Thomas Swann - The forest of forever

Dryads lived in oak trees. And yet this tamarisk tree made a strange whispering, like a tongue guessed at but not quite understood, like a soft-voiced maiden from the Misty Isles, whispering at her loom; and somehow he felt companioned by her.

“Tree,” he whispered. “Have you something to say to me?”

The tree did not answer him, but he saw in the eyes of his mind an image of other trees, in other places, immemorial cedars on the slopes of great limestone mountains, fir trees, prickly but not wounding, and one tall oak which spread its limbs like enfolding wings.

“My brother.” It was Minos himself, the king. “I saw you start from the palace like a wounded gazelle and followed you here.” The king was a man of thirty with a youthful, unlined face but hair as white as the snow atop Mt. Ida; diminutive like all of his race but august from his plumed headdress to his feet shod in high boots of Egyptian antelope leather. Born as blithe as his people, he had tried to retain their lightness and their laughter. But even the king of a happy people has cares. He was ready to wrestle the bull or go to the theater where maidens danced with a python in their arms, but he must also wrestle at times with the problems of ruling a populous empire whose ships sailed as far as the Misty Isles to bring back tin and dye.

“What troubles my little brother?” he repeated, with the tenderness of an older brother who would always see the younger as little, though they were identical in height. There was also perplexity in his voice and a gentle reproach. “You come to the grove-alone. You speak to the trees, when you might better speak to your brother and king. Is it for love you pine? Never before has a maiden disdained the handsomest of men.”

“No, my brother. It is none of these things.”

“What then?”

What then? It was a question without an answer. “I don’t know,” he said sadly. “I felt a kind of want.”

“For every want there is an answer. The thirsty man drinks wine from the nearest cellar. The hungry man eats lobster from the Great Green Sea. The lovelorn man makes love to a woman old in experience but young in beauty.”

Aeacus forced a smile. “How could I thirst or hunger or yearn after love in many-pleasured Crete? I’m acting like a foolish schoolboy who has broken his tablets and forgotten his lessons. If I could only understand…”

The king appeared to muse. “Not so foolish, perhaps. Our ancestors were a restless people before they settled in Crete. Perhaps one is speaking through you. And I have the answer. Last night an Achaean warship raided the coast. Three farmhouses were burned. Our patrol craft rammed and sank her, but there’s still a raiding party afoot. They’ve gone inland. There’s no end to the mischief they can do.”

“I’ll go after them. I’ll pick some men from the palace guard and-”

“Only if you so will it. There is no need for a prince to endanger himself in pursuit of pirates unless he chooses. I have already chosen a party, and the head of the palace guard can lead them.”

“I will lead them.”

The king smiled. Through the intertwined limbs of the feathery tamarisk trees, a sunbeam smote his hair and kindled its white to silver. He was crowned more truly than with his royal headdress. “Very well, you shall lead them. Your skill with the bulls is legend. Your dagger flashes like a dragonfly. But take care. Remember that Cretan agility and daggers are more than a match for Achaean brawn and swords-but only if you take care. You must leave your sighs in the palace, or an ill-smelling braggart will put a sword through your heart before you remember to draw your dagger.”

“I’ve been poor company of late, haven’t I, my brother?”

“It is true that a sad Cretan is no asset to a happy court. If you stay in your present mind, you’ll have the ladies in tears, and their cheeks will be streaked with kohl. Go to the hills and find your lost laughter.”

The brothers embraced each other with more than ritual formality. Aeacus loved Minos above all other men. To other races, he knew-the solemn Egyptians, the vainglorious Babylonians-the Cretans seemed light and fickle, incapable of deep, enduring love, because their funerals resembled festivals and they rarely shed tears. To a Cretan, however, death was not oblivion but another country, where all that one loved, all those one loved, were restored and immortalized beneath the radiant smiles of the Great Mother and her Griffin Judge. Yes, the Cretans could love, and if they fell into love as easily as a child falls into a sand pit and climbed out with neither bruises nor scratches, it was not from fickleness, Aeacus would have argued, but abundance of affection. Aeacus himself loved thirty friends, uncountable women and even more children, his brother, himself, and most of all, the someone or something he had not yet found.

The chase led inland, upward, away from the salt-sweet wind of the sea and toward the mountains which ridged the island like an exposed backbone. Burning farmhouses…slaughtered sheep…a rooster crowing incessantly from the top of an olive tree… Thus the marauders had branded the earth in passing. Such raids were becoming more frequent now that the Cretan ships had so many colonies to visit, so little time to guard their own coastline with its innumerable indentations, its coves and projections and rocky headlands, its perfection of concealment. But the Achaeans were still regarded as a minor annoyance, the price of empire. If anyone anticipated a wholesale invasion by those blond, awkward, sword-wielding barbarians, he kept such foolish anticipations from the king. A minor annoyance except, Aeacus mused, to the fishermen or the country folk who lost their houses and often their lives and had not the consolation of a fixed, firm faith, but only a body of shapeless superstitions in which the Underworld loomed as a dark and sinister habitat of monsters and monstrous torments.

It was not often that Aeacus thought of fishermen and farmers. They existed; they provided the court with fish, meat, vegetables, fruit, olive oil, and wool; they performed the function designated for them in the scheme of the Great Mother. Did they love? Did they sorrow? He felt a twinge of guilt that he so rarely thought of them, then the guilt of feeling guilty when he was the king’s beloved brother embarked upon a gallant adventure, and then the happy abandonment of a race not given to introspection.

A small child came running to them across a field. Behind him, smoke billowed from a wattle hut, hens collided with pigs and sought refuge in a torn vineyard. The child, a lean little boy of perhaps five, was weeping with uncontrollable tears. Aeacus lifted him in his arms and felt the beating heart and waited patiently till the boy could speak.

“Mama and papa…”

“Dead, my child?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t cry, don’t cry.” Strange, the sight of tears. No one cried in the court. Or at least they hid their tears. “My men will give them a proper burial. They’ll be waiting for you in the Underworld. The Griffin Judge will appraise them kindly and watch over them and keep them safe.”

“Will he?” The child looked up at him with astonishment. He was ugly, almost monkeylike in his small brown leanness. In the court of Knossos, such ugliness might have repelled him. Not now. Not here. “I thought it was only the great lords like you he watched over.”

“It’s everyone.” He spoke with assurance, but until that moment had never considered if peasants, like kings and courtiers, went to the Underworld. Was there room for them? Did they continue to serve their earthly masters?

“And one of my men will stay with you till we come back, and then we will find a home for you closer to a town, where you will be safe.”