S3E14 – TWHF (Pt 1, Ch 18-19) – “The Warrior Queen”

Orual undergoes her first major test of her queenship.

S3E14: “The Warrior Queen!” (Download)

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Time Stamps

01:08 – Drink-of-the-week
01:21 – Quote-of-the-week
05:40 – Chapter 18 Summary
36:06 – Chapter 19 Summary
49:29 – Closing remarks

YouTube Version

After Show Skype Session

This Season, after each episode, Matt and I will be recording a ten-minute Skype conversation:

Show Notes

• Matt had Herbal Tea and I was drinking Glenmorangie Lasanta

• Quote-of-the-week:

“I saw him again with Psyche on his knees; ‘Prettier than Aphrodite,’ he had said, ‘Yes, but that was Psyche,’ said my heart. ‘If she were still with us, he would stay. It was Psyche he loved. Never me.’ I knew while I said it that it was false, yet I would not, or could not, pit it out of my head.”

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 18)

• Matt told us about his talk at Notre Dame.

• I announced that we have a channel on Slack (available to Patreon subscribers) to ask Andrew Lazo questions about Till We Have Faces.

• I read my 150-word summary of Chapter 18:

After checking on the King, Orual meets Redival, afraid of what will happen to her when he dies, and curious as to the identity of the handsome man in the house! The Fox apologises to Orual for the pressure he put on her to abandon the duel. Bardia coaches her in anticipation of the fight, and gets her to slaughter a pig in preparation. As Queen, Orual grants the Fox his freedom, but is horrified to realize that he might leave. He comes to her later that evening to announce he will remain in Glome. After a night of restless thoughts, Orual visits Trunia. Redival arrives with wine for them, after which Trunia suggests a possible marriage. After some sword practice with Bardia, they go to the King’s bedchamber to find her some armour. While searching, the King dies, which results in only a brief pause before they resume their search.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 18)

• Orual is waiting for her father to die:

“…no lover nor doctor ever watched each change of a sick man’s breath and pulse so closely as I…”

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 18)

I said this reminded me of Monty Python:

Redival wants to know what will happen to them when the King dies:

“I shall be Queen, Redival. Your treatment shall be according to your behaviour.”

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 18)

Redival asks Orual to get her a husband:

“Yes; probably two,” said I. “I’ve a dozen sons of kings hanging in my wardrobe. But go.”

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 18)

• The Fox apologizes for trying to emotionally manipulate Orual the previous day:

“Daughter, I did badly last night. I think this offer to fight the Prince yourself is foolish and, what’s more, unseemly. But I was wrong to weep and beg and try to force you by your love. Love is not a thing to be so used.”

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 18)

• I noted the number of references to fine clothes mentioned in this chapter, and indeed, throughout the entire book.

• Prince Argan accepts the combat and says he’s going to hang the Queen rather than stain his sword. Orual throws some shade in return…

“That’s a weapon in which I profess no skill,” said I. “And therefore it’s barely justice that your master should bring it. But then he’s older than I (his first battle was, I think, long ago), so we’ll concede it to make up for his years.”

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 18)

• Orual notes the Fox’s growing discomfort and her transition into The Queen:

The Fox, I could see, was in great pain while all these provisions were being made, the thing growing more real and more irrevocable at each word. I was mostly the Queen now, but Orual would whisper a cold word in the Queen’s ear at times.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 18)

• Arnom arrives, dressed in the priest’s robes, indicating that the old priest has died. After an initial shock of seeing him dressed like that, Orual realizes that things will be different under his priesthood, noting:

He would never be terrible like the old Priest. He was only Arnom, with whom I had driven a very good bargain yesterday; there was no feeling that Ungit came into the room with him.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 18)

• While Arnam and the Fox go into the bedchamber, Bardia takes Orual outside to talk. His focus is preparing her to take the life of Argan and not to hesitate:

“…believe me, it’s a hard thing to do; I mean, the first time. There’s something in a man that goes against it”

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 18)

Orual doesn’t think she’d hesitate, and thinks about stabbing the King to test this hypothesis! Bardia says that, regardless, he’s going to send her through “the exercise” which he makes all recruits go through: the slaughtering of a pig. Orual writes:

I saw in a flash that if I shrank from this there would at once be less Queen and more Orual in me.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 18)

She kills the pig and plans to share the choicest parts with Bardia, the Fox and Trunia if she survives the combat.

• Making the most of her time as Queen, Orual declares the Fox a free man:

Next moment I was plunged in despair. I cannot now understand how I had been so blind as not to foresee it. My only thought had been to save him from being mocked and neglected and perhaps sold by Redival if I were dead…

“Grandfather!” I cried, no Queen now; all Orual, even all child. “Do they mean you’ll leave me? Go away?”

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 18)

The Fox is overwhelmed:

“You mean I could . . . I can . . . it wouldn’t matter much even if I died on the way. Not if I could get down to the sea. There’d be tunnies, olives. No, it’d be too early in the year for olives. But the smell of the harbours. And walking about the market talking, real talk. But you don’t know, this is all foolishness, none of you know. I should be thanking you, daughter. But if ever you loved me, don’t speak to me now. Tomorrow. Let me go.” He pulled his cloak over his head and groped his way out of the room.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 18)

• The pause is torturous to Orual:

And now this game of queenship, which had buoyed me up and kept me busy ever since I woke that morning, failed me utterly. We had made all our preparations for the combat. There was the rest of the day, and the whole of the next, to wait; and hanging over it, this new desolation, that if I lived I might have to live without the Fox

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 18)

• Orual goes for a walk, avoiding the area where she used to spend time with Psyche and Fox.

It embittered me that the Fox should even desire to leave me. He had been the central pillar of my whole life, something (I thought) as sure and established, and indeed as little thanked, as sunrise and the mere earth. In my folly I had thought I was to him as he was to me. “Fool!” said I to myself. “Have you not yet learned that you are that to no one? What are you to Bardia? as much perhaps as the old King was. His heart lies at home with his wife and her brats. If you mattered to him he’d never have let you fight. What are you to the Fox? His heart was always in the Greeklands. You were, maybe, the solace of his captivity. They say a prisoner will tame a rat. He comes to love the rat — after a fashion. But throw the door open, strike off his fetters, and how much’ll he care for the rat then?” And yet, how could he leave us, after so much love? I saw him again with Psyche on his knees; “Prettier than Aphrodite,” he had said. “Yes, but that was Psyche,” said my heart. “If she were still with us, he would stay. It was Psyche he loved. Never me.”

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 18)

The Fox comes to her that evening, very grave and quiet, as though he had been tortured. After reciting some proverbs, he says he’s going to stay.

…he went on, making little of his deed, as if he feared I would dissuade him from it. But I, with my face on his breast, felt only the joy.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 18)

• Orual has a restless night, thinking over all the recent, strange changes in life. She writes:

It was so new and strange that I could not, that night, even feel my great sorrow. This astonished me. One part of me made to snatch that sorrow back; it said, “Orual dies if she ceases to love Psyche.” But the other said, “Let Orual die. She would never have made a queen.”

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 18)

• On the day before the battle, crowds of the People begin to form. Members of the aristocracy visit her and she comments that they were all clearly intrigued by her veil and what lay behind it. Orual visits Trunia and tells him that a champion will fight for him. She calls for wine and, surprise, surprise, Redival enters carrying it in! Orual is both unsurprised and surprised at how she behaves:

I knew her well enough to guess that once there was a strange man in the house she’d eat her way through stone walls in order to be seen. Yet even I was astonished to see what a meek, shy, modest, dutiful younger sister (perhaps even a somewhat down-trodden and spirit-broken sister) she could make of herself carrying that wine, with her downcast eyes (which missed nothing from Trunia’s bandaged foot to the hair of his head) and her child’s gravity.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 18)

The Prince suggests marriage to Orual and, when rebuffed, Redival. Orual thinks the Trunia is too good for her sister, but agrees!

• Bardia takes Orual on one last sword practice. He has two other things to say: He tells her not to head the fear, if she feels it, when she steps out into the ring. He wants her to replace her hauberk with something better befitting a question and a champion. They go into the King’s bedchamber to look for something better. Orual writes:

 The Fox was sitting by the bedside — why, or with what thoughts, I don’t know. It was not possible he should love his old master.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 18)

• They start looking through his armour…

And it was when we were most busied that the Fox’s voice from behind said, “It’s finished.” We turned and looked. The thing on the bed which had been half-alive for so long was dead; had died (if he understood it) seeing a girl ransacking his armoury. “Peace be upon him,” said Bardia. “We’ll be done here very shortly. Then the women can come and wash the body.” And we turned again at once to settle the matter of the hauberks.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 18)

Note “the women” and the poor love they have for the King. She comments how little impact the death of even better men makes.

• I then read my 150-word summary of Chapter 19:

After considerable preparations have been made, there is a royal procession to the duel. At the field of combat, Anom (the priest) offers a sacrifice. The final preparations are made and then the trumpets sound to indicate the beginning of the duel between the Queen and Argan. Trunia is stunned to see that the veiled Queen will be his champion. Orual and Argan fight and she defeats him with relative ease, striking a fatal blow to his thigh. Afterwards she mounts a horse and addresses the people. While Orual would infinitely prefer an intimate dinner with close friends, it is expected for her to host a large feast. Since his wife has just entered labour, Bardia does not attend. As the feast turns into a drunken mess, the Queen departs to her private quarters.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 19)

• Although the fight only lasted ten minutes, the preparations were many. Orual tries to get the Fox to don splendid dress…

But you never had more trouble with a peevish girl going to her first feast.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 19)

• Bardia wants Orual to fight without a veil, but Orual refuses. The resulting appearance made her look quit terrible They try to get Trunia to dress up as well…

“Whether your champion kills or is killed,” he said, “I’ll fare no better in purple than in my old battle order…”

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 19)

• There is a royal procession out to the battlefield. Orual is put in mind of the times when Psyche went out, both to heal the people and then to be sacrificed. She wonders whether this is what the god meant when he said “You too shall be Psyche”. The Lords were grave (unconvinced of Orual’s ability), but the people were excited:

Any fight was a free show for them; and a fight of a woman with a man better still because an oddity — as those who can’t tell one tune from another will crowd to hear the harp if a man plays it with his toes

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 19)

• There is a sacrifice and some more pageantry and finally it begins. Trunia is shocked to see that his champion is, in fact, the Queen. Trunia stunned to see the Queen is his champion:

The men from Phars roared with laughter. Our mob cheered. Argan was within ten paces of me, then five; then we were at it.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 19)

• Argan begins in a cocky fashion, but after Orual grazes him, he takes it more seriously. Orual comments that it seems like any other match with Bardia, rather than a battle-to-the-death. She is a little worried that Argan’s superior strength may win out, but she noticed a change in him – he realized that he was going to die. The Queen defeats him pretty easily, with a clean shot to his leg. She even comments that she was less splattered with blood than when she killed the pig.

I felt of a sudden very weak and my legs were shaking; and I felt myself changed too, as if something had been taken away from me. I have often wondered if women feel like that when they lose their virginity.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 19)

Reminded me of the song “You know my name” by Chris Cornell:

If you take a life do you know what you’ll give? Odds are you won’t like what it is

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 19)

The Fox and Bardia rush up:

Bardia (the Fox close behind him) came running up to me, with tears in his eyes and joy all over his face. “Blessed! Blessed!” he cried.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 19)

Remember what they called Psyche?

• The Queen addresses the men from Phars. Bardia tells her that it’s now necessary that she hold a feast in the Palace. Orual doesn’t want to. She wants a quiet night and is worried about what supplies they have. Prince Trunia continues his attentions and Orual quite enjoys it. Orual actually says she’s happy, but of course blames the gods for what happens next…

• Bardia comes up to the Queen and says:

“Queen, the day’s work is over. You’ll not need me now. I’d take it very kindly if you’ll let me go home. My wife’s taken with her pains. We had thought it could not be so soon. I’d be glad to be with her tonight.” …

I understood in that moment all my father’s rages. I put terrible constraint on myself and said, “Why, Bardia, it is very fit you should. Commend me to your wife. And offer this ring to Ungit for her safe delivery.” The ring which I took off my finger was the choicest I had…

His thanks were hearty yet he had hardly time to utter them before he was speeding away. I suppose he never dreamed what he had done to me with those words The day’s work is over. Yes, that was it — the day’s work. I was his work; he earned his bread by being my soldier. When his tale of work for the day was done, he went home like other hired men and took up his true life.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 19)

• Orual hates it. Hates the men and the drunkenness. She has too much to drink and fantasizes about Bardia being her husband, giving birth to Psyche. She heads to bed and pushes aside the thoughts of Psyche.

There’s the crying again. No, it’s only the buckets at the well. “Shut the window, Poobi. To your bed, child. Do you love me, Poobi? Kiss me good night. Good night.” The King’s dead. He’ll never pull my hair again. A straight thrust and then a cut in the leg. That would have killed him. I am the Queen; I’ll kill Orual too.

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (Chapter 19)

• I wrapped up the episode by reading a poem from Kahlil Gibran:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;

For even as He loves the arrow that flies,

so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (“Children”)

• Next week we’ll be reading Chapter 20 and Chapter 21!