Читать книгу Jason (Mycenaean Greek Trilogy) - Henry Treece - Страница 7

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We arrived, after a day of riding from dawn to dusk, at the Village of Women. We were all there, even the smallest boys, in a long single file, threading down through the mountain slopes towards the pine woods; and always, as we drew nearer the place we were bound for, warnings went on ahead of us—the high, reedy singing of girls who were tending the goats and the sheep higher up in the hidden grazing-slopes. These songs followed us, seemed to hover like birds above us, guiding us forwards, forwards, all the while, to meet what lay waiting for us at the place where the Spring festival had always been celebrated by the Horse-herders.

Cheiron had told us before we set out that when the three days were over, one of us would be honoured by the Goddess. All the men nodded, their black hair blowing over their eyes as they sat on their ponies, their legs dangling; but the boys of my own age and younger just smiled and stared at him, as though he was speaking a formula which had nothing to do with reality, with life and death. For most of them, Cheiron might just as well have been chanting the names of the thirteen months of the Medusan calendar—the calendar that the Hellenes were already changing in many places. Aristides had been as bored as any of them, though he was one of the oldest of the boys and had been classed as a man in the Village of Women for the last three festivals.

As we came to the first of the pine woods, riding low under the overhanging boughs, I watched him carefully, being only a few yards behind him. He was laughing and singing, as though he hadn’t a care in the world, and calling out to others like myself who were going for the first time as men, that we should never forget it! I shuddered to hear him speak like this, and wished that I could have drawn my pony alongside his, to warn him of what lay ahead of him—though I had given my solemn word to Cheiron, and, besides, I did not know what lay ahead of him, I only feared for him.

I had always lived on the rolling uplands, among the high soughing grasses and under the blue sky; now, below the pine-boughs, I began to be afraid in an unspeakable sort of way—I felt as I often do still when I am in houses, enclosed by walls and with a roof above me—trapped. The pine wood was like a house, or rather a vast temple, with many columns to support its dark and fretted roof. Our horses’ hooves sank into the mulch of ancient pine-needles and cones and a heavy smell of earth came up to us. Here and there bright red and green fungi stuck up through the loam, arrogantly. The smaller boys pointed at these and laughed, until Cheiron turned in his saddle and glared at them until they were silent once more.

My own nostrils were full of the smoky scent of the foliage about me. There was something musk-like, cat-like, woman-like, about it that disturbed me. Even the sudden brittle cry of a bird, startled in the depths of the wood and flapping its way through the tangled dry boughs, reminded me of the shrill singing of the women on the hills. Everything seemed to lead to women that day. There were women in the air, in the deep damp earth, among the boughs, in the scent of the leaves. It was as though the whole creation was of women, for women, and that we men and boys were as helpless as the little stuffed boy-dolls that the Minoan ladies used to hang in their orchard trees to ensure a good crop.

Just before dusk we came to the village. Aristides was singing a cheerful song about a sailor from Scyros who tried to pay court to a dolphin, when Melanos, Cheiron’s second-in-command, held up his hand for silence, and we rode down out of the damp woods with bowed heads.

The village was a score or so of wooden huts, set round in a great half-circle at the edge of the woods, and overlooking a central cleared space in which stood a long low house, thatched with straw, and with window-holes only at its two ends. This was the feast hall. I had been there before in my status as a boy and knew that it contained only two rooms: one in which the children played and all feasted at the long trestle-table; and the other, which I had never entered as yet, into which the men went at night-time. As we dismounted and approached the door, a new feeling passed through my body and I began to tremble. I felt that I was on the verge of a high steep cliff, at the edge of some strange, perhaps awful discovery. I have always feared cliffs, and with a good reason.

The village seemed deserted and some of the little boys began to cry as the owls hooted all about us in the dark woods. Then one of them pointed to the lintel above the doorway and cried out, ‘Look, Father Cheiron, there is wet blood over the doorway.’

We all looked and saw it. I suppose I had seen it before as a child without knowing what it was. This time it had a curious effect on me. My lower jaw began to quiver so violently that I could not speak. Aristides could speak though. He shouted back to the little lad who had called out, ‘Take care, young one! That is the blood of the Gorgon who will come to get you before the night is out!’

He meant it to be a joke but no one laughed. Cheiron’s face was very pale as he knocked three times upon the closed door without even looking at Aristides. At any other time he would have given him a good beating for scaring a little boy, for the Horse-herders allowed no bullying. Straight fighting was one thing but bullying was another.

Then, as the third knock died away, the door opened and the young woman, the Nymph, who had been at the rounding-up of stallions stood there to welcome us. This time she was wrapped in a long robe of grey worsted with a hood which half-covered her face. But I could tell who it was by the round splotches of colour on her cheeks, and the long tails of oiled black hair that escaped the hood and fell over her breast.

Slowly she said, ‘Hera bids you welcome, men! It has been long since the snow first fell, and she has awaited you impatiently. Now come within and warm yourselves with wine and fire. The buds must burst, the fruit must grow! Come within to enjoy the blessing of the All-Mother!’

As she finished speaking, from the back part of the long-house the voices of many women were raised in a high, wordless, soaring song, a paean of some sort, accompanied by the beating of a little drum and a series of chords upon some stringed instrument like a lyre. These lyres were made with a turtle-shell and two bull’s horns. The strings were of sheep’s entrails.

It was all indescribably sharp and frightening to me this time, though as a child I did not recall it as such.

Then, according to the custom among the Horse-herders, we all rushed through the doorway and ranged ourselves about the long table to eat and drink what was set before us. This table was always well spread as a welcome to us after the long journey over the hill and down through the dark woods. There were warm oat-cakes, barley-bread, creamy butter, olives, and a great wooden dish set in the midst of everything piled high with grain soaked in milk, and containing morsels of sheep-meat, goat-flesh, and juicy particles of shell-fish. By each man’s wooden platter was a cup of Cretan wine in a finely-glazed cup with great handles. These cups were very old and had about them the look of an egg-shell, they were so delicate. Our own greyish Minyan ware was crude beside them.

Cheiron saw that the young boys were served first, for there were no women in this room and the men had to do all the sharing-out. He warned us all that the cups were precious things and that the women set great store by them, because they had come down from the earliest times. A broken cup would cost a full-grown horse, he said, so we must be very careful with them. At this many of the little boys refused to drink out of them, and had to be helped by the older ones.

Aristides, however, seemed possessed of a devil. First he took the seat at the head of the table where Cheiron himself should have sat; then, after laughing and roaring like a madman, he drained his cup at one gulp and flung it deliberately into a corner, where it smashed to fragments. Cheiron, who had calmly taken the seat below Aristides, did not say a word. But he bit his lips and stared down at the scrubbed boards of the trestle. Even Melamos, usually a quick-tempered man with the boys in his care, looked away, as though this had not happened. By now the little boys were so occupied with filling their bellies that they did not notice what had taken place. But those of us who were now classed as men glanced at each other and wondered.... Then the time for wondering was over, for the door that led to the second, secret room was flung open and a great sound of singing came to our ears. It was accompanied by the sharp scent of burning pine-cones and of some heavily resinous wood which stung the eyes and nostrils.

A crowd of little girls came running in, to take the hands of the young boys and to dance and play with them. For the first time I observed that these girls did not play like the children I had watched in other villages, farther south, roughly and without purpose. They moved always as though to music, with rhythm and shuffling bare feet. Their hands came out in small stiff gestures too, as though they had been trained to move only in this way. Each one wore a shapeless blue robe, and their hair, dark and oiled, hung loosely down their backs.

It is strange that I had never noticed all these things before when I had come to the long-house as a little one myself. Then, it had been a matter of reaching the journey’s end, of sitting in the hay by a warm fire, of eating and drinking until I felt ready to burst! The little girls had been incidental, like furniture. We had played and laughed together for three days and then had parted without another thought. We did not even know each other’s names. These were never told, on either side; which means nothing, of course, since all folk went under many different names at various stages of their lives in those days.

But my thoughts were taken from the playing children when Cheiron came behind me and pushed me forward, through the inner door.

‘Come, Diomedes,’ he whispered, ‘the days of playing and childhood are over now. We must now dance to a different measure or the corn will not grow, nor the mares foal!’

We went into a longer room than the one we had dined in. Its wooden floor was bare but along either wall, at the side, hay was piled to knee-height; and the walls themselves were decked with the interlaced boughs of pine and laurel and cypress, which cast off a bitter-sweet, musk-like tang.

At the far end of the room, a charcoal fire burned, and in its glow I saw a low altar, on which was set many sea-shells, a white marble cross with arms of equal length, and two statuettes of the Mother, wearing the short bodice which exposed her navel, and her flounced skirt, her arms held out before her and encircled with snakes.

The smell of the hay by the walls came sweetly to my nostrils then, and out of the corner of my eye I saw that here and there along the room stood a tall red-ware amphora—of wine, I suspected—with glazed cups standing beside each one. At least we were not going to be thirsty.

Then Cheiron gave the command, and we arranged ourselves in a long line, down the centre of the room, back to back, and forty in each rank. And when we were in position, the women came from the shadows at the far end of the hall, where the fire and the altar were, each of them dressed in the short bodice and flounced skirt, their dark hair flying and their bodies laid bare. The music started up again, the drum and the lyre, to give point to the movements of the bare and rustling feet.

Each woman carried a broad strip of cloth which she wound round the eyes of each man, wordlessly, so that we were all blindfolded. And then a voice began to chant, the voice of the Nymph who had shown me the little silver sickle when the stallions were giving the Mother her due. I shall never forget the words she spoke, as we stood silently in that pine-scented room:

‘Omphalos, Omphalos!

Sign of begetting, sacred cave!

Omphalos the Mother-sign,

The cave of death!

The Cranes dance

When Spring comes,

To show that they

Would do as we—

To find their man

And dedicate

Him to the Omphalos,

The sign of birth!’

As the chant ended, I heard Aristides cry out in the heavy silence, ‘Mother, I come! Why do you need to ask?’

There was something like a shocked gasp among both women and men, and then the sound was drowned by the shuffling of feet upon the wood and among the hay. I think it was the Cranes’ courting-dance that the women performed, though I could not see it, because of the bandage about my eyes.

But at last there was silence; the dance, whatever it was, was over, and someone, a woman, had taken me by the two hands and had guided me towards the hay by the wall. It was now that I did one of the things which have proved that I was not named Diomedes, the Sly One, for nothing! As we rolled over together, to make ourselves comfortable, I slid my cheek down the woman’s bare shoulder and pushed up the blinding bandage a little over my left eye—the one I lost later, outside Mycenae—and saw her. She was young, very young, perhaps a year younger than I was. But she had all the paint and the gilt that I had come to know. She had also a strength and a fire that I had never known before. Once, while we were resting, she whispered to me in a tongue that I hardly recognized as my own, ‘Can you see, brother? I think your bandage has slipped and you must not see. That would spoil the magic.’

I put on my most wooden voice and said, ‘Sister, how could you think such a thing? All I can see is the darkness, and that is enough for me!’

This seemed to satisfy her, because she said no more about it and gave her attention to other things. I forgot poor Aristides now, and gave my mind to the affair in hand. It was good to be among the men at last, I thought. If this was what it meant, it was good. But for a moment I saw a sharp picture of the stallions down in the hollow, and I shuddered.

‘What is it, brother?’ asked the girl. ‘Has the Mother touched you with her snake?’

I shook my head in the hay and did not risk an answer.

Soon after that, the drum began again, and the lyre sent its harsh chords vibrating down the long warm hall. The Nymph cried out in a shrill voice, ‘Men of the Horse People, Hera bids you to the dance again!’

My girl helped me to get up and led me back to my place once more. Then the Cranes’ dance started up a second time. And when it stopped, I looked under my bandage very secretly and saw that the Nymph herself had chosen me this time.

In the hay I was very careful, very discreet, remembering that my name was Diomedes. That I was the Sly One!

After a spell the Nymph said to me, ‘What did you think of the little silver thing I showed you on the hill that day, brother?’

I pretended to look puzzled and even made a movement as though I would take the bandage from my eyes, but she stopped me with cool firm hands.

‘What are you speaking of?’ I asked, as though troubled. ‘I have never taken silver from a woman on the hill-side, I swear by the Mother of us all!’

She put her narrow hand over my mouth at this, as though anxious that I should not say anything out of place. I smiled in my heart because I knew that I was speaking the truth anyway. It convinced the Nymph at my side, and after that she seemed to give herself to the ritual without a care.

For my own part, I now had no cares either; not even for Aristides. After all, he had been to this village for the last three years in the status of a grown man. A man’s luck cannot last for ever.