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Before the moon had changed three times, my mother took to her bed from the blow which the king had given her on the breast. That is, just after the vine-treading down in the valley. As she lay pale and sweating, with my father wiping her brow and I stumbling back and forth to the stream behind our cottage to fetch cool cloths for her fevered body, we heard the songs of the people below, coming up on the warm wind, celebrating Dionysus and the heavily-laden vine. These songs were gay and shrill, and the reed pipes which accompanied them were thin and sharp, like our mountain wine itself; but our ears were not open to such happiness. It seemed to come up to us from another world entirely; a place where the gods were different and the customs strange. Usually some of us shepherds were asked down to the valley for the wine-feast, for we were not so unlike each other, valley-dwellers and hill-men; we had all come from the First Days, when the Cretans had sailed to Attica and mingled with the Shore Folk there.

But now, with the sun’s heat shimmering over the hillside and our sheep staggering on weary hooves to whatever shade they could find from the scrub bushes on Cythaeron, we felt alone. We felt as a rock must feel when the sea draws back from it at ebb-tide, to leave it solitary and exposed, its footing now revealed to be littered with slippery grey-green weeds, the bones of ships and of long-dead men.

My mother spoke no word against the king who had struck her down so calmly. She had worked hard all her life and at the end had got small reward for her bent limbs and wrinkled face; only a sudden blow on the breast to finish her labours. To see her suffering through the heat, with the flies coming in at dawn through the window-hole and settling on her, black on her pain-bleached skin, caused sudden angers to rise in me. I would strike at the creatures with a laurel branch, and would curse them as servants of a cruel king, who was not content to strike the blow alone, but must have buzzing slaves to make the bearing of it even harder.

My mother would raise her hand gently when I spoke such words, and would whisper, ‘Oedipus, oh Oedipus, you are only a little boy still. These flies are not the king’s servants at all. They come from beyond his calling, from earth and sun. Mother Dia and Father Zeus are their masters, not the man who struck me. He is only a weapon in the hands of the gods, and the flies are another weapon. He is the clumsy sword and they the little daggers.’

I wept on my knees by her bed and said, ‘I will have his sword one day, mother. I will punish him for this, and have his sword.’

While she was stroking my head, my father came in weary from the herds and said, ‘I think not, son. When the gods gave you those twisted feet, they did not mean you to throw down mighty men. They wanted you to learn humility, to contemplate your misfortunes and to know that there are greater ones than yourself, who can rule your life by giving you a burden to bear even before you have left the womb.’

My father was a bent old man, whose Minyan black hair had faded to grey and then white, and now had almost all fallen away, leaving his sun-browned head bare and shiny in the heat. He had grown old suddenly in the last year, and the flesh had shrunk from his arms, leaving them like bent sticks tied together with blue cords. Yet, when I was seven, I remembered him laughing on the hill-top and chasing young sheep which would not come to the pen at dusk. Then he ran like a god, I thought, with the setting sun behind him and the hair on his head trailing behind him like a dark flame. And I remember how once he had gone to two unruly rams that were fighting for the herd, and, bending swiftly, had swung them both up in his arms and carried them back to the pen. In those days, he never said bitter things to me, never spoke of my lame feet so coldly. Instead, he would put me on his knee and stroke them and say, as kindly as a woman, ‘Courage, my son! One morning you will wake and find them as straight and handsome as the Lord Apollo’s.’

I used to look at them every dawn-time after that, expecting each day that my father’s words would be fulfilled. And though my feet were always as bent as before, I did not lose faith in him.

Up in the hills, shepherd families were very close to each other; and though in matters of prayer and offering we generally followed the Mother, it was to the shepherd-father of each house that the family looked for all help and guidance. In every cottage the people were like this. We envied no one, and were proud to tend our flocks and to sell them for a fair price. We did not complain when the ewes dropped their lambs away in the snow in the darkness, and we had to sit with them, shivering on the hillside, and caring for them. Nor did we complain when the hot sun burnt up all the pasture and we had to spend days away from home, leading our parched creatures to higher valleys where there was still green grass above the snow-line.

I had known nothing else than this, it was life. I was content, as long as I had a mother to bake oatcakes for me after a long day on the hill, and a father who taught me gently how to do this and that about the sheep-yard or in the pasture.

Now, to see my mother shrinking before my eyes, while the gay songs came up from the green valley, and to hear my old father speaking so bitterly about my ruined feet, as though my end was in my beginning and as though I had no power to change anything, as though I must suffer and suffer until the world ended, made me weep afresh.

My father, who had always been so gentle, suddenly flung down his olive-wood staff and beat on the mud wall of our house.

‘May the gods relieve us of this weeping fool!’ he shouted.

I had never heard him say anything so cruel as this before, and I was shocked out of my tears. Even my mother forgot her pain and stared at him for a moment, before smiling down at me and stroking my damp hair again. ‘There, my lamb,’ she whispered in her dry, crackling voice, ‘the father is weary and sad, or he would not speak such words. Forgive him, Oedipus, for he will be kind again when a moment has passed.’

I took her hard hot hand and nodded. ‘I forgive him, mother,’ I said. ‘I know what it is to speak without thought. I did that down by the stream-bed at Thebes, and brought this pain upon you. I know how it is.’

But she took hold of my ear and pulled it and said, ‘No, my lamb, it was not you who spoke. It was something beyond your understanding that prompted you. You must not blame yourself for everything that happens, if you do, then you will never grow to be a man, for you will walk, bent-backed, with the load of your guilt for ever; and such a burden will keep you from doing great things, just as though you had heavy stones tied to your hands and feet.’

When her tongue had spoken the word ‘feet’, she smiled again and drew her crooked hand away from me, and passed it over her wet face as though to wipe away what she had said.

It was the time for my father’s meal of sheep-broth and barley bread. I got up from the bedside and ladled out the food for him, and after a while he forgot his anger and nodded to me as he sat down to eat. Then he did something which he had not done since I was a little boy; at the edge of his clay plate, he laid out two or three of the best pieces of meat and said, ‘Eat, my boy. This is for you.’

I knew then that I was back in his heart again, and that what he had said earlier was already forgotten.

I had come, though, to a new step on the stairway which now I must climb; and so I said to him, ‘Father, be assured, I shall not weep again at what you say. So now that I ask you something, do not hold back from answering me.’

He looked down at his plate as he wiped the last of the meat juice from it with a piece of bread and said, ‘Very well, Oedipus, what is it that you wish to ask?’

I said, ‘Do you believe that the gods have punished me by giving me these twisted feet, and that for the rest of my days I must suffer them and never become like other men?’

I heard my mother sigh deeply in her narrow bed below the window-hole, but she made no effort to prevent my father from answering what I had asked, and after a time, while he wiped his mouth with a cloth to be rid of the crumbs and meat juices, he said, finding the words hard to make, ‘All in the world must suffer, lamb. You are not alone in fulfilling the fate, the pattern, the moira decreed for you by the gods.’

I nodded, trying to understand, but not protesting any longer. He saw this and smiled, then placed his hand upon my shoulder and said, ‘This suffering comes even to the greatest ones, the kings. Even to the gods themselves. They also have fought together and have brought agony and death to one another, as you know. It is all in the ancient songs, and you have heard them, by the camp-fires, when we shepherds have gathered at feast times.’

My mother cried out for water to wet her cracked lips, and I went to the cold stream to get it in a clay jar. When I came back, I heard her saying heavily, ‘So, you must tell him, husband. It is now your task to tell him.’

And after I had held the jar to her lips and had brushed the black flies away once more, my father said, ‘Sit down, Oedipus. There is something I must tell you, to make clear what I have said already.’

I felt that I was standing at the edge of a great cliff, and that I must hold my breath in case I lost my balance and fell. So, most carefully, I sat down on the stool and listened to my father, hardly daring to look at him.

He said slowly, ‘It is in my heart that the gods gave you your twisted feet as a sign to me, and not to you. I think that your feet are part of my punishment for meddling in their affairs.’

I was bewildered by his words, for I was the one who suffered, not my father, it seemed. He knew what my eyes spoke and smiled sadly, waving his hand so that I should not interrupt him. Then he said, ‘Do you think it no suffering for a father to see his son stumbling, a cripple, among the swift sons of other men? Do you think that a father does not weep a hundred times a day, deep in his heart, at such a punishment? If I have been gentle with you, has it not been because I wish for gentleness myself, after such hard usage by the gods? And if I have been harsh to you, is that not because I have revolted against their harshness to me?’

Never, in my life, had my father spoken so to me; never had he dug like a cockle-woman on the shore so deeply into the sand that covers all things, good and bad. Now I dared not come between him and the oracle, and I sat, holding my breath and waiting, not venturing even to nod my head.

He said, his eyes now staring at the timber of our roof, ‘This age which has suddenly come upon me; this wound which has struck down your mother—they are of the same origin as your poor feet, my son. They are all part of the punishment. So, I must tell you why the great ones have laid such heavy hands upon us, why we, who meant to harm no man, are visited by such penalties.’

He rose on his stiff legs and went to the tall jar that stood in the coolest corner of our cottage, and poured himself a cup of the sharp-scented wine. His thin hand shook as he raised the wine to his lips, and trickles of it ran down his chin and into his white beard, as red as blood.

Then, with bowed head, he said, ‘Many years ago, I sinned against the will of the gods. At the time, what I did was done in honesty and with no wish to offend the great ones. But we men are blind, even though we think to see in the bright sunlight, and what we do is often more, or less, than what we thought to do. A tortoise on the sand may think he walks towards the waves; but the gods know that it is the waves who come to him. So it is with man; he thinks to do one thing, but does another.’

My mother coughed and said weakly, ‘I must hear you tell him all before I sleep. Take courage, husband, and let your words flow like the wine; do not hold them back. Oedipus is old enough to understand now.’

Then my father said, ‘Perhaps twelve years ago, things were not well, away at the great city, in Thebes. Whose guilt it was, no man can tell, for we men know nothing; but the King there, Laius of the Cattle, was unhappy. He was like many other kings of the steppeland-folk, the bull-herders who came down from the north a thousand generations ago. He prayed, standing, to Zeus and Poseidon, and when he was young, no man’s hair was more golden, and no man’s eyes more blue. But at this time, in Thebes, his fine looks were already leaving him, for a great poison ate at his heart.’

From the shadowy bed, my mother coughed again, and my father went on more quickly, ‘His wife, Jocasta, was of the Shore folk, and counted her ancestors back to the first Minos of Crete. She was little more than a child when Laius rode into Thebes and flung her over his horse, and told the people that she was his Queen. He was old enough to be her father, even then; but it was always the same with cattle-kings from the north—they took what they wanted, whether it was a bullock or a throne. And to get a throne among the Shore Folk, a man needed to take the Queen who went with it. So Laius took Jocasta, despite the anger of her old father, Menoeceus, and her savage brother, Creon. And that is where the first guilt rose, perhaps, for though she was but a young girl, Jocasta had already been consecrated as a priestess, and given the title Shining Moon, to indicate that she belonged to Dia-Mother. And this dedication, as you will understand, made her different.’

As my father spoke these words, I felt a warm shame rising to my cheeks, for I almost knew what he would say next. It was something I had learned from the other, older boys, the sons of shepherds, as we gossiped on the hot rocks, while the herds grazed. I did not know it myself, of my own body, but I could already understand what it was they were talking about.

My father looked at me keenly, then said, ‘Yes, I can see you know what I mean. They have already told you, it seems. Well, that relieves me of the shame of telling you. So Jocasta was different, because of the goddess in her. She was young, and strong, and had this constant flame burning in her body, calling out to be quenched, so that the seed should grow and put forth its fruit. They say, here on the hills, that never for a moment in the day did she know peace from its raging; that like ancient Pasiphaë she cast hot eyes on all males that moved beneath the sun.’

My mother shifted in her damp bed, and coughed again. So the old man my father passed away from his memories of the young girl and said, ‘Laius Cattle-Chief was big enough in battle, but small in bed, they say. It was often thus with the rough-haired kings from the north; there had been some freezing of the blood, some wasting of the great force. And so, when they came among the small, brown Cretans, they were wanting, in a way they had never suspected, up on the grasslands, with women as cold-eyed as themselves. But what man will admit such a failing? No, I should not ask you that, Oedipus, for you are only a lad yet. But, I will tell you, for a man, king or not, to find himself lacking in that power is far worse than that he should run before the spears, or a charging bull. And so this Laius Cattle-Chief went to Delphi, having told the folk at Thebes that he meant to ask the priestess there, the Pythoness, at what season his wife would be most fruitful. But I can tell you that always he carried a bull’s pizzle as a whip, and wore bull’s horns on his helmet when other men wore horses’ manes; they say that he always drank from a horn and never from a cup, and that his chariot-floor was laden with large stones; always round stones, as big as my fist and bigger. You can make of that what you wish; I only speak what everyone knew.’

Now I was staring away from my father, my neck hot and red. He said, ‘At Delphi the old crone said, “Thank the gods you have no son, for he would murder you, King of Thebes!” At least, that is what he announced to the people when he returned home again. Though some of them said he had never been to Delphi at all, but to the Shrine of Cybele in Calydon where the priestesses know a cure for what troubled him. Whatever the case, King Laius put his hot young wife down into the cellars below the Great Megaron at Thebes, so that her warmth would not thaw him and cause such seed to spring as might murder him.’

I was beginning to yawn and shuffle on my stool, and my father notice this. He said quickly, ‘You must not think I am making this up. It has been passed up from the market at Thebes to us by the cattle-guards, and there is no shame in speaking of it, my son.’

I said, ‘No, there is no shame, father.’ In truth, I was weary of this talk of old kings and queens and their troubles. But I waited on, for the father to say something which chimed in with my own lame feet, and so I tried to be patient.

‘Soon,’ he said, ‘Jocasta’s belly began to swell. Now this was strange, because King Laius had not been with her. Certainly, since she was of royal blood, he took her food to her at night, and even drank a cup of wine with her. But that was all. When he reproached her, she told him that his memory must be at fault, since he had drunk most heavily one night, and would not let her rest until dawn. For his part, the King swore that she had enticed the young captain of the guard while he had been at Delphi, and that the child to come was not his own. And then, do you know ...’

But suddenly my mother raised herself on the narrow bed and said, ‘Oh, my dear husband, but what a poem you could make out of threading a needle! Listen, son, I will tell you; the Queen bore a son, and Laius, terrified that the Pythoness had spoken the truth, threw that baby out here, just below our door, with a nail through his feet, so that he could not crawl away from the wolves that roamed the hill then. I heard the baby crying, if that is the word for such a feeble sound, and brought him in. We drew the nail from his poor soft baby feet, and they were a piteous sight. If he had lived, he would have been a cripple all his days.’

I turned to her and said, ‘So, the King’s son died, mother?’

She nodded. ‘Aye, before that night was out, my lamb. The poor weak thing had been badly treated; and the nail through his limbs had put an end to him. But we should never have meddled, Oedipus. For within the year, you were born, my son, and your feet were as you know them. And that is why your father thinks the gods have put this trial on us for meddling in King’s affairs.’

She lay back then, panting, and my father took her a cup of wine with honey in it to round off the sharpness of the grape.

‘And is that all?’ I asked.

They both nodded, gazing at me in the dusk like old owls.

‘So,’ I said, ‘I am being punished in place of King Laius’ son, is that it? And because of Jocasta’s heat? Because of the shame of Kings and Queens? Because of the wilful pride of the gods?’

But they did not answer me this time, and my mother had shrunk down into the bed, letting the wine-cup spill its red over her shrivelled breast.

My father said, ‘Come, son, and help to wipe this off her. I cannot hold her and wipe her at the same time.’

I took a cloth and did as he bade me. Then I looked up and said, ‘But, father, she is as cold as ice. Look, her eyes are staring up into her head. What is wrong with her, father?’