"The Bull From the Sea"

[fiefoe]

Mary Renault's rich language is as close to dark chocalate as any in my recent memory. She is also good at keeping the reader in suspense as well, though It always helps to know so little of how the story of this famous Greek hero will go.

• I said smiling to the team, “Suppers at home.” Yet my heart was thinking, “Leave the tale so, dear comrades of our mystery. You have told them all they will understand; don’t cry against the wind.”
• I raised my voice for all to hear. “This will be my grief forever. Now I remember how he bade me whiten my sail, if I came safe home. I have been a year with the bulls since then, and through the great earthquake, and the burning of the Labyrinth, and war. My sorrow that I forgot.”
• “My lord, never reproach yourself. He died the Erechthid death. So went King Pandion at his time, from that very place; and King Kekrops from the castle crag at Euboia. The sign of the god was sent him, you may be sure, and your memory slept by the will of heaven.” He gave me a grave silvery smile. “The Immortals know the scent of the new vintage. They will not let a great wine wait past its best.”
• * I said, “He feared me always. When I first came to him as victor from the Isthmus, he tried to kill me out of fear.”... “When it came time to show the sail, I prayed Poseidon for a sign. I wanted to reach him before he knew of my coming: to prove I came in peace, that I bore him no ill will for failing me, that I could wait in patience for the kingdom. I prayed; and the god sent me the sign I prayed for.”... What I had been afraid he would do in fear, he had done in sorrow. There had been this kindness in him, beneath all his contrivance. And yet, was it so? He was the King.
• The people began to tread the grave-mound firm. Only the open door was left within its causeway, for the dead to witness his Funeral Games...
• * Fame and victory I had offered him, and the treasure of a thousand years for spoil; but he would not throw for it. That is a thing I cannot understand, nor shall I ever: a man who wishes and will not do.
• Need the gods judge us further? Surely that is sentence enough, to live with ourselves, and to remember. Oh, Zeus, Apollo, not without glory let me go down into the land of twilight! And when I am there, let me hear my name spoken in the world of men. Death does not master us, while the bard sings and the child remembers.
• * (after the funeral:) the elders, who had not warmed their blood with contests and still felt the chill of death, clustered together. But soon there came from them too a cheerful buzz like that of grasshoppers in a fine autumn, when the frost seems far away.
• “And so,” he said, “before we talk of ships and men, we ought to follow custom and choose a war-leader, seeing the King is under age.” <> There was a hush full of hidden whispers. Not a man spoke up for me. A little while before, it would have weighed upon my soul. But that had lightened, as the spark does in the updraft of the fire.
• So I had that war on my hands, before the great one. But it paid me well. The chiefs had long hated themselves for putting up with him; if I had given ground, they would have shifted off their hate to me.
• I had known at my father’s bier-side that she spoke with the Power. It had hung in my mind, a secret shadow; a waiting fate, moving to me slowly with its meeting stars. Now so soon it was here, while I had my strength and swiftness:
• * “We have done what is best.” You will see sometimes with a warrior going before his wounds are cold, that he will talk and talk, then snuff out like a dead lamp. “We came back too proud, and our kinsfolk hate us.”... “My father called me a brazen trull, for vaulting our old ox to show the boys. And Pylia, they found her a clerk to marry. Soft as a pig. In Crete we’d have thrown him to the bull. They said she was lucky to get him, having lived a mountebank and a public show.”... “They called us haters of men. Oh, Theseus! There is nothing left like the Bull Court. No, honor … so we tried . . .”
• He had the wisdom of god-filled things... I lifted my arm, as so often in the ring at Knossos, and gave the team-leader’s salute. <> It was strange to hear no shouting from the benches. “Well,” I thought, “it will be stranger to have no team.” That made me laugh. One would do nothing in the ring, without the madness of the god... Most precious in the ring is the counsel of the dying. Knowing he gored right-ways, I feinted left to straighten him; ... I swung upward with him, feet over head, feeling him steady to my weight as a familiar thing. A knowledge passed between us. And I felt a welcome... Only with the bull-dance would I coax him to come my way. So I made myself a whole team in one. That was the last and greatest dance of Theseus the Athenian, leader of the Cranes, which I danced alone at Marathon for the gods and for the dead.
• And now I was alone no longer. It was as if I had sown the furrows to bring forth men. They swarmed about me; they must have been creeping up while I was in the tree... They would have killed him then with spears and cleavers, working off their fear, as small men do. I was glad I could tell them he had been vowed to Apollo; he did not deserve so base a death.
• “Too little. The House of Minos stood for a thousand years, because Crete had one law.”
  “Yet it has fallen.”
  “For want of law enough. It stopped with the serfs and the slaves. Men are dangerous who have nothing left to lose.”...
  I said, “The King should have looked after them. Not only to quiet them;... The King must answer for them; he is next the god. For the serfs, the landless hirelings, the captives of the spear; even the slaves.”
  He was slow to speak. Then he said, “You are your own master now, Theseus, and many men’s beside. But I have lived longer, and this I tell you: nothing is stronger in men than the will to possess their own. Touch it, and you will make enemies who will bide their time. And are you a king to sit quiet at home five years together? Beware of malice at your back.”
• * He nodded, thinking. He was old; but like every man good at his trade, he was ready to hear of something new. <> “Men could be more than they are,” I said. “I learned that in the Bull Court, when I trained my team. There is a faith, there is a pride, which has to be acted first and grows by doing.”
• “In Eleusis, when you had wrestled with the Year King and he was dead, you married the sacred Queen. But before your year was out you overthrew her, and set up the rule of men. In Athens, Medea the High Priestess fled for her life from you. . . .”.. “And in Crete,” she said, “you took away Thrice-Holy Ariadne, Goddess on Earth, from the Mother’s sanctuary. Where is she now?”
• It took me five years to bring all Attica under one rule of law. I have seldom worked so hard. In war the battle-rage and the hope of glory sweep one on; in the bull ring there are the cheers and wagers, and the life of the team. This work was lonesome and slow, and patient as carving a statue from a flawed block one must humor, yet keep the shape of the god.
• As for me, I had to go about in my own person among the chiefs, and it was often tedious. One must remember their fathers’ deeds, right back to whichever god they sprang from; remark the heirloom in the hall; sit through the plodding lay strummed by a hanger-on.
• Often I wonder where such boys go later, when I look at the foolishness of men. “This is a bold dog,” I said, “to count his spoils beforehand.”
• The horsehoofs pounded; my arms rattled about me; my shield tugged in the wind and I slid it off for the boy to hold. He clutched it with one hand and held on with the other, drinking with open mouth the air-wash of our speed.
• Pirithoos: I found myself thinking I had never seen a man I should be sorrier to kill.
  He had paused too, idling on his spear. “You seem in love with trouble,” he said. “Well, you want it, I have got it to give. I will make dogs’ delight of you or any man who comes to me asking civilly. And what a squealing of women over your body! Oh, I have heard.”
  “Don’t be concerned,” I answered him. “No woman hereabouts will squeal under yours. Not girls but birds will be getting their fill of you, when our business is done.”
• I thought of a footloose journey north, with Pirithoos and his Lapiths. It tempted me like a sweet look from someone else’s wife.
• * 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.
• Even when I was at school up there-... 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.
• Oedipus: I could see by the way he got himself along that he had been blind a good while. She muttered in his ear, telling him who I was. He turned his head my way; and a shiver went all through me; for that old man had a face like Fate itself. Beyond sorrow, beyond despair; with hope and fear forgotten as we forget the milk of infancy... “A fine, full wine. Thebes cannot match the wine of Attica.” It was the speech of feasting kings.
• “I know why now. I waited for the Gentle Ones. When the score is paid, they take no more. The rest they hold in trust for you. All this last year, the sorrow has been like water caught in a deep cistern; not the beating rain that leaves you dry. I thought I should die at last like a winter sparrow, that falls in darkness from the bough and is nothing, save to the ants that pick it clean. But the store has grown. The kingly power is here again. I have a death to give.”
• First there was mist; then a clear darkness, with a little prick of windless flame. It burned up bright and tall; and in it stood the Lord Apollo, naked as a core of light, looking down at me with his great blue eyes like the sky that looks upon the sea... ‘Oedipus, know yourself, and tell me what you are.’... a hard question, in the Place of Ordeal sacred to the Sphinx. And then remembering, I knew the answer was the same. I said, ‘My lord-only a man.’
• A little giggler with the puppy fat not fined off her yet, and spots as like as not. All idle palace-bred girls go through it; it’s only peasants who work it off that are pretty at fourteen... Mark my words, if you wed now you’ll be stale for her when she comes to her best, and she will have a roving eye,”
• He was King in Iolkos; but he suffered a good deal from a curse that a northern witch had put on him. .. “Kolchis?” I said. “Did he tell her name?” “The crafty one, he called her. Aye, and that was her name. Medea.” <> I told how she had been my father’s mistress and had tried to poison me. As to his share in it, he had been frightened for the kingdom;
• She waded in nearly to the knee, before she tossed the rope of silver back from her shoulder, and nocked the arrow to her string. By then, I was hit already. The lift of her breast to her back-bent arm, the curve of her neck with its strong and tender cord drawn like the bowstring, shot me clean through with a shaft of flame. She stood to aim, all gold and silver touched with rose; her brows pulled together, her eyes level and clear, and the bawdy clamor passing her by as rain runs off crystal.
• At the very rim was an altar of rough-hewn rock, with a thick pillar by it, and on the pillar a thing shaped like the boat of the waxing moon. Its crust was strange: glassy and rough, like pitted clinker. I had seen such a thing, once, at another shrine; but that was smaller than a fist, and this was as thic?k as a man. It was a mighty thunderstone. You could see it smelted and fired by the heat of the lightning;
• “Take care! They are Moon Maids of Artemis. I saw the shrine. Let no one fight who can hide or run. Don’t force them; it is death-cursed. The Queen . . .” But there was no more time. The dancers came skimming over the edge, as swift as stooping falcons, bare to the waist, with their weapons of the dance. They seemed to be dancing still; their eyes fixed in the sacred ecstasy. <> I cried out to them I don’t know what, as one might to the sea when it bursts the sea-wall.
• * She paused a moment; then slowly her hand came out. It seemed it would have been a little thing, as we stood so, for me to reach out and take it. So may the other shore look near, before you swim the strait.
• Hippolyta: I said to her, “This is all-I love you. You are my life’s love. I came here for you, to win you or to die. Do as you must, as your law commands you; I will not have you disgraced for me. If I die it was my fate, and I ran to meet it. Be free of my blood. May sorrow never come near you. My shade will love you, even in the house of Hades under the earth.”
• But she was not that; she was a woman eighteen years old, strong, with warm blood in her; and when man and woman are born to love as we were, they will find it by any road. We felt one another’s mind, as we had felt it fighting; love came to us as birth does, knowing its own time better than those who wait for it. Though she knew less than any maid who has heard the women chatter, yet she knew more, knowing only me. My own life left me to live in her; with all women before I had been myself alone.
• These wars, when I remember them now, come back to me shining like harpers’ tales. I could not put hand or foot wrong with her there beside me. Lovers of boys may say it is the same; but I should think it is easy to be looked up to by a lad not come to his full strength, whom you are teaching all he knows and helping out when he is overmatched. We two fought like one. We were still finding one another; and war, to those who understand it, shows forth a man. We learned as much of each other in battle as we did in bed. It is good to be loved for the truth struck out of one in the eye of death, by a lover who has no fear to make her judgment humble.
• * For her caps, I got the one thing fine enough to put against her hair: the silk that comes a year’s journey before it reaches Babylon, woven with flying serpents and unknown flowers.
• A great house must have women, who are as much its wealth as corn and cattle; there must be proper service; besides, they are the signs of victory.
• to bring a good thing out of trouble, I gave her her own Guard. I chose these same young men to lead it; they wore her badge of a leaping leopard, and she trained them herself for war. Thus I showed the world my trust in her; and something that might have grown dangerous was brought into the open, where it turned to pride and honor.
• * Kreon: During the siege, the gods had called for a royal sacrifice, and he had left his son to step forth and die. He was getting old, and trying to make fear do the work of strength. For terror’s sake, he left the dead chiefs to rot in the sun unburied. So the poor girl Antigone, chained to her pieties like a patient ox, crept out at night to strew earth on her worthless brother. Her indeed King Kreon gave a tomb to; but he walled her in alive.
• But the brighter the light, the further seen. It shone too clearly: her love and mine, his excellence, and the hope of my heart. I had ruled now nine years in Athens, and I knew the people; I felt, as a pilot feels the set of the tide, that here they were not with me... The real fear was old, deep-rooted in every Hellene. She had served the Goddess; and I had not tamed her. They too remembered Medea... It was close to the ground, among the peasants, that this rumor spread like bindweed. If I had foreseen it, I daresay I would not have named the boy Hippolytos; it is a Shore Folk custom, for the son to take his mother’s name.
• It was Phaedra’s death that I had hoped for in my heart. I thought about it, as one must think when one sees the certain means to the end desired. Every king has men about him to whom he need only look a wish. But there is evil beyond one’s reach, as there is good.
• * Menestheus: If he had a fault, it was to run ahead of what was wanted; he had been overmuch corrected, and was fond of showing where others had fallen short. But officiousness always looks easier to train than dullness.
• the Lapiths no longer counted Kentaurs as men, and burned them the next day without rites, like murrained cattle. Yet I have thought that in time they might have grown more manlike, from being friends with men, but for this unlucky feast that roused the beast and quenched the man in them. Maybe Old Handy had bred some sons; and no doubt we killed them.
• He should be ashamed, I said, to strike a servant who could do nothing back. I suppose I should have begun with Zeus the King; but he, after all, prefers kings to be gentlemen. It went home to the boy, as I could see. He said, “Yes, Father,
• “why should Zeus curse the people, when they did no harm? You would not do that.” <> Just as if a man had spoken, I found myself saying, “I do not know. It is the nature of Necessity. I have seen Poseidon Earth-Shaker throw down the Labyrinth, crushing the evil and the good. The laws of the gods are beyond our knowing. Men are only men.
• The fugitives told their tales, and the people listened with fear-sharp ears. And each tale had some word of the warrior women, the Sarmatians who must each bring as her bride-dower the head of an enemy killed by her hand in battle; and the bright-clad Moon Maids charmed against fear and weapons, who led the vanguard. All this I learned from the suppliants when I questioned them. My own folk never spoke of it in my hearing. We both knew what that meant.
• * You can do nothing, Theseus. The Athenians will believe what they can see. I must answer for myself; no one else can do it.”... “Hush,” she said, “these are words,” and kissed me. “Fate and Necessity are here; and like us, they are what they are.”
• the danger that pressed us round drew us together. Valor and steadfastness and high-hearted laughter were the riches of our state; no one could show them forth as she did, and not be loved.
• * Little by little they lost their thrust, and wavered, and sank like turbid water back on to the plain, leaving a silt of corpses and stones. Our joy was too deep to cheer... Hippolyta and I walked round the ramparts hand in hand, like children at a festival, praising and greeting those we passed.
• * It made me laugh, that being given to death I should lug along, from habit, this burden which had no use but to keep me safe. I loosed the buckle of the sling, and tossed it from me and ran onward. It was not my business to choose when I should fall. <> I was glad when the shield was gone. It made me freer, given altogether into the hand of the god. This is a mystery, which I tell only to kings, since it concerns them: consent and fear nothing, for the god will enter you and take away your grief.
• Standing about me I saw the lads of her Guard. They were weeping, though my eyes were dry; it was many days before that comfort eased me... But I felt it now, as the dog-wolf feels it; that for the pain of loss there is no cure, but anger eats and is filled.
• I could not tell what I should fill even this one day with; and there were years ahead. She had taken my death, lover for lover; she had been a woman at the last. She who was once a king should have known that only a king can offer for the people. The gods are just; but one cannot mock them. <> She had saved her man alive to weep for her. But the King had been called; and the King had died.
• Hippolytos: 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 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.”
• “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.
• We drove up through the sea-gate, and on into Athens. I felt their minds as a pilot feels the weather, through the cheers and songs.
• I could always hear, when he took his place by me, a soft murmur among the women. Once it had sounded for me. But men must live with their seasons, or the gods will laugh at them.
• He had been bidding farewell to his friends, and their love came with him, like a scent of summer. It ran to waste off him, this power over men he could have turned to mastery. As the love came he bloomed in it; it was enough for the day. When the harvest ripened, he would give it away for nothing.
• “Oh, no; not gain. He is very upright. Whatever he did, he would need to be pleased with first. Perhaps anger helps him. But have you noticed, Father, when a man has bad luck, no matter how he suffers, Menestheus doesn’t notice it? He only pities him if he is wronged; he must begin with anger.”
• Sometimes, at the hunt, I had seen his mother’s lie so. She had kept no secrets from me, deeper than a leaf’s shadow on a stream. I had known where I was, with her.
• It was sixty years since a king had died in Troizen; when we came to bury him, there would be no one living to tell us what the custom had been before. It must be this great life ending, I thought, which made the very light seem strange, as it is before the thunder, when far isles look near and clear.
• “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.
• 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.
• * So clear seemed his guilt, like far hills before the storm
• Akamas: “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.
• were pulling out the splinters of the chariot that had gone through his flesh like spears. He lay in ruin, like the horses; a splendid creature broken everywhere, torn and muddied, flayed on the rocks and sand.
• Perhaps it was the Mother who had struck me down. I had stolen two of her daughters out of her shrines, and tamed her worship at Eleusis. All those who follow the old religion, or fear it still, say that it was the Mother. Or it may have been Apollo; for I was struck without pain, as men are killed by his gentle arrows; and as I was only half to blame for his good servant’s death, he left me half alive. But I have come to think it was Poseidon Earth-Shaker, because I turned his blessing into a curse. I think so; and I have good cause.
• * I thought of my life, the good and evil days; of the gods, and fate; how much of a man’s life and of his soul they make for him, how much he makes for himself. What if Pirithoos had not come for me, when I was setting out for Crete? What man would I have become? What Cretan son had gone unborn, in the years that made Hippolytos? Or what if Phaedra had cried “Rape!” another day, when the earthquake-sickness was not on me? Yet I had made already the man who heard that cry. Fate and will, will and fate, like earth and sky bringing forth the grain together; and which the bread tastes of, no man knows.
• a man was dead to Menestheus, unless he was a cause to fight for...  But Menestheus, if someone was oppressive, would threaten and bluster long before he could perform, so as to be praised for hating evil; then the man grew angry, and hurt all those in his power to hurt; and Menestheus had more wrongs to shout about. Men who did good in quiet, without anger, he thought were spiritless, or corrupt. Anger he understood; but he had no kindness for men before the wrong was done, which would have kept it undone.
• * Achilles: But a wind of fate blew me to Skyros... One of his boys, the King of Phlia’s heir, is a guest here now on Skyros; hidden to avoid some fate of an early death, which his priestess mother saw in omens.
• I was thinking, before I fell asleep, of the flashing light-footed boy, awaiting tomorrow. It would be good to spare him that. Let him keep this Theseus who speaks for the god within him. Why change a god for a lame old man with a twisted mouth? I could warn him of what he is; but it would not alter him. Man born of woman cannot outrun his fate. What need, then, to trouble his short morning with the griefs of time? He will never live to know them.
• Don’t we say all helpless folk—the orphan, the stranger, the suppliant, who have nothing to bargain with and can only pray—are sacred to Zeus the Savior? The King must answer for them; he is next the god.
  To stand for the people before the gods, that is kingship. Power by itself is the bronze without the gold.
  Fate and will, will and fate, like earth and sky bringing forth the grain together; and which the bread tastes of, no man knows.
  It is the mark of little men to like only what they know; one step beyond, and they feel the black cold of chaos.
• “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?”
• //marriage to the Cretan princess was a dynastic necessity so obvious that it, or at least a betrothal, would have had to take place soon after his conquest of the island.
• //Thereafter, Theseus’ luck forsook him. While helping in Pirithoos’ attempt to abduct Persephone, he was confined in the underworld in torment for four years, till Herakles released him. On his return he found Athens sunk into lawlessness and sedition.

-- An underling theme in the story is the changing of allegiances from the older feminine goddess Artemis to the newer masculine god Zeus.