John Powys - Atlantis

But no metaphysical war-cries and no mystical symbols can keep certain painful and jarring jolts and jerks from destroying our peace; and the splinter that now pierced our young friend’s ideal chain of reasoning was a teasing and academic kind of question following closely on the childish one he had just asked himself about the conscience of a fly compared with that of a whale.

And the point was this. How far were the gods, by nature, by tradition, by custom, by international law, and finally by the necessity of the case, exempt from the moral law that all human beings of every tribe in the world feel an instinctive imperative, wherever it comes from, to obey?

When for instance Zeus swallowed the great prophetess Metis for fear of a fatal rival, was he breaking the moral law? The result, our teachers say, was the birth of Athene from his head. But does that redeem his murder of Metis? Athene was not Metis. To be the daughter of a mother born out of the head of the person who swallowed her does not make you your mother. It makes you a woman with every reason to avenge your mother on the person who swallowed her.

Themis the Goddess of Order may have been forced to yield to the embraces of Zeus, but it was she who named her daughter Dike, “Just Retribution” and all his thunderings and lightnings cannot save the All-Father from the penalty of his crimes.

“By Aidoneus, no! When the time comes for me to be a Prophet the great test of my truth and the truth of what I prophesy can be only one thing, whether I do or do not make it clear that not one of the gods — no! not even the Son of Kronos himself — can escape from the Law of Retribution. Shall I really be what I so long to be when I return from this voyage? O Atropos, thou great little goddess of Fate, give me—” His thoughts, and, we are compelled to add, his prayer to Destiny too, were broken off short by seeing Zeuks rush to the stern of the ship and disappear down the ladder. “He is after Arsinöe! He is after my girl!”

Every muscle in Nisos’ tall slender frame grew stiff and tense. “I forgot her! I forgot her! I forgot her! And he had forgotten her. Hypnotized by the fathomless moon-stone of that unnatural eye in the hoof of the Flying Horse, and quivering with excitement, as indeed was Pegasos himself, in anticipation of the spreading of those tremendous wings and of the immortal creature’s leap upwards into the air, Nisos had not only forgotten his deliberate association of his newly formulated life-logos, spoudazo-terpsis, with Arsinöe rather than with Eione or Pontopereia; but he had completely lost the image — though it now came back with a rush and filled his whole consciousness — of the Trojan maid herself.

“God! What a ‘kakos’, what a cad I am!” But it was no use dancing a remorse dance, or calling upon Dionysos or Eros. What he had to do, if he had anything left in him but downcast aidos or pure “shame”, was to go after this incorrigible Zeuks and snatch Arsinöe away from him. But how could he, though he was the son of Odysseus and not of Krateros Naubolides, contend with the son of an immortal god, and that god none other than Arcadian Pan, whose passion for girls and obsession by girls amounted to an absolute mania?

“But you never know,” he told himself.

“For not only is ‘all fair in love and war’, but in all earthly struggles, whether between races, or persons, or things, it is Chance, sometimes at the beginning, sometimes in the middle, sometimes at the end, who changes the wind, and gathers the rain, and loses or saves the day.

“What a curious nature mine is!” Nisos said to himself, instinctively making use of all the analytical intelligence he had, and he had a good deal more than most young men, to put an end to the smarting sting of self-reproach. “Here I am shivering with intense interest to see Pegasos mount up from the deck of the ‘Teras’ and yet I feel if I am to keep any self-respect at all I ought to invent some excuse, any confounded excuse, such as a desire to use a bucket down below, or to get a weapon from the pile of them in the big cabin, or to ask one of those Libyans to lend me his pocket-knife, and, muttering this same invented excuse, I ought to throw an easy self-contained glance at Odysseus, and slip off past Akron.

“By the Gods, this is what I will do!” For some reason he thought at this moment of his dead pet sea-hawk whom he would never behold again; and he also thought — it must have been the idea of his own death that brought such things into his mind — of the old dead Dryad about whom nobody any more seemed to give the least thought. Then he moved towards Akron. But what in heaven’s name was the man doing?

The captain of the “Teras” was indeed acting in a drastic manner. He was slowly and deliberately divesting himself of his clothes, and with the help of Proros and Pontos he was tying round his waist a long rope. Nisos paused for a moment as the East Wind and the Moonlight isolated their intrepid skipper and held him in their crystal embrace, and then to the young man’s spell-bound gaze seemed to plunge with him into the water from a bow-sprit now as bare of ornament as the beard of Odysseus.

On their naked captain now boldly swimming, with the rope behind him passing, as he swam, through the hands of both Proros and Pontos, Nisos saw Odysseus fix a well-pleased and proudly satisfied look, a look that said: “Well done, faithful one!” But the old man was evidently so certain now of the result that he soon turned his gaze back to Pegasos, and to his silent dialogue with Nausikaa, who was now resting as securely on the divine horse’s back as she would soon be doing on her expectant throne in the land of her fathers. Nisos however kept his eyes steadily on that moon-lit swimmer, kept them there indeed till the “Teras”, quickly enough when the man had once climbed out of the water, was strongly and firmly moored to that human-shaped rock on the island of Wone, about fifteen yards inland, and about the same distance from those primeval Beings, who in their “Arima” of a forgotten Past could remember the days before Zeus and his thunderbolts, or the Titans and their mountains piled on mountains, had begun to disturb the world.

“I think, my Lord the King,” Nisos now began, edging himself forward between Pontos and Proros, “that I’ll just run down, if I may, and tell Zeuks that our ship is now safely moored.”

Odysseus however was too absorbed in his final farewell to Nausikaa to hear his youthful adherent’s courteous mutterings; and indeed it was not till Akron was back on the ship and had begun to dress and even to swallow a glass of wine that the casual words: “Just as you like, my son,” came from the old man’s lips.

As he went off Nisos told himself rather crossly and maliciously that at that moment the man’s beard looked as if it were the horn of a sea-unicorn, an appendage which, in the case of this singular marine beast, protrudes not from the creature’s forehead but from beneath its jaws. The absent-minded permission to be, as children say, “excused”, was however, as can be surmised, enough to send our friend hurrying down two ladders and past four oarsmen. “Suppose,” he said to himself, “Zeuks has taken her into Nausikaa’s cabin and is even now enjoying her in that sumptuous bed.”

Nisos knew so little about the actual details of sex-adjustment between boys and girls that he was apt to wander off into completely fanciful paths when he thought of such a thing as the ravishing of Arsinöe by Zeuks. “I shall simply,” he told himself, “hit him with all the strength I have, and if I can’t crack his skull I ought to be able to stun him. But perhaps that might excite Arsinöe’s sympathy. God! I don’t know!”