soldier.’ And she began to shoot again, from still further off. She stood solidly with her white tunic pulled up through the belt to clear her knees; she had grey eyes and a small, obstinate mouth and chin, and her hair was tied up tight on the top of her head in a knot that overflowed into jumping, yellow curls. When she hit the mark, which was not always, she would suddenly boil over with a terrific, secret excitement; she sprang straight up into the air and yelled: she had killed an enemy! The headless arrows made a little click against the stone; she wanted a louder noise and thought she would ask the Queen to tell her father she could have a spear. A spear and a horse … and never get married, never want men making love to her like all the other sillies of maids of honour! She was nearly the youngest, but she knew the Queen liked her better than almost any of them; and she—she wished that stone was one of the Queen’s enemies, one of the people who said horrid things about her. There!—she’d hit him full in the heart.

  After a time the King and Panteus came down the goat-path out of the hills; it was a safe place to talk secrets in, and Kleomenes had plans in his head enough to set all Sparta by the ears. Even now, Panteus was only just understanding; but he was excited, so wildly excited that he kept on stumbling over stones and olive roots and talking in jerks, not finishing his sentences. The King was excited too, but he showed it less, hardly at all unless to a person who knew him very well, who could see that queer, blind, blazing look behind his eyes, and the corners of his mouth twitching a very little with the force of the images that were tearing through his mind. They both stopped at the edge of the olives, suddenly aware of the child below them, shooting and shouting all by herself in the field.

  Each smiled at the other, secretly, a moment’s check to the unbearable torrent of their excitement. The King put his hand up to his mouth and gave a hunter’s call down to the child. She jumped round to face it, still and startled, the bow held tight to her breast. Then with her free hand she swept up the loose arrows from the grass beside her and ran towards the olives, her eyes on the King, wondering what was happening now. He looked tired, she thought, leaning one way on his long spear, with the other arm round his friend’s neck. Both had tunics of fine wool, deep red, wine-coloured almost. She remembered the stuff being dipped by the Queen’s women, the first day she came to the house; the bitter smell of the dye, the maids of honour making faces at it behind the Queen’s back, and Agiatis herself with the red dripping off her arms, down from the elbows, a tiny smear on her neck. …

  ‘Well,’ said the King, smiling at her, ‘what are you doing that for?’

  She looked down, fingering the bow, not wanting to answer.

  Panteus helped her out, asking gravely: ‘Are you a soldier?’

  She nodded. ‘The Queen lets me. And—I do really try!’

  ‘I saw that,’ said Kleomenes, ‘but don’t your friends come with you?’

  ‘My brother and sister were with me to begin with; but they wouldn’t go on. They’re babies.’

  ‘But the maids of honour?’

  ‘Oh no! They won’t start, they’re grown-up!’

  ‘And you’re just half-way betw
een, so it’s all right?’

  Philylla suddenly got shy and couldn’t answer him; she thought that was it, but didn’t want to say so. He was a grown-up too!

  Again Panteus came to the rescue: ‘May I look at your arrows?’ he said. She handed them over silently. ‘You don’t always hit the mark, do you?’ She shook her head and he picked out three or four of the arrows. ‘These aren’t straight,’ he said. ‘Look. Where did you get them?’

  She was almost crying but could not bear them to see; she took the arrows and broke them across her bare knee, ducking her head over them so as to hide her eyes.

  ‘Who made them?’ said Panteus again.

  ‘I did,’ she said at last, scraping her finger hard along the bowstring.

  Panteus was really unhappy; she was so like a boy, standing there among her broken things. ‘One always makes a few crooked ones at first,’ he said. ‘I did. There’s nothing to cry about.’

  ‘I’m not crying,’ said Philylla indignantly, and turned round to the King. ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘I want to tell you—if I can ever help you, do say! The Queen—she said I might speak if I saw you—and—she told me what you’re doing, how everything’s going to be splendid again! Some of them don’t like it, but I do, and—I do wish I could help.’

  ‘You may yet, Philylla,’ said the King gravely, ‘and thank you. We shall want every true heart. Now, run on and tell the Queen we are coming.’

  ‘I will,’ she said, and ran, her thick cloak in one hand, dragging out behind her, strongly, like a flag. Her heart was full of mixed pleasure at her own daring in speaking to the King and getting that answer from him, and shame at having made bad arrows, and the man thinking she was crying. Yet he was a good man, he hadn’t laughed; and the King had looked tired. She had noticed that; she was beginning to know about grown-ups. Only, did he think she was crying …? Hot and cold, hot and cold, Philylla ran down the goat-path, back to the Queen, whom she loved.

  But those last words of hers had sent the King and Panteus racing back to the overwhelming thrill of their plans. Only first Panteus had asked who the child was, ‘because she seems like part of the new things.’

  ‘Philylla, daughter of Themisteas,’ the King answered. ‘My wife chose her. In three years she will be breaking hearts all round her.’

  ‘She doesn’t think of that yet,’ said Panteus, and then again they looked at each other secretly, flashingly, because in three years Sparta was to be all different!

  The King sighed a little, saying to his friend: ‘I wish Sphaeros was here. He should have got my letter.’

  Philylla found them all out in the courtyard, and stopped a moment, feeling it all so poised that she must not break into it, however gently. The King’s mother, Kratesikleia, was sitting on the step, telling stories to her grandchildren; she had been very tall as a young woman, but now she was much bent, though it was somehow softly, as though less with age than with much stooping over cradles. Her hair was done high in a shining silver knot; below it the skin was finely wrinkled over the strong bones of her face. Her eyes were black and bright like a bird’s, and her hands very small; she used them a great deal in talking, and they always impressed her hearers. Even now the children were looking at them rather than at her face, as though the story came from them. There was a great red cushion behind her, and she leant forward from it as if she were going to leap out of the picture, or so it seemed to Philylla, into that tremendous, obsessing future that they all kept at the back of their minds.

  The two youngest children sat crouched beside her, listening hard. The baby girl was quite still except for her cheeks and lips sucking at her finger, and a rhythmical curving and straightening of her toes, as if some current of thick air were passing over them. The five-year-old boy had a hovering smile and his dark eyes looked far out, as though he were meditating some mischief—again for the future! Those two were like their father and grandmother, but the eldest, who was almost more than a child, who was nearly eight and would go to his class—if—if the classes were started again!—he was like his mother, with thick, silky-soft hair, lighter than his sunbrowned skin, and clear grey eyes, and lips that shut firmly over any secret. He saw Philylla coming in and smiled at her silently; they were great friends.

  But it was his mother that Philylla turned to. There was almost twenty years between them, but yet the girl felt there was no separation for them, none of the natural aloofness between two generations. It had all flowered in this last six months; the Queen was more to her now than her own mother could ever be again, or her own sister for that matter. The thing had happened completely.

  Agiatis was standing sideways to the others, with a piece of embroidery in her hands, the edge of a purple soldier’s cloak for her husband. She was still one of the most beautiful women in Sparta; perhaps it was partly this that made the twenty years seem such a small thing. Her hair, that Philylla loved to comb and plait when it was her turn, was almost covered by a close net of blue and silver cords. She wore the Dorian dress of plain wool, summer-bleached white, her own weaving. There were no ornaments at all; even the shoulder brooches were only silver, worked in a dullish pattern, and her ear-rings the same. Philylla admitted to herself dispassionately that Agiatis had very little eye for clothes, but then they didn’t interest her nowadays—why should they?—and it didn’t matter, for she was the right height and figure to look splendid in these simple things. Only: the child wondered for the hundredth time why they had ever called her Agiatis the Merry-minded. If one knew her well, of course—but just to see her and speak with her, it was the last thing one would say. Fifteen years ago she might have seemed very different, but surely not so different as all that! She stood there now, in her own house, looking at her own beautiful children; and yet she looked sad. Sad, but not minding it, Philylla thought again, and then suddenly jumped and shook herself, and ran into the court with her message.

  The picture broke at once into movement and noise and the present, but Agiatis was smiling now, the special, very soft smile she had for Philylla, that deepened again into something even more essential when the child spoke of her husband and Panteus. ‘And I told him!’ she said, her eyes bright and cheeks pink with running, ‘about wanting to help. I think he was pleased.’

  ‘I’m sure he was,’ said the Queen; ‘there aren’t so many to say it. Not among the women, at least.’

  ‘No,’ said Philylla slowly, thinking of the other maids of honour, ‘they are silly, aren’t they. I don’t know why.’

  The Queen smiled at her. ‘You will though, Philylla. When things turn simple, women have to give up much more than men. Because they live in shadow, by mystery.’

  ‘I see,’ said Philylla doubtfully, not seeing, ‘but they won’t be when I’m grown up, will they? I don’t like it!’ And unconsciously she moved further out towards the middle of the court, full into the winter sunlight.

  It was not every day she could go out into the fields and be a Spartan in her own way. The next morning she had to be indoors, with the others, weaving. She did not like this much; for one thing Agiatis always wanted them all to sing the old weaving-songs while they worked, but none of them liked to except Philylla, and she had an uncertain ear and more uncertain voice; so she was never allowed to sing. They talked instead, the elder ones about love and clothes, and occasionally politics, the younger ones about food and lessons and games and one another. And both the sets had, of course, that particular source of interest or annoyance, Agiatis, the Queen. The thing she was trying to do now was to train them for the dances again: as if anyone wanted even to think about those horrible, dim gods now! Two or three of the older girls were talking about that now, under cover of their looms, all rather horrified. ‘What does she think the good of them is if they aren’t real!’ That was Deinicha, a pretty, spoilt girl of sixteen, with fluffy hair and her finger-nails pink and polished. ‘It’s not right. If she goes on, she may make them come real. And Artemis—’ ‘I know. Some of the little ones lik
e pretending they’re doves or bears; they may make up some goddess of their own to fit the songs to, nothing like the old ones anyhow! But I can’t bear playing with these things. They’ve had too much power. And besides, if—if one has any feeling—one doesn’t look there for help!’ The other nodded and made a sign with her hand, something un-Greek enough. The Spartiate women imported their gods in the same ship with fine muslins from Egypt, or scents and hair-wash from Syria. At home in Hellas there were only charms, and little godlings for luck in love or housekeeping.

  They went on to talk of their perennial grievance, the clothes Queen Agiatis made the girls about her wear, their own weaving even, as if there were no such things as trade and good money in Sparta and lovely stuff over-seas, patterned and delicate, for soft skins and subtle colouring. But she wouldn’t even let them have powder, let alone all the possible small hints they knew they could use so cleverly, the lengthened line, the different tinting, that gave mere nature the mystery and attraction of art. It was all very well for her, with her husband and children and no one daring to laugh at her whatever she chose to look like. But her poor maids of honour, wasting all their best years at this extraordinary Court, while their sisters and cousins were enjoying themselves, and getting lovers, and living a life that you could call life! Well, the only comfort was, it couldn’t last. Or … could it? One of the helot women came in, with a huge grin and her arms full. The girls all stopped and ran up to her or looked round the corners of their looms. ‘Who’s the lucky one?’ they said, and one or two blushed and giggled self-consciously. But the woman, with as nearly a wink as was consistent with their dignity as the Queen’s girls, went over to the little ones and dumped her things on the bench beside Philylla, who was so really surprised that some of the others thought she must be acting. ‘Oh!’ she said, ‘are you sure? It’s not my birthday! Did mother send them?’ ‘Oh yes!’ said the woman, chuckling, and nudged her. ‘There you are, my lamb!’—it was a tablet, stringed, and sealed with red—‘now you write something pretty back.’ But Philylla was more interested in the presents than the letter. There was a great bunch of violets, sweet ones, blue and white, mixed with pink sprigs of daphne, and a rush box of honey-cakes sprinkled with cinnamon, and a bunch of arrows. She looked at them for a minute—they were light, but real grown-up ones with bone points; and last of all, in a cage of withies, a smart and glossy magpie, long-tailed and bright-eyed, that hopped towards her. Now the point of this, as all the older girls knew, but Philylla didn’t, was that a magpie was the one fashionable present just now from admirer to admired. They were usually taught to say some special phrase, not always very proper. The others all crowded round. ‘Take him out, Philylla! What does he say? Pretty bird, then, pretty bird!’ The magpie was very tame and friendly and sat on Philylla’s shoulder as she stood there, stiff and pink with pleasure and some pride, but he didn’t say anything, only whistled, cocking his jolly head at them. ‘But who’s it from?’ they clamoured. ‘Who is he? Why haven’t you told us, sly thing?’ ‘But I don’t know,’ said Philylla, dreadfully confused, fingering the tablet. ‘Read it then,’ said Deinicha. ‘Read it aloud, there’s a love.’ They all tried to peep over her shoulder, and she couldn’t bear to open it there in the middle of them; she wanted to run away by herself. ‘But read it!’ they cried at her, so excited that they were nearly pulling it out of her hand. She wriggled up to the wall and jerked at the seal; it was quite easy to read—she had been rather afraid it might be difficult. It was quite short. ‘Panteus to Philylla, greeting! Here are four things. Tell me which you like best. I think it will be the one I hope.’ She rubbed it out quickly with her finger; but still the others had seen it and repeated it to one another. They were more than a little surprised and jealous. ‘Panteus! Well, you’re flying high! Lucky little minx! How did you get your claws into him? What does the King say? Panteus indeed, why didn’t you tell us?’ ‘But,’ said Philylla, ‘I can’t help it! I really and truly didn’t know. I’ve only just seen him.’ ‘You must write a letter back,’ said Deinicha firmly, ‘and no baby nonsense, Philylla; you’ve got to do us credit—though you’ve done very well so far!’ she added handsomely. Philylla looked at the things again. Clearly it wasn’t the flowers or the cakes—though they were very nice!—it must be the arrows: because of what he had said about her own. And they were lovely arrows, a whole dozen of them, with stiff goose-feathers to make them fly. She would be able to shoot all sorts of big beasts now, deer even. But all the same she did love the magpie.