In the stress of this shock the two wounded animals, Pegasos still bleeding where his lost wing had been torn out, and Arion still switching and bleeding where he had lost half his mane, drew up side by side. Odysseus as he slid down to the ground, not without a certain grim satisfaction, shifted his grasp from the reins to the bridle of Arion, while Nisos, leaving to Zeuks all real responsibility for the wounded Pegasos, pushed the treasure-sack as well as he could to the part of the creature’s back that was still unhurt.
As for Zeuks, he set himself to make a timely use of the healing properties of human saliva. He spat exhaustively upon the raw place in the creature’s side from which the wing had been plucked, and when he had finished doing this he proceeded to blow upon the glittering bubbles of his own spittle until the whole surface of the creature’s side was as iridescent as if the luckless Iris herself, exhausted by her pursuit of Athene among the blameless Ethiopians, had dissolved in fatigue upon his back.
Nisos glanced quickly round to see if the old King were using his spittle as balm for Arion’s shoulder from which Enorches had torn at least half of that flowing mane; but in place of anything of that sort Odysseus was leaning his own elbow upon Arion’s back together with the Nemean Club while he investigated the cause of this abrupt halt of their divine steeds.
Nisos had only to follow the tilt forward of the old king’s beard to share his discovery, and they both faced the interrupter of their ride with cautious wonder. It was at a wild, shaggy, goat-legged, goat-horned, and yet human-shaped figure lying fast asleep in the shadow of a great rock that the old man and the boy now gazed in astonishment.
And then Nisos suddenly realized that there was another figure in their path, and one with which he was already acquainted. This second figure was nobody else but the eldest of the Three Fates, the powerful Atropos herself.
Then once more the boy faced her, the same frail woman, resting her back just as she had done before against the trunk of a spruce-fir that grew upon the very rock beneath which the sleeping Goat-foot lay. Unlike this goat-horned, goat-legged figure, however, the little old woman with her back to the tree was wide-awake; nor did the tree against which she was resting break the glare of the afternoon sun for her in the manner in which the rock did for the Being below her.
“O! I never thought—” gasped Nisos the moment he met the eyes of this little old woman.
“No, you never thought, my boy, did you, that you and old Atropos would meet again so soon! In truth I never expected it myself. You see,” she went on, keeping her eyes fixed on the boy and completely disregarding both Odysseus and Zeuks, “we Fates are not — I wish indeed we were! — the sole arbiters of destiny in this mad world. It was, for example, only in very vague shape that we Three foresaw all that’s happening upon the earth today.
“But when this confusion ends, for confusion by its inherent nature cannot last, neither we three, nor the goddess Themis, whose image the Harpies broke, no, nor even the great Son of crooked-counselling Kronos, himself, will be the only arbiters of what happens. There will still remain, my dear boy, those two great Powers, and I am not talking of Eros or Dionysos, whom we all, plants and trees and beasts and birds, and fishes and reptiles and worms and insects and men and gods must obey, Necessity and Chance.”
The eyes of Atropos seemed to hold behind them, when she had done speaking, so much more than the half-named body of a little, fleshless, shrivelled, skinny old woman, that Nisos continued to stare in petrified awe into their singular depths.
The sensation they gave him was that the sky above Ithaca and indeed above all the isles in all the bays and seas and straits and gulfs of the land of the Achaeans, together with the interiorly receding depths of all that land itself, the depths, in fact, of all the various solid elements that composed the rocks and sand and earth and soil of which that land was composed, had that pair of eyes as their eyes, and were even now, those remotenesses of sky beyond limit, and those staggering recessions of terrestrial matter beyond limit, gazing at him in a positively ghastly intensity while they informed him that the real deciders of his fate and of the fate of the old hero at his side, and of the fate of Eione, the ideal loveliness of whose perfect form had been for him the living background of the whole of this wild ride, were not the Fates nor the Gods nor the sublime obstinacy and cunning of Odysseus, but, as Atropos herself had just admitted, the inescapable pressure of pitiless Necessity and the motiveless antics of causeless Chance.
The tension, as they thus met once again, between the heart of Nisos and the eyes of Atropos was however soon brought to an end by an abrupt awakening movement in the goat-legged and goat-horned Personage lying in the shadow of that rock. He didn’t wake quickly. He awoke slowly. But no sooner had he lifted a hand, not even to scratch his head but to grope with lecherous fingers amid the foliations of grey lichen that covered the base of the rock than an astonishing thing happened; and what was queerest about this thing was that it was felt by everybody and that it was inescapable.
Both the animals quite evidently felt it. Odysseus felt it. Nisos felt it. And Zeuks felt it. The fragile old figure beneath the spruce-fir on the top of the rock must at that moment have been occultly, covertly, and peremptorily summoned to some other significant parting of the ways for persons in whose destiny she was interested; for she promptly took advantage of this opportune distraction, and gathering her flimsy garments about her scrambled down from the rock and disappeared among the trees to sea-ward.
Nisos was amazed at what had begun to happen to him the very first moment that this goat-legged sleeper opened his eyes. He had been so hypnotized into a sort of philosophic acceptance of things he could only half follow, that, when he found himself shaking from head to foot in extreme panic-terror, but without the faintest notion of why the sudden fear had come upon him, he felt as if he were going mad. Was some appalling danger threatening them all, including the animals who had brought them here? And had the oldest and strongest of the Spinners of Destiny come to warn them, and had now gone to ward off from them the approaching danger?
Nisos felt certain he was not more affected by this sudden and inexplicable panic than were his companions. He could see that the horses were trembling; and indeed he experienced in the teeth of this weird terror a proud satisfaction that his own right arm which, while he was holding his colloquy with Atropos, he had kept stretched out, had not loosened or lessened the pressure of the hand with which he was supporting the great treasure-sack, propt on the back of Pegasos.
And it was clear to him that the wits of Odysseus were not in any more danger of being lost in this mysterious panic than his own. The old king calmly advanced towards the recumbent goat-man, dragging Arion with him. Nisos noticed too that he held the bridle with his left hand while he advanced, and that he gripped the Heraklean club firmly with his right.
“Hail to you,” the old king said, “whoever you may be — whether immortal or mortal, whether god or man! And I pray you, if you are a god, to pardon us for disturbing your noon-sleep before natural termination. I am Odysseus and I have come with Nisos Naubolides and with our good friend Zeuks to do honour to the daughter of the great dead Prophet Teiresias whom many-voiced Rumour declares has been brought from Thebes to a dwelling here, hard by the sea. If, therefore, whether you are a god or a man, you will assist us in finding this House, I, Odysseus, son of Laertes, will of my free heart, give you whatever your soul desires of the treasure we carry with us.”
The prostrate goat-man heard him to the end without stirring. Then he made a very quick movement. He rolled the greenish-black eye-balls of the enormous whites of his nymph-ravishing eyes, and without changing his position, or relaxing his clutch upon the lichen-tuft he was fondling, he took in everything. In fact from the look in those exploring eyes he did more than take in everything. You could have said he devoured, drank up, and erotically possessed everything; not only the old warrior with his bowsprit beard and full-bosomed club advancing upon him, but the half-winged Pegasos, the half-maned Arion, the grave, slender boy Nisos, and every bulge in the choreographic blur which the blazing sun created out of the bucolic features of Zeuks — except the great sack of treasure, across which those rolling eyes flitted without offering it the faintest attention.