Heartened by the Queen’s gracious smile, the Victim danced the ballet of the Thirteen Months, the light and the music changing with each transformation. He danced the Kid, the Oarsman, the Wind, the Fire, the Hawk, the Flower-gatherer, the Thunderstorm. My private hallucination persisted vividly and at the crisis of the seventh transformation, when a blinding flash of lightning had made me jump, the ghostly twins unsheathed their daggers, dived sideways simultaneously and seemed to merge with the Victim’s body. At once he split into two: his pale Star-self was joined by a dark Serpent-self with a jewelled snake coiled at his groin. Star and Serpent squared up to each other, fighting with daggers amid flashes of lightning, crashes of thunder and a roar of rain, until the Star fell stabbed; I felt the dagger pierce my throat and my life-blood seemed to gush away.
The storm abated and the Serpent triumphantly resumed the ballet. He danced the Spear, the Salmon, the Vine-harvest, the Boar, the Breaker, the Drowning Man; and then stood still, trembling and expectant. Up leaped the Star again, avenging his own murder on the Serpent – and on me. I died a second time, the dagger plunged in my heart. All the lights went out.
The Victim’s Death and Pursuit
The Wild Women were dancing round the Victim, clockwise and then counter-clockwise, but gradually the counter movement grew longer, until at last they whirled round and round, widdershins, without a check and he toppled first to his knees, then to his knees and hands, and finally lay crouched in a dying huddle. Presently his ghost broke from the ring in the guise of a fish, but Atropos went after it, like a crane, and pursued it here and there until it returned to the whirling circle and merged with the Victim again. It broke out a second time, buzzing like a blue fly, but Atropos pursued it, like a swallow, and fetched it back again. It broke out a third time as a hare, and she pursued it like a greyhound. Lastly it broke out as a fawn and Atropos, seizing a three-pronged spear, led the whole troop of Wild Women in pursuit. All was again plunged into darkness, and above the laughing shrieks of his pursuers rose the Victim’s long, melancholy death wail. I felt myself sinking, plunging down faster and faster into nothingness, and Erica’s scornful voice rang in my ears: ‘It’s not even enough to die twice for the same woman: a poet must die three times!’
The Epilogue – The King’s Rebirth
My spirit slowly floated back, and I found myself in the Playhouse again. The Epilogue had begun. Lugubrious bass voices were chanting a funereal dirge, while women sobbed softly, but I only heard the last few bars. Presently a fiddle played a little whimpering tune with frequent breaks, and the couch rose again with the King’s furry ghost asleep on it. It awoke, rubbed its eyes and bounded aimlessly about until, as the light strengthened, it saw the Queen in a white cloak seated on a birth-stool, with six nymphs of the months grouped attentively around her. It scurried under her skirts, and disappeared.
The Queen underwent her rhythmic birthpangs to the anguished music of fiddles and pipes. At last she joyfully hauled out the ghost from under her skirts as a new-born baby, and put him to her breast. The nymphs sang a shrill paean of welcome to the new-born King, and three of them cradled him in a winnowing fan, and carried him away to lullaby music.
The light grew stronger, the axe-men reappeared and leaped ecstatically round the cradle beside which the three nymphs were bent; and so well they leaped that at last the old King emerged, smiling and vigorous, to be dressed by the nymphs in his coloured coat and buckskin breeches. But though his features were unchanged, he was now dark and black-haired: his other self, his twin. The heralds trumpeted with all their might, and the nymphs led him to his seat at the Queen’s side. Re-invested in his regalia, he sent the five arrows flying in token of his dominion, and the curtain fell on axe-men, woodmen, boys, elders and nymphs dancing a saraband of celebration.
The nine expressionless servants filed in and extinguished the footlights. The Lord Chamberlain reappeared and indicated with a wave of his hand that the silence was at an end.
I stretched, sneezed, and came out of my trance, to find Quant bending anxiously over me, his fingers on my pulse.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘I thought you’d gone.’
‘It’s nothing, nothing at all,’ I gabbled. Then I recovered my self-possession. ‘But oh, Quant, how terrifyingly the Victim danced! It’s hard to believe that it was only a mock death.’
‘It wasn’t,’ said Quant. ‘The Wild Women are still feasting on his flesh.’
Chapter XXII
The Whirlwind
Outside the Playhouse, Quant said goodbye. ‘You’ll not be returning to Horned Lamb?’ he asked.
‘No, I promised Nervo that I wouldn’t. I’ve been told that I’m not at all popular there.’
‘Then what are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to Broad Thumb’s house, to see whether Sapphire – whether Stormbird’s grown up yet.’
‘And then?’
‘This is Friday, isn’t it?’
He sighed. ‘Yes, it is Friday; but if you’re thinking of a Friday union, you’ll find the going very hard.’
‘The Goddess is merciful,’ I suggested.
‘When it pleases her. Goodbye, old fellow, and good luck! Since you’re taking that road, it’s unlikely that we’ll meet again. And I had so much to ask you, and to show you!’
We embraced in French style, and he went off disconsolately. I watched him go, feeling pretty miserable myself. Yet I had not seen quite the last of him. He came back shyly, to ask: ‘Edward, I wonder whether you’ll do me a favour?’
‘Why, Quant, of course – anything in my power.’
‘That poem of mine, about the light shining through the chink: do you happen to remember it?’
‘Yes, word for word. I’ve a good verbal memory for poems that mean something to me.’
‘Then I’m very happy, because this is what I was going to ask you: when you return to your age – as I suppose you must, sooner or later – will you publish it somewhere under your name? You see, I feel a little uncertain about the propriety of what I’ve done. If I could think that it’s been published in the Late Christian epoch, my conscience would be clear.’
‘I’ll be only too pleased – and, if I’m lucky, I may get a couple of guineas out of it, to buy my wife a new cigarette lighter. Even Dobeis has his uses at times.’
‘My affectionate regards to your wife,’ he said, and sauntered off, grinning like a schoolboy. This time he did not return, and after taking my bearings I forced my way through a dense crowd towards the Old Town.
As I walked, I was thinking how utterly different a picture of New Crete I should have carried back with me if I had been returned to my age on the night of my evocation. My visit to the Nonsense House had been unsettling enough; but, after all, I argued, it was only right that people should be freed from the bonds of custom at some stage in their lives, and better late than early. In my time it had been the young people who kicked over the traces and made lasting trouble for themselves, and the old people who were expected to behave with unnatural devoutness at a time when it mattered little how they behaved so long as they kept their follies decently to themselves. What stuck in my throat, though, was the public display of ritual murder and cannibalism I had just witnessed. To think that such beautiful, peaceful, sensitive, good-humoured people were brought up to regard that horrifying performance as normal and right! It shocked me to realize that the Goddess to whom I had just made a loving, voluntary submission was still, as in pre-historic times, the Old Sow who ate her farrow…
I paused for a moment at the entrance to a courtyard, and tried to think things out. A girl of about fifteen in a dark cloak came up to me. ‘You’re thinking hard and bitterly,’ she said. ‘I felt it as I passed.’
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘I was thinking about the Victim and the Wild Women.’
Her green eyes and white teeth glinted in the light of a street lamp. ‘I was one of them myself,’ she said. ‘What’s troubling you?’
>
‘I’m from the past,’ I said. ‘You may have heard of me. At the Playhouse I made my peace with the Goddess – I’d never before surrendered my heart to any deity – but now I know that the Victim was murdered and eaten, I feel a shuddering revulsion; I want to recant. In my epoch we did many disgusting things, but we did draw the line at cannibalism.’
‘Would you have us eat mock-sacrifices of bread and wine?’
‘Well, why not?’
‘Because the midsummer sacrifice must offer itself voluntarily, and no loaf of bread and no bottle of wine can do that. Tonight the people take bread and wine in ritual imitation of our feast; but if we had not celebrated it in fact, there’d be no virtue in the imitation. The Victim met his fate of his own free will; he was my dear brother. If no victim died on behalf of the people, the fields would grow barren.’
‘How am I to believe that?’
‘Before we tore him in pieces, we cut his throat and caught his life blood in a bladder. This will be mixed with water from the royal cistern, and a jar of it carried to every town and village in the kingdom, for sprinkling on the fields before the autumn sowing, to sanctify them. My brother died for his love of the Goddess and of us all, and when the labourers weep for him at the sprinkling rite, their tears will draw down the winter rains from the Moon, the source of all life-giving waters. And they’ll work strenuously for the remainder of the double year, grateful for the love he showed them.’
‘I see: “It is expedient that a man should die for the people.” But why was it necessary to eat his flesh?’
‘As a mark of reverence; ordinary corpses are buried in the earth. But his is the greatest prize that a man can win: to be made one with the living flesh of the nine-fold Mother.’
‘And the King? When will he die?’
‘The King dies when his term ends. That year’s Victim will be spared, and reign not merely for an hour; and the Old King will dance the Transformations himself, and sanctify the fields with his own blood. It’s because of the awful holiness of this sacrifice that New Cretan custom forbids the violent taking of life on any other occasion, even in war. If the sacrifice were annulled, murder would be committed on the least excuse, and where should we be then?’
I thought of the strewn corpses on Monte Cassino, where I had been almost the only unwounded survivor of my company; and of the flying-bomb raid on London, when I had held a sack open for an air-raid warden to shovel the bloody fragments of a child into it; and finally of Paschendaele where, in the late summer of 1917, my elder brother had been killed in the bloodiest, foulest and most useless battle in history – as a boy I had visited his grave soon after that war ended, and the terror of the ghastly, waterlogged countryside with its enormous over-lapping shell-craters had haunted me for years. ‘The Goddess knows best,’ I said to the girl eventually, and she nodded in grave assent.
‘You’re looking for Stormbird,’ she announced.
‘I am; how did you know?’
‘I know everything, as I told you in the alder-grove. You’ll find her by the mere, consulting my fish.’ She skipped off, before I had time to prostrate myself. But I was taking no chances: I performed my solemn puja as if she were still visible, in compliment to her omnipresence.
As I turned into the street again, I collided with the Interpreter.
‘Ah, what a fortunate coincidence in the extreme,’ he said, ‘viz: I feared that you would prove to be the needle in the haystack. I have run here post-haste in search of you.’
‘More trouble?’ I asked. ‘Anything happened to Starfish?’ ‘Alas, you have divined my news. Starfish is no more. This afternoon the servants found him lifeless beside the waterfall on Poets’ Hill, not far from our house.’
‘I’m grieved, but not surprised. Did he kill himself?’
‘Oh, Sir, what a foolish suggestion! A New Cretan to take his own life!’
‘Well, how did he die?’
‘Of a broken heart, and with no desire for rebirth. He left a clay-board of verses behind him. I’m no judge of poetry; I’m a recorder, but a specialist in the English language. To me they read ill, and far-fetched. I have them in my head. Listen !’
Waving his fingers to mark the rhythm, he recited:
‘O runnels of this holy hill
Beneath the stars that shine
Attentive to your Muse’s will,
Who sister is to mine,
And on the heath-flower-scented air
Fantastically raise
Your praises of a cold white glare
That none but madmen praise;
With burning throat I bow to taste
Peace at your waterfall,
Where my proud Muse must come in haste,
If she would come at all.’
He grimaced, and said: ‘Are these not incoherences and quite bad? Thus, there you are: a pretty kettle of fish. And worse: as I entered the town, intending to implore the Witch Sally to come back, I met my colleague Quant, making his exit with the news that the Witch is no more, either! Now there remains only yourself to step into the breach, and by keeping guard at the Magic House stave off calamity. But my colleague Quant assures me…’
‘Quant’s right again,’ I said testily, ‘i.e., e.g., nem. con., and verb. sap., I’m not going back to Horned Lamb on any condition.’
‘But, Sir, it’s the custom…’ the Interpreter quavered virtuously.
‘Tell that to someone else.’
‘Assuredly I will, Sir!’ He darted off with a nasty look, and I went on to Broad Thumb’s house.
Quite often, when I am half-asleep, I find myself reading a book. It is always in short dialogue, very interesting, very witty, and the author and his characters continue to surprise each other all down one page and halfway down the next. When I wake up, I remember tempting snatches of it, such as:
… and then, horror! in marched Mrs Blackstone with the little corpse held out accusingly between the pincers of the kitchen fire-tongs.
‘So he shanghaied her,’ said someone in knowing tones.
‘Shanghaied whom? Not Mrs B.? Ha, ha! No, not Mrs B.! Nobody has ever shanghaied Mrs B.!’
Now I felt as though I were reading that book again, but with the critical reservation that when I came out of my dream it probably wouldn’t make sense – not even Starfish’s poem which (though my translation is faintly Housmanesque) sounded magnificent in the original, nor the Goddess Nimuë’s defence of ritual murder.
I was soon at Broad Thumb’s house, and Broad Thumb was in. She greeted me as an old friend, and gave me the run of her larder. I was hungry, and ate a great deal of bread and cheese and nearly a whole goose-berry-pie. When I explained to her that I had to restore my nervous energy after visits to the bagnio and the Playhouse, she fried me a couple of eggs as well.
‘How’s Stormbird?’ I asked finally, wiping my mouth.
‘Oh, quite grown up. You’d hardly recognize her. Some cousins of my husband’s from Rabnon have taken her out to see the fun; one of them’s the goal-keeper who’s the talk of every barber-shop in the whole kingdom – the berserk fighter, Open-please. He greatly admires Stormbird, and I think she’s flattered. Not that I want anything to come of it, because I’m hoping that she’ll prove monogamous like ourselves – I should hate to lose her now, she’s such an affectionate girl – and settle down here in the Old City with a good husband. I wish now that I’d gone with them to keep her out of mischief, but I wanted to get on with my spinning. She’s still so young, initiated only this afternoon; she hasn’t even got her gold scarf-pin yet.’
‘Would you like me to keep an eye on her for you?’
‘I would indeed; besides, it’s your privilege, since you named her. Do whatever you think best for the dear child. She’ll probably be down at the mere, feeding the fish.’
‘Well, goodbye, Broad Thumb.’
‘Goodbye, poet. Leave a blessing on this house.’
‘May this be the last roof of Dunrena to fly off when the w
ind blows!’
A tremendous noise of singing and shouting floated down the night breeze: it was as if the fourth and fourteenth of July had accidentally coincided, but I found the mere-side almost deserted. I recognized Open-please at once by his height and his red and white Rabnon costume. He was standing by a honeysuckle arbour – how strong honeysuckle smells at night! – and bragging about his feats to the three admiring relatives. Modesty was not a New Cretan vice, and the account was evidently meant to impress Sapphire. She wore peasant’s dress, with a full, river-grey skirt and a close-fitting blue jacket with gold buttons at the cuffs, and was crumbling bread for the fish. I saw with relief that she seemed already bored with Open-please’s eloquence.
I went up and greeted them. ‘I’m Venn-Thomas, a poet from the past,’ I said, ‘and Stormbird’s mother has asked me to keep an eye on her tonight; she’s young and inexperienced and may easily offend against custom. That’s my commission, and also my privilege because it was I who named her.’
Everyone looked uncomfortable; Open-please seemed positively angry.
‘Would you break up our party?’ he protested.
‘Mari forbid!’
‘But you’re not one of us. Smokes don’t mix. How can we celebrate with you about?’
I frowned at him. ‘At any rate not by boasting of your feats, when the credit’s due to the Goddess who, for reasons best known to herself, inspired you to berserk fury. So don’t try to crow, Chicken Cluck, or your Mother might peck you; and her beak’s as sharp as a thorn.’