“Dear girl, he said. “I see you’ve come bearing gifts. Acorns is it, and what’s this, a baked partridge? How quaint. Are they for me? My name is Sunlord.” There was almost a feminine coquetry in his tone.
Clad in a loincloth brief enough to embarrass even a Cretan, he was smooth and brown and soft, with gauzy wings banded in black and gold. His slanted eyes were as gold as the bands on his wings, and I recalled that the Thriae had originally come from the land of the slant-eyed Yellow Men. They had been expelled by the natives for thievery and kidnapping, but not, it would seem, until there had been some mingling of races. There was no question that he was handsome, but so are banded serpents and the tigers which the roving Centaurs have fought in the jungles of the remote East.
“They’re for your queen,” I said with some asperity. “I’ve come to welcome her to the Country of the Beasts. Will you show me to her?”
Languidly he lifted a hand bejeweled with opals and malachites and pointed over his shoulder. I noticed that he wore anklets of golden bells, which tinkled when he uncrossed his ankles.
“Straight ahead. You can’t miss her. She’s the one with the bosom.”
Apparently enervated by our conversation, he settled back against the tree and pretended to close his eyes. Still, I saw that he was carefully watching me.
A pretty fellow, I thought, but in spite of his naughty looks as sexless as a tadpole. Kora would come to no harm from the likes of him; and the other drones who lounged among the trees or nestled in the grass looked no less depraved but no more energetic. A Babylonian king who wished to people his court with eunuchs would find them ready-made in these soft males. I understood why the queen in her nuptial flight must be accompanied by a number of drones; in all of that number, she was lucky to find a single male to pleasure, much less fecundate, her.
And then I saw the hive. Built in the shape of a hexagon, it was too large for a house, too small for a palace, and seemingly too vulnerable for a fort. Its framework was of slender tree trunks. The workers had obviously uprooted the trees with utter ruthlessness and I was only relieved to find that they had utilized willows instead of oaks. Now they were facing the trunks with clay, and, where the clay had dried, glazing it with a material which resembled wax. Some of the workers were wheeling out of the sky with deep-bottomed bowls of clay from the banks of the Beaver Lake. Others were producing the wax. The production was not a pleasant process. Three workers were wading, waist deep, in a vat like an oversized wine press and, with the help of ladles, mixing a base of resin with an excretion from their own bodies, an odorless, colorless liquid which poured from their undersized breasts, or nipples I should say, since their breasts were no more than an intimation. (To a worshipper of the Great Mother like myself, it seemed unspeakable that a bosom should be perverted to such a use. Poor things, I suppose it was the only kind of maternity they knew, giving birth to building materials.) Once the resin and waxy excretion were properly mixed, other workers arrived to trowel it onto the hardening clay of the walls, where in turn it hardened into a glistening, yellowish glaze no less decorative than the thin sheets of alabaster with which the Cretans face their palaces. When the edifice was finished, it would dazzle the eye like a huge, many-faceted topaz.
Having first observed the workmanship, I now more closely observed the workers and confirmed my first impression that they were the least feminine females I had ever met. They were gray, hairy, and thick-bodied, with stubby wings which looked insufficient to lift them from the ground. The wings beat incessantly and thunderously, and the workers managed to fly out of sheer mindless exertion. All of them wore a single expression, or lack of expression, bordering on petulance (and none of them wore any clothes). Their queen was flitting among them and giving stern and precise orders in a voice of incongruous sweetness. “Apply wax here.” “Let the clay dry there.” “Who fetched this rotten timber? I told you precisely which trunks to cut.” She was as beautiful as a phoenix even when she frowned, and she did nothing but frown until she saw me.
Then she smiled and never once, during all the time that I talked to her, did she relax that fixed and perfect smile. Identified by her tunic of tiger-striped silk, she was small and delicate, with feet about the size of my big toe. Her wings were as tenuous and brilliant as a dew-touched spider web in a burst of sunlight. Her eyes, like those of the drones, were slanted so that they seemed somehow not to share in the smile even when her lips curved upwards and her small white teeth glittered with pearled perfection. But an alien goddess and not our own Great Mother had fashioned her. She lacked amplitude, and I do not mean of proportion. I mean of spirit. What was littleness in her body was pettiness in her soul.
“My dear neighbor,” she said, casually stroking what appeared to be a foxtail draped around her neck. “Your coming is as the new moon out of the frosty treetops. I wish that I had tiger lilies to strew at your feet. I wish that I had myrrh to bathe your ankles…”
I am a blunt woman myself and her niceties began to cloy. I shoved forward my basket. “I’m Zoe, the Dryad, and I’ve brought you some acorns and a partridge.”
“Acorns and a partridge,” she echoed, with seeming delight (and perhaps a tinge of mockery for the graceless rustic who brought such inelegant gifts?). “A rarity of rarities.” The foxtail twitched; it was obviously alive and did not belong to a fox.
I fought down the urge to throw the partridge in her face and break her porcelain composure. I must not jeopardize my mission with any outbursts of temper; I must imitate Kora.
“I have come to welcome you to the Country of the Beasts.”
“Your presence in itself is a welcome. Your gifts are beyond measure.” What would she have said if I had brought her diamonds or sapphires? “As you see, my humble dwelling is far from finished. Still, there is a room where we may visit and exchange those confidences which unite the ladies of all lands. Perhaps you will teach me the customs of your land so that I may comport myself with fitting decorum. In my own country, I was a queen. Here, I am a guest, and perhaps I may unintentionally give offense.”
The so-called humble dwelling was a labyrinth which would have put the famous architect Daedalus to shame. The wax-glazed walls glittered like many mirrors, and at every turn we confronted our own images: Saffron’s perpetual smile, my own stout, reddish features which looked unbelievably coarse beside such exquisiteness and which, try as I might, wore a look of stoic determination instead of pleased expectation. Corridors led into corridors, rooms into rooms. Candelabra, burning with myriad lily-shaped candles, hung from the ceilings and bathed us in a shifting gauze of light. In one room, honey bees were depositing nectar in silver bowls; in another, a worker with a ladle was mixing pollen and wine and stirring the mixture as vigorously as a female Centaur might sweep a floor. Finally we found ourselves in Saffron’s audience room, hexagonal like the hive and apparently situated at its exact center.
Leopard skins covered the floor to a thickness of several inches, and the black and golden spots, reflected endlessly in the polished walls, gave me the feeling of a jungle infested with beautiful, merciless animals. A wicker chair, supported by silken threads and backless to accommodate the wings of the queen, swayed from the ceiling. In the center of the room there was a stone pedestal curiously lacking a statue. Perhaps it was intended to hold an image, as yet uncarved or uncast, of a winged deity.