I could bear no more for a while, so I laid my head down in her lap and wept. If only she would so have laid her head in mine!
‘Look up, Maia,’ she said presently. ‘You’ll break my heart, and I to be a bride.’ She could bear to say that. I could not bear to hear it.
‘Orual,’ she said, very softly, ‘we are the blood of the gods. We must not shame our lineage. Maia, it was you who taught me not to cry when I fell.’
‘I believe you are not afraid at all,’ said I, almost, though I had not meant it to sound so, as if I were rebuking her for it.
‘Only of one thing,’ she said. ‘There is a cold doubt, a horrid shadow, in some corner of my soul. Supposing—supposing—how if there were no god of the Mountain and even no holy Shadowbrute, and those who are tied to the Tree only die, day by day, from thirst and hunger and wind and sun, or are eaten piecemeal by the crows and catamountains? And it is this—oh, Maia, Maia. . . .’
And now she did weep and now she was a child again. What could I do but fondle and weep with her? But this is a great shame to write; there was now (for me) a kind of sweetness in our misery for the first time. This was what I had come to her in her prison to do.
She recovered before I did. She raised her head, queen-like again, and said, ‘But I’ll not believe it. The Priest has been with me. I never knew him before. He is not what the Fox thinks. Do you know, sister, I have come to feel more and more that the Fox hasn’t the whole truth. Oh, he has much of it. It’d be dark as a dungeon within me but for his teaching. And yet . . . I can’t say it properly. He calls the whole world a city. But what’s a city built on? There’s earth beneath. And outside the wall? Doesn’t all the food come from there as well as all the dangers? . . . things growing and rotting, strengthening and poisoning, things shining wet . . . in one way (I don’t know which way) more like, yes, even more like the house of—’
‘Yes, of Ungit,’ said I. ‘Doesn’t the whole land smell of her? Do you and I need to flatter gods any more? They’re tearing us apart . . . oh, how shall I bear it? . . . and what worse can they do? Of course the Fox is wrong. He knows nothing about her. He thought too well of the world. He thought there were no gods, or else (the fool!) that they were better than men. It never entered his mind—he was too good—to believe that the gods are real, and viler than the vilest men.’
‘Or else,’ said Psyche, ‘they are real gods but don’t really do these things. Or even—mightn’t it be—they do these things and the things are not what they seem to be? How if I am indeed to wed a god?’
She made me, in a way, angry. I would have died for her (this, at least, I know is true) and yet, the night before her death, I could feel anger. She spoke so steadily and thoughtfully, as if we had been disputing with the Fox, up behind the pear trees, with hours and days still before us. The parting between her and me seemed to cost her so little.
‘Oh, Psyche,’ I said, almost in a shriek, ‘what can these things be except the cowardly murder they seem? To take you—you whom they have worshipped and who never hurt so much as a toad—to make you food for a monster. . . .’
You will say—I have said it many thousand times to myself—that, if I saw in her any readiness to dwell on the better part of the Priest’s talk and to think she would be a god’s bride more than a Brute’s prey, I ought to have fallen in with her and encouraged it. Had I not come to her to give comfort, if I could? Surely not to take it away. But I could not rule myself. Perhaps it was a sort of pride in me, a little like her own, not to blind our eyes, not to hide terrible things; or a bitter impulse in anguish itself to say, and to keep on saying, the worst.
‘I see,’ said Psyche in a low voice. ‘You think it devours the offering. I mostly think so myself. Anyway, it means death. Orual, you didn’t think I was such a child as not to know that? How can I be the ransom for all Glome unless I die? And if I am to go to the god, of course it must be through death. That way, even what is strangest in the holy sayings might be true. To be eaten and to be married to the god might not be so different. We don’t understand. There must be so much that neither the Priest nor the Fox knows.’
This time I bit my lip and said nothing. Unspeakable foulness seethed in my mind; did she think the Brute’s lust better than its hunger? To be mated with a worm, or a giant eft, or a spectre?
‘And as for death,’ she said, ‘why, Bardia there (I love Bardia) will look on it six times a day and whistle a tune as he goes to find it. We have made little use of the Fox’s teaching if we’re to be scared by death. And you know, sister, he has sometimes let out that there were other Greek masters than those he follows himself; masters who have taught that death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that’s all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet—’
‘Oh, cruel, cruel!’ I wailed. ‘Is it nothing to you that you leave me here alone? Psyche, did you ever love me at all?’
‘Love you? Why, Maia, what have I ever had to love save you and our grandfather the Fox?’ (But I did not want her to bring even the Fox in now.) ‘But, sister, you will follow me soon. You don’t think any mortal life seems a long thing to me tonight? And how would it be better if I had lived? I suppose I should have been given to some king in the end—perhaps such another as our father. And there you can see again how little difference there is between dying and being married. To leave your home—to lose you, Maia, and the Fox—to lose one’s maidenhead—to bear a child—they are all deaths. Indeed, indeed, Orual, I am not sure that this which I go to is not the best.’
‘This!’
‘Yes. What had I to look for if I lived? Is the world—this palace, this father—so much to lose? We have already had what would have been the best of our time. I must tell you something, Orual, which I never told to anyone, not even you.’
I know now that this must be so even between the lovingest hearts. But her saying it that night was like stabbing me.
‘What is it?’ said I, looking down at her lap where our four hands were joined.
‘This,’ she said, ‘I have always—at least, ever since I can remember—had a kind of longing for death.’
‘Ah, Psyche,’ I said, ‘have I made you so little happy as that?’
‘No, no, no,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand. Not that kind of longing. It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine . . . where you couldn’t see Glome or the palace. Do you remember? The colour and the smell, and looking across at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, “Psyche come!” But I couldn’t (not yet) come and I didn’t know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home.’
She kissed both my hands, flung them free, and stood up. She had her father’s trick of walking to and fro when she talked of something that moved her. And from now till the end I felt (and this horribly) that I was losing her already, that the sacrifice tomorrow would only finish something that had already begun. She was (how long had she been, and I not to know?) out of my reach, in some place of her own.
Since I write this book against the gods, it is just that I should put into it whatever can be said against myself. So let me set this down: as she spoke I felt, amid all my love, a bitterness. Though the things she was saying gave her (that was plain enough) courage and comfort, I grudged her that courage and comfort. It was as if someone or something else had come in between us. If this grudging is the sin for which the gods hate me, it is one I have committed.
‘Orual,’ she said, her eyes shining, ‘I am going, you see, to the Mountain. You remember how we used to look and long? And all the stories of my gold and amber house, up there against the sky, where we thought we should never really go? The greatest King of all was going t
o build it for me. If only you could believe it, sister! No, listen. Do not let grief shut up your ears and harden your heart—’
‘Is it my heart that is hardened?’
‘Never to me; nor mine to you at all. But listen. Are these things so evil as they seemed? The gods will have mortal blood. But they say whose. If they had chosen any other in the land, that would have been only terror and cruel misery. But they chose me. And I am the one who has been made ready for it ever since I was a little child in your arms, Maia. The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from—’
‘And that was the sweetest? Oh, cruel, cruel. Your heart is not of iron—stone, rather,’ I sobbed. I don’t think she even heard me.
‘—my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back. All my life the god of the Mountain has been wooing me. Oh, look up once at least before the end and wish me joy. I am going to my lover. Do you not see now—?’
‘I only see that you have never loved me,’ said I. ‘It may well be you are going to the gods. You are becoming cruel like them.’
‘Oh, Maia!’ cried Psyche, tears at last coming into her eyes again. ‘Maia, I—’
Bardia knocked on the door. No time for better words, no time to unsay anything. Bardia knocked again, and louder. My oath on his sword, itself like a sword, was upon us.
So, the last, spoiled embrace. Those are happy who have no such in their memory. For those who have—would they endure that I should write of it?
VIII
As soon as I was out in the gallery my pains, which I had not perceived while I was with Psyche, came strongly back upon me. My grief, even, was deadened for a while, though my wits became very sharp and clear. I was determined to go with Psyche to the Mountain and the Holy Tree, unless they bound me with chains. I even thought I might hide up there and set her free when the Priest and the King and all the rest had turned to come home. ‘Or if there is a real Shadowbrute,’ I thought, ‘and I cannot save her from it, I’ll kill her with my own hand before I’ll leave her to its clutches.’ To do all this I knew I must eat and drink and rest. (It was now nearly twilight and I was still fasting.) But first of all I must find out when their murder, their Offering, was to be. So I limped along the gallery, holding my side, and found an old slave, the King’s butler, who was able to tell me all. The procession, he said, was to leave the palace an hour before sunrise. Then I went to my own chamber and told my women to bring me food. I sat down to wait till it came. A great dullness and heaviness crept over me; I thought and felt nothing, except that I was very cold. When the food came I could not eat though I tried to force myself to it; it was like putting cloth in my mouth. But I drank; a little of the small beer which was all they had to give me, and then (for my stomach rose against the beer) a great deal of water. I must have been almost sleeping before I finished, for I remember that I knew I was in some great sorrow but I could not recall what it was.
They lifted me into the bed (I shrank and cried out a little at their touch) and I fell at once into a dead stupidity of sleep; so that it seemed only a heart-beat later that they were waking me—two hours before sunrise, as I had bidden them. I woke screaming, for all my sore places had stiffened while I slept and it was like hot pincers when I tried to move. One eye had closed up so that I might as well have been blind on that side. When they found how much they hurt me in raising me from the bed, they begged me to lie still. Some said it was useless for me to rise, for the King had said that neither of the Princesses should go to the Offering. One asked if she should bring Batta to me. I told that one, with bitter words, to hold her tongue, and if I had had the strength I would have hit her; which would have been ill done, for she was a good girl. (I have always been fortunate with my women since first I had them to myself and out of the reach of Batta’s meddling.)
They dressed me somehow and tried to make me eat. One even had a little wine for me, stolen, I guess, from a flagon intended for the King. They were all weeping; I was not.
Dressing me (so sore I was) had taken a great time, so that I had hardly swallowed the wine before we heard the music beginning: temple music, Ungit’s music, the drums and the horns and rattles and castanets, all holy, deadly—dark, detestable, maddening noises.
‘Quick!’ said I. ‘It’s time. They’re going. Oh, I can’t get up. Help me, girls. No, quicker! Drag me, if need be. Take no heed of my groaning and screaming.’
They got me with great torture as far as the head of the staircase. I could now see down into the great hall between the Pillar Room and the Bedchamber. It was ablaze with torches and very crowded. There were many guards. There were some girls of noble blood veiled and chapleted like a bride’s party. My father was there in very splendid robes. And there was a great bird-headed man. By the smell and the smoke there seemed to have been much killing already, at the altar in the courtyard. (Food for the gods must always be found somehow, even when the land starves.) The great gateway was opened. I could see cold, early dawn through it. Outside, priests and girls were singing. There must have been a great mob of the rabble too; in the pauses you could hear (who can mistake it?) their noise. No herd of other beasts, gathered together, has so ugly a voice as Man.
For a long time I could not see Psyche at all. The gods are cleverer than we and can always think of some vileness it never entered our heads to fear. When at last I saw her, that was the worst of all. She sat upright on an open litter between the King and the Priest. The reason I had not known her was that they had painted and gilded and be-wigged her like a temple girl. I could not even tell whether she saw me or not. Her eyes, peering out of the heavy, lifeless mask which they had made of her face, were utterly strange; you couldn’t even see in what direction she was looking.
It is, in its way, admirable, this divine skill. It was not enough for the gods to kill her; they must make her father the murderer. It was not enough to take her from me, they must take her from me three times over, tear out my heart three times. First her sentence; then her strange, cold talk last night; and now this painted and gilded horror to poison my last sight of her. Ungit had taken the most beautiful thing that was ever born and made it into an ugly doll.
They told me afterwards that I tried to start going down the stairway and fell. They carried me to my bed.
For many days after that I was sick, and most of them I do not remember. I was not in my right mind, and slept (they tell me) not at all. My ravings—what I can recall of them—were a ceaseless torture of tangled diversity, yet also of sameness. Everything changed into something else before you could understand it, yet the new thing always stabbed you in the very same place. One thread ran through all the delusions. Now mark yet again the cruelty of the gods. There is no escape from them into sleep or madness, for they can pursue you into them with dreams. Indeed you are then most at their mercy. The nearest thing we have to a defence against them (but there is no real defence) is to be very wide awake and sober and hard at work, to hear no music, never to look at earth or sky, and (above all) to love no one. And now, finding me heart-shattered for Psyche’s sake, they made it the common burden of all my fantasies that Psyche was my greatest enemy. All my sense of intolerable wrong was directed against her. It was she who hated me; it was on her that I wanted to be revenged. Sometimes she and Redival and I were all children together, and then Psyche and Redival would drive me away and put me out of the game and stand with their arms linked laughing at me. Sometimes I was beautiful and had a lover who looked (absurdly) a little like poor, eunuch’d Tarin or a little like Bardia (I suppose because his was the last man’s face, almost, that I had seen before I fell ill). But on the very threshold of the bridal chamber, or from the very bedside, Psyche, wigged and masked and no bigger than my forearm, would lead him away with one finger. And when they got to the door they would
turn round and mock and point at me. But these were the clearest visions. More often it was all confused and dim—Psyche throwing me down high precipices, Psyche (now very like the King, but still Psyche) kicking me and dragging me by the hair, Psyche with a torch or a sword or a whip pursuing me over vast swamps and dark mountains—I running to save my life. But always wrong, hatred, mockery, and my determination to be avenged.
The beginning of my recovery was when the visions ceased and left behind them only a settled sense of some great injury that Psyche had done me, though I could not gather my wits to think what it was. They say I lay for hours saying, ‘Cruel girl. Cruel Psyche. Her heart is of stone.’ And soon I was in my right mind again and knew how I loved her and that she had never willingly done me any wrong, though it hurt me somewhat that she should have found time, at our last meeting of all, talking so little of me, to talk so much about the god of the Mountain, and the King, and the Fox, and Redival, and even Bardia.
Soon after that I was aware of a pleasant noise that had already been going on a long time.
‘What is it?’ I asked (and was astonished at the weak croak of my voice).
‘What is what, child?’ said the voice of the Fox; and I knew somehow that he had been sitting by my bed for many hours.
‘The noise, grandfather. Above our heads.’
‘That is the rain, dear,’ he said. ‘Give thanks to Zeus for that and for your own recovery. And I—but you must sleep again. And drink this first.’ I saw the tears on his face as he gave me the cup.
I had no broken bones; the bruises were gone, and my other pains with them. But I was very weak. Weakness, and work, are two comforts the gods have not taken from us. I’d not write it (it might move them to take these also away) except that they must know it already. I was too weak now to feel much grief or anger. These days, before my strength came back, were almost happy. The Fox was very loving and tender (and much weakened himself) and so were my women. I was loved; more than I had thought. And my sleeps were sweet now and there was much rain and, betweenwhiles, the kind south-wind blowing in at the window, and sunshine. For a long time we never spoke of Psyche. We talked, when we talked at all, of common things.