The Last of the Wine (28 page)

He thrashed Sostias with more strength than I had known was in him, and locked him in the empty store by the stable. When night came, I asked to let him out. “No,” said my father. “We should have him slipping off in the dark. I am selling him to the mines tomorrow, as I warned him last time.”

I was too much taken aback to answer. Sostias had been with us since I could remember. No one we knew had ever sold a house-slave to Laureion, except for some gross brutishness. At length I said, “He’s not young, sir. In a silver mine he won’t live long.”—“That depends on what he is made of,” my father said.

Later, in the quiet of the night, I heard my mother pleading with him. He answered her angrily, and she fell silent. The night was hot and close; I lay tossing on my bed, thinking of the old days not long gone, when our little make-shifts had been a joke in which old Sostias had shared. My childhood too I remembered, and how he had hidden me from the Rhodian woman when she wanted to beat me. At last I could bear it no longer. I got softly up, and fetched some food from the larder. As I stole up to the outhouse door, I heard a strange fumbling noise within. I opened. Moonlight shining in through a small barred window showed me Sostias turning to stare. In his hands was a rope, which he had been throwing at the beam above.

There was a short painful scene, in which we both shed tears. I am not sure what I had intended at the outset; perhaps only to give him some supper, and say farewell to him. “Sostias,” I said, “if I forget to lock up after me, you know where to go. You may meet horsemen in the hills. Hide till you hear them talk. If they speak Doric, tell them what you’re doing and they’ll let you through. You can get work in Megara, or Thebes.” He knelt, and wept upon my hands. “Master, what will he do to you for this?”—“No matter; at least he can’t sell me to Laureion. Keep off the drink, now; and good luck.”

Next morning I dressed with some care, to put a good face on it, and waited about the house. My father was out already; he came back bringing the mine agent with him, which I had not bargained for. He opened the door in the presence of this man, who, being disappointed (for the scarcity of slaves was increasing), grumbled at his vain journey, and spoke insolently to my father. He scarcely replied; it was as if he did not hear. As the man left, I felt a cold sweat break out upon my palms.

“Go in, Mother,” I said. “I must speak with Father alone.” I think she had not guessed before what I had done. “Oh, Alexias!” she said. Then the blood warmed my heart, and its courage returned. “Go in, Mother,” I said; “alone is better.” She looked once more at me, and went.

When my father came in, he hung the outhouse key on the nail again. Then, without speaking, he turned towards me. I faced him and said, “Yes, sir, I am to blame. I went last night to bid Sostias goodbye, and I was careless, it seems.” The flesh of his face seemed to grow heavy and dull, and his eyes widened. “Careless! You impudent dog, you shall pay for this.” I said, “So I intend, sir,” and laid on the table the money I had ready. “For a man of his age, whom but for me you would have found hanged this morning, I think thirty is enough.” He stared at the silver, then shouted, “Do you dare to offer me my own? You have done now with playing the master here.”—“The City gave it to me,” I said, “for running at the Isthmus. Call it a gift to the gods.” He was still for a moment, then thrust at it with his hand, so that part of it fell, ringing and rolling on the floor-tiles. We stood unheeding it, looking in each other’s eyes.

He drew in his breath; I thought from his eyes he was going to lift his hand to me, or even to curse me, for he seemed beside himself. But a stillness fell on him instead. In this pause it was as if fear put out a hand, and pulled me by the hair; yet the face of fear was hidden.

He said, “Before you came of age, your uncle Strymon offered your stepmother the protection of his house. Why did you oppose it?” He had never called her my stepmother before. I felt a chill at it, beyond all reason, so that I must have grown pale; I saw his eyes fixed on my face. Then, remembering what a homecoming I had saved him from, I grew angry, and answered, “Because I thought it too soon to presume your death.” I was about to go on; but before I could open my mouth again, he thrust forth his head at me like a madman, and spat out, “Too soon! You had done that, both of you, soon enough!”

I stared at him, his meaning knocking at the doors of my mind, while my soul tried to close them. In the pause, there was a sound under the table. My father turned quickly and stooped down. There was a loud scream, as he dragged out little Charis. She must have been playing on the floor when he came in, and crept there out of the way. He shook her, and asked her what she meant by eavesdropping, as if she could have understood a word of what had passed. Terrified out of her senses, she struggled in his hands, and seeing me shrieked, “Lala! Lala!” straining towards me. “Don’t, Father,” I said. “You frighten her, let her go.”

Of a sudden he thrust her away, so that she fell at my feet. I picked her up, trying to quiet her while she sobbed and wailed. “Take her then,” he said, “since you claim her.” The child was crying in my ear; I could not believe I had heard him rightly. He strode forward, and seized each of us by the hair, holding our faces side by side; his lips showed his closed teeth as a dog’s do. “She is small,” he said, “for a child of three.”

I have seen evil in the world, and known horror, as any man must who has lived in times like these. But none of it has been to me what that moment was. Since then, the Gorgon’s head has never been a children’s tale to me. I felt the blood sink back upon my heart, and my limbs grow cold. It seemed that a voice of madness spoke in me, saying, “Destroy him, and this will cease to be.” I cannot tell what wickedness I might have done, but for the child. Prompted by a god, she did not let me forget her, but thrust her hot wet face into my neck, and clutched my hair. I moved my hand over her body to calm her, and came partly to myself. “Sir,” I said, “you have suffered much hardship; I think you are sick. You ought to rest, so I will leave you.”

I walked out into the courtyard with my sister in my arms. There I stood still, looking before me. It seemed that if I did not move, I could remain as stone, and know nothing. But this sleep was not permitted to me. The child broke it, speaking in my ear. She was saying that she wanted her mother.

I bent and set her on her feet. Calling the maid Kydilla, who was passing through, I told her to take the child in, and find her mother for her. For she had a right to what was hers. Then I walked out into the street.

At first, if I had any clear thought, it was only to find a place to be quiet in. But as I moved on through the City, seeking it in vain, the movement itself became needful to me; I walked faster and faster; I was like a man trying to leave his shadow behind. Presently passing through the Acharnian Gate I was out of the City. Then, the need pressing me more strongly, I girded my mantle up, and began to run.

I ran through the level plain between the City and Parnes. I did not go very fast; for I knew in myself I must run far, and my training worked in me though I did not regard it. The high wall of Parnes rose before me, pale with the summer drought; bleached grass and dark scrub and grey rock, standing against a hard dark sapphire sky. I reached the footslopes and ran between the olive fields, where poppies splashed the barley-stubble with blood. At last hearing a stream below me in a gulley, I felt thirst, and climbed down the rocks to drink. It was shady after the heat of the road, the water cool and fresh; I lingered there, when I should have hastened on. By this I learned that what I had been flying from was madness; for there it overtook me.

The form of my madness was this: that the sin I had been charged with, I was guilty of, at least in my soul. As in the terror of this thought I climbed up from the stream and began to run over the mountains, all sense fled from me, and it seemed I had committed it in my body also. Sometimes my mind would partly right itself, and I would throw off this last frenzy; yet I never really came into my wit. Who can doubt it was the judgment on my impiety, in destroying my father’s letter, and disobeying his command? For I could not see, what any man in his senses must have seen, that being beside himself he had been carried to an absurdity which he must perceive already; that a dozen of our acquaintance could bear witness to the time of Charis’s birth; that Strymon himself, who though mischievous was not a villain, would have testified for me in this at least. I only felt myself accursed by heaven and among men. So I hastened on, deeper into the hills and higher, into the wild country above the farms; climbing, and running where there was any place to run. My legs were torn by the heath and scrub, my feet bruised upon the stones. Once a troop of Spartans sighted me; but they took me for a runaway slave making for Megara, and rode past.

At last I came into the high places, where nothing is to be seen but dry stony tops and deep gorges, and far-off rock-shapes shuddering in the heat. I felt no hunger. Sometimes I felt thirst, but I was loth to stay and quench it, for I knew myself pursued; so that I began to look round for what hunted me, seeking to surprise it. The sunburnt mountain was the colour of a wolf’s pelt, and once I thought I saw one move. But it was the wind playing with a bush; it was not wolves that trailed me.

The sun shone brightly; but after the noontide, the wind blew small dark clouds across the sky, whose shadows hovered, and swooped like ravens down the slopes of the mountains. At first when I saw what followed me, I seemed to see only such a cloud as this, coming up behind. I had now run far in the summer heat, and climbed high; my breath came loudly, my legs began to fail, and my tongue was as dry as a dusty shoe. I saw water before me flowing down from a spring, and flinging myself on the earth drank as a beast does. As I lay there, I felt the cold that ran before the cloud; and looking up I saw them.

They were not in the cloud, but in the shadow of the cloud, running over the brush and the little stones towards me. Their faces and their feet were blue like the night; their garments were without substance, sometimes showing their dark limbs, sometimes the ground behind them. With a shout of horror I leaped to my feet, and fled; and now I knew that what I had taken only for the noise of my labouring breath, had been the hiss of the snakes that twined and darted in their hair. As I ran I prayed; but my prayer fell back like a spent arrow; I knew I was given to them for my sin, as Orestes was given, and no god would save me. Yet I ran, like the hunted wolf, who runs not in hope nor thought but because he is made so.

I do not know how long I ran. As they gained on me I began to hear their voices, like the cry of a mixed pack, some deep, some high; and the snakes hissing, back and forth. Then as I was running downhill, I heard one shout, “Now!” and reach out towards me. I leaped forward, and missing my footing rolled down the mountain-side. I think my senses left me. But in time level ground checked my falling. I got up, wondering that I could stand, for I had thought that all my bones were broken. I stood swaying on my feet; the hillside was dark behind me, and before me was something pale, on which the late sun was shining. Those, whom it is better always to call the Honoured Ones, I could not see any more. But I felt that I was dying; so perceiving that what stood before me was the shrine of a god, I went forward till I reached the steps before the precinct. Then my eyes blackened, and I fell.

I awoke to feel water on my face, and found an old man beside me. He wore on his white hair a garland of laurel; and, my senses coming back to me, I saw he was the priest of the shrine. At first I could not speak to him; but he gave me water to drink with wine in it; in a little I could sit up, and return his greeting. I looked over my shoulder the way I had come; but the Honoured Ones had withdrawn from me.

He saw me looking, and said, “You have run far; your clothes are torn, you are bruised and bleeding and dabbled with mire. Have you shed blood, and do you come for sanctuary? If so, come into the holy place; for Apollo cannot protect you outside.” And he bent to raise me. His hands were old, but dry and warm, and there was healing in them. I said, “I have shed no blood. Better I had shed my own; for my eyes have seen my heart, and its light is turned to darkness for ever.”—“There is a labyrinth,” said he, “in the heart of every man; and to each comes the day when he must reach the centre, and meet the Minotaur. But you have not profaned anything sacred to a god, or killed under a pledge of safety, or committed incest?” I shuddered, and said, “No.”—“Come, then, poor boy,” he said, and set me on my feet.

If he had not been strong for his years, he could not have brought me the little way to his house; for my knees failed under me as we went, and but for his arms I should have fallen. His wife being an old woman appeared before me, and helped him to lay me on a bed. She gave me soup to drink, and took away my garment; they washed me, and cleaned my wounds with wine and oil, and covered me with a mantle. It was like being a child again in my grandmother’s house. Last he gave me a hot spiced posset, with poppy in it; as soon as my wounds ceased smarting from the wine, I fell asleep.

I slept through the evening and the night, and on till almost noonday. Then I put on the mantle they had laid over me, and went out. I felt tired and sore; my limbs moved heavily, but they were sound. The sanctuary stood beside a cleft in the mountains, with a steep hill above it on which pine-trees grew. One could see a great way down the gorge, to the plain and the sea. It was the kind of place Apollo loves. But the beauty of the morning was strange to me, and I saw that it was good only for other men.

The priest, seeing me up, came down from the shrine, which was a small one, made of a silver-coloured stone. He brought me back to the house, and put food before me, not questioning me at all, but telling me how the shrine had been founded, by one to whom the god had appeared in that spot. When I had eaten, he asked if I would like to see the sanctuary; “for,” he said, “the image of the god is very beautiful; though this place is hard to come at, people journey a long way to see it, having been told of it by others. It is not as old as the shrine; indeed, I was here myself at its dedication. Pheidias made it, the statuary of Athens.”