The Forest of Forever (13 page)

“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.

CHAPTER XIII

MOST OF THE Beasts had gathered at the edge of the forest to watch my departure. Chiron and his Centaurs, wives as well as husbands, had arrived en masse, with their beloved pigs hovering between their hooves; and the Bears of Artemis, forgetting their shyness, scurried around me in a frenzy of excitement and wanted me to add some berries, some honey, some catnip, to the already laden pouch suspended from my sash. There were others too: some thirty or more Dryads, who took turns trying to reassure Kora that Icarus and Thea, having a human father, would not suffer even if separated indefinitely from their tree; the better behaved Panisci, among them Partridge, who was close to tears because Eunostos was going to the Wicked City without him; the Bee Queen Amber, who had made a special contribution to my pouch; and of course Eunostos, flanked by his faithful Bion and three other Telchins. Phlebas and his band were conspicuously absent, and his special Girl, chomping insolently on a weed, had been heard to say that she hoped the children—spoiled things—were
never
recovered; it would serve them right to be eaten by the Knossians.

As for myself, I had stayed in my tree all night to absorb its vitalizing powers, which now permeated my body like a glow of wine, and to make my plans and preparations. I could not have slept even if I had taken the time.

Now I was ready. It was not a small thing to leave the Country of the Beasts. I had left in the past only when accompanied by one of my lovers and returned with depleted energy, even if enriched experience. It was not a small thing to leave my oak. There were wispy little oaks in the world of Cretans but they were not Dryad trees and who could say what small sustenance I might draw from them?

Kora separated herself from the band of Dryads and threw her arms around me. Her eyes were moist but she did not allow the tears to fall down her cheeks.

“It seems I’m one of those women to whom things happen. You’re one who makes things happen. Find my children for me, Zoe.” She looked incredibly pale and young; she was both the devoted mother, inseparable from hearth and loom, and the dreamer of the early days, though now bereft of her dream. The sight of her briefly sobered me from the intoxication of the adventure.

“I will, Kora,” I swore. “By the Great Mother’s breast, I will.” Confidence returned to me, and I felt that there was nothing in the forest or in the city which I could not accomplish, except become a fine, proper lady (or be loved by the one dearest to me).

Eunostos said nothing. There was nothing he needed to say. His smile said: “You and I, Aunt Zoe, who can stop us? Not those puny Cretans.” He planned to follow and overtake me that very night.

I held him by the horns—the intimate, loving gesture shown him in the past only by his mother, Kora, and little Icarus—and kissed his cheek.

“Be cautious. I don’t need to tell you to be courageous.”

And then I left the country, marching out into the meadow where Aeacus, three years ago, had fought his battle. The grass was soft beneath my sandals; butterflies, like winged buttercups, fluttered away from me and meadowed the air. It is a good omen, I thought. The air has partaken of earth, and earth is my friend.

Omens can be deceptive.

* * * *

I approached the farmhouse feeling—trepidation, did you expect me to say? Caution, perhaps? I refuse to be falsely modest. I approached with the complete assurance that I would get what I wanted, by wiles or sheer animal appeal, from the farmer: the stone-wheeled oxcart in which he carried his produce to Knossos and in which I would hide the undisguisable immensity of Eunostos. Of course I knew my limitations. Place me beside Kora and I was clay beside alabaster. But Cretan farmers were not acquainted with women like Kora. I glittered, I glistened, I rippled like a snake goddess in a breast-revealing gown which my Cretan lover had bought for me in Knossos. Compared to the average, woolen-garbed farmwife, I was a finely glazed cup beside a crude earthenware jug. I was, to be frank, sufficient to fill a farmer’s eye and make him drop his hoe.

This particular farmer was chopping wood with the rhythmic, leisurely motion of a man who had never known a bad harvest—not on rich Crete—or confronted Achaean marauders. His cart leaned against the blue, almost windowless thatched mud box which passed rather prettily for a house. His ox grazed in a neighboring pasture bosomed with hay ricks and besprinkled with daisies. Immediate theft was out of the question. Nor could I wait until night and make off with ox and cart without arousing either the farmer or the inevitable watchdog found in peasant homes. Cretan farmers are as wary as Bee queens, though for different reasons. They eat well on the fat of the land, but they own few possessions and guard them with a zeal enforced by pitchforks, hoes, and knives, to say nothing of dogs whose immediate ancestors roamed the forests and held their own with wolves. I must bide my time; I must wait till night, when Eunostos could creep out of the forest, some three miles away, and join me outside this very house. Meanwhile, however, I must beguile and ingratiate—and incapacitate the farmer and whatever family and animals he might possess.

He looked at me and dropped his ax. Evidently I had filled his eye, and his nostrils too, for he sniffed greedily at the myrrh in which I had bathed my face and breasts. He also looked at me with suspicion: what was this ample, not young but decidedly not superannuated woman doing in a bell-shaped skirt embroidered with conch shells and starfish and, boldness of boldness, in an open bodice which revealed, nay, accentuated and framed her two glories, her glowing pomegranates, her full moons, their nipples painted a titillating crimson to match her lips? Furthermore, I had ripped the gown in order to suggest an escape from bandits who had attempted my honor, and I had ripped in provocative places—a lure of thigh, a tantalization of leg. My hair, though brown with umber, scintillated with mica dust; my ears were concealed—at least their pointed tips—but the lobes were graced by big silver earrings, a loan from Amber, shaped like beehives and tinkling when I walked as if their inhabitants were about to take flight. I had touched enough kohl to my eyes and carmine to my cheeks to make me look not quite a courtesan, but at least a woman of experience, not a great lady but definitely not a peasant—perhaps a merchant’s wife whose husband was often at sea; in short, a woman with a roving eye and the wherewithal to rove.

The farmer grinned and gaped. He was sleek and just short of being plump, since the Cretan countryside was luxuriant enough to support its farmers without wearing them to the bone. He wore an unembroidered loincloth which reached almost to his knees and over which his bare stomach had started to bulge. Give him a year, perhaps two, and he would become fat. As I approached his house I affected a limp and slyly observed him slyly observing the undulation of my bosom. He sucked in his stomach. Thus diminished, he was not unattractive and I vowed that if necessary I would sacrifice my rarest possession to secure the oxcart.

“Achaean raiders,” I said in a throaty whisper. “I was going to visit my cousin in Gournia. Carriage stolen. Slaves killed. Wandering since dawn.” I swayed toward him and he extended a steadying hand which lit on my shoulder but gradually crept toward my twin glories.

“Where?” The tone was peremptory; the speaker, his wife. She had not so much emerged from the house as flurried; a little, swallowlike woman with a blackbird’s voice. The steadying hand was arrested in its descent.

“Where did they attack you?” I paused to fathom her curious accent. The “you” resembled an “e.” (Cretan peasants take enormous liberties with pronouns, but I will regularize them for the sake of my scroll.)

“Three or four miles from here. Over that hill—” I swept expansively with my hand to include the whole horizon and at least a dozen hills. I could not be specific since all I knew of the terrain was the general direction of Knossos. “But they’ve gone back toward the coast to their ships. No danger to you.”

Apparently he was having similar troubles understanding me. Beasts and Cretans share the same tongue but not the same inflections. There is a certain huskiness in the voice of a Beast, whether Dryad or Minotaur, a lilt in the voice of a Cretan.

“Needs some beer, Chloe,” said the husband at last, frowning at his wife and guiding me through the door. She returned his frown—for even peasant women stand up to their men on Crete—and followed us into the house.

The house was a single room, a hearth in the middle of the floor with an unlit fire whose smoke would have to escape from the one window, a pallet of straw, a low table without chairs, and an outsized and surprisingly clean pig. No, not surprising, since pigs like cleanliness; if they dwell in filth it is the fault of their masters. There was also a wooden cupboard from which the wife reluctantly drew a sheepskin of beer. I will have to say that in spite of the sparseness of furnishing, there was not a mote of dust, not a smudge of smoke. What is more, the cupboard was painted like a rainbow shell and graced with a single plain but exquisitely wrought cup of Kamares ware. But this was Crete, where even the peasants have a passion for cleanliness and an eye for color.

“I can’t pay you,” I said. “They took everything.” Chloe’s frown intensified to a scowl. If she had the delicate frame of a bird, she also had the beady, incriminating eyes and, one guessed, the claws. She stared at my large leather pouch, which looked heavy enough to contain gold and jewels.

“Except my earrings,” I added. “It nearly cost me my honor protecting them.” I cast a quick, knowing look at the farmer, as if to say: Not that my honor is unassailable. That was my problem: to allure him and lull her. “They’re real silver. Very old. Egyptian. I was born in Egypt, you see.” Since I did not speak like a Knossian, I had to account for what must seem to them a foreign accent. I unfastened the earrings and presented them to the woman.

“Fetch her some cheese, Tychon,” she piped in a much kindlier voice, a blackbird turned swallow. “Who’re we not to show hospitality to the poor dear?” She was already inserting the bars of the earrings into her own pierced ears. They were so large in proportion to so small a woman that they brushed her shoulders, but she peered at her reflection in the side of a bronze kettle and seemed to find them becoming, for she gave her hair a quick sweep and looked at her husband with the expectation of a compliment.

“Charming,” I said, trying to direct his attention from me to her. “Aren’t they?”

“Yus.” He was still looking at me, as if he wished to return the earrings to their original ears.

“He don’t talk much,” she said. “Do you think, ma’am, that—?” She pointed to her gray, shapeless gown of lamb’s wool, more exactly to the part which concealed her breasts and, indeed, raised the question if she had any breasts to conceal.

“I think,” I said, “that you could billow the sleeves a bit and cut away the front down to here—”

Her husband’s pronouncement was terse but final. “Nope.”

The swallow reverted to blackbird. “Ain’t as if I were flat.”

“Git supper for the lady.”

Petulantly she began her preparations, but her petulance was directed at her husband, not at me. Now I was receiving covert looks from her as well as him. His said: “Style’s fine for you, not her.” Hers said: “Men got no taste for the new styles.”

Supper, if not sumptuous, was clean and nourishing. Wheaten bread without worms or mold, fresh goat’s cheese, peppercorns, and carobs from a tree in the yard. As I ate, I saw that both of my hosts, as well as the pig, were staring at me with unabashed fascination. My beauty, it would seem, appealed to the farmer, my gift to his wife, and my scent of myrrh to the pig. But all three stares asked the same question: What did I want besides a meal and a temporary place to rest? Was Tychon going to be asked to drive me into town in his oxcart? Was Chloe going to be asked to put me up until I could send for friends to fetch me home? Was Bottom going to eat less heartily with an additional mouth to feed?

“If I could just stay the night with you… I don’t even need a pallet; I’ll be on my way tomorrow.”

“Walkin’?”

“I like to walk.”

“All the way to Knossos?”

“I’ll rise early and no doubt meet a farmer bound for market.”

“I could drive you.”

I forestalled a screech from Chloe. “I wouldn’t think of it. You have your duties here on the farm. Besides, your wife is far too lovely to be left alone when there’s even the slightest risk of Achaean raiders.” (Not for nothing had I been captive to a deceitful Bee queen.) “They would steal her away to the mainland with them.”

“Pass the beer to the lady, Tychon. And give a swig to Bottom.”

I put my lips to the mouth of the skin (actually a leg, which served as the spout) and smacked with excessive pleasure. The beer was at least palatable. I had tasted worse at Moschus’s table.

“An excellent beer,” I exclaimed while Tychon dangled the leg above the snout of his pig.

“Made it hisself,” the woman volunteered, fondling her new earrings and giving him a final chance, half plea, half command, to compliment them.

“Nice.”

Her hand moved questioningly toward her breasts. “Nope. Some things is best left indoors.” It was his longest communication.

The moment seemed propitious for my next move. Thievery, I was learning, could be fun. No wonder the Bee queens cultivated the art.

“And there’s something else I managed to save,” I said, reaching into my pouch, which was made of the sturdiest leather; though perforated with tiny holes, and drew out two—Striges! Yes, I had borrowed them from Amber, she who had been apprehended in the theft of sandals and chastised by Chiron. Now she was eager to appease him, and of course she knew that he and I were old and devoted friends.

“By the navel of Mother Earth,” swore Chloe. “What be they?”

“Pets.” I said. “Gentle, docile, and very affectionate. Let me show you.”

They exchanged glances as if to say, “We’ll be on our guard, but what’s the harm?” and reluctantly permitted me to coil a Strige around each of their necks.