The Double Tongue Read Online Free Page A

to go back to my room and think about it. I did that, scurrying away like a mouse in a rickyard – not even a rat. When I got back to my room I walked up and down, up and down, arms crossed on my bosom, hands beating the upper arm, what they call with women beating your breast though not even the deepest grief or terror would make a woman do that, up and down, up and down. I went mad, I think. Crouched on my pallet bed I saw there was only one thing for it. I must escape somehow. I must get away – but where? I thought of my brother and determined that I must go in his direction – towards Sicily – something would happen, the gods would protect me.
    Now, at my age, I know a strange thing. I was going through the motions of escape. What I was doing was making a last utterly desperate appeal to my parents: see! I am even willing to face death to escape this fate! But at the same time the underside of my mind knew it was an appeal. The only honest determination of my mind was this: I will go towards Sicily and I will go as far as I can.
    I will not elaborate on the contrivances I made. It involved getting the boughten slave who thought she owed her son’s life to me to get me a boy’s tunic. The necessary companion of this foolish escapade – foolish if I did not admit it was an appeal, but sensible otherwise – was, of all creatures, Pittacus. The only people who saw us leave by way of the back court were slaves who were at once astonished and frightened. I was astride the ass in my tunic with a scarf draped over my legs and Pittacus did not much like my weight where it was, as a change from the mill to which he was so accustomed as to think it the only way of living. He had also, what was very natural, a tendency to turn in a circle if I was not keeping him straight, which I could only do by whacking on the turning hand with a stick. We had got no more than a hundred yards along the track above the beach when I heard the horn from the hill. The next thing I heard was a great belling of hounds and shouts of men, which confounded Pittacus who wanted to go back home. I had got him pointed towards Sicily when the clamour increased suddenly. A full-grown stag came round the corner of the path with three hounds hanging from him and the rest of the pack boiling round him and the men on horses only a few yards behind. Even at that moment I did not understand my peril and felt for the poor stag and its terror so that it turned aside and dragged the snarling hounds down the beach towards the water. The hounds had a go at Pittacus and when he felt a real bite he bucked hugely and threw me into the air. I fell on a hound or two which broke my fall but it was still heavy enough to knock me out.
    I came to, to feel my tunic tearing. Leptides and Ionides were either side of me, keeping the horses’ hoofs clear of me and whipping the hounds away. The anger and contempt in their eyes – and the laughter in the faces of the riders who now crowded round – were worse than the nips I had suffered from the hounds. I find it hard to believe at this distance of time, but it was indeed Leptides who chased the stag into the water and ordered the huntsman to cut its throat while Ionides wrapped his cloak and my scarf about me and set me before him on his horse. I did notice even then how he winced at the touch of my flesh and how, when he saw what I tried so desperately to conceal from him, his face twisted in disgust. But I was ignorant, weeping and sore. I had made my appeal sure enough and now had to abide the consequences of it. I passed the next few hours in a kind of deliberate insensibility. They took me back to the house, called for my mother, said things, everybody said things. At one point Leptides was whipping off our boughten slaves, the house slaves had too much sense to interfere. At last I was in my own room, wearing a dress just like a grown woman, my nips smarting where they had laid salve on them, my mother standing by the