Nisos had no sooner decided upon selecting spoudazo, “I absolutely will” as the logos that should henceforth represent the motive-power of his life, than Odysseus and Nausikaa having decided upon something that was clearly very important as the result of their prolonged and absorbed discussion, swung clear round and came out of the extempore dining-hall into that wretchedly littered ante-chamber where those carefully scrubbed planks led down to the ship’s lowest hold.
Our friend followed the aged King of Ithaca and the middle-aged Queen of the Phaiakians till they paused at the threshold of the cabin that Nausikaa shared with Okyrhöe. The ever-watchful old warrior was aware in a flash that they were being followed, and turned indignantly upon Nisos. But Nisos, knowing the wanderer’s almost supernatural self-control, flung himself on his mercy without a second’s hesitation.
“You ought O my King,” he cried, “to know at once what I’ve learnt by means of the weapon you now hold in your hand! For as you now are holding it, mighty one, this is news you will never share with the Sixth Pillar in the Corridor at Ithaca! If I don’t repeat every word of it, O great Master, may I pass at once to the kingdom of Aidoneus!”
It was with an unclouded forehead and even with the beginning of a friendly smile that the Wanderer bade him speak; and hurriedly and breathlessly the lad told the two of them the whole story.
To the young man’s astonishment it was Nausikaa who spoke first. “You had better tell him,” she said, addressing Odysseus, “what you have told me.”
“I have been telling the Queen,” said Odysseus at once, “what no one in the world knows except your mother; namely, my dear child, that I, and not Krateros Naubolides, am your father.”
Our friend stood for a moment just as if one of those golden antennae, for that is what those elongated tassels that hung from the Helmet of Proteus were really like, had got twisted round his neck. Then his whole face puckered up, in the manner of a small boy who has been slapped and told to go to bed and the biggest tears that Nausikaa had ever seen, though two even bigger ones formed, though they did not fall, in her own eyes, rolled down his cheeks.
Odysseus looked quietly from one to the other of them, while with the wrist of the hand that held the club, that club which sometimes was called Dokeesis, “Seeming”, and sometimes “Expectation” he touched Nisos gently on the head. Then he said, while his bow-sprit beard turned with a queer jerk into the direction of the bed in Nausikaa’s cabin: “Well, my son, what our new Queen and your old Dad have to do now is to plant between us the seed of a new brother for you since you’ve lost Agelaos! And he’ll have to look sharp,” Odysseus added, as he led the Queen towards her own bed, “if our friend Leipephile is to conceive a new King of Ithaca before you and I come home from Atlantis!”
The old man — and our young friend, for all his emotional agitation, had the wit to notice this, took good care to prop up “Expectation” against the edge of their bed, before returning to the threshold to draw the curtains of their chamber — said to Nisos with an extremely humorous expression on his face: “For the sake of Aphrodite’s son, and by him I do not mean the good Aeneas — stay on guard here, my boy, and make sure that that terrible woman from Thebes doesn’t break in upon us! O yes! and don’t fail to remind me, before those Immortal Horses do carry them off, to see to it that that poor devil of an Enorches has a couple more blankets to keep him warm! He hurt both those creatures, you must remember, and flying horses, like ordinary horses, have long memories.”
CHAPTER XII
It was at the upper portion of Pegasos’s wounded shoulder that the hypnotized stare of Nisos was fixed. With his own back to the mast Nisos had accepted for a moment the serious responsibility of two important ropes while Proros as the natural result of the unusual amount of wine he had drunk went to the side of the vessel to relieve himself.
But after handing back the ropes Nisos still stared at the shoulder of the flying horse; for not only was he amazed to see that the outraged wing had grown fresh and strong but there was something else going on that astonished him even more. For while Nausikaa took her place in the centre of that god-like back, and while, behind her, the meticulous Herald discoursed earnestly and authoritatively to Okyrhöe, evidently explaining to her many matters of which she was completely ignorant with regard to the political situation among the Phaiakians to whose land she was now to be transported, to his bewilderment Nisos actually beheld, stretching out of the blankets with which the priest’s nakedness was covered, a bare arm with extended fingers clutching a piece of solidified ointment wherewith he was furtively rubbing and moistening the roots of the newly-grown feathers of that resuscitated wing.
“Is this insane fellow,” Nisos thought, “actually trying to wither up this new growth of feathers as he destroyed the original ones?”
But when, turning his gaze upon the Flying Horse’s god-like head, he caught the creature’s calm, alert, self-composed and liquid eye, he recognized the true state of the case; namely that the crazy priest was desperately trying to redeem the harm he had done by doctoring these miraculous feathers so as to make them resemble those of a supernatural albatross.
When once he was satisfied that the Priest was not playing any wicked game with Pegasos, Nisos gave himself up to the pure fascination of just watching the winged horse, as the creature patiently stood on that top deck of the “Teras”. His length was such that four of him would have reached from figure-head to stern and his width was such that four of him would have reached from the starboard rail to the larboard rail. The rippling flow of the muscles under his skin was apparent with every breath he drew; and as Nisos watched him with increasing wonder and told himself that there weren’t many boys in the world or men either who would ever live to sec such a sight, the divine creature’s grace became yet more astounding as the animal twisted his neck round to see Zeuks lift, first Eione, whose thighs he clearly enjoyed caressing as he assisted her, and then Pontopereia whom he hoisted up bodily by her waist, and who, taking no more notice of him than if he’d been a Mill-wheel or a Wind-mill, fixed her beautiful and intellectual dark eyes upon Nisos and breathed the words, unmistakably audible, though wafted to him on the prematurely engendered twin-sigh of a final farewelclass="underline" “You are my boy and I love you!”
Nisos was standing now so close to Odysseus that he could feel the quivering outer edge of the great wave of intense erotic vibration that was passing between the old king of Ithaca and the new Queen of Phaiakia.
That Odysseus’ emotion was unusually strong could be seen by the manner in which he squeezed the head of “Expectation” alias “Dokeesis”. Herakles himself could have hardly clasped his fingers round that wooden skull with a fiercer clutch. The consequence of this natural action while the lithe and limber, the glossy and sinewy, the delicate and perfectly equiposed body of the most athletic creature in the Cosmos rested on the deck of the “Teras”, was to produce such a vertiginous shock in the interior of the Heraklean Club that the Fly was forced like so many other great scientists to forget himself in his profession, and at once began interpreting, to the Moth and to all the world, in his high-pitched adverbial tongue, the information which the familiar voice of the Sixth Pillar in the old Corridor was conveying to the club.