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

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?”
    She answered with half her mind, being still weak and sick, “Nothing; she will die.”
    “She is young,” I said, “to lay hands upon herself.”
    My mother pressed her hand on her head as if it ached. “She will die, that is all. She comes from the Shore Folk; when they see their death they die. That is finished; it was her fate.”
    I felt her hand; it was warmer, and her face had some color back. So I said, “And what is mine?”
    She drew her brows together, and laid her fingers flat on her closed eyes. Then she put her hands on her lap and sat up straight. Her breathing grew deep and heavy, her eyes as marble were dead to mine. I waited alone.
    At last came a great sigh, such as the sick give sometimes, or men bleeding upon the field. Her eyes opened and knew me. But she moved her head as if its weight were too great to bear, and all she said was, “Go home and leave me. I must sleep.” I could not tell if the Sight had come to her, or if she could remember it. She lay just where she was, in the dry leaves of the wood, like a warrior after a long day’s battle or a slave all-in. I paused beside her, not liking to leave her in the wilds alone; but the old woman came up, and spread her mantle over her, and turned and looked at me. So then I went.
    As I walked down through the forest, I looked through the trees if I could see the maiden going. But I never saw her again.

V
    I T TOOK ME FIVE years to bring all Attica under one rule of law. I have seldom worked so hard. In war the battle-rage and the hope of glory sweep one on; in the bull ring there are the cheers and wagers, and the life of the team. This work was lonesome and slow, and patient as carving a statue from a flawed block one must humor, yet keep the shape of the god.
    Tribe by tribe and clan by clan I went to them, eating with their chiefs, hunting with their lordlings, hearing their assemblies. Sometimes, to draw a voice from the silent, I would go alone like a strayed traveller, and ask shelter from a fisherman, or at some stony mountain farm, sharing goat-cheese and hard bread and milling with them the small chaff of their day’s trouble, the skinflint landlord and the sick cow.
    Always, before I made myself known and worked my little wonder, I would ask for the altar of the ancestral god or goddess, and make an offering. It pleased my hosts and served my turn. These simple folk, shut in their fold of the hills, did not know the gods’ first names, nor that they were worshipped everywhere, but used some outlandish title from the old homeland; they seemed often to think, even, that their Zeus was theirs alone, and Zeus in the next valley was his enemy. And the mischief of all this was, it turned the local chief into a king. Of course he was the god’s high