John Powys: Atlantis

Of the parents of the two brothers Agelaos and Nisos whose names were Pandea and Krateros, she had always preferred Krateros; not only because as the head of the Naubolos family he was the ancestral rival of Odysseus and Telemachos but because his appearance always struck her as un-Hellenic and even a little Phoenician. Nosodea, the mother of the Priestess Stratonika and of Eurycleia’s Maid, Leipephile, who was the betrothed of Agelaos, she disliked most of all, more even than the King’s old nurse, Eurycleia herself, whose caprices she had to obey.

Exactly why she so hated Nosodea she felt now, as she mentally caused the woman to be dragged before her judgment-seat, that she could not quite make clear even to herself. “She’s such a regular woman!” she found herself repeating; but she knew she was packing into the word “regular” several qualities that were by no means exclusively feminine.

Nosodea’s husband, the father of the two girls, was a good deal older than his wife and was something of an enigma to the whole island. The adjective “geraios” meaning “old” was invariably added to his name by the whole neighbourhood; which in itself suggested, Arsinöe could not help thinking, that everybody felt the man to be different in some curious way from all his contemporaries.

And the odd thing was, the Trojan girl now told herself, while Babba fidgetted more and more irritably and Tis watched her with the expression with which when slaughtering an animal he waited for it to fall stunned after giving it a blow between the eyes, the odd thing was that for some inscrutable reason which completely baffled her she felt there was something in common between herself and Damnos Geraios and that if she could only get hold of the man when Nosodea was well out of the way she could form an alliance with him not only against his wife and two daughters but against the whole world!

“Well!” she sighed, almost as if she would have liked to spend the whole day thinking of all these people from the new background of her feelings, “I must be off, Master Tis! Thank you a thousand times for the milk!”

But it was at that moment that the Trojan woman received a startling shock. The herdsman suddenly lifted his muscular body from the tree-root that had been serving him as a milking-stool. He did not raise it to its full height, which at its best was nothing beyond a man’s medium stature, but he raised it sufficiently to make it resemble a quadruped swaying about on its hind legs. He still held the silver ladle; and as if to assist himself in an agitating process of confused and difficult thought he grasped it tightly at both ends and drew it angrily up and down across his forehead like a glittering rod across a sullen and silent musical instrument.

While absorbed in this process he kept repeating in a series of harsh cries the words: “Lady! lady, lady! The dream! The dream! The dream!”

Arsinöe experienced a spasm of such nervous irritation at this impediment to her already over-delayed departure that it was with an effort she suppressed the impulse to leave the man to his fit, or whatever it was, that was now doubling him up, and just hurry off. But impulsive selfishness was as foreign to Arsinöe’s introspective nature as was impulsive geniality.

“What dream are you talking about Master Tis? You really oughtn’t to give people such shocks. You quite scared me, jumping up so suddenly like that. Can’t you tell a person quietly, Master Tis, what’s come over you?”

But Tis continued to totter like a quadruped on its hind-legs; while, though holding it with only one hand now, he scraped his forehead with the ladle.

But it was at this moment that Babba, drawn into the situation by an obscure feeling that her friend and protector was being unfairly scolded, and also, by a less obscure desire to be led where she could find juicier and more sap-filled nourishment than the dry hay which at present bristled with so many sharp stalks over the edge of her wooden bin, shuffled back to Tis’s side and pressed her cold nose against the log from which he had just risen.

This instinctive bovine movement combined with the tone of rebuke in Arsinöe’s voice brought Tis to himself and he began hurriedly to explain. “You see, lady,” he almost blubbered, “great-grand-dad’s, bit of land at the blasted end of this here rock of beggars and bastards was called, in them blessed days of old, after, if ye understand me, the home-stead of Aulion of the Naubolides and also after the home-stead of Druinos of the Pheresides; and we was taught by grand-dad, whose old dad taught he, that on the day when Aulion and Druinos, our poor old bit of rock-dust and grass-root being called, thee must understand, by the name of Auliodruinos came under one hand, that one hand would bring down forever, break-up and bust-up, for good and all, you understand the House of Odysseus! And it just then came into me head that last night I dreamed that Grand-Dad was once again talking to us same as ‘un used to talk about this final confirmation and arbitration of They Above.”

At this point Tis stopped, and a look of abysmal satisfaction overspread his countenance. It was already familiar to the captive from Ilium that the use of long-drawn-out proclamatory expressions such as “confirmation” and “arbitration” was in itself comforting to the agora-loving inhabitants of Hellas; so now that she saw that look on the herdsman’s face she lost entirely her humanely feminine scruples about leaving this incredible simpleton alone with Babba. It was clear they understood each other. It was indeed not inconceivable that Babba herself derived vague images of rich green grass from words that sounded so rhetorically satisfying as “confirmation” and “arbitration”.

With her pride in the news that the unburied Heirax had brought quite unimpaired, therefore, by any twinges of a humanely feminine conscience, the Trojan girl, with one of the rare smiles that few in Ithaca had ever seen on her face, indicated to times during that disturbed February night, whileTis that it was time for him to think less about his grandfather and more about his job. She was not greatly worried at being so late; for she felt pretty sure, such were her own secret good spirits, that the king’s aged nurse would be too conscious of calamity on the wind to take her delay as more than a ripple of annoyance following a rolling wave of menacing premonition.

Four times during that disturbed February night, while the atmosphere in the palace-corridor grew tenser and tenser, and the Herculean club between its quartz-props grew more and more surly, and the fly Myos and the moth Pyraust were working themselves up to a fever of agitation, did the lonely old monarch rise from his bed and look out of his two windows. One of these faced due West, that is to say towards the opposite quarter of the sky from the one upon which the corridor of the six pillars opened. The other window of the king’s bedroom faced due North.

It was the middle of night when he got out of bed for the fourth time; and this time he heard a certain thin, frail, feminine voice uttering a quavering, rasping, high-pitched appeal from the ancient oak opposite his window. This was a hollow oak-tree not only familiar to his own boyhood, but equally familiar to the boyhood of Laertes his father; and it was the abode or what almost might be called the second self of a Dryad.

His encounters with this ancient Oak-Sister had been rarer since his marriage. They had been interrupted of course by the Trojan war and his capture by Circe and Calypso, and had been only intermittently resumed since his wife had followed his parents into the shades and his son Telemachos had turned into a reserved, self-centred, philosophy-absorbed priest, serving Athene indeed, but serving her in a very different manner from the way he served her himself.