Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

by C.S. Lewis

‘Father,’ said I. ‘You are right. It is fit that one should die for the people. Give me to the Brute instead of Istra.’

the reek of holiness was everywhere.

Even in my woman’s rage I had man enough about me to cry out, ‘Ward yourself, Bardia,’ before I fell on him. It was of course the craziest attempt for a girl who had never had a weapon in her hand before. Even if I had known my work, the lame foot and the pain in my side (to breathe deep was agony) disabled me.

‘It’s a thousand pities, Lady, that you weren’t a man,’ said Bardia. ‘You’ve a man’s reach and a quick eye. There are none of the recruits would do as well at a first attempt; I’d like to have the training of you. It’s a thousand—’

‘Ah, Bardia, Bardia,’ I sobbed, ‘if only you’d killed me. I’d be out of my misery now.’ ‘No, you wouldn’t,’ said he. ‘You’d be dying, not dead. It’s only in tales that a man dies the moment the steel’s gone in and come out. Unless of course you swap off his head.’

other so beautiful. Here! Lady! Stop it. I’ll risk my life, and Ungit’s wrath too.’

I wonder do the gods know what it feels like to be a man.’

swore it. He looked to left and right, did back the bolt, and said, ‘Quick. In you go. Heaven comfort you both.’

Psyche sat upon the bed with a lamp burning beside her. Of course I was at once in her arms and saw this only in a flash; but the picture—Psyche, a bed, and a lamp—is everlasting.

Then I realised somewhat slowly that all this time she had been petting and comforting me as if it were I who was the child and the victim.

It was so unlike the sort of love that used to be between us in our happy times.

‘Oh, Psyche,’ said I, ‘what does it matter? If only he had killed me! If only they would take me instead of you!’

are to say to ourselves every morning? “Today I shall meet cruel men, cowards and liars, the envious and the drunken. They will be like that because they do not know what is good from what is bad. This is an evil which has fallen upon them not upon me.

‘Send her your curse. And if the dead can—’ ‘No, no. She also does what she doesn’t know.’ ‘Not even for

Let her have all that’s big and costly and doesn’t matter. You and the Fox take what you please.’

‘Only of one thing,’ she said. ‘There is a cold doubt, a horrid shadow, in some corner of my soul. Supposing—supposing—how if there were no god of the Mountain and even no holy Shadowbrute, and those who are tied to the Tree only die, day by day, from thirst and hunger and wind and sun, or are eaten piecemeal by the crows and catamountains?

Do you know, sister, I have come to feel more and more that the Fox hasn’t the whole truth.

he was too good—to believe that the gods are real, and viler than the vilest men.’ ‘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?’

‘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. . . .’

‘But, sister, you will follow me soon. You don’t think any mortal life seems a long thing to me tonight?

And there you can see again how little difference there is between dying and being married.

‘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.

‘This,’ she said, ‘I have always—at least, ever since I can remember—had a kind of longing for death.’ ‘Ah, Psyche,’ I said, ‘have I made you so little happy as that?’

She had her father’s trick of walking to and fro when she talked of something that moved her.

But they say whose. If they had chosen any other in the land, that would have been only terror and cruel misery. But they chose me. And I am the one who has been made ready for it ever since I was a little child in your arms, Maia. The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing—to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from—’

‘—my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.

Oh, look up once at least before the end and wish me joy. I am going to my lover. Do you not see now—?’

But first of all I must find out when their murder, their Offering, was to be.

‘Quick!’ said I. ‘It’s time. They’re going. Oh, I can’t get up. Help me, girls. No, quicker! Drag me, if need be. Take no heed of my groaning and screaming.’

they must make her father the murderer.

First her sentence; then her strange, cold talk last night; and now this painted and gilded horror to poison my last sight of her. Ungit had taken the most beautiful thing that was ever born and made it into an ugly doll.

nearest thing we have to a defence against them (but there is no real defence) is to be very wide awake and sober and hard at work, to hear no music, never to look at earth or sky, and (above all) to love no one.

They say there was not a tear in her eye, nor did so much as her hand shake, when they put her to the Tree.

To love, and to lose what we love, are equally things appointed for our nature.

If we look at it with reason’s eye and not with our passions, what good that life offers did she not win? Chastity, temperance, prudence, meekness, clemency, valour—and, though fame is froth, yet, if we should reckon it at all, a name that stands with Iphigenia’s and Antigone’s.’

The days were endless. The very shadows seemed nailed to the ground as if the sun no longer moved.

What cured me was the wars. I don’t think there’s any other cure.’

‘Use? Try it and see. No one can be sad while they’re using wrist and hand and eye and every muscle of their body.

Now, your left foot forward. And don’t look at my face, look at my sword. It isn’t my face is going to fight you. And now, I’ll show you a few guards.’

But sweat is the kindest creature of the three—far better than philosophy, as a cure for ill thoughts.

‘Why, yes, it’s a pity about her face. But she’s a brave girl and honest. If a man was blind and she weren’t the King’s daughter, she’d make him a good wife.’ And that is the nearest thing to a love-speech that was ever made me.

We passed the house of Ungit on our right. Its fashion is thus: great, ancient stones, twice the height of a man and four times the thickness of a man, set upright in an egg-shaped ring. These are very ancient, and no one knows who set them up or brought them into that place, or how.

‘Why not?’ I had to tell myself over like a lesson the infinite reasons it had not to dance. My heart to dance? Mine whose love was taken from me, I, the ugly princess who must never look for other love, the drudge of the King, the jailer of hateful Redival, perhaps to be murdered or turned out as a beggar when my father died—for

And yet, it was a lesson I could hardly keep in my mind. The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me, as if I could wander away, wander forever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other to the world’s end.

Who can feel ugly when the heart meets delight? It is as if, somewhere inside, within the hideous face and bony limbs, one is soft, fresh, lissom, and desirable.

world. I had seen. I was not a fool. I did not know then, however, as I do now, the strongest reason for distrust. The gods never send us this invitation to delight so readily or so strongly as when they are preparing some new agony. We are their bubbles; they blow us big before they prick us.

I was afraid, now that we were almost at the Tree. I can hardly say of what, but I know that to find the bones, or even the body, would have set my fear at rest. I believe I had a senseless child’s fear that she might be neither living nor dead.

‘The god’s taken her,’ said he, rather pale and speaking low (he was a god-fearing man). ‘No natural beast would have licked his plate so clean. There’d be bones. A beast—any but the holy Shadowbrute itself—couldn’t have got the whole body out of the irons. And it would have left the jewels.

‘Yes, yes, Lady. We can search about,’ said Bardia. I knew it was only his kindness that spoke.

At the Offering, even the priests come no further than the Tree. We are very near the bad part of the Mountain—I mean the holy part. Beyond the Tree, it’s all gods’ country, they say.’