"Mary Renault - Greece 5 - Mask Of Apollo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Renault Mary)

years to go on thinking him great.

"Don't look at the Herald," he said to me at rehearsal. "You're not supposed to know what he means,
though any child would that was right in the head. Take all your cues from me."

He sent me out in front, to see the masks as the audience saw them. Climbing up high, above the seats of
honor, I was surprised to find how human they looked, and sad. While I was there he did his part as
Cassandra, god-mad with two torches. I knew it by heart, from hearing him practice. It was his best role,
everyone agrees. After that he changed masks, ready for Andromache. This is the play where they bring
her in from the sacked city on a cart piled up with loot, her child in her arms, just two more pieces of
plunder. A wonderful bit of theater. It never fails.
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I was still small enough to be used to women's arms; it was odd to feel, under the pleated dress I grasped
at, the hard chest of a man, holding each breath and playing it out with the phrases, the rib cage vibrant
like the box of a lyre. If one thinks, I suppose most men's sons would die of shame to hear their fathers
weep and lament in the voice of a woman. But as he never missed his exercises, I must have heard them
from the first day I drew breath: old men, young men, queens and booming tyrants, heroes, maidens and
kings. To me it was the right of a man to have seven voices; only women made do with one.

When the day came, I was still aggrieved there was no mask for me, though I had been told again and
again children did not use them. "Never mind," said my father, "the time will come." Then he pulled his
own mask down, the smiling face going into the solemn one. He was in the prologue as Athene.

Outside the parodos the cart was waiting, drawn by four oxen, with the gilded spoils of Troy. At last
came the call boy, and my father in the pale mask of the shorn-haired widow. He clambered up,
someone hoisted me after, he settled me on his knee, and the oxen started.

Out beyond the tall gateway was the great curve of the theater. I was used to the empty tiers. Now, filled
with faces, it seemed vast and unknown, murmuring and dangerous as the sea. My father's voice
whispered, "Don't look at the audience. You're scared of strangers. Think how they chopped up your
poor old granddad. Lean on me."

This is not how I myself would direct Astyanax. He is Hector's son; I like him alert and bold, thinking no
evil till the time. But my father knew his business too. Even the men were sighing as we came slowly on
into the orchestra; I could hear the little coos and cries of the women, floating on this deep bass.
Suddenly it took hold of me. My father and I, by ourselves, were doing this with fifteen thousand people.
We could carry them all to Troy with us, make them see us just as we chose to be. I can taste it still, that
first sip of power.

Then I felt their will reach out to me. It was like the lover's touch, which says, Be what I desire. All
power has its price. I clung to Andromache my mother and leaned upon her breast; but the hands I
answered to were Artemidoros the actor's. As they molded me like wax and sculptured us into one, I
knew the many-headed lover had caught him too; I felt it through both our skins. Yet I felt him innocent.
He did not sell, but gave freely, love for love.

The Herald came, with the news that I must die. I remembered I was not supposed to heed him; but I