Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) (18 page)

She pocketed it without comment, nodded, fetched restoratives from somewhere downstairs, and then signed to me that I should leave her alone with Sapphire.

When I was admitted again, Sapphire had regained her colour and something of her serene beauty. She was fast asleep and breathing normally.

‘The Nymph will not wake until midday tomorrow,’ said the servant, ‘unless she’s disturbed.’

I thanked her, and she went away with a respectful ‘good night’.

Then I undressed, lay down beside Sapphire and studied her lovely childish face by candlelight. Somehow I felt that she was miscast as a magician; obviously, she had talent and intuition and was absolutely sincere, and had studied hard, but was that enough? Magic demanded duplicity, not simplicity. Sally now… But was I being honest with myself? Was Sapphire’s attraction for me merely physical, despite the mysterious inner compunction that prevented me from wanting her in the ordinary way? We had no jokes, no ‘little language’, no small talk and no experiences or old friends in common, yet when I had come upon her crying in the armchair I had felt absurdly touched… What was that version of the
Song of Solomon
that the B.N.C. rowing men used to bawl at bump-suppers to the tune of
Come, All Ye Little Children
?

Why were you born so beautiful?
    Where did you get those eyes?

Your nose is straight, your lips are full,
    Your teeth would win a prize.

Your belly’s like a heap of wheat,
    Your breasts like two young roes.

O come to bed with me, my sweet,
    And take off all your clo’es!

How simple love was for Solomon or a rowing blue! But I did not feel like that about Sapphire, and she would not have accepted me if I had: on the ‘contrary, she counted on me as a poet to take wing and soar with her in spirit to a psycho-erotic seventh heaven far above my reach. I was in a thoroughly false position. Now, to make things worse, she was in trouble, in very bad trouble; and, indirectly, on my account. She groaned and muttered something in her sleep, and another rush of tenderness overcame me.

‘Don’t you worry, darling,’ I whispered, ‘I may not be a magician, but I’m damned if I’ll allow anyone to ill-treat you while I’m still about.’

See-a-Bird, Fig-bread, Starfish and I, all mounted, reached the boundary between the two villages as dawn was breaking. I had felt little compunction about leaving Sapphire; apparently all was well until noon, when I would ride home to see how she was.

We found the rival armies marshalled in irregular ranks, already confronting each other. ‘A very fine body of men,’ I found myself saying to Starfish, professionally, ‘and under a good sergeant-major they should make an even better show. Don’t you go in for drill here?’ But that was another of my stupid questions. Village warfare, it turned out, had more in common with the Old English game of Shrove-tide football than with war as I knew it. The fighting men, whose ages ranged from sixteen to sixty, were all well greased and naked except for leather breeches, gauntlets, mocassins and round leather helmets, and armed only with a light quarter-staff padded at one end. Rabnon, who outnumbered Zapmor by about three to two, were stained all over with a crimson and white crisscross; Zapmor were patched irregularly with red ochre and had blackened their faces with burnt cork.

The sun rose above the eastern hills, a trumpet blew, and the priests approached each other solemnly, as at the previous ceremony. Rabnon’s priest, holding up a painted bunch of wooden damsons, declaimed: ‘Brother, this is our war-token. With the Goddess’s aid, we shall carry it over your village green.’

The Zapmor priest replied in antiphony: ‘With the Goddess’s aid, we shall send it back whence it came.’

‘The war-token is a symbol of the conflict,’ Fig-bread explained. ‘Rabnon intends to carry it by force or subterfuge across the boundary into Zapmor territory. You remember our own totem-pole with the wide-mouthed godling at its base, and the similar one on the Rabnon green? Every village has its godling, and reveres him as the personal genius of the place. The war will end when the godling of one side or the other has been compelled to swallow the war-token. It’s one of the many rules in our code of war that the token must always be kept uncovered and above ground; then there’s another which obliges a man, once his quarter-staff is wrested from him, to stay out of action until his comrades succeed in recapturing it, or permanently if it’s broken; and another is that a captain may fight only a captain. You’ll soon get the hang of it.’

Besides ourselves, ten other magicians had turned up from near-by houses: six men and four women. When Fig-bread introduced me to them, they asked with a show of interest ‘How do you like New Crete?’

‘It defies criticism,’ I answered politely; this had also been my stock answer to the question ‘How do you like our New Germany?’ when in 1937 Antonia and I stayed with friends at Freiburg.

Then followed anxious enquiries about Sapphire and Sally: why had they not turned up? ‘Oh, Sapphire? She’s asleep and Sally’s at her bedside,’ said Fig-bread, who was doing all the talking. ‘It’s nothing of consequence – nothing at all. If the Goddess pleases, they’ll both be here this afternoon.’

But I could see by their manner that rumours of the trouble at home had already reached them.

There was something rather queer about Fig-bread this morning. I looked at him more closely and noticed an unusual lightness of gesture, a quickening of speech, a flashing of his usually sombre eyes. Was he drugged, I wondered. He had been chattering without pause all the way, mostly about the speed and beauty of famous horses of the past, with an honourable mention of his own glossy steed. Something must have happened to him, or perhaps was about to happen… Was he going to volunteer for the fighting, as two other young magicians had already decided to do, one on each side? Or did his behaviour merely reflect his nervous solicitude for Sally? He reminded me strongly of someone – but who was it? Not a physical resemblance, but the identical manner… ‘Legs’ Doughty-Wyllie, of course, on the night before our attack on Monte Cassino – ‘Legs’, a regular soldier, the driest and most taciturn of our company-commanders, talking breezy nonsense about the superiority of the Large Black pig to all other breeds in the English countryside. Queer, that nobody else seemed to be aware of the change in Fig-bread.

The bugles sounded the Advance and battle was joined. Zapmor made a determined rush to secure the token but Rabnon kept tossing it from hand to hand until Goose-flesh, their fastest runner, caught hold of it and raced for a wood just inside the Zapmor border. A Zapmor outpost was on guard there but Gooseflesh swerved, slipped past and was soon lost among the trees.

The Zapmor captain sent fast runners to the wood. They fanned out and surrounded it, but could not be certain whether Gooseflesh was still inside or whether the distant shouts from a look-out on a tree meant that he had gone away and was making for a wood deeper in Zapmor territory. Scouts streamed in pursuit and Gooseflesh was eventually caught and disarmed as he emerged from the second wood. However, they did not find the war-token in his possession and were forbidden by the code to question him about it.

A game of bluff and counter-bluff now ensued. Zapmor, pretending to have found the token, raised an excited halloo. Rabnon, who had it all the time – because what Gooseflesh had taken into the wood was not the token, but a bunch of roses – pretended to be deceived and crowded after the shouting enemy. A Zapmor patrol then made a detour and carefully searched the first wood until they found the decoy roses. Mocking laughter greeted them from the top of a tree where a Rabnon scout was posted.

A heavy quarter-staff fight was in progress inside the second wood. Starfish and I galloped over and it was a sight worth watching: the fighters used their staffs as blunt spears for thrusting, as clubs for striking, as poles for jumping or for tripping up their opponents. They were incredibly dexterous in its use; the clash of staff against staff was incessant, varied by shouts, laughter, war cries and the occasional dull boom of a well-aimed blow on a leather helmet. Rabnon were outnumbered in this skirmish and soon had to withdraw, leaving ten men disarmed. When reinforcements came up, the fight developed into an attempt to rescue the captured staffs before they were taken off to Zapmor, but several more were lost in the attempt.

Zapmor were the stronger and better-disciplined fighters, but Rabnon still kept possession of the token. They now made several feints at carrying it across the border and Zapmor did not catch sight of it until about eight o’clock, when it had become the centre of a brisk battle fought up and down a stream, only half a mile from Zapmor village. Rabnon decided to fight it out; but by a clever concentration of his reserves on a hill dominating the stream on the Rabnon side, the Zapmor captain succeeded shortly afterwards in launching a heavy attack on the enemy centre, which he broke. Zapmor seized the token and carried it a mile or so over the border, where they ran up against Rabnon’s general reserve and were fought to a standstill. At this point Starfish was hastily summoned to separate two fighters, both disarmed, who seemed intent on strangling each other. The way he went about this was simple and effective: he seized the lobes of their ears and said: ‘In Nimuë’s Name, break away!’ They disengaged at once, choking and laughing.

By ten o’clock bitter fighting had brought Zapmor within half a mile of Rabnon village. Nearly fifty of the enemy had been disarmed and their staffs taken back to the shrine for safe-keeping; this brought the rival sides to something like equal strength.

From now on Zapmor showed little tactical finesse. They formed a sort of Macedonian phalanx, with the token dangling from a quarter-staff in the middle, and forced their way forward yard by yard across a broad meadow. But the ground was soggy and Rabnon put up a furious resistance. By eleven o’clock they had gained only a quarter of a mile; but soon after Rabnon broke once more and by noon the war-token had been carried within sight of their own totem-pole. Then a trumpet blew the Cease Fire and both armies lay down panting, while their women folk hurried up dispensing kisses, advice, massage, plasters, food and drink. A Zapmor man had broken his collar-bone and another had twisted his ankle; See-a-Bird and Fig-bread took charge of them. These, apart from minor cuts and bruises and one case of slight concussion, were the only casualties so far reported.

I had eaten my lunch of bread and cheese in the saddle; now I tried to find my way home by a short cut through an oak wood and across some water-meadows. Presently my horse sank up to its fetlocks in mud and I found myself entering a grove of alders planted in a wide spiral. A crane, standing pensively on one leg not far off, observed my approach. It tilted its head, but did not appear alarmed. There were no buildings about, nor any votive offerings on the trees, but it was dear that I had blundered into a sacred grove; I must get out at once and take the proper road. As I turned my horse round I thought I heard the crane squeak shrilly in English: ‘Wait a moment, you!’

My hair stood on end. I had never been addressed by a bird before, except parrots, budgerigars and one monosyllabic tame raven.

However, when I looked back it turned out not to be the crane after all; the crane had disappeared. In its place stood a tall old woman, the oldest and dirtiest hag I had ever seen; Gran’mère Michel, the pipe-smoking centenarian of St Jean-des-Porcs, would have looked middle-aged and well-groomed beside her. She must have been crouching in the mud behind one of the trees.

My dappled rocking-horse began to snort and shiver. ‘Quiet, old boy, quiet!’ I said, but that was no use. The devil had entered into him. He went completely daft and played me all the maddest bronco tricks ever seen in a Wild West rodeo – bucking, plunging, shimmying, barking my legs against trees, jumping sideways like a kitten, trying to bite my feet. The hag stood cackling at us.

‘God damn you, you witch!’ I shouted. ‘Calm this beast for me, won’t you?’

She cackled louder than ever. ‘God! That’s rich! That’s very rich! “God damn you!” he says.’

In the late Twenties after I had been sent down from Oxford I spent a couple of years on a ranch in Arizona. Since I was the only Britisher within two hundred miles, quite a few rogue horses had from time to time been humorously incited to murder me. So this was nothing new; but the mud was greasy black and I was determined not to be thrown. Somehow I managed to keep my seat until the hag hobbled up, laid a skinny hand on the horse’s withers, and mumbled something to him in New Cretan. Instantly he behaved himself, let out a friendly whinny and started to crop the rank grass at his feet.

‘Where the Devil did you spring from?’ I asked, panting and furious.

‘First God and now the Devil!’ she squeaked. ‘My dear Teddy, you forget yourself.’

‘Please forgive my rudeness, but you scared me. How do you know my name?’

‘It’s my business to know names,’ she said. ‘I know everyone’s name hereabouts. What made you ride through my cranery? It’s strictly against rules.’

‘I’m a stranger here. I was taking a short cut…’

‘You needn’t worry about Sapphire. She’s all right. In fact, you’ll only make things worse if you go back now. There’ll be hell to pay about that cigarette case under Sally’s pillow; not that I think the girl didn’t ask for trouble. You’d better stick around here and watch the fun.’

‘What do you know about the cigarette case?’

‘I know all I want to know.’

‘Isn’t that rather a large claim? Do you by any chance know all I want to know, too?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t believe that!’

‘Look in my eyes!’

I looked steadily into them. They were as blue as mandarin beads and as sharp as sacking-needles.

‘Now, do you believe me?’

‘I can’t very well help believing. But when I return to my own sceptical age, how shall I know that – ?’

‘Would you like to ask a test question?’

‘If you won’t be offended.’