by Henry Treece
Later, when I watched the smiths beating these rough swords out on the anvils, and putting a keen edge to them, I felt proud to be the hard Iron Queen of Oeta. It was better than being the Amber Princess of Mycenae.
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But such glory does not last. The god cannot bear to see us too contented. I had been the Iron Queen of Oeta for only three years when I lost my first baby. It came away from me in the seventh month, when I was helping the king my husband to tip a heavy basket of iron-sand into the furnace-vent one morning. Pylades was as black as thunder with me, and shouted that I had purposely done this, that I did not want him to have a son. This was so cruel, I could not bear it.
The women carried me away to the reed hut where child-birth happened, and there they tried to quieten me, for I was raving with grief all the time, and thought the world had come to an end.
Pylades would not even see me. He smashed the furnaces and let the iron spoil, he was so angry. I remember telling one of the women to lay our dead child on the furnace-top as an offering to their stinking Fish God. She stared at me so horror-struck that I knew I had said a very bad thing, but I was so distracted that I went on and said even worse, just to show her that I did not care what became of me. I even said that I wanted Pylades dead, beside his son.
But at last I calmed down and sent a young girl to fetch Rarus to me. He came with bowed head, and hands crossed on his chest. He stood by my bed, not speaking.
This angered me again, and I shouted out, ‘Dog! So you will make me speak first, hey?’ I tried to throw a clay cup at him, but I was too weak, and fell back weeping in my bed. I thought he would come and bend over me and smooth my wet hair, but he stood quiet, where he was, his head still lowered. At last he said, ‘Queen, I have no comfort to give you. There is little left in me to offer, after all these years of watching you and longing for your love. You call me a dog, and that is what I am—a dog who has lost his mistress and now must go away and find a kennel in some other place.’
Rarus had never spoken like this before; his words were like a bucket of cold water splashed across my face. Bitterly I asked, ‘Where could one like you go, Rarus? Who would want you? Who would want you? No woman, certainly!’
He said, ‘No, no woman, lady. But sometimes, during the time I have been shut out from your room, I have remembered that there is a man who might want me, the man who raised me from the gutters of Mycenae and first put food in my mouth.’
I said in amazement, ‘You would go back to Aegisthus!’
Rarus nodded and smiled miserably. ‘Who else?’ he asked. ‘I might still be of use to him. I am nothing here. Your brother has threatened to strangle me if I as much as cross his path. There is a madness growing in your brother, lady, which will burst out one day and destroy him. I have watched it coming for long enough now, and I do not want to be here when it breaks forth.’
I thought long on what he had said. Then I answered him: ‘Rarus, I think you are speaking the truth. There is something strange with Orestes. He dreams that he is Agamemnon come again, and strikes anyone who calls him by his true name. Hermione tells me that he rolls about awake each night groaning and sweating, and hitting at her whenever she tries to get him back to bed.’
Rarus answered, ‘Yes, it is true; I have heard him. One day in his rage, he might well kill her, too. So, I will make my way back to my old master. He may vent his anger on me by thrashing me, but he will not kill me, I am sure.’
He turned and left the hut. I let him go, then wept on to my pillow, for I saw that my glorious new world had been nothing after all.
That night I dreamed of my mother. Her white, lined face filled my eyes, as though she was very close to me. I even scented the sickness of her body as I stared into her suffering face. She had reddened her lips and put clay dust on her cheeks, which made her look like the dead. ‘What are you trying to say to me, mother?’ I asked in my dream. She mouthed a long while, silently, and then words came from the deepest part of her throat, flying towards me like black birds. ‘Come back to Mycenae, daughter,’ her words said. I am not long to live, nor is the city long to stand. There is much to be done before the darkness falls. Come back… come back… come back….’
I woke before the dawn, fevered and pain-racked. The girl who tended me lay asleep by my bed, her red hands palm upwards on her lap, her head lolling stupidly down on her breast. She did not hear me rise and stumble about as I put on my clothes. She was still snoring even when I went through the door.
With painful effort, I reached the hill-top and turned once to look down at the stone valley. The furnaces were smouldering, sending out heavy fumes, fouling the air. All looked black or grey down there. I wondered why I had ever thought it a place of glory. Suddenly I saw that it was a place of evil, not magic. A place of foul dreams and sulphurous stench, a valley of madness.
I was glad to be away from it, even though it meant leaving Hermione; but, in any event, in these last months, while the child had been growing in me, I had seen less and less of her, and had felt the love dying between us, like a flower held too long in the warm hand. There was no doubt of it, sad as it was.
Over the first hill there ran a narrow winding road, beside a deep gully where a stream ran between great round pebbles. In summer there was no water, only pebbles, and spiked leaves, grey in colour, like all else in this wilderness. Dead sheep lay in the gully, with the crows at their eyes. I passed this place of agony with my own eyes averted, and my shawl over my head.
So, it was only by good fortune that I saw Rarus sitting on a stone, picking at a thorn which had lodged in his foot. I might easily have missed him.
He was not looking at me, but at the thorn, and he made no show of even having heard me approaching.
I went to him and said, ‘Now it is your right, Rarus, to make me speak first. Come, I will pull out the thorn, then we will go together back to Mycenae.’
He did not answer, but sat quite still until I had finished, then he took my bundle on his back and walked with me, sure-footed among the rocks and rubble, as though he had known we should return together all the time; as though he had always known that we were bound together, part of the same unbreakable pattern, since that awful dark night of our childhood, when we stood afraid with the snake twitching between us, tying us to one another with the ancient knot that no hand could undo.
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It had been one thing riding up to Delphi and then on, with Pylades’ horsemen, to Oeta; it was another thing to set forth, sick and lonely, with one’s life a ruin behind one, on foot, in an unknown country whose bitter mountains seemed to block the way at every turn.
I think we should never have reached Mycenae again, but Rarus talked with an old hill-shepherd who told us to follow the river that lay below us; that one day it would bring us to the sea, if the god was with us.
All my life I had heard men speak of the Saronic Sea, or the Gulf of Corinth, and I asked the old shepherd which of these seas we should reach, but he should his head. ‘Nay, woman,’ he said,’ tis neither. The river is called Euenus and it leads down to Chalcis. Men take it if they want to go to Ithaca, where old Odysseus used to be the king, the one who never got back from Troy. But I know no more about it than that. I am a land-man not a sea-man; I have never seen this sea men speak of, and do not wish to. Land is everything, with its cattle and its crops; who would leave these for sea? My old grandfather used to say: “Go to sea if you must, but only between sowing and reaping—and even then you will be a fool! ” Nay, sea’s not for the likes of me,’
We parted from him and were going down the hill when he stood up and waved his stick, shouting, ‘Take care! Take care! I have heard that there are Dorian somewhere down towards Chalcis. Walk with your eyes open, my friends!’
Rarus shrugged his shoulders and said to me, ‘Do not be afraid, Iron Queen; Dorian are behind us, too, coming down the land. They are like death; they stand at every corner. If we let that frighten us, we shall never move a pace
forward, but shall lie down and die here, of fear.’
I held his arm and said, ‘Rarus, do not call me Iron Queen any more. I am your sister again; all that is behind me now. As for being afraid, though you are not a warrior like the others, I feel safer with you than with anyone. I have always felt like that.’
He smiled gently and said, ‘I am glad, sister. We have been through much together in our life; you great, I nothing. It is as though the god brought us together, as he brings the blind man a stick, and us dogs a master.’
There were few villages, and those only scorched hovels where the watch-dogs drove us away before we had a chance to ask for bread. We drank from the river, and ate the red berries that grew on the hillside bushes. Sometimes there were wild vines which carried a tiny harvest for us; sometimes fleshy roots that grew in what thin soil lay on the rocks. Before the winter was on us, we had learned to fish in the shallow reaches of Euenus, in the little swirling backwaters, where the stream only reached the knee. Once Rarus killed a fox with a stone, but it was not good meat to eat, being bitter and gristly. It was an old fox, and already half gone before the stone struck it on the head.
Snow came and found us far from any village. I was so weary now that I begged Rarus to go on and leave me. He sat by me for two days, heaping brushwood about me for a shelter, and stones at my head to keep the wind away; then, one morning, he kissed my hands and feet and said, ‘It is like cutting off one of my hands, sister—but it must be done, as I see now. There is still so much life in me that if I lay beside you on the hill here, I should live on and on after you lay cold beside me.’
Then he wrapped his own threadbare cloak about me and went away.
I covered my face in my hands and did not watch him going; I should only have lost courage and have called him back to his own death.
And when he had gone, I thought over all my life, and saw at last what a fool I had been, how I had taunted the god, sometimes without knowing it; and I came to the conclusion that I had deserved all that had befallen me. There was no denying it. I said aloud, ‘Take me, Zeus; find some place for me somewhere, I care not where; but take me into your arms. That is all I ask. Here on the mountain I have no one’s arms about me and I am lost. Punish me if you will, but take me.’
I could hear the snow swirling round the little shelter that Rarus had made, and somewhere above me up the hill a bitch-fox barking sharply, as though she scented her prey, or perhaps cried out for her father whom we had killed.
Then I heard Rarus say, ‘There she is, still living, thank god!’
With him stood a very big man wrapped up in wolf-skins and deer hides. He was a Libyan, it seemed, for his skin was jet-black, and his long hair was dressed in a great horse tail at the back of his head, He wore agate ear-rings that hung to his shoulders, and bands of red copper on his wrists. Looking up at him, lazy with the cold, I saw that his nose was fine and curved, not flat as many Libyan’s noses are; and his lips thin and not pouting-thick. He reached out his long fingers and his pink palms towards me and took me up on his shoulder. ‘Come,’ he said in a deep voice that came out of his chest, ‘we have not far to go. Find courage, lady.’
This black man, coming so close upon my prayer, caused me to wonder if he was the god, or if the god used black servants to do his bidding. Always before I had thought of them as lesser-folk and slaves; but now, for the first time, I saw what strength and dignity they had, these black people.
I said to him, ‘Are you god’s servant, sir?’
He laughed among the snow on the hillside and said, ‘Of course! Why yes, of course!’
At last we came to the place where he lived, a low cave in the hillside, formed where a ledge of rock had fallen sideways to leave a sheltered space beneath it. There was a wattle-door before the entrance, and rushes growing before that. A man might live there all his life and never be discovered.
Inside, all was warm and light; a charcoal brazier glowed by the far wall, and clay lamps stood in every rocky cleft. On the floor, among the thick rushes, sat a woman, fashioning a bowl of clay. She was not black; she was of the Hellene folk, with chestnut hair, and brown breasts as freckled as a bird’s feathers. Three fair children rolled in play near the fire; a tiny dark baby lay suckling at her breast, even as she turned the bowl with hands that were thick with the wet clay. Her only dress was a deerskin skirt, but she wore long agate ear-rings, like her husband, and seemed a queen.
He set me before her and told her our story. Soon she had left her work and had set down bowls of boiled meat, and cups of apple-ale for us to drink. She watched over us, smiling and making little clucking sounds, as if we were her children, too. Though she could not have been older than I was myself, a great warmth came from her to me, and there were moments when I thought that she must be the Mother herself, the Mother in her gentle mood.
This was one of the sweetest times of my life. All was contentment in that cave with the merry children crawling about and playing through the day, a big brown dog watching over them and letting them do everything they wished, pulling its tail and ears, nestling against its belly for warmth, even trying to ride on its back.
While we stayed there and let the winter wear itself out, I learned to turn bowls and cups of clay from the woman; and Rarus was shown how to glaze them and bake them in a little oven in the rocky wall. The black man taught him this, with long agile fingers which made those of Rarus look like those of a clumsy child, though in most matters his hands were deft enough.
We never learned their names. When we asked, they laughed and said they had thrown away such useless things and called each other simply ‘husband’, or ‘wife’.
I felt so happy with them that I think I could have stayed in their cave for ever; but one morning the woman came to me with a serious face and said, ‘A dream visited me in the night, lady. Someone is crying out to you across land and sea; it is your mother, I think. She begged us to send you home again.’
The black man stood by her and nodded. ‘It came to me, too,’ he said, ‘but the voice was so weak that I could only hear it say, ‘All is ending, come!’
So Rarus and I set out that day, turning a little from the river, which now fell in torrents over a rocky ledge. Among the mists, distantly, I thought I saw the silver of water, and even ships sailing on it. But Rarus did not see this.
At the end of the second day, we stumbled round a rocky corner on the hill-path and almost fell over a man who sat with his back to the stones, and a tall spear between his knees. His red hair flared out from under a helmet of dull bronze, and his cheeks were streaked with bars of blue war-paint. There was no running away from him; yet, strangely, he seemed in no hurry to catch us. He scratched his stubbled cheek, then poised his spear as though wondering whether to cast it or not. Afterwards, he grinned and showed his broken yellow teeth, like a dog still not certain whether to bite, or to let the bare run back into the corn.
‘Who are you?’ he asked, in a slow outland voice.
Rarus answered, ‘We are brother and sister, Deionize and Ares. We go to seek our fortune in Locris, sir.’
The man put down his spear and laughed. ‘I wish you well of it,’ he said. ‘But I fear there will be little enough fortune left for such as you in Locris. Others have been there before you. Come with me.’
We followed him to a bend in the path which overlooked a rocky plain. There, almost as far as the sight could fly, were fires and tents and wagons, and horses tethered. Great herds of cattle lowed; goats cropped what herbage there was, among the stones; and the earth was black with men.
I had never seen anything like this, not even when the kings gathered for the sailing to Troy. ‘What is it?’ I asked, breathless.
The man laughed at me, in a good humour, then said, ‘It is some of my people, the Dorian, woman. We are coming down and down, always towards the navel of Hellas, always towards the proud places where men have lost their hearts for the sake of gold. This gold will we take, and these men will
we kill. Then the world will know sense again, and all shall be equal.’
He directed us to a little path that went steeply down the slope, away from the great plain. ‘No one will harm you in that direction,’ he said, ‘and one day, if you are lucky, you will reach Chalcis. But, I advise you, do not try Locris; it is already picked clean, like a white bone. Try somewhere else.’
Rarus had got his voice back by now, and he asked, joking, ‘Where shall we try, master?’
The Dorian scratched his nose with the point of his dagger, humorously, then called out, ‘Try Libya! Try Egypt! Sail over the seas to the world’s edge and try there; for we shall settle in all other places and take them for our own. Good luck to you!’
He went back to his guard-post, as though we were already forgotten, and we staggered on down the hill, among the dried sagebrush.
Four days later we reached Chalcis.
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it was not a large place at all, in those days, but it was big enough alter all our wanderings in the hills. There were four rows of white flat-fronted houses facing the sea, and a long stone wharf where the small ships tied up. Across the strait, about eight miles away, in Achaea, lay the other port of Patrae, and between the two there was a ferry, when there were enough folk or loads of wool and hide to take over.
I stood on the jetty and looked longingly towards Achaea. ‘Oh, Rarus,’ I said, ‘if we only had the price of our fare!’
A shipman who lounged by the sea’s edge, winding twine on a stick, heard me and said, ‘You had best get your fare quickly, woman. The boats will be leaving Chalcis soon and never coming back. We shall burn this town and clear out before the next moon. Better a burned town than one taken by the Dorian. As for me, I shall take my boat over and then go round the coast to the Isthmus to see what I can pick up. They say that there’s plenty of work to be had in Corinth just now, with all the workmen flying for fear of the incomers.’
