Thomas Swann - The forest of forever

At least she knew her science.

With her small but insistent hand, she pushed him onto his back. Dear Zeus, he thought. After my bout with the Panisci, am I equal to pleasuring a Bee queen? He took a deep breath and flexed his muscles. He lashed his tail-the part which was not under him-until it cracked like a whip. He felt a touch of soreness in his flanks but otherwise Zoe’s remedy and a restful sleep had worked a miracle. He ought to prove adequate, perhaps competent, possibly proficient. True, he had promised to wait for Kora at least a year. But it was for her sake that he was making his sacrifice. Surely she would understand, approve and appreciate.

Saffron sat beside him and, holding both of his horns, stared into his eyes. Then, with a hand no larger than a maple leaf, she rumpled his mane.

“Never trim it, my boy. It becomes you too well. And such large, lovely ears! They’re translucent in this light. Like mother-of-pearl.” For Kora’s sake no sacrifice was too great. If necessary, he decided, he could endure further sacrifices.

First she was lying beside him. Then she was in his arms. Then her little tongue was flickering over his lips and her hands were teasing the hair on his chest into curls. There was something, after all, to be said for a skinny woman.

She had invited; now it was time to accept the invitation. When a lady opens the door and offers the hospitality of a warm hearth, does a man stand shivering in the snow? He entered the house with alacrity and, being a gracious guest, not without gifts…

Smiling, she took the gifts and, still smiling, she bit his ear. He slapped a hand to the bite and felt the dampness of blood. A love nip, he supposed. But why had her teeth met with quite such determined force?

She kicked him. A love kick? Hardly. He must have angered her. Perhaps she felt that he had treated her frail little body like that of a buxom Dryad. Perhaps, accustomed to her drones and in spite of what she said about them, she had wanted mincing caresses instead of stalwart embraces. His experience with women did not extend to Bee queens.

“Saffron,” he started to apologize. “I’m used to the Dryads. If you’ll just tell me how-”

She spat in his face. She became a hybrid of hybrids-griffin, hydra, chimera-and her body entwined him like a python, her arms constricted like tentacles, her thighs resembled a snapping sea turtle. Together they tumbled off the couch and momentarily his big frame was airborne as Saffron fluttered her wings with a frenzy of passion or anger or whatever possessed her.

That’s it, he thought. She wants a nuptial flight! But I’m just not equipped to satisfy her.

That wasn’t it, either. With her fourth kick he lost his patience. Eunostos had known passionate women in the four years since he had come of age, but Saffron’s passion appeared to be born of fury instead of ardor: a venomous, vitriolic contempt for drones, Minotaurs, Men-males in general. He could not fathom her subtleties; he did not philosophize about the female who demands ascendancy, the goddess who requires the sacrifice of the god, the spider who devours her mate.

He simply fought her with his impaired but still prodigious strength. He was not a soft-bellied drone and he was not to be used or misused. She had bitten his ear; he bit her arm with teeth which a beaver might have envied. She kicked; he butted with horns whose heaviness gave them the force of small battering rams. She squeezed; he caught her neck between his hands and she fluttered like a chicken doomed to the pot.

In the end, the captive guest captured the house by storm.

Indignant but not in the least gutted, panting but not winded, a few scratches and bruises added to those sustained from the Panisci, he flung her onto the floor and sat on the couch to glower down at her frazzled body.

“And you call that lovemaking? What do you do when you hate a fellow?”

Her wings were frayed. Her tiger-striped tunic lay in shreds at her feet; the impeccable queen of the Thriae looked like a wench after a street brawl.

She stared at him with a stupefaction which rapidly became rage. “You weren’t fair. You resisted me!”

“What was I supposed to do? Lie down and be bitten into chunks?”

“I’m a queen, you lout. You were supposed to die in my arms. It’s expected.”

“I’m only a carpenter but I have my principles.”

With regal pride and obvious pain, she regained her footing and swayed toward the door.

Eunostos kept his seat and eyed her warily in case of further mischief. “And you’re going to set Kora and Zoe free?”

“Of course not,” she shrilled as she stepped out of the door and, nursing her wounded wings, fluttered toward the ground.

He stamped his hoof. Very well, then, he would have to rescue them.

“Partridge, Bion, we’re going to war!”

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.