The forest of forever

CHAPTER XV

We rode in silence, Eunostos and I in the same farmer’s cart which had brought us to Knossos, but flanked now by six Cretan horsemen astride Hittite chargers. It was no longer necessary to conceal Eunostos under the straw. The whole countryside knew of the Minotaur and the Dryad who had come to Knossos to steal Aeacus’s children and how they had been imprisoned for seven days until the king had decreed, against the protests of Aeacus, their return to the forest. We were not criminals, be had said; we had come to reclaim a mother’s children and, according to our own law, come with a just cause. But Cretan justice required that if we ever returned to Knossos, we would face imprisonment and death.

Eunostos had not reproached me for letting Icarus slip from my arms and return through the fissure into the garden.

“I hid him under my robe,” I had shamefacedly explained. “And held him against my side. But before I had even reached the street, he slipped out of my grasp. He was frightened of the dark, I expect, and he wanted you.” I did not explain what I did not wish to believe, that perhaps I had somehow willed him to escape, unconsciously relaxed my hold to keep from having to leave the city without Eunostos. I had hoped, I had dared to hope, that the King would give both of the children to Eunostos-or give him a promise of their later return-and that he would bring them to me in the deserted courtyard and we would return together to Kora. But when Icarus scrambled out of the fissure and Eunostos whispered, “Thea isn’t coming,” I knew that Eunostos would have to stay in the palace and I would gladly, though not deliberately, have exchanged Icarus for my beloved friend. But I did not reproach myself. Icarus had returned for love of Eunostos. Perhaps I had let him return for the same reason. One must make allowances for love.

“You may go now,” said the captain of the horsemen, a little man with the tiniest ears I had ever seen, almost like coquina shells, riding a large and indelicate animal who endured his rider with the same disdain which my ox showed to me. From the distance, you might have mistaken horse and rider for a Centaur. All six horsemen watched while we climbed out of the cart and crossed the last small space of meadow, and the captain called after us.

“Is it happy in the forest? With the Dryads, I mean, and houses in treetops, and workshops under the ground? After seeing you, I think it must be a magic place!”

“I don’t know about the magic,” said Eunostos. “To us, it’s just home. But it certainly used to be happy. I wish you could visit us, but Chiron wouldn’t allow it. Thank you, sir, for bringing us here. You’ll return the ox to his owner, won’t you?”

“I won’t forget. And I wish you had gotten the children!” He reined his horse and gruffly ordered his men to return to Knossos by way of Tychon’s farmhouse.

“Eunostos,” I said. “I’m very tired. I’ve been two weeks away from my tree. Seven days without acorns. I’ll have to rest before we visit Kora.”

He looked at me with concern, his young face a mixture of tiredness and tenderness. He had rarely heard me complain. “Of course, Aunt Zoe.”

“Eunostos, Zoe, where are the children?” It was Partridge. “I’ve come here every day to watch for you.” He dropped his onion grass and threw his arms around Eunostos. “What happened in Knossos?”

“We didn’t get them,” Eunostos said, returning the hug wearily but gratefully. “The king wouldn’t let them go. They have to stay with their father and learn how to rule a kingdom.”

“Never mind, you still have me.”

“Yes, old friend, I still have you. I’m glad you waited for me. I’m taking Zoe to her tree now. We’ll visit later. You and I and Bion. I’ll tell you everything.”

I was so fatigued that I had to lean on Eunostos for support. I felt as if a Strige had supped on my blood. My hands were sweating and my hair clung in damp tendrils around my ears.

“As soon as you get me to my tree, you go on ahead to tell Kora.”

“Yes, Zoe.”

He helped me up my ladder and onto my couch and threw a wolfskin over my now shivering limbs. I thought of course that he would go without me. I must have fallen asleep. I awoke in perhaps an hour. Already the emanations of the tree had revived my body, if not my spirits. Eunostos was still sitting beside my couch.

“I told you to go on,” I said. “Kora has to know, and you were the one to tell her. She may have heard the news from Partridge.”

“I didn’t want to leave you that long. You looked so feverish! And then you started to have chills. But you seem better now. Here, eat some of these acorns.”

He had lit a fire in my brazier-he must have borrowed some coals from one of my neighbors-and roasted the acorns while I slept.

“I’ll eat them on the way.”

“You’re sure you’re strong enough?”

“Of course I am! It wasn’t a fever 1 had, it was what we call tree-sickness. Besides, it’s only a few hundred yards to Kora’s oak.”

He helped me down the ladder as if I were an old lady and I became increasingly impatient with him, though my impatience was really to be finished with the intolerable duty of facing Kora. How do you tell a mother that she has lost her children?

It was when we entered the meadow that we saw the smoke. We broke into a run.

The trunk of Kora’s tree was sheathed in flames and the limbs were writhing arms of fire. For an instant it seemed to me that the tree itself was Kora. I thought I saw her face contorted in the blaze of foliage; I thought I heard her crying, but it was only the thin, eerie whistle of burning wood.

Others had arrived ahead of us: Partridge and Bion and a host of Dryads, and Myrrha, who, we later learned, had just returned from a visit to the Centaurs, and thus had been gone from the tree when it caught on fire. Eunostos plunged toward that deadly pyre of flame.

“No!” The voice was like a bee sting to the ear. It was the usually soft-spoken Myrrha. “No, Eunostos.”

He stopped in his tracks and listened without taking his eyes from the burning tree.

“The tree is stricken. Kora is dead or dying. Even if you carry her out of the flames, you will only prolong her agony. Allow her the dignity of dying as she chooses.” I would never again mistake her for a foolish, light-headed woman.

He stared from Myrrha to the tree. A branch crackled and fell to the ground and Partridge stamped on the sparks in a frenzy to be of help. The tree was a single quivering flame. Mercifully, there was no sound in the trunk, not the least sob. Silent Kora did not break her silence.

“Don’t you understand? It was Kora who lit the fire. It was not an accident.”

Eunostos sank to his knees, his hands outstretched as if he could somehow conjure the flames to die or Kora to live. Partridge ran to him and said, “I told her, Eunostos. It was my fault. I didn’t want you to have to tell her. It was my fault.”

“It was nobody’s fault,” I said to Partridge. “Somebody had to tell her. Go to Myrrha and take her to stay with the Centaurs. I’ll look after Eunostos.”

For the last time I looked at the tree. Again I seemed to be looking at Kora; but she was dressed in the colors of autumn instead of her familiar green, and tranquil, strangely tranquil, yielding the summer without regret. Fearless of winter. Foreseeing the fadeless asphodels of the Underworld.

Eunostos disappeared to his limestone cave. I did not try to stop him. Bion took hickory nuts, Partridge took onion grass and tried to cheer him with the news of the forest: Phlebas’s quarrel with Amber over a theft, Myrrha’s move to an oak near Centaur Town. I visited him every day with a pail of milk-he refused beer-and sometimes sat with him. He would not have heard me if I had spoken. He would have nodded; he might have smiled; but his mind was in the meadows of irrecoverable youth, the yellow gagea of unreturning spring. Those strong, practical creatures, the Minotaurs, carpenters and craftsmen and farmers…how rarely do we remember that they are also poets. And it is the inescapable burden of poets to forget that there are summers as well as springs.

Then, at the end of three days, he came to me, a tired, bespattered figure dusty with limestone, cockle-burrs in his mane, and sank to the floor. I sat on the couch and smoothed his mane with a wooden comb (he did not approve of my tortoiseshell comb; shells should remain on tortoises, he insisted).

“Aunt Zoe, was there ever a time when you lost everything?”

“There have been times when I thought I had.”

“But I know I have. I could have learned to live without Kora. I already had, in a way. One day I may be able to accept her death, since she wanted to die. But the children. Icarus…”

“You’re quite sure you’re never going to fall in love again? You’re only eighteen. What about the next five hundred years?”

“Almost nineteen. Yes, quite sure. Three years ago, I was happy, Aunt Zoe. So happy! I thought I had everything I wanted, except my parents, and I knew they were safe in the Underworld.”

“It isn’t in the scheme of the Great Mother for us to have everything we want. If we did we wouldn’t need her, and even a goddess likes to be needed. The lucky ones among us get half. But reach high, and half is enough. Now I sound like Moschus when he’s drunk too much beer and thinks he’s a philosopher. But I do know this. You haven’t lost everything. You still have your friends. Don’t forget them.”

“But Kora and the children…”

“Kora is dead. You can’t resurrect her from the Underworld, but you can be sure that the Griffin Judge has judged her kindly. I think that world is lovelier for this world’s loss. And her children are alive and loved by their father and uncle.”

“But I can never see them again.”

“Never? Oh, my friend, that is a word for cynics. I don’t pretend to be a prophetess. But like most of my race, I can sometimes catch glimmerings of the future. And I hope-I think-you will see your children again. Last night I had a dream. My soul went out of my body, as Kora’s used to do, but it wandered in the future, not the present. And I saw a young girl-oh, how beautiful-and a boy with a crown of green hair, and where do you think I saw them?”

“Where?”

“A great bird was carrying them through the sky and right toward this forest!”

“But that was only a dream. If I try to go to them, Minos will have me killed.”

“But they were coming to you. Kora dreamed of a prince and called him into the forest. It’s true he brought her sorrow. But the fact remains that he came. Keep on loving Thea and Icarus and perhaps they will hear you. Remember, the forest is in their blood. It is half of them. Perhaps it will call to them too.”

“I’m not Kora. I can’t live on a dream.”

“And you shouldn’t. If I have any wisdom at all, it is this: dreams by themselves are for children. But if you dream and reach and wait all at the same time, then pygmies can topple giants, cities can rise from rubble! Strong hands and a dream and patience built Babylon, and it wasn’t really Zeus who built Knossos.”

I ran my hand through his soft-as-milkweed mane and held him by the horns and kissed him on his smooth face, almost the only part of his without hair.

“I’m not good for much, Eunostos. Beauty I had, and maybe there’s a little left, if you don’t mind a few wrinkles. Wisdom-I leave that to Chiron. But if you ever want to cry, this is the place to come.”

“I’m not worth your love, Zoe. I’m nothing but the last Minotaur-and maybe it’s just as well.”

“The last-or the best?”

He laid his head in my lap. Then he looked up at me, with those unbearable green eyes which windowed his soul, and said, “Zoe, I know you’ve loved a lot of Beasts and Men and gotten over them. But was there ever anyone you loved more than the rest? And lost him? And thought you were going to die?”

“Yes, Eunostos. Though I can’t say I lost him since I never really had him.”

“I can’t imagine anyone not loving you.”

“He did, I think, in his way. But not in my way.”

“What did you do?”

“Ached, my dear, and baked a weasel pie!”

“And did you finally forget him?”

“I didn’t want to forget him. He was much too precious to me. I just rearranged my memory. Forgot some things, remembered others.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You’ll learn in the next hundred years or so.”

“And you aren’t sorry?”

“Not for a moment. I haven’t regretted any of my loves. Least of all the one that hurt the most.”

“Will you tell me who he was?”

“Someday, my dear.”