cries and, wonder of wonders, found him displaying not one but twenty vials of carmine, each with a mirror, as a shopkeeper displays his wares. But these wares appeared to be free.
The drones, meanwhile, had lolled on the edge of the clearing and feigned indifference to these foolish women and their ungainly pet, but now they stirred to life. They sighed and groaned to their feet; with studied indifference, they followed the tumult. Perhaps there was something for them. Sunlord paused to retrieve the original mirror and admire his reflection.
“What’s going on?” The cry was shrill and not in the least melodious. Saffron had emerged from the hive. “What’s happened to my workers?” She flew after them like a chicken hawk after chickens and landed among them like a particularly ravenous hawk.
Eunostos crept out of his trunk. There was no one between him and the hive.
Saffron, who had no need for carmine on her own honied skin, began to scatter the vials as if they had been clay images of forbidden gods.
“Idle adornments,” she shrilled. “I turn my back and you paint yourselves like wenches. Who’s going to finish the hive?”
She began to lay about her with her little fists. She kicked and cursed and stamped on vials of carmine. She bent a mirror against a trunk. Nor did she spare the drones.
“I don’t expect you to work, you good-for-nothings, but you don’t have to encourage the workers to your own idleness.” A knee in a soft midriff. A stinging blow across a plump cheek.
But what was this? The whirlwind ceased to whirl, the dust settled. The wounded could nurse their wounds; the winded could catch their breath.
There was more than carmine and mirrors, it seemed. How had she overlooked it in her descent? A chest brimming with necklaces and armbands, rings and seal-stones! (In truth, she had not overlooked it. Bion and several friends had hastily dragged it out of the bushes while she was ranting against her workers.) Suspicious, she thrust a hand into the seeming treasure. She lifted a necklace in five tiers of jade and rose quartz and tentatively placed it around her neck. Then the innate suspicion of her race and position and her own grasping self reared its Hydra head. Something for nothing? Impossible. What did this eight-legged fellow expect from her? Wax? Honey? Perhaps herself in some barbarous interracial marriage?
Eunostos had anticipated and prepared the Telchin for just such a question. Bion pointed to her anklet, a worthless piece of tin masquerading as silver. So that was it. He had come to trade. She pretended to consider and reconsider. She feigned reluctance as she bent to unclasp it. She fondled and caressed it, presented, withdrew, and finally relinquished it in exchange for a necklace which, in the slave markets of Thebes, would have fetched a dozen stalwart Nubians or twenty nubile maidens. Then she reached into the chest and seized a tiara encrusted with amethysts and chrysolites.
Eunostos streaked for the entrance to the hive.
The roof and walls were translucent; in the filtered light of the afternoon sun, he could see his way even in rooms where there were not any candelabra to guide him. His problem was where to be guided. He did not know which passage to follow, where to twist, turn, reverse or advance. He only knew that this labyrinth was a prison as well as a home, a workshop, a place of storage, and that one of its rooms was a cell with Kora and me as its inmates. He skulked by a room where a worker was mixing pollen with honey. He ducked out of a corridor to allow two workers, a patrol, he supposed, to pass without seeing him. It was not easy to hide his six-foot bulk in so unfamiliar a place, nor to keep from scraping his horns on ceilings accommodated to the four feet of the average Thria.
Then, the scent, faint but undeniable: the loved, remembered scent of green foliage and crisp brown bark which permeates our gowns, indeed our very skins. Remember, Eunostos’s mother had been a Dryad; he had loved that scent from his infancy.
He dared not call, he could only follow his nostrils, and fortunately they were keen. They began to quiver as he neared his destination. His tail lashed eagerly. He restrained a bellow. Then-his nostrils proclaimed, his heart affirmed-only a door stood between him and his beloved.
“Kora,” he whispered loudly. “Zoe!”
We heard him as if he were in the room with us. “Lower your voice, Eunostos, and raise the bolt. There are no guards in here.”
“There are out here!” It was not Eunostos’s voice; it was the rasping buzz of a worker guard.
A strugg1e, a flutter, a bellow, a flurry of cries I can only call cackles. The sound of a frenziedly resistant body being dragged down corridors. It must have taken at least six of them-all the guards in the house-to overpower him.
“Zoe, Kora, they’ve got me! They’ve trussed a net!”
The acorns had renewed my strength. At Eunostos’s call, I was the wolf whose cub has been caught in a hunter’s net. I was the whale whose calf is threatened by sharks. I was the Mother Earth bereft of her young. I raged, I thundered, I rammed against the door with my not inconsiderable might until it creaked and threatened to yield.
“Kora, help me!” But she was already at my side and her additional strength-I would never think her frail again-snapped the bolt, which was only wood, and swung open the door. There were no guards left to stop us. We followed the sounds of the scuffle and bounded out of the house.
An alarming sight awaited us. Saffron, adorned in the many-tiered necklace, bedecked in the amethyst and chrysolite tiara, was returning to the hive, and the painted workers were fluttering dutifully but dourly after her. She saw her guards; she saw Eunostos; she did not yet see Kora and me.
“Into the pot with him!” she shouted to the guards. But he was heavy and still struggling in spite of the net; they had to heave and toil for every inch they raised him. Creature of earth, he fought to retain the earth. Their wings were shredded, their faces by his hooves.
You might not expect agility from a woman of my dimensions. You would underestimate me. After all, I have been climbing trees, with or without ladders, for three hundred and sixty years, and amplitude is not to be confused with obesity. In the twinkling of a firefly, I snatched Saffron out of the air and flung her into the vat. Before she could extricate herself, I scrambled onto the rim, seized a ladle, and swatted her on the head. Then I forced her face under the liquid.
“Let Eunostos go — or I will drown your queen,” I shouted to the six guards.
The guards stared at me with disbelief. Saffron momentarily revived, sputtered to the surface, and disappeared again beneath my ladle.
They released Eunostos and let him fall the few feet they had managed to raise him from the ground. Flying in a circle around the vat, roseate still in carmine, they had ceased to look glum. They did not look fearful; in fact, they looked downright hopeful. After all, Saffron could not take away their mirrors as long as she remained in the vat.
By now Eunostos had struggled free of his net. He started to clamber up beside me. “Zoe, jump to the ground. I’ll take your place.”
“Get Kora to safety,” I cried. “They won’t hurt me while I have their queen. But I can’t stay here forever.”
“You won’t have to,” he shouted. “Moschus. Partridge. Bring on the Centaurs!”
I have never seen those horse-men, manes flying, hooves clattering in disciplined unison, gallop with more sublimity. Say what you will about their infidelities (and I am not one to say anything), they are matchless warriors. And Chiron himself had come to lead them. Chiron, the oldest Beast in the Country, five hundred years of wars and travels and wisdom and sheer, white-maned heroism. With Saffron to lead them, the workers might have attacked and resisted, flung their bamboo spears from the air or dived like eagles to claw at the Centaurs’ eyes. But Saffron was still in the wax, unconscious. I ladled her out of the vat and flung her onto the ground, and the leaderless workers remained unresisting (and perhaps secretly jubilant).
I jumped to the ground and saw that Eunostos, with Kora beside him, was conferring with Chiron. They talked briefly and then Chiron advanced to address the conquered Thriae. Always forgiving when it came to women and perhaps more forgiving now that the workers had painted themselves into at least a semblance of womanhood, he announced at some length, with the stylistic flourishes and dramatic pauses characteristic of his race and suitable to his station, that neither workers nor drones would be punished, since they had only followed the orders of their queen, but that they must leave the forest by the following day.
