But all he could blurt out at the moment was: “Of course nobody can bear more than a certain amount of pain; and if you’re watching its infliction on others there comes a point when you break out or go raving mad; but nothing helps anyone to endure what can be endured more than forcing yourself to feel in the way ‘prokleesis’ makes you feel: for when you feel like this it isn’t the cruel enemy or executioner or torturer or murderer you are defying; it is Life itself!
“And what are you defying Life to do? You are defying Life to make you stop fighting Life! You are defying Life to make you worship Death! You are defying Life to make you lose yourself in those Half-Deaths of mystical ecstasy, such as Enorches praises; he who this very day plucked out the wing that was the twin of this!”
Zeuks’ whole figure looked absurdly un-heroic and unprophetic as with his mouth full of half-munched bread he pulled out from under his belt a corner of his shirt and used it to dab up a small trickle of blood-stained ichor that was at the moment feeling its cautious way along the spine of the Flying Horse in evident fear of ending its career as a living stream in a pool on the kitchen-floor.
It is doubtful whether even the most perspicacious ghost among those who were rumoured to have recently escaped from the under-world under the guidance of Pontopereia’s father, had such an one passed through Ornax, would have been drawn to Zeuks as a person naturally provocative of spiritual attention.
But whatever an enlightened fugitive in the train of Teiresias might have thought of this short, vulgarly-attired individual, with his thumbs in his belt, who now proceeded to rub his bleached and bloated physiognomy, making as he did so a grotesque purring sound in his gullet, against the arched neck of the wounded offspring of the Gorgon’s blood, Zeuks himself had not experienced a more delicious sensation of well-being since the days when he lived so contentedly with the cast-off paramour of the goat-footed Pan.
The bread he was masticating was proving so delicious and he kept turning it round and round in his mouth so long that when he finally did gulp it down it was simply saliva that he swallowed, only faintly tinctured with a lingering taste of wheaten bread. But it conveyed to every cell, tissue, nerve, fibre, gland and sense-centre in his whole body all the long air-nourished, sun-perforated, dew-quickened, rain-soaked experiences that had filled with more than physical richness each grain of wheat that made up Nemertes’ precious flour.
Zeuks felt sure as he rubbed his head against the neck of Pegasos that the animal was feeling from its digesting of those oats exactly what he was feeling himself from his long-munched bread. It was therefore something of a shock to him when he heard the voice of young Nisos addressing him from the doorway and saw the others all turn round to greet the excited boy.
Nisos brought the news that Odysseus had decided to start for home extremely early; actually, in fact, before that faint grey light that preludes the rising of the sun and in Ithaca was called “Lykophos” or “Wolf’s Light”. Between the three sons of Nemertes, as Nisos made his announcement, a swift glance of pleasure and surprise had passed; and it was clear to both Zeuks and the boy that whatever the feeling of Nemertes might be, as far as Omphos, Kissos and Sykos were concerned the fact that this visit was to end before dawn was an indescribable relief.
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 cur
ious 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.”
Nisos looked at the old lady in admiration. “By the gods,” he cried, “I’d completely forgotten that curst sack! Why! You’re a soothsayer too, though you do work in this old kitchen! I certainly will do just what you say, and see what’s happened to that great golden mixing-bowl! I can tell your master, anyway, something about it—though whether the old king got it from his queen’s father or whether Alkinoos gave it him in the land of the Phaeakeans I forget at this moment; but if I see it and touch it I daresay I’ll remember what Eurycleia told me about it! Old as she is, her memory never fails her! Yes, I’ll go straight down those steps and talk to Zenios!
“O I do thank you, lady, for putting it into my head! What I expect has been in our old king’s mind all along is some sort of an idea, though it seems horrid to say so,”—at this point Nisos lowered his voice; not so much in order that his hearer’s three sons shouldn’t hear, as from an instinctive courtesy—proof, thought Nemertes, as she listened to him, of how well he’d been brought up—“some sort of an idea,” he threw out in a hurried whisper as he rushed off—“of paying some sort of ransom or tribute for Pontopereia!”
As Nisos hastened to the northern edge of the pre-historic semicircle of stone ruins that these unscrupulous explorers from Kadmean Thebes had modernized and made habitable, he said to himself: “Tribute? Ransom? I wonder I didn’t say ‘Offering’. What of course it will really be, if the old king leaves that treasure behind without a word, will be buying the girl from him as we buy slaves in the market.”
It was when he was feeling his way down those steps, and though it was quite dark he could see a light between door and doorpost at the foot of the stairs, that he stopped short, with one foot on the third and the other on the fourth step, and the extended fingers of his left hand spread out against the wall, for he had a sudden inspiration. “I’ll suggest to Odysseus,” he thought, “that I ought to visit Tis’s home along with old Moros, now I’m so near, and that it might be a good thing if I went into the Naiads’ Cave on my way back to see if the ship-keel is still as it was.”
Meanwhile if Nemertes could have observed what was going on in her master’s chamber at the bottom of that staircase she would have felt, well! not, as people say, “completely justified”, for Nemertes had seen too much of the treacheries of life ever to feel precisely that, but she would have felt that she had not been far wrong in her knowledge of the ways of her master, as a collector of pre-historic treasures.
Long before Nisos had begun to make his way down those steps Zenios had been sitting on a low, rough, oblong couch of fir-planks covered with several layers of sheep-skins, a couch which in his lonely moods he preferred to any other. He was holding in his hands the heaviest and most precious of that sack’s marvels. This was an unusually large Mixing-Bowl; the sort of Mixing-Bowl that among the more civilized Achaean tribes was generally known as a “Depas”.
This particular “Depas” was an enormous one. It had a flat stand at its base and a circular handle on each side of its circumference and it was made of solid gold. It was in fact made of gold so heavy, so massive, and so purged of every kind of alloy, that as Zenios caressed it it gave him the feeling that it was something so totally different from all other things in the world and so absolutely divided from all other things in the world that when he gave himself up wholly and entirely to the pure sensation of this feel of it, he himself became isolated from everything else on earth. The handling of real gold, massive gold, pure gold, solid gold, had become the one positive lust, the one supreme indulgence, the one ecstatic cult, the one ultimate paradise of Zenios’ existence; and when he did so, as he was doing now, he grew so identified with the precious thing he held, that with no effort other than passive surrender to bliss he became what, save for a few blameless Ethiopeans both in the extreme East and in the extreme West, a man seldom becomes, namely a motionless orb of convulsed sunlight, or even starlight, for whom the mere alternation of inbreathing and outbreathing is not only a sufficient satisfaction for one life, but a sufficient satisfaction to justify an infinite series of lives.
But meanwhile, very cautiously, and inch by inch, Nisos was descending the stairs towards this absorbed gold-worshipper. Now the approach of the aboriginal wild creatures in the forests of the earth towards one another has been from the beginning the cause of innumerable invisible vibrations across various expanses of earth and air and such primeval vibrations, whether of attraction or repulsion, or of pure warning, have never completely vanished from the human scene all the way down the ages.
It must have been some such vibration, and of pure warning too, that caused young Nisos, before he had reached the fourth step in his stealthy descent towards that chink of light between door
and door-post, to change his mind completely, and, avoiding with exquisite care the least shiver of disturbing sound, to ascend those steps twice as quickly as he had descended them, and, once clear of that quarter of the restored ruins of Ornax, to set off as fast as possible to find Odysseus.
Even Zeuks would not have been able to interpret for the benefit of any other person seated on that broad back all the thoughts of Pegasos as the two of them waited patiently for their start from Ornax on their homeward journey. The whole thing is conjectural of course, but it does seem unlikely that an immortal creature however wounded could feel quite as agitated‚ as did Okyrhöe for example, when she discovered that she was really going to perch herself on the still bleeding back of a one-winged unflying flier, “with this low peasant”, as she told herself “who out of vulgar blasphemy calls himself Zeuks’’, in front of her, “and this silly old King-Hero who won’t be able to see more of me than my back”, behind her.
The whole thing was a surprise and a shock to this beautiful designer of elaborate schemes; for the last thing she expected was to have to make her plunge into the innermost circle of Odysseus’ life without the least preparation, indeed with what might almost be called a “hippodromic” leap. However! If she had to do it she had to do it, and with a courage and recklessness that would have drawn from her cautious slow-moving husband a very straight look, she rushed to one of the innermost chests in the furthest corner of her Mirror-Room and dragged forth from it a garment that Zenios had never known she had bought, for she had managed the transaction in secret with a Phoenician Merchant during a mighty purchase of golden cups.
No sooner now had she dragged out this garment and wrapped her lovely body in it than in a flash all her annoyance disappeared! It was exactly suited to the occasion. Nothing on earth could have answered this unexpected situation better. Even though the immortal creature she rode on was wet with ichor and blood, and even though “with this on” the old hero could not even see how shapely her back was, the effect of her face looking forth from that feathery cloud of heavenly whiteness was beyond what even she herself had ever dreamed of!
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