The Forest of Forever (14 page)

Tychon grinned and relaxed his stomach.

“Tickles.”

If he looked a little less like a sheep, I thought, I could forgive the bulge. After all, I myself am not exactly a sapling, in age or girth.

“Looks like a bit of fur,” said the wife, gazing at her reflection in the side of the pot to evaluate the combination of neckpiece and earrings and liking what she saw. You may give me credit for introducing a new feature of feminine adornment, though in later years ladies preferred their neckpieces to be inanimate.

Tychon yawned.

“Hoed too much,” Chloe volunteered. “Ain’t a boy. Tychon! Let her have the pallet.” But Tychon had already sprawled on his bed of straw and begun to snore.

She shrugged. “Works hard, sleeps hard. Never mind. Don’t talk much when he’s awake.”

I saw that we were headed for an exchange of confidences. I would no doubt be questioned about the fashions of the town, the affairs of the court. Drawing on my past visit to Knossos and what I had learned from Aeacus, I had prepared answers for all possible questions, even down to the false rumor of an indiscretion between the king and the wife of the Egyptian pharaoh’s emissary.

But she pointed to my breasts and said, “Paint your nipples, dear?”

“Always. Whoever said we can’t improve on nature? An unpainted nipple is like a green apple. Unappetizing.”

“What do you use?”

“Carmine.”

“Too dear for me.”

“Had you thought of a vegetable dye? I’ve even made do with the juice of wild strawberries.”

But she had slid as quietly to the floor as an empty gown sliding from a wall hook.

Remembering my own unpleasant experience with those pernicious creatures, I removed the Striges before they had glutted themselves and returned them to my pouch. Then I turned to the business at hand. I could not resist a smile. Zoe, old girl, I told myself, you’re going to keep your promise to Kora.

Darkness came as stealthily as a member of Phlebas’s band bent on theft, and I felt in league with the night, bent upon my own machinations, however benign, and hugely enjoying the adventure in spite of the hazards and the stakes. With a certain reluctance, I exchanged my elaborate gown for a shapeless gray horror which I found, of all places, in the cupboard. Now I could approach Knossos driving an oxcart and looking like a peasant woman and Chloe could mend a few tears and have a fashionable gown which for better or worse would liberate what her husband preferred to remain in captivity. Then I knelt beside Chloe to recover the earrings. Had they belonged to me, I would gladly have left them in exchange for the oxcart, but the Bee queen had lent, not given, and I must return them to her along with the Striges (which I would have liked to strangle).

However, I had underestimated the pig.

He bared his tusks and instantly transformed himself from a docile pet to a ferocious guard. In the forest, he could have passed for a wild boar. I understood why Tychon did not need a watchdog. Bottom advanced upon me with cautious but deliberate steps. Doubtless he was still making up his mind whether to gore me or ram me. Hastily I sprang to my feet. Chloe could keep the earrings so long as I got the cart. At the moment, the getting seemed in doubt. It was out of the question to implant a Strige on the back of that advancing brute. If I could only think of a bribe—

I had just seen Bottom partake of the family skin with some relish. I hastily emptied the rest of the skin into a pot, the same which had served Chloe for a mirror, and shoved it under his snout.

A moment of indecision. Was I really a threat? After all, I had left a better gown for the one I had taken and I had not stolen the earrings, merely fingered them. Furthermore, there was no reason to connect me with the sudden but not unnatural-looking sleep of his master and mistress. He sniffed, examined, partook: daintily at first, then mightily. I edged toward the door; Bottom stopped lapping. It seemed that I was still suspect. I paused. Bottom resumed his lapping.

A drunken pig is far more fastidious than, say, a drunken Moschus. Bottom finished the bowl, walked without staggering to his master’s pallet, leaned comfortably against Tychon, and joined his snores to those of his master. Fighting down the temptation to recover the earrings and risk arousing Bottom—later I could make amends to Amber—I moved out of the house to claim the cart and ox.

The ox was tethered under the lean-to beside the house. When I untethered him, he refused to budge. I coaxed, I prodded, I swore twenty oaths to the Great Mother, but I could not move him from the house. I felt like a beaver which has found a tree impervious to its teeth or, to use a comparison more fitting to my race, like a transplanted oak which has failed to take root in rocky soil.

To compound my disgrace Eunostos at that very moment loomed over the horizon, stooping and trying to minimize his almost seven feet but still looking like a Minotaur or, to the country folk if they had seen him, a demon from the Underworld.

“But Zoe,” he cried, “you only have to talk to him.” He turned to the ox, muttered a few, to me, unintelligible sounds, and the stupid animal sauntered, yes, sauntered, in spite of his bulk and with undisguised scorn for me and affection for Eunostos, from under the lean-to and over to the cart, which leaned against another wall of the house. A few more words, some quick, sure movements of his hands, and ox was joined to cart for the journey to Knossos.

“What did you say to him, Eunostos?”

“I invited him to join us on a trip.”

“But he’s going to have to pull us. You make it sound as if he’s going to ride in the cart.”

“I know, but he has his pride. It’s better to make him feel like an equal.”

“I didn’t know you spoke ox.”

“You forget I have an affinity for the race. I expect we have a common ancestor. Besides, his vocabulary is limited—a mere hundred or so words.”

“Eunostos, you’re a wonder.”

He gave me an impulsive hug. “Aunt Zoe, you’re the wonder. The way you handled the farmer!”

I shushed him with a finger. “And his wife and pig. But they may wake up. Into the cart with you now.”

“Can’t I drive while it’s dark?”

“Not even while it’s dark.”

“But the farmers are all asleep.”

“But not their sons and daughters.”

It was like squeezing a Triton into a lobster box.

“Leave me a breathing hole,” he pleaded as he lay on his back, knees drawn up, arms pressed against his sides, chin on chest.

I shoveled hay over him. “It’s only a foot deep over your head. I have to hide your horns. You won’t suffocate.” It was no time to pamper him. “Just don’t sneeze,” I cautioned with a last toss of the pitchfork. Then I mounted the driver’s seat and addressed the ox:

“Ho there, fellow, off to Knossos.”

The ox refused to respond.

“My good Beast, let’s be on our way!”

His inertia bordered on insolence.

A sound filtered through the straw, rather like a series of grunts.

“That’s the most primitive language I ever heard,” I snorted. “And he’s not my equal, even if I did call him Beast.”

But the cart began to move.

CHAPTER XIV

WE HAD driven our oxcart for three days and lived on blackberries and mushrooms and crayfish caught in streams swollen by the melting snows from the mountains. Once I inveigled goat’s milk and eggs from a credulous farmer’s wife, who took me for a widow light in the head, while Eunostos remained in his crypt of hay. Every night, when we stopped to rest and my body seemed one intolerable ache from the jolts of the oxcart, I ate of the acorns in my pouch and scarcely thought of my tree. With the resilience of youth, Eunostos unbent himself and slept soundly under the cart, his horns and hooves concealed by straw or wrapped in old strips of linen torn from the folds of the gown I had borrowed from Chloe. The last night before Knossos, I waited among the papyrus stalks and watched for intruders while he swam in a pool and cleansed himself from the journey, and then I took his place in the sweet-chilling water, though careful to guard my hair and not expose the forbidden Dryad’s green.

I dare not call it a happy time, while childless Kora waited in the Country of the Beasts, her strained white face a spectre in our minds. But the plans, the risk, the hope—and hope seemed almost a certainty while we were on the move—bound us together with the comradeship of soldiers sharing danger, and also with the tenderness only possible between a boy and a woman who might have been his mother (or except accident of years, his beloved).

The morning of the fourth day, Knossos spread incredibly below us.

“Eunostos,” I called down to him. “We’re there. But we mustn’t be seen together. When we reach the marketplace, I’ll leave the cart. Give me a few minutes before you show yourself. Then you know what to do.”

His head erupted from the straw. “It’s like a rainbow fallen out of the sky!”

I submerged the head and the incriminating horns. “Not yet, simpleton. But yes, it is, and it looks as if it might return to the clouds at any minute.” I blinked my eyes. It was not a city, it was witchery, and at such a time I could not afford to be bewitched. As an antidote to sheer, open-mouthed wonderment, I reminded myself that, according to my Cretan lover, the Egyptians did not approve of Knossos. Streets which meandered when they ought to advance. End beams projecting from houses as if the builders had forgotten them and wandered off to make love. Flat roofs unexpectedly bulging into impertinent attics. Story built upon story like so many afterthoughts. Little blue huts side by side with scarlet villas. Sprawling apartments whose windows were filled with fiery orange parchment. Such a riot of colors—garishness, said the Egyptians. Where was the dignity of grays and browns, of sand colors, pyramid colors? Such a want of planning. Wastefulness, said the Egyptians. Where was the grandeur of temples with pylon gates and obelisks as straight as the shaft of a spear?

But the Cretans laughed and made no excuses for their fallen rainbow. “You say we squander our colors. Look at a field in spring. Do the flowers offend your eyes, whatever hues they mingle? You say we build crookedly. Look at the forest. Do the trees grow in rows? Do the branches make perfect spheres above their trunks? Beside, we did not build our city, Zeus built it. When he was a little boy, the Great Mother said to him, ‘You’re restless, my son, on the mountaintop. Descend into the valley and build me a town to delight my heart.’ And the child took stone from the mountain, clay from the banks of a stream, wood from the fir tree; and he snatched a whole rainbow right out of the sky and went into the valley without a plan in his quick little brain, but with a vision, and built his town in a single morning. And the Great Mother said, ‘But the streets are crooked.’ And the child answered, ‘So is a stream,’ and his mother smiled.”

“Zoe, I thought we were almost there. I’m about to sneeze.”

“We are I said, prodding the ox, who had finally learned to obey my commands. “I was just catching my breath. But now to practical matters.”

Knossos alone among the great cities of Men was totally unfortified; its walls were its bull-prowed ships. But though there were neither forts nor gates nor even guards, except for the palace garrison, it was understood that farmers would not enter the city with their carts, or warriors with their chariots. The farmers marketed their grapes, olive oil, melons—whatever the season’s crop—in a large open field flanked by vineyards and olive groves, or walked into the city to make purchases in the canvas-covered stalls, which fluttered like big butterflies, or in the arcades of shops, whose bare-breasted proprietresses were as pert and impudent as their pottery and figurines. In the absence of the farmers, no one bothered their carts, for theft belonged to the countryside, not to Knossos. It was not a virtuous city by any means: its consumption of beer and wine was legendary, its sexual practices imaginative and prodigious; but its sins (said the Egyptians), or rather its pleasures (said the Knossians), lay in partaking, not in taking. As they approached the city, the peasants somehow forgot their wariness and relaxed in a beneficent glow of brotherly and other kinds of love. Oh, they would bargain and haggle over a price, raise their voices even scowl on occasion—but to steal in Knossos? Unthinkable. There were no watchdogs, or dogs of any kind, only Egyptian cats, snoozing on rooftops or walking the clean unlittered streets as if they felt no yearning for their original homeland. For cats, like Cretans, abhor rules.

Great ladies and gentlemen traveled the meandering roads in sedan chairs carried by servants or slaves, but everyone else walked, for it was not a vast metropolis, like Babylon, but a relatively small city with small buildings for small people, and unwieldy wagons or clattering chariots were as unthinkable as elephants in a vineyard.

I had parked the wagon at the edge of the field, in the shade of an olive tree, since poor Eunostos must be roasting under his straw blanket.

“I’m going now, Eunostos,” I whispered, standing by the ox as if I were talking to him like a farmer who dotes on his animal. No one was close enough to catch my exact words. “But I’ll be watching you from a distance. Once you enter the palace, I’ll go to the agreed spot and wait till lamp-lighting time. If you don’t come, I’ll assume they have captured you and do what I can to set you free. If you do come—”

“It will be with the children. Or else the children will come without me. And if they do, you must get them right back to the country and not try to rescue me. Promise, Zoe?”

I promised but whispered under my breath, “Mother Goddess, I didn’t promise by you.”

I sauntered casually away from the cart and mingled with a group of peasants, nodding and smiling but careful not to speak and betray my Bestial accent. Everybody else seemed to be talking, buyers to sellers, sellers to buyers. But suddenly the talk began to subside and then there was not a sound in all that crowd. It was like the wind leaving a field of barley and letting the stalks ripple into silence. Eunostos had climbed from the cart. I watched him as he shook himself free of the straw and started for the cobbled road which led through the field and directly to the palace. They won’t harm him here in the shadow of the city, I thought, not even the superstitious country folk. Still, they will fear him and some will make sport of him.

I was mistaken. They stared with awe rather than fear at this seven-foot, horned, tailed demon who had materialized—from a cart, was it? More likely from the air! They did not throw rocks, they did not ridicule, they parted to let him pass, as if it were his city to which they had come, and where they remained by his sufferance. Perhaps because of his boldness—perhaps because he somehow glowed with divinity—they took him for a god instead of a demon. Now he had reached the road to the palace. Now he was overtaking peasants bound for audience with the king, and meeting ladies and gentlemen bound in the opposite direction for the market place. Voices lilted from curtained sedan chairs, the bearers halted, the curtains opened, and bare-breasted ladies dangled out of the windows. Children gathered on rooftops, pointing, gesticulating, but not ridiculing, and a small boy cried in a high, sweet voice.

“Mama, is it a Minotaur?”

“Yes, son. It may be the last Minotaur.”

“Has he come to hurt us?”

“I think this one has come to bring us luck. You see, he is like the god we worship. The same noble horns!”

Looking straight ahead of him, never stumbling, holding himself at his full height, his red mane a splendor of silk and sun, his horns like potent but unthreatening weapons, Eunostos entered the stepped portico of the palace and mounted toward the gate. He did not need a forest to give him dignity. He brought the forest with him and walked in the courage of his purpose. Guards advanced to meet him, not to capture but to escort, and together they vanished between the red, down-tapering columns and into the palace of Minos and his brother Aeacus and the royal children, Thea and Icarus.

* * * *

Eunostos was afraid. He felt as if he were drowning in a vat of honey. Beauty too beautiful. Softness too soft. Not even a hint of menace behind a smile, as in a Bee queen’s face. He could have fought monsters, certainly soldiers; young though he was and, so he thought, ineloquent, he could have argued against wrath or cunning. But this implacable gentleness, this tyranny of softness. It was beyond him and he was baffled. The rainbow city, its toy people, and now, here, the little king with his triple-plumed headdress, seated on his gypsum throne and flanked by two stone griffins who looked as august but unmenacing as the frescoed griffins—green, red, and blue—which shared the walls with reeds and water birds. Where were the spears to bar his path? These slim-waisted boys who passed for guards—no older than himself—why, he would scatter them with one sweep of his arm! Besides, they were guiding, not guarding him. He might have been a visiting ambassador.

The king was holding court and granting audiences. Peasants mingled with courtiers; the raw sweet smell of earth with nard and sandarac. Everyone equal now before the king and come to plead his case, present his gift, ask his boon. Eunostos paused in the rear of the room. His hooves seemed made of bronze. His head spun with a bewilderment of colors and costumes. The men in their loincloths were bright and trim, but not particularly variegated except that here was a cloth which reached to the knees, and there was one which covered no more than the name implied; here was the wool of a peasant, there was the linen of a courtier. But the women… There were skirts like bells, skirts like upturned saffron crocuses, skirts like crowns with many tiers, and here was a lady in—what was the word? Not even Men wore them, except in parts of the East. Trousers!

The king smiled and motioned him at once to advance to the throne, between the throngs of petitioners on foot and spectators lounging on stone benches which ran the length of the walls. Eunostos did not flinch. He knelt before the throne as I had instructed him and waited to be recognized.

“Arise and be heard.”

“I have come from the Country of the Beasts,” he said.

“I know, my son.” Minos was a young-faced king with hair as white as foam. What strange bird—phoenix perhaps—had given him the plumes for his headdress? What fishers had dived among coral and anemones and gathered the murex shells to empurple his loincloth? Bracelets of lapis lazuli; a necklace of coral like a strand of sea horses. Female adornments, but the Man was anything but feminine. Eunostos liked him. He is more than Aeacus, more than any of his people, he thought. Stronger yet kinder. Once his wounds had healed, he would not have stayed in the Country of the Beasts to steal the heart of a Dryad. Had he stayed, he would not have forsaken her.

“And you are Eunostos, the last Minotaur. My brother has told me about you. You were his friend. I have sent for him now.”

Aeacus entered the room without surprise and walked to meet Eunostos without hesitation. They might have been meeting to hunt together as in the old days. In the forest, he had been a beautiful alien. Here, he was beautiful, but intimately at home with dolphin-dancing walls and dolphin-gay people. He wore no adornment except a silver fillet in his hair. He needed no adornment, with his body richer than bronze, with hair like shadows caught in a loom and woven to intricate strands. Eunostos keenly felt his own dishevelment. His gray loincloth of homespun wool. The wisps of hay clinging to his arms and legs. And his hooves, his poor ridiculous hooves which no sandals in the world could hide. Yet no one had laughed at him, and even Aeacus looked at him with a kind of grudging and, at least to Eunostos, unaccountable wonder.

Aeacus extended his hand in the remembered gesture of fellowship. Eunostos did not return the gesture. The beautiful ones, the hurtful ones, he thought. Kora and Aeacus. They smile and their enemies drop their daggers or lose their hearts. They can only be wounded by others like themselves. And I, in my roughness and plainness have dared to tread in the very fount of beauty.

Almost furtively Aeacus dropped his hand. Almost too quickly, he spoke. “I did love your friend, Eunostos. I do love her, in my way. But I love my children more. Would you deny them—this?” He swept his hand in a circle around the room, but the circle seemed ever-widening—palace beyond room, city beyond palace, island beyond city. The Minoan Empire, athwart the sea like an ocean-shouldering whale (and no one yet knew how close were the deadly sharks).

“Can’t they have both?” Eunostos cried. “The forest and the city?” His cry was sulphur in the honied air. “Kora is lost. I think she will die without her children.”

“She has her friends, Eunostos. You and Zoe and the rest. Good friends. I would have brought her gladly to Knossos. But she would have died in the city, away from her tree. You know that better than I. Had there been no children, I would never have left her. But there are two, and both are royal. Do you really think I can send them back to a forest of wolves and goat-footed thieves and kidnapping queens?”

“Is that how you saw the forest? Is that all you saw?” It was at once an accusation and a lament.

“Not you, not you, Eunostos. I liked you from that first day when you wanted to heal my wounds. I never stopped liking you, even when I forbade you my house.”