Читать книгу Jason (Mycenaean Greek Trilogy) - Henry Treece - Страница 6

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I am Diomedes, son of Poseidon, they say. I have been called Diomedes of Colchis, of Iolcos, even of Corinth, during my warrior-lifetime.

But most men know me as Jason, ‘the Healer,’ nothing more—and often with no kingdom attached to the name. That is perhaps as it should be. Jason was the nickname given to me when I was a boy, by old Cheiron, master of the Hundred Horse-herders, who looked after me like a father until I was sixteen. Yet for the greater part of my life most folk who called me Jason laughed secretly when they said it, often holding their hands across their mouths so that I should not see, for in those days I had more to do with giving wounds than with healing them. All men knew that. I knew it, too, but made nothing of it.

How I got my nickname is perhaps the most important thing in my life. It is something I want to talk about, now that I am an old man, thin in the arms and legs, fat in the belly, and slow in my speech.... But I was not always so. Once men were afraid of me.

My earliest memories are of the long sweep of upland grazing just below the snowline on Mount Pelion, with the black horses galloping and neighing against the blue sky, the ground echoing with the thud of their lovely great hooves; and me sitting on the sheepskin saddle behind old Cheiron, wondering whether he was a horse or a man. His legs were so bowed with riding that they seemed to disappear behind the horse’s shoulder muscles; and his back was so bent as he leaned over to talk in the horse’s ear, he seemed a part of the creature’s neck. His long black hair, which was never cut, and his beard, mingled with the horse’s mane like one lot of hair. Even his long face, his nose and chin and jutting lower jaw, reminded me of a horse. He always dressed in horse-hide, and smelled like a horse. He laughed like one, too, and always stooped over his dish to eat like one, never using his knife or his hands, as the other men did.

Cheiron was the Horse King of Pelion. He could ride anything, and could talk to the wildest stallion until the creature was as mild as a lamb and willing to eat from his hand. I never knew Cheiron to strike a horse, yet they all obeyed him. When I was old enough to ask him about this, sitting in the rambling horse-hide palace on the hill-side, with one tent leading into another and yet another, just like a house of stone or wood, he smiled and said, ‘My other name is Hippodamus, the horse-tamer—so I ought to know such things, don’t you think, boy?’

That seemed to make sense to me, and I said, ‘Hippodamus, there is something else that worries me; as you are my father, then I must have had a mother. Yet I have never seen her. Who is she?’

Cheiron never became cross at the questions I used to ask him. He was a good and patient teacher. But this time he began to wag his shaggy head the way horses do when they are restless, and then he took a stick and stirred up our horse-dung fire. Though I was only a little lad, I sensed that his mind was troubled. I was not called Diomedes, the Sly One, for nothing.

And at last he came back to the leather cushions stuffed with horse-hair, that were the only furniture in the audience hall, and said, ‘Your mother was Hippothoë, the impetuous mare, I think. Yes, that is who she was. She wanted you to be called Hippolochus, Son of a Mare, but I always thought that Diomedes sounded better. Don’t you?’

He glanced sideways at me, with his dark horse’s eyes, and I nodded, to please him.

‘All the same,’ I said, ‘a man cannot get away from the truth, from the themis, the law of God. Where is my mother now, Cheiron? I would like to meet her and talk to her.’

‘Aiee! Aiee! Lad!’ he said. ‘She is not one to be pestered by little gossiping boys. She has other things to think of. She is the Great Mare who rules beyond Pelion, and grazes out as far afield as River Peneus, across the wide plains and over the high hills. A man could spend a lifetime looking for her. She is not often seen.’

He must have noticed tears in my eyes at these words, because he slapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘There, Diomedes, try to be patient. This sort of thing happens to most boys of your age. They have to wait until their mother comes to see them. It will be the same with you. One day, when the time is right, your mother will come over the hill to claim you—I promise you that.’

His words comforted me, and I went away to sleep with the other boys under the long skin wind-break, and to dream of the Great Mare, with tossing head and bright hooves and eyes, who would come for me if I was a good lad and perhaps take me riding on her broad back.

That dream kept me contented for years.

I don’t know what Cheiron told the other boys. They never talked about it then—though later they called themselves the sons of Zeus, Poseidon and so on, when they got too old to believe they were suckled at a mare’s teats.

We were a strange company, the Horse-herders. Like a folk on our own. The men were all short and very dark, with their hair down their backs, and hooked noses like eagles. I learned later that they were the children of the old Minoans who had settled in Thessaly and took to the hills when the Hellenes came down from the northern plains in their chariots to find land for themselves. We provided horses for half of the world, as I knew it then—Magnesia, Euboca, Locris, Boeotia; yes, even as far as Attica. Though the men of the Peloponnese bred their own horses, and bought nothing from us. Our horses were small and wiry, and the men of the far south wanted them bigger and stronger, to carry men in armour, not for drawing chariots in pairs.

There were always a hundred of us—never more nor less—and about thirty of us were boys like me. We used to think we were all brothers, and that Cheiron was our father, he was so kind to us—but when I grew older I knew better. Though they all called themselves Hippolochus—Sons of the Mare—that was not true. They didn’t even look the same as each other, which they would have done if they had had one mother, surely. Some of them had black hair, some brown, some red. I was the only one with bright yellow hair—as yellow as that of any Hellene.

Once a boy named Aristides pulled my long yellow hair and called out to the others, ‘Hoi! Look, a Hellene has got into our camp! Let us stone him!’

I was about nine at the time and he was much older; yet I think I could have bested him at fighting if I had been allowed. But the older boys came clustering round, laughing and neighing and pushing me from one to the other until I was dizzy and afraid.

Then Cheiron ran out of the tents, his stick in his hand, and drove them away from me, as though they were rough young colts.

‘So, you think because Diomedes has yellow hair you have a right to bully him, do you? What about you with the red hair, Aristides? Is that a better colour? And what of you with the brown hair, Phillipos? Cannot the Great Mare have colts of whatever colour she chooses? Must she always have black ones just because you think so?’

The boys were so ashamed, I was sorry for them. But then Cheiron called me forward to him and took the amethyst seal that had always hung round my neck on a thong.

‘When you next feel like misusing your lazy strength,’ he said, ‘find out first of all if your victim is wearing such a token as this. This is the Great Mother’s seal, my friends, and is only given to princes. You talk of Hellenes just because the Mare willed Diomedes to have yellow hair—but I tell you that with such a seal he could have walked into the Great Hall of Cnossus in the splendid days, and have sat beside Minos himself. Now what do you say?’

He stumped back to his palace, and then the boys clustered round me to see the seal and to ask my pardon. That night Aristides moved his place along the wind-break and slept next to me, holding my hand in his.

And after that, it must have got about among the men themselves, because they took to calling me ‘the Minoan,’ though the difference between us was as that between jet and snow.

By the time I was twelve, I was taller than anyone in the camp—the men included—and no one ever tried to tease me again.

I have since thought about those boys, who called themselves the sons of Cheiron. In truth, they were a mixed lot—but most of them of noble blood, had they known it. Some of them had been found exposed on the hills, as babies, to meet whatever death waited them because their parents could not afford to feed them; some were the illegal sons of princesses who dared not have them in the palaces; and some were the true sons of great ladies who sent them to Cheiron to be safe from the hands of murderous tyrant-kings.

That is perhaps why there was a ban on us in Iolcos. No Horse-herder was ever allowed within the city-gates. It was a law. When the Minyans of Iolcos wanted horses, they came out to a meeting-place at the foot of the hill and dealt with Cheiron in secret.

This, in its strange way, made us feel proud. We felt that we were too good for the weak men of Iolcos, and that they were afraid of us in some way, frightened to let us into their citadel.

But do not think, because we could not go into the city, that we had no entertainment. We sang, and danced, and fought with sticks, and rode; yes, rode, rode, rode, all the time!

Then there was another thing I must tell you about. We were a settlement of men and boys—but a day’s ride away, beyond the pine woods, there was a Village of Women, all dark women like the Horse-herders, but most of them pretty, in the Cretan way, and very lively in their songs and dances, and always glad to see us when we rode to visit them.

This we did three times a year—at the Spring sowing-time, after the Harvest, and at Winter. We all went, men and children, taking the horses with us. It did not seem strange to us when we were children that there should be a whole village with no men in it—after all, our camp on the mountain-side contained no women.

Of course, there were things we did not think about in those days. For instance, we did not think about what happened to any boy children in that village. Later, some of us, whispering together at night under the wind-break, got to realize what must have happened—the boys were either exposed on the hills, or perhaps put into the river when the aegre came up from the sea, as an offering to Poseidon, while the girls were nurtured to womanhood, to become members of that place of females.

There was another thing which used to puzzle me when I was a young boy; always, after we had visited this Village of Women for the festivals, we returned home to our hill-side short of one man. There was a great secrecy about this and no one would talk about it: but it was a fact. No one knew who it would be, to stay behind; but it was always one of the grown men, not the children.

I once asked Cheiron about this, when I was riding alongside him, almost within sight of Iolcos. He leaned over his horse’s neck for a while, whispering into the stallion’s ear, and then he turned to me with a sideways glance and said, ‘A man must be there to make the seeds grow in the earth, or to thank the All-Mother for a good grain harvest. And at Winter, he must be there to see that the snow does not lie too long, or the river rise too high. He must see that the year turns like a wheel. It is just that. There must be one man.’

He said this so quietly, so positively, that I did not carry the questions any further. I was about fifteen at the time, and had begun to know that there were many things in life that must not be pressed too far.

But later another thing happened which made me think about it all again.

Each year, before the mating-time of horses, there was a sort of ceremony among us, held in a hollow basin of the hill-side, into which we drove all the young stallions who were ready. The grown men sat on horses at the lip of the basin, with sticks and spears, to keep the stallions enclosed. At first we young lads sat with them and only watched. But as we grew older and stronger, we were allowed down there, among the flailing hooves and swirling tails, to play our part.

Cheiron would go among the stallions on his own mare, touching certain of them on the rump with his white wand; then we made for the marked ones and put hide thongs about their muzzles and their hind-legs. Sometimes it took three of us on each rope to hold in the stallion.

But when we had got him quiet, one of the men would come swiftly with a sickle-shaped knife of bronze, and take away what they called the ‘sweet breads.’ While the stallion reared and squealed, and we held on furiously, beating at his nose with our sticks, another man would catch a few drops of the blood which trickled out in libation cups of glazed clay.

This was done so naturally, so often, that we thought nothing of it. It was a custom, and not to be questioned. We noticed that the stallions who had been so treated became quieter, more docile, more manageable, and thought it was a necessary part of their training.

Once when I asked a herdsman about the custom, he said, ‘We call it “giving the Mother her due,” Diomedes. She requires it and it always has been done.’

The unwarlike horses who had ‘given the Mother her due’ seemed content, after a little while, and we boys assumed that the Mother had put peace into their minds by reason of the ceremony.

On this occasion there was always present a young woman from the far village, usually the newest Nymph, a girl in her early teens. She came with a skin bag to collect the ‘sweet breads’ and take them back to her village as an annual offering. And whoever came, she was always dressed in the same way—wearing a short blue bodice, to show her upper body, and a flounced pink skirt, drawn in so tightly at the waist that we boys thought it must have been most uncomfortable to put on.

This girl was always treated with great respect by the herdsmen, who bowed before her and walked backwards from her presence. We boys stared at her long oiled locks of hair, her coloured lips and the round blobs of red on her cheeks; and especially we stared at the gilded tips of her breasts, which struck us as being most amusing.

One day, shortly after I had spoken to Cheiron about our loss of a man at every festival in the Village of Women, I stood by such a girl as she watched the stallions ‘giving the Mother her due.’ Her lips were slightly apart, and her hair dark and long down her back. She was staring as though she did not wish to miss a single movement of the man with the sickle. I was greatly daring and said to her, ‘You are very interested, lady.’

She turned to me after a while and gazed at me from my feet to my head, her black eyes vacant. ‘Yes,’ she said, in a low, almost hoarse, voice, speaking our language with a Cretan tang. ‘Yes, it could be a man.’

Her words were like a hard blow between the eyes to me. If she had not been the Nymph of the Year and dressed in her garb of priestess, I think I would have given her a good shaking. But there was some strange thing like an invisible wall between us, and I dared not touch her. She seemed to know this, too, because she smiled and drew out of the waistband of her skirt a little silver sickle, so small that it lay neatly in the palm of her narrow brown hand. Its blade was filed very sharp; I could see that from where I stood. I did not dare say anything to her about such a thing. But she gave a little nod of her head, which set the dark elf-locks dancing on her back, then she smiled and turned back to watch the men at work in the hollow basin.

Later she spoke, into the wind, and I hardly caught her words. ‘This year it is my task. I must know what to do.’

I dared to say, ‘Is it the man who is left behind?’

She nodded, absently, watching the boys holding a great black stallion whose hide glistened with the sweat of terror.

‘It happens after you have all gone. When we have chewed the laurel leaves. It is my turn this year.’

Then she moved her eyes round until they rested on me, in a sideways gaze. I did not like that at all. She looked like a cow or a snake, the way she stared, unblinking.

‘You are the only one with yellow hair among the herdsmen,’ she said gently. ‘You are outstanding among them, being so tall and so golden. There has not been a yellow one for many years.’

I did not want to stay with her any longer then, in case her mind turned to other things about me. I picked up the horse-hide bag she had brought and went down the slope, away from her.

‘I will collect the “sweet breads” for you, lady,’ I said, glad to be out of her staring sight.

Indeed, I was relieved when they told me she had left our encampment. I felt safer among men alone. But I did ask Cheiron about something she had said.

‘Why do the women chew the laurel, Father?’ I asked that evening as we walked round the grazing pens, tending the gelded horses.

Cheiron was chewing a grass-stalk, like a horse himself, and smiled a little grimly, so that the long lines down his face got deeper, and his narrow dark brow furrowed.

‘I saw you talking to the Nymph,’ he said. ‘It is not wise to meet one’s fate half-way. Moira, the will of God, is like a bridge, which should not be crossed until one gets to it; and then one should stride over it without thinking. Otherwise, a man’s life is full of dark dreams and forebodings. A man should go to the festivals singing, and taking what is offered him for the glory of the Mother. He should not always be thinking that he alone is to pay the reckoning. Others, many others, have gone before him. And many others will follow him. There is nothing unusual about it, my son.’

‘No, Father,’ I said, ‘only for the one who is chosen!’

He gave a gruff little laugh as he examined a horse that was shuddering in a corner of the rocks, and not grazing hungrily like the others.

‘Three men could run through a sudden rainstorm,’ he said. ‘Two would come out dry and the other wet. The raindrops fall where they will. Moira is like that—it leaves some dry, and one wet. Who is to say how the rain should fall?’

He stroked the gelding’s neck gently with soothing hands, and spoke into his ear. The horse seemed to shake his head, as though disconsolate, and then Cheiron left it and came back to me.

He looked up into my eyes through his own narrowed lids, as though searching my mind. Then he said, ‘It is after the festival that the women chew the laurel, my son. There is something in it that makes them drunk, gives them strength, and lets them be able to do what has to be done. It is the old faith that orders this, Diomedes, and men cannot change it—although the Hellenes have tried to stamp it out in those places where they honour the father above the mother. That is all.’

I placed my hands upon his hairy shoulders and said, ‘Father, if I have my way, I shall burn down all the laurel bushes between Thessaly and Tiryns, before I have done!’ I spoke with all the passion of a frightened boy.

He shook my hands away from him with a movement more sudden and violent than I had ever known. For an instant I thought he was going to strike me with the long bull’s pizzle that he always carried when he went among the herds at night.

‘Never speak such words again, Diomedes,’ he said. ‘If you were heard, think what could happen to you!’

I must have looked so shocked that his face softened and he patted me gently on the back, just as he had patted the miserable gelding a minute before.

‘Come, my son,’ he said, ‘let us go back to my palace. We will drink a cup of fermented mare’s milk to drive the cold out of our bones. It is chilly up here on the hill tonight. Then we will talk about the Spring festival. It is almost the day for us to ride to the Village of Women; they will be expecting us soon. This year you will go as a man. Your days of watching are over; now it is time for you to be a-doing!’

As we walked our horses down the hill, I said to him, ‘I should go with a better heart if I knew that I was not to be the chosen one at the feast, Father.’

Old Cheiron shook his head and said, ‘You are trying to run before you have learned to walk! The Mother is not like that; she is good to us. If she asks payment, it is only after she has given gifts. To be chosen never falls to a man in his first year. The Mother would not cheat a man like that; we are all her sons, don’t forget, and she wishes our happiness. She knows every one of us, and waits for us. Most times she is willing to wait all our lives.’

I came up to him doubtfully and took his wrist.

‘Do you swear, Father?’ I asked him in the shadow of the tents.

Cheiron smiled into my face. ‘It is not my place to swear on her behalf, Diomedes,’ he said. ‘Anything could always happen. We could be smitten by lightning as we rode over the hill. Or the thunderstones could crush us all. Who knows? But I will tell you this—and I have never told it before—the choice this year has fallen on one much older than you. One with red hair. He does not know it, nor should I have told you but to comfort you, for I love you dearly.’

He stopped then and his face darkened. ‘But what I have said is not to be revealed to anyone. You must understand that. If you were to pass on my word, then someone would know, and a second choice would be made—a choice that even I could not prevent, my son.’

After that, we drank fermented mare’s milk and ate the succulent shell-fish that had been brought up for us from the sea by the fisher-folk who dealt with us. But I did not enjoy my meal, though it was counted a privilege to eat with Cheiron in his skin-palace. I kept thinking of the poor devil who was chosen, already, without his knowledge. I sensed that it was Aristides, the proud lad who had once taunted me about being a Hellene. He who had held my hand in the night, to make me his friend again.

And now he was dancing and singing with his mates about the fires, thinking of the festival that was to come again in the Village of Women beyond the far pines. He was already finished—yet I dared not tell him so. Yet, by the following morning, I had forgotten him, for I found that under the trees the aconites had given way to hyacinths—and I have always been a great lover of flowers. There is something so hopeful about them: they seem to die—and then, when Spring comes, they rise again in all their beauty. They must be sent by the gods to show us that there is no real ending—and that all will come again, be reborn. In their tender leaves and petals are themis—the truth of life, of the gods.