Feeling through every throb the one hand which was still on Zeuks’ throat that he had only to press these fleshy sinews with a viciously increasing purpose to stop the man’s breath for ever, Nisos suddenly thought: “But I am going to be a prophet; and all Prophets have the power of an absolute control over their rage. I shall therefore show this funny fellow Zeuks that I am letting him live when I could easily kill him and being a good friend to him when I could easily be the deadliest enemy.”
And on his side Zeuks was now saying to himself, as he kept his dog-like teeth firmly pressed against his antagonist’s hand: “What is the use of being the great-grandson of the ever-youthful Nymph Maia, even if in the end, for all the gods in my blood, I have to sleep the perpetual sleep of death, what, I ask you, is the use of it all if I can’t detach my consciousness from my body far enough to be able to put up with a leaping, scrabbling, jumping, skipping, dancing kid like this without wanting to bite his head off?”
“Come up quietly with me, Zeuks, old friend,” gasped Nisos. “The old man will be damned glad to see you. But, for the sake of all we both love best in the world, what has happened to Ajax?”
“Surely I’ll come with you, my dear boy,” replied Zeuks. “Ajax, did you say? Why, Ajax is wholly, entirely, absolutely, and altogether out of it. Ajax is in fact not only dead but buried. I found him dead and I buried him myself. But let us go now and let us go quietly as you and I know well how to go. But tell me this before we start and tell it me in your lowest and least heraldic voice. How are things with the old man over his wine? Have either of those ladies got him yet in her toils?”
Nisos gave him as well as he could a lively but rather a school-boyish description of what he had seen; and as the older man listened he nodded many times and muttered varying rather cynical commentaries. Then did the two of them thread their way between the first, second, third and fourth Pillars, Zeuks leaning on the arm of Nisos as if he had been much older than he actually was.
“No, my dear friend,” Zeuks said with a rapid downward glance towards the base of the Sixth Pillar as they passed that philosophic interpreter of elemental vibrations, “no! my impression from all you’ve told me about our old man’s behaviour with those two women is that the Princess Nausikaa is shocked at the physical change in him. I don’t want to mislead you. Sonny, for your impressions are vivid and you have described them mighty well; but my own feeling about it is that Nausikaa finds it hard to recognise in our old king the handsome hero with whom she fell in love when he suddenly appeared from out of the shadows of the rocks while she and her maidens were playing ball by the sea-shore. I don’t think myself he is in the faintest danger of being seduced by the Okyrhöe woman. My idea is that the kind of flattery he uses in her case, you know the sort of thing I mean, that exaggerated praise of everything about her, is due to a mounting and intensifying irritation with the way she treats him.”
“Yes! yes! yes!” murmured Nisos in a still lower voice as they drew near to the thick oaken brazen-barred door at the top of the steps, “yes! yes! I’ve noticed that about him too! He gets rid of his bottled-up rage just as some old people do of their bottled-up misery by the simple process of inventing exaggerated and fantastical fables. But I tell you, Zeuks, my friend, things are about as ticklish up there as they can possibly be. It’s like balancing yourself on a tight-rope — no! not like balancing yourself, like watching them balance themselves! No! I haven’t got it quite right even yet! It’s like watching them dancing upon thin ice dangerously slippery and liable to break and let them into the water!”
“Well, Son, we’ll soon be”—but Nisos couldn’t catch the dying out of that sentence; for they were now standing before the massive brazen-fitted time-darkened door, the other side of which was that palace dining-hall which had already been for numberless generations, and would be for many more to come, a centre of intrigue and plotting, not only for Ithaca, but for the whole of Hellas.
This black-oak door with its four panels and bronze frame opened to them now at the first pressure of Zeuks’ hand. It would have needed one of the minutest of all the dust-motes that danced so solemnly in that spear-shaft of a torch-ray across the head of the lady Okyrhöe, across the head of the lady Nausikaa, across the head of Odysseus himself, to thread that twisted path, beyond the cunning of the tiniest mite of sea-spray left by the sun in his descent, the twisted path to the heart of the old king.
It was clear at once to both Zeuks and Nisos that Odysseus was not so much drunk from the fumes of wine as drunk from the opposing sorceries of those two formidable women.
“You’d have thought,” said Nisos to himself, “that Circe and Calypso between them would have made him harder to beguile; but of course — Nausikaa—”
He closed the brazen-framed door behind Zeuks and himself and made a hurried obeisance to the old bearded figure on the throne-seat at the table, but although the king looked searchingly into each of their faces as they came forward it struck them both that he understood nothing of what he saw save only that some terrible crisis of a fatal choice was upon him.
As to this choice it was abundantly clear to both Nisos and Zeuks that until some unexpected ray of light penetrated that bearded head the old king was simply incapable of choosing between his new temptress and his ancient flame. There was indeed to each of them something almost sickeningly painful in the sight of this tremendous hero of the greatest war ever experienced by the human race being lured to this unseemly turnstile of sexual cross-purpose.
Nisos and Zeuks were able to approach the table in whispered colloquy with each other, were able indeed to receive a wine-glass from Eurycleia and have it filled by Arsinöe, and finally were able to enter into an extremely punctilious argument with the Herald without attracting more notice from Odysseus than a vague, obscure, and taking-everything-for-granted nod.
“Yes, you will be interested to hear,” said the Herald, “that your humble servant has been permitted to approach your King of Kings and Lord of Lords with a request for permission to visit in person the Royal Treasury and to see with my own eyes and touch with my own hands certain pieces of golden armour that actually belonged to Achilles the son of Peleus and which your King of Kings and Lord of Lords won from Ajax in a public competition presided over by the Olympians. This permission I hope presently to take advantage of, but this beautiful lady-in-waiting, who tells me she will escort me to the Treasury, begs me to await the moment when her lovely duty of dispensing wine to the King’s visitors is over for tonight.”
Zeuks looked at Nisos with a cold shiver of apprehension when Ajax was mentioned; and Arsinöe hastened to fill up the young man’s glass the moment he had allowed himself in his embarrassment to empty it at one gulp.
“You haven’t yet made it quite clear to me, sweet lady,” they heard Okyrhöe say to Nausikaa, “what exactly is the change you are so struck by in my darling hero here, since you beheld him, after his escape from that accurst Bitch-Nymph, washed up naked on your shores. O what a shock to your chaste and virginal feelings that occasion must have been! A naked man coming forth out of the wild waves and advancing straight towards you! No wonder this romantic and bewitching story had already become a sailor’s ditty in the docks of every port when I was a little girl!
“Little did I dream it would ever be my lot to be allowed by fate to succeed you in the affections of our little-girl-loving hero! O you must satisfy my childish curiosity, sweet Auntie Nausikaa; for my parents, you know, never allowed me to forget that I was descended from Nausithoos the father of Alkinoos who wedded your dear mother, Arete.