The Song of Troy by Colleen McCullough Read Free Book Online Page B

man. Labour had clearly progressed, for the house women were in the act of conducting Thetis from her bed to the childing stool while the midwives hovered, instructed, fussed. My wife was naked, her grotesquely swollen abdomen almost luminous with distension. Carefully they arranged her thighs on the hard wooden surface to either side of the wide gap in the stool’s seat designed to free the birth canal’s termination, the place where the baby’s head would appear and its body follow.
    A wooden bucket slopping water stood on the floor nearby, but none of the women spared it a glance because they had no idea what it was there for.
    They saw me and flew at me, faces outraged, thinking that the King had gone mad, determined to drive him out. I swung a blow at the closest which knocked her sprawling; the rest cowered back. Aresune was hunched over the bucket, muttering charms to ward off the Evil Eye, and did not move when I chased the women out and dropped the bar on the door.
    Thetis saw everything. Her face glistened with sweat and her eyes were black, but she controlled her fury.
    ‘Get out, Peleus,’ she said softly.
    For answer I shoved Aresune aside, walked to the pail of sea water, picked it up and tipped the water upon the floor. ‘No more murders, Thetis. This son is mine.’
    ‘Murder? Murder? Oh, you fool! I’ve killed no one! I am a Goddess! My sons are immortal!’
    I took her by the shoulders as she sat, bent over, atop the childing stool. ‘Your sons are dead, woman! They are doomed to be mindless shades because you offered them no chance to do deeds great enough to win the love and admiration of the Gods! No Elysian Fields, no heroic status, no place among the stars. You are not a Goddess! You are a mortal woman!’
    Her answer was a shrill scream of torment; her back arched and her hands gripped the stool’s wooden arms so strongly that their knuckles gleamed silver.
    Aresune came to life. ‘It is the moment!’ she cried. ‘He is about to be born!’
    ‘You will not have him, Peleus!’ growled Thetis.
    She began to force her legs together against all the instinct which drove her to open them wide. ‘I’ll crush his head to pulp!’ she snarled, then screamed, on and on and on. ‘Oh, Father! Father Nereus! He tears me apart!’
    The veins stood out on her brow in purple cords, tears rolled down her cheeks, and still she fought to close her legs. Though demented with pain, she strained every last fibre of will and brought her legs inexorably together, crossed them and twined them about each other to lock them in place.
    Aresune was down on the sopping floor, head beneath the stool; I heard her shriek, then whinny a chuckle. ‘Ai! Ai!’ she screeched. ‘Peleus, it is his foot! He comes breech, it is his foot!’ She crabbed out, got up and swung me round to face her with the strength of a young man in her ancient arm. ‘Do you want a living son?’ she asked.
    ‘Yes, yes!’
    ‘Then unlock her legs, sire. He is coming out feet first, his head is unharmed.’
    I knelt and put my left hand upon Thetis’s top knee, slid my right beneath it to grasp her other knee, and pulled my hands apart. Her bones creaked dangerously; she reared her head up and spat curses and spittle like a corrosive rain, her face – I swear it as I looked at her and she looked at me – her face gone to the scales and wedge of a snake. Her knees began to separate; I was too strong for her. And if that did not prove her mortality, what could?
    Aresune dived under my hands. I closed my eyes and hung on. Came a sharp, short sound, a convulsive gasp, and suddenly the room was filled with the wail of a living infant. My eyes flew open, I stared incredulously at Aresune, at the object she was holding head downward from one hand – a grisly, wet, slippery thing jerking and threshing and howling to the roof of the heavens – a thing with penis and scrotum bulging beneath the envelope of membrane. A son! I had a living