“Don’t you think we should hide?”
“Hide? Where? Everything has its eyes on us.” I gave her my hand; her fingers were moist and limp. Fearless Hora afraid in this fearful land! Tenderness flushed me like the warmth from a sailors’ fire, ship drawn ashore for the night. Forests were not for her; she was made for cushions of eiderdown and flaxen gowns and parasols brighter than lazuli butterflies. It hurt. The tenderness hurt. Sometimes I felt such feelings for other folk, and they interfered with my trade. (“Attachments are only for fools,” Hora liked to say. I had always agreed with her.)
She patted my beardless cheek (mother with child). Eastern silk was less soft than her supple hand. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed me on the ear. “Little cousin, I’ll get you out of this place. See if I don’t!”
“Little cousin is grateful, all six feet of him, but let’s climb the hill. Something’s gaining on us.”
“We’ve been climbing. We don’t seem to have made progress. And yet the hill isn’t big. Just a hillock, really. Lordon, watch it! You’ll fall in that hole!”
“I could swear it wasn’t there when I lifted my foot.”
“Nonsense. It was overgrown by those Beggar Sticks with burrs.”
“Bristly Beggar Sticks, odorous Dog Fennel, Sow Thistles. . . . Are we getting a hint from the hill? No wonder they call this the Country of the Beasts.”
“Who’s ridiculous now?”
Hills, even conspiratorial, are ultimately climbable, and at last we stood in the sun and looked before us at unbroken trees and behind us at the irrecoverable sea.
Hora sat on a rock. “They might at least have given us bread and wine. They said we could live on the land, but I’ve yet to see a stream.”
“Here,” I said, gathering dewberries from a thorny vine. “They’re full and juicy and ought to quench our thirst. Pretend they’re beer.”
“They’re out of season,” said practical Hora, straight from Egypt. “Shouldn’t be ripe till fall, and it’s only mid-summer.”
“What do you expect? For a people who hate straight lines and build octangular houses, at least on their islands—well, you can’t ask the seasons to behave. It’s not like Egypt, where the Nile always floods. We’ll just have to adapt.” I popped a berry into my mouth. “Phew. Tastes like hemlock.”
“Adaptation,” she smiled. “The first secret of my trade. Yours too, I should think. Phew.”
I looked at her in the bright, exposing sun: her face as pink and scrubbed as that of a child, her body lacking adornment of armlet or anklet or even a ring, her hair disarranged and without any fibulae but somehow softer than teased or swirled or trapped by a fillet behind her head. She looked—ripe. No, better than ripe. The mulberry tree had never appeared so bountiful with fruit.
“Hora, if it’s any consolation, you aren’t a mess.”
“Gratifying,” she smiled. “If a Beast is going to devour me, at least I shall look my best. I always hoped that when they laid me out for inhumation, they would see to my face and gown. But now I feel undressed. A ring, an anklet, anything would do . . . Listen. The hoofbeats again.”
“You’re not going to be inhumed for a good twenty years, and I will dress you in the jewels of a queen, even if I have to steal them,” It was a boast and a bluster to hide the hooves, a growing thunder of drums. No longer hesitant, tentative; confident now, gathering, advancing. Thump, thump, thump, they boomed in the undergrowth, circling the hills, building a ring around us, and I thought of a drummer as he drummed an army to war.
“I expect we are going to meet the first of the Beasts.”
“May they not be the last,” I muttered.
So suddenly did they step from the trees that they seemed at first to be bushes shoved into light. They moved in unison, stood in unbroken unity; gone, the thunder of drums. The silence said, “Wait. Let us observe you. Judge and execute.”
“Why, it’s only children,” laughed Hora. “Dirty at that, and younger than you by far. Satyrs, I should think. And all of them girls.”
“Female Panisci. Goat Girls. The kind that stop at the verge of puberty. They look with envy at older girls and their lovers, but never quite understand the meaning of desire. They talk about love as children talk about growing up to become a king or explorer or courtesan. The sailors told me about them on the ship. Some may be forty or fifty years old. Old minds in young bodies.”
They climbed the hill, slowly, savoring every step, watching the trapped with the confidence of the trapper, his net and spear in hand. Flanks and cloven hooves instead of hips and feet. Hair: on their heads in a riot of dirt; over their naked bodies in matted clumps. Hard, knowing features with thick red lips and eyes as yellow as the yolk of an egg. Curving horns. There was nothing of child about them except their size and their lamentable lack of breasts. They reeked of wine and decomposing food and the general accumulation of those who never bathe. They carried slings for weapons, and their single garment was a pouch for stones, attached to a leather belt. They leaned on each other and laughed and pointed at Hora and me, and spoke for the first time.
“’Ere, ’ere,” said one of the girls. “Always did fancy a’ older man.” She sounded as if she had a briar grape under her tongue. “Right strappin,’ I’d say. And get that goldy ‘air. Cor, like ‘is mom’s.”
Hora responded with her medusa look. “It may interest you to know that I am nobody’s mother.”
“Grandmom?” sneered the girls.
“Mind your manners, you filthy child.”
“I’ll get ‘er,” said a friend, raising her sling.
“If you will lead us out of this forest, you will find me strapping indeed,” I quickly replied. “And very grateful. I have experience beyond my years. Perhaps I can teach you to win a man.” (Lordon, Lordon, how you can lie! First you must teach her to grow a breast.)
“Share and share alike,” shrilled a girl whose horns were overgrown with moss, and whose face was scarred as if she had been in a fight—or fights. One of the older girls, I thought. Fifty years to accumulate grievances.
“You are making me sound like a pheasant pie,” I said. “But allow me a little time between my engagements, and I will prove a Hercules.”
“‘Ercules? ‘Who’s ‘e? Want action, that’s what. Eh, girls?” The Girls responded with a lecherous whinny, though action to them meant—who can say?—knocking me in the head, making a meal of me, or simply boasting to embellish their dream of womanhood and motherhood and ceasing to need a dream. I made a rapid count. Thirty-four . . . five. . . . Well, I would rather be dinner (almost) than lover to such disreputable girls. The smell of them, the look, the sound, was hardly an aphrodisiac.
“Come on down ‘ere, sweet ‘art.”
“Come on up ‘ere, girl. Who wants to make love on the side of a ‘ill?”
“Airish, are we? Want us to chop it off?”
“Never cut off your ear to spite your face,” I replied with, I fear, a notable lack of originality.
“Didn’t say ‘ear!”
“Lordon,” whispered Hora. “I think they mean to kill us. After all, we are useless to them, except as toys to children. And angry children break their toys. Look at the hate in their eyes.”
“I imagine they envy you.”
“But why? They called me your mother!”
“Because of their envy. Your age, your beauty, your poise. You’ve grown up. They can’t. If I can just pacify them with some sweet talk. . . .”
“Al1 thirty-six?” Like me, she was good at quick calculations. “Look at the blood on the fur of the girl with crooked horns. Not her own, I expect.”
“But they’re only children,” I said. “Perhaps they mean to scare us and nothing more.” Perhaps I could reassure Hora if not myself.
“Was anyone ever so cruel as a child who has not been trained? Have you ever watched a baby tear the wings off a dragonfly? To them, we’re dragonflies.”
“I thought you said toys.”
/> “Either is breakable.”
“Less talk and more action, man. Throw us the old cow and follow ‘er down.”
I clutched Hora’s hand. “We’ll fight,” I said.
“Two against thirty-six. They have slings.”
“I have a dagger.”
A sudden whirring startled the air, like the sound of a bee surprised into flight. Hora shoved me onto the ground and the stone flew over my head. Quickly I climbed to my feet; rather, I started to climb. The hill began to shake. Beggar Sticks stabbed me as I fell on my knees, momentarily befuddled, and tried to think how a strappin’ warrior could save ‘is mom. Another bumblebee whirr. Hora flung her body in front of me and took the stone in her hair. Whether it probed to her scalp, I could not say. Anger welled like Lambkill within my throat. Impotent anger; cruel and careless children.
The Girls reached the top of the hill, and a childish face, level with mine, reminded me of another place, a person . . . yes, the Harpy aboard the ship. (“The lady is dead!”)
The Girls engulfed me with a tangle of limbs. I hardly had time to notice their stench, I was so preoccupied with protecting my face from their blows. Ugh. A kick in the shin. Ugh. The rake of fingernails down my naked back. It seemed that they were adept at breaking toys.
Suddenly there was a stillness like—how shall I say?—the time before the Harpies attacked our ship: a clear blue sky, a pause, and a black inundation. This was just such a time. The ships that the Girls meant to sink were Hora and me.
“Goin’ to give me a kiss, sweet’art?”
I kissed her juicily, valiantly on the mouth. She wiped her lips and scowled. “That was a kiss? ‘Aven’t been missin’ a thing.” The voice was single but it spoke for the group.
“If you would ask politely—”
“All right then, Girls. ‘Ensbane, you take the left arm, I’ll take the right. Bindweed and Fennel, the legs. If we all pull together—”
“What about the ‘ead?”
“Best for last. Pull!”
“CRY SILVER BELLS!”
A woman stood at the foot of the hill. I did not have time to distinguish her form or her face. I saw a blur of green, but somehow I knew that the green was not of our foes, the forest, the shuddering hill.
“Silver Bells?” I asked.
“Silver Bells!” she repeated, her voice resounding like a conch shell from hill to trees and echoing through the piney fastnesses. “For the sake of the Goddess!”
The Goat Girls were gone.. . . Green stood above us, beside her a man with silver bells on his horns. He knelt to my cousin; Green knelt to me.
He was my first friend. . . . She was my first love.
Then I tumbled into the fountain of sleep.
Chapter Three
Zoe
“Moschus, will you heave your smelly carcass onto your side of the couch? I feel downright mummified. Four legs, two arms, and an untrimmed mane are a bit much. Also, you have a paunch.”
“Used not to object,” he snorted. “Said I had the horsiest hug in the forest.” (Understand that a Centaur hugs with his arms and not his forelegs. It is widely and incorrectly assumed that he does not have any arms.) “Got all of you in one grab.” He lay petulantly on his back, appendages thrust in the air like a minor forest.
“That was three hundred years ago. And you didn’t have a paunch.”
“Four hundred.”
“You could never add,” I snapped. “At any rate, I am not a sapling, and you, my dear, are scarcely a colt.” Poor, awkward Moschus. No one expects a Centaur to be at his best in bed. But Moschus was not at his best in the forest. Usually drunk on pomegranate wine, he wobbled instead of cantered among the trees or leaned against a trunk to daydream or snooze. Still, one forgives his friends their little foibles (mine is a disinclination to sleep without a mare. I sometimes find myself with manner-less males. I have even made do with a Faun).
“Time to get up anyway,” he said. “Got to see to my pigs.” He rolled to the floor but landed on his back, and I had to help him climb to his hooves and guide him down the circular stairway in my tree. Steps had been cut in the wood, but meant for a Dryad’s feet and not a Centaur’s hooves. The light of the morning shone through windows cut like stars in the living bark. (I had hurt my father tree, but not interfered with his sap. I think he understood. At least I had asked permission before I cut, and trees, like Dryads, want to look their best.)
“And my patients are starting to rouse.” A medley of barks, neighs, and screeches greeted my ears and called me to my rounds. “Yes, the day has begun.”
“Tonight, old girl?” he whinnied. He smelled of rancid wine and anyone else would have wanted to trim his mane. Still, he had been my friend since the end of the Golden Age—we had played together when Saturn sat on his throne—and friends are to be loved instead of changed.
“I’ve plans,” I lied. Even with Moschus there were times to lie. I must think of my human prisoners.
“Time for a morning libation.” He smacked his lips and blinked his bloodshot eyes.
“Work to do.”
He departed to look for one of the many flasks he had hidden in the woods. To Moschus, a tree stump or cave meant a hiding place, and the object to hide was a skin of wine or beer.
“Aunt Zoe!”
The younger folk call me “Aunt.” Actually, some of them are my nieces and nephews. My sisters, who live in another part of the forest, are fertile in contrast to childless me, and their mates have been Fauns, Centaurs, and Minotaurs. . . . Dryads, you see, are never male. The daughters are Dryads like their mothers, but the sons take after their fathers. It is often such with the folk of the Country. “Friendly differences”: thus had the Goddess decreed when she set the island of Crete on the back of a giant bull.
The speaker, however, was neither a nephew nor niece.
“Yes, Dear?”
Phlebas was none too bright, and, being a male Paniscus, he would never become a man. His body was that of a boy (plump). His mind was that of a child (dense). But his heart was as big as a coconut.
“Strangers.” He emphasized the word. He might have said “Sphinxes” or “Harpies.” A hopeless romantic, he liked to invent disasters or wonderments, or whisper an escapade and pretend himself a part.
“Where?” Better to humor him. Sometimes he told the truth in spite of himself, since escapades in the forest were as multitudinous as the cones on a fertile pine.
“A man and a woman. Hair’s gold.” His pointed ears gave a quiver of disbelief.
Another one of his tales? Nobody, not even the Lady before she died, had golden hair in the Country of the Beasts. Green for Dryads like me; blue for the Naiads; brown for Panisci and Satyrs; red for Silver Bells, the Minotaur, and his nephew, little Eunostos; black for Harpies who glare at us from the sky.
“Hurry up, Phlebas. Say what you have to say. I must see to my patients.”
He never liked to be hurried, but he is somewhat in awe of me. I have given him rich material for his tales about escapades.
“Climbing Bumpers, the hill. And my female cousins hot on their trail.”
Bumpers was not a reliable hill—old, crotchety, he hates to be climbed—and Phlebas’ female cousins were much the most disreputable inhabitants of the Country, foul-mouthed, scroungy, not above killing animals just for the sport. They had even connived with Humans on occasion and, I suspect, accepted bribes from the Cretans to help them capture Beasts for the Games in Knossos and Phaistos. If there were truly strangers on the hill, they needed immediate help.
“You’re sure? You’re not just making this up?”
“Cross my heart.” He rolled from hoof to hoof and his fat flanks resembled hams with fur.
“Show me to them.”
When I was a girl, nobody—Human, I mean—invaded our Country without being eaten by wolves. Well, the wolves had vanished into the higher hills, and now we have a strumpet with yellow hair. I always say, “If you’ve got it to give,
give it free,” but she had the nerve to charge, or so she had confessed when I helped her to my trees, and the youngster, her cousin, had worked as a pimp and thief! But the Lady—Alyssum, I mean—would never have left them to the murderous girls. Like her, I must summon Silver Bells, and of course he had rapidly put the girls to flight and helped me carry the victims to my Asklepion (most of those wretched children love the man. He had only to shoo them like carrion flies).
Now, the boy was appraising me from his couch. His open eyes, kingfisher blue, did not hold thoughts of theft. He was much too comely, however, like Silver Bells. A girl must beware of such men. And all of that yellow hair. . . . I tried to pretend it to gray, but it winked at me in the window light. I felt— maternal.
“You saved our lives,” he said. His couch was a pallet of soft ibex skins. Modest niceties punctuated the room: a cypress chest with flying fish on its lid, painted with ochre and umber. A niche in the wall for the Goddess, gentle in terra cotta. Cattails, sleek in a rock crystal urn. It was my finest room, in a tree with foliage like a Pharaoh’s hood. But then, he had needed care.
“Nonsense. Silver Bells saved you.”
“But it was you who called him.”
“I couldn’t let you be roughed by those rowdy girls, now, could I?”
“Is Hora all right?”
“Fine. Sleeping, I think. (Think? Knew. Pampered women like Hora sleep or ply, and weaving, sweeping, healing they leave to their slaves.)
“I suspect they were going to tear us limb from limb.”
“I doubt it.” No need to alarm him. The problem was what to do with him and his whorish cousin. Return them to the coast and their human friends? We love our Country and do not want invaders or even Visitors.
“Well, they certainly gave me a wrench. My arms feel unhinged.”
“Here. Rub some hog grease into the sorest places.”
Cry Silver Bells Page 3