John Powys - Atlantis

When Okyrhöe in the Podandrikon’s incomparable skin, and with her bold hand on Odysseus’ shoulder, finally appeared, it was evident that neither her own loveliness nor the unique wonder wrapped round her had made the old hero forget his Heraklean club.

“We shall be off in a moment, pretty creature,” murmured the fly to the moth from the deep life-crack in that self-conscious weapon, “and then we’ll soon find out how far the great god Pan has been able to go with young Eione.”

“It’s all very well for you to say that,” replied the moth, “but I wish you hadn’t gone to sleep while the Sixth Pillar was talking to the club just now; for the Pillar had heard about our midwife’s sister having quarrelled with her Egeria, and being now with old Moros, at the home of Tis and Eione, and being on the point of having a child.”

“How you beautiful girls,” jeered the teasing fly, “do adore thinking of the results of love-making! What interests me is whether the great god Pan will be able to go to the limit with young Eione.”

The moth stared vaguely out of the belly of the club into the surrounding darkness. “Yes, I wonder,” she pondered, “whether Eione is old enough to have a child.”

It was a riderless Arion who met the four of them, that is to say the two women, Okyrhöe and Pontopereia, mounted between the two men, Zeuks and Odysseus, when they arrived at the palace-porch and dismounted from the wounded back of Pegasos at the entrance to the Corridor of the Pillars. There was still a little more of that weird before-dawn light called Lykophos to be got through ere the sun rose, for neither Pegasos’ wounded shoulder nor his heavily-trailing solitary wing had interfered with the speed of his stride; and the darkness had only just broken when they got home.

The faithful Tis, however, was awaiting them, though since he had fastened Arion by a rope long enough to permit the animal to graze on the weeds in the Slaves’ Burial-ground it was clear he was ready to wait patiently for some time. But it was from Arion’s obvious restlessness and excited expectancy, to be seen in every turn of his finely-moulded head and every arching of his proud though mutilated neck, that Tis, who knew the instincts of animals as well as Odysseus knew the instincts of men, had guessed that some mysterious vibration existing between these two semi-godlike creatures had already begun to inform Arion of the near arrival of Pegasos.

When they actually did meet, their re-encounter would have delighted Nisos, and he would have observed with relief that each of them had now ceased to leave on the ground any trail of blood-stained ichor. The immediate witnesses of the scene however were too taken up with their own affairs to notice the condition of the pair of animals who were led off by Tis. He led them quite quietly and naturally to a shed adjoining the one devoted to Babba.

Babba herself, whose private affairs were less absorbing than those of any of the persons dismounting from the back of Pegasos, instantaneously thrust her horns through the wooden partition separating the two horses from herself, and then, hurriedly withdrawing these finely curved objects from the neat apertures they had made, proceeded to arrange her beautifully flapping ears so as to catch every faintest overtone and undertone of the thoughts and feelings that these unusual visitors exchanged between themselves.

But satisfactory as it was to an amiable and easy-going cow like Babba to have the distraction, though she could only understand half of what she heard, of listening to something that did at least make her forget the passing discomfort of waiting with full udders the time of her milking, it was a mild satisfaction compared with the pleasure Okyrhöe derived from talking to Arsinöe. The woman listened to every word Arsinöe uttered, to every sigh Arsinöe sighed. Nor was there any shade of seduction, whether frightening or reassuring, whether cajoling or propitiating, that she did not practise on her sister-handmaid from Priam’s court.

She had Arsinöe just now entirely to herself, for Odysseus had gone off with Zeuks to present that unusual cattle-dealer, as a queer specimen of an island farmer, to their old family-nurse, Eurycleia. Time and place and circumstance therefore all played into Okyrhöe’s hands and she threw such a thrilling intensity into what she was doing that she would have taken Arsinöe completely by storm if the latter had not possessed her own secret loyalties: but even these were troubled and shaken; for the girl accepted without question — being all the while herself the hero’s child — the grotesque lie that Okyrhöe was a daughter of Hector. “You have the very look of his eyes!” Arsinöe cried. As a matter of fact even while she was uttering this ridiculous cry, and very largely because of the honest vehemence with which she uttered it, this impassioned carver of the features she had idealized from childhood, in complete ignorance of her blood-relationship to their possessor, not only revealed their outlines in her own face but imagined she found them where in reality there wasn’t a trace of them.

To meet a sister-member of that girlish band of devoted hero-worshippers from Ilium was in itself an event that brought with it almost unbearable emotion, but to meet a woman who called Hector father loosened, as we say, Arsinöe’s knees and melted her reserved heart. It was therefore in the sobs of her compatriot upon her beautiful bosom, a bosom no longer entirely concealed under the skin of the Podandrikon, a creature whose name, owing to its association with some mysterious oriental court-fashion, must always, so its wearer had explained to Zeuks as on their ride the night-wind whistled through it, be pronounced with the stress on the syllable “dand”, that Okyrhöe won her first victory in the palace of the king of Ithaca.

It must, however, be allowed that in the bold invader’s second encounter with the defenders of this pillared rock-cave the victory was on the other side. The old Eurycleia, who had looked after the wounds, and recognized the scars, and protected the eccentricities, and cured the manias, of three generations, saw through the mask worn so becomingly by this beautiful adventuress at the first glance.

To every point Okyrhöe brought forward the old lady opposed a plain blunt doubt of its essential veracity.

“My rule has always been,” she declared at one point, “to obtain the word of a prophet or a teacher known through the whole of Hellas for proof of a family’s claim to be connected with this or that hero of the days of our grandparents; and I have never myself accepted the word of a ghost. Odysseus undoubtedly does believe that he met the ghost of Teiresias beyond the brink of Okeanos and made the ghost drink of the blood of the animal he was sacrificing. Moreover I know that Odysseus feels sure that he himself and none other went down into the Underworld ruled over by Aidoneus the brother of Zeus and Poseidon. Indeed everyone who lives near our dear Odysseus has heard him tell stories about the ghosts of the famous heroes and heroines that he encountered in that Kingdom of the Dead.

“But I have seen so much of life in my time, young lady, and if you’ll let me cry, ‘Go away!’ or ‘erre! erre!’ to the bad omen, so much of death too, that when I hear people tell me that they are connected with the family of Peleus or Theseus or Kadmos or Priam my feeling is simply this: if you have this noble blood in your veins your friends may be the better for it and your enemies the worse for it, but for you yourself life will be the same to you as it is to the rest of us, and death will be no longer in coming, nor kinder in the way in which it comes, than it is to the rest of us; for as my grandmother used to say, and she goes back further than your precious Kadmos, ‘the nearer to the First Man the stronger the hand; the nearer to the Last Man the shrewder the head!’