Authors: Colleen McCullough
Before the birth of my first son I had unearthed these curios for cleaning and polishing, sure my son would grow to be a man big enough to wear them. But as my sons continued to be born dead I sent them back to the treasure vaults to live in a darkness no blacker than my despair.
About five days before Thetis expected to be confined with our seventh child I took a lamp and trod the ragged stone steps leading into the palace’s bowels, threading my way through the passages until I came to the great wooden door which barred off the treasury. Why was I there? I asked myself, but could find no satisfactory answer. I opened the door to peer into the gloom and found instead a pool of golden light on the far side of the huge chamber. My own flame pinched out, I crept forward with my hand on my dagger. The way across was cluttered with urns and chests, coffers and stored sacred gear; I had to pick my path carefully.
As I drew nearer I heard the unmistakable sound of a woman weeping. Aresune my nurse was sitting on the floor cradling the golden helm which had belonged to Minos within her arms, its fine golden plumes streaming over her crinkled hand. She wept softly but bitterly, moaning to herself and breaking into the mourning song of Aigina, the island from which she and I originally came, kingdom of Aiakos. O Kore! Aresune was already weeping for my seventh son.
I could not leave her unconsoled, could not creep away and pretend I had never seen, never heard. When my mother had ordered her to give me her breast she had been a mature woman; she had reared me under my mother’s disinterested gaze; she had trailed through a dozen nations in my wake as faithful as my hound; and when I had conquered Thessalia I raised her high in my household. So I went closer, touched her very gently on the shoulder and begged her not to weep. Taking the helmet from her, I gathered her stiff old body close and held her, saying many silly things, trying to comfort her through my own suffering. At last she fell quiet, bony fingers plucking at my blouse.
‘Dear lord, why?’ she croaked. ‘Why do you let her do it?’
‘Why what? Her? Do it?’
‘The Queen,’ she said, hiccoughing.
Afterwards I realised that her grief had sent her a little mad; otherwise I could not have prised it out of her. Though she was dearer to me by far than my mother had been, she was always conscious of the difference in our stations. I gripped her so hard between my fingers that she writhed and whimpered.
‘What about the Queen? What does she do?’
‘Murders your sons.’
I rocked. ‘Thetis? My sons? What
is
this? Speak!’
Her frenzy dwindling, she stared at me in dawning horror as she grasped the fact that I knew nothing.
I shook her. ‘You had better go on, Aresune. How does my wife murder her sons? And why?
Why?
’
But she folded her lips one over the other and said nothing, eyes in the flame terrified. My dagger came out; I pressed its tip against her loose, slippery old skin.
‘Speak, woman, or by Almighty Zeus I swear that I will have your sight put out, your nails ripped from their beds – anything I need to do to unstopper your tongue! Speak, Aresune, speak!’
‘Peleus, she would curse me, and that is far worse than any torture,’ she quavered.
‘The curse would be evil. Evil curses rebound on the head of the one who casts them. Tell me, please.’
‘I was sure you knew and consented, lord. Maybe she is right – maybe immortality is preferable to life on earth, if there is no growing old.’
‘Thetis is mad,’ I said.
‘No, lord. She is a Goddess.’
‘She is not, Aresune, I would stake my life on it! Thetis is an ordinary mortal woman.’
Aresune looked unconvinced; I did not sway her much.
‘She has murdered all your sons, Peleus, that is all. With the best of intentions.’
‘How does she do it? Does she take some potion?’
‘No, dear lord. Simpler by far. When we put her on the childing stool she drives all the women from the room except me. Then she makes me put a pail of sea water under her. As soon as the head is born she guides it into the water and holds it there until there is no possibility that the child can draw breath.’
My fists closed, opened. ‘So that’s why they’re blue!’ I stood up. ‘Go back to her, Aresune, or she will miss you. I give you my oath as your King that I will never divulge who told me this. I will see she has no opportunity to do you harm. Watch her. When the labour begins, tell me immediately. Is that clear?’
She nodded, her tears gone and her terrible guilt drained away. Then she kissed my hands and pattered off.
I sat there without moving, both lamps foundered. Thetis had murdered my sons – and for
what?
Some crazed and impossible dream. Superstition. Fancy. She had deprived them of their right to be men, she had committed crimes so foul I wanted to go to her and run her through on my sword. But she still carried my seventh child within her body. The sword would have to wait. And vengeance belonged to the Gods of the New Religion.
On the fifth day after I had spoken to Aresune the old woman came running to find me, her hair streaming wild in the wind behind her. It was late afternoon and I had gone down to the horse paddocks to watch my stallions, for mating season was close and the horse masters wanted to give me the schedule of who would service whom.
I loped back to the palace with Aresune perched upon my neck, something of a steed myself.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked as I lowered her outside Thetis’s door.
‘Come in with you,’ I said.
She gasped, squealed. ‘Sire, sire! It is forbidden!’
‘So is murder,’ I said, and opened the door.
Birth is a women’s mystery, not to be profaned by any masculine presence. It is a world of earth owning no sky. When the New Religion overcame the Old, some things did not change; Mother Kubaba, the Great Goddess, still rules the affairs of women. Especially everything having to do with the growing of new human fruit – and the plucking of it, whether immature, at perfect ripeness or withered with age.
Thus when I entered no one saw me for a moment; I had the time to watch, to smell, to hear. The room stank of sweat and blood, other things foreign and appalling to a 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 son!
Thetis sat quietly, her face empty and still. But her eyes were not on me. They were focused upon my son, whom Aresune was cleaning, tying off the cord, wrapping in fresh white linen.
‘A son to delight your heart, Peleus!’ laughed Aresune. ‘The biggest, healthiest babe I have ever seen! I drew him out by his little right heel.’
I panicked. ‘His heel! His right heel, old woman! Is it broken? Is it deformed?’
She lifted the swathes of cloth to display one perfect heel – the left – and one swollen, bruised foot and ankle. ‘They are both intact, sire. The right one will heal and the marks fade.’
Thetis laughed, a weak and shadowed sound. ‘His right heel. So that was how he breathed earthly air. His foot came first… No wonder he tore at me so. Yes, the marks will fade, but that right heel will be his undoing. One day when he needs it firm and sinewy, it will remember the day of his birth and betray him.’
I ignored her, my arms outstretched. ‘Give him to me! Let me see him, Aresune! Heart of my hearts, core of my being, my son! My son!’
I informed the Court that I had a living son. The exultation, the joy! All Iolkos, all Thessalia had suffered with me through the years.
But after everyone had gone I sat upon my throne of pure white marble with my head between my hands, so weary I could not think. The voices gradually died away in the distance, and the darkest, loneliest webs of the night began a-spinning. A son. I had a living son, but I should have had seven living sons. My wife was a madwoman.
She entered the faintly illuminated chamber with her feet bare, dressed once more in the transparent, floating robe she had worn on Skyros. Face lined and old, she crossed the chill flagged floor slowly, her walk speaking of her body’s pain.
‘Peleus,’ she said from the bottom of the dais.
I had seen her through my hands, and took them now from my head, lifting it.
‘I am going back to Skyros, husband.’
‘Lykomedes won’t want you, wife.’
‘Then I will go somewhere I am wanted.’
‘Like Medea, in a chariot drawn by snakes?’
‘No. I shall ride upon the back of a dolphin.’
I never saw her again. At dawn Aresune came with two slaves and got me to my feet, put me into my bed. For one full circle of Phoibos’s endless journey around our world I slept without remembering one single dream, then woke remembering that I had a son. Up the stairs to the nursery, Hermes’s winged sandals on my feet, to find Aresune taking him from his wet nurse – a healthy young woman who had lost her own babe, the old woman chattered. Her name was Leukippe: the white mare.
My turn. I took him into my arms and found him a heavy weight. Not surprising in one who looked as if he was made from gold. Curling golden hair, golden skin, golden brows and lashes. The eyes which surveyed me levelly and without wandering were dark, but I fancied that when they acquired vision they would be some shade of gold.
‘What will you call him, sire?’ Aresune asked.
And that I didn’t know. He must have his own name, not someone else’s. But which name? I gazed at nose, cheeks, chin, forehead, eyes, and found them delicately formed, more in the mould of Thetis than me. His lips were his own, for he had none; a straight slit in his lower face, fiercely determined yet achingly sad, served him for a mouth.
‘Achilles,’ I said.
She nodded, approving. ‘Lipless. A good name for him, dearest lord.’ Then she sighed. ‘His mother prophesied. Will you send to Delphi?’
I shook my head. ‘No. My wife is mad, I take no credence in her predictions. But the Pythoness speaks true. I do not want to know what lies in wait for my son.’
NARRATED BY
Chiron
I had a favourite seat outside my cave, carved out of the rock by the Gods aeons before men came to Mount Pelion. It was on the very edge of the cliff, and many were the moments I spent sitting on it, a bear skin spread to shield my old bones from the hard caress of its stone, looking out over the land and sea like the king I never was.