Читать книгу Queens Walk in the Dusk - Thomas Burnett Swann - Страница 3

CHAPTER ONE

“…and you will wed your uncle, the priest of Melkart, as befits a princess of Tyre.”

The words of her brother, the king, inscribed on papyrus-thin ivory, screeched in her ears like a cry of marauding Harpies. She, fifteen-year old Dido, to marry a plump, middle-aged man with a shaved head who collected babies for the belly of Baal and reeked in his shapeless robes of smoke and blood! The custom of consanguineous marriages—brother and sister, niece and uncle—was borrowed from Egypt and honored throughout the East. After all, her brother was wifeless, childless, and sterile, and she was expected to wed a suitable husband and bear a son to inherit the throne. But to marry an uncle whom she despised because he never sacrificed lambs when babies were in supply, to please a brother whom she abhorred because he thought of her as a link in a royal chain and imprisoned her in a palace (or so he thought) to preserve her virginity…well, it was time to revolt.

Her father had been an explorer-prince; her mother—or so it would seem from the daughter’s amber hair and certain stories told in the marketplace—had been a Nereid whom he met on a voyage to Utica, a colony lodged among barbarous black kings and kingly elephants. That her father had been a prince did not impress her, but his valorous explorations, his loving a nymph of the sea, gave her a sense of mission, yes, importance. She rarely looked in a mirror, she often looked at a map, and neither an uncle nor a brother figured in her plans…

She had pledged her heart to a green-haired sailor boy, a Glaucus from the Aegean, and she fled toward his ship to tell him of her news. Thanks to her sister Anna, she had hidden her amber hair in a plain gray snood and borrowed the homespun robe of a chamber slave; thanks to Anna and other slaves—friends in her thought (friends in truth?)—she had left the palace without alerting the guards at the brass, lion-flanked gate, and now she neared the ships.

A narrow isthmus, traversed by an avenue of basalt blocks, connected island Tyre with the mainland of Asia and that particular region known as Canaan to Tyrians or Phoenicia to foreigners. Berths were cut in the isthmus to accommodate ships which lingered for sails to be mended or decks to be caulked, or simply to wait for a cargo of rubies from Ind or roc eggs from Araby. Glaucus’ bireme, briefly awaiting a cargo of cedars for the temples of Egypt, sat at anchor between the citadel of Tyre, “the city dreamed by the gods,” and the forests of Mt. Carmel which climbed into haunts of lion and bear and runaway slave. She did not look behind her at the city, rising ring upon ring in red-roofed houses and temples with cedar pillars (she never looked behind her, now or at any time); she looked at the pointed slippers which slowed her flight, kicked them into the sea, and ignored the murex shells, bleached, broken, and robbed of their dye, which cut and bruised her feet. She was not a boyish girl; she was an angry girl.

“Little Mother!” one of the sailors cried. They were used to her frequent visits to the docks; a snood and homespun could not deceive their trained and far-seeing eyes. Only one man had ever molested her, though she mingled with harlots who came to lie with the seamen; once a tiller, drunk on the wine of dates, had seized her arm and torn her gown, and his mates had boiled him in pitch intended for caulking their ship. Usually she brought a basket of sweetmeats for beggars and fishwives, and golden shekels for sailors from many lands; dwindling Egypt, rising Assyria, beleagured Troy, especially the city-states of Phoenicia, Sidon, Byblos, and Tyre, the little giant.

I am plain, she thought, and thus I am safe from men. But none of the sailors seemed to agree with her. Not from the look in their eyes: Dido plain…she with the amber hair and the murex-purple eyes? In truth, she was loved for her giving—not the gifts themselves, which were little things—but her wanting to give and listen and talk. Still, she was beautiful.

“Arion,” she cried. “I am looking for Glaucus, my friend.”

“He is hard to lose, sweet Dido.” His ebony hair was caught in a ring; his strong, semitic nose commanded his face.

“Here!” Glaucus rose from mending a sail, purple canvas stamped with the Sphinx of Tyre, and caught her in his arms. She felt like a ship which has found a pharos in the midst of a storm (for ships could feel, love, and hurt; even the unimaginative Tyrians treated them as a living race; they were metamorphosed forests which remembered their roots).

She cradled his head against her full and womanly breast, oddly reversing the role of savior and saved. “Glaucus, I am to—”

“Dido, thy brother’s men will see thee!”

Was no one deceived by her careful disguise? Why, the guards at the palace gate must have known from the first of her frequent flights!

The sail made a tent above them. Before the shadows eclipsed the light, she saw the supple body, the forest of green and labyrinthine hair (a miniature Mt. Carmel in which her fingers could play and explore), and more than his gentle spirit stirred in her blood.

She told him about the betrothal…

Glaucus at seventeen, though universally liked by his mates, was a common sailor and not an officer. He could not sail her to Rhodes, the island of roses and palms, nor to Crete, where lizards played in the baths of forgotten queens and untrod stairways spiraled into the sea. He belonged to the Glauci, a maritime race who took their name from a god of the Greeks and resembled the fish-tailed Tritons, though their bodies ended in proper human legs and they breathed through lungs and not Tritonian gills. Perhaps his people descended from the folk who, at the end of the Golden Age, had fled to the sea and changed themselves into dolphins, except that the Glauci had never completed the change. Caught between sea and shore, they were wistful and pessimistic and prone to adoring attachments with humans, secure on the land, or Nereids, born to the waves. Glaucus had lost his parents to a shark; a kindly sailor, now dead, had brought him aboard his ship and taught him sailoring. Dido loved him for his lostness and need, and mothered him with the delicacies which she stole from the palace kitchen or the mantles and loin cloths which she wove on her warpweighted loom. She also yearned for the strangeness of his beauty, the green hair and the greener eyes, slanted like those of certain Eastern folk; the broad chest and slender thighs of a swimmer; and she desired him with a virgin’s guilt and confusion, in a kingdom where girls less royal devoted their maidenheads to Astarte, queen of the sky, at the start of their puberty. To be apart from him was sometimes to fall upon jagged nautilus shells; sometimes to make a ladder from Astarte’s rainbow and climb to the gates of the goddess’ paradise; and to meet with him only to talk was no less cruel and no less enthralling to her.

“Thou cannot marry so evil a man,” he said, in the slow and formal manner of Glauci who learn Phoenician, enunciating with perfect clarity. A boy at court, he sounded, a sailor boy, he looked, smudged with tar, clad in sandals and ragged loin cloth (so lately trim from her loom). His formal speech offended her ear; the sailor made her envy the prostitutes.

“No, my dearest.” She clasped his hand (and felt the nautilus shards of unassuaged desire). “My uncle Sychaeus worships his nephew, the King. Any son I bear will follow their ways. Sacrifice babies and fill the coffers of Tyre. I will run away from this greedy place. I had thought of climbing the mountain if you would come with me. We could live in a cave with the bears. My brother has shut me into a prison which he calls ‘The Princess’ palace.’ I have a hundred slaves but not a single use. I am not even decorative like a spun-glass bowl!”

“Dido, Dido, look at yourself in a mirror!”

“I did this very day. To see if my hair was hidden under my snood.”

“It is, except for a tiny wisp.” He touched the escaping curl with his fingertip.

“Well, no one will notice a wisp. And no one will miss me when I am gone, except as a possible mother for an heir.”

Glaucus spuddered. “The snow on the mountain would kill me.”

“But I will warm you with furs and hot honied wine!” The kitchen slaves had taught her to cook.

“I cannot be so far from the sea. I need its—emanations.”

“What shall we do, dear Glaucus?” She would have liked to sail with him to the Misty Isles. Indeed, she had hoped to join him even before the threat of her brother’s command. Who would see to his food, his clothes, his warmth aboard that cabinless ship? But women were rarely invited to voyage with men.

“Perhaps—perhaps thou will marry me instead of thy uncle? I was a prince among my people.”

“Glaucus, I don’t care if you were a murex fisher. Of course I will marry you!” Rung over roseate rung, she climbed her ladder of rainbow into Astarte’s sky.

“Never mind. We will stay with our human friends and sail on this ship beyond the Pillars of Melkart! Wilt thou go with me, Dido?”

“But women on cargo ships offend the gods, Melkart at least, the jealous old man. And inflame the men, I am told.” (Perhaps Little Mothers were not inflammatory?) “Don’t they bring storms and such? Even attacks by Tritons?” She knew that treacherous Tritons and gentle Glauci, though kindred, were mortal foes.

“My friends adore thee,” he said. “Thou art—”

“A girl who acts like a boy and wanders among the seamen in the port.”

“A girl who acts like a girl, soft and gentle, who brings a bounty wherever she goes. Except—older in spirit than years. A sister to some. To others, a mother.”

“And to you, dear Glaucus?” She waited for “lover”, “sweetheart”, even “wife”.

“A sister, I think, and—and—”

“I don’t feel at all sisterly toward you at the moment. I feel like a sacred prostitute.”

“Wife,” he answered at last, though how she had urged and cajoled to evoke the word! “A sister and wife.” (At least he had not said “mother”). “Of course I will wed thee before we begin our journey. That is to say, if thou accept—”

“Let me return to the palace to get some gowns.” She owned an enormous personal fortune—Indian rubies; amber from Hyperborea; images wrought in silver, gold, or electrum; gowns with gold-leaf hems and pectorals sent to her by the pharaoh of Egypt. But what was a fortune to a fleeing bride? And in fact the gowns she intended to choose were linen, not gold-leaf, and as for mirrors, a cosmetician’s palette, or rock crystal bottles of scent—these were for palaces, not for voyages, and never much to her taste. She would have given them to the prostitutes, except that her brother might have noticed their absence and blamed the slaves and extracted a tongue or severed a hand. Yet Glaucus had accurately called her a girl who resembled a girl and not a boy. She was many softnesses bound by a single strength, and the strength was to know, explore, discover the furthest land in Oceanus or the nearest thought in a friend. “And of course my sister Anna…”

Glaucus’ wistfulness yielded to a sigh. “Perhaps the lady Anna will leave us for the Harpies when we pass the Straits of Messina.” Anna was highly unpopular with the fleet (“the old Scylla”); more unpopular in the palace and the port (“the old Gorgon”). She was much too learned to attract a man, and she liked to display her knowledge at every chance and correct those poor inferiors unacquainted with the knowledge of tablets and scrolls. She spoke her tongue to kings or to sailors; beautiful, she might have held their ear. But she resembled a starved giraffe: mottled head, long neck, skinny arms and legs. Only Dido knew the kindness behind the brusqueness and tried—in vain—to reveal the vulnerable being in the shell.

“Anna takes some knowing.”

“I will not live so long. But Harpies are said to live for a thousand years. Perhaps it will suffice.”

No time to take offense. Offenses were useless until one knew the truth. “She will help me with my arrangements. She has always helped me to leave the palace unnoticed. When shall we wed, my dearest?”

“Now.”

A single word from a youth whose conversation resembled a formal speech!

“Now? But I have things to do!”

“My ship sails tomorrow, my princess. Among the Glauci a wedding is brief and simple.” (Unlike their speeches.) “It is a promise more than a ceremony. Our life in the sea does not allow us the leisure of pageantry. Does haste offend thee, my love?”

She kissed him on the cheek. The skin, soft and unlined by salt-wind or garish sun, belonged to a baby instead of a sailor boy.

“Now,” she smiled.

“Wait for me here by the stanchion. I will seek my captain and see to the preparations. Then thou shall fetch thy belongings and thy—uh—your sister.”

She envied the temple maidens, as free in love as Astarte, queen of the sky. She looked with yearning at Glaucus’ retreating form, so different from fat-bellied Baal, or brother Pygmalion, gray as a rotting fish, or Uncle Sychaeus, who only smiled when he fed plump babies to Baal. Like every girl of her age, she knew the mechanics of love, but lifeless scrolls had given her lovers and fed the perfervid dreams inherited from her mother, the lady of the sea, and her exploring father, who had forgotten trade to love a Nereid. Now a dream must guide her into a fact.

“Shall I wait for you here?”

“Yes. No one will touch thee.”

“Hurry, my dear!” (Touch me, touch me, touch me.…)

* * * *

Dido’s wedding was held on the deck of Glaucus’ ship, concealed by a tentlike awning from passersby and the possible eye of the king. Glaucus’ friends, most of them young like him, circled her under a fabric dyed with the purple of the helix violet. The filtered daylight shimmered above their heads, and youthful sailors looked like merest boys. The captain, older than his crew, was also young, for Carthaginian sailors, the boldest in the sea, rarely lived into the toothless time and supped on memory instead of meat. Brown as a Libyan, he bowed and smiled but looked as if he preferred a storm to a wedding rite.

“It’s said that sailors are eloquent men. Well, eloquence leaves them at such a time as this.”

Dido smiled: “The Queen of Heaven will tell you what to say.” She hoped that the words would be brief.

He frowned and seemed to listen for secret words. “I think she tells me that Dido and Glaucus are married in her eyes and joined to my ship. Enduring love is rare, and she is pleased, and they shall attract cool winds and sunny skies wherever we choose to sail. Now then, Glaucus, garland your bride.” He placed a garland in the bridegroom’s hands. “I picked them myself. Oleanders and pomegranate flowers. Princess Dido, are they royal enough?”

“Rarer than pearls.” She smiled. He moved her with his gift. He, a rugged seaman, was not intended for picking flowers. She knelt and received the garland around her neck; she felt her husband’s hands among the flowers; she wanted to clasp them, and him, and prove the reality of the marriage rite, the wonder of wedding Glaucus instead of Sychaeus.

“And I must exchange a gift,” she said. “But here I am barefoot. Ringless. What can I give you, Glaucus?”

“Give me a tear,” he said. Dido’s mother, the sea nymph, had been a kinswoman of Electra, the Nereid, whose tears were the amber droplets tossed by the waves or strung by Sirens on anklets and necklaces.

“I’m much too happy to weep!”

“Sweetest Dido, your cheeks are a flood of tears. And see! An amber drop!”

He plucked it from her cheek and lovingly placed it in the hollow scarab he wore around his neck.

“Now it is time to mend the sails and stir the pitch,” said the captain.

“Elsewhere.” He smiled, and his young but weathered face had the color and friendliness of a scroll which is often unwound to be read and remembered and marked.

* * * *

Dido and Glaucus shared the tent; they, and the silence, an uninvited guest. Glaucus stared at the flap through which his friends had gone and the guest had come, and did not touch his bride. She searched for amorous words to describe her love—and put him at his ease. Helen, the temptress of Troy—how had she lured two nations into war? Semiramis, who had conquered Assyria with her wiles…what, under Astarte’s sky, was a wile?

“I am a virgin.” she said, a confession and not a boast in a city whose patron goddess was worshipped with maidenheads.

“So too am I,” said Glaucus without the slightest shame (and he a man!) “Except for thee, I have never yearned after human girls. But both of us, thou and I, are Peoples of the Sea.” He approached her and shyly opened his arms, manliness with a maiden’s reticence. “I think it is thus.…”

Their embrace, though not their first, was awkward because it must lead to the marriage couch, a heap of silks and linens thoughtfully left by the captain in the darkest part of the tent. Their noses bumped and their lips refused to meet (not that she minded a moist ear).

“Dido,” he said. “Call on thy queen of love. Give us into her hands.”

“I expect she is angry because I have waited so long.”

“That is not what she told the captain. Enduring love: a rarity in her eyes.”

“Well then…” and Astarte heard her prayer.

The warm sun of morning was on them, and they on milky sands, and then a tumble of waves (but welcome to folk of the sea), and then the ebb of the tide, and Dido thought, “Love is as sweet as my dream.” (Why did she add “almost”?)

Glaucus murmured not “Love” but “Little Mother”, and Dido sighed and smiled, “Mother first, my husband? Never mind. I am, as I am.” But she minded more than she said and even more than she thought, and remembered Helen, unscarred by wars and time and loved by gods and men.

The light which blinded them did not come from Astarte. The awning was jerked from the deck; Pygmalion’s soldiers had ringed them with blazing spears.

“Virgin,” taunted the captain. “‘She shall play no more on the docks,’ said the King to me, when I told him what I had heard. ‘Flights from the palace, disguises, talk with the scum of the docks. No one will harm a princess of Tyre. But she must have a husband, and I an heir.’ But now she has lain with a common sailor, a Glaucus at that!” If his spear was a shaft of sun, his sword was sculptured night. His men were like figureheads on a beached and silent ship.

She did not see the blade which pierced her husband’s heart; she fell to her knees and felt him die, however; the leap of the stricken body: the ebbing of life. She saw the spirit depart from his lips, and wanted to immaterialize and join its flight, but not from fear.

Fury possessed her ahead of grief. “I shall leave this city,” she cried. “I shall find a place where babies can grow to men, and maidens can marry them.”

“Leave?” laughed the captain, cleansing his blade on a cloth from the wedding couch. “How, may I ask? In a cockleshell?”

“In a fleet, how else? And if I could, I would send a wave against Tyre and drown my brother and men who serve him like you!” As long as she raved, grief was a crouching lion; she did not want him to spring at her throat.

The silent men began to whisper and shuffle and move away from her.

Even the captain quailed before her threat. For everyone knew the story of her birth. Dido, born of a nymph, a sorceress of the sea…

“Come,” he blurted. “The King is waiting for you.”

But sailors lined the isthmus and one of them called to her (Arion? She could not see through her tears.) “Little Mother, when you have need of us…”

Carthage was born of a wedding and a death.