The Forest of Forever (15 page)

“It’s true I love Kora. But I couldn’t have taken her from you. I would never have tried.”

“It wasn’t Kora I was afraid of losing to you.”

“Not Kora?”

“It was my children. My son, at least. In fact I have already lost him. Now I must do my best to win him back. To teach him to rule a kingdom. It was you I feared, Eunostos, because the longer he knew you the more impossible it would have been for me ever to have taken him from the forest. And that’s why he mustn’t go back with you.”

“But you can’t be afraid of me,” Eunostos protested. “I’m just a rough carpenter who stumbles over his own hooves.”

“Who is wild and yet gentle, free and yet bound by the bronze ties of love, and binding to those who meet him. There are two forests, Eunostos. I feared—a little—the forest of wolves and thieves. But yours—and you—struck terror to my heart. The first was a danger I knew how to fight. The second was a magic against which I had no defense except flight.”

“I didn’t mean to make you afraid. I hope Icarus loves me, but I never thought about taking him away from you, his own father. I never thought anyone would love me as much as they loved you. Kora couldn’t.”

“Even Kora returned to you at the last. In her heart, I mean. So you see I’m not really forsaking her. I’m leaving her with you.”

Aeacus was befuddling him with these strange compliments. Who could believe the Man? Lyre-tongued Aeacus, no doubt with another lie!

He turned to the king with a last desperate plea. “The Achaeans have a goddess, haven’t they, who was stolen by the lord of the Underworld. Not the kindly Griffin Judge, but a cruel tyrant called Hades. Her mother—whether she was the same as our Great Mother I don’t know—grieved for her and wandered over the world in search of her, and Zeus felt pity and returned the girl to the surface for half of every year.

“Even in the Country of the Beasts, we know you as a fair-minded king. You deliver justice to peasants as well as courtiers. What about Beasts? Our races were friendly, long ago. I don’t know what divided us. Reunite us now! Become our Zeus, great King. Let Kora have her children for half of every year. The Great Mother will thank you for it.”

Minos was slow to answer. He was not Aeacus. Words did not come glibly to his tongue. “But the goddess you speak of was stolen by a strange god. A father can hardly be accused of stealing his own children. These are my heirs, Eunostos. You see me enthroned in splendor. You’ve heard of my fleet which holds the Achaeans at bay. We are friendly with Egypt, unthreatened by decadent Babylon. My ships have sailed beyond the Misty Isles, and around that great dark island to the south. What you see and think and hear is the truth. For now. This cubit in time called now. It is true that I am great in wealth, powerful with ships. But power is no more constant than the rain. Inevitably there must come a drought. I must conjure the rain. I must fight to retain my power and leave it in fitting hands. My brother has spoken truly, though he was very wrong to wed your friend. Kora must suffer so that a great empire shall be justly ruled. Icarus and Thea must be taught to rule, you see, not to run wild and free in a forest as most of us would like to do. Do you think I want to sit on this throne and pretend to be a god, and condemn this man and praise that man, and order my ships into battle? No, Eunostos. I would much rather go hunting with you in your forest and drink beer with your friend Zoe and join Chiron on his travels. But I follow the will of the Goddess because she has marked me—both honored and cursed—to be a king.”

“But there are two heirs. Can’t I take one of them back to their mother? At least for a little while?”

“There are two of them now, but will both grow up to rule? The Great Mother sends death even to laughing Knossos. Pestilence comes with our returning ships; the winter wind blows cold from the north. I myself was stricken as a child. A demon of plague denied me the power to beget children. He might as easily have killed me. No, my son. Both children must remain in Knossos.”

This, then, was the ultimate anguish: that Minos was just. Eunostos knew that in the king’s place he would have delivered the same judgment.

But he could fight that judgment. His allies were hope and courage and, much to his surprise, a wiliness which would have done credit to a Bee queen.

“May I see the children to say good-bye?” How easy it was to lie for Kora’s sake! He did not even feel shame and no one appeared to notice what this hitherto guileless rustic had learned from the Cretans.

Aeacus’s smile darkened. “What good will it do, Eunostos? Icarus cries for you every day, as it is. If he sees you again, he will have to get used to losing you again.”

“At least I can tell their mother if they’re well. She thought they might sicken when taken from their tree.”

“She needn’t have been concerned. Chiron himself assured me that they could live without their tree, though of course he never suspected what I had in mind.”

“Yes, you may see them, Eunostos.” It was the king. It was a command.

Aeacus turned to him with a flush of anger. “My brother—”

Minos was quick to forestall him. “Eunostos has risked his life to bring these children back to their mother. The Great Mother, I think, would wish him a final visit with them. In our household shrine, we worship her son in the form of a bull. Eunostos is closer to divinity than you and I.”

“May I see them in your garden with the pool of silver fish?”

Aeacus forgot to be angry. “You remembered my telling you about it? And that was three years ago!”

“You played there as a boy. It sounded so beautiful that I wanted to see it. And I want to see the children out-of-doors, not under a roof. For a little it will be almost like the forest again.”

* * * *

He waited beside the pool. The silver fish idled among conch shells and coral. Blue lotuses languished in the bright sun, like maidens weary from the heat who had waded into the pool. Palm trees imported from Libya, and oleanders tapering their long green leaves from clusters of white and pink blossoms, and grapevines climbing trellises against the wall, and a single blue monkey scampering among the flowers with the insolence of possession: here was Kora’s dream, Aeacus’s truth.

Aeacus walked into the garden carrying Icarus and leading Thea by the hand. There were no guards with him. There seemed no need for guards, since the wall was too high to climb. Thea withdrew her hand and boldly approached Eunostos. Out of the forest, she did not seem to fear him. Perhaps, he thought, she remembers that only for a little while I seemed to her a horned demon. Perhaps she remembers me, at the first and at the last, as one who loved her.

She did not hug him but she smiled with a wise little smile and touched his hand.

He patted her hair; by accident, he brushed a curl away from a pointed ear. She carefully rearranged the curl and then returned to her father.

Icarus, meanwhile, seemed to be struggling out of sleep. He blinked his eyes, which were red as if from prolonged weeping. Then he recognized Eunostos. When he yelled, the blue monkey hid among the oleanders and the silver fish scattered among the conch shells.

He lunged from his father’s arms and Eunostos caught him and fell to his knees, laughing, and hugged him with wordless yearning, and loved him for Kora’s sake and as if he were his own son.

“Talk to him, Eunostos. Try to make him understand why he must stay here with me. He loves you best, I know that. But he must stay with me.”

“I don’t think he understands many of my words.”

“You don’t need words. You never did.”

Aeacus turned abruptly and walked into the palace with Thea, and Eunostos called after him. “Wait. Can’t she stay too?” But the mouth of the door was dark and silent. He knew that he had lost her, and the loss was as bitter as aconite, but Thea had never loved the forest. It was only fair, however painful for Kora, that one child should stay with her father and grow to become a queen.

Now he must act to save Icarus. Now there was no time for words, except to allay the suspicion of whatever guards might wait beyond the door.

“There ought to be a turtle,” he said. “Shall we go and look for one among the grapevines?”

Icarus nodded agreement—he would probably have nodded if Eunostos had said, “Shall I throw you into the pool?”—and Eunostos walked quietly to the far wall and prodded among the grapevines with his hoof, lifting, twisting, exposing. Yes, it remained, the old fissure through which Aeacus’s turtle had escaped into an adjacent courtyard opening onto a little-used street, and which Aeacus had never allowed to be filled with rubble or clay. Hastily Eunostos parted the vines to enlarge the opening. Small, small, but just large enough for Icarus, in spite of his hair.

“Zoe,” he whispered.

“Yes, Eunostos. I’m here at the other end. The courtyard’s empty. No one can see me from the street.”

“Thea isn’t coming. Call to Icarus.”

“Icarus, it’s your Aunt Zoe.”

“Go to her, Icarus.” Will you follow me? the child seemed to ask.

“Yes, I’ll follow you.” He kissed him on his green profusion of hair and thrust him as far into the opening as his hands could reach. It was the only lie he had ever told the boy. Even in happy Knossos there must be prisons for those who helped to kidnap a prince’s son. Probably there were executions. Never mind, if Zoe escaped from the city with Icarus.

He had just risen to his feet and walked to the pool when Aeacus returned.

“But you just left him,” Eunostos said calmly. “We were playing hide-and-seek. He’s hidden himself among the oleanders.”

“Call him then. You had best be starting back to the forest. Kora should know as soon as possible how things are. Tell her—tell her that she is still my Maiden.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“But where is Icarus?” Aeacus strode through the garden looking behind the bushes.

“He can’t have gone far, can he? There’s no way out of the garden except through that door. Or you wouldn’t have left me alone with him.”

“Except—” Aeacus stared at the torn vines against the wall. “You remember more than I thought. Guards!”

The garden was suddenly aswarm with lithe young Cretans, faces taut, hands on daggers.

“My son has been stolen by—who was it, Eunostos? Who came with you and waited beyond the wall?”

“I came by myself.”

“I don’t believe you. You love Icarus too much to thrust him out into the city alone. It can’t have been Kora. She couldn’t have made the journey. It was Zoe, wasn’t it? Yes, it must have been. She would have both the courage and the strength.” And he gave a hurried description to the guards. “Rather large. Handsome in a weathered kind of way. Hair probably dyed or concealed. No doubt dressed like a peasant. She will have hidden Icarus under her robe. Alert the garrison. Let no one leave the city.”

But there must be a thousand women in Knossos who fitted such a description, and the city had no walls and a very small garrison. Zoe indeed had courage and strength. And roads, crowded with carts and asses and oxen and peasants, led in many directions.

But then the cry, the beloved and shattering cry. “Zeus-father!”

Icarus returned through the fissure into the garden, laughing and scrambling toward Eunostos but at the same time inevitably, irrevocably, it seemed, away from him and toward the griffin-flanked throne of Knossos.

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.”