"Mary Renault - Greece 1 - The King Must Die" - читать интересную книгу автора (Renault Mary)

know. It was an old gray slab; put there for an altar, I suppose, when Zeus first hurled his thunder. I had
never met anyone there, yet often there were fresh ashes, as if someone had been offering. Now they
were there again, looking almost warm. Suddenly I wondered if it was my mother who came. Perhaps
she had had some omen she meant to tell me of. I turned to her, feeling gooseflesh on my arms.

"Theseus," she said. Her voice sounded hoarse, and I looked at her surprised. She blinked, and I saw
her eyes were wet. "Do not be angry with me; it is no choice of mine. I swore your father the oath gods
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dare not break; or I would not do it. I promised him by the River, and the Daughters of Night, not to tell
you who you are, unless by yourself you could lift this stone."

For a moment my heart leaped up; royal priestesses do not take such vows at the bidding of base-born
men. Then I looked again, and saw why she had wept.

She swallowed so hard that I heard it. "The proofs he left for you are buried there. He said I should try
you at sixteen, but I saw it was too soon. But now I must." Her tears ran down, and she wiped her face
with her hands. Presently I said, "Very well, Mother. But sit over there, and do not watch me."

She went away, and I stripped off my arm-rings. They were all I had on above the belt; I went bare in
nearly all weather, to keep hard. But, I thought, much good that had done me.

I crouched by the stone, and dug with my hands to find the lower edge. Then I loosened it round,
scraping like a dog the earth away, hoping to find it thinner at the other end. But it was thicker there. So I
went back, and straddled it, and hooked my fingers under it, and pulled. I could not even stir it.

I stopped, panting and beaten, like the half-broke horse who still finds the chariot tied behind him. I had
been beaten before I had begun. It was a task for a youth like Maleus, as big as a bear; or for Herakles,
Zeus-begot in a threefold night. It was a task for a god's son; and now I saw it all. "It must be with the
gods as with men; a son may be lawful, but take all after the mother's side. My veins have only one part
ichor to nine parts blood; this is the touchstone of the god, and the god rejects me." I looked back on all
I had endured and dared; it had gone for nothing from the beginning, and my mother had wept for shame.

It put me in a rage. I seized the stone and worried at it, more like a beast than a man, feeling my hands
bleed and my sinews cracking. I had forgotten even my mother, till I heard the sound of her skirt and her
running feet, and her voice crying, "Stop!"

I turned to her with my face dripping sweat. I was so beside myself that I shouted at her, as if she had
been a peasant, "I told you to stay away!"

"Are you mad, Theseus?" she said. "You will kill yourself."

"Why not?" I said.

She cried, "I knew how it would be!" and pressed her hand to her brow. I did not speak; I could almost
have hated her. She said, "He should have trusted me. Yes, even though I was young." Then she saw me
staring and waiting, and closed her mouth with two fingers. I turned to walk off, and cried out with pain; I