Atlantis (10 page)

The slender and stately old lady surveyed him with whimsical scrutiny. “So you want to get the news from those two small prisoners of yours, do you? And you need an interpreter?”

“O Nurse, I’m thankful it’s you!” gasped Nisos. “Mother wanted me to find out what’s going on and I don’t feel like telling her about what I’ve just seen down there”; and he gave his head a jerk in the down-hill direction. “Does the goddess, do you think, know all about
that
?
Does she know they’ve left a lot of their disgusting nails or claws, or whatever they are, behind, and all bloody too? Why does she let such things happen, Nurse,
and so near her Temple? Themis is cracked clean through—does she know
that
?—clean through, from shoulder to hip! Mother will have a fit when she hears. I’m not going to be the one to tell her, nurse. You bet your life I’m not! You know what she is when she hears things like that. She’ll go rampaging off to Druinos to pour out everything to Nosodea; and there in his corner like a hunched-up toad you may depend old Damnos Geraios will be gloating over every word and thinking what new silliness he can invent for dear sweet simple Leipephile and what new imaginary wickedness for that idealistic fool Stratonika, so that she’ll have to lacerate herself to the bone to purge it away! But tell me, nurse most sacred, nurse most precious, nurse most holy, does our great goddess, who sent you here in answer to my prayer, know about Themis?”

He looked searchingly at the virginal midwife as he asked this question. He knew well that his faith in the omnipotence of their goddess wasn’t what it had been when he was five years old. He was nearly seventeen now, and in these last years he had had a great many very private and rather peculiar thoughts; but it would still have shocked an indestructible vein of piety in him to think that such things could happen as this horrible attack on the obelisk of Themis so near Athene’s very judgment-seat,
without
her knowing anything about it!

Petraia smiled that reassuring familiar smile that had so often comforted him in his paroxysing panic lest the feathered bosom of aboriginal Night should swallow him up alive.

“Let’s think of your insects first,” Petraia said now, and she added: “Moths and Flies before Law and Order!” She added these words with that particular kind of domestic persiflage that is more annoying to a boy nearly seventeen than a slap in the face.

However, he obediently lifted the back of his hand closer to his eyes and stared at the moth and the fly so intently that he could see the delicate lacy fringes on the margins of the moth’s brown wings and the metallic circles like polished adamant round the bulging eyes of the house-fly.

As Nisos stared at the insects it seemed to him that he could feel like a palpable wafture of nard-scented air the divine power of feminine virginity, a power that male youth always recognizes without knowing precisely what it is, pass from Petraia’s hand to the nerves of his shoulder. It did, yes! it actually did, transform the quivering of those brown wings and the friction of those
jet-black
legs upon those gauzy wings into the expression of thoughts that a human being could follow. “So that’s it!” he said to himself sharply and shrewdly.

And he was so afraid that just as a crib of some classic
paragraph
might be snatched from a school-boy before he had got the hang of it, that this preternatural translation of the sign-language of insects into the sound-language of men might be withdrawn before he got its full import that he began announcing to Petraia in a louder voice than he generally used and in a hurried and curiously jerky manner that what the insects had revealed to him was that there was a quarrel beginning, that might soon become a deep rift, between Zeus and Hera, the former being alone on the peak of Gargaros deprived, one rumour declares, of all his weapons, while the latter was almost equally alone on the summit of Olympos.

He further announced to Petraia that the effect of this quarrel upon the great goddess Athene was to force her to withdraw herself from taking any part in any public movement until the issue between Zeus and Hera became clearer or definitely
resolved
itself in one way or another.

“But at this point,” so he explained to the old midwife, “while the moth understands that our goddess has left Ithaca altogether, the fly is sure she is still in the island, and probably still in the temple; but is unwilling to commit herself, or take any side, or make any definite move, till things are clearer than they are at present.

“Another thing the fly tells me, Nurse dear, which astonishes me a good deal, and to confess the truth gives me a funny feeling, indeed, if I were absolutely honest, as you used to teach me every Naubolides with our claim to the kingship ought to be, makes
me shiver and shake is that Tartaros has broken loose, and that Typhon, the most terrible of all the Titans, has burst his bonds from beneath Etna and is again breathing fire and smoke against the gods.

“But you see, Nurse dear, what makes it so hard for me to tell you all they say is that they keep contradicting each other as if they were speaking as ambassadors from opposite camps. For instance what the fly says is that the real reason why our great goddess Athene has withdrawn ‘pro-tem’ into herself is that she is waiting to hear what Zeus will do if certain rumours that have reached her from Italy are correct, namely that at a special place in Italy where there are seven sacred hills the descendants of Aeneas the pious ally of Priam have already begun to build a new Troy.

“The moth, on the other hand, swears that Athene has gone to visit the blameless Ethiopians to find out for herself whether it is true that Persephone has quarrelled with Aidoneus and helped Teiresias to bring back from Hades the weeping Niobe, the First Woman, together with her husband Phoroneus, the First Man.”

Long before the insects had ceased revealing their discoveries to the undulations of the knuckles of his now weakly and wearily extended hand, the inspiration proceeding from the virginity of the old maid who had nursed him ceased to give him the clue to the small creatures’ sign-language.

He gazed helplessly at her, while a wave of tiredness and the feeling of being a hopeless fool engulfed him. “What do
you
make of it all, Nurse?” he murmured feebly.

“It is clear enough, Nisos,” commented Petraia, “that a female moth and a male fly are bound to be on opposite sides in the great ‘old battle’.”

“What old battle, nurse darling?” enquired the boy, contemplating the insects on his knuckles with re-awakened interest.

“Between males and females, silly!” There fell a dead silence between them with the weight of a heavy stone: a silence that
was broken at last by the old maid herself. Her voice rang out with something of the prophetic resonance that had belonged to that twin-sister of hers who was a neophyte of Egeria, the Nymph in the Cave in the Italian forest.

“Didn’t I always tell you, forgetful child, how Apollo and Artemis persecuted Niobe, the First Woman, whose husband Phoroneus was the son of a Melian Nymph? Didn’t I tell you how that pair of murderous deities—holy Athene guard me from them!—between whom and our great Goddess there has always been war since, like that dangerous Cyprian Aphrodite, they took the side of the Trojans and may the golden Sun, Helios, and the silver Moon, Selene, shake off such intruders!—didn’t I tell you how that murderous pair killed the children of Niobe the first woman? And how they wouldn’t even let their neighbours bury those beautiful maidens and heroic youths? Haven’t I told you all that?

“And now this liar of a house-fly is trying to make out that our great goddess has lost herself in some kind of trance when the pillars of the world are shaking. O you male creatures, what infants you are! Children of women and nurselings of women, it is your mothers, your mothers, always your mothers, who are to blame! It is only from us, the unmarried ones, the childless ones, who have never known a man, that you ever hear the truth! That is what my sister always used to say. That is why she went to that forest of Aricia, which in Italy must be like the Nemean Forest in our main-land, and a little like our Arima too, only much bigger. Lucky, yea a thousand times lucky, are we in Ithaca to serve a Virgin Goddess!

“The mothers of men are the worst traitors to the cause of women. I tell you, boy, from the beginning of all things women have been betrayed, exploited, enslaved, insulted, perverted, depraved, debased, by men!”

Petraia drew breath at this point, while Nisos, feeling a little uneasy, since he still assumed it was in direct answer to his prayer that his old nurse had appeared on the scene, stared at the black fly on his knuckle with the vague idea of finding an excuse if not
a justification for the wickedness of men in that big black head supported on those gauzy wings.

But the indignant old maid went on in mounting emotion, until her indictment soon became so detailed in its survey of the wrongs of women and so crushing in its denunciation of their corrupters, that all he could do was to rub his knee with his free hand while one method of defence followed another in mute succession through his bewildered brain.

“Petraia,” he thought, “must have gone down to Hades like our King Odysseus for she can’t have seen all these things
happening
round here.” And then as his attention wandered a little from what he was hearing he became aware of an extremely unexpected and very curious experience. He found himself in fact whispering to the fly and being whispered to by the fly in a language of which he was absolutely ignorant. It was like a dream, though he was fully awake. The fly was a boy among flies as he himself was among people. And with this other boy he was now making fun of everything.

“But it’s our great goddess—it
must
be——” he told himself, “who in answer to my prayer has arranged this meeting with Petraia and has helped me and the fly to make friends! She is a Divine Being, therefore she must herself understand the
language
and the thoughts of all the animals, birds, reptiles, insects and even plants, that walk and fly and creep and grow around her temple.”

He had begun to call the fly “Kasi”. “Kasi-kid,” he said, “isn’t this whole business just like a game of Blindman’s Buff? Don’t you think so, Kasi?”

The old midwife at his side went on with her arraignment of all males; but he kept his attention fixed on the fly, for it had become a deep joy to him to feel that they’d really made friends. “Kasi” was an abbreviation of the Hellenic word for brother and it was the old class-mate expression that all the younger boys of Ithaca had made use of between themselves in the Island’s preparatory-school.

As for the fly, it was natural enough that since it had got older
considerably faster than his new friend it was as gratified at being called “Kasi” as Nisos would have been if he had been treated like a young comrade by one of the heroes in the Trojan war.

“Blindman’s Buff?” cried the Fly. “It’s as if we were all buzzing round a new-dropt cow-turd of Tis’ s old Babba, all warm and steaming! But this lady-moth here keeps giving me a flap with her left wing to remind me that I promised to escort her home; so I’m afraid I must say ‘cheire!’ for we must do what the ladies tell us, is it not so?”

“It is indeed the sad truth, Kasi,” admitted Nisos. “Ta-Ta! till the next time!” shrilled the Fly. But when the insects had commenced their flickering and wavering departure in such close colloquy that the all-seeing sun, whether ruled by an Olympian or a Titan or by nobody but his flaming self, couldn’t decide whether to turn them into one darting jewel or into two darting jewels, Nisos found that Petraia had fallen silent and was
regarding
him with a look that was a palimpsest of different expressions. It had reproach in it. It had a grievance in it. It had mischievous amusement in it. It had a puzzled pity in it.

But in place of any sad, weary, resigned, disillusioned
acceptance
of fate it had a gravity that was faintly whimsical. “Those finger-nails that disgusted and disquieted you so, my dear,” she remarked at last, “show me who cracked that image of Themis. And now listen to me, child; and lay to heart what I tell you; for I am not speaking only on my own authority. I am speaking to you, Nisos, you Babe that I took from your mother, as an unwedded mortal on behalf of an unwedded immortal, for I tell you, boy, that at this very moment I can feel her presence inspiring me and teaching me exactly what to say and exactly what not to say to you, Nisos, child,” and Petraia’s voice quivered with emotion, “the greatest event, and by far the best event, that has ever happened in the history of our terrible world is now happening.

“From the lowest depths of Tartaros to the highest peaks of Olympos a great revolt is in progress which if successful will change the world. But it is a revolt against Fate Itself, as well as
against the Will of the All-Father, a will that always bows to Fate and then pretends to be what the All-Father Himself would instinctively will, which of course really and truly it
isn
’
t
, only All-Father Zeus can’t and daren’t do what he’d like to do!

“Those who attacked that Figure of Themis were entirely justified in so doing. The Harpies, or ‘Snatchers’, as our enemies call them, are women like us,
like
me
! They are women, and they are maids, and they are not only old maids, they are immortal maids! And they have joined the great revolt that began before dawn this night, this night that has now become day, the first day of the greatest event in the history of all days!

“Need your old nurse tell her babe what that event is? It is the Revolt of Women! Yes, of the Women-Slaves of the entire universe! Yes, Nisos, nothing less than that, the revolt of all Females in the cosmos against the tyranny of all Males in the cosmos! Themis, the goddess of Custom and Habit and
Tradition
, has always been unfair to us women, always trying to force us back into slavery to men whenever we’ve tried to escape. And, as with Themis, so with the Fates. They too are against us. They too want to hold us down to the laws, ways, manners, morals, usages, privileges, conventions, institutions, organizations, founded upon male stupidity and bigotry!