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

Still, it was a great victory feast, for young Meleager and the long-legged huntress he shared the prize with; the grief was all to come. But the faces round the board grow dim to me, and I see, when I look back, Pirithoos everywhere.
    I have been the lover of many women, never of a man. It was the same with him, and our friendship did not change it. Yet if I picked up a spear or a lyre, mounted a chariot, whistled a dog or caught a woman’s eye, it was his eye I thought of. There was emulation mixed in our friendship, and even in our faith a kind of fear. From the day I met him, I would have trusted him with the woman of my heart, or my back in battle; and so would he have trusted me. But what he loved best in me, I myself had doubts of; and he could charm it like a bird out of the wood.
    I went out of my way home from Kalydon, westward to Thessaly, to be his father’s guest. We travelled light, cross-country, with the men he could spare from working home his ships; for speed, he said, but from the love of trouble as I could see. We had enough of it, from wolves and robbers and leopards and the mountain cold. Once, where the track clung to a steep gorge-side, a gale tore through it that made it sing like a great flute of stone; our shields were plucked and tugged by the hands of the wind-god, and would have sailed us off the face if we had not laid them down and filled them up with stones. One Lapith was lost that way.
    At last we were looking down upon the plains of Thessaly, where the rich land lies in broken stretches between long arms and shoulders of wooded hills. The Lapiths encamped beside a spring, and prayed to the god of its river; then they washed and combed themselves, shaved their upper lips, and trimmed their beards. They came out likely and proper men, and three parts Hellene. When they had signalled with smoke, the Palace Guard came out to meet us. Then first I saw the real Lapith wealth: not growing in the ground but running on it, with the thunder dear to Poseidon. This is the home of the great horses, that can carry a man.
    They were bloomed like new-shelled chestnuts, with manes as long as girls’; so fast and strong, I almost believed Pirithoos when he said that at their mating time the black north wind of Thrace came rutting down through the passes to leap the mares.
    We rode them down to the river valley. There the stream flows brown under poplars and silver birches; the stark mountains are only glimpsed far off, through tender leaves. Dark forests furred all the foot-slopes; Pirithoos called them the Kentaur woods.
    Lapiths are great shipbuilders, being so rich in timber; they make the houses of it too, with carved lintels painted red. The Palace of Larissa stood on a hill by the river, in the midst of the greatest plain. There Pirithoos’ father met us at the gate. He greeted me most courteously, but was short and harsh with his son. Every time he went off roving, the old man saw him dead; when the fear was laid, the memory rankled. Above, in Pirithoos’ room, I saw the fresh bed and rich hangings, and everything kept sweet while he was gone.
    While I was there, Pirithoos showed me the Lapith riding-tricks: spearing a trophy at full gallop, snatching a ring from the ground; standing in the saddle, or shooting from it with the short bow they use. He could ride two horses standing, with a foot on each. His people swore that Zeus had taken on the likeness of a stallion to beget him. He had been riding great horses at an age when I was still standing on tiptoe to give them salt. I never had his style; but before I left, I could keep along with him more or less. A horse is not so hard to stay on, after the bulls; and sooner than give him the best of it, I would have broken my neck.
    Once his father took me aside, and talked to me of kingcraft. We spoke of our laws and judgments and such things; and presently he asked me if I could not make Pirithoos put his mind to them: “For he is a boy no more;