My fear left me. I ceased to struggle, and my face broke water. I lay on the sea, as easy as the lost child the father finds on the mountain, and brings home in his arms. Once round the point, the current always sets for land again. But I should never have lived to remember it but for Poseidon, Shepherd of Ships.
In the hills’ shelter the sea was calm and the air gentle. Climbing to the torches I lost the last of the chill. I felt light and lucky, full of the god. Soon I saw light through apple leaves, and dancers whirling; there were pipes and singing and the thud of feet.
It was a little village feast, on a slope of orchards. The torches were fixed on poles around the floor, for the torch-dance was over. The men were doing the Dance of the Quails, with feathered masks and wings, wheeling and hobbling and dipping and giving quail-calls; the women stood round singing the song, clapping and tapping their feet. When I came out into the torchlight they broke off singing; and the tallest girl, the village beauty the men were whistling and calling to, cried out, “Here is the Kouros of Poseidon! Look at his hair all wet from the sea!” Then she laughed. But when I looked, I saw she was not mocking me.
After the dancing we ran away, and lay hidden close in the deep wet grass among the apple trees, stifling each other’s laughter when one of her suitors came crashing and roaring past. Afterwards she held me away from her; but it was only while she got out a windfall from under her back.
That was my first girl, and I had my first war not long after. The men of Hermione came north over the hills, and lifted thirty head of cattle. When I heard my uncles shouting to each other, and calling for their horses and their, arms, I slipped away and helped myself from the armory and the stable! I stole out by the postern, and joined them up on the hill road. Diokles thought it a good joke. It was the last he ever laughed at; one of the raiders speared him. When he was dead, I rode after the man who did it, and dragged him from his horse across the neck of mine, and killed him with my dagger. My grandfather had been angry at my going without leave; but he did not rebuke me after, saying it was only proper I should avenge Diokles, who had always been good to me. I had been so angry I could not even feel I was killing my first man; only that I wanted him dead, like a wolf or a boar. We got back all the cattle before nightfall, except for two which fell down a steep place on the mountain.
A few months after this, the time of King Minos’ tribute came round again.
The tax goods were gathering at the harbor: hides and oil, wool and copper and boarhound bitches in whelp. People looked sour; but I had other trouble. I knew this was when the small boys were taken out from the tall ones, and sent to the hills to hide. I made offerings to Poseidon, and Zeus, and the Mother, praying in secret to be spared this shame. But soon after, my grandfather said to me, “Theseus, when you are up in the mountains, if there are broken necks, or cattle stolen, I am telling you now you will be the first to answer for it. There is your warning.”
My heart reproached the thankless gods. “Must I go, sir? Surely it’s beneath the house, for me to hide away. They would never take me; they can’t think so meanly of us as that.” He looked at me testily. “They will think you are just the build of boy they like for the bull-dance; that and nothing more. Don’t talk when you know nothing.” I thought, “Well, that is blunt enough.”
“Who is King Minos,” I said, “to treat kings’ houses like a victor? Why do we pay him? Why not go to war?”
He tapped his fingers on his belt. “Come back later,” he said, “when I have less to do. Meanwhile, we pay Minos tribute because he commands the sea. If he stopped the tin-ships we could make no bronze, and should have to make swords of stone, like the first Earth Men. As for war, he has ships enough to bring five thousand men here in a day. Remember also that he keeps the seaways clear of pirates, who would cost us more than he does.”
“A tax is all very well,” I said. “But to take people, that is treating Hellenes like slaves.” “All the more reason to avoid it. In Corinth and Athens, likely boys were allowed to be seen; now other kingdoms know better. To talk of a war with Crete, as if it were a cattle raid! You try my patience. Behave yourself in the mountains. And next time I send for you, wash your face.”
All this was bitter to my new-found manhood. “We ought to hide some girls too,” I said. “Can we pick our own?” He gave me a hard look. “It’s a young dog that barks over his bone. You have leave to go.”
It was my bitter hour, when the big lads swaggered free in Troizen, while the small and slender, bear-led by two unwilling House Barons, were led away. Even though the cripples and the sickly stayed in Troizen too, we all felt disgraced for ever. Five days we were in the mountains, sleeping in a barn, hunting and climbing and fist-fighting and coursing hares on foot, a plague to our guardians, trying to prove to ourselves we were good for something. Someone got an eye pecked by a raven, and one or two of us, as we learned later, got sons or daughters; they are wild but willing, those girls in the back hills. Then someone rode out on muleback to say the Cretans had sailed for Tiryns, and we could come home.
Time passed, and I grew taller, but never overtook the others; and the wrestling court was a place of grief to me, for there were boys a year younger who could lift me off the ground. I no longer hoped to be seven feet tall; I wanted a foot even of six, and I was rising sixteen.
When there was dancing, my troubles always lifted; and I came to music through the dance. I loved the winter evenings in the Hall, when the lyre was passed about, and was glad when I began to be called on for my turn. On one such evening, a guest was there, a baron from Pylos. He sang well, and in compliment gave us the tale of Pelops, the founder hero of our line. It was not the same song as the one favored in Troizen, which was of Pelops’ chariot race for the hand of the Earth King’s daughter; how the King speared all her suitors as their chariots turned the end stone, till the trick with the waxen linchpin threw him first. This song was about Pelops’ youth: how Blue-Haired Poseidon loved him, and would warn him of the coming earthquake when he laid his ear to the ground; he was called Pelops, so said the song, from the earth-smear on his cheek.
I kept my thoughts to myself. This, then, was where my warning came from. Not a pledge straight from the god to me, but an inborn skill, like this man’s sweet voice who sang. It came to me in my mother’s blood.
Next day, still sick at heart, I went to look for my friends; but all the youths were wrestling. I stood beside the ground, seeing the white dust fly up to the poplar leaves; too proud to take a turn with the boys of my own weight, for those who were worth a match were all younger than I.
I watched them straining and grunting, heaving each other up and tossing each other down; and a thought came to me, how easily a man is thrown if something strikes the side of his foot just when his weight is coming on it. It puts him off balance and down he goes; it had happened to me with a wayside stone. I watched, the feet, and then the bodies, and thought about it.
Just then Maleus, a great shambling youth, called out, “Come on, Theseus, give me a match!” Then he bawled with laughter; not that he hated me, it was his way. I said, “Why not?” which made him slap his knees and roar. When we were closing, and he reached out to lift me, I moved and made him lean a little. Then I backheeled him. He went down like a boulder.
For some time, helped by the dust-cloud and by being quick, I threw the youths of Troizen with this one chip alone; till a day when I woke feeling lucky, and went for no reason down to the harbor. There was a small trader in from Egypt, buying hides and horns. Two little brown boys, as lithe as snakes, were scuffling naked on the deck. They were wrestling, not fighting; and though they were only half-taught children, I saw what they were up to. I got sweet figs and honey, and climbed aboard; and came away with half a dozen chips as good as my backheel, all fit to throw a heavier man. It was news to me in those days that the Egyptians know all about this matter. I thought it a portent straight from the god.