Читать книгу Jason (Mycenaean Greek Trilogy) - Henry Treece - Страница 4

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For three days the Minoan had crouched, small and dark and afraid, hidden in the fern-hung mouth of the cave. Sometimes he scraped lichen from the limestone rocks about him, stuffing his mouth with the pulpy mash to allay his maddening hunger, sometimes sucking at the little pebbles that lay on the floor of the cave and pretending they were the fine fat olives of his native Crete; the Crete he had known before the brown-haired Achaeans had stormed into the crumbling harbour and made him a slave. The great Crete of Minos, whose ships once fetched tribute from every port in the world, whose bulls snuffed proudly in the Labyrinth arena at each festival, whose round-breasted priestesses were tireless in sounding the praises of the Mother, the ‘Womb of All Men’ in her many guises—Dia, Aphrodite, Hera, Hecate. All one, all the Mother who would nourish her people; who asked in return only the blood of the sacred king.

But when the bearded Hellene barbarians had rushed up the shore that afternoon after the last earthquake, sacking the great palace at Cnossus, wantonly slaughtering the sacred bulls and raping the gold-decked priestesses, even making water on the shrines, the Mother who had promised so much raised no hand to stop the invaders, no finger to strike them blind or mad.

Why had she not saved her children, the Minoan wondered? Was it because old Minos had slackened in his devotions? Or because Ariadne, the princess-priestess, had sailed away from the sacred shrines with the unbeliever, Theseus?

The Minoan leaned against the rock-wall, almost witless with hunger. He had last eaten four days before—a crust of dry barley bread and a crumb of goat-cheese snatched from the hand of a little girl who sat singing fables among the wild thyme, watching the black-faced sheep.

‘Do not be afraid, little one, I shall not hurt you,’ he said to her. ‘I am hungry, that is all.’ But perhaps it was his strange Cretan speech, or the old livid scars of the slave-master’s whiplash across his thin brown body that frightened her; perhaps his long matted black hair, that hung half-way down his furrowed back ... She ran away squealing, her flaxen hair flying in the wind. Then he had had to run too, eating as he went, in case her father or her brothers should come after him with their long bronze swords or throwing-spears.

Now, after his grim journey over the mountain, he was in the cave mouth, the culvert, hidden by newly-sprouting fern. At least he did not suffer from thirst here. Clear spring water, flowing down from Mount Pelion, gushed out of the mouth of the culvert, icy cold, almost knee-deep. Sometimes he was so weak that he could not balance astride the stream to keep dry and was forced to stand in it until he could regain his strength. His feet and legs were chilled to the bone then. Like his mind, his life itself, they hardly seemed to belong to him.

Once he had been a merchant-prince himself, master of many olive groves and of great cattle-herds. Now he was nothing—a man old before his time by years of slavery in the low shafts of the gold-mines in far northern Paeonia, or crouched coughing in the damp in the lead-shafts under Mount Ossa.

He drew the strip of goatskin about his waist, his only dress, tightening it with a hide thong. Once he had worn fine silks from Egypt, and had slaves of his own to smooth aromatic balms into his skin. Now his hands were rough and misshapen, his skin cracked and covered with sores. If he walked into Cnossus, they would not know him, his teeth broken, his hair matted and shaggy, the hide about his loins stinking. Yet he had once worn gold and amethyst beads, and had his own box at the bull-ring at Cnossus, where he watched the boys and girls from Athens, the frightened young bull-leapers who were to exercise themselves for the glory of the All-Mother and her son, Minos....

The Cretan stumbled to the mouth of the culvert and looked out. On the horizon, grey-blue in the late afternoon, stood the high snow-covered shoulder of Mount Pelion, noble and strong, but foreign, with its clusters of pine woods. Then came the rolling downs, where sheep were grazed and the sound of the shepherds’ pipes made mad the heat of the afternoon. Then, so close at hand that he could have struck them with a pebble, had he the strength to throw one, a small grove or garden, hedged round with clumps of oleander and laurel, and towering over them, three dark cypresses that bowed with every breath of wind from the sea. Aconites still grew in the shade.

The clear water from the culvert in which he stood flowed down to that little grove, into a square bath with marble sides, its floor paved with a rude mosaic of coloured stones, not like the fine patterns of Crete, but at least something to remind him that, here in Thessaly, there had once lived men who claimed kinship with Minos and made their regular yearly voyages to Cnossus for the great markets and feasts. Above the bath, in the rock, were carved a moon-sign and an axe: tokens of the Mother Goddess.

Suddenly the Minoan froze, his heart thumping with terror once more. He heard footsteps beyond that rock above the little grove. It could be a guard, leather-clad and bearded, coming to look for him, carrying the long bronze sword and the two spears that he feared. He had seen a runaway slave taken in Larissa less than a week before. The tall fair-haired Hellenes had used him for spear-practice, against the door of a barn. As the wretch shuddered, skewered like a frog with the bronze spears in him, the Hellenes had watched him for a while, sitting on their shaggy ponies, laughing. Then their captain had kicked his mount forward and leaning down, had ripped the man’s stomach open with his long sword. The creature was still alive and screaming while his blood dripped to the dusty ground at his feet, steaming.

Men did not do this in Crete in the great days. A bull-leaper stupid enough to get gored was quickly finished by the Labyrinth servants. Two blows at the nape of the neck with the little moon-shaped stone axes, the goddesses’ weapon, and it was all over. No nastiness like this Hellene thing. No standing round and watching while a man lost his courage and his dignity. That was the right way, the way the Mother had ordained it, the way that men were forgetting, now that the Hellenes were coming southwards in their hordes to destroy the old world, the world that had lasted thousands of years.

The Minoan, crouching back among the chill fern-fronds, caught at his breath. The footsteps had come closer, but there was no sound of clinking swords, no sound of snuffling dogs. It was a woman, still young, her deep bronze-coloured hair hanging down her back in ringlets and curls, in the old manner, as they used to wear it in the time of Minos. Her dress, too, was not the shapeless garment that the Hellene women slung on. This one wore a deep sky-blue bodice which exposed her gilded breasts, and walked easily in the wide and sequined flounced skirt that he had always known. About her neck a chain flashed, heavy with many carved seals. On each of her arms, from wrist to elbow, a spiral bracelet. Her feet were bare, as befitted one who walked close to Mother Earth.

The Minoan strained his eyes in the sunlight to see the nature of the bracelets. They were important to him. Then he saw that they were snakes, golden snakes, coiled round the woman’s full arms, their tails coming almost into the palms of her narrow hands, their heads stopping short of her rounded elbow.

By the time he had seen this, and had stepped forward from the darkness of the low culvert, she had deftly loosened her flounced skirt and was standing naked and knee-deep in the little pool, gazing towards the distant mountain and speaking softly to herself, almost like one in a trance, one about to perform a ritual of cleansing, of purification.

He was almost at the marble side of the pool before she turned and saw him. Her oval face was stern and her eyes wide with annoyance, grey eyes staring into his dark brown ones; but she made no attempt to avoid him, to cover herself, as the northern, man-ruled Hellene women would have done. Instead, it was as though she were commanding him, putting a spell upon him.

His voice was weak and trembling before this woman. ‘Lady,’ he said, and then stopped.

Her keen eyes ran over him like searching hands. The fixed and ritualistic expression on her face did not change. He saw the red-stained lips, the two round spots of ochre painted on the cheeks in the ancient manner, just as the doll-priestesses at Cnossus had always decorated themselves.

Her voice was as controlled as her features.

‘If my husband’s men found you here they would have little pity for you. They are Hellenes and know no mercy.’

The Minoan wrung his thin hands and gazed down at the sunburnt earth. His voice was hardly more than a whisper.

‘Lady, I am hungry. I will gladly take a sword in my belly if only bread goes into it first. You have a little wicker basket, lady. Is there bread in that, I beg you?’

For a moment he almost ran forward and snatched at the wicker basket which lay on the grass beside the woman’s flounced skirt. But she shook her head and smiled, a sharp bitter smile, almost like that of a cat or a fox, to expose her sharp white teeth.

‘You would not care to eat what is in that basket. Or if you did, it would sting you to death.’

The Minoan fell to his knees and covered his eyes.

‘I understand, lady. It is your house-snake—the sacred snake of the Mother. Beg her to forgive me. I am hungry. In my right mind, I would never offer an insult to Hera, or whatever name you have for her here. I am hungry, lady, nothing more. Help me.’

The woman climbed slowly from the water and stood above him. As she bent, the long damp locks of her bronze hair brushed his scarred back and he shuddered.

His eyes closed; he heard her voice, perhaps a little warmer now.

‘You are a slave, then. A runaway slave. Death waits for you at every turn in the road, at every river bridge or ford, yet you were once a man, I see. You come from Crete, by the bull-seal which you wear round your neck. They did not take that from you, though they have tormented you in other ways.’

‘Lady, I lost my teeth fighting to keep it. Even they, the Hellenes, respected that.’

She said slowly, ‘How do you know that I am not a Hellene, slave?’

The Minoan swayed with tiredness, but still could laugh, though it was a thin sound, in the wind that swept across the aconites and through the little grove of laurel and oleander and wild thyme.

‘You may be a Minyan, lady, but you are no Hellene. There are signs about you that tell me so. Hair and skin and eyes.’

For a while she did not answer, and then she said, ‘Yes, a Minyan, though my husband is Hellene, one of the conquerors. His men wait for me, beyond that ridge of rock, slave.’

The Minoan began to shiver, but struggled hard to remain a man.

‘Call for them, your husband’s dogs, lady. I can suffer no more. The Mother has decreed this for me, it seems; there is nothing I may do to change it now.’

For a long moment he knelt, waiting for the woman to blow on a whistle or to call out; but there was only the silence of the uplands, the cry of the questing wind, the reedy bleating of young lambs, and, far away, the maddening repetition of the shepherd’s oaten pipes, rising and falling in that mindless five-tone scale.

She spoke like a ghost from the ancient past.

‘Let me look at you, slave. Did they harm you before they put you to work in the mineshafts?’

He felt her cool hands strip away his goatskin, and he shook his tangled head, wondering what was to come.

‘They tried to, lady, as they did to all the others; but it was one of their feast-nights and the man with the knife was clumsy. I twisted from the blade and cried out as the others had done, but, in the darkness, he did not see he had only cut into my thigh.’

Her hands were as gentle as water on him, searching. At last she said, ‘You came out of it well. You did better than you knew.’

The Minoan rested back on his hams and smiled with irony. All his nerves and muscles were twitching.

‘It has not filled my belly, lady. I would perhaps give what I saved that night for a loaf of bread now.’

Her voice was like the rustling of the breeze through dry acanthus leaves. ‘What you have saved may gain you bread, and more than bread, my friend. The Mother knows on whom to place her duties.’

The Minoan, his eyes still closed, felt himself being borne downwards to the turf. What strength was left in him was not meant for fighting, he thought. He tried to say, ‘I pay my dues to the Mother,’ but he had no strength to spare, even for words, at that moment.

For a while it was as though a warm stream flowed over him, embraced him, drowned him; in his nostrils was the acrid scent of pine-boughs burning; in his ears, the wind that ripples across the snow of high Mount Pelion; on his parched lips, the harsh brush of hair that smothers all hunger, stills all voices.

He shrank, shuddering, from the warm, devouring, sacred flesh—as though it had been ice, or thorn. But in the end its power, its hunger, ate him, sucked his spirit from him as though he were a lamb upon the altar: and for a spear-like instant it was as though Poseidon’s vast and roaring sea rushed over him, took him up like a straw on its fearful wave, to pitch him as high as the blue sky; then, without warning, to drop him, plummeting downwards to the weed-bed, drained of all will or knowledge, fearless now. A shell without feeling.

At last, he came up once more from the smothering depths of the sea to feel the warm spring sun upon his bare breast.

The woman, lying beside him in the golden grasses, gazed at the blue sky. Her face was as still as alabaster. Slowly, she unwound the two gold snakes from her wrists and placed them on his thin body.

‘These will buy bread, my friend, and a passage back to Crete. Break them into pieces and spend them carefully. Go eastwards, by night, down to the coast. Someone will carry you home again if you tell them my name. I am still called the Queen of Iolcos by those who hold to the ancient faith. I am Perimede.’

‘Perimede of the many wiles,’ the man said softly. ‘I have heard of you.’

‘No less than that,’ she said.

The Minoan kept his eyes closed lest he should risk the wrath of the Mother by seeing a queen unrobed.

‘What of your husband, lady?’ he dared to ask at last.

Above him, he heard the rustle of the flounced skirt, and then the woman’s sad laugh.

‘My husband, Aeson, is an old man and a fool. He is as dry and parched as a last-year’s olive! He lets his brother Pelias reign as the tyrant of Iolcos in his place. Aeson is too worm-eaten a piece of tinder to put a son in my flesh. This, by the will of the Mother, you may have done for him. A queen must take many lovers. Old Aeson will die, of himself, soon. I need a son.’

The Minoan rolled on to his side, weary, yet full of a strange fearful pride.

‘If the Mother lets a son grow inside you, Queen, what will you call him?’

A shepherd was coming down the long slope, his flock behind him, his two black dogs weaving in and out among the untidy army of animals. The sharp fluting sound of his pipes cut through the cold air like the breath of winter, rising and falling, rising and falling.

The woman stood away from the pool now, almost behind the rock, her glistening snake-basket in her arms. She did not look at the Minoan as she spoke; it was as though, having taken his offering, she had almost forgotten him already. Yet she spoke into the blue air, like one compelled in a dream.

‘A son of mine shall be called Diomedes. Diomedes, which means “the Sly One” in the Hellene speech. He shall be crafty because he must kill Pelias before the day is done. He must kill his tyrant uncle, and set up a new shrine to the Mother in Iolcos. That will be his duty, the duty your poor body may help me to fulfil.’

The Minoan rose, clutching the two gold bracelets to his thin chest, and turned towards the culvert where the shepherd would not see him.

But after a pace he paused and, with a violent jerk at the leather thong which held the amethyst seal to his neck, broke it away.

Not daring to look at the woman who had put such honour upon him, he held out the bull-seal.

‘Diomedes, should he come from you, must carry a sign from the Mother, from Crete herself,’ he said. ‘Hang this about the prince’s neck, lady. Not for my sake, but for Hera’s.’

He held out the dangling seal, all he had left, his shaggy head turned away, his dark eyes closed in deference. He did not feel her take the amethyst from his hand. He only knew that when he got back into the dimness of the fern-hung culvert, the amulet had gone from his hand.

And gone also was the golden gleam from the two snake bracelets. As he stared down at them, waiting for the shepherd’s pipe to die away into the distance towards Iolcos, he stared down at the twisted spirals of metal. Now he could see that they were of gilded bronze, not gold.

‘Perimede of the many tricks,’ he said. ‘A worthy mother for Diomedes! May he prosper! May he gain great profit from his bull-seal—his father never did! But, after all, she did not say they were gold. I did. That was in my mind.’

As he spoke, the Minoan felt a shiver run along his back. It was as though the Mother had stroked her damp hand the length of his tired body.

The shepherd’s dog was standing outside the culvert, sniffing curiously, and then suddenly barking sharply in warning.

The Minoan gazed helplessly at the black dog, seeing the flash of its white teeth, seeing its amber eyes as though they were the eyes of some vengeful god. He swayed on his feet, wondering whether he was strong enough to stoop and take up a big stone from the stream, to silence this creature before it revealed his hiding-place.

But the shepherd was already beside the dog, staring at the man who crouched in the fern-dimmed cavern. He was a short, thick-set fellow, who carried a stout oaken staff in his red hands. The hair stuck out from his round head like straw.

His voice was what the Minoan had expected, that appropriate to a red-handed man with an oaken staff and hair like straw.

‘Come on out of there,’ the voice shouted harshly, ‘You should be worth a pretty penny to me, Minoan! I don’t catch a runaway slave every day. Move on now, or I’ll have to come in and beat you out with my stick! I’ll break your ribs, I promise you, if you cause me any trouble!’

The Minoan did not delay. For most of his adult life he had been trapped in one cave or another, in reality or dream, by these yellow-haired Hellenes. He knew that he must come when he was called. He knew that his slavery could never end now.

He flung the gilded snake-bracelets back into the darkness of the culvert, where no one would think of looking for them. They were useless, anyway. Tricks to trap the unwary.

‘May Diomedes get more value from my seal,’ he whispered as the icy water of the stream flowed over his ankles.

Then he called out, ‘I come, shepherd. Do not send the dog after me. I come.’

His lips drawn back to show his broken teeth, half in pain, half in a shallow jest, he hobbled out under the ferns towards the waiting shepherd, pulling the goatskin tight about him once again, to hide as much of his body as he could.