“What on earth’s the matter, old friend?” he enquired. “Of course I want your help, want it very much indeed, want it especially at this juncture when I’ve got to get hold of Teiresias’ daughter but can’t think of any way of doing it, except by crossing the island on my own feet and carrying the girl off, like a warm bundle over my shoulder!
“But you are a wise lady, a friend of my parents, and, I daresay, of my grand-parents too, and you know all that is rumoured from skin to skin, to say nothing of mouth to mouth, from this damned Ornax promontory to the top of this confounded ‘Cuckoo-Throne’ where the Agdos-place of your precious old Zeuks must be hiding those heavenly horses in his pig-sties till he can find somebody to buy them! Who but a wise girl like you, my dearest friend, could possibly have told me that there was a shy old farm-labourer, with a homestead named Agdos perched on the top of Kokkys-Thronax, or whatever it was mother called it, who had got the winged Pegasos and the black-maned Arion hidden in some creaky shed or ruined stick-house up there until he hears of a travelling merchant rich enough, and by the gods daring enough, to make him an offer? Aye! But isn’t it more likely that Pegasos and Arion will hoof this poor old Zeuks into the sea, and carry their purchaser to the Moon to sell him, than that an imaginary Phoenician trader will offer to buy the winged offspring of the Gorgon and the black-maned by-blow of Poseidon’s rape of the mother of us all?
“But listen, my dear,” he went on; for with all his adamantine, mortised-and-tenoned, indurated, inveterate, homogeneous, impregnable, bowsprit-bearded egoism, the son of Laertes was born crudely kind and had acquired an almost supernatural discretion; and he could see that any off-hand sailorish jocularity which diminished the gravity of the startling facts the Dryad had disclosed was ill-suited to the tempo of the occasion. “It is clear that as in what you call your ‘garden’ you have worked at fulfilling the inscrutable intentions of our mother the earth, under whatever name she likes best to be invoked, so you have been permitted a most rare communion with every living creature, mortal or immortal, finned, furred, feathered, scaled, naked as a serpent, disembodied as a mist, such as ever has been, ever is, or ever could be associated with the surface of this rocky island.
“And when, as at this hour, in the presence of the most dangerous, crucial, important, and fatal conjunction of the Zodiacal Signs of my destiny upon earth, you my parents’ oldest friend, you the world-famous Dryad of the oldest oak in Hellas, take upon yourself the piloting of my boat through the earth-waves of mould and sand and gravel and clay, the only offering I have wherewith to thank you, Kleta-Dryad, is the cry of gratitude in my heart: ‘vox et praeterea nihil!’ as Petraia the Midwife always says, in the language of their New Troy, about her twin-sister’s Nymph in that Italian cave.”
He was silent, his eyes fixed steadily upon her face, his ten fingers, with the intention no doubt, in true Odyssean style, of simulating calm, resisting the natural human tendency to clasp and unclasp themselves under the pressure of agitating and anxious thought, tugging at the fastenings of his broad belt, while he even went so far as to indulge in the motion of a long shiver.
Then he straightened himself. “Well!” he muttered: “I must have a good bath and a mighty meal and a lordly action of the bowels; and I must get hold of Nisos, and, if I can do it without scaring any of them, discuss with him and with Tis and Eione at what hour we’d better make our visit to Ornax; and whether, we’d better assume, and I fancy Eione will be our best advisor on that point, that these mysterious strangers, Zenios and Okyrhöe, have come to Ithaca from Thebes and belong to the House of Kadmos, and that they have been within their legal right according to our Hellenic tradition in possessing themselves of the person of Pontopereia, the daughter of Teiresias.
“But you are the only one, I swear to you, Kleta darling, who have given me the true clue to my fate at this supreme crisis in my turbulent life; add thus while the Sun, once more Helios Hyperion, freed forever from the yoke of Apollo, looks down upon me, and the Moon, once more the virgin Selene, freed forever from the yoke of Artemis, looks down upon me, as, in this stick-house of a stable for immortal horses, I carry on my haggling with Zeuks — not with Zeus on the top of Gargaros in Ida, but with Zeuks on the top of Kokkys-Thronax in Ithaca — what I shall have in my heart will be neither the tricks of Zenios of Ornax, nor the wiles of Zeuks of Agdos, but the wisdom of the Dryad whose garden was the cradle of Odysseus.”
With these words the crafty hero did what even his father had never done — if Laertes was his father rather than that “Father of Lies”, the great Hermes himself — he flung his arms about the old creature’s neck and kissed her with such dexterity that the protruding point of his bowsprit beard rested tenderly upon the curve of her left shoulder.
He never knew, nor did any of his household ever know, far less any of the city-dwellers between the walls, or any vineyard-owners outside the walls, what the old Dryad did when in silence he had released her, in silence had turned his back upon her, in silence had re-mounted the steps to his bedroom; but the scattered offscourings of dismembered vegetation, the sheddings from dead leaves, the tiny bits of dead sticks, the half-stripped feathers, the empty husks of grass-seed, the pale straw-heads of withered stalks, not to mention the almost invisible insects for whom these minute objects were as stately avenues of cyclopean ruins, in fact all the unconsidered and unrecorded things that in their infinite multitude made up her “garden”, accepted the opinion of a small black slug who assured its neighbour, a still smaller beetle, that the gods had turned their Dryad, as they had once turned Niobe, the ancestress of the human race, into a fountain of tears.
But the sun mounted up, steadily and ever more steadily, into the heavens, until he reached a point when the phantom moon that floated opposite to his rising, seemed to be drifting so aimlessly in a sky which was incapable of doing justice to more than one great luminary at the same time, that she looked as if nothing could hold her back from sliding down in an utter dive of helplessness into whatever element of complete extinction awaited such as sank and sank and sank, till they reached the nadir of the universe.
None of the three women, however, who poured first cold, then tepid, then pleasantly warm water, over the king in his bath, had the faintest resemblance in her mood just then to the moon in her vanishing. They were all indeed, although each in her different manner, far too intensely interested in the problem with which Odysseus had just confronted them to think of anything else. This was the question as to what special treasure or treasures he and Nisos had better take with them to Kokkys-Thronax if they were to be in any sort of secure position in bargaining with this madman, Zeuks.
Bargain with the fellow it was clear they had to; and from what the Dryad had said it was also clear that he was likely to prove an extremely shrewd bargainer. It did cross the cunning old hero’s mind that it might be possible to take a band of men up there, surround this homestead called Agdos, and carry off that immortal pair of horses by force; but the more he thought of such a violent and arbitrary way of going to work the less he liked it.