“Don’t look so angry!” she teased. “You look as if you would like to butt me. Did I wake you up, dear boy?”
“Yes, you did.”
“Never mind. You’ll sleep like a drone after we’ve had our little visit.”
She sat down beside him on the couch, touching his leg with her thigh. The thigh felt silken beneath its thin silk tunic. He tried to contract himself away from her touch, but he was already pressing into the reeds of the walls. Perhaps resignation was indicated under the circumstances.
“You have a lot of hair on your chest to be so young,” she remarked. “It’s rather becoming, you know. Our drones never grow hair except on their heads. The only thing you can say for them is that they never get bald.”
“We’re born hairy. It keeps us warm in the winter. We don’t get bald either. What do you want?”
“To visit, as I said. To talk. To become acquainted with the last Minotaur. But I shouldn’t imagine you’ll always be the last. You’ll have sons and grandsons, and one day there will be a whole new tribe of Minotaurs. That is, if you choose the proper mate. One whose fertility matches your virility.”
“Zoe isn’t here now.”
“You’re not listening. I didn’t come to see Zoe, I came to see you.”
“I’m trying to listen. But you’re sitting on my hoof. And how did you know I was here?”
“From Zoe. And Kora.”
“Then you must be holding them prisoners!” Angrily he swung his arm and knocked her onto the floor.
She resumed her place on the couch as if she had fallen by accident. Her rueful laugh was like bells with copper tongues, sweet but metallic. Kora had laughed like wind chimes. “I see that no amenities are necessary between us, my dear. Yes, I am holding your two friends in my hive-unwilling guests, you could say-and it lies in your power to rescue them.”
He glared at her. “What do I have to do?”
“Eunostos, I must tell you a sad truth. My daughters are diligent workers, but unintelligent and unresourceful. It has taken them seven days to build the hive, which is not yet finished. I myself have given them a long, proud lineage. I can trace my ancestry back to the days when the Yellow Men were living in crude stone huts and Cretans were cowering in caves. But the males of my tribe-well, to call them Beasts is a monumental exaggeration. The very best of them-Sunlord, for example-is a poor specimen of bestiality. At the next nuptial flight, I’m not even sure that I shall be able to conceive, and a queen who doesn’t conceive is dethroned.”
“In other words, you need a husband from another race.”
“Precisely.”
“Well, you might consider a Centaur.”
She shuddered. “Too large. Too many legs.”
“A Paniscus? They’re the right size for you.”
“Odorous. Onion grass, don’t you know.”
“Just who did you have in mind?”
Impatience flickered behind her smile. “Don’t be dense, dear boy.”
“Me?”
“Who else?”
“For a stud,” he muttered. “Like the Cretan bulls who are bred for the ring.”
“Stud? Husband, you mean. Didn’t I speak of a nuptial flight? Or lover, if the notion of matrimony frightens you. Yes, Eunostos, you are to sire my next eggs. I spied you from the air when I first arrived in this land, and you seemed to me as a dragonfly to a rose. As a tiger moth to a night-blooming cereus. As a-”
“And that’s all I have to do to rescue Kora and Zoe?”
“That’s all,” she snapped. The Thriae do not like to be interrupted in their figures of speech. “I have no other reason to hold them.”
“Set them free first.”
She pouted and turned her back. “You make it sound like a crude bargain. Here I’ve swallowed my pride and come to your arms like a common little Dryad, and you want guarantees of my good faith.”
“At least give me proof you’re holding them.”
She proudly produced the Centaur pendant. “I believe this horsy fellow is a close relative of your dear one.”
He nodded with reluctant recognition. “Kora’s pendant. You do have them, then.” He did not think to ask for guarantees of our safety. It never occurred to him that Saffron might have murdered or be in the process of murdering us. His bluff male heart could not conceive of such perfidy in a female.
“After all, what have you to lose?”
After all, what did he have to lose? He did not know the traditional fate of a drone.
“Am I so unlovely?” she continued. “Are my wings uncouth, my color disagreeable? Is this any way to treat a stranger in your land?”
“You’re a bit skinny,” he said, “and you must be a hundred or so.”
“If you think me plain, you ought to see my workers. Why they don’t even know how to paint their faces!”
“You’ve never taught them?”
“It might distract them from their work. As for my age, I am a hundred exactly without a so. This Zoe creature, I believe, is in her three hundreds.”
“You’ve held up well at that,” he admitted. “You’re sure I won’t tear your wings?”
“As sure as I am that the earth is flat and supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”
At least she knew her science.
With her small but insistent hand, she pushed him onto his back. Dear Zeus, he thought. After my bout with the Panisci, am I equal to pleasuring a Bee queen? He took a deep breath and flexed his muscles. He lashed his tail-the part which was not under him-until it cracked like a whip. He felt a touch of soreness in his flanks but otherwise Zoe’s remedy and a restful sleep had worked a miracle. He ought to prove adequate, perhaps competent, possibly proficient. True, he had promised to wait for Kora at least a year. But it was for her sake that he was making his sacrifice. Surely she would understand, approve and appreciate.
Saffron sat beside him and, holding both of his horns, stared into his eyes. Then, with a hand no larger than a maple leaf, she rumpled his mane.
“Never trim it, my boy. It becomes you too well. And such large, lovely ears! They’re translucent in this light. Like mother-of-pearl.” For Kora’s sake no sacrifice was too great. If necessary, he decided, he could endure further sacrifices.
First she was lying beside him. Then she was in his arms. Then her little tongue was flickering over his lips and her hands were teasing the hair on his chest into curls. There was something, after all, to be said for a skinny woman.
She had invited; now it was time to accept the invitation. When a lady opens the door and offers the hospitality of a warm hearth, does a man stand shivering in the snow? He entered the house with alacrity and, being a gracious guest, not without gifts…
Smiling, she took the gifts and, still smiling, she bit his ear. He slapped a hand to the bite and felt the dampness of blood. A love nip, he supposed. But why had her teeth met with quite such determined force?
She kicked him. A love kick? Hardly. He must have angered her. Perhaps she felt that he had treated her frail little body like that of a buxom Dryad. Perhaps, accustomed to her drones and in spite of what she said about them, she had wanted mincing caresses instead of stalwart embraces. His experience with women did not extend to Bee queens.
“Saffron,” he started to apologize. “I’m used to the Dryads. If you’ll just tell me how-”
She spat in his face. She became a hybrid of hybrids-griffin, hydra, chimera-and her body entwined him like a python, her arms constricted like tentacles, her thighs resembled a snapping sea turtle. Together they tumbled off the couch and momentarily his big frame was airborne as Saffron fluttered her wings with a frenzy of passion or anger or whatever possessed her.
That’s it, he thought. She wants a nuptial flight! But I’m just not equipped to satisfy her.