The Bull from the Sea (31 page)

The fear of the earthquake was working in me, cold and sinking, as I had known it since a child, overshadowing all the rest; man’s greatest wrath is like the stamp of a child’s foot, beside the gods’. Old habit gave me the feel of it; not so bad as some that I had known; at least, not here; for it seemed this was the fringe of it, the center further off. Turning about, as a dog does for the scent, I felt my neck-hairs rise when I faced the sea.

The water of the straits was as still as molten lead. On the windless air, I heard horses screaming and whinnying, as the grooms led them from the stables into the field. Then through their noise I heard a voice quite near me, laboring and hoarse, say, “King Theseus! Sir!”

A big warrior, the Palace wrestler who taught the youths, was plowing up through the grove towards me, with a burden in his arms. When I turned, he laid it down upon the ground. It was Akamas. He thrust off the man, who was trying to prop his head, and leaned back on his elbows, fighting for breath, his body arched like a bow, jerking and gasping. The man said to me, “He would come, sir. I found him down there; he had been trying to run, and fallen. Sir, he keeps saying he must see you before he dies.”

The boy rose on one hand, and stretched the other out to me, beckoning me near. His face was white about the mouth, which was almost blue. On a great hiss of breath he said,
“Father!”
and clutched his chest with both hands, as if he would tear it open to let in air. His eyes were fixed on mine; charged not with terror, but with speech.

I went and bent over him, the son that I had left. “Can it be,” I thought, “that the god’s sign has come down to him, and he lacks the strength to bear it? Yet it proves him my true son, this one at least.” I said to him, “Hold on, lad, it will be over before long, and the fear will pass.”

He shook his head, and made a harsh sound in his throat, cut off by choking. His face filled with blood, like a hanged man’s; then he snatched at a breath, and cried out his brother’s name.

“No more!” I said. “You are sick, and you know nothing. Rest, and be silent.” His chest worked up and down, laboring with words. “Be still. Later you will understand.” Tears of pain and struggle had filled his eyes; half out of my mind as I was, I pitied him. “Hush!” I said. “He has gone away.”

Such a spasm seized him, that it took my mind from the earthquake; it seemed he would never breathe again. He was almost black, when he hurled from his knees up to his feet, and flung his arms at the sky. His breath crowed in his throat and he cried aloud, “Paian Apollo!” He stood there, swaying; then turned to the man who had carried him, and said hoarsely but quite steadily, Thank you, Sirios. You can go.”

The man looked at me, and at my nod went off. I helped the boy down again and knelt beside him. Before ever he spoke, some shadow brushed me with cold. But I said to myself it was the coming earthquake.

“Now quiet,” I said. “Or it will start again.”

“I can die. I was afraid before.” He nursed this rough flat voice, easing it along like a dead-tired horse. He was very weak. “I can die if I tell you first. Hippolytos … what you cursed him for … it isn’t true.”

“Hush, that is finished. It is for the gods to judge.”

“Let them hear me! Let them choke me if I lie!” His eyes opened and he caught his breath; then he drew it clear. But he whispered after, to save his strength. So robbers must look, white-faced and whispering, who creep into a royal tomb. “He said no.
She
asked him,
she
…” His working fingers dug into the ground. “… in Athens,” he said. “I
heard.”

I stared before me, knowing the wound was mortal; soon I would begin bleeding, soon would come the pain. The boy reached for my hand, and I took it, though it was little thought I had for him. Only a god can guess what he must have suffered; and he a Cretan, for whom the mother is god on earth.

His hushed, thief’s voice ran on. “I nearly died then. I hated him too, because of what he called her. But he said to me after, ‘I was wrong to be angry. She trusted me.’ He came to me the next day, when I was sick, to say that he was sorry. ‘Don’t be afraid, Akamas,’ he said. ‘I won’t tell Father, or anyone else on earth. I’d swear it to you, but an oath to a god is greater. I gave her the pledge of Asklepios, which binds a man till death.’”

I lacked even the strength to say to him, “It is enough.”

“You see,” he said, “it was the secret of her sickness. So he had to keep it.”

The sight of the woman rose before me. Bruised like a slave; a slave’s terror too, and a slave’s lies. If her tale had been true, she would have scratched his face, or bitten him. His torn tunic and dragged-out hair—he had been pulled at, not thrust away. Those weals upon her shoulders and her throat were the marks not of his lust, but of his anger, the rage of the lion who sees the bars of the trap on every side. When she screamed, he had shaken and shaken her in blind fury, forgetting his own strength. I out of all men, how could I not have known?

“He said to me”—the boy’s voice was getting stronger—“‘We will go together, and be the guests of Apollo. All evil is a sickness, and his music heals it. At Epidauros, everything will be well.’”

I stood up. My brows were dizzy, my feet were tingling. The flat oily sea made me sicker than any storm. I looked along the road to Epidauros, the road that ran by the shore.

“Father, it is true, I swear, I swear! If I lie may Apollo shoot me dead! It is true! Quick, Father, and stop the earthquake!”

Horror crept over me. I cried aloud to him, “I am not a god!” But his dark eyes, fixed on mine, seemed more than his own. He had challenged death, offering his fear in sacrifice; and the holiness had not brushed off him yet. The god in him had cried to the god in me; but there was no god to answer, only the feel of a sickness in the ground.

I said, “Stay here, where you are. I will go and find him.”

I ran off down the olive-slope, calling my men, who came pounding after, grim-faced with fright. Over my shoulder, I saw the old wrestler plodding back to the boy. He was sitting quietly. What inward fetter broke in him that day I do not know; but from that time on the fits grew short and mild, and now he has reached manhood, they are gone.

Down on the horse-field they had picketed the chariot-teams, lest they should bolt when the earth shook. Most of them were squealing and plunging on their hobbles; I picked out a quiet pair, and shouted for a racing-chariot. It was the first time I had raised my voice with an earthquake coming, since I was a child.

As I urged them down to the shore, I felt neither fear nor awe, only a strangeness, like high fever. The horses felt it in me; they dashed along hardly needing the whip, as if they wanted to get away from the man behind them. So too did I.

There is time, I thought, there is still time. He had been gone, how long? As long as it takes to string a lyre and tune it; to row a ship out of harbor; to drive a few turns round the track? And then I thought, “How soon?”

As I labored over the soggy mud flats, I thought of the slave-girl he had sent me, lest quarrelling with Phaedra I might learn the truth. He had feared for me, and for his brother; the truth of his own danger he had only seen too late. He had not the mind that foreknows such things.

The road climbed again; far off between two cypress clumps I glimpsed his chariot. As I looked, it slowed to a walk. He has seen me, I thought; he is waiting; all is saved. I waved, to catch his eye. But he had only paused to breathe his team; he was off again. He had all three of his horses; after all, he was going away for good. As they started up, I saw they were getting restive. Next moment he was out of sight.

The road was good; it had not rained for three days. I whipped up my team; but there was a change. Though they had not felt it in the horse-field, they felt it now. They checked and plunged; one reared up screaming; I had all I could do to hold them. As I stood leaning back against the reins, over the tossing heads I saw the bay below. And it had moved away. Even as I watched, the waters crept out further, showing the sea-floor no living man had seen, all weed and rotting boat-hulls. And still they sank, as if some great mouth below were swallowing them in.

I knew what the horses knew. The chariot turned, a beast with three heads filled with one fear. We charged off the road and up into the farmland, ploughing across the new-sown fields, breaking the water-channels, crashing through young vines. The farmer’s wife and all his children, hearing the din, ran shouting out of doors. The god was their friend. He sent them me for a blessing. Who can trace the pathways of the Immortals?

The horses bolted on, past the vines into unfilled scrub; the wheels leaped and lurched over clods and stones. I had hitched the reins about me, but only with one turn, for fear of something like this. As the brush slowed them, I loosed myself and jumped clear. I fell and rolled, and got up shaken and bruised, shuddering from the touch of earth. All the cattle in the byres were lowing and bawling. A he-goat with wicked eyes opened his mouth in a wild cry. And with that came the earthquake.

The ground jolted and jarred; there was a rumble of stones as the farm fell down in rubble. I heard the wife wail, the man shout out to her, hoarse with terror, from the fields. The children began to scream and the dogs to howl. The earthquake-sickness cleared from my head and belly. “It is over,” I thought. Then why do I feel this fear?”

A hare raced past me, almost brushing my leg, taking great bounds uphill. And then I saw the water coming.

The bay was filling again; not slyly, as it had emptied, but in a great rushing wave, climbing the shores. It washed right over the Psiphia mole, lifting the fishing-boats upon it like toys on a child’s string. Right over the chariot-road below me ran the salt sea, and climbed the plowland; spent itself, and paused, and went sucking back from the scoured land. There was a hush like death; and in this quiet, before all the outcries began again, I heard from northward along the road the squeal of furious horses, mixed with the great bellowing of a bull.

I did not ask, “What is it?” It was the voice of my fear.

Rising above the din, like the war-cry of a king above the battle, I heard a shout I would have known among the shouts of a thousand men. It ceased, broken halfway. The wild neighing rose, and stopped, and rose again. My own pair, caught in the traces round the foundered chariot, whinnied in dread.

I ran to them, dragging at the milling tangle, shouting for someone to give a hand. The farm people went on scrabbling in their ruins; after the god’s passing, they had no ear for kings. I cut loose with my dagger the horse that was not lame, and knotted the reins together. He could carry my weight that far.

There was nothing left you could call a road. It was all slime and flotsam, channels and slides of stones. The horse had been broke to draw; he slithered and pecked and stumbled, and I dared not press him. I myself could have run faster, a few years gone.

The mud had dying fish in it, flapping and squirming. There was a hissing by the road; the horse shied, and nearly threw me; a great dolphin, whistling through his blowhole, was trying to thrash towards the sea. The road climbed, for the slope grows steep there; it would soon be above the flood-line; yet still I heard horses crying, from where they had cried before, pausing sometimes as a trapped beast will pause from weariness, before it begins again. The bull bellowed once more, a sound of rage, or anguish. Struggling with my mount, which was getting scared again, I listened for another voice. But no voice called.

At the top of the rise, the road bent round. Then I saw, and got off the horse and ran.

Less than a bowshot off, on the shore below the road, a bloody mass of snared beasts struggled and heaved: three mangled horses, lashing and lunging. Above, blocking the road they had crashed down from, stood a bull, head down. He bellowed with fear and anger, and lurched, trying to paw the ground; lamed in a foreleg by the flood-wave that had swept him from his broken pen. Here he had struggled back to land, coated with weed and slime; a black bull of Poseidon, a bull from the sea.

There were men down there. As I ran, they were among the horses, killing them with cleavers. One after another gave a last choked scream. Scarlet blood drenched everything; the struggling ceased. The men clustered, bending, over something beyond.

They had cut him loose from the reins, when I got down there, and were pulling out the splinters of the chariot that had gone through his flesh like spears. He lay in ruin, like the horses; a splendid creature broken everywhere, torn and muddied, flayed on the rocks and sand. But the beasts were quiet; dead meat, out of their pain; while he groaned, and moved. In his blood-wet face his eyes were open, and looked in mine.

The men called out to me, telling me who he was. They took me for some passing wayfarer, seeing me on foot, miry and bruised; and shouted the news at me all together, as shocked men do. They had been working in the fields above; their farm had stood through the shock, and they had watched it all. They told how they had seen him on the road, driving from Troizen; how his horses had bolted at the earthquake, yet somehow he had got them in hand. But the water had come up, with the bull upon it, floundering out clear in the way. And then … they pointed to the hacked-off reins, still lashed round his middle in the double-hitch of the charioteer.

He put one hand to the ground, and tried to lift himself, and sank back with a cry; his back was broken. Someone said, “He is gone”; but his eyes opened again. Two of the men were arguing what farm the bull had come from, and who had the right to keep it now; another said it should be offered to Poseidon, or he would be angry and strike again. But the man who had cut the reins away said to me, “Look, friend; bad news is always best brought by a stranger. Will you go up to Troizen, and tell the King?”

I said, “I am Theseus. I am his father.”

They stared gaping, and knuckling their brows; they could not keep their eyes from running over me, a dirty unkempt man, haggard and stammering, whose face they had scarcely glanced at, one of themselves. I sent them to fetch a hurdle; one offered me his garment to stop the blood with; then we two were alone.