But one good came of it: we spent the hours till light in council. To talk with her always cleared my mind. I saw that to sit on the throne of Kadmos would be that one thing more that sinks the ship. The greater kings would have taken fright, and joined to bring me down. Besides, half a night in that room told me no luck could come of it. So when morning came, I proclaimed the elder brother’s son, who was still a child, and promised him my safeguard, choosing his council from some of the men who had called me in. Then I went home. Everyone praised my justice and moderation; and Thebes was safer in my hand than if I had been King.
We had a great homecoming. The people sang me as judge and lawgiver of Hellas, and shared the pride of it. And indeed, from that time on wronged folk from all the clans of Attica would come to sit on my threshold: slaves with cruel masters, widows oppressed or orphans disinherited; and not even the chiefs dared murmur when I saw right done. It was called the glory of Athens; for myself, I saw it as an offering to the gods. They had used me well.
Often I thought how, if I had been roving off with Pirithoos, I should have missed my chance at Thebes. The times moved quickly. Besides, what should I rove for? It would never bring me such a prize again. I was content, and stayed at home.
And then, as we got up one morning early for a ride, Hippolyta sat down on the bed again and said, “Oh, Theseus, I am sick.”
Her face looked green and her hand was cold; soon she threw up. While they fetched the doctor, I felt sick myself from fear; my mind ran upon poison. He came, and asked for her women, and waited for me to go. I was still too slow to understand, till he came out smiling, and said he must not steal the midwife’s trade.
When I got her alone, she was brisk and light, as if she had got a scratch in battle that she did not mean to make a song of. But when I took her in my arms she said softly, “You told me true, Theseus. Maiden Crag is far away.”
At the fifth month, she put on woman’s dress. I found her in it, alone, standing hands on hips and feet apart, staring down at her skirts and her growing belly. When she heard me, she kept her back turned and said in a sulky growl, “I must be mad, or I would be killing you.”
“Then so must I,” I answered. “For when I can’t have you, there’s no one I can fancy; and that never happened to me all my life.”
She wore the clothes well, from pride lest she should be laughed at; seeing her sweep by, I could have laughed, or cried. But soon after, when I stood on the balcony looking out across the Attic plain, I heard her feet behind me in their old swift stride. She put her hand over mine on the balustrade, and said, “He will be a boy.”
Later on, as she grew heavy and idle, she would send for the bards to sing. She chose the songs with care; no blood-feuds, or curses coming home, but lays of victory, or the birth of heroes from the loves of the gods. “Who can be sure,” she would say, “that he does not hear?” At night she would take my hand and lay it over where the child was, to feel it move. “He sits high. They say it is the sign of a man.”
Her pains began when I was over in Acharnai, dealing with a lord who had beaten a serf to death. I got home to find she had been three hours in labor. Strong as she was, always in the open and never ill, I had thought she would bring forth quickly. But she was travailing all night, with long hard pains. The midwife said it was often so with girls who had followed the life of Artemis; either the Goddess grudged it, or their sinews were too strongly knit to stretch. I went to and fro outside the door, hearing voices murmuring and the sputter of torches, but no sound from her. In the cold low hours, I was seized by a notion she was dead, and they dared not tell me. I pushed through the gaggle of sleepy women on the threshold, and went inside. She was lying quiet between the pains, pale, with sweat on her forehead. But when she saw me she smiled and held out her hand. “He is a fighter, this lad of yours. But I am winning.” I held her hand awhile, till I felt it tighten; then she snatched it back saying, “Now go away.”
As the earliest sunlight touched the Rock, while the plain was still in shadow, for the first time I heard her cry aloud; but there was triumph in it as much as pain. The midwives chattered; then came the voice of the child.
I was so near the door, I heard what the midwife told her; but when I went in, I let her be first with the news. She did not look sick now, only dead tired as if after a day in the hills or a long night’s love. Her limbs lay slack, but her gray eyes glowed. She threw the bedclothes back and cried, “What did I say?”
The midwife nodded, and said no wonder my lady had had to work all night, with this great boy. I took him up; he felt heavier than my other children I had handled, yet neither big nor small, just what was right. Nor was he red, or wizened, but bloomed and glowed as if the sun had ripened him in a good year. And though his eyes were the dim misty blue one always sees at birth, wandering and squinting, yet they were already hers.
I gave him back, and kissed her, and put my fingers into his hand, to feel his grip. As I played with it, I set his palm upon the royal ring of Athens, and his grasp closed on the bezel. My eyes met hers. We were silent, for there were others within hearing; but it never needed speech between us, to share our thought.
V
HE FLOURISHED LIKE SPRING flowers, and grew like a young poplar planted by a stream.
We found him a good wet-nurse; his mother had not much milk, and fretted for the wild hills and me. But she would come running in from the hunt, to pick him up and toss him upon her shoulder; he loved her strong hands, and would squeal for joy. Before he could walk, she would ride full gallop holding him astride before her; he had no more fear of a horse than of his nurse’s lap. But by the evening fire she would take him on her knee like any mother, and sing long northland songs to him in her own tongue.
I have fathered a good many sons, and there is no child of my body I have known of that I have not cared for. There were six or seven in the Palace. But it seemed in the nature of things that when I came to look at them their mothers said, “Quiet now and behave; here comes the King.” The people were not long in seeing that this one had taken my heart.
But the brighter the light, the further seen. It shone too clearly: her love and mine, his excellence, and the hope of my heart. I had ruled now nine years in Athens, and I knew the people; I felt, as a pilot feels the set of the tide, that here they were not with me.
When I had loved here and there, they had taken it lightly; indeed it was their boast. I could have peopled, myself, another Attica, if all the tales had been true. It had made a good one, that I had bedded even the Lady of the Amazons and got her with child. But when time passed, and she lived my queen in all but name; when they saw that by my choice she would have had that too; then their face altered.
It was not in the small man’s fear of change and newness that the danger lay. The real fear was old, deep-rooted in every Hellene. She had served the Goddess; and I had not tamed her. They too remembered Medea. They thought, and maybe rightly, that if I had not come she would have edged my father off his throne, and sacrificed him at the year’s end as was done in the days of the Shore Folk who had the land before us, and brought the old religion back again.
It was close to the ground, among the peasants, that this rumor spread like bindweed. If I had foreseen it, I daresay I would not have named the boy Hippolytos; it is a Shore Folk custom, for the son to take his mother’s name. But it would have been a public slight on her to change it; nor could I think of him by any other.