Atlantis (17 page)

Odysseus quickly understood that the half had not been told him of the fantastic personality he was now to meet for the first time. Into his mind, and indeed into the mind of his youthful attendant too, as they now both looked round at the faces about
them, there entered the suspicion that this little crowd of men, women, and children, gathered on this level expanse of rough grass with lichen-covered rocks and a sprinkling of spring flowers, was anticipating an extremely dramatic scene, but was prepared to feel no particular sympathy for either side.

Evidently something beyond all ordinary events was going to happen, for the children kept whispering to one another, while the younger among them lifted puzzled and rather frightened eyes to the faces of their mothers; and indeed it was plain that what everybody expected was that their old, weak, deserted, and poverty-stricken king was now going to be completely
outmatched
, out-witted, and rendered helpless if not ridiculous, by this famous country-side clown whom none of their richest farmers could tame. “They are all thinking,” Nisos told
himself
, “that the old man must be in his dotage if he fancies he can cope with such a crazy rebel against all established authority as this weird creature Zeuks.

“And everybody here must feel,” the boy’s thoughts ran on, “that the moment the king really sinks into the helpless silliness of old age, the House of Naubolides will assert its claim to rule; and to rule not only Ithaca but all the neighbouring islands as well.”

For a moment, as he rested his heavy sack upon a rock and automatically jerked his body so that the knife in the leather belt which his mother had given him on the day he was seventeen might fall into the precise place most convenient for clutching it at any sudden necessity, he felt a shiver of family-pride rushing through him, and of thankfulness to the Fates, the oldest of whom he had so recently defended, that he was different from the farmers’ boys of his own age in this crowd whose eyes he could see were fixed on him, he hoped with envy, though in one case he fancied he caught a couple of them laughing at him.

But if the king’s armour-bearer, or more strictly his
currency-bearer
, for it was purely in preparation for a shrewd piece of trading that the boy carried that heavy sack, had his own private thoughts created by the general atmosphere around him, the old
hero was not without his own sharp-edged reactions to this highly-charged occasion. What he, from old experience of the moods of flexible-susceptible human beings, suddenly felt now was a complete surprise to himself. He felt that his own
encounter
with this queer personage who had the audacity, as well as the subtle cunning, to steal, by the aid of heaven knows what irresistible spell, the actual winged horse sprung from the blood of Medusa was not the sole cause of the crowd’s excitement.

He couldn’t help noticing that in place of staring eagerly and excitedly in the direction of the outbuildings and barns of the homestead called Agdos, the eyes of most of the people assembled here kept turning to the circuitous upland track by which he and Nisos had reached this flat expanse of level grass and evenly strewn gravel, just as if they expected a considerable rear-guard of well-armed soldiers to be following him!

“Surely they cannot,” he thought, “really imagine that I’ve got a body-guard of Ithacan warriors ready, like those who arose from the sowing of the dragon’s teeth, to fight to the death wherever I lead them!”

But he quickly gave this mental question a physical rebuff with his broad shoulders, sharp-projecting chin and massive skull; and was prepared as he used to be, day following day, twenty years ago, for whatever ambush of his enemies was to burst out from round the next corner.

Odysseus had full need to be thus prepared, for in another second an enmity greater than any searching tentacle of Scylla or any whirling suction of Charybdis revealed itself to them all.

From the very same path by which the old king and the boy Nisos had just reached this spot came a hurrying figure of whose identity neither of them had any doubt. It was Enorches, the priest of Orpheus!

A curious shudder of supernatural awe ran through that whole crowd. The younger children clung to their mothers’ hands and garments whilst the men bit their lips, tightened their belts, and looked anxiously at one another. Nobody turned to the
well-roofed
sheds of Agdos, whence the mocking clown who called
himself Zeuks was awaiting his turn on that typically Hellenic stage, which seemed, as was always happening in the midst of those eternally contesting islands and cities and races and cults and political parties, to have been called into existence, for some malicious purpose of its own, at that particular moment, by some invisible master of ceremonies.

At first glance Nisos simply could not resist the childish impulse of pure panic which caused him to heave up his sack once more on his shoulders and retreat before that advancing figure till he was a few paces to the rear of Odysseus, though he kept his head sufficiently to restrain himself from crouching, precious bundle and all, actually behind those broad shoulders.

As he watched Enorches advance straight towards them,
evidently
prepared to speak face to face with Ithaca’s king, it was only by an intense effort that he forced himself to do what even his encounter with the oldest and most powerful of the Fates had not enabled him to do, namely look the man in the face.

But the boy did manage to do this; and no action in all the years of his life was destined to be more momentous, and this purely in its effect upon himself, than his action in this case. And Nisos not only looked straight into Enorches’ face. He quite deliberately forced his mind into its fullest, clearest consciousness as he did so; though the effort he had to make to do it was an extreme one, almost as if he had to embrace a boy or a girl with whom he was in love but whose body was hung with glittering sharp-edged and even pointed ornaments that hurt him as he pressed them with his arms and hands and naked skin.

But what, beneath that dazzling sky and burning sun did he make out of the face of the Priest of Orpheus? Well! The dominant features of it were its eyes and mouth. Nisos felt as if the visage into which he was now looking lacked forehead, ears, cheeks, and nose, lacked everything in fact but eyes and mouth; eyes to seek out its prey, and mouth to swallow it when found.

In that blazing noon and because of something demoniacal about the whirlpool-like suction of that mouth, Nisos felt as if this appalling Being had no forehead or nose, or ears, or chin,
or even neck! Enorches was, he felt, literally all eyes and mouth, like certain fish, certain serpents, certain birds, and certain insects.

As he gazed in fascinated horror at this Priest of the Mysteries the creature moved—the boy could hardly think of the man as a human person—a few steps nearer to the old king. In making this move Enorches naturally came nearer to Nisos also, who felt such a shiver of terror, that, lugging his great sack along the ground, for having once faced that visage he couldn’t take his eyes off it, even to lift up his bundle, he found himself in a position whence his magnetized stare of terror inevitably included Odysseus also.

And then to his astonishment the old king, taking no more notice of Enorches than if he’d been an over-officious retainer in a crowded court, turned to him himself. “Don’t you think, Nisos Naubolides,” the old man said, “that it might be a good idea when we come back with the daughter of Teiresias to make use of this level expanse in place of the traditional “agora”? Do you get what I mean, my lad?

“It strikes me somehow as a freer and less formal place, and being further from the city and further away from the city-walls it seems to me to be less under the influence of conventional rules, and more likely to be friendly to new and daring schemes, such as my wish to sail Westward, beyond the Pillars of Herakles and the Atlas Mountains, over the unknown waves that now, as we hear, hide the sunken continent of Atlantis. What are you staring at, boy? What’s come over you? This is only the Orpheus fellow, you know, come to beg me no doubt not to begin giving away my treasures until he has had his share for the Mysteries.

“How did he find out, the rogue, about this madman Zeuks having ensorcerized Pegasos and Arion? Well—we needn’t ask
that.
These Priests find out everything. The winds and waves themselves whisper to them, and the babies in arms babble to them, of the intentions of destiny.

“But isn’t this an agreeable spot for a grand assembly? Isn’t this just the very sort of place where orators are moved to speak
freely and where true shepherds of the people can naturally draw inspiration out of the air? I was a fool, Nisos Naubolides, not to think of this place. I warrant it was the old associations of our “agora” up there stopped me from thinking sooner of a real grand appeal to our people. This will be the exactly right place for Teiresias’ daughter to invoke the Olympians and propitiate the Fates.

“I feel like speaking to them now, only there aren’t enough of them at the moment; and these, as you see, dear lad, are just the farmers’ families round here. But what a place to inspire
anyone
! Look at these men and women, so lusty and well-fed! And what handsome-coloured cloth they’re wearing! Do they weave these garments themselves nowadays do you suppose? How interested Penelope would be could she see how richly purplish in this noon-sun and under this cloudless sky gleams that excellent mingling of sepia and violet!

“And do you see how that noble Fir-tree up there stretches a horizontal branch from its very heart towards that other tree—I can’t quite make out what tree
it
is—down there against the blue water of the bay? O yes! And when I come to address the assembly here—I tell you, my boy, it’ll be like that very first assembly ever held in Ithaca, about which I used to hear from my mother before I was your age.

“Heavens! I’ll make them sit up. Hermes! But I’ll make them acclaim
you,
my dear lad, above your stupid brother, to rule in my place when I have hoisted sail. By Olympos yes! you shall look down past all these farmers in their richly-dyed cloth at that divine tree yearning to exchange its sap with that great pine; and as you see the sails of those fishing-boats on those blue waves you’ll think of your old king looking down through the water of an unknown sea at the sunken palaces of Atlantis!

“Yes! By the ‘aegis’ of the Son of Kronos which is now the ‘aegis’ of Pallas Athene! when once, with the help of Pegasos and Arion, we’ve got Teiresias’ daughter here, we will drag enough sail-cloth out of them to carry me to the shores of the unknown West! By the Olympians, yes! Why should this rustic
father of yours, why should this stupid brother of yours, not be forced to give up their place to you, my dear boy? It worked before in this island, that sort of change; and it can be brought about again. O! if I could only get all the men of Ithaca
assembled
here I would know how to persuade them! Haven’t I seen——”

He was interrupted by a wild rush of all the crowd round them towards the sheds and barns of the homestead “whose name”, as they had heard so often that day, “was Agdos”. Enorches himself followed the crowd, passing both Odysseus and Nisos without a word: and there, before them all, walking, each of them on his four legs, quietly, obediently, tamely, patiently, came the winged dark-skinned horse, Pegasos, and the much smaller whitish-grey horse, with a sweeping black mane, known far less widely through Argos and all the mainland, but known well in the islands nearest to Ithaca, under the name of Arion.

Yes, quietly, gently, obediently, those two imperishable and immortal creatures walked forth from their stable towards Odysseus; while Nisos, who soon had his great sack of treasures, heavy as a king’s ransom as they were, hoisted on his shoulders, opened his mouth and breathed in gasps while he awaited what would happen. And there, sometimes behind his immortal captives, and sometimes beside them, and sometimes even before them, was Zeuks himself!

Zeuks was a man of middle height according to ordinary human measurement; but among his other peculiarities he
possessed
an astonishingly natural power of appearing to be taller or shorter according to the convenience, as you might put it, of the particular occasion. It was as if the occasion itself became a sorcerer who called up, out of the abyss of the uncreated, exactly the right puppet-homunculus that the trick required.

Evidently what was required at this moment by the inevitable situation was to get these unusual creatures safely, quietly, and in docile subjection, into the immediate presence of the king of Ithaca. Meanwhile within that unclosable, unhealable,
impenetrable
, almost invisible crack, that extended down the whole
length of the Club of Herakles, an intense argument was going on between Myos the fly and Pyraust the moth.

They had not been caught asleep, these two members of the royal household of Ithaca. In fact they had both been awakened by the stir in every inhabited portion of the palace, even before Odysseus had to end his emotional talk with the old Dryad which was the chief cause of his being where he was now.

Tis had been the first to disturb them. He had gone earlier than usual to milk Babba, for he wanted to get the pail of fresh milk safely into the palace before he drove the cow to a fresh strip of pasture, well the other side of the haunted Arima, upon whose devilish soil nothing would have induced him to tread. Then Arsinöe had flicked and flapped with one of the last scraps of a particular Pelasgian veil that she had surreptitiously
extracted
from Eurycleia’s private treasure-box but took care to use before the old lady got up.

It was only after this event that she used a piece of the common stuff which the old nurse was wont to dole out for dealing with the dust which in both corridor and hall gathered with special heaviness owing to the nature of the rocky substances out of which Ithaca’s royal cave had been originally and primevally dug.