The Bull From the Sea: A Novel

I

I HAVE SAILED ALL the seas since then, and sacked many cities. Unless there was war, I went roving with Pirithoos every year. To see new things, and live from day to day, is better than wine or poppy, and fitter for a man. I have passed between Scylla and Charybdis by the smoking snows; and off the Siren Rocks, where the wreckers send their girls to sing you over, I have caught a siren and lived to tell. Women I have had in plenty, though none for long. A face glimpsed over foreign walls, not to be had without guile and danger; till she is won, it can hold your mind from before and after, and you can believe she will not be like all the rest.

My people forgave me many years of this, because I had saved the City. Winter was long enough to bring the realm in order; if I found oppression growing up behind my back, I brought down a heavy hand. But by spring I would have wearied of it all, and of the royal rooms where my arms hung alone upon the wall; I would shut the door and be off to sea again.

If I had stayed in Attica all the year, I could have sent for young Hippolytos, and tried to get him accepted as my heir. Each spring I had half a mind to it. But the sea would call, and new places free from memories. I would leave him in Troizen one year more; he was happy there, with old Pittheus and my mother. When I heard he was known for three kingdoms round as Kouros of the Maiden, I thought of calling at Troizen as I passed; but the wind was contrary, and I let it go. I remembered those stubborn silences. The lad in Crete, who was gay and easy, and would sit at my knee by the hour for sailors’ tales, him I could have talked to; though you would not look at him and say, “There goes a king.”

One year at the winter’s end, a courier brought a royal letter from old Pittheus, sealed with the Eagle. It was the first I had had since the Cretan War. It said he was feeling the touch of age (the hand was a scribe’s, and the signature looked as if a spider had fallen in the inkwell). It was time to name his heir; and he had chosen Hippolytos.

I had never thought of this. He had got sons without number. It was true, however, that only my mother was left of his lawful children. He might have chosen me; but seeing how I lived now, I could not blame him; and with Troizen added to my kingdoms, I should have had to give up the sea. I thought the old man had done well and justly by us; it would give the boy standing if he came to Athens, the people might be more ready to accept him there also, and he could still join the kingdoms when I was gone. It reminded me that it was four years since I had last put in at Troizen. The boy must be seventeen.

In the sailing month I made my way there. As the ship rowed in, I saw the waiting people part, to let through a three-horse chariot. A man stood in it. He was the child I had seen last time.

He bowled neatly down to the wharfside. The people knuckled their brows before his eye had reached them, and did it smiling. So far, good. As he jumped down, and young men ran to hold his horses, I saw he topped the tallest by half a head.

He ran aboard to greet me, and went straight down on his knee. As he rose, he took my kiss upon his cheek and gave one; then he went on rising, up and up. He had been too civil to stoop.

Commanding warriors, I am used to tall men about me. I have met plenty in battle, too, and come off best. I could not tell why this shocked me so, as if it were I who had lessened, or shrunk with age.

Then my eye took in his beauty. That shocked me too. He was like the image of a god; there seemed a kind of hubris in it; yet it was not that. As he greeted me with the grave reverence proper to some foreign deity, I met his gray eyes, as clear as snow-water; shaped by long gazing, as a sailor’s are, but more still. They seemed to speak to me simply and frankly, in a language I did not know. They were her eyes no longer.

Tall trees grew on her grave-mound. The pups of our hounds’ last mating had grown gray-nosed and died. Her young Guard had sons who were learning arms. As for me, she would hardly have known the face the mirrors showed me now, gray-bearded, darkened with salt and sun. She had seemed to die again in all these passings. But just now, far off in the chariot, I had seen the hair pale as electrum, the springing stance, the joy in the swift horses, and for a moment she had lived again. She was gone now, and forever.

He led me to the chariot, mounted, and lashed the reins about him, holding the horses still as bronze for me to get up. The people cheered; he bent over the team as if he were a hired driver, leaving all the cheers to me, but turned with a shy smile to see that I was pleased. He was only a boy still. What I had felt seemed strange and foolish. This was my son and hers; and if I was not proud I must be hard to satisfy.

I praised his horses and his driving, and asked how long he had handled three. Not long, he said; he had had a pair since he was fourteen, but the third was for great days and festivals. He smiled again. So the sun stirs among the moving barley, though it has been shining all along. I had left him a long time in this little kingdom, when there was a great one in Athens. I had not looked to find him so well content.

We trotted out through the harbor town, the horses moving like one to his big light hands. He was careful even of the village pye-dogs, leaning out to give them a warning flick. He left me all the greetings, except when the children called to him, at whom he smiled. His bare shoulders shone before me, brown and broad, rippling like the horses’ glossy flanks; his own in their leather short-drawers were lean and strong. With his big-boned hands and feet, he would be taller yet. When I had been a child here, before my father owned me, trying to believe I was the son of a god, this was what I had prayed to grow into; but I had to make do with what I was given. Men have done worse with more.

As we left the town he pointed things out to me, telling the kingdom’s news, as keen as a young farmer, yet not thinking as yokels do that it filled the world. His sense seemed sound. I wondered what he found to do here. It all seemed like a small-holding, after Attica and Crete.

He had just touched up the horses for the open road, when a woman rushed out of a hut with a screaming child in her arms, and stood in the way. Instead of shouting to her to look out, he brought the team to a dead stop, took an extra hitch of the reins around his waist, and held out his arms without a word. The mother gave him the child, black in the face and jerking all over. He held and stroked it; presently it got its breath and color back and quieted down, and he handed it back again, saying, “You know you could do that too, and better than I.” She seemed to understand this, blessed him, and said it seldom happened nowadays. As we drove on he said, “Do forgive me, sir. It looked half dead this time, or I’d not have made you wait.”

“Quite right,” I answered. “I am glad to see you care for all your children, even those who were lightly got.”

He turned his head, his gray eyes wide open; then he laughed. “Oh, it’s not mine, sir; it is the woodcutter’s.” He went on smiling to himself; then turned serious, and looked as if he would speak, but changed his mind and bent to his driving.

At the Palace my mother greeted me. While I was a lad in Crete she seemed to age five years in one; since then in this quiet place she had grown no older, and might have been the lad’s mother instead of mine. Some of her half-brothers were there to bid me welcome, men still in their prime, and I watched how they looked at him; he, after all, was a bastard as well as they. But they seemed to accept him, just as the people did. Perhaps it was this gift of healing. No one had sent me word of it; but then I had not sent for news.

Inside, my mother said to me, “I will see if Father is ready. I told him you were coming, Theseus, but he forgets again. Now at the last he calls the women to wash and comb him. Hippolytos, don’t stand dreaming; look after your father and see he has some wine.”

He served me himself, sending off the steward. When I bade him sit, he took a low stool, and sat with his arms folded lightly upon his knees. Looking at their long muscles and remembering them at the reins, I thought, “What arms for a woman!” It was time he thought about marriage; if Pittheus was too old to see to it, I had better take it in hand.

But when I asked him if he had a girl in mind, he looked amazed, and answered, “Oh, no, sir. It’s too late to think of that.”

“Too late?” I said staring. But to laugh would hurt him, and do no good. “Come, lad; whatever happened, everything passes. A girl, was it, or a boy?”

“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.