“And you, Zoe?”
I gave her a look which would have wilted the wings of a Bee queen. “You know he’s always considered me his aunt.”
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “It’s just that I know how-generous you are. Well, I’m sure my visit won’t change his habits. It’s Icarus I mainly want him to see. After all, he’s the child’s Zeus-father. And to tell the truth, I want Icarus to see him. You’d be amazed that such a little child could miss anyone so much.”
“I wouldn’t be amazed at all, when that someone is Eunostos. As a matter of fact, I’ve noticed that Icarus has looked a bit peaked for the last two months. Now he’s not even gurgling. He looks almost like”-I started to say Thea. “Almost subdued. Yes, I’ll keep Thea for you, but she’s starting to look uncomfortable, as many times as she’s been here.”
“Tell her a story about the Bears of Artemis. The nice ones, not Phlebas’s band. I won’t be long.”
“As long as you’re going, you might as well stay awhile. Otherwise, you’ll disappoint Eunostos.” But she had already gone.
She entered the gate, unlatched as usual, and paused before she lifted the door-hanging to his house. She wanted to see him entirely too much. Perhaps, she thought, if I turn very quietly and tiptoe out the gate-It was too late. Icarus emitted a happy chortle.
There was nothing to do but enter the room. Apparently Eunostos had been kneeling beside his fountain to feed his turtle, the one with which he had replaced his wedding present to Kora and Aeacus, but he was already on his hooves and starting for the door to meet her.
He had dropped a platter of baked flies in the water (he trapped them on parchment dipped in honey) and he looked at her and Icarus as if they had returned from an audience in the Underworld with the Griffin Judge.
“I couldn’t bring both children,” she explained. “Zoe is staying with Thea.”
He lifted Icarus from the quiver and hugged him so tightly that she thought: he is going to break a rib.
But Icarus returned the hug with equal enthusiasm and refused to leave Eunostos’s arms. For an instant she envied her child. There was such a wonderful reciprocity between him and Eunostos: a spontaneous and unstinting affection. And the thought, quickly erased from her mind, prodded her, goaded her: except for my dream, except for my dream… Now she did not even permit herself an embrace. It might be misunderstood; it might recall the rejected thought.
“It’s been two months,” she said. It was not a reproach-Aeacus after all was to blame-but a lament.
“And two days.”
“Eunostos, let’s sit in the garden. Did the rosebush grow after you fed it the potash?”
“It’s the biggest in the garden now.” He was patting Icarus and tousling his hair; at the same time he was staring at Kora with an ardor which he could no longer mask as brotherliness.
There were mossy chairs among the columbine, their legs entwined with creepers and looking as if they too might have grown in that garden of sweet familiarity. Side by side they sat in the sun-warm morning and the inarticulateness of their long separation was like a gate between them. Even Icarus seemed to feel their constraint and sighed in Eunostos’s arms.
“Is it better in your tree now that I don’t come? I mean-”
“You mean is Aeacus more content? I don’t know, Eunostos. I don’t think so. He doesn’t talk to me very often. He smiles and nods and rocks Thea in her cradle and then goes hunting or to call on Chiron. Are you-are you happy with your girls?”
“Oh, I make do,” he said, shuffling his hoof.
“Do you bring them here?”
“No.” The answer was abrupt and decisive. “I built this house for you.” He hesitated. “Do you still love him, Kora?”
“Yes. I want to be with him even when he’s silent and I can’t read his silence.” It was true, in a way, and something else was also true. It was not meant to be spoken, but her tongue, silent too many years, betrayed her now. “But I love you too, and so do the children!”
“Icarus maybe.”
“And Thea, if she only had the chance.”
She took his hand. Such a big, rough hand, and yet what slender fingers he had! It was no wonder that he could make a poem out of wood, an elegy out of a chair or a toy. It was a sisterly gesture, she persuaded herself. She had not embraced him, this rough carpenter with the heart of a poet. She had never embraced him, even when he had rescued her from Saffron. But in this slight endearment she felt enfolded by all of his boyishness-turned-adult. For an instant-for more than an instant-she envied those light-headed, lighthearted Dryads who had enjoyed his more than brotherly kisses. It was all very well to love a dream; it was like drinking a great flagon of long-buried wine and feeling as if you could step from one treetop to the next. But then the sparkle and the lightness evaporated like dew on a maple leaf. To love a Minotaur was like eating a loaf of wheaten bread soaked with honey; there was no sparkle but there was a sweet and enduring nourishment.
“Icarus isn’t a bit bigger,” said Eunostos. “Oughtn’t he to have grown in the last two months?”
“He doesn’t eat as much as he did. He misses you. Now we have to go, Eunostos.” She had already betrayed Aeacus with her thoughts; she must not risk a worse betrayal.
“No, please, I have to find a present for Icarus first.” He clutched the child as if he were protecting him from a blast of wintry wind or a pack of wolves.
“He’s had his present. Coming to see you. Now he wants to give you one.”
Icarus held to Eunostos’s horns and implanted a wet kiss on his cheek.
“When will you come again?” The question was addressed equally to her and Icarus.
“I don’t know.”
“When may I come to see you? Aeacus didn’t say I could never come again.”
“I don’t know that either, Eunostos.”
He hurried into his workshop and returned with the feathered cap he had made for Thea, but made too large. But it fitted Icarus perfectly because of his hair, which doubled the size of his head.
Eunostos stood in the gate and waved his hand. Icarus waved his cap and then he began to cry. His mother hurried him into the trees. It was fortunate that she knew the trail so well; all the way home, she never looked up from the ground.
Aeacus had returned ahead of them. He was hanging his bow on the wall.
“I shot a bear,” he said. “If you salt the meat, we can have steaks all winter.”
“We don’t eat bears in the Country of the Beasts.”
“Suit yourself. Where have you been?”
“To visit Zoe.”
“I see that Icarus has a new cap.”
“Eunostos made it. He left it at Zoe’s house.”
Did he believe her? If he did not believe her, was he annoyed, angry, enraged? In all this time, she was still unable to penetrate his impassive smile. And yet she felt that in his strange, civilized fashion he still cared for her. It was not exactly love; it was the gentle and faintly condescending affection which sometimes survives the disappointment of losing a dream.
That night he lay beside her on their couch and held her hand and kissed her cheek.
“Kora,” he said. “Maiden. You called to me across the dark spaces of the night and I came to you. Was I right to come? I’m still an invader, you know. I’m not a Beast.”
“I wanted you to come.”
“But are you still glad?”
“Yes, Aeacus.” She answered without a pause but with a certainty which she did not feel.
“Then so am I. We have had good years. We mustn’t regret them. And you have given me royal children.”
He was quiet then. His hand relaxed its hold; he seemed to fall into a quiet sleep. She kissed his cool forehead, loving him in her way, though still not knowing him-this lover and stranger; but not, in spite of the vows he had sworn before Chiron, her husband-never truly her husband. Maiden had become wife and mother for a Man who had remained an alien and a wanderer.