The Corn King and the Spring Queen. Naomi Mitchison

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