We know certain historical facts, for instance about King Kleomenes of Sparta; the picture of him in this book by this storyteller allows these facts and perhaps throws light on them, and yet may be misleading. We try to imagine what went on in other people’s minds, and what we think they might have said or done, beyond the secure facts. Here and there it is just possible that I may have guessed right. This is the best that an author dealing with real people, either in fiction or biography (and can one draw a complete line between them?) can hope to do.
So my story which I hope you will be following, leaves Marob and the world of magic in which anything can happen, for the Mediterranean civilisation on the way to modern times and modern ideas and religions. Real people take their places in my book: Sphaeros, a known minor philosopher, and then King Kleomenes in Sparta with his wife and children and much that is known about Egypt at that time, and others who are at least names in history books. They were real people with real lives, apart from me and my alien language. But the dead cannot complain if I have got it wrong.
Events really happened, but must have looked different to those who wrote about them, starting with writers much nearer in time than ourselves. So, readers, in this tangle and mirage, good luck to you. Watch what Erif Der and Tarrik the Corn King did for the Plowing and the Harvest and then follow them across the Mediterranean, a big jump towards today. Be with them, and so, with me.
Naomi Mitchison
The things in this book happened between the years 228 bc and 187 bc. Some of the things really happened, and some of the oddest things are said to have happened by Plutarch and others who call themselves historians. The place called Marob is not historically real, but people on the shores of the Black Sea, and thereabouts, made very beautiful things, of the kind which Berris Der made. For the rest, I have tried to deduce a place, from a good deal of evidence of actual ideas and happenings in all sorts of other times and places. As between Marob and Sparta or Alexandria, it is very doubtful whether, at a distance of more than two thousand years, one can ever get near to the minds, or even to the detail of the actions, of the people one is writing about, although they are in a way nearer to one than one’s living friends; it is scarcely possible that Kleomenes of Sparta was really at all like the Kleomenes I have made, though I doubt whether, in the present state of knowledge, anyone else’s idea is inherently more probable—it is all a game of hide-and-seek in the dark and if, in the game, one touches a hand or face, it is all chance; so Marob is just as likely, or as unlikely, as the rest of the world.
At the beginning of this book there is a family tree of the Spartan royal family during the time I have written about it. There are no names recorded for the children of Kleomenes and Agiatis, but I have given them ancestral names which seemed to be likely.
I think this is all. Naomi Mitchison, 1925–30
Lavender’s blue, dilly, dilly!
Rosemary’s green;
When I am king, dilly, dilly!
You shall be queen.
Call up your men, dilly, dilly!
Set them to work;
Some to the plough, dilly, dilly!
Some to the cart.
Some to make hay, dilly, dilly!
Some to cut corn;
While you and I, dilly, dilly!
Keep ourselves warm.
PEOPLE IN THE FIRST PART
People of Marob
Erif Der
Her father, Harn Der
Her mother, Nerrish
Her eldest brother, Yellow Bull
Her next eldest brother, Berris Der
Her younger brother, Gold-fish
Her younger sister, Wheat-ear
Yellow Bull’s wife, Essro
Tarrik, also called Charmantides, Corn King and Chief of Marob
His aunt, Yersha, also called Eurydice
Greeks
Epigethes, an artist
Sphaeros of Borysthenes, a Stoic philosopher
Apphé, Yersha’s maid
Men and Women of Marob, Greek sailors and merchants
CHAPTER ONE
ERIF DER WAS SITTING on a bank of shingle and throwing pebbles into the Black Sea; for a girl, she threw very straight. She was thinking a little about magic but mostly about nothing at all. Her dress was pulled up over her knees, and her legs were long and thin and not much sunburnt yet, because it was still early in the year. Her face was pale too, with flat, long plaits of hair hanging limp at each side, and her ear-rings just shaking as she threw. She wore a dress of thick linen, woven in a pattern of squares, red and black and greyish white; at the end of the sleeves the pattern ended in two wide bands of colour. It had a leather belt sewn with tiny masks of flat gold, and the clasps were larger gold masks with garnet eyes and teeth. Over all she wore a stiff felt coat, sleeveless, with strips of fur down the sides, and she was not cold in spite of the wind off the sea.
A crab came walking towards her over the shingle; she held out her hand, palm upwards, so that the crab walked over it. Erif Der laughed to herself; she liked the feeling of its stiff, damp, scuttling claws on her skin. She picked it up carefully by the sides of its shell and made it walk again, this time over her bare foot. A cloud came over the sun; she threw two more pebbles into the sea, sat up and put her shoes on, then walked back towards Marob harbour till she came to the high stone breakwater; instead of going round with the road, she climbed up it, by way of a chain and ring and some wave-worn places in the stone; she was always fond of doing elaborate and unnecessary things. On the other side, she jumped down twelve feet on to another shingle bank, but she was not at all an easy person to hurt; air and water at least knew too much about her.
She went on more quickly now, and up into the town: she felt as if her father was calling her. Soon she was passing the Chief’s house, straight in front of the harbour, looking square on to the sea, east and a little north, with thick stone piers and small windows. Erif Der wondered if she would like to live there, and thought not, thought it would be cold, thought particularly that if she ever did have to, she would do her best not to have Yersha there too. As she was thinking this, Yersha herself came out of the main door with her hair done high and her mantle caught up on her shoulder, Greek fashion, and two armed guards following her. However, Erif Der was hurrying a little and did not choose to be seen or stopped, so Yersha looked the other way for a full minute, and when she turned again there was no one in sight; that was annoying for Yersha, who hated being magicked at all, even as little as this, and suspected it was done by Erif Der—who was much too young to have any powers really, besides being the daughter of Harn Der, besides going about alone like a street-girl, besides having been chosen to dance with the Chief at Plowing Eve and having—Yersha suspected—spoken with him of more matters than the plowing and the Courting dance! It had been occurring more and more to Yersha,