Thomas Swann - The forest of forever

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?