Читать книгу Oedipus - Henry Treece - Страница 9

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As I looked down across the great compound, I thought I had never in my life seen such beautiful creatures as the folk of Corinth. They were all alike, it seemed to me, both men and women; and it was hard to tell one from another, while their backs were toward me.

Up in my hills beyond Cythaeron, the folk had been small and bent, and often monkey-faced, with dark hair and short thick limbs, worn by toil and the fight with rams and mountain slopes; strong and agile folk enough, but not beautiful. And now I was seeing beauty in men for the first time.

They were tall and long-legged. They walked upright, never looking on the ground, but holding their fine narrow heads up proudly towards the sun, and laughing a great deal, and waving their long slim arms, and gesturing with their thin-fingered hands as they chattered and jested. What amazed me most was their colour; I knew they were of the south, distantly, and prayed to the Mother, but their skins were a deep, deep brown, almost black. I would have thought they were Libyans but for their hair, which was a sombre colour of deep red, or bronze. Later I learned that these folk spent little time in their houses, and much out in the sun and the wind, with their cattle, which gave them their colour; and as for their hair, they wore it long and in a hundred small plaits, which they covered with a paste of fat, and red clay, from their hills. These plaits were drawn back behind the head and either bound round with tight rings of gold or bronze, or slipped down inside a tube of ram’s horn, so that it hung down between their broad shoulders and out of the way when they were working or fighting.

So every man’s hair, drawn into this long tail or club, gave Corinthians their name—‘Men of the Clubs’.

As I looked over the rock and watched them, my heart rose like a lark to see such folk, laughing and splendid, the men often going two by two with their arms about one another, or holding hands as our small children do in the hills, and jesting, swinging out the other hand to gesture, or to point at what took their fancy. I thought: How much like dear brothers they are! Almost like lovers. Their lives must be very carefree and complete.

The women were the same, though they tended to run about more than the men, who walked with long paces, taking their time. Sometimes, two girl-companions would run up behind two young men and pull at their hair-clubs, or slap them between the shoulders, or snatch at the thin, fringed hide aprons they wore, trying to steal them and to leave the men uncovered. And this was done with the greatest good humour, the girls squealing with laughter if they were caught and their own short aprons were flicked up, or clapping their hands and pointing if they succeeded in stealing the men’s coverings, and leaving all bare.

The whole plain of the dusty compound was shifting constantly with this merry movement, and I thought: These Corinthians must be a great and fearless folk to laugh and play so much beneath the sun. Who would dare be their enemies?

Yet they must have had enemies, for suddenly I saw their soldiers in one part of the compound; rank upon rank of these tall brown men, dressed no differently from the others, but holding long spears. I had never seen spears so long, they were over twice the length of the men, and with blades as long as swords, two-edged and hardly varying in width from shank to tip. These waiting warriors stood with their spears upright on the ground and one leg curled backwards round them, resting on them, like storks or herons or cranes. Some of them, the captains, I thought, wore bands of white fox-fur round their foreheads; others had long slanting tattoo-scars across their cheeks. All wore bronze bracelets from wrist to shoulder, which made their arms glisten as the sunlight caught them, so that there was a never-ending movement of light among this regiment.

I leaned my chest against the hot grey rock, and sighed and sighed, and almost burst into tears to see such lovely men, such warriors. Oh, Zeus, I thought: to be one of them! To have such a long spear and lean on it in the sun like that! To have legs and feet like that!

Then the quiet voice came into my head again, the voice I had heard on the hill-face before old Metope went over into the gorge, and said, ‘Why don’t you go down to them, Oedipus? They are only men, and you are of the race of men. Why not ask if you can join them?’

‘I will,’ I said. ‘Oh, I will!’ And then I left my rock and ran through a cloud of dust into the basin, trying to keep my course straight and steady; trying not to seem inferior by my lame stumbling, and growing prouder and prouder with every step that did not fling me down. Indeed, I think I had never run so well as I did that bright morning. I felt that I was becoming a warrior with every pace, and my heart rose and rose in me until it almost burst.

What was in my mind, I do not know now. Perhaps I meant to fall at the feet of the nearest great captain, and beg him to let me join his company; or perhaps I was running blind into a dream, the outcome of which I had not paused to think of.

All I recall is that, as I left the slope and set foot upon the flat ground of the compound, a high shout went up on all sides of me, a shout less of alarm than of derision; and then the blue air was suddenly filled with the buzzing of javelins.

I saw them swinging above the dust cloud, their long blades spinning like tops in the air, throwing off a golden light as they spun, evil stars twinkling in broad day and close to the earth. And I was bitterly afraid, for I knew that the long spears carried death towards me faster than any deer could run; I who could only hobble, like a broken-winded horse.

So I stopped in the dust, my hands at my sides, looking towards the far hills, trying to seem as though death was no enemy of mine, as though we took each other’s hand ten times a day in comradeship. Then, as the sweat of terror ran down my back, the flying spears bent towards the earth like striking hawks, and with a harsh chuck! plunged into the earth before me, falling criss-crossed in a long tunnel, the first pair missing my bunched feet by less than a finger’s length. At first, I smiled with relief that these weapons had not killed me. Then, as I understood that they had never been meant to kill me, but to set up an obstacle for my lameness, my smile turned to a bitter twitching of the mouth. I thought: So they would not spoil their fine spear-blades by letting them pierce this worthless hide, let blood flow from this carrion-flesh! They regard me as nothing, as others have always regarded me. Where shall such as I find friends, if not among those my heart cries out to? In another moment, I should have broken down and wept, and have spoiled all my fine gesture of running down the hill towards these gods. But my tears were halted by a hoarse cry that came from the tallest of the captains, who stood nearest to me, at the head of his javelin-men.

‘Onto your knees, boy,’ he shouted. ‘No man may approach the King but on his knees.’

So, swallowing my grief, I bowed down and crawled through the dust, along the tunnel that the crossed javelins had formed, while all about me the plain echoed with laughter and merry shouting.

I kept my shamed head down, and did not look up again until I had passed between the javelins; and when I looked up, I knelt in the long shadow of a hide wind-break, where a young man and a woman sat together on a stool of black wood and leather-thongs, looking down at me with curious light eyes, and smiles that scarcely moved their pretty lips.

They were so alike, these two, that they seemed like twins, like a brother and a sister come from the womb within the one birth-pang.

The man wore a necklet of red-dyed ox-tails about his neck and below each knee; the woman wore neck-rings and anklets of dull red Libyan gold. Both had the eye-sign of Ngame scarred at the middle of their forehead, and marked in with blue dye.

The woman spoke first, showing her even white teeth, and holding up her brown face so that I should see the round spots of red ochre which her cheeks were painted with.

She said, ‘It is a warm day for such as you to be running in. We two of Corinth, Polybus and Periboea, Bull-King and Cow-Queen, greet you, lame stranger; but we do not require our visitors to come into our presence at such a speed.’

As she spoke, so gently, so pleasantly, so warmly, I saw the sweat-beads gather under her breasts, and her delicate brown hand go up to wipe them away. It was the sort of movement that I would not have thought a Queen would have dared to make in public. Yet, in a strange manner, it was an action which endeared her to me. Suddenly, I knew that I had come home; that I wanted this woman to be my elder sister and this man my brother; that I wanted nothing more than to shed all my blood for them, to let it run out of me like strong wine from a broken cask. And, in that moment, I was sure that it would be strong wine, no less than the strongest.

I think the two great ones read all this in my face and eyes and trembling hands, for the King, Polybus, said in a low voice to me, ‘Rise, boy, and come into the shade. Sit near us at our feet, and tell us what has brought you so far, to Corinth.’

I was amazed at the lovely clear Greek this King spoke; it was like fresh water coming down from a mountain stream, so bright and clear that one might see all the water-flowers, all the darting fishes in it, though they lay right at the bottom, on the pebbled bed. I had always been told that we of the hills spoke the best Greek, because it was the most ancient and had been told to the first Minos by Cronus himself, at the beginning of time.

But this King’s words were as beautiful in my ears as polished stones, as agate and garnets and even as that precious stone which Poseidon gives his favoured swimmers in the shells of sea-creatures. I could have listened to him, and have watched his sister-Queen’s fine hands, all day, and it would only have seemed a moment in time. She said, ‘Come, boy, do as the King says. Move into the shade and tell us of the world outside.’

By now the many folk upon the compound-plain had forgotten about me, and had turned back to their strolling and jesting and loving one another. So I spoke to the King and Queen, at first slowly, wishing my speech were as fine as theirs, and then all hurriedly, not choosing my words, but telling them all my tale, all that I knew of my life, from the first day I remembered seeing the sun, until the hour when I quarrelled with my shepherd-father and ran from our cottage.

And all the time I spoke, my voice babbling on like a brook in a deep gully, two young girls wafted broad fans of fern-leaves over our heads, to give breeze and to keep the flies away.

And at last, when I was breathless and wordless, the King leaned down towards me and placed his cool hand on my hot forehead and said, ‘So, we all have dreams, it seems, I to be a god, and you to be a warrior. Yet how unlikely it is that either dream should come to pass! This is the lesson we men must be at pains always to learn, young friend, that what we wish for may not be that which is intended for us at our birth; that what we hope for is often a gaily-painted snake that may look well, but would sting us to death if our hand ever closed on it.’

Queen Periboea nodded and smiled, as though her husband’s thoughts and words were hers, too, as though, almost, she had been speaking to me, and not the King.

I smiled back at them and said, ‘You are such great ones, and I am a ragged fellow from the hills. Why do you even lower yourselves to listen to me, much less to spend your words on me?’

It was Periboea who answered this time. She said quietly, and simply, as though she was speaking to a young child, ‘We, the Princes of Corinth, are a gentle people. Oh yes, we are very strong, as you can see, but we are kind with our strength. This is our first law, that strength without forbearance is but brutality. As you see, we train for war, but that is not to say we thrust war on others. Our second law is this, that no man must begin a quarrel, but that once a quarrel has been begun no man of Corinth must come away from it defeated.’

I said, ‘And are they always victorious, Great Queen?’

She smiled and lowered her eyelids slightly. ‘Only the gods are that,’ she said. ‘But at least our warriors who fall, do so with no feeling of defeat in their hearts, for they stand like lions until the end and go down smiling.’

Then the King said, ‘You ask many questions for a young boy, Oedipus. It is not easy, even for Kings and Queens, to answer questions on such a hot day. Come with us now, to where we were going, and you will see how the folk of Corinth live. Then you will not need to ask any more questions.’

It was all like a dream to me, the way the two rose from their stool and took me by the hand between them, leading me among the folk over the great sun-scorched plain. I could not believe my good fortune, I a crippled shepherd, in the close presence of such gods! A hundred times, as we strolled over the dust of the compound, I thought: In a moment I shall wake, and find my mother lying stark and blue upon the hide-bed in our cottage; or my father, beating his bloody fists against the wall, and shouting out that I am no son of his. Or, perhaps, old Metope staring at me in reproach as she went over the cliff-edge, as though she knew who pushed her and why, as though she knew what she would look like when her thin body struck the jagged rocks below ...

But I did not wake, and we went on among the tall folk of Corinth, through the sunlight, until we came to a broad basin in the ground, penned in by oaken stakes the height of a man. And here there was much shouting and bellowing and the sound of hooves and of feet. Dust rose above the stockade, into the blue air, and I was curious to know what lay beyond, and what the sounds all signified.

The Queen touched my cheek with her long fingers and said, ‘This is where our people temper their courage, until it becomes as hard and unbreakable as the sharp bronze, Oedipus. This is the bull-pen of Corinth, sacred to the great beast from whom we take our sign.’

As we came near, horns began to blow, as though in warning, and suddenly before us two gates swung open to let us in.

I had heard of the bull-dancers of the Labyrinth, the boys and girls whose lives were dedicated to entertaining the old King of Crete with their antics. But this, of Corinth, was not the same thing. The Bulls of Minos were an ancient outworn strain, carrying all fat and little muscle, nothing more than piebald vaulting-horses too slow to catch a cripple like me, and too stupid to do anything with him if they did by some chance overtake him. Much has been sung by the poets about those bulls of Crete; but I can tell you, they were such that a sudden turn or twist would bring them to their knees, or crick their spines and leave them helpless. You have seen those great ox-like beasts on the pitchers and vases from Crete, so you will know that what I say is true. They were too short in the leg, too long in the back to be agile; and those great horns of theirs! I laugh now to think of them—so long that a man could jump between them and be out of danger, levering himself up onto the big stupid head. And set too close together, so that those silly mottled beasts could not hook like swordsmen, and then sweep in to the final thrust...

But the bulls of Corinth were as black as Night, lithe in the hinderparts but deep as a chariot in front. Their high-muscled necks rose above their broad chests, and set at the end of them, small vicious heads, with swift sharp eyes that missed nothing, and horns, horns, oh, what horns! They swung out and round and then forward, like great hooks of bone, at their base as thick across as a man’s arm; at their points, as cruel as a sword.

In the great bull-pen, I saw perhaps a dozen of these beasts, their black hides shining like the silk of Babylon with sweat, the muscles and sinews that lay beneath that hide all working with every small movement, their tufted tails swishing like whips, and their small cleft hooves causing the grey dust to spurt out on every side, whenever these killers turned to sniff the air.

King Polybus watched me and smiled. ‘You have not seen such before?’ he asked.

I shook my head. ‘Such could only be seen in terrible dreams, King,’ I answered. ‘If they came up the hills to where I have lived, the folk there would run screaming and fling themselves over the cliff-side, thinking that Poseidon had come for his vengeance.’

The Queen laughed at me and then leaned over and gently brushed the hair from my damp forehead, as though I was her younger brother, or her growing son, if she had been old enough to have a son of my age.

Yet as she did this, there was a shouting and a stirring among the bulls that caused her to forget me and turn away. A line of men and women had been sitting opposite from us, on the ledge of the stockade, calling down to the bulls and from time to time prodding at them when they came close with the butts of their long javelins. Now, without taking leave of his companions, one of the men, a tall warrior whose ochred hair was even longer than that of the others, jumped down among the beasts and began to run between them, laughing and calling them by familiar nicknames: ‘Hey, bull! Hey, Big-nose! See who has come among you! Hey, Thin-arse, haven’t they fed you lately?’

To see the black bulls swing round, as though they understood him, and drive in towards him was the most fearful sight I had ever witnessed. Yet, somehow, with the dust now rising above his bronze-coloured head, and the tall spear still held upright, the man came between them, turning and twisting as the horns slashed and clashed together. The noise of the horns against one another was sickening. Then he was clear, and began to race towards where we sat on the stockade. He was perhaps half-way to safety when a young girl on the far fence called to him, ‘Hey, hey, brother, you did not pat Father Zeus. He is hurt at your neglect.’

The tall warrior stopped, sending up dust much like a bull himself, then laughed with white teeth up at the sun and turned back. Beside me, Polybus whispered, ‘That was a foolish taunt. The captain Jaccus is too valuable to be teased into going back.’

The King had hardly spoken when I saw the great bull they had called Father Zeus put down his head and swing in to meet the tall captain. I heard the man’s spear-butt rattle sharply on the beast’s horns, but one might as well have tried to stay a thunder-storm by pattering with a horn spoon on a clay pot. I saw the tall captain come up fast out of the dust on the horn, twirl in the air, still on the horn, his arms and legs now flailing, and then disappear among the clustered hooves and the thrusting heads that circled him, beating at each other like great drums, and all now shrouded with grey dust.

I was so horrified at this, all my limbs shuddered, and I nearly fell down into the bull-pen, my shocked fingers almost useless to keep me up there in safety. Then my attention was suddenly taken by what was happening beside me; for the King and Queen leaned towards one another, and with a single movement, as though they had practised it long, reached out and touched each other in a certain part of the body, gently and even nobly, as other folk might kiss. I had never seen this done before, and now it made the blood race in my veins to watch it. Yet, deeply I knew that this was but a farewell gesture among the cattle-folk who lived by the fertility of what these two now touched.

Then the Queen said, ‘Go well, with wings on your ankles, love.’ And before she had finished, the King was down and running across the basin, shouting and clapping his long hands together loudly, zigzagging like a mother-bird trying to entice the hunter away from her fledglings. Then, as the great beasts turned to snort at him, he ran round them, digging at their rumps, twisting their tails, driving them to distraction like a gadfly, everywhere at once.

And suddenly these killers left the man upon the ground and turned to their new enemy. But the King was never where they thought to gore him, and while he drew them further and further away from the still body of Jaccus, other men jumped down from the stockade and dragged their captain out of further danger. Then the King gave a great leap and was up beside them all on the far stockade, wiping his wet brow with the back of his long hand and frowning at what had so needlessly happened.

I turned to say something to the Queen about her husband’s bravery, but she was not listening to me. Her wide grey eyes were fixed on the black beasts, and her mouth was a little open, as though she was speaking silent words of mockery at them. Her bare breasts rose and fell quickly in the sunlight, a thin layer of dust upon the damp brown flesh of them.

Then she too was down and running, though more delicately than her husband the King. I heard the folk at the other side call out their encouragement, especially the many women, who had gathered now, during this excitement. I saw three men rise suddenly, balancing with care on the stockade, and poise their long javelins as though aiming towards the most dangerous of the bulls. But the King stayed still, his arms outstretched as though he indicated that Periboea should leap into them.

She did leap once, twice, three times, as the horns swung at her thighs. Then, even while she was laughing and tossing her ochred hair about her, her feet slipped in the dust and she was down. I saw her more clearly than I have ever seen anything; so clearly that I might have been standing a pace away from her. All else in the world was blotted from my sight; I saw only her. She lay, her breasts now full in the dust, her slender arms hooked about her head, the hands cupped over her ears and the sides of her face. She was still laughing, though the turmoil of hooves was scattering dirt into her face. I saw one hoof rest for a second in the small of her back, and then the great black head of Father Zeus swing down, and his right horn just miss her flank. This horn caught in the thong of her hide apron and tore the aegis away from her, swinging it upwards, tattered and bloody, into the air.

‘Oh, Mother Dia!’ I was saying. ‘Oh, protect Night’s Daughter! Oh, Father Poseidon, do not let them destroy her!’

And suddenly, as though the god had spoken back to me, I knew that this was my opportunity to make myself great in Corinth, and at the same time save this lovely woman. The gods had put this chance into my hands, I thought. In one swift run, I may show my love for her and wipe out all the humiliations of my past.

I was easing myself forward to leap, when a great hand took the hair of my head and held me fast. Twisting, I saw that a dark-faced warrior was behind me, his eyes white and wide, he was clenching his fingers into my hair, and saying, ‘This is not for you, Outlander. This is for Kings and Queens. Not for a lame boy.’

I struck at him, but he only smiled and held me tighter. Then, through my sudden tears, I saw the King swooping down among the black bulls once more, and coming up like a swimmer with a fish in his hands. I saw him leap high over a bull’s down-thrust neck, then plunge back through the dust to where arms reached down from the stockade to drag them both up.

To the man who held me I said, ‘I must go to them. Let me go to them. They are my friends. Look, the Queen is bleeding.’

The warrior put his great arm about me and said, ‘She has come to no harm, lad. We all carry such scars, both men and women, who live among the black bulls. He will know what to do for her, without your help. Come with me to the tent, and we will drink a cup of wine to celebrate this morning.’

As I turned from the bull-pen, I saw the King still holding his Queen in his arms, like a pretty doll, and nuzzling her breasts as he carried her away. She was smiling up at him, and twisting his bronze hair in her fingers, as young lovers do.