The Bull From the Sea: A Novel

  “I thought, sir, that you knew.” He had now got very serious; it made him look older, not younger as often with the young. “I have made an offering of all that. It’s settled and done.”

  Since I had met him at the harbor, some unease had dogged me. Now it was as if a door creaked open, to show me the ancient enemy. But I would not look. “You are a man now,” I said, “heir to a kingdom. You must put your toys away.”

  His brows, which were strong and darker than his hair, slanted and drew together. I saw his quiet did not come from meekness. “Well, sir, call it that if you wish; but how shall we talk then? It will be hard enough if both of us are trying; words don’t say much, in any case.”

  In my heart, his patience angered me. It was like the patience of a great dog, that lets the small one snap. “What is this? Let me know it, then. You are your mother’s only son. Don’t you think her blood worth passing on; do you hold it so lightly?”

  He did not speak for a while. His quiet stare seemed to say, “What will the man think of next? There is no knowing.” That too made me angry. At last he said, “She would not think so.”

  “Well?” I said. “Come, get it over; have you taken some vow, or what?”

  “Vow?” he said. “I don’t know. Yes, I suppose so; but it makes no odds.”

  “You do not know?”

  He said, trying hard with me (he was so young, he hardly expected anyone of my age to follow him), “Vows are to bind you if you change your mind. I shall take one if I am asked to; it makes no odds.”

  “To what god?” I asked him. It was better to have it done.

  “If I take a vow,” he answered, “that will be to Asklepios, when I am ready.”

  This was something new. There were things behind, which he would not talk about, as there had always been. But this he had said quite briskly. He had been a riddle, I thought, since he was born.

  I questioned him, expecting some high-flown words. But he said, “It started with the horses,” and then paused, thinking. “I used to doctor them. I always had a feel for it. Perhaps it comes from Poseidon.” He had a sweet smile. A woman would have melted. “Then at a push I had to give a hand with men, and that took hold of me. I started to wonder: what are men for?”

  I had never heard such a question. It made me shrink back; if a man began asking such things, where would be the end of it? It was like peering into a dark whirlpool with a deep and spinning center, going down and down. I looked at the boy. He did not seem sick, nor frightened; only a little out of himself, as another boy might if a girl he was crazy for had just passed the window. “That,” I said, “is the business of the gods, who made us.”

  “Yes, but for what? We ought to be good for it, whatever it is. How can we live, until we know?” I gazed at him; such desperate words, yet he looked all lit from within. He saw I was paying attention; that was enough to draw him on.

  “I was driving my chariot once, going to Epidauros. Let me take you, sir, we can go tomorrow, then you will see … Well, never mind that; we were going well along the sea-road, there was a wind at our backs …”

  “We?” I asked him, expecting to learn something of use.

  “Oh, it seems like that with a team, when you are all going like one.” I had put him off; it took him a moment or two to get back again. “The road was good, and clear, nothing to hold back for. I let them go and they went like thunder. And I felt it then; I felt God going down into the horses, down through me. Like a steady lightning that does not burn. It lifted my hair upon my head. And I thought, ‘It is this, it is this, we are for this, to bring down the gods as the oak leads down the lightning, to lead down God into the, earth. For what?’ The chariot was racing beside the sea, everything blue and shining, our manes all streamed in the wind, they were running for joy as they do wild on the plains. And I knew what it was for; but one cannot tell it, the life goes out with words.” He jumped to his feet as if he had no weight in him, and strode across to the window, walking on air. There he stood looking out, with the sun upon him, blazing without heat in stillness. Then he came to himself again and said, quite shyly, “Well, but one can feel all that with a sick pup in one’s hands.”

  As if she had heard, a nursing bitch came in heavy with milk, a wolfhound, and reared up with her paws against his chest. He stood rubbing her ears. Just so I had seen his mother stand, soon after I brought her home, eighteen years old. He was our living love, and through him we could live forever. Without him we died.

  “If you have the healing from some god,” I said, “all the more need to get sons and pass it on. The Immortals won’t thank you to waste it, that is sure.”

  He came down slowly from his lightness, finding he would need words after all. I could see him turning them over; like a racehorse hauling logs.

  “But that is it,” he said. “Not to waste it, that is the thing. This power takes all of a man; go off after this or that, and it wastes away. Girls, now; if I once made a start, whether I married or just had one at the Dionysia, I daresay I couldn’t do without them after. They look so pretty and soft, like little foxes. Likely enough one could never have enough of them, once one had begun. Much better not to begin.”

  I stared at him dumbly. I could hardly believe I had understood him. At last I said, “Are you joking, or trying to make a fool of me? Do you mean that you are still a virgin? At seventeen?”

  He flushed. It was not modesty, I perceived: he was man enough to feel an insult. A warrior was there; but a warrior under orders. He answered quite quietly, “Well, sir, it’s a part of what I mean.”

  So there was not even a wild crop on the hills of Troizen or in the farms, to carry the strain on; nothing. I thought how she had showed me him in the morning, after the long night’s travail. Now he flung our hope back in my face. If he had been a woman, he could have been made to obey; but no one can force a man to breed. He was the master; and he did not care.

  All I could find to say was, “At your age, I had children in Troizen old enough to run.”

  The scowl sailed off his brow like a summer cloud. He was amused. “I know that, sir,” he said. “I should hope I know my own brothers.”

  “You take it lightly,” I answered. Being angry, I added something more. It would have been nothing much on the deck of a longship. I knew it was not very seemly for a son to hear from his father; but I was past minding.

  He stared. Then he looked sick. If it had been with me, I daresay I might have borne that better. But no; it was with himself, for having tried to tell me his heart. I felt that as the last injury; for the core of my anger was love and pride in him. If it had been young Akamas in Crete, he could have gelded himself in the rites of Attis, and I daresay I should have got over it. A good boy enough; but plenty more where he came from.

  Breaking his silence, I seemed to hear a laughter that was not of men: from the Labyrinth, from the hills of Naxos, from Maiden Crag, from the cave beyond the Eye. They wove in a round dance three in one, and I heard their whispering laughter—the Mother, the Maiden, the Crone.

  My anger burst from me. But I kept down my voice, as I have learned to do; there are better ways than shouting, to reach a taller man. I said, among other things, that it was infamous to accept the heirdom of Troizen, to cheat in his dotage a king who had been great, and had sons who would have done right by him; to mock his hopes in his last days. “He has loved you,” I said. “Have you no shame?”

  He did not open his mouth; but his face answered for him. It turned red, and the muscles rose on the clenched jaw. He was not a man with much use for words, one way or another; from the grip of his hand upon the window sill, I saw it was not speech that would do him good. Well, he might think I did not understand him; but at least I knew that anger, better than any other man.

  Almost I could have told him so. But while we glared in silence like enemies in the field, in came my mother and said that the King was ready. She looked from face to face, but said nothing. I daresay we both avoided
her eye like boys.

  They had propped my grandfather up in bed; he looked as clean as thistledown. His hands of bone and milk-skin lay on the blue wool spread which scarcely showed a body under. When he greeted me, he held his hand as low as if to a child, and I saw his eyes had a clouded film. I knelt by him; he stroked my hair and said in a voice like rustling reeds, “Be faithful, boy; it is all we know to do. The gods know what to do with it.”

  He drowsed again. But my youth came back to me. I remembered how I had had the call to go to the bulls of Crete; how the people had wept, and my father had cried to me that I was leaving him to his enemies in his failing years—yes, and it was true. Yet I had gone, and could do no other.

  I heard horses, and looked from the window. Down on the road was the lad driving away. The dust from his wheels was pink with sunset. As he took the bend, I could picture his eyes devouring the ground before him till he came to the flat where he could go.

  I ran out to the stables, calling for a chariot and a good fresh pair. The charioteer came hurrying, but I waved him off and took the reins. You do not roam from land to land without racing sometimes with borrowed horses, and these knew who was master. I turned them out of the Eagle Gate upon the road to the sea. The folk of Troizen, who had lately seen me drive by in state, stood staring in my dust, remembering courtesy when I was gone by.

  I could see him at the turns; but he never looked back, only forward towards the hard mud flats of Limna; when he reached them he leaned forward over the team, and they raced away. But, I thought, though he had the start of me, he was a big lad; my beasts had less weight to carry. He had unhitched his third horse, the one for festivals, and was only driving the pair.

  The ripples of the landlocked Psiphian Bay plashed upon shining stones. On this same road I had driven to seek my father, and try my manhood in the Isthmus, just at his age. And now I was galloping till my teeth rattled in my head, for all the world as if I were a boy again with a taller boy to beat. Which was not so; a man does not get wet year after year at sea, without finding a stiff joint here and there. Mine would ache tomorrow. All the same, I meant to win my race today.

  I was gaining when a long turn hid him. He had not seen me. It was my will against his whim. I rounded the headland; there, quite near, was the chariot. But it stood empty beside the road. Without sense—for the pair stood quietly, the reins hitched to an olive tree—my heart tripped and hit my throat. Then, seeing all was well, I tied my own horses near them, and took the path up the hill.

  I thought he would give me a long scramble, knowing his ways. But he had not gone very far. There he was in an ilex grove; and as I walk lightly, he did not see me for the trees. He stood still, panting deeply from the drive, and the climb, and, as I saw, from anger. His big hands closed and unclosed as they hung beside him, and he paced the clearing like a beast in a cage. Suddenly he reached upward, and, with a great sound of cracking, tore off a limb near as thick as my arm. He trod on it and broke the middle, then snapped all the lesser branches across his knee. Leaves and white splintered wood lay all about him. He stood over this mess, staring down. Then he knelt, and felt about in it, and came up with something in his cupped hands. His touch was changed; stroking, and delicate. But the thing was dead, whatever it was. He dropped it—some little thing, a bird or a squirrel’s young—and put his hand to his forehead. When I saw his grief, I knew he had come to himself and was sorry for what had passed between us. That was enough for me. I came forth and held out my hands to him, saying, “Come, boy, it is past. We shall know each other better.”

  He looked at me as if I had dropped from heaven, then knelt and touched my hand with his brow. As he rose up I kissed him; and now, when he straightened after to his hero’s height, I felt only pride.

  We talked a little, and smiled together at our race, and then fell silent. Evening was far spent; the hilltops grew gold above the water drenched in their shadow; there were scents of sea wrack and dewy dust and thyme, and a shrill of grasshoppers. I said, “I took your mother from the Maiden, and she claims her debt. The gods are just, and one cannot mock them. Even though you serve one who has never loved me, be true and you will be my son. Truth is the measure of a man.”

  “You will see, Father,” he said, calling me this for the first time since childhood, “I will be true to you as well. He paused, and seeing he had more to say but was shy, I answered, “Yes?”

  “When I was small,” he said, “I asked you once why the guiltless suffer too, when the gods are angry. And you said to me, ‘I do not know.’ You who were my father, and the King. For that I have always loved you.”

  I made him some kind answer, wondering if I should ever make him out. Well, trust must do instead. As we walked back to our chariots, I asked him where he had been going. He said, To Epidauros, to be cured of my old sickness which I thought was gone. But you came instead.” I saw that he meant his anger. Strange words for a young man in his strength, just of an age for war.

  The sky grew bright with sunset; the earth glowed, and his face also with its own light. I drove home in peace, and that night’s sleep was sweet to me. But it is given only to the gods, to live in joy forever.

  II

  THAT SUMMER I SAILED with Pirithoos as far as Sicily, to sack the city of Thapsos. It was a night assault, from the sea, and went so well we were on the walls before the alarm. I could hear the watchman yelling. It was not “Theseus of Athens!” as it used to be, but “Theseus the Pirate! Theseus the Pirate!”

  I was angry, and the Thapsians paid for it. All the same, it set me thinking. All I had to show at each year’s end, these days, was a load of plunder, and a girl I would be weary of next year. Once it had been a hold of bandits cleared, the borders strengthened, laws broadened or fined down to a better justice; some old blood-feud settled between two tribes; a suppliant freed from a bad master. It seemed, when I thought, that no one had been much the better for my life, this year, or last, or the year before.

  As we coasted back past Italy, I thought of what had passed at Troizen. I could let things drift no longer. Hippolytos had chosen his own heritage, such as it was. Young Akamas, Phaedra’s boy, must be the heir of all my kingdoms. He must come to Athens, and be seen.

  There was no harm in the lad, and no little good. But he was too easygoing, and lived from day to day. Courage he did not lack, as I had often seen; but there seemed no thrust of ambition in him. He was the son of my wedded queen, with clear title, if I chose, to the mainland kingdoms; yet, as far as I could see, he waited for Crete to fall into his lap, and looked no further. It was true he was all Cretan, just like some graceful prince of the Older Kingdom painted in the Labyrinth, walking in a field of irises with the royal gryphon on a string; it was true, too, that I had made him so. I had only fetched him to Athens on a few short visits, all his life. He had been a delicate child, which was my excuse. The truth was I had wanted to keep him content with Crete. There had been enough brothers fighting over Attica, in my father’s day. But he would have to be seen there now. The people would have forgotten him; and it was time he was taught his trade.

  He still had the fecklessness of a child. He was too old never to have asked himself—as it seemed he had not—how long he could hold Crete without the mainland fleet to back him. It needed thinking of; for Deukalion was dead, and his son Idomeneus was quite another man. If he was not already conspiring to get the throne, it would not be fear that was stopping him, but a pride too high to risk disgrace. He had the blood of Minos, both the Cretan line and the Greek; and he was five-and-twenty, while I was past forty now and taking no great care of myself, as anyone could see. He would wait a while. But once I was gone, young Akamas would need both hands to hold on with.

  Women in Crete have always understood affairs, so I wondered what his mother made of it, and how much she had tried to push him on. He had a truly Cretan reverence for her; yet last time, he had seemed more at ease with me.

  She had never asked me to bring her to
Athens, though neither her people nor mine would have quarrelled with it after so long. Often I had thought about it; then looking at the closed rooms that still had echoes, I had put it off for another year. So I had said nothing to her; and she was never one to tell all her mind. She was turned thirty, and that is late to start again among strangers. Also she was Minos’ daughter; perhaps she did not care to step into the shoes of the dead, which would never have been hers while the living wore them; or to go where a bastard had been set above her son. Perhaps she had heard my house had too many girls and that, with my being away, they got out of hand. Like enough all these things had part in it.

  The summer was far gone. If I thought too long I should put it off again. So I parted from Pirithoos at sea, and made straight for Crete.

  The boy was there to meet me, full of spirits; asking where I had been, what I had brought him back, and how soon he could sail with me, though he was barely turned thirteen. He chattered like a starling all the way in the chariot. On the terrace of the royal house stood his mother waiting, small, neat and jewelled, her fine brown hair sleek in the sun, her bare breasts round and firm as the grapes down in the vineyard, whose scent the warm Cretan sun drew up to us.

  When we were alone, I told her how matters stood, saying, “It would not have been just to pass over Hippolytos, when his mother gave her life for me and Attica in the war. If I had died then, with both sons children, neither could have hoped for much. But he has offered himself to Artemis, to pay her debt. The gods know best, and we must do what is left to do.”

  “Yes,” she said, “that is true.” She sat silent, her tapered white hands folded in her lap. I almost said she need not come to Athens, unless she liked. I felt the words ask to be spoken, like a dog asking at a closed door. But I knew it would seem a slight to her. She had had a good deal to put up with; my calls had been short, between Athens and the sea. I had never, myself, flaunted my women at her; but the isles were full of tales and songs about the sea-raids I had got them in, and she must have heard. So I said she should be there to share in her son’s honor; that she could trust me to put the house in order, and see she was well served.