Thomas Swann - The forest of forever

“I had to grow up fast,” he admitted.

“But not too fast to have a little fun, I hope. You have a long time in which to be old. I’ll bet you haven’t been wenching since-”

“Not since I fell in love with Kora,” he admitted. “But don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten how. It’s like learning to count on an abacus. You never forget.”

He held out his hand and a butterfly, the large yellow kind with black markings on his wings, settled as if he had found a flower.

“Here,” he said. “Here’s a sunbeam for you. But don’t brush the dust off his wings.” He gave a tilt with his hand and the butterfly flew to me.

“You ought to save him for Kora.”

His green eyes grew wide with mischief. “She doesn’t need a thing.”

“No?”

“She’s going to have a baby!”

“A baby? But Eunostos, how wonderful!” Kora had already told me, but I let Eunostos think that he was breaking the news.

“I wasn’t supposed to tell. It sort of slipped out.”

“I’m glad it did. You know, I’ve had a bit of practice at midwifery. I delivered several of my own children without any help from anyone. I wouldn’t trust Myrrha, bless her heart, to deliver a blue monkey. She would talk it back into its mother’s womb. Is Aeacus pleased?”

Eunostos looked puzzled. “I really don’t know. He loves children, but he hasn’t had much to say about this one. In fact he’s taken to going off in the forest by himself. I saw him one day at the edge of the clearing where he had his battle with the Achaeans. Just standing there and looking into space.”

“I imagine he’s thinking about the complications.”

“But I thought Dryads had easy childbirths. My mother said I came in the time it takes a deer to wade across a small stream. The next day she was up and baking a woodpecker pie.”

“I was thinking of political considerations. You know, Aeacus’s brother hasn’t any wife or children. That means that this baby of Kora’s will be first in line for the throne of Knossos.”

“Knossos will have to find another king,” said Eunostos indignantly. “This baby’s going to stay with Kora, and you know Kora can’t leave the forest. She would die away from her tree.”

“That’s what I mean. Complications.”

If Kora foresaw difficulties, she never admitted to them, though she spoke often of the child. On one particular day in early fall, when the vineyards were swollen with grapes and the Centaurs were setting their wicker vats on stools to prepare for the vintage, she sat at her loom and Eunostos held her yarn. Aeacus had gone to visit Chiron, with whom he had struck up a friendship, and left Eunostos to keep his wife company. But she was not spinning, she was talking. She always found more to say to Eunostos than to Aeacus. Since her marriage, she had grown surprisingly fond of small talk, all the little happenings in the forest which Eunostos and I saw or heard about from our friends. How the Bee Queen Amber had been sharply chastised by Chiron when she was apprehended in stolen sandals. How two more Bears of Artemis had joined Phlebas’s herd and stealthily gathered weed in the forest by the light of the moon. Kora reserved her divinity for Aeacus. With Eunostos and me, she could show herself to be, as he had described her, familiar and pleasantly mundane like a hand loom. It was no wonder that she had trouble talking to Aeacus. After marriage, it is hard to be and at the same time talk with a dream.

She and Eunostos were discussing her child. “If it’s a girl, I’m going to name her Thea for my great-grandmother. If it’s a boy, his father will call him Icarus. It’s a good family name among the Cretans.” She had trained her hair to dip in curls over her forehead, the Cretan style, and covered her pointed ears.

“Why not have twins? Then you can use both names.”

Kora laughed heartily. She often laughed with Eunostos. “One at a time, please. Can you see four of us in this tiny room? With just me here, Aeacus has to get off by himself sometimes.”

“You could marry your mother to one of her suitors and get an extra room. By the way, I miss your ears.”

“Aeacus says I’m more mysterious when I hide them. It leaves something to guess at. As for marrying mother, I’m afraid there’s not much hope unless I can find a deaf Centaur.”

“If you have two babies,” said Eunostos, and Dryads often bore twins, “you could always give one to me.”

“A bachelor with a baby? Eunostos, you wouldn’t know what to feed him.”

“I’d leave him with you till he was weaned. Then I’d feed him-well, the same as I eat. Fried sparrows. Woodpecker eggs. Weasel stew.”

“He’d get a stomach ache and keep you awake all night with his crying.”

“Then you tell me what to feed him. I’ll make a list on a palm leaf.”

“Eunostos, I believe you’re serious.”

“I am,” he said shyly.

“You can be my baby’s Zeus-father. How would you like that? You can help me look after him when”-and her voice quavered a little-“when Aeacus goes on his explorations.”

After that, Eunostos told everybody that he was going to become a Zeus-father. He built another room onto his house (“for my Zeus-baby”) and began to make toys instead of furniture in his workshop. Aeacus showed him how to make a toy glider out of willow rods, and Bion brought him some clay to model animals-bear and wolf and ibex-and with the help of Kora’s loom he stitched a little pointed cap with a woodpecker’s feather which he said should fit a girl as well as a boy. He much preferred a boy, since girls were too breakable, but wanted to be prepared for a disappointment.

Aeacus, on the other hand, was very quiet about his impending fatherhood. Everyone knew that he loved children, cubs, calves, anything small and helpless. In that respect he was like Eunostos. And no one doubted that he would like a child of his own-not even me, and I was never one to admire him. But somehow he seemed more troubled than expectant. I wondered if he really wanted his maiden, his goddess, to become a mother. Like her, he had loved an image, and now the image was about to change and grow maternal and divide the love she could give him. Also, when a man knows that he is free to leave a place and return to his own country he is often content to stay. But when he is bound by children as well as a wife, he may grow fretful and homesick. A Cretan prince reared in a palace was never intended to live in a forest with a green-haired family.

It was a girl. Her name was Thea, as Kora had promised. Myrrha was so distraught that I had no trouble replacing her as midwife.

“Fancy being a grandmother,” she kept sighing. “Do you think it will frighten off my suitors?” I insisted that she wait downstairs with Aeacus and Eunostos until I had bathed the child in myrrh-water and placed her in Kora’s arms. Such a grave little face, looking at the new world and already making judgments! Dear Zeus, I thought. Not another silent one! At least she looks healthy.

“Come on up,” I called down the ladder.

Eunostos and Aeacus clambered up the ladder, with Myrrha close behind them. At the last minute, Eunostos remembered that father and grandmother come before Zeus-father and waited his turn to greet the mother and child.

Kora smiled up happily from the couch as Aeacus scooped the girl in his arms. The delivery had been quick and almost painless for her.

“She has your mouth but my ears,” she said proudly.

Bewilderment, quickly replaced with a smile, flickered across Aeacus’s face, almost as if he had not expected a daughter with pointed ears and green hair. Almost as if he had fathered a kind of beautiful freak. Don’t misunderstand me. He loved his daughter from the moment of her birth-more than he ever loved Kora-but I think that she made him feel the permanence of his exile from Knossos. By choice he had wed a Beast and settled among her people. But had he the right to rear his daughter as a Beast, in a tree instead of a palace? No poppy-shaped skirts for her, nor strolls beside the Great Green Sea with a saffron parasol nor an afternoon at the bull ring. She was born a princess; she could have become a queen, since women have often held the throne at Knossos. But here she was among beings with tails or hooves or pointed ears, and branded as one of them by her own ears. You understand that this is only a conjecture. Aeacus never confided in me. But Cretans are easier to fathom than Egyptians. They are sometimes subtle but rarely inscrutable. They sometimes smile when they wish to cry or nod when they disagree, but I could read Aeacus like a half-opened scroll.