John Powys - Atlantis

Her face as she turned to go re-assumed that look of Cimmerian hopelessness which had never left it since the day when her companions who had been pointed out so implacably, one by one, by Eurycleia, as the girls who had given their maiden-heads to the Suitors, had met their death by hanging—“no clean death for such” Telemachus had declared with all a young man’s righteous ferocity — and no graving-tool were it as powerful as the talons of the Erinyes themselves could have done for a human face what that event once for all had done, long ago as it was now, to the face of the youngest niece of Dolon.

But no sooner had she commenced her retreat over that square mile of mystery called “Arima”, the boundary of which, as all the natives of Ithaca knew, Odysseus in his old age never cared to cross, than she was aware of a new sound, a sound entirely distinct from the wild and hoarse dialogue between those two pillars of cloud, to which she paid no more attention, perhaps less, than did the frogs in that haunted swamp.

But the sound she heard now was completely unusual and very startling in that ghostly place. It was the unmistakable cry of a wounded bird. She heard it long before the bird itself fell miserably to the ground at her feet and lay there helplessly fluttering. Quickly she bent down, seized it, and pressed it to her breast. This she did with no change of expression and with the same unmoved, unsmiling, unhappy, inscrutably fixed look.

But she knew what had happened, and she knew what bird this was; none other in fact than Heirax the Hawk, the messenger-friend of Nisos, the princely House-Helper. Heirax had been wounded in the air, either by an attack from some other bird, or by an arrow from a human bow, just as he was reaching the cliffs of Ithaca, and for the last few minutes he had been desperately flying forward in hectic jerks and feverish swoops, with the frantic hope of reaching the palace and of delivering to her friend Nisos the tremendous news he carried before loss of blood brought him down.

But his fatal day, or, as any native of the island would have put it, his predestined “Keer” had come. He felt himself falling, and impelled by the natural instinct of all dying creatures to seek a hiding-place, he deliberately swerved so as to fall in “Arima”. It was only when quite close to the ground that he realized that he was destined to fall at the feet of the one single person belonging to the palace who was no friend of his friend Nisos. Leipephile was his best girl-friend and in his thoughts Heirax always pronounced that simple creature’s name as if it had been Leip-filly; thus totally avoiding the proper stress with Its accent on the “peph” that flippant second syllable.

Heirax’s pronunciation made the name more dignified as well as more appealing, though the sound of the word thus uttered would have made Agelaos, the girl’s betrothed, want to treat him as alas! the hawk was going to be treated now.

Not for nothing had the Trojan girl always stayed awake while the rest of them, including the king’s old nurse, nodded in weariness under the eternal divagations of their “much-enduring” lord. “Tell me, Heirax,” whispered Arsinöe now: “what your news is and I will swear by any oath you choose that I will tell it to Nisos. If you tell me, I will carry you back to the palace where they have drugs that will strengthen your spirit, and ointments that will stop the blood, and potions that will heal the pain. But if you will not tell me …” And she pressed her knuckles against the bird’s throat.

And Heirax the hawk said to himself: “It matters nothing whether I tell or refuse to tell. The news is bound to spread anyway. The only loss will be to Nisos and me. I shall lose the pleasure of telling him and he will lose the pleasure of being told by me.” He shifted his position slightly against her left breast and opening his beak made the sounds that Nisos had taught him.

Nisos had been a good teacher for a Hawk, especially for one born on a small island and accustomed to rocks and shores and sands and caves and curving waves and tossing wisps of foam. So his words were clear as to their meaning; though they were ungrammatical and disconnected in their utterance.

“Zeus,” he whistled — and at each sound drops of blood oozed from the wound in his side—“thunder lost …

peak of Gargaros …

… alone … Hera on Olympos …

… alone …

Trojans rebuilding Troy in Italy …

… Rome … Seven Hills … Tartaros

broken loose …

Niobe weeps no more …

… Chaos comes back …

Persephone

… leaves Aidoneus …

Prometheus escapes …

… Cheiron free …

Helios conquers

Apollo …

… Atlas no longer

… the sky …

the Mysteries … blown far and wide …

… Typhon free …”

Here there was a long pause; and in the interval the Trojan girl could hear the hoarse voices of those two Pillars of Cloud raised in an absorbed argument with each other. Eurybia was maintaining that what had happened was the overthrow of the Olympians by the Titans while Echidna was arguing that what was convulsing time and rocking space, and upheaving the Abyss till it was tilted as high as the Zodiacal Signs, was nothing more or less than the victory of the Eternal Feminine whether divine or human or diabolic or angelic or bestial or saurian or reptilian or earthly or aquatic or ethereal or fiery, over the male.

Then Heirax whistled: “Take me to Nisos or leave me to die in Arima!” Ever since she had heard the Hawk’s astounding news an absolute change had approached Arsinöe’s tragic face. It had not taken possession of it. It had only come near it. But it had come so near it that from now on to the end of her days at uneven intervals and for uncertain reasons there began to burst forth or rend forth or tear forth, or jet forth, or explode forth, a flame of exultation so formidable that anyone might have imagined that some fiery particle of the lost lightning of Zeus had by some mad chance got entangled in her hair giving to this already dangerous emotion of hers a supernatural power.

“And now I beseech you,” Heirax implored her, opening and shutting his beak with a queer, shrill, scraping sound, “take me to …” But it was out of a dead throat that the name “Nisos” dissolved in the air; for without a word the girl had wrung the bird’s neck.

But Heirax did have, for all his sudden end, a sort of tributary memorial set up in the scoriac floor of the Trojan girl’s memory; for whenever afterwards she recalled her exultation at the image of Zeus robbed of his aerial weapons and compelled to look down from one of those peaks in Ida, so officially familiar to him as the divine Umpire, and to hear news therefrom, without the power to interfere, of the rising of a new Troy on those Seven Italian Hills, she always felt herself lightly toying, as in her heart she derided the Fathers of Gods and Men, with the swaying neck and dangling head of that small enemy of Ilium, so limp in her hands.

But she didn’t toss that lump of blood-wet feathers either into Eurybia’s swamp or Echidna’s slaughter-cave. She carried it back to the feet of her tree-carved image of Hector and there as she curled it up, claws against beak and wings against belly, she murmured to it aloud: “I don’t fancy the worms of Arima will bother with you : but you’ll be eaten for all that! In this little matter, the friends of great Hector and the enemies of great Hector are the same. Eaten of worms are we all when we come to it: but at least we give birth to our own worms and are devoured by what we ourselves have engendered.” It may have been that some dim little-girl memory of the funeral-rites of the man whose horse-hair-crest above the armour of Achilles seemed just then to stir in reciprocity, came into her mind at that moment; for as she stared at the bird on the ground and thought of the Son of Kronos on his Thunderless peak her triumphant mood relaxed a little. At any rate it relaxed enough to enable her to hear a thin little reedy voice like an infant’s pipe played in a subterranean gallery.