I stared at him dumbly. I could hardly believe I had understood him. At last I said, “Are you joking, or trying to make a fool of me? Do you mean that you are still a virgin? At seventeen?”
He flushed. It was not modesty, I perceived: he was man enough to feel an insult. A warrior was there; but a warrior under orders. He answered quite quietly, “Well, sir, it’s a part of what I mean.”
So there was not even a wild crop on the hills of Troizen or in the farms, to carry the strain on; nothing. I thought how she had showed me him in the morning, after the long night’s travail. Now he flung our hope back in my face. If he had been a woman, he could have been made to obey; but no one can force a man to breed. He was the master; and he did not care.
All I could find to say was, “At your age, I had children in Troizen old enough to run.”
The scowl sailed off his brow like a summer cloud. He was amused. “I know that, sir,” he said. “I should hope I know my own brothers.”
“You take it lightly,” I answered. Being angry, I added something more. It would have been nothing much on the deck of a longship. I knew it was not very seemly for a son to hear from his father; but I was past minding.
He stared. Then he looked sick. If it had been with me, I daresay I might have borne that better. But no; it was with himself, for having tried to tell me his heart. I felt that as the last injury; for the core of my anger was love and pride in him. If it had been young Akamas in Crete, he could have gelded himself in the rites of Attis, and I daresay I should have got over it. A good boy enough; but plenty more where he came from.
Breaking his silence, I seemed to hear a laughter that was not of men: from the Labyrinth, from the hills of Naxos, from Maiden Crag, from the cave beyond the Eye. They wove in a round dance three in one, and I heard their whispering laughter—the Mother, the Maiden, the Crone.
My anger burst from me. But I kept down my voice, as I have learned to do; there are better ways than shouting, to reach a taller man. I said, among other things, that it was infamous to accept the heirdom of Troizen, to cheat in his dotage a king who had been great, and had sons who would have done right by him; to mock his hopes in his last days. “He has loved you,” I said. “Have you no shame?”
He did not open his mouth; but his face answered for him. It turned red, and the muscles rose on the clenched jaw. He was not a man with much use for words, one way or another; from the grip of his hand upon the window sill, I saw it was not speech that would do him good. Well, he might think I did not understand him; but at least I knew that anger, better than any other man.
Almost I could have told him so. But while we glared in silence like enemies in the field, in came my mother and said that the King was ready. She looked from face to face, but said nothing. I daresay we both avoided her eye like boys.
They had propped my grandfather up in bed; he looked as clean as thistledown. His hands of bone and milk-skin lay on the blue wool spread which scarcely showed a body under. When he greeted me, he held his hand as low as if to a child, and I saw his eyes had a clouded film. I knelt by him; he stroked my hair and said in a voice like rustling reeds, “Be faithful, boy; it is all we know to do. The gods know what to do with it.”
He drowsed again. But my youth came back to me. I remembered how I had had the call to go to the bulls of Crete; how the people had wept, and my father had cried to me that I was leaving him to his enemies in his failing years—yes, and it was true. Yet I had gone, and could do no other.
I heard horses, and looked from the window. Down on the road was the lad driving away. The dust from his wheels was pink with sunset. As he took the bend, I could picture his eyes devouring the ground before him till he came to the flat where he could go.
I ran out to the stables, calling for a chariot and a good fresh pair. The charioteer came hurrying, but I waved him off and took the reins. You do not roam from land to land without racing sometimes with borrowed horses, and these knew who was master. I turned them out of the Eagle Gate upon the road to the sea. The folk of Troizen, who had lately seen me drive by in state, stood staring in my dust, remembering courtesy when I was gone by.
I could see him at the turns; but he never looked back, only forward towards the hard mud flats of Limna; when he reached them he leaned forward over the team, and they raced away. But, I thought, though he had the start of me, he was a big lad; my beasts had less weight to carry. He had unhitched his third horse, the one for festivals, and was only driving the pair.
The ripples of the landlocked Psiphian Bay plashed upon shining stones. On this same road I had driven to seek my father, and try my manhood in the Isthmus, just at his age. And now I was galloping till my teeth rattled in my head, for all the world as if I were a boy again with a taller boy to beat. Which was not so; a man does not get wet year after year at sea, without finding a stiff joint here and there. Mine would ache tomorrow. All the same, I meant to win my race today.
I was gaining when a long turn hid him. He had not seen me. It was my will against his whim. I rounded the headland; there, quite near, was the chariot. But it stood empty beside the road. Without sense—for the pair stood quietly, the reins hitched to an olive tree—my heart tripped and hit my throat. Then, seeing all was well, I tied my own horses near them, and took the path up the hill.
I thought he would give me a long scramble, knowing his ways. But he had not gone very far. There he was in an ilex grove; and as I walk lightly, he did not see me for the trees. He stood still, panting deeply from the drive, and the climb, and, as I saw, from anger. His big hands closed and unclosed as they hung beside him, and he paced the clearing like a beast in a cage. Suddenly he reached upward, and, with a great sound of cracking, tore off a limb near as thick as my arm. He trod on it and broke the middle, then snapped all the lesser branches across his knee. Leaves and white splintered wood lay all about him. He stood over this mess, staring down. Then he knelt, and felt about in it, and came up with something in his cupped hands. His touch was changed; stroking, and delicate. But the thing was dead, whatever it was. He dropped it—some little thing, a bird or a squirrel’s young—and put his hand to his forehead. When I saw his grief, I knew he had come to himself and was sorry for what had passed between us. That was enough for me. I came forth and held out my hands to him, saying, “Come, boy, it is past. We shall know each other better.”
He looked at me as if I had dropped from heaven, then knelt and touched my hand with his brow. As he rose up I kissed him; and now, when he straightened after to his hero’s height, I felt only pride.
We talked a little, and smiled together at our race, and then fell silent. Evening was far spent; the hilltops grew gold above the water drenched in their shadow; there were scents of sea wrack and dewy dust and thyme, and a shrill of grasshoppers. I said, “I took your mother from the Maiden, and she claims her debt. The gods are just, and one cannot mock them. Even though you serve one who has never loved me, be true and you will be my son. Truth is the measure of a man.”
“You will see, Father,” he said, calling me this for the first time since childhood, “I will be true to you as well. He paused, and seeing he had more to say but was shy, I answered, “Yes?”
“When I was small,” he said, “I asked you once why the guiltless suffer too, when the gods are angry. And you said to me, ‘I do not know.’ You who were my father, and the King. For that I have always loved you.”
I made him some kind answer, wondering if I should ever make him out. Well, trust must do instead. As we walked back to our chariots, I asked him where he had been going. He said, To Epidauros, to be cured of my old sickness which I thought was gone. But you came instead.” I saw that he meant his anger. Strange words for a young man in his strength, just of an age for war.