John Powys - Atlantis

But Nemertes looked grave. Carefully brushing off from her clothes the smallest wisp of straw from the oats-bin and the least little wheat-bread crumb from the loaf she had just divided, she beckoned Nisos to her side. “Just a moment, my Lord Zeuks, if you don’t mind,” she said, and taking Nisos gently by the arm led him, avoiding the switching and quivering feathers of Pegasos’ extended wing, for the animal evidently realized that a move of some sort was in the air, to a shadowy recess behind her cooking-stove.

“You are a good and faithful servant to your king, or I couldn’t talk so straight to you,” she said in a low voice. “But you’re not the only loyal adherent in the world, any more than Odysseus is the only true and honest master. Now I beg you to follow me very carefully, my young friend, in what I’m going to say. My sons are too simple-minded and too uncultivated in their intellects to get the full force of what I want to say; but you have had a good education in the best school in this island even if you’ve never been on the main-land, and so I’ll talk to you as I would to my husband, the Builder of Towns, who went to a school in Crete. My place in life from now on, you must understand, is to serve Okyrhöe, who at the moment, though I shan’t be surprised if she eventually becomes the partner of a god, when no doubt she will herself release me from my service, who is, I say, at the moment the wife of this man Zenios who declares himself to be of the House of Kadmos.

“But the point, my dear Nisos, that I should find hard to make my sons understand is this. When at the death of my husband, the Builder of Towns, I undertook, largely for the sake of my sons, so that we could all continue together, the service of Okyrhöe, I swore to serve her faithfully and I swore it by the gods, especially by the great Themis, the goddess of Order and Justice.

“Now my three sons hate Okyrhöe; nor can I blame them for this. To Zenios they feel nothing at all; neither love nor hate, neither consideration nor contempt. They are, however, quite prepared to go on working for him, feeling that by so doing they are serving their mother. You follow what I mean? When I am faithful to Okyrhöe it is not for her sake, but the sake of the great goddess of Order and Justice and Right, by whom I swore. Now I will tell you something else. And this, Nisos my lad, is a serious warning, If my mistress bids me make up a bed for him over there”—and she nodded towards Zeuks—“at the entrance to the Chamber of the Mirror where she always sleeps herself, he would be wise to make some excuse. Let him tell her, for instance, that he never undresses and goes to bed before an early start like this. In fact he’d better tell her—”

She was interrupted by a wild, excited, high-pitched, youthful voice from the other end of that spacious kitchen; and at once they instinctively moved apart, and quite separately advanced to meet the girl, who was Pontopereia herself.

“I’ve come,” she was saying, and it was to every living person in that steamy, shadowy, fire-lit place that she addressed herself. “I’ve come to tell you that what I’ve been praying to the gods for a whole year might happen has now happened. The spirit of my father Teiresias has come upon me and the prophetic power of Teiresias has taken possession of me, and I feel flooded by what I know, and I feel afloat on what I understand, and I feel afire with what I have grasped, and if you don’t enter into my meaning and catch the spirit of my revelation I swear to you that something dreadful will happen, and happen soon, and happen to all of us! So listen! listen! listen! and don’t move, any of you here, till I’ve told you what I know!”

“Say what you’ve got to say, child; and say it quietly and say it quickly. We are all listening.”

These words were not spoken by Nemertes who had approached nearest to the excited young girl and had even laid a firm and calming hand on one of her gesticulating arms. They were spoken by Zeuks, who, coming alongside of Nemertes as a massive and sturdy barge might come alongside of a sailing-ship, laid his hand upon Nemertes’ shoulder and did so in such an affectionate and genial a way that no sensible or kindly person could possibly have taken offence; nor indeed could anyone, who in the position of Nisos and Nemertes’ three sons had been destined to be spectators of this encounter, have denied that the combined magnetism of two such friendly and massive personalities was the very thing to calm the girl’s excited nerves.

But was it the thing best calculated to bring to birth from this virgin frame a prophetic message from the world of spirits, or at any rate from a world beyond the reach of our normal sensations? Evidently to Nisos it was not, for he began pacing up and down with a frown of nervous apprehension. What he measured with his anxious steps was a limited stretch of the stone floor of that ancient chamber, a floor that may well have belonged, like the stone walls of the place, to some prehistoric god of silence, for there was a curious absence of every kind of echo to the human voice and of every kind of resonance from the human tread.

But as he paced nervously up and down, avoiding the now motionless feathers of Pegasos’ prostrate wing, he couldn’t help glancing now and again at the almost pathetic contrast between the illuminated beauty of Pontopereia’s face and the clumsy heaviness of her limbs and indeed of her whole body from the waist down.

“What is prompting me,” he thought, “to be so absurdly critical as to demand that a girl should be this or that before I can let myself fall in love with her, or think of her in my mind as my particular choice? Well! that’s how I am,” he concluded, “and there’s no use making a fuss about it! I only pray that that accurst Goat-foot has encountered Enorches and made such a Dionysian raid upon that scoundrel’s oldest wine that by this time he can’t distinguish a young virgin from an old midwife.”

Meanwhile Pontopereia was announcing in a tone whose prophetic intensity was no less assured, though it was calmer than when she first entered the kitchen, that if they wished their ride to be a success they must not wait till morning; no! not even if by morning they meant an hour before “Wolf-Light”. On the contrary they must start at once; and if they felt sleepy they must console themselves by thinking how sweet it would be to lay their heads on their own pillows when they got home!

As far as Nisos could judge from the acquiescent pose of Zeuks’ neat and pliant figure, for the face of the advocate of “Prokleesis” was turned towards Pontopereia, the man seemed prepared to do whatever she proposed; and it was a surprise to the boy when in the silence that followed her declaration Zeuks swung round and exchanged a rapid series of signals and significant signs with Pegasos, an exchange in which the horse’s trailing wing played less of a part than its quivering ears, and the man’s expressive hands less of a part than his thrust-out and sucked-in thick lips.

“Do you really think they’ll get Odysseus to agree to such a thing at such an hour?” Nemertes remarked to Nisos when Zeuks followed Pontopereia out of the kitchen. “But though I’m only an old woman in an old kitchen and no prophetess I would advise you, sonny, to slip off, now you have the chance, and see our Master, yes! see Zenios himself, whom you’re sure to find in his treasure-room at the bottom of that flight of stairs — you saw those stairs, didn’t you, laddie, as you went into the dining-hall? — for what I fancy your old king has forgotten, and what I’m certain this queer fellow Zeuks has forgotten, is that great sack of treasure you unloaded up there in the porch. It was treasure, wasn’t it? I saw, by the way you lifted it, how heavy it was; and I also saw, for we old women notice things like that, that when Zenios came back with Moros the first thing he did was to get the old man to help him trundle that sack of yours down those stairs. He has a queer sort of mind, has our master Zenios; and though I don’t suggest for a second that he intends to rob anyone of whatever that sack contains, I know him by this time well enough to know that if six hours or even four hours are allowed by destiny to pass over a neighbourhood where our Master and any precious treasure are to be found, at the end of those hours, and generally long before they end, the master of whom we are speaking and the treasure of which we are speaking will have been brought into physical contact as if by the use of a magnet.”