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, an
d 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.
The books were difficult to understand, and most of them did not seem to have anything to do with what had happened to him. They were about world-cycles very often, and it did him no good to think that what was going on now had gone on exactly the same in an identical universe before and would go on again countless times, just as, so often, he had seen the full moon rise over one special headland. Sometimes they were bits of good examples, things that wise and great men had done when faced by choices and difficulties; but they were never the Marob kind of choices and difficulties. And sometimes they were about God and sometimes about the Elements and sometimes about how Time is to become a real thing in the mind, an idea of continuous motion. They were written in rather grim, formal little sentences like sticks, but not like his own coloured sticks of midsummer. They all looked alike and he had to be very careful or the one stick which he wanted, which he could use to build with, might get past him and be lost. The books of the older philosophers, which his aunt used to read and he used to laugh at, were pleasanter stuff, full of reflections like an open pond in a garden with birds flying over it. This was a dark little river in a long tunnel; he had to grope through it. He found at last books by the Stoic philosophers, Zeno and Kleanthes, which dealt with good and evil, justice and order, and the causes of things. He went on reading.
In the early mornings he left Erif and the baby Klint, who breathed so dreadfully gently that often he had to stoop right over the cradle to feel its breath, dreading with a gripped heart that he might feel nothing, no tiny warmth, and then have to tell Erif! He went up to the long low room which ran from end to end of the Chief’s house, under the roof-beam. Below the tiles there was thick thatch for the sake of warmth, but it was carelessly fastened down, since it was only inside, out of the wind. There were a few small windows and the sparrows flew in and out. In one place there was a bees’ nest behind a rotted beam; it made all that end of the room smell of honey. There were chests along the middle with spare clothes and weapons and hangings, and among them one or two which were full of books. He sat down and read and thought.
One of the rolls had notes by Sphaeros himself, perhaps for a longer book. Tarrik had often heard him say that thoughts and words should be the same thing, only one was transparent, the other opaque; the thought comes forth and crystallises into the word; dialectic guides it. But all the same Sphaeros did not write as well as he thought or spoke, though Tarrik, knowing him, put more meaning into the phrases than a stranger would have. The book started by an inquiry into the physical world, the nature of that reality which seems at first to be the only reality until the seeking mind brings stresses to bear on it, and the thing crumbles. Then Sphaeros wrote of the intermingling of man with this physical world, so that there could neither be separation of body and soul, nor of man from the air he breathed, the water he drank and which flowed about his body, the fire which warmed him, the earth which held him up and fed him, from the friends and enemies, the whole rest of the universe which made his circumstances. That section of the book ended and Sphaeros went forward, with a curious eagerness that came out even in the writing to the Duty of Man, Duty of the Wise, Duty of Kings. The Thing that makes one know with utter certainty that one has done wrong: the wrong action as a Kataleptike Phantasia, as though one should imagine a man’s daemon whispering in his ear. It seemed easy for Sphaeros to think like this, to have this profound sense of right and wrong, and to cling to the right. But Tarrik hated it: he could not see these things immanent in life, not in Marob at least. And surely not in Greece, where everything happened more easily and lightly because of the sunshine. Even the Spartans—even the King’s half of Sparta—did not feel all the time that actions were right or wrong. He struggled against it, and yet felt Sphaeros all the time planting it into some willing, rebel pan of his mind.
Then again Sphaeros wrote about the order of Nature and how one should be part of it. He said that it was difficult, for, in detail, how could one tell which of two actions was the more harmonious? He wrote not too remotely but as though he had known these difficulties himself. The book was mostly for Greek readers, men and women of the unhappy city states, which had once worked so well and allowed the fullest life, but now merely cramped their citizens up into a pattern that hurt them and the rest of the world as well. Their boundaries cut right across the natural course of humanity. None of the Stoics had regarded them. They were cityless men. Zeno had come from Cyprus, his parents from further east; he was a little stooping man with a hooked nose and a great brown beard. Why should he care for Greek city states? Sphaeros himself had wandered all his days, and wherever he had gone, he had broken down boundaries that men had put up, wantonly, as it were in their own blood stream. Before Zeno there had been philosophers who preached the reuniting of Hellas. But the Stoics were first to name the brotherhood of man.
In all this, Tarrik tried to find himself. He felt profoundly that he had at some point and unknown to himself taken a step that had landed him dry and lonely outside the stream of life. He was out of harmony. And now he could not retrace his steps. Erif Der, his wife, had done the same thing and he loved her, and he was deeply anxious for her. Yet was the old Marob life harmonious? Was it part of the order of nature to work magic, steal sun and rain for your own seasons and crops, almost to alter the courses of the stars? He thought not. Perhaps it had been—before people like himself had begun to question it. Once upon a time it had been part of the order of nature for men to eat the enemies they had killed; there was nothing wrong or abhorrent about it. But now that would be a pitfall in a clear road. With time and questioning, rights become wrongs and wrongs rights. The Corn Kings before him had been satisfied. They had accepted that their lives should end, as they all had unless they had been killed or died suddenly when still in their strength, in
that last way, in that queerer feast than any they had made part of before. It had been natural; that was their life reabsorbing itself into the life of Marob out of which it had come. But he, Tarrik—Charmantides—he was not satisfied.
Day after day he wrestled in his mind with this, and was very gentle to every one he had any dealings with. He and Erif were kind to one another, like two hurt, lost children in a wood at night. He never spoke of Sardu. There were other women, but he did not pay much attention to them. If a farm had done not so well or one patch in a crop unexpectedly withered, he might be called upon to go there, and if some barren and unhappy woman was using her forces to suck the good out of the soil and bow the hemp or thin the barley ears, it was for the Corn King to intervene. But every day, between times, he was thinking about the books. It seemed to him sometimes most likely of all that he had got the whole thing wrong, that it was not meant for Marob, just as he himself was not meant for Sparta or friendship with King Kleomenes.
One day a letter came from Berris. It said: ‘So much has happened that I don’t know where to begin. I had no time to write earlier in the year when we were fighting and Kleomenes was leading us to more and more glory and always more certain ultimate victory. We raided the old enemy, Megalopolis, and beat them back like chickens inside their walls. Then we invaded Achaea and utterly defeated the army of the League. I think they would have accepted him as their leader after that; they were afraid. But then chance, that they call here Spoiler of Victories, stepped in. He was hurrying through the heat of the sun to catch up with his fortune, and suddenly something burst in his throat, and he began to bleed. He could not speak for a long time; he just lay in his tent, white. They thought he was dying, and sent for Agiatis. You know he is not so strong as he looks; I suppose he is based on fire, not earth. He got well, but his Fortune had gone by, and perhaps now he will never find her again. For the League lifted its head; Aratos talked them round. I think, and so does Hippitas, who has talked to me more about it than the others, that Aratos is trying to get a promise of help from Macedonia. If so, I do not know what will happen. I do not know whether even this Sparta is strong enough to stand against the outer world. What do you think, Tarrik? I wish to God that Kleomenes had not missed his chance!’
The Corn King and the Spring Queen Page 30