Читать книгу Oedipus - Henry Treece - Страница 6

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The woman’s coming to our house changed me. Now, as I watched the sheep in some hidden grazing-dale, I would lie motionless for hours, staring at a small blue flower among the wiry grass, or counting all the snow-clad curves of the billowing clouds that built their immense battlements over my head in the blue sky. It was as though all action had gone from me, all thought as well; as though now I was lame in my head as well as in my feet. The only thing that moved in me, deep as a well, deep as the pits where the black-faced Minyans dug for metals, was a little red worm of vengeance—not only against this woman who had taken my mother’s place, and my father’s poor shreds of love for me, and the dread king who had struck down with his javelin at Thebes when we took the sheep in to market; but against all men. All the world that was the god’s; and the god himself, who had caused me to be marked, branded, hobbled like a bullock grazing before the butcher came to him with the pole-axe.

Once as I lay, holding a dead dry lark in my hand and stretching out its limp wings, as though I might learn the secret of what let it fly so strongly upwards, away from the earth, away from torment, I heard whispering and laughter above me, and looked up startled to see a string of shepherd children on the hill above me, pointing at me and chattering. When I turned my eyes upon them, they crossed their first two fingers at me, as though warding off evil, as though I had now become different from themselves and must be guarded against.

A tall boy shouted out, ‘Medea has come to your house. Stop staring at us, clawfoot.’

His sister, a thin-legged girl with dark hair that blew out like a banner, pushed at him and screamed, laughing, ‘No, not Medea—she died too long ago. This stranger is Torone, the Shrill Queen! Have you never heard her telling clawfoot and his old father what they must do about the house? Oh, it bursts the ears!’

When I got to my feet, to go to them and ask them to treat me as they had done before, to come down and play with me in the dale, they turned and ran away, waving their heads and arms, pretending to be afraid of me, but laughing all the time. Their mocking voices came back to me on the wind that always blew across the mountain, stabbing me to the heart.

That evening, I spoke outright to the woman, ‘Some say you are Medea, and some Torone. What do you say to that?’

She was stirring porridge in a clay pot for when my father came home, and did not look up at me. Her hair hung down on both sides, hiding her face. She said, ‘Let them say what they will say. Only the thunderbolt and the lightning-sword can silence babbling starlings in a tree. But what harm does their noise do? They are not worth putting poison down to kill them, the silly birds. My name is Oresthea, which means, “Dedicated to the Mountain Goddess”. If the little fools of the huts choose to call me something else, that is their affair. I do not care what they call me, as long as you call me mother.’

I let fall my horn spoon on the table top and said, ‘But you are not my mother. My mother was Rhene, and she has gone into the ground.’

Oresthea turned her head from the hearth and looked at me through her hair. ‘Rhene, the Old Ewe,’ she said, smiling. She spoke with such contempt that I went out into the darkness, and did not come back until my father fetched me, dragging me by the neck of my shirt, his face set with anger.

All this time, he was changing, too. At first, when he had taken this woman to his bed, he had seemed for a while younger and brisker. But then he had fallen back again, worse than before. His feet dragged as he went with his crook up to the grass slopes, and his face became more drawn and haggard. He reminded me of a fly that has been sucked dry by a spider; his skin hung about him and his bones began to show their shape. He ate little now, and often made a grimace when Oresthea set his food before him. But when he left it untouched, she never railed at him, as my mother would have done, but flung it into the hearth-fire and let the flames eat it up instead.

My father never spoke to me about her; he moved in his own silent world of misery, as I did. We were like two helpless men, adrift in their fishing-boats on a tideless sea, who watch each other, as the boats pass, but have no heart to speak.

By the time winter came, and the wind had fangs in it, my father was out at all hours, as though he hated to return to his home and hearth-fire now. I pitied him, for he had grown so old, but shrank from putting my hand on his, almost as one might shrink from touching a dead man, or a dedicated one who was to be the Sown Man of the year.

Yet Oresthea scarcely seemed to notice all this. She went about our house busily enough, tending fires, making oatcakes, skimming the milk and shaking it in jars to make butter. She also lived in her world, over the boundaries of which no foot might tread.

Many times, and especially when she sat near the window at her olive-wood loom, weaving black cloth, I heard her singing quietly:

‘Omphale, Omphale, centre of things,

Cavern of serpents, of beating wings,

Of milk-curdled moon and the throbbing strings

That sing of Omphale, the centre of things.’

I could make no sense of her words, and would have died rather than ask her what the song meant. I did ask my father, though, one evening when I met him out beyond the pines that bordered our grazing. He gazed at me, half-bewildered, then pointed to my navel and said, ‘That is Omphale. It is a sign that you came from a woman. They say the gods have no navel. You have one, so do not dream you are a god.’

Then he went off to search for a lost sheep, and said no more about this. It did not help me to understand Oresthea’s song, and after a while I ceased even to hear it when she sang, her white fingers busy at the wool.

It was perhaps a year after she came to our house when I saw a small brown snake. It lay on a bank of dried bracken, in the first warmth of the new sun, and did not move when I scrambled up to look at it more closely. It was almost as though it lay there waiting for me. Its eyes were open and its tongue darted out now and again, so it was not asleep. For a while I knelt by it and thought: Here is the terrible serpent that kills all who come near it. Here is a strand of the hair of Medusa! Yet it does not sting me. How like a little god it is, lying on the brown fern fronds and taking no account of the world! How restful and secure, how confident!

It was no longer than my arm, if that, and no thicker than my middle finger, or at the most, my thumb. Down its coiled back was a pretty zigzag of gold, like a gentle lightning. Its black eyes shone as brightly as chips of the jet that Hyperboreans brought in their trading-wagons down to Halus, for the Phoenicians to collect.

I leaned above the little snake and said, ‘You are a Prince, yet you have no feet. You do not complain for having to go on your belly through the dust, yet I strike my head in bitterness because I cannot run.’

The snake watched me, without moving, his dark tongue flicking out before him.

I went closer and said, ‘Now I think I can understand. You have no Omphale, no navel, like other creatures—and so you must be a god, as my father said. How proud I should be if you were my friend, little Prince.’

I wished that the shepherd children could see me now, my face so close to the pretty head of the snake, as though we spoke of secrets together. They would not taunt me then, I thought.

Suddenly love gushed from my heart like a stream towards this silent brown friend among the bracken. I could help myself no longer, but put my lips to his head and kissed him. And as I drew my lips away, his small head moved at me, so swiftly and silently, as though he kissed me in return. His kiss was sudden and sharp, and then he had gone, slithering away into the deeper parts of the dry fern.

I laughed at his shyness in kissing me so briefly and then in running away. I sat by the fern for a while, begging him to return. But he did not come again, and then my lips and cheeks began to go cold, and my eyes closed of their own will, so that I could hardly see out of the slits that the lids made. The sun above me in the pale sky suddenly began to lurch and then to go far away, into the distance, and then came roaring back until I thought it would shatter the mountain. Inside my head a bronze gong began to beat, and when I tried to stand, my legs would not hold me up. I stretched out on the bracken and heaved then, for my stomach was revolting against something. A different new life had come into me. I thought: This is what it is to be kissed by a god. Perhaps I too am becoming a god, am ridding my stomach of all cares and learning to move upon my belly like a god.

I recall feeling down, to find if I still had a navel, and I remember the harsh scratching of the bracken as I tried to slither, as the little snake had done, across the ground.

Then the sun came down very near to me, and I felt the furnace of his breath on the back of my head. I could have reached up and have touched it. It was unbearable, and so I fell away from it into the red and grey clouds which whirled before my closed eyes.

I was away, wandering in strange worlds for longer than I know. When I saw Oresthea again, her belly was swelling, and there was a round hole in the thatch of our roof, through which I could see the dry sky.

I pointed at it with my forehead, for my hands would not raise themselves, and said, ‘Why?’

Oresthea looked up and said calmly, ‘In the height of the summer, the sun breathed on it and burned it. One would have thought the sun was anxious to come into our house and destroy us all.’

I did not want to speak of this, for now I remembered how fiercely the sun had kissed me on the hill, how fearful his love was. How like death.

I said, ‘Why, my father, not mend it, the hole?’

Oresthea smiled bitterly and said, ‘Your father is an old man, Oedipus. He is beyond mending—though, to give him his due, he has not been beyond making something.’

She slapped herself on the belly with the flat of her hand. Then, lifting her lip, she said, ‘But it will be a poor thing, it will come to nothing, I have no doubt. Either that, or it will crawl on four feet all its life, or wriggle like the snake you kissed, in the dust.’

Now I shuddered to think of the little snake, for I knew that it had not been my friend after all. Nor was the sun my friend, it seemed, for he had tried to come into the cottage to fetch me away and burn me, as he burns the dried olive-branches after the harvest.

I shut my eyes and went to sleep again, so as not to see or hear anything of life.

Another time when I woke, it was dark, and the clay lamp flickered near the hearth-stone. My father was not there, but Oresthea sat, twisting the long strands of her unbound hair in her fingers, and gazing like a sightless god about her, as though she would be alone for ever in her dream.

The hole was larger in the roof now, and green mosses grew on the walls. The air was full of a strange scent, of damp wood and sour wine, of vinegar and the smoke of pine-cones.

As in the market-place of Thebes that day, when my tongue ran away with me, speaking words I had not intended, now I suddenly said, ‘A father and a son—and out of the sky the great furnace blazing, bringing all to nothing, toppling them down, all of them, the house-roof and the tall pine.’

My words meant hardly anything to me as I spoke them, yet to Oresthea they must have borne a heavy message, for her eyes came back into her head and she let fall the strands of her hair. Then she rose heavily and dragged her stool to the bedside and leaned over me. Her shadow, from the clay lamp, was enormous and covered me like a shroud, with a heavy blackness, a thick blackness, that had the smell of autumn woods in it, the scent of newly-turned earth, that lies hidden from the eye beneath green lichens.

She laid her cold hand upon my head and said, as though there was no one to listen, ‘A father and his son were there, and an eye from above gazed down on them, not yet burning bright, but waiting and watching them, in all they did. This was on the island of Minos, before all things. No, not before the labyrinth, for it was the father, ingenious Daedalus, who built that for the bull-running. Or to hide the monster that the Queen, Pasiphaë, had brought forth after coupling with the bull in her Maenad frenzy. I do not know. It happened before men had grown to right sense and could tell the story properly.’

I did not wish to hear the woman’s mumbling, but sleep would not take me away from her voice; nor was I strong enough to raise my fingers and put them in my ears. I shrank, tight as a mouse in his hole, and tried to think of other things; but always her words bored through my dreams and came to me.

‘Daedalus Artificer, who set up the great stone circle of the Hyperboreans; builder of palaces, man to whom the natures of all stones and metals and woods was known. Yet, for all his skill, this Daedalus must remain a prisoner on Crete when the Great King bade him stay. When Minos the Terrible shut the gates and closed the ports, this Daedalus could not go to where his old heart beckoned him. On the shore at Phaestus, he sat with his son, Icarus son of Moon-Goddess Car, and together they wept at being slaves. Two men weeping, the father and the son.’

She was silent a while, and then I felt her pushing me sideways, making a place for herself on the thong-bed. I kept my eyes closed as she sighed and heaved her heavy body beside me. The sharp scent of her garments filled my nostrils. Her hair fell across my face, as though spiders ran on me, but I had not the force to move my head away.

She groaned for a while and said in another voice, ‘I am near my time, I think, Oedipus. You will lie in the bed where your father’s son is born, perhaps. And ignorant folk in later days may say that you lay with your father’s woman and a son was born between you. Ah, what they say! What they say, the fools of this world!’

She laughed without merriment a while, then she settled herself and was still. And when I thought she would let me be, with her endless story, she went on again and said, ‘So, on the shore at Phaestus, father and son weeping in thraldom. And at last the god speaking and telling the old artificer that a clever man could build himself wings, like a bird, if only he took feathers, and bound them together with twine, and set them in beeswax, and lashed them to his arms. Oh, Daedalus, how could you trust the man-god so! Yet he did, old fool, and made the wings, and told Icarus how they should fly together out of Crete. And Icarus trusted his father, just as the father trusted the god. They must have been mad, the two of them. Perhaps they had kissed the Mother’s snake, as you did, Oedipus, and so knew madness!’

I struggled in my heart, wishing to break from her scent and her ruthless tale.

She put a hand on my breast as though to keep me where I was, and said, ‘Then the high winds came, as they do from the sea in Crete, and the old man took his son to a hill-top and showed him how to imitate the birds of the air. And by some whim of the god, they soared from their hill, catching the currents like gulls, and rising, rising, rising, until they were drunk with their new glory. Down by the shore, fishermen whose long rods shivered in their hands, looked up and saw these two laughing in the blue sky. Men ploughing in the King’s fields let go the plough-handles and gazed up at them. Shepherds raised their crooks to point, and all cried out, “See, see, the gods are flying away from Crete! Oh, Mother Dia, but the times we live in! The times we live in!” Delos, Paros, fell behind the two; the sacred island of Samos lay to their left; and to their right, Calymene, famed for its honey. In the dry blue air, the two were weightless, they were witless with the aethereal wine of the sky, their bodies had no more substance than gossamers, they knew no fear now, no hatred for Minos, no common human cares, not even love for one another. Daedalus threshed the insubstantial air with great motions of the arms, like a powerful oarsman rowing in his place, like a farmer threshing corn, moving on relentlessly braver with, every stroke of his pinions. But Icarus, the Darling of the Mother, cried, “Oh, to equal the sun! Oh, to rise, to climb up to his red cheek and spit in his face!” And so he turned his face upwards and, caught in a hot current, swept on, higher and higher, like an eagle who skims up the face of a tall cliff without moving one feather of his pinions. Now old Daedalus, glancing back over his brown shoulder, saw his reckless son straying from course, and he wheeled and came round, below the boy, a thousand feet below, and called up, “Come down, you fool! I, who know the nature of all substances, tell you that beeswax cannot stand against the sun.” But the young man, sent mad with the hot dry air that coursed through his veins, and never wishing to set foot on hard earth again, shouted down in derision, “Go, sink to earth if you will, old man, but let us who seek glory find it where we will. Go, crawl on ground and chew on a goat’s teat!”

‘And, as the young one spoke these words, the sun’s great cavern eye opened, and let loose the furnace-blast of heat that lay behind it. Daedalus shrieked in the upper air, so that all the Cyclades heard his words, “Come down, my son, the wax is melting!” And Icarus, looking along his arms, saw that they were now wet with molten wax, and that behind him floated a trail of feathers, black and grey and white. And now, whereas air had once flowed swiftly through his veins in place of blood, lead coursed heavily, slowly, painfully, and his heart beat so slowly that it sounded in his ears like the anvil-blows of a dying smith, like the hoof beats of a spent horse, like the rivers of Thessaly in winter when their swift freshets congeal and come to an icy halt. So he stopped, and stood for a space in the empty air, like a man grappling with a dream, in the midst of blue nothingness, and all the folk below saw this youth standing on air, the sun smiling over him, as though holding him up for a space of three breaths. And as the island people gazed and wondered, Icarus began to fall. At first, he fell like a man turning over in bed, slowly in the night; then he fell faster and faster, until he spun like a whipped top. And now his golden hair stretched upwards to the sun as his leaden body plunged. The sound he made was like rain hissing through the air; like a waterfall swishing down. He saw the wine-dark sea far, far beneath him, so far that he could not see the waves at all, but everything looked polished, like smooth agate in his eyes. He saw as far as Egypt, that golden land where the Nile runs like a broad silver belt between deep green shores; he saw the mountains of Thrace, with the black rams fighting among the snows; he saw the furthermost neck of the Middle Sea, where the Pillars of Heracles come towards each other, like lovers warm for kissing and beyond which lie the orchards of Paradise, heroes’ home; he saw even the great grey circle of stones which his father had put up for the savage, skin-clad men of Hyperborea. And as he saw these things, and saw his naked wingless arms, and felt the empty air beneath his helpless flailing feet, he yelled and yelled. But no sound came from him to his weeping father, for the rush of furious air quite stifled any words he spoke. And, as he flashed past his poised father, like a stone cast from a mountain, like a weighted javelin coming towards earth, he looked towards old Daedalus with eyes so great and piteous that the old artificer tore at his own wings, trying to unfix them, so that he might join his son in death. But the gods will not let us go from their presence when we will, but when they will, and the wax stood firm to hold the feathers in. And Daedalus saw his son plunge down and down, beyond his helping, until the youth was nothing but a speck of dust, and hardly to be seen against the dark blue of the Icarian Sea. There was no splash of white, no difference, when the sacrifice was swallowed up. It was as though the sea, the Mother of us all, could take a thousand offerings to her breast and never sigh, and never show how she had eaten them up, and taken them into herself. All that old Daedalus glimpsed at last, when in his heavy grief he bent his pinions low, was a tattered wing floating upon the waters and a shoal of hungry fishes nibbling at its edge, thinking the wax was such meat as had just fallen to their maw.’

Suddenly I woke from my dream and cried, ‘Medea! I know you now, Medea!’

But she did not answer me. Her own time of crying out had come upon her. Now was she Torone, the Shrill Queen, indeed.