‘What do you know of custom, or of the Goddess, you barbarian from the past? It’s common talk in the barbershop at Rabnon that you caused the death of our magician Claud, that you spent a night alone in the Nonsense House, and that you brought a brutch in your hair to do us harm!’
‘Stormbird,’ I said, turning away from him with a gesture of impatience, ‘your mother has given you into my charge. If you’ve finished feeding the fish, come with me and leave this man to ask Ana’s pardon for his intemperate words.’
Open-please scowled. ‘Stormbird,’ he said, ‘you must choose between this monster and myself.’
‘Stormbird,’ I said, ‘you must choose between your mother’s orders and this man’s arrogance.’
‘Have you brought anything to show that she gave you those orders?’ she asked cautiously.
Open-please and his three cousins at once took up the point. ‘Yes, where’s your token?’ they shouted in unison. ‘You’re a barbarian, and all barbarians used to tell nothing but lies and practise nothing but cruelties.’
If I had been back in my own year of grace, I’d have run at the bastard and pitched him to the fishes, but I couldn’t do that here. There was no need, either; I realized that though he had a good hand to play, I held the joker. ‘If the Goddess felt no confidence in me,’ I said haughtily, ‘do you think she would have caused me to be evoked from the past? You talk like a three-year-old. She is immortal; there was never a time when she was not omnipotent. I am her poet, and by insulting me, her guest, you also insult her. Now join hands in a ring around me: you, Open-please, and you three there. In Mari’s Name, obey!’ They obeyed, though with bad grace. If one used the right formula, the commons could be hypnotized into doing any ridiculous thing.
I spread out my hand and piously intoned: ‘Divine Mari, conjoined in trinity with the holy Child Nimuë, and the holy Mother Ana; omnipotent guardian of sky and earth and sea, mistress of the Five Estates, patroness also of moon-men, half-men and elders; Victory is in your divine Name. You are the sole strength of your magicians: for without you nothing can be ordered, conjured or contrived. Goddess, I adore you as divine, I invoke your Name. Lovingly grant the plea that I make to your godhead: that your child Stormbird shall be free to come with me, alone, to eat from my plate, to drink from my cup, and that these four fools who doubt your power, shall remain here, hand in hand, unable to break this circle until the first rays of the sun gild the white towers of your city of Dunrena!’
I ducked out of the ring. ‘Stormbird!’ I called.
She ran to me, smiling, and we walked off, leaving her companions under the honeysuckle as if glued together, and looking as stupid as hens with their beaks on a chalk line.
‘Wait a moment, my child, and let me look at you!’
It was extraordinary how different she was from Sapphire, though her features were unchanged: no heavy weight of learning on her mind, no pensive, considered gestures, her eyes bright with humour. Beautiful as ever, and not dull by any means – the breadth of her forehead showed that – but completely artless. As I looked at her, my feelings settled: the factitious passion disappeared, and a deep, wistful love remained, the love that I had felt for her at first sight; I recognized it now as the love that a father feels for his only daughter. I had always tried hard to conceal my sentimentality: in fact, I had buried it under so many cartloads of stony cynicism to keep it from sprouting, that I rarely remembered its existence. Not even Antonia realized how passionately I always longed for a daughter. We had three sons, and that was fine, of course, and I would not have been without a single one of them, but at each birth I had prayed that it would be a girl. The arrival of our third son almost estranged us, because she said happily: ‘Three sons; I do feel proud! Now we can stop, can’t we, Ned?’ At last I knew what had drawn me so strongly to Sapphire: she looked like Antonia, but also like the faded photographs of my mother as a girl – she was, in fact, exactly what a daughter of mine might have been.
I lifted Stormbird off her feet and kissed her gently. She laughed for pleasure. ‘Why did you do that?’ she asked. ‘But I liked it,’ she added. ‘It makes me feel so safe.’
‘Where do we go from here?’
‘Anywhere.’
‘Did you see any fish?’
‘I should think I did. When I scattered my bread, they all bobbed up, even the big white grandmother – for the first time for months and months, my cousins told me; they thought she was dead – and they opened their mouths like this, all round, as though they were saying O, O, O! It’s wonderfully lucky; and today’s my birthday!’
‘Let’s go towards the noise, shall we?’
‘I don’t like noise, but you’ll look after me, won’t you?’
She slipped her arm into mine, and we went off over the lip of the crater and through the Palace grounds, but when we reached the big spiral of tents, we did not venture into the roaring bedlam there, but stood under a tree near a bed of hollyhocks. Everyone carried an oak-branch and was three parts drunk with the red wine from the kegs that had been broached outside every tent, and I had never seen such unrestrained horse-play, even at the Bar-XL Ranch in Arizona on Christmas Eve, where the girls at least kept their heads and struggled nobly to preserve the decencies of the festival.
For a little while we stood watching, amused and incredulous, until Stormbird pulled at my sleeve, and cried: ‘Quick, let’s run away; something’s going to happen, something new and terrible!’
‘No, my sweet,’ I said. ‘Honourable people never do that.’
‘Let’s walk then. Only let’s start at once.’ I caught the terror that was beginning to shake her.
‘On an occasion like this, one place is as good as another,’ I said. ‘We’re staying here.’
But I knew that her instinct was right. Soon after she had spoken, a mass of merrymakers crowded together on the fringe of the tents, like bees when they swarm. By the look of them, they were all commoners or captains, and around them darted and sang an excited cloud of recorders and servants; but the magicians had withdrawn and were trooping off to a shrine on a knoll behind the royal stables. Presently the swarm moved unsteadily towards us.
‘There he is!’ yelled the Interpreter in New Cretan. ‘There stands the barbarian, making magic under that tree!’
‘After him, lads and lasses!’ shouted Nervo. ‘He’s poisoned our land. Fall on him, crush the life out of him but, for the love of Ana, don’t spill his blood!’
I picked up an oak-branch which someone had discarded. Slowly and deliberately, so as not to reveal my alarm, I scratched a wide circle in the soft turf around Stormbird and myself. Drawing her closer, I shouted at the top of my voice: ‘Enter this circle at your peril! A brutch will fly into your ear-holes and eat your brains!’
‘What does he say? What does the barbarian say? We can’t understand him!’ they buzzed angrily.
I held up my hand. ‘In Ana’s Name,’ I ordered, ‘be silent while I prophesy!’
They kept their distance and the shouting gradually ceased. I hissed sharply three times, as I had seen the Lord Chamberlain do, and they became deathly still.
‘Cretans of the Five Estates!’ I cried. ‘I am a barbarian, a poet from the past, but I did not break into your fertile country like a negro-mandril from the Bad Lands. I was evoked by the magicians of Horned Lamb at the order of the Blessed Goddess herself; and I am now about to perform the task she has entrusted to me.’
I felt my chest swell with a divine afflatus, and my voice rang unnaturally loud, no longer my own. I spoke in the purest New Cretan – some words of which I did not understand myself.
‘I have a message to impart to you; listen well! The Goddess is omnipotent, the Goddess is all-wise, the Goddess is utterly good; yet there are times when she wears her mask of evil and deception. Too long, New Cretans, has she beamed on you with her gracious and naked face; custom and prosperity have blinded you to its beauty. In my barbarian epoch, a time of great darkness, s
he wore a perpetual mask of cruelty towards the countless renegades from her service, and lifted it, seldom and secretly, only for madmen, poets and lovers.
‘We knew her for wise, we knew her for good, we turned to her in our despair of the times with a deeper and livelier love than you, fortunate children of the light, can ever know, for all your daily prayers to her and your easy obedience to the divine order that she has restored from chaos. Yet her mercies are infinite, and she is now resolved no longer to withhold from you the knowledge that we enjoyed because of the welter of evil through which we swam. She summoned me from the past, a seed of trouble, to endow you with a harvest of trouble, since true love and wisdom spring only from calamity; and the first fruits of her sowing are the disasters that have emptied the Magic House at Horned Lamb. And this is the sign prophesied for her whirlwind, and its vortex will be the circle in which this storm-child and I now stand. You will be caught in that baleful gust, you will gasp and sicken, and carry the infection to every town and village in this kingdom; migrant birds and insects will carry it farther, to all the kingdoms of New Crete; and the symptoms of the infection will be an itching palm, narrowed eyes and a forked tongue.
‘Blow, North wind, blow! Blow away security; lift the ancient roofs from their beams; tear the rotten boughs from the alders, oaks and quinces; break down the gates of the Moon House and set the madmen free; send the King flying into the mere; lay the godlings prostrate on their greens! Look! The Goddess Mari claps the baleful mask over her face, and her holy perverts prance in ecstasy. Blow, North wind, blow, at Mother Carey’s will!’
My voice had risen to a bull-like bellow, and at the sound of Mother Carey’s name, they all fell flat on their faces. There was a slight stir in the grass on the fringe of the circle, and a yellow wind sprang up and began racing round us with increased violence in a widening spiral.
‘I must go now,’ I said. ‘My task is done.’
‘Don’t leave me,’ cried Stormbird, ‘don’t turn me out into the wind! Where are you going?’
‘Back to my past.’
‘Then take me with you. You named me, and I’m in your charge.’ The wind was raging monstrously now; it blotted out the moonlit landscape in a sulphurous swirl. I heard the crash of rotten boughs in the parkland, and the wrenching-off of roofs in the Old City. A frantic figure in white and purple hurtled through the air over my head towards the mere: the King! Yet, strangely, not a single tent was torn from its guy-ropes and the sacred hollyhocks hardly stirred, though the grinding roar of the gale seemed to tear the sky apart.
I grasped the locket in my hand, and when I turned to Stormbird, I knew I could not and must not leave her behind. ‘Cling to my hair,’ I ordered, ‘cling tight with both your hands and hold on through thick and thin!’ She gripped my hair where it curls above my ears, and said: ‘Go, I’m ready.’
Then I spoke, stretching my hands in supplication: ‘Ana, Mother, take me home! Return me to my own door-step!’
The roaring died in the distance, I lost consciousness, and the next thing I knew was that the locket in my hand had somehow got fixed to something else and I could not put it back into my pocket. I turned it round, and found that it was not a locket at all, but a door-knob; and that I had no pockets.
I was standing completely naked on my own door-step, shivering in the night wind. As I opened the door, I heard the motor-cycle – the young doctor’s motor-cycle – still rounding the bend near the station. After listening for a moment, I went softly up the stairs in the moonlight, and into my dressing-room. I found a pair of clean pyjamas, put them on, and was on the point of going into the bedroom when, with a start, I remembered something. Very carefully I passed a comb through my hair and laid it back on the dressing-table from which I had taken it.
‘Wait here, Stormbird,’ I whispered, ‘only a little while.’
Antonia stirred sleepily as I got into bed beside her. ‘How cold you are, my sweet! Where have you been? Bathroom?’
‘A place called New Crete,’ I said.
‘Please forward to present address,’ she muttered vaguely, then, raising herself on one elbow: ‘I say, Ned.’
‘Tonia?’
‘If you were a real friend, you’d buy me a new ivory brush. I’ve never felt quite a lady since that Good Friday bomb carried mine to Hell.’
‘I am a real friend, and I’ll buy you your brush, even if it costs the earth.’
‘Then kiss me, Ned!’ she said, sinking back on her pillow.
Three faint knocks sounded on the door.
‘What on earth’s that? It sounded like knocking.
‘Your cue,’ I told her. ‘You say: “Welcome, Stormbird!”’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m going to give you that ivory brush.’
‘Welcome, Stormbird,’ she repeated obediently, hugging me close.
‘Welcome, dear child,’ I added in a whisper.
PENGUIN CLASSICS
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First published by Cassell & Company Ltd 1949
Published in Penguin Classics 2012
Copyright © Robert Graves, 1949
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-197092-9
Robert Graves, Seven Days in New Crete
(Series: # )
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