The slap of the waves on the shore-line sounded in my ears; and with them the voice of old Mykale. “Loose not the Bull from the Sea!” And I thought, “He has been loosed, and I must bind him; the luck of my reign is in it. Why do I wait?”
I ran straight out, halfway to him. He was watching me, one foot stirring the dust. I put two fingers in my mouth, and whistled hard the fanfare of the Bull Court, which they play when the bull is loosed into the ring.
He pricked his ears. Then he planted his forefeet squarely and lowered his head; but he did not charge. He was saying, as clearly as speech, “Oho, a bull-dancer. Why so far off, if you know the game? Come up, little bull-boy, come up and dance with me. Take the bull by the horns.”
He had the wisdom of god-filled things. I should have known he would draw me back to the bull-dance, which was sacred when the first earth-men fought each other with axes and knives of stone. I lifted my arm, as so often in the ring at Knossos, and gave the team-leader’s salute.
It was strange to hear no shouting from the benches. “Well,” I thought, “It will be stranger to have no team.” That made me laugh. One would do nothing in the ring, without the madness of the god.
His hoof raked once. Then, quick as I remembered him, he charged head-on.
Most precious in the ring is the counsel of the dying. Knowing he gored right-ways, I feinted left to straighten him; then grasped at the stained and painted horns. My fingers and palms had lost the leather hardness of the Bull Court, but kept their strength. I swung upward with him, feet over head, feeling him steady to my weight as a familiar thing. A knowledge passed between us. And I felt a welcome. He was in a strange land, far from home, where men and dogs had baited him, the sacred sun-child used to the homage of a king. The touch and the weight, the grip of a bull-boy, cheered his slow inbred wits. He felt more like himself.
Only with the bull-dance would I coax him to come my way. So I made myself a whole team in one. That was the last and greatest dance of Theseus the Athenian, leader of the Cranes, which I danced alone at Marathon for the gods and for the dead.
When I came down from the vault there was no one there to catch me, or to play the bull away. But he was as unused to this state of things as I was, and his mind was slower; it was that which saved me. I would dodge when he turned, and come round to meet him, and leap again, always working nearer to the tree, till my hands were skinned from the horns and my arms began to shake with weariness. I stood to leap again, thinking, This time he will feel me flagging; then he will strike.” But he looked past me, snuffing the air, and ran on to the tree. The heifer lowed softly, and lifted her yellow tail.
I stood panting, aching and raw, till I saw he had forgotten me. Then I crept up, and fixed the hobble to his hind leg, and scrambled into the boughs.
He did not feel it just at first, having pleasanter business. Then he lugged and tugged till the whole tree quivered. The trunk was two men thick and must have stood a hundred years, but I thought he would heave it up. If I had not clung like an ape, he would have shaken me out with the twigs and birds’ nests. The scared cow added her bawl to the bull’s great bellow. But the stout rope held, and at last he tired. He had been caught before in the Cretan pastures, and no great harm had come of it. He stood; and I dropped the bull-net over him.
And now I was alone no longer. It was as if I had sown the furrows to bring forth men. They swarmed about me; they must have been creeping up while I was in the tree. The net’s edge was hardly wide enough for the grasping hands. I climbed down and showed them how to catch his feet in it so that a pull would trip him. They would have killed him then with spears and cleavers, working off their fear, as small men do. I was glad I could tell them he had been vowed to Apollo; he did not deserve so base a death.
I made them all wait, and went on alone, leading the heifer. I had a debt to pay. She was so frail, I did not want her to learn who I was from anyone but me. So I knocked, but got no answer, and went inside. She was lying below the window; when I picked her up, she had no more weight than a dead bird. She had spent her last breath in care for me, watching my struggle; I hoped she had lived to see me win.
I sacrifice for her every year, at the tomb I built for her where the cottage stood; and the servant I promised her has grown gray serving her shrine. The folk of Marathon offer too, for they think she makes their cattle fruitful; so she will not be forgotten after my death.
The bull-girls lie close by; I ordered them a warriors’ barrow and buried them on one bier. The kinsfolk murmured, till I lost patience and gave them some of my mind. They held their peace after that.
I went back to the bull. The people were still in mortal dread of him, and I said I would stay with him till he was offered to the god. I saw him stoutly haltered either side, then mounted his neck and rode him into Athens. He did not mind the shouting and thrown flowers; he was used to those in Crete; so he went consenting to the god who owned him, looking to the last for the bull-field and the good old days. It was I who knew they would never come again.
But when he had breathed his strong soul upward, and I heard the paean, my soul lifted with eagles’ wings. I had met and mastered the evil of my fate; I was King indeed.
IV
WE FOUGHT THE WAR in Crete before the summer broke and the streams washed down the mountains into the rich plains. I led there two fleets of warriors; the second came from King Pittheus of Troizen, my mother’s father, who had reared me as a boy before my father owned me. He was too old to go himself, but he sent a troop of his sons and grandsons, and good men I found them, well worth their share of the spoils. I knew the Cretan country hardly better than they, having lived out my year a captive of the Labyrinth; but the native serfs I knew, the land’s first children, and they knew me: first as the bull-leaper they used to bet on, then as the man who led them when they rose. They thought I would give them more justice than their half-Greek lords, so they helped me every way. And if you go even now to Crete, you will hear them say that I kept faith with them.
Before the half-fallen, patched-up Labyrinth, stained black with fire, still stood the porch of the Bull Court with its crimson columns and its great red bull charging across the wall. In sight of it we fought the clinching battle for the Knossos plain. In the mountain lands to the east they are wild as foxes; it is freedom they want, not power. Minos ruled them lightly and so do I. But that Crete which had been lord of the seas and islands was in my hand; and it was not a bloody war. They were sick for a master, having been governed from the Labyrinth a thousand years. Fallen to petty chiefdoms, they had thought chaos come again. It was a lesson I took to heart; it would shame me, not to make my own land as civil as the one I had conquered.
I spared even Deukalion himself, when he asked for mercy. I found him what I had guessed, a puppet who would dance to my tune too: vain, not proud; content to be vassal king and subject ally, in return for the empty show. His wife was like him, lazy and fine, or in Crete she might have been dangerous. As it was, when I heard they were bringing up the little Phaedra, King Minos’ youngest daughter, saved when the Palace burned, I thought no harm to leave her there. I had meant to see her before I left, for she had been a taking child, who had made a hero of me when I was a bull-boy, in the way of such small girls. But there was always too much to do; at the harbor as I was sailing, I bought from a Nubian a cage of little bright birds from Africa, and sent it to her from me.