The forest of forever tmt-2

by Thomas Burnett Swann

  “On your wedding day?”

  “What if you hadn’t helped me when the Panisci beat me up?”

  “Oh, very well,” I grumbled. I am not as heartless as I sound. I remembered Kora’s dream.

  Aeacus, brother of Minos, king of Crete, sighed in the palace courtyard and dipped his hand in a pool of silver fish. Palm trees leaned above him, drooping their fronds like great green birds with many wings. Saffron crocuses rippled a golden fleece. Egyptians live in the past: they look at the Pyramids and yearn for departed majesties. Achaeans live in the future: they look at their bronze-heeled chariots and yearn for tomorrow’s battle. But Cretans live in the moment, poised like a blue lotus on the stilled waters of time, perfectly content, untroubled by memory or anticipation; a joyous people. And Aeacus till now had been the happiest as well as the handsomest of princes, with all the prerogatives and none of the burdens of royalty.

  But Aeacus sighed, and a lady of the court, Metope, looked at him in astonishment. She was abloom in a flaring skirt and brandished her bare breasts like melons ripe to be plucked.

  “Aeacus,” she said. “Tonight the ladies of the court will dance the Dance of the Cranes beside the River Kairatos. And afterwards they will choose their lovers from the men who have come to watch them. Do you want to come?”

  “No.”

  “No!” she repeated, incredulous. “You no longer find me pleasurable?”

  “At the moment nothing pleases me.”

  “Cruel Aeacus! You speak like a Hittite instead of a Cretan. Have I developed a wrinkle since I last looked in my mirror?”

  He peered into her face and detected a faint little network of lines beneath her eyes. But this time he remembered to speak like a Cretan instead of a Hittite.

  “No, dear Metope, there are no new wrinkles. Nor old ones. The fault lies with me, not you. Your face is as smooth and pink as the inside of a conch shell, and much more soft. Lately I’ve been-somewhere else.”

  “Where, Aeacus? Where would you rather be than Knossos? Thebes, Memphis, Babylon…?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come to the dance then. It will bring you back to us. It will make you laugh again.”

  “Very well, I will come.”

  He was not affronted by her invitation. In Knossos, the women were as bold and amorous as the men. Besides, he had already lain with her in a meadow of asphodels and on a stone couch mountained with pillows and called her, in flattering light and under the influence of wine, a mortal incarnation of the Great Mother.

  He shook himself free of his sighs and laughed. “Yes, I will come.

  She looked at him with a frank, level gaze of a race whose women hold equal footing with men. “Laughter becomes you. It shows your teeth, which are white like the shells on the beach. You make me think of abundance, of pomegranates in a luxuriant field. We’re small, we Cretans. Yet there’s still a richness about you. It’s more than your bronze chest and roseate cheeks. More than your lyre-sweet laughter. More than your supple hands, so full of gifts for the children of the court. You yourself are a gift, the rarest of all. Did you know that you are loved above your brother?”

  “That is very wrong,” he said. “My brother is king.” He felt the affront to his brother’s dignity. Still, he had to admit that it was good to be loved. He, who loved purple of murex, blue-gray of dolphin, laughter of harvesters returning from the barley field. He who was only angry at ugliness or when the Achaeans raided the Cretan coast. Yes, he loved to be loved. He basked in love like a cat in a palace lightwell.

  “Your brother is king, but there is something almost Egyptian about him. He thinks too much.”

  “And I?”

  “You feel. That is what it means to be Cretan.”

  He lifted one of the curls from her forehead and kissed her lightly on her white skin, which curls and cosmetics and parasols protected from the hot Cretan sun.

  “I will watch the Dance of the Cranes,” he said, and he followed her with his eyes as she moved, prettily but absurdly like a great crimson flower, through a doorway flanked by stone bulls and into the palace. Then he forgot her.

  He sighed and fled from the court, down gypsum stairs, across a second courtyard paved with cobblestones and worn by dancing feet, along the triumphal approach to the palace, and between trellises of grapes and on…and yet on… Behind him, the track of a goat through silver-leafed olive trees. He could not have told where he ran or why, till he stood in a tamarisk grove and leaned on a tree to stifle a sob-and to listen.

  The tree was speaking to him. It was not that she spoke in words, she spoke to his heart. She welcomed him. But then, it was widely known that the Mother loved trees and bushes and flowers as animals and endowed the lowliest plant with indwelling spirit, perhaps invisible, perhaps as tangible as Metope in her poppy-shaped skirt. Aeacus knew, of course, about those very tangible spirits known as Dryads, but he also knew that they dwelt in the Country of the Beasts, and no Cretan invaded those forbidden fastnesses of Minotaurs and Centaurs and other horrendous beings sometimes spied by those who ventured to the edge of the forest (for that is the view which the Cretans hold of us).

  Dryads lived in oak trees. And yet this tamarisk tree made a strange whispering, like a tongue guessed at but not quite understood, like a soft-voiced maiden from the Misty Isles, whispering at her loom; and somehow he felt companioned by her.

  “Tree,” he whispered. “Have you something to say to me?”

  The tree did not answer him, but he saw in the eyes of his mind an image of other trees, in other places, immemorial cedars on the slopes of great limestone mountains, fir trees, prickly but not wounding, and one tall oak which spread its limbs like enfolding wings.

  “My brother.” It was Minos himself, the king. “I saw you start from the palace like a wounded gazelle and followed you here.” The king was a man of thirty with a youthful, unlined face but hair as white as the snow atop Mt. Ida; diminutive like all of his race but august from his plumed headdress to his feet shod in high boots of Egyptian antelope leather. Born as blithe as his people, he had tried to retain their lightness and their laughter. But even the king of a happy people has cares. He was ready to wrestle the bull or go to the theater where maidens danced with a python in their arms, but he must also wrestle at times with the problems of ruling a populous empire whose ships sailed as far as the Misty Isles to bring back tin and dye.

  “What troubles my little brother?” he repeated, with the tenderness of an older brother who would always see the younger as little, though they were identical in height. There was also perplexity in his voice and a gentle reproach. “You come to the grove-alone. You speak to the trees, when you might better speak to your brother and king. Is it for love you pine? Never before has a maiden disdained the handsomest of men.”

  “No, my brother. It is none of these things.”

  “What then?”

  What then? It was a question without an answer. “I don’t know,” he said sadly. “I felt a kind of want.”

  “For every want there is an answer. The thirsty man drinks wine from the nearest cellar. The hungry man eats lobster from the Great Green Sea. The lovelorn man makes love to a woman old in experience but young in beauty.”

  Aeacus forced a smile. “How could I thirst or hunger or yearn after love in many-pleasured Crete? I’m acting like a foolish schoolboy who has broken his tablets and forgotten his lessons. If I could only understand…”

  The king appeared to muse. “Not so foolish, perhaps. Our ancestors were a restless people before they settled in Crete. Perhaps one is speaking through you. And I have the answer. Last night an Achaean warship raided the coast. Three farmhouses were burned. Our patrol craft rammed and sank her, but there’s still a raiding party afoot. They’ve gone inland. There’s no end to the mischief they can do.”

  “I’ll go after them. I’ll pick some men from the palace guard and-”

  “Only if you so will it. There is no need for a pri
nce to endanger himself in pursuit of pirates unless he chooses. I have already chosen a party, and the head of the palace guard can lead them.”

  “I will lead them.”

  The king smiled. Through the intertwined limbs of the feathery tamarisk trees, a sunbeam smote his hair and kindled its white to silver. He was crowned more truly than with his royal headdress. “Very well, you shall lead them. Your skill with the bulls is legend. Your dagger flashes like a dragonfly. But take care. Remember that Cretan agility and daggers are more than a match for Achaean brawn and swords-but only if you take care. You must leave your sighs in the palace, or an ill-smelling braggart will put a sword through your heart before you remember to draw your dagger.”

  “I’ve been poor company of late, haven’t I, my brother?”

  “It is true that a sad Cretan is no asset to a happy court. If you stay in your present mind, you’ll have the ladies in tears, and their cheeks will be streaked with kohl. Go to the hills and find your lost laughter.”

  The brothers embraced each other with more than ritual formality. Aeacus loved Minos above all other men. To other races, he knew-the solemn Egyptians, the vainglorious Babylonians-the Cretans seemed light and fickle, incapable of deep, enduring love, because their funerals resembled festivals and they rarely shed tears. To a Cretan, however, death was not oblivion but another country, where all that one loved, all those one loved, were restored and immortalized beneath the radiant smiles of the Great Mother and her Griffin Judge. Yes, the Cretans could love, and if they fell into love as easily as a child falls into a sand pit and climbed out with neither bruises nor scratches, it was not from fickleness, Aeacus would have argued, but abundance of affection. Aeacus himself loved thirty friends, uncountable women and even more children, his brother, himself, and most of all, the someone or something he had not yet found.

  The chase led inland, upward, away from the salt-sweet wind of the sea and toward the mountains which ridged the island like an exposed backbone. Burning farmhouses…slaughtered sheep…a rooster crowing incessantly from the top of an olive tree… Thus the marauders had branded the earth in passing. Such raids were becoming more frequent now that the Cretan ships had so many colonies to visit, so little time to guard their own coastline with its innumerable indentations, its coves and projections and rocky headlands, its perfection of concealment. But the Achaeans were still regarded as a minor annoyance, the price of empire. If anyone anticipated a wholesale invasion by those blond, awkward, sword-wielding barbarians, he kept such foolish anticipations from the king. A minor annoyance except, Aeacus mused, to the fishermen or the country folk who lost their houses and often their lives and had not the consolation of a fixed, firm faith, but only a body of shapeless superstitions in which the Underworld loomed as a dark and sinister habitat of monsters and monstrous torments.

  It was not often that Aeacus thought of fishermen and farmers. They existed; they provided the court with fish, meat, vegetables, fruit, olive oil, and wool; they performed the function designated for them in the scheme of the Great Mother. Did they love? Did they sorrow? He felt a twinge of guilt that he so rarely thought of them, then the guilt of feeling guilty when he was the king’s beloved brother embarked upon a gallant adventure, and then the happy abandonment of a race not given to introspection.

  A small child came running to them across a field. Behind him, smoke billowed from a wattle hut, hens collided with pigs and sought refuge in a torn vineyard. The child, a lean little boy of perhaps five, was weeping with uncontrollable tears. Aeacus lifted him in his arms and felt the beating heart and waited patiently till the boy could speak.

  “Mama and papa…”

  “Dead, my child?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t cry, don’t cry.” Strange, the sight of tears. No one cried in the court. Or at least they hid their tears. “My men will give them a proper burial. They’ll be waiting for you in the Underworld. The Griffin Judge will appraise them kindly and watch over them and keep them safe.”

  “Will he?” The child looked up at him with astonishment. He was ugly, almost monkeylike in his small brown leanness. In the court of Knossos, such ugliness might have repelled him. Not now. Not here. “I thought it was only the great lords like you he watched over.”

  “It’s everyone.” He spoke with assurance, but until that moment had never considered if peasants, like kings and courtiers, went to the Underworld. Was there room for them? Did they continue to serve their earthly masters?

  “And one of my men will stay with you till we come back, and then we will find a home for you closer to a town, where you will be safe.”

  The child clung to him with the tenacity of the animal he resembled. Aeacus had to disengage his fingers, gently but firmly, and hand him to one of his men. He would have liked to stay in the ruined house, bury the parents with the proper services (wherever their ghosts might roam), feed the child, and tell him stories of friendly dolphins and dog-headed fish. When I return to the court, he told himself, I will wed and have a child. Many children. Perhaps it was for them I have sighed, for my unborn children. The tree had whispered of-something.

  An hour’s march from where he had left the boy, in the midst of a rocky, pitted meadow, he met the Achaeans. The pits disgorged warriors, the rocks came to life, and the little Cretans found themselves beleaguered before they could draw their daggers.

  Draw them they did at last, and then it was an equal fight. Like blue monkeys beset by dogs, they fought the big-bodied, blond intruders, nimbly sidestepping their sword thrusts, thrusting with their own daggers, until a single Achaean limped from the field, and Aeacus stood alone among his fallen men, too tired to give chase, scarcely strong enough to support his own weight, wounded-if not to death-at least to a dazed benumbment.

  He looked at his slain friends in the midst of the field and looked around him dazedly and saw that he was not far from two great cliffs with a forest narrowed between them like a wedge. He caught the healing fragrance of bark and oak leaves and heard the faint rustling of water. Perhaps he could find a stream and bathe his wounds and return to bury his friends. Could he walk so far?

  Dimly he recognized the forest. The Country of the Beasts, where no Cretan ventured, half from fear and half from remembering a covenant made before the beginning of recorded time, before there had been any scribes to scratch history on clay tablets, that this one forest belonged inviolably and eternally to the Beasts.

  Still, the trees whispered to him: cone-shaped cypresses, smoothed and sculptured as if by the nimble fingers of the Great Mother, and tumultuous oaks whose branches seemed little jungles. “You may break the covenant,” they seemed to say. “Enter our deepest shadows and learn our mysteries and yes, our terrors, but even terror can be beautiful.”

  The sun gaped like a wound; the limbs were succoring hands which comforted and promised to heal even while they threatened to hold.

  He stumbled into the forest.

  He lay on the ground, eyes closed, poised between sleep and waking. He heard the rustle of bushes. Painfully he opened his eyes and saw a young boy, no, a young bull. No, a brawny bull-boy with silken red hair punctuated by horns. He tried to raise his hand. The boy stepped back from him with evident alarm.

  “I can’t get up,” Aeacus said. He lay in his own blood and wondered with more curiosity than fear if he were going to die. The boy circled him, approached, confirmed his helplessness, and spoke in a deep but musical Cretan.

  “Shall I help you up?”

  Aeacus deliberated. “I don’t know. I might start to bleed again. Perhaps you could first bind my wounds.”

  “Let me bind your wounds.”

  She had come so quietly that Aeacus and evidently the Minotaur boy (for that seemed to be his race) had not even heard her approach. She had come through the trees, or out of a tree, it was hard to say. She was taller than Cretan ladies and she wore, in place of their bell-shaped skirts and open bodices, a loose flowing gown the color of
leaves and a necklace of orange berries. Her hair was green like her gown, swept above her head in a knot, and held by a silver pin in the shape of a grasshopper. Her ears, thus revealed, were delicately pointed. The boy looked at her with surprise and doubt.

  “We can take him to my house,” he said.

  “Mine is closer, Eunostos. But first I must clean his wounds.” She knelt beside him and touched damp moss to a cut on his shoulder. The relief was immediate, but whether from the moss or the administering hand, he could not be sure.

  “And what shall I do?” asked the Minotaur boy, seemingly aggrieved at being replaced as the rescuer of this wounded stranger. Aeacus liked him.

  “After he has rested,” she said, “you shall help me carry him to my house. We shall make a litter from sticks and vines and carry him as hunters carry a stag, though much more gently, of course.”

  “What is your name?” Aeacus asked.

  “I am Kora, the Dryad.”

  “And where is your house?”

  “In a tree. Where else?” she laughed.

  Aeacus closed his eyes, assured of his rescue and unashamed of his helplessness, since there is nothing more welcome to helpful people than those who need to be helped. It was not long until the girl and the Minotaur boy had fashioned the litter and his body swayed to their gliding steps as they carried him into the forest, into the Country of the Beasts.

  In spite of his wounds, he did not sigh.

  CHAPTER IX

  In Eunostos’s absence, I greeted his guests and tried to put them at ease. Here was Partridge, heading at once for the skin of fermented onion juice and avoiding the other guests with the zeal of one whose conversation was limited to “huh” and “can’t” and “don’t know.” Here was Bion, hovering at the door as though he were not sure of his right to mingle with the higher orders of Beast; after all, there were those who considered him a mere domestic. I took him at once to the largest table and soon he was clutching a loaf of wheaten bread between his forelegs and happily bobbing his head. And Moschus-surely I would have trouble with Moschus, who always arrived drunk and began his amorous advances with his salutations. Tonight he was drunker than usual and accompanied by an uninvited guest, no friend of Eunostos, a frowsy young Dryad of about fifty.