The King Must Die

by Mary Renault

  My fear left me. I ceased to struggle, and my face broke water. I lay on the sea, as easy as the lost child the father finds on the mountain, and brings home in his arms. Once round the point, the current always sets for land again. But I should never have lived to remember it but for Poseidon, Shepherd of Ships.

  In the hills’ shelter the sea was calm and the air gentle. Climbing to the torches I lost the last of the chill. I felt light and lucky, full of the god. Soon I saw light through apple leaves, and dancers whirling; there were pipes and singing and the thud of feet.

  It was a little village feast, on a slope of orchards. The torches were fixed on poles around the floor, for the torch-dance was over. The men were doing the Dance of the Quails, with feathered masks and wings, wheeling and hobbling and dipping and giving quail-calls; the women stood round singing the song, clapping and tapping their feet. When I came out into the torchlight they broke off singing; and the tallest girl, the village beauty the men were whistling and calling to, cried out, “Here is the Kouros of Poseidon! Look at his hair all wet from the sea!” Then she laughed. But when I looked, I saw she was not mocking me.

  After the dancing we ran away, and lay hidden close in the deep wet grass among the apple trees, stifling each other’s laughter when one of her suitors came crashing and roaring past. Afterwards she held me away from her; but it was only while she got out a windfall from under her back.

  That was my first girl, and I had my first war not long after. The men of Hermione came north over the hills, and lifted thirty head of cattle. When I heard my uncles shouting to each other, and calling for their horses and their, arms, I slipped away and helped myself from the armory and the stable! I stole out by the postern, and joined them up on the hill road. Diokles thought it a good joke. It was the last he ever laughed at; one of the raiders speared him. When he was dead, I rode after the man who did it, and dragged him from his horse across the neck of mine, and killed him with my dagger. My grandfather had been angry at my going without leave; but he did not rebuke me after, saying it was only proper I should avenge Diokles, who had always been good to me. I had been so angry I could not even feel I was killing my first man; only that I wanted him dead, like a wolf or a boar. We got back all the cattle before nightfall, except for two which fell down a steep place on the mountain.

  A few months after this, the time of King Minos’ tribute came round again.

  The tax goods were gathering at the harbor: hides and oil, wool and copper and boarhound bitches in whelp. People looked sour; but I had other trouble. I knew this was when the small boys were taken out from the tall ones, and sent to the hills to hide. I made offerings to Poseidon, and Zeus, and the Mother, praying in secret to be spared this shame. But soon after, my grandfather said to me, “Theseus, when you are up in the mountains, if there are broken necks, or cattle stolen, I am telling you now you will be the first to answer for it. There is your warning.”

  My heart reproached the thankless gods. “Must I go, sir? Surely it’s beneath the house, for me to hide away. They would never take me; they can’t think so meanly of us as that.” He looked at me testily. “They will think you are just the build of boy they like for the bull-dance; that and nothing more. Don’t talk when you know nothing.” I thought, “Well, that is blunt enough.”

  “Who is King Minos,” I said, “to treat kings’ houses like a victor? Why do we pay him? Why not go to war?”

  He tapped his fingers on his belt. “Come back later,” he said, “when I have less to do. Meanwhile, we pay Minos tribute because he commands the sea. If he stopped the tin-ships we could make no bronze, and should have to make swords of stone, like the first Earth Men. As for war, he has ships enough to bring five thousand men here in a day. Remember also that he keeps the seaways clear of pirates, who would cost us more than he does.”

  “A tax is all very well,” I said. “But to take people, that is treating Hellenes like slaves.” “All the more reason to avoid it. In Corinth and Athens, likely boys were allowed to be seen; now other kingdoms know better. To talk of a war with Crete, as if it were a cattle raid! You try my patience. Behave yourself in the mountains. And next time I send for you, wash your face.”

  All this was bitter to my new-found manhood. “We ought to hide some girls too,” I said. “Can we pick our own?” He gave me a hard look. “It’s a young dog that barks over his bone. You have leave to go.”

  It was my bitter hour, when the big lads swaggered free in Troizen, while the small and slender, bear-led by two unwilling House Barons, were led away. Even though the cripples and the sickly stayed in Troizen too, we all felt disgraced for ever. Five days we were in the mountains, sleeping in a barn, hunting and climbing and fist-fighting and coursing hares on foot, a plague to our guardians, trying to prove to ourselves we were good for something. Someone got an eye pecked by a raven, and one or two of us, as we learned later, got sons or daughters; they are wild but willing, those girls in the back hills. Then someone rode out on muleback to say the Cretans had sailed for Tiryns, and we could come home.

  Time passed, and I grew taller, but never overtook the others; and the wrestling court was a place of grief to me, for there were boys a year younger who could lift me off the ground. I no longer hoped to be seven feet tall; I wanted a foot even of six, and I was rising sixteen.

  When there was dancing, my troubles always lifted; and I came to music through the dance. I loved the winter evenings in the Hall, when the lyre was passed about, and was glad when I began to be called on for my turn. On one such evening, a guest was there, a baron from Pylos. He sang well, and in compliment gave us the tale of Pelops, the founder hero of our line. It was not the same song as the one favored in Troizen, which was of Pelops’ chariot race for the hand of the Earth King’s daughter; how the King speared all her suitors as their chariots turned the end stone, till the trick with the waxen linchpin threw him first. This song was about Pelops’ youth: how Blue-Haired Poseidon loved him, and would warn him of the coming earthquake when he laid his ear to the ground; he was called Pelops, so said the song, from the earth-smear on his cheek.

  I kept my thoughts to myself. This, then, was where my warning came from. Not a pledge straight from the god to me, but an inborn skill, like this man’s sweet voice who sang. It came to me in my mother’s blood.

  Next day, still sick at heart, I went to look for my friends; but all the youths were wrestling. I stood beside the ground, seeing the white dust fly up to the poplar leaves; too proud to take a turn with the boys of my own weight, for those who were worth a match were all younger than I.

  I watched them straining and grunting, heaving each other up and tossing each other down; and a thought came to me, how easily a man is thrown if something strikes the side of his foot just when his weight is coming on it. It puts him off balance and down he goes; it had happened to me with a wayside stone. I watched, the feet, and then the bodies, and thought about it.

  Just then Maleus, a great shambling youth, called out, “Come on, Theseus, give me a match!” Then he bawled with laughter; not that he hated me, it was his way. I said, “Why not?” which made him slap his knees and roar. When we were closing, and he reached out to lift me, I moved and made him lean a little. Then I backheeled him. He went down like a boulder.

  For some time, helped by the dust-cloud and by being quick, I threw the youths of Troizen with this one chip alone; till a day when I woke feeling lucky, and went for no reason down to the harbor. There was a small trader in from Egypt, buying hides and horns. Two little brown boys, as lithe as snakes, were scuffling naked on the deck. They were wrestling, not fighting; and though they were only half-taught children, I saw what they were up to. I got sweet figs and honey, and climbed aboard; and came away with half a dozen chips as good as my backheel, all fit to throw a heavier man. It was news to me in those days that the Egyptians know all about this matter. I thought it a portent straight from the god.

  Nowadays, it is all Athenian style wher
ever you go; so once again you must match with your own weight, if you want to go far. But I still umpire at the Games of Poseidon, because it pleases the people. Sometimes I wonder who will umpire at my funeral games. I thought once it would be my son; but he is dead.

  Soon, in Troizen, even men were coming to see me wrestle, and I took some on. Though they learned a few of my holds, I kept a few ahead, for one thought leads to another. And people began to say there was surely something between the god and me; for how could I keep it up against men so much bigger, unless Earth-Shaker put out a hand to pull them to the ground?

  So, as I neared seventeen, I was in better content with myself, even though I had not grown beyond five feet and a half. It had not stood in my way with girls; and the children I got were fair and Hellene. Only one was small and dark; but so was the girl’s brother.

  My birth month came, when I should be seventeen. And on the day of my birth, in the moon’s second quarter, my mother said to me alone, “Theseus, come with me; I have something to show you.”

  My heart paused in its beating. A secret so long kept is like a lyre-string stretched near breaking, which a feather will sound, or a breath of air. Silence held me, as it had before the earthquake.

  I went with her; and she led me through the postern, up the road to the hills. I walked half a pace behind her, going softly. The path skirted a gorge, where the mountain stream ran deep, green with ferns below and woods above; we crossed it by a great flat boulder, put there by giants before anyone remembers. And all the while I thought my mother looked quiet and sad, and my heart was chilled; this was not the countenance, I thought, of women whom gods have favored.

  We turned up from the stream, and came into the holy Grove of Zeus. It had been old already on the hillside in the time of the Shore People who had the land before us. And even they can only say it has been there time out of mind.

  It is so quiet there, you can hear an acorn dropping. Now it was spring; the leaves were tender on the great gnarled boughs; and about the trunks which two men’s arms together could hardly span, faint starry shade-flowers grew. Last year’s oak leaves smelled musty underfoot, soft and black, or brown and rustling. All the way we had not spoken, and now the snapping of a twig seemed loud.

  In the midst of the wood was the most sacred spot, where Zeus had hurled his thunderbolt. The ancient oak it had blasted had almost rotted into the ground, it was so long ago. But though the huge limbs were perishing among the brambles, a stump like a tooth still stood, with a secret life in it; faint buds of green showed on the roots where they humped like knees above the earth. The spot is so sacred that no sapling has dared to grow there since Cloud-Gatherer struck it; through the hole in the green roof one can see the sea.

  My mother walked on in her gold-clasped sandals, lifting her skirt in front to clear the slope. Fawn-spots of sun fell on her fine bronze hair, and on the thin shift under her bodice which showed the pink tips of her moving breasts. Her forehead was broad, her gray eyes widely set, with soft brows nearly meeting above her straight proud nose; the arch over the eye was her greatest beauty, and the smooth clear curve up from the eyelid. Like any priestess, she had a mouth for secrets; but it was serious, not sly like some one sees. Though I could never see it when people said I was like her, I was always glad if they said I had her eyes. Mine looked bluer because I was tanned, and my chin was my own, or else my father’s. But to me, this long time now, she was the priestess no one dares question, more than she was anything else. She seemed armored in the Goddess; so that if she were to tell me my father was Thyestes the lame stillman who brewed her bath-scent, or a swineherd from the back hills, it would not touch nor shame her, but only me.

  She led me up to the sacred oak, and stopped; and I saw at her feet a stone.

  I knew it. I had found it as a boy, when Dexios and I first went tiptoe to the oak wood, daring each other under the gaze of the trees; the dryads who live there stare harder into one’s back than anywhere else I know. It was an old gray slab; put there for an altar, I suppose, when Zeus first hurled his thunder. I had never met anyone there, yet often there were fresh ashes, as if someone had been offering. Now they were there again, looking almost warm. Suddenly I wondered if it was my mother who came. Perhaps she had had some omen she meant to tell me of. I turned to her, feeling gooseflesh on my arms.

  “Theseus,” she said. Her voice sounded hoarse, and I looked at her surprised. She blinked, and I saw her eyes were wet. “Do not be angry with me; it is no choice of mine. I swore your father the oath gods dare not break; or I would not do it. I promised him by the River, and the Daughters of Night, not to tell you who you are, unless by yourself you could lift this stone.”

  For a moment my heart leaped up; royal priestesses do not take such vows at the bidding of base-born men. Then I looked again, and saw why she had wept.

  She swallowed so hard that I heard it. “The proofs he left for you are buried there. He said I should try you at sixteen, but I saw it was too soon. But now I must.” Her tears ran down, and she wiped her face with her hands.

  Presently I said, “Very well, Mother. But sit over there, and do not watch me.”

  She went away, and I stripped off my arm-rings. They were all I had on above the belt; I went bare in nearly all weather, to keep hard. But, I thought, much good that had done me.

  I crouched by the stone, and dug with my hands to find the lower edge. Then I loosened it round, scraping like a dog the earth away, hoping to find it thinner at the other end. But it was thicker there. So I went back, and straddled it, and hooked my fingers under it, and pulled. I could not even stir it.

  I stopped, panting and beaten, like the half-broke horse who still finds the chariot tied behind him. I had been beaten before I had begun. It was a task for a youth like Maleus, as big as a bear; or for Herakles, Zeus-begot in a threefold night. It was a task for a god’s son; and now I saw it all. “It must be with the gods as with men; a son may be lawful, but take all after the mother’s side. My veins have only one part ichor to nine parts blood; this is the touchstone of the god, and the god rejects me.” I looked back on all I had endured and dared; it had gone for nothing from the beginning, and my mother had wept for shame.

  It put me in a rage. I seized the stone and worried at it, more like a beast than a man, feeling my hands bleed and my sinews cracking. I had forgotten even my mother, till I heard the sound of her skirt and her running feet, and her voice crying, “Stop!”

  I turned to her with my face dripping sweat. I was so beside myself that I shouted at her, as if she had been a peasant, “I told you to stay away!”

  “Are you mad, Theseus?” she said. “You will kill yourself.”

  “Why not?” I said.

  She cried, “I knew how it would be!” and pressed her hand to her brow. I did not speak; I could almost have hated her. She said, “He should have trusted me. Yes, even though I was young.” Then she saw me staring and waiting, and closed her mouth with two fingers. I turned to walk off, and cried out with pain; I had torn a back muscle, and it took me by surprise. She came over and felt it gently; but I looked away.

  “Theseus, my son,” she said. Her gentleness almost undid me; I had to shut my teeth together. “Nothing forbids me to tell you this: it is not I who find you wanting. And I think I am fit to judge.” She was silent, looking out through the gap in the oak leaves at the blue sea. Then she said, “The Shore People were ignorant; they thought Ever-Living Zeus dies every year. So they could not worship the Mother rightly, as we Hellenes know. But at least they understood that some things are better left to women.” She paused a moment; but she saw I was only waiting for her to go away. So she went; and I threw myself upon the ground.

  The black oak soil, rich with the scents of spring, drank down my tears into the fallen leaves of ages. The Grove of Zeus is not a place where one can defy the gods. I had been angry with Poseidon, who had broken my pride like some column tossed down for a whim. But presently I saw he had done
me no harm, but many favors. It would be hubris to affront him; and not even worthy of a gentleman, who ought never to be outdone, either in cruelty by an enemy or in kindness by a friend. So I limped home, and got into the hot bath my mother had ready. She rubbed me down after with oil of herbs; but we did not speak.

  I could not wrestle for a fortnight, and told the other youths I had fallen on the mountain. For the rest, life went on as before; except that the light had been put out. Those to whom this has happened will understand me; not many, I daresay, for such men die easily.

  For a man in darkness, there is only one god to pray to.

  I had never before singled out Apollo for worship. But of course I had always prayed to him before stringing a lyre or a bow; and when I went shooting, I was never mean with his share. He had given me good bags time and again. Though he is very deep, and knows all mysteries, even those of the women, he is a Hellene and a gentleman. Keeping that in mind, it is easier than it seems not to offend him. He does not like tears intruded on his presence, any more than the sun likes rain. Yet he understands grief: bring it to him in a song, and he will take it away.

  In the small laurel grove near the Palace, where he had an altar, I gave him offerings, and played to him every day. At night in Hall, I used to sing of war; but alone in the grove, with only the god to listen, I sang of sorrow: young maidens sacrificed on their wedding eve, ladies of burned cities weeping their fallen lords, or the old laments which have come down from the Shore People, of young heroes who love a goddess for a year, and foreknow their deaths.