Nowadays, it is all Athenian style wherever you go; so once again you must match with your own weight, if you want to go far. But I still umpire at the Games of Poseidon, because it pleases the people. Sometimes I wonder who will umpire at my funeral games. I thought once it would be my son; but he is dead.
Soon, in Troizen, even men were coming to see me wrestle, and I took some on. Though they learned a few of my holds, I kept a few ahead, for one thought leads to another. And people began to say there was surely something between the god and me; for how could I keep it up against men so much bigger, unless Earth-Shaker put out a hand to pull them to the ground?
So, as I neared seventeen, I was in better content with myself, even though I had not grown beyond five feet and a half. It had not stood in my way with girls; and the children I got were fair and Hellene. Only one was small and dark; but so was the girl’s brother.
My birth month came, when I should be seventeen. And on the day of my birth, in the moon’s second quarter, my mother said to me alone, “Theseus, come with me; I have something to show you.”
My heart paused in its beating. A secret so long kept is like a lyre-string stretched near breaking, which a feather will sound, or a breath of air. Silence held me, as it had before the earthquake.
I went with her; and she led me through the postern, up the road to the hills. I walked half a pace behind her, going softly. The path skirted a gorge, where the mountain stream ran deep, green with ferns below and woods above; we crossed it by a great flat boulder, put there by giants before anyone remembers. And all the while I thought my mother looked quiet and sad, and my heart was chilled; this was not the countenance, I thought, of women whom gods have favored.
We turned up from the stream, and came into the holy Grove of Zeus. It had been old already on the hillside in the time of the Shore People who had the land before us. And even they can only say it has been there time out of mind.
It is so quiet there, you can hear an acorn dropping. Now it was spring; the leaves were tender on the great gnarled boughs; and about the trunks which two men’s arms together could hardly span, faint starry shade-flowers grew. Last year’s oak leaves smelled musty underfoot, soft and black, or brown and rustling. All the way we had not spoken, and now the snapping of a twig seemed loud.
In the midst of the wood was the most sacred spot, where Zeus had hurled his thunderbolt. The ancient oak it had blasted had almost rotted into the ground, it was so long ago. But though the huge limbs were perishing among the brambles, a stump like a tooth still stood, with a secret life in it; faint buds of green showed on the roots where they humped like knees above the earth. The spot is so sacred that no sapling has dared to grow there since Cloud-Gatherer struck it; through the hole in the green roof one can see the sea.
My mother walked on in her gold-clasped sandals, lifting her skirt in front to clear the slope. Fawn-spots of sun fell on her fine bronze hair, and on the thin shift under her bodice which showed the pink tips of her moving breasts. Her forehead was broad, her gray eyes widely set, with soft brows nearly meeting above her straight proud nose; the arch over the eye was her greatest beauty, and the smooth clear curve up from the eyelid. Like any priestess, she had a mouth for secrets; but it was serious, not sly like some one sees. Though I could never see it when people said I was like her, I was always glad if they said I had her eyes. Mine looked bluer because I was tanned, and my chin was my own, or else my father’s. But to me, this long time now, she was the priestess no one dares question, more than she was anything else. She seemed armored in the Goddess; so that if she were to tell me my father was Thyestes the lame stillman who brewed her bath-scent, or a swineherd from the back hills, it would not touch nor shame her, but only me.
She led me up to the sacred oak, and stopped; and I saw at her feet a stone.
I knew it. I had found it as a boy, when Dexios and I first went tiptoe to the oak wood, daring each other under the gaze of the trees; the dryads who live there stare harder into one’s back than anywhere else I know. It was an old gray slab; put there for an altar, I suppose, when Zeus first hurled his thunder. I had never met anyone there, yet often there were fresh ashes, as if someone had been offering. Now they were there again, looking almost warm. Suddenly I wondered if it was my mother who came. Perhaps she had had some omen she meant to tell me of. I turned to her, feeling gooseflesh on my arms.
“Theseus,” she said. Her voice sounded hoarse, and I looked at her surprised. She blinked, and I saw her eyes were wet. “Do not be angry with me; it is no choice of mine. I swore your father the oath gods dare not break; or I would not do it. I promised him by the River, and the Daughters of Night, not to tell you who you are, unless by yourself you could lift this stone.”
For a moment my heart leaped up; royal priestesses do not take such vows at the bidding of base-born men. Then I looked again, and saw why she had wept.
She swallowed so hard that I heard it. “The proofs he left for you are buried there. He said I should try you at sixteen, but I saw it was too soon. But now I must.” Her tears ran down, and she wiped her face with her hands.
Presently I said, “Very well, Mother. But sit over there, and do not watch me.”
She went away, and I stripped off my arm-rings. They were all I had on above the belt; I went bare in nearly all weather, to keep hard. But, I thought, much good that had done me.
I crouched by the stone, and dug with my hands to find the lower edge. Then I loosened it round, scraping like a dog the earth away, hoping to find it thinner at the other end. But it was thicker there. So I went back, and straddled it, and hooked my fingers under it, and pulled. I could not even stir it.
I stopped, panting and beaten, like the half-broke horse who still finds the chariot tied behind him. I had been beaten before I had begun. It was a task for a youth like Maleus, as big as a bear; or for Herakles, Zeus-begot in a threefold night. It was a task for a god’s son; and now I saw it all. “It must be with the gods as with men; a son may be lawful, but take all after the mother’s side. My veins have only one part ichor to nine parts blood; this is the touchstone of the god, and the god rejects me.” I looked back on all I had endured and dared; it had gone for nothing from the beginning, and my mother had wept for shame.
It put me in a rage. I seized the stone and worried at it, more like a beast than a man, feeling my hands bleed and my sinews cracking. I had forgotten even my mother, till I heard the sound of her skirt and her running feet, and her voice crying, “Stop!”
I turned to her with my face dripping sweat. I was so beside myself that I shouted at her, as if she had been a peasant, “I told you to stay away!”
“Are you mad, Theseus?” she said. “You will kill yourself.”
“Why not?” I said.
She cried, “I knew how it would be!” and pressed her hand to her brow. I did not speak; I could almost have hated her. She said, “He should have trusted me. Yes, even though I was young.” Then she saw me staring and waiting, and closed her mouth with two fingers. I turned to walk off, and cried out with pain; I had torn a back muscle, and it took me by surprise. She came over and felt it gently; but I looked away.
“Theseus, my son,” she said. Her gentleness almost undid me; I had to shut my teeth together. “Nothing forbids me to tell you this: it is not I who find you wanting. And I think I am fit to judge.” She was silent, looking out through the gap in the oak leaves at the blue sea. Then she said, “The Shore People were ignorant; they thought Ever-Living Zeus dies every year. So they could not worship the Mother rightly, as we Hellenes know. But at least they understood that some things are better left to women.” She paused a moment; but she saw I was only waiting for her to go away. So she went; and I threw myself upon the ground.