Nisos had the wit to realize quickly enough, when Odysseus had greeted Zeuks and was conversing with him, that what those little, searching, deep-set eyes, peering out from the receding depths of what seemed an eternally replenished background, expressed just then was a mixture of deeply affectionate respect and humorous amusement.
And it was further evident to Nisos that this singular person’s profound respect for the king was increased, not diminished, by the fact that he found the old hero so infinitely entertaining. It was also evident that Odysseus felt absolutely at ease with Zeuks and entirely natural in dealing with him. Indeed he continued to be so direct, so objective, so practical in his handling of him that it was difficult for Nisos to see what there was about such shrewd and downright and matter-of-fact business relations that could excite not only ribald laughter but hugely humorous enjoyment.
But it was quite evident to Nisos that either the old king enjoyed being laughed at, or, and this is what seemed to the boy the more probable, that he had been so toughened by all his experiences of the ways of the world, that his self-created thick skin and his long-practised straight-to-the-point opportunism had made him as impervious to humour as he was impervious to love!
Nisos inserted a second finger into the king’s belt, the longest finger he had. In some queer fashion the old man’s imperviousness to everything but the one single desire to sail away, to sail over the sunken towers of Atlantis into the Unknown West, touched the boy to the heart. It was a purpose he could understand. It had something about it that resembled his own fixed intention to become, when once he had grown a pointed beard, a Prophet to the Strong.
Let the rollicking humour of Zeuks bubble and bubble from what springs it would! Let it burble up against the old hero’s face pebbles as hard as balls of brimstone! There’d be one friend for the old adventurer who’d be as tough and impervious as himself! Yes, imperviousness was what the future “prophet to the strong” felt he must struggle to win.
But fate had other moves to make; and there were several farmers there who, although with homesteads on the same ridge as farm-labourer Zeuks, and although they had come out to see the farm up there at high noon, were in part self-pitying puppets moved by fingers other than their own, and yet were in part also living creators of the future of Ithaca.
Enorches had already begun to scream angrily at Zeuks before Nisos, with his right hand supporting the treasure-sack balanced to a nicety at the back of his head and with two fingers thrust deep into the belt of Odysseus, had even realized that he himself, and the deserted old king, and the winged Horse, and the black-maned Horse, and Zeuks and the Priest of Orpheus were in a random knot together, with the flabbergasted but still fascinated crowd hemming them in on all sides and surging round them,
“It’s no good your grinning and chuckling at me, thief, robber, pirate, serf!” cried Enorches. “It’s no good your fancying that a wretch like you, the lowest of the low, the basest of the base, born to be the slave of those who rightly and properly by the laws of Themis and Zeus and Eros and Dionysos and the Inspired Singer Orpheus rule the entire world, can make a covenant with a king to put in his keeping this mad Spawn of the Gorgon and this By-Blow of Poseidon and Demeter!
“Did you think, Dung of the Earth, did you suppose, Turd of the World, that the Stars in their Courses would fight for a blob, a shred, a foul pellet, a filthy crumb, a drop of cuckoo-spit, a clipping of toe-nail, like you? There are many who rule us. There are many who strive to rule us. There are many who once ruled us. Erebos and Tartaros are full of such as once lorded it over us! And where are they now?
“Don’t you understand sod of sods, don’t you comprehend, dreg of dregs, that what you’ve been given hands and feet for by the beautiful ones, the creative ones, the powerful ones, the one’s eternally to be worshipped, is the privilege, dung of dungs, blob of blobs, squit of squit, curd of curd, scurf of scurf, flake of flake, chip of chips, drop of drop, sweat of sweat, the privilege to serve your betters, and yet here you are actually daring to decamp with demigods!
“Yes! to steal, to kidnap, to imprison in your wretched pigsty these two sacred creatures, the feathers of whose wings and the hairs of whose manes you are unworthy to kiss! Release them, I command you! Hand them over to me, the god-appointed guardian of the holiest of holy mysteries!
Though Athene may have fled to her shrine among the Ethiopians, I have not fled; and where I am there will always be a sanctuary for any offspring of the ever-living gods, however far blasphemy and sacrilege and atheism may spread their savagery! Give up these holy creatures I say! Yield them over to me now and I will see that you escape the punishment you deserve! But refuse and it will fall upon you! Harken unto me all ye that are here, devoted worshippers of the most high Gods! Have you not heard—has it not been revealed to you——”
It was at this point that Enorches, whose very name had been given him at his birth because of the enormity of his testicles, and who had been called ere now by fellow-priests “the well-hung brother” proved his manhood by leaping forward with a spring and scrambling up upon one of the rocks with which Odysseus’s newfound “agora” was sprinkled and by bursting into a ringing oration.
“Our whole Hellenic way of life,” he cried, “is in danger my friends, and we’re not alive enough to what’s going on to do anything to save it! We haven’t even cleared our minds of all the childish poetry our mothers and nurses put into our heads to stop us piddling on the floor, or upsetting the pot on the fire, or cutting off the tail of the dog, or giving the hen’s best chicks to the cat! We have been too shallow and stupid, my friends, in our whole attitude to religion!
“We have accepted like babies all our mothers told us about the Twelve Olympians, about Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Apollon, Artemis, Hermes, Aphrodite, Hephaistos, Ares, Themis, and our own Athene.
“But, my friends, all this is sheer childishness, and what it leads to is exactly what has happened in the case of this worthless pirate, this low-born thief, this dung-heap rapscallion, this offscouring of the city’s brothels who calls himself Zeuks so that he may blaspheme the more, so that he may make a mock at our Father in Heaven, and, worse still, put to scorn our Father’s Sister and Mate, the great Queen of Heaven, Hera herself!
“What none of you are grown up enough to understand, though I’ve been explaining this very thing for the last ten years, is that by certain new, certain occult, certain mystical, certain sanctified, certain divinely inspired revelations, drawn at length and explained at last from the most sacred and precious oracle that we of pure Hellenic birth can boast, an oracle do I say? an inheritance, a birth-right, a talisman, an enchantment, a divine and celestial Word, by means of which our enemies are inevitably defeated and our intentions are inevitably fulfilled, we know that we’ve arrived at a point in our development where Eros and Dionysos appear in their true light. Does anyone here on this fair platform, looking down on the rich harbour of our island-home, realize the full significance, the concerted value, the abysmally-charged import of the birthright of which I speak?
“Has anyone here been so freed of late from our mothers’ lullabies and war-tales as to know what I mean when I say that our way of life in Hellas has been saved only just in time from its final extinction by recent interpretations of the prophecies of our unique poet and singer, Orpheus?”
At this point in the midst of the resounding oration of Enorches there suddenly occurred the sort of movement of relaxation in that well-to-do careless crowd which suggests an articulate admission that the subject of a speech is totally beyond the intelligence of its listeners but that the personality of the speaker, and the fervour of his arguments, not to mention the dramatic situation in which he is taking so dominant a part, are all conducive to the said listeners’ settling down to listen in self-satisfied pleasure as if they’d been suddenly transported to an agreeable theatre.
What pleased our young friend Nisos in all this, especially when he noticed that both the two p
ortions of this unconventional hill-top assembly, the part of it that had been so fascinated by Zeuks and his unusual horses as to feel definitely hostile to Enorches, and the part of it that remained under his spell, had both relaxed, was the fact that Zeuks himself had suddenly taken the initiative with Odysseus, and had advanced close up to him, trailing the long thin leather straps by which he drew the two horses after him, and that the two were now engaged, under the very nose of the excited orator in what looked like a very harmonious and mutually satisfactory bargain.
Meanwhile the speaker was approaching the culminating points of his speech, which were entirely concerned with the Mysteries.
“What is revealed to us in the Orphic Mysteries,” he was saying, “is the inner truth, the ultimate quintessence, of our whole Hellenic life. This essence, this quintessence, my dear friends, floats like an exhalation through every moment of our existence. Whither and Whence does it float? That is no simple question; for it is fed by a thousand ineffable imponderables!
“Mystery it is, and mystery it pursues. From mystery it ascends and in mystery it is engulfed. As the heat of this thrice-sacred noon dissolves in those blue waves down there, so there is a sweetly-dissolving high noon in the life of all of us Achaians towards which we are moving even as I speak; and I swear to you, brothers and sisters of this Isle of Ithaca, that it is only in the celebration of the Orphic Mysteries that you, men and women of Hellas, can rise to your full spiritual stature and rejoice in your full divine inheritance!”
Enorches was clairvoyant enough to grow aware at this point that his large audience were enjoying his speech delivered from that jagged little rock in precisely the spirit he cared least of all for it to be enjoyed, that is to say, as a theatrical performance, and he allowed his arms to sink to his side and his voice to die away.
But he didn’t come down immediately from his little rock. He looked round him with a quite special expression, the expression of a creature with the beak of a bird of prey and the body of a serpent, a creature who has bitten its prey in half, and swallowed half of it, but still feels unsatisfied.
And it happened to be just at that very moment that Pyraust, the girl-moth, implored her boy-friend, Myos the House-Fly, to remove his powerful front legs from the particular one of her languidly trailing wings which it was always easiest for her to straighten out first when she had decided to spread both her wings in flight.
“I know he’s calling for me to go to him,” she explained, “and when he’s calling so strongly it hurts me, yes it hurts me very much, not to be able to go to him! So lift up your front legs, my beautiful one, I beseech you! They are so strong and so gloriously black; and O! how weak my poor trembling brown wings seem in comparison with them! But lift them up now, I beg you!”
But the fly remained obstinate. “In a second; all in good time, all in due course!” he buzzed. “But while we are together I do so want to settle once for all this one single point. Surely you do admit, my sweet one, you can’t help it, that in the smallest atom of dust, just as in the smallest grain of sand, there is a whole world of reality. Never mind all this noisy speaking and shouting! It’s about shams and shows; not about reality at all!”
Thus speaking Myos pressed his two front legs, so black, so shining, and so extremely strong, more firmly than ever upon the quivering wing of the girl-moth. “But look who’s here!” he added presently; and, again, after another pause: “Aren’t you glad, my Crumb of Crumbs, that I didn’t let you go when he first began bawling out his blathering bluster? Why! you’d have bumped into her! And I can tell you, my leaf of longing, my flying feather of dainty fancy, if you had bumped into her it would have been the end of you!”
The brown moth ceased struggling. The fly removed his leg from her wing. They both settled themselves down as comfortably as they were able in those narrow quarters where they were only about six inches below the powerful fingers of the king of Ithaca as he went on bargaining with Zeuks. Neither Zeuks nor he paid the faintest attention to the torrent of rhetoric from the lichen-covered rock, a torrent which, as soon as the speaker realized what newcomer it was who had now appeared among them, recommenced with redoubled vigour. For the personage who had burst in upon that extemporized “ecclesia” was in fact no other than Petraia, the old-maid midwife; and it was a Petraia worked up to a considerable degree of professional indignation, not to speak of virginal vituperation.
She advanced at a pace which could only be described by the vulgar expression “at a run”. She forced her way straight through the crowd till she reached a family group whose members were pushing against each other to get as close as they could to Pegasos and Arion.
Here she singled out a woman, obviously about as far advanced in pregnancy as it is possible to be and, clutching her by the only portion of her person which was not already pre-empted by three other children in addition to the small creature as yet undelivered, she dragged her away protesting loudly, a protest shared by so many of her brood that her carrying off by Petraia caused quite a little convulsion and a sort of counter-eddy in the stream of people who surrounded those two supernatural beasts.
As she dragged the woman towards the farm-house which was nearest to Zeuks’ domain they passed so close to the club of Herakles that Myos and Pyraust could clearly catch what Patraia was saying, and she was saying a great deal.
“A self-respecting woman like you,” she was complaining, “ought to be wiser than to be so interested in these playthings of men! All that these silly boy-men want are more and more playthings! What they don’t realize is the true meaning of this great news that is now spreading through the entire world. They don’t realize, these silly boys, that during a few recent weeks there has been a revolution in Nature herself! Nature herself has decided to assert herself at last. And this means, can mean, does mean, and will mean only one thing! And that one thing is this: Women from now on are no longer subject to men.
“And it means more than that. It means that women are not only from now on freed from the yoke of men, but that men are from now on subject to women, and must learn, if they don’t want to witness the death and perishing of the entire human race, to subject themselves to their mothers and wives and daughters.
“From now on men must learn that their highest worship is their worship of women and that this worship is called Uranian because it resembles the inspiration of the Heavenly Muse!”
All this while Petraia never ceased dragging her pregnant captive towards the Bed of Delivery, the Bed which everyone present at that stupendous scene was forced by her ringing declaration to behold as the only holy and thrice-blessed Bed to be desired by all! The unfortunate or divinely fortunate woman in whom the shock of this outrageous publicity had already started the suspended pains of labour was imploring the three children who were clinging to her to let her go, as well as imploring Petraia not to drag her so fast; and so shrill was the desperate falsetto clamour of their combined voices that the man of the family following uncomfortably behind was unable to succeed in his attempt to appear to be absorbed with interest in a particular white sail on the horizon of the bay.
Just before passing out of sight Petraia called the man to the woman’s side, and, as the two of them with their children vanished from sight, she herself swung round once more and uttered, in a tone more piercing than any she had yet used, her final defiance.
“News has just reached me,” she cried, “from my sister, who serves the Nymph Egeria, in the land of the King of the Latins where the Trojans have founded a new Troy, that Persephone herself has escaped from the Kingdom of Death and has begun to hasten across the face of the earth to find her mother Demeter! When these two meet, so has the Nymph Egeria told my sister, the world’s new age of the real rule of women will begin!
“And then it will be that men will sink back once more into what was their position when the world began, that is to say into complete inferiority to women; so that from that moment onwards their proper use and value and status
in the world will be as it was in the Golden Age under the Rule of Kronos; that is to say as merely the breeding animals that we women use at our free will and pleasure, so that we can bear a sufficient number of girl-children who will in their turn become the rulers of the earth!”
With this final cry of defiance Petraia was gone; but Nisos, whose diplomatic caution, not to speak of his vivid personal fear of the fellow, had made him keep his eyes on Enorches who had remained silent on his rock during Petraia’s outburst, now found himself unable to resist a shiver of panic when he saw the Orphic priest solemnly, pontifically, and with awe-inspiring intensity, lift up his right arm and point with extended fingers, as if uttering a devastating malediction, towards a particular point upon the horizon of the noonday blueness of the sea.
“Listen to me, O people of Ithaca!” he cried, “and be not deceived by an excited creature who knows no more of what has really begun to happen in the world than a feeble-winged moth!”
At this point it was no more concealed from Nisos than it was concealed from the Moth herself or indeed from her friend the Fly, that a thought-wave of some sort had been passing, consciously or unconsciously, in its gloating religiosity and its bitter belligerency between the Orphic priest and the two insects within the split bosom of the club of Herakles, one of them the priest’s natural sacrificial victim and the other his natural biter, stinger, teaser, poisoner, tormentor, scavenger, devourer, and final exterminator.
Atlantis Page 15
