Atlantis (39 page)

“On plates and under plates! On tables and under tables! On window sills and under window sills! You flies are far too
sensitive and intellectual and highly-strung to take risks with your food. It’s different altogether with us. We’re made for risks like that! If
we
don’t take risks every day of our lives we very quickly degenerate. I oughtn’t to scold you, my precious wise one”—here the beautiful moth showed signs of emotion, for her right wing quivered and her left antenna groped freebly in a whiff of steam-infected air from the hall within—“because I have myself been yielding so weakly to my admiration for your learning that I have not yet, though I heard his inspired speech, flown to enquire how the noble Priest of the Mysteries has borne up after his exhausting oration.

“But, O thou wisest of flies, I do feel such shame when I think”—It was then that there broke in upon their conversation the voice of their living and moving tent, namely the Club of Herakles, who when in the company of his special and most privileged associates always called himself “Dokeesis” a name which in that dark Nemean Forest, where he was brought up, has the meaning of “seeming”, because there are so many shadows there that it is often hard to distinguish between
appearance
and reality.

“It is I who am speaking to you, again, Sixth Pillar, yes it is I, the Slayer of the Nemean Lion, and I want to know whether I heard you correctly, Sixth Pillar, when you spoke of receiving the news that the great Goddess Hera the Queen of Heaven, had suddenly left Olympos empty of her divine presence and had gone to Gargaros, the summit of Ida, with the intention of persuading the Son of Kronos, by the help of Desire, and by the help of Sleep after the satisfaction of Desire, to yield up his third portion of Power over the Kingdoms of this World to his two Brothers Aidoneus and Poseidon?

“And if I heard you correctly, O illustrious Sixth Pillar, who bear on your pedestal the signature of a son of Hephaistos, I would like to ask you if you could tell me what in your opinion was the secret purpose of the wife of Zeus in thus betraying her husband, the Ruler of the Upper Air, and through the air of the whole surface of the earth?”

There was no need for the little shame-faced silky-winged Pyraust to prod her friend the fly to listen to this dialogue whose reverberation shook the corridor. Indeed the fly’s big eyes had begun to bulge to such an extent that the anxious moth-girl feared they might fall out of his head leaving two bloody
apertures
through which she would be staring into her friend’s “frontal lobe”, the last thing she wished to do.

“In my opinion,” the two insects now heard the Sixth Pillar say, “the goddess Hera must have welcomed the return, completely unknown to her husband, of the Messenger she sent, namely the seven-coloured Iris, to find Pallas Athene among the blameless Ethiopians. In my opinion Pallas Athene must have assured her that if they worked together now and got the help, both of Persephone from Hades, and of Thetis from the Sea, they would be able to take the domination of the world out of the possession of men and hand it over into the possession of women where it ought to have been from the beginning.”

After this there was dead silence in the corridor; until the shame-faced moth took upon herself to fling a question upon that wine-scented air towards the lusty olive-sprout that had dared to grow up between a couple of flagstones.

“Can you tell me, Olive-Branch, whether it will be the lady Okyrhöe or the lady Nausikaa who will win the love of
Odysseus
?’’ There was such a long silence after this dramatic question that the fly came near to spreading its gauzy wings and taking upon itself the role of Messenger from the Insects to the Olympians.

Well did the moth know what was in her friend’s mind; and she couldn’t help wondering what she herself would feel if she accompanied the fly through the flashes of light that wavered down from the hall above, and with rainbow colours flashing from point to point in
his
wings and mysterious gleams glorifying the lustrous brown of
her
wings, they were both to flicker up those stone steps and confront the revellers with the startling and momentous news that henceforth the world was to be ruled by women.

But the olive-shoot’s wise answer brought back everybody’s wits to the practical situation with which they were now faced. “The king will choose neither of those two women,” announced the sagacious olive-shoot. “But you may be sure,” he added with sturdy cynicism, “the King will use all the power he may have over both these ladies to be in a position to hoist sail without delay and explore the unknown West beyond Lost Atlantis.”

Once more the boldness and rashness of the turn their talk so soon took brought down upon them all the same uneasy silence. But this time it was not from among any of them in the corridor that the interruption to their colloquy came; and it was Zeuks who was the first to be aware of it.

Zeuks was still standing against the wall clutching his
formidable
double-edged dagger in one hand and his sandals in the other; but he now imperceptibly moved his head so that his right ear might be directed towards the stairs that led down into the corridor from the dining-hall.

Zeuks heard steps descending those stairs, very, very slow and cautious steps, and very light steps, but with no vacillation or hesitation about their purpose. Somebody—a light-footed boy or girl—was coming as a spy or anyway as a scout. Zeuks listened intently to the faintest sound made by this explorer and he soon heard the hurried gasping breaths that the light-footed young person in his excitement was unable to suppress.

Listening with the divining rod, as you might call it, of his auditory intelligence Zeuks was soon rewarded for his
concentrated
attention by recognizing a particular click between two of these irrepressible gasps that identified the prowler without further question. He was Nisos Naubolides.

And then there occurred one of those curious moments, or rather seconds, in the experience of persons suddenly
encountering
each other in this particular dimension of our multiverse, persons familiar to each other and yet on the alert in regard to each other’s immediate intentions. At such a second of time there is liable to happen an electric explosion between the life energy of the one and the life energy of the other, an explosion
over which and upon which the consciousness of neither of the persons has the slightest influence or effect. What you might call the two kinds of life-levin or of life-lightning in these persons, thus confronting each other, must be far more different than the persons themselves are different and far more antagonistic.

Nisos, for instance, had always felt for Zeuks a friendly
attraction
and Zeuks had certainly felt for Nisos a protective affection. And yet no sooner did the lad descending those steps in the
twilight
catch sight of the familiar figure of Zeuks than he performed, or the life-lightning that was using him performed, some
surprising
acts. In the first place he put his fingers to his lips in the universal sign which means: “Hush! This little business is entirely between ourselves!” Then, though he was some seven or eight steps above the corridor, he made a wild leap like a young lion and landed on the corridor floor at least a yard beyond the Sixth Pillar; and then with a second and still more leonine leap he grasped Zeuks by the throat.

It was lucky for him that the impersonal life-lightning which seized upon Zeuks at that same instant confined itself, as if Zeuks had really been an animal, to physical contact. What Zeuks actually did was to thrust back, with a blind instinctive jerk, deep into the thick wool of the under-shirt out of which he’d drawn it, that dangerous two-edged dagger; and then with the whole strength of both his arms he tore one of Nisos’ hands from his throat and treating this captured hand as a hawk might treat a butcher-bird he squeezed it into his capacious mouth and pressed his teeth against it, not really hard enough to draw blood, but hard enough to give Nisos the feeling that those doglike teeth
were
drawing blood.

Thus had the situation between these two resolved itself into one of those purely physical encounters which carry with them so large a current of earth-life that they seem to satisfy both the creatures involved with a sort of absolute satisfaction. And what happened then was so much what we can imagine any
benevolent
fate would have intended to happen that it is hard to believe that it was brought about by pure chance.

Feeling through every throb the one hand which was still on Zeuks’ throat that he had only to press these fleshy sinews with a viciously increasing purpose to stop the man’s breath for ever, Nisos suddenly thought: “But I am going to be a prophet; and all Prophets have the power of an absolute control over their rage. I shall therefore show this funny fellow Zeuks that I am letting him live when I could easily kill him and being a good friend to him when I could easily be the deadliest enemy.”

And on his side Zeuks was now saying to himself, as he kept his dog-like teeth firmly pressed against his antagonist’s hand: “What is the use of being the great-grandson of the
ever-youthful
Nymph Maia, even if in the end, for all the gods in my blood, I have to sleep the perpetual sleep of death, what, I ask you, is the use of it all if I can’t detach my consciousness from my body far enough to be able to put up with a leaping,
scrabbling
, jumping, skipping, dancing kid like this without wanting to bite his head off?”

“Come up quietly with me, Zeuks, old friend,” gasped Nisos. “The old man will be damned glad to see you. But, for the sake of all we both love best in the world, what has happened to Ajax?”

“Surely I’ll come with you, my dear boy,” replied Zeuks. “Ajax, did you say? Why, Ajax is wholly, entirely, absolutely, and altogether out of it. Ajax is in fact not only dead but buried. I found him dead and I buried him myself. But let us go now and let us go quietly as you and I know well how to go. But tell me this before we start and tell it me in your lowest and least heraldic voice. How are things with the old man over his wine? Have either of those ladies got him yet in her toils?”

Nisos gave him as well as he could a lively but rather a
school-boyish
description of what he had seen; and as the older man
listened
he nodded many times and muttered varying rather cynical commentaries. Then did the two of them thread their way between the first, second, third and fourth Pillars, Zeuks leaning on the arm of Nisos as if he had been much older than he actually was.

“No, my dear friend,” Zeuks said with a rapid downward glance towards the base of the Sixth Pillar as they passed that philosophic interpreter of elemental vibrations, “no! my
impression
from all you’ve told me about our old man’s behaviour with those two women is that the Princess Nausikaa is shocked at the physical change in him. I don’t want to mislead you. Sonny, for your impressions are vivid and you have described them mighty well; but my own feeling about it is that Nausikaa finds it hard to recognise in our old king the handsome hero with whom she fell in love when he suddenly appeared from out of the shadows of the rocks while she and her maidens were playing ball by the sea-shore. I don’t think myself he is in the faintest danger of being seduced by the Okyrhöe woman. My idea is that the kind of flattery he uses in her case, you know the sort of thing I mean, that exaggerated praise of everything about her, is due to a mounting and intensifying irritation with the way she treats him.”

“Yes! yes! yes!” murmured Nisos in a still lower voice as they drew near to the thick oaken brazen-barred door at the top of the steps, “yes! yes! I’ve noticed
that
about him too! He gets rid of his bottled-up rage just as some old people do of their bottled-up misery by the simple process of inventing exaggerated and fantastical fables. But I tell you, Zeuks, my friend, things are about as ticklish up there as they can possibly be. It’s like balancing yourself on a tight-rope—no! not like balancing
yourself,
like watching them balance
themselves!
No! I haven’t got it quite right even yet! It’s like watching them dancing upon thin ice dangerously slippery and liable to break and let them into the water!”

“Well, Son, we’ll soon be”—but Nisos couldn’t catch the dying out of that sentence; for they were now standing before the massive brazen-fitted time-darkened door, the other side of which was that palace dining-hall which had already been for numberless generations, and would be for many more to come, a centre of intrigue and plotting, not only for Ithaca, but for the whole of Hellas.

This black-oak door with its four panels and bronze frame opened to them now at the first pressure of Zeuks’ hand. It would have needed one of the minutest of all the dust-motes that danced so solemnly in that spear-shaft of a torch-ray across the head of the lady Okyrhöe, across the head of the lady Nausikaa, across the head of Odysseus himself, to thread that twisted path, beyond the cunning of the tiniest mite of sea-spray left by the sun in his descent, the twisted path to the heart of the old king.

It was clear at once to both Zeuks and Nisos that Odysseus was not so much drunk from the fumes of wine as drunk from the opposing sorceries of those two formidable women.

“You’d have thought,” said Nisos to himself, “that Circe and Calypso between them would have made him harder to beguile; but of course—Nausikaa——”

He closed the brazen-framed door behind Zeuks and himself and made a hurried obeisance to the old bearded figure on the throne-seat at the table, but although the king looked searchingly into each of their faces as they came forward it struck them both that he understood nothing of what he saw save only that some terrible crisis of a fatal choice was upon him.

As to this choice it was abundantly clear to both Nisos and Zeuks that until some unexpected ray of light penetrated that bearded head the old king was simply incapable of choosing between his new temptress and his ancient flame. There was indeed to each of them something almost sickeningly painful in the sight of this tremendous hero of the greatest war ever
experienced
by the human race being lured to this unseemly turnstile of sexual cross-purpose.