the sunlight, not angry yet, but ready to be. From housetops and windows half Marob was watching. Snow had fallen the week before and been cleared away; now it was a lovely, sharp, windy morning. The well-head in the middle was covered over with hurdles to make a raised refuge place for the branders and killers. They stood about on it, some ten or twenty young men who wanted to show off to their girls and friends, all gay with coloured knots and leather fringes to their coats and boots. Tarrik was among them, standing right on top of the hurdles, with gold and red ivory scales sewn all over his clothes and the long, plaited whip hanging from his hand to the ground; he jerked his arm up and cracked it out over the bulls’ backs. Most of the people shouted back at him, ready to give him his chance and let him show he was Corn King again. But Erif Der started, clinging to the side of the windows; she waved her hand to him, with something tinkling between the fingers; she was very white, and after a moment looked back into the room as if she were going to fall. Yellow Bull came close to her and whispered: ‘You are sure—this time?’ She glared at her brother and said nothing. Harn Der, wiser and perhaps more anxious, pulled at his arm and got him away, right out of her sight.
They left her alone; she had worked out everything—everything except what the bulls would do: that she must leave to chance. She wished she could stay still now, frozen, unthinking, unpicturing, instead of being horribly alive to it all, in the middle of this magic that she had made herself, and that she knew was well made. She gathered it up against Tarrik and let it go; at any rate, she was in her father’s house; why need she feel that there was any change between last winter and this?
The bulls were beginning to get angry now, swinging their great heads and bellowing; but so far they had kept clear of the men at the well-head, knowing the sound of whip-cracks and the gadfly bite that always followed. The people watching all round began throwing stones and shouting. One of the bulls charged suddenly, horns down, at a house wall, but then at the last moment swerved aside and came blundering back into the herd. Two women in the window above him screamed, and one of them called shrill to a boy among the branders, who yelled back and shot out his whip-lash and flicked the flank of the bull, angering him. In another ten minutes the show was at its height; the old bulls were being killed and the young ones branded with this year’s mark. Blood ran dark and bright in the gutters; people and beasts alike were smelling it, and the singed hair and flesh. They got mad. The boys on the top of the flax stores were throwing down balls of tow that they had set on fire. One of the branders, not quick enough, was caught before the others could come to his help with their weighted whip-handles, and had to be carried into a house with his arm broken. But nobody minded except him: it was all part of the fun. Only Erif Der was not really looking, not enjoying it properly as she always had in other years; her father came softly behind her to see what she was doing, but she did not turn round, and he went away again with Yellow Bull to the other room. Yellow Bull wished he had been bullfighting too this year: it would have been, somehow, fairer. But his father had wanted to be quite sure of having him safe; he saw that this was wise, but all the same, it stopped him from getting any pleasure out of the show.
Tarrik had waited till there were a dozen bulls at once charging about the market, clatter and thud and grunt of their wild, hot bodies, the weight and danger behind their sharp horns and stupid, savage brains. Then he marked his beast, jumped clear and threw out his coil of rope with the stone on its end. It went snaking out, low after the bull, and twisted round his hind-leg. Tarrik braced himself gloriously, with eyes and ears open for another brute to dodge. As the strain came, he heaved himself back on the rope, feeling his strength and godhead burn down through muscles of arms and back and legs to his quick feet hard on the rammed earth of the market-place. The bull fell, kicking with all four of its hoofs like knives, and he was on to it and banged it between the eyes with the bronze knob of his whip. The shouting all round rose to a yell for him; he heard his own name and thrilled to it, and stuck his knife deep into the bull’s throat folds. It quivered immensely and groaned; then its eyes glazed and it died. Tarrik jumped on to its ribs and stamped on the warm, foam-streaked hide, cracking his whip and shouting shrilly as he felt the blood trickling down his hands. Then he began showing off to Marob, playing tricks, jumping over the brutes’ backs and under their noses, roping a young bull to be branded, scoring the neck of an old one with his knife point to madden it; he was all barbarian.
From a broad window, not too high above it all, his aunt was watching; sometimes she felt herself almost swamped in the waves of savageness bursting all round her; she nearly got to her feet and yelled too. But still she could stop herself, look away, ask Apphé whether she had remembered the gold thread for the embroidery. She wondered if she would always be able to stay so beautifully calm; every year, as she grew older, she enjoyed it more. Sphaeros was sitting beside her, and he watched, but he did not seem as if he even wanted to yell; the lines on his face showed, his clasped fingers fitted together; he had not spoken much, nor even answered her questions with at all a courteous fullness, all the morning. Perhaps he was shocked, in spite of admitting it all intellectually: the Scythians of Olbia had never played this savage game.
Then Erif Der, sitting in her window, began to sing in a high, shaking voice. No one could have heard over the din in the market, but Tarrik seemed to be listening. He stood quite still where he was, with his rope trailing on the ground; one of the bulls, charging blindly, just missed him; the other bull-fighters shouted at him, ran towards him—and then stopped, all shaken with fear at something in his face. They saw that his bad luck had come again, the blight on the Corn King: this was how he had been at Midsummer and Harvest.
Erif Der shut her eyes; she did not choose to see it happen. It was better, if one must think, to go right on into next year when it would be all over, and this house her house again. Then her mind split into two; one half worked quite free of the magic—the most living half; it darted about, hovering over faces remembered; her father telling her their plan, making her feel a grown woman fit to act with the men; Yersha walking blind into a magic net made fast with the pin of her own hair; Berris, unhappy, not wanting to make things; Tarrik. Tarrik. Tarrik. There he was, solid, at the end of all the paths that darting mind could take. Deliberately, with a great effort, she blotted out that half of the mind, shoved it down and under till she was poised again on a tide of magic, flowing out on the thin music of her song, to do what she wanted. She dared to open her eyes; all this boiling in her mind had taken incredibly little time. Tarrik still stood there, clouded, and yet—it was not finished.
For the first moment, Eurydice had not understood; she thought he was showing off again, and leant back, smiling half apologetically at Sphaeros. But then, when everybody else had seen, she saw too. She caught her neighbour Hellene by the arm, with a kind of soft, whispered shriek: ‘Look! She’s killing him!’ ‘Who?’ said Sphaeros quickly. ‘Erif Der—that woman—oh, what are you going to do?’ ‘Make him think,’ said Sphaeros, and slipped the heavy cloak over his head and off, and put one knee up on the window-sill, blocking her view, so that for one moment she only saw the hard jut of muscles in his arm and shoulder, wondered dizzily at a middle-aged philosopher being like that, heard a yell of something—horror or admiration—go up from the crowd, and fainted.
Sphaeros saw it was only twelve feet to the ground, and jumped easily, his hands just touching the ground as he sprang up again. He watched his line among the bulls and took it. Twenty years ago he had been a brilliant runner and proud of it; the pride was gone, but that same body was ready to do what action he willed. He called to Tarrik by his other, his Greek, name. ‘Wake!’ he cried, ‘think!’ And as he got there, Tarrik shuddered from his feet upwards and turned to him. They were almost touching when an old bull charged. Tarrik, coming alive, heard the loudening, sudden bellow, and saw the lowered terror of black horns coming at them. The cloud lifted.
The bull knocked Sphaeros over sideways, then dropped its head and spiked him in the armpit with one horn, roaring. Tarrik threw his looped whip over the other horn and dropped against it with all his weight. The bull, over-balanced, slid round on its forelegs with a wrenching grunt, and came down on one knee and the looped horn, which broke off short. Sphaeros’ body had fallen across its neck, so that Tarrik stabbed behind the shoulder, falling forward on to the knife hilt to
