rsians' coming. The Great King from beyond
the deserts would smite those outrageous upstarts. Atta would
willingly give earth and water. It was the whim of a fantastic
barbarian, and would be well repaid if the bastard Hellenes were
destroyed. They spoke his own tongue, and worshipped his own gods, and
yet did evil. Let the nemesis of Zeus devour them!

The wreckage pursued him everywhere. Dead men shouldered the sides of
the galley, and the straits were stuck full of things like monstrous
buoys, where tall ships had foundered. At Artemision he thought he saw
signs of an anchored fleet with the low poops of the Hellenes, and
sheered off to the northern shores. There, looking towards Oeta and
the Malian Gulf, he found an anchorage at sunset. The waters were ugly
and the times ill, and he had come on an enterprise bigger than he had
dreamed. The Lemnian was a stout fellow, but he had no love for
needless danger. He laughed mirthlessly as he thought of his errand,
for he was going to Hellas, to the shrine of the Hellenes.

It was a woman's doing, like most crazy enterprises. Three years ago
his wife had laboured hard in childbirth, and had had the whims of
labouring women. Up in the keep of Larisa, on the windy hillside,
there had been heart-searching and talk about the gods. The little
olive-wood Hermes, the very private and particular god of Atta's folk,
was good enough in simple things like a lambing or a harvest, but he
was scarcely fit for heavy tasks. Atta's wife declared that her lord
lacked piety. There were mainland gods who repaid worship, but his
scorn of all Hellenes made him blind to the merits of those potent
divinities. At first Atta resisted. There was Attic blood in his
wife, and he strove to argue with her unorthodox craving. But the
woman persisted, and a Lemnian wife, as she is beyond other wives in
virtue and comeliness, excels them in stubbornness of temper. A second
time she was with child, and nothing would content her but that Atta
should make his prayers to the stronger gods. Dodona was far away, and
long ere he reached it his throat would be cut in the hills. But
Delphi was but two days' journey from the Malian coast, and the god of
Delphi, the Far-Darter had surprising gifts, if one were to credit
travellers' tales. Atta yielded with an ill grace, and out of his
wealth devised an offering to Apollo. So on this July day he found
himself looking across the gulf to Kallidro