Till We Have Faces

by C.S. Lewis

But there is no judge between gods and men, and the god of the mountain will not answer me.

The god of the Grey Mountain, who hates me, is the son of Ungit.

“When I’m big,” she said, “I will be a great, great queen, married to the greatest king of all, and he will build me a castle of gold and amber up there on the very top.”

“Prettier than 32Andromeda, prettier than Helen, prettier than Aphrodite herself.”

“Babai!” said the Fox. “It is your words that are ill-omened. The divine nature is not like that. It has no envy.” But whatever he said, I knew it is not good to talk that way about Ungit.

“Daughter, it doesn’t matter a straw,” said the Fox. “The divine nature is without jealousy. Those gods—the sort of gods you are always thinking about—are all folly and lies of poets. We have discussed this a hundred times.”

That is why you angered Ungit just now, King, when you spoke of offering a thief. In the Great Offering the victim must be perfect. For in holy language a man so offered is said to be Ungit’s husband, and a woman is said to be the bride of Ungit’s son.

Our real enemy was not a mortal. The room was full of spirits, and the horror of holiness.

“But, Master, I’d lose not only my throne but my life to save the Princess, if I were a king and a father.

It’s only sense that one should die for many. It happens in every battle.”

I could talk no more at all now. The whole world seemed to me to be in my weeping.

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

He thought there were no gods, or else (the fool!) that they were better than men. It never entered his mind—he was too good—to believe that the gods are real, and viler than the vilest man.”

“Orual,” she said, her eyes shining. “I am going, you see, to the Mountain. You remember how we used to look and long? And all the stories of my gold and amber house, up there against the sky, where we thought we should never really go? The greatest King of all was going to build it for me. If only you could believe it,

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.84Do 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. All my life the god of the Mountain has been wooing me.

The nearest thing we have to a defence against them (but there is no89real 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.

Weakness, and work, are two comforts the gods have not taken from us. I’d

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

I said not long before that work and weakness are comforters. But sweat is the kindest creature of the three; far better than philosophy, as a cure for ill thoughts.

The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me; as if I could wander away, wander for ever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other to the world’s end.

I had misjudged the world; it seemed kind, and laughing, as if its heart also danced. Even my ugliness I could not quite believe in. 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.

I should be just like such a man if a mere burst of fair weather, and fresh grass after a long drought, and health after sickness, could make me friends again with this god-haunted, plague-breeding, decaying, tyrannous world.

The gods never send us this invitation to delight so readily or so strongly as when they are preparing some new agony.

It’s more likely everything that had happened to me before this was a dream.

This shame has nothing to do with He or She. It’s the being mortal; being, how shall I say it? . . . insufficient.

This valley was indeed a dreadful place; full of the divine, sacred, no place for mortals. There might be a hundred things in it that I could not see.

Seas, mountains, madness, death itself, could not have removed her from me to such a hopeless distance as this. Gods, and again gods,130 always gods . . . they had stolen her. They would leave us nothing.

The whole thing must be madness. I had been nearly as mad as she to think otherwise. At the very name madness the air of that valley seemed more breathable, seemed emptied of a little of its holiness and horror.

Either way, there’s divine mockery in it. They set the riddle and then allow a seeming that can’t be tested and can only quicken and thicken the tormenting whirlpool of your guess-work. If they had an honest intention to guide us, why is their guidance not plain? Psyche could speak plain when she was three; do you tell me the gods have not yet come so far?

I perceived now that there is a love deeper than theirs who seek only the happiness of their beloved.

“You don’t think—not possibly—not as a mere hundredth chance—there might be things that are real though we can’t see them?”

“I know well enough what you mean by it, Grandfather. But do you, even you, know all? Are there no things—I mean things— but what we see?”

“I’d be more likely to weep. Oh, child, child, child, when shall I have washed the nurse and the grandam and the priest and the soothsayer out of your soul? Do you think the Divine Nature— why, it’s profane, ridiculous. You might as well say the universe itched or the Nature of Things sometimes tippled in the wine cellar.”

“Filth? Perhaps I do not see it as you do. I am an alien and a slave myself; and ready to be a runaway—to risk the flogging and impaling—for your love and hers.”

“You don’t believe in the divine blood of our house,” I said. “Oh yes. Of all houses. All men are of divine blood, for there is the god in every man. We are all one. Even the man who has taken Psyche. I have called him rascal and villain. Too likely he is. But it may not be. A good man might be an outlaw and a runaway.”

And part of my mind now was saying, “Do not meddle. Anything might be true. You are among marvels that you do not understand. Carefully, carefully. Who knows what ruin you might pull down on her head and yours?”

You do not think I have left off loving you because I now have a husband to love as well? If you would understand it, that makes me love you—why, it makes me love everyone and everything—more.”

“But think, Psyche. Nothing that’s beautiful hides its face.

Nothing that’s honest hides its name.

Oh, Orual—to take my love for you, because you know it goes down to my very roots and cannot be diminished by any other, newer love, and then to make of it a tool, a weapon, a thing of policy and mastery, an instrument of torture . . . I begin to think I never knew you. Whatever comes after, something that was between us dies here.”

180My terror was the salute that mortal flesh gives to immortal things.

He rejected, denied, answered, and (worst of all) he knew, all I had thought, done or been.

Or, at least, had it been so in the very past, before this god changed the past? And if they can indeed change the past, why do they never do so in mercy?

It was unmoved and sweet; like a bird singing on the branch above a hanged man.

“Now Psyche goes out in exile. Now she must hunger and thirst and tread hard roads. Those against whom I cannot fight must do their will upon her. You, woman, shall know yourself and your work. You also shall be Psyche.”

If you heard the woman you most hate in the world weep so, you would go to comfort her. You would fight your way through fire and spears to reach her. And I knew who wept, and what had been done to her, and who had done it.

Now that I’d proved for certain that the gods are and that they hated me, it seemed that I had nothing to do but to wait for my punishment.

I now determined that I would go always veiled. I have kept this rule, within doors and without, ever since.

No one who had seen and heard the god could much fear this roaring old King.