“Girls,” she cried. “We’ve found a pet.” A log fell to the ground. Bodies no longer swished in the vat of wax. The ghost of a smile flickered into several of the faces, and the others lost their petulance.
“And I think he’s brought us a gift.”
Bion reached in the pouch which he wore around his neck and removed a bronze mirror in the shape of a swan. The worker accepted the mirror from his two forelegs and looked at the back, which was figured with winged dove goddesses who might almost have been Thriae, though all of them were beautiful enough to be queens. Obviously the poor worker was not familiar with the function of a mirror; she took it for a useless bauble, and beauty without practicality had, in the past, meant little to her. But turning the object in her hands, she saw the polished surface on the other side and caught her own reflection. Though she had looked at her sisters for years, she had clearly not imagined that she herself was quite so dour and sexless and altogether repugnant. She flung her hands to her face. One of her sisters retrieved the mirror, which had fallen to the ground, and discarded it with similar revulsion. It was not long before all twenty workers had seen themselves framed and branded as unbeautiful in this appalling gift.
At first it appeared that Bion would have to flee for his life. But Eunostos had anticipated just such a poisonous reaction and counseled Bion to arm himself with the antidote. The Telchin withdrew a vial of carmine from his pouch, flicked off the lid, dipped an antenna to the red cosmetic cream, and rubbed a generous portion onto the gray, leathery face of the worker nearest to him. She stood stonily while he made the application; she seemed to be deciding whether to hit him or give him a chance to redeem his first gift with a second and more appropriate one.
He held the much-discarded mirror to her face. She grimaced and started to knock it out of his feet. But wait-Who was this rosy-checked stranger grimacing back at her? She took the mirror between her trembling hands; she stared, she smiled the radiant smile of a woman whose ugliness, for the first time, has been ameliorated to mere plainness.
“Sisters,” she cried. “Look at me!” The sisters looked at her and liked what they saw. One of them snatched the vial from Bin’s willing legs and painted her own cheeks so generously that she resembled a Babylonian whore (much the most whorish, I am told by the Centaurs).
The vial was empty, eighteen workers remained unbeautiful. Bion pointed his feeler.
There, there, in the juniper trees, just beyond the clearing!
Work was forgotten; the workers in a body, running and skipping and flying, pursued the Telchin with raucous cries and, wonder of wonders, found him displaying not one but twenty vials of carmine, each with a mirror, as a shopkeeper displays his wares. But these wares appeared to be free.
The drones, meanwhile, had lolled on the edge of the clearing and feigned indifference to these foolish women and their ungainly pet, but now they stirred to life. They sighed and groaned to their feet; with studied indifference, they followed the tumult. Perhaps there was something for them. Sunlord paused to retrieve the original mirror and admire his reflection.
“What’s going on?” The cry was shrill and not in the least melodious. Saffron had emerged from the hive. “What’s happened to my workers?” She flew after them like a chicken hawk after chickens and landed among them like a particularly ravenous hawk.
Eunostos crept out of his trunk. There was no one between him and the hive.
Saffron, who had no need for carmine on her own honied skin, began to scatter the vials as if they had been clay images of forbidden gods.
“Idle adornments,” she shrilled. “I turn my back and you paint yourselves like wenches. Who’s going to finish the hive?”
She began to lay about her with her little fists. She kicked and cursed and stamped on vials of carmine. She bent a mirror against a trunk. Nor did she spare the drones.
“I don’t expect you to work, you good-for-nothings, but you don’t have to encourage the workers to your own idleness.” A knee in a soft midriff. A stinging blow across a plump cheek.
But what was this? The whirlwind ceased to whirl, the dust settled. The wounded could nurse their wounds; the winded could catch their breath.
There was more than carmine and mirrors, it seemed. How had she overlooked it in her descent? A chest brimming with necklaces and armbands, rings and seal-stones! (In truth, she had not overlooked it. Bion and several friends had hastily dragged it out of the bushes while she was ranting against her workers.) Suspicious, she thrust a hand into the seeming treasure. She lifted a necklace in five tiers of jade and rose quartz and tentatively placed it around her neck. Then the innate suspicion of her race and position and her own grasping self reared its Hydra head. Something for nothing? Impossible. What did this eight-legged fellow expect from her? Wax? Honey? Perhaps herself in some barbarous interracial marriage?
Eunostos had anticipated and prepared the Telchin for just such a question. Bion pointed to her anklet, a worthless piece of tin masquerading as silver. So that was it. He had come to trade. She pretended to consider and reconsider. She feigned reluctance as she bent to unclasp it. She fondled and caressed it, presented, withdrew, and finally relinquished it in exchange for a necklace which, in the slave markets of Thebes, would have fetched a dozen stalwart Nubians or twenty nubile maidens. Then she reached into the chest and seized a tiara encrusted with amethysts and chrysolites.
Eunostos streaked for the entrance to the hive.
The roof and walls were translucent; in the filtered light of the afternoon sun, he could see his way even in rooms where there were not any candelabra to guide him. His problem was where to be guided. He did not know which passage to follow, where to twist, turn, reverse or advance. He only knew that this labyrinth was a prison as well as a home, a workshop, a place of storage, and that one of its rooms was a cell with Kora and me as its inmates. He skulked by a room where a worker was mixing pollen with honey. He ducked out of a corridor to allow two workers, a patrol, he supposed, to pass without seeing him. It was not easy to hide his six-foot bulk in so unfamiliar a place, nor to keep from scraping his horns on ceilings accommodated to the four feet of the average Thria.
Then, the scent, faint but undeniable: the loved, remembered scent of green foliage and crisp brown bark which permeates our gowns, indeed our very skins. Remember, Eunostos’s mother had been a Dryad; he had loved that scent from his infancy.
He dared not call, he could only follow his nostrils, and fortunately they were keen. They began to quiver as he neared his destination. His tail lashed eagerly. He restrained a bellow. Then-his nostrils proclaimed, his heart affirmed-only a door stood between him and his beloved.
“Kora,” he whispered loudly. “Zoe!”
We heard him as if he were in the room with us. “Lower your voice, Eunostos, and raise the bolt. There are no guards in here.”
“There are out here!” It was not Eunostos’s voice; it was the rasping buzz of a worker guard.
A strugg1e, a flutter, a bellow, a flurry of cries I can only call cackles. The sound of a frenziedly resistant body being dragged down corridors. It must have taken at least six of them-all the guards in the house-to overpower him.
“Zoe, Kora, they’ve got me! They’ve trussed a net!”
The acorns had renewed my strength. At Eunostos’s call, I was the wolf whose cub has been caught in a hunter’s net. I was the whale whose calf is threatened by sharks. I was the Mother Earth bereft of her young. I raged, I thundered, I rammed against the door with my not inconsiderable might until it creaked and threatened to yield.