The Bull From the Sea: A Novel

III

THE STRAITS OF HELLE passed like a dream. Even its wars were dreamlike. All things else were a sleep we woke from to one another. I did not care what my men made of it, and they knew better than to tell me. As long as they showed her respect, it was all I asked.

As for Pirithoos, when I brought her down to the camp he rolled his eyes to heaven; but having given me up he was glad to see me, and kept the right side of a quarrel. She was proud, and had cause to be shy, and at first she took against his roughness. But valor won him always, even in women; and when he found she knew the war-customs all along the coast as far as the mouth of Hellespont, he changed his tune. In council of war they got a respect for one another which turned to liking. She was never his notion of a girl; if she had been a youth, indeed, he would have settled to it more easily, and half the time in those early days he treated her like a boy of some kingly house over whom I had lost my head. But, knowing nothing of such customs, she only felt his good will; before long, he was teaching her pirates’ Greek.

She warned us, among other things, that the tribes who had let us through on the voyage out would attack us when we came back laden. So we were ready. These wars, when I remember them now, come back to me shining like harpers’ tales. I could not put hand or foot wrong with her there beside me. Lovers of boys may say it is the same; but I should think it is easy to be looked up to by a lad not come to his full strength, whom you are teaching all he knows and helping out when he is overmatched. We two fought like one. We were still finding one another; and war, to those who understand it, shows forth a man. We learned as much of each other in battle as we did in bed. It is good to be loved for the truth struck out of one in the eye of death, by a lover who has no fear to make her judgment humble. Her face was pure in battle, as it had been when she offered to the Goddess. Yet it was not blood she offered, nor the death of the enemy, but faith and valor, and the victory over fear and pain. There is no cruelty in the face of the lioness.

We fought among the longships that came forth to meet us; and at the springs of fresh water on the slopes; and in the creek where we beached to caulk the hulls, and the dark blue-painted Thracians charged us naked, creeping up behind the sandhills and scrubby tamarisks. By night we waked from each other’s arms to take up shield and spear; and sometimes even by day, when the fight was over, we would go off with its blood and dust still on us, to lie down in love among the bracken or the dunes; and if there was nowhere to go it was a grief to us.

My men found this strange, which was enough to make them mistrust it. It is the mark of little men to like only what they know; one step beyond, and they feel the black cold of chaos. They had taken for granted that I meant to break her in, and till I had made a house-woman of her like any other, would feel myself half a man. As for my manhood, I reckoned it was proved by now and I could leave such cares to others; for the rest, one does not clip one’s hawk and put it in the henyard. For her I was man enough.

Pirithoos, who had more sense than this, still wondered aloud that mad for her as I was, I would risk her in war. I could only tell him it was as it was. Besides, I had beaten her hand to hand, her first defeat since she took up arms; and as our bodies knew each other’s needs without asking, so with our souls. It was a joy to feel her get back her pride. He would not have understood, however; and still less did my fools of spearmen. If I had torn some screaming girl-child from the household altar, and forced her before her mother, it would have been all in the day’s work to most of them. But now, I started to find the evil-eye sign chalked upon the benches. They thought she had bewitched me. Pirithoos said it was because when we fought together we never got a scratch, and the Amazons were said to have a charm against it. At this I said no more; if one of them after all had seen the Mystery, I did not want to be told.

We came out into the Hellene seas and fair blue weather. All day we would sit handfast on the poop, watching the shores and islands, and learning to talk with words. What with her tongue and mine and the Shore Folk speech stringing it together, it was a patched-up business at first; but it served our turn.

“When I told you my name,” I said, “you knew it.”

“Oh, yes. The harpers came to us every year.”

“Did I look as you had thought?” I know what harpers are, and wondered if she had expected a man seven feet high. There was barely an inch between us.

“Yes,” she said. “Like the bull-dancers in the pictures, light and quick. But you had put up your hair under your helmet. I missed your long hair.” She touched it as it lay over her shoulder. Then she said, “On New Moon’s Eve I saw an omen, a falling star. And I thought when you came, It fell for me. I must die; but with honor, by this great warrior; and they will put my name in the Winter Song.’ I felt—oh, a change, an end.”

“And then?” I said.

“When you threw me and got my sword, that was a death to me. I woke all empty. I thought, ‘She has given me out of Her hand, though I kept Her laws. Now I am nothing.’”

“That is the way of it, when you hold out your hand to fate. I felt the same on the ship going to Crete.”

She made me tell her about the bull ring; we did not speak of the dagger in the wall. I knew she had been torn in two, and the wound not healed yet. But a little while after, she said to me, “On Maiden Crag, if a Moon Maid goes with a man she must leap down the cliff side. That is the law.”

I answered, “Maiden Crag is far away, but the man is near.”

“Come nearer.” We leaned our shoulders together, and wished the light away; there is not much chance, in a war-fleet, to be alone.

It was still like this with us when the ships reached Thessaly. As we rode along the river path towards Pirithoos’ Palace, he edged up his horse to mine. “Well, Theseus. This seems a good dream you’re having, though it never troubled sleep of mine. You will have to wake up when you get back to Athens; so you had better borrow my hunting-lodge, and dream a little longer. Look, you can see the roof, below that shoulder of the mountain.”

So I shipped home my men, all but my body-servant and a guard of eight. Half a month we stayed where the forest thins and the high woods are open, in a Lapith house of logs with a painted doorway. There was a table of pine-wood, sleeked with hand-rubbing; a round stone hearth with a bronze fire-basket, for the cold upland nights; and a carved red bed, whose bearskins we would throw down at evening before the fire. Pirithoos sent up a groom and huntsman, and an old woman to cook. We would find errands for all these people, to be alone.

We slept as much as nightingales. We would be up at the dark of dawn to eat bread dipped in wine, and ride into the hills as the stars were paling. Sometimes on the lonely tops we would see startled Kentaurs shambling away from us; we would make them the sign of peace we had learned from Pirithoos, and they would pause to stare under their low heavy brows, or point us where there was game; then we would leave them a hunk of meat in payment. When we had fed our household we killed no more, but would give the gods their portion, mine to Apollo and hers to Artemis; that is how the custom of the double offering started, which you will find now in all my kingdoms. After this, we would sit on a rock or in an open glade as the sun grew warm, learning each other’s language, or hushing to make the little birds and beasts come near us; watching the horse-herds like swarms of ants on the plain below; sleeping sometimes, to make up for the night; or locked in love, knowing nothing beyond ourselves but some leaf or snail-shell on the ground next to our eyes.

She liked the great Thessalian horses, which she had only known by hearsay, and was soon as bold on them as a Lapith boy; but up in the high hills we used the little Kentaur ponies with eyes in their feet, such as she had known at home. She had been only nine years old when they offered her to the Goddess. Her father was the chief of a tribe inland from Kolchis, a mountain people; as long as she could remember, she had known her parents had vowed to dedicate her, if they should be given a son. Since they had paid their pledge she had never seen them, and they were growing dim to her; she remembered best about her father how he darkened the doorway as he stooped to come in. But her mother she saw always lying in bed with the newborn boy, while she herself watched silent, seeing the joy and knowing they did not grudge the price. They had sent her to the precinct in the foothills, where the little girls were trained and toughened like boys, till they were of age to bear arms. “Once,” she said, “the Warrior Priestess found me crying. I thought she would beat me; she used to beat the cowards. But she took me laughing in her arms, and said I should live to be a better man than my brother. That was the last time I cried, till the other day.”

Once I asked her what became of the Maidens when they grew old. She said that some became seers and gave oracles; the rest could serve if they liked at the shrine of Artemis down in the plain; but often they chose to die. Sometimes they leaped from the Crag; but mostly they killed themselves in the sacred trance, as they danced the Mystery. “So would I have done. I had made up my mind I would never live to wither and stiffen and be dead alive. But I don’t dread it now, because we shall be together.” She did not ask, like other women, if I would love her still.

Once a Kentaur came to us with a gift of wild honey—that is all they have to give—and begged us with signs to kill a beast that was taking their children. While we beat the coverts for a wolf, I heard a furious snarling; running over I found her with a full-grown leopard on her spear. Before I could help her, she cried out, “No! He is mine!” as fierce as the beast itself. It was a hard thing, to let her be; she knew it after, and was sorry, but full of her triumph all the same. Yet she could whistle birds to her hand, and would bring all manner of creatures into the house: a pecked pigeon, and a fox-cub she fed till the vixen came for it. It bit me, but she could handle it like a pup.

She was always after me to teach her wrestling. To tease her I said for some time it was my mystery. But at last I laughed and said, “Well, then, find somewhere to fall soft. For I won’t have you grazed and bruised all over, and that, my girl, is the price of taking a man.”

We found a dip in the pine wood, drifted full of needles, and went at it properly, stripped to the waist. She was as quick as I, and as strong as it needs if you are quick enough. Neither of us could surprise the other, we knew each other’s minds too well; but she learned quickly, and liked the sport, saying it was like the play of lions.

She had given me a fall, but I had brought her down with me; we rolled on the springy pine-mat, in no haste to rise again, when she stopped laughing and pulled away and said, “A man is watching.”

I looked up. There coughing and stroking his beard was a baron of Athens, whom I had left as a judge when I sailed away.

I got up and went over, wondering what bad news could have made him come so far himself, instead of sending a courier. A rising in Megara? The Pallantids landing by sea? As he greeted me, I saw him fidgeting and looking down his nose. I knew then, and said, “Well?”

He brought out some tale, rehearsed beforehand, of this and that; matters a few spearmen could have settled, or he himself in judgment. He said some ship or other had brought a rumor I was sick. But I could see through his shuffling well enough. The warriors had been talking. Oh, yes; Theseus had been himself on the voyage out; he had sacked Kolchis, and filled their hands with spoil; all had been well till the Amazon had worked her Scythian magic on him, stealing the soul from his breast in return for her charm against weapons; then he had left the fleet as a hound-pack leader goes off on the trail of a wolf-bitch at full moon, to run mad with her in the forest.

It was beneath me to read his thoughts aloud to him. I said that since no one in Athens could deal even with trifles while I was gone, I would come myself and see to them. I saw there was no choice; playtime was over. If hearsay got about and crossed the borders, some enemy might see his chance; then these fools would have bred the thing they feared.

I turned to speak to her; but she was gone, without my hearing a footfall. So it was then, and often after; if she thought herself a hindrance to me, she would be off like a deer in covert. She would come back as quietly, saying nothing of it, from love and pride.

My dry-nurse had not come alone. Up at the house there were three more like him, waiting to see what I had turned into since I was bewitched. The best of them—I think he had really had some fear for me—gave me a tablet tied with cord. It was from Amyntor, whom I had left in command of the army when I sailed off. So he could do as he chose; and had chosen to write his message in Old Cretan. It is used in the rites of the bull-dance, and by the native serfs; you must go to Crete to learn it. I saw by the glum faces they had all had a look inside. After the greetings, the message said, “There is nothing here your spearmen cannot take care of, till you wish to come. I saw your heart, sir, in the Bull Court, but fate was not ready. We, who remember, will have a welcome for the fair and brave.”

After we got back he had married Chryse, the best of the bull-girls; so he understood. But things must have gone far enough, if he thought this message needed.

I called a servant to bring wine. I suppose they had thought to stay the night in my house, before they saw it. Their eyes crept round all four walls, lingering on the bed. I was growing weary of them. “I will not keep you now,” I said. “The track is dangerous in the evening mists. I want a message taken to the Head Steward of Athens; send a runner if no ship is leaving. I want the Queen’s rooms opened up, which were closed in my father’s day; cleaned, painted and made handsome. I want to find them ready.”

There was a pause. They did not look at one another; I saw to it that they did not dare. But their thoughts spun between them like cobwebs in a breeze.

“You came by ship,” I said. “Is it fit for me to sail in?” Indeed, they said, it was well prepared. “The Lady Hippolyta is coming with me. She was a royal priestess in her land, and will be treated as befits her. You have leave to go.”

They laid fist on breast, and started backing out. In the doorway they took root, blinking; and the lesser ones edged behind the greater. The chief of them, who had found us in the wood, seemed to have words stuck in his throat like a fishbone. I waited, tapping my fingers on my belt. At last it came. “By your favor, my lord. The ship for the Cretan tribute is at Piraeus, waiting to sail. Have you any commands? Some message?”

He had not the face to hold my eye. I was getting angry.

“You have got already,” I said, “my message for the runner. There is nothing in Crete that will not wait.”