The Bull from the Sea by Mary Renault Read Free Book Online

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?”
    “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.