The Corn King and the Spring Queen. Naomi Mitchison

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СКАЧАТЬ 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,’ СКАЧАТЬ