The Bull From The Sea by Renault Mary

Author:Renault, Mary [Renault, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Historical Fiction

V

He flourished like spring flowers, and grew like a young poplar planted by a stream.

We found him a good wet-nurse; his mother had not much milk, and fretted for the wild hills and me. But she would come running in from the hunt, to pick him up and toss him upon her shoulder; he loved her strong hands, and could squeal for joy. Before he could walk, she would ride, full gallop holding him astride before her; he had no more fear of a horse than of his nurse's lap. But by the evening fire she would take him on her knee like any mother, and sing long northland songs to him in her own tongue.

I have fathered a good many sons, and there is no child of my body I have known of that I have not cared for. There were six or seven in the Palace. But it seemed in the nature of things that when I came to look at them their mothers said, "Quiet now and behave; here comes the King." The people were not long in seeing that this one had taken my heart.

But the brighter the light, the further seen. It shone too clearly: her love and mine, his excellence, and the hope of my heart. I had ruled now nine years in Athens, and I knew the people; I felt, as a pilot feels the set of the tide, that here they were not with me.

When I had loved here and there, they had taken it lightly; indeed it was their boast. I could have peopled, myself, another Attica, if all the tales had been true. It had made a good one, that I had bedded even the Lady of the Amazons and got her with child. But when time passed, and she lived my queen in all but name; when they saw that by my choice she would have had that too; then their face altered.

It was not in the small man's fear of change and newness that the danger lay. The real fear was old, deep-rooted in every Hellene. She had served the Goddess; and I had not tamed her. They too remembered Medea. They thought, and maybe rightly, that if I had not come she would have edged my father off his throne, and sacrificed him at the year's end as was done in the days of the Shore Folk who had the land before us, and brought the old religion back again.

It was close to the ground, among the peasants, that this rumor spread like bindweed. If I had foreseen it, I daresay I would not have named the boy Hippolytos; it is a Shore Folk custom, for the son to take his mother's name. But it would have been a public slight on her to change it; nor could I think of him by any other. The barons, if they had chosen, could have done much to check such tales. They knew her life, and could see the truth for themselves.

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