“O Great Goddess of Wisdom,” prayed the white-robed figure, “send to thy faithful and devoted worshippers the power to hold fast amid all troubles and tribulations and against all enemies and traitors, and against all chances and accidents, and against all famines and pestilences and elemental disasters, that imperishable gift of pure reason which alone can assauge and mitigate and allay all the ills that our human mortality brings with it! Return, return, O greatest of all Goddesses, thou who wast born of the divine head of the son of Kronos, thou who hast merely to shake the tassels of thy glorious, equitable, thrice-holy Aegis, and all the howling, ravening, raving, blood-drinking, bone-cracking, flesh-devouring minions of mischief who serve the bigots, the dogmatists, the maniacs, the fanatics, the inquisitors who dominate this maddest of all possible worlds are scouted and routed into headlong flight!
“Here in this ancient hall while our world-famous king is entertaining two beautiful princesses and while Pontopereia the daughter of Teiresias — yes, my sweet child, I see that you’re listening to me from your perch like a sea-swallow blown inland before its time in that high window seat! — here, I say, in this old hall, while our king is entertaining his beautiful visitors, have you, his faithful people, forgotten — hast thou our wily sovereign thyself forgotten — the noble, the heroic, the pure, the devoted, the religious-hearted Telemachos, son of Odysseus, son of Laertes.
“What, I ask you, is wrong with all you people, that you are dividing yourselves now into these accurst divisions, some of you wanting Odysseus to rot like a wounded stag till he lies dead in his bed and makes way for Krateros Naubolides, or for Agelaos, son of Krateros Naubolides, the betrothed of my own sister Leipephile, and some wanting him to catch the ears of the whole world with his voyage across the drowned Atlantis to unknown shores beyond the Ultimate Horizons, but none of you, no! not even thou thyself, O King! thou infinitely heroic and infinitely wise lord of adventure by land and sea! — have even so much as considered the claim of this noble, this calm, this beautiful, this dignified, this profoundly intellectual, this spiritual-soul’d, pure-minded only son of Odysseus and Penelope!
“Why, I ask you, my friends, why, I ask you, my sisters and parents and neighbours, why, I ask you, my wily, secretive, many-natured, much-experienced, much-enduring, invincible Odysseus, have you narrowed down this ridiculous dispute to whether an old man is to risk mixing his bones with the bones of the lost populations of drowned Atlantis or is to be allowed to walk in the forests in sunshine and moonlight to listen to the winds and the waves, to survey the motions of the stars and risings and settings of the sun and the moon until he is buried by the side of his faithful wife, when all the while, only a few leagues away, there abides in the deep contemplation of the secret wisdom of the Great Goddess whose shining temple we have among us, the only son of this heroic king and his noble wife?
“I know well that Telemachos seeks no kingship and no kingdom. I know well that Telemachos has his courts and his palaces, his lands and his waters, his armies and his fleets in the high invisible world of the ancient philosophers and thinkers of the human race. I know very well that all you servants of our old heroic king, and thou O King thyself, I know would be with thy servants in this, would have difficulty in persuading Telemachos to add to the intellectual labours of his philosophical life by undertaking the more active and practical burdens of kingship.
“I know very well too that he has great respect for my sister’s betrothed suitor, Agelaos Naubolides. But he is a much older man than my sister’s Agelaos and if our old and much-enduring adventurer — I speak with all respect, most noble king! — were never to return from this incredible voyage upon which he has fixed his heart, his soul and his unusual brain — according to the natural ways of life it seems quite likely that my young friend Agelaos would not have to wait so very long for his turn at the game of Kingship. Therefore let us all, let every one of us, I say, be prepared for the future in the strength of our great Goddess Athene!”
Here the tall girl bent her head, smiled at her mother, Nosodea, who was taking the whole thing with the utmost matter-of-fact placidity and had just moved to the side of the pregnant woman who was now awake again, and quietly accepted the chair which the declamatory Midwife, talking quite hilariously now, dragged to her side.
And then, to Nisos’ relief, Odysseus, who himself had risen from his seat and moved up close to the pregnant woman’s side, once more requested him, but quite gently and apparently taking for granted that his earlier orders had been unheard, to hasten at once to the kitchen and fetch Eurycleia.
“And tell her, my boy,” the old king added, “that I’d be glad if she could make up a bed for this woman so that her child can be born, even if the birth is delayed for a day or two, somewhere within these walls.”
Lifting his head and straightening his shoulders while he whispered a hasty assurance to Zeuks that he’d be back in a pulse-beat, Nisos was just starting on this quest when Odysseus made a sign that he would like a private word with him before he left the hall. When he obeyed this sign and was standing so close to the old man that he could smell the wine he’d been drinking and even feel his own chin tickled by the foremost hairs of that still undaunted and still defiant beard, the old man took advantage of the Midwife’s formidable back being momentarily bent over her sister to whisper to his young emissary that it was extremely likely that the father of this expected infant was none other than that king of the Latins whose defeat by Aeneas and his Trojan followers had, it seemed, led to the founding in Italy of a New Troy upon a group of Seven Hills, not without the aid of the most famous of all cave-nymphs and not without the help of human infants nourished by the dugs of wolves!
“So you can tell our nurse, my boy, if you find her in a difficult mood, that this baby, if a bed is made for its mother here, may turn out to be the heir to all the riches of the Italian Peninsula!” It was at that moment that Nisos became aware that his own mother, Pandea, was cautiously, slowly, obstinately, threading her way towards him, for, drawn as women always are, by the twin-shadows of birth and death, the wife of the rival claimant to their island-throne had naturally an extra magnet tugging at her bosom in addition to the loadstone weighted by both birth and death.
But so quickly had it got about among the neighbours that the most romantic as well as the most human of all the old king’s adventurous lady-loves had suddenly arrived along with Ajax, son of Telamon, regarded by all the world as dead, that popular curiosity, most of all in the women, had already crowded the corridor and the steps with people and was now filling the dining-hall.
Pandea had always been one of the most neighbourly and gossip-loving of ladies and this made her present passage through the crowd to reach her son Nisos by no means rapid. She was in fact caught by the belt and by the folds of her gown at every step.
At any moment now Nisos could have hurried off, thus obeying the king, escaping from his mother, and precluding any untimely labour-pains for the woman here; but he suddenly felt himself powerfully seized by the left wrist. It was Odysseus. “Where,” cried the old man in a husky, agitated voice, “where, in the name of all the gods, is Ajax?”