She lay on the hillside, with the young men round her. They had straightened her, and laid her upon a shield. Not daring to touch the arrow, they had sent the youngest to the Citadel, to fetch the priest of Apollo. He had pronounced her dead, and drawn it out, and covered her with a pall of scarlet lined with blue; and the lads had laid her hands upon her sword. The priest said to me, The Lord Paian sent her the omen. But she asked if it was his command to keep it secret; and he answered according to her wish.”
“Sir,” said the youths, “a bier is coming for her. Shall we carry her down the hill?”
I answered, “You have done well, but it is enough now. Leave her to me.”
I took off the pall, and picked her up in my arms. Her body was cold, the limbs beginning to stiffen. I had been gone too long; her shade was far off already. I held a corpse with her face. She had felt like sleep, when I went away.
At the foot of the hill they met us with the bier, and I laid her on it; the battle had been long, and I was tired. As we came nearer to the Rock, I heard the paeans of victory. It stirred my anger; yet it was what she would have wished to hear.
Soon I too must give thanks, standing before the gods for the Athenians; that was my work. The City had been saved for a thousand years. This day, I thought, will be sung of; and I seemed to hear the song. Thus, fell King Theseus, giving his life for the people; in the flower of his age, with his love beside him, honored by gods and men.”
The sweat of battle had cooled upon me; I felt a sharp wind from the sea. The Palace stood on its rock and waited. It was not long past noon. I could not tell what I should fill even this one day with; and there were years ahead. She had taken my death, lover for lover; she had been a woman at the last. She who was once a king should have known that only a king can offer for the people. The gods are just; but one cannot mock them.
She had saved her man alive to weep for her. But the King had been called; and the King had died.
Epidauros
I
I HAVE SAILED ALL the seas since then, and sacked many cities. Unless there was war, I went roving with Pirithoos every year. To see new things, and live from day to day, is better than wine or poppy, and fitter for a man. I have passed between Scylla and Charybdis by the smoking snows; and off the Siren Rocks, where the wreckers send their girls to sing you over, I have caught a siren and lived to tell. Women I have had in plenty, though none for long. A face glimpsed over foreign walls, not to be had without guile and danger; till she is won, it can hold your mind from before and after, and you can believe she will not be like all the rest.
My people forgave me many years of this, because I had saved the City. Winter was long enough to bring the realm in order; if I found oppression growing up behind my back, I brought down a heavy hand. But by spring I would have wearied of it all, and of the royal rooms where my arms hung alone upon the wall; I would shut the door and be off to sea again.
If I had stayed in Attica all the year, I could have sent for young Hippolytos, and tried to get him accepted as my heir. Each spring I had half a mind to it. But the sea would call, and new places free from memories. I would leave him in Troizen one year more; he was happy there, with old Pittheus and my mother. When I heard he was known for three kingdoms round as Kouros of the Maiden, I thought of calling at Troizen as I passed; but the wind was contrary, and I let it go. I remembered those stubborn silences. The lad in Crete, who was gay and easy, and would sit at my knee by the hour for sailors’ tales, him I could have talked to; though you would not look at him and say, “There goes a king.”
One year at the winter’s end, a courier brought a royal letter from old Pittheus, sealed with the Eagle. It was the first I had had since the Cretan War. It said he was feeling the touch of age (the hand was a scribe’s, and the signature looked as if a spider had fallen in the inkwell). It was time to name his heir; and he had chosen Hippolytos.
I had never thought of this. He had got sons without number. It was true, however, that only my mother was left of his lawful children. He might have chosen me; but seeing how I lived now, I could not blame him; and with Troizen added to my kingdoms, I should have had to give up the sea. I thought the old man had done well and justly by us; it would give the boy standing if he came to Athens, the people might be more ready to accept him there also, and he could still join the kingdoms when I was gone. It reminded me that it was four years since I had last put in at Troizen. The boy must be seventeen.
In the sailing month I made my way there. As the ship rowed in, I saw the waiting people part, to let through a three-horse chariot. A man stood in it. He was the child I had seen last time.
He bowled neatly down to the wharfside. The people knuckled their brows before his eye had reached them, and did it smiling. So far, good. As he jumped down, and young men ran to hold his horses, I saw he topped the tallest by half a head.
He ran aboard to greet me, and went straight down on his knee. As he rose, he took my kiss upon his cheek and gave one; then he went on rising, up and up. He had been too civil to stoop.
Commanding warriors, I am used to tall men about me. I have met plenty in battle, too, and come off best. I could not tell why this shocked me so, as if it were I who had lessened, or shrunk with age.
Then my eye took in his beauty. That shocked me too. He was like the image of a god; there seemed a kind of hubris in it; yet it was not that. As he greeted me with the grave reverence proper to some foreign deity, I met his gray eyes, as clear as snow-water; shaped by long gazing, as a sailor’s are, but more still. They seemed to speak to me simply and frankly, in a language I did not know. They were her eyes no longer.
Tall trees grew on her grave-mound. The pups of our hounds’ last mating had grown gray-nosed and died. Her young Guard had sons who were learning arms. As for me, she would hardly have known the face the mirrors showed me now, gray-bearded, darkened with salt and sun. She had seemed to die again in all these passings. But just now, far off in the chariot, I had seen the hair pale as electrum, the springing stance, the joy in the swift horses, and for a moment she had lived again. She was gone now, and forever.
He led me to the chariot, mounted, and lashed the reins about him, holding the horses still as bronze for me to get up. The people cheered; he bent over the team as if he were a hired driver, leaving all the cheers to me, but turned with a shy smile to see that I was pleased. He was only a boy still. What I had felt seemed strange and foolish. This was my son and hers; and if I was not proud I must be hard to satisfy.
I praised his horses and his driving, and asked how long he had handled three. Not long, he said; he had had a pair since he was fourteen, but the third was for great days and festivals. He smiled again. So the sun stirs among the moving barley, though it has been shining all along. I had left him a long time in this little kingdom, when there was a great one in Athens. I had not looked to find him so well content.
We trotted out through the harbor town, the horses moving like one to his big light hands. He was careful even of the village pye-dogs, leaning out to give them a warning flick. He left me all the greetings, except when the children called to him, at whom he smiled. His bare shoulders shone before me, brown and broad, rippling like the horses’ glossy flanks; his own in their leather short-drawers were lean and strong. With his big-boned hands and feet, he would be taller yet. When I had been a child here, before my father owned me, trying to believe I was the son of a god, this was what I had prayed to grow into; but I had to make do with what I was given. Men have done worse with more.
As we left the town he pointed things out to me, telling the kingdom’s news, as keen as a young farmer, yet not thinking as yokels do that it filled the world. His sense seemed sound. I wondered what he found to do here. It all seemed like a small-holding, after Attica and Crete.