“That’s all right. The ache is starting to go.”
“I like you,” he added. “You look like a mother, but not the elderly kind. A woman whose husband would never want to stray.”
“Nonsense. You don’t even know me. Besides, I haven’t a husband.” Thief talk, I thought. Lower my guard with a compliment. Steal my urn or my chest. The next thing I know, he will compliment my looks, though my three hundred years—I have rounded the number, a woman’s privilege—have left me with ample hips, a streak of gray in my moss-green hair, and wrinkles under my eyes—after an orgy, at least. (Not that I haven’t my charms. . . .)
“Of course I know you! I get to know people in my trade. You make me think of a fig tree laden with figs. Hora is more the mulberry type. You’re for bed and babies. Hora is just for bed. Both are nice. I’m a thief, by the way.”
“I guessed. I get to know people too. It shows in your build and eyes.”
“Do I look depraved?” He gave a piratical wink and seemed to hope for a “Yes.”
“No. Just mischievous.”
“Oh, I shall have to practice, I guess. Well, I won’t rob you. Your house is beautiful. Houses, I should say. What do you call your village?”
“An Asklepion, After Asklepius, god of healing. You see, I have my particular tree, as Dryads do. But I come and go as I please, so long as I always return, and the empty trees around me—well, I put them to use. I made them into houses for the sick. And then there’s my Incubation Hall under the ground. Those I can’t diagnose I put in a row of beds. Asklepius comes to them in a dream and tells them the cause of their pain, or even effects a cure.”
“Lucky for Hora and me.”
“Hora you say? The name won’t do. Silver Bells has suggested ‘Marguerite.’ He says she reminds him of the marguerite daisy.” (I would have said an Aphrodite Fly-Trap.) “Its yellow disk, don’t you see. I guess he has flowers on his mind. Losing Alyssum, I mean, and less than a year ago. And what about a name for you?”
“Well, certainly not a flower, unless it were Hadesin-a-Bush. Do I have to have a new name?”
“One that suits. Eunostos used to be Perdix, but Alyssum said that Perdix suited a partridge, so she called him Silver Bells. He was always rescuing folk, and whenever he did, his bells would shake and tinkle to frighten the griffin, the Human, whatever the kind of threat. The name was exactly right for him.”
“How about ‘Oryx’? I always liked the animal. Swift and strong like a thief. Able to hide, if he must.”
“None of them hereabouts. Wolves devoured them before I was born. But the name has a pleasant ring. All right, Oryx. You can help me with my rounds.”
“Are you, a proprietess as well as a healer?” he asked. “After all, there are various ways of healing. Somebody may just be lonesome. Hora—that is, Marguerite—is a courtesan.”
“I know.”
“She has her own particular medicine.”
“I have no doubt.”
“She could pay you back for all of your help. Work for our keep, as it were. And I might visit a neighbor and—” I saw an eager twitch in his fingertips.
“I don’t want to be paid,” I said. “and I’m not a proprietess. I’m a healer. The sick come to me and I set their broken limbs or rout their demons of fever. That’s not to say I haven’t a taste for fun.” I thought of my Nubian lover in his tiger skin. The Babylonian with his medical (and other) skills. The Centaurs, the Satyrs. . . . well, my gifts have been bountiful. Gifts, I repeat. I have never charged.
The trees in my Asklepion were joined by swaying walkways of skin and rope, and every tree held a different patient, a different demon of pain. He followed me gingerly over the first walkway and into a tree where a Bear of Artemis, a little girl with a nub for a tail and fur instead of a gown, was coughing violently on her couch. She wore a circlet of violets in her hair. It was my children’s tree. Bullfrogs carved from pomegranate rinds adorned the chest. The lamp was a hanging pig of striped clay. A live goose sat on a mossy nest and nursed an egg. When a child was able to leave the couch, I let him search in the chest before I sent him home: he would find a gift . . . a scarab, a slingshot, a tail-ring.
“All right, Melissa. Let’s see to that cough.”
“May I help?”
“If you like. Here. Make friends with Melissa and give her this rocket to nibble.” I waited for her to bite his hand. The purple flower, though decorative, tastes like a jimson weed, and making friends would not be an easy task. Melissa hated vegetables, strangers, sickness, big, brotherly-looking boys—all in all, her disposition was not of the best in my tree. But I was testing Oryx. Was he only good as a thief?
He took the rocket, wrinkled his nose, and sat on the pallet beside the child.
“It’ll help your cough,” he said.
She bit his hand.
With hardly a wince he withdrew the hand and began to eat the rocket.
“Very well. I’ll eat it myself.” Chomp. “Uhmmmmmm. Delicious.” Chomp.
She coughed violently and snatched the rocket out of his hand. The cough subsided with each succeeding bite.
“Feel any better?” another mistake. She glared at him and showed her teeth. Bears of Artemis, small by nature, resent any debt to larger folk. They feel that they ought to do everything for themselves and prove that their size is not a limitation. Their minds as well as their bodies remain those of children (thus they differ from the Panisci).
Oryx pursued his cure with equanimity. “I had a cousin once who was eaten by a bear. In fact, she was taken home to its cubs and divided.”
Melissa’s eyes grew as wide as daisies spread for the sun. Bear-girls have a horror of altogether bears, who begrudge them their human halves and think of them only as meals.
“Everything?”
“Right down to her tail. You see, she was a Bear Girl like you.”
She gave him a scornful, “Awwwww. Where’s your fur?”
“It’s the blood that counts. First cousin once removed was a Bear of Artemis.”
(A liar as well as a thief, but I had to commend the lie.)
“Where’d you get that hair? Yellow.”
“Used to be brown. Sun bleached it, while I was sailoring.”
“Got another rocket?”
“Got another cough?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t hear it.”
“It’s hidden in my throat.” Paw pressed to her mouth, she pretended to stifle a cough.
“I’ll ask Zoe.”
“Yes, I’ve got another rocket.”
Melissa wolfed it greedily, stem, leaves, and bloom, as if she expected Oryx to want his share.
“Come on,” I said. “Other patients to see. And of course you’ll want to visit your cousin, of which you seem to have an unusual variety. If this one ever wakes up.” I did, not try to keep the reproach from my voice. I knew that the pampered creature was languishing on her couch, and the chariot-sun had climbed a third of the sky!
“She’s used to sleeping late. Works at night,” he explained. “Plays the lyre, sings, reads poetry, cossets, dallies. You know.”
“Yes, I know very well. But we have no truck with whores in the Country of the Beasts. Love isn’t meant to be sold.”
“My cousin is not a whore. It’s all a matter of style.”
“And how much gold she can get from some poor sailor boy.”
“What she gives is better than gold, and she has a special rate for poor sailor boys.”
Stubborn brat! Always the last word. Still, he had his charm.
“Besides,” he continued, “it was the only way she knew to support us. You see we were orphaned when I was only eleven and she was fourteen. In spite of a late start, she learned every trick in the scroll. The Pharaoh of Egypt recommended her to his nephew.” He paused. “That was before I hit his nephew on the head.”
“Time for the next patient. Oryx, if you’re going to hit anybody on the head—”
&nb
sp; “Oh, he deserved it. He didn’t want to pay. One expects generosity from a Pharaoh’s kin.” Then to Melissa. “Good-bye and get well. And watch out for bears.”
Melissa followed him with her daisy eyes. Suspicion warred with affection. Those hard-seeming little girls have soft hearts. “Been sailorin’, huh, Buddy?”
“Yes. All the way to Achaea and Egypt.”
“And didn’t get lashed by a sphinx?”
“Too quick for her.” Strangely, the banter left his voice. He seemed to forget his game; he seemed to be telling a truth.
“Goin’ to spruce my tail?”
“Next time.”
“And bring me some fresh violets!”
“A whole basket.”
“You made a good start,” I said as we left the tree. “Can’t baby these girls. Or browbeat them either. Fond of folk, aren’t you, Oryx?”
“Yes, I guess I am. Even those I rob. But I don’t love anyone. Except Marguerite.” He paused and cocked his head and looked me quizzically in the eye. “But when I meet a woman like you, a worldy woman, I start to wonder if—”
“Ought to have met the Lady.” I had known my share of boyish adoration. Flattering, yes. But send me a Minotaur bull like Silver Bells to do a bull’s work! (Unfortunately, no one had ever sent him, even before his wedding.)
“Who is the Lady? Even a Harpy mentioned her death.”
“She was a Naiad, a fountain nymph. Hair as blue as a gentian. Everybody loved her. Harpies, you say? Well, we have no truck with them here. But one of them broke a wing in a gust of wind and crashed in our forest. I wouldn’t have her in my Asklepion. But Alyssum nursed her to health. Hadn’t a wicked thought, the Lady. But not womanish, if you know what I mean. Said no and meant it to every male in the forest. Then Silver Bells asked, and he had to win her with poems. Do you know, they were actually wed. Now me, I’ve had a husband or two in my younger days. But never again. . . .”
“I know what you mean. Marriage is one more shackle on the heart. But where is Silver Bells? I want to thank him.”
“You’ll see him, and his nephew Eunostos too. You’ll get to meet everybody, and. then we’ll have to decide what to do with you.”
“I’ve already decided to stay in the Country.”
“You haven’t had an invitation as yet. Or that indolent cousin of yours.”
“You mean we’re your prisoners?”
“In effect, yes.” I tried to look like a gaoler.
“I’m guilty,” he grinned. “Keep me in the forest.”
“We shall have to consult the Great Centaur. His word is final in matters like this.” (He was one of my lovers, of course.)
We visited all of my patients, a blue-haired Naiad who had brushed a Nightshade plant—the deadly kind—and left an ugly welt across her arm; quince and wild pursiane, applied in a plaster, quickly removed both the welt and the pain, though more than a brush with that lethal plant would have killed the girl. . . . A full-grown Satyr who had stomped his hoof in a pout and left a painful crack: a splint for him, applied by Oryx with my direction. He was a quick learner. Perhaps it went with his trade. Somehow, though, I thought less often of him as a thief. Perhaps because he had told me how he had come to steal. Perhaps because he was eager to please without being unctuous and soft. Perhaps because there was so much liking in him, whatever he said about love. (And such a wonder of hair! Unexpectedly, I yearned to hold his head against my breast, I who had wanted a child for three hundred years but been denied by the Goddess for reasons I did not know.)
“That cousin of yours is going to have to get up,” I pronounced at the end of my rounds. “The sun is directly overhead. Scandalous.”
“I’ll wake her,” he said. “She likes to ease out of sleep.”
I led him to her couch in the lowest, scruffiest tree. The couch was a simple pallet of papyrus reeds, and Hora lay tangled intimately with her goatskin coverlet. Like me, she was used to sleeping with a friend.
“Hora,” he whispered. “It’s Lordon. We’re safe from those horrid girls.”
I snatched the coverlet off of her (Artemis, what a shape! I could understand, if not forgive, her trade). “Get up, woman,” I barked. “I run an Asklepion, not a brothel.”
She sighed, and golden ringlets tumbled over her head (and how I envied that hair!).
“And who are you?” she inquired With a decorous smile, but as if it were she who owned the place, and I the visitor.
“The owner, that’s who.”
“And I am Silver Bells.” In spite of his bells, I had failed to hear his approach. With him was his nephew, little Eunostos. They were the last of their race, the magnificent Minotaurs. Silver Bells’ sister, Eunostos’ mother, I mean, had strayed from the Country and caught a hunter’s spear. Her grief-stricken husband had died from the Ivory Sleep. Eunostos was only eight, and his uncle treated him like a small brother, taught him to hunt and garden and made him a bow and quiver and a peaked, moss-green cap with a feather plucked from a woodpecker’s tail. A Minotaur is a versatile Beast, and he does not think it would be beneath him to garden or toil in a workshop as well as to hunt and fight; an affectionate Beast, who will hug his nephew as soon as his niece. He is also a natural poet and an omnivorous reader of scrolls. Silver Bells’ one real fault was a total inability to cook. I had to bring him pheasant or partridge pies, pokeweed salads and possets flavored with thyme, to insure that Eunostos would have a proper diet. Left to themselves, they would have subsisted on honey cakes.
I turned to greet them, but they were looking at her.
“Silver Bells! Now I remember. It was you who saved us.”
“You didn’t take much saving. The girls are cowards with one who knows their ways.” It is hard to describe the speech of a Minotaur. It is dreamlike and musical as befits a poet, and yet it is of the earth as well as the sky.
“You have a distinguished air about you, Sir.” (It was she who had the air. Airs, I should say.) “A courtliness all too rare in these barbarous times. May I ask, uh, the name of your race? I notice several becoming appurtenances.”
A Minotaur’s horns are not like those of a goat. They resemble the antlers of a stag, and he, of course, wore tiny silver bells with golden clappers. Whenever he moved, he resembled singing birds. His face was shaved—he shaved every day with a bronze razor dipped in a thermal pool—and his hair, though long, was caught behind his head with a copper ring, displaying his pointed ears. Red as a woodpecker’s crest, it suited his ruddy skin. In other locations, hair abounded but always under control. Chest. Legs. Loins (and fortunate too, since he wore no loin cloth. Not that a Beast would notice such a lack, but city-bred courtesans never miss a trick.) And of course the tail, long, slender, tufted with gossamer down. Minotaurs pride themselves on their versatile tails. They use them to grasp objects, to flick insects, to display for the females who catch their eyes. Part of their courtship lies in the nimbleness of their tails. (But Silver Bells seemed to have lost his vanity when Alyssum had told him. “You may stop showing off, my dear. It isn’t your tail I love.”)
“I particularly like your tail,” concluded Marguerite.
She’s got him, I thought. If she knows how to cook. Then I remembered how lately his wife had died, when those arena people had caught her in their net (she had fought, and failed, and willed herself to die, rather than act in their games). No, I decided, she wants him, and she won’t even make him pay! To Silver Bells, she is only a guest from the coast.
“Marguerite,” said a small, manly voice. “My uncle and I have brought you some wine.” Adoration rounded Eunostos’ eyes. He straightened his cap and stood to his fullest height. Men! Even at eight, you can catch them with golden hair.
The airs disappeared from Marguerite’s manner and speech. She received the wine as if it had come from Egypt. “Young man, you remind me of my cousin. You know how to treat a lady.” (Indeed!)
“My uncle says that ladies reflect the Goddess, and one is always to sh
ow them manners.”
“Not all of them,” I muttered, but nobody seemed to hear.
“Your uncle is a rare gentleman. Come, Eunostos, and sit beside me.”
Lightly she bent and kissed his head. I will have to say that it seemed a natural move. She was cleverer than I had thought. Woo the child, win the man.
She must, however, work with a Siren’s speed.
The Great Centaur had yet to decide her fate.
Chapter Four
Zoe
I would have to give an orgy.
The Great Centaur, Chiron, had not yet delivered judgment on Oryx and Marguerite (not that I cared about her, but I liked the boy, and I wanted a chance to teach him not to steal). Chiron was generally just in his pompous way, but, since he was one of my lovers, I thought that I knew how to bend his justice to the aid of my guests. He was much too timid, in spite of his regal airs, to execute them, but much too suspicious—and not without reason—of Humans to let them remain in the Country of the Beasts. However, if he returned them to the coast and their own people, they might reveal our riches—and weaknesses—and invite invasion. We liked to preserve our reputation for ferocity and inviolability. He would doubtless set them adrift in a cockleshell of a boat, and the careless Tritons would drive them from Crete. Thus, they would either drown or end at a Siren’s feast.
That is to say, unless I changed his mind.
The Great Centaur liked formality and loved an audience. On such an occasion, I could not invite him to a tete-a-tete in my tree. I must ply him with food and drink in the company of selected guests to applaud his aphorisms, admire his majesty. I must flatter, cajole, manipulate, and only then present my dessert and plead for my visitors.
In the Country, everyone works for himself, and I had neither slaves nor servants to help me prepare for the evening (or attend to the sick in my trees). But Marguerite and Oryx, knowing their fate to be at stake, and Oryx, out of sheer generosity, proved adaptable helpers. To my astonishment, Marguerite was extremely knowledgeable about the care of the sick, the mending of bones, the preparation of herbs; she attended my patients while I prepared the food; and Oryx, carrying a bow as well as a fishing net, ventured into the forest after game for the evening (we never kill animals—except for aging pigs to get their skins—but we do eat birds and fish). Others helped too: Melissa left her sick bed to gather violets in the woods, and Phlebas scattered tables and wooden benches among my trees.
Cry Silver Bells Page 4