Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) (32 page)

The King’s Despoilment

The red light still blazed, and presently the reluctant Victim entered, pushed forward by the three Graces. They urged him to strip the dead King of his regalia; but he was still modest and abashed, and even when he screwed up his courage the gibbering menaces of the ghost scared him away at every attempt. At last he gripped the ghost by both wrists and flung it off the couch, unbuckled the King’s belt, pulled off the boots, removed the antlers, and triumphantly displayed his booty. Then, at leisure, he despoiled the corpse of its coat and breeches and tried them on, well pleased with their fit. A hoarse groan echoed through the house, and the couch, on which the ghost had once more climbed, sank slowly out of sight.

The Victim’s Investiture

The light whitened and strengthened. The axe-men marched in, no longer disguised, to wish the Victim joy and pay him homage with a noisy horn-pipe, brandishing their axes above their heads, then laying them like the spokes of a wheel at his feet and leaping vigorously over them. Next his six boy companions made much of him, crowning him with garlands and carried him around on their shoulders. Then the elders, tapping the ground with their wands, danced a stiff little jig of allegiance. But wild, discordant music announced the arrival of the perverts – our thumbs jerked automatically to our mouths – and in they rushed, slobbering over the Victim, embracing and petting him. He shrank from their deathly touch with loathing, striking and kicking them, but they kept glancing at the Queen, who had entered quietly, in her wicked mask, and now stood swaying behind the Victim, slyly encouraging them and shaken by silent laughter. At last the axe-men intervened: they formed up in line, retrieved their axes from the ground and drove off the perverts.

In came the heralds again, blowing their trumpets, and the Victim was solemnly invested as King to majestic music. Having prostrated himself before the Queen, now seated graciously on her throne, he slowly mounted the three steps, pausing on each, while the music grew louder and more majestic still. It was a coronation anthem in which all the players joined, but I could not distinguish the words; they did not sound New Cretan. The exultant Victim sat down on the throne, and the Maidens advanced to buckle his belt, draw on his boots and crown him with the antlers. The anthem came to an end, handbells rang and the woodmen entered to hand him his bow and five arrows. These he discharged as his predecessor had done, and the Queen set the double axe between his knees.

Then woodmen, axe-men, boys, elders, Maidens and Graces joined in a complicated dance to the sound of a great variety of instruments; making spirals, wedges, stars, figures of eight and other patterns of religious significance. Afterwards the Queen and the New King descended from their throne and performed a nuptial dance, cold and ceremonious at first, but gradually quickening to a passionate climax, the light growing more feeble all the time. This ended the second act.

The Victim’s Warning

Another long, breathless pause, and when the lights went up again the Victim reclined luxuriously on the royal couch in full regalia, the Queen at his side. They were idly watching the boys turning cartwheels to the brisk accompaniment of pipes, and then the elders fighting a sham-battle with wands for quarter-staffs. The Victim clapped his hands in childish delight. But after this short interlude the light grew blue once more and a warning ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo!’ rang out, followed by bursts of discordant music and a wild stampede of perverts. The light flickered and dimmed. Scattering the shrieking perverts in all directions, in flew the owl. She blundered aimlessly about with dismal hoots; the Queen resumed her wicked mask. The dazed Victim turned to her for reassurance, but recoiled in horror as he caught her beckoning the Wild Women from the shadows. They prowled in slowly, and the Queen rose from the couch, abandoning the Victim to his fate. At once they began to bewitch him, as they had bewitched his predecessor. In terror he blew his horn for the axe-men and they entered with nodding head-dresses and jingling garters. The bagpipes skirled again, warring with the strident witch music; but this time the Wild Women were not to be baulked of their prey. They disarmed the axe-men with ease and drove them off in disorder.

The Wild Women edged closer in a shrieking, yelling dance. The couch swayed and began to sink, but the agonized Victim leaped off. Again they mercilessly hemmed him in and one of the Maidens darted forward and snatched off his belt, then another dragged off his coat, until he was stripped of everything but a pair of plaited garters and a shining star that covered his genitals. He stood panting and disconsolate.

The Transformations

The discordant witch music ceased abruptly and the Wild Women stood frozen, feet spread apart, arms akimbo, while an unearthly greenish-yellow light blazed from above. The Queen was standing between the Sphinx’s wings, quite naked except for her moon-mirror crown. The stripped Victim sank low in adoration before her and, as I watched, my last defences crumbled: I too adored her unreservedly as the visible incarnation of the Goddess who is our universal Mother, Bride and Layer-out. A weird hallucination overcame me: I saw two giant replicas of myself standing on either side of the stage, like heraldic supporters to a coat of arms. One was light-skinned and red-haired like myself, the other black-haired and dark. They gazed at each other with intense hatred, each grasping a dagger in his belt. ‘I am my worst enemy,’ I thought schizophrenically. ‘I’ve always known that. But why? Because he and I are both in love with the same different woman?’ My heart thumped against my ribs: the Queen was going through a series of bodily changes, becoming in turn all the women whom I had ever loved, each caught at the moment of her greatest beauty, but all calm and smiling. The last to appear was Sapphire, as she had looked when she had said goodbye to me at the door of the quince-hut. ‘I love only her now,’ I thought, ‘and I’ve no rival but my dark self.’

Heartened by the Queen’s gracious smile, the Victim danced the ballet of the Thirteen Months, the light and the music changing with each transformation. He danced the Kid, the Oarsman, the Wind, the Fire, the Hawk, the Flower-gatherer, the Thunderstorm. My private hallucination persisted vividly and at the crisis of the seventh transformation, when a blinding flash of lightning had made me jump, the ghostly twins unsheathed their daggers, dived sideways simultaneously and seemed to merge with the Victim’s body. At once he split into two: his pale Star-self was joined by a dark Serpent-self with a jewelled snake coiled at his groin. Star and Serpent squared up to each other, fighting with daggers amid flashes of lightning, crashes of thunder and a roar of rain, until the Star fell stabbed; I felt the dagger pierce my throat and my life-blood seemed to gush away.

The storm abated and the Serpent triumphantly resumed the ballet. He danced the Spear, the Salmon, the Vine-harvest, the Boar, the Breaker, the Drowning Man; and then stood still, trembling and expectant. Up leaped the Star again, avenging his own murder on the Serpent – and on me. I died a second time, the dagger plunged in my heart. All the lights went out.

The Victim’s Death and Pursuit

The Wild Women were dancing round the Victim, clockwise and then counter-clockwise, but gradually the counter movement grew longer, until at last they whirled round and round, widdershins, without a check and he toppled first to his knees, then to his knees and hands, and finally lay crouched in a dying huddle. Presently his ghost broke from the ring in the guise of a fish, but Atropos went after it, like a crane, and pursued it here and there until it returned to the whirling circle and merged with the Victim again. It broke out a second time, buzzing like a blue fly, but Atropos pursued it, like a swallow, and fetched it back again. It broke out a third time as a hare, and she pursued it like a greyhound. Lastly it broke out as a fawn and Atropos, seizing a three-pronged spear, led the whole troop of Wild Women in pursuit. All was again plunged into darkness, and above the laughing shrieks of his pursuers rose the Victim’s long, melancholy death wail. I felt myself sinking, plunging down faster and faster into nothingness, and Erica’s scornful voice rang in my ears: ‘It’s not even enough to die twice for the same woman: a poet must die three times!’

The Epilogue – The King’s Rebirth

My spirit slowly floated back, and I found myself in the Playhouse again. The
Epilogue
had begun. Lugubrious bass voices were chanting a funereal dirge, while women sobbed softly, but I only heard the last few bars. Presently a fiddle played a little whimpering tune with frequent breaks, and the couch rose again with the King’s furry ghost asleep on it. It awoke, rubbed its eyes and bounded aimlessly about until, as the light strengthened, it saw the Queen in a white cloak seated on a birth-stool, with six nymphs of the months grouped attentively around her. It scurried under her skirts, and disappeared.

The Queen underwent her rhythmic birthpangs to the anguished music of fiddles and pipes. At last she joyfully hauled out the ghost from under her skirts as a new-born baby, and put him to her breast. The nymphs sang a shrill paean of welcome to the new-born King, and three of them cradled him in a winnowing fan, and carried him away to lullaby music.

The light grew stronger, the axe-men reappeared and leaped ecstatically round the cradle beside which the three nymphs were bent; and so well they leaped that at last the old King emerged, smiling and vigorous, to be dressed by the nymphs in his coloured coat and buckskin breeches. But though his features were unchanged, he was now dark and black-haired: his other self, his twin. The heralds trumpeted with all their might, and the nymphs led him to his seat at the Queen’s side. Re-invested in his regalia, he sent the five arrows flying in token of his dominion, and the curtain fell on axe-men, woodmen, boys, elders and nymphs dancing a saraband of celebration.

The nine expressionless servants filed in and extinguished the footlights. The Lord Chamberlain reappeared and indicated with a wave of his hand that the silence was at an end.

I stretched, sneezed, and came out of my trance, to find Quant bending anxiously over me, his fingers on my pulse.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘I thought you’d gone.’

‘It’s nothing, nothing at all,’ I gabbled. Then I recovered my self-possession. ‘But oh, Quant, how terrifyingly the Victim danced! It’s hard to believe that it was only a mock death.’

‘It wasn’t,’ said Quant. ‘The Wild Women are still feasting on his flesh.’

Outside the Playhouse, Quant said goodbye. ‘You’ll not be returning to Horned Lamb?’ he asked.

‘No, I promised Nervo that I wouldn’t. I’ve been told that I’m not at all popular there.’

‘Then what are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to Broad Thumb’s house, to see whether Sapphire – whether Stormbird’s grown up yet.’

‘And then?’

‘This is Friday, isn’t it?’

He sighed. ‘Yes, it is Friday; but if you’re thinking of a Friday union, you’ll find the going very hard.’

‘The Goddess is merciful,’ I suggested.

‘When it pleases her. Goodbye, old fellow, and good luck! Since you’re taking that road, it’s unlikely that we’ll meet again. And I had so much to ask you, and to show you!’

We embraced in French style, and he went off disconsolately. I watched him go, feeling pretty miserable myself. Yet I had not seen quite the last of him. He came back shyly, to ask: ‘Edward, I wonder whether you’ll do me a favour?’

‘Why, Quant, of course – anything in my power.’

‘That poem of mine, about the light shining through the chink: do you happen to remember it?’

‘Yes, word for word. I’ve a good verbal memory for poems that mean something to me.’

‘Then I’m very happy, because this is what I was going to ask you: when you return to your age – as I suppose you must, sooner or later – will you publish it somewhere under your name? You see, I feel a little uncertain about the propriety of what I’ve done. If I could think that it’s been published in the Late Christian epoch, my conscience would be clear.’

‘I’ll be only too pleased – and, if I’m lucky, I may get a couple of guineas out of it, to buy my wife a new cigarette lighter. Even Dobeis has his uses at times.’

‘My affectionate regards to your wife,’ he said, and sauntered off, grinning like a schoolboy. This time he did not return, and after taking my bearings I forced my way through a dense crowd towards the Old Town.

As I walked, I was thinking how utterly different a picture of New Crete I should have carried back with me if I had been returned to my age on the night of my evocation. My visit to the Nonsense House had been unsettling enough; but, after all, I argued, it was only right that people should be freed from the bonds of custom at some stage in their lives, and better late than early. In my time it had been the young people who kicked over the traces and made lasting trouble for themselves, and the old people who were expected to behave with unnatural devoutness at a time when it mattered little how they behaved so long as they kept their follies decently to themselves. What stuck in my throat, though, was the public display of ritual murder and cannibalism I had just witnessed. To think that such beautiful, peaceful, sensitive, good-humoured people were brought up to regard that horrifying performance as normal and right! It shocked me to realize that the Goddess to whom I had just made a loving, voluntary submission was still, as in pre-historic times, the Old Sow who ate her farrow…

I paused for a moment at the entrance to a courtyard, and tried to think things out. A girl of about fifteen in a dark cloak came up to me. ‘You’re thinking hard and bitterly,’ she said. ‘I felt it as I passed.’

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘I was thinking about the Victim and the Wild Women.’

Her green eyes and white teeth glinted in the light of a street lamp. ‘I was one of them myself,’ she said. ‘What’s troubling you?’

‘I’m from the past,’ I said. ‘You may have heard of me. At the Playhouse I made my peace with the Goddess – I’d never before surrendered my heart to any deity – but now I know that the Victim was murdered and eaten, I feel a shuddering revulsion; I want to recant. In my epoch we did many disgusting things, but we did draw the line at cannibalism.’