The forest of forever

CHAPTER III

Kora awoke when the sun slanted across her face like the soft creepers of a morning glory vine. She touched her feet to the mossy floor, found her sandals, and lifted a green linen gown from a chest of cedarwood and a cloak which seemed to be woven from pink and white rose petals. She bathed her face from a bowl of rainwater trapped among the branches; she did not bother to look in her mirror, for she had slept peacefully, even if dreamfully, and knew that she had not mussed her hair enough to require a comb.

She walked onto the porch and looked around her at the garden of foliage which enfolded the room like the hand of a friendly Cyclops.

“Father tree,” she whispered. “I am going to buy Eunostos a gift.” She always spoke to the tree before she left on her day’s errands, and the tree shuddered with the pleasure of a stroked animal. She had his consent. He liked Eunostos. Reentering the room, she descended the staircase in the hollow trunk and paused at her mother’s couch to look down at the frail, sleeping figure who, having entertained a Centaur during the night, would doubtless sleep until noon. Poor mother. She bad no dream to accompany her; she had to rely on earthier companions.

She opened her arms to embrace the morning, her only lover, with its sunbeams and fragrances, its grass besprinkled with dew like mica. Her reverie was broken by a tapping above her head. Woodpeckers had started to peck at the limbs of her tree. She hurled an acorn at the rowdy birds. Other birds were welcome: swallows and nightingales. But the woodpeckers wounded her tree-father with their cruel beaks.

Eunostos’s proposal yesterday had deeply touched her. Not that she meant to accept; not that she wished to encourage him in his pursuit of her. At the same time, she did not wish to discourage him. She could hardly envision a better husband. Gentle yet strong; reasonably faithful; a poet to compensate for also being a carpenter. But did she want a Minotaur for a husband, she who had dreamed of cities and palaces and nimble young Cretans wrestling bulls?

Thus, she must find Eunostos a handsome but not too personal gift. The gift of a sister, not of a lover. What then? The Bears of Artemis were celebrated for their necklaces of black-eyed Susans and they picked raspberries for market, but the thought of Eunostos adorned with black-eyed Susans made her smile and he could surely pick his own berries. The Panisci, rascally youngsters, were totally unproductive. The Telchins hammered metal and set stones for men as well as women, but she could not imagine a ring on one of Eunostos’s big fingers. Had he wanted such a ring, or silver tips for his horns, which had been fashionable in his father’s day, Bion would long since have made them. The Centaurs then, the practical, agricultural Centaurs, who produced most of the food staples for the country-grain, olive oil, and milk-and all of the farm implements, like rakes and mattocks and bull-tongue ploughs. Since Eunostos had shown her his garden, she would buy him a mattock or hoe (somehow a bull-tongue plough seemed inappropriate for a Minotaur, as well as too large for so small a garden).

But remembering last night’s dream, she forgot Eunostos. Dream? No. She had seen too clearly, remembered too vividly. Every night now, it seemed, her soul went out from her body and returned with visions of terror and wonder. Wonderful indeed last night, and a little terrible. She had seen a young prince beside a pool of blue lotuses and silver fish. She had watched him speak to a girl with painted nipples-a brazen girl, to be sure-and then she had followed him as he fled from the palace and took refuge in a grove of tamarisk trees.

She had tried to call to him but she had not even known his name. Still, he had seemed to hear her. He had ardently embraced a tamarisk tree and her own body had throbbed with a sweet anguish for which she had no name.

“Kora!”

A Paniscus stood in her path. Phlebas. He was much the largest of the Panisci. He looked an old fifteen, his horns were long and crooked, and his haunches bristled with coarse red hairs.

“Where are you going?”

“To Centaur Town.” She spoke curtly because his question was curt, though she rather pitied his hoof-loose, aimless life.

“Why not come to my house?”

“I’m out to barter this linen cloak for a mattock.” Panisci neither bathed, nor trimmed their hair, nor washed their hooves. They looked as if they had wallowed in everything swept out of a house after a thorough housecleaning. She would have liked to give him a bath, but she knew that he would resist water as a fish resists the land. Poor little ragamuffin, she thought, ashamed of her original pique. With no adults to guide him, was it any wonder that he lived and looked as he did? It did not occur to her to be frightened of him. The Panisci had never bothered her in the past, except for Phlebas’s suggestive remark about a grape which shrivels into a raisin.

He snatched at the cloak but she whipped it out of his grasp. He grinned at her. “I could barter it too. Give it to me.”

She quickened her pace. She could easily defend herself against a single Paniscus. His horns were sharp, but in spite of her seeming fragility, she was agile enough to avoid them. Suppose, however, that he had brought his friends? He sauntered from the path but almost at once the bushes on either side of her began to crackle. A hoofbeat, the swish of a tail, a lewd snicker. She began to run. She had left the oaks of the Dryads, and among the cypresses, those funereal cones with their bronze-tinted leaves, there was no one to help her, not even a friendly Centaur.

She burst into a clearing. Thank Zeus she was out of the trees, usually her friends, but now a possible ambush. In the blaze of the morning sun, among the daisies and buttercups, what could harm her? Wolves skulked only in the dark and vampire bats moved like shadows among shadows. But regardless of sunlight and sunbright flowers, a band of Panisci-eight of them-emerged from the trees and, with smiling faces and slow, deliberate steps, surrounded her. Children, yes; but children in bands can be murderous. They joined hands and she found herself in a living prison.

“What do you want?” she cried, trying to keep the quaver out of her voice.

A snicker, a bleat; otherwise, silence. They began to circle her as if they were enacting some strange rite to the Lady Moon. Round and round they moved, swung, reeled, until she became quite dizzy from the sight of them.

“Is this what you want?” She flung the linen cloak to Phlebas.

“Yes,” he said, snatching it out of the air and draping it around his hairy shoulders to cavort over the grass like a tipsy maenad.

Perhaps, she thought, I can make a break through the hole he has left in the chain.

“And this?” She tossed him her ring, an intaglio chiseled by the Telchins.

“Yes!” There was no chance for a break. Now they all loosed their hands, but only to snatch at her, slap at her, prod her with hairy fingers.

“What else, you dirty little boys?”

Phlebas threw back his head and his laughter was like the bleating of a dozen goats. He did not laugh like a child.

The Panisci were much too lazy to build their own houses. They used the tunnels and warrens and other constructions deserted by the giant beavers which had once lived in the country but which had been the first casualties in the War with the Wolves. And being thieves, the Panisci hid the tunnel mouths with bushes and stones to confuse their pursuers.

Phlebas’s band occupied a lodge of mud and branches in the middle of a small lake originally dammed by the beavers. In the time of the beavers, the lodge had contained both a dry shelf and a covered pool, but the Panisci, disliking water, had filled the pool with mud and they reached the lodge by scrambling through a tunnel under the lake and then ascending sharply into a round, low room which appeared to be not so much decorated as littered. The original inhabitants, a blunt though circumspect race, would have been horrified to see the heaps of decaying leaves which took the place of beds, the moth-eaten wolfskin laid on a slab of wood which might, with a wrench of the imagination, be called a table, the crude earthen pots, half of them overturned in puddles of juice, the other half reeking with rancid milk or olive oil. The only attractive objects appeared to have been stolen. A gown which had come from the loom of a Dryad. A pruning fork which Chiron had missed last week from his vineyard. Gems from the workshop of a Telchin. And there-What was that shimmering tunic of unknown material which someone had carefully smoothed and hung on the wall? It was certainly not wool or linen.

As for the inhabitants, there must have been a dozen Panisci, no, thirteen, and there were four Bears of Artemis-shameful little hussies-who were keeping company with the Goat Boys. Since both Boys and Girls attained a physical development of from twelve to fifteen and since puberty comes to the Beasts at eleven or twelve, they sometimes formed unions which were rarely lasting-in fact, the Boys often shared a Girl in common-but which might produce offspring. Two of the four Girls were absentmindedly cradling infants: a cub and a kid.

The Girls were outcasts from their own race. They lacked the fastidious charm of their more civilized sisters who lived in hollow logs and wove berry chains to make a decent living. Their paws were red and coarse, their fur was long and unkempt. The necklaces they wore were not of black-eyed Susans but strand upon garish strand of metal and other bright oddments stolen or dug from the earth or found in stream beds. They were a brazen lot, these Girls. They looked at Kora as if she had come to steal their men and it shocked her to see such knowing stares on such young faces. It was even rumored that they chewed the leaves of the hemp plants, which the Centaurs had imported from their travels in the East, and enjoyed exotic visions or fell into a drugged stupor. Indeed, one of the Girls was huddled in the corner, oblivious to her comrades and looking as if she were watching a private vision. Someone spoke to her but she neither moved nor changed her expression.

“Eirene’s out of it,” another Girl said.

“Well, she’ll miss her supper.”

“Do you think she cares? I’ve a mind to join her.”

“The weed can wait. After the fun.”

Kora, it seemed, was the fun. Phlebas flung her into their midst as a hunter might have flung a haunch of venison to his hungry comrades. The thought occurred to her that she might be intended for dinner. She knew that they preferred vegetables-grass, roots, the lower branches of trees, preferably vegetables stolen from the Centaur gardens-but that they ate almost anything, including leather sandals. Well, she thought, with that wry, self-depreciating humor which sometimes salted her dreams. Half of them will go hungry. There isn’t enough of me for thirteen portions.

But they did not have her in mind for dinner. Not yet, at least. Having little to occupy them and being children or at least childish, they were curious creatures, and a Dryad in their lodge was an object of intense curiosity. They ogled her and poked her-she slapped their hands. They pinched her and prodded her-she kicked one of them in the shin and sent him limping across the room.

“Let’s dunk her in the lake.”

“Let’s yank out that pretty hair by the roots.”

“Let’s cut her up and see how she tastes.” (Now it was coming.)

The imagination of children is unlimited. She shuddered; the taste of fear was nightshade in her mouth. But her dignity did not forsake her. She drew herself to her full height of five feet so that she might tower above them in what she hoped was an awesome manner; she smoothed the linen gown which they had rumpled; she wriggled her foot and straightened her sandal.

“You are horrid children, all of you,” she said. “And if you don’t let me go, Eunostos and the Centaurs will drag this pitiful lodge right under the water. They can swim, you know, even if you can’t.”

“And drag you under with it? Besides, they don’t even know you’re here,” said Phlebas.

The group reacted as if he had told a hilarious joke: the Boys stamped their hooves and the Girls clapped their paws. “They don’t even know you’re here!”

With that, they snatched the gown from her back so unexpectedly that she understood their success as thieves. And they vied with each other insulting the modest dimensions of her breasts. (Zoe should be in my place, she thought.)

Shivering in that ill-lit, ill-heated place, for there was no window to let in the sun-merely the fitful flickering of a fire on the clay floor and some beeswax candle stubs-she almost lost her courage. She sat on the floor by the fire and the thought of Eunostos (he would track her abductors) prevented her from breaking into tears or huddling like a frostnipped swallow to warm herself and hide her breasts.

A Paniscus kid, whose mother, she supposed, had forgotten him in the midst of merriment, crawled into Kora’s lap. She started to remove him and his stench of onion grass and sour milk. But he smiled up at her with a winsome innocence, his little horns peeping through his hair like toadstools. She took heart at the sight of this brave, pathetic child, whose mother appeared so indifferent to him.

What a dear little kid, she thought, to live in such surroundings. He raised his hand to the Centaur pendant which her captors had neglected to remove along with her gown.

“Do you think it’s pretty?” she cooed. “You may play with it if you like.”

Hardly had she finished her invitation than he bit her finger, snatched the pendant from its chain, and, scuttled to his mother with the booty.

“That’s a good child,” cooed the mother, in imitation of Kora.

Now Kora did begin to cry, though the wound to her pride was far greater than the pain from the bite. Green blood oozed from her bitten finger.

“What are you, some kind of vegetable?” Phlebas asked. “Look at that, boys, we have a lettuce among us.”

“Did you think that everybody’s blood was red?” she snapped. She was so angry now that she forgot to cry. “We live in trees and eat acorns. Why shouldn’t our blood be green?”

“Suit yourself,” said Phlebas. “But we’ll stick to red. Won’t we, boys?”

The Boys assented with a simultaneous bleat. The Girls, who had not been asked and whose blood was closer to brown than to red, remained silent.

Fortunately for Kora, the Panisci were soon distracted and they quite forgot the novelty of green blood and indeed of Kora. They returned to their usual pursuits-that is, horseplay and idleness. One of the Girls had donned Kora’s robe and, while it was so large for her that it dragged the ground, at least it concealed her hairy flanks. She began to dance and stumble about the room, improvising a song-to Kora it was more like a howl-while Panisci stamped on the earth and set up a savage drumbeat, and Phlebas took a tortoiseshell lyre from a wall peg and accompanied the song with a monotonous plucking which sounded like nothing so much as a series of bat squeaks. But the sound suited the words: “Bats and rats and spiders too, Out of the earth we conjure you: Wax the wings of the honey bee, Drag the Dryad down from her tree!”

The weed-drugged Girl in the corner had roused herself sufficiently to struggle to her feet, and she was standing in one spot and swaying to the music as if it had merged with her vision. But not everyone was singing and dancing. There was never unanimity among the Panisci and their women, whatever their pursuits. Some had started to eat, with much smacking of lips and sucking of fingers, and a total disregard for the musicians. They seemed to make no distinction between a raw, unwashed root and a chunk of rancid fish, a grub or a toadstool. One of them tossed a tidbit to Kora, which she caught, examined, and discarded in disgust. A large white slug, lethargic but still alive.

“Why waste food on her?” pouted the mother of the thieving child. Phlebas cuffed her across the mouth. “Where’s your mind, up in the trees? You know we can’t afford to lose her. Remember the bargain.” Two Panisci held her arms while a third, retrieving the slug, forced it into her mouth.

“Eunostos will find me,” she gagged as the tail of the creature slithered down her throat.

“He’s too big for the tunnel. He might wriggle in like a snake, but we would brain him before he got very far. As for the Centaurs, they couldn’t get low enough to wriggle. And if they try to swim, we’ll stand on the roof and hit them in the water with our slingshots.”

“What do you mean to do with me?” Kora, at the very mention of Eunostos’s name, had recovered her outward poise if not her inward composure, and she asked the question with quiet defiance.

“What do you think?” he leered, the dirty-minded little boy. The leer vanished when the Girl he had cuffed, apparently his woman, stamped on his hoof.

“Wait and see,” he sulked to Kora.

She did not have long to wait.

The singing died to a hum, lips ceased to smack, a bone clattered to the floor. The rancid air smelled now of honey and pollen. Someone was approaching the lodge through the tunnel.

A queen of the Thriae stepped into the room and brushed the dirt from her gossamer wings. With a curt dip of a wing, she acknowledged and dismissed the entire gathering of Boys and Girls and walked immediately to Kora.

“My dear,” she asked, drawing the girl to her feet, “what have they done to you? They’ve stolen your gown and they are smudges of dirt all over your face! Never mind, you’re safe with me. My name is Saffron and we’re going home.”

“But how did you find me?” Kora sobbed. It was the same queen she had spied above Eunostos’s trunk.

“When one has wings, one sees everything.”

No one tried to stop her as she recovered her stolen robe and hastily slipped it over her shoulders, as she followed Saffron out of the ill-smelling chamber, and as she stepped into the welcome light of the declining sun. Behind her, most of the sounds did not resume. Someone sang a line of that revolting song, “Wax the wings of a honey bee,” but the singer was interrupted by what sounded like a slap across the mouth, and Kora hoped that Saffron had not understood the words. It was clear that most of those disreputable children, though they had flouted all the other decencies, were awed by authentic royalty.

In the light and air, she swayed like a wind-shaken sapling; she thought at first that she was going to fall. But Saffron steadied her with a small jeweled hand.

“Just a little longer, my dear, and you shall rest and bathe and eat and be your beautiful self again.” Saffron took her arm and guided her across the field.

“But my tree lies the other way.”

“You’re to be my guest.”

“I’m deeply grateful to you, but right now I ought to go home. My mother will be sick with worry, and so will Eunostos.”

“I shall send them word of your safety. Eunostos will no doubt come to fetch you.” At the edge of the woods three sullen workers, as stiff and colorless as clay idols, awaited the return of their queen. At Saffron’s command, they thundered into the air and converged on Kora with grasping hands.

“But I thought you rescued me!” she screamed as her feet left the ground.

“I bought you, my dear, and dearly. With a silken tunic and five silver anklets.” (As a matter of fact, they were tin.)