The forest of forever

CHAPTER VII

Partridge and Bion, as usual, were within an easy bellow of their friend Eunostos. They were in fact at the foot of Zoe’s tree.

“We saw that Bee woman slither in the door,” admitted Partridge, “and she seemed to be up to mischief. But I didn’t want to interrupt till you called. You might have been trysting.”

“You know I’m promised to Kora,” snorted Eunostos.

“Well, you can’t wait forever,” said Partridge tolerantly, as he viewed the ravaged couch.

“As a matter of fact, we’re going to rescue Kora now.”

“Oh,” said Partridge, who looked as if he would rather be grazing among the buttercups. But the more martial Bion waved his feelers and bared a pair of small but incisive teeth. In the secrecy of Kora’s tree, hidden from Thriae scouts, if there were such, and treacherous Panisci, for there were certainly such, they formulated their plans. Eunostos was young but he was not so inexperienced as to think that he and his two friends (valiant though they were-well, Bion anyway) could charge the hive of a Bee queen and singlehandedly effect the rescue of Kora and me. He had read about such adventures: the stalwart Minotaur of Hoofbeats in Babylon had rescued a Babylonian princess from captivity among nefarious batmen by assaulting their cave at night and panicking them with his bellows. But that was an epic and Eunostos knew himself to be slightly too young for an epical hero, even though an epical heroine awaited his rescue.

He could even ask Chiron to attack the Thriae with a troop of Centaurs. Though the Centaurs could probably level the hive, in spite of the winged defenders with their bamboo spears, Kora and I might die in the carnage. Eunostos had witnessed Saffron at her most murderous and he no longer doubted that she would murder her hostages rather than allow them to be rescued. No, he must devise a stratagem. He must rely on subterfuge. He must somehow divert Saffron, the workers, and the drones so that he could enter the hive and rescue us, and only then unloose the Centaurs to launch an attack and forestall pursuit. Subversion must precede invasion.

“Hello up there!” came a cry from the foot of the tree. It was Moschus, the Centaur. “Has my girl forsaken me?”

Eunostos thrust his head out of the door and Moschus scowled.

“I guess she has. These days, the world belongs to the young.”

“You don’t understand,” Eunostos said, clambering down the ladder, followed by Bion, and then a fat, puffing Partridge. And he explained the plight of both Kora and Zoe. Moschus, whose breath as usual smelled of beer, cried for an immediate assault on the hive. He whinnied and reared back on his hind legs, but Eunostos emphasized the need for caution.

“If you could just bring some of your friends to the woods nearby…you understand, they mustn’t look warlike. They must look as if they’ve come to graze among the buttercups. And Partridge, why don’t you go with Moschus?” Partridge must be made to feel useful without endangering himself and everyone else with his military ineptitude.

Partridge beamed with pride; he had been designated as an important messenger but not required to fight. Moschus was less pleased at having to take orders from a stripling of fifteen, and being equated, as it were, with an overweight Goat Boy.

“Partridge,” he sulked, “must you eat onion grass?”

Together they departed among the oaks, the Centaur in the lead with the Goat Boy wheezing behind him.

“And Bion…” Bion’s task was all-important. Eunostos spoke slowly and with simple words to make sure he was understood. Bion dipped his antennae in response and scurried off to his friends and their workshop.

In less than an hour Eunostos had occupied a hollow tree with a peephole at the edge of the clearing where Saffron’s workers were completing her hive. He was sure that they had not observed his approach. The were much too preoccupied with their work, and Saffron’s insistence on a quick completion had apparently led them to neglect posting a scout in the air. Now, he must wait, must force himself to wait; a difficult task indeed for a young Minotaur whose lady is in the hands of an unprincipled Bee queen. He conjured her in his mind, an image of jade and alabaster mellowed by love. “My gallant Eunostos,” he heard her cry. “Only you can rescue me from my enemies. Restore me to my tree and its healing walls of bark. Receive your just reward!” And Zoe, his dear Aunt Zoe, who had been like a mother to him.

Antennae waved in front of his eye. Bion stood on four legs outside the tree, his other four legs, with their hooklike feet, clutching the trunk and raising his round head to the level of Eunostos’s peephole.

“Everything accomplished, Bion? And you brought some of your friends to help you?”

A flurry of feelers.

“Go to it, man!” He felt an onrush of love for this more-than-a-pet, this devoted companion. (Only for Kora and me would he risk the life of his friend.)

Bion emerged from the shrubbery and, at a leisurely pace for a Telchin, sidled among the workers as they mixed their wax and applied the finishing touches to the walls of their new hive. They were so intent on their work-for they had to work with haste, since the wax dried rapidly once it was dipped from the vat and applied to the walls-that they did not see him at first. Then one of them dropped her trowel and gave a buzz of pleasure, the first such emotion which Eunostos had ever seen in a worker. His assumption had been correct. The insect Beasts of the air would feel an immediate affinity, even if a certain condescension, for the insect Beasts of the earth. For one thing, they observed the same mating practices, the same nuptial flight of the queen and her potential lovers.

Bion approached the worker who had first spied him and, like a cat with an Egyptian, presented his back to be stroked. His body vibrated with feigned but convincing pleasure as her coarse fingers moved over his metallic skin and came to rest on his head.

“Girls,” she cried. “We’ve found a pet.” A log fell to the ground. Bodies no longer swished in the vat of wax. The ghost of a smile flickered into several of the faces, and the others lost their petulance.

“And I think he’s brought us a gift.”

Bion reached in the pouch which he wore around his neck and removed a bronze mirror in the shape of a swan. The worker accepted the mirror from his two forelegs and looked at the back, which was figured with winged dove goddesses who might almost have been Thriae, though all of them were beautiful enough to be queens. Obviously the poor worker was not familiar with the function of a mirror; she took it for a useless bauble, and beauty without practicality had, in the past, meant little to her. But turning the object in her hands, she saw the polished surface on the other side and caught her own reflection. Though she had looked at her sisters for years, she had clearly not imagined that she herself was quite so dour and sexless and altogether repugnant. She flung her hands to her face. One of her sisters retrieved the mirror, which had fallen to the ground, and discarded it with similar revulsion. It was not long before all twenty workers had seen themselves framed and branded as unbeautiful in this appalling gift.

At first it appeared that Bion would have to flee for his life. But Eunostos had anticipated just such a poisonous reaction and counseled Bion to arm himself with the antidote. The Telchin withdrew a vial of carmine from his pouch, flicked off the lid, dipped an antenna to the red cosmetic cream, and rubbed a generous portion onto the gray, leathery face of the worker nearest to him. She stood stonily while he made the application; she seemed to be deciding whether to hit him or give him a chance to redeem his first gift with a second and more appropriate one.

He held the much-discarded mirror to her face. She grimaced and started to knock it out of his feet. But wait-Who was this rosy-checked stranger grimacing back at her? She took the mirror between her trembling hands; she stared, she smiled the radiant smile of a woman whose ugliness, for the first time, has been ameliorated to mere plainness.

“Sisters,” she cried. “Look at me!” The sisters looked at her and liked what they saw. One of them snatched the vial from Bin’s willing legs and painted her own cheeks so generously that she resembled a Babylonian whore (much the most whorish, I am told by the Centaurs).

The vial was empty, eighteen workers remained unbeautiful. Bion pointed his feeler.

There, there, in the juniper trees, just beyond the clearing!

Work was forgotten; the workers in a body, running and skipping and flying, pursued the Telchin with raucous cries and, wonder of wonders, found him displaying not one but twenty vials of carmine, each with a mirror, as a shopkeeper displays his wares. But these wares appeared to be free.

The drones, meanwhile, had lolled on the edge of the clearing and feigned indifference to these foolish women and their ungainly pet, but now they stirred to life. They sighed and groaned to their feet; with studied indifference, they followed the tumult. Perhaps there was something for them. Sunlord paused to retrieve the original mirror and admire his reflection.

“What’s going on?” The cry was shrill and not in the least melodious. Saffron had emerged from the hive. “What’s happened to my workers?” She flew after them like a chicken hawk after chickens and landed among them like a particularly ravenous hawk.

Eunostos crept out of his trunk. There was no one between him and the hive.

Saffron, who had no need for carmine on her own honied skin, began to scatter the vials as if they had been clay images of forbidden gods.

“Idle adornments,” she shrilled. “I turn my back and you paint yourselves like wenches. Who’s going to finish the hive?”

She began to lay about her with her little fists. She kicked and cursed and stamped on vials of carmine. She bent a mirror against a trunk. Nor did she spare the drones.

“I don’t expect you to work, you good-for-nothings, but you don’t have to encourage the workers to your own idleness.” A knee in a soft midriff. A stinging blow across a plump cheek.

But what was this? The whirlwind ceased to whirl, the dust settled. The wounded could nurse their wounds; the winded could catch their breath.

There was more than carmine and mirrors, it seemed. How had she overlooked it in her descent? A chest brimming with necklaces and armbands, rings and seal-stones! (In truth, she had not overlooked it. Bion and several friends had hastily dragged it out of the bushes while she was ranting against her workers.) Suspicious, she thrust a hand into the seeming treasure. She lifted a necklace in five tiers of jade and rose quartz and tentatively placed it around her neck. Then the innate suspicion of her race and position and her own grasping self reared its Hydra head. Something for nothing? Impossible. What did this eight-legged fellow expect from her? Wax? Honey? Perhaps herself in some barbarous interracial marriage?

Eunostos had anticipated and prepared the Telchin for just such a question. Bion pointed to her anklet, a worthless piece of tin masquerading as silver. So that was it. He had come to trade. She pretended to consider and reconsider. She feigned reluctance as she bent to unclasp it. She fondled and caressed it, presented, withdrew, and finally relinquished it in exchange for a necklace which, in the slave markets of Thebes, would have fetched a dozen stalwart Nubians or twenty nubile maidens. Then she reached into the chest and seized a tiara encrusted with amethysts and chrysolites.

Eunostos streaked for the entrance to the hive.

The roof and walls were translucent; in the filtered light of the afternoon sun, he could see his way even in rooms where there were not any candelabra to guide him. His problem was where to be guided. He did not know which passage to follow, where to twist, turn, reverse or advance. He only knew that this labyrinth was a prison as well as a home, a workshop, a place of storage, and that one of its rooms was a cell with Kora and me as its inmates. He skulked by a room where a worker was mixing pollen with honey. He ducked out of a corridor to allow two workers, a patrol, he supposed, to pass without seeing him. It was not easy to hide his six-foot bulk in so unfamiliar a place, nor to keep from scraping his horns on ceilings accommodated to the four feet of the average Thria.

Then, the scent, faint but undeniable: the loved, remembered scent of green foliage and crisp brown bark which permeates our gowns, indeed our very skins. Remember, Eunostos’s mother had been a Dryad; he had loved that scent from his infancy.

He dared not call, he could only follow his nostrils, and fortunately they were keen. They began to quiver as he neared his destination. His tail lashed eagerly. He restrained a bellow. Then-his nostrils proclaimed, his heart affirmed-only a door stood between him and his beloved.

“Kora,” he whispered loudly. “Zoe!”

We heard him as if he were in the room with us. “Lower your voice, Eunostos, and raise the bolt. There are no guards in here.”

“There are out here!” It was not Eunostos’s voice; it was the rasping buzz of a worker guard.

A strugg1e, a flutter, a bellow, a flurry of cries I can only call cackles. The sound of a frenziedly resistant body being dragged down corridors. It must have taken at least six of them-all the guards in the house-to overpower him.

“Zoe, Kora, they’ve got me! They’ve trussed a net!”

The acorns had renewed my strength. At Eunostos’s call, I was the wolf whose cub has been caught in a hunter’s net. I was the whale whose calf is threatened by sharks. I was the Mother Earth bereft of her young. I raged, I thundered, I rammed against the door with my not inconsiderable might until it creaked and threatened to yield.

“Kora, help me!” But she was already at my side and her additional strength-I would never think her frail again-snapped the bolt, which was only wood, and swung open the door. There were no guards left to stop us. We followed the sounds of the scuffle and bounded out of the house.

An alarming sight awaited us. Saffron, adorned in the many-tiered necklace, bedecked in the amethyst and chrysolite tiara, was returning to the hive, and the painted workers were fluttering dutifully but dourly after her. She saw her guards; she saw Eunostos; she did not yet see Kora and me.

“Into the pot with him!” she shouted to the guards. But he was heavy and still struggling in spite of the net; they had to heave and toil for every inch they raised him. Creature of earth, he fought to retain the earth. Their wings were shredded, their faces by his hooves.

You might not expect agility from a woman of my dimensions. You would underestimate me. After all, I have been climbing trees, with or without ladders, for three hundred and sixty years, and amplitude is not to be confused with obesity. In the twinkling of a firefly, I snatched Saffron out of the air and flung her into the vat. Before she could extricate herself, I scrambled onto the rim, seized a ladle, and swatted her on the head. Then I forced her face under the liquid.

“Let Eunostos go — or I will drown your queen,” I shouted to the six guards.

The guards stared at me with disbelief. Saffron momentarily revived, sputtered to the surface, and disappeared again beneath my ladle.

They released Eunostos and let him fall the few feet they had managed to raise him from the ground. Flying in a circle around the vat, roseate still in carmine, they had ceased to look glum. They did not look fearful; in fact, they looked downright hopeful. After all, Saffron could not take away their mirrors as long as she remained in the vat.

By now Eunostos had struggled free of his net. He started to clamber up beside me. “Zoe, jump to the ground. I’ll take your place.”

“Get Kora to safety,” I cried. “They won’t hurt me while I have their queen. But I can’t stay here forever.”

“You won’t have to,” he shouted. “Moschus. Partridge. Bring on the Centaurs!”

I have never seen those horse-men, manes flying, hooves clattering in disciplined unison, gallop with more sublimity. Say what you will about their infidelities (and I am not one to say anything), they are matchless warriors. And Chiron himself had come to lead them. Chiron, the oldest Beast in the Country, five hundred years of wars and travels and wisdom and sheer, white-maned heroism. With Saffron to lead them, the workers might have attacked and resisted, flung their bamboo spears from the air or dived like eagles to claw at the Centaurs’ eyes. But Saffron was still in the wax, unconscious. I ladled her out of the vat and flung her onto the ground, and the leaderless workers remained unresisting (and perhaps secretly jubilant).

I jumped to the ground and saw that Eunostos, with Kora beside him, was conferring with Chiron. They talked briefly and then Chiron advanced to address the conquered Thriae. Always forgiving when it came to women and perhaps more forgiving now that the workers had painted themselves into at least a semblance of womanhood, he announced at some length, with the stylistic flourishes and dramatic pauses characteristic of his race and suitable to his station, that neither workers nor drones would be punished, since they had only followed the orders of their queen, but that they must leave the forest by the following day.

“But your queen must remain to be tried before a court of Beasts,” he concluded. “She is an evil woman who has almost caused three deaths. Moschus, bring her before me.”

“Can’t.”

“Moschus!”

“Not unless you want her like this.”

Moschus pointed; the rest of us looked. And there lay Saffron in a sheath of wax, which had hardened over her body like a shroud.

She was becomingly but unmistakably dead.

You may think me a hard, merciless woman, but she had threatened Kora and me and wanted to drown Eunostos in the vat of wax. I have never spared pity for the pitiless, especially when they die through their own misdeeds.

“I know just the place for her,” I said, lifting her now somewhat weightier bulk and reentering that hateful hive.

In a deserted hive, in the hexagonal central room, there is a pedestal which is no longer without its statue. Bear Girls and young Centaurs often visit the place out of curiosity. The golden skin of Saffron shines through the wax and you might mistake her for a figure carved from amber. She is much more beautiful than in life, even with her wildly tangled hair and her staring eyes. They call her the Golden Gorgon.

When I emerged from the hive, Eunostos was pleading with Kora. He had knelt to her, all six feet of matchless Minotaur, a glory of mane and horns, of youth and might and tenderness; and she, a white lotus bending to touch his head.

“And you’ll marry me then and come to live in my stump?”

“Yes, Eunostos. You saved my life.”

I looked into her eyes but I did not see Eunostos. I saw her dream. I saw death.