The forest of forever

CHAPTER XII

“Zoe!”

I muffled my ear with the corner of a wolfskin. It was early morning and I had scarcely fallen asleep after the departure of Moschus; wineskins littered the floor and wine cobwebbed my thoughts.

“Zoe, will you lower the ladder?”

I recognized Kora’s voice. Anyone except Kora or Eunostos I would have ignored. I dragged myself from my womb of coverlets and staggered to the door.

“Yes, dear?” I felt like a Cretan feigning a smile when he wanted to frown.

“May I come up?”

She was laden with both of her children, Thea in her arms, Icarus in the quiver strapped to her back. She wore a russet gown embroidered with green clover leaves, and her smile was as radiant and natural as mine was forced.

I lowered the ladder; what is more, I forced myself to descend, rung after painful rung, and lift Thea from her arms. I felt my years when that little bud of a girl seemed as heavy as Icarus. Inside the house I hastily returned Thea to her mother and sprawled full-length on the couch. For once, Kora would have to guide the conversation. I hardly had energy to listen-until I heard her announcement.

“I’m going to visit Eunostos,” she said as if such visits were a daily occurrence. “Since I can’t carry both children all the way, I wondered if I could leave Thea with you.”

“Do you think it’s wise to call on Eunostos? After what Aeacus said?”

“Aeacus doesn’t know. He’s hunting again. Besides, it’s mainly Thea he doesn’t want carried about the forest.”

“You know very well he doesn’t want you to see Eunostos.”

“I don’t care.” There was bronze in her voice. “Eunostos wants to see me, doesn’t he?”

“Of course he wants to see you.” How could I explain that seeing her and Icarus so rarely and under surreptitious circumstances might hurt him more than seeing them not at all? He was trying his youthful best to build a life without her and his Zeus-children. In the past few weeks he had turned out a three-legged stool to rest my ankles, an olive press for Chiron, a slingshot for Partridge to defend himself against the rough Panisci, and endless other artifacts which he gave to his friends or traded to his acquaintances. Partridge had come to stay with him in the stump; Bion was already staying with him. He was seldom alone, rarely unoccupied, and only cheerless when he thought himself unobserved.

“It’s just that-well, he’s taken to wenching again, and it’s good for him, and the sight of you might make him stop. You know what I say: ‘A celibate Minotaur is a sick Minotaur.’”

“I’m glad,” she said resolutely, though she looked more wistful than glad. “Is he-popular?”

“Sensational. As a stripling, he was always vigorous, but callow and inexperienced. Now my friends tell me he’s become the ideal lover. He’s added grace to vigor; he’s learned how to pleasure a woman with all those sentimental endearments which make us feel loved as well as desired, if only for the evening. They say he’s pleasured every Dryad between twelve and four hundred-except for a few stubbornly faithful wives in Centaur Town.”

“And you, Zoe?”

I gave her a look which would have wilted the wings of a Bee queen. “You know he’s always considered me his aunt.”

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “It’s just that I know how-generous you are. Well, I’m sure my visit won’t change his habits. It’s Icarus I mainly want him to see. After all, he’s the child’s Zeus-father. And to tell the truth, I want Icarus to see him. You’d be amazed that such a little child could miss anyone so much.”

“I wouldn’t be amazed at all, when that someone is Eunostos. As a matter of fact, I’ve noticed that Icarus has looked a bit peaked for the last two months. Now he’s not even gurgling. He looks almost like”-I started to say Thea. “Almost subdued. Yes, I’ll keep Thea for you, but she’s starting to look uncomfortable, as many times as she’s been here.”

“Tell her a story about the Bears of Artemis. The nice ones, not Phlebas’s band. I won’t be long.”

“As long as you’re going, you might as well stay awhile. Otherwise, you’ll disappoint Eunostos.” But she had already gone.

She entered the gate, unlatched as usual, and paused before she lifted the door-hanging to his house. She wanted to see him entirely too much. Perhaps, she thought, if I turn very quietly and tiptoe out the gate-It was too late. Icarus emitted a happy chortle.

There was nothing to do but enter the room. Apparently Eunostos had been kneeling beside his fountain to feed his turtle, the one with which he had replaced his wedding present to Kora and Aeacus, but he was already on his hooves and starting for the door to meet her.

He had dropped a platter of baked flies in the water (he trapped them on parchment dipped in honey) and he looked at her and Icarus as if they had returned from an audience in the Underworld with the Griffin Judge.

“I couldn’t bring both children,” she explained. “Zoe is staying with Thea.”

He lifted Icarus from the quiver and hugged him so tightly that she thought: he is going to break a rib.

But Icarus returned the hug with equal enthusiasm and refused to leave Eunostos’s arms. For an instant she envied her child. There was such a wonderful reciprocity between him and Eunostos: a spontaneous and unstinting affection. And the thought, quickly erased from her mind, prodded her, goaded her: except for my dream, except for my dream… Now she did not even permit herself an embrace. It might be misunderstood; it might recall the rejected thought.

“It’s been two months,” she said. It was not a reproach-Aeacus after all was to blame-but a lament.

“And two days.”

“Eunostos, let’s sit in the garden. Did the rosebush grow after you fed it the potash?”

“It’s the biggest in the garden now.” He was patting Icarus and tousling his hair; at the same time he was staring at Kora with an ardor which he could no longer mask as brotherliness.

There were mossy chairs among the columbine, their legs entwined with creepers and looking as if they too might have grown in that garden of sweet familiarity. Side by side they sat in the sun-warm morning and the inarticulateness of their long separation was like a gate between them. Even Icarus seemed to feel their constraint and sighed in Eunostos’s arms.

“Is it better in your tree now that I don’t come? I mean-”

“You mean is Aeacus more content? I don’t know, Eunostos. I don’t think so. He doesn’t talk to me very often. He smiles and nods and rocks Thea in her cradle and then goes hunting or to call on Chiron. Are you-are you happy with your girls?”

“Oh, I make do,” he said, shuffling his hoof.

“Do you bring them here?”

“No.” The answer was abrupt and decisive. “I built this house for you.” He hesitated. “Do you still love him, Kora?”

“Yes. I want to be with him even when he’s silent and I can’t read his silence.” It was true, in a way, and something else was also true. It was not meant to be spoken, but her tongue, silent too many years, betrayed her now. “But I love you too, and so do the children!”

“Icarus maybe.”

“And Thea, if she only had the chance.”

She took his hand. Such a big, rough hand, and yet what slender fingers he had! It was no wonder that he could make a poem out of wood, an elegy out of a chair or a toy. It was a sisterly gesture, she persuaded herself. She had not embraced him, this rough carpenter with the heart of a poet. She had never embraced him, even when he had rescued her from Saffron. But in this slight endearment she felt enfolded by all of his boyishness-turned-adult. For an instant-for more than an instant-she envied those light-headed, lighthearted Dryads who had enjoyed his more than brotherly kisses. It was all very well to love a dream; it was like drinking a great flagon of long-buried wine and feeling as if you could step from one treetop to the next. But then the sparkle and the lightness evaporated like dew on a maple leaf. To love a Minotaur was like eating a loaf of wheaten bread soaked with honey; there was no sparkle but there was a sweet and enduring nourishment.

“Icarus isn’t a bit bigger,” said Eunostos. “Oughtn’t he to have grown in the last two months?”

“He doesn’t eat as much as he did. He misses you. Now we have to go, Eunostos.” She had already betrayed Aeacus with her thoughts; she must not risk a worse betrayal.

“No, please, I have to find a present for Icarus first.” He clutched the child as if he were protecting him from a blast of wintry wind or a pack of wolves.

“He’s had his present. Coming to see you. Now he wants to give you one.”

Icarus held to Eunostos’s horns and implanted a wet kiss on his cheek.

“When will you come again?” The question was addressed equally to her and Icarus.

“I don’t know.”

“When may I come to see you? Aeacus didn’t say I could never come again.”

“I don’t know that either, Eunostos.”

He hurried into his workshop and returned with the feathered cap he had made for Thea, but made too large. But it fitted Icarus perfectly because of his hair, which doubled the size of his head.

Eunostos stood in the gate and waved his hand. Icarus waved his cap and then he began to cry. His mother hurried him into the trees. It was fortunate that she knew the trail so well; all the way home, she never looked up from the ground.

Aeacus had returned ahead of them. He was hanging his bow on the wall.

“I shot a bear,” he said. “If you salt the meat, we can have steaks all winter.”

“We don’t eat bears in the Country of the Beasts.”

“Suit yourself. Where have you been?”

“To visit Zoe.”

“I see that Icarus has a new cap.”

“Eunostos made it. He left it at Zoe’s house.”

Did he believe her? If he did not believe her, was he annoyed, angry, enraged? In all this time, she was still unable to penetrate his impassive smile. And yet she felt that in his strange, civilized fashion he still cared for her. It was not exactly love; it was the gentle and faintly condescending affection which sometimes survives the disappointment of losing a dream.

That night he lay beside her on their couch and held her hand and kissed her cheek.

“Kora,” he said. “Maiden. You called to me across the dark spaces of the night and I came to you. Was I right to come? I’m still an invader, you know. I’m not a Beast.”

“I wanted you to come.”

“But are you still glad?”

“Yes, Aeacus.” She answered without a pause but with a certainty which she did not feel.

“Then so am I. We have had good years. We mustn’t regret them. And you have given me royal children.”

He was quiet then. His hand relaxed its hold; he seemed to fall into a quiet sleep. She kissed his cool forehead, loving him in her way, though still not knowing him-this lover and stranger; but not, in spite of the vows he had sworn before Chiron, her husband-never truly her husband. Maiden had become wife and mother for a Man who had remained an alien and a wanderer.

She awoke to find him gone, and the children with him.

Luckily I found her before she had left her tree. I had been concerned about the consequences of her visit to Eunostos, though I had not anticipated quite so dire and sudden an outcome.

“It’s a long way to Knossos,” she said, “and I won’t be able to carry much. A little food: a flask of wine and a cheese. And acorns to last me for a week.” She had not been crying; she had not taken time for tears. She was not even angry. She was lost.

“It will take you three solid days to reach Knossos. You’ll never find your children and get back to your tree alive!”

“I may overtake them on the way. He’s burdened with the children.”

“And if you do, how can you stop him?”

“I can’t stop him but I can ask him to leave my children. Let him go, if he must, but leave my children.”

“He won’t listen to you. I won’t let you go, Kora.”

“You can easily stop me,” she said. “You have the strength. But you will have to kill me. Will you do that, Zoe?”

I looked into her face and saw, for the first time, the utter implacability of a Dryad who had remained a girl too long and become a woman too quickly and meant what she said. I saw an unreasoning courage which, if rebuffed, might become madness.

“I’m going to get Eunostos,” I said. “Wait for me till I bring him back. You can surely do that much for me. Together we’ll think what to do.”

“I can’t wait.”

“Ankles be damned,” I swore, and ran like Artemis at the hunt-ran all the way to Eunostos’s trunk and fell in a heap at his gate.

“Aeacus has taken the children.”

“Where?” It was his only question. He did not seem surprised, but anguish lashed him like the branch of a fir tree. I expected him to scream.

“Toward Knossos,” I said. “Go after her. I’ll follow when I get my wind back.”

I overtook them where the forest opens onto the field. At least Eunostos had held her until my arrival, but she was even now breaking free of him, a tall, resolute figure encumbered only with a wicker basket and striding toward the Country of Men.

“Listen,” I shouted after her. “How do you think you can get to Knossos? You’ve never been out of the forest!” She paused until I caught up with her. She had no words for me, but I had made her think. “Do you know what the Cretan rustics say of Beasts? They fear and despise us. They frighten naughty children with stories about our cannibalism. They would capture or kill you.”

Her face was that of a bewildered little girl. “I could hide my ears and hair,” she protested. “Dirty my cheeks and pass for a peasant going to market.”

“And die before you found your children. How long do you think you can live away from your tree?”

“But I’m not bound to a tree,” cried Eunostos. “I can go anywhere. I’ll get your children for you, Kora!”

“And how are you going to disguise yourself short of a funeral shroud? Horns on one end and hooves on the other! You sound like Partridge.”

“I don’t need a disguise. One good bellow will send those rustics scurrying like Bear Girls chased by a bear.”

“And if you get to Knossos?”

“The Cretans aren’t monsters. Not the city folk, anyway. The king is said to be a fair-minded Man. I’ll ask him to make Aeacus return the children.”

“And you think he’ll listen to you? His own brother’s children, heirs to the throne?”

“I don’t know. At least he might let them spend half the year with Kora. But we have to do something, don’t we?”

“Yes, we do. We’ll go together, Eunostos, you and I. I’ll be the peasant, not Kora, and I’ll find a way to smuggle you into the city. You’re right, the king is fair. He will probably refuse you but I don’t think he will harm you. If he does refuse, then it will be my turn to act. I won’t ask, I will steal back what has been stolen.”

“But they’re my children,” Kora cried. “You’re making plans as if I didn’t exist!”

“Kora,” I reminded her. “I am approximately seventeen times your age. I can stay away from my tree a good two weeks without so much as getting a headache. What is more, I am something of a traveler. I have been to the coast with Achaeans and I took a short voyage on one of their ships. Once, I even dyed my hair with umber from the banks of the Beaver Lake, combed it over my ears, and went to Knossos with a Cretan sailor who had taken my fancy. For a solid week, he showed me around the city-taverns, bull ring, theater, palace, everything. I was downright faint before I got back to my tree, but I didn’t regret a minute. There is no more to be said if you want your children back. Swallow your pride and turn their rescue over to experts.”

Perhaps it was wicked of me to feel a strange exhilaration even while Kora was grieving for her lost children and I sincerely and deeply felt her loss. But then I never claimed to be the Great Mother. I was nothing but a free-living Dryad who loved an adventure, amorous or martial. And loved Eunostos.

And so I prepared for my greatest adventure with my greatest friend.