The Forest of Forever Read online

  In the next room, he kindled the coals on the hearth and sprinkled some dried leaves in a pan of water. “Damn,” he muttered. “Great-Mother-damn.” Here he was taking care of the last person in the world he wanted as a friend, and it was quite impossible to dislike anyone in your care.

  When the tea had come to a boil, he poured it into a large clay cup like a turtle shell, sweetened it with honey, tasted it to make sure that it was not too hot, and carried it to Aeacus, who had to hold the cup in both of his hands, they were trembling so much. He seemed to be having a chill.

  “You’ll have to spend the night,” said Eunostos decisively. “I’ll leave Bion to look after you, and I’ll go and tell Kora where you are. If you want anything, just ask Bion. But speak slowly and use simple words, and make sure that you have his attention.”

  “I have a feeling he doesn’t like me,” said Aeacus with a certain apprehension.

  “That’s on my account,” said Eunostos. “Telchins are very loyal friends to the higher races of Beast. It’s only each other they eat.”

  “But I’m not a Beast at all, much less higher!”

  “No, but you’re close enough. He likes more sinewy meat. Besides, I’ve left him some hazelnuts in the workshop. Now we’ve got to get you into the next room and onto the couch.”

  It was surprising how easy it was to lift a grown Man, if the Man was a Cretan and the lifter was a Minotaur. When Aeacus, cup still clutched between his hands, lay on the couch, Eunostos propped his head on a pillow so that he could finish drinking and threw a coverlet over him. He remembered how his mother had looked after him when he had caught hoof and mouth disease from the Centaur colts.

  “Is there anything I can get you before I go? Something to eat? A scroll to read? I have Hoofbeats in Babylon, The Indiscretions of a Dryad, Centaur Songs—”

  “Anything you’ve written?”

  “I’m not collected yet. I was planning a little scroll of poems for Kora, but they’re still on palm leaves.”

  “Not a thing then. I’ll just lie here and enjoy your house. Did you call this drink tea? We don’t have it in Knossos. Beer and wine, but not tea.”

  “The Centaurs learned how to make it from the Yellow Men.”

  “It’s very good. I feel better already.”

  “I had better go now.”

  “I saw the turtle in your fountain. I had a turtle till I was fifteen. He lived in a pool with silver fish.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He crawled away. An earthquake had made a small fissure in the wall of the courtyard. I never filled it in, hoping he would crawl back. But he didn’t.”

  “Well, I expect he knew where he was going.”

  “The adjacent courtyard opened onto the street. I always hoped he was rescued by a child. Wagons aren’t allowed in Knossos, so he couldn’t have been run over.”

  “You must have missed him a great deal.”

  “I did. Eunostos?”

  “Yes?”

  Aeacus held out his hand in the universal gesture of good fellowship.

  “Damn,” muttered Eunostos, but he took the hand, which was cold, shaking, and very tenacious. Reluctantly he returned the pressure. The worst had happened. He had become friends with the Man who had taken his bride. I’ll end up giving them my turtle for a wedding present, he thought.

  CHAPTER X

  WHEN I HEARD that Eunostos and Aeacus had become friends, I thought: Well, good for Eunostos. Now he can be reconciled with Kora too and be at peace with himself. Now he can see her without illusions and love her as she really is, with her mortal limitations. For if a person rejects us and we never see him again, we suppose him larger than life, we find the fault in ourselves, and we always think: “If only I had been worthier…” But the married Kora, engaged in her daily domesticities, was a beautiful, kindhearted, but unremarkable young Dryad of flesh and green blood.

  Much to his credit, Eunostos did not act like a young calf mooning over his lost love. He was nearly sixteen now; he was definitely a bull and he acted with commendable maturity. Never a worshipful look, never a whispered compliment, but always the open, bluff affection of the brother Kora seemed to want.

  Kora reciprocated with a quiet gratitude. She had won a brother as well as a husband. Accompanied by Aeacus, she visited Eunostos’s house and showed him how to deepen the color of his roses or train them to climb his trellis. She brought him roasted acorns and tidied his workshop and wove him a loincloth like the one Aeacus had worn when he came to the forest, green instead of purple, but just as princely, with a belt and a silver clasp in the shape of a turtle.

  At that time, Aeacus never showed the least jealousy. Perhaps, knowing himself adored by Kora, he felt no need to be jealous. Besides, he liked Eunostos. It was soon a familiar sight to see the two of them exploring the forest, with Eunostos acting as guide and pointing out landmarks. Here was the hive of the Bee Queen Amber (“Watch out for her. They say she’s meaner than Saffron, the one who kidnapped Kora”). Here were the log lairs of the Bear Girls—you could tell by the briar patch which they had trained to circle them like a wall and keep out predatory bears.

  They hunted together too with bow and arrow or blowgun—woodpeckers, sparrows, and rabbits for the table—but Eunostos explained that they must never kill the larger animals like deer and bears.

  “They’re too much like us,” he said. “We only kill the small ones because we have to eat. Or wolves, because they like to eat us.”

  Aeacus in turn taught Eunostos the uses of a dagger: how to dart and duck and thrust, how to wound, and, if necessary, to kill.

  “You can even take on a man with a sword and twice your size. Small as I am, if I were to use a sword against an Achaean, I would stand as much chance as a sparrow against a hawk. The sword would weigh me down and he would slice off my head with his first good blow. But with a dagger, I’m more than a match for him. When he swings, I’m already somewhere else, usually stabbing him between the ribs.”

  Eunostos was too courteous to explain that he was not likely to meet anyone twice his size, that he preferred a sword to a dagger, and that what he would really like was a double-edged battle ax, which his ancestors had used against the Centaurs before the two races became friends.

  Lithe-limbed little Cretan and robust, red-maned Minotaur: unlikely friends in a friendly forest.

  Needless to say, Eunostos did not neglect his other friends in favor of Aeacus. He called almost daily at my tree.

  “Have you gotten over her?” I asked him one day. We were on our way to Centaur Town, I to visit with Moschus (yes, we were keeping company again), he to trade a small wooden chest he had made for seeds and farm implements, since he was enlarging his garden.

  He thought before he answered. “No, I just love her differently.”

  “What is she like to you now, Eunostos?”

  “Like a hand loom. She’s part of her house, part of her tree, quiet but industrious.”

  “No longer mysterious? No longer a goddess?”

  “Not any more. But I don’t mind. Now I don’t have to be shy with her.”

  “And Aeacus. How does he see her?”

  “I expect he still sees her as a goddess. You see, she’s so quiet with him that he can think her into anything he likes.” He might have been talking about himself before he lost Kora.

  “And he’s still a god to her?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And to you?”

  “A good friend. I like to go hunting with him. He only kills when he needs something to eat, and then nothing big like a deer or a bear. And he tells me about the palace at Knossos, and his brother, the king, who sits on a throne flanked by two stone griffins.”

  “Eunostos, today you sound as old and wise as Chiron. No more poems. No more reposing among the flowers.” But I suspected and hoped that the old Eunostos, the young Eunostos, still lingered beneath his new serious mien.

  “I had to grow up fast,” he admit
ted.

  “But not too fast to have a little fun, I hope. You have a long time in which to be old. I’ll bet you haven’t been wenching since—”

  “Not since I fell in love with Kora,” he admitted. “But don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten how. It’s like learning to count on an abacus. You never forget.”

  He held out his hand and a butterfly, the large yellow kind with black markings on his wings, settled as if he had found a flower.

  “Here,” he said. “Here’s a sunbeam for you. But don’t brush the dust off his wings.” He gave a tilt with his hand and the butterfly flew to me.

  “You ought to save him for Kora.”

  His green eyes grew wide with mischief. “She doesn’t need a thing.”

  “No?”

  “She’s going to have a baby!”

  “A baby? But Eunostos, how wonderful!” Kora had already told me, but I let Eunostos think that he was breaking the news.

  “I wasn’t supposed to tell. It sort of slipped out.”

  “I’m glad it did. You know, I’ve had a bit of practice at midwifery. I delivered several of my own children without any help from anyone. I wouldn’t trust Myrrha, bless her heart, to deliver a blue monkey. She would talk it back into its mother’s womb. Is Aeacus pleased?”

  Eunostos looked puzzled. “I really don’t know. He loves children, but he hasn’t had much to say about this one. In fact he’s taken to going off in the forest by himself. I saw him one day at the edge of the clearing where he had his battle with the Achaeans. Just standing there and looking into space.”

  “I imagine he’s thinking about the complications.”

  “But I thought Dryads had easy childbirths. My mother said I came in the time it takes a deer to wade across a small stream. The next day she was up and baking a woodpecker pie.”

  “I was thinking of political considerations. You know, Aeacus’s brother hasn’t any wife or children. That means that this baby of Kora’s will be first in line for the throne of Knossos.”

  “Knossos will have to find another king,” said Eunostos indignantly. “This baby’s going to stay with Kora, and you know Kora can’t leave the forest. She would die away from her tree.”

  “That’s what I mean. Complications.”

  If Kora foresaw difficulties, she never admitted to them, though she spoke often of the child. On one particular day in early fall, when the vineyards were swollen with grapes and the Centaurs were setting their wicker vats on stools to prepare for the vintage, she sat at her loom and Eunostos held her yarn. Aeacus had gone to visit Chiron, with whom he had struck up a friendship, and left Eunostos to keep his wife company. But she was not spinning, she was talking. She always found more to say to Eunostos than to Aeacus. Since her marriage, she had grown surprisingly fond of small talk, all the little happenings in the forest which Eunostos and I saw or heard about from our friends. How the Bee Queen Amber had been sharply chastised by Chiron when she was apprehended in stolen sandals. How two more Bears of Artemis had joined Phlebas’s herd and stealthily gathered weed in the forest by the light of the moon. Kora reserved her divinity for Aeacus. With Eunostos and me, she could show herself to be, as he had described her, familiar and pleasantly mundane like a hand loom. It was no wonder that she had trouble talking to Aeacus. After marriage, it is hard to be and at the same time talk with a dream.

  She and Eunostos were discussing her child. “If it’s a girl, I’m going to name her Thea for my great-grandmother. If it’s a boy, his father will call him Icarus. It’s a good family name among the Cretans.” She had trained her hair to dip in curls over her forehead, the Cretan style, and covered her pointed ears.

  “Why not have twins? Then you can use both names.”

  Kora laughed heartily. She often laughed with Eunostos. “One at a time, please. Can you see four of us in this tiny room? With just me here, Aeacus has to get off by himself sometimes.”

  “You could marry your mother to one of her suitors and get an extra room. By the way, I miss your ears.”

  “Aeacus says I’m more mysterious when I hide them. It leaves something to guess at. As for marrying mother, I’m afraid there’s not much hope unless I can find a deaf Centaur.”

  “If you have two babies,” said Eunostos, and Dryads often bore twins, “you could always give one to me.”

  “A bachelor with a baby? Eunostos, you wouldn’t know what to feed him.”

  “I’d leave him with you till he was weaned. Then I’d feed him—well, the same as I eat. Fried sparrows. Woodpecker eggs. Weasel stew.”

  “He’d get a stomach ache and keep you awake all night with his crying.”

  “Then you tell me what to feed him. I’ll make a list on a palm leaf.”

  “Eunostos, I believe you’re serious.”

  “I am,” he said shyly.

  “You can be my baby’s Zeus-father. How would you like that? You can help me look after him when”—and her voice quavered a little—“when Aeacus goes on his explorations.”

  After that, Eunostos told everybody that he was going to become a Zeus-father. He built another room onto his house (“for my Zeus-baby”) and began to make toys instead of furniture in his workshop. Aeacus showed him how to make a toy glider out of willow rods, and Bion brought him some clay to model animals—bear and wolf and ibex—and with the help of Kora’s loom he stitched a little pointed cap with a woodpecker’s feather which he said should fit a girl as well as a boy. He much preferred a boy, since girls were too breakable, but wanted to be prepared for a disappointment.

  Aeacus, on the other hand, was very quiet about his impending fatherhood. Everyone knew that he loved children, cubs, calves, anything small and helpless. In that respect he was like Eunostos. And no one doubted that he would like a child of his own—not even me, and I was never one to admire him. But somehow he seemed more troubled than expectant. I wondered if he really wanted his maiden, his goddess, to become a mother. Like her, he had loved an image, and now the image was about to change and grow maternal and divide the love she could give him. Also, when a man knows that he is free to leave a place and return to his own country he is often content to stay. But when he is bound by children as well as a wife, he may grow fretful and homesick. A Cretan prince reared in a palace was never intended to live in a forest with a green-haired family.

  * * * *

  It was a girl. Her name was Thea, as Kora had promised. Myrrha was so distraught that I had no trouble replacing her as midwife.

  “Fancy being a grandmother,” she kept sighing. “Do you think it will frighten off my suitors?” I insisted that she wait downstairs with Aeacus and Eunostos until I had bathed the child in myrrh-water and placed her in Kora’s arms. Such a grave little face, looking at the new world and already making judgments! Dear Zeus, I thought. Not another silent one! At least she looks healthy.

  “Come on up,” I called down the ladder.

  Eunostos and Aeacus clambered up the ladder, with Myrrha close behind them. At the last minute, Eunostos remembered that father and grandmother come before Zeus-father and waited his turn to greet the mother and child.

  Kora smiled up happily from the couch as Aeacus scooped the girl in his arms. The delivery had been quick and almost painless for her.

  “She has your mouth but my ears,” she said proudly.

  Bewilderment, quickly replaced with a smile, flickered across Aeacus’s face, almost as if he had not expected a daughter with pointed ears and green hair. Almost as if he had fathered a kind of beautiful freak. Don’t misunderstand me. He loved his daughter from the moment of her birth—more than he ever loved Kora—but I think that she made him feel the permanence of his exile from Knossos. By choice he had wed a Beast and settled among her people. But had he the right to rear his daughter as a Beast, in a tree instead of a palace? No poppy-shaped skirts for her, nor strolls beside the Great Green Sea with a saffron parasol nor an afternoon at the bull ring. She was born a princess; she could have become a queen, si
nce women have often held the throne at Knossos. But here she was among beings with tails or hooves or pointed ears, and branded as one of them by her own ears. You understand that this is only a conjecture. Aeacus never confided in me. But Cretans are easier to fathom than Egyptians. They are sometimes subtle but rarely inscrutable. They sometimes smile when they wish to cry or nod when they disagree, but I could read Aeacus like a half-opened scroll.

  Fortunately, no one else seemed to notice his hesitation. Eunostos and Myrrha were looking rapturously at the baby, a piquant creature in spite of her grave countenance, with generous green hair (but then, Dryad babies are never born hairless).

  Eunostos could no longer remain in the background. “Let me hold her, Aeacus. Kora, can’t I hold her? I won’t drop her. I’m her Zeus-father, remember?” He cradled the child in his arms and the grave, troubled look left her face, and she began to smile. Who would have thought that such a big, rough-handed boy, without any brothers and sisters for practice, could have held a baby so gently that she would give her first smile?

  “Sleep, little Thea,” he whispered. “There won’t be any Striges in your night. You have two fathers to look after you.” Then he began to hum an old lullaby:

  “Sleep, little Dryad, sleep in your tree.

  Listen! The wind sings silverly.”

  Aeacus was not looking at his baby. He was looking at Eunostos, for the first time with unmistakable jealousy.

  CHAPTER XI

  TIME PASSED even in the timeless Country of the Beasts, though as imperceptibly as the dripping of a water clock. For three winters, snow fell on the mountaintops, melted with spring into a hundred silver freshets which cobwebbed the forest like a giant spider web, dried with summer to stream beds which grass and clover and violets hurried to green, as if dry beds had no place in so rich a country.

  And there were changes among the Beasts. Eunostos was eighteen, a strapping young Minotaur who toiled from cockcrow to lamp-lighting time in his workshop but, I am pleased to say, resumed the wenching which his unfortunate courtship of Kora had interrupted. I myself had enjoyed six new lovers, five Centaurs and one precocious and surprisingly well-mannered Paniscus. And my tree, aside from looking a trifle scarred from the depredations of woodpeckers, thrust its vigorous limbs to the sunny skies and showed no signs of decay or decline. Bion had left his nest and come to work in Eunostos’s workshop, where he labored at his own table and cut gemstones or embellished Eunostos’s furniture with mosaics and intricate workings in copper and bronze. Only Partridge never seemed to change, the eternal adolescent, chewing his onion grass and trotting after Eunostos, who still loved him and pretended that he was the brightest chap in the country.