“They shall remain in the sacred stables and in the consecrated meadows of the celebrants and hierophants of the Mysteries! They shall be made joyful by Eros, the Lord of Divine Lust, and shall be redeemed from the service of men by Dionysos the Lord of oblivious ecstasy!”
Thus speaking Enorches snatched at the bridle of Pegasos with one hand and at the bridle of Arion with the other, evidently hoping that the power of his personality, and the authority of his manner, and the occult magnetism of his touch would produce the required vibration of super-human force in sufficient accumulation to enable him to carry them off to those usurped purlieus of Athene’s shrine which he had now appropriated as his own. But the event turned out otherwise.
Never had Nisos felt prouder of the old hero than he did at that moment: never had he felt more utterly resolved that no insurrection against him by the House of Naubolides, even with his own dad, Krateros, and his own brother, the betrothed of Leipephile, as its leaders, should ever meddle with the old warrior’s authority!
In a flash, in the flickering of an eyelash, in the curve of a single ripple on the halcyon sea outside the bay, Odysseus had made use of the Club of Herakles as if it were a battering-ram and had administered to the Priest such a blow in his belly that the man went over in a perfect summersault, legs and arms in the air, and lost all his breath for a moment when he struck the ground. Next, with a series of rapid gestures and commands, so calmly and quietly made that he might have been seated in his hall at the end of the pillared corridor, Odysseus got Nisos and the treasure, still in its great sack, on the broad shoulders of Pegasos, and Zeuks himself, shaken by terrific amusement, lodged on the immortal creature’s rump, and finally, just as his enemy, having regained breath was scrambling to his feet, he got himself, the club in his hand, and within it the Moth and the Fly clinging desperately together, balanced somehow upon the black-maned Arion.
All would have been well and they would have escaped in royal style, leaving the Priest of the Mysteries confounded, if it had not been that at this moment of all moments the old everlasting competitive instinct was aroused in the black-maned horse, progeny of the semen of Poseidon when Demeter played the mare, an instinct to show that a horse born of the coupling of Land and Sea could be faster, though it never left the earth, than one with wings so wide that their shadows stretched further than any bow could shoot and whose parentage was the spilling of Gorgonian blood!
With this natural but luckless urge propelling him the horse Arion started off with a bound before the old king, being a poor horseman since the isle was too rocky and mountainous to breed horses, had properly settled himself on its back; with the result that the old man, feeling himself to be slipping, tugged violently at the bridle, causing the creature to rear up on its hind legs.
Here was Enorches’ chance, and “the well-hung one”, as his fellow mystagogues called him, who was now beside himself with blind fury, seized Pegasos by his nearest wing, and Arion by the nearest portion of his flowing mane, and with a mighty wrench and a superhuman tearing and rending, of which the maddest follower of Dionysos would have been proud, pulled out a whole quarter of that flowing mane by the roots and the whole of the left wing of the Flying Horse by its roots, screaming, as he did so, in a voice that seemed to whirl like a sea-vulture round their heads in strident circles: “By all that’s beyond our knowledge, and beyond our powers of knowledge, I curse you both!”
But they were no ordinary mortal horses these two; and after a quick exchange of equine-heart to equine-heart commentary on the situation with their heads touching, disregarding the Priest of Orpheus as completely as if he were an inanimate reproduction of the male organ that had simultaneously come to life and become inebriated, but whose antics were of no interest to creatures of their immortal breed, they leapt forward on their dedicated journey.
Thus it was that in spite of the abundant mixture of ichor and blood which dripped from the two horses’ injured sides, and in spite of the insecure seat and bad horsemanship of the aged king, and in spite of the weight of the sack of treasure and its uneasy balancing by so young a rider as Nisos, and in spite of the fooling and jesting of Zeuks, who astraddle on Pegasos’ rump, began murmuring a bawdy Bœotian ditty at the expense of the defeated priest, it was long before the sun showed any sign of sinking that this unusual group of living souls reached the rocky harbour-town of Reithron Paipalöenton. The laziest loiterers round the water-front of this town must have realized as they saw them, if they had not done so before, that something had happened, in the heaven, or in the earth, or in Erebos beneath the earth, that had materially altered the normal adjustment of the celestial and terrestial order, causing the most weird concatenations of persons and things.
Here they saw, for instance, these Reithron spectators of their harbour’s routine, two mysteriously unusual horses, both dripping with blood, one of them with a single useless wing of many cubits length and a bleeding hole where its fellow had been and the other with a ghastly raw place where half of its sweeping black mane had been plucked out from its neck, so that its skin, though naturally of a greyish tinge, showed like white ivory blotched with blood, while riding upon one of these creatures was the most famous of all the heroes of the Trojan War save the swift-footed Achilles, and riding on the other, with a handsome boy in front of him, was a figure of comedy so extravagant that he might have been the tipsy Silenos himself, fresh from following Dionysos across the world!
And if the philosophic observers of Reithron Paipalöenton were struck by the outward appearance of our travellers, what about the Moth and Fly within the life-crack of the Heraklean Club?
“Are we still ourselves, Pyraust, my sweet friend?” enquired Myos, the house-fly, of his bewildered companion, while the west wind rushed wildly past them and the waves broke under the hooves of their two steeds, as they followed the jagged coast-line of that long and narrow island from one extremity to the other; but there was a tense moment of speechlessness within the bosom of the club of Herakles until after several convulsive and deep-drawn shivers the brown moth collected strength enough to reply.
“You are yourself, O imperturbable invertebrate! But, alas for me! I haven’t got the courage, nor the personality, to follow my own purposes and go my own way — O how wild this wind is! It would blow me into the forest if I were out in it; or if it were from the East I’d be drowned in the sea! — no! I haven’t got the strength of will to live my own life for myself in my own way; and even now my conscience is all worried because I didn’t go to help the Priest when he was surrounded by enemies! How brave he was to stand up for himself against them all and not even be afraid of tearing the feathers out of one of them and the hairs out of the other!
“O the poor, lonely, holy, heavenly man! O the wildly-loving, desperate man! O the great, erotic champion of blind, beautiful, abandoned drunken passion! O divine intoxicator! O the blessed inspirer of eternal hatred carried to a point beyond all understanding! How could I have borne to see a Priest of the Love of very Love and the Hate of very Hate frustrated in the ecstatic piety of his revenge, just when his beautiful anger had become a devouring Worm that could not be destroyed and a consuming Flame that could not be put out?
“I was a wretched disciple not to fly over to him, a miserable hand-maid not to whisper to him with my fluttering wings how much I admired him, how deeply I venerated his mighty, his majestic, his mysterious anger!”