This incident was solely and simply due to the sudden jerk to the corpse’s head when Zeuks lifted up that long, lean, painfully muscular body preparatory to making the effort, which was not at all an easy one, of balancing it on his shoulder. But this negligible and unimportant accident made, for a special reason, a most agitating impression on the mind of Zeuks.
What it did for him was to set going a peculiarly morbid infirmity of his imagination; namely the fantastic illusion that his own automatic blinkings and pulse-beats and heart-throbs and blood-circulations, yes! and even the naturally drawn breathings from his lungs might suddenly be intensified to a degree beyond bearing and he might be driven so wild by all these reiterative pulsings, pumpings and poundings that he’d be sent raving through Arima like a naked madman!
His face was contracted into a desperately grim scowl as he staggered off from the Hector-Tree with the body of Ajax on his back. “And so,” he told himself, “it has now come to the point; and the question is, can the great-grand-son of immortal Maia keep his ‘will to forget’ intact when his whole taut skin drums from within to the tune of ‘remember!’
Staggering along for a dozen strides at a time, every few seconds Zeuks had to stop to take breath. His shoulders were broad enough; but his legs were short; and the corpse he carried was so tall that its toes, for he carried it face downwards, kept tapping against his own heels.
But it was the horrible feeling that at any moment this repetitive pounding and pulsing and blinking might split his skin that was spoiling that moment for him rather than any effort of carrying Ajax. And it was at his tenth stop that he made a really desperate attempt to deal with this insane attack. He planted his feet firmly in a patch of damp and mossy soil, not far from the spot where Eurybia used to exercise her curious sedentary witchcraft, and where she used to argue with Echidna from twilight to twilight as to whether this breaking loose out of Tartaros, about which all the Attic world was now talking, was due to feminine wiles or to titanic straining.
Having got the heel of one sandal hidden in that soft wet moss and the under-curve of the other sandal covering something brittle below that wet moss that might easily have turned out to be the ivory-white thigh-bone of a still-born child, Zeuks now took up his own consciousness, as if it were a massive plummet of lead sharpened at the end, and drove it down deep into the earth.
Had either of his youthful acquaintances, Nisos or Pontopereia, been at his side at that moment they would have had, in the case of the former a male inspiration, and in the case of the latter a female inspiration, simply from Zeuks’ visage. It was literally distorted, contorted, convulsed with pure exultation when at last he hauled up into the light the mental self he had let down into the abyss. What pleased him so much was the supreme success of his supreme effort; for his horrid, loathsome, disgusting mental illness, revolting in itself and attended by the wildest and maddest terrors, had actually been left behind in the depths of the earth like an after-birth at the bottom of a weedy garden.
This was a relief so incredible that it confused him by its very beatitude. “Never again,” he told himself, “never once again shall I have those horrors!”
And Zeuks remembered how when he was farming in the vicinity of Cuckoo-Hill he once heard Enorches, the Priest of the Mysteries, curse a rash young neighbour who had tried to seduce the neophyte-priestess Spartika, the daughter of Nosodea, and the sister of Leipephile; and how the pompously perverse and the necrophiliastically censorious tone of the man in his assumption of priestly authority had for long haunted him because it jumped with his own peculiar mental malady: “May your crime exude from every pore of your body like stinking pus! May it burst from every inch of your skin like gangrenous necrosis! May it reek from your body like putrid decomposition! May it cross every sight you see with a streak of fœtid blood! May it infect every sound you hear with an explosion of foul wind! May it taint everything you touch with vile and viscous glutinosity! May all you taste have the tang of brine and all you smell have a reek of the mortuary! May your consciousness of yourself become a consciousness of empty eye-sockets and rattling cross-bones! May the clock-strokes of annihilation record the hours of all your nights and the dust-motes of disillusion drift over the minutes of all your days!”
Zeuks could not only remember the shock he got from this curse, he remembered also the intensity of the particular prayer about his own fate which was his reaction to it. He had prayed to Arcadian Pan that he might become the supreme lord of the Island of Ithaca, dwelling, as Odysseus the son of Laertes did, and as Agelaos the son of Krateros Naubolides hoped one day to do, above the Corridor of the Pillars. “Why do I think of that prayer at this particular moment?” he asked himself as he staggered and shuffled under the weight of the tall corpse he was carrying, up the much-trodden path across the burying-ground of the slaves that led into the olive-garden.
But Zeuks the son of Arcadian Pan didn’t hasten to leave the graves of the old slaves in order to reach the cradles of the young olives. On the contrary he moved more slowly than ever. He was clutching the dead man’s wrists so tightly with both his hands that the warrior’s toes still in heavy silver-clamped sandals tapped against his own bare heels causing him pain. In this slaves’ cemetery Zeuks was on fairly familiar ground, for several of the farmers of Cuckoo Hill who were too poor to possess cemeteries of their own brought the bodies of their dead slaves to this spot.
Zeuks in his previous visits to the place however had never noticed that one of these graves and this a very deep one had not been filled up but was gaping wide-open. Now what, in the name of Persephoneia, the Queen of all the Dead, was the explanation of this? There were no inscriptions here at all and there had been none for centuries; so that the identity or identities of the occupant or occupants of this deep hole in the earth could only be revealed by such as had lowered him or her into this deep and narrow sepulchre or had recently robbed this nameless sanctuary of its inmate.
By this time the sun had already gone down below the horizon and night was rapidly approaching. “What in the name of Aidoneus and Persephoneia will our old man do with this other old man?” Zeuks now asked himself in perplexity. “He must be-entertaining the Princess by this time in the Dining-Hall and if that incredible old Eurycleia weren’t the woman she is our old king would be in a fine fix! But that’s just what this amazing old woman must have been doing again tonight, saving him from the shame of failing in any of his kingly duties! But what in the name of Aidoneus would the old man feel at this overpowering moment, when he’s not only got the Phaiakians on his hands, along with that crazy Herald of theirs, but has had to confront this Princess of all Princesses, if I were to appear before him with the corpse of Ajax!”
Very carefully and very slowly Zeuks lifted the long lean body, all bone and muscle and sinew, from his shoulder and laid it on its back on the indescribable rubble and litter that surrounded that gaping hole. Then, with his eyes on a smashed pot that looked as if it might have been the first piece of pottery ever made by the hand of man, his thoughts turned to Okyrhöe, “I hate that woman. I know she’s up to some game. Yes, I hate her! Oh, why is it that in this world there’s always somebody we have to wish in Hades? It’s not a matter of war or revenge or rivalry or just family against family, or tribe against tribe, or race against race. Those things are all part of the game, part of the way things are, part of the price we have to pay for being alive at all.
“Krateros Naubolides wants to keep the king here, so that without any trouble he can slip into his shoes when he dies. Odysseus on the contrary naturally wants before he dies to make such a thunderous commotion and such a roaring rumpus that his personality will go resounding on, like the beating of brazen swords upon brazen shields, till it’s heard over both the horizons of the world; heard where the blameless Ethiopians at the Gates of the West cry their farewell to the burning sun on his nightly journey, and heard where the blameless Ethiopians at the Gates of the East cry their welcome to the burning sun as he rises for a new day!