The Corn King and the Spring Queen Read online

  Naomi Mitchison

  THE

  CORN KING

  AND THE

  SPRING QUEEN

  With a new Introduction

  by the author

  Edinburgh • London • New York • Melbourne

  to

  MR. X

  who went to Outland

  in a small aeroplane

  on Wednesday

  week

  Contents

  Introduction

  Foreword

  PART I. Kataleptike Phantasia

  II. Philylla and the Grown-ups

  III. What Advantageth it Me?

  IV. The Patterns of Sparta

  V. Up the Ladder and over the Wall

  VI. Dream on, who can?

  VII. Kings who Die for the People

  VIII. Death and Philylla

  IX. They that Mourn

  Introduction

  To write an introduction to a book which has been written some sixty years back is rather like introducing one’s grandmother. So, at least, I suppose I know how my grandchildren might feel. I look at my book, half reluctant, half eager, turning the pages—could I really have written that, amn’t I on dangerous ground, trying to assess it? I write differently now, perhaps better, perhaps not. But I know that by now I am a very different person with different ideas of the world, above all writing for a different audience, probably more critical, themselves leading more interesting and varied lives than those readers two generations back. What will the new ones think of this old book?

  But then I take a gulp of the old vintage. I find myself remembering, only too well, the moods and problems, but also the delight, of writing this book which you are going to read. But my brain-child has run away; now it belongs to its readers rather than its writer.

  Now let us look at the story of this book. It begins to happen somewhere on the edge of the Black Sea. You will not find Marob on any map, but for you and me it is real. The people who lived thereabouts are vaguely called Scythians; one of the few things we know about them is that they made astonishingly beautiful objects, mostly bronze. You can see a few in the main museums of the world, but most and probably the best are in the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad. We judge a civilisation by what its people do, what they think if they put it into writing or speech, but also by what they make. When we look at their artefacts there must be constant interpretation, just as there should be when we do the same with present cultures. Some of these may have been going on for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years, but have only lately been touched by what we think of as our own superior culture. Yet are we always quite certain of our superiority?

  What earlier people thought about, how they dealt with love and hate, joy and disaster is often hard to understand if they are far across the bridges of written or remembered history. Yet, if their remaining artefacts are beautiful across the sea of years, something can be adduced about them, some understanding can be made.

  Yet none of this was in my mind when I first made contact with Marob in a sailing boat off Plymouth, watching the waves and not attending to what Julian Huxley was telling me about the minutiae of the ocean population. But it grew into a force behind my writing, page after pencilled page in those notebooks I carried with me and dropped on to floors or into mud and took with me on long, uninterrupted, Underground journeys, sometimes round and round the Circle, totally unaware of my fellow passengers, because I was not really there, but far elsewhere. You might have thought I was worrying about politics or about which shop to go to for something I wanted, or indeed, that I was deep into a love affair. But no, no, I was being one person or another in my book, becoming them in turn as I wrote about them and they seemed to be sitting beside me.

  In the late twenties and early thirties, the Cambridge Ancient History was coming out volume by volume. I gobbled them up, even decorating some volumes with pasted-in photographs of buildings or statues. But I had to find out more, I had to get closer, behind the answers to my questions. I got into exchanges with Professor Adcock and some of the other historians who were writing it, above all William Tarn, who seemed to be in tune with my ideas, so that everything he told me fitted in. As often as not I asked questions which they couldn’t answer or only with an additional perhaps, or occasionally a probably. But I think most authors are rather pleased to answer the questions of readers who have clearly absorbed what they are asking about. There were other books of course, including my dear old Golden Bough, and so often—but any writer knows this—something, a sentence in a book, a tree, the expression of someone passing, a cloud across the moon, will set the instrument ticking. One will grab the nearest pencil and write.

  So, over the months, my picture of the edge of what we call civilisation built itself up and beyond that the fuller picture of what was happening in the centres of Mediterranean culture, yet always keeping an eye on what the historians, or, for that matter, the contemporary authors, wanted us to believe. Plutarch, for instance, had very firm ideas of how his biographies should be regarded and what lessons could be learned from them for a later era.

  So the pictures gathered and gathered. Something that began with one girl, for the moment myself, playing with little crabs, on a beach—but of what sea?—who happens to be able to work magic, turned into a whole country and culture of people with, almost touching them, pages of real, admitted history. When this became so pressing that it had to be written down, I got on with it, checking all that could be checked. It became an elaborate, even exhausting, story. Sometimes I turned aside to write something different, or the real world with its pains and anxieties broke in, and the story of the book went dark for a time. But it always came back.

  The main picture became clear: how these people who lived on the edge of the real Mediterranean culture, but not too near and with a comforting background of custom and magic to help them with their problems of health and happiness, their food supply and their social habits, came into touch with other ideas, more akin to those we ourselves know. The book follows those who leave Marob and what happened, both to them and to those left behind. As the story gathered and coloured the individual people became more clear to me: the Chief of Marob, his witch-wife and her brother who makes the beautiful things, those bronzes. I saw them struck by another set of ideas and carried away into the last phase of Hellenic culture and into an understanding of the ideas of philosophers and politicians.

  Now the story had shifted into the revolution in Sparta, led by the last of the Kings. At the time of writing that seemed very relevant to what was going on in the real world of the early thirties. I would wake from my book to watch these realities and see each in the terms of the other. My book, by this time, was based on real, documented history, but all the same, how we look at history depends on what we want to find. If a bit of historical guessing, even by an accredited historian, did not fit my story, I disregarded it or found holes in it. There are newer historians, even in the unpopular classic stage, who cast a different light on some of my characters.

  So, readers, remember that my account of what was happening in Sparta or Athens or even Egypt, is all based on real history, but the view was moulded by what I—and many another person—was thinking in the Europe of those days, with Mussolini and his fascists in Italy and already the shadow of Hitler in Germany. If I was writing this book now I might treat my characters and my story differently. But I cannot be certain, even of that.

  We know certain historical facts, for instance about King Kleomenes of Sparta; the picture of him in this book by this storyteller allows these facts and perhaps throws light on them, and yet may be misleading. We try to imagine what went on in other people’s m
inds, and what we think they might have said or done, beyond the secure facts. Here and there it is just possible that I may have guessed right. This is the best that an author dealing with real people, either in fiction or biography (and can one draw a complete line between them?) can hope to do.

  So my story which I hope you will be following, leaves Marob and the world of magic in which anything can happen, for the Mediterranean civilisation on the way to modern times and modern ideas and religions. Real people take their places in my book: Sphaeros, a known minor philosopher, and then King Kleomenes in Sparta with his wife and children and much that is known about Egypt at that time, and others who are at least names in history books. They were real people with real lives, apart from me and my alien language. But the dead cannot complain if I have got it wrong.

  Events really happened, but must have looked different to those who wrote about them, starting with writers much nearer in time than ourselves. So, readers, in this tangle and mirage, good luck to you. Watch what Erif Der and Tarrik the Corn King did for the Plowing and the Harvest and then follow them across the Mediterranean, a big jump towards today. Be with them, and so, with me.

  Naomi Mitchison

  Foreword

  The things in this book happened between the years 228 bc and 187 bc. Some of the things really happened, and some of the oddest things are said to have happened by Plutarch and others who call themselves historians. The place called Marob is not historically real, but people on the shores of the Black Sea, and thereabouts, made very beautiful things, of the kind which Berris Der made. For the rest, I have tried to deduce a place, from a good deal of evidence of actual ideas and happenings in all sorts of other times and places. As between Marob and Sparta or Alexandria, it is very doubtful whether, at a distance of more than two thousand years, one can ever get near to the minds, or even to the detail of the actions, of the people one is writing about, although they are in a way nearer to one than one’s living friends; it is scarcely possible that Kleomenes of Sparta was really at all like the Kleomenes I have made, though I doubt whether, in the present state of knowledge, anyone else’s idea is inherently more probable—it is all a game of hide-and-seek in the dark and if, in the game, one touches a hand or face, it is all chance; so Marob is just as likely, or as unlikely, as the rest of the world.

  At the beginning of this book there is a family tree of the Spartan royal family during the time I have written about it. There are no names recorded for the children of Kleomenes and Agiatis, but I have given them ancestral names which seemed to be likely.

  I think this is all. Naomi Mitchison, 1925–30

  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 sam
e 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.’