“The drones must do something,” suggested Eunostos. “Or the queens wouldn’t keep them around.”
Myrrha raised a reproving eye at him. Like many free-living women, she was prudish in the company of her daughter. “As I said, it’s the queens who are the trouble-makers. I wonder what they want in the Country of the Beasts. We have so little for them to steal.”
“I expect the storm blew them here by accident,” I said. “Let’s hope they don’t stay.”
We soon turned to other subjects. Happy subjects, on the whole, though it always saddened me to visit the home of two menless women. Myrrha still enjoyed frequent, if itinerant, lovers, but Kora at eighteen was the oldest virgin in the country and a cause of concern for her mother.
Since I myself was a trifle old for Eunostos, I had resigned myself to yielding him to Kora. In fact, I was quietly engineering their union, since he was the last Minotaur and it seemed to me that Kora, once cured of her virginity, could bear him noble sons. You understand, of course, that the offspring of a Minotaur and a Dryad are not hybrids: the sons are Minotaurs, the daughters are Dryads. There are several races in the Country of the Beasts, but each race is either male or female with the sole exception of the Centaurs, who have their own females but also enjoy the women of other races. Humans have questioned why the Great Mother created so many races with a single sex and compelled them to mingle if they wished to multiply. The answer is clear: she likes variety. She likes for opposite to attract opposite. She wants her many-faced, many-figured children to value difference as well as familiarity.
“Now you must have some wine and honey cakes. Will blackberry do?”
“Admirably.”
“You may have a cup, too, Eunostos. My, aren’t you the young bull now!” (I did not tell her that, since he had been orphaned, Eunostos never drank milk when he could get wine, and much preferred beer; it came of his running with loose company.) “When I finish this robe for Kora, I must weave you a loincloth.” She fetched a flagon from her cupboard and proceeded to fill some wooden mugs.
“My husband carved them,” she said, “and I wouldn’t change them for silver.”
The clay oven glowed; the scent of raisin-eyed cakes pervaded the room; hospitality was a tangible presence, like a Centaur’s pet pig. I did not even hear the dripping of the water clock. How could I know that it was the last peaceful time the four of us were to spend together?
“Eunostos, will you see me home?” I finally asked, when the parchment in the windows no longer glowed with the afternoon sun.
By this time Eunostos was quoting a poem to Kora, and Kora was listening with a faint appreciative smile; but I had the oddest feeling that it was not Eunostos she heard.
CHAPTER II
Eunostos stood at the foot of Kora’s tree and debated if he should call her name. If he knocked at the door in the trunk, Myrrha would answer and inflict an interminable monologue on him before she called her daughter from the upper room. Beside him was his friend Partridge, the Paniscus, who lent him advice and support. Partridge was thirty. Like all of his race of Goat Boys he had failed to develop, both physically and mentally, beyond the age of fifteen; but in Partridge’s case, mentally at least, it was closer to twelve. He was plump, hairy, and sandy from the warren in which he lived; thistles stuck to his flanks and his breath reeked from the stalks of onion grass he was even now nibbling. But Eunostos loved him because Partridge was something of an outcast among his own people, being rather too fat for their rough and tumble ways and too gentle to like those ways even had he not been fat.
Between them, eyeing the tree and catching vibrations with his feelers, crouched Bion, the Telchin, a three-foot, antlike being who lived under the ground, cut gems with his metal-hard pincers, and made bracelets and rings, anklets and necklaces, as well as various beauty aids like kohl and carmine, which he traded to the Dryads and Bear Girls in return for hazelnuts and wheaten bread. He was much more intelligent than a monkey or a cat, though rather less than a Beast. To Eunostos he was, like Partridge, a friend.
“Go on,” nudged Partridge. “Call her.” He munched furiously on his onion grass.
“Kora.” It was less a call than a whisper.
“Eunostos, give her a good bellow.”
“Kora, I’ve come to visit.” He brandished a spray of violets and peered hopefully at the porch which circled the trunk and the upper room.
A leather door-hanging rustled to the side and Kora appeared on the porch. Her gown of green linen was embroidered with white narcissi, and her face was white, too, like the unveined marble which has lain in the earth since the Great Mother lived on the island, before the coming of Men and Beasts. Her hair, the color of ivy in sunlight, tendriled about her shoulders. She wore neither rings nor anklets nor bracelets, but only a pendant around her neck: a Centaur of hammered silver which she presumed to be a likeness of her father. It was not a single attribute, however, which caught Eunostos’s eye; it was an aura of remoteness, of inviolability. She was like an unexplored cave or a silent underground river: secret and alluring and a little frightening.
At eighteen, she seemed to Eunostos decidedly an older woman and therefore the more to be desired. Had she not been beautiful, she might have been called a spinster. (Yes, we have them, poor things, even in the Country of the Beasts, along with a delightful number of rakish bachelors.) As it was, she had often been called aloof, disdainful, and frigid-but never undesirable. In truth, she was none of these things. She was simply waiting. For what, she could not have told you.
“Eunostos,” she called down to him. “Have you come to call on mother?”
“I’ve come to call on you.” It was his first such admitted call, though ostensibly he had visited her mother Myrrha often during the past few months, in spite of the fact that she was as garrulous as a sparrow at sunrise. “This time you come down to me.”
His tail lashed furiously; he was very nervous.
She hesitated. She’s heard those stories about my wenching, he thought, not without a certain pride. At fifteen, it is pleasant to be thought a sly young rogue.
“Very well.”
Eunostos was grateful that she did not linger coquettishly in her tree to change her robe or sweep a tortoiseshell comb through her hair. She never seemed aware of her own beauty, except as a kind of nuisance which brought uncountable Centaurs, from striplings right up to senile old Moschus, to knock at her tree. In six twinklings of a firefly, she emerged from the door at the foot of the tree.
“Give her the flowers,” hissed Partridge, so concerned for his friend that you could forgive him his onion breath and thistled flanks. He was none too bright but he knew what to do when a Dryad stood in her doorway. For that matter, Eunostos knew what to do with the more accessible Dryads. My friend Myrtle had taught him the facts of life when he was eleven. For the last year, he had been an orphan, knocking about the woods on his own, making his home in caves and warrens or under trees, living it up with the young Centaurs and making free with the Dryads, but somehow never forgetting the manners, the innate gentleness, taught to him by his own Dryad mother and his Minotaur father.
He presented the flowers and Kora took them from his hand. His tail made furious swishes and he stamped his hooves from sheer nervous tension.
The violets had started to wilt-he had held them too long and too tightly in his big hot fist-but Kora received them as if they were roses. She said little; she rarely said much. Stillness seemed to envelope her like a wedding garment (for Beasts thought of weddings, not orgies, when they courted Kora, just as they thought of orgies not weddings when they courted her mother or me). But she smiled and touched him affectionately on his horns.