Thomas Swann - The forest of forever

“Is it better in your tree now that I don’t come? I mean-”

“You mean is Aeacus more content? I don’t know, Eunostos. I don’t think so. He doesn’t talk to me very often. He smiles and nods and rocks Thea in her cradle and then goes hunting or to call on Chiron. Are you-are you happy with your girls?”

“Oh, I make do,” he said, shuffling his hoof.

“Do you bring them here?”

“No.” The answer was abrupt and decisive. “I built this house for you.” He hesitated. “Do you still love him, Kora?”

“Yes. I want to be with him even when he’s silent and I can’t read his silence.” It was true, in a way, and something else was also true. It was not meant to be spoken, but her tongue, silent too many years, betrayed her now. “But I love you too, and so do the children!”

“Icarus maybe.”

“And Thea, if she only had the chance.”

She took his hand. Such a big, rough hand, and yet what slender fingers he had! It was no wonder that he could make a poem out of wood, an elegy out of a chair or a toy. It was a sisterly gesture, she persuaded herself. She had not embraced him, this rough carpenter with the heart of a poet. She had never embraced him, even when he had rescued her from Saffron. But in this slight endearment she felt enfolded by all of his boyishness-turned-adult. For an instant-for more than an instant-she envied those light-headed, lighthearted Dryads who had enjoyed his more than brotherly kisses. It was all very well to love a dream; it was like drinking a great flagon of long-buried wine and feeling as if you could step from one treetop to the next. But then the sparkle and the lightness evaporated like dew on a maple leaf. To love a Minotaur was like eating a loaf of wheaten bread soaked with honey; there was no sparkle but there was a sweet and enduring nourishment.

“Icarus isn’t a bit bigger,” said Eunostos. “Oughtn’t he to have grown in the last two months?”

“He doesn’t eat as much as he did. He misses you. Now we have to go, Eunostos.” She had already betrayed Aeacus with her thoughts; she must not risk a worse betrayal.

“No, please, I have to find a present for Icarus first.” He clutched the child as if he were protecting him from a blast of wintry wind or a pack of wolves.

“He’s had his present. Coming to see you. Now he wants to give you one.”

Icarus held to Eunostos’s horns and implanted a wet kiss on his cheek.

“When will you come again?” The question was addressed equally to her and Icarus.

“I don’t know.”

“When may I come to see you? Aeacus didn’t say I could never come again.”

“I don’t know that either, Eunostos.”

He hurried into his workshop and returned with the feathered cap he had made for Thea, but made too large. But it fitted Icarus perfectly because of his hair, which doubled the size of his head.

Eunostos stood in the gate and waved his hand. Icarus waved his cap and then he began to cry. His mother hurried him into the trees. It was fortunate that she knew the trail so well; all the way home, she never looked up from the ground.

Aeacus had returned ahead of them. He was hanging his bow on the wall.

“I shot a bear,” he said. “If you salt the meat, we can have steaks all winter.”

“We don’t eat bears in the Country of the Beasts.”

“Suit yourself. Where have you been?”

“To visit Zoe.”

“I see that Icarus has a new cap.”

“Eunostos made it. He left it at Zoe’s house.”

Did he believe her? If he did not believe her, was he annoyed, angry, enraged? In all this time, she was still unable to penetrate his impassive smile. And yet she felt that in his strange, civilized fashion he still cared for her. It was not exactly love; it was the gentle and faintly condescending affection which sometimes survives the disappointment of losing a dream.

That night he lay beside her on their couch and held her hand and kissed her cheek.

“Kora,” he said. “Maiden. You called to me across the dark spaces of the night and I came to you. Was I right to come? I’m still an invader, you know. I’m not a Beast.”

“I wanted you to come.”

“But are you still glad?”

“Yes, Aeacus.” She answered without a pause but with a certainty which she did not feel.

“Then so am I. We have had good years. We mustn’t regret them. And you have given me royal children.”

He was quiet then. His hand relaxed its hold; he seemed to fall into a quiet sleep. She kissed his cool forehead, loving him in her way, though still not knowing him-this lover and stranger; but not, in spite of the vows he had sworn before Chiron, her husband-never truly her husband. Maiden had become wife and mother for a Man who had remained an alien and a wanderer.

She awoke to find him gone, and the children with him.

Luckily I found her before she had left her tree. I had been concerned about the consequences of her visit to Eunostos, though I had not anticipated quite so dire and sudden an outcome.

“It’s a long way to Knossos,” she said, “and I won’t be able to carry much. A little food: a flask of wine and a cheese. And acorns to last me for a week.” She had not been crying; she had not taken time for tears. She was not even angry. She was lost.

“It will take you three solid days to reach Knossos. You’ll never find your children and get back to your tree alive!”

“I may overtake them on the way. He’s burdened with the children.”

“And if you do, how can you stop him?”

“I can’t stop him but I can ask him to leave my children. Let him go, if he must, but leave my children.”

“He won’t listen to you. I won’t let you go, Kora.”

“You can easily stop me,” she said. “You have the strength. But you will have to kill me. Will you do that, Zoe?”

I looked into her face and saw, for the first time, the utter implacability of a Dryad who had remained a girl too long and become a woman too quickly and meant what she said. I saw an unreasoning courage which, if rebuffed, might become madness.

“I’m going to get Eunostos,” I said. “Wait for me till I bring him back. You can surely do that much for me. Together we’ll think what to do.”

“I can’t wait.”

“Ankles be damned,” I swore, and ran like Artemis at the hunt-ran all the way to Eunostos’s trunk and fell in a heap at his gate.

“Aeacus has taken the children.”

“Where?” It was his only question. He did not seem surprised, but anguish lashed him like the branch of a fir tree. I expected him to scream.

“Toward Knossos,” I said. “Go after her. I’ll follow when I get my wind back.”

I overtook them where the forest opens onto the field. At least Eunostos had held her until my arrival, but she was even now breaking free of him, a tall, resolute figure encumbered only with a wicker basket and striding toward the Country of Men.

“Listen,” I shouted after her. “How do you think you can get to Knossos? You’ve never been out of the forest!” She paused until I caught up with her. She had no words for me, but I had made her think. “Do you know what the Cretan rustics say of Beasts? They fear and despise us. They frighten naughty children with stories about our cannibalism. They would capture or kill you.”

Her face was that of a bewildered little girl. “I could hide my ears and hair,” she protested. “Dirty my cheeks and pass for a peasant going to market.”

“And die before you found your children. How long do you think you can live away from your tree?”

“But I’m not bound to a tree,” cried Eunostos. “I can go anywhere. I’ll get your children for you, Kora!”

“And how are you going to disguise yourself short of a funeral shroud? Horns on one end and hooves on the other! You sound like Partridge.”