“I left her on Naxos, at the island shrine. Do you know the rite there, Mother? Do you know how the Wine King dies? She took to it like a fish to the sea, though she had been reared softly, knowing nothing of such things. There is rotten blood in the House of Minos. I will leave my kingdom better stock, when I come to breed.”
I felt the great carved eye upon the rock boring my back, and turned to face it. It stared back, a dry eye of stone. Then I heard a sound, and saw the eyes of my mother weeping.
I stretched out my hands; but she stepped back, one arm waving me off, the other hiding her face.
After a while I said, “You taught me a kinder Goddess, when I was a child.”
“You were Hers then,” she said. The eye stared out beyond me. I turned, and saw the two priestesses watching. All the wood seemed eyes.
She turned to the stone, and made a curving sign. Then she leaned down and searched the earth, and rose with both hands full. One held a sprouting acorn, the other dead leaves that were going back to mold again. She set them down, and took my arm signing for silence, and led me off a little way. Peering through the trees I saw fox-cubs playing, soft pretty things. Near them on the ground, half eaten, was a young dead hare. My mother turned back towards the stone. The hairs on my arms rose up with gooseflesh, and stirred in the faint airs of the wood.
I said, “Then what must I offer Her?”
“Her altar is within Her children. She takes Her due.”
“Poseidon is my birth-god,” I said; “Apollo made me a man, and Zeus a king. There is not much woman in me.”
She answered, “Apollo, who understands all mysteries, says also, ‘Nothing too much.’ He is knowledge, Theseus; but She is what he knows.”
“If prayers cannot move Her, why have you brought me here?”
She sighed and said, “All gods are moved by the appointed sacrifice.” She pointed to the path that led beyond the rock. “The Shore Folk say that before the gods made their fathers from sown pebbles, this was a shrine of the earth-born Titans, who ran upon their hands and fought with the trunks of trees.”
I would have spoken, though I had nothing to say, only to call her back to what I knew; she had gone into deep waters, while I was away. But the seer and the priestess wrapped her round; she went on to the staring rock, and I followed dumbly. The two priestesses had risen and came after.
At the rock she said, “When we have passed the Gate, say nothing, whatever you hear or see. No man may speak here. A sacrifice will be given you. Offer it in silence. Above all, that which is hidden do not uncover. The Dark Mother does not show Herself to men.”
Beyond the rock the path went down into a gully, the deep bed of an old stream. Above the steep sides, trees met; the shadows were green and watery; the stones seemed dry till one trod in a hidden pool or heard a secret trickle. The rocks narrowed; there was a rope across, tied in a curious knot. My mother pulled it somewhere, and it fell apart. As we passed it, she pressed a finger to her lips.
Our feet slipped ankle-deep in water, the cleft sides stood three-man-high above our heads. Then they opened; there was a round rock-walled space, with trees growing in its sides. In the far wall, a little way up, there was a cave. The stream ran out from it, murmuring and chuckling; and mossy, low steps ran up, towards the dark within.
My mother pointed away, to a space between two boulders. I went there, my backbone feeling cold; but there was only a wild pig tethered. I dragged him out; by a slab below the steps the old priestess stood with a cleaver. There was black blood upon the stone. The boar snorted and tugged; the thought of his screaming froze me. I used all my strength, and clove his neck to the windpipe. His breath hissed, mingled with blood which ran into the earth. He died; and I saw in the mouth of the cave the three faces waiting: the green maiden, the woman, the crone. My mother beckoned.
It was dark in the cave. Further on, it sloped downwards into blackness. The stream, scouring one side, had smoothed itself a channel stained yellow and red. Baskets stood on the floor, of grain, of shrivelled roots and leaves; some were covered over. On the shadowy walls dim things were hanging: cloths or robes, or sacks of worked leather. On the other side of the stream, behind a jutting rock which cut off the light, was a curtain of kidskin hung over a wooden frame. A stone slab showed under it, like the foot of an altar.
They began the rites of appeasement. I was marked with the dead boar’s blood, then washed with water from the stream; my head by the crone, my right hand by my mother. Then the maid came to wash my left. She was dark and slight, a girl of the Shore Folk with eyes like forest water, shy and unguarded. They gazed at me as she came up, gangling as a hound-pup and as tenderly made. In this awesome place I had forgotten my deeds and my fame. But this girl remembered.
I let my hand fall. She paused; then took it timidly in hers to hold it for the washing. Her brow flushed, then her face and her breast. But she kept her eyes down, and put away her pitcher neatly.
The rites were long. The women passed and repassed the screened-off altar. Things were brought out and censed and sprinkled, taken back and hidden. I watched my mother, thinking how I had seen her year after year since boyhood, splendidly robed, her jewelled skirts clashing and swinging, making the harvest sacrifice upon the threshing floor in the bright sunlight; and all the while these secrets in her heart.
Fire crackled behind the curtain; there was a smell of burning gums and leaves. The pungent smoke itched my nose and throat. Where I had been in awe, I began to weary. The maiden passed behind the screen and I watched for her returning, thinking of her young coltish thighs and soft breasts. She came; and by chance or because she could not help it, her eyes met mine. My mother was not looking; I smiled, and moved my lips in a kiss. She looked down confused; and not watching where she went, brushed the screen with her shoulder. It tottered and fell down.
In the bull ring and out, I had lived hard that last year, with my life hanging on a quick eye. I had looked before I knew.
The Goddess sat on the altar, in a little throne of painted wood. But she herself was stone. She was round and dimpled, both a woman and a stone. Your two hands could have spanned her round. Waist she had none, being great with child; her small arms were folded between her great belly and heavy breasts, her huge thighs tapered to tiny feet. She was unpainted, unclothed, unjewelled; a small round gray stone. There was no face to see; it was bowed upon her breasts, showing only rough-carved curls. Yet I shivered and sweated; she was so old, so old. Zeus’s oak grove seemed like spring shoots beside her. Earth might have fashioned her from itself, before man’s hands could carve.
My mother and the crone had run at the screen and put it up again. The old woman stood making the signs against evil. The girl was pressed against the far wall of the cave, her eyes fixed and staring, her knuckles against her mouth, standing in the stream. The red mud of its channel stained her feet like blood. I dared not speak in the holy place. I looked my pity. But she stood stiffly and did not see.
At last my mother came out from behind the curtain, white in the face, with stains of ashes on her forehead. She beckoned me, and walked down the steps below. I followed silently. Over my shoulder I saw the two priestesses were together no longer. The old woman was near, keeping close for comfort. The girl was alone, a long way behind.
We passed the rock with the eye, and came out into unhallowed ground. My mother sat upon a rock, and bowed down her face in her hands. I thought she wept; but she said, “It is nothing, it will pass,” and I saw it was a faintness on her. Presently she sat up. While I waited I had looked out for the girl. “Where is she, Mother?” I asked. “What will become of her?”