Thomas Swann - The forest of forever

“And you’ll marry me then and come to live in my stump?”

“Yes, Eunostos. You saved my life.”

I looked into her eyes but I did not see Eunostos. I saw her dream. I saw death.

Eunostos’s trunk resounded with preparations for the wedding. He had wanted to gather flowers and twine them above the door to his bamboo house, but no-Kora did not like them broken from their plants. The roses and columbine remained in his garden; the yellow gagea in his favorite meadow. But at least the Bears of Artemis had garlanded his windows with chains of black-eyed Susans and formed a big red heart of the berries above his door.

Eunostos himself, with help from me and the Centaurs, had prepared the feast. Tables groaned beneath baked dormice and roasted woodpeckers, honey cakes and loaves of wheaten bread sprinkled with sunflower seeds. And poor, fat Partridge had fermented a beverage of onion grass which Eunostos had accepted graciously but carefully segregated from the skins of wine and beer. The air was sweet not only with the delicacies of the table, but with fragrances from the underground workshop of the Telchins: a hint of myrrh, and intimation of sandarac, an essence of lavender, marjoram, and thyme.

Eunostos waited: it was not yet time for his friends to arrive, for friends and groom to fetch the bride from her tree, for Chiron to officiate over the ceremonies, for the wedding to be consummated in the bamboo house while we, the guests, roistered in the garden and shouted bawdy jests through the window.

Eunostos waited and, since most bridegrooms are as nervous as a Dryad at the sight of an ax, I waited with him.

“Eunostos,” I said, noticing the twitch in his tail, “it’s not as if you lacked experience. A Bee queen and all those Dryads-you haven’t a thing to fear.”

“But Kora is so-ethereal,” he said.

I was getting a little tired of Kora’s ethereality. “Treat her like any other woman. It’s just what she needs.”

“Eunostos, Zoe, did you hear the news?” It was Partridge, puffing more than usual.

“How do we know if we’ve heard it unless you tell us?”

“A Man, a Cretan. Right here in the country. Wandered in between the cliffs. Wounded, too!”

“He’s broken the covenant,” I said. “Chiron will be furious.”

“He’s probably in a daze,” Eunostos said, doubtless remembering his own recent wounds. “Zoe, will you stay here to greet my guests? I’m going to help him.”

“On your wedding day?”

“What if you hadn’t helped me when the Panisci beat me up?”

“Oh, very well,” I grumbled. I am not as heartless as I sound. I remembered Kora’s dream.

Aeacus, brother of Minos, king of Crete, sighed in the palace courtyard and dipped his hand in a pool of silver fish. Palm trees leaned above him, drooping their fronds like great green birds with many wings. Saffron crocuses rippled a golden fleece. Egyptians live in the past: they look at the Pyramids and yearn for departed majesties. Achaeans live in the future: they look at their bronze-heeled chariots and yearn for tomorrow’s battle. But Cretans live in the moment, poised like a blue lotus on the stilled waters of time, perfectly content, untroubled by memory or anticipation; a joyous people. And Aeacus till now had been the happiest as well as the handsomest of princes, with all the prerogatives and none of the burdens of royalty.

But Aeacus sighed, and a lady of the court, Metope, looked at him in astonishment. She was abloom in a flaring skirt and brandished her bare breasts like melons ripe to be plucked.

“Aeacus,” she said. “Tonight the ladies of the court will dance the Dance of the Cranes beside the River Kairatos. And afterwards they will choose their lovers from the men who have come to watch them. Do you want to come?”

“No.”

“No!” she repeated, incredulous. “You no longer find me pleasurable?”

“At the moment nothing pleases me.”

“Cruel Aeacus! You speak like a Hittite instead of a Cretan. Have I developed a wrinkle since I last looked in my mirror?”

He peered into her face and detected a faint little network of lines beneath her eyes. But this time he remembered to speak like a Cretan instead of a Hittite.

“No, dear Metope, there are no new wrinkles. Nor old ones. The fault lies with me, not you. Your face is as smooth and pink as the inside of a conch shell, and much more soft. Lately I’ve been-somewhere else.”

“Where, Aeacus? Where would you rather be than Knossos? Thebes, Memphis, Babylon…?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come to the dance then. It will bring you back to us. It will make you laugh again.”

“Very well, I will come.”

He was not affronted by her invitation. In Knossos, the women were as bold and amorous as the men. Besides, he had already lain with her in a meadow of asphodels and on a stone couch mountained with pillows and called her, in flattering light and under the influence of wine, a mortal incarnation of the Great Mother.

He shook himself free of his sighs and laughed. “Yes, I will come.

She looked at him with a frank, level gaze of a race whose women hold equal footing with men. “Laughter becomes you. It shows your teeth, which are white like the shells on the beach. You make me think of abundance, of pomegranates in a luxuriant field. We’re small, we Cretans. Yet there’s still a richness about you. It’s more than your bronze chest and roseate cheeks. More than your lyre-sweet laughter. More than your supple hands, so full of gifts for the children of the court. You yourself are a gift, the rarest of all. Did you know that you are loved above your brother?”

“That is very wrong,” he said. “My brother is king.” He felt the affront to his brother’s dignity. Still, he had to admit that it was good to be loved. He, who loved purple of murex, blue-gray of dolphin, laughter of harvesters returning from the barley field. He who was only angry at ugliness or when the Achaeans raided the Cretan coast. Yes, he loved to be loved. He basked in love like a cat in a palace lightwell.

“Your brother is king, but there is something almost Egyptian about him. He thinks too much.”

“And I?”

“You feel. That is what it means to be Cretan.”

He lifted one of the curls from her forehead and kissed her lightly on her white skin, which curls and cosmetics and parasols protected from the hot Cretan sun.

“I will watch the Dance of the Cranes,” he said, and he followed her with his eyes as she moved, prettily but absurdly like a great crimson flower, through a doorway flanked by stone bulls and into the palace. Then he forgot her.

He sighed and fled from the court, down gypsum stairs, across a second courtyard paved with cobblestones and worn by dancing feet, along the triumphal approach to the palace, and between trellises of grapes and on…and yet on… Behind him, the track of a goat through silver-leafed olive trees. He could not have told where he ran or why, till he stood in a tamarisk grove and leaned on a tree to stifle a sob-and to listen.

The tree was speaking to him. It was not that she spoke in words, she spoke to his heart. She welcomed him. But then, it was widely known that the Mother loved trees and bushes and flowers as animals and endowed the lowliest plant with indwelling spirit, perhaps invisible, perhaps as tangible as Metope in her poppy-shaped skirt. Aeacus knew, of course, about those very tangible spirits known as Dryads, but he also knew that they dwelt in the Country of the Beasts, and no Cretan invaded those forbidden fastnesses of Minotaurs and Centaurs and other horrendous beings sometimes spied by those who ventured to the edge of the forest (for that is the view which the Cretans hold of us).