The Bull from the Sea

by Mary Renault

  On the way home, I put in at Troizen with my uncles and my cousins, to greet my grandfather for the first time since I left his house. He was at the harbor mole waiting to meet me; a tall stooped old warrior, in his state robes. Last time I had seen him so, it was to receive the King of Pylos; and while we waited for the guest, he had sent me off again to comb my hair. That had been four years back, when I was fifteen.

  The youths unyoked the horses and pulled the chariot up through the Eagle Gate, with roseleaves and myrtles falling, and paeans sung. On the Palace steps stood my mother waiting. When we had parted, she had come straight from taking the omens for me at the Mother’s altar; her flounces had clashed with gold, and about her diadem had clung the smell of incense. Now there were ribbons and violets in her hair and her skirts were stitched with flowers; she held in her hand a garland to crown me. Her beauty dazzled me; and then, when I came close to kiss her, I saw the last bloom of her youth was gone.

  After the feast in Hall, my grandfather took me to his upper room. The stool was gone where I used to sit at his feet, and the chair brought in which he kept for kings.

  “So, Theseus,” he said. “High King of Attica, High King of Crete. What now?”

  “High King of Crete, Grandfather, and King of Athens. High King of Attica is a word, no more. That comes next.”

  “The Attic team will be hard to yoke together; ill-matched and rough. As they are now, they will pay your tithes and fight your enemies. That is much, in Attica.”

  Too little. The House of Minos stood for a thousand years, because Crete had one law.”

  “Yet it has fallen.”

  “For want of law enough. It stopped with the serfs and the slaves. Men are dangerous who have nothing left to lose.”

  He raised his brows. It was the look of a grandfather at a boy; but he said no more.

  I said, “The King should have looked after them. Not only to quiet them; they were his charge. Don’t we say all helpless folk—the orphan, the stranger, the suppliant, who have nothing to bargain with and can only pray—are sacred to Zeus the Savior? The King must answer for them; he is next the god. For the serfs, the landless hirelings, the captives of the spear; even the slaves.”

  He was slow to speak. Then he said, “You are your own master now, Theseus, and many men’s beside. But I have lived longer, and this I tell you: nothing is stronger in men than the will to possess their own. Touch it, and you will make enemies who will bide their time. And are you a king to sit quiet at home five years together? Beware of malice at your back.”

  “I will, sir,” I said. “I don’t want to work anyone against the grain. All those customs they brought from their first lands; the little old goddess at the fourways, the village sacrifice, are a home roof to them against the naked wind. I have known exile too. But they live in fear, from chief to pig-boy: of the raider from over the hill, the grinding master whose hired hands sweat all day for the scrapings of the pot, the brawling neighbor who kills the straying sheep and beats the shepherd. I will give them justice between chief and chief, craftsman and craftsman, if they will come to me for it. I killed Prokrustes, to show I can make it good. I think they will come.”

  He nodded, thinking. He was old; but like every man good at his trade, he was ready to hear of something new.

  “Men could be more than they are,” I said. I learned that in the Bull Court, when I trained my team. There is a faith, there is a pride, which has to be acted first and grows by doing.”

  I saw his forehead wrinkle. He was trying to see me, his grandson and a king, in a life he only knew from songs and wall-pictures: a jewelled mountebank vaulting bulls before base-born crowds, eating and sleeping and training with people from everywhere, sons of hanged pirates, barbarous Scythians, wild Amazon girls taken in war. It shocked him past talking of, that I had been a slave. He was wiser than the bull-girls’ kindred, and much better; but he did not understand. There was no life like that glory in the dust.

  So I talked to him of his sons’ deeds in battle, praising the best as they deserved, for I knew he had not yet chosen out his heir. They were all sons of his Palace women; of his queen’s children only my mother had lived past childhood. As a boy, before I knew my own getting, I had thought he would choose me; but you could not expect him to leave the land to an absent lord, and I wanted him to know I had no more thought of it.

  After this I went to look for my mother. They told me she had gone to sacrifice. I asked if nobody knew where she was, for night was falling; but they said I should find her at sunup in the wood of Zeus. So I looked out a girl who showed me she had not forgotten me, and went to bed.

  At morning I went up through the hillside woods, by the path above the stream. At first the woods were open, the clearings loud with birds; then the ancient forest grew high and met above. Grass-blades were thin and pale, and wet black oak leaves lay in the falls of years, roots arched among them like stiffened serpents. I threaded the winding path that is never trodden clear but never quite grows over, till I came to the holy place where Zeus struck down the oak tree. It had spread wide, before its death, and still there was open sky there. Between its roots was the stone where my father had left his tokens for me, when I came to manhood. My mother stood beside it.

  I stepped forward smiling; then my arms fell down. She had on her priestly robes and her tall diadem worked with gold snakes; I saw she was purified for some holy rite, and not to be touched by the hand of man. Before I could speak, she motioned with her eyes. There were two priestesses standing in the grove, an old woman and a maid of thirteen or fourteen years. They had a covered basket such as sacred things are carried in; the crone was whispering to the maiden, who stared past her with great eyes at me.

  My mother said, “Come, Theseus. This place belongs to Zeus, and is for men: we must go to another shrine.”

  She turned towards a path that ran deep into the thicket. A night-bird’s feather seemed to brush me coldly. I said, “What is it, Mother?” although I knew. She answered, “This is not the place to speak in. Come.”

  I followed her into the green shades; out of sight behind I heard the old woman and the girl murmuring, or stepping on twigs and leaves. Presently we came to a tall gray rock. There was a carving on it, old and worn, of a great open eye. I stood still, knowing that this was a place of the Goddess, forbidden to men. The path bent round beyond; but I turned my eyes from it and waited. The priestesses had sat down, just out of hearing, on a mossy stone. Even now my mother did not speak.

  “Mother,” I said, “why are you bringing me before Her? Have I not toiled in Her lands and suffered, and lived with my life on my fingers’ ends? Is it not enough?”

  “Hush,” she said. “You know what you have done.” She looked sidelong at the stone and the path beyond it, and drew me a little away from them into the wood, whispering, and moving softly. When she stood near, I saw I had grown an inch while I was in Crete. But I felt no bigger for it.

  In Eleusis, when you had wrestled with the Year King and he was dead, you married the sacred Queen. But before your year was out you overthrew her, and set up the rule of men. In Athens, Medea the High Priestess fled for her life from you…”

  “She tried to murder me!” I did not speak very loud, but in the quiet I seemed to be shouting. “The Queen of Eleusis plotted with her, that I should die by my own father’s hand. Did you send me to him for that? You are my mother!”

  She pressed her hand to her head a moment, then said, I am a servant here. I speak as I am bidden.” She sighed deeply, with all her body. It was this great heaviness, more than her words, that chilled my blood. “And in Crete,” she said, “you took away Thrice-Holy Ariadne, Goddess on Earth, from the Mother’s sanctuary. Where is she now?”

  “I left her on Naxos, at the island shrine. Do you know the rite there, Mother? Do you know how the Wine King dies? She took to it like a fish to the sea, though she had been reared softly, knowing nothing of such things. There is rotten blood in th
e House of Minos. I will leave my kingdom better stock, when I come to breed.”

  I felt the great carved eye upon the rock boring my back, and turned to face it. It stared back, a dry eye of stone. Then I heard a sound, and saw the eyes of my mother weeping.

  I stretched out my hands; but she stepped back, one arm waving me off, the other hiding her face.

  After a while I said, “You taught me a kinder Goddess, when I was a child.”

  “You were Hers then,” she said. The eye stared out beyond me. I turned, and saw the two priestesses watching. All the wood seemed eyes.

  She turned to the stone, and made a curving sign. Then she leaned down and searched the earth, and rose with both hands full. One held a sprouting acorn, the other dead leaves that were going back to mold again. She set them down, and took my arm signing for silence, and led me off a little way. Peering through the trees I saw fox-cubs playing, soft pretty things. Near them on the ground, half eaten, was a young dead hare. My mother turned back towards the stone. The hairs on my arms rose up with gooseflesh, and stirred in the faint airs of the wood.

  I said, “Then what must I offer Her?”

  “Her altar is within Her children. She takes Her due.”

  “Poseidon is my birth-god,” I said; “Apollo made me a man, and Zeus a king. There is not much woman in me.”

  She answered, “Apollo, who understands all mysteries, says also, ‘Nothing too much.’ He is knowledge, Theseus; but She is what he knows.”

  “If prayers cannot move Her, why have you brought me here?”

  She sighed and said, “All gods are moved by the appointed sacrifice.” She pointed to the path that led beyond the rock. “The Shore Folk say that before the gods made their fathers from sown pebbles, this was a shrine of the earth-born Titans, who ran upon their hands and fought with the trunks of trees.”

  I would have spoken, though I had nothing to say, only to call her back to what I knew; she had gone into deep waters, while I was away. But the seer and the priestess wrapped her round; she went on to the staring rock, and I followed dumbly. The two priestesses had risen and came after.

  At the rock she said, “When we have passed the Gate, say nothing, whatever you hear or see. No man may speak here. A sacrifice will be given you. Offer it in silence. Above all, that which is hidden do not uncover. The Dark Mother does not show Herself to men.”

  Beyond the rock the path went down into a gully, the deep bed of an old stream. Above the steep sides, trees met; the shadows were green and watery; the stones seemed dry till one trod in a hidden pool or heard a secret trickle. The rocks narrowed; there was a rope across, tied in a curious knot. My mother pulled it somewhere, and it fell apart. As we passed it, she pressed a finger to her lips.

  Our feet slipped ankle-deep in water, the cleft sides stood three-man-high above our heads. Then they opened; there was a round rock-walled space, with trees growing in its sides. In the far wall, a little way up, there was a cave. The stream ran out from it, murmuring and chuckling; and mossy, low steps ran up, towards the dark within.

  My mother pointed away, to a space between two boulders. I went there, my backbone feeling cold; but there was only a wild pig tethered. I dragged him out; by a slab below the steps the old priestess stood with a cleaver. There was black blood upon the stone. The boar snorted and tugged; the thought of his screaming froze me. I used all my strength, and clove his neck to the windpipe. His breath hissed, mingled with blood which ran into the earth. He died; and I saw in the mouth of the cave the three faces waiting: the green maiden, the woman, the crone. My mother beckoned.

  It was dark in the cave. Further on, it sloped downwards into blackness. The stream, scouring one side, had smoothed itself a channel stained yellow and red. Baskets stood on the floor, of grain, of shrivelled roots and leaves; some were covered over. On the shadowy walls dim things were hanging: cloths or robes, or sacks of worked leather. On the other side of the stream, behind a jutting rock which cut off the light, was a curtain of kidskin hung over a wooden frame. A stone slab showed under it, like the foot of an altar.

  They began the rites of appeasement. I was marked with the dead boar’s blood, then washed with water from the stream; my head by the crone, my right hand by my mother. Then the maid came to wash my left. She was dark and slight, a girl of the Shore Folk with eyes like forest water, shy and unguarded. They gazed at me as she came up, gangling as a hound-pup and as tenderly made. In this awesome place I had forgotten my deeds and my fame. But this girl remembered.

  I let my hand fall. She paused; then took it timidly in hers to hold it for the washing. Her brow flushed, then her face and her breast. But she kept her eyes down, and put away her pitcher neatly.

  The rites were long. The women passed and repassed the screened-off altar. Things were brought out and censed and sprinkled, taken back and hidden. I watched my mother, thinking how I had seen her year after year since boyhood, splendidly robed, her jewelled skirts clashing and swinging, making the harvest sacrifice upon the threshing floor in the bright sunlight; and all the while these secrets in her heart.

  Fire crackled behind the curtain; there was a smell of burning gums and leaves. The pungent smoke itched my nose and throat. Where I had been in awe, I began to weary. The maiden passed behind the screen and I watched for her returning, thinking of her young coltish thighs and soft breasts. She came; and by chance or because she could not help it, her eyes met mine. My mother was not looking; I smiled, and moved my lips in a kiss. She looked down confused; and not watching where she went, brushed the screen with her shoulder. It tottered and fell down.

  In the bull ring and out, I had lived hard that last year, with my life hanging on a quick eye. I had looked before I knew.

  The Goddess sat on the altar, in a little throne of painted wood. But she herself was stone. She was round and dimpled, both a woman and a stone. Your two hands could have spanned her round. Waist she had none, being great with child; her small arms were folded between her great belly and heavy breasts, her huge thighs tapered to tiny feet. She was unpainted, unclothed, unjewelled; a small round gray stone. There was no face to see; it was bowed upon her breasts, showing only rough-carved curls. Yet I shivered and sweated; she was so old, so old. Zeus’s oak grove seemed like spring shoots beside her. Earth might have fashioned her from itself, before man’s hands could carve.

  My mother and the crone had run at the screen and put it up again. The old woman stood making the signs against evil. The girl was pressed against the far wall of the cave, her eyes fixed and staring, her knuckles against her mouth, standing in the stream. The red mud of its channel stained her feet like blood. I dared not speak in the holy place. I looked my pity. But she stood stiffly and did not see.

  At last my mother came out from behind the curtain, white in the face, with stains of ashes on her forehead. She beckoned me, and walked down the steps below. I followed silently. Over my shoulder I saw the two priestesses were together no longer. The old woman was near, keeping close for comfort. The girl was alone, a long way behind.

  We passed the rock with the eye, and came out into unhallowed ground. My mother sat upon a rock, and bowed down her face in her hands. I thought she wept; but she said, “It is nothing, it will pass,” and I saw it was a faintness on her. Presently she sat up. While I waited I had looked out for the girl. “Where is she, Mother?” I asked. “What will become of her?”

  She answered with half her mind, being still weak and sick, “Nothing; she will die.”

  “She is young,” I said, “to lay hands upon herself.”

  My mother pressed her hand on her head as if it ached. “She will die, that is all. She comes from the Shore Folk; when they see their death they die. That is finished; it was her fate.”

  I felt her hand; it was warmer, and her face had some color back. So I said, “And what is mine?”

  She drew her brows together, and laid her fingers flat on her closed eyes. Then she put her hands on her lap and sat
up straight. Her breathing grew deep and heavy, her eyes as marble were dead to mine. I waited alone.

  At last came a great sigh, such as the sick give sometimes, or men bleeding upon the field. Her eyes opened and knew me. But she moved her head as if its weight were too great to bear, and all she said was, “Go home and leave me. I must sleep.” I could not tell if the Sight had come to her, or if she could remember it. She lay just where she was, in the dry leaves of the wood, like a warrior after a long day’s battle or a slave all-in. I paused beside her, not liking to leave her in the wilds alone; but the old woman came up, and spread her mantle over her, and turned and looked at me. So then I went.

  As I walked down through the forest, I looked through the trees if I could see the maiden going. But I never saw her again.

  V

  IT TOOK ME FIVE years to bring all Attica under one rule of law. I have seldom worked so hard. In war the battle-rage and the hope of glory sweep one on; in the bull ring there are the cheers and wagers, and the life of the team. This work was lonesome and slow, and patient as carving a statue from a flawed block one must humor, yet keep the shape of the god.

  Tribe by tribe and clan by clan I went to them, eating with their chiefs, hunting with their lordlings, hearing their assemblies. Sometimes, to draw a voice from the silent, I would go alone like a strayed traveller, and ask shelter from a fisherman, or at some stony mountain farm, sharing goat-cheese and hard bread and milling with them the small chaff of their day’s trouble, the skinflint landlord and the sick cow.