Atlantis (40 page)

Nisos and Zeuks were able to approach the table in whispered colloquy with each other, were able indeed to receive a
wine-glass
from Eurycleia and have it filled by Arsinöe, and finally were able to enter into an extremely punctilious argument with the Herald without attracting more notice from Odysseus than a vague, obscure, and taking-everything-for-granted nod.

“Yes, you will be interested to hear,” said the Herald, “that your humble servant has been permitted to approach your King
of Kings and Lord of Lords with a request for permission to visit in person the Royal Treasury and to see with my own eyes and touch with my own hands certain pieces of golden armour that actually belonged to Achilles the son of Peleus and which your King of Kings and Lord of Lords won from Ajax in a public competition presided over by the Olympians. This permission I hope presently to take advantage of, but this beautiful lady-
in-waiting,
who tells me she will escort me to the Treasury, begs me to await the moment when her lovely duty of dispensing wine to the King’s visitors is over for tonight.”

Zeuks looked at Nisos with a cold shiver of apprehension when Ajax was mentioned; and Arsinöe hastened to fill up the young man’s glass the moment he had allowed himself in his
embarrassment
to empty it at one gulp.

“You haven’t yet made it quite clear to me, sweet lady,” they heard Okyrhöe say to Nausikaa, “what exactly is the change you are so struck by in my darling hero here, since you beheld him, after his escape from that accurst Bitch-Nymph, washed up naked on your shores. O what a shock to your chaste and virginal feelings that occasion must have been! A naked man coming forth out of the wild waves and advancing straight towards you! No wonder this romantic and bewitching story had already become a sailor’s ditty in the docks of every port when I was a little girl!

“Little did I dream it would ever be my lot to be allowed by fate to succeed you in the affections of our little-girl-loving hero! O you must satisfy my childish curiosity, sweet Auntie Nausikaa; for my parents, you know, never allowed me to forget that I was descended from Nausithoos the father of Alkinoos who wedded your dear mother, Arete.

“O yes! it is indeed as if one of those impossible dreams in a young girl’s life had come true that the very same hero of my childhood should actually have become now that I’m grown up and can realize all it means, yes, should actually have become, in spite of his old age, my lover and my beloved!

“O sweet Auntie Nausikaa, you
must
forgive my emotion in
meeting you; for you must realize how the sight of you calls up every glimpse and feature of my earliest visions of life, now so wonderfully satisfied, with him as my lover”—At this point Okyrhöe actually leant across the table and touched the stem of the wine-glass out of which Odysseus was drinking. “Yes,” she told him, “your little girl is confessing all our happiness to her Auntie Nausikaa!”

It was at this point that Zeuks looked at Nisos, and Nisos looked at Zeuks; and never, in all the history of love has such savage derision been excited by such palpable humbug.

“We Phaiakians,” began the Herald, his natural ritualistic assurance evidently emphasized by the long unnatural
suppression
which he had endured while his Phaiakian princess struggled to ward off without losing her temper the diabolical jibes of the weird woman from Thebes.

“We Phaiakians are more ready to enter into technical arguments on matters of science and on the navigation of
oceangoing
ships than any other race, and we find it very hard to argue on these important subjects with barbarians. That is one of the reasons why it is such a deep satisfaction to us to have the privilege of talking with real Hellenic gentlemen like yourselves.”

“My own feeling is,” said Nisos, trying to make himself a little more comfortable by leaning sideways against the table, “my own feeling is that it is better to work out our own personal system of philosophy as well as our system of navigation in private meditation than to offer them both for public discussion.”

“Heaven and earth!” cried Zeuks. “What about impulsive fellows like me? I couldn’t tell you by day or by night what I was going to do next!” Thus speaking, the great-grandson of the Nymph Maia hesitated not to take to himself a curious chair that stood empty, with its back to one of the richly carved alcoves of that stately hall, a chair that was actually formed out of the figure of a monstrously swollen dwarf from whose head a stag’s antlers protruded and whose feet were elongated into tree-roots.

There was something about this chair so perfectly adapted to the personality of Zeuks that Odysseus seemed to accept him and
the chair as if they had been one thing and not two things. In fact whenever Odysseus glanced in their direction he gave to this fantastical flesh-turned-into-wood man in a chair a half-humorous nod, a nod that seemed to say: “We are all in the same box; and if we don’t grow horns and roots we grow fins and scales.”

The easy way in which Zeuks was now enjoying life in that horned and rooted man-chair with which he had identified himself gave our friend Nisos an opportunity to take in more of the general situation than he had as yet had leisure to grasp. He noticed that more than half the seats round the table were empty but that the plates of their recent occupiers were still half full of untouched nuts and fruits and that their wine-glasses too were still only half empty.

It soon began to be clear to the young man that the cause of this desertion of the table was the simple fact that the three chief officers of Nausikaa’s crew had been persuaded by Eurycleia, along with the half-a-dozen sailors who had navigated their ship, to join our old friend Tis and the Trojan captive Arsinöe in a wine-drinking revel parallel with the one that was now ebbing feebly to its close in this dilatory teasing of Nausikaa by the crafty Okyrhöe. Gay and lively were the cries and the laughter that kept reaching that quiet hall from the echoing passage leading down to the underground kitchen and
wash-house
.

As Nisos watched all that was going on he soon was made to feel decidedly uncomfortable by the absence of the familiar form of the beautiful Leipephile, who, quite naturally, was away somewhere with her betrothed, the elder son of Krateros
Naubolides
. Little physical things, too, as so often happens on such drastic occasions, were worrying Nisos now, and these were the more annoying and irritating because of Zeuks’ excessive and exaggerated delight in identifying himself with that grotesque chair and its horns and roots.

Nisos himself, who had no chair and had begun to feel a fool as he stood alone by the side of the table like a child who has crept down from its nursery, had just got one of his bare knees
into some sort of a kneeling position upon the edge of a high four-legged footstool, a position he endeavoured to render more secure by pressing his hand in the side of the table. He was unlucky in both these supports; for the footstool had once been covered by some sort of ancient rug, and an unpleasant knot left in its weaving chafed his knee to distraction, while at the precise spot where he pressed his hand on the table’s edge there happened to be two or three brass nails that hadn’t been properly hammered into the wood and one of these nails behaved as if it were trying to bite at the fleshy part at the base of his thumb.

Had Tis’s little sister been present in this dining-hall just now instead of being carried on a crazy rampage on the back of Pegasos along with Arcadian Pan and that pair of appalling Phantoms, whose eternally-whispered wrangle seemed destined to be transferred from Arima to the drowned towers of Atlantis, she would no doubt have drifted to Nisos’ aid.

Pontopereia, the daughter of Teiresias, who
was
present, was far too shy to speak to a soul except the punctilious Herald to whom she finally confessed her longing to climb up to one of the high windows under the roof of this great chamber and persuaded him to help her in this achievement.

While our friend Nisos was contending with knots in rugs and nails in boards there were other personalities in that hall, quite apart from the Herald and Pontopereia, who seemed to feel that the moment had come for the old little lady Atropos to draw near and give destiny a new turn. Among these other personalities were individual hairs in the beard of Odysseus: for though, like the branch of a tree, a beard, whether of a goat or a man, has its own general individual being, its separate hairs like the leaves on such a branch have identities of their own. Thus the king’s beard in its general personality was not surprised to hear its separate hairs disputing.

“A spiritual impression has reached me,” began one of its smallest hairs, addressing itself to one of the largest; “that before darkness covers the earth today you and I and every other hair in this beard may be homeless.”

“May I be permitted to enquire,” returned the big hair to the little hair, “upon what authority you base this somewhat startling prediction?”

“There’s not the least reason why you should put on that patronizing tone just because you are a little older and a little thicker than I am,” retorted the other. “The important question is whether we shall or shall not both be thrown into a bonfire of rubbish and there burnt up into invisible nothingness!” And as he spoke the smallest hair made a faintly fluttering motion, like a minute dandelion-seed, or some still more simply constructed airborne vehicle, towards the smouldering fire in the centre of the room that still contained a few red embers and a few wisps of grey smoke, and as he made this gesture he shuddered visibly through the whole length of his being; “burnt to nothingness,” he concluded. “Go,” said the biggest hair in the king’s beard to an extremely active though almost invisible insect, “go and
discover
for the benefit of all of us whether there is still enough life in those smouldering embers to reduce even the scurf on the navel of a wood-louse to nothingness.” The resonance of so commanding a word plunged all the hairs into silence.

“I would dearly like to see myself, Odysseus,” began Nausikaa suddenly, “some of those golden pieces of armour, just a single shin-piece perhaps, or one of the lighter sort of thigh-pieces, if your treasury is handy, of the armour of Achilles, which by the adjudication of the Olympian gods was bestowed on you in preference to Ajax, the son of Telamon.”

The bowsprit-shaped beard of the king was raised with a jerk at this demand. “Tell somebody, tell Arsinöe,” the old man commanded, “to bring up here to show, to show to the Princess any of those pieces she finds herself strong enough to carry!”

“Yes, my lord the King, certainly, my lord the King,” replied the stentorian Herald, scrambling back not only to the floor of the hall from the high window-ledge whither he had helped the daughter of Teiresias to find an uninterrupted refuge for her shy and unwordly mind, but to the reality of his own role in life from which he had been snatched by a sudden amorous illusion,
“I will certainly see that the lady Arsinöe brings up at once all that in her heart the Princess covets to behold.”

It was then that young Nisos as he leant so uncomfortably against the table was led by the King’s command and the Herald’s reply to imagine that here indeed was the voice of Atropos herself. “It’s I who will be the herald to Arsinöe!” he told himself as he hurried off. He found the Trojan captive helping Eurycleia in the task of washing the most precious of the vessels that had just been used; and taking her aside out of the riotous revelry of Nausikaa’s officers and men he explained to her just what the Princess had said; nor did he hesitate to make his own comment upon Nausikaa’s request.

“Don’t you think, my friend, that what she really wants is to re-establish something of her old link with the old man? Don’t you think that in this subtle battle between these two—and I confess, my dear, it’s a surprise to me that this complete stranger from Thebes, of whom we know nothing except what she herself tells us, should presume to make such a bold move as to try at once to link her life with his in sexual love so as to forestall any natural return of the old romantic attraction between Odysseus and Nausikaa—don’t you think that it’s our business to help Nausikaa all we can and to put as many spikes as we possibly can in the wily path of this confounded sorceress?”

Was it Atropos again who now inspired the Trojan captive with a lie worthy of the old Odysseus himself?

“I have already, Nisos Naubolides, thought of this very thing. In fact I have been spending all the twilight hours of this long and heavy evening, while these sailors of the Princess have been making such a barbaric rumpus, in carrying out to a particular tree, yes, Nisos Naubolides, to a special ash-tree in our ghostly Arima here which for years I have been carving into a faint resemblance to Hector of Troy himself, one after another of these golden pieces of the armour that once belonged to Achilles.”

Nisos stared at the woman for a second in absolute wonder, even with awe. How clever girls were! How they anticipated everything that could possibly happen, and long before it
happened too! So
this
was the explanation of a premonition he had had for some while that something was going to happen here at home that would turn out to be more serious than any crazy excursions upon which Arcadian Pan might embark with poor little Eione, Tis’s small sister!

“Listen, you wise one!” he cried, pulling her close to him by her shoulders and putting his eager lips to her right ear, “can’t you think of some trick you and I might play upon this damned woman from Syracuse—no! from Thebes it was! And, by the gods I shall hate the very name of Thebes from now on! Yes, I shall always think of Thebes in future as a filthy city of rats, with walls of stinking rottenness, and towers and domes that are just heaps of dung!

“But tell me, Arsinöe, O please, please tell me, Arsinöe, how we can play some effective trick upon this scriggling and wriggling worm of a woman! You were so clever, Arsinöe, so divinely clever, in making an image of carved wood out of a living tree and hanging the armour of Achilles on it! Surely you can think of some device, some trick, some stab in the dark, by which you and I together could save the old man from this curst Theban Sorceress! Do,
do,
I beg and beseech you, Arsinöe, put your good Trojan wits alongside of my poor rocky-island ones and see what we can do! Never mind your coming from Troy. In a thing like this we are at one. Your grand old Priam would agree with me I know; and as for the noble Hector himself, why, he wouldn’t hesitate for a second! I know it, I am sure of it, my sweet Arsinöe! Ithaca and Ilium can hold together as well as any civilized pair against this dock-yard Brothel Bitch from the slave-markets of the Orient! Think, think, think, all-wise one! I swear to you that you and I, if we can only put our heads properly together, can forget all that old Helen-of-Troy business and show this confounded Theban witch that she shan’t meddle with us in our gratitude to these Phaiakian sea-farers and to their brave Princess Nausikaa.