Chiron had come and, finding no bride to marry, returned to his compound with injured dignity. The Bears of Artemis had long since retired to their hollow logs and bed. Moschus, his new conquest caught in a tangle of arms and legs which might charitably be called an embrace, was snoring among the vegetables. Partridge, rotund with onion juice, drowsed under one of the tables. Bion was gathering fallen scraps to hoard in his workshop.
Eunostos scratched Bion’s head. “You’ll look after things while I go to see Kora, won’t you, old friend?” He was taking her a basket of grapes.
Bion’s look was questioning: shall I come too and carry the basket?
“No, I’d better go alone. Too many of us might disturb the Cretan.” He looked behind him at the fallen garlands, the swaying lanterns which lit only sleep, the revelers who had reveled without a bride. I won’t come back until I come with Kora, he thought.
It was early morning when he arrived at Kora’s tree. Myrrha, who had just entertained and dismissed a Centaur on his way home from the feast, met him with a sleepy greeting.
“Kora sat up all night with the Cretan. She’s still awake and you can go right up to her room.”
He found that she had propped Aeacus’s head on a cushion and was feeding him a warm posset of fennel leaves steeped in sparrow broth. She and Aeacus turned to Eunostos when he entered the room. Aeacus smiled. There was a gash in his left leg which Kora had dressed with moss, and several scars on his chest, and one above his right eye. He must have been in pain but you would not have known from his smile.
“It’s the Minotaur boy,” he cried. “I’ve wanted to thank you but I’ve been asleep.” He started to rise from the couch, but Kora pushed him back against the cushion.
“I brought you some grapes,” said Eunostos to Kora, then to her guest. “For you too, sir.”
She stood above the couch like a warm green flame; her cheeks were flushed and her hair, usually swept above her head, tumbled over her shoulders in a sweet abandonment. Strangely, she was crying. No sobs shook her body, but tears streamed down her cheeks. She was radiance troubled with shadows.
She may be crying for the Cretan, Eunostos told himself, and looked at Aeacus to see if his condition had worsened since they had found him in the forest. But he looked much better than he had the previous day; he was clearly improving, in spite of his multiple wounds, and enjoying good spirits, except that he too saw Kora’s tears and his smile became astonishment and then dismay. He caught and pressed her hand and she gripped his fingers with a frantic yearning. And then Eunostos knew that she was not crying for Aeacus but for him, because she had found her dream.
He dropped the basket of grapes and stumbled down the stairs.
“Eunostos,” Myrrha greeted him as he flung aside the curtain in the door. “You hardly spoke on your way up. Isn’t he ‘a handsome young man? Eunostos-”
When I left Kora’s tree, I did not return to Eunostos’s wedding party. How could I tell the groom that his bride had forsaken him for a Man? Kora must tell him; Kora must make her peace with him. I returned to my tree and tried to sleep. I alternated between tossing on my couch and walking to a window to look at the moondusted oak trees, Kora’s faintly visible at some distance, and the field of flowers where Eunostos had written his poems and dreamed of a Dryad to love him.
Then, the sun was a faint presentiment behind the trees, and a creeping of yellow back into the flowers, and belated sleep for me.
Someone touched my shoulder. “Zoe.”
“Go away. I just got to sleep.”
“Zoe, please!”
“Eunostos!”
He fell to his knees and buried his head in my bosom. I ran my hand through his mane. “You’ve come from Kora.”
“Yes.”
“And she told you.”
“What am I to do, Aunt Zoe?”
“Wait, my dear.” I had no wisdom for him; only platitudes; only a tenderness which welled into my heart like hot water into a Cretan bath, wounding even while it warmed.
“For what?”
“Another Kora. A worthier Kora.”
“I’m never going to love again.”
“Everyone does. If they let themselves.”
“You do, Aunt Zoe, but you’re different from me. You can fall out of love.”
“I don’t fall out of love, I just add one love onto another and keep them all, and so will you.”
“No,” he said. “There’s only Kora.”
How could I tell him that what he felt for her was as sharply hurtful as the thrust of a Thriae spear but not beyond healing? The Kora he loved lived only in his poems; it was his misfortune that he expected her soul to equal her beauty. Her soul was not unbeautiful, but being young had not had time to match her face.
“We’ll see, my dear. Meanwhile, do you want to stay with your Aunt Zoe awhile? You don’t have to go back to that lonely house yet. Bion and I will clean it for you and have it waiting.”
“I’d better go back. It’s all I’ve got.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “you have more than you think,” but he had already left the room, and I heard my ladder sagging under his weight, and the thump of his hooves on the ground, and the slow, sad steps toward his house.
No one has ever seen me cry. I choose my times.
Three days had passed. Eunostos sat at his workbench with a saw in his hand. But the saw was idle, the hand did not move, and the chair which he had begun before the proposed wedding remained a mere beginning. Bion prodded him with a feeler. It was Partridge who had brought him material for the chair as a wedding gift: tanned oxhide to be stretched across a framework of willow rods. It was Bion who had brought him the tools. Partridge had gone in search of his dinner, since Eunostos would not allow him to graze in his garden, but Bion had remained to keep him company. Eunostos stroked his head and never noticed that his friend was too miserable to wave his antennae.
Someone called his name. Someone was wandering in his garden and looking for him, but did not seem to know the location of the workshop, whose entrance was hidden by a blackberry thicket to discourage Panisci or Thriae. He had better confront his visitor before his roses were trampled.
He climbed the earthen staircase and stepped into the sunshine. It was so bright, after the pale lanterns of his workshop, that he blinked, and only then did he recognize the visitor.
Aeacus.
“I thought you were wounded,” he growled.
“I was-I still am. This is my first day out of the tree. I wanted to talk to you.”
At the sight of his limp, Eunostos stifled an urge to butt him. He did not want to talk to Aeacus. He did not want to look at his kindly smile, at the kind violet eyes. He wished that Aeacus had looked smug and condescending, or arrogant and boastful, and then he might have butted him in spite of the limp.
But Aeacus breathed heavily and leaned his weight on a trellis where wild roses were twining tentative feelers.
“You’re about to knock down my trellis. Kora wouldn’t like that. She says roses have souls.”
“Forgive me. Kora should know.” His pain was evident when he tried to stand without support. The wound in his leg had hardly begun to heal.
Eunostos pointed toward his house. “There are chairs inside.”
“It looks like a crown of bamboo. Light and airy and graceful. Did you build it yourself?”
“Yes, but the Centaurs brought me the bamboo.”
They sat facing each other, silent, and Aeacus lost his smile. He looked sad and perplexed, though his bronzed little body glittered in his murex-purple loincloth, with its silver clasp in the shape of a halcyon bird.
At first they carefully avoided a direct discussion of Kora.
“Chiron is going to let me stay in the forest,” Aeacus said. “I’ve broken the covenant but only by accident. However, if I stay, it must be for good. I can’t go back to Knossos and expect to return here. People might want to follow me, and where would the covenant be?”