John Powys - Atlantis

He had always tried to think of himself as born to grow into a mysterious prophet, and the notion of such a prophet having a love-affair with some dedicated female was peculiarly appealing to him. Nor at this moment as the echoes of Enorches’ voice died away among the rocks and caves of his native island, did it seem a negligible stroke of fate on his behalf — perhaps showing the hand of Atropos herself, to whom he had been of some service — that the female to be associated with his career should be the youthful sister of his faithful old friend, Tis.

In any case the Spinners of our human destiny did not give Nisos at this moment any further time for romantic thoughts about the youthful Eione with her homely face and her exquisite limbs, for he was called to the king’s side by an imperative summons.

He obeyed with alacrity; and he found at once as he placed his treasure-bearing sack at the feet of the two protagonists that the transaction had been, with satisfaction to them both, brought to a successful conclusion.

Odysseus was obviously in the particular mood into which he never rose or sank except when things fell out almost exactly as he had hoped, and yet without any exhausting effort on his part. His great square head seemed more like a fleshless skull now that he’d got what he wanted than when he was still fighting for it. His chin was so relaxed and at ease that his beard had the look of the bowsprit of a vessel that has reached a halcyon sea of undisturbed calm, with the Sirens in the form of friendly birds clinging contentedly to the rigging.

As for Zeuks, he turned his head slowly towards Odysseus, then slowly towards the Priest of Orpheus who had now rushed between them, shooting himself down from the lichen-covered rostrum of his eloquence like a fleshly arrow from an hieratic bow.

“Eros!” cried Zeuks with the inconceivable gusto of a guest at a delicious private banquet who has just tasted what to him is the renewal of a long series of forgotten delights, enjoyed long ago and far away. “Eros! Why it’s wonderful to realize at last that we can freely embrace our divine boy as a grown-up independent Deity, acting on his own without any woman’s help!” And as if to prove his delight Zeuks started singing:

“Ha! Ha! Ha!

Hee! Hee! Hee!

Smell, taste, listen!

Touch and see!

Touch, see, listen!

Taste every juice!

Embrace Aidoneus!

And you won’t fear Zeus!”

Nisos felt such a burning atmospheric fire-ball of protection whirling round his head from Zeuks’ deep-set humorous eyeholes that he actually dared to make a faint flicker of an ugly face of impudent defiance at the Priest of Orpheus: and when he turned to see how Odysseus was responding to the encounter between these two formidable ones he experienced an agreeable shock; for Odysseus was, as a matter of fact, making much the same sort of grimace as he was making himself, only it was made in accordance with the hero’s age, dignity, and heroic past. The old king indeed scrupled not to nod several times with his great massive head in the direction of Zeuks, as much as to say: “I am entirely of your opinion, O most excellent dealer in immortal horse-flesh! And as for this noisy rhetorician, he hides, as his type usually do, his only spadeful of good turf under bushels of mystical bad hay.”

Obviously aware that their presence, combined with the special quality of their unusual nature, had much to do with this unseemly contention, both the winged Pegasos and the black-maned ivory-coloured Arion now began to use all their animal powers, four legs, their muscular shoulders, their nervous haunches, their arching necks, even the flashing wings of the one and the sweeping mane of the other, to thrust their way into the very centre of the contest.

This put the torch to the pyre. The fury of the Priest of Orpheus broke all bounds. “ What? ” he shouted, projecting his carrion-crow physiognomy so close to the king’s impassive skull that it really did cross Nisos’ mind to wonder what would happen if the man’s vulturine beak were actually to snatch a gobbet of bleeding flesh from the throat beneath that proud ship’s bow.

“Have you been dreaming,” was what the Priest had the gall to mutter to the King, “in the decrepit vanity of your degenerate flesh to which in the solitude of its ancestral cave an outworn Olympian, herself a refugee in Ethiopia, has granted a retreat wherein your moribund body can decompose at leisure; have you, I say, been dreaming that the present-day inhabitants of Ithaca, only a few among whom can even remember the lies and tricks and multiple disguises and devices, for which in days before their parents were born, you won for a year or two some kind of a melodramatic notoriety, will stand by quiescent while you terminate Tyrian transactions with dung-heap pirates, and hand over treasures which properly belong to the people of this island to do with as they wish? Give me these two horses, this moment, you Zeuks, if that is the ridiculous appellation put on you by some former clown in mischievous blasphemy or cringing sycophancy towards the tottering Thunderer we call Zeus whose very thunderbolts have fallen once more into the hands of that one-eyed race of Cyclopean Giants from whom he originally stole them; yes! yes! give me these horses this moment!

“They shall remain in the sacred stables and in the consecrated meadows of the celebrants and hierophants of the Mysteries! They shall be made joyful by Eros, the Lord of Divine Lust, and shall be redeemed from the service of men by Dionysos the Lord of oblivious ecstasy!”

Thus speaking Enorches snatched at the bridle of Pegasos with one hand and at the bridle of Arion with the other, evidently hoping that the power of his personality, and the authority of his manner, and the occult magnetism of his touch would produce the required vibration of super-human force in sufficient accumulation to enable him to carry them off to those usurped purlieus of Athene’s shrine which he had now appropriated as his own. But the event turned out otherwise.

Never had Nisos felt prouder of the old hero than he did at that moment: never had he felt more utterly resolved that no insurrection against him by the House of Naubolides, even with his own dad, Krateros, and his own brother, the betrothed of Leipephile, as its leaders, should ever meddle with the old warrior’s authority!

In a flash, in the flickering of an eyelash, in the curve of a single ripple on the halcyon sea outside the bay, Odysseus had made use of the Club of Herakles as if it were a battering-ram and had administered to the Priest such a blow in his belly that the man went over in a perfect summersault, legs and arms in the air, and lost all his breath for a moment when he struck the ground. Next, with a series of rapid gestures and commands, so calmly and quietly made that he might have been seated in his hall at the end of the pillared corridor, Odysseus got Nisos and the treasure, still in its great sack, on the broad shoulders of Pegasos, and Zeuks himself, shaken by terrific amusement, lodged on the immortal creature’s rump, and finally, just as his enemy, having regained breath was scrambling to his feet, he got himself, the club in his hand, and within it the Moth and the Fly clinging desperately together, balanced somehow upon the black-maned Arion.

All would have been well and they would have escaped in royal style, leaving the Priest of the Mysteries confounded, if it had not been that at this moment of all moments the old everlasting competitive instinct was aroused in the black-maned horse, progeny of the semen of Poseidon when Demeter played the mare, an instinct to show that a horse born of the coupling of Land and Sea could be faster, though it never left the earth, than one with wings so wide that their shadows stretched further than any bow could shoot and whose parentage was the spilling of Gorgonian blood!