The Forest of Forever (2 page)

“Here,” I said. “I brought you some acorns.”

She accepted the gift as if they were emeralds from the land of the Yellow Men. “My dear, what a feast! My tree isn’t bearing well this year. We’ll roast them tonight. But you’re wet to the bone. And you too, Eunostos. Slip into one of my robes, Zoe, while I rub Eunostos down with a cloth.” Eunostos, of course, was naked, like all young Beasts and many old ones.

“Thriae,” Eunostos announced, beginning to glow beneath a brisk massage. “Right here in the forest. Zoe and I saw them arrive with the storm.”

Myrrha dropped the cloth. “Bee-Folk! You don’t say.” She began to ruminate about the perfidy of the race, the mischief we must expect. Myrrha was notorious for her ruminations. It was said of her that if you wanted to make an announcement to every Beast in the forest, you should whisper it to Myrrha and swear her to secrecy.

At this point, Kora descended the stairs. She walked so quietly that it was the bark-and-leaf scent rather than the sound which announced her coming. She was tall and slender without being thin, rather like a white lotus, it seemed to me, and her beauty was of the sort which soothes rather than excites. To look at her was like dipping hot, tired ankles into a cool stream.

Eunostos deftly retrieved the fallen cloth, rolled over the floor to Kora’s feet, and tossed her the cloth. She smiled indulgently down at him, the smile of a young woman for a mere lad of fifteen, and, avoiding his flanks, proceeded to dry his mane.

“Queens, workers, and drones—we saw them all,” he said, gazing up at her with adoration.

“Never mind about the drones,” said Myrrha. “They’re good-for-nothing sluggards who loll in the hives or under the trees. It’s the women you have to watch. I heard about them—the queens, that is—from my late husband. They’ll snatch the threads from your loom if you give them a chance.”

“The drones must do something,” suggested Eunostos. “Or the queens wouldn’t keep them around.”

Myrrha raised a reproving eye at him. Like many free-living women, she was prudish in the company of her daughter. “As I said, it’s the queens who are the trouble-makers. I wonder what they want in the Country of the Beasts. We have so little for them to steal.”

“I expect the storm blew them here by accident,” I said. “Let’s hope they don’t stay.”

We soon turned to other subjects. Happy subjects, on the whole, though it always saddened me to visit the home of two menless women. Myrrha still enjoyed frequent, if itinerant, lovers, but Kora at eighteen was the oldest virgin in the country and a cause of concern for her mother.

Since I myself was a trifle old for Eunostos, I had resigned myself to yielding him to Kora. In fact, I was quietly engineering their union, since he was the last Minotaur and it seemed to me that Kora, once cured of her virginity, could bear him noble sons. You understand, of course, that the offspring of a Minotaur and a Dryad are not hybrids: the sons are Minotaurs, the daughters are Dryads. There are several races in the Country of the Beasts, but each race is either male or female with the sole exception of the Centaurs, who have their own females but also enjoy the women of other races. Humans have questioned why the Great Mother created so many races with a single sex and compelled them to mingle if they wished to multiply. The answer is clear: she likes variety. She likes for opposite to attract opposite. She wants her many-faced, many-figured children to value difference as well as familiarity.

“Now you must have some wine and honey cakes. Will blackberry do?”

“Admirably.”

“You may have a cup, too, Eunostos. My, aren’t you the young bull now!” (I did not tell her that, since he had been orphaned, Eunostos never drank milk when he could get wine, and much preferred beer; it came of his running with loose company.) “When I finish this robe for Kora, I must weave you a loincloth.” She fetched a flagon from her cupboard and proceeded to fill some wooden mugs.

“My husband carved them,” she said, “and I wouldn’t change them for silver.”

The clay oven glowed; the scent of raisin-eyed cakes pervaded the room; hospitality was a tangible presence, like a Centaur’s pet pig. I did not even hear the dripping of the water clock. How could I know that it was the last peaceful time the four of us were to spend together?

“Eunostos, will you see me home?” I finally asked, when the parchment in the windows no longer glowed with the afternoon sun.

By this time Eunostos was quoting a poem to Kora, and Kora was listening with a faint appreciative smile; but I had the oddest feeling that it was not Eunostos she heard.

CHAPTER II

EUNOSTOS STOOD at the foot of Kora’s tree and debated if he should call her name. If he knocked at the door in the trunk, Myrrha would answer and inflict an interminable monologue on him before she called her daughter from the upper room. Beside him was his friend Partridge, the Paniscus, who lent him advice and support. Partridge was thirty. Like all of his race of Goat Boys he had failed to develop, both physically and mentally, beyond the age of fifteen; but in Partridge’s case, mentally at least, it was closer to twelve. He was plump, hairy, and sandy from the warren in which he lived; thistles stuck to his flanks and his breath reeked from the stalks of onion grass he was even now nibbling. But Eunostos loved him because Partridge was something of an outcast among his own people, being rather too fat for their rough and tumble ways and too gentle to like those ways even had he not been fat.

Between them, eyeing the tree and catching vibrations with his feelers, crouched Bion, the Telchin, a three-foot, antlike being who lived under the ground, cut gems with his metal-hard pincers, and made bracelets and rings, anklets and necklaces, as well as various beauty aids like kohl and carmine, which he traded to the Dryads and Bear Girls in return for hazelnuts and wheaten bread. He was much more intelligent than a monkey or a cat, though rather less than a Beast. To Eunostos he was, like Partridge, a friend.

“Go on,” nudged Partridge. “Call her.” He munched furiously on his onion grass.

“Kora.” It was less a call than a whisper.

“Eunostos, give her a good bellow.”

“KORA,
I’ve come to visit.” He brandished a spray of violets and peered hopefully at the porch which circled the trunk and the upper room.

A leather door-hanging rustled to the side and Kora appeared on the porch. Her gown of green linen was embroidered with white narcissi, and her face was white, too, like the unveined marble which has lain in the earth since the Great Mother lived on the island, before the coming of Men and Beasts. Her hair, the color of ivy in sunlight, tendriled about her shoulders. She wore neither rings nor anklets nor bracelets, but only a pendant around her neck: a Centaur of hammered silver which she presumed to be a likeness of her father. It was not a single attribute, however, which caught Eunostos’s eye; it was an aura of remoteness, of inviolability. She was like an unexplored cave or a silent underground river: secret and alluring and a little frightening.

At eighteen, she seemed to Eunostos decidedly an older woman and therefore the more to be desired. Had she not been beautiful, she might have been called a spinster. (Yes, we have them, poor things, even in the Country of the Beasts, along with a delightful number of rakish bachelors.) As it was, she had often been called aloof, disdainful, and frigid—but never undesirable. In truth, she was none of these things. She was simply waiting. For what, she could not have told you.

“Eunostos,” she called down to him. “Have you come to call on mother?”

“I’ve come to call on you.” It was his first such admitted call, though ostensibly he had visited her mother Myrrha often during the past few months, in spite of the fact that she was as garrulous as a sparrow at sunrise. “This time you come down to me.”

His tail lashed furiously; he was very nervous.

She hesitated. She’s heard those stories about my wenching, he thought, not without a certain pride. At fifteen, it is pleasant to be thought a sly young rogue.

“Very well.”

Eunostos was grateful that she did not linger coquettishly in her tree to change her robe or sweep a tortoiseshell comb through her hair. She never seemed aware of her own beauty, except as a kind of nuisance which brought uncountable Centaurs, from striplings right up to senile old Moschus, to knock at her tree. In six twinklings of a firefly, she emerged from the door at the foot of the tree.

“Give her the flowers,” hissed Partridge, so concerned for his friend that you could forgive him his onion breath and thistled flanks. He was none too bright but he knew what to do when a Dryad stood in her doorway. For that matter, Eunostos knew what to do with the more accessible Dryads. My friend Myrtle had taught him the facts of life when he was eleven. For the last year, he had been an orphan, knocking about the woods on his own, making his home in caves and warrens or under trees, living it up with the young Centaurs and making free with the Dryads, but somehow never forgetting the manners, the innate gentleness, taught to him by his own Dryad mother and his Minotaur father.

He presented the flowers and Kora took them from his hand. His tail made furious swishes and he stamped his hooves from sheer nervous tension.

The violets had started to wilt—he had held them too long and too tightly in his big hot fist—but Kora received them as if they were roses. She said little; she rarely said much. Stillness seemed to envelope her like a wedding garment (for Beasts thought of weddings, not orgies, when they courted Kora, just as they thought of orgies not weddings when they courted her mother or me). But she smiled and touched him affectionately on his horns.

“Dear Eunostos. They’re lovely.” She was being tactful; Dryads hate to see any vegetable life uprooted, cut, and otherwise mutilated. We would rather leave flowers on their bushes and bushes in the ground. If we eat acorns, it is only to keep them from the squirrels and to give us energy when we depart from our oaks.

Impulsively he seized her hand and drew her after him with an irresistible tug. She dropped the violets, the wind spread her hair and billowed her ankle-length gown, and she burst into sudden laughter.

“You laugh like wind chimes,” Eunostos said. “The ones the Centaurs hang in their windows.”

“Was I laughing?” she asked. “I didn’t even notice.”

Why couldn’t she have said, “I was laughing because I am glad to be with you”? But that was Kora, utterly artless and therefore supremely artful.

“Where are we going, Eunostos?”

“To a secret place.”

Bion started to follow them; with his eight legs, he could easily have matched their pace. But Partridge stopped him with a loud bleat.

“Don’t, you idiot. They want to tryst.” Partridge did not have a woman, but his plump body concealed a generous romantic soul, and he liked to imagine his friends in an endless drama of amorous adventures.

Bion lowered his feelers and started to sulk. Telchins can understand our simpler words and “idiot” had stuck in his craw. Partridge patted him on his metallic flank.

“I didn’t mean idiot, I meant simpleton,” he apologized. His own vocabulary was limited and he supposed that “simpleton” indicated a simple rather than a stupid creature. Fortunately, the word was new to Bion, who appeared mollified. Together they took up a vigil under the tree to await the return of their friend.

Eunostos led Kora along paths between cypress trees and through copses where rabbits stared at them with more curiosity than fear and blue monkeys scampered in search of grubs. Once, they surprised a Paniscus who had turned a tortoise onto its back and was poking it with a stick. Eunostos seized the stick and righted the poor animal and sent him toddling to safety. The Paniscus, whose name was Phlebas, shouted an obscenity and Eunostos flung him onto the grass with a butt to his midriff.

“Grapes that aren’t picked shrivel into raisins,” Phlebas shouted after them; but Eunostos was too happy to puzzle over the metaphor.

In a blackberry thicket, a Bear Girl dropped her pail and started to follow them. She had no need for clothes or adornments: there was fur on her head that looked like a small round cap through which her ears protruded like jaunty feathers, fur on her body which might have been a winter coat, and a round fur tail like a large hazelnut. But she did at least wear a chain of black-eyed Susans around her neck. Eunostos, though he liked the Bear Girls, did not like being followed at such a time.

“I saw a ferocious bear in the cypress grove,” he said. It was enough to send her flying for refuge. Though the Girls claim descent from the goddess Artemis and a gentle brown bear, they insist that later bears, forgetting that notable union, have come to regard them as a rare delicacy. (However, there are no recorded instances of a Girl being devoured by anything but a wolf; it takes a strong stomach to digest so much fur.)

Finally they came to a clearing and a huge tree trunk which had once belonged to the largest, oldest tree in the forest. It was Eunostos’s former home, which a year ago had been blasted by lightning. It was then that Eunostos had lost his parents and, as far as we knew, he had not lived in that sorrowful place since their death.

“But Eunostos,” Kora cried. “You’ve cut away all the burned branches and left just the lower part of the trunk. It looks like a small round fort. It was one of those trees left over from the time when the Titans lived on Crete, wasn’t it? Everything grew bigger then. Are you living here now?”

“Not yet,” he said mysteriously. “Come inside,” and he led her through a door, which swung on a wooden hinge, and they stepped inside the trunk. It was roofless and hollow, of course, and on one side he had planted a vegetable garden, where carrot stalks stood like palace guards and cabbages lolled like plump eunuchs, and on the other side, flowers—wild roses and columbine—were the kings and queens of the place.

“But how lovely!” Kora said. “And a little house between the two gardens!” It was a simple round hut with bamboo walls, but so graceful that Kora must have wondered how a seemingly awkward boy could have bent the bamboos to the shape of a peaked crown and cut the windows to look like crescent moons and the door, a great half moon. In the first room, a fountain bubbled out of a pool in the clay floor and cooled the air like a breeze from snow-haired Mt. Ida. There were gemstones on the sandy bottom, gifts from Bion—cornelian, amethyst, beryl—and a little fortress made of seashells which Eunostos had dug from the earth, relics of a time when the Great Green Sea had covered a part of the forest.

“A turtle lives in the fort,” said Eunostos. He admired turtles: they were so self-contained—so like Kora and unlike himself.

Nor had he neglected the practical necessities of day-to-day living. After all, the chief characteristic of the Minotaur is that he has an eye for beauty but a hoof for hard work (call him an artisan instead of an artist, if you will; but thus he avoids the overpreciousness of the mere aesthete). Close to the fountain, but out of its spray, was a cross-legged bamboo chair with pillows.

“Zoe sewed the pillows,” he confessed, “though I stuffed them.” He knew that Dryads liked pillows stuffed with moss, which otherwise encumbered their trees.

“There’s also a couch,” he added somewhat tentatively, lest Kora suspect him of dishonorable intentions. “In the next room.” It was made of wolfskin stretched over a bamboo framework and raised on sturdy hooves. “And a red-brick hearth and cooking pots and, see, a well-stocked larder!” He pointed to a jar of roasted acorns, a tray of snails soaked in olive oil, a cheese of bear’s milk, a basket of delicate sparrow eggs, and a weasel pie. “Zoe made the pie. I’m no cook. I hope you are.”

“Eunostos, I love your house.”

“Our house,” he corrected. Surely she can cook, he told himself. Zoe must have taught her.

Kora said nothing. She sat down in the chair and hid her face in a pillow and began to cry. Her tears were silent but very copious.

Eunostos, who was not used to tears, especially from the reticent Kora, knelt beside her and lifted her hair and kissed her on the tip of her pointed ear. It is a Dryad’s most sensitive area and only someone who loves her takes such a liberty.

“You don’t like my house,” he said without reproach. “It’s too small, too rustic. It comes of my being an orphan, I expect. I don’t have taste.”

“Your house is delightful.”

“Then it’s me. I’m too rough for you. My hooves are dirty, my mane needs trimming.”

She stared up at him with eyes so green that even her tears could not keep them from looking like malachites. “No, Eunostos. It’s none of those things.”

“I’m too young for you then? Callow and inexperienced? But I’ve been on my own for a whole year now, and orphans grow up fast. I’ve”—and a note of pride crept into his voice, while his chest expanded by at least three inches—“I’ve been wenching with the boys.”

“I know you’ve been wenching with the boys. Do you think my mother doesn’t tell me such things? You needn’t apologize.”

“I wasn’t exactly apologizing,” he stammered.

“I don’t hold it against you. What’s a young bull to do when he hasn’t any family of his own?”

“If I’m not too rough and I’m not too young—”

“You haven’t said anything about love.”

“But I’ve shown you how I feel. Isn’t that the same thing?”

“A Dryad likes to be told.”

“I love you, Kora.”

“Why do you love me, Eunostos?”

“Because—because you’re beautiful.”

“In five hundred years I’ll be an old crone.”

“And I’ll be an old dotard like Moschus, so I don’t expect I shall notice.”

“I haven’t Zoe’s bosom.”

“You’ll develop.”

“How much do you love me?”

“More than my new house. More than my friends Partridge and Bion.”

“I should hope so.”

“More than any other Dryad in the forest!”

“Even Zoe?” (The bitch! And I had cooked the pie for her and sewn the linen pillows.)

He deliberated. (I will have to say that for him.) “I love Zoe very much. Like an aunt and a friend at the same time. But yes, I love you more.”

“Go on…”

“Enough to go to work for you! Did you know that there’s a trapdoor in the garden which leads to an underground workshop? That’s where I made the chair and couch. That’s where I’ll make furniture for a livelihood. Kora, I’m going to be a carpenter!”

“That’s very nice for you.”

“But not for you?”

“Somehow carpentry is not very—poetic.” (I would have slapped her.)

“Have some acorns,” he said in desperation while he wracked his brain for a poem, and one which he had written to another Dryad, another year, flashed into his mind. Sentimental, to be sure; but Dryads, it seemed—females in general, experience had taught him—thrived on sentiment. It was about a sea-bird instead of a forest bird, but perhaps it would suffice for a moment.