by Mary Renault
She rolled in her red hair, laughing in sobs, catching her breath with shrill crowing gasps, the pitch of her laughter mounting louder and higher. The boy, to whom this was new, knelt by her in stifling terror, pulling at her hands, kissing her sweat-smeared face, calling in her ear to her to stop, to speak to him; he was here with her, he, Alexander; she must not go mad or he would die.
At last she moaned deeply, sat up, gathered him in her arms and stroked her cheek against his head. Weak with relief, he lay against her with closed eyes. “Poor boy, poor child. It was only the laughing-sickness; that is what he has brought me to. I should be ashamed, before anyone but you; but you know what I have to bear. See, darling, I know you, I am not mad. Though he would gladly see it, the man who calls himself your father.”
He opened his eyes and sat up. “When I’m a man, I’ll see right done you.”
“Ah, he does not guess what you are. But I know. I and the god.”
He asked no question. Enough had happened. Later, in the night, when, empty with vomiting, he lay dry-lipped in bed listening to the distant roar of the feast, her words came back to him.
Next day the games began. The two-horse chariots ran their laps, the dismounter leaping off and running with the car and vaulting on again. Phoinix, who had noticed the boy’s hollow eyes and guessed the cause, was glad to see him held by it.
He woke just before midnight, thinking of his mother. He got out of bed and dressed. He had dreamed she called to him from the sea, like the goddess mother of Achilles. He would go to her, and ask her what she had meant last night.
Her room was empty. Only an old crone, belonging to the house, crept muttering about, picking things up; they had all forgotten her. She looked at him with a little wet red eye, and said the Queen had gone to the Hekate shrine.
He slipped out into the night, among the drunks and whores and soldiers and pickpurses. He needed to see her, whether she saw him or not. He knew the way to the crossroads.
The city gates stood open for the festival. Far ahead were the black cloaks and the torch. It was a Hekate night, moonless; they did not see him stalking them. She had to fend for herself, because she had not a son of age to help her. It was his business, what she did.
She had made her women wait, and gone on alone. He skirted the oleanders and the tamarisks, to the shrine with its three-faced image. She was there, with something whining and whimpering in her hands. She set her torch in the sooty socket by the altar-slab. She was all in black, and what she held was a young black dog. She held it up by the nape, and hacked a knife at its throat. It writhed and squealed, the whites of its eyes shone in the torchlight. Now she grasped it by its hind feet, jerking and choking while the blood ran down; when it only twitched, she laid it down on the altar. Kneeling before the image, she beat her fists on the ground. He heard the furious whisper, soft as a snake’s, rise to a howl the dog itself might have made; the unknown words of the incantation, the known words of the curse. Her long hair trailed in the puddled blood; when she got up the ends were sticky, and her hands were clotted with black.
When it was over he tracked her home, keeping himself hidden. She looked familiar again, in her black cloak, walking among her women. He did not want to let her out of his sight.
Next day Epikrates said to Phoinix, “You must spare him to me today. I want to take him to the music contest.” He had meant to go with friends, with whom he could discuss technique; but the boy’s looks disturbed him. Like everyone else, he had heard the talk.
It was the contest for the kitharists. There was hardly a leading artist from the mainland or Greek Asia or the cities of Sicily and Italy, who had not come. The unguessed-at beauty caught the boy up, breaking his mood and throwing him straight into ecstasy. So Hektor, stunned by Ajax’ great stone, had looked up at a voice that raised the hair on his head, and found Apollo standing by him.
After this, he took up his life much as before. His mother reminded him often with a sigh or a meaning look; but the shock had passed the worst, his body was strong and his age resilient; he sought healing as nature taught him. On the footslopes of Mount Olympos, he rode with Phoinix through chestnut groves, chanting line for line of Homer, first in Macedonian and then in Greek.
Phoinix would gladly have kept him from the women’s rooms. But if once the Queen mistrusted his loyalty, the boy would be lost to him forever. She must not look for her son in vain. At least he seemed now to come away in better spirits.
He had found her busy with some plan which made her almost cheerful. He had waited in dread, at first, for her to come with her midnight torch, and fetch him to the Hekate shrine. She had never yet bade him call down a curse himself upon his father; the night they went to the tomb, he had only had to hold things and stand by.
Time passed; it was clearly no such thing; at last he even questioned her. She smiled, the subtle shadows curving under her cheekbones. He should know in good time, and it would surprise him. It was a service she had vowed to Dionysos; she promised he should be there. His spirits lightened. It must be the dancing for the god. These last two years she had been saying he was too old for women’s mysteries. He was eight now. It had been bitter to think that Kleopatra would soon go with her instead.
Like the King, she gave audience to many foreign guests. Aristodemos the tragedian had come not to perform, but as a diplomat, a role often entrusted to well-known actors; he was arranging ransoms for Athenians taken at Olynthos. A slender elegant man, he managed his voice like a polished flute; one could almost see him caress it. Alexander admired the good sense of his mother’s questions about the theater. Later she received Neoptolemos of Skyros, a protagonist even more distinguished, who was rehearsing for The Bakchai, playing the god. This time, the boy was absent.
He would not have known his mother was working magic, if he had not heard her through the door one day. Though the wood was thick, he caught some of the incantation. It was one he did not know, about killing a lion on the mountain; but the meaning was always the same. So he went away without knocking.
It was Phoinix who roused him at dawn to see the play. He was too young for the chairs of honor; he would sit with his father when he came of age. He had asked his mother if he could sit with her, as he had done till only last year; but she said she would not be watching, she had other business then. He must tell her afterwards how he had liked it.
He loved the theater; waking to a treat which would begin at once; the sweet morning smells, dew-laid dust, grass and herbs bruised by many feet, the smoke of the early workers’ torches just quenched at daybreak; people clambering down the tiers, the deep buzz of the soldiers and peasants up at the top, the fuss with cushions and rugs down among the seats of honor, the chatter from the women’s block; then suddenly the first notes of the flute, all other sound dying but the morning birdsong.
The play began eerily in the dawn-dusk; the god, masked as a beautiful fair-haired youth, saluting the fire on his mother’s tomb, and planning revenge on the Theban King who scorned his rites. His young voice, the boy perceived, was being skillfully done by a man; his maenads had flat breasts, and cool boys’ voices; but, this knowledge once stored away, he gave himself to the illusion.
Dark-haired young Pentheus spoke wickedly of the maenads and their rites. The god was bound to kill him. Several friends had described the plot beforehand. Pentheus’ death was the most dreadful one could conceive; but Phoinix had promised one did not see it.
While the blind prophet rebuked the King, Phoinix whispered that this old voice from the mask was the same actor’s who played the youthful god; such was the tragedian’s art. When Pentheus had died offstage, this actor too would change masks, and enact the mad queen Agave.
Imprisoned by the King, the god broke out with fire and earthquake; the effects, set up by Athenian craftsmen, entranced the boy. Pentheus, defying miracles, infatuate for doom, still rejected the divinity. His last chance gone, Dionysos wound him in deadly magic and stole his wits away. He
saw two suns in the sky; thought he could move mountains; yet let the mocking god disguise him absurdly as a woman, to spy on the maenad rites. The boy joined in the laughter whose edge was sharpened by the sense of terrors to come.
The King went off to his agony; the chorus sang; then the Messenger brought the news. Pentheus had climbed a tree to spy from; the maenads had seen him, and in their god-crazed strength uprooted it. His mad mother, seeing only a wild beast, had led them to tear him in pieces. It was over, and as Phoinix had said, need not be seen. The mere telling had been enough.
Agave was coming, cried the Messenger, with the trophy of her kill.
They ran in through the parodos in bloody robes. Queen Agave carried the head, spiked on a spear as hunters did it. It was made of the Pentheus mask and wig with stuffing in them, and bits of red rag hanging down. She wore a terrible mad mask, with an agonized brow, deep staring eyes and frenziedly grimacing mouth. From this mouth came a voice. At its first words, he sat as if he too had seen two suns in the sky. He was not far above the stage; his ears and eyes were sharp. The wig of her mask was fair; but in its streaming tresses live hair was spilling through, the dark red showed clearly. The Queen’s arms were bare. He knew them; even their bracelets.
The players, enacting shock and horror, drew back to give her the stage. The audience began to buzz; they had heard at once, after the sexless boys, that this was a real woman. Who…what…? The boy seemed to himself to have been hours alone with his knowledge, before questions began to get answers and the word ran round. It spread like a brush fire; good eyes insisting to dim ones, the women’s high chatter and outraged sibilance; the deep ebb-shoal murmur from the men above; from the seats of honor, a stunned dead silence.
The boy sat as if his own head had been transfixed. His mother tossed her hair and gestured at the bleeding trophy; She had grown into the dreadful mask, it had become her face. He broke his nails, gripping the edge of his stone seat.
The flautist blew on his double pipes; she sang:
I am exalted,
Great upon earth!
Let men praise me—
This hunt was mine!
Two rows down, the boy saw his father’s back, as he turned towards a guest beside him. His face was out of sight.
The curse in the tomb, the black dog’s blood, the thorn-pierced mammet, had all been secret rites. This was the Hekate spell by daylight, a sacrifice for a death. The head on the Queen’s spear was her son’s.
It was the voices all around that roused him from the nightmare. They waked him into another. They rose like the hum of flies disturbed from carrion, almost drowning the actors’ lines.
It was of her they were talking, not of Queen Agave in the play. They were talking of her! The southerners who said Macedon was barbarous; the lords and farmers and peasants. The soldiers were talking.
A sorceress they might call her. The goddesses worked magic. This was another thing; he knew these voices. So the men of the phalanx talked in the guardroom, about a women half of them had had; or some village wife with a bastard.
Phoinix too was suffering. A steady man rather than a quick one, he had been stunned at first; he had not thought even Olympias capable of such wildness. Without doubt, she had vowed this to Dionysos while giddy with wine and dancing at her rites. He began to put out a hand for comfort; looked again and refrained.
Queen Agave came out of frenzy to knowledge and despair; the relentless god appeared above, to close the play. The chorus sang the tag-lines.
The gods have many faces,
And many fates fulfill,
To work their will.
The end expected comes not;
God brings the unthought to be,
As here we see.
It was finished; but no one stirred to go. What would she do? She made a reverence to the cult-statue of Dionysos in the orchestra, before sweeping out with the others; some extra picked up the head; it was clear she would not return. From high up in the faceless crush of men came a long shrill whistle.
The protagonist came back to take absent-minded applause. He had not been at his best, with this freak on his mind; however, it had been made well worth his while.
The boy rose, without looking at Phoinix. Chin up, looking straight ahead, he thrust his way through the lingering, chattering crowd. All along their way, talk stopped for them; but not soon enough. Just outside the propylon, he turned round, looked Phoinix in the face, and said, “She was better than the actors.”
“Yes indeed. The god inspired her. It was her dedication to do him honor. Such offerings are very pleasing to Dionysos.”
They came out into the square of tramped earth outside the theater. The women, in twittering groups, were drifting homeward, the men standing about. Close by, exempt from convention, stood a cluster of well-dressed hetairas, expensive girls from Ephesos and Corinth, who served the officers at Pella. One said in a sweet carrying voice, “Poor dear little lad, you can see he feels it.” Without turning, the boy walked on.
They were nearly out of the press; Phoinix was starting to breathe more easily, then found him gone. How not, indeed? But no; there he was not twenty feet off, near a huddle of talking men. Phoinix heard their laughter; he ran, but was still too late.
The man who had spoken the last and unambiguous word, had been aware of nothing amiss. But another, whose back was to the boy, felt a quick low tug at his sword belt. Looking about at man-height, he was only just in time to knock up the boy’s arm. The man who had spoken got the dagger along his side, instead of straight in his belly.
It had been so swift and silent, no bystander had turned. The group stood stock-still; the stabbed man with a snake of blood running down his leg; the dagger’s owner, who had grabbed the boy before he saw who it was, gazing blankly at the stained weapon in his hand; Phoinix behind the boy, both hands on his shoulders; the boy staring into the face of the wounded man, and finding it one he knew. The man, clutching the warm ooze from his side, stared back in astonishment and pain; then with a shock of recognition.
Breath was drawn in all round. Before anyone spoke, Phoinix lifted his hand as if he had been at war; his square face grew bulllike, they would hardly have known him. “It will be better for you all to keep your mouths shut.” He pulled at the boy, breaking off the exchange of looks still unresolved, and led him away.
Knowing nowhere else to hide him, he took him to his own lodging in the one good street of the little town. The small room was frowsty with old wool, old scrolls, old bedding, and the ointment Phoinix rubbed on his stiff knees. On the bed, with its blanket of blue and red squares, the boy fell face down and lay soundless. Phoinix patted his shoulders and his head, and, when he broke into convulsive weeping, gathered him up.
Beyond this instant and its needs, the man saw no call to look. His love, being sexless, seemed to him proved selfless. Certainly he would have given all he had, shed his own blood. Much less was wanted now, only comfort and a healing word.
“A filthy fellow. Small loss if you had killed him. No man of honor could let it pass…A godless fellow who mocks a dedication…There, my Achilles, don’t weep that the warrior came out in you. He’ll mend, it’s more than he deserves; and keep quiet if he knows what’s good for him. No one shall hear a word from me.”
The boy choked into Phoinix’ shoulder. “He made me my bow.”
“Throw it out, I’ll get you a better.”
There was a pause. “It wasn’t said to me. He didn’t know I was there.”
“And who wants such a friend?”
“He wasn’t ready.”
“Nor were you, to hear him.”
Gently, with a careful courtesy, the boy disengaged himself, and lay down again with his face hidden. Presently he sat up, wiping his hand across his eyes and nose. Phoinix wrung out a towel from the ewer and cleaned his face. He sat staring, saying “Thank you” now and then.
Phoinix got out his best silver cup from his pillow-box, and the last of
his breakfast wine. The boy drank, with a little coaxing; it seemed to run straight through to his skin, flushing his drawn face, his throat and breast. Presently he said, “He insulted my kin. But he wasn’t ready.” He shook out his hair, pulled down his creased chiton, retied a loosened sandal string. “Thank you for having me in your house. Now I am going to ride.”
“Now that’s foolish. You’ve had no breakfast yet.”
“I have had enough, thank you. Goodbye.”
“Wait, then, I’ll change and go with you.”
“No, thank you. I want to go alone.”
“No, no; let’s be quiet awhile, read, or go walking—”
“Let me go.”
Phoinix’ hand withdrew like a scared child’s.
Later, going to see, he found the boy’s riding-boots gone, his pony, his practice javelins. Phoinix hurried about for word of him. He had been seen above the town, riding towards Mount Olympos.
It still wanted some hours to noon. Phoinix, waiting his return, heard people agree that the Queen had done this outlandish thing as an offering. Epirotes were mystai with their mothers’ milk, but it would do her no good with Macedonians. The King had put the best face he could on it for the guests, and been civil to Neoptolemos the tragedian. And where was young Alexander?
Oh, gone riding, answered Phoinix, hiding his mounting fear. What had possessed him, to let the boy walk off like a grown man? He should not have let him a moment out of his sight. No use to follow; in the huge Olympian massif, two armies could be hidden from one another. There were fathomless crags, whose feet were inaccessible; there were boar, wolves, leopards; even lions lived there still.