The Forest of Forever (1987)

by Thomas Burnett Swann

  DEDICATION

  To BOB ROEHM,

  my tutelary spirit in the dark weirwoods

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1971 by Thomas Burnett Swann.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Wildside Press, LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  PART ONE

  EUNOSTOS

  CHAPTER I

  I AM THREE hundred and sixty years old and I pride myself, not unjustly, on having enjoyed twice as many lovers as I have years. I have loved Men, Minotaurs, Centaurs, and Tritons and no one has ever complained that Zoe, the Dryad of Crete, has failed in the art of love. Saffron, the erstwhile queen of the Thriae or Bee-Folk, once called me as weatherbeaten as my oak. She pointed to the gold tooth fitted by my Babylonian lover of twenty—no, thirty summers ago, and to the streaks of gray in my green hair, like moss among leaves. I, in turn, expanded the twin grandeurs of my unsagging breasts.

  “My dear,” I replied, with more courtesy than she deserved, “who wants a sapling when he can have a full-fledged oak?”

  I hardly need to add that in these days when everyone is telling his own history—on papyrus, clay tablets, or palm leaves—I have innumerable stories to tell, and since decorum has never been one of my burdens, I am sorely tempted to tell you about some of my escapades. The Babylonian. The Briton. The Achaean (lusty brute!). The only thing that silences me is the fact that some of my friends—and enemies, for every desirable woman is envied as much as she is desired—have a much more ennobling tale to be told. Since those involved are unable to speak for themselves, I must speak for them. As a matter of fact, I do at times take part in the melancholy events: I participated as well as observed. But I neither claim nor wish to be the heroine, poor, dreaming Kora, who was cursed with beauty as some women are cursed with ugliness. However, I will presume to speak for her, even to some of her thoughts, as well as for Eunostos, the last Minotaur, and Aeacus, the Cretan prince.

  I promised you a melancholy tale, but where is the forest without its wells of light? If you demand a death or a rape on every tablet, my story is not for you.

  * * * *

  Hooves crossed, tail at ease, Eunostos lay on his back in a patch of yellow gagea. He had cradled his head in a deserted ant’s nest and he held a reed pen between his teeth. There is nothing more reposeful than a reposing Minotaur calf. His race has a reputation for ferocity and indeed, when aroused, they are fierce and redoubtable warriors—a match for the Centaurs, more than a match for Men. Under ordinary circumstances, however, they are peaceful beings, given to gardening, carpentry, or contemplation.

  He was a strapping boy (and I use the word “boy” not in the sense of his being Human but of being young), tall, muscular, though just fifteen; with a ruddily handsome face and a mane of woodpecker-red hair of which he was justly proud.

  “Eunostos.”

  He sat up, twitched his tail, which was tipped with red fur and admirably designed for swatting flies, and dropped the pen from his teeth. I noticed the shapely horns beginning to sprout through his mane. Yes, he would soon be a bull.

  “Did somebody call my name?” His voice was deep but the tone was mild. It was the kind of voice which says: Linger and chat. Our talk will be small but satisfying.

  I stepped out of the trees. He sprang nimbly to his hooves, crossed the meadow in a quick bound, and caught me in a boyish embrace. It always pleased me to see his admiration: a youngster admiring a woman of experience who has kept her looks through years and vicissitudes. In fact, I was looking my best, as my mirror had told me that morning when I donned my leaf-of-the-water-lily gown, adorned my wrists with bracelets of time-greened copper, and, as a small sacrifice to modesty, emplanted a large tourmaline in the cleft of my bosom.

  “Aunt Zoe!” It was a courtesy title which I did not particularly like. I was not his aunt, merely a friend of his deceased mother, who had insisted on the title. (Once upon a time—was it forty years ago?—I had been his father’s friend.)

  “Eunostos, I’m carrying a basket of acorns to Myrrha and Kora. I thought you might like to join me. That roguish Centaur Moschus has given me no end of trouble since we stopped keeping company and—well, it’s good to have a man on hand.” I was not in the least afraid of Moschus; I rather enjoyed his importunities and intended to resume keeping company with him—after several reassuring interludes with younger men. (You understand that by “men” I mean male adults of any race, and not necessarily Humans.) But I wanted to make Eunostos feel mature and confident. Orphaned for a year, he badly needed the encouragement and guidance of an older woman.

  At the mention of Kora, the prettiest Dryad in the Country of the Beasts, he did not have to be urged.

  We started through the woods, Eunostos ahead of me like a good scout, thrashing a suspicious looking thicket, prodding for poisonous serpents with a pointed stick while clutching his reed pen and palm leaf tablet with the other hand. (Yes, Minotaurs have hands; it is only their legs that are hooved.)

  “What were you dreaming about when I surprised you, Eunostos?”

  “Kora,” he confided. “I was writing a poem to her.” A shy pleasure illumined his face; his eyes were wide and green and they looked as if they had drunk their color from the sea, though he had never left the forest.

  “What about?”

  “Love.”

  “What do you know about love, little one?” The term was relative. He was six feet tall, but his full growth would include another foot.

  “But that’s what it means to be a poet. You make up what you don’t know. Do you think the author of Hoofbeats in Babylon had ever been to Babylon?” He began to read from the palm leaf clutched in his hand:

  “A Minotaur with gainly hoof

  Pursued a Dryad girl.

  She spied him from her barky roof

  And spruced a wayward curl.”

  “Don’t you mean ‘ungainly’?”

  “No, this hoof was very nimble.” He looked down at his own hooves and stamped them, one after the other, lightly on the turf.

  “Promising,” I said, “but it needs a bit of polish.” What else can you tell a budding poet, if you happen to be unable to distinguish poetry from doggerel?

  “What’s this, giving me the slip, my girl?” A Centaur bestrode our path; he looked quite awesome with his four legs and two arms and his billowing gray mane. But it was only Moschus, who was no more awesome than a deflated wineskin. A small pig, a pink little fellow a long way from becoming a hog, frolicked between his legs.

  “No, Moschus, but I have more to do than dally with you in the forest. I’m on my way to Myrrha’s house.”

  “Who said anything about dalliance? It was conversation I had in mind. And possibly lunch,” he added, eyeing the acorns, which Centaurs prize almost as much as Dryads. He looked Eunostos up and down. “Hello, young fellow. How goes the wenching, heh?”

  Eunostos nodded courteously and between them there flashed the unspoken comradeship of horned, tailed Beasts; though the Centaurs secretly consider themselves superior because they have six limbs instead of four. Also—and I am not speaking out of conceit—there was the tacit understanding of males who appreciate a desirable woman, with a touch of envy on the part of Moschus, who had temporarily lost me, and a touch of pride on the part of Eunostos, who had temporarily found me, even if in the guise of an aunt.

  “Watch out in the forest,” Moschus called after us, his breath smelling of beer. “There’ve been—portents.”

  Portents? What kind? I wish I had paused to question him. But he is something of a wiseacre and a pause would have given him a chance to retell one of his limited and long-winded anecdotes.


  “I hope he won’t step on his pig,” muttered Eunostos. “I’ve just thought of a new poem:

  Piglet,

  Minikin-flanked

  And deft to root and dig,

  By what mischance do you expand

  To pig?”

  We continued our trek, glimpsing a Bear Girl as she peeped shyly at us from the bushes, watching a blue monkey turn somersaults over our heads. In the Country of the Beasts, there was life at every turn of a path. We, the Beasts—that is, those beings like Centaurs, Minotaurs, and Dryads who combine the attributes of Men with those of the lower animals—hunted birds and rabbits for food (never for sport), but we did not hunt each other; thus, at least at that time, there was little reason for caution or concealment. I do not mean to say that there were not any dangers; there are vipers and vampire bats and occasional wolves—and the Panisci or Goat Boys were notorious thieves. But, generally speaking, the Bear Girls hid and peeped and vanished only because they were shy.

  Our country, our forest, was not like other forests. Oak and cypress and elm, tamarisk and cedar, copses and meadows and wooded knolls: these you could find in many places on Crete. But you see we dwelt with our forest, we never tried to master her, wound her, crush her to our purposes. We never cut down the trees to make our houses; we simply borrowed a few limbs from overluxuriant elms, or reeds from the river bank, and built among the trees. We trod the narrowest of paths and never made roads because we did not like to crush the vegetation under our feet. The forest was our home, but we were its guests and not its masters. It was still our happy time.

  “The Minotaur has combed his mane,

  The girl has left her roof—”

  He paused. “What rhymes with ‘mane’?”

  “Bane,” I said without thinking.

  “But that’s such a gloomy word, and this is a happy poem. The girl is going to requite him, you know.”

  “I’m sorry, Eunostos. I guess I was thinking about Moschus’s portents.” Also, though I did not tell him, I was suffering a presentiment of danger without in the least guessing its nature. It is both the blessing and the curse of Dryads that they can sometimes foresee the future, but cloudily, as if they were peering from the surface at the bottom of a muddy stream and trying to distinguish the form of rock and snail and fish.

  The first portent came in the shape of a sudden storm. There was a clap of thunder; the recently cloudless sky hurled down a wrath of rain. Even under the oak trees we were drenched; the water collected above our heads till it weighed down the branches and then it poured onto us in torrents. Eunostos’s hair was matted to his head, exposing his horns in all of their red-tinted ivory. My water-lily-leaf gown enveloped me like a clammy snakeskin and the leaves threatened to separate and reveal my ample splendors.

  “Well, it’s not quite a disaster,” I said. “We can dry off at Kora’s house. I guess Moschus’s portent had to do with the weather.”

  But the storm had brought more than rain. A great black cloud lingered above our heads even when the rest of the sky had cleared. Suddenly we saw that it was composed of individual segments, entities, beings. It was not a cloud but a flock of what seemed to be enormous birds.

  “By the breast of the Mother Goddess,” Eunostos swore. Since the death of his parents, he had picked up such oaths from running with loose company. Since I ran with the same company, I was not affronted. “We’re being invaded by vultures.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think they’re vultures. They’re not black, not all of them anyway. See, there’s a blue one, and red, and green. They seem to be wearing garments and I think they’re—yes, I know they are.”

  “What?” he asked, deferring to the accumulated experience of my three hundred and sixty years.

  “Thriae.”

  “Bee-Folk?” he cried. “From the mainland?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The bright ones are the queens and drones. The dark ones are the workers. The storm must have blown them off their course. Or maybe they’re searching for a new home.”

  “They aren’t very nice, are they?” His tail twitched as if assailed by flies.

  “I’ve never met any myself, but the Centaurs say that they’re given to thievery and other petty practices. Whether they’re capable of worse, I don’t really know.”

  The Thriae circled above us, chattering in high melodious voices (the queens and drones) or guttural monotones (the workers) and no doubt deciding where they should land. It was not long before they had divided into six swarms, each with its own queen, and one of the swarms appeared to be heading straight for us. I hurried Eunostos among the trees, but I turned and looked over my shoulder and directly into the face of a queen, hovering like a monstrous dragonfly a few cubits above my head. She was not looking at me, however; she was looking at Eunostos as if—well, as if he were the chosen drone in her nuptial flight.

  “Come on, Eunostos,” I said quickly, to keep him from looking over his shoulder and into the naked face of lust. “Whatever they’re up to, it’s nothing good. Let’s warn Myrrha and Kora.”

  The house of Myrrha, as befitting that of a Dryad whose deceased husband and most of whose lovers had been Centaurs, was an oak tree whose trunk opened into a circular reed cottage on the ground. The reeds were painted a vivid green to match the leaves of the tree. There were two windows, framed by red clay, and a very tall doorway whose door was the skin of two wolves so skillfully stitched together that they might have belonged to one tremendous animal. There were no defenses except removable parchment in the windows, a precaution against the blasts of winter winds or the foragings of vampire bats. When you entered the cottage, you could climb the circular stairs inside the trunk to the upper room, also constructed of reeds, and lodged among the branches like a bird’s nest, though much more tidy and trim.

  Myrrha was downstairs seated at her loom and weaving a tapestry embroidered with a flattering likeness of her late husband (presumably Kora’s father). As conceived by his widow, he embodied the noblest attributes of his race: strength, wisdom, and lustiness. Myrrha herself was fragile without being peaked: a thin, gracefully aging woman whose green hair had turned to silver and whose ears were as delicate as murex shells. Surprisingly, in view of her appearance, she had enjoyed more lovers than anyone else in the country except me. Perhaps her success lay in the fact that she said yes when she looked as if she would say no.

  “Myrrha, I’ve brought a guest,” I boomed.

  “Zoe and Eunostos,” she trilled. “Kora, come down at once, we have visitors.” She motioned me to a bench against the wall, where I sank in a heap of cushions and rested my aching feet (I am not plump, you understand; the weight of my bosom places an undue strain on my ankles).

  “Here,” I said. “I brought you some acorns.”

  She accepted the gift as if they were emeralds from the land of the Yellow Men. “My dear, what a feast! My tree isn’t bearing well this year. We’ll roast them tonight. But you’re wet to the bone. And you too, Eunostos. Slip into one of my robes, Zoe, while I rub Eunostos down with a cloth.” Eunostos, of course, was naked, like all young Beasts and many old ones.

  “Thriae,” Eunostos announced, beginning to glow beneath a brisk massage. “Right here in the forest. Zoe and I saw them arrive with the storm.”

  Myrrha dropped the cloth. “Bee-Folk! You don’t say.” She began to ruminate about the perfidy of the race, the mischief we must expect. Myrrha was notorious for her ruminations. It was said of her that if you wanted to make an announcement to every Beast in the forest, you should whisper it to Myrrha and swear her to secrecy.

  At this point, Kora descended the stairs. She walked so quietly that it was the bark-and-leaf scent rather than the sound which announced her coming. She was tall and slender without being thin, rather like a white lotus, it seemed to me, and her beauty was of the sort which soothes rather than excites. To look at her was like dipping hot, tired ankles into a cool stream.

  Eunostos deftly retrieve
d the fallen cloth, rolled over the floor to Kora’s feet, and tossed her the cloth. She smiled indulgently down at him, the smile of a young woman for a mere lad of fifteen, and, avoiding his flanks, proceeded to dry his mane.

  “Queens, workers, and drones—we saw them all,” he said, gazing up at her with adoration.

  “Never mind about the drones,” said Myrrha. “They’re good-for-nothing sluggards who loll in the hives or under the trees. It’s the women you have to watch. I heard about them—the queens, that is—from my late husband. They’ll snatch the threads from your loom if you give them a chance.”

  “The drones must do something,” suggested Eunostos. “Or the queens wouldn’t keep them around.”

  Myrrha raised a reproving eye at him. Like many free-living women, she was prudish in the company of her daughter. “As I said, it’s the queens who are the trouble-makers. I wonder what they want in the Country of the Beasts. We have so little for them to steal.”

  “I expect the storm blew them here by accident,” I said. “Let’s hope they don’t stay.”

  We soon turned to other subjects. Happy subjects, on the whole, though it always saddened me to visit the home of two menless women. Myrrha still enjoyed frequent, if itinerant, lovers, but Kora at eighteen was the oldest virgin in the country and a cause of concern for her mother.

  Since I myself was a trifle old for Eunostos, I had resigned myself to yielding him to Kora. In fact, I was quietly engineering their union, since he was the last Minotaur and it seemed to me that Kora, once cured of her virginity, could bear him noble sons. You understand, of course, that the offspring of a Minotaur and a Dryad are not hybrids: the sons are Minotaurs, the daughters are Dryads. There are several races in the Country of the Beasts, but each race is either male or female with the sole exception of the Centaurs, who have their own females but also enjoy the women of other races. Humans have questioned why the Great Mother created so many races with a single sex and compelled them to mingle if they wished to multiply. The answer is clear: she likes variety. She likes for opposite to attract opposite. She wants her many-faced, many-figured children to value difference as well as familiarity.