by Brian Aldiss
Semele had come to look after her grandchild only when Hakuba had died unexpectedly. Those were the years of Jocasta’s greatest grief.
In her adolescence, she had become a keen runner. Only the generous size of her breasts had robbed her of a championship in the Theban games.
She had thought nothing of marrying Prince Laius. She considered it her birthright to wed into the royal line. She knew – her father had told her as much – that Laius had at an earlier age cohabited with two wild youths whom, in a drunken quarrel, he had stabbed to death. What were these sins but the follies of youth, the jeux d’esprit of a bold disposition? Besides, now that he was King of Thebes, Laius was as beyond reproach as he was above the law.
So Jocasta wed Laius. Laius wed Jocasta.
Oaths were sworn. Flowers were thrown.
The throats of many nanny goats were cut.
Offerings were made, dances danced, wine consumed.
Jocasta’s tastes were lascivious. This pleased Laius.
The marriage went well enough. At least she lived in a palace.
There was that trouble with Athens.
Laius became more brutal. He lost interest in Jocasta sexually. He preferred beating her to making love to her. All these recollections flowed through her mind like blood from an altar.
There came the night, filled with the greyness of a watching moon, when she dined with her brother Creon, spilling out her troubles in confidence to him, exhibiting her bruises. Creon was good to her. Creon and she had enjoyed carefree sexual relations when children.
They had spurned conventional entrances. It was long ago.
Creon grew up to be a stubborn law-abiding man, wedded to the fair Eurydice. He had never forgotten his early affection for his sister. Nor had Jocasta ceased to love her elder brother. She knew his weaknesses. She knew, too, that he coveted the throne on which her husband Laius reigned.
She recollected now, as her carriage bumped over the barren heathland, a night when she returned to Laius’ palace, after dining with Creon and Eurydice. Creon had accompanied her, since it was deemed incorrect for women – even queens – to walk in the streets alone.
Entering the palace, they heard cries, sounds expressing something between pain and ecstasy, or a blend of both.
Hastening through to the courtyard, they came on a scene which remained, though many a year had passed, vivid in Jocasta’s mind. Laius was bent naked over a naked boy. About these figures, as in a diseased dream, stood four naked slaves, holding lamps aloft, and all with erections gleaming as if oiled.
The sweat of Laius ran from his back and down his buttocks to the floor.
Laius had penetrated the rear exit of the boy. His left hand clutched the boy by the throat, while with his right hand he agitated the puerile organ of the child. It was from this boy that the cries of agony and joy issued. Laius himself was mute, his face in the lamplight a mask of lust.
Creon leapt forward, drawing his short sword.
‘You beast! How dare you perform this foul act before mere slaves?’
As he waved his sword, the four slaves dropped their lamps and fled, clutching those organs they no doubt thought imperilled by Creon’s avenging blade. The darkness would have been complete, had the moon overhead not been at full, throwing its drab light on the scene.
Although considerably aghast at being discovered, Laius was defiant.
‘You dare speak thus to your king? Go! I must satisfy myself somehow. My wife will not do it.’
To all this Jocasta had been witness, concealed behind a curtain. Only now did she step forth to confound her husband’s words.
‘You liar!’ she cried. ‘On how many occasions have I not bent to your drunken whim, yielded my body to your thrust – yielded to your wretched preferences, while you poured your disgusting seed into my hinder parts?’
‘Who is this wretched urchin you were defiling?’ Creon demanded of the king. ‘Some common street boy, doubtless!’
Creon seemed to grow in authority and darkness, while Laius shrank back, snatching up his disordered robe and clutching it about him with one hand.
The boy seized on the opportunity, slipping from Laius’ grasp, to run away. They heard him as he rushed into the street, yelling at the top of his voice that the king had molested him.
‘Do shut that brat up!’ cried Laius. His voice was faltering. ‘He’ll awaken the neighbourhood. He liked what we were doing, Creon, begged for it, believe me. He’s no slave. He’s a freeman’s son, by name Chrysippus. Do pray silence him.’
Creon drew himself up, while still wielding his sword in a threatening manner.
‘Put your clothes together, you pederast. I will see that this vile act is known, and your four menial witnesses executed in due time. Your reign as King of Thebes is at an end.’
Jocasta’s mind drifted to the present. It was many a year since that gross incident, buried within the sinews of a June night. Laius, forgetting his crown, had fled the city. Yet, as Creon said, a curse lay over Thebes to this day. There was a pollutant in its bloodstream: so Creon declared. It kept him from the throne.
The memory of those days returned roughshod to Jocasta when the procession passed another place where three roads met, on the edge of the heathland. There, it was said, brigands had attacked Laius in his chariot and killed him. That act of regicide haunted the situation still in Thebes.
Such reflections caused a melancholy disturbance in Jocasta. She felt herself tremble inwardly. Why was it that human life should be so troubled? The life of a wolf was better. Wolves enjoyed the wilderness and the hunt. They relished their strength, their speed, and their family relations. Why was a human being’s life more troublesome than a wolf’s?
Perhaps wolves had no memory. Perhaps animals were not born to carry the burden of the past with them every day.
Why did she suffer from black spells, during which she felt her life to be hardly worth a candle? She had experienced similar moods when her first child was growing inside her body. Her grandmother had rebuked her for them.
She had become bound to religion, undertaking incantation and self-chastisement. Then, when her child had been born, she – little more than a child herself! – had gone to the shrine of Apollo to seek a blessing for the infant, and had experienced the great black moment of her life.
For what had the servant of Apollo said?
She felt the trembling overcome her again as she recalled the prodromic utterance: that her innocent babe, her boy-child, would grow up to kill his father and, even worse, would take his father’s place and cohabit with his mother. This grievous prediction would surely be fulfilled.
She had told Laius of this terrifying prophecy. He had struck her, alarmed and made furious by the blackness of the prediction. Laius was full of pride. He had gone, humbling himself, to Apollo. Apollo had spoken in precisely the same terms Jocasta had been forced to hear: that their infant boy would grow up to be a regicide and, having killed his father, would take his place in his father’s bed, to mate with his own mother.
Laius pleaded. Laius swore. Laius sacrificed a dozen goats. Laius covered himself with dust and pleaded again. Still the answer came: that the future was immutable. What had been predicted could be turned aside by no man.
Husband and wife, Laius and Jocasta, had discussed this ghastly prediction in whispers; talked in the dark bedchamber, failed to sleep, became ill, quarrelled, made it up, whispered again.
And decided that the prediction must not be fulfilled.
That Apollo must be defied.
Decided that their infant must be killed.
That his tainted blood must be spilled.
‘Do you feel unwell, Mama?’ Ismene asked. The question brought Jocasta back into her present, to the vehicle with its creaking wheels, the barren land all about them, and dark clouds frowning on the horizon.
Jocasta glared at her daughter under her long lashes.
‘Leave me to myself, Ismene. I’m well enough.
’
Ismene made a face. ‘I know. “My happiness is my own, so’s my gloom” …’ She was quoting an earlier saying of her mother’s against her, in a sing-song voice.
Jocasta merely sank back into her cloak of dismal introspection as the carriage jolted on its slow way, a creak for every turn of the wheels. In her mind, she heard her grandmother declare that she was sulking again.
Oedipus and his sons walked beside the carriage. The king gave no indication that the march brought him pain. They discussed how far a man might walk before he came to the edge of the world. Soldiers marched before and behind the party. The landscape, tawny and desolate, lay like a lion asleep. There was no suggestion that it would ever cease, or ever awaken.
Jocasta feared that she could never escape from the past. Like the landscape, it surrounded her, went on for ever. Past, present and future were one whole garment. She could not tear that garment from her body.
Laius had been weaker of will than his wife. She had forced him to act against Apollo’s prophecy. She had steeled herself to look on while he pierced the infant’s feet with a skewer and tied them together with cord, so that the child was unable even to crawl. Laius had then gone to the end of the city with the howling child under his cloak. There he had thrust it on a shepherd, with instructions to leave the infant to die on a distant hillside, away from the sight of men.
There was an element of comfort for Jocasta to recall that she had rushed forward and kissed the poor babe farewell on its wet cheek. Then the shepherd had it firmly under his arm and was off.
It was a while after the child had been left for dead on the hillside that Laius had turned against her and, in sodomising the boy Chrysippus, had become outcast from Thebes.
She rested her head on the curve of the arm of the carriage, remembering. The heathland bumped by under her lustreless gaze. All that misery had occurred so long ago; yet when she allowed herself to remember it, back it came, sour and chilling. Snatches of Oedipus’ conversation with his sons drifted to her darkling senses. She listened idly. He was talking now of the curse that lay over the city of Thebes.
Oedipus was saying, ‘Certainly there is cause for sorrow in Thebes. But it has happened before. Why do the citizens vex me? The reason lies beyond philosophical conjecture. Why, they go so far as to accuse me of causing the grief! Why do they not love me? I hate the lot of them. Why should they not love me?’
And Polynices’ sharp response, in a bored tone, ‘Perhaps because you hate them …’
The boys showed their father little respect. They don’t realise, Jocasta said to herself, that the poor man is in pain every step of the way. Yet he deliberately resolved to walk the distance to Paralia Avidos.
Her thoughts were drawn back to those terrible days when she and Laius had condemned their infant son to death at the hands of the shepherd. She had gone back into the palace in a storm of weeping. It was then that the shadow deepened between her and Laius. There were lies to be told, pretences to be kept up. She had become withdrawn. And Laius, of a disturbed mind, had turned first to whores and then to catamites.
She seemed to be trapped in a circle of retribution from which, terrifyingly, there was no escape. How might Apollo be appeased – unless by more sacrifice?
With an effort of will, she brought herself out of her sprawling position, to sit bolt upright and smile at her daughters. If her Oedipus could suffer without complaint, then so could she.
‘The air is so beautiful here,’ she said. ‘Are you enjoying the ride, girls?’
3
The day blossomed, the sun grew bolder. The blazing air silenced conversation. Soldiers marched with their heads down, horses gleamed with sweat, flies buzzed industriously about them.
It was a broken land, uninhabited, the land called Phocis through which they were passing.
The procession halted to rest the horses. Jocasta took a pace or two alone. Heather was crisp beneath her sandalled feet. As she passed the cream-coloured mare, Vocifer set her dark regard at her – almost, Jocasta said to herself in horror, almost as if it would speak with her. The thought increased the blackness of her mood. The mare, though she foamed at the mouth, said not a word.
After a respite, the company got on its way again; the carriages creaked forward once more.
The track they followed became more eroded. The ruts gave an indication of increased rainfall. Summer had baked the ground until it resembled the crust of a loaf of bread. Yet, as the company continued on its way, blades of crab grass, as brown as the land from which they sprang, maintained a brittle presence. Soon, only a mile further on, small white flowers appeared, rare as snowflakes, responding to a fresher smell in the air.
They saw a shepherd boy in the distance, tending a small flock of sheep and goats. The bleating of the animals carried to them through the clear air, and the wail of the wooden pipes played by the boy.
The company had been climbing a gradient for over an hour. At last they gained the crest of the ascent. Before them, as they gathered together and made a breathless halt, the ground rolled away, becoming greener as it went. Then followed a band of yellow and gold and then – oh, the dazzle of it! – the great azurine expanse of sea, ochre and green near the shore, deep dark blue of smalts further from land, peacock between. The murmur of it came to their ears.
A cry went up from the parched throats of the men.
‘The sea! The sea!’
Onward the company went, more gladly now.
A camp was established in Paralia Avidos by the shore, where a small freshwater stream gushed from the cliff. Not far distant stood the temple dedicated to the god Apollo. Clustering about it like sheep about a shelter were numerous market stalls.
Jocasta stood by Oedipus, linking her arm in his, to oversee the establishment of their camp. Her daughters frisked nearby, glad to be out of the carriage.
‘I’ll race you into the sea, Ismene!’ cried Antigone, beginning to shed her robes. ‘We can cool off immediately – and scare a few crabs!’
‘You’re not getting me into that stuff!’ Ismene said. ‘It’s full of fish. You should have been a boy, Antigone.’
‘I’ll come in with you,’ said Polynices, pulling off his tunic.
‘So will I,’ said Eteocles, not to be outdone.
Naked, Antigone waded into the sea, stopping only when the languid swell ventured to cover her navel. She stood gasping, laughing, splashing water over her upper body, gazing across the watery expanse to a distant shore. Her golden hair turned dark with its wetting.
Polynices paddled out next to her. ‘Your breasts make me hard, sister,’ he said, clutching the organ referred to. ‘I love the way the pink bits point upwards.’
She splashed water in his face, laughing.
Oedipus came to the water’s edge, stooped and laved his face and neck. Jocasta stood silent behind him, gazing out across the sea. In the distance on the deep, a single sail showed, as tiny as a white butterfly’s wing.
In a while, Ismene went with her mother to see what the market stalls offered. Oedipus took his head groom aside and quietly ordered him to have the mare killed.
‘But Vocifer is a fine horse, sir,’ said the man in protest.
‘I told you to kill her. See to it.’
That night, when the moon rose dripping from the sea, to cast a platinum pathway across the waves, Oedipus kept vigil in the heavy perfumed dark of the temple. He had sacrificed a lamb to the god. Its carcass still crackled and smouldered on a slab nearby.
Silence otherwise prevailed in the temple, reinforced by the hiss of a flambeau, representative of the sun after its withdrawal. The embers of the lamb remained, as Oedipus endured on his knees, head bent.
A serpent appeared in the air before him. This was no emblem of Apollo. It was winged, writhing to make its golden scales gleam. A light, at first soft, then blinding, filled the chamber. Still crouching, for he scarcely dared move, Oedipus cast his gaze upwards, under his eyebrows.
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nbsp; In place of the snake a female of radiant beauty materialised. Her jet black hair was ringleted and fell to her snowy shoulders. Her gown, gathered at the waist with a chain of flowers, was so flimsy it scarcely concealed the greater beauties beneath its folds. Her thighs were snowy white. On her wrists she wore serpentine bracelets, and about her ankles similar enhancements in pure gold.
‘Oh, radiant creature, are you not the wood nymph Thalia?’ asked Oedipus, surprised. He attempted to rise. She gestured with her right hand, so that he remained fixed in his crouched position.
When she spoke, her voice was so soft that it came to him borne on unimagined perfumes. ‘I am as you say, O Oedipus, the wood nymph Thalia. I am come from Apollo, whom I serve as messenger, to speak with you.’
‘Will not Apollo speak with me?’ He could scarcely hear his own voice for the nymph’s radiations, which seemed half-scent, half-music.
‘Hera, the goddess of moonlight and fertility, sent the Sphinx to punish King Laius for his sins. Instead Laius was killed by mortal man.’ As she spoke, Thalia regarded Oedipus intensely with her dark eyes. He found himself unable to move under the power of that gaze. Her eyes had appeared beautiful. Now they were frightening and filled with the emptiness of night.
Although her carmine lips moved when she spoke, their sounds seemed to come from elsewhere.
‘What of this matter? How does it concern me?’ Oedipus asked, with such pride as he could command from his inferior position. ‘Laius is nothing to me.’
‘You have won the Sphinx, O Oedipus,’ said the mysterious nymph, ‘but when the Sphinx dies, you will die also. The Sphinx is a remaining daughter of an older age, an age before you men began to become entirely human. Recall how her body parts represent the seasons – the woman’s head standing for Hera, the goddess, while the lion’s body, the eagle’s wings and the serpent’s tail stand for the three ancient agricultural seasons, spring, summer, winter.