The Corn King & the Spring Queen: The Distinguished Novel

By Naomi Mitchison

A classic epic fantasy set in ancient civilizations along the Black Sea where tenderness, beauty and love vie with brutality and dark magic.

Erif Der, a young witch, is compelled by her father to marry his powerful rival, Tarrik the Corn King, so becoming the Spring Queen. Forced by her father, she uses her magic spells to try and break Tarrik’s power. But one night Tarrik rescues Sphaeros, a Hellenic philosopher, from a shipwreck. Sphaeros in turn rescues Tarrik from near death and so breaks the enchantment that has bound him. And so begins for Tarrik a Quest—a fabulous voyage of discovery which will bring him new knowledge, and which will reunite him with his beautiful Spring Queen.

“This breathtaking recreation of life in the ancient world welds the power of myth and magic to a stirring plot.” —Ian Rankin

“Originally published in 1931, this dense, epic-length fantasy is a quest story cunningly woven of history and myth. . . . In scenes of beauty and power, Mitchison breathes life into such perennial themes as courage, forgiveness, the search for meaning, and self-sacrifice.” —Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 1, 1990
• ISBN: 9781468305296

Book preview

PART I

Kataleptike Phantasia

Lavender’s blue, dilly, dilly!

   Rosemary’s green;

When I am king, dilly, dilly!

   You shall be queen.

Call up your men, dilly, dilly!

   Set them to work;

Some to the plough, dilly, dilly!

   Some to the cart.

Some to make hay, dilly, dilly!

   Some to cut corn;

While you and I, dilly, dilly!

   Keep ourselves warm.

PEOPLE IN THE FIRST PART

People of Marob

Erif Der

Her father, Harn Der

Her mother, Nerrish

Her eldest brother, Yellow Bull

Her next eldest brother, Berris Der

Her younger brother, Gold-fish

Her younger sister, Wheat-ear

Yellow Bull’s wife, Essro

Tarrik, also called Charmantides, Corn King and Chief of Marob

His aunt, Yersha, also called Eurydice

Greeks

Epigethes, an artist

Sphaeros of Borysthenes, a Stoic philosopher

Apphé, Yersha’s maid

Men and Women of Marob, Greek sailors and merchants

CHAPTER ONE

ERIF DER WAS SITTING on a bank of shingle and throwing pebbles into the Black Sea; for a girl, she threw very straight. She was thinking a little about magic but mostly about nothing at all. Her dress was pulled up over her knees, and her legs were long and thin and not much sunburnt yet, because it was still early in the year. Her face was pale too, with flat, long plaits of hair hanging limp at each side, and her ear-rings just shaking as she threw. She wore a dress of thick linen, woven in a pattern of squares, red and black and greyish white; at the end of the sleeves the pattern ended in two wide bands of colour. It had a leather belt sewn with tiny masks of flat gold, and the clasps were larger gold masks with garnet eyes and teeth. Over all she wore a stiff felt coat, sleeveless, with strips of fur down the sides, and she was not cold in spite of the wind off the sea.

A crab came walking towards her over the shingle; she held out her hand, palm upwards, so that the crab walked over it. Erif Der laughed to herself; she liked the feeling of its stiff, damp, scuttling claws on her skin. She picked it up carefully by the sides of its shell and made it walk again, this time over her bare foot. A cloud came over the sun; she threw two more pebbles into the sea, sat up and put her shoes on, then walked back towards Marob harbour till she came to the high stone breakwater; instead of going round with the road, she climbed up it, by way of a chain and ring and some wave-worn places in the stone; she was always fond of doing elaborate and unnecessary things. On the other side, she jumped down twelve feet on to another shingle bank, but she was not at all an easy person to hurt; air and water at least knew too much about her.

She went on more quickly now, and up into the town: she felt as if her father was calling her. Soon she was passing the Chief’s house, straight in front of the harbour, looking square on to the sea, east and a little north, with thick stone piers and small windows. Erif Der wondered if she would like to live there, and thought not, thought it would be cold, thought particularly that if she ever did have to, she would do her best not to have Yersha there too. As she was thinking this, Yersha herself came out of the main door with her hair done high and her mantle caught up on her shoulder, Greek fashion, and two armed guards following her. However, Erif Der was hurrying a little and did not choose to be seen or stopped, so Yersha looked the other way for a full minute, and when she turned again there was no one in sight; that was annoying for Yersha, who hated being magicked at all, even as little as this, and suspected it was done by Erif Der—who was much too young to have any powers really, besides being the daughter of Harn Der, besides going about alone like a street-girl, besides having been chosen to dance with the Chief at Plowing Eve and having—Yersha suspected—spoken with him of more matters than the plowing and the Courting dance! It had been occurring more and more to Yersha, in this last year, that her nephew, the Chief, had not told her exactly all that he had been doing and saying every day. That was bad enough, without having children like Erif Der, who ought to be kept at home and made useful, working magic on her! Yersha hated magic: she could not do it herself, because of the quarter of Greek blood in her that made things too plain and too real to be twisted about in the Scythian way.

Meanwhile Erif Der went on, along the main street of Marob, and across the flax market to her father’s house. Harn Der was standing in front of the hearth, jabbing the fire with the shaft of an old boar spear, so that quantities of smoke poured into the room, which was dark enough already. He was a short, thick man with hair and beard that bristled out all ways at once, and a leather coat and breeches. Erif Der stopped and blinked and rubbed her eyes. ‘Well, father,’ she said, ‘here I am.’ Her father left off stirring the fire and the smoke cleared; when her eyes stopped tingling she could see that her brother, Berris Der, was there too. As usual he had a hawk on his shoulder; equally as usual, he had something in his hands to play with, this time a strip of soft copper that he was bending and unbending, so that sometimes it looked more like a cup, and sometimes more like a flower, or a snake, or a bracelet. Berris Der was three years older than she was and they were not always interested in the same things; but still they smiled at one another rather more consciously than as simple relations. The girl came and stood by her father. ‘Well,’ she said again, looking at the fire rather than at him; ‘you wanted me?’

Harn Der frowned at her. ‘You have to see and to know that it is time for your part in this,’ he said.

Erif Der swung her foot uncomfortably, and the corners of her mouth twitched a little; all at once she looked much younger and less magic. ‘Still I don’t know how!’ she said. ‘Father, are you sure it has to be me?’

‘Little fool!’ said Harn Der, more gentle in voice than in words, ‘I shall be Chief of Marob before the end of the year, and remember, that will be you.’

‘But it’s so hard,’ said the girl, ‘first to marry him, and then to magic him, and then to unmarry him. I think I shall go wrong somewhere.’

Harn Der answered, smiling to himself a little: ‘What are you afraid of?’

‘Myself. My own power.’

‘You should go and learn power instead of sitting on the beach and doing nothing—like your mother.’

The girl’s mouth and bright eyes twisted into sudden laughter: ‘Much you know of learning magic, father!’

‘Would I use you if I knew myself, little vixen? Go, get on with my work! What was the use of Plowing Eve if you will not watch your furrow?’

‘Ah,’ said Erif Der lightly, shifting to the other foot, ‘I can tell you that. I think the Chief knows.’

‘I never told you to think!’ said her father, ‘besides—it’s not so. Tarrik is a fool: he cannot know.’

‘All the same—’ she said, then shrugged her shoulders. ‘Well, perhaps he doesn’t know. Perhaps he is a fool.’

‘He is not that, then,’ said Berris Der suddenly, ‘he is the one of you all that knows what I am looking for, and if father’s plan was anyone else’s plan I should be well out of it! And remember, if you hurt Tarrik, I shall be out of it!’

‘Oh you, Berris,’ said his father, ‘if you don’t want to know you shouldn’t listen. And—for the hundred and first time—we are not going to hurt Tarrik. I know as well as you that it would be no good in the end: so long as he is Corn King. If I did not know it, couldn’t I have killed him twenty times over and been Chief by now? But that would have been for my harm and the harm of Marob as well. I am not going to hurt the corn. As it is, the Council will see that he goes, gently, for no one hates a madman, and then they will put me in his place and Marob will not be divided against itself.’

‘But I shan’t have to stay married to him?’ asked Erif Der anxiously.

‘Of course not. You will be the Chief’s daughter: to do whatever you and we choose. But listen: when I said Tarrik was a fool, I meant a fool in the way you thought he was wise. He does not know of the plan, still less that you are part of it. And as to the way Berris thinks he is wise, whatever that may be, it will not alter, and when I am Chief, Tarrik can work with Berris and they can both talk about beauty.’

Erif Der shook her head, but said nothing and went over to a chest by the wall; she took out a coat of brown fur, a shade darker than her own hair, and put it on instead of the felt one, which she folded carefully and put away. Then she took a gold bracelet out, and tried it on her arm, first above, then below the elbow, pinching it into place; when it was high on her arm the sleeve hid it, but then, whenever she lifted her hand, it flashed out wonderfully. ‘Which is right, Berris?’ she said. Her brother frowned at her and walked out; she hesitated, changed the bracelet to the other arm, and ran after him, caught him up, and walked beside him, a pace behind.

Harn Der looked after them, scratched his head, and after a little walked out into the flax market; he found one of his own farm people, who had been sent down to Marob to buy new milk jars, and was going back with the big red crocks slung over his shoulder; he said that everything was doing finely, the wheat well up, the flax and hemp high for the time of year, and there were two fat calves ready to be killed and sent down whenever they were wanted. Harn Der was pleased, thinking of his crops and his beasts; no one in Marob had better land than his, few had so much of it; and all good, sheltered, and well watered, away from the sea, but not so far from the town that the inlanders, the Red Riders, would ever come and raid it. In a few weeks he would be going down there with his wife and children, to live all summer in great yellow tents, with the birds and the beasts on the plains all round him, and the sun shining and the crops growing.

But it was more than land he had, and better than gold. Every one in Marob knew him and thought of him always as wise and strong and a ruler of men; the elders had seen him at war, seen him guarding their land against the Red Riders in the days when Tarrik was only a child. A great archer was Harn Der then, and a great horseman; you could see the yellow tassel of his helmet a mile away across the fighting, when things were at their worst, and then back it would come to you and you would know that everything was going to be right and the Red Riders beaten and driven out of the fields you loved. That was Harn Der, and that was Harn Der’s eldest son, Yellow Bull, who was making himself new lands out of the swamps to the south of Marob and had built his house there, not in the walled town. Harn Der sighed, and went home again moodily, thinking of his sons and all he was doing for them.

Berris and his sister were out of sight by now; they were walking fast and Erif Der was out of breath and a little angry. She took an odd-looking, small wooden star out of the front of her dress and held it for a few yards, then stopped for a moment, panting, and touched her brother’s hand. ‘It’s very hot, isn’t it, Berris?’

‘Yes, I suppose,’ said Berris vaguely, slowing down, and took off his coat as he walked and trailed it from his hand till it dropped. ‘Very hot,’ he went on, and began pulling at his shirt, and, ‘very hot,’ his sister echoed, looking at him gravely. He pulled the shirt over his head and his felt cap dropped off with it; there was a brown line at the base of his neck where he stopped being sunburnt. The belt went with the shirt; he started just a little at the chink of the clasps falling on the road, but he was looking at Erif Der. Still walking slowly, he stepped out of his loose trousers. ‘So hot,’ he said again, and there was a film of sweat on his skin. He pushed back the hair from his forehead, and suddenly behind Erif Der there seemed to be a face staring at him, two, three faces. He stared back at them. They were opening their mouths to say words to him, his sister faded and they came real, and all at once he noticed, first, that he was really quite cold, and then that he had nothing on and all his clothes were straggling in little heaps down the road where he had dropped them.

He stood and swore at the starers till they ran—they were all poor men, and he, in spite of everything, Harn Der’s son. Then he went up to Erif Der; she had her mouth tight shut and her cheeks pink; she tried to look him in the eyes again, but he was too angry for her now. ‘Pick up my clothes,’ he said.

‘I won’t!’ said Erif Der, getting pinker.

‘Yes you will,’ said her brother, and got her by the two plaits. She screamed and hit out at him, but he swung her away by her hair. ‘Pick them up,’ he said.

She went and got them without a word, and threw them down at his feet; she was too sore and angry to cry. ‘You beast, Berris!’ she said, ‘I’ll make you sorry for that!’

Berris recovered his temper with his trousers. ‘No, you won’t,’ he said, ‘I can always pull your hair and you can’t always magic me, so it won’t do you any good in the long run.’ She kicked his coat and said nothing. ‘Little goose,’ he went on, ‘what did you do it for? Suppose Tarrik had seen?’

‘Well, let him!’ said Erif Der. ‘Let him! Then no one can say he didn’t know what I can do!’

‘Oh,’ said Berris, ‘so that’s what you’re after. My belt, please. No, pick it up. Pick it up! So you want Tarrik to know?’

‘Tarrik does know! I’m going home. I shall tell father you hurt me!’

Berris caught her by one arm: ‘Baby! You come with me to the forge. Come and blow the fire for me. Erif, I’m making something—something exciting. A beast. Come on, Erif.’

‘Is Tarrik going to be there? Is he? Let go, Berris!’

‘Very likely. Erif, you are shiny when you’re so cross. There, that’s better. Are you coming?’

‘I won’t answer till you let me go.’

He dropped her arm. She rubbed it against her cheek for a moment, then nodded and went down the street towards the forge.

Berris Der unlocked the door, taking a little time over it, because he had made the lock himself and was proud of it: the key was like a little stag with mad horns. He left the door open and unfastened the shutters from inside. Erif Der went to the fire and raked away the earth that had been banked round it the evening before: it was still alive and stirred redly under her breath as she fed it with dry chips. She leaned to the bellows. ‘Why have you got to do that?’ asked Berris. ‘Can’t you make the fire obey?’ Erif Der shook her head: ‘I don’t know enough about fire,’ and she turned her back on him to get a purchase on the bellows handle. Berris was at another of his own locks now; it was on a great oak chest, bound with forking straps of silver-inlaid bronze. He took something out, and laid it carefully on the embers, which throbbed white and red with heat under the bellows. After a time he called her to look.

She stood away from him, watching. There was a small, queer, iron horse, twisted and flattened, biting his own back; he was angry and hammer-marked all over; his mane shot up into a flame; his downward jammed feet were hard and resisting; the muscles of his body were ready to burst out. Berris Der laid him on the anvil and began hammering to a rhythm, one, two on the horse, three with a solider clink on the iron of the anvil. The horse twisted still more; fresh hammer marks beat out the old—the substance seemed less and the movement more; every moment he became less like the tamed horses of fenced pastures; and more like something wild in the mind, beaten madly by the violences of thought. The glow died out of him. The blows stopped suddenly; he was back in the fire, and his watchers at work, thinking of him. Then again the anvil. Berris chanted in time with the hammer, tunelessly: ‘Horse, horse, horse.’ At a point of the fantastic he stayed, the hammer half raised. ‘Well?’ he said. She came nearer, tracing the horse shape half unconsciously in the air with one finger. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘I expect he is the best thing you have done?’ ‘Yes, but how do you know?’ ‘Not any way you’d like. Ask Tarrik.’ Her brother did not answer, but stayed still, his lips pursed, watching his queer little horse as it lay there with the light on it, the centre of the forge; he made the movement of touching it, but could not really, because of the heat in the iron.

There was a tapping on the open door of the forge; Berris looked round, half angry at being disturbed, half pleased at having someone fresh to admire his work. Erif Der stepped back one pace and sat down on the floor beside another chest which stood between the fire and the window. ‘Come in!’ said Berris, smiling at his horse; ‘come and look.’

A man came in out of the sunshine and stood beside Berris, one hand on his shoulder. ‘So!’ he said, ‘you have something new?’ And he stood with his head a little on one side, looking at it. He was older than Berris, tall and graceful, with long, broad-tipped fingers, bare legs, and dark, curly hair; he was clean shaven and his eyes and mouth showed what was going on in his mind. His clothes looked odd and bright in the forge: a short, full tunic of fine linen, light red bordered with deeper red, and a heavy mantle flung round him, one end caught in his belt, the other over his shoulder and hanging thickly and beautifully from his arm. He had thin sandals on his feet and moved cautiously, afraid of knocking against some hot metal.

‘What do you make of it, Epigethes?’ said Berris Der, speaking shyly in Greek.

The other man smiled and did not answer at once; when he spoke it was gravely, paternally almost, though he was not so very much older than Berris. ‘Very nice,’ he said.

‘You don’t think so!’ said Berris quickly, flushing, frowning at his horse. ‘It isn’t!’

The Greek laid a hand kindly on his shoulder: ‘Well, Berris, it’s rough, isn’t it?—harsh, tortured?’

‘Yes—yes—but isn’t that, partly, the hammering?’

‘Of course. What have I always told you? You must work on the clay first till you get out all these violences. And then cast.’

‘But, Epigethes, I hate clay! It’s so soft, such a long way from what I want. And then, there’s the time it takes, with the wax and all—and when it’s done I’ve got to scrape and file and chip and fill in nail holes!’

‘I know, I know,’ said Epigethes soothingly, ‘but you can always come to me for the casting: any time you like. I would tell my man, and you would have nothing to do but leave the model with him.’

‘Yes, but—’ said Berris again, and then suddenly, ‘Oh, it’s more than that! Whatever I did, you wouldn’t like it! I can’t make my things right, I never shall!’ He looked down at the shape on the anvil; he hated his little horse now.

Epigethes sat down on the bench; still he had not seen Erif Der. ‘Berris,’ he said, ‘I’ll make you an offer. I can teach you, I know I can teach you! You have the hands and eyes—everything but the spirit. There—forgive me, Berris!—you are still a barbarian. No fault of yours: but I can cure it. Come and work with me for six months, and no one will know that you are not a Hellene born.’ But Berris Der was getting more and more gloomy; all the joy had faded out of his horse; he saw nothing but its faults, its weaknesses; he lost all pride and assertion, could not hope to be anything but a failure; he shook his head. ‘No, but I promise you!’ said Epigethes. ‘I swear by Apollo himself! And all I ask is what you can give me easily, this pure northern gold of yours, the weight of a loaf of bread, no more. And not coined, not to spend on foolishness, but to use as an artist, to make into beauty! Like this, Berris’—he put his hand into the breast fold of his mantle—‘and I am sure you could do as good if once you had the spirit.’

Berris bent over to look. It was a gold plaque in low relief, a woman’s head bowered in grape tendrils, with heavy, flowing lines of throat and chin, female even in the gold, and exquisite, minutely perfect work on the grapes—those vines that had been worked on over and over again by generations of Greek artists, till they knew for certain which way every tiniest branchlet should go. But it all meant something different to Berris Der, something worshipful, the impacted art tradition of Hellas: for a poor barbarian to stare at and admire, but never to criticize, oh no, not criticize. He took it in his hands; how different it was from his horse, how well Epigethes must have known just what it was he wanted, and exactly how to get it! And he would be able to make things like this, if once he gave himself up to the Greek, gave his hands and powers as tools for the other to work with. He would make—as one should, one clearly should!—soft, lucid shapes, nature beautified, life in little, sane, unfantastic.

He went to the chest again and took out something else, half of a gold buckle, beaten into a gorgon’s head, full face, with staring eyes. He passed it to Epigethes, rather roughly. ‘Is that better?’ ‘But of course!’ said the Greek, surprised, holding it up to the light. ‘No one need be ashamed of this. The style is coming; why, it is like a boss on the big vase I am making now. You will be an artist yet! When did you make it?’ Berris Der looked at the ground. ‘I went to your house a week ago,’ he said, ‘when you were with the Chief. I saw your vase; I measured the heads on it. This is a copy.’ And he snatched it back and shoved it into the chest, trembling a little.

‘Why not?’ said Epigethes, ‘between friends? You cannot do better than copy me for the next half-year. It will train your eye, and everything else will follow. Come again when I’m there: any time. I doubt if your Chief wants to see me again!’

‘Tarrik! Why not?’

‘Oh,’ Epigethes smiled, a little self-consciously, ‘I’m afraid he does not care for my work. I thought he might, having some Hellene blood himself. But no: you, the pure Scythian, you are more nearly Athenian than he.’

Berris was sad, he wanted to justify the Chief—and yet—’I wish he liked them; but perhaps he will some day. Me more Athenian … Oh, do tell me about Athens again!’

Epigethes laughed. ‘Some day you shall come there with me and see all the temples and theatres and pictures and everything! You shall fall in love with all the goddesses and try to pick the painted roses, and you will forget that you once twisted iron into ugly shapes.’

‘Oh, I wish I could come!’ said Berris, ‘I do so long for Hellas!’ And he coloured and looked out of the window, thinking what a barbarian he must seem. But about Tarrik—‘Why did the Chief not like your work, Epigethes? How could he help it? What did he say?’

‘Oh, he said a great many things, foolish mostly. But it makes difficulties for me. I had hoped, if he cared for my things, laid out some of his treasures on these—perhaps!—more lasting treasures, I might have been able to stay here for a long time, teaching you some of it. But now—well, I am not a rich man.’

The Greek glanced at his plaque again, then folded it up in a square of linen and put it back. Berris Der went over to the wall and unlocked a tiny metal door, heavily hinged, that opened with a certain difficulty. Epigethes turned his head tactfully away. Berris took out a solid lump of gold, about the size of an apple. ‘I meant to work on it,’ he said, ‘but you—you are worthier. Take it. Oh please, take it!’

The Greek shook his head. ‘How can I? My dear boy, I can’t take your gold like this.’

But Berris held it out to him imploringly. ‘Oh, I do want you to stay! It’s mine, my very own, do take it!’

Epigethes seemed to make up his mind. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘if you will come and take lessons from me.’

‘Oh I will!’ cried Berris, ‘and you shall teach me to be a Hellene!’

‘If your Chief will let me!’ said Epigethes, feeling the golden lump with his finger-tips.

‘I’m sorry about that.’ And then Berris had a brilliant thought: ‘Oh, Epigethes, you must go to my father. He’ll buy your things—after I’ve spoken to him. And my brother, down in the marshes, I’ll take you there. Will you start teaching me soon?’

‘Tomorrow if you like. Walk with me to the corner of the street, won’t you? Let me see your keys, Berris; you made them, I expect? Still crude, you see.’

They walked out together. When they were quite gone, Erif Der got up and went over to the anvil; the horse was nearly cold; she stared at him with lips pursed, poked him here and there, turned him over. Then she shrugged her shoulders and went back to her corner. She had a handful of little metal scraps, bronze and copper and iron; she arranged them on the floor in patterns. Or perhaps they arranged themselves, while she sang to them, a tiny, thin song in the back of her throat.

Berris Der came back to his forge looking very grown up and determined. He took up his tongs. ‘Blow the fire!’ he told his sister. She began, then stopped, one hand on the bellows. ‘You aren’t going to change your horse?’ she asked. But, ‘Blow!’ he half shouted at her, ‘I want it hot, melting hot!’ And he threw on more wood. She started blowing, with long, steady strokes from the shoulder; twice she spoke to him, but he did not answer. He took his biggest hammer, a great, heavy, broad-headed thing, and propped it against the anvil. The logs flared and glowed and crumbled into white heat; the little iron horse lay there till he was red all over, and the girl’s back ached from the bellows. ‘So!’ said Berris, and she stopped, and straightened herself with a sigh of relief.

He took the horse and laid it on the anvil; he looked at it with cold anger, and then began to smash it with the big hammer, all over. The red-hot sparks flew round him, thick and low, scorching his leather apron and shoes; he hit anyhow, with a blind, horrible passion of hate against his own work, grunting at his efforts sometimes, but saying no word. He did not stop till the iron was black again, and shapeless. Then he took it up with the tongs and threw it clanging into a corner of old cast-off scraps. Erif Der watched it go; she was back again in her old place on the floor.

Her brother went to his chest and stood beside it, taking out one thing after another, mostly half finished; he handled them and frowned or muttered at them, and put them back again. At last he unwrapped the Gorgon’s head buckle, and found a piece of gold, roughly beaten out, and compared the two; he was copying the head exactly on to the other half of the buckle. He took them both over to his bench, right under the window, and began to measure and make tiny marks on the gold. They were right under his eyes as he sat upright with both elbows in front of him on the bench to steady himself. He took his magnifying crystal out of the soft leather roll it lived in, and peered through it, counting and placing the tiny balls of filigree. But he seemed clumsy at his tools; his hands were shaking after all that violent hammering; he dealt unlovingly with the things. Once or twice other men passed the window and looked in and spoke to him; he answered crossly, covering the work with his hands. Sometimes there was sun shining on him, but more often not, as the day had turned out cloudy after all.

Chapter Two

BY AND BYE ERIF Der felt that someone was watching her; she looked up, rather cross at having been caught. Under her eye-lashes she saw Tarrik lolling against one of the door-posts, quite quiet, with a bow in his left hand. He had a squarish, smiling, lazy face; the oddest thing about it were his bright brown eyes that looked straight into yours. He was clean shaven about the chin, but in front of his ears and on his cheek-bones near the outward corners of his eyes, there were little soft hairs. He was brown and red as to colour, as if he lay out in the sun all day, and let it warm his bare skin while others were working. Like Berris, he wore loose shirt and trousers, both of white linen, and a white felt coat embroidered with rising suns and a criss-cross of different-coloured sunrays. His belt was all gold, dolphins linked head to tail; it had a rather small sword hanging from it on one side, and at the other a gold-plated quiver of arrows, a whistle, and a tiny hunting-knife with an onyx handle. He wore a crown, being Chief, a high felt cap, covered with tiers and tiers of odd, fighting, paired griffins in soft gold; his hair, underneath, was dark brown and curly; on his upper lip, too, it was brown and quite short, so that one saw his mouth, and, when he laughed, as he often did, his white, even, upper teeth.

The girl looked quickly from him to her brother; but Berris was tap-tapping on the gold, with his back to them both. Tarrik smiled, tightened his bowstring and began playing with it, till it buzzed like a wasp. She frowned at him, not sure whether he mightn’t be laughing at her, treating her like a baby, when really it was she who had all the power. She put her hand to the wooden star under her dress.

Then the tapping at the bench stopped and Berris called her to blow the fire again; the gold was getting brittle, he had to anneal it. As he got up, Tarrik made the bowstring sound sharply again. He slipped off the stool and gave the Chief his formal salute, right hand with bare knife up to the forehead, then went over and took Tarrik by the upper arms and shook him with pleasure at the meeting. Tarrik grinned, and let him, and Erif Der took the opportunity of getting to her feet and taking out the wooden star. ‘I didn’t know you were coming,’ said Berris. ‘Oh, Tarrik, I’ve had a terrible day! I thought I’d made something good and it wasn’t!’

‘How do you know?’ said Tarrik, and his voice was as pleasant as his smile. ‘Let me see it.’

Berris shook his head. ‘No. I killed it. Wait, though; let me get this hot now, or it will crack.’ He took the gold and put it carefully on to the fire, gripping it lightly all the time with his wood-handled tongs.

Tarrik leant over to look. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s bad. You’d better melt it down, Berris.’

At that Berris coloured, but still held the buckle steady in the flame. ‘Suppose,’ he said, ‘suppose you know nothing at all about it?’

‘Has our handsome friend Epigethes been here? Has he?’ asked Tarrik. ‘I thought so.’ He looked across the fire at Erif Der, blowing the bellows, with the bracelet on one arm and the star tight in the other hand. He began to sing at her, very low, in time with her movements, a child’s rhyme about little ships with all kinds of pretty ladings. And still she was not sure if he was laughing at her or making love to her. The fire on the forge between them nearly stopped her from working on him.

The gold was hot and soft by now; it would not crack. Berris Der took it out and across to the bench. ‘It’s bad, it’s bad, it’s bad,’ said Tarrik, leaning over, ‘it’s like a little Greek making a face.’ And suddenly Erif Der found that she liked Tarrik. That was so surprising that she nearly dropped the star; because she had never really thought of her own feelings before. There was she, Harn Der’s daughter and a witch; so of course she would do everything she could for her father and brothers. And there was the Chief, who was to have the magic done on him, to be her husband for a few months—because that was part of it—but never, somehow, to get into her life. But if she liked him it would all be much harder. Quickly, fear came swamping into her mind; she wanted to stop, to run away. She began to creep out, very quietly, slinking along the walls of the forge. But Berris wanted his gold heated again; he called her to blow the fire, angrily, because he was working badly and because he hated Tarrik to tell him so. She went back, her head in the air, pretending to herself and every one else that she knew exactly what she wanted. But while she blew she got fuller of panic every moment. If she could not run, at any rate something must happen!

Tarrik was talking to Berris Der very gently, spinning his bow on its end or playing a sort of knuckle-bones with odd pieces of wood. Most of the time he was abusing Epigethes, quite thoroughly, with maddeningly convincing proofs of everything he said. Sometimes Berris wanted not to hear, to be too deep in what he was doing, and sometimes he answered back, violently, trying to stop it. ‘He’s the first Greek artist who’s ever had the goodness to come here,’ he said, ‘and this is all the welcome he gets! You—you who should have some feeling for Hellas—you haven’t even the common decency to be civil to him the first time you meet. And you don’t even manage to frighten him, you just make a fool of yourself—and a fool of Marob in all the cities of the world.’

‘Not if the corn we send them stays good,’ said Tarrik, rather irritatingly.

‘Corn! You used to care for beauty. But when beauty comes to us you won’t even look.’

‘And you won’t look beyond a pretty tunic and a Greek name. Well, I’ve got a Greek name too, call me by it and see if you don’t pay more attention to what I say.’

‘You fool, Tarrik!’

‘Charmantides.’

‘You—God, I’m over-heating it!’ He snatched the buckle out of the fire and back to the window.

Tarrik followed him: ‘But if you do—isn’t it bad and getting worse? Berris, look at it, look at it fresh, what’s all this nonsense here, all this scratching, what is it about? There’s no strength in it—oh, it is a bad little buckle! What else have you made?’

‘Nothing, nothing—I never have! All the beauty goes, the beauty goes between my eye and my hand! Oh, it’s no use!’ And suddenly he saw how bad it really was and dropped the hammer, let go of everything, and sat with his hands fallen at his sides and his forehead on the edge of the bench.

‘Stop!’ said Tarrik. ‘Get up! Listen to me. I’m being Charmantides now. I’m just as good a Greek as Epigethes and I don’t want to be paid for my lesson. I’m good Greek enough to know it’s not something—something magic,’ he said, looking round, a little startled, as if that had not been quite the thing he meant to say. ‘There’s no use our copying Hellas; we haven’t the hills and the sun. You know, Berris, that I’ve been there, I’ve seen these cities of yours, and I would see them again gladly if I could, if I were not Chief here. And they are not so very wonderful; they are not alive as we are, and always I thought they were in bond. They pretend all the time, they even think they are free, but truly they are little and poor and peeping from side to side at their masters, Macedonia on one side, Egypt and Syria the other. Hellas is old, living on memories—no food for us. Turn away from it, Berris.’

‘Then you think my buckle is as bad as all that?’ asked Berris mournfully, bringing it all, of course, to bear on his own work.

‘Look for yourself,’ said Tarrik. ‘Take it as a whole. You don’t know what you want. Is it a copy of life, less real, or a buckle for a belt? Which did you think of while you were making it?’

And so they might go on talking for hours and nothing would happen. Erif Der stood at the side of the forge, hands gripping elbows, her eyes full of reflected flames. ‘Tarrik!’ she said, loud and suddenly, ‘is that all you have to say?’ Both men stopped and turned round and looked at her. The light of the forge flickered on her cheeks and long plaits and the front of her throat, coming up, pale and soft out of the rough linen of her dress. Her mouth was a little open; there was a pattern round her feet. Berris stayed by the bench, but Tarrik dropped his bow, and came forward two steps. Aloud, he said, ‘Erif Der, I love you, I want to marry you.’ He reached out towards her, but she was in a circle of her own and would not move from it; only he could hear her breathing gustily, as if she had been running; his own hammering heart sounded plainer still.

She did not answer him, but Berris did, with a question: ‘Do you? Will you marry her?’

‘No—yes,’ said Tarrik, his hands up to his head, pressing the crown down on to his hair, half covering his ears.

Erif Der threw up her hands with a little cry, loosing him. ‘I did it!’ she said, ‘I did it, Chief! Well? Am I clever?’ She stepped out of her circle.

‘Why did you tell me?’ said Tarrik softly. ‘When will you let me go?’

‘But I have!’ she cried. ‘Now say—say what you really want!’

‘I want the same thing,’ said Tarrik and pulled her over to him. She ducked, butting at him, clumsily, childishly, with head and fists, and got kissed on her neck and face and open mouth, maddeningly, and found nothing to shove against, nothing that would stay still and be fought; so that suddenly she went quiet and limp in his arms, and, as suddenly, he let her go. She had trodden on Tarrik’s bow; the string snapped; he picked it up. ‘Witch,’ he said, ‘I shall go to Harn Der, and then I shall marry you.’

‘I give my leave,’ said Berris hastily, ‘and so will father.’ But no one listened to him.

‘Very well,’ said Erif Der. ‘Now listen, Tarrik. I will magic you as much as I please and you will not be able to stop me!’

‘Go on, then,’ said Tarrik, ‘but there are some other things I shall do that you will not be able to stop.’ She smoothed her plaits and stroked her hot face with her own familiar palms. ‘You’ll see,’ she said, and went out. But it was all very well when Berris pulled her hair; next time it would be Tarrik, who was much stronger. She knew her magic depended on herself and could be as much broken as she was; never mind, the sun had come out again, the sea smell swept up the streets of Marob, fresh and strong. She went back to the flax market, half running; father would be pleased with her, she must tell him quick. And how soon could Yersha possibly be got out of the Chiefs house?

Tarrik and Berris Der were still talking. When she had gone, they had dropped back at once to where they had left off, Berris wondering, startled at the way it had come, thinking of his father and not liking to talk about it to Tarrik, because it would have been bound to be all lies. But Tarrik felt wonderfully light, leaping from one thing to another in his airy mind. He had always been rather like this; he knew how it angered the Council and Harn Der, but now it was all marvellously accentuated. He knew that he was free, that nothing mattered—not Marob, not the corn, not the making of beauty, nor his own life. He went on talking seriously, as he had done before, but every now and then laughter rose in him like a secret wind, and shook his mouth while he was speaking about art to Berris Der. By and bye it became too much and he got up, saying he would go to Harn Der later that day, but must go now to the Council. ‘Yes,’ said Berris, startled, ‘because of the road? I should have thought of it—oh, go quick!’ He pushed the bow into his hand and hurried him out. Tarrik went out of the forge and down the street with a kind of swaying, dancing walk, as if he were trying not to bound into the air at every step.

As soon as he was out of sight, Berris took the half-made buckle and melted it down, with some filings he had, and ran it into a plain bar. He would have done the same with the other buckle, but at the last moment he stopped, he could not bear to kill so much of his own work in one morning. Then he damped down the fire, hung up his leather apron, and saw that everything was locked up. He knew he should be glad that the plan was working and his father would be Chief so soon; but yet he felt heavy and sad, partly because of Tarrik, and partly because of his own failures, and partly because there had been so much magic going on round him for the last few hours.

Tarrik was worse than usual at the Council. To start with, he was late—not that he was often anything else, and anyhow they could always get on perfectly well without him—but still, unless he was there, none of their doings had any sacredness: they were only, as it were, parts of his body.

Today they were talking about a great plan that had been started the year before by Yellow Bull, the eldest son of Harn Der, who lived south in the marshes. He had gone over all the ground, punting himself through those queer, half-salt, weed-choked channels that spread inland for miles, alone in a flat boat, living on snared birds and eggs and muddy-tasting fish. He stood before the Council now, a rough-skinned, wild-eyed young man, wearing mostly fur, very eager to have his plan followed, very bad at explaining it. He wanted them to make a secret road through the marshes, building on piles between the islands, digging deep drains towards the sea, and making strong places here and there with walls and towers. There was firm ground a few feet down in many places, and their draining for the road would leave acres of dry pasture, where neither horses nor cattle had ever grazed before. And there were great, wild islands, that needed only to be cleared to get them new lands, where they would be free from attack for ever, out of the reach of the Red Riders, and beyond … Yellow Bull did not know himself how his road should end. It went on and on, getting less real every mile that it went. Whenever he dreamt, it was this: of pushing and winding among endless reed-banks, with the smell of rotting stems always in his nostrils and the mud bubbling among the hidden roots. And his road would follow Yellow Bull through the reeds with great armies marching on it; and yet he would be alone. But Yellow Bull could not tell the Council his dreams, he could not say how much he wanted the road.

And the Council could not decide if it was worth while. Harn Der thought it would be, but saw all the difficulties and dangers there must be. It would take a lifetime, and all the labour there was in Marob—lives and years. The Chief had been more interested in this than in anything that had been before the Council since the Red Riders had been beaten behind the northern hills four seasons ago. He had been most eager to keep it a secret for Marob, have some hidden and guarded entrance, and let no stranger in on to it. He had asked and thought about its end.

Today Yellow Bull and those who cared about the road had hoped to get orders from the Chief; for this, in the end, must be his doing; they had no power to bring such a change to Marob. They had told the Chief, and he had promised to be there. Now there was no sign of him. Even his best friends were angry. At last he came, not by his own door, but from the main road, with a broken-stringed bow in his hand, enough to bring bad luck to anything. He came quite slowly, as if he had not kept them waiting long enough already. Yellow Bull stood with his hand and knife up at the salute, looking very fine and strong and rugged. Harn Der looked from one to the other, and thought very well of his son; and he was not the only one there to think that.

In the very middle of the Council room there was a great, ten-wicked silver lamp, hanging down on a chain. As he passed underneath it, the Chief suddenly ran three steps and jumped, swung forward on the lamp and dropped off. It scattered oil all over the ground on its swing back, and the Council looked shocked and horrified, but none more so than Yellow Bull. Tarrik, on the other hand, took his seat as if nothing had happened, and smiled pleasantly at the Council. They signed to Yellow Bull to speak again; he began, nervously.

It was after this that Tarrik became quite unbearable. He simply sat there and laughed, shatteringly; no one could speak or plan with that going on, least of all Yellow Bull. Only for a few moments did the Chief recover. It was when Harn Der spoke of the end of the road, how one day it might come through the marshes and out to a new land, a seaport perhaps; one of the others had taken this for a danger, opening a way to attack from the south, not the Red Riders, but ship-people—Greeks even. Then Tarrik had spoken, suddenly, bitterly and reasonably, to say that the Greeks were no danger that way—swords came from the north and the north-east; no one need be afraid of Hellas; they had been beaten too often now. The danger was that people should still think them great and wonderful, still do what they said, not through fear of war, but through fear of seeming barbarian. ‘Let us be what we are!’ said Tarrik, and seemed to cast out the Greek in himself. But no one cared for him to say that; they must not have their relations with the south disturbed, they must keep their markets, the flow out of corn and flax and furs and amber, and the flow in of oil and wine and rare, precious things, the pride of their rich men, the adornment of their beautiful women—and besides, something to look to, some dream, some standard. Harn Der thought of the Greek artist his son had spoken of, made up his mind that the man should be encouraged, and considered what to buy, a present perhaps for Yellow Bull to take back with him to the marshes and his young wife, who must be lonely so far from the city and everything that makes life pleasant for women.

The Chief most likely saw that he had pleased no one again; he went back to laughter or silence. Disheartened, the Council began to break up. Then suddenly he said: ‘I must see where the secret is to hide. Yellow Bull, take me to the road.’ ‘I will, Chief!’ said Yellow Bull eagerly. But again Tarrik was laughing.

They went out. A slave came in and mopped up the spilled oil, with a timorous eye on the Chief, who still sat in his chair, still laughing a little from time to time. It began to be near evening. With the room empty and windows unshuttered, there was always a little sound of waves, light in summer and loud in winter, coming up across the road from the harbour and the stony beach.

Tarrik, whose name was also Charmantides, got up and went through the house to the women’s court, to find his aunt Eurydice, who was called Yersha by the Scythians. Her room looked partly over the sea and partly over the gardens, where there were lawns of scythed grass between great rose hedges, carved marble seats under apple trees, and narrow borders of bee-flowers and herbs round fountains and statues that came once from Hellas. But Yersha who was Eurydice sat at the other window, watching the sea. She had been copying manuscript; there was pen and ink beside her, and half a page of her slow, careful writing, and now she was quite still, beside her window. Along her walls there were chests of book rolls; above them their stories were repeated in fresco, black lines filled in softly with tints of flesh or dress—Achilles in Skyros, Iphigenia sacrificed, Phaedra and Hippolytos, Alkestis come back from the dead, horsemen with the thick, veiled beauty of a too much copied Parthenon, women with heavy eyelids and drooping hands and lapfuls of elaborate drapery, all framed in borders of crowded acanthus pattern that repeated itself again and again on the mouldings of doors and windows. The floor was of marble from Skyros, white streaked with brown and a curious green, the couches and table of citron wood and ivory, with worked silver feet. There were a few vases, light colours on a creamy ground, with palely florid borders and handles, and one or two marble groups, a swan or so, and the little winged, powerless Erotes, like mortal babies.

She turned from her sea-gazing and smiled at him. ‘Charmantides,’ she said, ‘come and talk to me. Tell me why you did it.’

‘Did—which?’

‘Just now, at the Council: laughed, dear.’

He stood beside her fingering her pen. Why had he laughed? It was gone now. Gone. He shook his head. ‘I am going to marry Erif Der,’ he said, and felt her breath and thought both check a moment before she answered.

‘I see. And that was why you were laughing? I am glad you are so happy.’

He looked down at her, standing there by the table, making ink patterns on his finger-nails with her pen, and wondered what to answer. He did not think it was happiness that made him laugh, he was not the least sure what were his feelings for Erif Der, except that he wanted to get possession of her; he knew that she was somehow dangerous.

His aunt knew that too. She went on: ‘Have you spoken to Harn Der?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘To Yellow Bull, then?’ He shook his head. ‘But surely you’ve seen someone besides the child herself?’

‘She’s not a child,’ said the Chief.

‘All the more reason, then, that she should not answer for herself. But—Charmantides—you know I have tried to be a mother to you, since your own mother died. I think you have loved me. Why did you not tell me about this before?’

He began to elaborate the patterns on his fingers interestedly. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘Are you sure? Not at Plowing Eve?’

He smiled: he liked thinking of Plowing Eve. Yes, she had been the best Spring Queen whom he had ever led through the needful dance—and afterwards, how the men had enjoyed themselves. … But he had not thought of marrying her then. ‘No,’ he said truthfully, ‘it was only now.’

‘Then, if it was only now, surely you see that this is not natural, not right? Surely you know, Charmantides, the things she can do. This is magic and done for some purpose of hers or her father’s!’

‘Very likely,’ said the Chief, ‘perhaps that was why I was laughing. But I am going to marry her all the same.’

‘Why?’ said Eurydice. ‘Oh why!’

‘Because I like to,’ he said, and looked out of the window. Cloud and sunshine swept over the sea; and below him on the beach was Erif Der, standing on a bollard, her fists clenched over her breasts, looking up at the Chief’s house. Abruptly Tarrik began to laugh again. ‘I am going to see Harn Der,’ he said, and went striding out, his white felt coat swinging stiffly as he went.

As he walked along the streets of Marob, the men he passed saluted him with drawn knife at the forehead, and any girls who were armed did the same, but most of the women just lifted hand lightly to eyes, looking at him softly from under long lashes, hoping he would turn their way, the truth being that they and all the younger men liked Tarrik far better than old Harn Der and the Council, who would rule them for their good, but for no one’s pleasure. Still, it depended on little, it would come and go, and Tarrik could only be young once. He certainly enjoyed himself, and had broken very few hearts for long; most of his loves were married by now, and not at all angry with him, still looking softly even. There were several possible children, but none quite proved or at all acknowledged. At any rate Erif Der knew as much about it as anyone.

Tarrik answered the salutes and glances more or less; but he was not thinking about them. Nor, for that matter, about what he was going to do now. He was making a charming plan for killing two birds with one stone; actually, that is to say, killing one of them, and as to the other, well, Yellow Bull was an extremely worthy young man—in spite of his having such a ridiculously red, scrubby face! A knot of girls at the street corner giggled to one another with speculations as to why the Chief was laughing out loud all by himself; but this time they were wrong. He stopped at a window and called up: ‘Oh, Epigethes!’ The Greek leaned out, his face changing to suspicion and some fear when he saw it was the Chief. ‘Will you come and ride with me?’ Tarrik shouted up. ‘Down south, to see Berris Der’s brother. In three weeks? We will talk about art, Epigethes.’ There was something about this that terrified Epigethes. ‘But I shall be busy, Chief,’ he said. ‘I have been given work to do by your nobles. I am an artist, I have no time for riding.’ ‘Ah yes,’ said Tarrik, ‘but I command you. Remember you are in my country. You know,’ he went on, happily watching the Greek getting more and more frightened, ‘I am a barbarian, and if I were to lose my temper—I can take it, then, that you are coming when I am ready?’ And he walked on. Then after a few minutes he stopped and blew three times with his fingers in his mouth, making a curiously loud and unpleasant whistle. Almost at once a shock-headed man in a black coat ran up to him. ‘See that there is no ship in my harbour to take Epigethes away,’ said Tarrik, laying a finger on the man’s arm.

By the time he came to the flax market it was almost sunset; people were going home to supper. A small boy was sitting on the well curb in the middle, singing at the top of his voice and kicking his bare heels against the stone. Tarrik came and sat beside him. The boy looked round and gave a mock salute, and went on till the end of his song; then, in the same breath: ‘Are you coming to supper with us, Tarrik? You must!’

Tarrik pulled his hair, gently and affectionately: ‘Nobody asked me, Gold-fish,’ he said. ‘I want to see your father, though. And I’m going to marry your sister.’

Gold-fish slid off the curb and stared. ‘Has she magicked you?’ he asked.

‘I expect so,’ said Tarrik. ‘Does she ever magic you, Gold-fish?’

‘Can’t magic me!’ said the small boy proudly; then, truth getting the better of him, ‘At least, she won’t try.