The Bull from the Sea (30 page)

One day his slow young page came up to me, asking awkwardly if I had seen him; he had a note for him from the Queen. When I offered to see it he gave it me quite easily. Perhaps he was simple; perhaps less simple than he seemed.

The tablet said, “Theseus misses you; do you forget he is your guest? Of myself, no matter. You offend and slight him. What is it that you fear?”

I told the page I would see to it, and went straight to her room. When I had her alone, I said to her, “What is this? What have you been up to with Hippolytos? Is this your promise?”

I finished more quietly than I began, for I could see she was not well. She had sunk back, with her hand clasped to her throat. She had been full of vapors lately; yet she had refused to go to Epidauros, after all.

“Come, calm yourself,” I said. “I am to blame; I should have known you two would never agree. Why, we both know; but what use to speak of it? What’s done is done; but it was long ago, and she is dead. You came here to see Akamas; you know now he is well. Any day the old man may die; I will not have strife brought into the house, when my son is taking up his heritage. Two days from now I am going back to Athens. You will come with me.”

She stared a moment; then she started to laugh. It was low at first; then it rose wild and screeching, peal on peal. I called her women, and left her. I knew, when I married her, that she came of old rotten stock, given to all extremes. But I had to think for the kingdom.

Hippolytos was out, as usual. It was not till dusk he came plodding home, limb-weary as a field hand, his clothes stained from the forests, green and brown. He greeted me with courtesy, which did not make up for his neglect; yet, remembering he had borne patiently, for my sake, his stepmother’s scoldings, I told him without anger that we were going home.

He began to say something; stammered and broke off; then knelt and put my hand to his forehead. He was down there so long that I told him to get up. Slowly he rose. His eyes were streaming. He stood still, taking deep breaths, while great silent tears ran down his cheeks. At last he muttered, “I am sorry, Father. I don’t know what it is… I am sorry you are going.” His voice choked and he said, “Forgive me,” and hurried out. Turning, I saw young Akamas, who had hung about for him (often lately he had shaken off the boy to go out alone), stare after him in horror, and run out another way. He thought too much of him not to be ashamed at seeing him unmanned.

That day passed, and the night, and the next morning. I don’t know how I spent the time; the memory has been swept away. But a little before noon, I went out to the stables, to see what shape the horses were in for the journey. The rain held off; but gray clouds covered the sky and the breeze was moist, blowing from the sea.

Suddenly I heard a woman’s high yelling scream. For a moment, I only felt it go through my head; I had not noticed till then an ache beginning. Then the sound broke into shrill jerking spurts, as if the woman herself were shaking, and I thought, “Her husband is knocking her about.” Then came a great shriek, “A rape! A rape!” And I knew the voice. The eyes of my charioteer met mine. Like one man we started forward.

He unhitched two horses and we leaped up. The cries came from the olive grove beyond the barns. It was sacred to Mother Dia, with a little old altar where my mother used to sacrifice in spring, to bless the trees. We rode as near as we dared to the sacred precinct, dismounted, and ran.

Between the trees, not far from the altar-stone, sat Phaedra, on the ground, wailing and sobbing, flinging her body to and fro, beating her clenched fists first on the earth and then upon her breast. Her hair hung wild, her bodice and skirt gaped open at every clasp; her shoulders and arms and throat were covered in great red finger-weals, whose shape could be clearly seen.

I ran up to her. She clutched and clawed at my arms, gabbling and gasping; I could not make out the words. When I tried to raise her, her clothes began falling off; she pulled away her hands to grab her belt about her, her breath heaving and shivering; then scrambled up, her skirt bunched in one hand, and pointed with the other through the grove. Her voice broke in a rough caw like a raven’s. “There! There!”

I heard men’s voices, running footsteps, rattling arms. The outcry had brought the Guard. They were still coming up; but the foremost had heard her words and were off through the trees already, like hounds with the quarry in full sight. They called to one another; then their voices changed. And looking along the grove, I saw the man.

He was running out to the hill-slopes, clambering over the boulders, wild as a stag. The light caught his hair as the sea-wind lifted it. In all Troizen, there was not such another head.

I stood still. A great sickness swept down from my head into my body. There seemed room in me for nothing else.

All round me went the din of the hue and cry. My temples throbbed with it. Only the foremost understood, yet, whom they were after. But when the word spread back, they would all run on. There are laws bred into the very bones of men, older on earth than princes.

I sent someone to fetch the Queen’s women. To the rest I said, “Stand back. Leave us alone.”

She had fixed her skirt-clasp somehow. Now she stood wringing her hands, round and round each other, as if she were washing and could not get them clean. “Quickly!” I said. “No one can hear. In the name of Zeus, what happened? Speak.”

She stood panting; with each breath came a rattle from her chattering teeth, and nothing more. Still I kept hold upon myself, from the habit of doing justice. “Speak up, hurry, before they bring him here.” But she only rocked about, washing her hands. A sudden hot light flashed before my eyes; I came and stood over her and shouted, “Speak, woman! Did he get it done, or not?”

“Yes!” she cried, and left her mouth open, gaping. I thought she would scream again; but now at last came the words.

“In Athens it began, he started then to come after me, but he said it was to cure my head. In Athens I didn’t know. It was here he told me, here in Troizen; I have been almost dead with fear. I dared not tell you; how could I tell you of your son, what he was, what he meant? He wanted me, oh yes! But it was more, it was more. This is the truth, Theseus. He has taken a vow to the Goddess, to bring back Her rule again.”

We were alone in the grove, beside the ancient altar. The men I had sent away had followed after the chase. Great hands seemed to press my head, crushing it down into the earth.

“He said he had had omens, that he must marry Minos’ daughter and make her Goddess on Earth. Then the power would return and we should rule the world. I swear it, Theseus, I swear by this holy stone.” A great shiver shook her body. “‘Let me reign with you,” he said, ‘and love you; and when She calls me, it will be nothing for me to die. For we shall be as gods, remembered forever.’ That was what he said.”

The sounds of pursuit had sunk. The crowd was coming back towards the grove. He must have stopped to wait for them. “Not yet!” I thought. “Can’t they give me time?” My brow felt bursting. I longed to be alone as a wounded man wants water. But her voice rushed on.

“I said to him, ‘Oh, how can you say so when your father lives?’ and he answered, ‘He is under Her curse and the land is sick with it. She calls men and sets them by, and he has had his time.’”

Through the beating in my head I heard men’s low muttering voices, broken with their heavy breathing from the run. He was walking among them, free, looking straight before him, like a man led to his death.

The women had come up from the Palace. They hovered among the trees, like scared birds, flustered and twittering, each urging another forward, exclaiming in whispers at her bruises and torn clothes. Suddenly she grabbed my arm again. “Don’t kill him, Theseus, don’t kill him! He could not help it, he was mad as the maenads are.”

I thought of Naxos; of the bloody hands, torn flesh; the sleeping girl draggled with blood and wine. Blood seemed everywhere; it was the color of the buzzing sky. “It is like the earthquake warning,” I thought, and then the thought passed by. Her hands on my arm were like her sister’s hands. I pulled them off, and signed for the women. The squat old altar looked at me, each crack in the stone a grinning mouth and every hole an eye.

They were here. He stood before me. His hair was all dishevelled; there was a bleeding place, where it had been torn. His tunic was split along the shoulder. His eyes met mine. So a stag will stand, when you have run it down and it can go no longer, looking at you as if it saw some vision, waiting for the spear.

The women crept up to Phaedra; one wrapped her in a cloak, another held a flask to her lips; they waited my leave to take her away. Her bruises were darkening; she might have been a beaten slave. The sickness, the noises in my head, were making me almost mad; I found my hand on my dagger. There was a scream of birds, above the birdlike cries of the women, a lowing of cattle from the byres, a dog’s long-drawn howl. They were the sounds of earth; all this was true. I pointed to my wife, huddled shivering into the cloak, and said to my son, “Did you do this?”

He did not speak. But he turned his eyes to her. It was a long, dark look. She covered her face and broke into wailing, muffled by the cloth. I signed to the women; they led her off murmuring, through the trees.

His eyes met mine; and at that his face closed up, his mouth set like a seal. All this while, as the horror in me mounted and turned to rage, some hope had held out, like the watchman of a doomed city alone upon the wall. No signal came; there would be no message. Now all my life’s enemies met in him.

I spoke. But the words have gone from me. Not long after, I was taken sick; and when I came to myself, the words had gone. Yet sometimes I wake, with the sound just fading. Somewhere within me are the words; and I have feared to sleep, lest my sleep release them.

So clear seemed his guilt, like far hills before the storm: how he had watched at the shrine, and told me of an omen; had taken Akamas to Troizen, to make her follow; given me a woman, to keep me from her; and fled my presence day after day, lest I should read his thoughts. He had wept, to hear that she was going. Today had been his last chance. It seemed as clear as if a god had shouted it in my ear. Indeed my ears were ringing.

As I spoke these words I have forgotten, the men about him all drew aside. He was not king of Troizen yet, and now would never be. He had broken the sacred hearth-laws ; ravished his father’s wife; and I was not his father only, nor his guest, but High King of Attica, Megara, and Eleusis, Guardian of Thebes and Lord of Crete. How could they dare to choose my enemy?

He stood, and heard me. Not once did he part his lips to answer. But near the end, I saw his hands clench at his sides, his nostrils widen, his eyes stare as one sees them in battle above a shield. He took one step forward, and set his teeth, and stepped back again; and I read in his face, as clear as words on marble, “Some god hold me back, before I take this little man and break him between my hands.” Then, if I could, I would have struck him dead.

The anger that rose in me seemed the wrath of the earth itself. It flowed up through my feet, as the earth-fire rises in some burning mountain before it destroys the land. And then, as if my mind had been lit with flame, I knew that it was true. It was not my anger only. The dog had howled and the birds had cried, and my head had tightened; yet I had not felt Poseidon’s warning, because my anger had risen in time with his. Now I felt it, and felt it soon to fall; the god my father standing by me, to avenge my bitter wrong.

It was like a thunderbolt in my hand. They were all looking at me in fear, as if at something more than mortal; yes, he also. And in the strength of the god I struck my foot upon the earth, crying, “Go out of my lands and from my sight forever. Go with my curse, and the curse of Earth-Shaking Poseidon; and beware of his wrath, for it will be soon.”

One moment he was there, white-faced, standing like stone; the next there was an empty place, and the people staring after him. They stood and gazed; but no one followed, as they would have followed some other man, to stone him out of the land. They had loved him; I suppose it seemed to them that his madness and his doom were sent from heaven, and they had best leave him to the gods. He was gone; and as rage like a fever started to cool in me, I felt the earthquake-sickness, just as it had always been.

I closed my aching eyes. A picture flashed behind them, as if it had been waiting there: the groves of Epidauros, drenched with peace and rain. Then I, being priest as well as king, remembered how all my life, since I was a child at Poseidon’s sanctuary, I had held his warning as a trust to save the people, and never used it for a curse.

I woke to myself, and looked about me, and said to the folk of Troizen, “I have had the sign of Poseidon. He will shake the earth, and soon. Warn them in all the houses, to come out of doors. Send word to the Palace.”

They groaned with awe, and started to run off; soon I heard heralds’ horns. Then no one was left about me but men of my own from Athens, standing uncertainly a little way off, fearing to come or go. I was alone, hearing the noise of the alarm spreading all the way down to Troizen from the Citadel; and with it another sound, the triple hoofbeat of a chariot-team on the road below. It made me shudder, with the wrath of the god so near. That was how I heard it first, a wicked beating upon the earth, going through my head. Then I remembered. I had given out my warning to every soul in Troizen. Only for him I had wrapped it up in darkness, that hearing he might not understand.

I stood on the prickling earth, my heart still pounding from my own anger and the god’s. The Palace was like a skep of bees when a horse has kicked it; women running out with babies, pots and bundles, and stewards with precious things. There was a stir in the great doors; they were bringing out old Pittheus in a curtained litter. I looked beyond. Far down the road, the bright head vanished in the foot-slopes towards the Psiphian shore. The fastest team in Troizen, following, would not overtake him now.