The forest of forever tmt-2 Read online

  The weed-drugged Girl in the corner had roused herself sufficiently to struggle to her feet, and she was standing in one spot and swaying to the music as if it had merged with her vision. But not everyone was singing and dancing. There was never unanimity among the Panisci and their women, whatever their pursuits. Some had started to eat, with much smacking of lips and sucking of fingers, and a total disregard for the musicians. They seemed to make no distinction between a raw, unwashed root and a chunk of rancid fish, a grub or a toadstool. One of them tossed a tidbit to Kora, which she caught, examined, and discarded in disgust. A large white slug, lethargic but still alive.

  “Why waste food on her?” pouted the mother of the thieving child. Phlebas cuffed her across the mouth. “Where’s your mind, up in the trees? You know we can’t afford to lose her. Remember the bargain.” Two Panisci held her arms while a third, retrieving the slug, forced it into her mouth.

  “Eunostos will find me,” she gagged as the tail of the creature slithered down her throat.

  “He’s too big for the tunnel. He might wriggle in like a snake, but we would brain him before he got very far. As for the Centaurs, they couldn’t get low enough to wriggle. And if they try to swim, we’ll stand on the roof and hit them in the water with our slingshots.”

  “What do you mean to do with me?” Kora, at the very mention of Eunostos’s name, had recovered her outward poise if not her inward composure, and she asked the question with quiet defiance.

  “What do you think?” he leered, the dirty-minded little boy. The leer vanished when the Girl he had cuffed, apparently his woman, stamped on his hoof.

  “Wait and see,” he sulked to Kora.

  She did not have long to wait.

  The singing died to a hum, lips ceased to smack, a bone clattered to the floor. The rancid air smelled now of honey and pollen. Someone was approaching the lodge through the tunnel.

  A queen of the Thriae stepped into the room and brushed the dirt from her gossamer wings. With a curt dip of a wing, she acknowledged and dismissed the entire gathering of Boys and Girls and walked immediately to Kora.

  “My dear,” she asked, drawing the girl to her feet, “what have they done to you? They’ve stolen your gown and they are smudges of dirt all over your face! Never mind, you’re safe with me. My name is Saffron and we’re going home.”

  “But how did you find me?” Kora sobbed. It was the same queen she had spied above Eunostos’s trunk.

  “When one has wings, one sees everything.”

  No one tried to stop her as she recovered her stolen robe and hastily slipped it over her shoulders, as she followed Saffron out of the ill-smelling chamber, and as she stepped into the welcome light of the declining sun. Behind her, most of the sounds did not resume. Someone sang a line of that revolting song, “Wax the wings of a honey bee,” but the singer was interrupted by what sounded like a slap across the mouth, and Kora hoped that Saffron had not understood the words. It was clear that most of those disreputable children, though they had flouted all the other decencies, were awed by authentic royalty.

  In the light and air, she swayed like a wind-shaken sapling; she thought at first that she was going to fall. But Saffron steadied her with a small jeweled hand.

  “Just a little longer, my dear, and you shall rest and bathe and eat and be your beautiful self again.” Saffron took her arm and guided her across the field.

  “But my tree lies the other way.”

  “You’re to be my guest.”

  “I’m deeply grateful to you, but right now I ought to go home. My mother will be sick with worry, and so will Eunostos.”

  “I shall send them word of your safety. Eunostos will no doubt come to fetch you.” At the edge of the woods three sullen workers, as stiff and colorless as clay idols, awaited the return of their queen. At Saffron’s command, they thundered into the air and converged on Kora with grasping hands.

  “But I thought you rescued me!” she screamed as her feet left the ground.

  “I bought you, my dear, and dearly. With a silken tunic and five silver anklets.” (As a matter of fact, they were tin.)

  CHAPTER IV

  Eunostos, on his way to visit Kora, had joined me in my tree for a mug of beer.

  “Zoe, why are you sad?” he asked. “And why are you looking at me as if I made you sadder?”

  “Not sad,” I insisted. “Merely-thoughtful.”

  “No, sad. Are you worrying about the Thriae?”

  How could I tell him that the Thriae were not in my thoughts (though perhaps they should have been)? That I was sad because he was growing up and I, who had loved him in two ways, first as a little calf, then as a daydreaming youngster, might come to love him in another, more hurtful way? Jolly Zoe, my lovers say of me. She loves us and leaves us with never a sign of regret. I try to preserve my image. Who wants a moody mistress (and I have no wish to be a wife)? But I do have my moods.

  How could I tell him, too, that I foresaw a great deal of pain for one so kind and vulnerable, even in the kindly Country of the Beasts (for so it still seemed), and it would break my heart to see him hurt by Kora?

  “I was thinking about when I was your age,” I hedged. “I was as slim as a young sycamore and all the Centaurs, were in love with me. That was even before your father’s time.”

  “The Centaurs still love you,” he said. “Old and young. You’re so maternal.”

  I fought down the urge to spank him and smiled as if he had paid me a princely compliment. “Thank you, my dear. But the hooves beat less frequently at my door.”

  “But you always tell me never to look back without a chuckle. Life’s a jester, not a headsman. Isn’t that what you say?

  “You’re right,” I laughed. “I wouldn’t change my life for all the pearls in the Great Eastern Sea.”

  “Neither would I,” he said. “Your life, I mean. Now take your house. At Myrrha’s house, I have to wipe my hooves on a mat before I go inside. But here everything is so-” He groped for a word. “Informal.”

  Yes, that was a tactful word. He might have said chaotic. My one-room house, lodged in a tangle of branches and reached, not like Kora’s room by a ladder inside the trunk, but by an outside ladder of grapevines, had scarcely known a housecleaning. Half of its walls were windows, none of them with parchment, and I let the wind and the sun do most of my cleaning. My furnishings were few. A pile of wolfskins for a bed. A block of wood for a table. A round cupboard hewn from a stump and stocked with cheeses, loaves of bread, and a skin of beer. (You understand that when a Dryad uses wooden furniture, she makes sure that the wood has come from a tree which died from natural causes-lightning, drought, old age-and not from a live tree murdered by woodsmen.) A wardrobe consisting of a tunic and three ankle-length gowns, one of them in the Cretan style with open bodice to reveal my breasts (a gift from a Cretan lover). A single papyrus scroll, The Indiscretions of a Dryad, for light reading on the few evenings I spent without company (it is the only poem I understand, full of laughs and definitely not an epic-a gift from Eunostos). What more does a still-popular Dryad need to amuse herself and her men?

  And there was always my tree for companionship, as shaggy and disheveled as an old dog, and just as beloved. We Dryads live with our trees and also we die with them, or die without them if for some reason we are separated for more than a few days. Should we die by accident while our tree still flourishes, then a blood relative takes our place, and many generations of Dryads have been known to inhabit the same durable oak. In my own case, the oak had belonged to my mother and grandmother before me and I reckoned its age to be a thousand or more, if indeed it was not as old as the pyramids.

  “I have to go now,” he said in a voice which implied: “But I could be coaxed into staying a little longer.”

  “Since when was Eunostos concerned with time?”

  “It’s the Thriae,” he admitted.

  “You think they might be up to some mischief?”

  “You said yourse
lf they were thieves. I saw one yesterday and didn’t like the look of her. And Kora is so trusting.”

  “You’re right, I did say they were thieves. But for all we know, they might have returned to the mainland.”

  “I hope so. Still, I just better make a door for Kora’s house. A wolfskin isn’t going to keep out thieves.”

  “That’s her mother’s concern. She can get a door from the Centaurs.”

  “She’s a bit forgetful these days. Besides, she hasn’t as much to trade as she used to.”

  “So you have to do her work.”

  “I haven’t till now, unless she asked me. I’m not very dolent.”

  “You mean you’re indolent?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “But you’ve been busy with your poems.”

  “A Minotaur with gainly hoof,” he began to recite. “I do think that one has possibilities. But”-and a wistful maturity shone in his young face-“poems don’t build doors. I’m not even a traveling singer who can hawk his poems for bread. From a practical point of view, I must get on with my carpentry.”

  The Thriae had alarmed him more than I had anticipated. I almost wished that I had not told him about their inclinations.

  “One more mug of beer and then you shall go.”

  The old Eunostos, the dreamy boy, reasserted himself and he dawdled over the beer.

  “I’ve thought of a rhyme for ‘mane,’” he said at last. “Lain.”

  “Eunostos, what is on your mind?”

  “Well, it’s better than ‘bane,’ and certainly ‘slain’ won’t do. I don’t want a sad ending. I want her to come into his arms, as it were. She left the bed wherein she lain…”

  “Laid. Your mother would come back from the Underworld if she knew an ignorant Dryad like me had to correct her son’s grammar.”

  “I’m a poet, not a grammarian. But you’re right. It’s lie, lay, laid.” With that he sprang to his hooves, kissed my cheek, and clambered down the ladder.

  “Eunostos, come back soon.”

  “I will, Zoe.”

  “And next time, stay longer.”

  “I promise.”

  In the forest, he jumped and kicked his hooves together and tried to tell himself that he was as happy as he had been in the field of yellow gagea, composing his poem. Before the storm. Before the arrival of the Thriae. After all, he had just visited his best friend (his own word for me). But his hooves returned heavily to the earth, his head bowed, and the lines of the poem flew right out of his mind.

  He sensed at once that there was something unnatural about Kora’s house. In appearance it was unchanged, the same reed walls, the same red-ringed windows like square smiles. A trim, happy house which seemed a natural outgrowth of its tree. Then he realized that there was absolutely no sound even as he approached the door. Myrrha was not chattering to Kora, and she was not even humming at her preparations for supper. Had she gone to visit the Centaurs? Most unusual at suppertime, when she should have been frying pigeon eggs in a terra cotta skillet over the stone brazier.

  Without waiting to knock, Eunostos lifted the wolf-skin and stepped into shadows, for the sun had already set and no lamp had been lit. Only the brazier, devoid of skillet or eggs, gave a thin, flickering light. Myrrha was lying on the couch, her body sunk in cushions and protected by a cloak of funereal black.

  She turned her head and faced him, as white as a sun-bleached shell.

  “Kora didn’t come home.”

  “Where did she go?” The implication had not yet reached him.

  “For a walk. But she didn’t come home. And that was before breakfast.”

  Kora was known to be fond of solitary walks, but even when she ventured to the compound of the Centaurs, she never spent more than a morning away from her tree.

  In a word, Kora was lost.

  Eunostos felt as if he had plunged into a stream of melting snow. First he was numb; then the cold went through him like splinters of ice.

  “Did you look for her?”

  “Yes. And the Centaurs. All afternoon. All we found was a shred of cloth from her gown. And hoofmarks. Eunostos, I think the Panisci have her.”

  The news of Kora’s disappearance reverberated through the forest. She had no enemies, so we thought, and we-her fellow Dryads, the Centaurs, even the little Bears of Artemis-were shamed and frightened by our failure to find her. Myrrha was inconsolable. Moschus brought her beer. The Bears of Artemis brought her pails of blackberries. I brought her a smoked goose and a loaf of bread. She greeted all of us with the same blank expression. She moved with a slow, shambling gait and spoke in monosyllables or disconnected phrases.

  And what about Eunostos? She did not know where he had gone when he fled from her house; she hardly remembered his going. Others were a little more helpful. The evening of Kora’s disappearance, a Bear Girl had seen him cross the meadow of yellow gagea.

  “It was like there were bees after him,” she said. “He didn’t even speak to me. And he’s usually so friendly.” A Paniscus who, like most of his self-centered race, seemed unconcerned about Kora, thought that he remembered seeing Eunostos head for the hills which climbed toward Mt. Ida. On the other hand, he mused, it was dark and he might have seen a Centaur boy.

  Needless to say, I went in search of him myself as soon as I had seen that Myrrha was in good hands. Misled by the Paniscus, I lost the whole morning in the foothills of Mt. Ida. But in the afternoon, I tracked his hoofprints to the limestone ridge which shuts most of our country from the outer world of the Cretans. There, in the darkest and most inaccessible cave, I found him huddled so tightly that you would have thought him a bear cub instead of a six-foot Minotaur. “Eunostos.”

  Silence. Then, as if from the end of a beaver’s warren, the slow, reassuring words. “Yes, Aunt Zoe.”

  “But my dear, you’ve had an accident.”

  “It was the Panisci.”

  “But how did you get here?”

  “I don’t remember. I must have wandered here after they beat me up.”

  “Well, now you’re coming home with me!”

  He had been roughhoused from hoof to tail-not exactly mauled, you understand, not quite crippled, but scratched, clawed, bitten, and butted in a fashion which indicated a pack of cowardly Panisci. It was all that I could do to push him up my ladder and guide him to a couch, where he sank to his haunches and dropped his head into his hands. I was barely able to keep him from toppling onto the floor.

  “My poor calf,” I cried, brushing the mane from his eyes and baring a large gash across his forehead. “What have they done to you?”

  “I went looking for Kora. I thought the Panisci had her.” He coughed and shuddered. “You know how they’ve lechered after her.”

  “And-?”

  “They didn’t have her, but Phlebas-he’s the cross-eyed one-said he wished they did. He knew what to do with her even if I didn’t. I rammed him in the belly until he admitted that they had had her but had sold her to one of the Bee queens. Then his friends jumped me. I could have handled three or four. But six at the same time! After that, I don’t remember a thing till you found me in the cave.”

  “Wait till Chiron hears about this,” I muttered angrily. “The Thriae will wish they had never blown this way. Have you any idea which queen?”

  “Not really. But the one who spied on Kora and me was wearing a tiger-colored tunic. Will that help?”

  “It may help a great deal. Each of them seems to have her special color. But no more talking now, Eunostos. You’re no good to Kora like this.” I managed to stretch his long frame onto the couch. His hooves stuck over the end, but I supported them with a stool. I bathed his face with a cloth dipped in rose water and raised his head on a pillow.

  “Drink,” I said, and he sipped a few drops of potion concocted from basil, tansy, and marjoram. “It will ease your pain.” It was also a sedative; it would sooth him into a healing sleep.

  His tail twitched less nervously and f
inally subsided into a gentle swish. His eyelids drooped. The last thing he said to me was, “I’m going after that queen.” Then he fell asleep.

  I knew, however, that no sooner had he regained his strength than he would go charging down my ladder and after the Thriae, who would hardly receive him with open wings. There was one solution. I would go to her hive ahead of him. Utilizing my feminine wiles, I would learn the truth about Kora. Why the queen had bought her from the Panisci. What I could do to release or rescue her without at the same time endangering her life. If I failed in my mission, I would hasten to Chiron and ask him to summon a conclave of Beasts for immediate action. Not only would he recover Kora, we would drive those devious Bee-Folk from our forest. Chiron was old and trusting and he had not confronted a real menace since the War with the Wolves in my own girlhood. Being a Centaur, he was especially trusting when it came to women. But he was also fair and he knew that I would not make false accusations.

  I knelt beside the couch where Eunostos slept. “My dear, my dear,” I whispered. I will find your girl for you. Trust your old Aunt Zoe.”

  CHAPTER V

  I knew that there were six hives of Thriae in the forest, each in its own style, each with its own queen, workers, and drones. The Bears of Artemis, who miss little in spite of their shyness, directed me to the hive of Saffron, the queen with the tiger-striped tunic. A drone was leaning against a tree and grinning up at me in a bold and suggestive fashion. He looked as if he possessed the imagination but not the energy to be a rogue. He would rather violate twenty women in his mind than pursue one in the flesh.

  “Dear girl, he said. “I see you’ve come bearing gifts. Acorns is it, and what’s this, a baked partridge? How quaint. Are they for me? My name is Sunlord.” There was almost a feminine coquetry in his tone.