Читать книгу Jason (Mycenaean Greek Trilogy) - Henry Treece - Страница 8

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After three days and nights the sounds of the drum and lyre, of the shuffling feet, had become almost intolerable. Even the shouts of the children playing in the ante-room became the sharp head-splitting cries of the Erinnyes, of demons.

It was time to go. Old Cheiron, his horse-hide smock now torn, yawned and stretched by the door which led out to the pine woods and said, ‘Oh, for the hills and the horses!’

I felt stained and sweaty and feather-light in the head. I walked past him and made my way, on the far side of the huts, to where I heard the sound of water rushing between rocks. We boys had always been taught to keep ourselves and our horses clean, and now I felt that I needed the cool freshness of water upon my skin, above all things.

There was a little round pool, hemmed in by great slab-like rocks, upended by some volcanic rising, and the stream ran down from the mountain and into this natural basin before brimming over the sides and making its way still farther down the slope among the trees.

I had already stripped off my tunic and was running towards this place when I heard voices, slow weary voices, coming from behind those pointed black rocks.

Three women lay there, half-submerged in the waters, letting the mountain stream run over them, as though they too were rocks, or shells, or some unfeeling work of Nature.

When the first of them saw me there was a great twittering, a shrill bird-like squealing and snatching for garments. One of them, her bodice drenched, appeared over the rocks and pointed her forefinger at me, between my eyes. She shouted out something which I did not understand and did not stay to enquire about. I turned and ran back through the huts, to the long-house, where Cheiron was assembling the horsemen.

When he saw me he laughed. ‘Have you, too, been to still a baby in the cold stream?’ he asked.

I gazed at him amazed. ‘Is that what they are doing?’ I said.

He turned from me and bound the sheepskin saddle on his horse’s back. ‘We are ready to leave,’ he said. ‘Come, Diomedes, do not delay.’ And that was all I had from him.

Only the little girls came to see us go. They stood in a straight line, the evening sun upon their oval wax-like features, their long dark hair floating in the wind, their tiny hands raised in the ritual signal of farewell. Few of the little boys bothered to turn in their saddles and wave back. We men merely smiled and then put our horses to the muddy slope that led upwards through the woods.

No one mentioned Aristides.

I think we were almost at the outer edge of the pine forest when I first discovered that the amethyst seal had gone from my neck. I was at the tail-end of the file and so did not feel myself answerable to anyone. I swung my black horse about and galloped back among the trees.

Riding down the slope I made good time and soon came upon the Village of Women once again. Now in the growing dusk all looked different. The little girls had gone and there was a great loneliness about the place, as though no one lived there at all.

Dismounting, I ran through the feast-hall and the door into the room where we had held our festival.

As I entered that place, its air now as thick as that of a goat-pen, there arose gasps all about me. It was as though I had defiled some awful and forbidden shrine. In the blue dimness, I groped my way towards the pallet of hay on which I had passed the three days of the Mother’s festival. My hands groped, near frantic, among the wisps of dried grass, until they came upon something hard and cold. It was the seal which had been wrenched from me in some paroxysm of ecstasy. I held it safely in my hand again and felt complete, myself again.

But before I could run from that room of smoke-laden fear, a cry at the far end halted me, made me stare towards the glowing fire, the little altar where the images of the Goddess held her writhing snakes.

‘Diomedes, my friend! My friend!’

I turned back like a man in a dream of death and saw Aristides; but not the Aristides I had always known. Only that call of his had been the true Aristides—only for a second or two. By the time I had focused my eyes upon him he was once again what I knew he must become—meat for the Mother, albeit seemly dressed.

Aristides sat before the altar, bolt upright, as though trussed like a cock for the table, in a high-backed gilded chair.

His face was painted, the eyelids blue, the cheeks red; but no paint could disguise his dreadful pallor, his stark terror. And though he wore the purple tunic of kings and priests, open at the breast and down as far as the waist, he was no king, unless it was the King of Death, which is no king at all.

He stared at me as though I were some creature of a past but desirable life; a fellow he would dearly like to embrace if only for safety’s sake, but never would again.

‘Aristides!’ I called. ‘My friend! What shall I do?’

The frozen creature in the chair did not answer me with his voice or hands. But his fear-crazed eyes swung to left and to right. I looked and saw the reason for his terror. On either side of him, squatting on their haunches, were the women, all of them dressed in the hateful blue bodice which exposed their lewdly gilded breasts, the hateful flounced pink skirts which jangled with sequins as the wearer walked.

But these women were not walking. They were sitting, and waiting. Some of them wore masks—of the bitch, the sow; the mare. But most of them wore their own haggard faces, their dark hair tangled over their shoulders, their cheeks pinked with blobs of horrible ochre. They were just white faces full of eyes, large black Cretan eyes, that saw everything and saw nothing. Their thin jaws moved in some awful rhythm as they chewed, and chewed the laurel. Of all things, the laurel! Mindless masks moving their thin and awful jaw-pieces.

In each woman’s lap lay a bunch of shrivelled leaves from which the narrow brown hands plucked timelessly.

And in each woman’s lap rested a little silver sickle. I saw the light from the wall-torches glinting on these things, and I recalled that day when the Nymph had come to watch the stallions ‘giving the Mother her due.’

‘Aristides,’ I called once more, ‘can you hear what I am saying, my friend?’

I think for a moment I may have had some mad idea of rushing forward and freeing the boy I had known at the Horse Camp. But he did not answer me. Instead, he stared straight before him and at last he began to laugh like a madman.

As I stood there wondering what I should do, the Nymph herself rose from behind the chair, her face still painted as before but her flounces now torn from her. She turned her black eyes towards me and said aloud, ‘Diomedes, Boy of the Horses, do you come back again? Perhaps you cannot bear to leave us? Or perhaps next year you will wish to sit in the chair of Aristides? Which is it, my friend? There is room for two, it is a broad chair, made to hold twins.’

I did not answer her; I had masterfully known her many times in that strange festival of the Mother—but I felt no match for her at this moment. I swung round and ran from the room, my ears full of the wailing of those haggard-faced women who sat beside poor Aristides in his high-backed chair of death.

My horse galloped as furiously as though, he too, had been inside that fœtid room and had seen what I had seen. I found Cheiron waiting for me, dark-faced and grim, at the edge of the pine wood.

‘Diomedes,’ he said, ‘you are a fool! You should have been where Aristides is tonight. That is the place for a fool.’

I pushed my tired horse beside his and leaned over to lay my head upon his harsh and hairy shoulder.

‘Cheiron, my father,’ I cried, unashamed of my tears, ‘do not say that! I went back for my seal and saw poor Aristides in the chair. I did not mean to see it. I only wanted to find what I had lost. Believe me, Cheiron, I meant no harm.’

He sat silent for a while as the wind swept over us and the birds and the pine-boughs sighed around us. Then, at last, he said, ‘You poor thing! You are no Minoan in spite of your seal and what they call you.... You are a Hellene, after all, my son. A simple man-thing. A God-lover: no subject of the Mother.’

I took his hard dry hand and held it.

‘Yes, Father,’ I cried out. ‘That is what I am! After this festival, I am afraid of women! They frighten me, my father! They put terror into me!’

Cheiron did not say anything which might have been a reply to my own anguish. Instead he swung his horse round, still holding my hand as gently as he could, like a friend, a true father.

‘Come, Diomedes, the Hellene,’ he said softly. ‘We must try to catch up with the others before they reach the Horse Camp. But I am troubled about you. It is something I cannot decide about. Only the Oracle at Delphi can tell us what you are to do. If the women cause you so much dread then we must ask a man to lead you to whatever doom awaits you. The Oracle must reveal to you your Moira.’

I remember saying, between my sobs, ‘Yes, Cheiron! Yes, that is what we must do. I trust men, my father—I trust men.... But women are so different, so cruel, like animals. Yes, even the Mother, Cheiron.’

Then I recall that he turned in the saddle, stiff-faced, and cut me deeply across the cheek with his bull’s pizzle and that I did not cry. My tears were now for other, deeper things.