Читать книгу Oedipus - Henry Treece - Страница 7

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My own sickness overwhelmed me and I knew no more until I woke to find myself lying outside on a pallet of straw with the morning’s warm sun upon me. My father was on his knees beside me, holding a water jug in his hand and gazing down on me.

Seeing my eyes open, he said, ‘You were well out of it. It came to nothing. At our age one can expect no more than to be a jest for the gods. But there is colour in your face, as though the life from the one has gone into the other. That is the way of things: on the mountain here, a man may lose a lamb one day and find a ram the next. You look stronger already. I look to see you walking when I return.’

He rose and went, setting down the water jug beside me. I lay and thought: This is the kindest he has been for a long while. Perhaps things will be better in this house from now on.

As I lay idly dreaming, with mountain-birds wheeling and crying above me and the thin bleating of sheep coming up to me from below, a little space of peacefulness came over me, a calm after a long tempest, and for a while my body and my heart were at rest. This does not happen often in the life of a man as restless as I am, but, when it does, such moments of grace lie like precious, sparkling stones against the blackness of life. I was not happy or sad, neither hungry nor satisfied: I was as nothing, or, rather, as everything; a part of the earth and the sky, not a creature on them or under them, but of them, not fighting them any longer but moving with them, or staying still as they stayed.

My father was right, I walked that day: or, at least, I went on all fours at first, into our house. The woman, sitting in her black in the darkest corner, said weakly, ‘Ah, what is it that goes on four legs in the morning?’

I said, ‘It is man, who in the afternoon goes on two. And this afternoon, I shall go on two, Oresthea.’

She laughed into the dark folds of her robe. ‘I, in the evening of my age,’ she said, ‘must make do with three now, for I need a staff to keep me upright.’

Though I did not love her, I pitied her, for it seemed that she was being punished by the gods for throwing away her girdle so lightly. She held out her hands to me and raised me, though I did not ask for her help. ‘You are the only lamb I shall know,’ she said. ‘For both of us, for better or for worse, this must be so. No more water runs from the stream and the well has become dry over the years of drought. Will you be my son, Oedipus?’

She was so thin and haggard, I was in such a state of lazy peace, I nodded, no more: but I gave my silent consent. As I did this, a brown bird, large and frightening, struck itself on the lintel of our door, with a clattering of wings, as though it had tried to come inside. There was a fluttering of feathers and a scraping of beak and claw on the woodwork: and then it had gone again.

Oresthea shuddered and said, ‘I have not seen that sort of bird before. It was too small for an eagle, yet too large for a hawk.’

I was as startled as the woman, but I said boldly, ‘It was nothing but an owl, blinded by the sun, that mistook its direction and blundered to the doorway.’

Oresthea bowed her head and whispered, ‘Then, if it was an owl, it was not nothing, for the owl is the Wide-Eyed, Glauce, Her bird. So she has sent a warning—but whether to you or to me, we do not know. Though we shall, aye, we shall.’

There was not long to wait before we knew. That night, though I went quickly to sleep, it was not to rest. A long dream wrapped its cloak about me and would not let me go until dawn. In this dream, like Icarus, I trod the empty blue air and fell, the wax of my wings melted on my shoulders, shrieking. Before me, at a lower level, my father and Oresthea were flying together, with a steady beat of wings, she with her black robes streaming out behind her, he with his shepherd’s crook pushed through his belt as though, even in the sky, there were flocks and herds to tend. As I fell, crying out to them, they half-turned in the air and pointed downwards without answering me, then plunged on, always growing smaller in the blue distance. Still plummeting down, I looked towards where they had pointed and saw, on a golden shore where the white wave-crests tumbled ceaselessly, my mother, Rhene, holding up her hands towards me, as though calling me to her. Through the rushing of the air about me, and the grumbling of the sea, I heard her voice as I had known it long ago. She was saying, ‘Come, come, my lame son. Let yourself fall and I will catch you. I will hold you and steady you: there is no need for feet!’

Yet, in this dream, I knew that I was falling too fast, too heavily for anyone to catch me and to save me from dashing myself to pieces on the golden shore. To draw me on like this, with open arms, was to invite me to my death. I tried, angrily, to shout this to my mother, Rhene, as I fell; but the roaring wind filled my mouth and throat, driving back my words.

In a helpless sweat of terror, I moved my outspread wingless arms, and suddenly, unaccountably, glided in a warm air-current away from her arms, and then plunged like a whistling rock towards the harsh, green, salt sea, where shoals of weed waited to smother me, and great fishes loitered like dark shadows away from the sun, their jaws already open for the feast.

In the last moments of my fall, I glanced towards my mother on the shore, meaning to reproach her, and saw that a brown owl sat on her right shoulder, staring at my end with wide, golden, pitiless eyes.

I hit the water crying, ‘Glauce! Glauce!’

Then I was awake, and my father and Oresthea were on either side of me, gazing down, their faces passionless and stiff.

My father said, ‘He has been too long indoors, in his sickness. He must be set to work in the clean mountain air, as soon as he can follow a flock with his crook.’

Oresthea shook her head, saying, ‘There are some sicknesses which lie deeper than that, old man, and cannot be cured by breathing the morning air.’

Then they went away and left me shaking in my damp bed. I do not know whether I loved them or hated them. For now I had other things to think of; to the burden of my feet had been added this of the falling dream. I did not blame Oresthea for giving it to me by her tale of Icarus; I think it had lain in me from my birth, as a seed lies deep in the earth and never shows itself as a poisonous weed until the peasant rakes away the upper covering, the pine-needles, and so lets the waiting seed see light and put forth its leaves.

In Man, it is all falling: when he is but a seed, he falls from the father to the mother; and when the time has been accomplished, he falls from her out into the cruel light. In his career through the world of mankind, he may fall many times, defeated in battle, or from a horse, or by hitting his foot against a stone after a feasting; and, at the end, his daylight falling done, he tumbles down again into the darkness of death, and then into a hole in the earth. So, it is always falling; that is man’s destiny, his pattern woven on the loom. Only some of us are blind to it, or hide it by climbing, either to hilltops or fame; not knowing that by such elevation we but set ourselves the higher for the final fall.

My dream came again and again, even though I had become strong enough to go out on the hillside with a small flock of my father’s sheep. And at last, even in the sunlight, its sights and echoes hardly left me through the daytime. It was always the same, save that after a while, when my father began to grow more and more impatient with me, thinking I was betraying his old age, avoiding my shepherd’s work and forcing more labour on him than his bent body could stand, a new thread became woven into the dream.

It was that, as I flew, I suddenly became aware that I held a round pebble in my right hand; and that, as he and Oresthea drew away from me, to desert me in the upper air, a rage overtook me and I flung that pebble, which struck him on the head and tumbled him down beside me to the green water and the fishes.

And when my mother, Rhene, waiting on the shore, saw this, she smiled and said, ‘So, you have brought him with you. You have destroyed your father.’

When she said these words, the brown owl on her shoulder flapped its wings, then flew away, crying joyfully and letting fall white droppings over the shore.

This was more terrible to bear than the other. And at last, when I could tolerate this dream alone no longer, I told it all to Oresthea one day when my father was away at the village in the low valley, bartering a load of fleeces in exchange for flour and wine.

She was silent for a time, then quietly she said, ‘I think that there might be a cure for this sickness, Oedipus. It seems to me that Glauce, who is the owl in your vision, is demanding an offering. It seems also that your dead mother is disturbing you from the place where she is. She, too, is asking for something.’

I said, ‘Do you mean that they are telling me to throw a stone at my father, to put an end to him?’

I was afraid almost to utter the words; and glad when Oresthea shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, with her bitter smile, ‘for he would be little enough of an offering to anyone as he is now. I think the god has given us the answer in your mother’s own name; Rhene, which means the ewe.’

I said, ‘You still speak from behind a dark curtain, Oresthea, and I do not see your words.’

She answered, ‘Like most men, you are blind to what lies most plainly before your eyes, Oedipus. That is why you need such women as I am to tell you what the gods are saying. You are all the same, men, whether you are Kings or slaves.’

I grew impatient then and struck the table with my spoon. ‘Very well,’ I said, ‘what are the gods saying? Tell me, if you know. But I do not think you know.’

She looked above my head, musing and smiling, and then said distantly, ‘You will not be at rest until an offering is made. See, Zeus has sent you this dream to inform you of that wish. Your mother, Rhene, in this dream implores you with upraised hands. What could be more plain?’

As she spoke, the hair of my head seemed to rise and the skin of my shoulders to move of itself. I said, scarcely able to find breath for the words, ‘They are asking me to fall from the sky? They want me to do as the old Kings did, to leap down off the mountain, off the cliff?’

Oresthea said, now wearily, ‘Not all of them did; only the poets say they did. Poets will say anything to please their lords, who give them rings and bracelets, and set meat and wine before them at the table. Many of the kings who leaped out into the sky were not kings, but other men, dressed as kings, Oedipus, who deceived the god by their crowns and robes and their well-combed hair. For a king, it costs small labour to send another, a prisoner or slave, up to the high place. And, after the leap, the king is born again, and lives in ease and comfort until the next offering must be made. And there are always slaves, always prisoners, among the cattle-kings.’

I ran my thumb-nail along the ridged wood of the table, where between the grain the sappy growth is soft enough to bear an impress. In this wood I drew a man leaping from a high rock. The woman came behind me and, with her sharper nail, scratched across what I had drawn, as though to blot it out, to kill it before it must be made flesh.

Then, by the window-hole looking out across the hill-pasture, she said, ‘Your mother the ewe gives us the answer. Her beseeching in your dream would be satisfied if you gave to Rhene a leaping ewe. Surely, there are enough old ewes among our flocks on the mountain for one to be offered?’

I said, ‘My father knows them all, and has names for them all. To his old eye, each one’s face is different and familiar. He would know, though no one told him.’

Truly, I did not wish to deceive my father because of this woman’s prompting, even though such deceit might set me free of my heavy dream. I would rather risk his wrath by asking him for a ewe. Though even there, I was not sure that I wanted a dumb beast to fall to its death for me. I was a soft-hearted boy then and suffered for all the world.

Oresthea sighed and rapped slowly with her white knuckles on the window-stone, deeply thinking. She said, ‘I now know your father well enough to understand that he would rather you suffered the dream all your life than give you the least of his flock to save you.’

I was about to answer this, defending my father, though almost knowing what she said to be the truth, when she held her hand against my lips and said, almost fiercely, ‘Be silent, fool, and listen to one who sees further into the future than you do, one who knows what will come to you if you do not take the chance that is offered you now. Look, there is an old ewe, Metope, I think he calls her, because of her blundering, headlong running. She is almost dead on her feet already. There is worm in her fleece and her hooves are almost eaten away with rot. Yet she is a ewe, such as Rhene the Ewe would accept. Go now to the pasture while your father is still down in the village, and send Metope on this errand for you. Who will know, but you and I, that she did not, in her blind blundering, slide on the mountain shale and lose her balance? By Hera, but she would be no loss—and what she might do for you is countless.’

Oresthea almost shoved me out of doors, and I went, under the spell of her swift, hot words, leaving myself no time for thought or compassion.

Old Metope was grazing listlessly near the cliff-edge, where the rocky lip is flaked and layered by heat and ice, so that parts of it slither down every year, making the pathway wind about where the mountain-side has fallen away.

I snatched up a handful of fresh grass from near the edge, and as I did, looked over giddily. Far below there were dark pines, swaying in a different wind from what I felt upon my face. And beyond the pines, there were white-walled cottages, so small that five of them could sit upon my finger-nail.

Nearer to me, on the sheer cliff-wall below me, grey-green bushes sprouted from fissures in the rock, coming out at an angle, up towards the sun, as though they defied all falling. As I looked down at all this, a brown bird broke from a bush in the cliff-wall and fluttered jerkily below me. It seemed much like the owl which had tried to fly in at our cottage, or the one which sat in my dream on Rhene’s shoulder. As I thought this, the bird turned again and mounted higher, up towards me, and suddenly began to cry out.

Perhaps it was the blood drumming in my head, or perhaps the wind that cut across the bird’s calling, but it seemed to speak words I knew. ‘Cast yourself down. Be washed of all sin,’ it said. ‘All things are given to him who leaps towards them, Oedipus. Leap now, and claim your heritage!’

And truly, as I listened, there was within me a strong pulling, an urging to go forward over the crumbling edge. The sweat burst from my forehead as I struggled with the temptation to leap. But at last I broke from the spell, and flung myself backwards onto the safe dry turf and springy heath. My heart almost came out of my mouth as I gasped for breath; but I still held the bunch of fresh green grass in my right hand.

I looked a little way up the slope. Old Metope was standing quite motionless, watching me with her amber eyes from which the water drained down her bone-like face. The strong smell of her brown fleece came to me on the wind, and I knew then that what Oresthea had said was true; Metope was almost at her end. And I knew also that I could never face such a terrible fall as lay before me now, in waking or in dream.

Pulling together my courage, I rose to my knees and called softly, ‘Metope! Come, Metope! Here is grass, Metope! Come on, old girl! Come on then!’

She gazed at me quite still. I could see the light glaze on her old eyes, like the beeswax polish that men rub onto the ash-shafts of javelins to make them slide through the hand more swiftly. Or when they put their weapons away for the winter and wish to preserve the wood from worm.

I smiled at this thought, and said to the ewe, ‘It is a little late to think of keeping the worm from you, Metope. Come now, and do us both a good turn, lass.’

Then she broke from her dream and lumbered towards me. On my knees, I moved nearer the cliff-edge where the rock was tottering in layers, and held the bunch of grass above the lip.

Metope was truly named, Headlong, for she was onto the toppling rock, with the grass already in her dry old mouth, before she knew what was happening to her. I saw the upright layers poise outwards, then give way, and for a moment my heart thumped with agony for it seemed that the ewe might swing round and back to safety. But the brown fleece was too heavy for quick movement, and she went over, taken by its weight, out into the empty air, with the grass in her mouth still. I leaned over to watch, and as she whirled round heavily, forty paces below me, her amber eyes fixed for a moment on mine and she gave a sad small bleat, which the rush of wind carried away immediately as she went on down. The green grass fell from her mouth and, being lighter, followed down after her, but always going slower and slower, while she went faster and faster, until, just before she struck the line of jagged rocks that fringed the pathway far below, I could not bear to watch any longer, and drew back onto the safe heathland, my mouth parched and all my limbs shaking with the fever of what I had done. It was sunset before I was strong enough to rise to my feet, and, leaning hard on my crook, to make my way down towards our house once more.