The Bull From the Sea: A Novel

VI

WE GOT HOME TO find the boy thriving in Chryse’s care; even in that short time he had been growing. The barons and the commons had not, as I had hoped, forgotten Crete; but that was little, beside some news Pirithoos had given me in Thessaly, which I had to carry alone.

Far to the north, beyond the Euxine and the Ister, there was a great movement of the peoples. The Endless Plain, at the back of the north wind, is so far from the sea that if you bring an oar there, the folk take it for a winnowing fan; but storms were blowing there, and nations foundering like ships on a lee shore. The southern Thracians had heard it from the northern ones, who had it from the southern Scyths, and they from the Scythians northward, that a people called the Black Cloaks were coming out of the great northeast wastes, and eating the plains before them. What kind of people they were, he could not tell, only that they worshipped no gods but the night and day, and that the fear of them ran before their tufted spears like the cold wind before the rain.

Pirithoos did not think they would come to the Hellene lands; they were too far, and having great herds moved slowly. “But,” he said, “if they come southwestward, they will push the Scythians south, and those will come down, landless and hungry, as they say our own fathers did. Let’s hope we can hold harder than the Shore Folk who were here before us. If the Black Cloaks move some other way, it may never come. But, Theseus, look; if it does I shall have my hands full. If you want good friends in the bad time, you had better think again of this Cretan marriage. You know I don’t mean to slight your lady; she has more sense than any woman I know, and I swear she never had a wish that could do you harm. She must see it as well as I.”

Those were his words to me. If he had any with her, I do not know. But one night in Athens, when I was lying awake in bed and thinking of these things, she laid her arm across my breast and said, “Theseus, we are what we are. But you must marry the Cretan.”

I answered, “We are what we are. And if I give her what you ought to have, you will never have it.”

“I am a warrior,” she said, “who took you for my king; my honor is in serving yours. Nothing undoes that vow; it is the truth of my heart. So don’t make me a traitor.”

“And the boy? There is bad blood in the House of Minos. Must I graft on that stock, to pass him by?”

She lay, silent awhile, then said, “He is in the hand of some god, Theseus. I felt it while I was bearing him; he seemed stronger than I. I think he feels it too. Sometimes I see him listening.”

So we talked about the child; but she broke off, and said again, “Marry the Cretan, Theseus. Since you were betrothed to her, you have not been there once. Can you trust your governors and the Cretan lords forever? Of course not; and it has been upon your mind.” She always knew my thoughts without telling.

She slept at last, but I lay waking. When the first birds called and the sky lightened, I knew what I would do.

I called the barons, and told them that having considered their counsel and the kingdom’s good, I would sail to Crete and take to wife Minos’ daughter. But to hold the land in peace, I would honor its ancient law which came down from the old religion there: that inheritance is through the mother, and a woman who marries with a foreigner will lose it if she goes from her land to his. So I would leave her in Crete, with fitting state and proper guardians, and visit her when I went there on the kingdom’s business. Thus both realms would be well secured.

They were overjoyed. I had done well to put them in mind that this queen too might serve the Goddess. Almost they thanked me for not bringing her home.

That year I remitted the Cretan tribute, and asked only that they build a house for the bride, and for me when I was with her. I chose the old fort by the southern river, by the shrine of the Sacred Three. I had meant to have it strengthened in any case; it was easy to have it made handsome too. Not for all the world would I have raised up again the Labyrinth, in whose very dust you could smell the wrath of the gods. Deukalion had patched up the western wing; and he was welcome to it, for me.

So that year passed, while the house was building. The child still grew and grew. As soon as the first mist had cleared out of his eyes, they had been like his mother’s, gray as a cloudless dawn; and the silvery hair he was born with hardly darkened. She loved the light on it, and would not have it curled. His skin, like his hair, was fine; but with a little sun it would glow like golden fruit. He was quick and strong, and would scramble everywhere. When he was three, he was found in a broodmare’s straw, his arms and legs round the new foal; he had tried to ride it, and when the two babes tumbled, the mare leaned down and licked them both. You could see, as his mother said, that he had the blood of Poseidon. It was a hard parting, when I set out next spring for Crete.

Life had been picked up again in the great island, as it always is while men live on. If you kept away from the ruined strongholds (I had burned some myself, during the war) there was little amiss to see. The fields were tilled, the vine-stocks greening; the almond tree blossomed by the fallen wall. New houses were going up, less fine than those before but snug and bright. The potters were at work again, those that were left, and had started one more new fashion, this time for birds.

The native Cretans welcomed me as loudly as on the day when I had led them against the Labyrinth. It pleased them that I would hold my wedding feast among them like their own king, and not a conqueror. Some of the Hellene barons who held from me, and had grown oppressive in my absence, were not so pleased. The best and greatest had been trustworthy; but it would not have done to stay away much longer. When I had dealt with what was pressing, I drove to Deukalion’s house to meet my betrothed.

Whatever he thought, he greeted me very civilly. Once I was married, his throne hung on my favor more than before. He had been king only in name, and now would be barely that; but the shadow was precious to him, or perhaps to his lady wife. She came swimming up to me with a chatter of jewelled skirts and a cloud of scent from Egypt, languished awhile, and with a great play of eyes withdrew to bring the Princess.

All this long while, I had seen in my mind’s eye the child who loved the bull-boy, smiling through tears in the nursery painted with apes and flowers. Now I saw led in by the hand a little Cretan lady, just like the portrait I had been sent. Her hair had darkened, and was crimped in long serpent ringlets, before and behind. Her lashes and brows were blackened with kohl, her eyelids painted with lapis paste, her breasts with powdered coral. Her open bodice was clipped in trimly above her tight gold belt; the skirt with its seven flounces showed only her hennaed toes. She cast down her eyes, and touched her forehead with small tapered fingers which, when I took them, never moved in mine. I kissed her closed lips, as one may in Crete; they were fresh and warm under the rouge, and as still as her hand.

Later came the day-long pomps of the wedding, the offerings at the shrines, the sprinklings by the priestesses, the gifts to the kindred; the sunset drive in the gilded car, and the feast as hot and bright as noonday with the scented oil of a thousand lamps on painted stands. Singing, the women led her to the bridal room, and did whatever takes women an hour to do; and the youths with torches, singing, led me in to her. Then the crowds were gone, the doors were shut, the lamp was low; there was a sudden stillness, only the softly plucked harps of the night-music beyond the door.

I lay down by her, and took her chin in my hand, and turned her face towards me. She looked up with dark silent eyes. They had taken off her day-paint and put on paint for the night; the colors were softer, but it hid her still. “Look, Phaedra,” I said, and showed her the old scar across my breast, “I am still marked with the Bull Court. Do you remember when they told you I was dead?”

She answered stiffly, as if we were in a hall of audience, “No, son of Aigeus.” She meant her eyes to tell nothing, but she was young. They told me, among the rest, that she was Minos’ daughter; and there was no doubt that she knew everything.

“I am Theseus still,” I said to her. “I told you if the bulls did not kill me I would be a king, and come back to marry you. And here I am. But fate never comes in the shape men look for: See what has passed over us between then and now; war and earthquake and change, and all those chances that living brings to men under the sun. Yet I have never forgotten how you wept for me.”

She said nothing. But I would have thought worse of myself forever, if I had lain till morning with a woman I could not warm. There was never yet a son or daughter of the House of Minos, but had in them some of the fire of Helios from whose seed they sprung. I was there to serve my kingdom. Perhaps if I had gone about my duty briskly, without trying to make it better than it was, and left the fire unwakened, the shape of future things might have been changed. But I pitied her, for fate had been her master, as it had mine. Also it is my nature to want victory, in this as in other things. No man can outrun the destined end, from the day he is born.

My days were full of business, which I had left too long. When I met her then, she was quiet and soft-spoken, with the pretty airs and graces high-born ladies are taught in Crete, which are for any man. She seldom raised her eyes to mine. By daylight we did not speak about the night, nor make the secret signs of lovers. But the night had its own laws; and indeed when the time came I might have grieved to leave her, if I had been going anywhere but home.