“He’d get a stomach ache and keep you awake all night with his crying.”
“Then you tell me what to feed him. I’ll make a list on a palm leaf.”
“Eunostos, I believe you’re serious.”
“I am,” he said shyly.
“You can be my baby’s Zeus-father. How would you like that? You can help me look after him when”-and her voice quavered a little-“when Aeacus goes on his explorations.”
After that, Eunostos told everybody that he was going to become a Zeus-father. He built another room onto his house (“for my Zeus-baby”) and began to make toys instead of furniture in his workshop. Aeacus showed him how to make a toy glider out of willow rods, and Bion brought him some clay to model animals-bear and wolf and ibex-and with the help of Kora’s loom he stitched a little pointed cap with a woodpecker’s feather which he said should fit a girl as well as a boy. He much preferred a boy, since girls were too breakable, but wanted to be prepared for a disappointment.
Aeacus, on the other hand, was very quiet about his impending fatherhood. Everyone knew that he loved children, cubs, calves, anything small and helpless. In that respect he was like Eunostos. And no one doubted that he would like a child of his own-not even me, and I was never one to admire him. But somehow he seemed more troubled than expectant. I wondered if he really wanted his maiden, his goddess, to become a mother. Like her, he had loved an image, and now the image was about to change and grow maternal and divide the love she could give him. Also, when a man knows that he is free to leave a place and return to his own country he is often content to stay. But when he is bound by children as well as a wife, he may grow fretful and homesick. A Cretan prince reared in a palace was never intended to live in a forest with a green-haired family.
It was a girl. Her name was Thea, as Kora had promised. Myrrha was so distraught that I had no trouble replacing her as midwife.
“Fancy being a grandmother,” she kept sighing. “Do you think it will frighten off my suitors?” I insisted that she wait downstairs with Aeacus and Eunostos until I had bathed the child in myrrh-water and placed her in Kora’s arms. Such a grave little face, looking at the new world and already making judgments! Dear Zeus, I thought. Not another silent one! At least she looks healthy.
“Come on up,” I called down the ladder.
Eunostos and Aeacus clambered up the ladder, with Myrrha close behind them. At the last minute, Eunostos remembered that father and grandmother come before Zeus-father and waited his turn to greet the mother and child.
Kora smiled up happily from the couch as Aeacus scooped the girl in his arms. The delivery had been quick and almost painless for her.
“She has your mouth but my ears,” she said proudly.
Bewilderment, quickly replaced with a smile, flickered across Aeacus’s face, almost as if he had not expected a daughter with pointed ears and green hair. Almost as if he had fathered a kind of beautiful freak. Don’t misunderstand me. He loved his daughter from the moment of her birth-more than he ever loved Kora-but I think that she made him feel the permanence of his exile from Knossos. By choice he had wed a Beast and settled among her people. But had he the right to rear his daughter as a Beast, in a tree instead of a palace? No poppy-shaped skirts for her, nor strolls beside the Great Green Sea with a saffron parasol nor an afternoon at the bull ring. She was born a princess; she could have become a queen, since women have often held the throne at Knossos. But here she was among beings with tails or hooves or pointed ears, and branded as one of them by her own ears. You understand that this is only a conjecture. Aeacus never confided in me. But Cretans are easier to fathom than Egyptians. They are sometimes subtle but rarely inscrutable. They sometimes smile when they wish to cry or nod when they disagree, but I could read Aeacus like a half-opened scroll.
Fortunately, no one else seemed to notice his hesitation. Eunostos and Myrrha were looking rapturously at the baby, a piquant creature in spite of her grave countenance, with generous green hair (but then, Dryad babies are never born hairless).
Eunostos could no longer remain in the background. “Let me hold her, Aeacus. Kora, can’t I hold her? I won’t drop her. I’m her Zeus-father, remember?” He cradled the child in his arms and the grave, troubled look left her face, and she began to smile. Who would have thought that such a big, rough-handed boy, without any brothers and sisters for practice, could have held a baby so gently that she would give her first smile?
“Sleep, little Thea,” he whispered. “There won’t be any Striges in your night. You have two fathers to look after you.” Then he began to hum an old lullaby: “Sleep, little Dryad, sleep in your tree. Listen! The wind sings silverly.”
Aeacus was not looking at his baby. He was looking at Eunostos, for the first time with unmistakable jealousy.
CHAPTER XI
Time passed even in the timeless Country of the Beasts, though as imperceptibly as the dripping of a water clock. For three winters, snow fell on the mountaintops, melted with spring into a hundred silver freshets which cobwebbed the forest like a giant spider web, dried with summer to stream beds which grass and clover and violets hurried to green, as if dry beds had no place in so rich a country.
And there were changes among the Beasts. Eunostos was eighteen, a strapping young Minotaur who toiled from cockcrow to lamp-lighting time in his workshop but, I am pleased to say, resumed the wenching which his unfortunate courtship of Kora had interrupted. I myself had enjoyed six new lovers, five Centaurs and one precocious and surprisingly well-mannered Paniscus. And my tree, aside from looking a trifle scarred from the depredations of woodpeckers, thrust its vigorous limbs to the sunny skies and showed no signs of decay or decline. Bion had left his nest and come to work in Eunostos’s workshop, where he labored at his own table and cut gemstones or embellished Eunostos’s furniture with mosaics and intricate workings in copper and bronze. Only Partridge never seemed to change, the eternal adolescent, chewing his onion grass and trotting after Eunostos, who still loved him and pretended that he was the brightest chap in the country.
A second child, Icarus, had been born to Kora less than a year after the birth of Thea. Eunostos had asked to adopt him and, being refused, came even more frequently to visit at her tree. Kora’s beauty was undiminished but different. There was a greater fullness to her body; her alabaster cheeks were faintly flushed, like roses reflected in snow. If mystery had gone from her, even for Aeacus, familiarity had given her a becoming softness, and she seemed indistinguishable from loom and cradle and brazier. As for Aeacus, he kept his own counsel. He still hunted with Eunostos, though not so often as in the early days. If he loved the maternal Kora less than he had loved the maiden, at least he was unfailingly courteous to her, and no one could question his love for his children, especially Thea, whom he adored with the adoration which he had once reserved for her mother. But his walks in the forest had become a frequent occurrence and I, for one, wished that one day he would keep on walking until he reached Knossos.
It was morning. Eunostos sat with Kora on the porch. Icarus and Thea lay side by side in a large cradle, a product of Eunostos’s workshop. Eunostos was talking; at the same time he was gently rocking the cradle with his hoof and watching the babies with the corner of his eye. Icarus was gurgling happily, plump as a robin, but Thea was looking uncomfortable, if not quite disgruntled.
Eunostos was eating raisins in large handfuls and when Kora turned her head, he would slip a few to Icarus, who was not supposed to eat them, said Kora.
But Eunostos knew better, since his own mother had fed him raisins as soon as he was weaned. Thea, on the other hand, grimaced whenever he made her an offer.