The Corn King and the Spring Queen. Naomi Mitchison

catch him. But he’s an old man and our King’s not old; the young one will catch up in time—as he did before in the same game—and won! They say there’s little love lost between the generals of the League. I don’t know, but Aratos is a Sicyon man, good enough at buying and selling, whether it’s stuff or his own friends! He’s no soldier. When he hears an arrow his heart goes flop and his eyes turn up, and when he sees a spear he’s got to go quick behind the first tree to empty himself!’

      ‘I’ve heard that too,’ said Philylla politely, recovered from the shock she had been given, ‘and I can’t see why the Achaean League stays so strong with a man like that at the head of it.’

      ‘Ah, there’s money behind the League,’ said the man wisely and vaguely, shaking his head. ‘Egypt. Black men. Crocodiles.’

      ‘Oh,’ said Philylla, ‘Egypt is a very civilised place. One of the dresses I had for my birthday was made of Egyptian muslin; there’s a sort of plant they have that grows wool like a tiny sheep. Did you ever hear that? It’s quite true. They must have lots of money. But swords will win in the end!’

      ‘Swords and the King’s will.’

      Now Philylla would have gone on quite happily being a general and a sort of grown-up. But suddenly her foster-mother interrupted them: ‘You and your King Kleomenes! He gets round you all like—like a woman! As if things were ever altered this way. He’s no better than all the rest, bless him. Shall I tell you something about him?’

      ‘If you’ve got anything interesting to tell,’ said Philylla, rather annoyed, ‘but I don’t expect it is. The King’s a black bull—the silly stories all round him are flies. We don’t listen to the buzzing.’

      Tiasa sat on a stool and put her arms round Philylla, who by habit had come to stand between her knees. Thick looks passed between them, the dizzying half-way from love to anger. The woman began her story. ‘Ever since the very beginning there have been two kings in Sparta: one for peace and one for war; one to come and one to go; one to be steady, one to be ready, and two for the brothers of Helen. Your Kleomenes is king of one line. Agis was king of the other. After Agis died—’

      ‘Was murdered.’

      ‘Well, well, poor lad, it’s all the same to him now; well, after that his baby son was king of that line. But the baby died, as babies do, even the ones that are wanted most. Then the king was Archidamos, Agis’ young brother, who’d fled away in the bad times. Your Kleomenes sent for him to come back, and back he came out of Messene.’

      ‘I know this story,’ said one of the men. ‘It is not true.’

      ‘All the better if it’s not,’ said the wcman, and went on. ‘He hadn’t been back a month before he was murdered one fine night between moonset and cockcrow. Little enough was said about it; you’d have thought there was only one king in Sparta, and that one Kleomenes. Whoever had done it they were never caught, and never much hunted for that matter. And no one else has come home to claim the kingship on that line. But I’ve had it in my mind it must be a sight easier for Kleomenes if he’s got all these high and mighty ideas that you children talk so big about, if he hasn’t another king beside him who might have respect for the laws and get in his way.’

      Philylla laid her hand over the woman’s breasts, with painful knowledge of the complete intimacy there had been between them not so long ago, with a queer vision of herself tiny and ugly, sucking, slobbering, at the brown nipples, helpless in the big hands. She said: ‘If you were not my foster-mother you would not dare to say this to me.’

      ‘But I am, lambie, so I do dare. It’s good for you to hear something else sometimes.’

      ‘As if I didn’t hear it at home! Listen: you must not say these things. Not ever again. Kleomenes never did that deed. I swear it. I know.’ She turned to the men: ‘We will not have it,’ she said, ‘we stand for the King and justice and hard living and truth!’

      ‘Yes,’ said the man who had spoken to her first, ‘and now you must go back, or else they will miss you and send to look for you. It would be a pity if they found you here. Good luck, Lady Philylla!’ They crowded round then and kissed her hands, and all at once she was a queen—a queen like Agiatis!

       Chapter Four

      AT THE END OF the battle of Leuctrum, the Marob people went back to their own quarters, half a dozen tents in a little walled enclosure of fruit trees. The green almonds were swelling already, beginning to weight the twigs; Berris had never seen them before. He was dazed and very unhappy. It had all only just happened.

      He had shut his imagination and gone among the spears. Tarrik enjoyed that, but he didn’t. It had been a muddling, scrambling sort of fight, in and out of ditches, putting one’s horse at loose stone walls—then who was quickest at the far side, you or the other man—losing touch with one’s friends in back gardens with ridiculous smug rows of cabbages and beans or sunk lanes between the stony little cornfields, not sure till the last moment whether the man galloping towards you was friend or enemy. Then he and the Chief, and perhaps a dozen others from Marob, collected in a patch of waste ground where the garden rubbish was dumped; there was a shed for a wine-press at the far end. One of the others had a helmet full of water, and they all drank. The place was covered with some sort of vetch, pink and white. There was a great noise and they got their horses in hand and a bit of the battle came at them, a sort of ragged cavalry charge. They shot off arrow after arrow at the horses, brought down three or four who broke up the line behind them, and then met the rest on their spears. As it happened, Berris was opposite the leader, and quite by accident managed to kill him, he was not very sure how. And then a prisoner, a man from Megalopolis, told them that it was Lydiades, their own leader and one of the two most important generals of the League. Immediately Berris remembered his promise to Philylla.

      He had dismounted to look. Lydiades was not quite dead, just moving a little all over, but unconscious and beyond speech. The spear had gone through his chest, but he did not seem to be bleeding much, outside at least. He was a noble-looking man, with clear skin and his neck set rather beautifully on to his shoulders. Suddenly Berris became dreadfully sorry; he had spoilt something irreplaceable. He knelt beside Lydiades and looked at the horrid smashed hole his spear had made. He tried to close it up, to make it seem as if it hadn’t been done. That was no use. Lydiades died. Over the body he found himself looking across at one of the prisoners, who was kneeling too, his face so twisted with misery and anger that Berris found his own face was twisting in sympathy. ‘Tell me,’ said Berris.

      The man said: ‘He was the best—the best of us all! He had power over us for a year; if he had chosen to stay tyrant he could have, for no one else loved glory and splendid things as he did. But he did not choose! He threw off the tyranny of his own free will, gave us back our liberty, let us join freely the free Achaean League. He was braver and more generous and higher hearted than anyone else, and now the old dog Aratos, the son of Klinias, has let him be killed.’ The man broke down into fits of weeping. Berris looked once more at Lydiades, noticing the beautiful proportions of his arms and legs and the way he lay tangled up with his splendid armour. The shield and helmet were heavily and tortuously inlaid with golden comets and gorgons. In the near presence of that dead man, their owner, Berris did not quite like even to think his inevitable opinion of them.

      King Kleomenes was told. He was angry and upset for two reasons: first, because Lydiades, though his enemy, had also been the great influence against Aratos in the councils of the League, and Aratos was the only part of the League he really feared; also he had always thought of Lydiades as being in some way and in some future a possible ally, and Sphaeros had thought the same. This was part of the second reason too, and the rest was simply violent regret that a man like Lydiades who had also been influenced by the Stoic philosophy and had at least done one action worthy of a philosopher king, should be dead like this in a skirmish. He bade them bring the body over to his quarters, and put on it a purple cloak of his own, and so sent it back in all honour to Megalopolis, whose tyrant it had been once and since then the first of the citizens. He sent with it an escort of half a dozen citizen prisoners; they had seen his grief and the gesture of the cloak, sincere