The Bull From the Sea: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  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.

  The fear of the earthquake was working in me, cold and sinking, as I had known it since a child, overshadowing all the rest; man’s greatest wrath is like the stamp of a child’s foot, beside the gods’. Old habit gave me the feel of it; not so bad as some that I had known; at least, not here; for it seemed this was the fringe of it, the center further off. Turning about, as a dog does for the scent, I fe
lt my neck-hairs rise when I faced the sea.

  The water of the straits was as still as molten lead. On the windless air, I heard horses screaming and whinnying, as the grooms led them from the stables into the field. Then through their noise I heard a voice quite near me, laboring and hoarse, say, “King Theseus! Sir!”

  A big warrior, the Palace wrestler who taught the youths, was plowing up through the grove towards me, with a burden in his arms. When I turned, he laid it down upon the ground. It was Akamas. He thrust off the man, who was trying to prop his head, and leaned back on his elbows, fighting for breath, his body arched like a bow, jerking and gasping. The man said to me, “He would come, sir. I found him down there; he had been trying to run, and fallen. Sir, he keeps saying he must see you before he dies.”

  The boy rose on one hand, and stretched the other out to me, beckoning me near. His face was white about the mouth, which was almost blue. On a great hiss of breath he said, “Father!” and clutched his chest with both hands, as if he would tear it open to let in air. His eyes were fixed on mine; charged not with terror, but with speech.

  I went and bent over him, the son that I had left. “Can it be,” I thought, “that the god’s sign has come down to him, and he lacks the strength to bear it? Yet it proves him my true son, this one at least.” I said to him, “Hold on, lad, it will be over before long, and the fear will pass.”

  He shook his head, and made a harsh sound in his throat, cut off by choking. His face filled with blood, like a hanged man’s; then he snatched at a breath, and cried out his brother’s name.

  “No more!” I said. “You are sick, and you know nothing. Rest, and be silent.” His chest worked up and down, laboring with words. “Be still. Later you will understand.” Tears of pain and struggle had filled his eyes; half out of my mind as I was, I pitied him. “Hush!” I said. “He has gone away.”

  Such a spasm seized him, that it took my mind from the earthquake; it seemed he would never breathe again. He was almost black, when he hurled from his knees up to his feet, and flung his arms at the sky. His breath crowed in his throat and he cried aloud, “Paian Apollo!” He stood there, swaying; then turned to the man who had carried him, and said hoarsely but quite steadily, Thank you, Sirios. You can go.”

  The man looked at me, and at my nod went off. I helped the boy down again and knelt beside him. Before ever he spoke, some shadow brushed me with cold. But I said to myself it was the coming earthquake.

  “Now quiet,” I said. “Or it will start again.”

  “I can die. I was afraid before.” He nursed this rough flat voice, easing it along like a dead-tired horse. He was very weak. “I can die if I tell you first. Hippolytos … what you cursed him for … it isn’t true.”

  “Hush, that is finished. It is for the gods to judge.”

  “Let them hear me! Let them choke me if I lie!” His eyes opened and he caught his breath; then he drew it clear. But he whispered after, to save his strength. So robbers must look, white-faced and whispering, who creep into a royal tomb. “He said no. She asked him, she …” His working fingers dug into the ground. “… in Athens,” he said. “I heard.”

  I stared before me, knowing the wound was mortal; soon I would begin bleeding, soon would come the pain. The boy reached for my hand, and I took it, though it was little thought I had for him. Only a god can guess what he must have suffered; and he a Cretan, for whom the mother is god on earth.

  His hushed, thief’s voice ran on. “I nearly died then. I hated him too, because of what he called her. But he said to me after, ‘I was wrong to be angry. She trusted me.’ He came to me the next day, when I was sick, to say that he was sorry. ‘Don’t be afraid, Akamas,’ he said. ‘I won’t tell Father, or anyone else on earth. I’d swear it to you, but an oath to a god is greater. I gave her the pledge of Asklepios, which binds a man till death.’”

  I lacked even the strength to say to him, “It is enough.”

  “You see,” he said, “it was the secret of her sickness. So he had to keep it.”

  The sight of the woman rose before me. Bruised like a slave; a slave’s terror too, and a slave’s lies. If her tale had been true, she would have scratched his face, or bitten him. His torn tunic and dragged-out hair—he had been pulled at, not thrust away. Those weals upon her shoulders and her throat were the marks not of his lust, but of his anger, the rage of the lion who sees the bars of the trap on every side. When she screamed, he had shaken and shaken her in blind fury, forgetting his own strength. I out of all men, how could I not have known?

  “He said to me”—the boy’s voice was getting stronger—“‘We will go together, and be the guests of Apollo. All evil is a sickness, and his music heals it. At Epidauros, everything will be well.’”

  I stood up. My brows were dizzy, my feet were tingling. The flat oily sea made me sicker than any storm. I looked along the road to Epidauros, the road that ran by the shore.

  “Father, it is true, I swear, I swear! If I lie may Apollo shoot me dead! It is true! Quick, Father, and stop the earthquake!”

  Horror crept over me. I cried aloud to him, “I am not a god!” But his dark eyes, fixed on mine, seemed more than his own. He had challenged death, offering his fear in sacrifice; and the holiness had not brushed off him yet. The god in him had cried to the god in me; but there was no god to answer, only the feel of a sickness in the ground.

  I said, “Stay here, where you are. I will go and find him.”

  I ran off down the olive-slope, calling my men, who came pounding after, grim-faced with fright. Over my shoulder, I saw the old wrestler plodding back to the boy. He was sitting quietly. What inward fetter broke in him that day I do not know; but from that time on the fits grew short and mild, and now he has reached manhood, they are gone.

  Down on the horse-field they had picketed the chariot-teams, lest they should bolt when the earth shook. Most of them were squealing and plunging on their hobbles; I picked out a quiet pair, and shouted for a racing-chariot. It was the first time I had raised my voice with an earthquake coming, since I was a child.

  As I urged them down to the shore, I felt neither fear nor awe, only a strangeness, like high fever. The horses felt it in me; they dashed along hardly needing the whip, as if they wanted to get away from the man behind them. So too did I.

  There is time, I thought, there is still time. He had been gone, how long? As long as it takes to string a lyre and tune it; to row a ship out of harbor; to drive a few turns round the track? And then I thought, “How soon?”

  As I labored over the soggy mud flats, I thought of the slave-girl he had sent me, lest quarrelling with Phaedra I might learn the truth. He had feared for me, and for his brother; the truth of his own danger he had only seen too late. He had not the mind that foreknows such things.

  The road climbed again; far off between two cypress clumps I glimpsed his chariot. As I looked, it slowed to a walk. He has seen me, I thought; he is waiting; all is saved. I waved, to catch his eye. But he had only paused to breathe his team; he was off again. He had all three of his horses; after all, he was going away for good. As they started up, I saw they were getting restive. Next moment he was out of sight.

  The road was good; it had not rained for three days. I whipped up my team; but there was a change. Though they had not felt it in the horse-field, they felt it now. They checked and plunged; one reared up screaming; I had all I could do to hold them. As I stood leaning back against the reins, over the tossing heads I saw the bay below. And it had moved away. Even as I watched, the waters crept out further, showing the sea-floor no living man had seen, all weed and rotting boat-hulls. And still they sank, as if some great mouth below were swallowing them in.

  I knew what the horses knew. The chariot turned, a beast with three heads filled with one fear. We charged off the road and up into the farmland, ploughing across the new-sown fields, breaking the water-channels, crashing through young vines. The farmer’s wife and all his children, hearing the din, ran
shouting out of doors. The god was their friend. He sent them me for a blessing. Who can trace the pathways of the Immortals?

  The horses bolted on, past the vines into unfilled scrub; the wheels leaped and lurched over clods and stones. I had hitched the reins about me, but only with one turn, for fear of something like this. As the brush slowed them, I loosed myself and jumped clear. I fell and rolled, and got up shaken and bruised, shuddering from the touch of earth. All the cattle in the byres were lowing and bawling. A he-goat with wicked eyes opened his mouth in a wild cry. And with that came the earthquake.

  The ground jolted and jarred; there was a rumble of stones as the farm fell down in rubble. I heard the wife wail, the man shout out to her, hoarse with terror, from the fields. The children began to scream and the dogs to howl. The earthquake-sickness cleared from my head and belly. “It is over,” I thought. Then why do I feel this fear?”

  A hare raced past me, almost brushing my leg, taking great bounds uphill. And then I saw the water coming.

  The bay was filling again; not slyly, as it had emptied, but in a great rushing wave, climbing the shores. It washed right over the Psiphia mole, lifting the fishing-boats upon it like toys on a child’s string. Right over the chariot-road below me ran the salt sea, and climbed the plowland; spent itself, and paused, and went sucking back from the scoured land. There was a hush like death; and in this quiet, before all the outcries began again, I heard from northward along the road the squeal of furious horses, mixed with the great bellowing of a bull.

  I did not ask, “What is it?” It was the voice of my fear.

  Rising above the din, like the war-cry of a king above the battle, I heard a shout I would have known among the shouts of a thousand men. It ceased, broken halfway. The wild neighing rose, and stopped, and rose again. My own pair, caught in the traces round the foundered chariot, whinnied in dread.