“Kora, help me!” But she was already at my side and her additional strength-I would never think her frail again-snapped the bolt, which was only wood, and swung open the door. There were no guards left to stop us. We followed the sounds of the scuffle and bounded out of the house.
An alarming sight awaited us. Saffron, adorned in the many-tiered necklace, bedecked in the amethyst and chrysolite tiara, was returning to the hive, and the painted workers were fluttering dutifully but dourly after her. She saw her guards; she saw Eunostos; she did not yet see Kora and me.
“Into the pot with him!” she shouted to the guards. But he was heavy and still struggling in spite of the net; they had to heave and toil for every inch they raised him. Creature of earth, he fought to retain the earth. Their wings were shredded, their faces by his hooves.
You might not expect agility from a woman of my dimensions. You would underestimate me. After all, I have been climbing trees, with or without ladders, for three hundred and sixty years, and amplitude is not to be confused with obesity. In the twinkling of a firefly, I snatched Saffron out of the air and flung her into the vat. Before she could extricate herself, I scrambled onto the rim, seized a ladle, and swatted her on the head. Then I forced her face under the liquid.
“Let Eunostos go — or I will drown your queen,” I shouted to the six guards.
The guards stared at me with disbelief. Saffron momentarily revived, sputtered to the surface, and disappeared again beneath my ladle.
They released Eunostos and let him fall the few feet they had managed to raise him from the ground. Flying in a circle around the vat, roseate still in carmine, they had ceased to look glum. They did not look fearful; in fact, they looked downright hopeful. After all, Saffron could not take away their mirrors as long as she remained in the vat.
By now Eunostos had struggled free of his net. He started to clamber up beside me. “Zoe, jump to the ground. I’ll take your place.”
“Get Kora to safety,” I cried. “They won’t hurt me while I have their queen. But I can’t stay here forever.”
“You won’t have to,” he shouted. “Moschus. Partridge. Bring on the Centaurs!”
I have never seen those horse-men, manes flying, hooves clattering in disciplined unison, gallop with more sublimity. Say what you will about their infidelities (and I am not one to say anything), they are matchless warriors. And Chiron himself had come to lead them. Chiron, the oldest Beast in the Country, five hundred years of wars and travels and wisdom and sheer, white-maned heroism. With Saffron to lead them, the workers might have attacked and resisted, flung their bamboo spears from the air or dived like eagles to claw at the Centaurs’ eyes. But Saffron was still in the wax, unconscious. I ladled her out of the vat and flung her onto the ground, and the leaderless workers remained unresisting (and perhaps secretly jubilant).
I jumped to the ground and saw that Eunostos, with Kora beside him, was conferring with Chiron. They talked briefly and then Chiron advanced to address the conquered Thriae. Always forgiving when it came to women and perhaps more forgiving now that the workers had painted themselves into at least a semblance of womanhood, he announced at some length, with the stylistic flourishes and dramatic pauses characteristic of his race and suitable to his station, that neither workers nor drones would be punished, since they had only followed the orders of their queen, but that they must leave the forest by the following day.
“But your queen must remain to be tried before a court of Beasts,” he concluded. “She is an evil woman who has almost caused three deaths. Moschus, bring her before me.”
“Can’t.”
“Moschus!”
“Not unless you want her like this.”
Moschus pointed; the rest of us looked. And there lay Saffron in a sheath of wax, which had hardened over her body like a shroud.
She was becomingly but unmistakably dead.
You may think me a hard, merciless woman, but she had threatened Kora and me and wanted to drown Eunostos in the vat of wax. I have never spared pity for the pitiless, especially when they die through their own misdeeds.
“I know just the place for her,” I said, lifting her now somewhat weightier bulk and reentering that hateful hive.
In a deserted hive, in the hexagonal central room, there is a pedestal which is no longer without its statue. Bear Girls and young Centaurs often visit the place out of curiosity. The golden skin of Saffron shines through the wax and you might mistake her for a figure carved from amber. She is much more beautiful than in life, even with her wildly tangled hair and her staring eyes. They call her the Golden Gorgon.
When I emerged from the hive, Eunostos was pleading with Kora. He had knelt to her, all six feet of matchless Minotaur, a glory of mane and horns, of youth and might and tenderness; and she, a white lotus bending to touch his head.
“And you’ll marry me then and come to live in my stump?”
“Yes, Eunostos. You saved my life.”
I looked into her eyes but I did not see Eunostos. I saw her dream. I saw death.
PART TWO
CHAPTER VIII
Eunostos’s trunk resounded with preparations for the wedding. He had wanted to gather flowers and twine them above the door to his bamboo house, but no-Kora did not like them broken from their plants. The roses and columbine remained in his garden; the yellow gagea in his favorite meadow. But at least the Bears of Artemis had garlanded his windows with chains of black-eyed Susans and formed a big red heart of the berries above his door.
Eunostos himself, with help from me and the Centaurs, had prepared the feast. Tables groaned beneath baked dormice and roasted woodpeckers, honey cakes and loaves of wheaten bread sprinkled with sunflower seeds. And poor, fat Partridge had fermented a beverage of onion grass which Eunostos had accepted graciously but carefully segregated from the skins of wine and beer. The air was sweet not only with the delicacies of the table, but with fragrances from the underground workshop of the Telchins: a hint of myrrh, and intimation of sandarac, an essence of lavender, marjoram, and thyme.
Eunostos waited: it was not yet time for his friends to arrive, for friends and groom to fetch the bride from her tree, for Chiron to officiate over the ceremonies, for the wedding to be consummated in the bamboo house while we, the guests, roistered in the garden and shouted bawdy jests through the window.
Eunostos waited and, since most bridegrooms are as nervous as a Dryad at the sight of an ax, I waited with him.
“Eunostos,” I said, noticing the twitch in his tail, “it’s not as if you lacked experience. A Bee queen and all those Dryads-you haven’t a thing to fear.”
“But Kora is so-ethereal,” he said.
I was getting a little tired of Kora’s ethereality. “Treat her like any other woman. It’s just what she needs.”
“Eunostos, Zoe, did you hear the news?” It was Partridge, puffing more than usual.
“How do we know if we’ve heard it unless you tell us?”
“A Man, a Cretan. Right here in the country. Wandered in between the cliffs. Wounded, too!”
“He’s broken the covenant,” I said. “Chiron will be furious.”
“He’s probably in a daze,” Eunostos said, doubtless remembering his own recent wounds. “Zoe, will you stay here to greet my guests? I’m going to help him.”
“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.