Клайв Стейплз Льюис: Till we have Faces

Of course no one in the house went to bed on the night of the birth, for that, they say, will make the child refuse to wake into the world. We all sat in the great hall between the Pillar Room and the Bedchamber, in a red glare of birth–torches. The flames swayed and guttered terribly, for all doors must be open; the shutting of a door might shut up the mother’s womb. In the middle of the hall burned a great fire. Every hour the Priest of Ungit walked round it nine times and threw in the proper things. The King sat in his chair and never moved all night, not even his head. I was sitting next to the Fox.

“Grandfather,” I whispered to him, “I am terribly afraid.”

“We must learn, child, not to fear anything that nature brings,” he whispered back.

I must have slept after that, for the next thing I knew was the sound of women wailing and beating the breast as I had heard them do it the day my mother died. Everything had changed while I slept. I was shivering with cold. The fire had sunk low, the King’s chair was empty, the door of the Bedchamber was at last shut, and the terrible sounds from within it had stopped. There must have been some sacrifice too, for there was a smell of slaughtering, and blood on the floor, and the Priest was cleaning his holy knife. I was all in a daze from my sleep, for I started up with the wildest idea; I would go and see the Queen. The Fox was after me long before I reached the door of the Bedchamber. “Daughter, daughter,” he was saying. “Not now. Are you mad? The King——”

At that moment the door was flung open and out came my father. His face shocked me full awake, for he was in his pale rage. I knew that in his red rage he would storm and threaten, and little might come of it, but when he was pale he was deadly. “Wine,” he said, not very loud; and that too was a bad sign. The other slaves pushed forward a boy who was rather a favourite, as slaves do when they are afraid. The child, white as his master and in all his finery (my father dressed the younger slaves very fine) came running with the flagon and the royal cup, slipped in the blood, reeled, and dropped both. Quick as thought, my father whipped out his dagger and stabbed him in the side. The boy dropped dead in the blood and wine, and the fall of his body sent the flagon rolling over and over. It made a great noise in that silence; I hadn’t thought till then that the floor of the hall was so uneven. (I have re–paved it since.)

My father stared for a moment at his own dagger; stupidly, it seemed. Then he goes very gently up to the Priest.

“What have you to say for Ungit now?” he asked, still in that low voice. “You had better recover what she owes me. When are you going to pay me for my good cattle?” Then, after a pause, “Tell me, prophet, what would happen if I hammered Ungit into powder and tied you between the hammers and the stone?”

But the Priest was not in the least afraid of the King.

“Ungit hears, King, even at this moment,” he said. “And Ungit will remember. You have already said enough to call down doom upon all your descendants.”

“Descendants,” says the King. “You talk of descendants,” still very quiet, but now he was shaking. The ice of his rage would break any moment. The body of the dead boy caught his eye. “Who did that?” he asked. Then he saw the Fox and me. All the blood rushed into his face, and now at last the voice came roaring out of his chest loud enough to lift the roof.

“Girls, girls, girls,” he bellowed. “And now one girl more. Is there no end to it? Is there a plague of girls in heaven that the gods send me this flood of them? You—you——” He caught me by the hair, shook me to and fro, and flung me from him so that I fell in a heap. There are times when even a child knows better than to cry. When the blackness passed and I could see again, he was shaking the Fox by his throat.

“Here’s an old babbler who has eaten my bread long enough,” he said. “It would have paid me better to buy a dog as things turn out. But I’ll feed you in idleness no longer. Some of you take him to the mines tomorrow. There might be a week’s work in his old bones even now.”

Again there was dead silence in the hall. Suddenly the King flung up his hands, stamped, and cried, “Faces, faces, faces! What are you all gaping at? It’d make a man mad. Be off! Away! Out of my sight, the whole pack of you!”

We were out of the hall as quick as the doorways would let us.

The Fox and I went out of the little door by the herb–garden on the east. It was nearly daylight now and there was a small rain beginning.

“Grandfather,” said I, sobbing, “you must fly at once. This moment, before they come to take you to the mines.”

He shook his head. “I’m too old to run far,” he said. “And you know what the King does to runaway slaves.”

“But the mines, the mines! Look, I’ll come with you. If we’re caught I’ll say I made you come. We shall be almost out of Glome once we’re over that .” I pointed to the ridge of the Grey Mountain, now dark with a white daybreak behind it, seen through the slanting rain.

“That is foolishness, daughter,” said he, petting me like a small child. “They would think I was stealing you to sell. No; I must fly further. And help me you shall. Down by the river; you know the little plant with the purple spots on its stalks. It’s the roots of it I need.”

“The poison?”

“Why, yes. (Child, child, don’t cry so.) Have I not told you often that to depart from life of a man’s own will when there’s good reason is one of the things that are according to nature? We are to look on life as——”

“They say that those who go that way lie wallowing in filth—down there in the land of the dead.”

“Hush, hush. Are you also still a barbarian? At death we are resolved into our elements. Shall I accept birth and cavil at——”

“Oh, I know, I know. But, Grandfather, do you really in your heart believe nothing of what is said about the gods and Those Below? But you do, you do. You are trembling.”

“That’s my disgrace. The body is shaking. I needn’t let it shake the god within me. Have I not already carried this body too long if it makes such a fool of me at the end? But we are wasting time.”

“Listen!” said I. “What’s that?” For I was in a state to be scared by every sound.

“Horses,” said the Fox, peering through the quick–hedge with his eyes screwed up to see against the rain. “They are coming to the great door. Messengers from Phars, by the look of them. And that will not sweeten the King’s mood either. Will you—ah, Zeus, it is already too late.” For there was a call from within doors, “The Fox, the Fox, the Fox to the King.”

“As well go as be dragged,” said the Fox. “Farewell, daughter,” and he kissed me, Greek fashion, on the eyes and the head. But I went in with him. I had an idea I would face the King; though whether I meant to beseech him or curse him or kill him I hardly knew. But as we came to the Pillar Room we saw many strangers within, and the King shouted through the open door, “Here, Fox, I’ve work for you.” Then he saw me and said, “And you, curd–face, be off to the women’s quarters and don’t come here to sour the morning drink for the men.”

I do not know that I have ever (to speak of things merely mortal) been in such dread as I was for the rest of that day; dread that feels as if there were an empty place between your belly and your chest. I didn’t know whether I dared be comforted by the King’s last words or not; for they sounded as if his anger had passed, but it might blaze out again. Moreover, I had known him do a cruel thing not in anger but in a kind of murderous joke, or because he remembered he had sworn to do it when he was angry. He had sent old house–slaves to the mines before. And I could not be alone with my terror, for now comes Batta to shear my head and Redival’s again as they had been shorn when my mother died, and to make a great tale (clicking her tongue) of how the Queen was dead in childbed, which I had known ever since I heard the mourning, and how she had borne a daughter alive. I sat for the shearing and thought that, if the Fox must die in the mines, it was very fit I should offer my hair. Lank and dull and little it lay on the floor beside Redival’s rings of gold.