“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.)
CHAPTER IV
Eunostos, on his way to visit Kora, had joined me in my tree for a mug of beer.
“Zoe, why are you sad?” he asked. “And why are you looking at me as if I made you sadder?”
“Not sad,” I insisted. “Merely-thoughtful.”
“No, sad. Are you worrying about the Thriae?”
How could I tell him that the Thriae were not in my thoughts (though perhaps they should have been)? That I was sad because he was growing up and I, who had loved him in two ways, first as a little calf, then as a daydreaming youngster, might come to love him in another, more hurtful way? Jolly Zoe, my lovers say of me. She loves us and leaves us with never a sign of regret. I try to preserve my image. Who wants a moody mistress (and I have no wish to be a wife)? But I do have my moods.
How could I tell him, too, that I foresaw a great deal of pain for one so kind and vulnerable, even in the kindly Country of the Beasts (for so it still seemed), and it would break my heart to see him hurt by Kora?
“I was thinking about when I was your age,” I hedged. “I was as slim as a young sycamore and all the Centaurs, were in love with me. That was even before your father’s time.”
“The Centaurs still love you,” he said. “Old and young. You’re so maternal.”
I fought down the urge to spank him and smiled as if he had paid me a princely compliment. “Thank you, my dear. But the hooves beat less frequently at my door.”
“But you always tell me never to look back without a chuckle. Life’s a jester, not a headsman. Isn’t that what you say?
“You’re right,” I laughed. “I wouldn’t change my life for all the pearls in the Great Eastern Sea.”
“Neither would I,” he said. “Your life, I mean. Now take your house. At Myrrha’s house, I have to wipe my hooves on a mat before I go inside. But here everything is so-” He groped for a word. “Informal.”
Yes, that was a tactful word. He might have said chaotic. My one-room house, lodged in a tangle of branches and reached, not like Kora’s room by a ladder inside the trunk, but by an outside ladder of grapevines, had scarcely known a housecleaning. Half of its walls were windows, none of them with parchment, and I let the wind and the sun do most of my cleaning. My furnishings were few. A pile of wolfskins for a bed. A block of wood for a table. A round cupboard hewn from a stump and stocked with cheeses, loaves of bread, and a skin of beer. (You understand that when a Dryad uses wooden furniture, she makes sure that the wood has come from a tree which died from natural causes-lightning, drought, old age-and not from a live tree murdered by woodsmen.) A wardrobe consisting of a tunic and three ankle-length gowns, one of them in the Cretan style with open bodice to reveal my breasts (a gift from a Cretan lover). A single papyrus scroll, The Indiscretions of a Dryad, for light reading on the few evenings I spent without company (it is the only poem I understand, full of laughs and definitely not an epic-a gift from Eunostos). What more does a still-popular Dryad need to amuse herself and her men?
And there was always my tree for companionship, as shaggy and disheveled as an old dog, and just as beloved. We Dryads live with our trees and also we die with them, or die without them if for some reason we are separated for more than a few days. Should we die by accident while our tree still flourishes, then a blood relative takes our place, and many generations of Dryads have been known to inhabit the same durable oak. In my own case, the oak had belonged to my mother and grandmother before me and I reckoned its age to be a thousand or more, if indeed it was not as old as the pyramids.
“I have to go now,” he said in a voice which implied: “But I could be coaxed into staying a little longer.”
“Since when was Eunostos concerned with time?”
“It’s the Thriae,” he admitted.
“You think they might be up to some mischief?”
“You said yourself they were thieves. I saw one yesterday and didn’t like the look of her. And Kora is so trusting.”
“You’re right, I did say they were thieves. But for all we know, they might have returned to the mainland.”
“I hope so. Still, I just better make a door for Kora’s house. A wolfskin isn’t going to keep out thieves.”
“That’s her mother’s concern. She can get a door from the Centaurs.”
“She’s a bit forgetful these days. Besides, she hasn’t as much to trade as she used to.”
“So you have to do her work.”
“I haven’t till now, unless she asked me. I’m not very dolent.”
“You mean you’re indolent?”
“That’s what I said.”
“But you’ve been busy with your poems.”
“A Minotaur with gainly hoof,” he began to recite. “I do think that one has possibilities. But”-and a wistful maturity shone in his young face-“poems don’t build doors. I’m not even a traveling singer who can hawk his poems for bread. From a practical point of view, I must get on with my carpentry.”
The Thriae had alarmed him more than I had anticipated. I almost wished that I had not told him about their inclinations.
“One more mug of beer and then you shall go.”