Till We Have Faces_ A Myth Retold - C. S. Lewis [23]
"Or else," said Psyche, "they are real gods but don't really do these things. Or even — mightn't it be — they do these things and the things are not what they seem to be? How if I am indeed to wed a god?"
She made me, in a way, angry. I would have died for her (this, at least, I know is true) and yet, the night before her death, I could feel anger. She spoke so steadily and thoughtfully, as if we had been disputing with the Fox, up behind the pear trees, with hours and days still before us. The parting between her and me seemed to cost her so little.
"Oh, Psyche," I said, almost in a shriek, "what can these things be except the cowardly murder they seem? To take you — you whom they have worshipped and who never hurt so much as a toad — to make you food for a monster. . . ."
You will say — I have said it many thousand times to myself — that, if I saw in her any readiness to dwell on the better part of the Priest's talk and to think she would be a god's bride more than a Brute's prey, I ought to have fallen in with her and encouraged it. Had I not come to her to give comfort, if I could? Surely not to take it away. But I could not rule myself. Perhaps it was a sort of pride in me, a little like her own, not to blind our eyes, not to hide terrible things; or a bitter impulse in anguish itself to say, and to keep on saying, the worst.
"I see," said Psyche in a low voice. "You think it devours the offering. I mostly think so myself. Anyway, it means death. Orual, you didn't think I was such a child as not to know that? How can I be the ransom for all Glome unless I die? And if I am to go to the god, of course it must be through death. That way, even what is strangest in the holy sayings might be true. To be eaten and to be married to the god might not be so different. We don't understand. There must be so much that neither the Priest nor the Fox knows."
This time I bit my lip and said nothing. Unspeakable foulness seethed in my mind; did she think the Brute's lust better than its hunger? To be mated with a worm, or a giant eft, or a spectre?
"And as for death," she said, "why, Bardia there (I love Bardia) will look on it six times a day and whistle a tune as he goes to find it. We have made little use of the Fox's teaching if we're to be scared by death. And you know, Sister, he has sometimes let out that there were other Greek masters than those he follows himself; masters who have taught that death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that's all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet — "
"Oh cruel, cruel!" I wailed. "Is it nothing to you that you leave me here alone? Psyche; did you ever love me at all?"
"Love you? Why, Maia, what have I ever had to love save you and our grandfather the Fox?" (But I did not want her to bring even the Fox in now.) "But, Sister, you will follow me soon. You don't think any mortal life seems a long thing to me tonight? And how would it be better if I had lived? I suppose I should have been given to some king in the end — perhaps such another as our father. And there you can see again how little difference there is between dying and being married. To leave your home — to lose you, Maia, and the Fox — to lose one's maidenhead — to bear a child — they are all deaths. Indeed, indeed, Orual, I am not sure that this which I go to is not the best."
"This!"
"Yes. What had I to look for if I lived? Is the world — this palace, this father — so much to lose? We have already had what would have been the best of our time. I must tell you something, Orual, which I never told to anyone, not even you."
I know now that this must be so even between the lovingest hearts. But her saying it that night was like stabbing me.
"What is it?" said I, looking down at her lap where our four hands were joined.