Читать книгу Jason (Mycenaean Greek Trilogy) - Henry Treece - Страница 9

Table of Contents

My next three days were a torment to me. Cheiron avoided me after he had slashed open my cheek with his whip—but I did not hold that action against him. I would have done the same to any young man who had spoken to me as I had done to him, making light of my authority, speaking loosely of the Mother. After all, she was a goddess, to whoever believed in her.

But the truth was that I had suddenly become sick with terror at the mere idea of women—of their difference. It was not that I had not had pleasure from their bodies; in the three-day festival, I had known ecstasies that almost matched the delights of riding an unbroken stallion across the hill pastures. No, it was not that. It was something else, something fearsome, cruel and destructive. They carried both pleasure and death in the darkness of their bodies. I could not think of it without horror. They were so cruel with it. Poor Aristides, sitting painted in the chair, and the women who had let him enjoy their comforts, now waiting, chewing the maddening laurel, their sickles ready to cut at him in a frenzy ... All this frightened me. Even the little girls in their blue robes, with their oiled hair hanging down their thin backs, frightened me. One day they would sit like that, pale-faced and waiting, the sickles in their narrow brown hands. And the boy in the chair would be one they had played with as a child, years before—too many years before for one to remember the other.

Then there was that warm sickly smell of earth that kept coming into my nostrils and my mouth. I had known it, again and again, as I had lain in the hay during the festival of the Mother. It was not a man-smell; it was from the very bowels of the earth, from Earth Mother; and it made me afraid.... Zeus, I thought, how plain and simple are poor men! Their muscles are hard and strong, their speech is laconic and harsh. But they are understandable. If a man takes a wound in the arm or the leg, he wraps a bandage about it and it heals; but these women, I had learned, carried a permanent, frightful wound, that was of Mother Earth, and would not be healed until a man had died to cleanse it. At our Village of Women they cut the men with little sickles; down south at Eleusis, where Persephone was the queen, they ploughed him, stinking, into the fields to make the barley grow; on the island of Naxos, the women-Maenads at the feast of Dionysus tore a man to pieces and fought with each other for the privilege of eating his tenderest flesh.

I sweated through three nights of terror under that wind-break on Mount Pelion, dreaming the Mother had come for me, had gobbled me back into the womb with sharp cat-like teeth, and that I lay putrefying there to bring a strange fertility to her once again. Like manure on a field.

I tell you, it was a filthy dream; it was all darkness and smoke and stench, the stench of sulphur and decay. Do not blame me for having it—I was young and had not known women before. I had only known men, and clean horses on the uplands, under the blue sky.

On the third night I remember waking from my nightmare and clenching my fists in the chilly darkness.

‘Zeus, Father!’ I said. ‘Oh, Poseidon, Father! Free me from this horror! I will do anything to be rid of it. I will kill all the women. Even the mares and the polecats! Oh, God, release me from this thing. Let me fall into the clean sea. Let the squid pick my bones clean—as long as it is clean, clean, clean!’

In the morning Cheiron sent for me in his skin-palace but did not look at me with his dark eyes as he spoke.

‘My son,’ he said, ‘the whip sprang from my hand before I could stop it that night. Do not be sullen because of that. It could happen to anyone at any time. I was troubled in my mind then. Perhaps over Aristides. I do not know.’

I knelt and kissed his brown foot that smelled of leather.

‘Father’, I said, ‘it was not that. You may whip me with the bull’s pizzle until I am black and blue and I will not care. It is this horror of the women that turns me from my food and from my sleep. I love you as I have always done, believe that; but I cannot bear to go any more to the Village of Women. The thought of it unmans me, Cheiron.’

He bent from his cushion and placed his hard hands on my shoulders so that I must bow my head. Then he said, ‘Yellow-hair, dear Yellow-hair! You are not one of us after all. You are all Hellene, all Father-man. We of the ancient Crete accept the dream of the Mother, and the knife that ends that dream. We do not question the Mother’s strength nor her rightness. But you of the north are different. For you, it must be the open brightness of the sun, not the shy darkness, the man-eating darkness, of the moon, or of the black sweet-smelling earth. We are a different folk from you and there is nothing that can be done about it. Your life must go according to a different pattern now. We cannot keep you on the hill any longer. But you will never go again to the Village of the Women, my son, be assured of that.’

I stood up then, tall and yellow, straight-nosed and red in the flesh. I towered above Cheiron. I could have broken him in half at that moment, I felt so strong, so changed. But he looked up into my light eyes, my eyes of the sun, with his dark ones, eyes of the earth, of Earth Mother, and smiled slowly. And then I knew that I was younger than he, less than he—a child, before his long and ancient wisdom.

‘Melanos will take you to Delphi,’ he said. ‘I cannot leave the encampment in case the Mother needs me. I must be here, always. Melanos knows the way over the hills and along the passes. He will see that you get there in time for the questioning. But I must wait here for She may call for me to go to the Village of the Women and even to sit in the golden chair that little Aristides last sat in. That could always happen to a Horse King on this hill-side. Do not think we have no responsibilities, my son.’

I said, ‘Would she take you, too, Cheiron?’

He shrugged his brown shoulders and answered, ‘I have been spared all these years when the lot was cast. Luck cannot last for ever. One day I must know the touch of the sickles myself. It is ordained. Now go, my son, for I have ordered Melanos to be waiting for you at the edge of the grazing fields. There will be two others to accompany you. I did this secretly so that the other boys in our encampment would not get wind of it all and try to escape from their own doom.’

He stood and hugged me to him. He was only a little man by Hellene measurements; yet as I put my arms about his hard small body, I was sorry for him, sorry to leave him. He had been the only father I had ever known—except for the gods, like Zeus and Poseidon, who were but dreams, names we called on when we were in trouble, to get us out of a whipping.

At the edge of the grazing fields Melanos was waiting for me, seated on a black stallion. There was another black stallion for me, too. The other boys whom I was to accompany were on black mares. They were auburn-haired youths, said to be twins, with whom I had had no dealings before because of their irritable tempers—Castor and Polydeuces. They had come, the other boys said, from far Sparta.

They grinned at me in the early morning sunlight and then began to spar off at each other, though they were sitting in the saddle. That was their trouble—they cared more for fighting with their clenched fists than for any other thing. Each of them had a broken nose, which angered Cheiron who liked his boys to look well. And each of them vowed that he would never lift spear, or pull bowstring to chin, in the Hellene manner, while he lived. They declared that the only god-like weapon was the clenched fist. They thought they were throwing thunderbolts, like Zeus, perhaps!

Where they had got this strange notion, I do not know. But the truth was that even the wrestlers among us gave them best. They knew tricks of ducking, of guarding, and of counter-punching, which made us all look like fools when we took them on in a fight.

Polydeuces called out to me, ‘Well, Diomedes, whose son are you? We are of Zeus.’

I knew his tricks, and said, ‘I am of Cheiron, and perhaps of Poseidon. But who knows his father in times like these?’

Castor pushed his horse alongside mine and said, ‘Poseidon, pah! You are the bastard of a wandering Hellene tinker. Your hair tells that story. We are Spartans, next in importance to the old Minoans themselves.’

I said, not meaning to be offensive, ‘It would take two Spartans, as they call themselves, to beat one northern Hellene, friend.’

He made a grim face at this.

I knew well enough what would happen to me if he challenged me to fisticuffs and got me down from my horse, so I bent and took him by the ankle before he expected it. Then, kicking my stallion away from his mount, I stretched his leg as far as it would go without breaking.

And when the first groan came from his lips, I flung his leg up so that he slithered off on the far side and fell to the ground.

Melanos shook his whip at me and said, ‘You have proved your point, Hellene. Now let us have no more of this horse-play. I will flog any of you to howling-point if this happens again. You are all the sons of Cheiron, and there shall be no more argument about it.’

Nor was there. We followed Melanos like little children, though we were all nearly seventeen at the time, and became good friends.

The ride to Delphi was a long one, the best part of a hundred and fifty miles, for we often had to skirt such inlets as the Pagasaean and Euboean Gulfs. Besides, we were not always allowed to ride through towns, especially those held by Hellenes, who belonged to what they called a lawless folk; so that made our journey longer than it might have been.

Still, we carried our own water and wine-flasks, our own strips of dried sheep-meat lashed behind the saddle; and so we did not want. As for sleeping out of doors, we had always known that, and so we needed no taverns, no inns, to give us shelter.

I had never been so far afield before. I was especially delighted to ride close to Iolcos, where the Megaron of King Pelias stood high and white upon a rocky hill, its walls sheer, its many pillars a bright red in the morning sunlight. And all the red-roofed houses seemed to creep up towards it, as though for shelter. And below them, the deep green of the olive-fields, and then the grazing and the long-horned cattle.

I said as much to Melanos, with whom I rode mostly, and he replied, ‘Why, that is nothing! Once you see the Acropolis at Athens, the Lion Gate at Mycenae, and the grave circle there, you will think that Iolcos is a dung-hill. Why, inside the great hall at Tiryns the pillars reach as high as the sky itself. Yes, I do not deceive you; they touch the sky. Anyone who has been there will tell you as much.’

I gazed at him open-mouthed, but Polydeuces laughed and said, ‘Take no notice of old leather-bottom, Diomedes! He has never been inside a city-wall in his life! All he has known is horses and the bare hill-side!’

Melanos pretended to strike at him with his bull-whip but I could tell that Polydeuces’ shot had gone home like his punches and after that I placed no reliance on what Melanos told me about such things.

We came to Delphi two weeks after starting out from Mount Pelion. And it was as well we did for we had run out of food and needed to get more, unless we were to eat the three jars of dried barley which Cheiron had given us to take as an offering to the Oracle.

It was still cold at Delphi. The wind either blew down from snow-capped Mount Parnassus or from the south across the Gulf of Corinth. We were glad to ride into the narrow ravine which led to the shrine of Apollo, just for its shelter.

After a while that narrow gulch opened out into a basin where all the buildings were. I can remember many red-tiled houses set among cypress trees, and beyond all a long building faced with many columns. I believe the shrine has changed a great deal since I went there, but my recollection of it was of something rather plain, and neglected. I recall that the red paint was flaking off the wooden pillars which formed the entrance-way. I even broke off one of the flakes and hid it in my tunic to show the other boys when we got back to Mount Pelion. I was very simple in those days.

But in spite of the white doves that fluttered everywhere and the tall dark cypresses laid out in rows, Delphi was not the heavenly place I had pictured it. All along the steps of the shrine sprawled old men—blind, lame, their sores oozing in the cold sunshine, begging for bread, or anything the visitors cared to fling to them.

And within the precincts themselves there were women everywhere, young and old, little girls and toothless crones, all offering themselves for a small fee, and all professing to be gifted with second sight, to be the servants of Apollo.

You know what I thought of women at this time. When I saw them by scores there, I almost turned and ran to my horse, but Melanos held me and said, ‘Don’t be a fool, Diomedes! These creatures are either too young to frighten a man, or too old and dried-up to care! Go forward as though you do not see them. There is nothing to be afraid of. They are not like our women at the village, friend!’

I did as he said, pushing among them with my broad shoulders, scattering them on either side. Then I felt a little ashamed and threw an old bronze bracelet into the begging-bowl of a youngish woman whom I had almost knocked sprawling. She came back at me immediately, baring her breasts, hoisting up her tattered flounces, and I ran.

Delphi was the most sacred place in our country and had been founded by the Minoans under the divine guidance of the God Apollo, and was said therefore to be of the utmost beauty. I believe that, many years later, a great thing was made of it, temples built and altars raised, but at the period I am talking of there was little of this sort of thing to see. Certainly there was an altar in the Sacred Close, but it was a very plain affair, and garlanded with the brown-tipped laurels which I had come to abhor.

It was here that we offered our pots of grain to an official of the treasury—a long-nosed fellow who looked as though he smelled something bad all the time. He told us that for such a small offering we could only expect a small sacrifice. He took the grain and brought out three young lambs so recently born that they could hardly hobble across the courtyard. Sacrifices to Apollo were supposed to be without blemish but one of these lambs lacked an eye, one dragged a hind-leg, and the other had some skin disease which had removed the fleece from its rump. I think the eagles had been at them on Mount Parnassus before the temple officials had got to them. Or perhaps some sharp farmer had traded them in, to be bought by such country simpletons as ourselves. But the officials had covered their fleeces with chalk and they looked passable.

Anyway, the lambs served as well as anything else as far as I could judge. They fell at the first blow of the stone axe and lay conveniently still while the official cut their throats and caught the thin trickle of blood in the libation cups for offering at the altar. Melanos, who watched, said that each lamb had bowed its head as though promising us good fortune before the axe fell, but I did not notice this. I only saw the ridiculous wreath of dying Spring flowers about each little creature’s neck and smelled the tuft of greasy hair which was clipped from them for burning at the altar. Then they were disembowelled and some of our barley, not much, was scattered among the steaming entrails. I saw the lambs being cut up for roasting and eating later, but I did not feel like sampling such meat—nor did Polydeuces and Castor. They were as sickened as I was with all this.

After an hour an old man, his face covered by a dirty cloth, came to us and said that we were to go down to the cavern where the Pythoness was waiting for us.

This was the worst of all, for it was a steep drop, and the smell of sulphur came up, almost choking us. It was dark and like walking down into a volcano. Rats scuttled away from our feet as we got lower down and I did not like that either. Over all hung the heavy smell of ordure.

Then we drew lots to see who should go in first. The lot fell on me though I did not wish it that way. I had hoped one of the others would go first so that I might ask him how it all went. But I had to go. Melanos was standing with us, seeing that we did not do anything out of place there.

At first I could not see anything in the cellar, except a smoky lamp set in a crevice on one of the walls. Then someone spoke to me in a harsh cracked voice and I turned to see a figure hunched up, swathed in tattered clothes, and sitting on a tall bronze tripod.

The voice was high and nasal and the accent unbearably foreign and strained. I could tell that the creature was a woman, not a man, by the one shrivelled breast which was allowed to expose itself out of the dirty shift; but the voice might have belonged to either sex. It was the voice of age alone.

This then was the famous Pythoness about whom all Hellenes spoke with awe. For a moment I forgot why I was there; the whole thing seemed so ordinary. And then the woman on the tripod fumbled inside her shift and drew forth a handful of laurels. I almost turned and ran back up the dark stairs—until I saw that she was burning them and sniffing down the acrid fumes they produced. This was not to be the sickle-ceremony, when the Maenads chewed the laurel, and so I stayed, though my legs were shivering with the strangeness of it all.

At last, when I came near to the point of laughing aloud at the old crone, coughing and snuffling in the smoke, the ground shuddered under my feet and I almost lost my balance. Then from a cleft in the floor just below the tripod, a puff of sulphurous smoke belched out and half-hid the Pythoness. I also began to cough and sneeze and fell to my knees, wondering whether I was going to be sick in that quivering abyss.

But all at once a voice seemed to speak inside my head. It said, ‘Diomedes, seal-bearer, man among men, boy among women, what would you know?’

I said, in a voice which I did not recognize as my own, ‘Apollo, lord of light, what is my destiny, what is my Ananke?’

The Pythoness began to cough again and to spit all about her, not bothering where her spittle landed.

The sulphurous smoke came out in a puff once more, and once more the ground heaved below me, like the earth vomiting.

There was a deep rumbling in the cavern; nothing that sounded at all like a voice to me. And then a long silence.

At last I got off my knees and leaned against the wall, suddenly feeling unclean and very afraid and uncertain of what truth was at all.

The old crone on the tripod lifted one corner of the filthy shift that hid her face and mumbled something which I did not catch. I asked her in a low voice to repeat what she had said. At first I thought she would refuse; but she did speak again, though with a great show of contempt. I listened most carefully but made out her words only with difficulty.

‘Go back to Iolcos, boy. Get your father’s kingdom for him, even if it means putting a sword into Pelias. Set up a shrine to the Mother. She wants that.’

I did not know what all these words meant. My father, Poseidon, had as much kingdom as a god needed. And if my father was Cheiron, then he had his uplands and his horses; that was his kingdom. As for Pelias, he was the tyrant at Iolcos, and no enemy of mine. Indeed, such boys as I were not even allowed within the gates of Iolcos. And as for putting a sword into a king I had never seen, that seemed without all meaning.

I began to ask the Pythoness what it was all about, but she moaned and then made such a hissing sound out of her toothless mouth that I did not stay any longer.

I ran up the stairs to where Melanos was waiting with the others. He did not ask me what the Pythoness had said, nor did the boys. Polydeuces went next, and while he was gone Castor did not say a word. He did not even speak to his brother, when Polydeuces came rushing up those slimy steps just as I had done, scattering the rats before him.

We set off for home that afternoon after we had bought some more sheep-meat to see us through. I must say that the prices at Delphi were the highest I had ever known anywhere.

It took us nearly three weeks to get back to Mount Pelion because some sort of war had started up between the Spartans and the men of Thebes. We had to wait on a hill-side until the passes were cleared before we could go on. That put us out of reckoning with our food and we almost starved during the last stretch of our journey to Pelion. In fact, we should have starved if Polydeuces had not turned highwayman one night and robbed the litter of a great lady who was making her way to Delphi to find out if she was pregnant or not by her slave.

Polydeuces told us with a grin that if she was not pregnant by the slave she would be by him. But I did not think that was funny at all. I was still thinking of the dead Spartans we had passed in the defile, with their leather armour all stripped off and the vultures already tearing the masks of flesh from their faces. Yet their hair was still neatly oiled and combed: that is what astonished me most in the whole journey. They were such neat, careful men, though such fearless fighters. Spartans were true men.