The Bull from the Sea

by Mary Renault

  I opened my mouth to say, “I have work to do.” But it seemed I had been working harder than a plowboy for months and years. I thought of a foot-loose journey north, with Pirithoos and his Lapiths. It tempted me like a sweet look from someone else’s wife.

  He said laughing, “You can stretch your legs aboard, I left deckroom enough for your cattle.”

  I was still young. Not far behind me was the Isthmus journey, not knowing at dawn what the day would bring; Crete, and the bull-dance. I had had the sign of Poseidon; I was born to be a king; and while I moved to it, everything within me worked the one way. Now I had got it. The King had enough to do. But there was another Theseus fretting idle; and this man knew him, too well.

  “Why not?” I said.

  So I put my business by, and went to Kalydon. I saw ships rolled over the peaceful Isthmus, the Gulf of Corinth blue between mountains, and Kalydon by its mouth. And a fine boar-hunt we had there; great deeds, good company and a rich feast. It was good only while it lasted; for it started a blood-feud in the royal house there, and, as happens often, the best man died. Still, it was a great victory feast, for young Meleager and the long-legged huntress he shared the prize with; the grief was all to come. But the faces round the board grow dim to me, and I see, when I look back, Pirithoos everywhere.

  I have been the lover of many women, never of a man. It was the same with him, and our friendship did not change it. Yet if I picked up a spear or a lyre, mounted a chariot, whistled a dog or caught a woman’s eye, it was his eye I thought of. There was emulation mixed in our friendship, and even in our faith a kind of fear. From the day I met him, I would have trusted him with the woman of my heart, or my back in battle; and so would he have trusted me. But what he loved best in me, I myself had doubts of; and he could charm it like a bird out of the wood.

  I went out of my way home from Kalydon, westward to Thessaly, to be his father’s guest. We travelled light, cross-country, with the men he could spare from working home his ships; for speed, he said, but from the love of trouble as I could see. We had enough of it, from wolves and robbers and leopards and the mountain cold. Once, where the track clung to a steep gorge-side, a gale tore through it that made it sing like a great flute of stone; our shields were plucked and tugged by the hands of the wind-god, and would have sailed us off the face if we had not laid them down and filled them up with stones. One Lapith was lost that way.

  At last we were looking down upon the plains of Thessaly, where the rich land lies in broken stretches between long arms and shoulders of wooded hills. The Lapiths encamped beside a spring, and prayed to the god of its river; then they washed and combed themselves, shaved their upper lips, and trimmed their beards. They came out likely and proper men, and three parts Hellene. When they had signalled with smoke, the Palace Guard came out to meet us. Then first I saw the real Lapith wealth: not growing in the ground but running on it, with the thunder dear to Poseidon. This is the home of the great horses, that can carry a man.

  They were bloomed like new-shelled chestnuts, with manes as long as girls’; so fast and strong, I almost believed Pirithoos when he said that at their mating time the black north wind of Thrace came rutting down through the passes to leap the mares.

  We rode them down to the river valley. There the stream flows brown under poplars and silver birches; the stark mountains are only glimpsed far off, through tender leaves. Dark forests furred all the foot-slopes; Pirithoos called them the Kentaur woods.

  Lapiths are great shipbuilders, being so rich in timber; they make the houses of it too, with carved lintels painted red. The Palace of Larissa stood on a hill by the river, in the midst of the greatest plain. There Pirithoos’ father met us at the gate. He greeted me most courteously, but was short and harsh with his son. Every time he went off roving, the old man saw him dead; when the fear was laid, the memory rankled. Above, in Pirithoos’ room, I saw the fresh bed and rich hangings, and everything kept sweet while he was gone.

  While I was there, Pirithoos showed me the Lapith riding-tricks: spearing a trophy at full gallop, snatching a ring from the ground; standing in the saddle, or shooting from it with the short bow they use. He could ride two horses standing, with a foot on each. His people swore that Zeus had taken on the likeness of a stallion to beget him. He had been riding great horses at an age when I was still standing on tiptoe to give them salt. I never had his style; but before I left, I could keep along with him more or less. A horse is not so hard to stay on, after the bulls; and sooner than give him the best of it, I would have broken my neck.

  Once his father took me aside, and talked to me of kingcraft. We spoke of our laws and judgments and such things; and presently he asked me if I could not make Pirithoos put his mind to them: “For he is a boy no more; yet he acts as if I would live forever.” I had seen that he moved slowly always; his flesh was sunk, and his skin too sallow for a man not yet turned sixty. Afterwards I said to Pirithoos, “Your father is sick; and he knows it too.”

  He drew his brows together. “Aye, so do I. After being away, I saw the change. I spoke with the doctor again this morning. Talk, talk; it’s the empty jar that clinks so loud. There’s nothing for it, I must take him up the mountain.”

  I asked if Paian Apollo had a healing shrine there. He looked a little sheepish, then said, “No, there’s an old horse-doctor we go to when the rest give up. Come too if you like; you were wanting to see a Kentaur.”

  I must have stared, after his talk. He whittled away at a bullrush (we were sunning by the river, after a swim) and said, “Well, they have earth magic, if you can find a good one.”

  “Where I come from,” I said, “that is women’s business.”

  “Not among horse-folk. You southerners took that up from the Shore People you conquered. We keep the ways of our wandering forebears. Oh, yes, my father knows why I go roving; it’s in all our blood; it’s only his sickness makes him fret. Well, with horse-folk, women count as baggage, like the cattle. What else can they be while the people move—unless you want to have them take up arms, like the wild-cat Amazons?”

  I opened my mouth; but I had talked enough of the Bull Court, and feared I might grow tedious.

  “And Kentaurs,” he said, “are horse-folk too, after their kind. I’ve hunted these hills all my life, and barely seen the rump of a Kentaur woman. At the first smell of you, they’re off into the caves. Even when I was at school up there—”

  He broke off short and I said, “What?”

  He hemmed awhile, then said, “Oh, it comes before our rite of manhood hereabouts, among the royal kin. Other kings’ houses do it too; at Phthia they do, and at Iolkos. It’s our dedication to Poseidon of the Horses. He made the Kentaurs; they claim he made them before Zeus made proper men. Or some say they were got on horse-stock by earth-born Titans. We are horse-masters, we Lapiths; but they are horse-kin, they live with them wild. Aye, and shameless with the mares as noonday. Full of horse-magic, the Kentaurs are; and that’s worth more than any woman’s corn-spell, here in Thessaly.”

  “But how did you live up there?”

  “On the naked hills, and in the rock-holes. A lad should be hard, before he calls himself a man. When you take arrow poison, you lie up in the sacred cave. No one forgets that night, by Zeus! The dreams …” He covered his mouth, to show that telling was forbidden.

  “Arrow poison?” I asked.

  “Old Handy makes you sick with it; it can’t kill you after, or not for seven years. Then you must have another dose; but it’s nothing to the first. Well, you will see him for yourself.”

  Next morning we started out at cocklight; we two on horseback, the King on an ambling mule. We threaded groves of bay and arbutus where the dew of the mountain mists brushed our bare knees in the gray daybreak; then up the ilex slopes where it sparked in sunrise; then through thick pine woods that brought back night again, with our mounts’ feet soundless on the needle-pad, and hamadryads pressing so thick and silent we almost hushed our breath. Always
the track was clear, not thickly trodden but never quite grown over; there were horse-droppings, and the prints of little hoofs.

  Even Pirithoos was quietened. When I asked him if Old Handy lived much higher, he half looked over his shoulder, saying, “Don’t call him that up here. That’s only what we boys called him.”

  The sick King followed us, picking his way by the easy turns. He had the face of a man returning. His head had been sunk forward when we set out; but now he looked and listened, and once I saw him smile.

  The high air grew keen and sweet; we were among small fir scrub, gray rocks and heather, blue space all around us, cold peaks beyond. In such a place you might come upon the Moon Mistress blazing like a still flame in her awful purity, staring out a lion.

  Pirithoos reined in his horse. “We must wait for the groom with the pack-mule. He has got the gifts.” So we waited, hearing new-waked birds, and the lark arising, and deep quiet behind. After a while, I felt someone was watching us. I would look round, and find nothing; and the hair would creep upon my neck. Then I looked again; and clear on a boulder a boy was lying, loose and easy as a basking cat, chin upon hands. When he saw my eye, he rose and touched his brow in greeting. He was dressed in goatskins, like a herdboy; barefoot, with matted hair; but he gave the King and Pirithoos the royal salutation as it is done in princely houses.

  Pirithoos beckoned him, and asked if the Kentaur priest was in the cave. He did not call him Old Handy, but by his Kentaur name. That tongue is so ancient and uncouth it is hard for a Hellene to shape his mouth to it; full of strange clicks, and grunts like bears’. The boy said in good Greek that he would see; he went springing over the rocky ground as light as a young buck, while we rode softly after. Presently my horse snuffed the air and whinnied. At the next turn, I saw a sight made me nearly jump from the saddle: a beast with four legs and two arms, for all the world like a rough-coated pony with a shock-haired boy growing up from its shoulders. So it seemed, first seen. Coming near, I saw how the pony grazed head down, and the child sitting up bareback had tucked his brown dirty feet into the shaggy pelt.

  He greeted us, making with his grimy hand the sign of homage you see in a royal guard. Then he turned his scrubby mount with his knee, and trotted the way of the first boy, quick as a goat over the stones. Presently as we followed, back came the first on just such another pony, some twelve hands high. He spoke the Kentaur’s name again, and said he was in the cave.

  As we rode, I asked Pirithoos whose son that was. He said, “Who knows? The High King’s of Mykenai, as like as not. They come from everywhere. The Old Man knows who they are; no one else does, till their fathers fetch them home again.”

  I looked down at his feet; he sat his long-maned stallion the same way. I could see him then, with wild black hair falling into his green eyes, living like a mountain fox-cub by what was in him. It seemed there were other schools for that, besides the Bull Court. It was what had drawn us together.

  The trail went round a boulder. Beyond was a slope of rough grass, whin and bramble, stretching to a tall gray cliff-face; and in the face was a cave.

  Pirithoos dismounted, and helped his father down; the pack was lifted from the mule and the beasts led away. I looked about me, and heard the piping of a reed. Sitting on a flat stone under a thorn tree, a boy was playing; when he took the pipe from his mouth, a strange singing answered him. A lyre hung in the tree, which the wind was sounding softly. And coming nearer, I saw twined in the branches a great lean polished snake, swaying its head with the tune. I was going to warn him of his danger; but he shook his head, and looked at the serpent smiling, and waved me very courteously to be still.

  Pirithoos and his servant were unpacking the gifts, when I looked at the cliff again. Two men were riding along its foot, towards the cave. I stared, and went up softly between the boulders. These were not princes living rough, these were the Kentaurs.

  They were naked except for a clout of goatskin; but I thought at first they were clothed all over, so thick was their hair. On their necks and shoulders it did not hang, but grew down, in a thick ridge like a mane, tapering off over the backbone. The backs of their long arms and their bandy legs were thatched as thick as the bellies of their wild stocky ponies in whose fur they had tucked their toes, seeming to grasp with them like fingers. Little beasts the ponies were, like the boys’ but cobbier, with strong hairy fetlocks, and an air hard to put a name to: disrespectful, you might say. If they were servants, it was only as the jackal serves the lion; they had struck their own bargain, this for me, that for you. Even as I watched the men slid off them, leaving them naked as they were foaled, to wander as they chose.

  The men shambled along, with burdens in their arms. Their brows were as low and heavy as lintels, their noses short and wide; and as if their beards had all been spent upon their shoulders, a mere scrub bristled their shallow chins. Wild as the woods they were; and yet, they knew respect for a sacred place. They ceased their grunts and clucks to one another, and trod to the cave as softly as hunt-dogs at heel. There they bent and set what they carried close to the threshold. I saw each pick up a handful of its earth, and rub it on his forehead, before they went away.

  Pirithoos had been busy with his own gifts: a sheepskin dyed scarlet, a painted crock of honey, and a netted bag for herbs. He beckoned me to come up the slope with them. The sick man was weary now, and his son laden, so I gave him my shoulder over the stones. As we neared the cave-mouth, I heard a weak keening cry, and saw what the Kentaurs had left there: a comb of wild honey, and a child. It was a Kentaur baby, staring with old wrinkled eyes. They had wrapped it in a bit of catskin; its knees were drawn into its belly, as if it ached there.

  Pirithoos spread his gifts upon the rocks, beside the honeycomb. The old King went forward, nodding to us, as if to say, “You have leave to go.” Then he lay down on the bare warm grass at the cave-mouth, near to the child.

  We waited, Pirithoos and I, among the boulders. The servant had crept further off. Time passed. The King stretched out in the cool sunshine, as if he would sleep. There was no sound but the whining child, the mountain bees in the heather, and the boy who piped to the wind’s harping and the snake’s ear.

  The shadows stirred in the cave, and a man came forth from it, a Kentaur. I had thought, from what I had been told, he must have some Hellene blood. But he was Kentaur all over, grizzled and old. He paused at the cave’s mouth, and I saw his wide nostrils snuff the air like a dog’s that has been indoors, his eyes following his nose. He went first to the child; picked it up, smelled at its head and rump, and spread his hand on its belly. Its crying quietened, and he laid it down on its side.

  I gazed long at his face. Whatever wild shape his guardian god had put on to beget him, some god was there. You could see it in his eyes. Dark and sad they were, and looked back a long way into the ancient days of the earth, before Zeus ruled in heaven.

  The sick King on the grass lifted his hand in greeting. He did not beckon, but, as one priest with another, waited the Kentaur’s time. He nodded gravely; he was scratching as he did it, yet his dignity seemed no less. Just then a few notes from the boy made him prick his ear; he went and took the flute and piped a phrase. I heard a bird answer from the thicket. The boy said something, and he replied. I could not hear what tongue they spoke together, but the lad seemed easy and at home. And I knew the old Kentaur’s sadness. He had come further up from the earth than all his people, who feared his wisdom and did not know his mind; so these were all his company, children who went down the mountain and turned to men, and forgot his counsel or were ashamed of it. “An old horse-doctor,” they would say, “who charmed us against arrow poison.” But when the fear of sickness or death caught them back to childhood, then they remembered him.

  He went to the King on his short bent legs, and squatted down by him, and heard what he had to say. Then he got on hands and knees and smelled him all over, and laid his little round ear to his breast, and felt his belly, first kneading it deep
, then, when he started, gentling him like a horse. Presently he went off into the cave, with the Kentaur baby on his arm.

  After a while he came back, with a draught in a cup of clay. When the King had drunk it, he sat down by him, and for a long time sang softly. What Kentaur god he was invoking, I do not know; it was a slow deep drone, burring in his great chest. The boy’s piping, the wind in the lyre, and the chirr of crickets, all mingled with it; it was like the voice of the mountain. At last it ceased; the King touched hands with him, and came away. His step was no stronger than before, and yet there was a change. He looked like a man who has made peace with his fate.

  Pirithoos looked at him awhile, then ran up the slope towards the cave. The Kentaur met him there, and they talked together. I saw Old Handy peer at him, perhaps to trace the boy he still remembered. When they parted, Pirithoos lifted his hand, as men do who make a pledge. All the way home he was very quiet; but in the evening, when we were alone and the wine had loosened us, I asked what promise he had given. He looked at me straight, and said, “He asked me to be good to his people, when I am King.”

  VII

  THE ATHENIANS WELCOMED ME home, seeming indeed, like women, to love me more for my unfaithfulness; but they had saved up all their tricky disputes and tangled judgments for me to settle. Having dealt with these, and found them still content with me, I grew bold to push my plans. I proclaimed a great all-Attic festival, in the month of harvest home. The priests of the Goddess from every shrine, no matter what name they called her by, were bidden to the sacrifice; there were Games in her honor, where the young men could meet under sacred truce, and forget their feuds. And the tribal chiefs who were shepherds of their folk before the gods, I asked as guest-friends into my house.