The Scorpion God: Three Short Novels (2 page)

“He’s lying.”

At last they led him through the Great House towards the courtyard that lay inside the main gate. Even though this was the day for the God to prove himself the courtyard was almost empty. But outside the main gate two rows of soldiers—black men with huge shields and spears—kept a lane clear, and the people of the river valley massed behind them on either side. The noise from them had sunk from the clamour that announced the beginning of the God’s run. They had looked enough now, even at Pretty Flower where she stood in front of her women on a dais by the gate. They were tired of peering down the lane and along the path under the cliffs by which the God would return. The shawms were silent, Pretty Flower motionless if decorative, the God out of sight; and they needed something else to look at and the Prince provided it. He appeared at the inner edge of the forecourt, on the steps that led down from the entry to the Great House. He was flanked by fat, painted columns, and fat nurses. His pleated kilt had no dust on it and the gold studs of his sandals gleamed. So did the little necklace hung over his shoulders and the bracelets on his wrists. As for his sidelock, it had been combed, brushed, oiled till it looked like a shape cut out of ebony. He had a faint, public smile round his lips, and as the women in the crowd cried out how sweet and pretty he was, the smile became one of genuine pleasure. He paused by the dais, squinted up at Pretty Flower’s face before its backing of fans, then lowered his hand to his knee in the appropriate gesture. His nurses helped him on to the dais and he stood there, blinking. Pretty Flower leaned, undulating. Her smile became one of love and she touched his cheek in an exquisitely feminine gesture with the back of her hand. She murmured down to him.

“You’ve been crying, you little runt.”

The Prince examined his feet.

The noise of the crowd sharpened. The Prince glanced up and Pretty Flower took a step towards the edge of the dais, pulling him with her. From behind them, palm fronds were thrust into their hands. They looked where the crowd was looking, along the path.

Upriver, and just within sight, was a kind of foot of stone, sticking out of the cliff. There was a long, low building on this foot and a tiny figure moving by one end of it. Then a second figure appeared beside the first. They were difficult to see; and their movements were complicated by a wild vibration from the sunheat. They were manikins who changed shape with it or even disappeared in it for a moment. All of a sudden, the crowd on either side of the lane became thickets, hedges, groves of palm fronds moved by a perpetual wind. The shawms brayed.

“Life! Health! Strength!”

The first of the two figures was not the God. He was the Liar, the bony young man, who ran not only straight along the path, but back along it now and then, circled the God, made desperate gestures, urging him on. He sweated but was tireless, voluble. Behind him came the God, Great House, Husband of the Royal Lady who had attained her eternal Now, Royal Bull, Falcon, Lord of the Upper Land. He was running slowly and sharpening his carving knife with a vigour that had a dawning desperation in it. He shone more wetly, and the kilt stuck to his thighs. He came out of the shuddering of the land and the sunblink. His white headgear had collapsed and he no longer jabbed at it with the crook or flail. Even his tail seemed affected and jerked about like the tail of a dying animal. He reeled sideways in his run. The Liar cried out.

“Oh, no!”

The crowd noises were as desperate as the runner’s face.

“Great House! Great House!”

Even the soldiers were affected, turning sideways and breaking rank as if to help. The Prince saw a remembered figure with a stick edge between them into the path. The blind man stood there, face up, stick out. The God came thudding down the lane and the crowd closed in behind him. The blind man was shouting at the top of his voice—shouting something completely inaudible. The God’s feet made an irregular pattern in the dust. His knees were bending, his mouth opened wider, his eyes stared blindly. He was falling. He struck the blind man’s stick, his arms dropped, his knees gave. Still staring, he fell on the stick, rolled and lay still. The headgear of white linen trundled away.

In the sudden silence, the blind man was heard at last.

“The Prince is going blind, God! Your son is going blind!”

The Prince made a despairing gesture upward to Pretty Flower who was still smiling. He cried out his lesson.

“He’s lying!”

“The Prince is going blind!”

Pretty Flower spoke clearly, calmly.

“Of course he’s lying, dear child. Soldiers—take him to the Pit.”

The soldiers were pushing, striking out, clearing a space round the fallen God and the Liar who crouched by him. The crowd was swirling round the blind man who became a toy, a shouting doll. Pretty Flower spoke again.

“He tripped the God with his stick.”

Other soldiers got at the blind man. They fought round the group on the ground; they got the Blind Man between them. Pretty Flower took the Prince by the wrist, shook it, and spoke sideways down to him.

“Smile.”

“He’s lying, I tell you!”

“Little fool. Smile.”

The tears ran into the Prince’s smile as she pulled him away from the dais, and then with what dignity was possible, through the Main Gate. Soldiers forced a way for them, and others carried the God. Pretty Flower and her women hurried the Prince to where the nurses took him and bore him and his tears out of sight. Then she and her women disappeared too.

A procession met the God in the forecourt as if it had been prepared for just this occasion. There was a couch borne by six men. There was a man in a leopard’s skin and one—if he was a man—with the head of a jackal. They were led by a tall man much older than Great House, who wore a long robe of white linen. The sun winked from his shaven head. The Liar reached him first, still talking.

“Terrible, terrible, Head Man—and so unnecessary—that is, I mean—terrible! How could you have known? How could you guess?”

The Head Man smiled.

“It was a possibility.”

“Remember I have no claim—no claim whatsoever!”

The Head Man smiled down at him benignly.

“Come now, my dear Liar. You undervalue yourself.”

The Liar leapt as if a soldier had pricked him with a spear.

“Oh no, no! Believe me, I have no more to give!”

The God was on the couch. The procession moved towards the Great House. The Head Man watched it leave.

“He likes to hear your lies again and again.”

The Liar stopped him before the entrance, holding him by the robe.

“He’s heard them so often he could remember them himself—or get someone to make pictures of them!”

Turned half-back, the old man looked at him.

“That’s not what He said yesterday.”

“Indeed I assure you, I’m not in the least necessary!”

The old man turned right round, looked down, and laid a hand on the Liar’s shoulder.

“Tell me, Liar—as a matter of interest—why do you avoid life?”

But the young man was not listening. He was peering past the old man into the Great House.

“He will, won’t he?”

“Will what?”

“Run again! He was tripped. He will won’t he?”

The old man examined him with a profound professional interest.

“I don’t think so,” he murmured gently. “In fact I’m sure he won’t.”

He walked to the Great House alone. The Liar stayed on the steps, jerking, trembling, and tugging at the pallor round his mouth.

Pretty Flower took most of it out on the Prince. In the comparative privacy of the Great House, she sent him off with a slap on the cheek that made up—as he had known it would—for all the affection on the dais. He went to bed whimpering, as the sun set.

The Liar was not disposed of so easily. He caught her alone in a dark corridor and seized her by the wrist.

“Unhand me!”

“I haven’t handed you yet,” he whispered. “Can’t you think of anything else but sex?”

“After what you did——”

“I did?
We
did, you mean!”

“I won’t think of it——”

“You’d better not. You’d better succeed. You’d better keep your mind on it!”

She slumped against him,

“I’m so tired—so confused—I wish—I don’t know what I wish.”

His arm crept round and patted her shoulder.

“There, there. There, there.”

“You’re trembling.”

“Why shouldn’t I tremble? I’m in deadly danger—I’ve been in it before; but never like this. So you’d better succeed. Understand?”

She stood away from him and drew herself up.

“You want me to be good? You?”

“Good? No—oh, yes! What you call good. Be very good!”

She moved past him, stately and pacing.

“Very well, then.”

A whisper pursued her down the corridor and floated to her ear.

“For my sake!”

She shivered in the hot air and kept her eyes averted from the dim figures looming from the high walls. There was a noise now to hide any whispering—a confused sound, from the banqueting hall, of voices and music. She passed the hall to the farther end and drew aside a curtain. Here a space had been curtained off and lit with many lamps; and here her women waited, silent for fear of those henna’d palms and painted nails. But Pretty Flower had little thought for her women this evening. Silent and withdrawn, pure and determined, she allowed them to undress her, anoint her, spread her hair and change her jewels. She went and sat before her mirror as at an altar.

The mirror that Pretty Flower used was priceless. It was fabulous. For one thing, it did not reflect merely her face, but her body as far down as the waist. If she leaned still farther forward she could even see her feet. Only the Great House held treasures such as that. Then again, apart from the size of the mirror it was neither copper nor gold as was customary if a woman had a mirror at all. It was of solid silver which gave back to the user the most precious gift of all—a reflection with neither flattery nor distortion. The winged sky goddesses who held the mirror on either side were gold, and supported the shining centre in an impersonal way, as if determined to exert no influence on the user which might sway her judgment. The surface of the mirror had been rolled, beaten, ground, polished, until there was no other surface to which it might be likened. Indeed, as a surface it could not be said to exist, unless you breathed on it, or touched it with your finger to assure yourself of the invisible solidity. The surface was a concept, was nothing but a reversal that brought the world face to face, not with its own image, but with itself.

Absence of distortion, absence of flattery was exactly what Pretty Flower needed. She sat, gazing at her magical sister who gazed back, and they both became absorbed. The women in the brightly-lit room recovered from their fear and began to murmur together as they busied themselves about her. She did not feel them nor hear them. She sat on a stool before the low table that supported the mirror. She was naked now, except for a belt of blue and gold that marked her waist without constricting it; and this last was just as well since any constriction of that slenderest part of her body would end what nature had so nearly completed and divide her in two. Flattery from the mirror or any other source would have been superfluous. Pretty Flower had achieved an exuberant Now; and no change could have been an improvement. They had heaped up her shining black hair out of the way on her head, though a curl or two had escaped. Her eyes did not blink for her absorption had deepened. The surgeon’s stare before the body, the artist’s before his work, or the philosopher’s inward gaze at some metaphysical region of thought—none of these was more concentrated and abstracted than Pretty Flower’s stare at her own image.

She was considering a colour evidently, for she held a bruised reed in her right hand where she could dip it with decision into the array before her on the slate palette. She could choose malachite crushed in oil, or crushed lapiz, or white or red clay, saffron. She could choose gold if she wanted to for on a small stand next to the palette hung little sheets of gold leaf that trembled like the wings of an insect in the heat from the naked lights.

“They are ready——”

But Pretty Flower ignored her women—indeed, was unaware of them. By some exercise of mental force, some inner pain, she had thrust herself up out of indecision to a level of clear understanding. Crimson it should be, must be, by the obscure but logical pressures of the rest. Her underlip slid out from where her upper teeth had gripped it against the lower and she nodded to her magical sister. Crimson enhanced with blue—not the dark blue of midnight, hardly to be distinguished from the black, nor the dense, grainless blue of midday over against the sun—but azure with white in it, seeming to shine from below the surface. With infinite care, she applied the colour.

“They are waiting——”

Pretty Flower laid the titstick among the others on the table.

“I’m ready too.”

She dropped her arms and the bracelets tinkled as they fell to her wrists. She undulated to her feet, and the light shone, ran together, pulled out or disappeared over the dark brown smoothness of her skin. The women covered her, swathing her, wrapping her in folds of fine lawn; and she wound herself into them, moving more and more slowly, till the seventh veil covered her from hair to instep. Then she stood still, listening to the roar of conversation and sound of music from the banqueting halt She drew herself up—unaware perhaps that she spoke aloud, in tones of sorrow and resolution.

“I will be good!”

Inside the banqueting hall the conversation had reached that point in a meal where it becomes a steady note. No one gave the Great House more than a casual glance every now and then. Since he seemed content to eat and drink and chat with the Head Man or the Liar, it was only courteous to ignore him—to pay him the courtier’s supreme compliment of apparent indifference. For this reason, the long tables down either side of the hall contained groups which, while they were held together by the string of the occasion, nevertheless behaved as if the string was an elastic one. For if three guests—two women and one man, perhaps—seemed absorbed in themselves, even so, after only a few moments, one would be drawn into the next group which would divide correspondingly. All down either side of the hall, behind the tables and under the steady note, it looked as if the lillied head-dresses were stood in water and moved by a gentle wind. No courtier was drunk yet. Though their inspection was covert—as if by nature and not art—they had contrived to drink dish for dish with the God, no less and no more. Since he was older than anyone but the Head Man, and since he was evidently better at drinking than running, they would soon be drunk; they would soon be drunk, but not before the God was.