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.