The Bull from the Sea (8 page)

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.”

T
HE 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.

Till that time, I had never found it weigh on me to be priest as well as king. Poseidon had been good to me, giving me the earthquake warning that the dogs and birds have, but, among men, only the blood of Pelops’ line. Him I listened to, and did for the other deities such duties as are prescribed. But now, to reconcile the rites of all these jealous goddesses was like a judgment where a wrong verdict may start a ten-years war. One night I dreamed that they all appeared to me, threw off their sacred robes, and stood there mother-naked; it was my fate to give a prize to the fairest, and be cursed by all the rest.

This dream so shook me that I got up in the night and poured oil and wine before Athene. Her shrine was dark. In the hand of the priestess I had roused from sleep, as she shivered in the midnight chill, the lamp-flame trembled. The face of the Mistress, in the helmet’s shadow, seemed to move like a proud shy girl’s who says without words, “Perhaps.” When I lay down in bed again, I slept sweetly; and next day when I met the priests and kings to plan the feast day, I got them easily to agree.

It seemed she liked her offerings. The feast and Games went through as if her hand were leading us all the way. The old men said that in all the tales of their own grandfathers, there had been no such splendor in the land. Luck touched us everywhere: fair weather and good crops; no new feuds starting; good omens at the sacrifice; at the Games, clean wins by men with few enemies. The people glowed, the youths and girls had a gloss of beauty, the singing was sweet and true. When I stood up to give the prize for wrestling, a great paean rose up from the people, so that one might have thought that they saw a god, and I said to my heart, “Remember you are mortal.”

I threw with my luck, and at that same feast made all Attica and Eleusis into one kingdom with one rule of law. Lords, craftsmen and peasants all agreed to have their causes tried in Athens; the priests acknowledged their gods in ours, adding, if they liked, the name they used at home. At last they understood that this was the end of war in Attica; that any man, unless he had killed with his own hand and paid no blood-price, could pass through his neighbor’s deme unarmed.

It was not long after this, that I rode out to Kolonos, to take the omens of Poseidon.

It is a pretty place, not far from the City, good for grapes and olives; young men in love go there to hear the nightingales. But the top is sacred to Poseidon Hippios; and even in those days, people let it alone. There was nothing to see, except broken boulders with a clump of fir trees; but if you stood at the top, below you was a round flattish dip, as if a great horsehoof had struck the ground, about as wide as a young boy can throw a stone.