The Forest of Forever (1987)

by Thomas Burnett Swann

  The morning of the fourth day, Knossos spread incredibly below us.

  “Eunostos,” I called down to him. “We’re there. But we mustn’t be seen together. When we reach the marketplace, I’ll leave the cart. Give me a few minutes before you show yourself. Then you know what to do.”

  His head erupted from the straw. “It’s like a rainbow fallen out of the sky!”

  I submerged the head and the incriminating horns. “Not yet, simpleton. But yes, it is, and it looks as if it might return to the clouds at any minute.” I blinked my eyes. It was not a city, it was witchery, and at such a time I could not afford to be bewitched. As an antidote to sheer, open-mouthed wonderment, I reminded myself that, according to my Cretan lover, the Egyptians did not approve of Knossos. Streets which meandered when they ought to advance. End beams projecting from houses as if the builders had forgotten them and wandered off to make love. Flat roofs unexpectedly bulging into impertinent attics. Story built upon story like so many afterthoughts. Little blue huts side by side with scarlet villas. Sprawling apartments whose windows were filled with fiery orange parchment. Such a riot of colors—garishness, said the Egyptians. Where was the dignity of grays and browns, of sand colors, pyramid colors? Such a want of planning. Wastefulness, said the Egyptians. Where was the grandeur of temples with pylon gates and obelisks as straight as the shaft of a spear?

  But the Cretans laughed and made no excuses for their fallen rainbow. “You say we squander our colors. Look at a field in spring. Do the flowers offend your eyes, whatever hues they mingle? You say we build crookedly. Look at the forest. Do the trees grow in rows? Do the branches make perfect spheres above their trunks? Beside, we did not build our city, Zeus built it. When he was a little boy, the Great Mother said to him, ‘You’re restless, my son, on the mountaintop. Descend into the valley and build me a town to delight my heart.’ And the child took stone from the mountain, clay from the banks of a stream, wood from the fir tree; and he snatched a whole rainbow right out of the sky and went into the valley without a plan in his quick little brain, but with a vision, and built his town in a single morning. And the Great Mother said, ‘But the streets are crooked.’ And the child answered, ‘So is a stream,’ and his mother smiled.”

  “Zoe, I thought we were almost there. I’m about to sneeze.”

  “We are I said, prodding the ox, who had finally learned to obey my commands. “I was just catching my breath. But now to practical matters.”

  Knossos alone among the great cities of Men was totally unfortified; its walls were its bull-prowed ships. But though there were neither forts nor gates nor even guards, except for the palace garrison, it was understood that farmers would not enter the city with their carts, or warriors with their chariots. The farmers marketed their grapes, olive oil, melons—whatever the season’s crop—in a large open field flanked by vineyards and olive groves, or walked into the city to make purchases in the canvas-covered stalls, which fluttered like big butterflies, or in the arcades of shops, whose bare-breasted proprietresses were as pert and impudent as their pottery and figurines. In the absence of the farmers, no one bothered their carts, for theft belonged to the countryside, not to Knossos. It was not a virtuous city by any means: its consumption of beer and wine was legendary, its sexual practices imaginative and prodigious; but its sins (said the Egyptians), or rather its pleasures (said the Knossians), lay in partaking, not in taking. As they approached the city, the peasants somehow forgot their wariness and relaxed in a beneficent glow of brotherly and other kinds of love. Oh, they would bargain and haggle over a price, raise their voices even scowl on occasion—but to steal in Knossos? Unthinkable. There were no watchdogs, or dogs of any kind, only Egyptian cats, snoozing on rooftops or walking the clean unlittered streets as if they felt no yearning for their original homeland. For cats, like Cretans, abhor rules.

  Great ladies and gentlemen traveled the meandering roads in sedan chairs carried by servants or slaves, but everyone else walked, for it was not a vast metropolis, like Babylon, but a relatively small city with small buildings for small people, and unwieldy wagons or clattering chariots were as unthinkable as elephants in a vineyard.

  I had parked the wagon at the edge of the field, in the shade of an olive tree, since poor Eunostos must be roasting under his straw blanket.

  “I’m going now, Eunostos,” I whispered, standing by the ox as if I were talking to him like a farmer who dotes on his animal. No one was close enough to catch my exact words. “But I’ll be watching you from a distance. Once you enter the palace, I’ll go to the agreed spot and wait till lamp-lighting time. If you don’t come, I’ll assume they have captured you and do what I can to set you free. If you do come—”

  “It will be with the children. Or else the children will come without me. And if they do, you must get them right back to the country and not try to rescue me. Promise, Zoe?”

  I promised but whispered under my breath, “Mother Goddess, I didn’t promise by you.”

  I sauntered casually away from the cart and mingled with a group of peasants, nodding and smiling but careful not to speak and betray my Bestial accent. Everybody else seemed to be talking, buyers to sellers, sellers to buyers. But suddenly the talk began to subside and then there was not a sound in all that crowd. It was like the wind leaving a field of barley and letting the stalks ripple into silence. Eunostos had climbed from the cart. I watched him as he shook himself free of the straw and started for the cobbled road which led through the field and directly to the palace. They won’t harm him here in the shadow of the city, I thought, not even the superstitious country folk. Still, they will fear him and some will make sport of him.

  I was mistaken. They stared with awe rather than fear at this seven-foot, horned, tailed demon who had materialized—from a cart, was it? More likely from the air! They did not throw rocks, they did not ridicule, they parted to let him pass, as if it were his city to which they had come, and where they remained by his sufferance. Perhaps because of his boldness—perhaps because he somehow glowed with divinity—they took him for a god instead of a demon. Now he had reached the road to the palace. Now he was overtaking peasants bound for audience with the king, and meeting ladies and gentlemen bound in the opposite direction for the market place. Voices lilted from curtained sedan chairs, the bearers halted, the curtains opened, and bare-breasted ladies dangled out of the windows. Children gathered on rooftops, pointing, gesticulating, but not ridiculing, and a small boy cried in a high, sweet voice.

  “Mama, is it a Minotaur?”

  “Yes, son. It may be the last Minotaur.”

  “Has he come to hurt us?”

  “I think this one has come to bring us luck. You see, he is like the god we worship. The same noble horns!”

  Looking straight ahead of him, never stumbling, holding himself at his full height, his red mane a splendor of silk and sun, his horns like potent but unthreatening weapons, Eunostos entered the stepped portico of the palace and mounted toward the gate. He did not need a forest to give him dignity. He brought the forest with him and walked in the courage of his purpose. Guards advanced to meet him, not to capture but to escort, and together they vanished between the red, down-tapering columns and into the palace of Minos and his brother Aeacus and the royal children, Thea and Icarus.

  * * * *

  Eunostos was afraid. He felt as if he were drowning in a vat of honey. Beauty too beautiful. Softness too soft. Not even a hint of menace behind a smile, as in a Bee queen’s face. He could have fought monsters, certainly soldiers; young though he was and, so he thought, ineloquent, he could have argued against wrath or cunning. But this implacable gentleness, this tyranny of softness. It was beyond him and he was baffled. The rainbow city, its toy people, and now, here, the little king with his triple-plumed headdress, seated on his gypsum throne and flanked by two stone griffins who looked as august but unmenacing as the frescoed griffins—green, red, and blue—which shared the walls with reeds and water birds. Where
were the spears to bar his path? These slim-waisted boys who passed for guards—no older than himself—why, he would scatter them with one sweep of his arm! Besides, they were guiding, not guarding him. He might have been a visiting ambassador.

  The king was holding court and granting audiences. Peasants mingled with courtiers; the raw sweet smell of earth with nard and sandarac. Everyone equal now before the king and come to plead his case, present his gift, ask his boon. Eunostos paused in the rear of the room. His hooves seemed made of bronze. His head spun with a bewilderment of colors and costumes. The men in their loincloths were bright and trim, but not particularly variegated except that here was a cloth which reached to the knees, and there was one which covered no more than the name implied; here was the wool of a peasant, there was the linen of a courtier. But the women… There were skirts like bells, skirts like upturned saffron crocuses, skirts like crowns with many tiers, and here was a lady in—what was the word? Not even Men wore them, except in parts of the East. Trousers!

  The king smiled and motioned him at once to advance to the throne, between the throngs of petitioners on foot and spectators lounging on stone benches which ran the length of the walls. Eunostos did not flinch. He knelt before the throne as I had instructed him and waited to be recognized.

  “Arise and be heard.”

  “I have come from the Country of the Beasts,” he said.

  “I know, my son.” Minos was a young-faced king with hair as white as foam. What strange bird—phoenix perhaps—had given him the plumes for his headdress? What fishers had dived among coral and anemones and gathered the murex shells to empurple his loincloth? Bracelets of lapis lazuli; a necklace of coral like a strand of sea horses. Female adornments, but the Man was anything but feminine. Eunostos liked him. He is more than Aeacus, more than any of his people, he thought. Stronger yet kinder. Once his wounds had healed, he would not have stayed in the Country of the Beasts to steal the heart of a Dryad. Had he stayed, he would not have forsaken her.

  “And you are Eunostos, the last Minotaur. My brother has told me about you. You were his friend. I have sent for him now.”

  Aeacus entered the room without surprise and walked to meet Eunostos without hesitation. They might have been meeting to hunt together as in the old days. In the forest, he had been a beautiful alien. Here, he was beautiful, but intimately at home with dolphin-dancing walls and dolphin-gay people. He wore no adornment except a silver fillet in his hair. He needed no adornment, with his body richer than bronze, with hair like shadows caught in a loom and woven to intricate strands. Eunostos keenly felt his own dishevelment. His gray loincloth of homespun wool. The wisps of hay clinging to his arms and legs. And his hooves, his poor ridiculous hooves which no sandals in the world could hide. Yet no one had laughed at him, and even Aeacus looked at him with a kind of grudging and, at least to Eunostos, unaccountable wonder.

  Aeacus extended his hand in the remembered gesture of fellowship. Eunostos did not return the gesture. The beautiful ones, the hurtful ones, he thought. Kora and Aeacus. They smile and their enemies drop their daggers or lose their hearts. They can only be wounded by others like themselves. And I, in my roughness and plainness have dared to tread in the very fount of beauty.

  Almost furtively Aeacus dropped his hand. Almost too quickly, he spoke. “I did love your friend, Eunostos. I do love her, in my way. But I love my children more. Would you deny them—this?” He swept his hand in a circle around the room, but the circle seemed ever-widening—palace beyond room, city beyond palace, island beyond city. The Minoan Empire, athwart the sea like an ocean-shouldering whale (and no one yet knew how close were the deadly sharks).

  “Can’t they have both?” Eunostos cried. “The forest and the city?” His cry was sulphur in the honied air. “Kora is lost. I think she will die without her children.”

  “She has her friends, Eunostos. You and Zoe and the rest. Good friends. I would have brought her gladly to Knossos. But she would have died in the city, away from her tree. You know that better than I. Had there been no children, I would never have left her. But there are two, and both are royal. Do you really think I can send them back to a forest of wolves and goat-footed thieves and kidnapping queens?”

  “Is that how you saw the forest? Is that all you saw?” It was at once an accusation and a lament.

  “Not you, not you, Eunostos. I liked you from that first day when you wanted to heal my wounds. I never stopped liking you, even when I forbade you my house.”

  “It’s true I love Kora. But I couldn’t have taken her from you. I would never have tried.”

  “It wasn’t Kora I was afraid of losing to you.”

  “Not Kora?”

  “It was my children. My son, at least. In fact I have already lost him. Now I must do my best to win him back. To teach him to rule a kingdom. It was you I feared, Eunostos, because the longer he knew you the more impossible it would have been for me ever to have taken him from the forest. And that’s why he mustn’t go back with you.”

  “But you can’t be afraid of me,” Eunostos protested. “I’m just a rough carpenter who stumbles over his own hooves.”

  “Who is wild and yet gentle, free and yet bound by the bronze ties of love, and binding to those who meet him. There are two forests, Eunostos. I feared—a little—the forest of wolves and thieves. But yours—and you—struck terror to my heart. The first was a danger I knew how to fight. The second was a magic against which I had no defense except flight.”

  “I didn’t mean to make you afraid. I hope Icarus loves me, but I never thought about taking him away from you, his own father. I never thought anyone would love me as much as they loved you. Kora couldn’t.”

  “Even Kora returned to you at the last. In her heart, I mean. So you see I’m not really forsaking her. I’m leaving her with you.”

  Aeacus was befuddling him with these strange compliments. Who could believe the Man? Lyre-tongued Aeacus, no doubt with another lie!

  He turned to the king with a last desperate plea. “The Achaeans have a goddess, haven’t they, who was stolen by the lord of the Underworld. Not the kindly Griffin Judge, but a cruel tyrant called Hades. Her mother—whether she was the same as our Great Mother I don’t know—grieved for her and wandered over the world in search of her, and Zeus felt pity and returned the girl to the surface for half of every year.

  “Even in the Country of the Beasts, we know you as a fair-minded king. You deliver justice to peasants as well as courtiers. What about Beasts? Our races were friendly, long ago. I don’t know what divided us. Reunite us now! Become our Zeus, great King. Let Kora have her children for half of every year. The Great Mother will thank you for it.”

  Minos was slow to answer. He was not Aeacus. Words did not come glibly to his tongue. “But the goddess you speak of was stolen by a strange god. A father can hardly be accused of stealing his own children. These are my heirs, Eunostos. You see me enthroned in splendor. You’ve heard of my fleet which holds the Achaeans at bay. We are friendly with Egypt, unthreatened by decadent Babylon. My ships have sailed beyond the Misty Isles, and around that great dark island to the south. What you see and think and hear is the truth. For now. This cubit in time called now. It is true that I am great in wealth, powerful with ships. But power is no more constant than the rain. Inevitably there must come a drought. I must conjure the rain. I must fight to retain my power and leave it in fitting hands. My brother has spoken truly, though he was very wrong to wed your friend. Kora must suffer so that a great empire shall be justly ruled. Icarus and Thea must be taught to rule, you see, not to run wild and free in a forest as most of us would like to do. Do you think I want to sit on this throne and pretend to be a god, and condemn this man and praise that man, and order my ships into battle? No, Eunostos. I would much rather go hunting with you in your forest and drink beer with your friend Zoe and join Chiron on his travels. But I follow the will of the Goddess because she has marked me—both honored and cursed—to be a king.”r />
  “But there are two heirs. Can’t I take one of them back to their mother? At least for a little while?”

  “There are two of them now, but will both grow up to rule? The Great Mother sends death even to laughing Knossos. Pestilence comes with our returning ships; the winter wind blows cold from the north. I myself was stricken as a child. A demon of plague denied me the power to beget children. He might as easily have killed me. No, my son. Both children must remain in Knossos.”

  This, then, was the ultimate anguish: that Minos was just. Eunostos knew that in the king’s place he would have delivered the same judgment.

  But he could fight that judgment. His allies were hope and courage and, much to his surprise, a wiliness which would have done credit to a Bee queen.

  “May I see the children to say good-bye?” How easy it was to lie for Kora’s sake! He did not even feel shame and no one appeared to notice what this hitherto guileless rustic had learned from the Cretans.

  Aeacus’s smile darkened. “What good will it do, Eunostos? Icarus cries for you every day, as it is. If he sees you again, he will have to get used to losing you again.”

  “At least I can tell their mother if they’re well. She thought they might sicken when taken from their tree.”

  “She needn’t have been concerned. Chiron himself assured me that they could live without their tree, though of course he never suspected what I had in mind.”

  “Yes, you may see them, Eunostos.” It was the king. It was a command.

  Aeacus turned to him with a flush of anger. “My brother—”

  Minos was quick to forestall him. “Eunostos has risked his life to bring these children back to their mother. The Great Mother, I think, would wish him a final visit with them. In our household shrine, we worship her son in the form of a bull. Eunostos is closer to divinity than you and I.”

  “May I see them in your garden with the pool of silver fish?”

  Aeacus forgot to be angry. “You remembered my telling you about it? And that was three years ago!”