John Powys - Atlantis

“All the Achaian world will be waiting with eagerness, my Lord King,” she murmured, “to hear the result of this encounter between you and the Lady Nausikaa. We forget sometimes how quickly news travels in these modern days. It’s the quality of the sails the ships carry, I expect: O, and of course it’s also because there are so many more merchant-sailors nowadays! Merchants are the great news-carriers and scandal-bearers. No doubt they always have been. But we mustn’t forget all these modern improvements in the masts and sails and benches and keels of ships, and even in the sleeping-places below the benches.

“It is wonderful to think of all the improvements we have lived to see of which our fathers never dreamed! Yes, I have followed pretty closely the history of Phaiakia from merchant-sailors’ narratives of what has been going on there, for in the history of any country what you pick up from travelling merchants is always nearer the truth than the speeches of official rulers and their ambassadors.”

“It was at this point that the fly became convinced that if Okyrhöe went on for one single sentence more in this manner Odysseus would revolt against her influence. But the clever woman now made it manifest that she could practise a quite different strategy, and as soon as she began in this clear, definite, and concrete manner, to aim at convincing him, she had the king at her mercy.

“What I have been leading up to,” she now remarked in a most emphatic manner, “is this. I have been, as I tell you, O King, following rather carefully the events in Phaiakia; and I have noticed that when Alkinoos died his throne was occupied first by one, and then by another, of the favourite sons of the widowed queen. But both these sons died before their mother — at least that is what my merchant-sailors have told me; though I fully admit they may have had, in each case, their own peculiar business-reasons for lying — and so when finally the mother herself died the only surviving child of Alkinoos was Nausikaa.

“She married twice and both her husbands died childless, a situation that set going various shameful rumours among the people, rumours that Nausikaa poisoned them both with the hope of sailing for Ithaca when they were dead and being wedded to thyself! Of course you will know, O great King, much better than a mere stranger and traveller like myself, how to treat such ignoble tales: but you must at least remember in excuse for such tales that you have, as few heroes ever have, become a legend during your life-time, and since many of us in our youth have read — and have written too, I’ll be bound! — passionate love-lyrics about you and this daughter of Alkinoos, it is inevitable that when we hear of you two meeting again all manner of disturbingly romantic thoughts rush into our human-too-human heads!

“From a perfectly practical and sensible point of view the coming to Ithaca of this experienced and beautiful woman was indeed most cleverly planned. She too without any doubt has been collecting news from merchant-ships about Ithaca, just as I have about Phaiakia; and having found out that Penelope has been long dead and that you have never taken a second wife she naturally thinks of marrying you and of having those children by you which she clearly could not have by any other husband. It is a tragic and a touching hope; but I can imagine it proving a good deal of a nuisance and embarrassment to you.”

Neither the fly nor the moth as they listened to these words could see the effect upon the king of this treacherous warning, though they couldn’t help noticing how the beard of Odysseus kept giving curious little forward jerks. But then the king’s beard had for some time clearly been trying to isolate itself from the rest of his appearance. Apparently its desire was to become a sort of advanced Body-guard, which, if it were not propitiated, or, as the school-boy mates of Nisos would say, “sucked up to”, its owner would have to treat as an independent personality, or simply to cut it off.

As a matter of fact the old man’s imperviousness at this moment had no connection with these ambitions of his beard. It was in accord with his whole character that, while he accepted every material detail of what Okyrhöe suggested, he disregarded, or postponed for later consideration, the lady’s psychic interpretation of the same.

What did cross his mind at that moment was a definite regret that owing to his penuriousness, or to his poverty, or to a mixture of them both, he had for years contented himself with getting on without any more effective cook in his excavated cave of a kitchen than the family’s ancient Nurse Eurycleia, who though she knew well enough what to prepare for his own meals, and even better how to restrict the appetites of Arsinöe and Leipephile, would lack both the physical strength and the culinary experience to cook for a visitor like the Princess Nausikaa.

“ Nisos! ”

“I am here, my lord the King!”

“Run down this hill as fast as you ran up just now. Make it as clear as you can to Eurycleia what kind of guests we shall have tonight. Explain to her that Ajax will be as old as I am and probably as fussy about his food. I take it, lad, that if you start now you’ll get home before either of them have time to arrive, especially if our friend Zeuks, who’s such a babbler, is the one you’ve left with Ajax. You will have time to get there first, sonny, won’t you?”

Nisos didn’t look at the sky above the slope on which they had paused nor at the tops of the trees at the foot of the hill. He looked at his own sandals and he looked at his own hands. And then he said: “Yes, I think I can, my King. I’ll have a good try at it anyway.” And with one quick glance at Pontopereia he set off at top speed.

But while Nisos was running at top speed down the wooded slope between the “agora” and the palace, dodging sharp-edged rocks and thick clumps of impenetrable island-bushes, and squeezing his way between close-growing fir-trees whose lower branches were spiky and dead from lack of sun, and as he ran was being sexually and emotionally almost pulled in half; for his feelings were tugged at in one direction by what might be called the golden cord of Eione’s supple limbs and lovely gestures and in another direction by the silver cord of Pontopereia’s expressive face, the middle-aged Zeuks was guiding the senile Ajax through the deserted but still haunted region that was called “Arima”.

The heraldic master of ceremony from the land of Phaiakia would certainly have described our friend Zeuks as an egregious and unconscionable rogue; but it is certain that as this same Zeuks slowly and carefully — though chuckling very often as he did so over private quips of his own — escorted the old, bent, white-headed Ajax, by the nearest way he could think of, to the rock-hewn House of Odysseus, he had some startling shocks.

The nearest way that was familiar to Zeuks was the unfrequented path through that haunted region that from Time unknown had been, and to Time unknown would always be, called Arima, and which really seemed, now it was deserted by Eurybia and Echidna, almost more ghostly in its loneliness than when those two phantasmagoric Beings disputed in their dreadful dialogue who first, who last, had broken loose from Erebos.

“You are taking me a little, just a little, too fast!” murmured the aged Ajax as they passed the spot where Echidna used to be.

Zeuks stopped at once to give the old man a chance to get his breath and to look round. He himself also looked round; and in doing so he noticed a blaze of golden light not far in front of them. It was a peculiar blaze. It was like nothing that Zeuks had ever seen before. He stared at it in positive amazement. Then suddenly, though entirely without any rational cause, he associated this fiery marvel with the presence of the aged warrior at his side.