Thomas Swann - The forest of forever

The farmer grinned and gaped. He was sleek and just short of being plump, since the Cretan countryside was luxuriant enough to support its farmers without wearing them to the bone. He wore an unembroidered loincloth which reached almost to his knees and over which his bare stomach had started to bulge. Give him a year, perhaps two, and he would become fat. As I approached his house I affected a limp and slyly observed him slyly observing the undulation of my bosom. He sucked in his stomach. Thus diminished, he was not unattractive and I vowed that if necessary I would sacrifice my rarest possession to secure the oxcart.

“Achaean raiders,” I said in a throaty whisper. “I was going to visit my cousin in Gournia. Carriage stolen. Slaves killed. Wandering since dawn.” I swayed toward him and he extended a steadying hand which lit on my shoulder but gradually crept toward my twin glories.

“Where?” The tone was peremptory; the speaker, his wife. She had not so much emerged from the house as flurried; a little, swallowlike woman with a blackbird’s voice. The steadying hand was arrested in its descent.

“Where did they attack you?” I paused to fathom her curious accent. The “you” resembled an “e.” (Cretan peasants take enormous liberties with pronouns, but I will regularize them for the sake of my scroll.)

“Three or four miles from here. Over that hill-” I swept expansively with my hand to include the whole horizon and at least a dozen hills. I could not be specific since all I knew of the terrain was the general direction of Knossos. “But they’ve gone back toward the coast to their ships. No danger to you.”

Apparently he was having similar troubles understanding me. Beasts and Cretans share the same tongue but not the same inflections. There is a certain huskiness in the voice of a Beast, whether Dryad or Minotaur, a lilt in the voice of a Cretan.

“Needs some beer, Chloe,” said the husband at last, frowning at his wife and guiding me through the door. She returned his frown-for even peasant women stand up to their men on Crete-and followed us into the house.

The house was a single room, a hearth in the middle of the floor with an unlit fire whose smoke would have to escape from the one window, a pallet of straw, a low table without chairs, and an outsized and surprisingly clean pig. No, not surprising, since pigs like cleanliness; if they dwell in filth it is the fault of their masters. There was also a wooden cupboard from which the wife reluctantly drew a sheepskin of beer. I will have to say that in spite of the sparseness of furnishing, there was not a mote of dust, not a smudge of smoke. What is more, the cupboard was painted like a rainbow shell and graced with a single plain but exquisitely wrought cup of Kamares ware. But this was Crete, where even the peasants have a passion for cleanliness and an eye for color.

“I can’t pay you,” I said. “They took everything.” Chloe’s frown intensified to a scowl. If she had the delicate frame of a bird, she also had the beady, incriminating eyes and, one guessed, the claws. She stared at my large leather pouch, which looked heavy enough to contain gold and jewels.

“Except my earrings,” I added. “It nearly cost me my honor protecting them.” I cast a quick, knowing look at the farmer, as if to say: Not that my honor is unassailable. That was my problem: to allure him and lull her. “They’re real silver. Very old. Egyptian. I was born in Egypt, you see.” Since I did not speak like a Knossian, I had to account for what must seem to them a foreign accent. I unfastened the earrings and presented them to the woman.

“Fetch her some cheese, Tychon,” she piped in a much kindlier voice, a blackbird turned swallow. “Who’re we not to show hospitality to the poor dear?” She was already inserting the bars of the earrings into her own pierced ears. They were so large in proportion to so small a woman that they brushed her shoulders, but she peered at her reflection in the side of a bronze kettle and seemed to find them becoming, for she gave her hair a quick sweep and looked at her husband with the expectation of a compliment.

“Charming,” I said, trying to direct his attention from me to her. “Aren’t they?”

“Yus.” He was still looking at me, as if he wished to return the earrings to their original ears.

“He don’t talk much,” she said. “Do you think, ma’am, that-?” She pointed to her gray, shapeless gown of lamb’s wool, more exactly to the part which concealed her breasts and, indeed, raised the question if she had any breasts to conceal.

“I think,” I said, “that you could billow the sleeves a bit and cut away the front down to here-”

Her husband’s pronouncement was terse but final. “Nope.”

The swallow reverted to blackbird. “Ain’t as if I were flat.”

“Git supper for the lady.”

Petulantly she began her preparations, but her petulance was directed at her husband, not at me. Now I was receiving covert looks from her as well as him. His said: “Style’s fine for you, not her.” Hers said: “Men got no taste for the new styles.”

Supper, if not sumptuous, was clean and nourishing. Wheaten bread without worms or mold, fresh goat’s cheese, peppercorns, and carobs from a tree in the yard. As I ate, I saw that both of my hosts, as well as the pig, were staring at me with unabashed fascination. My beauty, it would seem, appealed to the farmer, my gift to his wife, and my scent of myrrh to the pig. But all three stares asked the same question: What did I want besides a meal and a temporary place to rest? Was Tychon going to be asked to drive me into town in his oxcart? Was Chloe going to be asked to put me up until I could send for friends to fetch me home? Was Bottom going to eat less heartily with an additional mouth to feed?

“If I could just stay the night with you… I don’t even need a pallet; I’ll be on my way tomorrow.”

“Walkin’?”

“I like to walk.”

“All the way to Knossos?”

“I’ll rise early and no doubt meet a farmer bound for market.”

“I could drive you.”

I forestalled a screech from Chloe. “I wouldn’t think of it. You have your duties here on the farm. Besides, your wife is far too lovely to be left alone when there’s even the slightest risk of Achaean raiders.” (Not for nothing had I been captive to a deceitful Bee queen.) “They would steal her away to the mainland with them.”

“Pass the beer to the lady, Tychon. And give a swig to Bottom.”

I put my lips to the mouth of the skin (actually a leg, which served as the spout) and smacked with excessive pleasure. The beer was at least palatable. I had tasted worse at Moschus’s table.

“An excellent beer,” I exclaimed while Tychon dangled the leg above the snout of his pig.

“Made it hisself,” the woman volunteered, fondling her new earrings and giving him a final chance, half plea, half command, to compliment them.

“Nice.”

Her hand moved questioningly toward her breasts. “Nope. Some things is best left indoors.” It was his longest communication.

The moment seemed propitious for my next move. Thievery, I was learning, could be fun. No wonder the Bee queens cultivated the art.

“And there’s something else I managed to save,” I said, reaching into my pouch, which was made of the sturdiest leather; though perforated with tiny holes, and drew out two-Striges! Yes, I had borrowed them from Amber, she who had been apprehended in the theft of sandals and chastised by Chiron. Now she was eager to appease him, and of course she knew that he and I were old and devoted friends.

“By the navel of Mother Earth,” swore Chloe. “What be they?”

“Pets.” I said. “Gentle, docile, and very affectionate. Let me show you.”