Lindsay Clarke - A Prince of Troy

‘If you dwell on Polymela’s death too long,’ he said, ‘you’ll go mad from grief. Eurytion’s death was an accident. In the confusion of the chase, it could have happened to anyone. And if your wife couldn’t live with the thought of it, you are not to blame. You must live your life, Peleus. You need air and light. How would it be if you and I took to the mountains again? If I challenged you to a hunting contest would you have the heart to rise to it?’

Thinking only that his friend meant well by him, Peleus seized the chance to get away from the pain of his blighted life. A hunting party was assembled. Taking spears and nets, and a belling pack of dogs, Peleus and Acastus set out at dawn for the high, forested crags of Mount Pelion. They hunted all day and at night they feasted under the stars. Relieved to be out there at altitude, in the uncomplicated world of male comradeship, Peleus drank too much of the heady wine they had brought, and fell into a stupor of bad dreams.

He woke in the damp chill of the early hours to find himself abandoned beside a burned-out fire, disarmed, and surrounded by a shaggy band of Centaur tribesmen who stank like their ponies and were arguing in their thick mountain speech over what to do with him. Some were for killing him there and then, but their leader – a young buck dressed in deerskins, with a bristling mane of chestnut hair – argued that there might be something to be learned from a man who had been cast out by the people of the city, and they decided to take him before their king. So Peleus was kicked to his feet and hustled upwards among steep falls of rock and scree, through gorse thickets and stands of oak and birch, across swiftly plunging cataracts, and on into a high gorge of the mountain that rang loud with falling water.

As the band approached with their prisoner, a group of women looked up from where they were beating skins against the flat stones of a stream and fell silent. The leader of the band climbed up a stairway of rocks and entered a cave half-way up a cliff-face. Kept waiting below, Peleus took in the stocky, untethered ponies that grazed a rough slope of grass. Goats stared at him from the rocks through black slotted eyes. He could see no sign of dwellings but patches of charred grass ringed with stones showed where fires were lit, and his nose was assailed by a pervasive smell of raw meat and rancid milk. Two children clad in goatskin smickets came to stand a few yards away. Their faces were stained with berry-juice. If he had moved suddenly, they would have shied like foals.

Eventually he was brought inside the cave where an old man with lank white hair, and shoulders gnarled and dark as olive wood, reclined on a pallet of leaves and deeply piled fresh grass. The air of the cave was made fragrant by the many bundles of medicinal herbs and simples hanging from its dry walls. The man gestured for Peleus to sit down beside him and silently offered him water from an earthenware jug. Then, wrinkling his eyes in a patient smile that seemed drawn from what felt like unfathomable depths of sadness, he spoke in the perfect, courtly accent of the Argive people. ‘Tell me your story.’

Peleus later told Odysseus that he regained his sanity in his time among the Centaurs, but the truth is that he was lucky to fall into their hands at a moment when their king, Cheiron, was gravely concerned for the survival of his tribe.

The Centaurs had always been a reclusive, aboriginal people, living their own rough mountain life remote from the city dwellers and the farmers of the plain. Cheiron himself was renowned for his wisdom and healing powers and had, for many years, run a wilderness school in the mountains to which many kings used to send their sons for initiation at an early age. Pirithous, King of the Lapith people on the coast, had attended that school when he was a boy and always cherished fond memories of King Cheiron and his half-wild Centaurs. For that reason he invited them to come as guests to his wedding feast, but that day someone made the mistake of giving them wine to drink. The wine, to which their heads were quite unused, quickly maddened them. When they began to molest the women at the feast, a bloody fight broke out in which many people were killed and injured. Since that terrible day the tribe of Centaurs had been regarded by the uninitiated as less than human. Those who survived the battle at the feast fled to the mountains where men hunted them down like animals for sport.

By the time Peleus was brought before Cheiron in his cave there were very few of his people left. So during the long hours when they first talked, the two men came to recognize each other as noble souls who had suffered unjustly. At that moment Peleus had no desire to return to the world, so he accepted the offer gladly when Cheiron suggested that he might heal his wounded mind by living a simple life among the Centaurs for a time.

The days of that life proved strenuous, and in the nights Peleus was visited by vivid, disturbing dreams which Cheiron taught him how to read. He felt healed too by the music of the Centaurs, which seemed filled with the strains of wind and wild water yet had a haunting enchantment of its own. Through initiation into Cheiron’s mysteries, Peleus rediscovered meaning in his world. And through his bond with Peleus, Cheiron began to hope that one day he might ensure the survival of his tribe by restoring good relations with the people of the cities below. So as well as friendship, the old man and the young man found hope in one another. That hope was strengthened one day when Peleus said that if he ever had a son, he would certainly send him to Cheiron for his education, and would encourage other princes to do the same.

‘But first you must have a wife,’ said Cheiron, and when he saw Pelion’s face darken at the memory of Polymela, the old man stretched out a mottled hand. ‘That dark time is past,’ he said quietly, ‘and a new life is opening for you. Several nights ago Sky-Father Zeus came to me in a dream and told me that it was time for my daughter to take a husband.’

Amazed to discover that Cheiron had a daughter, Peleus asked which one of the women of the tribe she might be. ‘Thetis has not lived among us for a long time,’ Cheiron answered. ‘She followed her mother’s ways and became a priestess of the cuttlefish cult among the shore people, who honour her as an immortal goddess. She has given herself as daughter to the sea-god Nereus, but Zeus wants her and her cult must accept him. She is a woman of great beauty – though she has sworn never to marry unless she marries a god. In my dream, however, Zeus said that any son born to Thetis would prove to be even more powerful than his father, so she must be given to a mortal man.’ Cheiron smiled. ‘That man is you, my friend – though you must win her first. And to do that, you must undergo her rites and enter into her mystery.’

As with all mysteries, the true nature of the shore women’s rites can be comprehended only by those who undergo them, so I can tell only what Odysseus told me of the account Peleus gave him of his first encounter with Thetis. It took place on a small island off the coast of Thessaly. Cheiron had advised him that his daughter was often carried across the strait on a dolphin’s back. If Peleus concealed himself among the rocks, Thetis might be caught sleeping at mid-day in a sea-cave on the strand.

Following his mentor’s instructions, Peleus crossed to the island, took cover behind a myrtle bush, and waited till the sun rose to its zenith. Then all his senses were ravished as he watched Thetis gliding towards the shore in the rainbow spume of spindrift blowing off the back of the dolphin she rode. Naked and glistening in the salt-light, she dismounted in the surf and waded ashore. He followed her at a distance, keeping out of sight, till she entered the narrow mouth of a sea-cave to shelter from the noonday sun.