On the way home, I put in at Troizen with my uncles and my cousins, to greet my grandfather for the first time since I left his house. He was at the harbor mole waiting to meet me; a tall stooped old warrior, in his state robes. Last time I had seen him so, it was to receive the King of Pylos; and while we waited for the guest, he had sent me off again to comb my hair. That had been four years back, when I was fifteen.
The youths unyoked the horses and pulled the chariot up through the Eagle Gate, with roseleaves and myrtles falling, and paeans sung. On the Palace steps stood my mother waiting. When we had parted, she had come straight from taking the omens for me at the Mother’s altar; her flounces had clashed with gold, and about her diadem had clung the smell of incense. Now there were ribbons and violets in her hair and her skirts were stitched with flowers; she held in her hand a garland to crown me. Her beauty dazzled me; and then, when I came close to kiss her, I saw the last bloom of her youth was gone.
After the feast in Hall, my grandfather took me to his upper room. The stool was gone where I used to sit at his feet, and the chair brought in which he kept for kings.
“So, Theseus,” he said. “High King of Attica, High King of Crete. What now?”
“High King of Crete, Grandfather, and King of Athens. High King of Attica is a word, no more. That comes next.”
“The Attic team will be hard to yoke together; ill-matched and rough. As they are now, they will pay your tithes and fight your enemies. That is much, in Attica.”
Too little. The House of Minos stood for a thousand years, because Crete had one law.”
“Yet it has fallen.”
“For want of law enough. It stopped with the serfs and the slaves. Men are dangerous who have nothing left to lose.”
He raised his brows. It was the look of a grandfather at a boy; but he said no more.
I said, “The King should have looked after them. Not only to quiet them; they were his charge. Don’t we say all helpless folk—the orphan, the stranger, the suppliant, who have nothing to bargain with and can only pray—are sacred to Zeus the Savior? The King must answer for them; he is next the god. For the serfs, the landless hirelings, the captives of the spear; even the slaves.”
He was slow to speak. Then he said, “You are your own master now, Theseus, and many men’s beside. But I have lived longer, and this I tell you: nothing is stronger in men than the will to possess their own. Touch it, and you will make enemies who will bide their time. And are you a king to sit quiet at home five years together? Beware of malice at your back.”
“I will, sir,” I said. “I don’t want to work anyone against the grain. All those customs they brought from their first lands; the little old goddess at the fourways, the village sacrifice, are a home roof to them against the naked wind. I have known exile too. But they live in fear, from chief to pig-boy: of the raider from over the hill, the grinding master whose hired hands sweat all day for the scrapings of the pot, the brawling neighbor who kills the straying sheep and beats the shepherd. I will give them justice between chief and chief, craftsman and craftsman, if they will come to me for it. I killed Prokrustes, to show I can make it good. I think they will come.”
He nodded, thinking. He was old; but like every man good at his trade, he was ready to hear of something new.
“Men could be more than they are,” I said. I learned that in the Bull Court, when I trained my team. There is a faith, there is a pride, which has to be acted first and grows by doing.”
I saw his forehead wrinkle. He was trying to see me, his grandson and a king, in a life he only knew from songs and wall-pictures: a jewelled mountebank vaulting bulls before base-born crowds, eating and sleeping and training with people from everywhere, sons of hanged pirates, barbarous Scythians, wild Amazon girls taken in war. It shocked him past talking of, that I had been a slave. He was wiser than the bull-girls’ kindred, and much better; but he did not understand. There was no life like that glory in the dust.
So I talked to him of his sons’ deeds in battle, praising the best as they deserved, for I knew he had not yet chosen out his heir. They were all sons of his Palace women; of his queen’s children only my mother had lived past childhood. As a boy, before I knew my own getting, I had thought he would choose me; but you could not expect him to leave the land to an absent lord, and I wanted him to know I had no more thought of it.
After this I went to look for my mother. They told me she had gone to sacrifice. I asked if nobody knew where she was, for night was falling; but they said I should find her at sunup in the wood of Zeus. So I looked out a girl who showed me she had not forgotten me, and went to bed.
At morning I went up through the hillside woods, by the path above the stream. At first the woods were open, the clearings loud with birds; then the ancient forest grew high and met above. Grass-blades were thin and pale, and wet black oak leaves lay in the falls of years, roots arched among them like stiffened serpents. I threaded the winding path that is never trodden clear but never quite grows over, till I came to the holy place where Zeus struck down the oak tree. It had spread wide, before its death, and still there was open sky there. Between its roots was the stone where my father had left his tokens for me, when I came to manhood. My mother stood beside it.
I stepped forward smiling; then my arms fell down. She had on her priestly robes and her tall diadem worked with gold snakes; I saw she was purified for some holy rite, and not to be touched by the hand of man. Before I could speak, she motioned with her eyes. There were two priestesses standing in the grove, an old woman and a maid of thirteen or fourteen years. They had a covered basket such as sacred things are carried in; the crone was whispering to the maiden, who stared past her with great eyes at me.
My mother said, “Come, Theseus. This place belongs to Zeus, and is for men: we must go to another shrine.”
She turned towards a path that ran deep into the thicket. A night-bird’s feather seemed to brush me coldly. I said, “What is it, Mother?” although I knew. She answered, “This is not the place to speak in. Come.”
I followed her into the green shades; out of sight behind I heard the old woman and the girl murmuring, or stepping on twigs and leaves. Presently we came to a tall gray rock. There was a carving on it, old and worn, of a great open eye. I stood still, knowing that this was a place of the Goddess, forbidden to men. The path bent round beyond; but I turned my eyes from it and waited. The priestesses had sat down, just out of hearing, on a mossy stone. Even now my mother did not speak.
“Mother,” I said, “why are you bringing me before Her? Have I not toiled in Her lands and suffered, and lived with my life on my fingers’ ends? Is it not enough?”
“Hush,” she said. “You know what you have done.” She looked sidelong at the stone and the path beyond it, and drew me a little away from them into the wood, whispering, and moving softly. When she stood near, I saw I had grown an inch while I was in Crete. But I felt no bigger for it.
In Eleusis, when you had wrestled with the Year King and he was dead, you married the sacred Queen. But before your year was out you overthrew her, and set up the rule of men. In Athens, Medea the High Priestess fled for her life from you…”
“She tried to murder me!” I did not speak very loud, but in the quiet I seemed to be shouting. “The Queen of Eleusis plotted with her, that I should die by my own father’s hand. Did you send me to him for that? You are my mother!”
She pressed her hand to her head a moment, then said, I am a servant here. I speak as I am bidden.” She sighed deeply, with all her body. It was this great heaviness, more than her words, that chilled my blood. “And in Crete,” she said, “you took away Thrice-Holy Ariadne, Goddess on Earth, from the Mother’s sanctuary. Where is she now?”