They were outside, at midday, sweating and excited, and the light was quivering down in white sheets edged abruptly with the oblique shadows of houses. The pink smoke of fruit blossom still lay all about the plain of Sparta: the brilliant flower colours were still unfaded by the sun; they had not seen or imagined the pale drying of the summer grass. ‘I wonder,’ said Berris, screwing up a spray of sweet leaves against his nose, ‘what is the real reason. I don’t think anything can be wrong with Erif; she’s never ill. Unless she was going to have a baby?’ But Tarrik shook his head. ‘Well then, it might be there’s a sort of gap coming between you that the star can’t bridge. Perhaps she’s gone back to father and Yellow Bull.’
‘Why should she?’ said Tarrik sharply, and clutched so hard at the star that the chain snapped with a little ting and the broken end flicked up against his neck.
‘I don’t know,’ said Berris rather unhappily, and picked up the chain. ‘I don’t know what she told you. I hadn’t seen any of them much since the bullfighting. They would talk, and I’d got things to work out. But supposing Erif is just where you left her, could it be you? I mean, if you didn’t care—’
But Tarrik said: ‘I do care.’
‘Oh well, I suppose you know, Tarrik, and I suppose that girl you’re after now is just to remind you of her!’
‘Oh, that young woman! She’s just to see how much the Greeks can stand of us after all!’ And Tarrik grinned, relaxing his grip on the chain. ‘But it’s no good trying the Queen’s girls, Berris. That bare-legged crew of hers won’t have anything to do with savages like you and me. You’ll never have that Philylla girl of yours!’
‘I don’t want to,’ said Berris, a good deal hurt, partly because he had never considered Philylla like this and partly because he was a little ashamed not to have. He went on: ‘But, Tarrik, about the star. If it’s not her and it’s not you, mightn’t it be the place? Look—look at the light there is on everything, every single grass blade so all over seen that it couldn’t hide a fly! Look at those flat walls, just spread out blank for the sun’s patterns to go on! All these sharp things completely seen, Tarrik—I mean, it’s not a magic country.’
‘No,’ said Tarrik, ‘I believe that’s it. Magic won’t work here, just as it wouldn’t with Sphaeros. But I shan’t lose my own, I can’t! Not the magic that’s in me! Berris, I can make the corn grow still!’
Berris said: ‘You’ve given that to my brother now.’
‘Yes, but after—if I’d lost it here and couldn’t do it any more!’ For a minute he was rather badly frightened and Berris, watching him, couldn’t find a word to say. They both knew what happened to the Corn King when his godhead began to fail; the thing that had happened to Tarrik’s father; the thing that would happen to Tarrik if he had the bad luck to get old—not be killed first by the Red Riders or drowned in a storm. Only it had always been a very long way off before; now it grinned between them. With an effort, Tarrik broke past: ‘Nothing can happen to me! But that must be it about the star, Berris. I wonder if Erif can tell about me. I wonder if she’s finding that the knife has gone dim too. You know the King wants us all for his war next week?’
‘Oh, but does he!’ said Berris, and fell to thinking.
The next week, then, they all went off, marching against the Achaean League.
Philylla went home for her fourteenth birthday. Her father had two houses, one in the city of Sparta itself, and one in the country, a low white house beyond Geronthrai on the top of a foothill, looking west across the broad crop-patterned valley towards Taygetos. As it was spring and rather lovely up there, the family had left the city and gone over with several ox-carts of essential furnishing and provisions with them. They went for miles through their own estate; the tenants and cultivators, slave or half-slave or free, came out of the farms as they went by, and their daughters brought bunches of flowers or anything in the way of food or drink that it was thought possible the noble owners might not despise too much. Dontas was riding and maddeningly pleased with himself; he charged the flocks of geese and sent them flapping and cackling and hissing out of his way.
When they got to the farm, Philylla’s mother, Eupolia, went into mild hysterics over the bareness of everything before the hangings they had brought were put up, and Themisteas walked off to look at his stables; his racers were mostly kept up here out of harm’s way. Philylla had all the country servants crowding round her, saying how she’d grown, how pretty she was, what a lucky man it would be who’d get her. The big, soft-eyed country woman, Tiasa, who had been her wet-nurse, came up through the crowd and kissed her and brought her over to a seat under the furry first peepings of vine leaves. Philylla shut her eyes and began breathing in the queer, shiveringly alive country smells, of green things pushing and growing, and tight, rustling corn sacks and meal sacks, of old wood and hot dung and places where honey had dripped. Her foster-mother was feeling at her with big wise hands that knew what they wanted, touching at all the soft, very sensitive growing points of her body. Waves of feeling poured over her as she waited, shut-eyed, centering, centering. … And then she jumped up, one spring on to her feet, another on to the bench, and looked down at the smiling face and big breasts of her foster-mother. The smells still clung about her tongue and widened nostrils; the rustling and cooing and bleating, the always remembered lilt of the country voices, struck like deep bells on her ears. She shook herself and stuck her arms out into the sun. ‘What is it?’ she said.
Tiasa answered: ‘Time will show,’ and stooped and kissed her feet between the thongs of the sandals. But already Philylla was thinking away from it all to her own time, the King’s time.
She could usually bully her small sister and brother into at least not contradicting her, but the grown-ups were maddening! She couldn’t help sometimes trying to tell them, and then they either disregarded her or laughed at her. She knew she didn’t always explain it properly, and often she got too excited to be clear; or else she didn’t quite know herself exactly what it was she wanted so much to happen. And sometimes they did listen for a minute or two, but then they always ended by producing all sorts of silly reasons against it and against the King and Queen. They said: ‘Experience shows us—,’ ‘When you know as much about human nature as I do—’ ‘When you’re my age, Philylla—’ As if there was anything good about being old! Philylla knew that the new ideas ought to work, and when she was told they wouldn’t and couldn’t, but the only reason seemed to be that most people are greedy and lazy and selfish, she just got too angry to bear it and ran off into the store-room and hid behind the big oil jars and cried. She wanted somebody else to come and cry with her and agree that the grown-ups were silly, and solemnly vow and swear never to become like that themselves, however old they got. Sometimes she pretended Agiatis was there, but she knew the Queen was too patient and gentle ever to hate properly, as she hated. Sometimes it was one or another of the maids of honour who thought as she did, and sometimes it was one of these other two: Berris Der, that she could explain it all to and who would listen; or Panteus, who would explain it all to her. She didn’t know which she would rather have. Panteus would be rather frightening; he was too near the King. They were both away now, with the army. There were going to be battles. It was unfair that she couldn’t be a soldier!
It was the week after her birthday and she was beginning to wish she could go back to the city at once instead of staying at home for the three more days she had. Everything seemed to be going wrong; she had been rude and then violently apologetic to her father and