Atlantis by John Cowper Powys Read Free Book Online

Herdsman went on with his quaint compliments long after the Trojan captive had possessed herself of the ladle’s gleaming handle and taken a satisfying sip of its warm contents. When she had restored to its owner the one and only heir-loom in his family except their name, for Tis’s Father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, who all worked on their own farm at the other end of the island, were never known as anything but Daddy Tis, Grand-Pa Tis, and Old Tis, she begged this middle-aged youngest and simplest of the Tisses to tell her if he knew whether Nisos Naubolides had gone back to the palace.
    Without the faintest hesitation—for what did this middle-aged youngest of the Tisses know about cosmogonic upheavals and Trojan second-births?—the herdsman informed her that the young princeling of the great House of Naubolides hadn’t yet returned from visiting Aulion his ancestral home. “He said something,” continued the innocent herdsman, “about running in to Druinos on his way back. My lady Pandea,” he said, “loves a gossip with my lady Nosodea.”
    “But Master Tis,” protested the Trojan girl, aware that there was an obscure shadow wavering across the path she was now travelling though keeping well out of her immediate reach and as unable to shake her new secret triumph as it would have been to touch the adamantine unhappiness of her former mood, “how do you explain this business of the Priest of Orpheus being able—”
    But the girl stopped short. What was the use of trying to make a man like this see what she could or couldn’t understand among the confused doings of these infernal Achaians? “One thing’s clear,” her thoughts ran on: “Telemachos was, is, and ever will be my most dangerous enemy here. He is a priest in Athene’s temple; and suppose he heard rumours that I’d been seen at work in that grove of Ash-Trees within the confines of Arima, he might come himself and get hold of me, independently altogether of Odysseus, and treat me exactly in the same cruel way he treated those others at the killing of the Suitors.”
    The lonely Trojan woman stood like a statue between Tis, whowas now wiping his silver ladle with fresh-plucked moss and Babba who was switching her tail in growing impatience to be out, in the sunshine, cropping grass. The girl’s eyes were fixed upon empty space, while before a secret judgment-seat in her hidden soul each of the island-leaders connected with the Palace or the Temple appeared one by one.
    She thought of the great statue of Themis, daughter of heaven and earth, and sister of Okeanos, which stood at the foot of the grassy slope leading up to the porch of the Temple. This goddess of humane Law and Order, and of the righteous customs and traditions of mankind, had been worshipped in Ilium as devoutly as she was worshipped here; and Arsinöe’s chief links between her youthful happiness and her mature servitude were the many gods of Hellas that were worshipped by both races.
    Once or twice when the moon was full she had even slipped out of the palace-porch, and stealing down to the Temple barefooted , so that no grass-stain on her sandals, or gossamer-seed caught in the knots of the threads that fastened them, would betray her daring to the sharp eyes of old Eurycleia, had gone so far as to pay a visit to the stone image of this Goddess of divided mankind and to kiss the earth at its base.
    Of the parents of the two brothers Agelaos and Nisos whose names were Pandea and Krateros, she had always preferred Krateros; not only because as the head of the Naubolos family he was the ancestral rival of Odysseus and Telemachos but because his appearance always struck her as un-Hellenic and even a little Phoenician. Nosodea, the mother of the Priestess Stratonika and of Eurycleia’s Maid, Leipephile, who was the betrothed of Agelaos, she disliked most of all, more even than the King’s old nurse, Eurycleia herself, whose caprices she had to obey.
    Exactly why she so